Deconstruction is a post-structuralist critical approach formulated by French philosopher Jacques Derrida in the late 1960s, designed to dismantle the absolute hierarchies and metaphysical certainties of Western philosophy and literature. Rejecting the idea that a text possesses a single, stable, foundational meaning, deconstruction exposes how language is inherently unstable, contradictory, and self-subverting. Through key conceptual tools such as différance, the critique of logocentrism, the dismantling of binary oppositions, and the identification of aporia, deconstructive reading reveals that meaning is perpetually deferred. Mastering Derrida’s deconstruction is essential for advanced literary scholarship and critical theory examinations.
1. Which French philosopher and literary theorist is recognized as the founder of deconstruction?
Correct Answer: b) Jacques Derrida
Explanation:
Jacques Derrida introduced deconstruction in the late 1960s, challenging traditional Western metaphysics and structuralism.
2. In what year did Jacques Derrida present his landmark lecture 'Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences' at Johns Hopkins University?
Correct Answer: a) 1966
Explanation:
Derrida presented this influential paper in 1966, marking a pivotal moment in the transition from structuralism to post-structuralism.
3. What does Derrida's neologism 'différance' primarily combine or signify?
Correct Answer: a) Difference and deferral
Explanation:
'Différance' plays on the French verb différer, meaning both to differ (distinguish) and to defer (postpone meaning indefinitely).
4. According to Derrida, what is 'logocentrism'?
Correct Answer: b) The Western philosophical tradition that privileges speech, presence, and an absolute foundational truth or 'Word' over writing
Explanation:
Logocentrism is the desire for an ultimate ground, principle, or presence that anchors all meaning and truth.
5. What is 'phonocentrism' in deconstructive theory?
Correct Answer: a) The bias favoring the spoken word over the written word as a truer signifier of immediate presence
Explanation:
Phonocentrism assumes speech brings us closer to thought and reality than writing, which Derrida seeks to deconstruct.
6. What does Derrida mean by the 'metaphysics of presence'?
Correct Answer: b) The philosophical craving for an immediate, self-authenticating reality, truth, or origin that is fully present to consciousness
Explanation:
Western metaphysics is built on the illusion that presence can be apprehended without mediation or representation.
7. What is 'deconstruction' primarily designed to do when applied to a text?
Correct Answer: b) To expose internal contradictions, instabilities, and binary oppositions, demonstrating that a text undermines its own intended unity
Explanation:
Deconstruction is not destruction; it is an analytical strategy that reveals how texts destabilize their own hierarchical claims.
8. Which of the following best describes a 'binary opposition' in deconstruction?
Correct Answer: b) A hierarchical pair of terms (e.g., speech/writing, male/female) where one term is privileged and the other is subordinated
Explanation:
Western thought relies on rigid binaries; deconstruction works to reverse and displace these hierarchies.
9. What is the first step in deconstructing a binary opposition?
Correct Answer: b) Reversal (inversion of the hierarchy)
Explanation:
Deconstruction begins by temporarily reversing the hierarchy (e.g., placing writing above speech) before moving to displacement.
10. What does Derrida mean by the term 'iterability'?
Correct Answer: a) The capacity of a sign to be repeated in new contexts while retaining its structural alterity and capacity for mutation
Explanation:
Iterability implies that signs can always be cited and detached from their original context, which alters their meaning.
11. What is an 'aporia' in deconstructive criticism?
Correct Answer: b) An impasse, paradox, or unresolvable logical contradiction within a text
Explanation:
An aporia is the point where a text breaks down or reaches a blind spot due to internal contradictions.
12. Which major book by Jacques Derrida, published in 1967, launched deconstruction and critiqued the history of Western philosophy?
Correct Answer: d) 'All of the above'
Explanation:
Derrida published all three of these seminal texts in 1967, establishing the theoretical framework of deconstruction.
13. What does Derrida mean by the famous statement 'Il n'y a pas de hors-texte' ('There is no outside-text')?
Correct Answer: b) Everything is mediated through language, discourse, and systems of representation, and we cannot access an unmediated 'reality' outside of textuality.
Explanation:
The phrase emphasizes that reality is always already inscribed within language and networks of signification.
14. What is 'supplementarity' according to Derrida's reading of Jean-Jacques Rousseau in 'Of Grammatology'?
Correct Answer: b) A dangerous supplement that both adds to and exposes a lack in the original, revealing that the original was never self-sufficient
Explanation:
The supplement is both extra and necessary, disturbing the clean boundary between original and copy.
15. Which term does Derrida use to describe concepts like 'pharmakon' that have contradictory meanings (both remedy and poison)?
Correct Answer: a) Undecidables
Explanation:
Undecidables are terms that resist closure within traditional binary logic, operating on both sides of an opposition.
16. In Derrida's essay 'Plato's Pharmacy', what does the Greek word 'pharmakon' represent?
Correct Answer: b) Both a cure/remedy and a poison/scapegoat, pointing to the instability of writing
Explanation:
Plato tries to expel writing as a poison, but Derrida shows how writing operates as both remedy and poison simultaneously.
17. What is the role of the 'center' in structuralism, according to Derrida's critique?
Correct Answer: a) The center organizes and limits the play of the structure while remaining exempt from structural play itself.
Explanation:
Derrida argues that structuralism relies on a transcendent center (like God, man, or origin) that anchors meaning.
18. What does Derrida mean by 'de-centering'?
Correct Answer: b) Dismantling the notion that a text, culture, or language possesses a fixed, absolute center or foundational truth
Explanation:
De-centering exposes the fact that the center is a construct, opening up an infinite 'play' of signification.
19. How does deconstruction view the author's intentionality?
Correct Answer: b) The author's intention cannot fully control language; texts always generate meanings, ambiguities, and contradictions beyond what the author consciously intended.
Explanation:
Because language exceeds individual consciousness, authorial intent is always split and unstable.
20. Which American university became the primary institutional stronghold for deconstructive literary criticism in the 1970s and 1980s?
Correct Answer: b) Yale University
Explanation:
The 'Yale School' of deconstruction included prominent critics such as Paul de Man, J. Hillis Miller, Geoffrey Hartman, and Harold Bloom.
21. Which prominent member of the Yale School wrote 'Blindness and Insight' and was later embroiled in controversy regarding his early wartime journalism?
Correct Answer: a) Paul de Man
Explanation:
Paul de Man was a brilliant deconstructive theorist whose posthumous revelation of wartime writings sparked intense debates about deconstruction and politics.
22. What is meant by 'reading against the grain' in deconstructive criticism?
Correct Answer: b) Interrogating a text to uncover its blind spots, suppressed assumptions, and moments where its rhetoric contradicts its explicit argument
Explanation:
Deconstructive reading looks past the smooth surface of the text to find where it unravels under its own weight.
23. What is the relationship between deconstruction and nihilism, according to Derrida's defenders?
Correct Answer: b) Deconstruction is not nihilistic; rather, it is an ethical engagement with alterity, justice, and the endless responsibility of interpretation.
Explanation:
Derrida repeatedly insisted that deconstruction is affirmative, opening up possibilities for justice rather than destroying meaning.
24. What does Derrida mean by 'trace' (trace)?
Correct Answer: b) The haunting presence of the absent other within any sign, indicating that meaning is never fully present but constituted by what it excludes
Explanation:
The trace is the mark of the absence of the other, showing that every identity is constituted by what it is not.
25. Which of Ferdinand de Saussure's linguistic concepts did Derrida critique and radicalize?
Correct Answer: b) The arbitrary relationship between the signifier and the signified
Explanation:
Derrida argued that Saussure's signifier does not lead to a stable signified, but rather to an endless chain of signifiers.
26. What is the 'endless chain of signifiers' in deconstruction?
Correct Answer: b) The continuous referral of meaning from one signifier to another without ever reaching an ultimate, foundational signified
Explanation:
Because meaning is always deferred, signifiers only point to other signifiers in an infinite semiosis.
27. How does deconstruction differ from New Criticism?
Correct Answer: a) New Criticism assumes a text has a unified, harmonious, organic meaning; deconstruction proves that texts are fractured, contradictory, and self-subverting.
Explanation:
While both practice close reading, New Critics seek unity, whereas deconstructionists seek division and instability.
28. What is the significance of the term 'erasure' (sous rature / under erasure) in Derrida's work?
Correct Answer: b) Using a term while crossing it out to indicate that it is inadequate yet necessary for philosophical discourse
Explanation:
Putting a word under erasure (like Being) shows that while it is conceptually flawed, we cannot think without it.
29. Which 19th-century philosopher heavily influenced Derrida's critique of metaphysics and truth?
Correct Answer: b) Friedrich Nietzsche
Explanation:
Nietzsche's critique of truth as a mobile army of metaphors was foundational for Derrida's deconstruction.
30. What does Derrida's critique of 'ethnocentrism' entail?
Correct Answer: b) Exposing how Western philosophy mistakes its own localized, logocentric traditions for universal human truth
Explanation:
Ethnocentrism assumes European metaphysics is the center of all human rationality.
31. What is meant by 'iterability' and context in Derrida's debate with J.L. Austin?
Correct Answer: a) Austin argued speech acts depend entirely on context and authorial intention; Derrida argued that text/utterance can always be cited out of context due to iterability.
Explanation:
This famous debate in 'Limited Inc' explored whether linguistic iteration shatters the purity of context.
32. Which term does Derrida use to describe the absolute foreignness or radical otherness of another person or text?
Correct Answer: a) Alterity (or the Other)
Explanation:
Alterity represents that which resists total assimilation into our conceptual systems.
33. What is the deconstructive view of history?
Correct Answer: b) History is not a grand, unified narrative with a single origin or goal, but a complex, fractured web of texts and discourses.
Explanation:
Deconstruction de-centers teleological and totalizing views of historical progress.
34. What does 'logocentrism' share with 'phallogocentrism'?
Correct Answer: a) Both privilege a central, authoritative standard (the Word / the phallus) as the foundation of meaning and power.
Explanation:
Phallogocentrism, a term feminist critics developed using Derridean insights, combines logocentrism with patriarchal privilege.
35. How does deconstruction approach literary genres?
Correct Answer: b) It demonstrates that genres always contaminate one another, exhibiting internal margins and exceptions that disrupt categorical purity.
Explanation:
In essays like 'The Law of Genre', Derrida shows how a text always participates in and exceeds its genre.
36. What is the function of rhetoric in deconstructive readings of philosophy?
Correct Answer: b) Philosophy relies entirely on metaphors and figurative language while pretending to be pure logic; deconstruction exposes philosophy's reliance on rhetoric.
Explanation:
Derrida shows that philosophical concepts are often dead metaphors whose figurative origins have been forgotten.
37. What is meant by 'bricolage' as discussed in Derrida's 'Structure, Sign, and Play'?
Correct Answer: b) Using whatever conceptual tools and cultural materials are available at hand to construct meaning, since there is no transcendent truth
Explanation:
Borrowed from Claude Lévi-Strauss, the bricoleur works with available materials without a master blueprint.
38. Which critic applied deconstruction to legal studies, founding the field of 'Law and Literature' and critical legal studies?
Correct Answer: b) Jacques Derrida (and scholars like Robert Cover / Drucilla Cornell)
Explanation:
Derrida's lectures on law and justice (such as 'Force of Law') deeply influenced legal theory.
39. What does Derrida argue about the concept of 'justice' in 'Force of Law'?
Correct Answer: b) Justice is an infinite, deconstructive experience that exceeds any codified law, remaining always to come ('à venir').
Explanation:
Law is calculative, but justice is an unconditional demand that exceeds calculation.
40. What is the deconstructive critique of structuralism?
Correct Answer: b) Structuralism tries to map stable systems and structures while relying on a hidden transcendental center that deconstruction exposes as a fiction.
Explanation:
Deconstruction emerges from structuralism by showing that structures lack a stable center.
41. What does Derrida mean when he calls the Western philosophical tradition 'phallogocentric'?
Correct Answer: a) It is centered on male authority and the illusion of absolute presence/truth.
Explanation:
The term merges logocentrism with patriarchal phallic privilege.
42. How does deconstruction view the distinction between literal and figurative language?
Correct Answer: b) The boundary between literal and figurative language collapses because all literal language is built on forgotten metaphors.
Explanation:
Deconstruction shows that what we call literal is simply a metaphor whose figurative nature has been naturalized.
43. What is the primary objective of a deconstructive critic when examining a literary text's metaphors?
Correct Answer: b) To show how the text's central metaphors undermine its own logical argument and reveal internal contradictions
Explanation:
Metaphors often carry unintended meanings that subvert the explicit thesis of the work.
44. Which term describes Derrida's method of reading texts by focusing on marginal details, footnotes, and throwaway remarks rather than central arguments?
Correct Answer: a) Marginal reading / Inversion of margin and center
Explanation:
Deconstruction often turns to the margins of a text to find the clues that dismantle the center.
45. What is the significance of the title of Derrida's book 'Margins of Philosophy'?
Correct Answer: b) It explores the borders, limits, and excluded margins where philosophical systems break down and expose their dependence on metaphor.
Explanation:
The book investigates what philosophy pushes to its margins in order to define itself.
46. How does deconstruction view identity and subjectivity?
Correct Answer: b) Identity is fractured, unstable, and constructed through language and difference, lacking an essential core.
Explanation:
Subjectivity is decentered and constituted through the play of différance.
47. What does Derrida argue in 'The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond'?
Correct Answer: b) The role of contingency, telecommunications, and missive destination in psychoanalysis and philosophy, showing that messages can always go astray
Explanation:
The post card illustrates iterability and the fact that a message does not necessarily reach its intended destination.
48. What is the deconstructive concept of 'hospitality' in Derrida's later ethical writings?
Correct Answer: b) An unconditional, radical opening to the absolute stranger/other without asking for identification or conditions
Explanation:
Unconditional hospitality demands welcoming the stranger without preconditions, colliding with conditional legal borders.
49. Which French feminist theorist critiqued and engaged with Derrida while formulating écriture féminine?
Correct Answer: d) Both a and c
Explanation:
Both Hélène Cixous and Julia Kristeva had a deep intellectual dialogue with Derrida, linking deconstruction to feminist theory and psychoanalysis.
50. What does Derrida mean by 'hauntology' in 'Specters of Marx'?
Correct Answer: b) A neologism replacing ontology, suggesting that being is always haunted by ghosts of the past, specters of history, and alternative futures
Explanation:
Hauntology disrupts the present by showing how it is constituted by ghostly inheritances and returns.
51. What is the primary critique leveled against deconstruction by traditional humanists?
Correct Answer: a) It promotes moral relativism, destroys literary value, and leads to intellectual despair.
Explanation:
Traditionalists often accused deconstruction of dismantling moral standards and rendering interpretation impossible.
52. How did Derrida respond to accusations that deconstruction means 'anything goes' in interpretation?
Correct Answer: b) He argued that deconstruction is rigorous, demanding careful textual analysis and paying strict attention to the internal constraints of language.
Explanation:
Derrida insisted that deconstruction is not arbitrary reading, but a rigorous accounting of textual details.
53. What role does 'reading' play in deconstructive theory?
Correct Answer: b) Reading is an active, productive encounter that exposes the text's internal aporias and generates multiple, shifting significations.
Explanation:
Deconstructive reading is an active engagement that uncovers the fissures within textual authority.
54. Which term describes Derrida's technique of examining how a text undoes its own assertions?
Correct Answer: a) Auto-deconstruction
Explanation:
Texts are viewed as self-deconstructing because language always produces contradictions beyond the author's control.
55. What is the relationship between deconstruction and psychoanalysis in Derrida's work?
Correct Answer: b> Derrida engaged heavily with Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan, analyzing the concept of the unconscious, repression, and the trace within the psyche.
Explanation:
Essays like 'Freud and the Scene of Writing' show Derrida's deep engagement with psychoanalytic theory.
56. What does Derrida mean by 'archive fever'?
Correct Answer: b) The compulsive desire to collect, store, and institutionalize memory and documents, driven by the fear of forgetting and the paradox of loss
Explanation:
In 'Archive Fever', Derrida explores the political and psychological structures of archiving and technological memory.
57. How does deconstruction view the concept of 'truth'?
Correct Answer: b) Truth is not a foundational presence, but a product of rhetorical systems, contingent agreements, and linguistic conventions.
Explanation:
Deconstruction challenges the metaphysical view of capital-T Truth.
58. What is the significance of the phrase 'there is nothing outside the text' in relation to the real world?
Correct Answer: b) It asserts that everything we know about the real world is mediated through language, signs, and cultural interpretation.
Explanation:
Derrida clarifies that he does not deny physical reality, but rather the possibility of accessing it unmediated by language.
59. Which prominent literary critic and theorist wrote 'Deconstruction: Theory and Practice' (1982), introducing deconstruction to wide academic audiences?
Correct Answer: c) Both a and b wrote major introductory texts on deconstruction
Explanation:
Both Christopher Norris ('Deconstruction: Theory and Practice') and Jonathan Culler ('On Deconstruction') wrote foundational guides.
60. What does Derrida's concept of 'animot' (animal) critique in philosophy?
Correct Answer: b) The philosophical tradition that lumps all diverse living non-human creatures under a single generalized category ('the animal'), ignoring their multiplicity and alterity
Explanation:
In 'The Animal That Therefore I Am', Derrida deconstructs the boundary between human and animal in Western philosophy.
61. How does deconstruction view literary influence and tradition?
Correct Answer: b) Tradition is haunted by exclusions, repressions, and internal contradictions that deconstructive reading brings to light.
Explanation:
Deconstruction disrupts smooth accounts of literary history.
62. What is the primary objective of reversing a binary opposition in deconstructive practice?
Correct Answer: b) To temporarily show that the marginalized term is just as foundational as the privileged term, before displacing the binary altogether
Explanation:
Reversal is only the first tactical step; the ultimate goal is displacement.
63. Which of Derrida's works deals extensively with the concept of friendship and political ethics?
Correct Answer: a) Politics of Friendship
Explanation:
'Politics of Friendship' explores democracy, alterity, fraternity, and ethical relations.
64. What does 'dissemination' mean in Derrida's literary theory?
Correct Answer: b) The scattering of multiple, uncontainable meanings that resist being gathered into a single parental origin or unified interpretation
Explanation:
Dissemination contrasts with polysemy, representing an infinite proliferation of meaning that cannot be reined in.
65. How does deconstruction treat literary irony?
Correct Answer: b) Irony and rhetorical self-consciousness reveal how language constantly undermines its own literal claims, a core theme in deconstructive rhetoric.
Explanation:
Deconstructive rhetoric highlights the unstable irony inherent in all signification.
66. What is the deconstructive perspective on originality and creation?
Correct Answer: b) All texts are built from prior signs, citations, and traces (iterability), making pure originality an illusion.
Explanation:
Iterability implies that every text is already a quotation or citation of earlier discourses.
67. Which concept describes Derrida's stylistic experiment in 'Glas', where two columns of text discuss Hegel and Jean Genet simultaneously?
Correct Answer: a) Collage / Double column layout challenging linear reading
Explanation:
'Glas' uses a split page to disrupt traditional linear, logocentric reading habits.
68. What is the deconstructive approach to totalizing systems (like Marxism or structuralism)?
Correct Answer: b) Totalizing systems always encounter internal limits, blind spots, and exceptions that cannot be accounted for within their own logic.
Explanation:
Deconstruction questions any system that claims to explain everything comprehensively.
69. What does Derrida mean by 'signature' in his writings on communication and art?
Correct Answer: b) A mark that must be repeatable (iterability) to function as a signature, meaning its uniqueness is always compromised by its reproducibility
Explanation:
For a signature to work, it must be iterable, which paradoxically destroys its absolute singularity.
70. How does deconstruction view the concept of 'representation'?
Correct Answer: b) Representation is always mediated, constructing the reality it claims to merely reflect, with no unmediated access to truth.
Explanation:
Representation never captures an unmediated original presence.
71. Which concept links Derrida's literary theory with his ethical turn regarding hospitality and forgiveness?
Correct Answer: a) Unconditionality / The impossible
Explanation:
Derrida focuses on 'pure' concepts (hospitality, forgiveness, gift) that are impossible in strict practice yet demand unconditional openness.
72. What is the deconstructive view of structural binaries like nature vs. culture?
Correct Answer: b) They are unstable hierarchical constructs where culture often operates as the supplement that disrupts nature's supposed purity.
Explanation:
Derrida examines how nature and culture contaminate each other.
73. What does 'différance' look like when spoken aloud in French compared to 'différence'?
Correct Answer: a) They sound identical.
Explanation:
In French, 'différance' and 'différence' are homophones, demonstrating how writing introduces a difference that speech cannot hear.
74. How does deconstruction treat literary characters?
Correct Answer: b) As textual constructs, nodes of linguistic traits, and rhetorical effects rather than living people
Explanation:
Characters are functions of textuality rather than psychological essences.
75. What is the role of the 'translator' according to Derrida's essays on translation?
Correct Answer: b) To negotiate the impossibility of absolute equivalence, transforming and supplementing the original text in an endless series of linguistic negotiations
Explanation:
Translation for Derrida is a transformation and survival ('survie') of the original.
76. Which philosophical movement preceded and provoked the emergence of deconstruction in France?
Correct Answer: a) Structuralism and Phenomenology
Explanation:
Derrida developed deconstruction through a critical engagement with phenomenology (Husserl) and structuralism (Saussure, Lévi-Strauss).
77. What does the deconstructive term 'scission' or 'fracture' refer to?
Correct Answer: b) The internal split or division within any concept or sign that prevents it from ever being identical to itself
Explanation:
Nothing is ever fully identical to itself because of internal difference and temporal deferral.
78. How does deconstruction approach the concept of the 'book' as an object?
Correct Answer: b) As an open, permeable network of citations and traces that resists closure and totalization
Explanation:
Derrida argued against the traditional idea of the 'book' as a self-contained, harmonious universe.
79. What is the significance of the word 'pharmakeus' in Plato's dialogues, as analyzed by Derrida?
Correct Answer: b) A sorcerer, magician, or scapegoat, representing the ambiguous, uncanny nature of the writer/philosopher
Explanation:
Plato casts Socrates and writers in roles associated with the pharmakeus (sorcerer/scapegoat).
80. Which deconstructive term describes the process of looking for the moment of blindness in a text's insight?
Correct Answer: a) Blindness and Insight (after Paul de Man)
Explanation:
De Man's famous formula explores how a critic's insight is often generated by their blindness.
81. What does Derrida mean by 'auto-immunity' in his late political writings?
Correct Answer: b) The paradoxical process by which a system (like democracy or an organism) acts to destroy its own protection in order to protect itself
Explanation:
Auto-immunity describes how democracy or sovereignty opens itself up to threats that destroy it from within.
82. How does deconstruction view narrative closure in novels?
Correct Answer: b) Narrative closure is always artificial and fragile, leaving behind unresolvable aporias and textual residues that disrupt the ending.
Explanation:
Deconstructive readings show how endings fail to neatly tie up all the thematic loose ends.
83. What is the deconstructive stance on binary oppositions like 'male and female'?
Correct Answer: b) They are hierarchical social constructions that deconstruction seeks to reverse and displace to reveal gender fluidity and multiplicity.
Explanation:
Deconstruction underpins queer theory and feminist critiques by destabilizing rigid binary gender norms.
84. Which major conference in 1966 marked the entry of French post-structuralism into the American academic scene?
Correct Answer: a) The Johns Hopkins Colloquium ('The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man')
Explanation:
This 1966 conference featured Derrida's famous lecture on structure, sign, and play.
85. What does Derrida's critique of 'pure origin' argue?
Correct Answer: b) There is no pure, untainted origin; every origin is already contaminated by traces, repetitions, and differences (supplementarity).
Explanation:
The search for a pure origin is an illusion of metaphysics; simulation and repetition precede origin.
86. How does deconstruction view the relationship between philosophy and literature?
Correct Answer: b) The boundary breaks down; philosophy uses literary tropes and metaphors, while literature engages in philosophical questioning, making them mutually entangled.
Explanation:
Derrida famously blurred the rigid genre boundary separating philosophy from literature.
87. What is the ultimate legacy of deconstruction in contemporary literary and cultural studies?
Correct Answer: b) It permanently transformed how scholars read texts, question institutional power, analyze binaries, and critique foundational truths across humanities disciplines.
Explanation:
Deconstruction's legacy persists as a critical habit of mind that questions foundational assumptions across literary, cultural, legal, and philosophical studies.
