Chapter 22 An Immense Power The Three Phenomenological Insights Supporting Derridean Deconstruction Leonard Lawlor Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) is the founder of the method and philosophy that he called “deconstruction.” He developed deconstruction from Heidegger’s idea of a destruction in Being and Time (Heidegger 2010: 19–25, §6) and Husserl’s idea of a dismantling in Experience and Judgment (Husserl 1973: 41–6, §10). 1 For Derrida, deconstruction’s criticisms always target conceptual hierarchies, which might be classiied as metaphysical or as political. In general, the hierarchies revolve around the dichotomy between life and death; presence and non-presence; speech and writing; and, more in the ethico-political domain, between non-violence and violence (or between peace and war). In his earliest formulation of deconstruction (at the end of the 1960s), Derrida says that deconstruction consists in two phases (Derrida 1978b: 41–2). In the irst phase, deconstruction attempts to show how the inferior, unprivileged, and deriva- tive term in any given hierarchy in fact makes the superior, privileged, and original term possible. Derrida wants to show that what looks to be generated and dependent—death; non-presence; writing; and violence—makes the origin or the arche possible. Death, non-presence, writing, and violence make life, presence, speech, and peace possible. he irst phase of deconstruction is therefore a phase of reversal. he reversal always takes place by means of classical argumentation concerning presuppositions. he second phase extends the investigations into presuppositions. It attempts to determine what makes the hierarchy itself possible in the irst place. It investigates what is more original than the opposition between origin and derivative. In the second phase, deconstruction goes to the very “root,” as Derrida says in this early period, of the hierarchy. However, even though it is more original than the origin, this “root” is not a uniied origin. It is the 1 For the connection of Derridean deconstruction to Heidegger’s idea of destruction, see Derrida 2013. OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRSTPROOFS, Mon Feb 12 2018, NEWGEN 9780198755340_Book.indb 412 23-Feb-18 12:50:10 PM