Deconstruction and political economy

pp. 150-178

in: Robert Albritton, Dialectics and deconstruction in political economy, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 1999

Abstract

"Deconstruction" is the most important and characteristic concept in Derrida's large and growing philosophical opus. Because it is a cluster concept that is capable of diverse forms, it has been picked up and widely disseminated throughout the corpus of postmodern thought, iterating indefinitely its protean potentials. In the process of usage, "deconstruction's' coinage has inflated, cheapening its value without reserve. And yet, unlike economic coinage, philosophical concepts can always be directly deflated to get at their less dilute usages. It is my intention to map the areas of strength and of limitations to deconstructivism.