Deconstruction: Overview and Critique

Abstract

Deconstruction is a post-structuralist, intellectual, and critical theory, formulated by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida in the 1960s. It is an approach to re-reading literary and philosophical given their multiple possible meanings. This article seeks to present a brief account of deconstruction: its epistemological roots of Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger, major concepts, tools. Then, it presents a critique of deconstruction, especially in the works of John Ellis and Abdel Aziz Hammouda. Furthermore, the article briefly refers to the impact of the deconstruction on the religious text (the Holy Qur'an and the Prophet's Sunnah), as some Arab secularists have laid particular stress on the application of this Western hermeneutics to Islamic texts. For them, it is deemed as a necessary step to ensure that the religious text remains open to many interpretations, and responds to different circumstances and conditions. The article argues that deconstruction, as a literary philosophical doctrine, has been born of Western modernity. And therefore, it does not seem appropriate to transform it into a civilization with different cultural and religious components.