“Derrida’s name is most closely associated with the often cited but rarely understood term “deconstruction.” When responsibly understood, the implications of deconstruction are quite different from the misleading clichés often used to describe a process of dismantling or taking things apart.”
The real meaning of deconstruction. M.Taylor, 2004
Deconstruction departs from a refusal of authority; a negative response to any authority or determining power of identity.
Deconstruction is not a method or a practice that can be applied to deconstruct an idea or an artifact. If something is deconstructible, it is already deconstructible; always already deconstructible. Deconstruction consists of anything would be to say it consists of deconstruction, dislocating, displacing, disarticulating, disjoining, putting “out of joint” the authority of the “is”.
The same applies for deconstruction “itself”. Deconstruction is not reducible to an essential feature, task or style. Like any word, idea or meaning, deconstruction “acquires its value from its inscription in a chain of possible substitution”; a context of possible symbolisations. But there is no definition that can be ascribed or drawn from the differential relations with other meanings produced in a context. There are no causal chains that can reproduce a fixed meaning about “what is” deconstruction itself. Deconstruction is an aporetic notion in a continuous flow and interchange of meanings. For Derrida “deconstruction takes place”… “it is an event that does not await the deliberation, consciousness, or organization of a subject…” Deconstruction deconstructs itself, and this is the main reason that it cannot be considered as a general theory or explanatory principle that can be imported to deconstruct meaning within a system. It is always already within any meaning production, any system any multifaceted notion. Spontaneously reveals a sense of duality’s deconstructible nature, but it is not its cause. It does not help us see the inside outside relations of things but only that these are always already in a deconstructible situation. Derrida does not analyse what deconstruction does to oppositional terms but what is always implanted to these oppositions, their deconstructible nature. We are always in a state of designing new conceptualisations of things. We perpetually design new concepts even if those concepts are never a “concept as such”, never fully related to the previous state / regime. But these concepts always curry a ‘trace’ of their own deconstructible nature. Every ‘new’ concept is already there, it happens already. Deconstruction happens.
μο.
Leave A Comment