Deconstruction (concept)

At Issue

The structuralism conference at The Johns Hopkins University in 1966 was intended to introduce into the United States structuralist theory, an approach to reading in which a poem or novel is viewed as a closed entity that has specific meanings. When Jacques Derrida read his paper, “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” the demise of structuralism and the arrival of a new theory, deconstruction, was unexpectedly announced.

Deconstruction has since become the main philosophical tenet of poststructuralism, an intellectual movement that is largely a reaction to structuralism. Poststructuralism includes not only the deconstructive analyses of Derrida, who has had an enormous influence on the development of literary theory, but also the work of other French intellectuals, including the historian Michel Foucault, the feminist philosopher and critic Julie Kristeva, and the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan.

Ferdinand de Saussure, the founder of modern structuralist linguistics, saw language as a closed, stable system of signs, and this view forms much of the foundation of structuralist thought. These signs helped structuralists to arrive at a better understanding of a text, because it was thought that they offered consistent, logical representations of the order of things, or what Foucault called “a principle of unity.”

Rather than attempting to understand the logical structure of things, poststructuralism, and deconstruction in particular, attempts to do much more: It attempts to understand the limits of understanding. Deconstruction is an extraordinarily complex strategy of reading that is based primarily on two presuppositions.

The first presupposition relies heavily on Saussure’s notion of signs; however, Derrida argues that rather than representing the order of things, signs represent disorder, because they can never be nailed down to a single meaning. He posits that because meaning is irreducibly plural, language can never be a closed and stable system.

The second presupposition involves Derrida’s observation of Western modes of thought. He noticed that “universal truths” have gone unquestioned in terms of their “rightness,” and that these concepts are defined by what they exclude, their binary opposites (for example, man is defined as the opposite of the identity that constitutes woman). Derrida’s strategy is to reveal the hierarchy that is inherent in these binary oppositions and to show that by meticulously examining what are believed to be the distinctions between them, in each instance the pair is found not to be opposite after all.

Although some people see Derrida as a brilliant theorist who instigated a radical reassessment of the basic concepts of Western thought, critics have argued that deconstruction’s main presupposition—that one must always be resigned to the impossibility of truth because meaning is irreducibly plural—makes Derrida’s theory nihilistic at worst and an elitist, bourgeois game at best.

Derrida defends deconstruction against the charge of nihilism by positing that it is necessary to suspend ethics in order to arrive at ethical understanding. He claims that ethics has emerged as a defense against violence; however, the binary oppositions established by ethics to bring about order are also a form of violence because of their imposed hierarchy. He believes that the problem of ethics involves being able to move from one term in the pair to the other while maintaining the sameness of the two rather than their inequality.

While Derrida and other theorists were defending deconstruction, revelations surfaced that Paul de Man—a member of the “Yale School,” a group of deconstructionists at Yale who helped to introduce Derrida to America—had written more than one hundred articles for an anti-Semitic, pro-Nazi newspaper in Belgium during World War II. After the discovery of de Man’s collaboration, a great deal of comment was generated both against deconstruction and against de Man, who died in 1984, having successfully concealed his past from his colleagues and students.

In response, Derrida stated that de Man’s acts were unforgivable; however, he believed that it must be realized that these acts were committed more than half a century earlier, when de Man was in his early twenties. That argument helped ameliorate to some extent the moral problems caused by de Man’s wartime activities, but it did nothing to resolve the more serious problem that occurred after the war—his lifelong secrecy about the collaboration, a serious moral contradiction for a practitioner of a theory that has as its main goal the revelation of what is excluded, or kept secret, in a text. Thus, the idea that deconstruction is nihilistic was strengthened by the revelation of de Man’s collaboration. Other theorists defended deconstruction by asserting that those who adopt deconstructionist positions have various agendas, including radical feminism and other progressive movements, so that any attempt to invalidate all deconstruction because of de Man’s past is unfair.

Derrida has also had numerous well-publicized disagreements about deconstruction with Michel Foucault. Their conflict centered on Derrida’s efforts to deconstruct texts in order to set free hidden possibilities and Foucault’s attempts to experience history to reveal its latent structures. It is in these public disagreements that Foucault, whose writings centered on history and language and had nothing to do with deconstruction, has dramatically influenced poststructuralist theory. Much has been written about the disagreements, and most of these writings attempt either to reconcile or to choose between the writings of these two intellectuals.

Both opponents and proponents of deconstruction agree that while Derrida is radically subversive, his attack on Western notions of truth and reason does not lead to utter meaninglessness. Because of Derrida’s influence, deconstruction has expanded the range of literary theory and has led to a much deeper questioning of the assumed naturalness of structure in systems of thought. Derrida’s work shows that by unraveling key binary oppositions of the Western tradition, one may eventually uncover more important things that are just beyond the limits of ordinary understanding.

Bibliography

Boyne, Roy. Foucault and Derrida: The Other Side of Reason. London: Unwin Hyman, 1990.

Con Davis, Robert, and Ronald Schleifer, eds. Contemporary Literary Criticism. 2d ed. N.Y.: Longman, 1989.

Darby, Tom, Bela Egyed, and Ben Jones, eds. Nietzsche and the Rhetoric of Nihilism: Essays on Interpretation, Language and Politics. Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1989.

Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory: An Introduction. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983.

Sallis, John, ed. Deconstruction and Philosophy: The Texts of Jacques Derrida. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987.

Wiener, Jon. “Deconstructing de Man.” The Nation 246 (January 9, 1988): 22-24.