Derrida and Deconstruction

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Name:- Pandya Riva M.

Roll no:-25

Paper:-7

Topic:- Derrida and Deconstruction

             

                                                                                                                                                                                          Derrida is a French philosopher, born in Algiers in 1930. He is perhaps best known for developing the analytical technique of deconstruction. He was a founding father of deconstruction, a controversial system of analyses which challenges the basis of traditional western thought. Derrida evolves deconstruction as a strategy of critical questioning directed towards exposing unquestionable metaphysical assumsions and literary language. In his celebrated work of grammatology, Derrida unravels in details his main philosophical contention on deconstruction.

Deconstruction

                                      Deconstruction means a way of reading that concern itself with decentering with unmasking the problematic nature of all centres.or it is a critical outlook concerned with the relationship between text and meaning. A close and critical reading of a written text to uncover the ways of thinking that constrain our impressions or conceptualization of the world.

This idea has been extended to other forms of text - for example, visual art and architecture.

The technique may often be (miss)used in a destructive manner. However, Derrida's original aim was not to destroy, merely to point out hidden assumptions and contradictions that shape a text.

Derrida himself is often viewed with deep suspicion, if not hatred, by many academics. It seems that deconstruction has a nasty habit of biting hard into people's pet ideas and theories.

What does this mean for us?

                                  Derrida disputes the idea that a text (or for us, a communication) has an unchanging, unified meaning. He challenges the author's intentions, and shows there may be numerous legitimate interpretations of a text. This is where the idea of "the author is dead" arises: once the text is written, the author's input is finished. The meaning (any meaning) is up for grabs, in other words.

• Identify binary opposition

                              Notice what a particular text or school of thought takes to be natural, normal, self-evident, originary, immediately apparent, or worthy of pursuit or emulation. Or, notice those places where a text is most insistent that there is a firm and fast distinction between two things. It is the most important part of deconstruction .Binary opposition means to look at what is not in a story. There are two part of it,

1) Dominant, 2) Oppressed or no dominant.

                                           For Saussure The binary opposition was the means by which the unit of language have value of meaning..Each unit is defined against which it is not. With the categorization terms and concept tend to be associated with a positive or negative. For e.g.: Man-woman, presence-absence, Reading-writing etc..

                                  Derrida argued that this oppositions were arbitrary and inheritantly unstable. Deconstruction is regarded as a forum of anti-structuralism. It rejects most of assumsions of structuralism and more vehemently binary opposition on the grounds that such oppositions always privilege one term over the other that is signified over the signifier. For e.g.:- The words Light and Dark. Many of us associate light with goodness or positive thing. The same with up and downs with up having the more positive condition.

• Differance

                                                                                                                                                                                       Differance is a French word coined by the French philosopher and deconstructionist, Jacques Derrida. The word is a play on several other words that illustrate Derrida’s meaning. The concept of differance is a complex theory that tries to illuminate the way words are used and how their specific meaning is derived. Derrida called difference a "neographism," meaning a term that is neither a word nor a concept and is used to describe a literary idea. So one word leads to another word and that word leads to other and finally we cannot come out of the dictionary so there is no final meaning to any word ,.for example:- the word, interest if we look at the dictionary it has various meanings like, hobby, money, a group of people etc..2) Bat one meaning of it is cricket bat another is flying animal.

                                Saussurian sign is equal to signifier which signifies something but Derridian sign is free play of signifiers, signifying nothing. This is a chain of signifiers which is never stop.(we assume that we understand), So meaning is always postponed and you can never reach the final meaning.

Logocentricism and Phonocentricism

                                          Logocenricism means logo as centre, source of knowledge or human beings, while Phonocenricism means the speech or writing binary, speech is supposed to single presence of the speaker.
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                                         To speak a little bit of Derrida, it might be said that like the logocentrics of old we anal-retentive, logo-phallo-centric philosophers privilege logos – that is, meaning, reason, spirit and we take speech to be prior, in the order of signification, to writing. And by privileging speech over writing, we privilege presence over absence. So speech is practice of presence while writing is absence it means that when writer write something, the reader is not present at that time. Language is speaking rather than writing.

Metaphysics of Presence

Derrida borrows this phrase “Metaphysics of Presence” from heideggar.By logos or presence, derrida signifies “ultimate referent” a self-certifying and self-sufficient ground or foundation available to us totally outside the play of language itself that serves to be a “center” to guarantee the structure of a linguistic system.

For instance,

-Hut

-House

-Palace

                             Its relationship to the other words (a house is bigger than a hut but smaller than a palace.) Derrida focuses on the center of it and then tries to deconstruct that center.

Decentring the center

                            According to derrida, the center also closes off the play which it opens up. As center it is the point at which the substitution of contents, elements or terms is no longer possible.Futher says that center is paradoxically “within the structure and outside it” or even “the center is not the center”

Structure, Sign and play:

                                    This essay was read at the John Hopkins international colloquium “The language of criticism and the science of man” Derrida demonstrates how structuralism as represented by the anthropologist Claude Levi Strasuss which sets out as a criticism or rejection of science and metaphysics can be read as embodying precisely those aspects of science and metaphysics which it seeks to challenge. “There are thus two interpretations of interpretation of structure, sign of free play. The one seeks to decipher, dreams of deciphering a truth or an origin which is free from free play and from the order of sign, and lives like an exile the necessary of interpretation. The other which is no longer turned toward the origin, affirms free play and tries to pass beyond man and humanism.”

Derrida in this essay notes that language bears within itself the necessity of its own critique. The essay is considered as inauguration of poststructuralist as a theoretical movement.So Structuralism began as a criticism or attack on metaphysics or science is another.

                                             The centre is paradoxically within the structure and outside it; the totality has its centre elsewhere. The centre is not the centre. As we know that meaning is always postponed. So criticism also can never go outside of the tradition It uses the same assumption that tradition is using .Darrida says that its happens because of a language. Language has always lack of something. So the final meaning can never be grasped its postponed. Whenever we make a philosophical statement the ultimate meaning is already postponed. So the language demands critique. And derrida says that Deconstructive writing is most of the time auto critical, it means that it questions itself.

                                            Finally, Derrida points out the two reasons for schools of interpretations which are irreconcilable yet exist simultaneously: 1) the interpretation which seeks to decipher an original Truth that is uncluttered by free play, and 2) the interpretation which affirms the role of free play within the system.

                                                                                                                                                                                           His philosophy of not being centered in a single one philosophy has validity. Derrida, as taught in the school of deconstruction, encourages the use of several perspectives (several centers, so to speak) to view a concept. This does not help to affirm any holistic view, but it enables a chance to find common ground between perspectives even though the idea seems impossible. To me, if the purpose of free play is to de-center within a system, then it is perhaps possible to use the idea of free play to develop and enlargen the system in order to accommodate new centers for thought. This seems to be the point of the post-modern spirit: finding new ways of viewing the world that is not set in any specific system, but constantly moving around with the principles of free play in order to participate in the world better.

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