Derrida and Deconstruction

  What do you understand by 'Deconstruction'? (Remember: if you think you understand Deconstruction, you don't. :)).
 
Jacques  Derrida

*Simple define of Deconstruction

   A Philosophical and critical movement, starting in the 1960s and especially applied to the study of literature, that questions all traditional assumptions about the ability of language to represent reality and emphasizes that a text has no stable reference or identification because words essentially only refer to other words and therefore a reader must approach a text by eliminating any metaphysical or ethnocentric assumptions through an active role of defining meaning, sometimes by a reliance on new word construction, etymology, puns, and other word play.

  Deconstruction, form of philosophical and literary analysis, derived mainly from work begun in the 1960s by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, that questions the fundamental conceptual distinctions, or “oppositions,” in Western philosophy through a close examination of the language and logic of philosophical and literary texts. 

In the 1970s the term was applied to work by Derrida, Paul de Man, J. Hillis Miller, and Barbara Johnson, among other scholars. In the 1980s it designated more loosely a range of radical theoretical enterprises in diverse areas of the humanities and social sciences, including—in addition to philosophy and literature—law, psychoanalysis, architecture, anthropology, theology, feminism, gay and lesbian studies, political theory, historiography, and film theory. In polemical discussions about intellectual trends of the late 20th-century, deconstruction was sometimes used pejoratively to suggest nihilism and frivolous skepticism. In popular usage the term has come to mean a critical dismantling of tradition and traditional modes of thought.

 Jacques Derrida, a French Philosopher gives an idea of Deconstruction and explain it in his numerous texts. Deconstruction is not a hedonistic(pleasure seeking) abandonment of all restraints, but a disciplined identification and dismantling of the sources of textual power. Barry peter, in his work  'an introduction to literary and cultural theory' gives detailed information about Derrida;s concept of Deconstruction.



  * Read an ad or TV serial or Film or literary text as post-structuralist critic. Be brief, precise and to the point.

 
  The Post structuralist literary critic is engaged in the task of 'deconstructing' the text. This process is given the name 'Deconstruction' which can roughly be defined as applied post-structuralism.

 Derrida's lecture at Johns Hopkins

The occasional designation of Post-structuralism as a movement can be tied to the fact that mounting criticism of Structuralism became evident at approximately the same time that Structuralism became a topic of interest in universities in the United States. This interest led to a colloquium at Johns Hopkins University in 1966 titled "The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man", to which such French philosophers as Derrida, Barthes, and Lacan were invited to speek

Derrida's lecture at that conference, "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Human Sciences," was one of the earliest to propose some theoretical limitations to Structuralism, and to attempt to theorize on terms that were clearly no longer Structuralist.

The element of "play" in the title of Derrida's essay is often erroneously interpreted in a linguistic sense, based on a general tendency towards puns and humour, while social constructionism as developed in the later work of Michel Foucault is said to create play in the sense of strategic agency by laying bare the levers of historical change. Many see the importance of Foucault's work to be in its synthesis of this social/historical account of the operation of power.

  Tenets of Deconstruction of the Percy Bysse Shelly poem, "Ozymandias."

 I met a traveller from an antique land,

Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;

And on the pedestal, these words appear:

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.''

            The story of the fallen leader in Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Ozymandias” is a reiteration of other tales that depict the inevitable destruction of great, political giants and the impossibility of enduring greatness. As told by the "traveller"  to the narrator in the format of an abbreviated frame story, the king in Shelley’s has a large statue built in his likeness to preside over his, now fallen, kingdom which serves to ironically announce the futility of absolute rule. Though he likely realized he would not physically live forever, he sought to secure a place in earth’s future by elevating his visage upon a (somewhat) physical pedestal. The base declares both his arrogance and cruelty by placing himself as the "King of Kings" (10) and commanding all to "Look upon [his] works, ye mighty, and despair!" . His statue, as he likely saw it, would live on into eternity where no one would ever forget his name or face. The reality is that his statue is now a ruin, "Nothing beside remains" and his name barely recognizable in stone, and even less so in the history books. 

             The fact that the king's statue is alone in the desert and, seemingly, forgotten about by the society he swore would resonated with his legacy and is so conveniently found and properly explained by a potentially untrustworthy traveller shows the story to be too neatly resolved. The bald lesson of excessive pride may not be the point of the story turned poetic after-school special. The obvious moral is undermined by merely examining a few select phrases and the initial reading is called into question. 



        Thank you.......