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Post-Structuralism and Deconstruction: Handout 5: Working With The Instability of Language

Deconstruction focuses on the instability and multiplicity of meanings in language. It rejects the structuralist view that language provides a stable system to derive singular meanings from texts. Deconstructionists like Derrida believe that the relationship between signifiers and signifieds is looser than Saussure described, and that meanings are perpetually deferred through the slippage of signifiers. As a result, texts can contain competing meanings and interpretations that are "undecidable". The goal of deconstruction is a double reading to find a provisional stable meaning while also showing how the text deconstructs itself.

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73 views1 page

Post-Structuralism and Deconstruction: Handout 5: Working With The Instability of Language

Deconstruction focuses on the instability and multiplicity of meanings in language. It rejects the structuralist view that language provides a stable system to derive singular meanings from texts. Deconstructionists like Derrida believe that the relationship between signifiers and signifieds is looser than Saussure described, and that meanings are perpetually deferred through the slippage of signifiers. As a result, texts can contain competing meanings and interpretations that are "undecidable". The goal of deconstruction is a double reading to find a provisional stable meaning while also showing how the text deconstructs itself.

Uploaded by

Bianca Darie
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© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Handout 5: Working with the Instability of Language

Post-structuralism and Deconstruction

AUTHOR -->WORK -->LANGUAGE--> READER --> CONTEX

Deconstruction in a nutshell

- Seen as one of the most complex critical theories;


- Popular in the 1980’s;
- Like structuralism, it also focuses on language;
- However, it was also a reaction against structuralism;
- For structuralists language was a stable system; for deconstructionists and post-structuralists
language is unstable, contradictory, filled with paradoxes;
- Since language is characterized by instability, extracting a singular, clear, univocal meaning
from a text is an impossibility;
- There is a multiplicity of meanings often competing together making any reading “undecidable”
(see below);
- The bond between signified and signifier is looser than Saussure described it (chain of
signifiers);
- Double reading: 1st part) finding a stable meaning; 2nd part) showing how the text deconstructs
itself;

Big Players
Jacques Derrida (“Of Grammatology”, “Dissemination”, “The Beast and the Sovereign”), Michel Foucault
(“History of Madness”, “History of Sexuality”), Roland Barthes (“The Pleasure of the Text”,
“Mythologies”), Paul de Man, J. Hillis Miller, Jonathan Culler

Big Concepts

 Western binary logic: human/animal, man/woman, reason/instinct, presence/absence,


speech/writing, conscious/unconscious, subjective/objective,where one term in privileged over
the other;
 Exploding/deconstructing the binary: showing how one term contains the other or how the
relationship between the two terms is not of one opposition but of symbiosis;
 Phallologocentrism: phallus (patriarchy), logos (language), centrism (focusing on). Society is
dominated by a male oriented focus on language;
 Free play of signifiers/ chain of signifiers: a signifier does not immediately point to a signified,
but to other signifiers (think of a dictionary definition, for instance)
 Différance: combination between “to differ” and “to defer”. Meaning is perpetually deferred
through the slippage of the signifier;
 Dissemination: meaning is not linear, logic, it scatters. From “seme” (sign) and “semen” (seed);
 Aporia: fundamentalcontradiction in the text;
 Undecidability(of interpretation)
 Readerly&Writerly Texts (R.Barthes)
 Pleasure &Jouissance(R.Barthes)

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