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  • Essay / Interpretation of the language and literature of Jacques Derrida

    'What is deconstruction? Nothing, of course. » in Jacques Derrida Letter to a Japanese friend. For Jacques Derrida, “deconstruction does not consist of a set of theorems, axioms, tools, rules, techniques, methods” and language itself is incapable of revealing meaning; alternatively, an individual's understanding of a text is thought to be determined by the context which relies on a set of components. Like those who imply a text (the author) and those who infer the text (the reader). Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an original essay A deconstructionist's approach to language is not to draw our attention to the inability of language to communicate. Rather, it is about preventing us from thinking that the sole purpose of language is to convey meaning. Derrida and the deconstructionists make no secret of coming out of their dark lairs and saying “I caught you!” You made a mistake! but to remind us that the sole purpose of language is not just to convey meaning. However, we should not neglect the critical aspect of language, which is its structure and nature, because its fluidity allows us to construct a diverse range of interpretations. Derrida's "il n'y a pas de hors-texte" has often been mistranslated as "il n'y a pas de hors-texte", and has been interpreted to mean something like "all that is outside the or of the actual texts that we consider do not matter and do not really exist.” ". Whereas in Derrida's debate, it means "something like the opposite, that there is only text since we cannot escape the text." Literary critic Harold Bloom supports Derrida's approach that literature can have only one interpretation, further asserting that "deconstruction, as it has come to be called, refuses to identify the force of literature with a any embodied meaning and shows how profound such logocentric or incarnationist perspectives are. have influenced the way we think about art. The term “logocentric” refers to the presumption of unconditional truth that could be established via language. Although Derrida believed that this was unfounded due to the indeterminacy of language, as words could not be fixed to an exact meaning. Derrida was allied with the "post-structuralism" movement and has sometimes been referred to as a post-structuralist due to his affiliation with the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure whose work must be properly inferred to understand Derrida's work, such as when Derrida states: “monsters can’t be announced, you can’t say “here are our monsters” without immediately turning monsters into pets. In relation to Derrida's comment, Saussure expressed that the idea of ​​a "meaning" within a language is created by "signs" which have two parts. A signifier which is the word/image and the signified is the idea/meaning of this signifier and the signifier points to a signified. Saussure concludes that what gives signs meaning are the differences between them, which therefore constitute a fragment of a systemic network, because signs point to different points to give meaning. For example, try to describe something without specifying what it is not, you can't. If you were trying to describe what a "dog" is to someone, chances are you would say "animal", "four-legged", similar to a "cat" and other words, other signs. Derrida stated that other signs were always, at all times, present regarding the meaning of a sign, hecalled this the “trace” of the sign (which post-structuralism has also recognized and criticized). However, Derrida determined that “the trace is not presence but rather the simulacrum of a presence which dislocates, displaces and refers beyond itself”. The trace has, strictly speaking, no place, because the erasure belongs to the very structure of the trace. The concept of "trace" was reconstructed by Derrida as "différance", which refers to the idea that meaning impractically prevails in the openness between signs. Derrida said in an interview “this spacing is both active and passive production of intervals without which the terms “full” would not mean, would not function”. Derrida's aim is to show that language is extremely subjective, in the sense that connotation varies from reader to reader and changes from time to time. Therefore, the idea of ​​a communal truth that can be obtained via philosophy or a single theory is unrealizable. Derrida believes that a significant part of the Western philosophical tradition is based on binary oppositions, the idea that one concept or terminology is considered more ordinary and authentic than the other. I will discuss Derrida's concept of the trace in Plato's Phaedrus, with reference to Derrida's Plato's Pharmacy later in this essay. Like deconstructionists, “poststructuralism is a style of critical reasoning that focuses on when our meaning systems go wrong as a means of identification.” Poststructuralism focuses on those moments when we “impose meaning on a space that is no longer characterized by shared social agreement on the structure of meaning.” They believe that this idea of ​​meaning slips between signs, this concept was called trace by Derrida. Post-structuralism attempts to explain “how it is that we fill these gaps” in our knowledge. By determining the “points of slippage (…), we highlight the important role of ethical choice – by which I mean decision-making guided by beliefs about virtue and oneself, and not by moral principles or policies”. The poststructuralist Roland Barthes published his essay "The Death of the Author" (1967) explaining that "this paradoxical idea does not refer to the empirical or literal death of a given author, but to the fact that, in a radical sense , , the author is absent from the text.” In “The Death of the Author,” Barthes criticized the tendency of literary criticism to “explain” a text by bringing into play the life and presumed intentions of the author. “Barthes and Michel Foucault are interested in thinking about literature in a way that does not depend on considering the author as the origin of a text's meaning or as the authoritative presence in the text.” Barthes, Foucault and Derrida, in reality, all defend the same thing; all of this concerns the transparency of "meaning" (from Barthes and Foucault's point of view, an author's meaning does not always have to be taken into account) and Derrida's proposition is that language cannot communicate meaning alone through interpretations. “What is an author? » of the post-structuralist Foucault. (1969) is similar to Barthes' criticism of the author, which contradicts: "There was a time when the texts that we call literary today (stories, stories, epics, tragedies, comedies) were accepted, put into circulation and valued without any question about the identity of their author; their anonymity posed no difficulty since their seniority, real or imaginary, was considered a sufficient guarantee of their status.” Foucault here emphasizes the current fundamental principles according to which “literary authorship is integrally linked to changes in law and questions of law.