Deconstruction loses nothing from admitting that it is impossible; also that those who would rush to delight in that admission lose nothing from having to wait. For a deconstructive operation, possibility would rather be a danger, the danger of becoming an available set of rule-governed procedures, methods, accessible practices. The interest of deconstruction, of such force and desire as it may have, is a certain experience of the impossible....
Deconstruction is inventive or it is nothing at all; it does not settle for methodological procedures, it opens up a passageway, it marches ahead and marks a trail; its writing is not only performative, it produces rules -- other conventions -- for new performativities and never installs itself in the theoretical assurance of a simple opposition between performative and constative. Its process involves an affirmation, this latter being linked to the coming [venir] in event, advent, invention.
A remark, from a commentator:
We now know -- or have no excuse for not knowing -- that deconstruction is not a technique or a method, and hence that there is no question of "applying" it. We know that it is not a moment of carnival or liberation, but a moment of the deepest concern with limits. We know that it is not a hymn to indeterminacy, or a life-imprisonment within language, or a denial of history: reference, mimesis, context, historicity, are among the most repeatedly emphasized and carefully scrutinized topics in Derrida's writing. And we know -- though this myth perhaps dies hardest of all -- that the ethical and the political are not avoided by deconstruction, but are implicated at every step.
Attridge, Derek, "Singularities, Responsibilities: Derrida, Deconstruction and Literary Criticism" in Critical Encoiunters: Reference and Responsibility in Deconstructive Writing ed. Cathy Caruth and Deborah Esch, pp 109-110.
Deconstruction is a poststructuralist theory
based largely, but not exclusively, on the writings of the Paris-based
Jacques Derrida. It is in the first instance a philosophical theory and
a theory directed towards the (re)reading of philosophical writings.
Its impact on literature, mediated in North America largely through
the influences of theorists at Yale University, is based in part on the
fact that deconstruction sees all writing as a complex historical, cultural
process rooted in the relations of texts to each other and in the institutions
and conventions of writing, in part on the sophistication and intensity
of its sense that human knowledge is not as controllable or as cogent as
Western thought would have it and that language operates in subtle and
often contradictory ways, so that certainty will always elude us.
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