Deconstruction Theory By Jacques Derrida

Deconstruction Theory

By Jacques Derrida

Deconstruction is both a literary theory and a philosophy of language that largely comes from French writer Jacques Derrida’s1967 book Of Grammatology. Deconstruction maintains that all of western philosophy and literature is based on metaphysics and therefore denies the existence of intrinsic meaning.

Derrida (1930-2004) was a philosopher whose work attempted to expose what he saw as paradoxes in western thought.

In a particular text, for example, Derrida held that there was no meaning outside of that text. With his work in the1960s, Derrida attempted to challenge the underlying assumptions of most of Western thought since the Greeks.

Deconstruction took the ideas of Kant and Nietzsche in an attempt to re-evaluate western values. For Derrida and deconstruction, the context of a text is an integral part of the text itself. This is summed up in Derrida’s famous statement:

“there is nothing outside the text.”

With deconstruction, there is an element of taking apart a text, but Derrida’s philosophy instead attempts to demonstrate the impossibility of setting up ideal structures in Western thought. Instead of destroying structure, Derrida attempted to take it apart and discover the constituent parts. Deconstruction used the written text, rather than the spoken word, since Derrida believed that it was an articulation that conveyed originality.