After the event

looking back on deconstruction

pp. 3-27

in: Mark Currie, The invention of deconstruction, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013

Abstract

If invention is the creation of something new, we must be looking back when we talk of the invention of deconstruction, from a position after the event. There are many discussions of the aftermath of deconstruction but not many historical retrospectives that look back on the invention, the period of emergence, of what was one of the most notorious intellectual movements of the twentieth century. This book offers this kind of hindsight on the invention of deconstruction, but it begins from the position that retrospect is, and perhaps always was, necessary for an understanding of deconstruction, and may even have been necessary at the time of its emergence. This means that retrospect might not in itself be the marker of completion or an indication that deconstruction has come to an end. It is, paradoxically, part of the history of its invention, and it follows that, as we look back on it, the process of invention may still be unfolding.