Deconstruction

Deconstruction is a term used in philosophy, literary criticism, and the social sciences, popularised through its usage by Jacques Derrida in the 1960s. The Oxford English Dictionary defines deconstruction as "A strategy of critical analysis,directed towards exposing unquestioned metaphysical assumptions and internal contradictions in philosophical and literary language." Derrida developed the term deconstruction in relation to his critical engagement with phenomenology, structural linguistics, and literature in the 1960s. The term is also related to the traditions of hermeneutics as it works with questions of how texts should be read and interpreted and immanent critique as a deconstruction demonstrates problems or contradictions that are already operating within the deconstructed text. Concerning deconstruction Derrida states that

From about 1963 to 1968, he tried to work out - in particular in the three works published in 1967 - what was in no way meant to be a system but rather a sort of strategic device, opening its own abyss, an unclosed, unenclosable, not wholly formalizable ensemble of rules for reading, interpretation and writing. This type of device may have enabled me to detect not only in the history of philosophy and in the related socio-historical totality, but also in what are alleged to be sciences and in so-called post-philosophical discourses that figure among the most modern (in linguistics, in anthropology, in psychoanalysis), to detect in these an evaluation of writing, or, to tell the truth, rather a devaluation of writing whose insistent, repetitive, even obscurely compulsive, character was the sign of a whole set of long-standing constraints. These constraints were practised at the price of contradictions, of denials, of dogmatic decrees"


The technical difficulty of the primary material by Derrida on deconstruction and the eager appropriation of the term by people who did not always have a clear understanding of Derrida's usage of the term has lead to considerable confusion in its reception. In response Derrida clarified the situation by clearly stating what deconstruction is not. The most important of Derrida's qualifications of the term is that deconstruction is not poststructural and deconstruction is not a methodology in the traditional sense. Derrida avoided offering a reductive definition of deconstruction that he felt would necessarily oversimplify the complex and technical role of the term in his own philosophy - he insists that to understand the term properly you have to "do your homework" and read the relevant texts involved - but many secondary texts have risked offering their own interpretive definitions. Today the term deconstruction is popular far beyond Derrida's own usage of it and is most closely associated with continental philosophy and literary criticism. Paul de Man is a prominent practitioner of his own interpretation of deconstruction and the most famous member of what came to be referred to as the Yale School of deconstruction.