DECONSTRUCTION

method of literary criticism which assumes that language refers only to itself rather than to an extratextual reality and which asserts multiple conflicting interpretations of a text and bases such interpretations on the philosophical, political, or social implications of the use of the language in the text rather than on the author's intention. Deconstruction was initiated by Jacques Derrida in France, who, in a series of books published beginning in the late 1960s, launched a major critique of traditional Western metaphysics. He introduced the words dconstruire (to deconstruct) and dconstruction (deconstruction) in De la grammatologie (1967). Like Sigmund Freud's psychological theories and Karl Marx's political theories, Derrida's deconstructive strategies, which take off from Ferdinand de Saussure's insistence on the arbitrariness of the verbal sign, have subsequently established themselves as an important part of postmodernism, especially in poststructural literary theory and text analysis. Though the deconstructive principles of Derrida and later critics are well established, they remain somewhat controversial. The deconstruction of philosophy involves the questioning of the many hierarchical oppositionssuch as cause and effect, presence and absence, speech (phonocentrism) and writingin order to expose the bias (the privileged terms) of those tacit assumptions on which Western metaphysics rests. Deconstruction takes apart the logic of language in which authors make their claims, a process that reveals how all texts undermine themselves because every text includes unconscious traces of other positions exactly opposite to that which it sets out to uphold. Deconstruction undermines logocentrism (literally, a focus on the word, the original and originating word in relation to which other concepts such as truth, identity, and certainty can be validated; but understood more generally as a belief in reason and rationality, the belief that meaning inheres in the world independently of any human attempt to represent it in words). It follows from this view that the meaning of a text bears only accidental relationship to the author's conscious intentions. One of the effects of deconstructive criticism has been a loosening of language from concepts and referents. To many American scholars deconstruction seemed a logical step beyond New Criticism (with its strong emphasis on text), and it was readily accepted and enlarged upon at Yale University by such individuals as Paul de Man and J. Hillis Miller. Some of the other figures who, to a greater or lesser degree, have associated themselves with the deconstructionist position are Geoffrey Hartman, Catherine Belsey, Harold Bloom, Eugenio Donato, Shoshana Felman, Michel Foucault, Barbara Johnson, Edward Said, Jonathan Culler, and Gayatri Spivak. Additional reading