The Routledge Dictionary of Literary Terms

50 Deconstruction
concept nor origin: at most, a condition of
the possibility of meaning, which resists
hypostatization. The artifice and even
frivolity of its neologism act to prevent it
being taken as a master key to any structure.
Indeed, the use of neologisms, puns
and etymologies, as well as individually
opaque styles, is common among deconstructive
writers.
As we have seen, the power of
logocentrism is not total. Certain texts
appear ‘to mark and to organize a structure
of resistance to the philosophical
conceptuality that allegedly dominated or
comprehended them’. There is a distinction
between this latter group and those
texts that simply contain an inherent contradiction
or aporia. The aporia is a built-in
deconstruction, as it were; but the ‘resistant’
texts go further and begin their own
critique. They include (only in part) the
writings of Nietzsche and Heidegger,
Freud and Saussure. They also include
some ‘literary’ texts – Derrida distrusts
the category, but finds in Artaud,
Mallarmé and others ‘the demonstration
and practical deconstruction of the
representation of what was done with
literature’.
The relevance to literary studies, then,
is not through a critical method (which is
not on offer as such) nor in the finality of
given interpretations (there are no final
interpretations) but in the theoretical and
conceptual insights of deconstruction.
There are specific points at which
Derrida’s argument overlaps with more
narrow literary concerns: the treatment of
nature in Rousseau, for example (Of
Grammatology, 1967, trans. 1976); or
the treatment of mimesis in Mallarmé
(Dissemination, 1972, trans. 1981). A
great deal of modern writing has turned
around problems of representation and
consciousness, and these are extensively
discussed by Derrida through his critical
involvement with phenomenology,
semiotics and psychoanalysis. Many critical
issues are open to a deconstructive
approach; thus the concern with authors
evinces a desire for origin, to serve as
interpretive closure; and realist representation
is precisely an illusion of presence.
In general, Derrida’s way of thinking
radically revises what a reader expects to
do with a text.
The specific use of deconstruction in
literary argument grew in the United
States, following pioneer work by Paul
de Man and J. Hillis Miller at Yale. There is
a dubious tendency in de Man to privilege
literature in general as a self-deconstructing
discourse; but this does not destroy the
brilliance of individual readings which, in
their aporetic ensemble, make the text
‘unreadable’ in terms of closure
(Allegories of Reading, 1979). Similarly,
Hillis Miller argues that ‘The fault of
premature closure is intrinsic to criticism’
(Fiction and Repetition, 1982). Besides
generating new readings, mainly of
nineteenth- and twentieth-century material,
American deconstruction has enlivened
debate about critical principles. The
refusal of final meaning caused a certain
institutional anxiety about anarchic
individualism – understandably so,
perhaps, in view of the polemical mannerism
of deconstructionist style for those
who do not enjoy it. But the absence of
absolute criteria for interpretation does
not mean total freedom; it is precisely the
pressure of pre-existent discourse that
deconstruction re-marks in its critique of
origin. In a recent interview, Derrida says
that ‘Meaning...does not depend on the
subjective identity but on the field of
different forces, which produce interpretations’
(The Literary Review 14, 1980,
p. 21).
Deconstruction, as a set of popular
clichés, soon palls. Simply to demonstrate