Deconstruction

• French philosopher, literary
critic, journalist, scholar and

academic
• Some of his important works
include 'Writing and Difference,'
'Speech and Phenomena,' and
'Of Grammatology,'
• His paper 'Structure,Sign, and
Play in the Discourse of the Human
Sciences,' virtually inaugurated a
new critical analysis known
as deconstruction
• a philosophy and a
method of literary
analysis that questions
traditional assumptions
about certainty,
identity, and truth;
• regards meaning as
resulting from the
differences between
words rather than their
reference to the things
they stand for
• challenges the ability
of language to
communicate or represent
Author? Text? Reader?
• Rather, deconstruction is interested in the idea
that meaning breaks apart.
• The notion of ‘structure’, as Derrida argues even
in structuralist theory has always presupposed a
centre, (the principle of unity which underlies
the structure), to draw meaning of some sort.
• The desire for a centre is called logocentrism in
Derrida’s classic work, Of Grammatology.
• People desire a centre because it guarantees a
being as presence. (e.g. we think of our mental
and physical life as centred on an ‘I’)
• Deconstruction is concerned with the decentred
and undecidable.
• Think of a tree. How would you
describe it?
• Difference deals with using what the
tree is not, in an attempt to
explain what it actually is.
• However, we can never truly know the
definition of anything because we
can never really say what
something is.
• We are only depending on each
other's experiences and not
really defining a tree.
• Thus, all meanings are eternally
• Deconstruction wants to
note, and reverse these
hierarchies.
• Derrida refuses to assert a
new hierarchy.
• He uses the term
‘supplement’ to convey the
unstable relationship of
these couplets.
• Deconstruction opposes the
binary thinking altogether.
• Belgian-born deconstructionist
literary critic and theorist.
• Instrumental in popularizing
deconstruction as a form of
literary criticism in the United
States.
• His book circled around the paradox
that critics only achieve insight
through a certain blindness.
• Criticism must be ignorant of the
insight it produces.
• The Sterling Professor emeritus of
English and Comparative Literature
at Yale University.
• His critical writings are
frequently interrupted and
complicated by such ‘imperfect’
references.
• Critical reading should aim not to
produce consistent meaning but to
reveal ‘contradictions and
equivocations’ in order to make
fiction ‘interpretable by making it
less readable’.
• Distinguished Professor of English
at the University of California
Irvine.
• As a preeminent American
deconstructionist, he is well-known
for his explanation of the theory
in his essay Stevens’ Rock and
Criticism as Cure (1976):
“Deconstruction is not a
dismantling of the structure of a
text, but a demonstration that it
has already dismantled itself. Its
apparently solid ground is no
• Foucault regards discourse as a
central human activity, but not as a
universal ‘general text’, a vast sea
of signification.
• It is evident that real power is
exercised through discourse, and that
this power has real effects.
• However, there are the social
constraints, especially the formative
power of the education system which
defines what is rational and
scholarly.
• The regulation of specific disciplines
involves very refined rules for
• Foucault denies that we can ever
possess an objective knowledge of
History.
• However, Foucault does not treat the
strategies writers use to make sense
of History as merely textual play.
• Such discourses are produced within a
real world of power struggle.
• “There are no absolutely ‘true’
discourses, only more or less powerful
ones.”
• Initiated a new kind of
intertextual historical theory
which is inevitably an
interventionist one since it
assists in remaking the past.
• Challenges the old historicism on
several grounds and establishes a
new set of assumptions:
1. There are two meanings of the
word ‘history’: (a) ‘the events
of the past’ and (b) ‘telling a
story about the events of the
past’.
2. Historical periods are not
unified entities.
3. Historians can no longer claim
that their study of the past is
• British counterpart of New
Historicism
• Developed a more politically
radical type of historicism.
• They see Foucault as implying
a more precarious and
unstable structure of power,
and they often aim to derive
from his work a history of
‘resistances’ to dominant
ideologies.
• A commitment to transgressive
and oppositional voices to
become more explicit.

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• French philosopher, literary

critic, journalist, scholar and

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