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Derrida states that his use of the word deconstruction first took place in a context in which "structuralism was dominant" and deconstruction's meaning is within this context. Derrida states that deconstruction is an "antistructuralist gesture" because "[s]tructures were to be undone, decomposed, desedimented".
One of the many difficulties of expressing Jacques Derrida's project (deconstruction) in simple terms is the enormous scale of it.Just to understand the context of Derrida's theory, one needs to be acquainted intimately with philosophers such as Socrates–Plato–Aristotle, René Descartes, Immanuel Kant, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Charles Sanders Peirce, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Karl Marx ...
Jacques Derrida (/ ˈ d ɛr ɪ d ə /; French: [ʒak dɛʁida]; born Jackie Élie Derrida; [6] 15 July 1930 – 9 October 2004) was a French Algerian philosopher. He developed the philosophy of deconstruction, which he utilized in a number of his texts, and which was developed through close readings of the linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure and Husserlian and Heideggerian phenomenology.
Derrida believed that phonocentric cultures associate speech with a time before meaning was corrupted by writing. He saw phonocentrism as part of the influence of Romanticism, specifically its belief in a time in which people lived in harmony and unity with nature. Derrida did not believe that there was any ideal state of unity with nature.
Derrida approaches texts as constructed around oppositions which all speech has to articulate if it intends to make any sense whatsoever. This is so because identity is viewed in non-essentialist terms as a construct, and because constructs only produce meaning through the interplay of differences inside a "system of distinct signs".
The term is a blend word of the older terms phallocentrism (focusing on the masculine point of view) and logocentrism (focusing on language in assigning meaning to the world). Derrida and others identified phonocentrism, or the prioritizing of speech over writing, as an integral part of phallogocentrism. Derrida explored this idea in his essay ...
Derrida identifies this bias, logocentrism, as central to Western metaphysical thought, which privileges "presence" and direct expression in speech. This bias has stifled deeper inquiry into writing's origin and role, reducing it to a mere technical tool rather than acknowledging it as fundamental to meaning-making.
In Derrida's words, "structural discourse on myths—mythological discourse—must itself be mythomorphic". [22] Lévi-Strauss explicitly describes a limit to totalization (and at the same time the endlessness of 'supplementarity'). Thus Lévi-Strauss, for Derrida, recognizes the structurality of mythical structure and gestures towards its ...