French Theory Of Deconstruction

In the late 1970s and 1980s, the philosophical, literary,  and social theories of a disparate group of French thinkers arrived on American shores.

In universities, their work caused a sensation and thanks to the infatuation from students, those intellectuals achieved an improbable level of fame and became unlikely celebrities. Their corpus was naturally dubbed “French theory”. Among them was Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard, Gilles Deleuze, etc. 

At the core of their philosophy is the concept of deconstruction.  First developed by Jacques Derrida, and defined as a challenge to the assumptions of Western culture, the radicalization of a certain spirit of Marxism. 

Deconstruction is the attempt, through a close evaluation of the language and the logic of philosophical and literary texts, to question fundamental conceptual distinctions, oppositions, and binary categories (man/woman, body/spirit, nature/culture, etc.).  Deconstruction constitutes the ways of thinking traditionally in Western philosophy.

In the 1980s, this concept was translated into more general and radical theoretical enterprises in diverse areas of the humanities and social sciences (psychoanalysis, anthropology, theology, feminism…) to question the objective truth.

The postmodern philosophers of the French theory argued that certain aspects of reality are socially constructed through narrative and language; therefore, the truth is subjective, and results from a consensus i.e. does not exist objectively. 

According to this paradigm, everything is a social construction, storytelling enforced by the dominant (oppressor) group. As such, science, via the concept of rationality, impose a viewpoint, the viewpoint of the domineering individuals. In a similar fashion, gender, rather than being intrinsically related to biological factors, is defined as a cultural and historical social construction that can be deconstructed.

In short, the differences between male and female are not natural but have been created by the western culture. The French writer and philosopher Simone de Beauvoir summarized this idea in her feminist essay “The Second Sex” with the slogan “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman” (on ne naît pas femme : on le devient).

De Beauvoir’s feminism considers being a woman not as a “natural state” defined by biological and psychological attributes but as the result of history, culture, and political construction.

In her existentialism philosophy existence precedes essence (i.e. the existence, the mere fact of its being, is more fundamental and immutable than the essence, the nature of a thing/person).  Femininity and womanhood are determined, created by history, and not inherent to women.

This conception paved the way for gender study and gender identity, understood as a personal sense and identification of gender. By this definition, sex is “assigned” at birth and an individual may decide to identify with a different sex or fluctuate between genders at various times during life.

De Beauvoir’s philosophy, and other deconstruction ideologies, is an anti-essentialism. It is an apex egalitarianism denying particularism. Indeed, since gender is a social construct, there are no specificities and qualities intrinsically feminine or masculine. Everything is acquired, nothing is innate: Individuals are interchangeable.

Subsequent to the postmodern deconstruction, in principle, individuals in western societies should undergo a liberator reconstruction. However, far from being emancipatory, the reconstruction happened to be a submission to the market. The mercantile fever inherent in the neoliberal capitalist system offered a playground to deconstructed individuals.

For example, fundamentally, Simone de Beauvoir proposed emancipation from the acceptance of roles socially assigned to women (the “immanence”) by acceding to the “transcendence”, the opposing male lot: active, creative, productive, powerful, extending outward into the external universe.

In other words, women’s freedom from oppression implies mimicking manliness rather than asserting a unique idea of feminine identity. Therefore, her doctrine ironically inferred that the submission to masculinity is liberating. And eventually, thanks to technological progress, transgenderism has offered to depressed teen girls the opportunity to change gender, to become a man: the emancipation via life altering operation.

In the UK for instance, the referral figures show that the majority (72%) of the people transitioning in 2017/2018 were female at birth (1,806 of the 2,519 referrals) which is over 25 times more than 10 years ago.  In short, nowadays, more girls under 35 years old want to change sex than boys of the same age.

No doubt that the cost of the procedures, puberty blockers, plastic surgery, drugs and hormones required to sustain the transition all lifelong, are a source of steady profits for clinics and pharmaceutical companies.

Transgenderism is only one of the many examples of a big industry hidden behind the supposed quest for emancipation promoted by the deconstruction doctrine of the French theory philosophers. Ultimately, deconstruction only served to advance economic liberalism in the name of individual freedom. Deconstruction has led to the submission to neo-capitalism under the guise of liberation from presumed oppression. 

Deconstruction of “the being” instituted the reconstruction by “the having”.