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Groundworks for
Deconstruction
The philosophies that guided
Derridas works
Friedrich Nietzsche
(1844-1900)
Martin Heidegger
(1889 - 1976)
Some influences:
Thomas Aquinas,
Immanuel Kant, Heinrich
Rickert, Edmund Husserl
Major Works: Being and
Time (1927), Hderlin's
Hymn "The Ister" (1942),
The Principle of Reason
(1955), Identity and
Difference (1956)
Existence
Difference
Being
Existence
Differance
Jacques Derridas contribution to
deconstruction
Differance: a (hopefully)
useful chart
Blood
Heart
Square
Artery
Love
Red
Shape
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
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
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
Understanding Deconstruction:
Phenomenology
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: 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
Understanding Deconstruction:
Onto-theology
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:
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
youre 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.
Post-structuralism,
Deconstruction, and
Authorship
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)
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