Assignment: Paper E-C-203,

Topic: Derrida's Deconstruction,

Student's Name - Pooja N. Trivedi, 

Roll No - 20, 

M. A. Part I, Semester - II,

Submitted To - Dr. Dilip Barad, 

                        Department of English,

                        Bhavnagar University,

                        Bhavnagar.

After New Criticism and Structuralism, the latest development in the technique of literary criticism is Deconstruction which provided a promising alternative to the Freudians, Marxist and others. For the term was conceived by French philosopher and critic Jacques Derrida, who expressed his own deconstruction mainly in ‘Of Grammatology’,

“A philosophy of meaning that deals with the ways that meaning is constructed and understood by the writers, texts and readers.”

One way of understanding the term is that it involves discovering, recognizing, and understanding the underlying and unspoken and implicit assumptions, ideas and frameworks that form the basis for thought and belief. It has various shades of meaning in different areas of study and discussion. M. H. Abrams defines in his ‘A Glossary of Literary Terms’,

“Deconstruction, as applied in the criticism of literature, designates a theory and practice of reading which questions and claims to "subvert" or "undermine" the assumption that the system of language provides grounds that are adequate to establish the boundaries, the coherence or unity, and the determinate meanings of a literary text.”

Typically, a deconstructive reading sets out to show that conflicting forces within the text itself serve to dissipate the seeming definiteness of its structure and meanings into an indefinite array of incompatible and undecidable possibilities. There is a great deal of confusion as to what kind of thing deconstruction is – whether it is a school or as some call it a ‘textual even and determining what authority to accord to a particular attempt at delimiting it.

It is easier to explain what deconstruction is not than what it is. According to Derrida, deconstruction is neither an analysis, a critique, a method, an act, nor an operation. In addition, deconstruction is not properly speaking, a synonym for “destruction”. Rather, according to Barbara Johnson, it is quite specific kind of analytical “reading”

“Deconstruction is in fact much closer to the original meaning of the word analysis itself which etymogically means “to undo” – a virtual synonym for “to de-construct”… If everything is destroyed in a deconstructive reading, it is not the text, but the claim to unequivocal domination of one mode of signifying over another. A deconstructive reading is a reading which analyses the specificity of a text’s critical difference from itself.”

Further, deconstruction is not the same as nihilism or relativism. It is not the abandonment of all meaning, but attempts to demonstrate that western thoughts has not satisfied its quest for a “transcendental signifier” that will give meaning to all other signs. Again to quote Derrida, “Deconstruction is not an enclosure in nothingness, but an openness to other.” and an attempt “to discover the non-place or non-lieu which would be other of philosophy. Thus, meaning is “out there” but it cannot be located by western metaphysics, because text gets in the way.

Thus, deconstruction is really a technique of de-sedimenting the text in order to allow what was already inscribed in its texture to resurface the deconstructive reader expose the grammatological structure of the text by locating the moment in the text which harbours the unbalancing of the equation, the sleight of hand at the limit of a text which cannot be dismissed as a contradiction.

M.H. Abrams argues that the most distinctive part of Derridian theory is that “…he shifts his inquiry from language to ecriture, the written or printed text; and the second that he conceives the text as an extraordinary limited fashion.”

Let us now take up the basic terms that Derrida shakes to demolish traditional criticism and facilitate the act of deconstruction. First of all “writing” and “speech” are the pivot words in the ‘Of Grammatology’. Metaphysics and theology assigned to the written word a secondary place and to the spoken word the primary place. Derrida argues that the traditional concepts of speech and writing have been shaped, conditioned and governed by metaphysics. Deconstruction identifies in the Western philosophical tradition a “logocentricism” or “metaphysics of presence” also known as phallocentrism which holds that speech-thought (the logos) is a privileged, ideal and self present entity, through which all discourse and meaning are derived. Structuralism that is indebted to that concept often claims to have made the study of language and the act of criticism scientific discipline. Derrida shows that this claim is false because the signifier signified concept of language that linguistics has branded down to us is another version of the traditional concept of speech and writing. This logocentricism is the primary target of deconstruction.

Another term that deconstruction introduces is of ‘defferance’ also brings with it the idea of trace. A trace is what a sign differs from. It is the absent part of the sign’s presence. In other words, through the act of difference, a sign leaves behind a trace, which is whatever is left over after everything present has been accounted for. Derrida puts in, “the trace itself does not exist” because it is self effacing that is, “in presenting itself it becomes effaced.” Because all signifiers wholly present nor wholly absent.

Derrida has grouped metaphysics linguistics and structuralism into one category. All the three disciplines have expelled writing as secondary something that exists only to represent the voice that it embodies, the voice that reveals the meaning.

Derrida calls this concept of writing the “vulgar concept”. He dismisses this vulgar concept and attempts to liberate language and criticism from the totalizing and totalitarian influence of introducing the new concept of writing based on three very complex words: “difference”, “trace” and “arche-writing”. Derrida’s attempt is to demystify our understanding of language. Therefore deconstruction begins with the demystification as well as the demythification of the traditional concepts of language.

Deconstruction urges that the whole problem and history of language must be entirely thought. The result of rethought is the conclusion that language is “writing”. This means all that a critic can do is to partake in the forces of difference and move along the trace. The possible way for deconstructive critic is to criticize a text, is to use the rhetorical, the etymological and figurative analysis and emerges with newer interpretations.

Sankaran Ravindran says that in spite of “difference” that the writer makes between one word and another, he can never express his meaning accurately and exactly. He must always mean more than and something different from what he indicates through writing. The critic, therefore, is to take the words of the poet or writer not as outward meaning but as indicator of his meaning.

Moreover, several of Derrida’s skeptical procedures have been especially influential in deconstructive literary criticism. It is not easy to sum up deconstruction, in two words, as the saying goes.

However, to end with the note of M.H.Abrams, Derrida did not Derrida did not propose deconstruction as a mode of literary criticism, but as a way of reading all kinds of texts so as to reveal and subvert the tacit metaphysical presuppositions of Western thought. His views and procedures, however, have been taken up by literary critics, especially in America, who have adapted Derrida's "critical reading" to the kind of close reading of particular literary texts which had earlier been the familiar procedure of the New Criticism. Paul de Man has said, in a way which reveals that new-critical close readings "were not nearly close enough."

The end results of the two kinds of close reading are utterly diverse. New Critical explications of texts had undertaken to show that a great literary work, in the tight internal relations of its figurative and paradoxical meanings, constitutes a freestanding, bounded, and organic entity of multiplex yet determinate meanings.

On the contrary, a radically deconstructive close reading undertakes to show that a literary text lacks a "totalized" boundary that makes it an entity, much less an organic unity; also that the text, by a play of internal counter-forces, disseminates into an indefinite range of self-conflicting significations. The claim is made by some deconstructive critics that a literary text is superior to nonliterary texts - self-reference – and "right reading" or "correct reading" of a text impossible. The business of the critic is to deconstruct an existing construct and then to reconstruct it so as to liberate it from the concepts of metaphysics.