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)