Theory

The eagerness to appropriate deconstruction to literary criticism has lead to an emphasis on how Derrida's usage of the term deconstruction changes the understanding of language and how this affects the reading or interpretation of the text. Derrida's development of the term deconstruction in both Of Grammatology and Speech and Phenomena focusses on problematising the appeal to presence as it occurs in the historical privileging of speech over writing and in phenomenology. This appeal to presence takes the form of an appeal to the full self presence of meaning in the consciousness of the speaking or phenomenological subject. An implication of this argument challenging this form of the appeal to presence - if one is to assume its success (making this assumption without consideration of the actual arguments involved is the most common way that advocates of deconstruction get it wrong) - is that language users can no longer be considered fully in control of the meaning of the language they use. Language could therefore be said to have its own force and it should be possible to demonstrate how the language that is used resists the use to which it is put or, more simply, that the writer cannot neatly mean what they intend to mean. The empirical facticity of the text, the use of certain words or certain passages in the text, can be demonstrated to resist or contradict the meaning the author - or canonical interpretation - intends for the text as a whole. It is this emphasis on the hermeneutical implications of deconstruction that leads to its most common usage. A deconstruction therefore describes the failure of the appeal to presence within the text. In literary criticism this is taken as the failure of the text to mean what its author intended it to mean. For Derrida the description of this failure must be demonstrated with painstaking rigour in any particular text by paying close attention to the details of the text in relation to the intentions of the author in order for one to be able to say that the text has been deconstructed.