Jacques Derrida’s Strategy of Deconstruction: Demolish and Build

Abstract

This paper highlights how Jacques Derrida invoked the strategy of deconstruction to carry out a two-fold task in modern philosophical thought, a mission based on demolition and reconstruction. By diagnosing the maladies of western thought—which centers on itself and excludes the margin, the extrinsic, and the derivative and seeks refuge in the center, the intrinsic, and the origin—Derrida demolished the “metaphysics of presence.” He then reconstructed the “idea of difference” by pursuing a different form of thought, removed from every center and open to the margin, the extrinsic, and the derivative by virtue of difference. The paper shows how Derrida’s attempt to undermine the metaphysics of presence is to think about the reasons for subjugation to the meaning, presence, and foundational voice of the metaphysics of presence and the whole western philosophical tradition extending from Socrates to Heidegger. His desire to found the idea of difference by thinking about writing as the origin of speech and a margin inhabiting the heart of the center is both an attempt to break the hold of those metaphysical dichotomies that still captivate western thought, and a call to reconstruct afresh according to a strategy that does not view the margin as outside of the center, but as the point where the center disarticulates and difference begins. Finally, the paper stresses that the link between deconstruction and this two-fold task to demolish and reconstruct shows that deconstruction itself contains the meaning of difference. As much as deconstruction involves the demolition of the history of ideas as something centered around the subject, reason, and voice, and as a mistaken history of meaning and truth, it is also reconstruction and draws new features for a universal thought removed from any center, that is from any metaphysics.