School of thought
Deconstruction
Movement
Classification
- Period
- c. 1967 CE onward
- Regions
- Europe (origin), North America
- Domains
- Philosophy of Language
Overview
Deconstruction became a late twentieth-century intellectual movement around Derrida's critique of presence, stable meaning, and hierarchical binary oppositions. Thinkers associated with it developed divergent projects in philosophy, literary theory, law, and politics. Its best-known practice is a way of reading texts, Deconstructive Reading, but the movement is not reducible to that procedure.
Key ideas
- Logocentrism: Western thought privileges presence, speech, and the logos (reason) over absence, writing, and the material. Derrida shows this privilege is unjustifiable and self-undermining.
- Trace and Différance: No sign is self-present. Every sign bears the 'trace' of what it differs from and defers to. Meaning is always already contaminated by absence and difference.
- Supplementarity: The 'supplement' (what is supposedly added to something complete) reveals that the original was never complete. Writing 'supplements' speech, exposing speech's own incompleteness.
Key figures
Jacques Derrida · Paul de Man · Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
Methods used
Influenced by
Reacts to
- Structuralism
Derrida's 1966 lecture 'Structure, Sign, and Play' attacked the structuralist assumption of a stable center, turning structuralism's own tools against it.
References
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Jacques Derrida
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Jacques Derrida, §1 and bibliography — Formation: Derrida's teaching in Paris and his three French books of 1967.
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Jacques Derrida, §2
- Of Grammatology — Jacques Derrida
- Writing and Difference — Jacques Derrida