Chapter 8: Deconstructive Criticism

According to Tyson, (1999) deconstruction is a approach of reading literature which is based on the assumption that language is unknowable. Introduced into philosophy by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida in the late 1960s, the term ‘deconstruction’ is now chiefly associated, despite the disclaimer of its originator, with the school of literary criticism. Derrida’s disclaimer presents a major obstacle to any attempt, this one included, to encapsulate his thought. He tells us that deconstruction is neither analytical nor a critical tool; it is not a method, or an operation, it is not an act performed on a text by a subject; it is, rather, a term that resists both definition and translation.

Derrida originated the philosophical technique of deconstruction, a system of analysis that assumes a text has no single fixed meaning, because of the inadequacy of language to express an author’s intention and because a reader’s understanding of the text is culturally conditioned – that is, influenced by the culture in which the reader lives. As Tyson claims, “how we see and understand ourselves and the world is thus governed by the language with which we are taught to seem them. That is, language mediates our experience of ourselves and the world” (p. 246) Thus, a text has many possible legitimate interpretations brought about by the “play” of language. Derrida stresses the philosophical importance of pun, metaphor, ambiguity, and other playful aspects of language traditionally disregarded in philosophy. His method of deconstruction involves close and careful readings of central texts of Western philosophy that bring to light some of the conflicting forces contained in the text and that highlight the devices the text uses to claim legitimacy and truth for itself, many of which may lie beyond the intention of its author.

Deconstruction is called a poststructuralist theory, because it emerged as a reaction against t structuralism’s orderly vision of language and human experience. Following the logic of deconstruction, “if language is the ground of being, then the world is infinite text, that is, an infinite chain of signifiers always in play. Because human being are constituted by language, the, too, are texts. In other words, deconstruction’s theory of language is an implication of subjectivity, for what it means to be a human being” (p. 250). Given that our experience of our world and ourselves is formed in terms of the language we use, and because language is seen as unstable, ambiguous force field of competing ideologies, we too are unstable and ambiguous force fields of competing ideologies. Consequently, the self-image of a stable identity that we believe we have is really just a comforting self-delusion, which we produce in collusion with our culture, for culture, too wants to see itself as stable and coherent when in reality it is highly unstable and fragmented. As Tyson states “We don’t really have an identity because the word identity implies that we consist of one, singular self, when in fact we are multiple and fragmented, consisting at any moment of any number of conflicting beliefs, desires, fears, anxieties and intentions” (p. 251).

The three take away points form this summery of deconstruction is (1) language is dynamic, ambiguous, and unstable, continually disseminating possible meaning; (2) existence has no center, no stable meaning, no fixed ground; and (3) human being are fragmented battlefields for competing ideologies whose only “identity” is the one we invent and choose to believe.