Blackwell Reference Online

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School of philosophy and literary criticism forged in the writings of the French philosopher Jacques Derrida and the Belgian/ North American literary critic Paul De Man.Deconstruction can perhaps best be described as a theory of reading which aims to undermine the logic of opposition within Texts (see Binary opposition). For Derrida this requires a scrutiny of the essential distinctions and conceptual orderings which have been constructed by the dominant tradition of Western philosophy. In a series of engagements with thinkers as diverse as Plato, Hegel, Rousseau, Kant, Husserl, Austin, and Légvi-STRAUSS, Derrida adopts a strategy of reading which questions the assumptions and limitations of textual meaning by revealing how the polarities and certainties a text has proposed have actually been constructed through a series of preferences and repressions which have privileged certain ideas, values, and arguments above others. Derrida's point is that what has been presented as a dichotomy in Western thought, such as man/woman, is in fact merely a difference which has been manipulated into a hierarchy. However, contrary to some literary and postmodern appropriations of his writings, Derrida's thought does not aim at the dissolution of analytic distinctions altogether, nor is he concerned with a simple reversal of hierarchical oppositions. As Derrida and some of his more subtle acolytes ... log in or subscribe to read full text