Deconstruction

Hotel Bar Sessions

The HBS hosts dig into Jacque Derrida's philosophy to see if it really is responsible for everything that's wrong with the world.

There are very few philosophies that are blamed for so much as deconstruction. Introduced by Jacques Derrida in the late 60s, deconstruction rose to popularity in the late 70s and 80s, fought a real battle to be accepted as something other than a “fad” in the early 90s, and really built up steam in the late 90s, after having been adopted by other humanities disciplines as a method of analysis and exposition. However, by the end of the 21st century aughts, deconstruction was already being edged out of favor by many of its critics and some of its heirs.

Today, in 2024, deconstruction has been refigured and disfigured so dramatically that it has become a chimera. One of its faces is reductive and banal, but mostly harmless, as seen in so-called “deconstructed” dishes or clothing on reality TV. The other face, though, is hyperbolically menacing: distorting reality, poisoning discourse, undermining traditional values, and sneakily turning all of us into nonsense-babbling relativists.

So what is deconstruction all about?

Full episode notes available at this link:
https://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/episode-122-deconstruction

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