For deconstruction of this kind was an avant-garde, sceptical, contradiction-revealing strategy, which could undermine, subvert, expose, ‘undo’, and transgress any text. What is more, it had exciting political implications, since it showed the indubitable superiority of the deconstructor’s ‘insights’ to the text’s unwitting ‘blindness’ to the contradictions it encoded. To deconstruct a poem, text, or discourse is to show how it (actually) undermines the philosophy it (seems to) assert, or the hierarchical oppositions on which it overtly relies. And deconstruction was most effective when the
...more
