The critical difference: Deconstruction and postmodernism

Abstract

Summary Although deconstruction seems, at first sight, to be a variety of postmodernism, the matter is not that simple. This article attempts to show that, certain similarities notwithstanding, Derridean deconstruction and postmodernism differ in important respects. It therefore first reconstructs the emergence of deconstruction from Derrida's “critique” of Husserl's transcendental phenomenology, in the course of which the role played by the problematical status of the written sign and of temporality in Derrida's reading of Husserl is emphasized and linked to the far‐reaching spatio‐temporal implications of différance. In the discussion that follows, postmodernism is placed within the larger conceptual context of modernity, postmodernity, and modernism. The question of modernity's viability is shown to be appraised in divergent ways from the perspectives of philosophical modernism (Haber‐mas) and postmodernism (Lyotard), respectively. With the aid of Johnston the affinity of deconstruction with literary/artistic postmodernism is subsequently explored in preparation for the final stage of the argument, in which deconstruction's decisive irreconcilability with postmodernism (and modernism) is demonstrated. This is done in terms of Allan Megill's notion of crisis, formulated with reference to Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault and Derrida, and centres on the latter's attack upon the idea of crisis, presupposed by postmodernism as well as modernism.