In the middle of October 2004, Jacques Derrida, a very prominent literary critic of the Post Modern period died of pancreatic cancer at the age of 74. He is one of the pioneer and is usually regarded as the leader and chief mentor of the new trend in thought, rarely explains any vague concept in the older familiar language of philosophical discussion.

Literary criticism can never be an exact science. Any attempt at a precise definition is bound to speak as much of the time when it is made as of the thing defined. Yet it is always possible to identify certain distinctive features when a phenomenon assumes the nature of a movement.

And ‘Deconstruction’ in literary criticism becomes a knotty problem as well as equally a naughty one. It is a highly controversial issue in various branches of knowledge as it touches almost every subject in which the intellectuals are interested.

The poets, specially the modern poets see life and paint it as it is with all its warts and ugliness. These poets influenced by the scientific and psychological ideas of the time, realised that there is an incessant activity of jumbled thoughts in every individual at every moment of the day.

Therefore the soul of poetry is expressed in the recording of the rapid infringement of images on the consciousness. So modern poetry do not take rest on ‘emotion recollected in tranquilly’. The ultimate result is that new poetry aims at stark reality which ultimately often leads to confusion to know what the poet intend to say in real.

This new trend in the expression level of the poets and writers has particularly influenced a new genre in literary criticism. It leads to analysing the expression level that is the language of a poem in different meanings.

And from that ‘Deconstruction’ in literary criticism comes into being in the modern literary criticism. Teachers of literature and literary critics have either praised it whole heartedly outright or ridiculed it outright.

‘Deconstruction’ is not strictly a philosophical system but a devastating critique of many earlier system of thought normally popular in any field. Its chief weapon is a searching analysis of language which leads to new and unexpected interpretations of facts, opinions and theories.

Dr VN Dhavale, a witty Indian scholar in English literature has his opinion in this new interpretation of thought. ‘It is a new way of looking at the world with some ‘new light’ on the use of language, but it leads to several unpleasant conclusions’.

Jacques Derrida (1930-2004), the snowy hair intellectual is known far and wide as pillar of obstruc-tionism, a field of enquiry which believes that any text has multiple meaning and the great majority of these meanings won’t be apparent even to the author.

The text must be read as slippery, deceptive, unknowable and most importantly an unstable narrative. The text is not a closed system but an open one into which we can have access through many different entrances none of which can be claimed as the main one. Each single text, again is a network that recalls many other texts and opens up the horizon of intertexuality.

A text is no longer seen as a veil hiding a meaning, but a web without a centering spider, free play without closure. The reader is the co-author and the text or, more precisely a subtext, emerges out of the vital interaction between the text and the reader.

So Derrida and critics of the ‘New Criticsm school’ have been trying to connect literary views with some branches of modern thought particularly with psychology and psycho-analysis, anthropology, linguistics or some social and political theory. So ‘Deconstruction’ now brings them closer to a new type of metaphysics which to the average readers, is much more obstruse and obscure.

This obscurity is the result of the nebulous nature of many concepts used by different sponsors of deconstruction. Derrida coined new words or phrases, or use old terms in a new context which makes comprehension very difficult.

This vagueness and ambiguity of natural language have always been recognised and it is not necessary to add to this vagueness by using old words in unexpected context. Derrida makes it clear that his interest in literature and ‘writing’ is more significant to him than his philosophical interest.

About ‘writing’ he asserts that ‘writing is one of the representatives of the trace in general. It is not the trace itself. The trace itself does not exist’. Derrida dislikes the importance given to speech. He therefore gives priority to his concept of ‘writing’ and criticise all earlier philosophers and linguisticians from Plato to Saucssure for the way they relied on speech.

Both admired and feared by his contemporaries across the world, structuralism and deconstruc-tion remained his passionate obsession as he kept on breaking new grounds in these areas. The reader’s real problem in reading Derrida’s work is how to know whether his argument is really serious or merely playful.

He himself even tells that his manner of argument is and has to be a strategy that is complex and tortuous, involved and full of artifice. Many philosopher like Passmore has to comment that in Derrida there is a jungle like obscurity in dissemination.

To be precise, Derrida defies the summerization of events. He was one of those thinkers who didn’t tire of telling us that worldly things are bundles of contradictions. Meanings are always elusive and words are not what we think they are.

Truly for Derrida there is no such thing as meaning. It always eludes.