Post-structuralism, Deconstruction, and Post-modernism

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Post-structuralism, Deconstruction, and
Post-modernism

• A presentation by
• Bryan Foster Miranda Mueller

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Groundworks for Deconstruction

• The philosophies that guided Derridas works

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Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)

• Major works On truth and lying (1873), Human,
  all too Human (1878), Thus Spoke Zarathustra
  (1883), Beyond Good and Evil (1886)

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On Truth and Lying, Nietzsche

• Absolute knowledge is impossible, even of simple
  things. Our ignorance of real truth is
  dissimulated from us by our own minds and the
  structures of language and ideology we take for
  granted. Language is arbitrary, comprised of
  metaphors layered atop other metaphors.

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Martin Heidegger (1889 - 1976)

• Some influences Thomas Aquinas, Immanuel Kant,
  Heinrich Rickert, Edmund Husserl
• Major Works Being and Time (1927), Höderlin's
  Hymn "The Ister" (1942), The Principle of Reason
  (1955), Identity and Difference (1956)

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Identity and Difference, Heidegger
Being
Existence
Difference
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Identity and Difference, Heidegger
Difference
Existence
Being
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Differance

• Jacques Derridas contribution to deconstruction

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Jacques Derrida (1930-2004)

• Major influcences Friedrich Nietzsche,
  Jean-Jaques Rousseau, Louis Althusser, Ferdinand
  de Saussure, Martin Heidegger
• Major works Writing and Difference (1967) Of
  Grammatology (1967) Dissemination, (1972) Limited
  Inc (1988)

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Differance, The importance of a semiotic
analysis Why the a?

• Proof that language is comprised of arbitrary
  signs that live in a play of differences
• Not capitalized because it is not some ineffable
  being that cannot be approached by name
• Rationalization between spatiality and
  temporality
• Defer
• Differ
• Indecision between activity and passivity that
  shows the uselessness of binary oppositions

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Differance a (hopefully) useful chart
Blood
Heart
Square
Artery
Love
Red
Shape
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Differance is NOT

• A name, but a nominal unity (297)
• a word nor a concept (283)
• A being-present (298)
• For if it were, it would be conceived with
  nostalgia
• Therefore it is the difference between Being and
  being, present and presence
• It is the deployment of Being

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Differance is

• The movement of play that produces differences
  allowing language and signs to exist
• Differences in phonemes make up a language, but
  these differences are a result of something else.
  Differences therefore language did not fall
  out of the sky
• Relation of speech to language
• As opposed to Saussures idea that speech is put
  in opposition to language

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Differance is

• Freudian!
• The origin of psyche and memory
• The differences involved in the production of
  unconscious traces and the process of inscription
• Specifically moments of differance
• The outlet in which the restricted/inaccessable
  system (the unconscious)

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Differance is

• The foundation for arche-writing
• Arche-writing a concept of writing that insists
  that the gap or breach introduced between what is
  intended to be conveyed and what is actualy
  conveyed, is standard, coming from an initial
  breach that afflicts everything one intends to
  express, even self-presence within the work

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Understanding Deconstruction

• Some useful explanations of
• really really big words

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Understanding Deconstruction Phenomenology

• Philosophy established by Edmund Husserl
• Concerned with how the mind might come to know
  and understand true ideas.
• A phenomena, here, would be the mental
  representation of an object

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Understanding Deconstruction Epoch

• A process wherein the physical and temporal is
  stripped away from the metaphysical, where an
  object and its representations are reduced to a
  pure idea.
• According to Derrida, the period of time between
  Plato and Husserl in which metaphysics reigned.

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Understanding Deconstruction Logos

• From the Greek word for mind, reason, and
  language
• The notion of a pure and ideal truth grasped
  intuitively and without the need for or
  intermediary of signifiers.
• Identified with phonocentrism by Derrida

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Understanding Deconstruction Onto-theology

• The belief that existence has substance and/or
  presence, rather than being generated by a series
  of semi-determinate things, each of them
  generated in much the same manner.
• (Differentially)
• Literally means religion of being

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Understanding Deconstruction Aufhebung

• Translation sublimation
• Refers to the hypothetical transformation of
  ideas into signifiers (eg thought into
  language), and their return to the state of
  idea through comprehension by another
• eg somebody hears you and gets what youre saying

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Understanding Deconstruction Erinnerung

• Translation memory
• The idea that signs retain the spirit of the
  idea that has been invested in them.
• Signs (words and symbols) are held to merely be
  temporary receptacles of an idea.

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Understanding Deconstruction Trace

• Also known as otherness or alterity
• Everything that appears to have its own identity
  is in fact constructed by its relationship with
  or difference from other things.
• These things are held to carry a trace of each
  other.

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Semiology and Grammatology, Derrida and Kristeva

• Deconstructing metaphysics
• Stop searching for the transcendental truth!
• Tear down the idea of binary oppositions
• Try differentiating language and speech, code and
  message, etc. as Saussure did.
• According to Derrida, it is impossible to know
  where to start in defining these binary terms.
• Therefore, differance works because it functions
  on the relation of differences instead of
  differences themselves

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Post-structuralism, Deconstruction, and Authorship
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Barbara Johnson (1947-2009)

• Major Works A world of difference (1987), The
  Critical Difference (1980), The Feminist
  Difference (1998), The Wake of Deconstruction
  (1994)
• Schools of Thought/ Major ideas structuralism,
  post-structuralism, Lacanian psychoanalysis,
  feminist critical theory

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Writing, Johnson

• Summarizes the basic points of other writers
  Barthes, Saussure, Lacan, Derrida and explains
  the impact of each, followed by he
  destabilization of the eariler writers by the
  later ones.
• She argues, using this premise, for the inclusion
  of historical, psychoanalytical, political, and
  philosphical concepts in analysis and their
  prevalence in 20th century French thought.
• Reading is held to to be the simple task of
  grasping the meanng of a text, but of grasping
  its multiple possible interpretations, even when
  they are contradictory. (polysemy)

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Roland Barthes(1915-1980)

• Major works Mythologies (1957), Empire of Signs
  (1970), The Death of the Author (1968)

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Death of the Author, Barthes

• Give credit to the reader
• Including the author historicizes, and therefore
  limits the text
• The author cannot express himself because what he
  thinks must be translated by a dictionary (of
  signs) that is not a direct representation of his
  thoughts.
• A text is not a line of words releasing a single
  theological meaning rather, it is a
  multi-dimensional space in which a variety of
  writings, none of them original, blend and clash
• Differance

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Michel Foucauld (1926-1984)

• Influences Friedrich Nietzsche, Louis Althusser,
  Georges Dumézil, Karl Marx
• Major Works Discipline and punish The birth of
  the prison (1975), The Archaeology of Knowledge
  (1969), The Order of things (1966), Death and the
  Labyrinth (1963)

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What is an author?, Foucauld

• The Author as a celebrated and central figure to
  their body of work is a modern conceit
• The I in literature does not refer in any
  direct way to the author currently, but was
  rather a temporary intermediary between the work
  and its creator
• Suggests a world in which the author was no
  longer the regulator of the fictive,
  constraining the work by his presence, a
  hypothetical place of anonymous production and
  therefore potentially unlimited interpretation