Could you please explain what it is?
Thank you.
Siatd is the guy to ask about that… . (someoneisatthedoor)
However, quickly,
Deconstruction was basically started by the philosopher Jacques Derrida and he posited that literary works are actually a type of a fluid spectrum of meaning which continuously exists, but only in fact becomes fluid upon the reading of the work.
All this means that words are fallible and thus, the true meaning behind them gets invariably lost in the translation. This line of thinking opens/opened up a whole new avenue of thinking regarding the written word.
ilovephilosophy.com/phpbb/vi … p?t=147922
(My comments on the events surrouding Derrida’s death)
ilovephilosophy.com/phpbb/vi … p?t=146616
(My intro to deconstruction thread)
Wikipedia’s articles on this subject are generally pretty accurate. There is a list of texts that I recommend in the Derrida’s death thread…
Feel free to ask any questions that you have, we have half a dozen posters here with considerable knowledge of this particular theoretical detour…
How so? Could you explain further?
Hi someoneisatthedoor.
Is there a way you could simply all of Deconstruction into simple outlines so that it’s easier to understand what Deconstruction is?
Thanks a lot!
Ok…
how do you define a word without using the word in the definition? Everything is defined by its negative. Where is the place? Well it’s -not- here so it must be there.
Words don’t accurately convey thoughts, so with that in mind if you are to look at a work of say… poetry, the meaning immediately becomes fluid because the words are not enough to narrow down the concept. The meaning is what you find, deconstruction isn’t a process but an event which is inherent to the work.
I choose poetry as a good example because there is no singular ‘message’ in poetry, its beauty is found in the experience of reading it, not the totality of its words.
I’ll admit I really haven’t studied deconstruction all that extensively, but even Derrida urged people to remember that even his own works were not free of deconstruction and to keep that in mind. This is… confusing to say the least because it basically means that even Derrida cannot truly get us to grasp what he is trying to explain about the nature of words… using words.
Perhaps it would help either to explain what Deconstruction is not, or to give an example of it.
(The latter being a classical method used to point out the undefinable.)
What is it not?
Um…stability of meaning, apparently. (Sorry, it’s not my thing.)
iv never heard of it, heres what it is; its when you have an emotion and to put it into words it deconstructs the original emotion. the words take feeling out of the emotion. the words go rite threw the emotion, then you hear the words and the original emotion is gone. now all you have left is the bullets that killed it.
Sounds like it’s the opposite of good writing.
(…that is, of writing that conveys meaning effectively.)
Hmmm…SIATD, care to explain the significance of structuralism (particularly Saussere and Levi-Strauss) and post-structuralism, plus throw in some Lacan, Deleuze, Barthes, etc?
Mix it all together, then sprinkle some (late) Heidegger and presto: Derrida.
Seriously, though, Deconstruction is a hermeneutical process that focuses on the text (“Nothing is outside the text”) and how it is interpreted. It’s not, however, the notion that the text can be whatever one wants it to be, nor is it the notion that one can look at the text from outside it and gain some timless “objective” interpretation of it.
Deconstruction isn’t just about the fluidity of meaning or the radical insufficiency of words to describe the fullness of being. While these ideas are important to understanding any modern or postmodern work of philosophy or literature, deconstructivism is a style of philosophical research, a mode of thinking similar in scope to phenomenology.
The basic idea is that instead of taking a concept or assertion and working forwards towards a conclusion, we work backwards by deconstructing the idea, and then the modes that make this idea possible. Then we break down all the ideas contained in each of these. Since writing is the most common mode of conveying philosophical concepts, this ‘mode’ comes under close scrutiny by Derrida.
Deconstruction can be equally seen as going a step further or taking a step backwards.
Deconstruction is what I used to do to my Lincoln logs.
any other purpose is just silly.
Kropotkin
Do you think this the same as “unpacking the meaning” of a text…or is it an opposite of that?
(I seem to be caught in Nothing’s question!)
Yeah like I said I really haven’t studied deconstruction all that much… but doesn’t Derrida talk of it being more of an event than a process?
From Points:
The Almost Nothing of the Unpresentable - One day I’ll get round to producing a text version of this and print the whole thing here. but not today.
I’m well aware that this may have confused you further, but read the above several times and when you understand it (sometime in the future when you’ve read more and seen more and otherwise experienced and understood more) then you’ll see why I cited this particular passage.
This did make me smile. It would take me about a million words (as much as I’ve written here already combined together on one topic) to explain this to my own satisfaction, let alone that of someone else.
I suppose that I could go through the 20 most important arguments from deconstruction but even that would take days. Do you fancy doing it?
Of course it isn’t, mainly because it is concerned with Presence, rather than Being.
Not really, phenomenology is largely about trying to reduce consciousness to its bare bones so that we can work out its influence on being and therefore answer the age-old metaphysical question. Or so it seems to be about, you’d better ask someone like James No. 2 about that…
This would be philosophical analysis, precisely what Derrida says deconstruction is not reducible to, which is something well established.
Derrida primarily discusses writing with concern regarding the binary opposition of speech and writing and the metaphysical presumptions therein.
Or both simultaneously…
It’d be fun. i was thinking about writing a paper on this topic for my “Language after Postmodernism” class i’m taking this quarter. We read Deleuze (Logic of Sense), Lacan (sections from Ecrits), Blanchot (The Writing of the Disaster…or should i say The Disaster of the Writing ^_^), and Nancy (The Ground of the Image), along with one of my professor’s books simpifying Derrida and the related parts of Heidegger. Maybe we could make a few posts on structuralism, then move towards post-structuralism. From there, deconstruction will rather easily present itself, ne?