Deconstruction, on its own terms, is a very complex and interesting way of working with words which, in the end, yields whatever the strong reader is able to conjure from his own most profound commitments sans whatever she suspects of being construed to privilege some suspect or alien authority. It is, in short, intrinsically interesting and useful in displaying the deep prejudices of those who practice it, and unfortunately, except for those who practice it to the point of radical commitment to a really true, good, and beautiful Cause–thereby ceasing to be deconstructive critics–ultimately useless.
I am sad to say I probably devoted too much of my life to demonstrating my acuity with this method, and happy to say I really did fight “out the other end” into what lies beyond words, the grace of my baptism propelling me through fidelity to the Word into discovering its coordinate Sacrament. And I am happy to say that deep familiarity with this way of reading and writing is often very useful in the intellectual climate of late modernity (however much I may find fault with them, no good Marxist, existentialist, or post-structuralist is wrong about everything; and in fact there are insights I cannot imagine gleaning without them). In fact, I cannot easily imagine how, without passing through the forest of deconstruction, I could have reached the gleaming city we never dreamed of on the plains where I grew up. So I am grateful for this wasting and wandering, for it led me here.
Still, I think it is important to note that, from the perspective I have adopted since encountering the profound truth of the Real Presence of Jesus Christ in the Eucharist–the mystery called “transubstantiation”–the basic “moves” of [the] deconstruction [of the logocentrism of the Western metaphysical tradition] are all encumbered with a too-easy acceptance of an Enlightenment depiction of knowing as typical of the Western tradition, itself based on an invisible assumption that the erroneous tradition past St. Thomas Aquinas is typical of the whole of that tradition (including Thomas). I can hint a genealogy of the error quite briefly, in fact:
/1/ Misread “A is either already actual A; is potential A becoming actual A; or is non-A” as “A is either A or non-A”
/2/ Misidentify “non-A” as a substantive opposite to “A” (exclude indeterminacy and assert the contrary as strictly necessary for conceivability, so that to know light we need dark, to know pleasure we need pain, etc.)
/3/ Notice that mundane experience of qualities is never strictly polar (that is, we don’t experience pure-light-without-darkness or pure-pain-with-no-pleasure)
/4/ Decide substantive non-A and A are not necessarily realities, but names applied to our responses to reality (the effects of sun and candle are “light” and “heat” which we seek to relieve “dark” and “cold”)
/5/ Observe that the order of assigning the names “A” or “non-A” to experiences should be arbitrary (i.e., one could just as easily say that “dark” and “cold” are effects we seek to relieve “light” and “heat”)
/6/ Observe that the names “A” and “non-A” thus construed tell us more about our habits of naming our responses than about reality
/7/ Methodically arrange similarities in our habits of naming to characterize the “privileged” terms (light, heat, whiteness, fair skin / dark, cold, blackness, dark skin)
/8/ Strategically observe elements of indeterminacy and becoming revealed by the gap between the apparently polar “A” and “non-A” and the mundane experience of qualities (voila différance! so Africa is warmer, and darkness absorbs light but expresses heat, and fair skin is pinkish and reddens when reflecting most light, and pigment values are ordered differently than spectral values, etc.)
Deconstruction in the sense used in certain forms of post-structuralist critique is #8, and closely follows from the structuralist/semiotic moves #6 and #7, and absolutely depends on the nominalist/voluntarist moves #4 and #5. One can argue significantly about the exact ordering of #2, #3, and #4 (and that argument is most of the history of modern Western metaphysics).
Note well that no one is compelled to take all of these steps by logic, though some appear to be the only reasonable response to the previous steps. And note especially that it is entirely possible to take all of these steps without ever directly attacking the principle of non-contradiction, that “A is not non-A” (roughly). Indeed, most efforts to defend the principle of non-contradiction fail to gain traction because, on the one hand, they tend to assume at least #1, and generally almost all of #1-5, while failing to note that #8 does not necessitate a PNC violation, but sidesteps it (and thus successfuly subverts logic that takes #1 plus PNC as foundational).
Note, then, two criticisms inherent in this arrangement: First, that what is restored in #8 was excluded in #1 and #2; any system of thought which does not participate in this initial exclusion would not necessarily be subject to deconstruction (or at least not on the terms proposed by the tradition through Derrida). Second, that the “gap” through which these excluded elements demanded restoration, established by #2-5, is not universally characteristic of human thought, Western thought, or even modern Western thought.
To the extent that deconstruction helps us to “probe” and “sift” definite but mistaken ways of working with words, it has some potential for goodness, truth, and beauty–but that potential can only be realized when we leave the ground that makes deconstruction possible in the first place.