Deconstruction as philosophy or literature: is deconstruction a rigorous post-Hegelian philosophical method or a literary practice that plays at the margins of philosophy?

Jacques Derrida, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

The position in brief

Deconstruction is rigorous post-Hegelian and post-Heideggerian philosophy, not literary criticism with extra steps. The infrastructural chain — différance, trace, supplement, iterability, hymen, parergon, pharmakon, plus d'un, restance — names quasi-synthetic conditions of possibility-and-impossibility for the basic concepts of metaphysics.1

The bipartite operation is reversal AND displacement: first inverting the violent hierarchy of the classical opposition (because the terms are not symmetrical), then displacing the structure itself (because reversal alone would reinstate it). Deconstruction is not the reversal of binaries; not the mutual annulment of opposites (Romantic neutralization, the "unity of nullity" Hegel saw through); not the demonstration that texts deconstruct themselves (the Yale-school misreading).

The close reading of literary texts (Mallarmé in "The Double Session," Joyce in "Ulysses Gramophone," Celan in "Schibboleth," Blanchot throughout) is in service of philosophical questions about the conditions of meaning, not aesthetic appreciation.2

Sources

  1. He also coins terms that do not function as simple names, such as " différance " and " re-mark," and shows that certain familiar concepts that we take for granted are not concepts at all, since they operate in this undecidable manner, such as "metaphor," "law"— and, we might conjecture, " literature." 12 Once the anterior movement nicknamed by " arche-writing," "trace," etc., has been demonstrated (it can never be "…
    Acts of Literature, p. 10
  2. It is difficult to erase it afterward because, in the work of deconstruction, I have had to, as I have to here, multiply the cautionary indicators and put aside all the traditional philosophical concepts, while reaffirming the necessity of returning to them, at least under erasure.
    Psyche, Inventions of the Other Vol II, p. 4

Where the argument is made

  • Of Grammatology (1967, Spivak trans., JHUP)
  • Writing and Difference (1967, Bass trans.)
  • Margins of Philosophy (1972, Bass trans.)
  • 'Letter to a Japanese Friend' (1985) on the meaning of deconstruction
  • the early 'Force and Signification' on Jean Rousset in Writing and Difference
  • Mémoires for Paul de Man (1986)

How the argument was received

The canonical scholarly defense (Gasché's Tain of the Mirror, Bennington's Derridabase, Norris's Derrida, Naas's Taking on the Tradition) reads my work as rigorous philosophy of reflection in the post-Hegelian tradition. The literary-deconstructive reading (de Man, Hartman, Hillis Miller, the Yale school) inherited from American New Criticism a concern with self-undoing texts — useful for literary criticism, structurally distinct from the philosophical project. Habermas's Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (1985) charged that I level philosophy and literature and abandon rational discourse; the charge missed both the protocols I observe and the protocols I question. The polemic about whether deconstruction is "really" philosophy was settled in continental philosophy by the late 1980s; it remains live in English-language analytic philosophy.