Can sombedy explain to me the merits of deconstruction?

No dude all those discussions are always metaphysical which means they dont necessarily need to be based on reality. Arguing about the nature of something falls within philosophy not deconstruction and it always will end in we can't know and thats ok in philosophy but in reality something has to be done and only one outcome of all the supposed equally valid ones has to be chosen

So how do they reach that consensus? What enables the hivemind is right the rest is wrong so the left wins the right to decide because imposing any kind of limit goes against the everything is subjective and can be attacked because its an actual position.

Once the leftard has won the moral highground they can claim whatever and its going to be correct not because its correct but because whoever assumes a position will be singled out as wrong

Its like think about the human rights when it comes to refugees while in reality the refugees might commit crime and murder. They made the judgement that the refugee life are worth more than that of the native population and no one can argue against them cause muh human rights enable more than whatever position the opposition stands on.

Deconstruction is a buzzword to give legitimacy to whoever wants to exercise power from the left

I'll post here since this thread has less replies and posters but is closer to the front page (our air is also cleaner, being more multidisciplinary than Veeky Forums). After I wrote the last sentence a good amount of /pol/itics and ~25 year rule filth has been posted, so let's instead bring harsh chemo, free of anything political.

Stanford's encyclopedia doesn't have an article on deconstruction, so I ignored the 'guruism' meme and read the Derrida article. My impressions:

>breaks the rule of using everyday/generalised language before building up to specialised phrases; instead abruptly shifts to the latter
>'deconstruction works towards preventing the worst violence. It attempts to render justice.' Such a manifesto should be an instant red flag for Anons who are beyond Good and Evil (but not Good and Bad).
>biographical red flags: ressentiment against Vichy govt?, limitations in both career/state/academic philosophy and married/stardom lifestyle (compare Nietzsche's observation that the Greats were independent above all)
>'Marxist thought is still relevant to today's world despite globalization and that a deconstructed Marxism consists in a new messianism, a messianism of a “democracy to come.”' This explicitly echoes the slave/christian renunciation of this life in favour of hopes?
>'philosophy publications of this epoch ... comparable to the moment of German Idealism at the beginning of the 19th century' finally we get some historical sense. If the writer is more than accurate here, this would explain the abrupt jargon-reliance and poor literary-style ('Derrida's style is not traditional', again contrast to Nietzsche whose verse, aphoristic, and polemic styles followed classic examples.. hierarchy, good and bad, rather than 'innovation' - 'Derrida writes in two columns, with the left devoted to a reading of Hegel and the right devoted to a reading of the French novelist-playwright Jean Genet'.

>'He seems to have appropriated the term from Heidegger's use of “destruction” in Being and Time' for some Anons, this is another warning.
>'We have also seen how much Derrida is indebted to traditional transcendental philosophy which really starts here with Descartes' search for a “firm and permanent foundation.”' This time you can read Nietzsche's treatment of the cogito.
>'Simply, deconstruction is a criticism of ... the belief that existence is structured in terms of oppositions ... that ... are hierarchical, with one side of the opposition being more valuable than the other.' So not only did deconstruction flag us with its commitment to justice against violence, but it also seems to be beyond Good and Bad (those value judgements which when inverted by ressentiment came to be understood as Good and Evil)
>'The first phase of deconstruction attacks this belief by reversing ... hierarchies ... between the soul and body ... good and evil'. The latter surely negates itself then? The commitment to justice against violence is deconstructed, the opposition to hierarchy (Good and Bad) produces bad philosophy which can go home empty-handed.
>'we can see now the kind of thinking in which deconstruction engages. It is a kind of thinking that never finds itself at the end. Justice – this is undeniable – is impossible (perhaps justice is the “impossible”) and therefore it is necessary to make justice possible in countless ways.'

Fundamentally it seems dissenting, unwilling to play the the literary, philosophical and linguistic game by the existing rules. A kid crushing the all the sandcastles because his is the least beautiful. In the process the kid excuses himself with justifications that refute themselves.

Correct me if I'm wrong.

Found this, thought it would be nice for the thread

>The basic enterprise of contemporary literary criticism is actually quite simple. It is based on the observation that with a sufficient amount of clever handwaving and artful verbiage, you can interpret any piece of writing as a statement about anything at all. The broader movement that goes under the label "postmodernism" generalizes this principle from writing to all forms of human activity, though you have to be careful about applying this label, since a standard postmodernist tactic for ducking criticism is to try to stir up metaphysical confusion by questioning the very idea of labels and categories. "Deconstruction" is based on a specialization of the principle, in which a work is interpreted as a statement about itself, using a literary version of the same cheap trick that Kurt Gödel used to try to frighten mathematicians back in the thirties.

> Deconstruction, in particular, is a fairly formulaic process that hardly merits the commotion that it has generated. However, like hack writers or television producers, academics will use a formula if it does the job and they are not held to any higher standard (though perhaps Derrida can legitimately claim some credit for originality in inventing the formula in the first place). Just to clear up the mystery, here is the formula, step-by-step:

> -- Step 1 --
Select a work to be deconstructed. This is called a "text" and is generally a piece of text, though it need not be. It is very much within the lit crit mainstream to take something which is not text and call it a text. In fact, this can be a very useful thing to do, since it leaves the critic with broad discretion to define what it means to "read" it and thus a great deal of flexibility in interpretation. It also allows the literary critic to extend his reach beyond mere literature. However, the choice of text is actually one of the less important decisions you will need to make, since points are awarded on the basis of style and wit rather than substance, although more challenging works are valued for their greater potential for exercising cleverness. Thus you want to pick your text with an eye to the opportunities it will give you to be clever and convoluted, rather than whether the text has anything important to say or there is anything important to say about it. Generally speaking, obscure works are better than well known ones, though an acceptable alternative is to choose a text from the popular mass media, such as a Madonna video or the latest Danielle Steele novel. The text can be of any length, from the complete works of Louis L'Amour to a single sentence. For example, let's deconstruct the phrase, "John F. Kennedy was not a homosexual."

> -- Step 2 --
Decide what the text says. This can be whatever you want, although of course in the case of a text which actually consists of text it is easier if you pick something that it really does say. This is called "reading". I will read our example phrase as saying that John F. Kennedy was not a homosexual.

-- Step 3 --
Identify within the reading a distinction of some sort. This can be either something which is described or referred to by the text directly or it can be inferred from the presumed cultural context of a hypothetical reader. It is a convention of the genre to choose a duality, such as man/woman, good/evil, earth/sky, chocolate/vanilla, etc. In the case of our example, the obvious duality to pick is homosexual/heterosexual, though a really clever person might be able to find something else.

-- Step 4 --
Convert your chosen distinction into a "hierarchical opposition" by asserting that the text claims or presumes a particular primacy, superiority, privilege or importance to one side or the other of the distinction. Since it's pretty much arbitrary, you don't have to give a justification for this assertion unless you feel like it. Programmers and computer scientists may find the concept of a hierarchy consisting of only two elements to be a bit odd, but this appears to be an established tradition in literary criticism. Continuing our example, we can claim homophobia on the part of the society in which this sentence was uttered and therefor assert that it presumes superiority of heterosexuality over homosexuality.

-- Step 5 --
Derive another reading of the text, one in which it is interpreted as referring to itself. In particular, find a way to read it as a statement which contradicts or undermines either the original reading or the ordering of the hierarchical opposition (which amounts to the same thing). This is really the tricky part and is the key to the whole exercise. Pulling this off successfully may require a variety of techniques, though you get more style points for some techniques than for others. Fortunately, you have a wide range of intellectual tools at your disposal, which the rules allow you to use in literary criticism even though they would be frowned upon in engineering or the sciences. These include appeals to authority (you can even cite obscure authorities that nobody has heard of), reasoning from etymology, reasoning from puns, and a variety of other word games. You are allowed to use the word "problematic" as a noun. You are also allowed to pretend that the works of Freud present a correct model of human psychology and the works of Marx present a correct model of sociology and economics (it's not clear to me whether practitioners in the field actually believe Freud and Marx or if it's just a convention of the genre).

> You get maximum style points for being French. Since most of us aren't French, we don't qualify for this one, but we can still score almost as much by writing in French or citing French sources. However, it is difficult for even the most intense and unprincipled American academician writing in French to match the zen obliqueness of a native French literary critic. Least credit is given for a clear, rational argument which makes its case directly, though of course that is what I will do with our example since, being gainfully employed, I don't have to worry about graduation or tenure. And besides, I'm actually trying to communicate here. Here is a possible argument to go with our example:

>It is not generally claimed that John F. Kennedy was a homosexual. Since it is not an issue, why would anyone choose to explicitly declare that he was not a homosexual unless they wanted to make it an issue? Clearly, the reader is left with a question, a lingering doubt which had not previously been there. If the text had instead simply asked, "Was John F. Kennedy a homosexual?", the reader would simply answer, "No." and forget the matter. If it had simply declared, "John F. Kennedy was a homosexual.", it would have left the reader begging for further justification or argument to support the proposition. Phrasing it as a negative declaration, however, introduces the question in the reader's mind, exploiting society's homophobia to attack the reputation of the fallen President. What's more, the form makes it appear as if there is ongoing debate, further legitimizing the reader's entertainment of the question. Thus the text can be read as questioning the very assertion that it is making.

Another minor point, by the way, is that we don't say that we deconstruct the text but that the text deconstructs itself. This way it looks less like we are making things up.

Seems we are on a roll here. But I want to revert away from the few bits of STEM ressentiment your pasta has that my posts didn't. So for balance, a comprehensive history of "analytic philosophy":
>1. All philosophy has been analytic, from the beginning of philosophy (quite simply because that's what all philosophy, indeed all thought, consists of: analysis).
>2. Nietzsche arrives on the scene. Anglo-Saxons do not understand his analysis, ergo it is not analysis. Also, he made fun of them repeatedly for not being able to understand him. This at least they understood.
>3. Anglo-Saxons: "Screw the priggish continentals: We will make our OWN philosophy." (= "The continentals are mean to us, so we won't play with them anymore.")
>4. Wittgenstein's On Certainty. Illegible rubbish, but it set the tone for all future "analytic philosophy".
>5. No one pays attention to the Anglo-Saxons' illegible rubbish, while book sales and star status of the continentals (many of whom are charlatans indeed [as we have shown ITT] but at least not boring) are soaring.
>6. Finally Rorty turns around and proclaims the end of "analytic philosophy". "I wish I'd read less of our autistic bullshit and more novels instead."
>7. According to the Anglo-Saxons, then, novels are the culmination and ultimate expression of philosophy.
>8. And that's where Anglo-Saxon "analytic philosophy" stands to this day. Nothing more than a gigantic reaction movement to Nietzsche calling them names and making fun of them.

i feel like im getting memed here

why

i dunno, the nietzsche pics look suspicious

It has no merits, per se. It is a process of taking apart.

But there are many ways to take things apart. One is by smashing them, and is called destruction. Another is by carefully peeling back the outer shells until you arrive at a core, making sure to keep track of the artifacts in order to see how it all fit together in the first place.

The epistemological crisis is that with everything we deconstruct, there is no core.

So we deconstruct the process of deconstruction, arriving at a recursive paradox and finding the limits of our species, our technologies, our histories, and our selves.

It's cheap, yes. But it's also extremely costly to those who rely upon simplicity to build their being.

This is true, but Nietzsche is reddit fedora shitposting tier.

>This is true, but Nietzsche is reddit fedora shitposting tier.
How so?

>Have people well observed just how much a genuinely religious life requires an outward leisure ... with a good conscience, from time immemorial, from blood, to which the aristocratic feeling that work is dishonourable is not entirely foreign — that is, the feeling that work makes the soul and body coarse and thus that, as a result, the modern blaring, time-consuming industriousness, so proud of itself ... trains and prepares people precisely for “unbelief” more than for anything else? They just live too much apart and on the outside to find it necessary in such cases to conduct an argument with themselves for or against the matter. Among these indifferent people nowadays belongs the majority of German Protestants in the middle classes ... including most of the hard-working scholars and all the accessories of the university. The scholar succeeds only with the help of history in bringing to religion a reverent seriousness and a certain timid consideration. But even if his feelings about religion have managed to rise all the way to gratitude towards it, in his own person he hasn’t yet come a step closer to what still constitutes church and piety: perhaps the reverse is the case. How much naivete ... lies in this belief of the scholar in his own superiority, in the good conscience of his toleration, in the unsuspecting, unsophisticated certainty with which his instinct treats religious people as a less worthy and lower type, above whom he himself has grown up, out, and away from — the scholar, the small, presumptuous dwarf and member of the rabble, the diligent and nimble head-and-hand-worker of ... “modern ideas”!