Deconstruction

Deconstruction, as a literary and philosophical position, has widely influenced contemporary thought (including, I think, psychoanalysis), so much so that deconstruction, as a word, has made its way into the popular press and even into the title and style of a Woody Allen movie. In the big, wide world, ‘deconstructing’ has come to mean simply ‘to take apart’, oddly returning to its German original, abbauen—to unbuild. I think it is somewhat more accurate to say that deconstructing an idea is a traditional intellectual pursuit: digging out and questioning the underlying assumption of a given concept. Deconstruction would add (in the tradition of Nietzsche and Heidegger) the implication that every intellectual position rests on some premise or other that cannot be finally proven. As such, deconstruction merges with another current stance: anti-foundationalism. There is no ultimate, provable foundation for any value or idea, and no value or idea stands as the unshakable foundation for others. It is not given to mortals to achieve a God's-Eye view.

Deconstruction, the word, craves a still more precise usage, however, a difficult task for anyone who has not taken philo at a French lycée. The best place to begin, perhaps, is with (as the Michelin guides say) un peu d'histoire. Deconstruction grew out of and was a reaction against the modernist style. In literary criticism in the 1940s, '50s and '60s, modernist criticism was called formalism (Eastern Europe), New Criticism (US and UK), or, in particular, structuralism (France). These all have in common a modernist tendency to treat works of literature, art, cultures and other things as stand-alone, solid, even monumental, things-in-themselves, to be studied and analysed in and for themselves without much reference to their surroundings.

Decades before, language, in the writings of the turn-of-the-century linguist, Ferdinand de Saussure, had become one of these objects, to be isolated from its own history and form its users'