Poststructuralism & Deconstruction: Différance, Discourse & the Unstable Text

Différance (Derrida, Of Grammatology, 1967) combines two senses of the French 'différer': to differ (spatial — signs mean through difference from other signs) and to defer (temporal — meaning is always put off, never fully present). It is spelled with an 'a' rather than 'e' — indistinguishable in French speech, only visible in writing — enacting the argument that writing reveals what speech conceals. Différance shows that there is no fully present, self-identical meaning: the sign is always a play of differences and deferral.

Logocentrism is Derrida's term for the Western metaphysical tradition's assumption that meaning is grounded in a self-present origin — the Logos (reason, word, God, truth, consciousness). Logocentrism privileges presence over absence, speech over writing, identity over difference. Derrida's project is to show that this supposed origin is always already contaminated by différance — there is no transcendental signified, no pure presence to ground meaning.

In 'The Death of the Author' (1967), Barthes argues that once a text is written, the author's intentions are irrelevant to its meaning. A text is a 'tissue of quotations' from cultural codes, not the expression of an individual consciousness. Meaning is produced not by the author but by the reader: 'The birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.' This challenges the New Critical 'intentional fallacy' from a different direction — not to privilege the text, but to open it to the plurality of reading.

In 'What is an Author?' (1969), Foucault argues that the 'author' is not a biographical individual but a discursive function — a regulatory and classificatory position produced by institutional practices. The author-function varies across discourse types (scientific vs literary) and historical periods. It attributes texts, establishes relationships between them, and controls the proliferation of meaning. Foucault asks: 'What difference does it make who is speaking?' — pointing toward analysis that does not depend on the authority of a subject.

The trace is Derrida's term for the structure by which every sign bears the mark of all the other signs it is not. Meaning depends not on any positive, self-present content within the sign but on the network of differences from absent others. There is no pure presence — every presence is inhabited by the trace of what it is not. The trace is the residue of absence within presence: it is never itself fully present, always the mark of something that was never simply present.

In S/Z (1970), Barthes distinguishes: the readerly text (lisible) presents itself as consumable and assigns the reader a passive role — meaning is determinate, closure is achieved. The writerly text (scriptible) invites the reader to produce meaning actively — it is open, plural, resistant to closure. Barthes prefers the writerly, and argues that even classic 'readerly' texts (like Balzac's Sarrasine, which he reads in S/Z) are secretly writerly — traversed by multiple irreconcilable codes.

For Foucault, discourse is a historically specific system of statements, institutional practices, and power relations that produces knowledge and constitutes the objects and subjects it appears merely to describe. Discourse is not simply language — it is the regulated set of practices that determine what can be said, known, and thought in a given period. Discourse is always entangled with power: power produces knowledge, and knowledge produces power (pouvoir-savoir).

The supplement (Derrida, Of Grammatology, 1967) is a logical structure in which what is added to a supposedly complete thing reveals that the thing was never complete. Rousseau presents writing as a supplement to speech — but in doing so, reveals that speech needed supplementing, was never self-sufficient. The supplement both adds to and substitutes for what it supplements. This structure is everywhere in literary texts: the preface, the footnote, the sequel — each revealing the incompleteness of what it supplements.

The Yale School (1970s–80s) consists of Paul de Man (Allegories of Reading, 1979 — rhetorical reading, resistance to theory), J. Hillis Miller (undecidability in Victorian fiction, ethics of reading), Geoffrey Hartman (Saving the Text, 1981 — literary criticism as creative writing), and Harold Bloom (anxiety of influence — loosely associated). Derrida himself taught at Yale and his presence was central. The Yale School developed American Deconstruction as a practice of close literary reading.

Aporia (from Greek: without passage) is the moment in a deconstructive reading when a text reaches an impasse — when the very concepts it uses to establish a hierarchy or argument turn out to have been contaminated by what they were meant to exclude. The aporia is not a flaw to be resolved but the fundamental condition exposed by rigorous reading. Paul de Man argued that all literary language is aporetic — caught between rhetorical and grammatical registers that cannot be decided.

Derrida argues in Of Grammatology that Saussure's treatment of writing as secondary, derivative, and external to speech is a form of phonocentrism — the logocentric assumption that speech is closer to 'presence' and therefore to meaning. But Derrida shows that Saussure's own definition of the sign (meaning through difference, not positive content) undermines this hierarchy: if signs mean through difference, then the structure of 'writing' — spacing, absence, iteration — is already inside speech. Writing is not secondary to speech; arche-writing is the condition of possibility of both.

In Discipline and Punish (1975), Foucault analyses Jeremy Bentham's panopticon — a prison design with a central observation tower from which all cells are visible but in which inmates cannot see whether they are being watched. The panopticon produces discipline through the internalisation of surveillance: subjects regulate themselves because they might be watched. Foucault extends this as a metaphor for modern power — the school, hospital, factory, and military all operate through similar mechanisms of normalisation, examination, and hierarchical observation.

Arche-writing is Derrida's term for a writing more primordial than the opposition between speech and writing. It designates the structure of différance itself — the spacing, deferral, and absence that makes all language possible. Arche-writing is not ordinary writing (marks on paper) but the condition of possibility of both speech and ordinary writing: the structure of the trace, the play of differences, the absence of any self-present origin. Derrida argues that what is usually called 'writing' reveals this structure most clearly — which is why the metaphysics of presence tries to suppress it.

Gayatri Spivak translated Derrida's Of Grammatology into English (1976), introducing Deconstruction to the Anglo-American academy through her landmark 'Translator's Preface' — itself a deconstructive reading. She subsequently developed a postcolonial deconstruction — using Derrida's tools to analyse the construction of the 'subaltern' in colonial and postcolonial discourse. Her essay 'Can the Subaltern Speak?' (1988) is the most important application of poststructuralism to postcolonial questions.

In 'The Resistance to Theory' (1982), de Man argues that the resistance to literary theory is itself a theoretical position — driven by the fear of what rigorous reading would reveal about the rhetorical, non-referential character of language. Theory threatens to expose that literature does not represent reality transparently but operates through rhetorical figures (metaphor, irony, metonymy) that cannot be grounded in reference. The resistance to this insight is part of the ideological function of literary education.