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    Assg 5 - What Is Derrida's Deconstruction Theory

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    Irbab Younis
    Deconstruction is a philosophical theory introduced by Jacques Derrida that involves analyzing texts to reveal uncertainties and contradictions within them rather than looking for a fixed meaning or theme. Derrida argued that language acquires meaning through contrasts between signs rather than words directly expressing ideas, and that meanings are deferred and never fully present. He believed this mistaken search for a self-sufficient meaning is what he called the "metaphysics of presence." Further, Derrida stated that for deconstruction to be effective it must create new terms to mark the differences between concepts rather than synthesize opposing ideas.

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    Assg 5 - What Is Derrida's Deconstruction Theory

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    Irbab Younis
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    Deconstruction is a philosophical theory introduced by Jacques Derrida that involves analyzing texts to reveal uncertainties and contradictions within them rather than looking for a fixed meaning or theme. Derrida argued that language acquires meaning through contrasts between signs rather than words directly expressing ideas, and that meanings are deferred and never fully present. He believed this mistaken search for a self-sufficient meaning is what he called the "metaphysics of presence." Further, Derrida stated that for deconstruction to be effective it must create new terms to mark the differences between concepts rather than synthesize opposing ideas.

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    Assg 5 - What is Derrida's deconstruction theory

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    Deconstruction is a philosophical theory introduced by Jacques Derrida that involves analyzing texts to reveal uncertainties and contradictions within them rather than looking for a fixed meaning or theme. Derrida argued that language acquires meaning through contrasts between signs rather than words directly expressing ideas, and that meanings are deferred and never fully present. He believed this mistaken search for a self-sufficient meaning is what he called the "metaphysics of presence." Further, Derrida stated that for deconstruction to be effective it must create new terms to mark the differences between concepts rather than synthesize opposing ideas.

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    61 views2 pages

    Assg 5 - What Is Derrida's Deconstruction Theory

    Uploaded by

    Irbab Younis
    Deconstruction is a philosophical theory introduced by Jacques Derrida that involves analyzing texts to reveal uncertainties and contradictions within them rather than looking for a fixed meaning or theme. Derrida argued that language acquires meaning through contrasts between signs rather than words directly expressing ideas, and that meanings are deferred and never fully present. He believed this mistaken search for a self-sufficient meaning is what he called the "metaphysics of presence." Further, Derrida stated that for deconstruction to be effective it must create new terms to mark the differences between concepts rather than synthesize opposing ideas.

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    Ma'am Ayesha Kashif

    Bushra Ramzan

    70143731

    What is Derrida's deconstruction theory?

    Deconstruction is any of a loosely-defined set of approaches to understanding the


    relationship between text and meaning. The concept of deconstruction was introduced by the
    philosopher Jacques Derrida, who described it as a turn away from Platonism's ideas of "true"
    forms and essences which take precedence over appearances. Since the 1980s, these proposals of
    language's fluidity instead of being ideally static and discernible have inspired a range of studies
    in the humanities, including the disciplines of law, anthropology, historiography, linguistics,
    sociolinguistics, psychoanalysis, LGBT studies, and feminism. Deconstruction also inspired
    deconstructivism in architecture and remains important within art, music, and literary criticism.

    Jacques Derrida's 1967 book Of Grammatology introduced the majority of ideas


    influential within deconstruction. Derrida published several other works directly relevant to the
    concept of deconstruction, such as Différance, Speech and Phenomena, and Writing and
    Difference.

    To Derrida, That is what deconstruction is made of not the mixture but the tension
    between memory, fidelity, the preservation of something that has been given to us, and, at the
    same time, heterogeneity, something new, and a break.

    According to Derrida, and taking inspiration from the work of Ferdinand de Saussure,
    language as a system of signs and words only has meaning because of the contrast between these
    signs. As Richard Rorty contends, "words have meaning only because of contrast-effects with
    another words...no word can acquire meaning in the way in which philosophers from Aristotle to
    Bertrand Russell have hoped it might - be being the unmediated expression of something non-
    linguistic (e.g., an emotion, a sensed observation, a physical object, an idea, a Platonic Form)".
    As a consequence, meaning is never present but rather is deferred to other signs. Derrida refers to
    this - in his view, mistaken - the belief there is a self-sufficient, non-deferred meaning as
    metaphysics of presence. A concept, then, must be understood in the context of its opposite: for
    example, the word "being" does not have meaning without contrast with the word nothing.

    Derrida further argues that it is not enough to expose and deconstruct the way oppositions
    work and then stop there in a nihilistic or cynical position, "thereby preventing any means of
    intervening in the field effectively". To be effective, deconstruction needs to create new terms,
    not to synthesize the concepts in opposition, but to mark their difference and eternal interplay.
    This explains why Derrida always proposes new terms in his deconstruction, not as a free play
    but from the necessity of analysis. Derrida called these undecidable - that is, unities of
    simulacrum "false" verbal properties (nominal or semantic) that can no longer be included within
    philosophical (binary) opposition.

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