by Josй Borghino
Derrida's first works touted the efficacy of a way of reading philosophical texts which he called 'deconstruction'. This term denoted a form of close analysis of the hints, misunderstandings, implicit assumptions and 'unintended' double entendres in texts in a way that inevitably undermined those texts' claims to unequivocal truth or a single, stable meaning.
Deconstruction opens texts to other, repressed or contradictory truths and meanings. It doesn't say that truth or meaning are impossible, rather that texts (by their very nature as human artefacts) contain many and constantly changing truths and meanings which a subtle and aware reader will always be able to discern.
It's not so much that the Truth isn't 'out there', but that it is partly out there, partly 'in here' (in the human mind and its perceptual/imaginative apparatus), and partly in the journey between the two - that activity humans do best, namely, thinking.
Language
Deconstruction questions the possibility of ever getting cheek by jowl with Truth because every human endeavour (but especially the search for Truth) is shot through with the effects of the language we have to use to describe, perceive and process reality. It is language that allows humans to grasp and communicate reality, but (paradoxically) it is that very language that distances us from reality.
In a powerful sense, it is language (or its effects) that compels human beings to attempt to close in on reality at the same time as it makes a full intimacy with that reality impossible.
Derrida's crucial insight is that philosophy depends on language as much as any other human enterprise, despite its protests that philosophical language is neutral or transparent.
Writing
Derrida writes like a fabulist, accepting the poetic, literary possibilities of language. His work is dense, full of puns and allusions, encouraging the words he uses to connote as much as they denote. His readings of other philosophers and writers are supremely reflexive - constantly admitting that he is in the process of reading, opining, thinking. He will spin out seemingly trivial connections or secondary meanings, while ignoring the bleeding obvious.
To some readers this is maddening obfuscation; to others it is serious and significant playfulness. Whereas the ideal of the Anglo-American tradition of philosophical writing (before Derrida rejuvenated/destroyed it) is achieving a clear and spare rhetorical style, Derrida embraces the self-conscious, heightened style of poetry, drama and fiction where multiple meanings are valued and highlighted.
Derrida celebrates and exploits the connectedness of words, their metaphorical richness, and exposes the metaphors that persist in texts (especially) where their authors insist that they are metaphor-free.
Spacing
Language for Derrida is not just a receptacle for conveying meanings or significance, it is a spacing or framing of a surrounding silence. And that silence also infects language itself, lies within it like the blank space between the letters of a word, like the gaps between two utterances. It is this interest with framing that draws Derrida to think about visual art and the whole human enterprise of seeing as yet another text to be deconstructed.
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