19 What Is Deconstruction?

Deconstruction is a critical approach to literary analysis and philosophy that was developed in the late 1960s, most notably by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida. It challenges the traditional notions of language, meaning, and truth by exposing the contradictions and inconsistencies within texts and ideas.

At its core, deconstruction argues that all texts and ideas are composed of a series of oppositions or binary pairs, such as good/evil, presence/absence, or male/female. These binary pairs are often assumed to be stable and objective, but deconstruction asserts that they are actually unstable and subjective, and that true shared meaning is an impossible goal. This is why I have placed “the gap” at the center of our target.

Deconstruction involves closely analyzing a text or idea to reveal these underlying binary pairs and the ways in which they are unstable and contradictory. It seeks to undermine the notion that language can provide objective meaning or truth by exposing the ways in which language undercuts its own meaning, privileges certain meanings, and contains hierarchies of meaning.

According to deconstruction, there is no definitive interpretation of a text or idea, but rather multiple possible meanings that are always in flux. Deconstruction also emphasizes the role of the reader or interpreter in shaping the meaning of a text, arguing that the reader’s own biases and assumptions play a crucial role in the way a text is understood.

Deconstruction has been widely influential in literary and cultural studies, as well as in philosophy, and has been used to analyze a wide range of texts and ideas. It has also been the subject of much debate and criticism, with some arguing that it is overly skeptical or nihilistic in its approach to meaning and truth.

A Note about Structuralism (and Post-Structuralism)

While we will not use structuralism in this class, it’s important to be aware of its existence because deconstruction, also called post-structuralism, is a response to structuralism. Structuralism is a theoretical approach that emerged in the social sciences and humanities in the mid-20th century. It views phenomena as systems of interrelated parts or elements, and emphasizes the underlying structures and patterns that shape those phenomena.

In literature, for example, a structuralist analysis might focus on the underlying rules or patterns that govern the construction of a narrative or a character’s development. In linguistics, structuralists study the grammar and syntax of languages to identify the underlying rules that govern their structure.

Structuralism is often associated with the work of French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, who applied its principles to the study of cultures and societies. According to Lévi-Strauss, cultures are structured like languages, with underlying systems of symbols and meanings that shape the way individuals think, communicate, and behave.

One of the key principles of structuralism is the idea that meaning is not inherent in individual elements, but rather emerges from the relationships and patterns that exist between them. Structuralists also emphasize the importance of context and the ways in which different elements are interdependent and cannot be understood in isolation.

While structuralism has been influential in a variety of fields, it has also been criticized for its tendency to prioritize abstract systems over individual experiences and for its potential to oversimplify complex phenomena.

Structuralism isn’t really used in literary criticism anymore, though it continues to be used in linguistics and anthropology. Post-structuralism/deconstruction are more popular critical methods for literary scholars, so we will focus our time in this section on deconstruction. However, if you are interested in learning more, you can read Claude Levi-Strauss’s essay, “The Structural Study of Myth,” to see how this theory functions in relation to texts. We will not practice applying structuralism to a text; instead, we will work with application using deconstruction as our critical method.

An Excerpt from Deconstruction Scholarship

Hold on tight! As we learned in the introduction, deconstruction is about exposing the gaps in meaning. In the excerpt from a chapter below,  Jaques Derrida tries to explain his concept of différance. Before you attempt to read Derrida, I recommend watching this video from philosophy professor Ellie Anderson.

From “Différance” by Jacques Derrida (1982) (translated by Alan Bass)

I will speak, therefore, of a letter.

Of the first letter, if the alphabet, and most of the speculations which have ventured into it, are to be believed.

I will speak, therefore, of the letter a, this initial letter which it apparently has been necessary to insinuate, here and there, into the writing of the word difference; and to do so in the course of a writing on writing, and also of a writing within writing whose different trajectories thereby find themselves, at certain very determined points, intersecting with a kind of gross spelling mistake, a lapse in the discipline and law which regulate writing and keep it seemly. One can always, de facto or de jure, erase or reduce this lapse in spelling, and find it (according to situations to be analyzed each time, although amounting to the same), grave or unseemly, that is, to follow the most ingenuous hypothesis, amusing. Thus, even if one seeks to pass over such an infraction in silence, the interest that one takes in it can be recognized and situated in advance as prescribed by the mute irony, the inaudible misplacement, of this literal permutation. One can always act as if it made no difference. And I must state here and now that today’s discourse will be less a justification of, and even less an apology for, this silent lapse in spelling, than a kind of insistent intensification of its play.

On the other hand, I will have to be excused if I refer, at least implicitly, to some of the texts I have ventured to publish. This is precisely because I would like to attempt, to a certain extent, and even though in principle and in the last analysis this is impossible, and impossible for essential reasons, to reassemble in a sheaf the different directions in which I have been able to utilize what I would call provisionally the word or concept of différance, or rather to let it impose itself upon me in its neographism, although as we shall see, différance is literally neither a word nor a concept. And I insist upon the word sheaf for two reasons. On the one hand, I will not be concerned, as I might have been, with describing a history and narrating its stages, text by text, context by context, demonstrating the economy that each time imposed this graphic disorder; rather, I will be concerned with the general system of this economy. On the other hand, the word sheaf seems to mark more appropriately that the assemblage to be proposed has the complex structure of a weaving, an interlacing which permits the different threads and different lines of meaning—or of force—to go off again in different directions, just as it is always ready to tie itself up with others.

Therefore, preliminarily, let me recall that this discreet graphic intervention, which neither primarily nor simply aims to shock the reader or the grammarian, came to be formulated in the course of a written investigation of a question about writing. Now it happens, I would say in effect, that this graphic difference (a instead of e), this marked difference between two apparently vocal notations, between two vowels, remains purely graphic: it is read, or it is written, but it cannot be heard. It cannot be apprehended in speech, and we will see why it also bypasses the order of apprehension in general. It is offered by a mute mark, by a tacit monument, I would even say by a pyramid, thinking not only of the form of the letter when it is printed. as a capital, but also of the text in Hegel’s Encyclopedia in which the body of the sign is compared to the Egyptian Pyramid. The a of différance, thus, is not heard; it remains silent, secret and discreet as a tomb: oikesis. And thereby let us anticipate the delineation of a site, the familial residence and tomb of the proper¹ in which is produced, by différance, the economy of death. This stone (provided that one knows how to decipher its inscription) is not far from announcing the death of the tyrant.²

And it is a tomb that cannot even be made to resonate. In effect, I cannot let you know through my discourse, through the speech being addressed at this moment to the French Society of Philosophy, what difference I am talking about when I talk about it. I can speak of this graphic difference only through a very indirect discourse on writing, and on the condition that I specify, each time, whether I am referring to difference with an e or différance with an a. Which will not simplify things today, and will give us all, you and me, a great deal of trouble, if, at least, we wish to understand each other. In any event, the oral specifications that I will provide (when I say “with an e” or “with an a”) will refer uncircumventably to a written text that keeps watch over my discourse, to a text that I am holding in front of me, that I will read, and toward which I necessarily will attempt to direct your hands and your eyes. We will be able neither to do without the passage through a written text, nor to avoid the order of the disorder produced within it—and this, first of all, is what counts for me.

The pyramidal silence of the graphic difference between the e and the a can function, of course, only within the system of ptionetic writing, and within the language and grammar which is as historically linked to phonetic writing as it is to the entire culture inseparable from phonetic writing. But I would say that this in itself (the silence that functions within only a so-called phonetic writing) quite opportunely conveys or reminds us that, contrary to a very widespread prejudice, there is no phonetic writing. There is no purely and rigorously phonetic writing. So-called phonetic writing, by all rights and in principle, and not only due to an empirical or technical insufficiency, can function only by admitting into its system nonphonetic “signs” (punctuation, spacing, etc.). And an examination of the structure and necessity of these nonphonetic signs quickly reveals that they can barely tolerate the concept of the sign itself. Better, the play of difference, which, as Saussure reminded us, is the condition for the possibility and functioning of every sign, is in itself a silent play. Inaudible is the difference between two phonemes which alone permits them to be and to operate as such. The inaudible opens up the apprehension of two present phonemes such as they present themselves. If there is no purely phonetic writing, it is that there is no purely phonetic phone. The difference which establishes phonemes and lets them be heard remains in and of itself inaudible, in every sense of the word.

It will be objected, for the same reasons, that graphic difference itself vanishes into the night, can never be sensed as a full term, but rather extends an invisible relationship, the mark of an inapparent relationship between two spectacles. Doubtless. But, from this point of view, that the difference marked in the “differ( )nce” between the e and the a eludes both vision and hearing perhaps happily suggests that here we must be permitted to refer to an order which no longer belongs to sensibility. But neither can it belong to intelligibility, to the ideality which is not fortuitously affiliated with the objectivity of theorein or understanding.³ Here, therefore, we must let ourselves refer to an order that resists the opposition, one of the founding oppositions of philosophy, between the sensible and the intelligible. The order which resists this opposition, and resists it because it transports it, is announced in a movement of différance (with an a) between two differences or two letters, a différance which belongs neither to the voice nor to writing in the usual sense, and which is located, as the strange space that will keep us together here for an hour, between speech and writing, and beyond the tranquil familarity which links us to one and the other, occasionally reassuring us in our illusion that they are two.

What am I to do in order to speak of the a of différance? It goes without saying that it cannot be exposed. One can expose only that which at a certain moment can become present, manifest, that which can be shown, presented as something present, a being-present⁴ in its truth, in the truth of a present or the presence of the present. Now if différance (and I also cross out the ) what makes possible the presentation of the being-present, it is never presented as such. It is never offered to the present. Or to anyone. Reserving itself, not exposing itself, in regular fashion it exceeds the order of truth at a certain precise point, but without dissimulating itself-as something, as a mysterious being, in the occult of a nonknowledge or in a hole with indeterminable borders (for example, in a topology of castration).⁵ In every exposition it would be exposed to disappearing as disappearance. It would risk appearing: disappearing.

So much so that the detours, locutions, and syntax in which I will often have to take recourse will resemble those of negative theology, occasionally even to the point of being indistinguishable from negative theology. Already we have had to delineate that différance is not, does not exist, is not a present-being (on) in any form; and we will be led to delineate also everything that it is not, that is, everything; and consequently that it has neither existence nor essence. It derives from no category of being, whether present or absent. And yet those aspects of différance which are thereby delineated are not theological, not even in the order of the most negative of negative theologies, which are always concerned with disengaging a superessentiality beyond the finite categories of essence and existence, that is, of presence, and always hastening to recall that God is refused the predicate of existence, only in order to acknowledge his superior, inconceivable, and ineffable mode of being. Such a development is not in question here, and this will be confirmed progressively. Différance is not only irreducible to any ontological or theological—ontotheological—reappropriation, but as the very opening of the space in which ontotheology—philosophy—produces its system and its history, it includes ontotheology, inscribing it and exceeding it without return.

For the same reason there is nowhere to begin to trace the sheaf or the graphics of différance. For what is put into question is precisely the quest for a rightful beginning, an absolute point of departure, a principal responsibility. The problematic of writing is opened by putting into question the value arkhe.⁶

Also, by decision and as a rule of the game, if you will, turning these propositions back on themselves, we will be introduced to the thought of différance by the theme of strategy or the stratagem. By means of this solely strategic justification, I wish to underline that the efficacity of the thematic of différance may very well, indeed must, one day be superseded, lending itself not only to its own replacement, at least to enmeshing itself in a chain that in truth it never will have governed. Whereby, once again, it is not theological.

I would say, first off, that différance, which is neither a word nor a concept, strategically seemed to me the most proper one to think, if not to master (thought, here, being that which is maintained in a certain necessary relationship with the structural limits of mastery) what is most irreducible about our “era.” Therefore I am starting, strategically, from the place and the time in which “we” are, even though in the last analysis my opening is not justifiable, since it is only on the basis of différance and its “history” that we can allegedly know who and where “we” are, and what the limits of an “era” might be.

Even though différance is neither a word nor a concept, let us nevertheless attempt a simple and approximate semantic analysis that will take us to within sight of what is at stake.

We know that the verb differer (Latin verb differre) has two meanings which seem quite distinct;⁷ for example in Littre they are the object of two separate articles. In this sense the Latin differre is not simply a translation of the Greek diapherein, and this will not be without consequences for us, linking our discourse to a particular language, and to a language that passes as less philosophical, less originally philosophical than the other. For the distribution of meaning in the Greek diapherein does not comport one of the two motifs of the Latin differre, to wit, the action of putting off until later, of taking into account, of taking account of time and of the forces of an operation that implies an economical calculation, a detour, a delay, a relay, a reserve, a representaton—concepts that I would summarize here in a word I have never used but that could be inscribed in this chain: temporization. Differer in this sense is to temporize, to take recourse consciously or unconsclously, in the temporal and temporizing mediation of a detour that suspends the accomplishment nor fulfillment of “desire” or “will,” and equally effects this suspension in a mode that annuls or tempers its own effect. And we will see, later how this temporization is also temporalization and the becoming-time of space and the becoming-space of time, the “originary constitution” of time and space, as metaphysics or transcendental phenomenology would say, to use the language that here is criticized and displaced.

The other sense of differer is the more common and identifiable one: to be not identical, to be other, discernible, etc. When dealing with differen(ts)(ds), a word that can be written with a final ts or a final ds, as you will, whether it is a question of dissimilar otherness or of allergic and polemical otherness, an interval, a distance, spacing, must be produced between the elements other, and be produced with a certain perseverance in repetition.⁸

Now the word difference (with an e) can never refer either to differer as temporization or to differends as polemos.⁹ Thus the word différance (with an a) is to compensate economically—this loss of meaning, for différance can refer simultaneously to the entire configuration of its meanings. It is immediately and irreducibly polysemic, which will not be indifferent to the economy of my discourse here. In its polysemia this word, of course, like any meaning must defer to the discourse in which it occurs, its interpretive context; but in a way it defies deriving from the present participle (différant), thereby bringing us close to the very action of the verb differer, before it has even produced an effect constituted as something different or as difference (with an e).¹⁰ In a conceptuality adhering to classical strictures “différance” would be said to designate constitutive, productive, and originary causality, the process of scission and division which would produce or constitute different things or differences. But because it brings us close to the infinitive and active kernel of differer, différance (with an a) neutralizes what the infinitive denotes as simply active, just as mouvance in our language does not simply mean the fact of moving, of moving oneself or of being moved. No more is resonance the act of resonating. We must consider that in the usage of our language the ending -ance remains undecided between the active and the passive. And we will see why that which lets itself be designated différance is neither simply active nor simply passive, announcing or rather recalling something like, the middle voice, saying an operation that is not an operation, an operation that cannot be conceived either as passion or as the action of a subject on an object, or on the basis of the categories of agent or patient, neither on the basis of nor moving toward any of these terms. For the middle voice, a certain nontransitivity, may be what philosophy, at its outset, distributed into an active and a passive voice, thereby constituting itself by means of this repression.

Différance as temporization, différance as spacing. How are they to be joined?

Let us start, since we are already there, from the problematic of the sign and of writing. The sign is usually said to be put in the place of the thing itself, the present thing, “thing” here standing equally for meaning or referent. The sign represents the present in its absence. It takes the place of the present. When we cannot grasp or show the thing, state the present, the being-present, when the present cannot be presented, we signify, we go through the detour of the sign. We take or give signs. We signal. The sign, in this sense, is deferred presence. Whether we are concerned with the verbal or the written sign, with the monetary sign, or with electoral delegation and political representation, the circulation of signs defers the moment in which we can encounter the thing itself make it ours, consume or expend it, touch it, see it, intuit its presence. What I am describing here in order to define it is the classically determined structure of the sign in all the banality of its characteristics—signification as the différance of temporization. And this structure presupposes that the sign, which defers presence, is conceivable only on the basis of the presence that it defers and moving toward the deferred presence that it aims to reappropriate. According to this classical semiology, the substitution of the sign for the thing itself is both secondary and provisional: secondary due to an original and lost presence from which the sign thus derives; provisional as concerns this final and missing presence toward which the sign in this sense is a movement of mediation.

Notes

1. Translator’s Note: Throughout this book I will translate le propre as “the proper.” Derrida most offen intends all the senses of the word at once: that which is correct, as in le sens propre (proper, literal meaning), and that which is one’s own, that which may be owned, that which is legally, correctly owned–all the links between proper, property, and propriety.

2. TN. The last three sentences refer elliptically and playfully to the following ideas. Derrida first plays on the “silence” of the a in différance as being like a silent tomb, like a pyramid, like the pyramid to which Hegel compares the body of the sign. “Tomb” in Greek is oikesis, which is akin to the Greek oikos (house) from which the word “economy” derives (oikos) house and nemein–to manage). Thus Derrida speaks of the “economy of death” as the “familial residence and tomb of the proper.” Further, and more elliptically still, Derrida speaks of the tomb, which always bears an inscription in stone, announcing the death of the tyrant. This seems to refer to Hegel’s treatment of the Antigone story in the Phenomenology. It will be recalled that Antigone defies the tyrant Creon by burying her brother Polynices. Creon retaliates by having Antigone entombed. There she cheats the slow death that awaits her by hanging herseff. The tyrant Creon has a change of heart too late, and (after the suicides of his son and wife, his family) kills himseff. Thus family, death, inscription, tomb, law, economy. In a later work, Glas, Derrida analyzes Hegel’s treatment of the Antigone.

3. TN. “. . . not fortuitously affiliated with the objectivity of theorein or understanding.” A play on words has been lost in translation here, a loss that makes this sentence difficult to understand. In the previous sentence Derrida says that the difference between the e and the a of différance / différence can neither be seen nor heard. It is not a sensible–that is, relating to the senses–difference. But, he goes on to explain, neither is this an intelligible difference, for the very names by which we conceive of objective intelligibility are already in complicity with sensibility. Theorein–the Greek origin of “theory”–literally means “to look at,” to see; and the word Derrida uses for “understanding” here is entendement, the noun form of entendre, to hear.

4. TN. As in the past, etre (Sein) will be translated as Being. Etant (Seiendes) will be either beings or being, depending on the context. Thus, here etant-present is “being-present.” For a justification of this translation see Derrida, Writing and Différance, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), Translator’s Introduction, p. xvii.

5. TN. ” . . a hole with indeterminable borders (for example, in a topology of castration).” This phrase was added to “La Différance” for its publication in the French edition of this volume and refers to the polemic Derrida had already engaged (in Positions, elaborated further in le Facteur de la verite) with Jacques Lacan. For Derrida, Lacan’s “topology of castration,” which assigns the “hole” or lack to a place (“a hole with determinable borders”) repeats the metaphysical gesture (albeit a negative one) of making absence, the lack, the hole, a transcendental principle that can be pinned down as such, and can thereby govern a theoretical discourse.

6. TN. The Greek arkhe combines the values of a founding principle and of government by a controlling principle (e.g. archeology, monarchy)
will propose here will not be elaborated simply as a philosophical discourse operating according to principles, postulates, axioms or definitions, and proceeding along the discursive lines of a linear order of reasons. In the delineation of différance everything is strategic and adventurous. Strategic because no transcendent truth present outside the field of writing can govern theologically the totality of the field. . Adventurous because this strategy is not a simple strategy in the sense that strategy orients tactics according to a final goal, a telos or theme of domination, a mastery and ultimate reappropriation of the development of the field. Finally, a strategy without finality, what might be called blind tactics or empirical wandering if the value of empiricism did not itself acquire its entire meaning in its opposition to philosophical responsibility. If there is a certain wandering in the tracing of différance, it no more follows the lines of philosophy of its symmetrical and integral inverse, empirical-logical discourse. The concept of play keeps itself beyond this opposition, announcing, on the eve of philosophy and beyond it, the unity of chance and necessity in calculations without end.

7. TN. In English the two distinct meanings of the Latin differre have become two separate words: to defer and to differ.

8. TN. The next few sentences will require some annotation, to be found in this note and the next two. In this sentence Derrida is pointing out that two words that sound exactly alike in French (differents, differends) refer to the sense of differre that implies spacing, otherness–difference in its usual English sense. Les differents are different things, les differends are differences of opinion, grounds for dispute–whence the references to allergy (from the Greek allos, other) and polemics.

9. TN. However, to continue the last note, difference (in French) does not convey the sense of active putting off, of deferring (différance in what would be its usual sense in French, if it were a word in common usage), or the sense of active polemical difference, actively differing with someone or something. (“Active” here, though, is not really correct for reasons that Derrida will explain below.) The point is that there is no noun-verb, no gerund for either sense in French.

10. TN. Such a gerund would normally be constructed from the present participle of the verb: differant. Curiously then, the noun différance suspends itself between the two senses of differant–deferring, differing. We might say that it defers differing, and differs from deferring, in and of itself.

Here is a link to the translation.

Close Reading in Deconstruction

In New Criticism, we learned to do a close reading of a text that focused on looking for elements of the text that deonstrated complexity and contributed to unity. A deconstructive close reading is similar in practice, but instead, we want to emphasize the instability of meaning and the idea that texts contain contradictions.

Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to perform a close reading of a text using deconstruction as your critical method:

1. Choose a Text: Select a text that you want to analyze closely. This could be a literary work, a philosophical essay, a political speech, or any other written or spoken material such as an advertisement or TikTok video.

2. Initial Reading: Begin by reading the text once through without any specific agenda. This reading helps you grasp the surface meaning and overall structure of the text. In this reading, pay attention to your subjective reader response.

3. Identify Binary Oppositions: Deconstruction often focuses on binary oppositions or pairs of contrasting terms within a text (e.g., good vs. evil, presence vs. absence; light vs. dark; feminine vs. masculine). Identify these binary oppositions in the text. These will be essential to your analysis.

4. Question Assumptions: Start questioning the assumptions that underlie these binary oppositions. Deconstruction seeks to reveal how these opposites are interdependent and how they undermine each other. Look for instances where the text blurs the lines between these opposites.

5. Look for Ambiguities: Deconstruction thrives on ambiguities and contradictions within a text. Pay close attention to passages or phrases that are open to multiple interpretations or that seem to contradict themselves.

6. Identify Hierarchies: Examine whether the text establishes hierarchies between the binary opposites. Which member of the binary opposition is preferred or privileged?

7. Trace Patterns and Reversals: Look for patterns or instances of reversals in the text. Derrida argued that texts often contain moments where the binary oppositions are subverted or reversed. Identify such instances and analyze their significance.

8. Analyze Language and Wordplay: Deconstruction places a heavy emphasis on the linguistic aspects of a text. Pay attention to wordplay, language choices, and the way language constructs meaning. Consider how certain words or phrases may carry hidden connotations.

9. Formulate Your Thesis Statement: Based on your analysis, formulate your interpretation of the text. Highlight the ambiguities, contradictions, and hidden meanings you’ve uncovered. Discuss how the text challenges traditional binary oppositions and hierarchies.

10. Write Your Analysis: Organize your findings into a coherent analysis. Start with an introduction that introduces the text and its context. Then, present your analysis in a structured manner, using evidence from the text to support your claims. Conclude by summarizing your key insights.

Keep in mind that deconstruction is a challenging and often abstract method of analysis. It requires careful attention to language and a willingness to embrace ambiguity and uncertainty in the text. It’s also important to engage with the work of other scholars who have applied deconstruction to similar texts to refine your own interpretation.

Applying Deconstruction Techniques to Literature

To learn more about how to apply deconstruction techniques to a text, we will read “The Glass Mountain” by Donald Barthelme. Donald Barthelme is widely considered to be the father of postmodern fiction. As we have learned thoughout this course, literature and criticism exist in conversation with each other. Just as Archibald MacLeish’s poem “Ars Poetica” demonstrates the theory behind New Criticism analysis, Barthelme’s short story demonstrates awareness of the theoretical underpinnings of deconstruction. Ask yourself some questions as you read:

1. What is the genre of this short story? (Note: It will be helpful if you are not already familiar with these works to look up “The Glass Mountain” from the Yellow Fairy Tale Book by Andrew Lang)
2. Why are the lines numbered?
3. How are direct quotations used? Are they real or spurious? (you may have to do some Internet research to answer this question)
4.  What is the glass mountain?
5. What does the narrator hope to achieve by climbing the glass mountain?
6. Who are his “acquaintances”?
7. What is the symbol?
8. What is the point of this story?

After completing a close reading of the text, you’ll want to come up with a thesis statement that you can support with the evidence you’ve found.

While ChatGPT clearly still has some shortcomings as a writer, one of its strengths is pattern analysis. I asked ChatGPT to read the short story above and suggest some ideas for a deconstructive analysis of the text. Here are some of the ideas it came up with that would be worth exploring: