Peter Salmon - Breaking down deconstruction with Derrida

Novelist and biographer Peter Salmon, discusses deconstruction – the question the philosopher Jacques Derrida never wanted to answer.

About Peter Salmon "I’m a novelist and biographer. I recently wrote a biography of Jacques Derrida, the French philosopher, called An Event, Perhaps.

One of the great things about writing about Derrida was, like me, there were two things he was incredibly passionate about: literature and philosophy. In spending time with someone like Derrida, you learn to think more clearly, more deeply, about many things. Being able to write his biography was thrilling for that reason. I now have ways of looking at the world which I didn’t have before. Hopefully, the biography will help people get into those ways of looking at the world."

Key Points

• Deconstruction is not destruction; it’s investigating how something was constructed, whether it be a chair, religion, justice system or truth. • Derrida was a charismatic figure who had a reputation for being a relativist – someone who believes there’s no truth – but he argued against this position his entire life. He believed an absolute truth can’t be proven. • Derrida’s ideas were important in challenging unexamined assumptions of philosophy that defined humans, such as the white, heterosexual, middle-class male.

In fact, deconstruction has no opinion about whether truth ultimately exists. What it can say, like with God, is we can have faith in truth or we can have faith that there’s no truth, but we can’t prove it. Until then, we have to work with what we’ve got. We have to explore the way that the word ‘truth’ is used, what it does. We deconstruct it.

Now, all of us in our general lives actually do this. If I read a poem, I can say, how true it is. If a friend tells me that their boyfriend, girlfriend, husband, wife is terrible, I can say, that’s very true. If I do some sums, quadratic equations, I come up with an answer and say they’re true. I move between these registers of truth very easily. I don’t even think about it, unless perhaps I’m reading Derrida. So, that’s what Derrida’s trying to capture: the way that these terms are used, the way that we move between these registers. Derrida’s always trying to capture what it’s actually like to be alive. He thinks philosophers have got it wrong by trying to pin the butterfly, but he thinks they’re valid questions to ask and questions we should be asking. What we can’t come up with is a definitive answer to that.