Deconstruction is a loosely-defined set of approaches to understanding the relationship between text and meaning. The concept of deconstruction was introduced by the philosopher Jacques Derrida, who described it as a turn away from Platonism's ideas of "true" forms and essences which are valued above appearances.
Literary theory is the systematic study of the nature of literature and of the methods for literary analysis. Since the 19th century, literary scholarship includes literary theory and considerations of intellectual history, moral philosophy, social philosophy, and interdisciplinary themes relevant to how people interpret meaning. In the humanities in modern academia, the latter style of literary scholarship is an offshoot of post-structuralism. Consequently, the word theory became an umbrella term for scholarly approaches to reading texts, some of which are informed by strands of semiotics, cultural studies, philosophy of language, and continental philosophy.
Jacques Derrida was an Algerian-born French philosopher. He developed the philosophy of deconstruction, which he utilized in a number of his texts, and which was developed through close readings of the linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure and Husserlian and Heideggerian phenomenology. He is one of the major figures associated with post-structuralism and postmodern philosophy although he distanced himself from post-structuralism and disowned the word "postmodernity".
Hélène Cixous is a French writer, playwright and literary critic. During her academic career, she was primarily associated with the Centre universitaire de Vincennes, which she co-founded in 1969 and where she created the first centre of women's studies at a European university. Known for her experimental writing style and great versatility as a writer and thinker, she has written more than seventy books dealing with multiple genres: theatre, literary and feminist theory, art criticism, autobiography and poetic fiction.
Luce Irigaray is a Belgian-born French feminist, philosopher, linguist, psycholinguist, psychoanalyst, and cultural theorist who examines the uses and misuses of language in relation to women. Irigaray's first and most well known book, published in 1974, was Speculum of the Other Woman (1974), which analyzes the texts of Freud, Hegel, Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, and Kant through the lens of phallocentrism. Irigaray is the author of works analyzing many thinkers, including This Sex Which Is Not One (1977), which discusses Lacan's work as well as political economy; Elemental Passions (1982) can be read as a response to Merleau‐Ponty's article “The Intertwining—The Chiasm” in The Visible and the Invisible, and in The Forgetting of Air in Martin Heidegger (1999), Irigaray critiques Heidegger's emphasis on the element of earth as the ground of life and speech and his "oblivion" or forgetting of air.
In continental philosophy and psychoanalysis, jouissance is the transgression of a subject's regulation of pleasure. It is linked to the division and splitting of the subject involved, which spontaneously compels the subject to transgress the prohibitions imposed on enjoyment and to go beyond the pleasure principle. Beyond this limit, pleasure then becomes pain, before this initial "painful principle" develops into what Jacques Lacan called jouissance; it is suffering, epitomized in Lacan's remark about "the recoil imposed on everyone, in so far as it involves terrible promises, by the approach of jouissance as such". He also linked jouissance to the castration complex, and especially to the aggression of the death drives.
Écriture féminine, or "women's writing", is a term coined by French feminist and literary theorist Hélène Cixous in her 1975 essay "The Laugh of the Medusa". Cixous aimed to establish a genre of literary writing that deviates from traditional masculine styles of writing, one which examines the relationship between the cultural and psychological inscription of the female body and female difference in language and text. This strand of feminist literary theory originated in France in the early 1970s through the works of Cixous and other theorists including Luce Irigaray, Chantal Chawaf, Catherine Clément and Julia Kristeva, and has subsequently been expanded upon by writers such as psychoanalytic theorist Bracha Ettinger. who emerged in this field in the early 1990s,
"Logocentrism" is a term coined by the German philosopher Ludwig Klages in the early 1900s. It refers to the tradition of Western science and philosophy that regards words and language as a fundamental expression of an external reality. It holds the logos as epistemologically superior and that there is an original, irreducible object which the logos represent. According to logocentrism, the logos is the ideal representation of the Platonic ideal.
A binary opposition is a pair of related terms or concepts that are opposite in meaning. Binary opposition is the system of language and/or thought by which two theoretical opposites are strictly defined and set off against one another. It is the contrast between two mutually exclusive terms, such as on and off, up and down, left and right. Binary opposition is an important concept of structuralism, which sees such distinctions as fundamental to all language and thought. In structuralism, a binary opposition is seen as a fundamental organizer of human philosophy, culture, and language.
Phallocentrism is the ideology that the phallus, or male sexual organ, is the central element in the organization of the social world. Phallocentrism has been analyzed in literary criticism, psychoanalysis and psychology, linguistics, medicine and health care, and philosophy.
The Symbolic is the order in the unconscious that gives rise to subjectivity and bridges intersubjectivity between two subjects; an example is Jacques Lacan's idea of desire as the desire of the Other, maintained by the Symbolic's subjectification of the Other into speech. In the later psychoanalytic theory of Lacan, it is linked by the sinthome to the Imaginary and the Real.
Phonocentrism is the belief that sounds and speech are inherently superior to, or more primary than, written language or sign language. Those who espouse phonocentric views maintain that spoken language is the primary and most fundamental method of communication whereas writing is merely a derived method of capturing speech. Many also believe that spoken language is inherently richer and more intuitive than written language.
Trace is one of the most important concepts in Derridian deconstruction. In the 1960s, Jacques Derrida used this concept in two of his early books, namely Writing and Difference and Of Grammatology.
Indeterminacy in literature is a situation in which components of a text require the reader to make their own decisions about the text's meaning. This can occur if the text's ending does not provide full closure and there are still questions to be answered, or when "the language is such that the author’s original intention is not known". Baldick further describes the concept as "a principle of uncertainty invoked to deny the existence of any final or determinate meaning that could bring to an end the play of meaning between the elements of a text". Therefore, indeterminacy is the belief that it is not possible to decide entirely what a word means when used in a certain circumstance, so the meaning of the whole text must remain open to interpretation.
Catherine Malabou is a French philosopher. She is a Professor at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy (CRMEP) at Kingston University, at the European Graduate School, and in the department of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine, a position formerly held by Jacques Derrida.
Penis envy is a stage in Sigmund Freud's theory of female psychosexual development, in which young girls experience anxiety upon realization that they do not have a penis. Freud considered this realization a defining moment in a series of transitions toward a mature female sexuality. In Freudian theory, the penis envy stage begins the transition from attachment to the mother to competition with the mother for the attention and affection of the father. The young boy's realization that women do not have a penis is thought to result in castration anxiety.
This is a list of articles in continental philosophy.
Poststructural feminism is a branch of feminism that engages with insights from post-structuralist thought. Poststructural feminism emphasizes "the contingent and discursive nature of all identities", and in particular the social construction of gendered subjectivities.
"The Laugh of the Medusa" is an essay by French feminist critic Hélène Cixous. Originally written in French as "Le Rire de la Méduse" in 1975, a later revised version was translated into English by Paula Cohen and Keith Cohen in 1976. In the essay, Cixous issues an ultimatum: that women can either read and choose to stay trapped in their own bodies by a language that does not allow them to express themselves, or they can use the body as a way to communicate. She describes a writing style, écriture féminine, that she says attempts to move outside of the conventional rules found in patriarchal systems. She argues that écriture feminine allows women to address their needs by building strong self-narratives and identity. This text is situated in a history of feminist conversations that separated women because of their gender especially in terms of authorship. The "Laugh of the Medusa" addresses this rhetoric, writing on individuality and commanding women to use writing and the body as sources of power and inspiration.
