Customer Reviews

Deconstructions: A User's Guide

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

If you've always wondered what the hell "Deconstruction" is supposed to be about, look no further. Before you get too excited, I'm not going to claim that this is the best book on Derrida's work or necessarily even for every neophyte--it's not exactly a primer. However, Royle's collection sidesteps the problem that so many other books fall prey to by trying to explain deconstruction, instead these authors show deconstruction at work. The editor's intro--cleverly disguised as a complaint letter to a dictionary's head editor--amusingly and clearly explains what deconstruction is not, untangling many (frankly vulgar) confusions and reductions that have grown up around the term in the last twenty-odd years (e.g. Deconstruction is not a technique, strategy, or method. It is not "destruction."). The essays proper pair deconstruction with some expected terms: feminism, poetry, psychoanalysis (revealing in this last example some of the debt Derrida owes Freud while acknowledging his intellectual rivalry with Lacan)--to the surprising: drugs, love, weaving (weaving?). These authors show how deconstruction, from a Derridean rather than a Yale-ian perspective, "happens." It isn't applied, its effects are articulated; and the deconstructions that are part and parcel of texts and the way they mean, when articulated, have effects, create changes in the ways the texts, and discourses (for example on drugs) mean. If that last sentence didn't make sense to you, read a few of these gems and, I promise, it will become more meaningful.

This collection of articles by top-flight critics introduces deconstructive thinking in a wide range of fields or connections (deconstruction and politics, deconstruction and feminism, deconstruction and psychoanalysis, etc.) It is a very fine book and a paperback edition ought to be made available so that people could afford to buy it.