Thursday, July 03, 2008

Rorty, Richard. "Deconstructionist Theory." FROM FORMALISM TO POSTSTRUCTURALISM. Vol. 8 CAMBRIDGE HISTORY OF LITERARY CRITICISM. Cambridge: CUP, 1995.

Most of Derrida’s work continues a line of thought which begins with Friedrich Nietzsche and runs through Martin Heidegger. This line of thought is characterized by an ever more radical repudiation of Platonism of the apparatus of philosophical distinctions which the West inherited from Plato and which has dominated European thought. In a memorable passage in The Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche describes ‘how the “true world” became a fable.’ There he sketches an account of the gradual dissolution of the other-worldy way of thinking common to Plato, to Christianity, and to Kant, the way of thinking which contrasts the True World of Reality with the World of Appearance created by the senses, or matter, or Sin, or the structure of the human understanding. The characteristic expressions of this other-worldliness, this attempt to escape from time and history into eternity, are what deconstructionists often call ‘the traditional binary oppositions’: true–false, original–derivative, unified–diverse, objective–subjective, and so on. . . . Read the rest here: http://themiddleeastinterest.wordpress.com/2008/07/01/deconstructionist-theory/.

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