How to deconstruct the world

Peter Salmon is an Australian writer living in the UK. His latest book is An Event Perhaps: A Biography of Jacques Derrida (2020) and his writing has appeared in the TLS, the New Humanist, the Sydney Review of Books and The Guardian among others.

The Metaphysics of Presence

Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) was a French philosopher whose brilliant analyses of the text of philosophy and literature overturned many of the fundamental assumptions of each.

In 1967, he introduced a new method to philosophy, deconstruction, which is the idea that if something is constructed, it can be de-constructed.
This applies to objects in the world, such as chairs, cars, and houses, but it also applies to concepts we use in our everyday lives.

Why it matters

One of the barriers to engaging with deconstruction is Derrida’s own fearsome prose style

The founding text of deconstruction, Of Grammatology (1967), is a wonderfully bonkers book ranging across all of language and language systems, all of history, and all literature
Draws attention to the fact that the words and concepts we use, including those in our own heads that we mistake for our thinking – or even our soul – are inherited from the culture around us
Some of the best ways to learn about deconstruction are to engage with works that have been influenced by or anticipate his work

Links & Books

The documentary Derrida (2002) is the most accessible introduction to deconstruction online

There are many bite-sized clips from the film, including one of him being funny in his library about the number of books he’s read
For a more serious look at deconstruction, watch the film Ghost Dance (1983)
Some of his later work is his least rebarbative, and introduces his thinking in ways that he eschewed earlier on

Think it through

Get comfortable – you’re planning to overthrow every preconceived idea

Fundamental to deconstruction is the idea that any text can be deconstructed
Need something to deconstruct
How the text is regarded, the prevailing wisdom
Think about why these texts are regarded this way, why this is the doxa
To think deconstructively is to not only call into question accepted truths, but to ask in whose interests it is that they be accepted