Can anybody explain in simple terms what "decostruction" mean?

Question

Deconstruction is a term used in the field of contemporary philosophy, literary criticism, and the social sciences.

Can anybody explain in simple terms what "decostruction" mean? Simple examples plz.

Thanx.

Answer 1

Is an interpretive approach to analyzing texts that negates the idea that there is one objective meaning and leaves a text open to subjective and creative interpretation.  A philosophical theory of criticism (usually of literature or film) that seeks to expose deep-seated contradictions in a work by delving below its surface meaning.  This method of deliberately ignoring the point was invented by a philosopher named Jacques Derrida, who endlessly used to talk about margins.These fall into two categories: bad margins, where all the people society doesn’t care for go, and good margins where critics, who can’t write poetry, write about it. Also, deconstruction makes use of a number of terms, many of which are coined or repurposed, that illustrate or follow the process of deconstruction. Among these words are différance, trace, écriture, supplement, hymen, pharmakon, slippage, marge, entame, parergon, text, and same. A more concrete example, drawn from one of Derrida's most famous works, may help to clarify the typical manner in which deconstruction works. Structuralist analysis generally relies on the search for underlying binary oppositions as an explanatory device. The structuralist anthropology of Claude Lévi-Strauss argued that such oppositions are found in all cultures, not only in Western culture, and thus that the device of binary opposition was fundamental to meaning.  Deconstruction challenges the explanatory value of these oppositions but does not seek to abolish them. Take, for example, the nature/culture opposition. This binary opposition was prevalent in many discussions during the 20th century. However, consider something like incest. Incest is a taboo, a "cultural rule," that is found by anthropologists, universally. Being universal it is then also indistinguishable from what is called "natural." Incest disrupts the simplicity of this nature/culture division and shows that the opposition relies for its meaning upon something else. The emergence then of a neologism to highlight this "weakness" in the nature/culture division can be considered. Deconstruction also discussed the idea that, where there was a word, the thing it referred to, wasn't there. How words stand for things was one of the more reasonable and legitimately philosophical areas of inquiry in Deconstruction. Critics of deconstruction take issue with what they characterize as empty obscurantism and lack of seriousness in deconstructive writings. In addition, critics often equate deconstruction with nihilism or relativism and criticize deconstruction accordingly.

Added: Found this, since the explanation is quite simple, perhaps would be useful for you.

The deconstructive method of criticism was born with Jaques Derrida and Paul de Man. The sense of this theory is the affirmation that every literary work, as in the same life, is raked by a contradiction of two terms that fight constantly and lead humanity to a necessary choice, people must choose in which side they will be. A clear example of this theory is the real life, people are in constant fight to choose the positive or the negative way to do things, to believe in God or no to do it, the same contradiction leads the world. But in a literary work always rules one of  two sides, right or wrong, cold or hot,... The author must be in one side but not in the other, he must relate the story from one point of view, he must have a clear way of thinking, some kind of ideology that makes him decline the story from one side to the other. That's to say that there must be one idea, a central idea that creates the classical structural centre, speaking in structuralism terms. that centre governs all the actions, decisions, crisis of the story. All the story runs around this centre. Derrida observed this fact, the rule of the centre, and he concluded that if there's a centre, a ruling idea, then there must be the oppose idea of that centre, the antagonist centre, it's in a secondary plane. But, what would happen if we turned down the centre and we replaced it with the antagonist idea? Then we would have the main idea of deconstructivism, the structure would be the opposed one, we would have broken down the structure and the government would be lead by the contrary idea. As Derrida says: "the decostruction starts when we find the moment in which the text transgresses the rules it establishes for itself, this is the moment in which the text breaks down." The work chosen as example is THE BEAR written by James Oliver Curwood in 1916. The aim of the book is to reflect that the soul and the thoughts of an animal can be similar to men's soul, it's to try to explain how animals can think, act and feel just as men do. This is an aspect that Curwood tries to rise through all the text. Within a detailed study made through several years in places inhabited by bears, just as those mentioned in THE BEAR , Curwood observed how animals, and specially bears, can think and act as men do, not only because of their way of acting but the feelings towards the other races, their trips, their way of getting food or their way of educating their cubs. The basis of his idea rests in the comparison of bear's acts and men's way of thinking. It's obvious that Curwood didn't know nothing about the psychology of the bears, all the text is an interpretation of a man who loves bears and tries to compare them and to make alike their way of living as if they were like men. As we can observe, there are several examples that can illustrate this just as: why the bear had to feel that he was the manor of the mountain where he lived? this is only because from a human point of view the domination of a place where one lives is an aspect that only men can think and conclude, but, what about bears? can they think and conclude that when they see other bears in the land where they live (and not their land) they must fight to clear who is the manor of that region? do they really know the meaning of property or manor? can they really get to this conclusion? Maybe they hate the rest of their race or they get pleasure of killing, who knows? Have they commonsense? Curwood tries to say that bears have commonsense in all the parts of the persecutions when he relates that the bear escaped from the hands of the hunters making circles in the trajectory that it makes around the mountain, that's what I would call an strategy, have the bears the faculty of being a strategist? I don't think so. And not only this, Curwood goes beyond the facts and thoughts, he steads that  bears can feel the same that men do. He uses the word "engagement" to describe some kind of meeting that bears, male and female, made in a part of the story when the time of rut came. Did they know what was an engagement or what it meant. Did they really know that the other bear would appear in one place the same day twenty minutes later? couldn't it be a casualty. We all know that the animals have a simple sense of time, day, night, seasons,... but not as exact as these bears, they met twenty minutes later. Thor, the bear went to that place, only the human racecan do this, but as I have said before these bears "have commonsense and an advanced way of acting." These are some examples of how Curwood includes elements that takes me to make that critic I am doing. Following a chronological line to criticize the work we would have to start from the first time the bears behave as men. From  the beginning of the text, Curwood relates the walking of a bear in a mountain, describing its feelings towards it and towards all the bears that had visited it whenever. Nevertheless he does it always using comparisons with human feelings; who knows if the bears feel? and if they do, it's not necessary for them to feel the same way human race do. When Thor meets the little bear in a mountain, as the author says, "it seemed as if Thor adopted it", can the bears adopt little cub? the cub just followed Thor wherever it went and it`s not enough reason to conclude that Thor wanted to be with the cub or "to adopt it" as if it was a human child, feeding and keeping it as if it was its son, nevertheless it does it. These are the moments that Derrida found that were the ones in which the texts broke down, these are the critical moment in which the author begins to enter in a subjective line that just can take him to hardly increasing disastrous situations like this, and these are the moments in which the author must be more careful.  In order to present more examples of this criticism, in the hardest part of the story, just as in the first as in the second meeting of the bear and the man, the bear stands very near of the hunter, I wont discuss if it can be real that the bear didn’t kill him, but the question I'm trying to clear is that the bear didn't kill him because of its piety, but, can a bear have the human ( and not much) characteristic of piety? Until the point we know the animals kill or they don't, they are hungry or they are not, but they don't leave another animal alive just for piety, there can be thousands of reasons for an animal not to kill another, but please, not piety, there must have an exceptionally level of mind development to do things for piety. Nevertheless the bear does it. Consequently, Curwood, with the best of his intentions, has tried to develop the very impossible idea of bringing near the bear's and men's soul leaving apart some logical questions that must be named and criticized. As a conclusion, the deconstruction of the text takes to the point of the turning down of Curwood's idea of the feelings and thoughts of the bears not only compared with men's ideas and thoughts but replaced by them. This deconstruction takes to a more natural view of the actions of animals in general and specifically bears.