We all are used to given advices to find out our own way. No one can teach us to look at what is at the center. Why? Answer is not quite simple as no one is at the equal place from where we are looking. Even if we are looking from same angle, there are always binary oppositions which cover so many centers. Moving one step ahead, everything is constructed including language itself. One might get surprise as we know language is something which differentiates to all of us social animals is having a unique identity due to our knowledge. We, Social animals transform the knowledge through language only. But yes! Language is not something which discovers binary oppositions in front of eyes but covers so many things which are unable to identify even for those who are subjugated.
Are you thinking what kind of hotchpotch I am talking about yet this is not what I am saying or trying to define as Derrida himself says he is not defying but differentiating! Overall it seems to aim for an engaged warmth rather than detached coolness.
There are thousands of love poems in which lover praise his/her lover and his/her beauty with comparison. Perhaps it seems too valuable to love but it doesn’t reflect or record. Thus, in this situation of being with, it decentered universe in which by definition we cannot know where we are, since all the concepts which previously defined the center and yet also the margins which need to have been ‘deconstructed’ or ‘undermined’.
For example, let’s try to read Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18, which seems to be written as a love poem or nature poem but initial question is that is it really same as we are seen or there is something deeply covered intentionally and yet difficult to distinguish, even to look at!
Sonnet 18 is been dramatized very interestingly in power structure.
There are implied threats also.
As Nietzsche says,
‘There are no facts, only interpretations.’
Dr. Barad sir has introduced Light Board or Glass Board and has explained this deconstructive Reding of Shakespeare's Sonnet 18. It can also be called a new experiment in this pistiling of Covid19. To watch his video, click here:
If someone ask, why this type of reading can be considered as a deconstructive? Answer is quite simple that deconstructive writing itself, by contrast, tends to be much more emotive. Without having any kind of doubt, Shakespearean sonnet 18 is emotional, even tone is urgent and euphoric.
Title of this poem ‘Shall I compare thee to summer’s day?’ contains a bit pun and illusions, and often the central line of the argument is based on free play or word play of some kind. This is fixed on some ‘material’ aspect of language.
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date;
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;
Metaphors used by poet are also illusionary.
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Even very first line of the poem, if we see what ‘I’ mean or in a manner of speaking ‘there is the same underlying sense that is in control of linguistic system.
After all, language is an orderly system, not a chaotic one, so realizing our dependence upon it need not induce our intellectual despair.
Thus, deconstructive reading aims to produce disunity, to show that what had looked unity and coherence actually contains contradictions and conflicts which the text and here as we looked at sonnet cannot stabilize and contain.
At very last, is easy to see why this process might be called reading against the grain, it is misleading too sometimes that the poem has an obvious scrap or over meaning which we have merely to regularly counteract.. Reading this poem is shown and of course odds with each other. So, ‘reading the text against itself’ produces a sense of disunity, of a text and here as we looked at poem, engaged in.
