- What do you understand by 'Deconstruction'?
Deconstruction doesn't actually mean "demolition;" instead it means "breaking down" or analyzing something especially the words in a work of fiction or nonfiction to discover its true significance, which is supposedly almost never exactly what the author intended. A feminist may deconstruct an old novel to show how even an innocent-seeming story somehow depends on the oppression of women. A new western may deconstruct the myths of the old West and show lawmen as vicious and criminals as flawed but decent. Table manners, The Sound of Music, and cosmetics ads have all been the subjects of deconstructionist analysis. Of course, not everyone agrees with deconstructionist interpretations, and some people reject the whole idea of deconstruction, but most of us have run into it by now even if we didn't realize it.
Deconstruction is an approach to understanding the relationship between text and meaning. It was originated by the philosopher Jacques Derrida , who defined the term variously throughout his career. In its simplest form it can be regarded as a criticism of Platonism and the idea of true forms, or essences, which take precedence over appearances.
Deconstruction instead places the emphasis on appearance, or suggests, at least, that essence is to be found in appearance. Derrida would say that the difference is "undecidable", in that it cannot be discerned in everyday experiences. Deconstruction argues that language, especially in ideal concepts such as truth and justice, is irreducibly complex, unstable, or impossible to determine. Many debates in continental philosophy surrounding ontology, epistemology, ethics, aesthetics, hermeneutics, and philosophy of language refer to Derrida's beliefs. Since the 1980s, these beliefs have inspired a range of theoretical enterprises in the humanities, including the disciplines of law, anthropology, historiography, linguistics, sociolinguistics, psychoanalysis, LGBT studies, and feminism. Deconstruction also inspired deconstructivism in architecture and remains important within art, music,and literary criticism.
- 'How to deconstruct a text?
As a literary theory, it focuses on exposing cultural lases in all texts, whether agamage in a popular book or the flashing script of a television ad
• Readers engaged in deconstruction analyse words and sentences to identify inherent buses and call into question amonplace interpretations of the text. While this may sound presumptuces or cymical on the front end, deamstruction im't about destroying mening Rather, it's about undenining ingrained amimptions to view things in a new light Neuffe.
Deconstruction, as applied in the criticism of literature, designates a theory and practice of reading which questions and claims to "subvert" or "undermine" the assumption that the system of language provides grounds that are adequate to establish the boundaries, the coherence or unity, and the determinate meanings of a literary text. Typically, a deconstructive reading sets out to show that conflicting forces within the text itself serve to dimipate the seeming definiteness of its structure and meanings into an indefinite arrey of incompatible and undecidable posibilities "
- Paradox about paradox :-
It presented itself as a supra ideological mode of analysis, exposing the ideological aberrations of others while seemingly possessing none itself.
- Oppose Prevailing Wisdom :-
- Expose Cultural Bias :-
- Analyze Sentence Structure :-
- Play With Possible Meanings :-
- Waiting for Godot: A Deconstructive Study :-
Samuel Beckett’s play “Waiting for Godot” within Derridean deconstructive perspective for investigating and scrutinizing the different facets of the text interms of Derridean deconstruction .
To open up the techniques of meta-theatre, which enable Samuel Beckett to go beyond the boundaries of the traditional stereotypes and fossilized notions, values and traditions of language, theatre and the literary text, which revolve around messianic logocentrism or phonocentrism in the history of philosophy from Plato to the present times. To scrutinize the text from Derrida’s deconstructive hermeneutics for dismantling the fixity, singularity and unified meaning of the text of the thought raging play under discussion.To retrace the zigzag and complicated philosophical pathways of West Europeantradition of the metaphysics of presence and its compelling influences and repercussions,which have proved to be the inhibiting and fossilizing deadlocks of aporia of meaning andauthoritative centralized structures of human thought to explore the new horizons.
The complex structure of “Waiting for Godot’’ is based upon symbols andideological content, in which the vertical repression and layering or sedimentation is dominant structure of the text of the play. For this reason, it has been always a focal target for world’s researchers. Most of the researchers interpreted its different elements from different angles.Therefore, the complex and entangled structure of the play has drawn multifarious researchattentions. There are so many books and dissertations composed on this play.
Finally, the tramps are unable to act, even to commit suicide. For example, the following dialogue makes the point clear:
“Vladimir: We will hang ourselves tomorrow. (Pause.) Unless Godot comes.Estragon: And if he comes?
Vladimir: We’ll be saved”
(Beckett, Samuel, 1956, Act Two, p. 94).
We can mostly notice their incapability and undecidability to do anything through out the whole play:
“Estragon: “Why don’t we hang ourselves?
Vladimir: With what?
Estragon: you haven’t got a bit of rope?
Vladimir: No.
Estragon: Then we can’t.
Vladimir: Let’s go.
Estragon: Oh wait, there is my belt.
Vladimir: It’s too short.
Estragon: You could hang on to my legs.Vladimir: And who would hang onto mine?Estragon: True”
We find the characters of the play entangled within an illusory web of logocentricillusions of thought that they want to grasp the ultimate truth of life and the universe in a wayas logocentric Western tradition of the metaphysics of presence confines their mind to thinkabout the authoritative universal truth, meaning and origin. Nevertheless, they are unable tofind it and on the contrary, they confront uncertainty and absurdity as illustrated in theconversations between Estragon and Vladimir about the Holy Scripture, the memories of thepast or identity of Godot. Suspecting all the messianic logocentric authorities of founding thetexts of Western culture, Samuel Beckett studs Godot and Endgame with references to thesevery texts in order to make us “think and participate in his anxious oscillation betweencertainty about what is untrue and uncertainty about what may be true”
Conclusion :-
The present study tried to interpret Samuel Beckett’s play “Waiting for Godot”from a new and innovative perspective through Derridean deconstruction. It showed how the metaphysics of presence and messianic logocentrism imprint preventive effects on mentalstructure of human beings, and fall them in the aporetic trap of omnipresent and omnipotentlogi. Therefore, they slavishly accept the authority of the messianic theocentric and anthropocentric logi. The study tries to prove that the techniques of meta-theatre used in Samuel Beckett’s play, reject the conventional dramatic realism, make the text of the play delogocentric text, and brings it very close to Derridean deconstruction, which rejects and deconstructs the semantic singularity and fixity of meaning or hidden transcendental meaning of the text.