Writing in This statement by Poulet proved to be prophetic, for, in retrospect it seemed evident that a single paper took the “structuralist” turn and diverted it to “post-structuralism,” which in the case of Jacques Derrida would become a branch of philosophy called “Deconstruction.
Derrida is also a reader who reads and contemplates words and enjoys playing with words and creates word play. All rights reserved. influential figure in literary criticism in the sense that there's scarcely any theory unaffected by Derridean deconstruction In order to understand the break announced by Derrida it is important to understand just what it was about Structuralism that left it so vulnerable to attack.
The next post will discuss If you have found this material useful, please give credit to © Art History Unstuffed. In 1966, at John Hopkins University, USA, Jacques Derrida stood up to read his paper, entitled: “In this paper, Derrida argues when one attempts to analyze a structure, a universal ‘center’ is assumed which guides that structure, but that center is not analyzed and in order to analyze that center, another center would need to be assumed; hence, as it is believed in Logocentricism doesn’t only assume a center but also, as Derrida argues, prefers speech over writing and this act is called ‘phonocentrism.’ Derrida is also critical of phonocentrism and to prove its shortcomings he draws our attention to a concept that expose the ambiguity of ‘sign.’In other words, the two different meaning of the words can only be understood in writing; otherwise ‘Again, this hierarchy is also not permanent or absolute for, as Derrida believes, it can also be undone by ‘deconstruction.’The speech-writing binary can also be extended to that of philosophy and literature.
This scientific objectivity is achieved by subordinating “parole” to “langue;” actual usage is abandoned in favor of studying the structure of a … It is predictable that it would be he, in an act of audacity, who would put Structuralism under an analytic spotlight and would challenge its leading thinker, Claude Lévi-Strauss. He questioned assumptions of the Western philosophical tradition and also more broadly Western culture.
Accordingly, post-structuralism discards the idea of interpreting media (or the world) within pre-establis… Jacques Derrida was a notoriously difficult philosopher to comprehend, especially for Americans, who are baffled by his writing style and his purpose. Derrida referred to himself as a historian. Many prominent Post-Structuralists (generally labeled as such by others rather than by themselves), such as Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes (1915 - 1980), were initially Structuralists but later came to explicitly reject most of Structuralism 's claims, particularly its notion of the fixity of the relationship between the signifier and the signified, but also the overall grandness of the theory, which seemed to promise everything … English sentences are relatively brief, constructed in terms of beginning middle and end.
In America all of these French tendencies were lumped together into a rather reductive version called “theory.” In his book Today’s students are fortunate to have access to most of the philosophical works of this and the pre-war period, translated from French, German, Russian, Czech, and so on but it is important to have a sense of chronology and context. At this point, one learns how can these binary can be deconstructed but Derrida wants us not to end up creating another binary such as, let’s say: turning speech-writing to writing –speech or philosophy-literature to literature-philosophy. Jacques Derrida. | Site designed by His biographer Benoît Peeters described his intellectual life as an outsider who was at the heart of French thought, a man in the middle who always stood somewhat apart from a society that had named him alien. Structuralism posits the concept of binary opposition, in which frequently used pairs of opposite but related words (concepts) are often arranged in a hierarchy, for example: Enlightenment/Romantic, male/female, speech/writing, rational/emotional, signif… By questioning the dominant discourses, and trying to modify them, he attempted to democratize the university scene and to politicize it. Americans, being pragmatic, prefer ideas that can be applied to the real world and Derrida’s works seems to belong to the realm of the esoteric and untethered from actuality. Certainly, for English speakers, Continental philosophy is challenging.