Jacques Derrida's Concept Of Deconstruction

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Jacques Derrida (1930 - 2004) has a significant influence upon the academic and intellectual lives of the last decades of the twentieth century. Algerian born French philosopher and critic, he has a large number of books, essays and dissertations been written on his revolutionary ideas and controversial works to his credit.Derrida is considered as one of the major philosophers of all time. Jacques Derrida’s work has a major influence over the studies of scholars working in the disciplines of humanities and social sciences. But Derrida is famous beyond the academic world as well. In the mid 1960s, distancing himself from the preceding philosophical movements and traditions in the French intellectual scenario, he proposed his concept of Deconstruction. …show more content…

The project of deconstruction is centre of the philosophy of Derrida. Derrida developed this idea and coined the term “deconstruction” from Heidegger’s concept of destruction and Husserl’s notion of Abbau [dismantling or unbuilding]. Deconstruction was presented mainly in his famous books Of Grammatology, Writing and Difference, Speech and Phenomena, Margins of Philosophy and Dissemination. The first three books are found to be the first ideas that introduced deconstruction to the intellectual and academic audience of the west.
Derrida’s urge to identify things different from what may be designated by that name resulted in deconstruction. He never stopped having doubts about the very identity of what is referred to by such a ‘nick –name. ‘. In Derrida’s own words; Derrida describes deconstruction as …show more content…

As Spivak observes, ‘All texts...are rehearsing their grammatological structure, self-deconstructing as they constitute themselves’ ((1976: Ixxviii). All that the deconstructionist is supposed to do, then, is writing, because in the final structure, deconstruction is writing. Furthermore, it is writing with no preconceived goal; as Barthes (1970) put it, ‘to write is an intransitive verb’, a verb without an object, an end in itself. Deconstruction manifests itself in the process of writing rather than in the product: ‘Deconstruction takes place, it is an event that does not await the deliberation, consciousness, or organization of a subject’ (Derrida 1991 :

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