Modern Poetry and the Idea of Language Book

A. Introduction
1. What is deconstruction? It is neither a harmless academic game nor a terrorist weapon. Beneath all traditional literary criticism there has been an agreement about certain conventions or rules of debate without which it would be impossible to discuss literature. The central convention was that literature possessed meaning and that literary criticism sought to understand that meaning. Deconstruction challenges the distinction between literature and criticism. Criticism becomes an act of writing or ecriture.
B. Roots: structuralism and New Criticism
1. Deconstruction is post-structuralist in its refusal to accept the idea that there is a stable structure with an objective meaning in every text.
2. Kant: He set out to redeem philosophy from the radical skepticism of Hume who argued that it was impossible to arrive at definite knowledge about the outside world. He argued that knowledge was the product of the human mind, and that the mind could only interpret the world and not know its reality. Thus, Kant was not interested in the real, but the human understanding of the real.
3. Saussure: He and the structuralists borrowed from Kant since he too sought to divorce mind from reality. Saussure argued that our knowledge of the world is shaped by the language we use to interpret it. This relativity of meaning is the starting point for all structuralist thought.
4. New Critics: This is what the New Critics intended to do with poetry. Criticism was separate from poetry. Criticism could not come to understand the objective meaning of the poem with scientific language. Instead, it is only through paradox, irony, etc, that a poem could be understood.
C. Derrida: language against itself
1. Derrida refuses to rate philosophy the privileged status as the dispenser of reason. He argues that philosophers impose their thoughts by ignoring the disruptive effects of language (such as metaphor, irony, paradox). Thus, philosophers believe that they can convey their thoughts without the language distorting the meaning. Derrida argues that this is wrong and argues that a kind of literary criticism is necessary for any type of discourse. Literature is no longer at a depriviliged position to philosophy.
2. Differance: (for Derrida this term means to differ and to defer--as in defer a meaning). If there is one theme that runs through all structuralist thought it is the principle first articulated by Saussure that language is a differential network of meaning. Structuralism took Saussure's synchronic idea. Not only language, but all cultural activity, could be studied from a synchronic viewpoint (the related level s of signifying activity at a given time).
3. Derrida's attack on Rousseau (who argues writing is a supplement of speech). Rousseau believed that speech was the most natural form of language. Derrida argues that writing is more natural. Derrida shows that Rousseau contradicts himself at various points in his text and thus confirms the priority of writing.
4. Derrida's attack on Levi-Strauss. Levi-Strauss was the first to use structural linguistics to understand other languages or signifying systems. He believed that there are certain regularities (recurrent myths) that occur in all cultures. Derrida reads Levi-Strauss as an heir to Saussure. Levi-Strauss links writing with civilization and argues that this 'fall' occurs when the primitive speech is overcome. For Levi-Strauss writing is a means of colonization or oppression and a resulting violence.
5. Thus, Derrida is intent upon freeing structuralism from Saussure's phonocentric approach.
D. Nietzsche: philosophy and deconstruction
1. While some of Nietzsche's thought has been associated with the rise of the Nazi's (such as the concept of the superman), his critique of Western philosophy was influential for deconstruction. Nietzsche was important because of his style of philosophic writing which was skeptical of all forms of truth, including his own. Philosophy, he argued, chose dominate metaphors to place its faith in truth. Different philosophies simple privileged different metaphors.
2. Deconstruction then exposes different systems of thought to its privileged terms, inverts them, and shows them to be false.