Deconstruction By Jacques Derrida

Deconstruction By Jacques Derrida

Introduction :-

Jacques Derrida was an Algerian-born French philosopher, known as the founder of deconstruction. His voluminous work has had a profound impact upon literary theory and continental philosophy. His best known work is Of Grammatology. Distancing himself from the various philosophical movements and traditions that preceded him on the French intellectual scene (phenomenology, existentialism, and structuralism); in the mid 1960s he developed a strategy called deconstruction.

Derrida was one of the most widely revered and widely reviled thinkers of the mid-to-late twentieth Century.

 Key concept of the Derrida's Deconstructions:

Deconstruction:

Deconstruction is a school of philosophy and literary criticism forged in the writings of the French philosopher Jacques Derrida. Deconstruction can perhaps best be described as a theory of reading which aims to undermine the logic of opposition within Texts. For Derrida this requires a scrutiny of the essential distinctions and conceptual orderings which have been constructed by the dominant tradition of Western philosophy

Differance

Differance is a French word coined by the French philosopher and deconstructionist, Jacques Derrida. The word is a play on several other words that illustrate Derrida’s meaning. The concept of differance is a complex theory that tries to illuminate the way words are used and how their specific meaning is derived. Derrida called difference a "neographism," meaning a term that is neither a word nor a concept and is used to describe a literary idea.

In his theory of deconstruction, Derrida claimed that because each person has different moods, backgrounds, and ways of experiencing things, a word or choice of words will not conjure up the same idea to every person.

‘’….in language there are only differences without positive terms’’

This idea leads him the two key concepts 1) Sign 2) Structure.

Binary Oppositions

The binary opposition is the structuralist idea that acknowledges the human tendency to think in terms of opposition. For Saussure the binary opposition was the “means by which the units of language have value or meaning; each unit is defined against what it is not.” With this categorization, terms and concepts tend to be associated with a positive or negative.

For example, Reason/Passion, Man/Woman, Inside/Outside, Presence/Absence, Speech/Writing, etc. Derrida argued that these oppositions were arbitrary and inherently unstable.

The structures themselves begin to overlap and clash and ultimately these structures of the text dismantle themselves from within the text. In this sense deconstruction is regarded as a forum of anti-structuralism. Deconstruction rejects most of the assumptions of structuralism and more vehementaly “binary opposition” on the grounds that such oppositions always previlege one term over the other, that is, signified over the signifier