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David J. Gunkel, "Deconstruction"

siiky

2023/09/14

book,philosophy

https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262542470/deconstruction

As Donna Haraway argues, "certain dualisms have been persistent in Western traditions; they have been systemic to the logics and practices of domination of women, people of color, nature, workers, animals -- in short, domination of all constituted as others, whose task it is to mirror the self. Chief among these troubling dualisms are self/other, mind/body, culture/nature, male/female, civilized/primate, reality/appearance, whole/part, agent/resource, maker/made, active/passive, right/wrong, truth/illusion, total/partial, God/man."[^19] These logical distinctions, therefore, do not institute an equitable division between two terms that are on equal footing and of comparable status. They are always and already hierarchical arrangements that are structurally biased. And it is this skewed hierarchical order, as many feminists, environmentalists, postcolonial theorists, and others have demonstrated and documented, that installs, underwrites, and justifies systems of inequality, domination, and prejudice. There are, then, moral and political reasons to question systems of conceptual opposition and to attempt to think in excess of and beyond the usual and inherited arrangements. As Hanna Arendt concludes, "we all grow up and inherit a certain vocabulary. We then have got to examine this vocabulary."[^20]

[^19]: Donna J. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), 177.

[^20]: Hanna Arendt, Thinking without a Banister: Essays in Understanding, 1953-1975 (New York: Schoken Books, 2018), 461.

p. 54

The two terms that comprise a binary opposition are structurally arranged and formulated as an order subordination, where one of the two terms already governs the other or has the upper hand. Deconstructions begins with a phase of overturning the existing hierarchy. This "flipping of the script," or what Derrida also describes as "bring low what was high" is, quite literally, a revolutionary gesture insofar as the existing order -- an arrangement that is already an unequal and violent order -- is inverted or overturned. "To overlook this phase of overturning," Derrida explains, "is to forget the conflictual and subordinating structure of opposition."

But inversion, in and by itself, is not sufficient. It is only half the story. And this is why it is just a "phase" or a first step. As Derrida points out and is well aware (and he is following, among others, Nietzcshe on this point) a conceptual inversion or revolutionary gesture -- whether it be social, political, or philosophical -- actually does little or nothing to challenge or change the dominant system. In merely exchanging the relative positions occupied by the two opposed terms, inversion still maintains the binary opposition in which and on which it operates -- albeit in reverse order or upside-down. Simply turning things around, as Derrida notes, "still resides within the closed field of these oppositions, thereby confirming it."

pp. 59-60