Deconstruction

Deconstruction, branch of critical theory, and in particular a way of reading texts, which contests the idea that language can guarantee absolute meaning in any form of discourse, and which attempts to analyse texts by uncovering the conflicts within them and deciphering some of their multiple meanings. It is closely related to, and derived in part from, Structuralism and Post-Structuralism, and has applications in philosophy, anthropology, and psychology, although it is now primarily associated with linguistics, literature, and literary theory.

The originator and leading exponent of deconstruction is the French thinker Jacques Derrida, who established it as a mode of thought in the 1960s with a series of books, including De la Grammatologie (1967; Of Grammatology, 1976) and L'Écriture et la Différence (1967; Writing and Difference, 1978). Derrida was influenced by the ideas of the philosophers Martin Heidegger and Friedrich Nietzsche, who had questioned the validity of concepts such as truth, knowledge, and identity, and by the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, whose work challenged the notion of a fixed and absolute self. Also of great importance to Derrida's work were the ideas of Ferdinand de Saussure, a Swiss linguist who pioneered the investigation of language as a socially constructed phenomenon. In particular, Saussure drew a distinction between langue (language as a system of signs) and parole (individual speech acts made possible by the langue), and asserted that language as a system was based on the relationship between its elements; that is, that words have no inherent or essential meaning, but derive meaning by their difference from one another. There is an irreducible gap between the signifier (the word) and the signified (the object or concept to which it refers).

Developing these ideas, Derrida claimed that “il n'y a pas de hors-texte”—that there is nothing outside of the text, or, that there is no meaning outside of language itself. He argued that logocentrism, or the way in which the word has been privileged throughout history as a perfect expression of thought, means that it is not possible to step outside language to uncover a “real” meaning. Therefore, there can be no single and fixed meaning in any text, only multiple meanings brought about by the jeu (play) of language. Meaning is endlessly deferred, present only in the form of a trace of all the possible absent meanings, and all language is metaphorical, referring to something which it is not.

The practice of deconstruction is therefore concerned with bringing to light some of the conflicting forces in the text and highlighting the devices it uses in order to claim legitimacy and truth-status for itself, many of which may lie beyond the intention of its author. It also seeks to destabilize the hierarchy of significations derived from the “binary oppositions” in language: pairings such as speech and writing, nature and culture, and masculine and feminine, in which one word is defined as the norm from which the other deviates. A deconstructive close reading will not attempt to fix meaning, but merely to “situate” texts in relation to one another, and to locate the aporia—or impasse of meaning—within them.

This project gives rise to the concept of intertextuality, or the idea that texts are related to each other by their shared use of literary conventions (see Genre) and devices, by their participation in a tradition, and by their allusions to one another. The term is particularly associated with the French structuralist critic Julia Kristeva. Roland Barthes termed texts which lend themselves to a deconstructionist or structuralist reading lisible (readable); he demonstrated this thesis by deconstructing the Balzac short story Sarrasine in S/Z (1970). The opposite of these are scriptible (writable) or illisible (unreadable) texts, which evade interpretation by refusing to conform to literary conventions. Other noted deconstructionist critics (and critics of deconstruction) are Paul de Man, whose Allegories of Reading (1979) applied the techniques of deconstruction specifically to literary texts, J. Hillis Miller, Barbara Johnson, Jonathan Culler, Terry Eagleton, and M. H. Abrams.