Derrida and Deconstruction

Paper no:E-c-203

Topic: Derrida and Deconstruction

Name: Gohil Hetalba

Roll No :5

Class:M.A,Sem-2

Submitted To:

Dr.Dilip Barad

Department of English

Bhavnagar University

Bhavnagar.

    Jacques Derrida was an Algerian-born French philosopher, known as the founder of deconstruction. His voluminous work has had a profound impact upon literary theory and continental philosophy. His best known work is Of Grammatology. Distancing himself from the various philosophical movements and traditions that preceded him on the French intellectual scene (phenomenology, existentialism, and structuralism); in the mid 1960s he developed a strategy called deconstruction. 

    Derrida was one of the most widely revered and widely  reviled thinkers of the mid-to-late twentieth Century

Deconstruction:
     Deconstruction is a school of philosophy and literary criticism forged in the writings of the French philosopher Jacques Derrida. Deconstruction can perhaps best be described as a theory of reading which aims to undermine the logic of opposition within Texts. For Derrida this requires a scrutiny of the essential distinctions and conceptual orderings which have been constructed by the dominant tradition of Western philosophy

Differance

    Differance is a French word coined by the French philosopher and deconstructionist, Jacques Derrida. The word is a play on several other words that illustrate Derrida’s meaning. The concept of differance is a complex theory that tries to illuminate the way words are used and how their specific meaning is derived. Derrida called difference a "neographism," meaning a term that is neither a word nor a concept and is used to describe a literary idea.

   In his theory of deconstruction, Derrida claimed that because each person has different moods, backgrounds, and ways of experiencing things, a word or choice of words will not conjure up the same idea to every person.

‘’….in language there are only differences without positive terms’’
This idea leads him the two key concepts 1) Sign 2) Structure.

Logocentricism and Phonocentricism

     To speak a little bit of Derrida, it might be said that like the logocentrics of old we anal-retentive, logo-phallo-centric philosophers privilege logos – that is, meaning, reason, spirit and we take speech to be prior, in the order of signification, to writing. And by privileging speech over writing, we privilege presence over absence. We hanker after transcendental signified -- signified that transcend all signifiers, meanings that transcends all signs.

  The spoken word to be somehow prior to the written word, we do all that nasty stuff. Studying texts, even the texts of the canon with its oppressive metaphysics of presence, allows us to recognize and acknowledge what is absent.

Metaphysics of Presence

   Derrida borrows this phrase “Metaphysics of Presence” from heideggar.By logos or presence, derrida signifies “ultimate referent” a self-certifying and self-sufficient ground or foundation available to us totally outside the play of language itself that serves to be a “center” to guarantee the structure of a linguistic system.

For instance,

Raft

Boat

Ship

Ocean liner

Its relationship to the other words (a boat is bigger than a raft but smaller than a ship) Derrida focuses on the center of it and then tries to deconstruct that center.

Decentring the center

   According to derrida, the center also closes off the play which it opens up. As center it is the point at which the substitution of contents, elements or terms is no longer possible.Futher says that center is paradoxically “within the structure and outside it” or even “the center is not the center”

  To sum-up, the innate to the theory of meridian and deconstruction are disturbing, provocating and challenging.