Jacques Derrida - Derrida's View of Deconstruction

Derrida's View of Deconstruction

Further information: Jacques Derrida on deconstruction

Derrida called his approach "deconstruction". Deconstruction has become associated with the attempt to expose and undermine the oppositions, hierarchies and paradoxes on which particular texts, philosophical and otherwise, are founded.

Derrida's strategy involved a phase of thinking in a dual way about everything, to the point that

... all the conceptual oppositions of metaphysics

(signifier/signified; sensible/intelligible; writing/speech; passivity/activity; etc.)

- to the extent that they ultimately refer to the presence of something present

(for example, in the form of the identity of the subject, who is present for all his operations,

present beneath every accident or event,

self-present in its "living speech",

present in its enunciations, in the present objects and acts of its language, etc.)

become non-pertinent(Positions pp 28-30).

Derrida considered that when encountering what he called a "classical philosophical opposition", one never encounters "peaceful coexistence" of the two opposing concepts, but rather a "violent hierarchy", where one of the two dominates over the other.

"In a classical philosophical opposition we are not dealing with the peaceful coexistence of a vis-à-vis, but rather with a violent hierarchy. One of the two terms governs the other (axiologically, logically, etc.), or has the upper hand" (Positions, p.41).

In order to begin the deconstruction, one must break the link between the two opposing concepts.

To deconstruct the opposition, first of all, is to overturn the hierarchy at a given moment (Positions p.41).

But, as a second step, Derrida added that one must do what is needed so that the two concepts stay separate and non hierarchical. In order to achieve this, one must intervene in the field effectively, to create new marks, a new concept that no longer is, and never could be included in the previous regime.

Not to synthesize the terms in opposition, but to mark their difference and eternal interplay.

Derrida said this phase was structural and that it was "the necessity of an interminable analysis" because "the hierarchy of dual oppositions always reestablishes itself".

The infinite task is then to show how every speech always dramatize this oppositions,

establishing an arbitrary center and an hierarchic relation

(body-soul, existing-being, passivity-activity, sensible-intelligible, receptivity-spontaneity,

heteronomy-autonomy, empirical-transcendental, immanent-transcendent, local-global, femininity-masculinity, animal-Man, beast-sovereign, etc.) (Positions p.42)

To mark the undecidable of all oppositions working across all texts in western culture, he created marks like

• the pharmakon - that is neither remedy nor poison, neither good nor evil, neither the inside nor the outside, neither speech nor writing;
• the supplement that is neither a plus nor a minus, neither an outside nor the complement of an inside, neither accident nor essence, etc.;
• the hymen that is neither confusion nor distinction, neither identity nor difference, neither consummation nor virginity, neither the veil nor unveiled, neither inside nor the outside, etc.;
• the gram that is neither a signifier nor a signified, neither a sign nor a thing, neither presence nor an absence, neither a position nor a negation, etc.;
• spacing that is neither space nor time;
• the incision that is neither the incised integrity of a beginning, or of a simple cutting into, nor simple secondary, etc. (Positions p. 43).

Perhaps Derrida's most quoted and famous assertion, which appears in an essay on Rousseau in his book Of Grammatology (1967), is the statement that "there is nothing outside the text" (il n'y a pas de hors-texte),. Critics of Derrida have quoted it as a slogan to characterize and stigmatize deconstruction. Derrida once explained that this assertion "which for some has become a sort of slogan, in general so badly understood, of deconstruction (...) means nothing else: there is nothing outside context. In this form, which says exactly the same thing, the formula would doubtless have been less shocking. I am not certain that it would have provided more to think about."

The end of deconstruction has been trumpeted by many in academe since the late 1980s. Nevertheless, deconstruction and Derrida's popularity continued to increase. In 2002 a feature-length documentary on his life and work, filmed by Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering Kofman, achieved commercial success in the United States as well as internationally. One of Derrida's last public speaking appearances—in Campbell Hall at the University of California at Santa Barbara (late October, 2003)— produced attendance that exceeded the seating capacity of the hall (900). The continuing stream of books on Derrida— over 150 titles since 2000 versus about 25 for John Searle and about 40 for Richard Rorty, for example — indicates no abatement in the popularity of deconstruction in relation to other competing trends in Philosophy.