Customer Reviews

Deconstruction For Beginners

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This book offers something for readers who know nothing of deconstruction, but also something for those who have read a lot about it. I have read a lot of books on deconstruction, but this is the only one that shows how deconstruction has worked in different cultures--notably, China and India. Besides, it is irreverent and hilarious, at one point inserting some Derridean quotes on ethics into an ribald erotic situation. The parallels between Nagarjuna's Madhyamika Buddhism and deconstruction are fascinating.

Derrida once said that he approved of the comic book treatments of his thought because they bypass and subvert the offical channels of knowledge proffered at universities. Powell's carnivalesque treatment of Derrida is certainly planted firmly in that groove.

I bought this book in order to gain a better understanding of Deconstructive theory. I was open to the comic book format which is quite fun, and the illustrator,Joe Lee,captures the feel of underground comics. I didn't enjoy the pornographic nature of the writing. Jim Powell's explanations for deconstructive theory are at times entrenched in direct references to sexual acts and male and female genitalia. I'm not a fan of porn, and most people who are interested in deconstructive theory are probably not either.Despite the fact that the writer's lewd and carnally juicy explanations are helpful in understanding deconstruction,I didn't enjoy reading it. After a sincere effort at gleaning the information I was looking for, I threw this book in the trash.

The "for Beginners" series is a somewhat illusory series in the first place, because the first two titles, Marxism for Beginners and Freud for Beginners, were written independently by serious scholars who simply wanted to evangelize for their topics and who knew not to take the matter too seriously. Since then, the series has had spotty success, but the other titles have conformed generally to a light hearted style that masks a very weighty communication of particular information.

With Deconstruction for Beginners, the book is almost all text, and the author(s) have that tragically po-faced approach that marks them as True Believers rather than fellows. They hector and lecture, rather than speak, through the pages. Instead of eliminating the difficulty of their subject, they seem to want to force their "beginner" to get a nose rubbed in the diffidence of original texts without guidance or perspective.

The concept of the "for Beginners" series is good, but it has not been executed consistently, and this volume, in particular, stands out as a real stinker. It does nothing to attract students to deconstruction, nothing to help them over the hurdles, for it wants to hang onto the absurd priestly vestments of the cult of the difficult.