MATHANKUMAR.SMATHANKUMAR.S

Jacques Derrida, Ph.D., was born to an Algerian Jewish family in EI-Biar, Algeria on 15th July, 1930. Jacques Derrida was French Philosopher. Derrida is best known for developing a form of semiotic analysis known as deconstruction.

Derrida published more than 40 books, together with hundreds of essays and public presentations.

In his later writings, he frequently addressed ethical and political themes present in his work. These writings influenced various activists and political movements.

Derrida’s oeuvre could be viewed as an exploration of the nature of writing in the broadest sense as difference. To the extent that writing always includes pictographic, ideographic, and phonetic elements, it is not identical with itself.

LIFE AND WORKS OF JACQUES LIFE AND WORKS OF JACQUES DERRIDADERRIDA

Deconstruction is a form a philosophical and literary analysis derived principally from Jacques Derrids’s 1967 work Of Grammatology.

In the 1980 it designated more loosely a range of theoretical enterprises in diverse areas of the humanities and social sciences, including philosophy and literature, law, anthropology, historiography, linguistics, sociolinguistics, psychoanalysis, political theory, feminism, gay and lesbian studies.

Deconstruction is generally presented via an analysis of specific texts.

DECONSTRUCTIONDECONSTRUCTION

Deconstruction has at least two aspects: literary and philosophical.

Literary aspect Literary aspect The literary aspect concerns the textual interpretation, where invention is essential to finding hidden

alternative meanings in the text.

Philosophical aspectPhilosophical aspect The philosophical aspect concerns the main target of deconstruction: the “metaphysics of presence,”

or simply metaphysics.

Deconstruction contends that in any text, there are inevitably points of equivocation and ‘undecidability’ that betray any stable meaning that an author might seek to impose upon his or her text.

ASPECTS OF DECONSTRUCTIONASPECTS OF DECONSTRUCTION

Jacques Derrida begins the essay “Difference” (perhaps the most systematic articulation of the non-concept that, according to Derrida, he “ha[s] been able to utilize” in previous works) by talking about the letter a and trying to explain (though not justify; instead perform an “insistent intensification of its play”) the neologism that he developed.

In the first few paragraphs of the essay, he talks about writing and how he neologism (“neographism” he calls it) is “a lapse in the discipline and law” of the system, a sort of disruption in writing and, if I may add, in language and the order of signs in general.

DIFFERENCE

In the philosophy of language, this has taken the form of the privileging of speech over writing.

In Plato (as in the Phaedrus, read by Derrida in “Plato’s Pharmacy,” explained by Christopher Norris in Derrida), for example, writing is considered a “mere inscription” consisting of “alien, arbitrary, lifeless signs”.

These written signs, according to Plato, serve as “mere substitutes” for speech, which, in contrast (i.e. unlike writing), expresses immediately, without contamination, and actively (lively happening in the moment) the truth.

i.e:- Sign – Animal Signifier – Cat Signified –

Derrida is trying to challenge by using the word difference. As a preliminary formulation, we can say that the choice of difference – with an a instead of a e – is a performance by Derrida (a stunt, even) to reinforce the point he is trying to make.

In French, the nasal sounds en and an explains comically on page 4 of his essay,) one cannot tell whether one is saying difference (with an e) of difference (with an a).

In other words, differe/ance is one of those instances in which the order where speech expresses or manifests instantly and immediately – without delay, without confusion, without detachment (no remove) – self-present meaning or truth (as discerned by reason) is disrupted.

Derrida observes, “a written text always and already keeps watch over my discourse [including spoken discourse”. “We will be able neither to do without the passage through a written text [i.e. we need to pass through writing], nor to avoid the order of the disorder produced within it” (4).

Thus, the distinction between the two terms of the binary opposition-speech and writing-is blurred (indistinct, unclear).

More importantly, the hierarchy between them is (at least for now) overturned, as writing turns out to be the unexplored yet key term in the opposition.

DECONSTRUCTION IN TERMSDECONSTRUCTION IN TERMS

To illustrate this “natural” working, as it were, of difference, Derrida looks closely at language.

Traditionally, language (especially the Western languages) has been thought to be a phonetic system (i.e. a linguistic system premised on the Derrida claims that “there is no phonetic writing”.

Derrida is trying to do (by the use of difference) is subvert the order of hierarchical binary oppositions set up by the tradition.

This is not to say that he aims merely to invert the hierarchy, i.e. to put writing over speech, undermining the primacy of truth, reasons, and all those other concepts assigned a privileged position.

Thus, immediately following Derrida’s undermining of speech, spoken language, and phonetic writing (i.e. after the overturning of the hierarchy spoken of above), is the objection that “graphic difference itself [as discerned in the written text] vanishes into the night [literally, since without light, it cannot be seen], can never be sensed as a full term’.

In other words, “the difference marked in the ‘differ( )nce’ between the e and the a eludes both vision and hearing’.

Thus, what Derrida asserts is not a difference that writing somehow has privileged access to but rather “a difference with which belongs neither to the voice nor to writing in the usual sense, but between speech and writing, and beyond the tranquil familiarity which links us to one and the other, occasionally reassuring us in our illusion that they are two”.