Name - Vyas Nupur Hiteshbhai.
Roll number- 39
Subject- paper- 7 Literary theory and criticism
Aassignment Topic- Deconstruction
Batch year- 2015-2017
Submitted to Department of English, MKBU, india, gujarat
(Bhavnagar).
Email id- nupurvyas1995@gmail.com
Deconstruction
Derrida, Jacques 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 is a critical outlook concerned with the
relationship between text and meaning. Jacques Derrida's 1967 work Of
Grammatology introduced the majority of ideas influential within
deconstruction. According to Derrida and taking inspiration from the work of
Ferdinand de Saussure, language as a system of signs and words only has meaning
because of the contrast between these signs. As Rorty contends "words have
meaning only because of contrast-effects with other words...no word can acquire
meaning in the way in which philosophers from Aristotle to Bertrand Russell
have hoped it might—by being the unmediated expression of something
non-linguistic (e.g., an emotion, a sense-datum, a physical object, an idea, a
Platonic Form)".As a consequence meaning is never present, but rather is
deferred to other signs. Derrida refers to the - in this view, mistaken -
belief that there is a self-sufficient, non-deferred meaning as metaphysics of
presence. A concept then must be understood in the context of its opposite,
such as being/nothingness, normal/abnormal, speech/writing, etc.
Finally, Derrida argues that it is not enough to expose and
deconstruct the way oppositions work and then stop there in a nihilistic or
cynical position, "thereby preventing any means of intervening in the
field effectively".To be effective, deconstruction needs to create new
terms, not to synthesize the concepts in opposition, but to mark their
difference and eternal interplay. This explains why Derrida always proposes new
terms in his deconstruction, not as a free play but as a pure necessity of
analysis, to better mark the intervals. Derrida called undecidables, that is,
unities of simulacrum, "false" verbal properties (nominal or
semantic) that can no longer be included within philosophical (binary)
opposition: but which, however, inhabit philosophical oppositions, resisting
and organizing it, without ever constituting a third term, without ever leaving
room for a solution in the form of Hegelian dialectics (e.g. différance,
archi-writing, pharmakon, supplement, hymen, gram, spacing).
In the 1980s, the Postmodernism era, deconstruction was
being put to use in a range of theoretical enterprises in the humanities and
social sciences, including law anthropology, historiography, linguistics, sociolinguistics,
psychoanalysis, feminism, and LGBT studies. In the continental philosophy
tradition, debates surrounding ontology, epistemology, ethics, aesthetics,
hermeneutics, and philosophy of language still refer to it today. Within
architecture it has inspired deconstructivism, and it remains important in
general within art, music, and literary criticism.
Derrida's original use of the word
"deconstruction" was a translation of Destruktion, a concept from the
work of Martin Heidegger that Derrida sought to apply to textual reading.
Heidegger's term referred to a process of exploring the categories and concepts
that tradition has imposed on a word, and the history behind them. Derrida
opted for deconstruction over the literal translation destruction to suggest
precision rather than violence.
Basic philosophical concerns
Derrida's concerns flow from a consideration of several
issues:
A desire to contribute to the re-valuation of all western
values, built on the 18th century Kantian critique of reason, and carried
forward to the 19th century, in its more radical implications, by Kierkegaard
and Nietzsche.
An assertion that texts outlive their authors, and become
part of a set of cultural habits equal to, if not surpassing, the importance of
authorial intent.
A re-valuation of certain classic western dialectics: poetry
vs. philosophy, reason vs. revelation, structure vs. creativity, episteme vs.
techne, etc.
To this end, Derrida follows a long line of modern
philosophers, who look backwards to Plato and his influence on the western
metaphysical tradition.[23] Like Nietzsche, Derrida suspects Plato of
dissimulation in the service of a political project, namely the education,
through critical reflections, of a class of citizens more strategically
positioned to influence the polis. However, like Nietzsche, Derrida is not
satisfied merely with such a political interpretation of Plato, because of the
particular dilemma modern humans find themselves stuck in. His Platonic
reflections are inseparably part of his critique of modernity, hence the
attempt to be something beyond the modern, because of this Nietzschian sense
that the modern has lost its way and become mired in nihilism.
Différance
Différance is an important idea within deconstruction, it is
the observation that the meanings of words come from their synchronity with
other words within the language and their diachrony between contemporary and
historical definitions of a word. Understanding language according Derrida
required an understanding of both viewpoints of linguistic analysis. The focus
on diachronity has led to accusations against Derrida of engaging in the
Etymological fallacy.
There is one statement by Derrida which has been of great
interest to his opponents, and which appeared in an essay on Rousseau (part of
the highly influential Of Grammatology, 1967), It is the assertion that
"there is no outside-text" (il n'y a pas de hors-texte),which is
often mistranslated as "there is nothing outside of the text". The
mistranslation is often used to suggest Derrida believes that nothing exists
but words. Michel Foucault, for instance, famously misattributed to Derrida the
very different phrase "Il n'y a rien en dehors du text" for this
purpose. According to Derrida, his statement simply refers to the
unavoidability of context that is at the heart of différance.
For example, the word "house" derives its meaning
more as a function of how it differs from "shed",
"mansion", "hotel", "building", etc. (Form of
Content, that Louis Hjelmslev distinguished from Form of Expression) than how
the word "house" may be tied to a certain image of a traditional
house (i.e. the relationship between signifier and signified) with each term
being established in reciprocal determination with the other terms than by an
ostensive description or definition: when can we talk about a "house"
or a "mansion" or a "shed"? The same can be said about
verbs, in all the languages in the world: when should we stop saying
"walk" and start saying "run"? The same happens, of course,
with adjectives: when must we stop saying "yellow" and start saying
"orange", or exchange "past" for "present? Not only
are the topological differences between the words relevant here, but the
differentials between what is signified is also covered by différance.
Thus, complete meaning is always "differential"
and postponed in language; there is never a moment when meaning is complete and
total. A simple example would consist of looking up a given word in a
dictionary, then proceeding to look up the words found in that word's
definition, etc., also comparing with older dictionaries from different periods
in time, and such a process would never end.
Metaphysics of presence-
Derrida describes the task of deconstruction as the
identification of metaphysics of presence or logocentrism in western
philosophy. Metaphysics of presence is the desire for immediate access to
meaning, the privileging of presence over absence. This means that there is an assumed
bias in certain binary oppositions where one side is placed in a position of
one over another, such as good over bad, speech over the written word, male
over female among other oppositions. Derrida writes, "Without a doubt,
Aristotle thinks of time on the basis of ousia as parousia, on the basis of the
now, the point, etc. And yet an entire reading could be organized that would
repeat in Aristotle's text both this limitation and its opposite." To
Derrida the central bias of logocentrism was the now being placed as more
important than the future or past. This argument is largely based on the
earlier work of Heidegger, who, in Being and Time, claimed that the theoretical
attitude of pure presence is parasitical upon a more originary involvement with
the world in concepts such as the ready-to-hand and being-with.
Logocentricism-
French philosopher Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) in his book
Of Grammatology responds in depth to what he believes is Saussure’s logocentric
argument. Derrida deconstructs the apparent inner, phonological system of
language, stating in Chapter 2, Linguistics and Grammatology, that in fact and
for reasons of essence Saussure’s representative determination is ‘...an ideal
explicitly directing a functioning which...is never completely phonetic’.The
idea that writing might function other than phonetically and also as more than
merely a representative delineation of speech allows an absolute concept of
logos to end in what Derrida describes as infinitist metaphysics.[9] The
difference in presence can never actually be reduced, as was the logocentric
project; instead, the chain of signification becomes the trace of
presence-absence’.
'That the signified is originarily and essentially (and not
only for a finite and created spirit) trace, that it is always already in the
position of the signifier, is the apparently innocent proposition within which
the metaphysics of the logos, of presence and consciousness, must reflect upon
writing as its death and its resource.'
"Logocentrism" is a term coined by the German
philosopher Ludwig Klages in the 1920s. It refers to the tradition of
"Western" science and philosophy that situates the logos, "the
word" or the "act of speech", as epistemologically superior in a
system, or structure, in which we may only know, or be present in, the world by
way of a logocentric metaphysics. For this structure to hold true it must be
assumed that there is an original, irreducible object which the logos
represents, and therefore, that our presence in the world is necessarily
mediated. If there is a Platonic Ideal Form then there must be an ideal
representation of such a form. According to logocentrism, this ideal
representation is the logos.
Phonocentrism-
Phonocentrism is the belief that sounds and speech are
inherently superior to, or more primary than, written language. Those who
espouse phonocentric views maintain that spoken language is the primary and
most fundamental method of communication whereas writing is merely a derived
method of capturing speech. Many also believe that spoken language is
inherently richer and more intuitive than written language. These views also
impact perceptions of sign languages - especially in the United States. Oralism
is the belief that deaf students should use sounds, speech reading, and
primarily English instead of signs in their education. Alexander Graham Bell is
a well known proponent for oralism of the deaf - such phonocentristic views are
rejected by the Deaf community. Phonocentrisim in the context of deafness is
referred to as audism.
Some writers have argued that philosophers such as Plato,
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Ferdinand de Saussure have promoted phonocentric
views. Walter Ong, who has also expressed support for the idea of
phonocentrism, has argued that the culture of the United States is particularly
non-phonocentric.
Some philosophers and linguists, notably including the
philosopher Jacques Derrida, have used the term "phonocentrism" to
criticize what they see as a disdain for written language. Derrida has argued
that phonocentrism developed because the immediacy of speech has been regarded
as closer to the presence of subjects than writing. He believed that the binary
opposition between speech and writing is a form of logocentrism.
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