Deconstruction

Although deconstruction has roots in Martin Heidegger’s concept of Destruktion, to

deconstruct is not to destroy. Deconstruction is always a double movement of
simultaneous affirmation and undoing. It started out as a way of reading the history of
metaphysics in Heidegger and Jacques Derrida, but was soon applied to the interpretation
of literary, religious, and legal texts as well as philosophical ones, and was adopted by
several French feminist theorists as a way of making clearer the deep male bias embedded
in the European intellectual tradition.
To deconstruct is to take a text apart along the structural “fault lines” created by the
ambiguities inherent in one or more of its key concepts or themes in order to reveal the
equivocations or contradictions that make the text possible. For example, in “Plato’s
Pharmacy,” Derrida deconstructs Socrates’ criticism of the written word, arguing that it
not only suffers from internal inconsistencies because of the analogy Socrates himself
makes between memory and writing, but also stands in stark contrast to the fact that his
ideas come to us only through the written word he disparaged (D 61-171). The double
movement here is one of tracing this tension in Plato’s text, and in the traditional reading
of that text, while at the same time acknowledging the fundamental ways in which our
understanding of the world is dependent on Socrates’ attitude toward the written
word. Derrida points out similar contradictions in philosophical discussions of a preface
(by G. W. F. Hegel, D 1-69) and a picture frame (by Immanuel Kant, TP 17-147), which
are simultaneously inside and outside the respective works under consideration.

Since the distinction between what is inside the text (or painting) and what is outside can
itself be deconstructed according to the same principles, deconstruction is,
like Destruktion, an historicizing movement that opens texts to the conditions of their
production, their con-text in a very broad sense, including not only the historical
circumstances and tradition from which they arose, but also the conventions and nuances
of the language in which they were written and the details of their authors’ lives. This
generates an effectively infinite complexity in texts that makes any deconstructive reading
necessarily partial and preliminary.

Table of Contents
1. Destruktion
2. Deconstruction
a. Early Formulations
b. Literary Deconstruction
c. Contentions and Confrontations
d. Later Versions
3. Feminist Deconstruction
4. References and Further Readings
. References
a. Additional Readings
1. Destruktion
Heidegger’s use of the word Destruktion suffers from the same problem as Edmund
Husserl’s use of Intentionalität. Neither is an ordinary German word; both were borrowed
from Latin almost as neologisms to express a concept their creators perceived as relatively
new to the philosophical domain, only to have the words become confused with their more
common cognates when translated into French or English. The usual German word for
“destruction” is “Zerstörung”, but Heidegger’s concept of Destruktion is also closely related
to Abbau or dismantling. Derrida uses the word deconstruction to capture both German
terms. (EO 86-6).
In Being and Time, Heidegger says that the purpose of Destruktion is to “arrive at those
primordial experiences in which we achieved our first ways of determining the nature of
Being—the ways which have guided us ever since” (BT 44). This is the double gesture
referred to above, one that takes apart the European traditions and in so doing finds the
basic understanding of Being beneath its surface. This goal separates Destruktion from
deconstruction, not because deconstruction is purely negative, but because it has no fixed
endpoint or goal. Deconstruction is always an on-going process because the constantly
shifting nature of language means that no final meaning or interpretation of a text is
possible. Subsequent ages, grounded in a different language and different ways of life,
will always see something different in a text as they deconstruct it in the context of the
realities with which they live. What is meant by “the written word”, for example, has
already evolved substantially since Derrida wrote “Plato’s Pharmacy” due to the explosion
in electronic media. All deconstruction can reveal are temporary and more or less
adequate truths, not more primordial or deeper ones. For Heidegger, on the other hand,
the “primordial experiences” of Being revealed through Destruktion result in a single
interpretation that offers a more authentic alternative to philosophy’s misunderstanding
of the temporality and historicality of human existence.
Temporality and historicality are essential components of Dasein, Heidegger’s term for
human existence, because it is “thrown projection”, that is, an entity necessarily oriented
toward an unknown future, but always based on a past for which it is not itself fully
responsible and which it can never fully know. Time, then, is not only a category of
experience (as in Kant), but the very core of our existence. As beings in a present moment
are defined in terms of a past that creates our possibilities and a future into which we
project them. On a larger scale, this temporality of Dasein (as opposed to Hegelian Spirit)
is what creates history; our ability to project forward and interpret backwards not only
the circumstances of our lives, but also those of the entire social world to which we
belong. For Heidegger, Destruktion of the traditions in that social world can lead us back
to a past that can be re-interpreted in ways that reveal the deeper understanding of Being
hidden in the earliest texts of the European tradition; it can offer ways to project a
different, more authentic future for Dasein based on the new way of seeing the past.
2. Deconstruction
a. Early Formulations
As already noted, deconstruction differs from Destruktion in that it has no fixed or
expected endpoint or map, but is rather a potentially infinite process. Although obviously
a critical tool, it also lacks the sense, evident in Heidegger, that the text to be
deconstructed is part of how European thought has somehow gone wrong and needs
correction. This is because deconstruction rejects both the idea that there is a fixed series
of eras (ancient, medieval, modern) in European history that mark a downward path, and
the idea that there is some determinate way in which that path might be reversed, by a re-
interpretation of early Greek philosophy. Rather, Derrida insists that what he
deconstructs are texts that he “loves” (EO 87) and they are vital parts of our intellectual
world, with a view to revealing their underlying complexities and hidden
contradictions. He does not seek to undo Kant, for example, or interpret his writings in
ways closer to Derrida’s own vision of what philosophy should be, but rather shows us the
ways in which Kant both changes and continues the metaphysical tradition, as well as the
ways in which Kant’s texts undo themselves along the same “fault lines” that have
undermined that tradition throughout its history.
In 1967, Derrida offered this definition:

To ‘deconstruct’ philosophy, thus, would be to think—in the most faithful, interior way—the
structured genealogy of philosophy’s concepts, but at the same time to determine—from a
certain exterior that is unqualifiable or unnameable by philosophy—what this history has
been able to dissimulate or forbid, making itself into a history by means of this. . .motivated
repression (P 6).
What is outside of, or excluded from the realm dominated by the philosophical tradition,
although unnamed in it, provides a vantage point and a key with which to find the flaws
and lacunae that domination seeks to hide. The opposition between the spoken and
written word in Plato, the text and its introduction in Hegel, the painting and its frame in
Kant belong to a series of oppositions (good/evil, mind/body, male/female,
center/margin, necessary/contingent, and so forth .) that run though and in many ways
structure the European philosophical tradition. Each of these pairs is also a hierarchy
meant to exclude both the non-dominant member of the pair (the body, the female, the
margin, the contingent) and anything outside the opposition (the ambiguous, the
borderline, the hybrid) from the philosophical realm. These hierarchical oppositions, in
turn, create the basis for political hierarchy and social domination (male/female,
freeman/slave, propertied/landless, Christian/other, citizen/immigrant), power
differentials that motivate the repression to which Derrida refers. This is why
deconstruction denies the possibility of some pre-Socratic “primordial experience” of
Being to be found through dismantling the metaphysical tradition which could then solve
the problems that tradition has created, because that experience, too, would be subject to
deconstruction along these same lines.

What deconstruction reveals, among other things, is that the repression that is necessary
for creating a history of philosophy is in large part a repression of what philosophy itself
cannot control, of what escapes the grasp of philosophy while being part of it. The fault
lines that deconstruction follows are the traces left inside philosophy by what it must
define as exterior to it in order to be philosophy. Derrida’s early work connects these fault
lines to what is represented by the written word: our inability to control or limit the
meaning that might be given to our words because of the historical development of
language, the ambiguity of linguistic meaning, and the ability of written text to be
excerpted, reproduced and read in contexts we can neither imagine nor control (as
opposed, supposedly, to the immediate and limited context of the spoken word). This is
why any text can be deconstructed (even Friedrich Nietzsche’s fragmentary message “I
have forgotten my umbrella” in Spurs), but canonical texts (Plato, Kant, Hegel, later
Heidegger himself) offer the richest and most productive grounds for deconstruction. We
learn more about ourselves by seeing the traces of a fear of absolute loss that motivate
the Aufhebung in Hegel’s texts, than we might from finding the same anxiety in the writing
of someone whose influence on European philosophy (and politics) has been less
profound.
As an example of deconstruction here, however, it seems advisable to choose a text closer
to Nietzsche’s umbrella, than Hegel’s phenomenology of Spirit. The Truth in
Painting takes its title from a letter in which Paul Cézanne tells Émile Bernard, “I owe you
the truth in painting [la verité en peinture] and I will tell it to you.” Derrida points out that
the philosophy of language would assert that in writing this, Cézanne must have known
what he meant, but in fact the sentence itself has no determinate meaning. “The truth in
painting” escapes and exceeds the boundaries philosophy wants to draw with regard to
language because it has at least four meanings, none of which is reducible to any of the
others: 1) the truth about truth itself to be found in or through a painting or other work
of art, such as the truth Heidegger finds in Van Gogh’s painting of the shoes in “Origin of
the Work of Art”; 2) the truth of the painting as painting, that is, how “true to life” it is,
how well it succeeds in representing what it is meant to represent; 3) the truth about its
object that can be found through the painting, such as when a portrait lays bare the
character of its subject; and 4) the truth about painting in the sense of what is true in
painting as a human enterprise or art form.
This ambiguity of the French sentence is compounded by the fact that Cézanne promises,
not to paint the truth, but to tell or say it in language, thus linking text and painting in a
complex nexus of possible meanings and realizations. There is, and can be, no single
meaning of this sentence simply because of the rather ordinary (but untranslatable)
French phrase “en peinture”. As is sometimes the case with the deconstruction of such
partial and cryptic texts, Derrida’s target here is not Cézanne’s words themselves, but
rather the account of truth and promises (the implicit debt in Cézanne’s “I owe you”)
found in contemporary philosophy of language. Not only does this sentence fail
traditional philosophical tests for having a truth value, due to its ambiguity, it also fails to
have the conditions of satisfaction, with which more recent philosophy of language hoped
to replace those tests and determine whether Cézanne paid his “debt”. By deconstructing
the phrase “the truth in painting”, Derrida hopes to underscore the pragmatic reality that
how language functions as a living phenomenon makes it impossible to develop purely
formal criteria for identifying or cataloguing true statements.
b. Literary Deconstruction
One notable fact about the reception of deconstruction in the United States was its
relatively early acceptance by departments of literature compared to departments of
philosophy. Undoubtedly , there are several reasons for this, but one may be that, as
Geoffrey Hartman notes, “Deconstructive criticism does not present itself as a novel
enterprise” because the ambiguity and contextuality, the interplay of the spoken and
written word, that deconstruction emphasizes in philosophical texts are both more
obvious and more acknowledged in literary ones. At the same time, deconstruction, by
foregrounding the fact that “Everything we thought of as spirit, or meaning separable
from the letter of the text, remains within an ‘intertextual’ sphere” (DC viii), opened
important channels of communication between philosophy and literary studies.

The tools of deconstruction and the sorts of truths they reveal, are similar in both
spheres. The basic strategy is still to follow the trace of a key ambiguity or blind spot
through the text to illuminate hierarchical oppositions it relies on and the fault lines along
which it can be undone, while still acknowledging its power and importance in European
thought. Ernest Jones’ classic psychoanalytic reading of “Hamlet”, for instance, is
deconstructive in that it foregrounds the suppressed patricide in “Julius Caesar”
(Shakespeare ignores the fact that Brutus was Caesar’s illegitimate son, thus implying an
invariant (beloved-)father/(legitimate-)son pair), and then uses this omission as one key
in tracing the Oedipal fault line in the later play. Here deconstruction yields, not a new
meaning to “Hamlet”, as one could say Derrida does in his discussion of prefaces in Hegel,
but a new richness to our understanding of Shakespeare’s work.

This highlights the fact that deconstruction plays a different role in literature than in
philosophy. Deconstruction tends to be used in literary theory in arguments between and
among theorists about the value of their theories, rather than about the value of the texts
under discussion. One deconstructs Kant to argue with Kant (and perhaps others), but
one doesn’t deconstruct Shakespeare to argue with Shakespeare (or, as we saw above,
Cézanne to argue with Cézanne). In addition, literary deconstruction is about texts that
are of a different nature than the deconstruction itself, while the deconstruction of one
philosophical text results in another philosophical text. This makes it much clearer in
philosophy that deconstructive texts can themselves be, in fact must be,
deconstructed. What literary deconstruction produces, on the other hand, is not itself
literature. This doesn’t mean that literary deconstructions cannot be deconstructed, but
that they are not deconstructed in the same way that they are constructed. The context in
which such a deconstruction might be carried out, is quite different from the context in
which the original deconstructive text was created. Put another way, literary
deconstruction assumes the possibility and reality of literature in at least some sense of
the term, whereas deconstruction as a philosophical enterprise questions, at its most basic
level, the possibility of philosophy itself.

c. Contentions and Confrontations

Deconstruction has always been engaged in active dialogue with other contemporary
approaches to philosophical and literary texts. The most productive of these
conversations have been with those schools of thought that are closest in history and
orientation to deconstruction, often sharing its roots in Heidegger’s work. At the same
time, the issues raised in those debates are often similar to those raised by more strident
critics completely opposed to the deconstructive enterprise. A brief summary of some of
the most notable confrontations, across more than twenty years, offers an opportunity to
consider the most powerful objections to deconstruction, from the end of the 20th
century, onwards.
The 1981 conversation between deconstruction (in the person of Derrida) and
hermeneutics (in the person of Hans-Georg Gadamer) raises at least two recurrent
themes. The first has already been indirectly discussed—the charge that deconstruction
is a negative enterprise. Gadamer, who speaks of the debate as one between Heidegger’s
reading of Nietzsche and Derrida’s, calls deconstruction a “repudiation” of the “language
of concepts” that is the legacy of European philosophy (DD 101). As already noted,
however, deconstruction is always a question and a double movement aware of its own
debt to the texts it deconstructs, and so never a repudiation. The second charge is that
deconstruction does not allow for the possibility that a word can be redefined or used
independently of its traditional metaphysical meaning. Gadamer raises this point with
regard to “understanding” in general, “self-understanding” and “dialectic”, asking why
these terms must be considered part of metaphysics when used in the way he uses
them. This argument is weakened, however, by Gadamer’s own reference to “an older
wisdom that speaks in living language”, thus affirming the continuing echo of the
tradition even in the most carefully redefined or well-intentioned philosophical terms
(DD 95-99).

Although directed at postmodernism, the 1990 exchange between major feminist

theorists recorded in Feminist Contentions raises some of the same themes as the earlier
debate, but also bears directly on the feminist reception of deconstruction in the United
States. The feminists who argue here against postmodernism, and by extension against
deconstruction, make the case that political action requires a stronger basis than either of
these is capable of providing. Seyla Benhabib, for instance, acknowledges that
subjectivity is largely shaped by language and other symbolic structures, but insists that
there must remain some sense in which “we are both author and character at once” in our
own life histories. She argues that, in order to be politically effective in the face of
women’s sometimes tenuous sense of self and lack of autonomy, feminist philosophy
requires a core of irreducible selfhood and agency that deconstruction would deny (FC 21-
22). As Judith Butler points out however, this line of argument precludes the possibility
of any “political opposition” to the self as traditionally understood because it allows us no
political way to move beyond the traditional metaphysical dualisms (author/character,
authority/submission, self/other, autonomy/heteronomy, and back to,
e.g., male/female) (FC 36).
In her response to Butler, Benhabib emphasizes another recurring theme in debates about
deconstruction: “how can one be constituted by discourse without being determined by
it?” That is, how does the deconstructive understanding of the self as opaque and
internally divided provide a starting point for social and political critique (FC 110)? We
have seen, however, that for deconstruction discourse is neither monolithic nor
unequivocal, which means that it cannot be fully determinative of the self, either. The
very lack of a permanent, substantial self in the usual sense that Benhabib and others
criticize in deconstruction, is at the same time, what creates the possibility of agency
outside and beyond the world of fixed essences and meanings envisioned by the
philosophical tradition. (A Cartesian self, Descartes himself tells us in the Meditations, is
most free when it has no choice but to follow Reason.) The complexities here can be seen
in the way deconstructive texts themselves often grapple with these same questions about
the possibility of personal and political agency (see below) but, as might be expected,
come up with no final answer.
The 1993 confrontation between deconstruction and the neo-pragmatism of Richard
Rorty raises similar points. Rorty accuses Derrida of being a humanist in the sense of a
follower of the Enlightenment, while he suggests that deconstruction itself diverts
attention, at least in the United States, away from real politics (which he later defines as
“a matter of pragmatic, short-term reforms and compromises”). He embraces the
deconstructive understanding of language, which he likens to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s, but
denies that the consequences of a Wittgensteinian theory of language can be meaningfully
applied to the natural sciences. He argues instead for an empiricist and naturalist
position in science, that he sees to be in conflict with the “transcendental” side of
deconstruction, that is, its continuing concern with metaphysics and the resultant
tendency to see science as a form of metaphysical materialism (DP 14-17).
In response, Derrida accepts some commonality between pragmatism and
deconstruction, but defends the asking of the transcendental question and the refusal to
do away with metaphysics altogether as a defense against “empiricism, positivism, and
psychologism”. He also refers to his work on the inevitability of violence in the political
realm, which counters the tacit optimism in Rorty’s political views (DP 81-83). Derrida’s
argument is that the political state relies on the rule of law, and the rule of law, in turn,
relies on the power to punish, that is, on violence, which is therefore the ground of the
political state. His later work on immigration also underscores the dependence of the
political state on a sharp and often violent boundary between who has the full rights
of democratic citizenship (“fraternity” in the French context)–that is, the citizen, the
landowner, the freeman, all always male–and who does not (aliens, peasants, slaves,
women).

Philosophy in a Time of Terror (2003) is not a direct confrontation between deconstruction

and Jürgen Habermas’ theory of communicative action, but illustrates the continuity of
themes among those critical of deconstruction over the preceding twenty years. In the
context of 9/11, Habermas’ remarks acknowledges the structural violence that underlies
the successful societies of what he terms the West. But then questions the
“deconstructivist suspicion”, that the model of communication that works reasonably well
in everyday situations, will no longer be adequate when we move to larger conversations
between political and social groups. He argues that insisting dialogue is “nothing but”
displaced violence obscures the potential of dialogue for ending violence without creating
new pretexts for it (PT 35-38). He similarly objects to the deconstruction of the concept
of tolerance as always an exercise of the power to tolerate or not, because the toleration
demanded in a democracy is one between equals and thus mutual rather than
paternalistic. He also finds a certain circularity in deconstruction, since it seems to rely
on the same universalism, tolerance, and so forth , it seeks to undo.
As already noted, however, this double gesture is itself the essence of
deconstruction. Derrida, for his part, points out that the “major events” that provoke the
kind of communication between groups Habermas refers to are more often, if not
exclusively, those that directly affect Europe and the United States and not, for instance,
an equal number of deaths in Somalia or the Sudan. What is threatened by 9/11, he goes
on, is exactly a particular context of interpretation that has dominated the dialogues
between “the West” and its Other, legitimating some forms of violence while disallowing
others (PT 92-93). He reasserts his reading of toleration as an exercise of paternalistic,
or specifically religious, power (PT 127). One does not ask an oppressed group to
“tolerate” their oppressors; it is something asked only of those in a position to grant or
deny such toleration. He also questions the possibility of an actually existing democracy,
due to the violence of power relations (PT 120), much less the possibility of a democracy
in which different groups would be sufficiently equal for toleration to be genuinely
mutual.

This last contestation between Habermas and Derrida, is indirect because it was in the
form of separate interviews, illustrates three main points. One, already noted, is the
continuity of objections to deconstruction over an extended period of time, primarily
focused around issues of the everyday vs. the transcendental (a dualism that
deconstruction seeks to undermine) and the political implications of deconstruction. The
second is the lingering impression that these confrontations rely more on contradiction
than on real attempts at communication, or even argument. A method that questions
everything, including itself and even the concept of method, as deconstruction does,
leaves critics little concrete substance to criticize, except the circularity and the double
gesture that deconstruction embraces. At the same time, the third point to be noted is the
increasing engagement of deconstruction with politics after 1989, if not directly in
response to these challenges, at least in the context of their persistence.

d. Later Versions
In the 2001 interview about 9/11, Derrida makes a series of statements about the nature
of deconstruction that suggest both similarities and differences from his earlier
pronouncements. He defines the deconstructive philosopher as someone “who analyzes
and then draws the practical and effective consequences of the relationship between our
philosophical heritage and the structure of the still dominant juridico-political system
that is so clearly undergoing mutation” (PT 106). The explicit emphasis on both politics
and the pragmatic is as marked as the much more obscure references that were more
common thirty years earlier. At the same time, he emphatically repeats the double
gesture of affirming his faith in and allegiance to the idea of an international law that is,
like democracy, unrealizable and, again like democracy, undecidable, that is, impossible
even to envision without contradiction (PT 115). Finally, he refers back to “Plato’s
Pharmacy” to suggest that the political state is, like writing for Socrates, “at once remedy
and poison”, something we can live neither with, because of its inherent violence, nor
without, because only the state can protect us from the violence it engenders (PT 124).

Deconstruction retains it critical edge well into the 21st century, even when directed
against closely allied texts. For instance, the 2001 address Derrida gave upon receiving
the Theodor Adorno Prize turns back on Adorno himself, specifically on his privileging of
the German language even as he champions globalism and a united Europe. This
deconstruction centers in the familiar manner on the untranslatably ambiguous French
word fichu (n. neckerchief; adj., lost or done for). The word appears in French in a letter
to Adorno’s wife by Walter Benjamin, who uses it in describing a dream where he speaks
of “changing a poem into a fichu” in the first sense (neckerchief or scarf). This fichu is
then associated in the dream with the letter “d”, which Derrida suggests might refer to a
name Benjamin used in signing letters, or to his sister or his wife, both named
Dora. Derrida then goes on to point out that “dora” in Greek can mean scorched or
scratched skin, hence linking it to fichu in the second sense, but also to Auschwitz and to
9/11, which was Adorno’s birthdate (PM 164-181). In an excellent example of the
deconstruction of a deconstruction, the English translator of this address inserts a
footnote here to add that “dor”, meaning gift, is also part of Adorno’s given name,
Theodor, “gift of the gods” (PM 203).
Clearly gender plays a central role in the deconstructive process in “Fichus”. If the fault
line or rifts in traditional philosophical texts are the result of attempts to exclude from
philosophy what it cannot control, Woman (i.e., Adorno’s wife, Benjamin’s wife and sister,
any woman who wears a fichu) will be one of the constant sites of deconstructive
undoing. Death also becomes of increasing importance in deconstruction, as shown in
Derrida’s late works focused on the death of the father, the mother, and eventually his
own. In addition to the connection psychoanalysis makes between women and death,
both these themes are revealed by deconstruction to be at the root of what the
philosophical tradition has always sought to avoid. Writing, for Socrates, can be deceptive
(like a woman), or wander from the source like an illegitimate son (born to such a
woman). Socrates does not say either “woman” or “death”, but the hatred of writing,
deconstruction argues, as of all manifestations of our embodiment in Plato and the
tradition he inaugurates, is fundamentally a “motivated repression” of what always
exceeds philosophy, the philosopher’s body, his desires, and ultimately his death.
3. Feminist Deconstruction
The connection between deconstruction and feminist readings of the European tradition,
although implicit in Derrida’s work since “Plato’s Pharmacy” (1972), was made explicit in
a 1981 interview with Christie V. McDonald called “Choreographies”. Much earlier,
however, feminist theorists in France were incorporating deconstructive strategies in
their work. In their 1975 book The Newly Born Woman, for instance, Hélène Cixous and
Catherine Clément underscore the series of hierarchical oppositions (good/bad,
life/death, day/night, culture/nature, male/female) that provide most, if not all, of the
key terms that open a text to a deconstructive reading. The list, which carries a footnoted
reference to Derrida, is not, as we have already seen, an innocent one. In Plato the pair
speech/writing is one central theme; in the ancient Greeks generally, active/passive; in
religion God/man, later Christian/Jew; in René Descartes and the moderns mind/body;
in colonial or racist ideology Western/Oriental, white/black. In a further repetition of
Derrida’s method, Cixous and Clément’s move is not to reverse these hierarchies, which
would only create another system of power. They seek instead to think in a third
way. This third way is called “bisexuality” here, meaning the refusal to focus on a single
sexual organ in favor of undifferentiated pleasures of the flesh (NBW 84-85). This move
to rethink sexuality as part of a deconstructive strategy, drawing on psychoanalysis and
anthropological texts such as Marcel Mauss’ “Essay on the Gift”, is a common theme in
French feminist deconstruction, also found, for example, in the work of Luce Irigaray and
Julia Kristeva (and in later texts by Derrida himself).
Given the importance of Sigmund Freud’s work to this strain of feminist deconstruction,
Sarah Kofman’s 1980 book on Freud provides a detailed example of the potential power
of this method for feminist thought. One major fault line she examines is the concept of
“penis envy”, a phenomenon that is supposedly central to the process that transforms
bisexual creatures into women. Kofman notes, however, that this process amounts to
transforming into a woman “a little girl who has first been a little boy” because within
 psychoanalysis pre-Oedipal bisexuality affirms the “original predominance of masculinity
(in both sexes)” (EW 111-122). She draws extensively on Freud’s biography, as well as his
texts, to make clear how he characterizes women as defined both by lack (their penis envy)
and their excess (“her narcissistic self-sufficiency and her indifference” which leaves the
male “emptied of this original narcissism in favor of the love object” [EW 52]), another
classic deconstructive self-contradiction. Ultimately, she argues that penis envy, Freud’s
“idée fixe”, and indeed his whole account of femininity and female sexuality, “allows him
to blame nature for the cultural injustice by which man subordinates woman’s sexual
desires to his”. She also notes Freud’s surprise that, given all this, women might be hostile
to men or frigid (EW 208-209).
In The Man of Reason (1984) Genevieve Lloyd undertakes a feminist reading on a larger
historical scale, deconstructing (although she does not use that term) major philosophical
texts from Plato to Simone de Beauvoir along a fault line that would equate reason with
the masculine. The hierarchical dualism found in deconstruction (speech/writing,
male/female, and so forth.) in epistemologically-oriented English language philosophy
take the form rational/irrational, knowledge/ignorance, and so forth. Lloyd traces the
ways in which these last two pairs maintained a powerfully gendered meaning as the
concept of Reason itself evolved through the history of European philosophy. After 1600,
public/private and universal/particular became politically important additions to the list;
in the twentieth century existentialism adds transcendence/embodiment. Most
important, Lloyd says, has been the underlying pair superior/inferior. As we have already
seen, whatever is on the masculine side of the dichotomy is assumed, simply from that
fact, to have value; whatever is the feminine side, to have none. Again, like Derrida,
Cixous and Clément, Lloyd rejects a move to reverse this polarity because “ironically, it
[would] occur in a space already prepared for it by the intellectual tradition it seeks to
reject” (MR 105). Perhaps more optimistic than her French counterparts, Lloyd ends with
her own version of the deconstructive double gesture: “Philosophy has defined ideals of
Reason through exclusions of the feminine. But it also contains within it the resources
for critical reflection on those ideals and on its own aspirations” (MR 109).
4. References and Further Readings
a. References
• Benhabib, Seyla, Judith Butler, Drucilla Cornell, and Nancy Fraser. Feminist Contentions: A Philosophical
Exchange. New York: Routledge, 1995. (FC)
• Bloom, Harold, Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, Geoffrey Hartman, and J. Hillis Miller. Deconstruction and
Criticism. New York: The Seabury Press,1979. (DC)
• Borradori, Giovanna. Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Harbermas and Jacques
Derrida. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. (PT)
• Cixous, Hélène, and Catherine Clément. The Newly Born Woman, Betsy Wing, trans. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1986. (NBW)
• Critchley, Simon, Jacques Derrida, Ernesto Laclau, and Richard Rorty. Deconstruction and Pragmatism,
Chantal Mouffe, ed. New York: Routledge, 1996. (DP)
• Derrida, Jacques. Positions, Alan Bass, trans. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981. (P)
• Derrida, Jacques. Dissemination, Barbara Johnson, trans. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981. (D)
• Derrida, Jacques. The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation, Christie V. McDonald,
ed., Peggy Kamuf, trans. NewYork: Schocken, 1985. (EO)
• Derrida, Jacques. The Truth in Painting, Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod, trans. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1987. (TP)
• Derrida, Jacques, and Christie V. McDonald. “Choreographies”, in Feminist Interpretations of Jacques
Derrida, Nancy J. Holland, ed. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997.
• Derrida, Jacques. Paper Machine, Rachel Bowlby, trans. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005.
(PM)
• Descartes, René. The Philosophical Words of Descartes, Volume I, Elizabeth S. Haldane and G. R. T. Ross,
trans. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1911).
• Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time, John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, trans. New York: Harper,
1962. (BT)
• Heidegger, Martin. “The Origin of the Work of Art” in Poetry, Language, Thought, Albert Hofstadter, trans.
New York: Harper, 1971.
• Jones, Ernest. Hamlet and Oedipus. New York: Doubleday, 1954.
• Kofman, Sarah. The Enigma of Woman: Woman in Freud’s Writings, Catherine Porter, trans. Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 1985. (EW)
• Lloyd, Genevieve. The Man of Reason: “Male” and “Female” in Western Philosophy. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1984. (MR)
• Michelfelder, Diane P., and Richard E. Palmer, eds. Dialogue and Deconstruction: The Gadamer-Derrida
Encounter. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1989. (DD)
b. Additional Readings
• Armour, Ellen T. Deconstruction, Feminist Theology, and the Problem of Difference. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1999.
• Excellent, but dense, example of the political use of deconstruction.
• Bordo, Susan R. The Flight to Objectivity: Essays on Cartesianism & Culture. Albany, NY: State University
of New York Press, 1987.
• Excellent, accessible feminist deconstruction of Descartes.
• Cornell, Drucilla. Beyond Accommodation: Ethical Feminism, Deconstruction, and the Law. Lanham,
MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999.
• Excellent, but dense, example of the use of deconstruction in legal theory.
• Derrida, Jacques. Writing and Difference, Alan Bass, trans. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978.
• Early deconstructions of Foucault, Hegel, Husserl, and others.
• Derrida, Jacques. Margins – Of Philosophy, Alan Bass, trans. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982.
• Early deconstructions of Heidegger, Hegel, and J. L. Austin.
• Derrida, Jacques, and Anne Dufourmantelle. Of Hospitality, Rachel Bowlby, trans. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford
University Press, 2000.
• Addresses issues of gender, immigration, and the political state.
• Derrida, Jacques. Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas. Palo Alto,
CA: Stanford University Press, 2005.
• Excellent political and feminist late deconstruction.
• Derrida, Jacques. Psyche: Inventions of the Other, Volume II, Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth Rottenber,
eds. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008.
• Includes both “Geschlecht” articles on Heidegger and gender, plus other important papers from
1998-2003.
• Fraser, Nancy. Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse and Gender in Contemporary Social
Theory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989.
• A major feminist theorist who is critical of deconstruction.
• Kofman, Sarah. Selected Writings, Thomas Albrecht, ed., with Georgia Albert and Elizabeth Rotten
berg. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007.
• Moi, Toril, ed. The Kristeva Reader. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986.
• Sellers, Susan, ed. The Hélène Cixous Reader. New York: Routledge, 1994. (CR)
• Silverman, Hugh J., and Gary Aylesworth, eds. The Textual Sublime: Deconstruction and its
Differences. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1990.
• Several interesting articles on deconstruction, including one by Paul DeMan.
• Taylor, Mark C., ed. Deconstruction in Context: Literature and Philosophy. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1986.
• Collection of philosophical writings from Kant onward that provides some of the historical
context for deconstruction.
• Whitford, Margaret, ed. The Irigaray Reader. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1991.

Author Information
Nancy J. Holland
Email: nholland@gw.hamline.edu
Hamline University
U. S. A.

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