Deconstruction and Derrida

   Name :- Rathod Zindagi V.

    Roll : 13

    Part :- I Sem. II

Paper:- E-C-203: Literary Criticism

Topic:-    Deconstruction and Derrida

                                                             

           

   Submitted to,                                                          

              Dr. Dilip Barad,                                                      

              Department of English                       

              Bhavnagar University

v What is Deconstruction?

                   Deconstruction, as applied in the criticism of literature, designates a theory and practice of reading which questions and claims to “subvert” or “undermine”, the assumption that the system of language provides grounds that are adequate to establish the boundaries, the coherence or unity, and the determinate meaning of a literary text. Typically, a deconstructive reading sets out to show the conflicting forces within the text to dissipate the seeming definiteness of its structure and meaning into indefinite array of incompatibility and undecidable possibilities.

                    Derrida presented his basic views in the three books in 1967, since entitled,

                ‘Grammatology’, ‘writing and difference’, and ‘speech and phenomena’.

                     Derrida’s reiterated claim is that not only all western philosophies  and theories of the language, but all western use of language, hence all western culture, are ‘logo centric’, that is they are centered or grounded on a ‘logos’ or as started in a phase, he adopts from Heidegger, they rely on ‘metaphysics of presence’. They are logo centric, according to Derrida, in part because they are‘phonocentric’ that is they grant, implicitly or explicitly, logical‘priority’ or ‘privilege’, to speech over writing as the model for analyzing all discourse.

                     Derrida’s view is that we can never, in any instance of speech or writing, have a demonstrably fixed and decidable meaning in an utterance on text, but asserts that these are merely effects and lack a ground that would justify certainly in interpretation.

                     Derrida was the most influential philosopher in 70s and 80s of last century. His philosophy is the further extension ofstructuralism and is better called as ‘post- structuralism’. He carries this structuralist movement to its logical extreme and his reasoning is original and startling. We have seen in this movement that as in New Criticism, the attention was shifted from the writer to the work of literary text; consequently textual analysis becomes more important than extra textual information. Further the author disappeared and only the text remained. This is what we called thestylistic and structuralist position.

                       The meaning as it emerges from the text alone counted. In this process the importance of the reader and his understanding increased, and the Reader Response or Reception.Theory came into being. Derrida gives the same process a further and final push according to which what matters is the reading and not the writing of the text. At times one feels, through not quite justifiably, that in Derrida even the text disappears and what is left behind is an individual’s reader response to it. Now the reader rules the supreme, and the validity of his reading cannot be challenged. However, the stricter of each reading has to be coherent and convincing.

v Decentering the centre:

                        Derrida deconstructs the metaphysics of presence. That is to say that according to Derrida there is no presence or truth apart from language. He seeks to prove that the structure of the structure does not indicate a presence above its free play of signs. This presence was earlier supposed to be the centre of the structure which was paradoxically through to be within, and outside this structure, it was truth and within, it was intelligibility.

                        But Derrida contends that, ‘the centre could not be through in the form of a being presence’ and that in any given text, there is only a free play of an infinite number of sign substitutions. A word is explained by another word which is only a word not an existence. Thus a text is all words which are just words, not indicative of any presence beyond them. In the words of John Sturrock,

             “The resort to language or sign entails, we know the loss of all uniqueness and immediate. The sign is not the thing in itself.”

                          It is utteractive or repeatable. A sign which was uttered only once would be not sign. It is the types of which each utterance is token.

                         There is no a textual origin of a text. The author’s plan of a book is a text. His realization is no truth, where, the text where summary is third text. A text kindles a text and text seeks to present or explain. There is no reality other than texuality. The texuality is the free play of signifies. There is no signified that is not itself a signifier.

                           In the words of John Sturrock, Derrida seeks to undermine “a prevailing and generally unconscious ‘idealism’, which asserts that language does not create meanings but reveals them, thereby implying that meaning, pre- exists their expression.” This for Derrida is nonsense. For his there can be no meaning which is not formulated, we cannot reach outside language.

v Supplementarity:

                           The concept of Supplementarity follows from Decentrring the centre. A literary text is a work of language and language as such according to Derrida, is like time, ever in a state of Flux. Just as time has no emergence of man, and will disappear along with man.

                          Derrida quotes and approves Levi-Strauss who writes:

            “Whatever may have been the moment and the circumstances of its appearance in the scale of animal life, language could only have been in one full swoop. Things could not have set about signifying progressively but rather of biology and psychology a crossing over came about from a stage where nothing had a meaning to another where everything possessed.”

                           But language being a flux is not ever the same. It is always gaining in new elements and loosing the older ones. “The totality of the myths of a people”, Derrida quotes Levi- Strauss again,

               “Is of the order of the discourse. Provided that these people do not become physically or morally extinct, this totality is never extinct. Such a criticism would therefore be equivalent to reproaching a linguist with writing the grammar of a language without having recorded the totality of the words which have been uttered since that language came into existence and without knowing the verbal exchanges which will take place as long as the language continues to exist.”

                            Totalisation is thus useless and impossible. The language paradoxically comes into being as a quest of imaginary truth apart from language and continues to realize the lack of truth in the words that it employs. The free play of signifies, “a field of infinite substitutions in the closure of a finite ‘ensemble’ permitted by the lack.”

                        v Conclusion:

                        “Derrida emphasizes that to deconstruct is not to destroy; that his task is to ‘dismantle the metaphysical and rhetorical structures’ operative in a text ‘not in order to reject or discard them, but to reconstitute them in another way.’-that he puts into question the ‘search for the signified not annual it, but to understand it within a system to which such a reading is blind.’

-         M.H. Abram