English 67

[my notes for week three are appended]

Derrida wrote Dissemination (where Plato’s Pharmacy first appeared) in 1972, before anyone used the term “deconstruction.” As Lynn points out, this term has become a word without a referent. That doesn’t make it meaningless, but it ironically points to the lack of a stable “there” which words can be relied upon to refer back to. The OED lists the first occurrence of this word in a quotation from 1882: the beginnings of any project of reform must be a “work of deconstruction.”
The next citations listed all come from English translations of Derrida, Speech and Phenomena (1973). These days you can hear this word bandied about on television, in record reviews: often it just means “analysis” – the breaking of something into its constituent parts to see how it was put together, and how it works. That I think is part of the nature of deconstruction in the Derridean, post-structuralist sense, but it’s perhaps closer to the mark to say that deconstruction is about more than analysis or close reading. Deconstruction overturns previously unquestioned assumptions, and asks unasked questions, and refuses the easy binary oppositions of traditional philosophy: speech and writing in the case of “Plato’s Pharmacy.”
Lynn also gave a quick sketch of the philosophy of language of Ferdinand de Saussure, who is credited with structuralist linguistics, which posited that words have relationships to objects and concepts but that relationship is arbitrary and conventional (which does not mean random, however). In other words: language works by convention, and social agreement (or fails to work by disagreement), but there is no transcendent Logos that underwrites all linguistic meaning.
Deconstructive work at its worst can feel like mere semantic games, or like linguistic involution. This is an occupational hazard of working with language, but one that is worth hazarding for the occasional breath-taking insights that post-structuralist thinking affords us.

notes w3