Major Authors

Deconstruction Take the following familiar phrases: "I know what I mean, but I can't put it into words", or, "That's not exactly what I meant to say"--this is the basic condition of language for the Deconstructionists. For them, the very idea that we could say or write exactly, precisely, and fully what we mean is an illusion that all linguistic utterances both reveal and attempt to conceal. Therefore, a central premise of Deconstruction is that language always means more/other than what it appears to be trying to mean. The signifiers of language try to represent signifieds, but because, as Ferdinand de Saussure has told us, signs are arbitrary, conventional, and differential, they never completely succeed in doing so. The signs that constitute language carry with them the "trace" of other signs from which they differ, and this apparently "supplementary" material carries the signifying process away from its supposed intent. Moreover, although we have no choice but to use signs to make meaning, the rhetoric of the message often (always?) betrays its inability to do so completely, precisely, adequately. For Jacques Derrida, this fundamental condition produces two reactions: a nostalgia for an illusory world in which we are not subject to the vagaries of the linguistic sign, or a celebration of the freeplay of signification. A deconstructionist critic, then, might address the ways in which a particular text reveals one of the above attitudes, or the critic will explore how a particular text seems to posit meaning(s) while the rhetoric of its signs actually "deconstructs" that meaning. One should note that Derrida's view of language is deeply interwoven with his conception of Western metaphysics as a whole and his critique of its system of binary oppositions, especially that of presence and absence.

Major Authors

Revised: May 21, 2003

Contact: Prof. Christine Roth or Cary Henson