When Life Began to Deconstruct Itself

From the Greek krisis and Heidegger’s Destruktion to Derrida, Caputo, and a New Life

In 1997, I bought a book with the curious title Deconstruction in a Nutshell. The book was edited and accompanied by a commentary by the American philosopher John D. Caputo, and was based on a conversation with Jacques Derrida at Villanova University in 1994. Caputo reads Derrida not primarily as a philosopher who tears things down, but as one who listens for what an established order excludes — what has not yet been allowed to speak. That hospitality toward what is to come would prove to concern me more deeply than I understood when I bought the book.

I bought it during a period when my life was beginning to change. I had recently developed Ménière’s disease. My hearing was impaired, my body was unsettled, and it had become difficult to continue working in frontline child welfare services. I was facing a transition from practical child welfare work to teaching social work.

It may be tempting to say that the illness forced me to change my life. But that is not quite right. Ménière’s disease was an external event and a bodily reality. It limited me and made certain forms of work more difficult. But the illness struck a life that already contained a tension. Nor was the difficult situation in child welfare the sole cause of what happened. For many years, I had faced demanding decisions. I had lived with responsibility, unease, and doubt.

Yet it was not the difficult cases that deconstructed my life.

The decision to change my life came from within.

Perhaps that was why Caputo’s book attracted me. I was not merely facing a change of profession. Something in the structure of the life I had built was beginning to loosen. I was still a social worker, but I could no longer be a social worker in the same way. I was not going to abandon my experiences from child welfare. I had to find another way of carrying them forward.

Loosening the Knots

The word “deconstruction” is not Greek. Derrida fashioned the French déconstruction partly to translate and transform Heidegger’s concepts of Destruktion and Abbau. He wanted a word that did not signify annihilation, but could describe a dismantling of inherited conceptual structures in order to understand how they had been constructed. He later explained this in his letter to the Japanese philosopher Toshihiko Izutsu.

Although the word is not Greek, the philosophical movement has a Greek prehistory.

The Greek verb analyein means to dissolve, loosen, or set free. It could be used of untying a knot, loosening woven threads, or preparing a ship to depart. Our word “analysis” comes from it. Originally, to analyse did not mean merely to divide something intellectually. It meant loosening connections so that something could move.

The image fits a life transition remarkably well. My life was not to be shattered. The knots had to be loosened. The connections between profession, identity, responsibility, and future had to be examined. Something had to be set free so that a new movement could begin.

Derrida nevertheless emphasises that deconstruction is not analysis in the ordinary sense. Analysis generally assumes that a whole can be divided until we reach its simplest and most fundamental components — a final point at which the dissolution ends. Derrida doubts that such final and indivisible components exist. The reason lies in what he calls différance: every sign, every concept, derives its meaning from what it differs from, while at the same time deferring any final, closed meaning. No knot can therefore be unravelled into one last, pure thread. Every meaning points onward to other meanings. Every explanation opens new questions.

Deconstruction therefore does not untie the knot once and for all. It shows that the knot was never as unambiguous as we imagined — that a difference and a deferral were always present in what we took to be a single thread.

Crisis and Decision

Another Greek word is krisis. It comes from krinein: to distinguish, judge, or decide. A crisis was originally a decisive turning point. Something had to be separated from something else. A decision had to be made.

I remember a particular moment from this period: sitting in a meeting in frontline services, unable to make out everything being said around the table because my hearing was failing, yet still having to make a decision that would directly affect a child’s life. There, in the gap between what I could no longer perceive and what I was still required to decide, the crisis was not an idea. It was a bodily limit against which I came up every day.

Ménière’s disease created such a crisis in my life. But that does not mean that the illness determined the outcome. It confronted me with a decision. I could not choose whether to be ill, but I could decide how I would live with what had happened.

Here, an interesting tension arises between my experience and Derrida’s philosophy. I say that I made a decision to change my life. At the same time, Derrida says that deconstruction is not an act performed from the outside by a sovereign subject. It is not a tool we take up and apply to a text, an institution, or a life. In the conversation at Villanova, he says that deconstruction is something that happens — and that it happens from within.

Does this mean that my decision was of no significance?

No. But the decision did not create the deconstruction. It was my response to it.

Something in my former life had already begun to lose its self-evidence. The relationship between my body, my work, and my future could no longer be held together in the same way. I had not set this process in motion through a philosophical method. I discovered that it was already under way.

The decision consisted in taking responsibility for what was in the process of happening.

Heidegger’s Positive Destruction

Derrida’s concept leads back to Martin Heidegger’s Destruktion. In § 6 of Being and Time, Heidegger describes the necessity of a “destruction of the history of ontology.” The purpose is not to reject the philosophical tradition. He wants to penetrate the layers of interpretation that have accumulated around its fundamental concepts, so that the experiences that once gave them meaning may emerge again. What has hardened into self-evidence must be led back to the experiences from which it arose.

Here, too, there is a connection to Greek philosophy. Heidegger attempted to return to the Greek question of Being, before that question had become a fixed system of concepts. He was especially concerned with alētheia, truth understood as unconcealment: not merely the correspondence between a proposition and a state of affairs, but an event in which something that has been hidden comes into view.

Derrida takes a further step beyond Heidegger. He does not believe that we can simply return to a pure origin preserved beneath the layers of tradition. The origin, too, is composite; nor does it stand outside the movement Derrida calls différance. Where Heidegger’s destruction seeks back toward the primordial experiences covered over by tradition, Derrida reminds us that these experiences, too, were never pure or unambiguous.

My own life transition can be understood in the light of both thinkers. The new was not added to my life from the outside. Through my work in child welfare, I had accumulated experiences of responsibility, judgement, power, help, guilt, and human dignity. In frontline services, I had to act — to make assessments and decisions, often under time pressure and without certainty about the consequences. Yet these experiences also contained questions that practical working conditions gave me neither the time nor the language to examine fully. What does it mean to help another human being? What happens when the helper must exercise power? How can we understand a person without reducing them to a case, a diagnosis, or a category? What kind of knowledge does social work require?

When I left frontline services and began to teach, I did not therefore leave child welfare behind. I carried those experiences back to the questions from which they had arisen — a Heideggerian Destruktion. But in Derrida’s spirit, this was not a return to a pure, original experience that I was finally able to see. Practice generated its own need for reflection, without that need being reducible to one final, certain point. The social worker already carried the teacher within. The teacher would later carry the researcher within. None of these layers cancelled the others; each pointed onward to the next.

It was not a foreign power that attacked my life. Life itself had created the questions that its old form could no longer answer. Deconstruction did not destroy what I had been. It revealed that I could become more than I had been until then.

Caputo’s Nutshell

The title Deconstruction in a Nutshell is, of course, ironic. Deconstruction cannot be enclosed in a nutshell. It cannot be summarised in a simple definition without that definition itself beginning to open.

Caputo’s strength lies in showing the affirmative side of deconstruction, the same hospitality I mentioned at the outset. Deconstruction does not merely say no to what exists. It works to keep the future open, and it examines which voices, possibilities, and experiences have been excluded from the established order — which questions a rigid life, a rigid text, or a rigid institution has left no room for. The book thus shows the connection between deconstruction and responsibility, justice, and what has not yet been allowed to speak.

When I bought the book in 1997, I could not know where this opening would lead. I was to teach social work. Later, I would conduct research, write a doctoral dissertation, and become a professor. The experiences from frontline services would follow me, but in new forms.

The old life did not disappear. It was read anew.

Perhaps this is also the difference between destruction and deconstruction. Destruction leaves ruins. Deconstruction asks what the ruins conceal, which materials can still be used, and which possibilities the former construction held back.

Ménière’s disease was no philosophical gift. The illness should not be romanticised. It exacted a price and imposed limitations. But it became part of the situation in which I had to listen to a movement that was already under way in my own life.

I did not buy Caputo’s book because it taught me how to deconstruct my life. I bought it because my life was already beginning to pose the question for which the book was trying to provide a language.

Deconstruction came from within.

But it required me to respond.