Post-Structuralism or Deconstructionism
- The most evident difference between post-structuralists and their structuralist predecessors is their abandonment of the simplistic methodological approach of structuralism. They challenge structuralism’s claim of being a meta-language capable of interpreting all texts and believe that a neutral, all-knowing perspective outside a text is impossible. Post-structuralists advocate for the infinite play of signifiers and believe that reading methods play a crucial role in the infinite play of signifiers.
Derrida and Deconstructionism
- Derrida proposed a method he called deconstruction to read Western philosophy. In general, deconstructive reading presents that a text should not be interpreted as the communication of a single author conveying an obvious message but should be read as a manifestation of conflicts within different cultures or worldviews.
- A deconstructed text will exhibit many simultaneously coexisting viewpoints, often conflicting with each other.
There is a similarity in the context descriptions of Derrida’s deconstructionism and Homi Bhabha’s postcolonialism. Both criticize structuralism for overly simplifying generalizations, akin to the stereotyping of racial essentialism and fixity in postcolonialism, which involves describing people and things in language and fixing them in an unchanging framework.
In the context of postcolonialism, whether it is people or cultures, they are changing, although it is non-continuous. People and cultures are continually evolving due to the impact of things and people from more cultural backgrounds.
Derrida’s Differance
- Definition of Differance: Differance is a free play or display of differences that continually generates, it is the source of differences, it is an originary differance, but this source is imperfect and complex. (Similar to a book having an original version before multiple translations, a term evolving with new meanings during its development)
- Derrida believes that differance is a cryptic unconscious domain; it is not rationalistic, phenomenological, with clear consciousness, but an unconscious or subconscious free play activity, like Nietzsche’s will to power, Freud’s subconscious, it is an unconscious or subconscious free play activity. (This is similar to how a narrator’s interpretation or a reader’s understanding can spread or be understood in the “originary” or “translated” form in the unconscious domain.)
- Expansion of the Noun ‘Differance’: It has two meanings, 1. Temporal delay, 2. Difference.
- Characteristics of Differance: In the differentiating activity of differance, one of the binary oppositions will become the differance of the other; it is both the differance of the other and the result of difference. It is, on one hand, a free play activity of differences produced in temporal delay and, on the other hand, the result of differences.
- Common Relationship Between Differance and Enunciation: Differance, due to the generation of ever-changing signifying relations or, in other words, the movement that produces signifying relations, is more likely to play a role in the creative process of the text due to the ambiguity and ambiguity of written symbols.
Summary:
Differance is not a word or symbol referring to a meaning and truth present in an existing presence because it belongs to the cryptic realm. Language, in the playful activity of differance, generates and creates itself. It is no longer dominated by logocentrism, that is, it is no longer limited and dominated by normative human restrictions, allowing people to lose the domination of flesh-and-blood emotions and freedom; it is the opposite of essentialism. Homi Bhabha emphasizes the postcolonial features and characteristics, and these discourses are similar to Derrida’s deconstruction of differance. The term ‘differance’ represents the development of a primordial content in the unconscious and subconscious activities, altering its original meaning. The former is a purposeful, politically charged enunciation that, in the incomplete understanding of cultural backgrounds, may overtly or covertly mix one’s understanding in interpreting content. The latter is the enunciation of an “originary” in the unconscious domain, but in the process of enunciation, the content has already changed. Both involve the divergence of the originary, but one might be conscious, and the other is unconscious.