Thinking activity: Derrida and Deconstruction

Derrida and Deconstruction :-

 

French philosopher Jacques Derrida, collecting some of the early lectures and essays that established his international fame. It was published in 1967 alongside Of Grammatology and Speech and Phenomena.


The question of why Derrida’s texts are so difficult is interesting in itself. One reason is the unfamiliarity of his concepts. Another is his concern that statements asserting knowledge always assume other knowledge. As Hilary Lawson says in his excellent 1985 book Reflexivity: The Post-Modern Predicament, “our ‘certainties’ are expressed through texts, through language, through sign systems, which are no longer seen to be neutral. It appears, therefore, in principle there can be no arena of certainty.” Derrida wants to avoid making statements which depend either on fixed linguistic meanings or on assumptions made elsewhere.





Take the word ‘justice’. The word signifies an abstract concept. Our concept of justice is moreover associated with the concrete institutions of justice – the courts, the police. The complainant wants justice (in the abstract), and looks to the courts for it, and considers the abstract concept and what the courts deal in as the same. But are they? Meaning evolves all the time, and the concept of justice changes: it would have had a different meaning in the minds of most people before there were any courts. On the other hand, one concept of justice – these days the institutional concept – is likely to dominate.


This flexibility also means that texts are capable of more than one interpretation. Peter Benson gave a good example of this in this very magazine: “the medieval Christian approach to the Bible declared there to be four ways to read each passage: literal, analogical, typological and topological. These interpretative traditions have been challenged by fundamentalists, who seek to pin an immediately-known fixed meaning to every word… Fundamentalism is therefore one manifestation of the metaphysics of presence. From Derrida’s perspective, it involves a misunderstanding of the nature of language”