Miller describes deconstruction as follows: „Deconstruction is not a dismantling of the structure of a text, but a demonstration that it has already dismantled itself. Its seemingly solid soil is not a rock, but thin air. » [46] 18. In that last statement, I used the word „not serious“ in a new sense. Originally, I used it to mean „not serious“ At the end of the deconstruction, however, it took on a new meaning, namely „regardless of whether the statement corresponds to the true intention“ By reversing the serious/non-serious opposition, I created a broader concept of non-serious discourse on which both seriousness and non-seriousness depend (in the earlier sense of the term). This is a common practice in a deconstructive reversal and involves the creation of a paleonym, a new concept with an old name reminiscent of the previously subordinate concept See the infra text accompanying notes 42-44 The American philosopher Walter A. Davis argues in Inwardness and Existence: Subjectivity in/and Hegel, Heidegger, Marx and Freud that deconstruction and structuralism are prematurely stopped moments of a dialectical movement, which emanates from Hegel`s „unhappy conscience“. [63] [Page needed] Although Derrida is a philosopher, his work has mainly been applied to the problems of literary criticism; As a result, much of the literature is written to deconstruct literary critics and scholars. (5) However, adapting the work of Derrida and other literary critics to the problems of legal and political thought is not as difficult as it seems at first glance.
Derrida is particularly interested in the connection (and the discrepancy) between what we want to say and the signs we use to express our meaning. In short, he is interested in the interpretation of texts, and this is not strange terrain for lawyers who spend most of their time understanding what other lawyers have said in legal texts. On the other hand, explaining the deconstructive practice is not an easy task. Like many French intellectuals of his time, Derrida was trained in the continental tradition of philosophy, whose main influences are Hegel, Husserl and Heidegger. None of these philosophers is known for his clarity of presentation, and Derrida often does little better than his intellectual predecessors. (6) For this reason, I will try to translate his ideas into a form that is easier to understand by those familiar with anglo-American schools of philosophy. For Derrida, it is this logocentrism and the idea of the externality of meaning that open up the possibility of deconstruction. He studies how the natural „origin“ of meaning and its „institution“ in writing cannot be so easily separated from each other. Instead of nature (justice) and institution (law) exist independently, Derrida suggests that nature itself is constructed only in relation to the institution. Thus, instead of law being a direct embodiment of justice, the understanding of justice and law is determined by the interaction between the two. It is a rejection of rigid separation that allows for the search for certainty – the idea that justice exists as a primary objective norm that must be discovered. By reading the law in such a way that it reflects or embodies the natural origin of justice, all other possible interpretations of justice that are not incorporated or encapsulated in the law are ignored or hidden.
In this way, writing defines nature and reflects it. In the process of deconstruction, one of Derrida`s main concerns is not to fall into Hegel`s dialectic, where these opposites would be reduced to contradictions in a dialectic that aims to dissolve them into a synthesis. [18] : 43 The presence of the Hegelian dialectic in the intellectual life of the France in the second half of the 20th century was enormous, with the influence of Kojève and Hyppolite, but also under the influence of a dialectic based on contradictions developed by Marxists and including Sartre`s existentialism, etc. This explains Derrida`s concern to always distinguish his method from that of Hegel,[18]:43 since Hegelianism believes that binary oppositions would produce a synthesis, while Derrida saw binary oppositions as incapable of collapsing into a synthesis free of the original contradiction. Thus, the idea of deconstruction consists in counteracting the idea of a transcendental origin or a natural speaker. It refutes the idea that it is possible to transcend the institution to discover something beyond that – the existence of an independent origin. This idea is summarized in the sentence „There is nothing outside the text4“,De Grammatologie 158, which is often used to summarize Derrida`s work. For Derrida, origin does not exist independently of its institution, but exists only „by its functioning within a classification and therefore within a system of differences. 5Of Grammatology 109 In his own words, Derrida calls this phenomenon „differentiation“,6Geoffrey Bennington and Jacques Derrida, Jacques Derrida (University of Chicago Press, 1993) 71 and it is this idea, which forms the basis of deconstruction. Différance refers to the fact that meaning cannot be considered fixed or static, but is constantly evolving.
It stems from the constant process of negotiating competing concepts. Rather than pursuing the truth of a natural origin, deconstruction requires questioning those competing interpretations that together create meaning. The act of institution – or writing – itself captures this constant competition between the different possible interpretations of meaning within the institution. The effect of translating thought into language is therefore to inscribe differences in the structure of meaning. It simultaneously embodies the meaning desired as intended by the author and the limits imposed on this meaning by the act of interpreting the text. In this respect, meaning is also defined by what is contained in the institution and what is not. At any moment, one concept will dominate one over the other and thus exclude the other. However, while the idea of exclusion suggests that the excluded does not exist, what is introduced depends for its existence on what has been excluded. Both exist in a hierarchical relationship in which one will always dominate over the other. The dominant concept is one that manages to legitimize itself as a reflection of the natural order, thus crowding out competing interpretations that remain trapped as an excluded trace in the dominant sense. Chip Morningstar criticizes the deconstruction and believes that it is „epistemologically questioned“.
He argues that the humanities are prone to isolation and genetic drift because of their irresponsibility to the world outside of academia. At the Second International Conference on Cyberspace (Santa Cruz, California, 1991), he reportedly pushed deconstructivists off the scene. [65] He then presented his point of view in the article „How to Deconstruct Almost Anything,“ in which he noted, „Unlike the report in the `Hype List` column of Wired`s #1 („Po-Mo Gets Tek-No,“ page 87), we did not shout at postmodernists. We made fun of them. [66] Derrida asserts that „deconstruction is not a method and cannot be transformed into one.“ [27] : 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 some circles (academic or cultural, especially in the United States) the technical and methodological `metaphor` that seems necessarily associated with the word `deconstruction` has been able to seduce or deceive.“ [27]: 3 Commentator Richard Beardsworth explains: Derrida describes the task of deconstruction as the identification of the metaphysics of presence or logocentrism in Western philosophy. The metaphysics of presence is the desire for immediate access to meaning, the privilege of presence over absence. This means that there is a supposed bias in some binary oppositions where one side is placed in one position on the other, such as the good over the bad, the language over the written, the man over the female. Derrida writes: Two points arise from this deconstruction. First of all, if we tried to give a special status to concepts like „difference“ and „trace“, whether as the foundations of deconstruction or as unspeakable concepts that escape analysis, we would fall into the very trap that Derrida is trying to avoid. Rorty, note 1 above, pp. 151-53.
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