Deconstructionism is a type of thinking that strongly criticizes, analyzes and revises words and their concepts. The deconstructive discourse highlights the inability of philosophy to establish a stable floor.
It can be understood as the generalization of Martin Heidegger's implicit method of analysis of the history of philosophy, postulated by Jacques Derrida that is based on historical concepts and metaphorical accumulations (hence the name deconstruction), showing that the clear and obvious is far If it is, since the tools of consciousness in which the truth must be given are historical, relative and subject to the paradoxes of the rhetorical figures of metaphor and metonymy.
The term deconstruction is a translation proposed by Derrida into the German Destruktion, which Heidegger uses in his book Being and Time, insofar as he is not so concerned, within the deconstruction of metaphysics, of reduction to nothingness, as for show how she fallen. In Heidegger, destruction leads to the concept of time; she must watch in several successive stages the experience of time that has been covered by metaphysics, forgetting the original meaning of being as a temporary being.
Derrida translates and recovers the notion of deconstruction himself; understands that the meaning of a given text (essay, novel, newspaper article) is the result of the difference between the words used, since it is not the reference to the things they represent; it is an active difference, working in every sense of every word it opposes, in a way analogous to Saussurian's differential meaning in linguistics. To mark the active character of this difference (instead of the passive character of the difference relative to a contingent judgment of the subject) Derrida suggests the term de différence, a sort of 'différance' of the stem of the word that combines the difference and the present participle of theverb "differ." In other words, the different meanings of a text can be discovered by breaking down the structure of the language in which it is written.
Deconstruction is a strongly criticized method, mainly in France, where it is associated with Derrida's personality. His style, often opaque, obscures the reading of his texts. However, deconstruction offers a radically new vision and great force on 20th century philosophy.
Deconstruction should not be viewed as a theory of literary criticism, much less as a philosophy. Deconstruction is really a strategy, a new reading practice, an archipelago of attitudes towards the text. It investigates the conditions of possibility of the conceptual systems of philosophy, but it should not be confused with a search for the transcendental conditions of the possibility of knowledge. Deconstruction revises and dissolves the canon in an absolute denial of meaning, but does not propose an alternative organic model.
