Deconstruction, deconstructed

Thank you for the flowers and the book by Derrida
But I must be getting back to dear Antarctica
_{— The Weakerthans, “Our Retired Explorer (Dines With Michel Foucault In Paris, 1961)}

The death of Jacques Derrida is nothing more than a reason for me to quote The Weakerthans, and more reason than I generally need. But it’s interesting that in all the blather about deconstruction over the years — the deep desire to apply it to things that it had no relationship to, and the deep desire to deny that it was true in any way — the essential truth of its central concept has been missed. In simplest terms, it’s that you can’t trust the text — but when applied to older texts, histories, language that is no longer in fashion, etc., deconstructionism is a needed reminder that we’ve lost the context in which these writings have been created, and to truly understand the text requires either huge scholarly effort (which itself can be suspect), or may be impossible. For instance, when reading Ben Franklin, can we really tell when his tongue is in his cheek? Do all those footnoted passages in Shakespeare mean what the footnoters tell us they mean? Even books and movies from the last century can leave us scratching our heads at times, wondering what the phrases meant.

But mostly it’s a reason to quote The Weakerthans.