Tag Archives: George W. Bush

Reconstruction, Concerning “Deconstruction”

Historically and biographically, this poem is a kind of meeting of two events. The first is the destruction of the Twin Towers. The second is my being in graduate school and reading various literary/philosophical theorists. I wasn’t actually reading Jacques Derrida, the philosopher mostly responsible for the practice and theory of deconstruction.  His ideas, as least in the simple form that I understand them, have permeated a lot of other writers’ thoughts. In very simple form, deconstruction as a theory postulates that all language self-contradicts, that it puts off or defers meaning.   In my simple way, I look at language as being like the yin/yang symbol in which the dark area contains a speck of white and the white area contains a speck of black. Words contain their own contradictions.   We humans hate or distrust in Others that which we have in ourselves—we force others to carry our own personal disgust by demonizing  or stereotyping others Continue reading