Derrida and Deconstruction: An Introduction

Defining Deconstruction

Deconstruction is notoriously difficult to define. No brief definition is likely to please those associated with deconstruction, and indeed they have complained often about the misrepresentation of deconstruction. Deconstruction is not, they tell us, a methodology, a school of thought, a philosophy of language, or a system of thought; and despite its trendy acceptance by American literary critics, contemporary deconstruction originates with the French philosopher Jacques Derrida. For this reason, Derrida's own comments provide the best starting point for understanding this difficult subject. A professor at a Japanese university once asked Derrida for help in translating the word deconstruction. In a personal letter to the professor, Derrida concludes by saying:

What deconstruction is not? everything of course!
What is deconstruction? nothing of course!

I do not think ... that it is a good word. It is certainly not elegant. It has definitely been of service in a highly determined situation. In order to know what has been imposed upon it in a chain of possible substitutions, despite its essential imperfection, this "highly determined situation" will need to be analyzed and deconstructed. This is difficult and I am not going to do it here. (5)

Another thing this passage demonstrates is deconstruction's emphasis on discourse and language, something it inherited from structuralism. Neither deconstruction nor structuralism work from the assumption that the task of language is to match up what we say and write with what exists in the world, i.e., neither accepts the referential theory of language. Rather both take their cue from the views of linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. Christopher Norris, one of the best expositors of deconstruction, writes:

[T]he linguist Ferdinand de Saussure ... argued that our knowledge of the world is inextricably shaped and conditioned by the language that serves to represent it. Saussure's insistence on the 'arbitrary' nature of the sign led to his undoing of the natural link that common sense assumes to exist between word and thing.... Far from providing a 'window' on reality ... language brings along with it a whole intricate network of established significations.... Reality is carved up in various ways according to the manifold patterns of sameness and difference which various languages provide. This basic relativity of thought and meaning ... is the starting-point of structuralist theory. (4-5)

. . . .

If there is a single theme which draws together the otherwise disparate field of 'structuralist' thought, it is the principle ... that language is a differential network of meaning. There is no self-evident or one-to-one link between 'signifier' and 'signified', the word as (spoken or written) vehicle and the concept it serves to evoke. Both are caught up in a play of distinctive features where differences of sound and sense are the only markers of meaning. Thus, at the simplest phonetic level, bat and cat are distinguished (and meaning is generated) by the switching of the initial consonants. (24-25)

It should be noted, however, that Derrida does not reject the necessity of rational discourse, and he still shares structuralism's emphasis on scientific, rational criticism. At a Linguistics of Writing conference, Derrida was asked:

Many who work in the field of linguistics and stylistics see their task as rendering explicit the codes or systems that underlie and make possible linguistic behavior, including that of writers and critics of literary texts ... Do you think the endeavour to formalise such codes is a fruitful activity, even if the goal of full explicitness is never--and perhaps can never be reached?

Formalisation is a fruitful, useful activity. The mastery it provides is its first if not its only justification.... One can never give up this task without running the risk of giving up rationality, scientificity itself in its most classical concept. (Fabe, 252)

I never asserted so absurd a proposition as that anything might arise without a cause; I only maintained, that our certainty of the falsehood of that proposition proceeded neither from intuition nor demonstration; but from another source. (187)

At any rate, to return to the original passage we were looking at, it gives us a concrete example of the deconstructionist emphasis on discourse and the role it plays in defining words. Here Derrida is concerned with how the word deconstruction itself has been displaced and replaced by various meanings, or as he puts it, "what has been imposed upon it in a chain of possible substitutions." To ask for a definite meaning of deconstruction is to assume that deconstruction escapes the same displacement any philosophical term undergoes, and Derrida suggests that understanding the term would require a thorough analysis of its use.

Deconstruction and Philosophy

One of the better ways to understand deconstruction is to look at its philosophical roots. Many consider Derrida's 1966 speech at John Hopkins University to be the hallmark beginning of deconstruction. As mentioned, Derrida sees the traditional terms of philosophy as metaphors and philosophy as a series of displaced metaphors, and he develops this view in the above speech, entitled "Sign, Structure, and Play."

Derrida opens by speaking of a rupture in the history of Western philosophy. This rupture is a decentering of the traditional structures of philosophical thought. Before this rupture, philosophers assumed that their various systems and structures were ready-made, pre-existing givens that were discovered, but not created, by themselves. They were blind to what Derrida calls "the structurality of structure," i.e., the man-made nature of their structures of thought, and they believed that these structures had a fixed and transcendent center of origin. The assumption of a stable center performed three functions: (1) "to orient, balance, and organize the structure," (2) "to make sure that the organizing principle of the structure would limit ... freeplay of the structure," and (3) to forbid further signification, i.e., further substitution and transformation of a structure's contents and terms (517). Put simply, the center is the endstop of a structure, that which closes it off and masks its structurality, i.e., masks its man-made nature.

Derrida critiques this centering process by drawing a contradiction from it. The center is supposed to both within and outside the structure; the center defines the structure but is not part of it (or else the structurality of structure comes to the foreground). Hence, concludes Derrida, "[t]he center is not the center." This is an attempt to turn Western philosophy's logic back onto itself, to expose its stress points, to decenter it--to literally deconstruct its structures. Derrida goes on to claim that:

the whole history of the concept of structure ... must be thought of as a series of substitutions of center for center, as a linked chain of determinations of the center. Successively, and in a regulated fashion, the center receives different forms or names. The history of metaphysics, like the history of the West, is the history of these metaphors and metonymies. (518)

The rupture occurred when the constant substitutions and transformations of center in these systems of thought suggested the possibility that the center does not exist, but that only infinite substitutions of the center exist. Put differently, it became possible that there is no signified, that there are only signifiers that go on signifying indefinitely. Hence, the structurality of structure comes into the foreground and is recognized, resulting in the rupture. The upshot is that philosophy becomes a discourse, an infinite play of the differences among signs. Derrida sums up the ways of coping with this recent development:

For there are two heterogeneous ways of erasing the difference between the signifier and signified: one, the classic way, consists in reducing or deriving the signifier ... the other, the one we are using here against the first one, consists in putting into question the system in which the preceding reduction functioned ... (520).

Deconstruction and Literature

Students of literature at this point might wonder what any of this has to do with reading and interpreting texts. The immediate answer is that though Derrida is trained as a philosopher, his primary interest is in literature: "... my most constant interest, coming even before my philosophical interest ... has been directed towards literature, towards writing called literature" (Carroll, 83). Moreover, Derrida et al. question the distinction between "philosophical" writing and "literary" writing, arguing that philosophy has forgotten it reliance on rhetoric and metaphor, a reliance little different than that of "literary" writing. Hence the same interpretive skills apply to both kinds of writing, and to writing in general.

A more involved answer is that language became a dominant subject in 20th century philosophy for both analytic and continental philosophers. We have already seen that structuralism called into question the referential theory of language. No longer was language seen as a neutral tool that matched up our beliefs, feelings, and thoughts to the outside world; rather it was now seen as a thing in itself, as capable as creating our thoughts and feelings as it was reflecting them. Many analytic philosophers believed that the traditional problems of philosophy were merely the result of ambiguous language, and hence they set out to study language, in hopes of resolving these age-old philosophical problems. Continental philosophers, meanwhile, became interested in literature, blurring the distinction between philosophical texts and literary texts. Sartre, for example, wrote everything from essays and treatises to plays.

One way of understanding the import of this interest in language is to compare it to the Kantian revolution in philosophy, which shifted emphasis away from trying to match up our knowledge with external reality and placed it instead on analyzing the preconditions of knowledge, i.e., the conditions that make knowledge possible. Kant concluded that we could only have certain knowledge about the mind's categories that define what we know, as one who looks through rose-tinted glasses sees a rose-tinted world; we cannot have certain knowledge about what really exists in the world. Many 20th century philosophers began to suspect the same thing about language, i.e., that it defines our knowledge rather than mere reflects it. Norris makes a connection between Kant and Derrida on this point:

Derrida's version of [the] Kantian argument makes writing ... the precondition of all possible knowledge.... His claim is a priori in the radically Kantian sense: that we cannot think the possibility of culture, history, or knowledge in general without also thinking the prior necessity of writing. (95, emphasis Norris')

What, then, is a deconstructionist interpretation of Hamlet or "Ode on a Grecian Urn"? I am purposely begging this question, because any answer would require much more explication than has been presented here. As controversial as the philosophical side of deconstruction is, its literary side is perhaps more controversial, and although there are now deconstructive readings for every major work in the Western canon, it is unlikely that there is such a thing as a standard deconstructive reading. What I will do is briefly discuss Derrida's ideas about reading and interpretation.

It should be noted that deconstruction does not flout the traditional tools and categories of literary criticism; on the contrary, it makes heavy and rigorous use of them. Proponents and opponents alike have construed deconstruction to mean that any interpretation of a work is valid, but this is not Derrida's view. Rather an interpretation should be a careful reading that accounts for all aspects of a text, whether recognized by the writer or not:

... the reading must always aim at a certain relationship, unperceived by the writer, between what he commands and what he does not command of the patterns of language that he uses. This relationship is not a certain quantitative distribution of shadow and light, of weakness or of force, but a signifying structure that critical reading should produce. (Grammatology, 158, emphasis Derrida's)

To recognize and respect all its classical exigencies ... requires all the instruments of traditional criticism. Without this recognition and this respect, critical production would risk developing in any direction at all and authorize itself to say almost anything. But this indispensable guardrail has always only protected, it has never opened, a reading. (158, emphasis Derrida's)

Works Cited

Carroll, David. Paraesthetics: Foucault, Lyotard, Derrida. New York: Methuen, 1987.

Derrida, Jacques. "Letter to A Japanese Friend." Derrida and Differance. Wood, David, and Robert Bernasconi. Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 1988.

------. Jacques. "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences." Criticism: Major Statements. Ed. Charles Kaplan and William Anderson. 3rd ed. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1991. 517-534.

------. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976.

Fabe, Nigel et al. The Linguistics of Writing. New York: Methuen, 1987.

Hume, David. The Letters of David Hume. Ed. J. Y. T. Greig. Vol. I. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1932.

Norris, Christopher. Deconstruction, Theory and Practice. New York: Methuen, 1982.

------. Derrida. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1987