Can someone explain deconstructionism to me?

Answer 1

Sure. Here's my answer:




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Answer 2

"A term tied very closely to postmodernism, deconstructionism is a challenge to the attempt to establish any ultimate or secure meaning in a text. Basing itself in language analysis, it seeks to "deconstruct" the ideological biases (gender, racial, economic, political, cultural) and traditional assumptions that infect all histories, as well as philosophical and religious "truths." Deconstructionism is based on the premise that much of human history, in trying to understand, and then define, reality has led to various forms of domination - of nature, of people of color, of the poor, of homosexuals, etc. Like postmodernism, deconstructionism finds concrete experience more valid than abstract ideas and, therefore, refutes any attempts to produce a history, or a truth. In other words, the multiplicities and contingencies of human experience necessarily bring knowledge down to the local and specific level, and challenge the tendency to centralize power through the claims of an ultimate truth which must be accepted or obeyed by all."
http://www.pbs.org/faithandreason/gengloss/decon-body.html

Answer 3

If Derrida, the coiner of the term can not explain it, I surely can't. Post-modern drivel that true scholars have no time for.

Answer 4

Go to dictionary.com or wikipedia.com. That'll help. :)

Answer 5

(((cut&pasted from wikipedia)))

In contemporary philosophy and social sciences, the term deconstruction denotes a process by which the texts and languages of (particularly) Western philosophy appear to shift and complicate in meaning when read in light of the assumptions they suggest about and absences they reveal within themselves. Jacques Derrida coined the term in the 1960s, and found that he could talk more readily about what deconstruction was not than about what it was, most especially in reply to questions posed by others about it.

Subjects relevant to deconstruction include the philosophy of meaning in Western thought, and the ways that meaning is constructed by Western writers, texts, and readers and understood by readers. Though Derrida himself denied deconstruction was a method or school of philosophy, or indeed anything outside of reading the text itself, the term has been used by others to describe Derrida's particular methods of textual criticism, which involved discovering, recognizing, and understanding the underlying—and unspoken and implicit—assumptions, ideas, and frameworks that form the basis for thought and belief, for example, in complicating the ordinary division made between nature and culture. Derrida's deconstruction was drawn mainly from the work of Heidegger and his notion of Destruktion but also from Levinas and his ideas upon the Other.

The problems of definition

The term deconstruction in the context of Western philosophy is highly resistant to formal definition. Martin Heidegger was perhaps the first to use the term (in contrast to Nietzschean demolition). Heidegger's central concern was to deconstruct the tradition of Western philosophy. The English term is an element in a series of translations (from Husserl's Abbau and Heidegger's Destruktion to Jacques Derrida's déconstruction), and it has been explored by others, including Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Paul de Man, Jonathan Culler, Barbara Johnson, J. Hillis Miller, Jean-François Lyotard, and Geoffrey Bennington.

These authors have resisted calls to define the word succinctly. When asked what deconstruction is, Derrida once stated, "I have no simple and formalizable response to this question. All my essays are attempts to have it out with this formidable question" (Derrida 1985, at 4). There is a great deal of confusion as to what kind of thing deconstruction is — whether it is a school of thought (it is certainly not so in the singular), a method of reading (it has often been reduced to this by various attempts to define it formally), or, as some call it, a "textual event" (a characterization implied by the Derrida quote just given) — and determining what authority to accord to a particular attempt at delimiting it.

Many pages have been devoted to attempts to define deconstruction or to demonstrate why attempts at delimitation are misconceived. Most of these attempts (including those signed by critics who are considered deconstructionist) are difficult reading and resistant to summary. On the other hand, there is a cottage industry of writers of variably explicit sympathy or antipathy to deconstruction (however they understand it) who attempt to explain it to those who are reluctant to read the original deconstructive texts.

Surveying the deconstructive texts and the secondary literature, one is confronted with a bafflingly heterogeneous range of arguments. These include claims that deconstruction can sort out the Western tradition in its entirety, by highlighting and discrediting unjustified privileges accorded to white males and other hegemonists. On the other hand, some critics claim that deconstruction is a dangerous form of nihilism that wishes the utter destruction of Western scientific and ethical values.

As a rule, deconstruction is ridiculed by members of the political right of just about any stripe. Its reception on the left is far more varied, ranging from hostility to co-option.

While there is no doubting that principal figures associated with deconstruction in France have been "leftist" in their political positions, Heidegger's place in deconstruction complicates matters considerably, as do the politics of Paul de Man in early adulthood. Heidegger assumed the rectorship of the University of Freiburg from 1933-1934 as a member of the National Socialist German Workers Party (Nazis), while de Man worked, during the German occupation of Belgium, as a writer for a collaborationist newspaper, Le Soir.

From a racial-religious perspective, deconstruction has no clear sectarian identity. For example, Derrida's views on religion are anything but sectarian. As a Jew raised in a walled Jewish community in colonial Algeria, Derrida rejected what he regarded as the countersignature of anti-Semitism by Algerian Jewish institutions of the 1940s. He is almost certainly an atheist in terms of dogmatic theology, and has written about religion in terms of what was shared among the Abrahamic faiths. Due to the open nature of Derrida's engagement with religion, deconstruction-and-religion attracts attention from scholars across disciplines.

Those writing sympathetically about deconstruction tend to use an "idiosyncratic" (sometimes in fact imitative) style with numerous neologisms, a bent toward playfulness and irony, and a massive amount of allusion across many corners of the Western canon.

What deconstruction is NOT

It is easier to explain what deconstruction is not than what it is. According to Derrida, deconstruction is not an analysis, a critique, a method, an act, nor an operation (Derrida, 1985, p. 3). Further, deconstruction is not, properly speaking, a synonym for "destruction." Rather, according to Barbara Johnson, it is a specific kind of analytical "reading":

Deconstruction is in fact much closer to the original meaning of the word 'analysis' itself, which etymologically means "to undo" — a virtual synonym for "to de-construct." ... If anything is destroyed in a deconstructive reading, it is not the text, but the claim to unequivocal domination of one mode of signifying over another. A deconstructive reading is a reading which analyzes the specificity of a text's critical difference from itself." (Johnson, 1981)

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