Derrida's Deconstruction

Woodlands at Dusk

150x90cm Oil on canvas

Part 2 of the upload of my dissertation - Derrida's Deconstruction.

Chapter 2: Deconstruction

In this chapter I intend to examine how Jacques Derrida developed his idea of deconstruction and how it led him to his work on hauntology.

Jacques Derrida was one of the most well known thinkers and writers of the twentieth century. He was a prolific writer and developed a range of ideas, which led him away from the dominant philosophical schools of thought which he initially studied (for example phenomenology and hermeneutics).

He was born in 1930 into a Jewish family in Algiers. Significantly, he was subjected to discrimination during his early education, being forced out of school because he was Jewish and refused entry because the quota for Jewish pupils had already been met (Attridge & Baldwin, 2004). These events may have had some influence on his later work, which was always attentive to the importance of the marginal and unsaid.

Jacques Derrida was fascinated by the use of language and the variation of meanings which occur, just by the accent, because of localised (idiomatic) meaning or emphasis. His work revolves around analysing the binary oppositions which seem to ‘naturally’ occur in the use of language.  Examples of a binary opposition can be as simple as left/right, light/dark or, perhaps more profoundly, absent/present.  By exploring these binary oppositions, or polarities of thoughts, Derrida developed his ideas on deconstruction.

Derrida is most well known for his proposals on the method or project of deconstruction. This was a field of research which Derrida originally started to work on after studying the theories of German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) whose most influential book Being and Time is considered to be one of the most important works of the twentieth century.

“Heidegger’s notion of Destruktion suggested not simply a negative act of destruction, but a positive act, such as a clearing away of something no longer useful” (Richards 2008, p.12)

Derrida re-established the old French word ‘deconstruir’ (Richards, 2008) the translation to English being deconstruction, which allowed him to develop his own ideas from Heidegger’s starting point.

Defining deconstruction is not straightforward – Nicolas Royle, in his guide to Derrida of 2003, looks at the dictionary definitions from the Oxford English Dictionary to give the reader two answers:

                 “deconstruction [DE + CONSTRUCTION]

a.      the action of undoing the construction of a thing

b.      (Philos. And Lit. Theory) A strategy of critical analysis directed towards exposing unquestioned metaphysical assumptions and internal contradictions in philosophical and literal language.”    (Royle 2003, p.24)

This dictionary definition already relies on, or uses, a binary opposition. Royle expands on this definition in his essay ‘What is Deconstruction? in Deconstructions: A Users Guide:

                

“deconstruction. n. not what you think: the experience of the impossible: what remains to be thought: a logic of destabilisation always already on the move in things themselves’: what makes every identity at once itself and different from itself: a logic of spectrally: a theoretical and practical parasitism or virology what is happening today in what is called society, politics, diplomacy, economics, historical reality, and so on: the opening of future itself” (Royle 2000, p.11)

So is deconstruction creative or destructive? Does it analyse a subject in order to dismantle something, or does it look at the systems (the binary oppositions) that operate in order for meaning to be generated? In essence, Derrida’s deconstruction is not about destroying or tearing apart an original piece of work; it is about understanding what is missing in order to gain insight into what is actually present.

An author or originator of a piece of work, whether it is written or visual, chooses her subject matter and leaves out what does not tie in with her theme. Too much information, and the reader or viewer is bombarded with facts, ideas or visual signs to the point of confusion, which results in the theme being lost in the midst of all the other things going on around it. In order to present a ‘coherent’ or legible thing (a book, piece of writing, an art work), the author has to be selective. Even the survey ordered by William the Conqueror (later renamed as the Doomsday Book) does not provide a complete record.

“The total population of England in 1086 cannot be calculated accurately from Domesday for several reasons: only the heads of households are listed; major cities like London and Winchester were omitted completely; there are no records of nuns, monks, or people in castles” (Doomsday Book Online 2011)

Therefore, by applying the methodology of deconstruction to the Domesday Book (by ‘close reading’ it) we can establish that the survey was not a complete and accurate record of everything or person in England in 1086, despite the aims of the authors to give the most comprehensive account of England possible.

In fact, Derrida deconstructed the works of writers as a mark of respect; it was not a method of providing negative criticism. His writing explores different variations on the same theme simultaneously, turning the critic into a juggler, whose job it is to keep the different ideas in the ‘air’ the same time; the challenge for the reader is to simultaneously follow the flow of the deconstructive reading, keeping all the ideas afloat in her mind whilst reading.

Derrida tackled the idea of the unseen and the supernatural in his texts on deconstruction and hauntology. Derrida took Heidegger’s original thoughts on deconstruction and expanded and redefined them. In essence, Derrida’s version of deconstruction was about determining what was omitted or missing then using what was absent (and remained absent – it was not the work of deconstruction to reinstate the ‘missing’) to present something new.