These days, anything that strives to be playfully critical and mildly nihilistic is instantly deemed 'deconstructive.' The word has been lifted from its philosophical heritage and disseminated throughout popular culture, suffering another mutation in meaning every time it's pronounced. This is,... [more]

These days, anything that strives to be playfully critical and mildly nihilistic is instantly deemed 'deconstructive.' The word has been lifted from its philosophical heritage and disseminated throughout popular culture, suffering another mutation in meaning every time it's pronounced. This is, after all, one among many linguistic phenomena that Jacques Derrida, essentially the founder of Deconstruction as we (claim to) know it, deals with in his texts. It's important to understand that Deconstruction is not merely a literary or philosophical concept, but rather a practice: it is something that must always be done, and done again. It involves a kind of hypersensitivity to textual discrepancies, an eye (or an ear) for infinitesimal differences in the meanings of words which, as they are repeated in different linguistic contexts, tend to flip over, invert themselves, betray their own proper sense. Derrida is always attempting to perform this inversion; he does so through extremely precise reading, ample citation, and relentless repetition of words and concepts which, as the differences between their various appearances become manifest, eventually brings about the collapse of a text's fixed or determined meanings. The moment of this collapse is the work of what Derrida calls its "difference"; paradoxically, it is this same difference which generates the oppositions it subsequently troubles. Discovering and manifesting a text's difference is the task of Deconstruction -- but its aim? That would seem to be the question Deconstruction now confronts. Having cleared the space in which something new might arise, one now awaits it. [show less]