At the risk of sounding completely odd I really enjoy binary oppositions. I find them rather intriguing and even more so after reading an overview on Structuralism/Poststructuralism and hence forth arriving at a broader understanding of the purpose of such. As you are probably well aware Jacques Derrida is often referred to as the leading figure in deconstruction. Perhaps like me, you have studied his work in your philosophy or religion courses.
Derrida looks at Western philosophy, or metaphysics and proposes the idea that there necessarily has to be a center, or point at which everything comes. In example, this point could be God, human self, the mind, or the unconscious. This of course depends on the philosophical system that is being referred to.
So playing off of this ideology comes the presumption that spoken word guarantees the existence of somebody doing the speaking. Derrida calls this the idea of the self that has to be there to speak part of the metaphysics of presence. Presence is itself a binary opposition. That is right, you guessed it, presence/absence. Of course presence becomes that which is preferred over absence. So this privilege of speech is what Derrida calls logocentricism. Logos, greek for word and centricism of course for center. For once my painful study of biblical Greek comes into practice- yay!!!
All this to say that the basic method of deconstruction is to find a binary opposition. Then comes the importance of showing how each pair is a part of the other. Supposedly then the structure of opposition, which kept the two binaries apart crumbles. The binary is to loose its meaning so that you can’t tell the difference between the two. I say supposedly in the above sentence, because this to me seems like a far cry from reality. Anyway, regardless of what I think this is why the method is called deconstruction because it is a combination of construction and deconstruction. This feels like a lesson taken straight from Intro. to English Studies all over again. Those of you who had the privilege of taking that course probably remember Downing talk about divine construction, on what seemed like a daily basis. Just thought I would refresh your lovely minds, now mine needs some sleep for refreshment. I'm of to sleep and dream divinely of deconstruction, maybe, just maybe.
Link used for above outside research: http://www.colorado.edu/English/courses/ENGL2012Klages/1derrida.html
1 comment:
Very nice post, maris. I think you have a decent basic understanding of what Derrida is up to, especially considering we aren't reading him in this class. (A crime in some opinions, but I think we can get at his ideas in other ways without having to spend the three weeks it takes to parse one of his essays). You're right that Derrida is in to binary oppositions--in this sense he is Post structuralist, not anti-structuralist. There's a big difference. The biggest differences could be describes as Derrida emphasizing that a) the system of differences is conventional and infinitely substitutable. By that, I mean that for Derrida a signifier doesn't point to a thing signified, but to another signifier. Thus, metaphors are about metaphors rather than about some non-linguistic reality. The other big thing for Derrida is his insistence that the chain of signification is dependent on "differance", what we might describe as difference itself, the space or slash between signifiers that is non-representable as a thing or as a signifier. In some sense differance is not the binary between difference and sameness, it is the space or movement that makes difference and sameness possible in the chain of signification. For Derrida, recognizing the placelessness of differance means there is no stable center or referent to which language points. So whereas structuralists tend toward stabilization through the analysis of linguistic systems, Derrida tends to show how such systems must always be posited only to fall apart under examination. The radical contingency of every human act of making, linguistic or otherwise.
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