Quotes About Deconstruction

As a kid, I remember taking apart whatever I could get my hands on.

Certainly, reading Post-Structuralist prose is a form of work, like jogging with a nail in your shoe.

We call this atomization after Einstein's reflection that if you deconstruct any challenge into its basic components, or atoms, and focus on solving them one at a time, even the largest challenge shifts from being overwhelming to being intellectually and psychologically solvable.

Civilisation once looked to art as the means of passing wisdom from one generation to the next. Writing itself was invented in part to convey the sacred: permanent things deserved a permanent place, hence the hieroglyphs on Egyptian tombs. But a modern civilisation that no longer believes in permanent things, one that accepts no certain narrative of meaning, resorts to deconstruction, not construction.

deconstructing a person is easier than constructing one.

an elevator. The doors of the elevator were gone, as were the cab and the lift mechanism, sold for reuse or for scrap.

Contextualism is only the flipside of logocentrism.

This is the history of un-art—the cultural productions that are not intended to convey beauty, not organized around the notion of singular genius expres- sion, not designed to sooth audiences and to confirm the order of things. Un-art comes to unmake worlds.

Non pas, tu t'en doutes, celle d'un retour en arrière aux Lumières, à la raison, à la république et à l'humanisme, ce qui n'aurait, je t'ai dit pourquoi, aucun sens, mais une tentative de les penser à nouveaux frais, non pas « comme avant », mais au contraire après et à la lumière de la déconstruction qui a eu lieu.

She wanted to get at the hate of them all, to pry at it and work at it until she found a little chink, and then pull out a pebble or a stone or a brick and then a part of the wall, and, once started, the whole edifice might roar down and be done away with. —RAY BRADBURY, THE ILLUSTRATED MAN

Taking a thing apart is always faster than putting something together. This is true of everything except marriage.

I like deconstructing things. I like cutting the legs out from under something that feels secret.

undid my knitting. All those little knots that you make one after another, row by row, to knit a sock, I undid them. It's easy. Take the needles out, a little tug and they just fall apart. One after another, row by row. I undid the extra heel and then I just kept going. The foot, the first heel, the ribbing of the leg. All those loops unraveling themselves as you pull the wool. Then there was nothing left to unravel, only a pile of crinkled blue wool in my lap.

There is nothing outside of the text.

Il n'y a pas de hors-texte.

In the act of tearing something apart, you lose its meaning.

It's like me, I wouldn' take the good ol' gospel that was just layin' there to my hand. I got to be pickin' at it until I got it all tore down.

Her task may be to deconstruct a moral order which is based on a heterosexual construction of reality, which organises not only categories of approved social and divine interactions but of economic ones too. The

I'm working on my own life story. I don't mean I'm putting it together; no, I'm taking it apart.

They are sceptical towards the claims of grand social theories or narratives, whether Marxist, liberal or Christian. There are no universal truths. They were used in the past to legitimate the power of those who know and deny power to those who do not know, and so should be criticised ('deconstructed').

Every so often a painter has to destroy painting. Cezanne did it. Picasso did it with cubism, then Pollock did it. He busted our idea of a picture all to hell. —Willem de Kooning

Who we're told to be carries the weight of history behind it. We may not like it but we better know it. Who we're told to be is no accident, but rather a purposeful construction of centuries of accumulated fear. Who we're told to be can be deliberately deconstructed.

My mother, whom I love dearly, has continually revised my life story within the context of a complicated family history that includes more than the usual share of divorce, step-children, dysfunction, and obfuscation. I've spent most of my adult life attempting to deconstruct that history and separate fact from fiction.

I shatter the objective universe around you—and all you can say is that there's an error in the formulation!" Excerpt From: Michael Frayn. "Copenhagen".