Deconstruction

Deconstruction is a loosely defined set of approaches to understanding the relationship between text and meaning, most closely associated with the philosopher Jacques Derrida. It is a way of reading and analysing texts and concepts that reveals the tensions, contradictions and hierarchies they contain, often in ways their authors did not explicitly acknowledge.

The term derives from Martin Heidegger, who used the German word Destruktion in Being and Time to refer to the loosening of the layers of interpretation that metaphysics had deposited over the notion of being. Derrida took up this idea and translated it as deconstruction, preferring the word because the aim is not to reduce everything to nothing but to show how a tradition has been built up and sedimented over time. His starting point is a critique of Platonism and of the notion of true forms or essences that stand above appearances. Deconstruction distrusts this hierarchy and holds that meaning is not located beyond appearance but is produced within it.

A central idea is that meaning is never fully present. Following the linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure, Derrida argues that words signify through their contrast with other words rather than through a direct relation to things. The concept of being, for example, acquires its sense only in contrast with nothingness, and in classical oppositions such as speech and writing, or intelligible and sensible, one term usually dominates the other. To name this active play of differences and deferrals, Derrida coined the word différance, a blend of difference and deferring.

Take a philosophical text that sets reason against passion and privileges reason. A deconstructive reading does not simply reverse the hierarchy. It shows how reason depends on what it excludes, and how the opposition rests on assumptions the text never examines.

Deconstruction has provoked considerable debate. Critics have accused it of relativism or nihilism, since if no text can fix a single meaning, all readings might seem equally valid. Its defenders reply that it is a rigorous analysis of the conditions of reading and writing rather than a denial of knowledge. Since the 1980s its ideas have influenced literary theory, law, anthropology, psychoanalysis, gender studies and architecture, where it gave rise to deconstructivism.