Wednesday, January 10, 2007

Deconstruction

"The idea, however, is not to demolish the edifice but to 'reinscribe' it in a way that would expose its lack of any transcendental significance or meaning. A text can be anything....The deconstructionist's reading of the discourse is, I believe, implicitly 'Freudian' in its approach. The major preoccupation of the auther, or rather the dominant concern of the text is shown to betray itself. Deconstructions is in a sense 'the interpretation of dreams.' Using implicitly the psychoanalytic technique, the critic exposes the 'return of the repressed' syndrome in the text." --Bimal Krishna Matilal

I have to add (because I like Matilal so much) that he was an Indian philosopher at Oxford who is now most famous for using the "tools" of analytical philosophy in re-constructing the epistemological theories of Navay-Nyaya (the "new-logic" school of classical Indian philosophy). That is, Matilal was certainly not a Deconstructionist. I just like the above quote because it shows what Deconstruction might have had to offer if it wasn't predicated on completely unwarrented "public language" assumptions about the nature of language. Besides, Freud is always fun to mention.

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