Ma'am Ayesha Kashif

Bushra Ramzan

70143731

What is Derrida's deconstruction theory?

Deconstruction is any of a loosely-defined set of approaches to understanding the

relationship between text and meaning. The concept of deconstruction was introduced by the
philosopher Jacques Derrida, who described it as a turn away from Platonism's ideas of "true"
forms and essences which take precedence over appearances. Since the 1980s, these proposals of
language's fluidity instead of being ideally static and discernible have inspired a range of studies
in the humanities, including the disciplines of law, anthropology, historiography, linguistics,
sociolinguistics, psychoanalysis, LGBT studies, and feminism. Deconstruction also inspired
deconstructivism in architecture and remains important within art, music, and literary criticism.

Jacques Derrida's 1967 book Of Grammatology introduced the majority of ideas

influential within deconstruction. Derrida published several other works directly relevant to the
concept of deconstruction, such as Différance, Speech and Phenomena, and Writing and
Difference.

To Derrida, That is what deconstruction is made of not the mixture but the tension
between memory, fidelity, the preservation of something that has been given to us, and, at the
same time, heterogeneity, something new, and a break.

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 Richard Rorty contends, "words have meaning only because of contrast-effects with
another words...no word can acquire meaning in the way in which philosophers from Aristotle to
Bertrand Russell have hoped it might - be being the unmediated expression of something non-
linguistic (e.g., an emotion, a sensed observation, 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
this - in his view, mistaken - the belief there is a self-sufficient, non-deferred meaning as
metaphysics of presence. A concept, then, must be understood in the context of its opposite: for
example, the word "being" does not have meaning without contrast with the word nothing.

Derrida further 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 from the necessity of analysis. Derrida called these undecidable - that is, unities of
simulacrum "false" verbal properties (nominal or semantic) that can no longer be included within
philosophical (binary) opposition.