A Critique and Analysis of Derrida’s Deconstruction Theory of Understanding Texts

Understanding texts has been an important issue in humanities and a major concern of scholars. Jacques Derrida propounded the deconstruction approach and thus created a new strand in this regard. Drawing on an intellectual infrastructure derived from Martin Heidegger’s ontology, he challenged the hermeneutics governing the views of Western philosophers. Moreover, he cast doubts over linguistic classifications and laws, such as signifier, signified, sign, distinction, logocentrism, and phonocentrism, and concludes that every signifier can signify different things. He takes the main obstacle to understanding texts to be the construction of the texts. Thus, he opposed the phenomenological views of Husserl, structuralist views of Levi Strauss, and Saussure’s semiotics without providing any scholarly or rational reason, concluding that given infinite signification of signs for one another, there will be the possibility of an every-signifying signifier from an always-absent signified. Thus, he concluded that it is impossible to arrive at a certain and true understanding of a text. In this paper, we have tried to critically analyze this theory with a descriptive-analytic method in intellectual-logical terms, and thus discuss its truth or falsity.