Post-structuralism, Deconstruction, and Post-

modernism

A presentation by:

Bryan Foster & Miranda Mueller

Groundworks for Deconstruction

The philosophies that guided Derrida’s works

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)

• Major works: On truth and lying

(1873), Human, all too Human

(1878), Thus Spoke Zarathustra

(1883), Beyond Good and Evil (1886)

On Truth and Lying, Nietzsche

• Absolute knowledge is impossible,

even of simple things. Our ignorance

of real truth is dissimulated from us

by our own minds and the structures

of language and ideology we take for

granted. Language is arbitrary,

comprised of metaphors layered atop

other metaphors.

Martin Heidegger (1889 - 1976)

• Some influences: Thomas Aquinas, Immanuel Kant, Heinrich Rickert, Edmund Husserl

• Major Works: Being and Time (1927), Höderlin's Hymn "The Ister" (1942), The Principle of Reason (1955), Identity and Difference (1956)

Identity and Difference, Heidegger

Being Existence

Difference

Identity and Difference, Heidegger

Being Existence

Difference

Differance

Jacques Derrida’s contribution to deconstruction

Jacques Derrida (1930-2004)

• Major influcences: Friedrich

Nietzsche, Jean-Jaques

Rousseau, Louis Althusser,

Ferdinand de Saussure,

Martin Heidegger

• Major works: Writing and

Difference (1967) Of

Grammatology (1967)

Dissemination, (1972)

Limited Inc (1988)

Differance, The importance of a semiotic analysis:

Why the “a”? • Proof that language is comprised of

arbitrary signs that live in a play of differences

• Not capitalized because it is not “some ineffable being that cannot be approached by name”

• Rationalization between spatiality and temporality – Defer

– Differ

• Indecision between activity and passivity that shows the uselessness of binary oppositions

Differance: a (hopefully) useful chart

Heart

Love

Artery

Shape

Red

Square

Blood

Differance is NOT…

• A name, but a “nominal unity” (297)

• “a word nor a concept” (283)

• A “being-present” (298)

– For if it were, it would be conceived with nostalgia

– Therefore it is the difference between “Being and being, present and presence”

– It is the deployment of Being

Differance is…

• The movement of play that produces differences allowing language and signs to exist

– Differences in phonemes make up a language, but these differences are a result of something else. “Differences [therefore language] did not fall out of the sky”

• Relation of speech to language

– As opposed to Saussure’s idea that speech is put in opposition to language

Differance is…

• Freudian!

• The origin of psyche and memory

• The differences involved in the production of unconscious traces and the process of inscription – Specifically “moments of differance”

• The outlet in which the restricted/inaccessable system (the unconscious)

Differance is…

• The foundation for arche-writing

• Arche-writing: a concept of writing that insists that the gap or breach introduced between what is intended to be conveyed and what is actualy conveyed, is standard, coming from an initial breach that afflicts everything one intends to express, even self-presence within the work

Understanding Deconstruction

Some useful explanations of

really really big words

• Philosophy established by Edmund

Husserl

• Concerned with how the mind might come

to know and understand true ideas.

• A “phenomena”, here, would be the

mental representation of an object

Understanding Deconstruction: Phenomenology

Understanding Deconstruction: Epoch

• A process wherein the physical and

temporal is stripped away from the

metaphysical, where an object and its

representations are reduced to a pure

idea.

• According to Derrida, the period of time

between Plato and Husserl in which

metaphysics reigned.

Understanding Deconstruction: Logos

• From the Greek word for mind, reason,

and language

• The notion of a pure and ideal truth

grasped intuitively and without the need

for or intermediary of signifiers.

• Identified with “phonocentrism” by Derrida

• The belief that existence has substance

and/or presence, rather than being

generated by a series of semi-determinate

things, each of them generated in much

the same manner.

• (Differentially)

• Literally means “religion of being”

Understanding Deconstruction: Onto-theology

Understanding Deconstruction: Aufhebung

• Translation: sublimation

• Refers to the hypothetical transformation

of ideas into signifiers (eg: thought into

language), and their return to the state of

“idea” through comprehension by another

• eg: somebody hears you and gets what

you’re saying

Understanding Deconstruction: Erinnerung

• Translation: memory

• The idea that signs retain the “spirit” of

the idea that has been invested in them.

• Signs (words and symbols) are held to

merely be temporary receptacles of an

idea.

Understanding Deconstruction: Trace

• Also known as otherness or alterity

• Everything that appears to have its own

identity is in fact constructed by its

relationship with or difference from other

things.

• These things are held to carry a “trace” of

each other.

Semiology and Grammatology, Derrida and Kristeva

• Deconstructing metaphysics

– Stop searching for the “transcendental truth”!

• Tear down the idea of binary oppositions

– Try differentiating language and speech, code and message, etc. as Saussure did.

– According to Derrida, it is impossible to know where to start in defining these binary terms.

– Therefore, differance works because it functions on the relation of differences instead of differences themselves

Post-structuralism, Deconstruction, and

Authorship

Barbara Johnson (1947-2009)

• Major Works: A world of difference

(1987), The Critical Difference

(1980), The Feminist Difference

(1998), The Wake of

Deconstruction (1994)

• Schools of Thought/ Major ideas:

structuralism, post-structuralism,

Lacanian psychoanalysis, feminist

critical theory

Writing, Johnson • Summarizes the basic points of other

writers – Barthes, Saussure, Lacan, Derrida – and explains the impact of each, followed by he destabilization of the eariler writers by the later ones.

• She argues, using this premise, for the inclusion of historical, psychoanalytical, political, and philosphical concepts in analysis and their prevalence in 20th century French thought.

• Reading is held to to be the simple task of grasping the meanng of a text, but of grasping its multiple possible interpretations, even when they are contradictory. (polysemy)

Roland Barthes (1915-1980)

• Major works: Mythologies (1957), Empire of Signs (1970), The Death of the Author (1968)

Death of the Author, Barthes

• Give credit to the reader

• Including the author historicizes, and therefore limits the text

• The author cannot express himself because what he thinks must be translated by a dictionary (of signs) that is not a direct representation of his thoughts.

• A text is not “a line of words releasing a single ‘theological’ meaning”; rather, it is a “multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash”

– Differance

Michel Foucault (1926-1984)

• Influences: Friedrich

Nietzsche, Louis Althusser,

Georges Dumézil, Karl Marx

• Major Works: Discipline and

punish: The birth of the prison

(1975), The Archaeology of

Knowledge (1969), The Order

of things (1966), Death and

the Labyrinth (1963)

What is an author?, Foucault

• The Author as a celebrated and central figure to their body of work is a modern conceit

• The “I” in literature does not refer in any direct way to the author currently, but was rather a temporary intermediary between the work and its creator

• Suggests a world in which the author was no longer the “regulator of the fictive”, constraining the work by his presence, a hypothetical place of anonymous production and therefore potentially unlimited interpretation