2. • Deconstructionism is a 20th Century school in
philosophy initiated by Jacques Derrida in the
1960s. It is a theory of literary criticism that
questions traditional assumptions about
certainty, identity, and truth; asserts that
words can only refer to other words; and
attempts to demonstrate how statements
about any text subvert their own meanings.
3. • Although Derrida himself denied that it was a
method or school or doctrine of philosophy (or
indeed anything outside of reading the
text itself), the term has been used by others to
describe Derrida's particular methods of textual
criticism, which involved discovering, recognizing
and understanding the underlying
assumptions (unspoken and
implicit), ideas and frameworks that form the
basis for thought and belief.
4. • Deconstructionism is notoriously difficult to define or summarize,
and many attempts to explain it in a straight-forward,
understandable way have been academically criticized for being too
removed from the original texts, and even contradictory to the
concepts of Deconstructionism. Some critics have gone so far as to
claim that Deconstruction is a dangerous form of Nihilism, leading
to the destruction of Western scientific and ethical values, and it
has been seized upon by some conservative and libertarian writers
as a central example of what is wrong with
modern academia. Richard Rorty (1931 - 2007) has attempted to
define Deconstruction as the way in which the "accidental" (or
incidental) features of a text can be seen
as betraying or subverting its essential message.
