Editing Deconstruction (section)

==Difficulty of definition==
There have been problems defining deconstruction. Derrida claimed that all of his essays were attempts to define what deconstruction is,<ref name="Wood"/>{{rp|4}} and that deconstruction is necessarily complicated and difficult to explain since it actively criticises the very language needed to explain it.

===Derrida's "negative" descriptions===
Derrida has been more forthcoming with negative ([[wikt:apophatic|apophatic]]) than with positive descriptions of deconstruction. When asked by [[Toshihiko Izutsu]] some preliminary considerations on how to translate ''deconstruction'' in Japanese, in order to at least prevent using a Japanese term contrary to ''deconstruction''<nowiki/>'s actual meaning, Derrida began his response by saying that such a question amounts to "what deconstruction is not, or rather ''ought'' not to be".<ref name="Wood">{{cite book|last1=Wood|first1=David|last2=Bernasconi|first2=Robert|title=Derrida and Différance|date=1988|publisher=Northwestern University Press|location=Evanston, Illinois|isbn=9780810107861|edition=Reprinted}}</ref>{{rp|1}}

Derrida states that deconstruction is not an analysis, a critique, or a method<ref name="Wood"/>{{rp|3}} in the traditional sense that philosophy understands these terms. In these negative descriptions of deconstruction, Derrida is seeking to "multiply the cautionary indicators and put aside all the traditional philosophical concepts".<ref name="Wood"/>{{rp|3}} This does not mean that deconstruction has absolutely nothing in common with an analysis, a critique, or a method, because while Derrida distances deconstruction from these terms, he reaffirms "the necessity of returning to them, at least under erasure".<ref name="Wood"/>{{rp|3}} Derrida's necessity of returning to a term [[sous rature|under erasure]] means that even though these terms are problematic, they must be used until they can be effectively reformulated or replaced. The relevance of the tradition of negative theology to Derrida's preference for negative descriptions of deconstruction is the notion that a positive description of deconstruction would over-determine the idea of deconstruction and would close off the openness that Derrida wishes to preserve for deconstruction. If Derrida were to positively define deconstruction—as, for example, a critique—then this would make the concept of critique immune to itself being deconstructed.{{citation needed|date=February 2020}} Some new philosophy beyond deconstruction would then be required in order to encompass the notion of critique.

====Not a method====
Derrida states that "Deconstruction is not a method, and cannot be transformed into one".<ref name="Wood"/>{{rp|3}} This is because deconstruction is not a mechanical operation. Derrida warns against considering deconstruction as a mechanical operation, when he states that "It is true that in certain circles (university or cultural, especially in the United States) the technical and methodological "metaphor" that seems necessarily attached to the very word 'deconstruction' has been able to seduce or lead astray".<ref name="Wood"/>{{rp|3}} Commentator Richard Beardsworth explains that:

<blockquote>Derrida is careful to avoid this term [method] because it carries connotations of a procedural form of judgement. A thinker with a method has already decided ''how'' to proceed, is unable to give him or herself up to the matter of thought in hand, is a functionary of the criteria which structure his or her conceptual gestures. For Derrida [...] this is irresponsibility itself. Thus, to talk of a method in relation to deconstruction, especially regarding its ethico-political implications, would appear to go directly against the current of Derrida's philosophical adventure.<ref>{{cite book|last1=Beardsworth|first1=Richard|title=Derrida & The Political|date=1996|publisher=Routledge|location=London|isbn=978-1134837380|page=4}}</ref></blockquote>

Beardsworth here explains that it would be irresponsible to undertake a deconstruction with a complete set of rules that need only be applied as a method to the object of deconstruction, because this understanding would reduce deconstruction to a thesis of the reader that the text is then made to fit. This would be an irresponsible act of reading, because it becomes a prejudicial procedure that only finds what it sets out to find.

====Not a critique====
Derrida states that deconstruction is not a [[critique]] in the [[Kantianism|Kantian]] sense.<ref name="Wood"/>{{rp|3}} This is because [[Immanuel Kant|Kant]] defines the term ''critique'' as the opposite of [[dogmatism]]. For Derrida, it is not possible to escape the dogmatic baggage of the language used in order to perform a pure critique in the Kantian sense. Language is dogmatic because it is inescapably [[Metaphysics|metaphysical]]. Derrida argues that language is inescapably metaphysical because it is made up of [[Sign (linguistics)|signifiers]] that only refer to that which transcends them—the signified.{{Citation needed|date=April 2015}} In addition, Derrida asks rhetorically "Is not the idea of knowledge and of the acquisition of knowledge in itself metaphysical?"<ref name="Allison"/>{{rp|5}} By this, Derrida means that all claims to know something necessarily involve an assertion of the metaphysical type that something ''is'' the case somewhere. For Derrida the concept of neutrality is suspect and dogmatism is therefore involved in everything to a certain degree. Deconstruction can challenge a particular dogmatism and hence de-sediment dogmatism in general, but it cannot escape all dogmatism all at once.

====Not an analysis====
Derrida states that deconstruction is not an [[analysis]] in the traditional sense.<ref name="Wood"/>{{rp|3}} This is because the possibility of analysis is predicated on the possibility of breaking up the text being analysed into elemental component parts. Derrida argues that there are no self-sufficient units of meaning in a text, because individual words or sentences in a text can only be properly understood in terms of how they fit into the larger structure of the text and language itself. For more on Derrida's theory of meaning see the article on {{Lang|fr|[[différance]]}}.

====Not post-structuralist====
Derrida states that his use of the word deconstruction first took place in a context in which "[[structuralism]] was dominant" and deconstruction's meaning is within this context. Derrida states that deconstruction is an "antistructuralist gesture" because "[s]tructures were to be undone, decomposed, desedimented". At the same time, deconstruction is also a "structuralist gesture" because it is concerned with the structure of texts. So, deconstruction involves "a certain attention to structures"<ref name="Wood"/>{{rp|2}} and tries to "understand how an 'ensemble' was constituted".<ref name="Wood"/>{{rp|3}} As both a structuralist and an antistructuralist gesture, deconstruction is tied up with what Derrida calls the "structural problematic".<ref name="Wood"/>{{rp|2}} The structural problematic for Derrida is the tension between genesis, that which is "in the essential mode of creation or movement", and structure: "systems, or complexes, or static configurations".<ref name="Writing"/>{{rp|194}} An example of genesis would be the [[sense|sensory]] [[idea]]s from which knowledge is then derived in the [[empirical]] [[epistemology]]. An example of structure would be a [[binary opposition]] such as [[good and evil]] where the meaning of each element is established, at least partly, through its relationship to the other element.

It is for this reason that Derrida distances his use of the term deconstruction from [[post-structuralism]], a term that would suggest that philosophy could simply go beyond structuralism. Derrida states that "the motif of deconstruction has been associated with 'post-structuralism{{' "}}, but that this term was "a word unknown in France until its 'return' from the United States".<ref name="Wood"/>{{rp|3}} In his deconstruction of [[Edmund Husserl]], Derrida actually argues {{em|for}} the contamination of pure origins by the structures of language and temporality. [[Manfred Frank]] has even referred to Derrida's work as "neostructuralism", identifying a "distaste for the metaphysical concepts of domination and system".<ref>{{cite book|last1=Frank|first1=Manfred|title=What is Neostructuralism?|date=1989|publisher=University of Minnesota Press|location=Minneapolis|isbn=978-0816616022}}</ref><ref>Buchanan, Ian. ''A dictionary of critical theory''. OUP Oxford, 2010. Entry: Neostructuralism.</ref>

===Alternative definitions===
The popularity of the term deconstruction, combined with the technical difficulty of Derrida's primary material on deconstruction and his reluctance to elaborate his understanding of the term, has meant that many secondary sources have attempted to give a more straightforward explanation than Derrida himself ever attempted. Secondary definitions are therefore an interpretation of deconstruction by the person offering them rather than a summary of Derrida's actual position.
* [[Paul de Man]] was a member of the [[Yale School]] and a prominent practitioner of deconstruction as he understood it. His definition of deconstruction is that, "[i]t's possible, within text, to frame a question or undo assertions made in the text, by means of elements which are in the text, which frequently would be precisely structures that play off the rhetorical against grammatical elements."<ref>{{cite book|last1=Moynihan|first1=Robert|title=A Recent imagining: interviews with Harold Bloom, Geoffrey Hartman, J. Hillis Miller, Paul De Man|date=1986|publisher=Archon Books|location=Hamden, Connecticut|isbn=9780208021205|page=156|edition=1st}}</ref>
* [[Richard Rorty]] was a prominent interpreter of Derrida's philosophy. His definition of deconstruction is that, "the term 'deconstruction' refers in the first instance to the way in which the 'accidental' features of a text can be seen as betraying, subverting, its purportedly 'essential' message."<ref>{{cite book|last1=Brooks|first1=Peter|title=The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism: From Formalism to Poststructuralism|date=1995|publisher=Cambridge University Press|location=Cambridge|isbn=9780521300131|page=171|edition=1st}}</ref>
* According to [[John D. Caputo]], the very meaning and mission of deconstruction is:<blockquote>"to show that things - texts, institutions, traditions, societies, beliefs, and practices of whatever size and sort you need - do not have definable meanings and determinable missions, that they are always more than any mission would impose, that they exceed the boundaries they currently occupy"<ref>{{cite book|last1=Caputo|first1=John D.|url=https://archive.org/details/isbn_9780823217557/page/32|title=Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida|date=1997|publisher=Fordham University Press|isbn=9780823217557|edition=3rd|location=New York|page=[https://archive.org/details/isbn_9780823217557/page/31 31]}}</ref></blockquote>
* [[Niall Lucy]] points to the impossibility of defining the term at all, stating: <blockquote>"While in a sense it ''is'' impossibly difficult to define, the impossibility has less to do with the adoption of a position or the assertion of a choice on deconstruction's part than with the impossibility of every 'is' as such. Deconstruction begins, as it were, from a refusal of the authority or determining power of every 'is', or simply from a refusal of authority in general. While such refusal may indeed count as a position, it is not the case that deconstruction holds this as a sort of 'preference' ".<ref>{{cite book|last1=Lucy|first1=Niall|title=A Derrida Dictionary|date=2004|publisher=Blackwell Publishing|location=Malden, Massachusetts|isbn=978-1405137515}}</ref>{{Page needed|date=September 2017}}</blockquote>
* David B. Allison, an early translator of Derrida, states in the introduction to his translation of ''Speech and Phenomena'': <blockquote>[Deconstruction] signifies a project of critical thought whose task is to locate and 'take apart' those concepts which serve as the axioms or rules for a period of thought, those concepts which command the unfolding of an entire epoch of metaphysics. 'Deconstruction' is somewhat less negative than the Heideggerian or Nietzschean terms 'destruction' or 'reversal'; it suggests that certain foundational concepts of metaphysics will never be entirely eliminated...There is no simple 'overcoming' of metaphysics or the language of metaphysics.</blockquote>
* [[Paul Ricœur]] defines deconstruction as a way of uncovering the questions behind the answers of a text or tradition.<ref>{{cite book|last1=Klein|first1=Anne Carolyn|title=Meeting the Great Bliss Queen: Buddhists, Feminists, and the Art of the Self|date=1994|publisher=Beacon Press|location=Boston|isbn=9780807073063|url=https://archive.org/details/meetinggreatblis00kleirich}}</ref>{{Page needed|date=November 2013}}

===Popular definitions===
{{expand section|date=December 2022}}

A survey of the [[secondary literature]] reveals a wide range of heterogeneous arguments. Particularly problematic are the attempts to give neat introductions to deconstruction by people trained in literary criticism who sometimes have little or no expertise in the relevant areas of philosophy in which Derrida is working.{{Editorializing|date=September 2023}} These secondary works (e.g. ''Deconstruction for Beginners''<ref>{{cite book|last1=Powell|first1=Jim|title=Deconstruction for Beginners|date=2005|publisher=Writers and Readers Publishing|location=Danbury, Connecticut|isbn=978-0863169984}}</ref>{{Page needed|date=September 2017}} and ''Deconstructions: A User's Guide'')<ref>{{cite book|last1=Royle|first1=Nicholas|title=Deconstructions: A User's Guide|date=2000|publisher=Palgrave|location=New York|isbn=978-0333717615}}</ref>{{Page needed|date=September 2017}} have attempted to explain deconstruction while being academically criticized for being too far removed from the original texts and Derrida's actual position.{{Citation needed|date=April 2007}}

''Cambridge Dictionary'' states that ''deconstruction'' is "the act of breaking something down into its separate parts in order to understand its meaning, especially when this is different from how it was previously understood".<ref>{{Cite web |title=Cambridge English Dictionary: Meanings & Definitions |url=https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/deconstruction}}</ref> The [[Merriam-Webster]] dictionary states that ''deconstruction'' is "the analytic examination of something (such as a theory) often in order to reveal its inadequacy".<ref>{{Cite web |title=Definition of DECONSTRUCTION |url=https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/deconstruction |website=www.merriam-webster.com|date=10 June 2023 }}</ref>