Post-structuralism in France
Сочинение - Иностранные языки
Другие сочинения по предмету Иностранные языки
ruth, reality, whereas writing, a derivative presentation employed in the absence of living speech, inevitably misleads us into accepting illusions.
Derridas critiques of the speech/writing opposition - and of all the hierarchical oppositions that attend it - proceed by what he calls the method of deconstruction. This is the process of showing, through close textual and conceptual analysis, how such oppositions are contradicted by the very effort to formulate and employ them [3, p.829-830].his book Of Grammatology (1967) Jacques Derrida introduced the term deconstruction, when discussing the implications of understanding language as writing rather than speech. In describing deconstruction, Derrida observed that there is nothing outside the text. That is to say, all of the references used to interpret a text are themselves texts, even the text of reality as a reader knows it. There is no truly objective, non-textual reference from which interpretation can begin. Deconstruction, then, can be described as an effort to understand a text through its relationships to various contexts.
Derridas method consisted in demonstrating all the forms and varieties of this originary complexity, and their multiple consequences in many fields. His way of achieving this was by conducting thorough, careful, sensitive, and yet transformational readings of philosophical and literary texts, with an ear to what in those texts runs counter to their apparent systematicity (structural unity) or intended sense (authorial genesis). By demonstrating the aporias and ellipses of thought, Derrida hoped to show the infinitely subtle ways that this originary complexity, which by definition cannot ever be completely known, works its structuring and destructuring effects [4].denotes the pursuing the meaning of a text to the point of exposing the supposed contradictions and internal oppositions upon which it is founded. It is an approach that may be deployed in philosophy, literary analysis, or other fields. Deconstruction generally tries to demonstrate that any text is not a discrete whole but contains several contradictory meanings; that any text therefore has more than one interpretation; that the text itself links these interpretations inextricably; that the incompatibility of these interpretations is irreducible; and thus that an interpretative reading cannot go beyond a certain point.initially resisted granting to his approach the overarching name deconstruction, on the grounds that it was an exact technical term that could not be used to characterize his work generally. Nevertheless, he eventually accepted that the term had come into common use to refer to his textual approach, and Derrida himself increasingly began to use the term in this more general way., the main propositions of Derridas Deconstruction are [12]:
1.A text can be read as something quite different from what it appears to be saying. In short a text may possess so many different meanings that it cannot have a meaning (i.e. there is no guaranteed essential meaning to a text).
2.The priority since the time of Plato was given to speech over writing, as it was believed that there is a gap in writing, which speech does not possess. But Derridas theory argued that both speech and writing are lacking in presence. In short previously the meaning conveyed by (or signified by) speech was considered as instable and writing was considered to have a fix stable meaning. But Derridas theory that a text cant have a meaning, stressed that writing is equally unstable.
.Derridas theory suggested that there cant be binary opposition in a language system or any code. As Derrida believed that a text does not have a single meaning of any kind and as there is only the text and no meaning, then it cannot have a centre, to which there can exist a binary opposition. Hence, he discarded presence of any binary opposition in a text. Moreover, he has mentioned that in the place of binary opposition there exist disseminations, the various meanings spread over one another and hence betray any center.
.Derrida proposed the concept of diffrance, which he used to oppose logocentrism. In French language differer means to postpone, to delay and also it means to differ or be different from. The word itself illustrates Derridas point that writing doesnt copy speech. Thus meaning is continuously and endlessly postponed as each word leads us on to yet another word in the system of signification. So, Derrida sees a text as an endless sequence of signifiers, which has no ultimate signifier.
2.2 Roland Barthes - The Death of the Author
Barthes was a prominent post-structuralist who believed that there are two orders of signification: iconic and connotative. According to him, the idea of second-order signification is a myth. In myth there are two semiological systems, one of which is staggered in relation to the other: a linguistic system, the language, which Barthes calls language-object, because it is the language which myth gets hold of in order to build its own system; and myth itself, which Barthes calls metalanguage, because it is a second language in which one speaks about the first. When he reflects on a metalanguage, the semiologist no longer needs to ask himself questions about the composition of the language-object, he no longer has to take into account the details of the linguistic schema; he will only need to know its total term, or global sign, and only as this term lends itself to myth. This is why the semiologist is entitled to treat in the same way writing and pictures: what he retains from them is the fact that they are both signs and they constitute a language-object. He believes that a sign has a signifier and a signified which are related to each other through an unending chain of signifiers because there is not one signifier for a signified but many.1968 Barthes wrote what is largely considered to be his best-known work, the essay The Death of the Author. Barthes saw the notion of the author, or authorial authority, in the criticism of literary text as the forced projection of an ultimate meaning of the text. By imagining an ultimate intended meaning of a piece of literature one could infer an ultimate explanation for it. But Barthes points out that the great proliferation of meaning in language and the unknowable state of the authors mind makes any such ultimate realization impossible [11].his essay, Barthes criticizes the method of reading and criticism that relies on aspects of the authors identity - his or her political views, historical context, religion, ethnicity, psychology, or other biographical or personal attributes - to distill meaning from the authors work. In this type of criticism, the experiences and biases of the author serve as a definitive explanation of the text. Readers must thus separate a literary work from its creator in order to liberate the text from interpretive tyranny. Each piece of writing contains multiple layers and meanings. In a well-known quotation, Barthes draws an analogy between text and textiles, declaring that a text is a tissue (or fabric) of quotations, drawn from innumerable centers of culture, rather than from one, individual experience. The essential meaning of a work depends on the impressions of the reader, rather than the passions or tastes of the writer; a texts unity lies not in its origins, or its creator, but in its destination, or its audience [2]., in his essay, The Death of The Author, states: …writing is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin. Writing is that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body of writing [8, p.120].all the post-structuralists and the Deconstructionists, Barthes gives importance to the context of which the text is a product. At the end of his essay, The Death of The Author, he says: …it is necessary to overthrow the myth: the birth of reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author [8, p.123].Author is always in the past of the text; whereas the Writer is simultaneous with it. Writing always occurs now, in the act of reading it, enunciating it, unpacking its structure. There is no single theological meaning but a multidimensional space in which a variety of writings blend and clash. Assigning the text an author is equal to imposing a limit on this mesh. In the multiplicity of writing - everything is to be disentangled rather than deciphered. The structure is to be followed at every point, rather than reduced to a single angle. The unity of a text is in its destination - the reader; though the reader too is inscribed, not personal. Hence, the birth of reader begins with the death of the author [2].and scriptor are terms Barthes uses to describe different ways of thinking about the creators of texts. The author is our traditional concept of the lone genius creating a work of literature or other piece of writing by the powers of their original imagination. For Barthes, such a figure is no longer viable. The insights offered by an array of modern thought, including the insights of Surrealism, have rendered the term obsolete. In place of the author, the modern world presents us with a figure Barthes calls the scriptor, whose only power is to combine pre-existing texts in new ways. Barthes believes that all writing draws on previous texts, norms, and conventions, and that these are the things to which we must turn to understand a text. As a way of asserting the relative unimportance of the writers biography compared to these textual and generic conventions, Barthes says that the scriptor has no past, but is born with the text. He also argues that, in the absence of the idea of an author-God to control the meaning of a work, interpretive horizons are open