i know how much you guys love wikipedia but i don't feel like copying my philosophy dictionary by hand. content yourselves with this:
Deconstruction is a term in contemporary
philosophy,
literary criticism, and the
social sciences, denoting a process by which the texts and languages of
Western philosophy (in particular) appear to shift and complicate in meaning when read in light of the assumptions and absences they reveal within themselves.
Jacques Derrida coined the term in the
1960s, and proved more forthcoming with negative, rather than a pined-for positive, analyses of the school.
Subjects relevant to deconstruction include the philosophy of
meaning in Western thought, and the
ways that
meaning is constructed by Western writers, texts, and readers and understood by readers. Though Derrida himself denied deconstruction was a method or school of philosophy, or indeed anything outside of reading the text itself, the term has been used by others to describe Derrida's particular methods of textual criticism, which involved discovering, recognizing, and understanding the underlying—and unspoken and implicit—assumptions, ideas, and frameworks that form the basis for thought and belief, for example, in complicating the ordinary division made between nature and culture. Derrida's deconstruction was drawn mainly from the work of
Heidegger and his notion of
destruktion but also from
Levinas and his ideas upon the
Other.
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now, which one of you has been "deconstructing" lately? please, show us.
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now instead of compounding the original misdirection of this post you could simply use the word "analyze". that's right. or "analyse" if you are british. unless everyone here is a deconstructionist. oh im getting cranky, ha ha ha. that's what i get for taking the internet seriously. but... please????