From the Editors: To help make this mostly philosophical essay more practical, see if you can think of how the essay would respond to each of the following claims, which many of us have probably heard before in one form or another:
1) People defined "family" and "woman" as one thing only to maintain power for their view. These definitions are oppressive now.
2) The fix for violent language is not better communication but censorship.
3) Older documents and texts, like the Constitution, should evolve or be re-interpreted over time to adapt to societal changes.
Read our own thoughts on how the essay would respond to these claims at the end!
In section five of chapter three (“‘Reason’ in Philosophy”) of Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche complains that we have not yet gotten rid of God, because we still believe in grammar. Is Nietzsche, then, and not Derrida, the true father of deconstruction? Yes and no.
Nietzsche’s writings are foundational to both modernism and postmodernism. He helped initiate the deconstruction of—that is, the breakdown between—words (signifiers) and the meaning they refer to (signifieds). Nietzsche understood that as long as we believe that words like justice, truth, and goodness point beyond themselves to absolute (universal, transcendent) Justice, Truth, and Goodness, the supernatural becomes plausible, if not necessary.
