Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida and Anglo-American New Criticism

 

Jacques Derrida (1930--2004) was a French philosopher who developed the philosophy of deconstruction and poststructuralism which he elaborated in a number of his texts and speeches and which was innovated through close readings of the linguistic notions of Ferdinand de Saussure, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Martin Heidegger’s phenomenology.

Deconstruction stands for a method of critical analysis of philosophical and literary language which emphasizes the internal workings of language and conceptual systems, the relational quality of meaning, and the assumptions implicit in forms of expression.

Austrian linguistic philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889—1951) used the words “Language Games” in one of his books about the tricks and twists writers, politicians and even general people resort to for driving their points home. Although deconstruction has roots in German Philosopher Martin Heidegger’s concept of Destruktion, to deconstruct is not to destroy.  Deconstruction is always a double movement of simultaneous affirmation and undoing.

To deconstruct is to take a text apart along the structural “fault lines” created by the ambiguities inherent in one or more of its key concepts or themes in order to reveal the equivocations or contradictions that make the text possible.  For example, in “Plato’s Pharmacy,” Jacques Derrida deconstructs Socrates’ criticism of the written word, arguing that it not only suffers from internal inconsistencies because of the analogy Socrates himself makes between memory and writing, but also stands in stark contrast to the fact that his ideas come to us only through the written word he disparaged.  The double movement here is one of tracing this tension in Plato’s text, and in the traditional reading of that text, while at the same time acknowledging the fundamental ways in which our understanding of the world is dependent on Socrates’ attitude towards the written word.

Since the distinction between what is inside the text and what is outside can itself be deconstructed according to the same principles, deconstruction is an historicizing movement that opens texts to the conditions of their production, their context in a very broad sense, including not only the historical circumstances and tradition from which they arose, but also the conventions and nuances of the language in which they were written and the details of their authors’ lives.

In Being and Time, Martin Heidegger (1889—1976) says that the purpose of Destruktion is to “arrive at those primordial experiences in which we achieved our first ways of determining the nature of Being—the ways which have guided us ever since.  This is the double gesture referred to above, one that takes apart the European traditions and in so doing finds the basic understanding of being beneath its surface. Deconstruction is always a never-ending process because the constantly shifting nature of language means that no final meaning or interpretation of a text is possible.  Subsequent ages, grounded in a different language and different ways of life, will always see something different in a text as they deconstruct it in the context of the realities with which they live.  What is meant by “the written word”, for example, has already evolved substantially since Derrida wrote “Plato’s Pharmacy” due to the explosion in electronic media.  All deconstruction can reveal are temporary and more or less adequate truths, not more primordial or deeper ones.  For Heidegger, on the other hand, the “primordial experiences” of being revealed through Destruktion result in a single interpretation that offers a more authentic alternative to philosophy’s misunderstanding of the temporality and historicality of human existence.

Deconstruction’s reception was coloured by its intellectual predecessors, most notably structuralism and New Criticism. Beginning in France in the 1950s, the structuralist movement in anthropology analyzed various cultural phenomena as general systems of “signs” and attempted to develop “metalanguages” of terms and concepts in which the different sign systems could be described. Structuralist methods were soon applied to other areas of the social sciences and humanities, including literary studies. Deconstruction offered a powerful critique of the possibility of creating detached, scientific metalanguages and was thus categorized as “poststructuralist.” Anglo-American New Criticism sought to understand verbal works of art as complex constructions made up of different and contrasting levels of literal and non-literal meanings, and it emphasized the role of paradox and irony in these artifacts. Deconstructive readings, in contrast, treated works of art not as the harmonious fusion of literal and figurative meanings but as instances of the intractable conflicts between meanings of different shapes and forms.

A metalanguage may be thought of as a jump beyond the conventional traits and purposes of a language. Such philosophers as the German-born Logical Positivist Rudolf Carnap and Alfred Tarski, Polish-born mathematician, explained that philosophical confabulations and philosophical statements can be resolved only when seen in terms of a syntactical framework. The logic of semantics is what determines the truth of a statement, rather than the statement’s non-formal, or actual meaning. Rudolf Carnap felt that by making use of symbolic notation in a metalanguage and by adhering to rules of logic it was possible to avoid metaphysical judgments, which, in his system, were by definition invalid.
 

Mahfuz Ul Hasib Chowdhury
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