Introduction: ‘Deconstruction, if such a thing exists …’

Abstract

The three quotations which serve as epigraphs to this introduction all speak of ‘deconstruction’. They do so in a number of ways: as something which troubles and disturbs certain members of universities, if not the universities themselves; as something to be defined and subsequently marginalized; and as something which, always supposing its institutional existence to be a fact, has had its day and which subsequently has gone the way of the dodo. There seems to be a lot at stake in this one word. Principally, however, what the three quotations share is a recognition that from a variety of places and positions, polemical, ideological, historical and cultural, there are those who actively search out a meaning and identity for ‘deconstruction’.

… deconstruction bothers people in the university …

Colin MacCabe

Concerning the institution that is the university put in question by the PC debate, the term ‘deconstruction’ is most often presumed to refer to a theory, a method, a school, perhaps even a doctrine, in any case, some identifiable or localizable ‘thing’ that can be positioned — posed and opposed — within that institution, but also that can be excluded from within this defined enclosure.

Peggy Kamuf

Does this mean that so-called ‘deconstruction’ is what Hegel said art in his time was, ‘a thing of the past’? Some people certainly think so or wish that it might be so. To say so has almost become an idée reçue …

J. Hillis Miller

This phrase is taken from a response by Jacques Derrida to a question from Colin MacCabe. The first epigraph of this introduction is taken from the same interview, ‘Some questions and responses’, in The Linguistics of Writing: Arguments between Language and Literature, ed. Nigel Fabb, Derek Attridge, Alan Durant and Colin MacCabe (1987), 252–64. All further references to this and other works by Derrida are given parenthetically in the text. Derrida’s phrase is echoed elsewhere in this book, in the words of J. Hillis Miller, Peggy Kamuf, and in the title of Chapter 1, following this ‘Introduction’. Together, and dispersed throughout the text, these phrases should disturb any certainty concerning received notions about the identity of deconstruction.