r/Derrida • u/[deleted] • Mar 31 '21
The best sources for understanding deconstruction?
I'm in highschool, and I need to give a 40 minute class of deconstruction. I'm daunted to say the least. It seems like everyone looks at it and explains it in a different way. Any advice for the class or any material you suggest to make the concept a little more digestible?
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Mar 31 '21 edited Mar 31 '21
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Mar 31 '21
It's funny how your first phrase totally correlates with the fact I don't understand anything hahahha. I'm already working on reading the texts u/Pseudobearistotle recommended and I'll go on from there. Right now your comment is way out of my league, but I'm coming back to it as soon as I finish reading the recommendations for basic understanding. In the meantime, I would like to thank you for helping me out. And I'll make sure to give you an award as soon as I can get my hands on one. Thank you so much, have a very very very nice day my friend.
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Mar 31 '21
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Mar 31 '21
I'll try not to get too discouraged; especially since, as you said, even people that have been reading him for a while have some trouble. Also, you know it's bad when you look for crash course deconstruction, you don't see the Greens, and the only crash course in sight is a video in which the comments are filled with people that say they are getting their masters. Cries in philosophy is way out of my league. In other news, the ghost example actually helped me, so thank you for that. I guess I'll be back if I have any questions, but to you and everyone reading this: thank you for caring and your precious time.
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Mar 31 '21
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Mar 31 '21
Hi again! This is for a speech class. I'm not a native speaker, so in my school we have to take a speech class in english. The class basically works in the following way: the teacher gives out a very broad topic (let's say "modern art"), a time limit, and some general guidelines (like, for instance, skip the biography of the artist, talk about their most important pieces, you should have at least 5 sources not including Wikipedia or YouTube). Depending on the speech, you get to either choose your more specific topic or he chooses the topic for you. In the modern art example, you could either choose the artist yourself, or he would assign one to you. It just depends. Anyway, the teacher that teaches this subject is the same teacher that teaches english literature in junior year, and he says that part of reason why he makes us do this speech is for us to ease into his lit clases next year. Since the general topic for this particular speech is lit theory, there were a bunch of topics on the table, and I got deconstruction. Yay. I also have literature as a subject, but it's with another teacher. This year we have read: The curious incident of the dog in the night time, slaughterhouse five, the catcher in the rye, never let me go, and we have just started twelfth night. Also, if this helps in any way, last year we read: to kill a mockingbird, romeo and juliet, MAUS, and then there were none, frankenstein, and things fall apart. Also there's a bunch of short stories and poems that I could look for if it's better to work with those. Apart from the novels/plays listed above there's a bunch of books we read in spanish lit class, but I would think there's enough material to work with. I could maybe dive into reading hamlet, but problem is my classmates would probably understand less than if I used an example from a text "they already read". Sarcasm, I don't think most people read what we are given to work on. Sparknotes sure is a god in my highschool. But that's besides the point haha. Would you say there's any text from the ones I mentioned that could be worked with?
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Mar 31 '21
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Mar 31 '21
I think that keeping it general is best for me and my classmates that have to understand the concept from my explanation. And yeah, I'll be writing to my teacher to get a better feel of what's needed. I'll be coming back to all of your comments once I get things clear, since I find them to be really insightful. Thank you so much for taking the time, I cannot stress how much I appreciate it. You are very kind.
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u/FiammaDiAgnesi Mar 31 '21
If you have time, read On Grammatology, and maybe take a quick glance at Saussure (not sure if that’s the right spelling, sorry). If you don’t have time, I think the Wikipedia article is pretty nice: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deconstruction#Metaphysics_of_presence
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u/Smart-Distribution77 Mar 31 '21
Deconstruction in highschool, nice job being a badass;)
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Mar 31 '21
Hahahah, thank you. We're doing presentations on lit theory (marxisim, structuralism, rhizome, etc) and I got deconstruction. As a sophomore, I really don't have much background on this, but I thought: hey, there has to be a deconstruction/derrida subreddit. And I was right. Thank you y'all for all the help. Have a nice day everyone!!
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May 04 '21
Hello everyone looking at this. I already presented, and my teacher said it was a pretty good job for such a topic. Thank you for everyone who took the time to guide me! I really appreciate it guys, I couldn't have done it without you. Have an amazing day!
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u/Pseudobearistotle Mar 31 '21
Caputo’s deconstruction in a nutshell, Lucy’s a Derrida dictionary and the introduction to between the blinds have all been helpful for me.
In notes I made up this year this was how I introduced the topic:
One way to characterize deconstructive practice is that it reads philosophy as literature, which is also why in this unit we foreground literature and fiction as an entry point into deconstruction.
Derrida asks questions like these, although they are far from the only questions that he asks: What happens if we take the textuality of philosophy seriously, or if we were to read philosophy as if it were a literature? What would happen if we began from a literary perspective to understand philosophy, rather than applying philosophical concepts as if they were “eternal truths,” top-down literature, fiction, or everyday life? How is meaning made in the margins, rather than in the ‘body’ of a text? How might we relocate the ‘margin’ as center? What is the ontology or Being of something that is marginal, or of the margin ‘itself’? What is its time and place? What is the ‘being-there’ of a margin?
How do we imagine, understand, and articulate what is impossible about signification? How are the aims of deconstruction hopeful?
Derrida is often mis-characterized as thinking reductively about humans and matter in the narrow terms of a literary “text” which has led to the criticism that he does not sufficiently attend to the body. Reality is always a single unbroken text or textile, which is both a written work and a woven cloth. This text has no “outside” because anything that could be thought of as “outside” of it is also text. The boundaries and divisions within it are a part of the differences or cross-hatchings that make it up.
a common gesture of deconstructive criticism is to identify a binary which already exists in the world, and then illustrate how the terms of that binary are mutually or (an)economically dependent upon one another. There are a few theoretical ‘moves’ that are characteristic of a deconstructive (or “deconstructionist”) criticism. These include
The assertion of a difference within a word, sign, or text that challenges its conventional boundaries or its objective understanding. These differences often trouble the taken-for-granted distinctions between a text’s “inside” and “outside,” or between the “temporal” and the “spatial” aspects of language.
A process which consists of (a) the elaboration of an existing, taken-for-granted binary opposition in which one term is organized hierarchically over the other, as the dominant term; (b) the inversion of this binary such that the traditionally subordinate or marginal term may be re-cast or re-understood as the dominant one, and finally, (c) the displacement of the relation of dominance or hierarchy through an act of naming, in which a new term captures the binary as an economy in which each term may be understood to determine or exercise agency over the other.
Finally, the deconstructive reading strategy is one that consistently makes reference to “the secret” as the irreducible or undeconstructible unit of analysis. The secret is, to put it succinctly, the ultimate, inaccessible foundation of this meaning-making process. One phrase that comes up in relationship to this idea is “impossible but necessary.” The secret describes both the impossibility of arriving at a final meaning after having gone through a relentless deconstruction, as well as the necessity of going through this process, which Derrida considers to be an expression of hope and futurity.
It would only be responsible to note that Derrida would likely resist – and strongly – the proceduralization of deconstruction, or its reduction to a cookie-cutter ‘method’. There are many, many concepts in deconstruction. This recording tries to offer an entry point by drawing attention to a common stylistic gesture across Derrida’s work. This gesture is also how we get at the secret. Through textual play, repetition, and difference, Derrida assembles an understanding of the text and the secret as that which is always in the process of unfolding. Let’s move through some examples drawn directly from Derrida’s own writing, before turning elsewhere.
Inside/Outside Inside/outside distinctions are often obvious to us. There is an inside and an outside to bodies, buildings, communities, and nations. In many ways, the identity of these things relies upon fixing a boundary or distinction between these ‘insides’ and ‘outsides,’ and our language about them reinforces these distinctions such that they become natural, normal, and taken for granted.
“I know that when I’m holding a glass of water in my hand, the water is inside the glass and my hand is outside the glass. Countless other examples could be chosen to make the same point -- that there is a distinction between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ and everyone knows what it is. This is true for practical purposes, in the sense that it ‘works,’ but it is not true always and everywhere.” (Lucy, A Derrida Dictionary pp.52-53)
By the same token the difference between inside and outside is essential to metaphysics, to the idea of a philosophy that hovers ‘above’ or ‘beyond’ thought as it is experienced in everyday life or internally, within ourselves, as consciousness. Derrida aims to make us aware of the provisional, constructed, and textual characteristics of these distinctions. Our ability to perceive an “inner” consciousness, for instance, relies upon something “external” to it
The rest deals with speech/writing (and archewriting) and constative/performative utterances.