Deconstruction and Derrida

      Introduction:-

           

Structure sign and play in the Discourse of the Human sciences".

Deconstruction is a theory and pactice of reading which questions and claims to 'subvert' or 'undermine' the assumption that the system of language provides grounds that are adequate to establish the boundaries, the coherence or unity, and the determinate meaning of literary text.

Derrida combines two characteristics of the language mentioned above : the arbitariness or the tendency to defer the ultimate and final meaning, and the systematic differentiality of, language and coins a new term "differance" the tendency or the force of language to defer and differ that is intrinsic to language. The new term is a pun, and is possible in French as the word differer can mean either to differ or to defer, depending on context.

Derrida's assertion that deconstruction is not something that you do, but something which happens to text implies that it is the force of 'difference' which is the part of the production and signification of binaries and their subversion and the resultant aporia, rather than a person, school or a historical period causing it.


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      Decentering the Centre

Derrida deconstructs the metaphysics of presence. That is to say that according to Derrida there is no presence or truth apart from language. He seeks to prove that the structurality of the structure does not indicate a presence above its free play of signs. This presence was earlier supposed to be the centre of the structure which was paradoxically thought to be within, and outside this structure, it was truth and within, it was intelligibility. But Derrida contends that, ‘the centre could not be thought in the form of a being-presence’, and that in any given text, there is only a free play of an infinite number of sign substitutions. A word is explained by another word which is only a word not an existence. Thus a text is all words which are just words, not indicative of any presence beyond them. In the words of John Sturrock, “The resort to language or sign entails, we know the loss of all uniqueness and immediacy. The sign is not the thing in itself”. It is utteractive or repeatable. A sign which was uttered only once would be not sign. It is the types of which each utterance istoken.

There is no a-textual origin of a text. The author’s plan of a book is a text. His realization of the same book is another text. Its summary is third text. A text kindles a text and there is no truth beyond the text that the text seeks to represent or explain. There is no reality other than textuality. The textuality is the free play of signifiers. There is no signified that is not itself a signifier.

In the words of John Sturrock, Derrida seeks to undermine “a prevailing and generally unconscious ‘idealism’, which asserts that language does not create meanings but reveals them, thereby implying that meanings, pre-exists their expression”. This for Derrida is nonsense. For him there can be no meaning which is not formulated, we cannot reach outside language.