Derrida and Deconstruction: Flipped Learning

 

Derrida and Deconstruction

This blog is the response to the flipped learning task assigned by our professor Dr. Dilip Barad. In this flipped learning we are given a few videos on Derrida and Deconstruction, after watching these videos we raise questions or doubts and we discuss and debate those questions if other students are having answers. (Know more about flipped learning)

What is Deconstruction:

 A philosophical or critical method which asserts that meanings, metaphysical constructs, and hierarchical oppositions (as between key terms in a philosophical or literary work) are always rendered unstable by their dependence on ultimately arbitrary signifiers

According to A Glossary of Literary Terms by M. H. Abrams,

Deconstruction, as applied in the criticism of literature, designates a theory and practice of reading that questions and claims to “subvert” or “undermine” the assumption that the system of language is based on grounds that are adequate to establish the boundaries, the coherence or unity, and the determinate meanings of a literary text. Typically, a deconstructive reading sets out to show that conflicting forces within the text itself serve to dissipate the seeming definiteness of its structure and meanings into an indefinite array of incompatible and undecidable possibilities.

Video 1:

In this video, the speaker is talking about Derrida and Deconstruction and why deconstruction is difficult to define. Derrida himself refuses to define Deconstruction because we are habituated to a clear and direct definition of anything, in other words, the human mind wants to define everything they come in connect with, and our mind process everything in order to understand that thing. Whereas Derrida Claims that it is not really possible to define everything nor Deconstruction.

 video 2:

In this video, Heidegger's influence on Derrida is discussed. Heideggar wanted to dismantle the entire tradition of Western philosophy by pursuing the question of beings of being. Derrida himself in the famous "Letter to a Japanese Friend" (1983) pointed out that the term was a product of his wish, “to translate and adapt to my own ends the Heideggerian word Destruktion or Abbau.

Video 3:

In this video several points are discussed, the idea that connecting the world with its meaning is not natural or the sign with it signified is conventional and thus a social construct. The meaning of the word, as structuralists, argues that it is arbitrary. It exists in relation to other words.

Video 4:

In this video, the speaker is discussing how getting at the center of the word or trying to find Meaning is impossible because one word leads us to another word rather than toward the meaning.

Video 5:

This video is about Structure, Sign, and Play. Derrida throughout his carrier has many times criticized Claude Levi-Strauss.  Apart from that, it is also discussed that Derrida there was no structure and he believed that there was no center.

Video 6:

This video is about Yale School of Deconstruction. Paul de Man, J. Hillis Miller, Harold Bloom, and Geoffrey Hartman are know as 'Hermeneutic Mafias' of Yale University who propagated thoughts of Derrida worldwide. They questioned aesthetic, formalistic, historical, and sociological approaches to literature.

 

This video is a lecture on Derrida and Deconstruction. Professor Paul Fry explores two central Derridian works: "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of Human Sciences" and "Différance."  

In this video Center and structure is also discussed. Besides that, he explains that language is the new god or new man because we cannot live without language. Because just like the structure everything has a center. There are many things that support this argument for example as means of communication language gives us consciousness, we cannot communicate with only thought or subconscious mind.