No idea what prompted your post. Whenever this stuff breaks out I always wonder, "Are they talking about me?" I mean I can be a pretty obnoxious guy, but I don't remember doing any deconstruction. Or maybe I am. If I knew what the heck it was, I might have better insight into whether I was doing it or not.
I'm not sure what it's supposed to mean. There's some famous letter by Derrida I read and a few other things on the subject. My problem is that this stuff reads like Edgar Cayce to me - a bunch of words that collectively have so much meaning that they mean nothing.
Moreover, I have this nagging suspicion that deconstruction is based on a misunderstanding (by the deconstructionists). There's that business mentioned below about "the critic claims there is no meaning to be found in the actual text" which seems to be a gross exaggeration of the actual situation. The presumption here is that the linguistic environments of each individual reader are completely unrelated, which they are not. I think it would be correct to say that the meaning of any text is always ambiguous, sometimes slightly and sometimes very much so. If there were "no meaning" in the text then no two people could read the same message and get anywhere close to the same thing from it.
Was it Pauli who once said "ganz nicht falsch" to describe an idea that was so ridiculous it wasn't even wrong?
k
