If all understanding is in constant motion and therefore potential contradiction, can we truly attain knowledge...

Take the redpill. Turn your eyes away from reality and instead look at the answer that is most convenient to you and your problems.

which?

The best, final way to understand and assess deconstruction and poststructuralism is that it's politically-motivated.

It's a kind of French and Jewish intellectual radicalist means to nitpick and undo any belief or norm or given idea or structure. Obviously the motivation here is leftist and atheistic.

The thing is, this expressed itself in a seemingly cool, kind of sacrilegious way in the 70s and 80s, but as it became the norm in academic humanities by the 90s, it became a corrosive mechanism that reduced everything to texts and constructs, and every reading in terms of only class/race/gender/sex, which is simplistic and boring. This is what Harold Bloom criticizes it so much for doing.

It also, perversely, revealed its true intentions, in that while it was supposed to be about undermining all structure and narratives/meaning... arriving by the 90s (in certain more interesting areas) of it at going past meaning and arriving more at presence... for the most part that apolitical and un-narrative conclusion was overlooked and deconstruction/post-structuralism's underlying political intention came to the fore and it flipped from being about tearing down narrative to in effect erecting and enforcing them. This is the "discourse" and identity politics and its various expressions that we have today. Which rather than encouraging some honest criticality, ignores that idea that everything was supposedly a social-construct and asserts some importance and primacy of certain social concerns and causes, and demands, without any real authority or argument to back it up, that you get onboard or face punishment.

Or, I meant to conclude, that while deconstruction ultimately is used by left academics to undermine beliefs or structures the left wants to attack, they don't use this critical mechanism on their own social constructs, structures, or causes.

It basically comes down to being able to say that anything you don't like is a "social construct"... but conveniently forgetting to make such an argument when it concerns your own movement and its supposed moral authority (which, if moral authority has been deconstructed supposedly, where do you get off pretending to have any?)

There is some left reflective deconstructive work. Specters of Marx comes to mind. And there must certainly be something out there about all the ideological conceit of social justice thinking in recent years.

In hindsight it's a terrible fucking idea.

History is just a narrative fiction, you knooooow
>Even the lolocaust?
Science is just ideology, you knooooow
>Even heliocentrism and evolution?

They seem under the impression that such instruments of scepsis will be forever the exclusive property of only one side of the political spectrum.

For example here's Foucault in Power/Knowledge on his work as a historian and scholar:
>I am well aware that I have never written anything but fictions. I do not mean to say, however, that truth is therefore absent. It seems to me that the possibility exists for fiction to function in truth. One fictions history on the basis of a political reality that makes it true, one fictions a politics not yet in existence on the basis of a historical truth.

Deconstruction is definitely usable as a tool to talk about the Holocaust's function as an ideology and as a narrative that is as distorted as anything else.

If you don't believe science is becoming an ideology just take a quick glance at reddit. Scientific proofs can be true, but the consequence of unwavering faith in a bastardized view of science, "scientism," is something else.

It's not the denial of the possibility of fact. It's an exploration of how facts transform into untrustworthy narrative because society is untrustworthy.

It's usable in that way, for anything (not that it is the final authority or can actually undermine just anything) but it can say something about where there ARE narratives in place and how to look over them (although I'd disagree with poststructuralists that some narratives aren't necessarily natural or even 'true', that there aren't certain recurring patterns)

But this idea that language / text is the end-all and there is no real beyond that is just a lie and I believe a cynical strategy that radicals thought would work to dismantle previous norms.

What do you mean by
>all understanding is in constant motion
?

Does post-modernism work in the same way?

I'm still at the greeks so I wouldn't know.

That's what postmodern theory is: deconstruction and poststructuralism and then all the social constructionist identity politics that follow from it that we have annoying us at the moment.

I'd say that postmodernism is outmoded now, although a number of its superficial features people might still see in the landscape now and mistake our time for being postmodern.

(there's always overlap, but we're definitely at a point that on several levels there are moves away from it, but of course there are still those still acting from its presumptions, as in the case of SJWs)

Derrida is universally accepted as a dishonest hack, even by those who aren't politically opposed.

Yeah because no one before Kant came to that conclusion lmao

Neat.

I've enjoyed your posts.

Wanted you to know. Thanks

Deconstruction has been occuring as a process (though maybe not an ideology) since the Greeks. Especially during Romanticism.

You are easily impressionable

bumping in hope of a bibliography, however small, to this end

>Deconstruction is definitely usable as a tool to talk about the Holocaust's function as an ideology and as a narrative that is as distorted as anything else.

Baudrillard did just this when he referred to the Holocaust as hyperreal, in reference to the late 70s TV series, although I doubt he would refer to what he did as "deconstruction".

No. You cannot know nuffin.

So it is a fancy word for a truism?

this is completely wrong and you have never read derrida. read rogues you fucking uncultured swine.

>History is just a narrative fiction, you knooooow
derrida never. ever says that.

>Science is just ideology, you knooooow
derrida gave a year long lecture course on biology. not philosophy of biology. biology biology.

why does Veeky Forums continually assure itself that its uninformed shitty opinions are actually worthwhile? fucking christ

Did you just post a fucking school of life video

>intellectual radicalist means to nitpick and undo any belief or norm or given idea or structure.

confirmed for never having read a single word of derrida

your blatantly wikipedia cherry picked appraisal of deconstruction which misappraises it as a method of postmodern thought is postmodern exhaustion and flattening of thought par excellence. you're a nincompoop

there are only a handful of people in this thread who've read derrida. they do not appear in the top half

deconstruction isn't a technique, it's a property of representation