Why Derrida?

Deconstruction in a nutshell: “the tension between memory, fidelity, the preservation of something that has been given to the reader, and, at the same time, heterogeneity, something absolutely new, and a break.” While Derrida’s early naming of deconstruction in of Grammatology was concerned with the problem of language and the undoing of texts, he went on in future years to demonstrate that deconstruction is not just about unsettling texts, but can be put to use to unsettle institutions in many different contexts. Structuralists view language as a social yet closed system of signs that is governed by rules and convention, and that is immune to drastic change through external historical forces or individual agency. The trace for Derrida is the always-already absent present understood to be essential to thought and experience.

Philosophy · Philosophy, Ethics, and Existentialism