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”.
Definition • a critical dismantling of tradition
and traditional modes of thought.
• The point of the deconstructive
analysis is to restructure, or
“displace,” the opposition, not
simply to reverse it.
Textual signs
Speech vs Spoken words as
language. linguistic signs.

For Derrida, the signs

are “spoken words
function as linguistic
it is to displace the
signs only to the extent
opposition so as to
that they can be
show that neither term
repeated in different
is primary.
contexts, in the absence
of the speaker who
originally utters them.”
Logocentrism • 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.
Contrapuntal In practical terms, ‘contrapuntal reading’ as I
Reading have called it means reading a text with an
understanding of what is involved when an
author shows, for instance, that a colonial
sugar plantation is seen as important to the
process of maintaining a particular style of
life in England . . . the point is that
contrapuntal reading must take account of
both processes, that of imperialism and that
of resistance to it, which can be done by
extending our reading of the texts to include
what was once forcibly excluded.” Edward
said
Contrapuntal According to Said, ‘in the
Reading counterpoint of western classical
music, various themes play off one
another, with only a provisional
privilege being given to any
particular one, yet in the resulting
polyphony there is concert and
order, an organized interplay that
derives from the themes, not from
a rigorous melodic or formal
principle outside the work.
Contrapuntal The goal of a contrapuntal reading is
Reading thus to not privilege any particular
narrative but reveal the ‘wholeness’
of the text, the intermeshed,
overlapping, and mutually embedded
histories of metropolitan and
colonised societies and of the elite
and subaltern. A contrapuntal reading
is like a fugue which can contain
‘two, three, four or five voices; they
are all part of the same composition,
but they are each distinct’.
Contrapuntal Through a contrapuntal reading, Said
Reading engaged in a ‘reading back’ to
uncover the ‘submerged but crucial
presence of empire in canonical
texts’ and to demonstrate ‘the
complementarity and interdependence
instead of isolated, venerated, or
formalized experience that excludes
and forbids the hybridizing intrusions
of human history’.
This Photo by Unknown Author is licensed under CC BY-SA This Photo by Unknown Author is licensed under CC BY-SA
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Assignment

Orientalism