Deconstruction:

Centers and Margins

 Four conceptions of meaning:

• Idealist (Platonic): God is the origin, center and guarantor of meaning.

• Humanist: The self is the source of meaning, which is expressed

intentionally through language.

• Structuralist: Structure is at the center of a signifying system, is an

impersonal force.
—All narratives are variations on universal patterns.
—Structure originates and produces meaning, which is therefore to be understood as the ultimate
coherence of the structure itself.

• Post-structuralist/Deconstructionist: Decenters all meaning-making

systems. Exposes how a given system posits (rather than reveals) a center from
which everything issues and on which the system’s privileged meaning is propped.
This includes Structuralism.
• Saussure: “Language is a system of differences without
positive terms.”

• As with Structuralism, Deconstruction observes that, like

Saussure’s account of language, all signifying systems (i.e. all
forms of representation) operate according to binary
oppositions. E.g.: Day/night; Model/copy; God/human;
Human/animal; Spirit/body; Conscious/unconscious;
Male/female; Culture/nature, Good/evil etc.

• BUT: Deconstruction goes further to note that one part of

the pair is always privileged over the other. Structures are
never neutral, their meaning never universal. In this sense,
Deconstruction questions Stucturalism’s claim to a
scientific basis.
Binary Oppositions through the
Deconstructive Lens

• The two terms of a binary opposition cannot exist in any meaningful way in
isolation from one another, yet neither has any essential truth, no grounding in
the non-human world.

• Deconstruction seeks to dissolve the barrier between terms to reveal

oppositions to be non-oppositional and therefore truth claims based upon one
valorized term of the pair to be unstable.
The deconstructive process offers a means of
contending with the problem of how to critique a
system (that is, come to know it, become able to
speak about it) from within the very system that made
such knowledge possible.

The potential deconstruction of a text is already within

that text and no system of interpretation external to
that text (e.g. psychoanalytic, historical, biographical) is
necessary.
“Deconstruction is not a dismantling of
the structure of a text, but a
demonstration that it has already
dismantled itself. Its apparently solid
ground is no rock but thin air.”
—J. Hillis Miller
• Deconstructive Method:
• I. Focus on binary oppositions within a text, show how these
terms are related (i.e. how one is central, naturalized, and
privileged while the other is suppressed, silenced and
marginalized.

• II. THEN: subvert the hierarchization of terms to make the text

mean the opposite of what it originally appeared to mean.

• III. THEN: observe that both terms of the opposition become

mutually intertwined and are released from their oppositional
conflict into a “free play” of non-hierarchical, non-stable
multitude of meanings.
 Binarisms in Western Metaphysics

Privileged Suppressed/Devalued
God Human
Model/Origin Copy
Center Margin
Essential Truth Appearance
Real thing/Real being Representation
Soul Body
Mind Body
Logos (inner meaning) Logoi (words, speech acts)

Inner thought (Intention) External speech (expression)

Presence Absence
Speech Writing

*Note how speech itself appears in oppositional positions and how speech
and writing can occupy the same side of the binary.
Derrida and Différance
• Of Grammatology [De la grammatologie](1967) challenged the
Logocentrism at the heart of Western metaphysics.

• Derrida redefines writing by performing a deconstructive

reading of Saussure himself to challenge the statement that
language is “a system of differences without positive terms.”

• Derrida demonstrates that Saussure’s assumption (and

therefore all of structuralist linguistics) is itself hierarchized,
privileging speech over writing.

• This valorization of speech, says Derrida, is linked to the

binarism presence (speech)/absence (writing), in which writing
becomes a supplement to speech, something that stands in for
the absent speaker, just as the Torah stands in for the voice of
God (and the absolute meaning guaranteed by the presence of
God).
God speaks and the universe
begins:
Let there be light
There is a God (the thing that does the speaking).

God is present (speech as proof of presence, as presence

itself)

God is the ORIGIN of all things and what God creates

through speech are binary oppositions (light/dark)
 The text of the Torah, then, is a sign of God’s absent
presence or deferred presence. Through reading, the logic of
text as supplement is to be undone, reversed to access
God/Truth
 • Derrida coins the neologism différance—a fusion of the French
words for difference (to differ: a spatial operation) and deferral (to
defer: a temporal operation). This odd homonym draws our
attention to writing as its own form of presence, one that
destabilizes the logocentric association between speech and
presence.

• The “a” in différance—the phoneme that marks the word’s

difference from “difference” and defers its meaning—can only be
perceived in writing, not speech.

• Derrida insists that différance is “neither a concept nor a word.” Like

all signs, though, it is contingent on both difference and deferred
presence.

•The (il)logic of supplementarity: All language is the absence of a desired

presence, a yearning for a language that can provide true presence. Yet if
speech is supplementary to language (suppléer= 1. to add on to something
complete AND 2. to complete something by addition), then speech can
never be complete or originary.
 This gives us the means to subvert all claims to truth in
language: writing itself can destabilize apparently originary,
centered systems of truth.