There is a lot of antipathy towards Jacques Derrida and Deconstruction both in and outside of academia. In the interest of furthering the dialogue, I add my most basic view on the topic to the fray. In all the accusations of nihilism and meaninglessness, it’s easy to overlook the fact that Deconstruction is about opening up new possibilities of thought. In Acts of Literature, Derek Attridge insists that “deconstruction is inventive or it is nothing at all.”
I like to think of Derrida’s deconstructive efforts as a questioning of underlying assumptions that reveals how something is constructed in order to reimagine it outside the limits of that construction. In this way, Deconstruction is not about destruction, but rather about the process of building new ways of seeing the already established. As I see it, Derrida’s project was to keep the world of ideas safe from any pronouncements that would shut down the possibility for questions and questioning.
He did this by calling attention to ideas that people believe without questioning, or even being aware that they believe them. He also sought to change the way these ideas are configured in order to undermine the absolute identity and authority that they have, sometimes unknowingly, been assigned.
To put it in the simplest terms: If Polly believes that toast can only be buttered on the top because that’s the way her mother always does it, it would be the deconstructionist’s job to butter the toast on the bottom in order to dismantle the tyranny of the top-buttered toast and the underlying belief system that makes it possible (i.e. “toast can only be buttered on the top,” “it is better to butter toast on the top,” or “it is not toast if it is not buttered on top”). In the end, I enjoy this way of thinking because I, for one, prefer creativity to the tyranny of top-buttered toast.