James E. Faulconer

                           (Revised 15 June 1998)
 

Some words are their own worst enemies. Deconstruction is one of them. Like
existentialism, special, liberal, conservative, and postmodern, its meaning is often so
vague as to be useless. Coined, more or less, by the contemporary French philosopher,
Jacques Derrida, the word deconstruction began its life in the late sixties, but it has only
become part of the American vocabulary in the last ten years or so. In that time, however, it
has moved from a technical philosophical term adopted by literary critics for their related uses
to a word that pops up in offhand remarks by everyone from botanists to the clergy.
Whatever its original meaning, in its now widespread use, deconstruction has come to mean
"tear down" or "destroy" (usually when the object is nonmaterial).

These uses of the word have been anything but charitable. To the irritation of older professors
as well as Derrida (whom older professors often think of as "the enemy"), many in literature
have used the word, positively and negatively, to mean something like, "playing with texts to
show that they have no meaning." In the Anglo-American academy and to a lesser extent also
in Continental Europe, the result has been that those who talk about deconstruction positively
often do so in simplistic ways and those who criticize it take the simpletons as representative
of deconstruction. One side creates the straw men, the other side burns them down, but
neither actually gets to the point of discussing deconstruction. Neither has the everyday use of
the word as a synonym for destruction helped it avoid a bad reputation. Today, at best, to
deconstruct something is to tear it apart. At worst, it is to be disrespectful and nihilistic.

In the face of these assaults on the word deconstruction, I'm sure it is too late to save it from
the fate of meaninglessness or synonymy with destruction. On the other hand, it may not be
too late to say something about how the word began its life and what the philosophy called
deconstruction is about. That may not save the word, but that shouldn't surprise us. The devil
usually gets all the good words. That may not surprise us, but perhaps knowing something
about the word and how Derrida originally meant it to work may help us understand what it
means as a philosophical term and what the movement called deconstruction is about.

Derrida takes the word deconstruction from the work of Martin Heidegger. In the summer
of 1927, Martin Heidegger delivered a lecture course now published under the title, Basic
Problems of Phenomenology. Given the topic of his lectures, Heidegger appropriately
begins them with a discussion of the nature of philosophy and, particularly of the philosophical
movement called phenomenology. Borrowing creatively from his teacher, Edmund Husserl,
Heidegger says that phenomenology is the name for a method of doing philosophy; he says
that the method includes three steps -- reduction, construction, and destruction -- and he
explains that these three are mutually pertinent to one another. Construction necessarily
involves destruction, he says, and then he identifies destruction with deconstruction, Abbau
(20-23). Heidegger explains what he means by philosophical destruction by using an ordinary
German word that we can translate literally "unbuild."

The lexical and historical connection of deconstruction to destruction is obvious, but
Heidegger does not mean by Abbau quite what we mean by either destruction or
disassembly. He uses Abbau to show that in his method the word destruction does not
mean what we might often mean by it. He explains what he means by Abbau --
deconstruction -- to clarify further that he does not simply mean "taking things apart." As
Heidegger conceived deconstruction, it was an answer to a philosophical problem: "All
philosophical discussion, even the most radical attempt to begin all over again, is pervaded by
traditional concepts and thus by traditional horizons and traditional angles of approach" (Basic
Problems 22). Unfortunately, however, we cannot assume that these concepts, horizons, and
approaches are the best ones for dealing with the things they supposedly explain. There is a
world "out there." Our problem is that our only rational access to that world is linguistic,
which might make us mistakenly to believe that our understanding of the world is always
derivative from our language. If we add our suspicion to Heidegger's point that we have
inherited our concepts and words from others who themselves had to work with inherited
concepts and words and we quickly come to a question: How, then, can we think about the
world productively? How can we avoid reducing understanding to something relative only to a
particular language and history?

Like every other philosopher in the nineteenth- and twentieth-centuries, Heidegger does not
believe there is an autonomous tool called reason that we use irrespective of our language,
time, circumstances, or interests, to criticize ideas. Thus, since we seem unable to begin from
such a rational zero point, free of any already given concepts, terms, or approaches, it
appears that we are forced to repeat the past and its mistakes. If we must use concepts we've
inherited from others to do philosophy (or anything else), how can we ever get to anything
new? How can we get beyond whatever philosophical mistakes our intellectual forebears may
have made? Aren't we condemned to historicism and cultural relativism?

Ironically, given much of the current discussion of Heidegger's work and the work that derives
from his, Heidegger's answer is, "No." We can use these concepts, horizons, and approaches
against themselves to discover what produced them. We might, for example, think about
Aristotle's discussion of form and matter, using those very terms to show their inadequacy.
What, after all, is matter? Any answer I give is in terms of another form rather than in terms of
matter. Questions: "What is that desk made of; what is its material?" Answer: "Wood." But
the word wood gives us a form, not a matter. I can ask, "What is the wood made of?" and
give a reasonable answer, though one still in terms of form. As we use the terms matter and
form against themselves, what starts out looking like a perfectly sensible question becomes
problematic. By problematizing the distinction, we begin to get at least a glimpse of the
problem to which Aristotle was responding. Perhaps we begin to wonder -- to think -- in the
same way that he did. If we do, perhaps we begin to do philosophy with regards to Aristotle's
questions rather than simply to repeat the scholarly exegesis of Aristotle's philosophy.

Derrida would say of this example that we can deconstruct the idea of form and matter. But
what he means by deconstruction differs from what Heidegger means. For one thing, rather
than a method or part of a method, for Derrida deconstruction is an attitude, in the root sense
of that word. It is a position one has with regard to something.

To think about the difference between Heidegger's and Derrida's notions of deconstruction,
consider an example: I am writing a book on community. I will work over it repeatedly until I
am satisfied that I am done. But what does done mean? Doesn't it mean "say everything I
want to say"? And what do I want it to say? Everything. Everything, that is, about what it
means to be a community. Of course, there will be this or that minor point that I may ignore or
safely overlook, but as long as something significant remains to be said about my topic or as
long as the connections of important points have not been made clear, I am not done. When I
am done, therefore, I have produced something that claims to say everything of importance on
my topic; that I have written the book on my topic is implicit in its existence as a book, even if
I insert footnotes and apologies and disclaimers to the contrary.

However, when I have finished the book and have (I hope) a publisher, what is the first thing I
will do? I'll write an introduction. But introductions are odd things. If they can say what the
book says, then what need is there for the book? If they can't, then what need is there for the
introduction? Sometimes they are appetizers, things designed to get people to read the book
(or at least to buy it). Most of the time, however, an introduction is a short version of the
book, an overview. It sets the problem in context, it shows the readers how important the
problem or solution is, it gives the argument in a more easily understood form. Introductions
add to the book to improve it, to supplement its work.

Thus, though the book implicitly claims to say everything needed, as a supplement, the
introduction says "one more thing" or "the same thing briefly," deconstructing the book's claim
to completeness and self-sufficiency. In deconstructing the book, the introduction doesn't
show us the irrelevance of the book. It doesn't show us that the book is meaningless. It
doesn't show us that just any interpretation of the book will do. It shows us that the book
claims more than it can deliver, that it has left something out though it claims to be complete. I
take that to be the general meaning of the word deconstruction as Derrida has used it: not
just using our words and concepts against themselves, but showing what has been left out or
overlooked. In fact, better: showing that something has been left out or overlooked, that
omission is structural to any text -- and that we can find those omissions in the structure of the
text -- without necessarily being able to specify what has been omitted.

Notice, however, that once, by means of a deconstruction, we have seen something that was
omitted, we won't be able to go back, insert the missing piece, and then be finally done. The
omission is structural to writing and explaining because it is structural to existence and
experience. Omission is unavoidable. The reason why is not difficult to see. For one thing, no
one can say everything about anything; things are never that simple, not simple things,
especially not "first things."

This inability to say everything is not a failure of language, something to be overcome. Neither
is it a point of new-age silliness or old-age magic (though it may be an origin of the latter). It is
one of the properties of things. If I hold an object up before someone and ask her to tell me
what she sees, she can give a list of the thing's properties. If she works at it, she can make
that list very long. It may become ever more difficult to add things to the list, but there is really
no end to what she could truthfully say about the object. She can, for example, always relate
it to another thing in the universe or even to the list she is making. Though we seldom have any
reason to go on and on in such a way, there is, in principle, no end to the length of the
description one can give of an ordinary object. As a result, it is impossible to say everything
about an object, material or otherwise.

More important, the object itself shows that there is still more to be said. Every object shows
itself as a set of possibilities, not merely as a determinate thing. To see a particular object is to
see it in terms of possibilities. It is for example, to see the possibility of seeing the object from
another perspective without knowing what perspective that might be or what I might see from
that other perspective. To see one side of a chalk board eraser is to know (though usually
only implicitly) that there is another side. That there is more to see and, therefore, to say is not
just an inference I make when I see this side; the other side is not something I deduce from
seeing this side. The fact that there is more than what I see immediately is part and parcel of
seeing an object at all, for I don't see planes and surfaces and then deduce that they are
objects. I see objects from the beginning and, as objects, objects have aspects that don't
meet the eye, aspects like their other sides and things that I will only discover determinately on
investigation. There is always more in what I see than I can name. Kant might have called this
fact about the excessive character of perception one of the conditions for the possibility of
having an experience at all. To perceive an object is to know immediately that there is always
more to be said. All experience is experience of more, of possibility.

Most of the time these facts about describing things are quite irrelevant. For practical
purposes I need only say what needs to be said, not everything. (For an interesting discussion
of this, though not a deconstructive one, see Jerry Fodor's The Elm and the Expert.) I write
a book for a purpose and an audience. It is difficult, if not impossible to do otherwise. Even if
doing otherwise is possible, it isn't often a very good idea. Given that I would like to influence
the ways we think about community, there is nothing wrong with my writing for my purpose
and audience. I should do so.

After I write my book for a particular purpose and a particular audience, someone else can
give a straightforward interpretation of it with that purpose and audience in mind. If I have
done my job well, there will be general agreement about what I have said to that audience for
that purpose. However, once I have published the book, it is no longer simply mine. It may be
taken up by other audiences or used for other purposes. Or someone can ask about the
effects of my having written for my purpose and audience: did doing so leave someone out?
someone who, perhaps, should not have been left out? In addressing my purposes and
audience, does the book fail to address a topic that I could have or should have addressed?
Does the text do something that I, perhaps, never intended it to do? Are there political or
ethical implications of what I have written that I could not see but that should, nevertheless, be
considered? Is something or someone excluded by the very structure of the enterprise,
whether the enterprise is that of writing my book or of philosophy?

One way to address these kinds of questions would be to write a book or article about my
book, to criticize it for not doing what it should. Christian, Marxist, feminist, and moral
criticism often take this form. Another way would be to write another book on community
that explicitly or implicitly corrects the mistakes my book makes. My book will be, in fact,
such a book. I write it with certain previous books and ideas in mind, books and ideas that I
think have made mistakes. But these are not the only ways of responding to my book.
Another is deconstruction (and deconstruction can serve the ends of any of the other kinds of
criticism, Christian, Marxist, feminist, moral, etc.).

Deconstruction differs from other ways of addressing questions about a work in that, rather
than comparing the work to an external standard for what should be done (such as moral
standards, scientific standards, or political ideology), it looks for ways in which the book itself
shows what it has overlooked. Deconstruction is a form of what is called imminent critique.
Derrida, for example, writes about a footnote in Heidegger's Being and Time to show that --
as a careful reading of the footnote will purportedly show -- the book's claims are
problematic. In fact, Derrida argues that Heidegger's work undercuts itself.

Derrida's deconstruction, however, is different from ideological or moral criticism. Derrida
does not deconstruct Heidegger's work to show that Heidegger should have written the book
better. Unlike a good book reviewer, Derrida is not repairing Heidegger's work for him,
presuming that with these corrections we will have, at least in principle, a better work.
Deconstructive criticism is not intended to suggest a way to make the book finally complete,
but to show its necessary incompleteness.