> "Charles Brown" <cbrown at michiganlegal.org> wrote:
>
> >What's the difference between "to deconstruct" and "to analyze " ?
>
Let's assume this is really a question.
Deconstruction, for one thing, is not a word that Derrida used often or liked. Of that, more anon.
But yes, deconstruction has an analytical moment. It is concerned with understanding things by taking them apart, little by little. But deconstruction--at least as Derrida practiced it--contains an irreducible ethical moment, in which, having understood the oppositions that give structure and meaning to a text, one displaces them. For a reason. All of Derrida's neologisms--differance, trace, parergon, dissemination, destinerrance, glas etc--are terms that he "keeps" in place of things displaced in his readings--for example, the privilege of speech over writing, the opposition between origin and structure, context and text, artwork and frame, telos and chance, etc.
So Derrida didn't often speak of deconstruction b/c he didn't see it as a procedure. I think, in his mind, he was someone who read, reread, and rewrote texts from different traditions. And I think he always followed the good advice Carrol got--he always looked at texts, paraphrased and used them in their strongest form. And he knew very well how to do traditional scholarship--read _Dissemination_ if you want proof of that.
Christian