This document provides an overview of key concepts from Jacques Derrida's work in deconstruction. It lists ideas like différance, which refers to how meaning is deferred and differentiated in language. Other concepts mentioned are pharmakon, which means both remedy and poison, and supplement, referring to both addition and replacement. The document also discusses Derrida's ideas about how meaning is ambiguous and unstable in language and texts, and how deconstruction involves close reading and exploring these ambiguities.

1. Jacques Derrida
(Deconstruction)

2. • Deconstruction
• Aporia
• Binary Oppositions
• Difference
• presence /absence
• Gift
"violent hierarchies"
• Phramakon
• Trace
• Supplement
• metaphysics or logocentrism

3. • Dissemination
• Play
• arche-writing
• Archival silence
• Yale_School
• Iterability
• Metaphysics of presence
• Phallogocentrism

4. Deconstruction
• Close Reading – nothing is outside the text
• Meaning is ambiguous
• Meaning is not stable/ fixed
• Language is incapable of conveying thoughts clearly
• Centre is not the center
• The centre is at the centre of the totality, and yet, since the centre
does not belong to the totality (is not the part of the totality) the
totality has its centre elsewhere. The centre has its centre elsewhere.
The centre is not the centre

5. Aporia
• Dead knot
• Impasse
• Undecidability

6. Archive Fever
• Spectrality
• Archival of silence

7. Différance
• Différance is a famous neologism coined by Derrida to establish the
limits of phonocentrism.
• Différance combines and develops a sense of differing and deferral
• implied by the French word ‘différence’.

8. pharmakon
• In “Plato’s Pharmacy” (1969) Derrida focusses on the Phaedrus, a
fictionalized conversation between two historical characters: Socrates
and Phaedrus, a young Athenian swayed by the rhetoricians.
• Pharmakon is a Greek word which could be translated as “magic
potion”. Other English translations have used “recipe”, “receipt”,
“specific”, “cure” and “remedy”. But as Derrida notes, pharmakon is a
specially ambiguous word.
• In Greek, pharmakon means both cure and poison.

9. The Supplement
• The French word supplément means both addition and replacement.

10. Examples
• I saw a man on a hill with a telescope.
• A mother beats up her daughter because she was drunk
• Silly, nice
• “LAMB” AND “TYGER” • Little Lamb who made thee • Dost thou
know who made thee • Gave thee life & bid thee feed. • By the
stream & o'er the mead; • Gave thee clothing of delight, • Softest
clothing wooly bright; • And what shoulder, & what art, • Could
twist the sinews of thy heart? • Did he smile his work to see? • Did he
who made the Lamb make thee?

11. Yale Critics
• Deconstruction and Criticism (1979)
• “boa-deconstructors”
• deMan,Paul - “Resistance to Theory”, Allegories of Reading: Figural
Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust
• Hillis Miller – “Critic as Host”
• “barely deconstructionists"
• Harold Bloom
• Geoffrey Hartman

12. Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse
of the Human Sciences
• “The entire history of the concept of structure, beforethe rupture of
which we are speaking, must be thought of as a series of
substitutions of center for center”
• Bricolage
• The Savage Mind
• Lévi-Strauss
• Gerard Genette – crirticism - meta-language

14. • Descartes,René
• Mauss,Marcel
• ofJean-Jacques rpussou