Deconstruction ppt

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Transcript of Deconstruction ppt

Page 1: Deconstruction ppt
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Deconstruction: Centers and

Margins

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Four conceptions of meaning:

• Idealist (Platonic): God is the origin, center and guarantor of meaning.

• Humanist: The self is the source of meaning, which is expressed intentionally through language.

• Structuralist: Structure is at the center of a signifying system,

is an impersonal force. —All narratives are variations on universal patterns. —Structure originates and produces meaning, which is therefore to be understood as the ultimate coherence of the structure itself.• Post-structuralist/Deconstructionist: Decenters all meaning-making systems. Exposes how a given system posits (rather than reveals) a center from which everything issues and on which the system’s privileged meaning is propped. This includes Structuralism.

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• Saussure: “Language is a system of differences without positive terms.”

• As with Structuralism, Deconstruction observes that, like Saussure’s account of language, all signifying systems (i.e. all forms of representation) operate according to binary oppositions. E.g.: Day/night; Model/copy; God/human; Human/animal; Spirit/body; Conscious/unconscious; Male/female; Culture/nature, Good/evil etc.

• BUT: Deconstruction goes further to note that one part of the pair is always privileged over the other. Structures are never neutral, their meaning never universal. In this sense, Deconstruction questions Stucturalism’s claim to a scientific basis.

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• The two terms of a binary opposition cannot exist in any meaningful way in isolation from one another, yet neither has any essential truth, no grounding in the non-human world.

• Deconstruction seeks to dissolve the barrier between terms to reveal oppositions to be non-oppositional and therefore truth claims based upon one valorized term of the pair to be unstable.

Binary Oppositions through the

Deconstructive Lens

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The deconstructive process offers a means of contending with the problem of how to critique a system (that is, come to know it, become able to speak about it) from within the very system that made such knowledge possible.

The potential deconstruction of a text is already within that text and no system of interpretation external to that text (e.g. psychoanalytic, historical, biographical) is necessary.

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“Deconstruction is not a dismantling of the structure of a text, but a demonstration that it has already dismantled itself. Its

apparently solid ground is no rock but thin air.”

—J. Hillis Miller

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•Deconstructive Method:

• I. Focus on binary oppositions within a text, show how these terms are related (i.e. how one is central, naturalized, and privileged while the other is suppressed, silenced and marginalized.

• II. THEN: subvert the hierarchization of terms to make the text mean the opposite of what it originally appeared to mean.

• III. THEN: observe that both terms of the opposition become mutually intertwined and are released from their oppositional conflict into a “free play” of non-hierarchical, non-stable multitude of meanings.

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PrivilegedPrivileged Suppressed/DevaluedSuppressed/Devalued

God Human

Model/Origin Copy

Center Margin

Essential Truth Appearance

Real thing/Real being Representation

Soul Body

Mind Body

Logos (inner meaning) Logoi (words, speech acts)

Inner thought (Intention) External speech (expression)

Presence Absence

Speech Writing

*Note how speech itself appears in oppositional positions and how speech and writing can occupy the same side of the binary.

Binarisms in Western Metaphysics

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• Of Grammatology [De la grammatologie](1967) challenged the Logocentrism at the heart of Western metaphysics.

• Derrida redefines writing by performing a deconstructive reading of Saussure himself to challenge the statement that language is “a system of differences without positive terms.”

• Derrida demonstrates that Saussure’s assumption (and therefore all of structuralist linguistics) is itself hierarchized, privileging speech over writing.

• This valorization of speech, says Derrida, is linked to the binarism presence (speech)/absence (writing), in which writing becomes a supplement to speech, something that stands in for the absent speaker, just as the Torah stands in for the voice of God (and the absolute meaning guaranteed by the presence of God).

Derrida and Différance

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God speaks and the universe begins:

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Let there be light

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There is a God (the thing that does the speaking).

God is present (speech as proof of presence, as presence itself)

God is the ORIGIN of all things and what God creates through speech are binary oppositions

(light/dark)

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The text of the Torah, then, is a sign of God’s absent presence or deferred presence. Through reading, the logic of text as supplement is to be

undone, reversed to access God/Truth

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• Derrida coins the neologism différance—a fusion of the French words for difference (to differ: a spatial operation) and deferral (to defer: a temporal operation). This odd homonym draws our attention to writing as its own form of presence, one that destabilizes the logocentric association between speech and presence.

•The (il)logic of supplementarity: All language is the absence of a desired presence, a yearning for a language that can provide true presence. Yet if speech is supplementary to language (suppléer= 1. to add on to something complete AND 2. to complete something by addition), then speech can never be complete or originary.

• The “a” in différance—the phoneme that marks the word’s difference from “difference” and defers its meaning—can only be perceived in writing, not speech.

• Derrida insists that différance is “neither a concept nor a word.” Like all signs, though, it is contingent on both difference and deferred presence.

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This gives us the means to subvert all claims to truth in language: writing itself can destabilize

apparently originary, centered systems of truth.

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