Deconstruction

criticism
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Deconstruction, form of philosophical and literary analysis,

derived mainly from work begun in the 1960s by the French
philosopher Jacques Derrida, that questions the
fundamental conceptual distinctions, or “oppositions,” in Western
philosophy through a close examination of the language
and logic of philosophical and literary texts. In the 1970s the term
was applied to work by Derrida, Paul de Man, J. Hillis Miller, and
Barbara Johnson, among other scholars. In the 1980s it
designated more loosely a range of radical theoretical enterprises
in diverse areas of the humanities and social sciences, including—
in addition to philosophy and literature—law, psychoanalysis,
architecture, anthropology, theology, feminism, gay and lesbian
studies, political theory, historiography, and film theory. In
polemical discussions about intellectual trends of the late 20th-
century, deconstruction was sometimes used pejoratively to
suggest nihilism and frivolous skepticism. In popular usage the
term has come to mean a critical dismantling of tradition and
traditional modes of thought.

Deconstruction in philosophy
The oppositions challenged by deconstruction, which have
been inherent in Western philosophy since the time of the ancient
Greeks, are characteristically “binary” and “hierarchical,”
involving a pair of terms in which one member of the pair is
assumed to be primary or fundamental, the other secondary or
derivative. Examples include nature and culture, speech and
writing, mind and body, presence and absence, inside and outside,
literal and metaphorical, intelligible and sensible, and form
and meaning, among many others. To “deconstruct” an opposition
is to explore the tensions and contradictions between the
hierarchical ordering assumed (and sometimes explicitly asserted)
in the text and other aspects of the text’s meaning, especially those
that are indirect or implicit or that rely on figurative or
performative uses of language. Through this analysis, the
opposition is shown to be a product, or “construction,” of the text
rather than something given independently of it.

In the writings of the French Enlightenment philosopher Jean-

Jacques Rousseau, for example, society and culture are described
as corrupting and oppressive forces that gradually develop out of
an idyllic “state of nature” in which humans exist in self-sufficient
and peaceful isolation from one another. For Rousseau, then,
nature is prior to culture. Yet there is another sense in which
culture is certainly prior to nature: the idea of nature is a product
of culture, and what counts as “nature” or “natural” at any given
historical moment will vary depending upon the culture of the
time. What this fact shows is not that the terms of the
nature/culture opposition should be inverted—that culture is
really prior to nature—but rather that the relation between the
terms is not one-sided and unidirectional, as Rousseau and others
had assumed. The point of the deconstructive analysis is to
restructure, or “displace,” the opposition, not simply to reverse it.

For Derrida, the most telling and pervasive opposition is the one

that treats writing as secondary to or derivative of speech.
According to this opposition, speech is a more authentic form of
language, because in speech the ideas and intentions of the
speaker are immediately “present” (spoken words, in this idealized
picture, directly express what the speaker “has in mind”), whereas
in writing they are more remote or “absent” from the speaker or
author and thus more liable to misunderstanding. As Derrida
argues, however, spoken words function as linguistic signs only to
the extent that they can be repeated in different contexts, in the
absence of the speaker who originally utters them. Speech
qualifies as language, in other words, only to the extent that it has
characteristics traditionally assigned to writing, such as “absence,”
“difference” (from the original context of utterance), and the
possibility of misunderstanding. One indication of this fact,
according to Derrida, is that descriptions of speech in Western
philosophy often rely on examples and metaphors related to
writing. In effect, these texts describe speech as a form of writing,
even in cases where writing is explicitly claimed to be secondary to
speech. As with the opposition between nature and culture,
however, the point of the deconstructive analysis is not to show
that the terms of the speech/writing opposition should be inverted
—that writing is really prior to speech—nor is it to show that there
are no differences between speech and writing. Rather, it is to
displace the opposition so as to show that neither term is primary.
For Derrida, speech and writing are both forms of a more
generalized “arche-writing” (archi-écriture),
which encompasses not only all of natural language but any
system of representation whatsoever.

The “privileging” of speech over writing is based on what Derrida

considers a distorted (though very pervasive) picture of meaning
in natural language, one that identifies the meanings of words with
certain ideas or intentions in the mind of the speaker or author.
Derrida’s argument against this picture is an extension of an
insight by the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. For Saussure,
the concepts we associate with linguistic signs (their “meanings”)
are only arbitrarily related to reality, in the sense that the ways in
which they divide and group the world are not natural or
necessary, reflecting objectively existing categories, but variable
(in principle) from language to language. Hence, meanings can be
adequately understood only with reference to the specific contrasts
and differences they display with other, related meanings. For
Derrida, similarly, linguistic meaning is determined by the “play”
of differences between words—a play that is “limitless,” “infinite,”
and “indefinite”—and not by an original idea or intention existing
prior to and outside language. Derrida coined the term différance,
meaning both a difference and an act of deferring, to characterize
the way in which meaning is created through the play of
differences between words. Because the meaning of a word is
always a function of contrasts with the meanings of other words,
and because the meanings of those words are in turn dependent
on contrasts with the meanings of still other words (and so on), it
follows that the meaning of a word is not something that is fully
present to us; it is endlessly deferred in an infinitely long chain of
meanings, each of which contains the “traces” of the meanings on
which it depends.

Derrida contends that the opposition between speech and writing

is a manifestation of the “logocentrism” of Western culture—i.e.,
the general assumption that there is a realm of “truth” existing
prior to and independent of its representation by linguistic signs.
Logocentrism encourages us to treat linguistic signs as distinct
from and inessential to the phenomena they represent, rather than
as inextricably bound up with them. The logocentric conception of
truth and reality as existing outside language derives in turn from
a deep-seated prejudice in Western philosophy, which Derrida
characterizes as the “metaphysics of presence.” This is the
tendency to conceive fundamental philosophical concepts such as
truth, reality, and being in terms of ideas such as presence,
essence, identity, and origin—and in the process to ignore the
crucial role of absence and difference.

Deconstruction
QUICK FACTS

KEY PEOPLE
 Paul de Man
 Jacques Derrida
 J. Hillis Miller
RELATED TOPICS
 Art criticism
 Literary criticism
 Trace
 Logocentrism
Deconstruction in literary studies
Deconstruction’s reception was coloured by
its intellectual predecessors, most notably structuralism and New
Criticism. Beginning in France in the 1950s, the structuralist
movement in anthropology analyzed various cultural phenomena
as general systems of “signs” and attempted to develop
“metalanguages” of terms and concepts in which the different sign
systems could be described. Structuralist methods were soon
applied to other areas of the social sciences and humanities,
including literary studies. Deconstruction offered a
powerful critique of the possibility of creating detached, scientific
metalanguages and was thus categorized (along with kindred
efforts) as “post-structuralist.” Anglo-American
New Criticism sought to understand verbal works of art (especially
poetry) as complex constructions made up of different and
contrasting levels of literal and nonliteral meanings, and it
emphasized the role of paradox and irony in these artifacts.
Deconstructive readings, in contrast, treated works of art not as
the harmonious fusion of literal and figurative meanings but as
instances of the intractable conflicts between meanings of
different types. They generally examined the individual work not
as a self-contained artifact but as a product of relations with other
texts or discourses, literary and nonliterary. Finally, these readings
placed special emphasis on the ways in which the works
themselves offered implicit critiques of the categories that critics
used to analyze them. In the United States in the 1970s and ’80s,
deconstruction played a major role in the animation and
transformation of literary studies by literary theory (often referred
to simply as “theory”), which was concerned with questions about
the nature of language, the production of meaning, and the
relationship between literature and the numerous discourses that
structure human experience and its histories.

Deconstruction in the social sciences and the

arts
Deconstruction’s influence widened to include a variety of
other disciplines. In psychoanalysis, deconstructive readings of
texts by Sigmund Freud and others drew attention to the role of
language in the formation of the psyche; showed how
psychoanalytic case studies are shaped by the kinds of psychic
mechanisms that they purport to analyze (thus, Freud’s writings
are themselves organized by processes of repression,
condensation, and displacement); and questioned the logocentric
presuppositions of psychoanalytic theory. Some strands
of feminist thinking engaged in a deconstruction of the opposition
between “man” and “woman” and critiqued essentialist notions of
gender and sexual identity. The work of Judith Butler, for
example, challenged the claim that feminist politics requires a
distinct identity for women. Arguing that identity is the product or
result of action rather than the source of it, they embraced a
performative concept of identity modeled on the way in which
linguistic acts (such as promising) work to bring into being the
entities (the promise) to which they refer. This perspective was
influential in gay and lesbian studies, or “queer theory,” as the
academic avant-garde linked to movements of gay liberation styled
itself.

In the United States, the Critical Legal Studies movement applied

deconstruction to legal writing in an effort to reveal conflicts
between principles and counterprinciples in legal theory. The
movement explored fundamental oppositions such as public and
private, essence and accident, and substance and form. In
anthropology, deconstruction contributed to an increased
awareness of the role that anthropological field-workers play in
shaping, rather than merely describing, the situations they report
on and to a greater concern about the discipline’s historical
connections to colonialism.

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Finally, the influence of deconstruction spread beyond the
humanities and social sciences to the arts and architecture.
Combining deconstruction’s interest in tension and oppositions
with the design vocabulary of Russian constructivism,
deconstructivist architects such as Frank Gehry challenged the
functionalist aesthetic of modern architecture through designs
using radical geometries, irregular forms, and
complex, dynamic constructions.

Influence and criticism

In all the fields it influenced, deconstruction called attention
to rhetorical and performative aspects of language use, and it
encouraged scholars to consider not only what a text says but also
the relationship—and potential conflict—between what a text says
and what it “does.” In various disciplines, deconstruction also
prompted an exploration of fundamental oppositions and critical
terms and a reexamination of ultimate goals. Most generally,
deconstruction joined with other strands of poststructural and
postmodern thinking to inspire a suspicion of established
intellectual categories and a skepticism about the possibility of
objectivity. Consequently, its diffusion was met with a sizeable
body of opposition. Some philosophers, especially those in the
Anglo-American tradition, dismissed it as obscurantist wordplay
whose major claims, when intelligible, were either trivial or false.
Others accused it of being ahistorical and apolitical. Still others
regarded it as a nihilistic endorsement of radical epistemic
relativism. Despite such attacks, deconstruction has had an
enormous impact on a variety of intellectual enterprises.

This article was most recently revised and updated by Adam Augustyn, Managing Editor,
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