The Core Assumption
Meaning lives in the unstable play of language and in situated acts of reading, so no interpretation can claim to have arrested the text's meaning once for all.
The Four Assumptions
- Where meaning lives
- Meaning lives nowhere finally: it is produced in the play of differences within language and in each situated act of reading, and it cannot be arrested at an author's intention or a text's single sense.
- What the text is
- The text is a woven fabric of traces, tensions, and aporias that undermines its own apparent hierarchies, privileging no voice within it as securely as its surface suggests.
- Who may interpret
- The authorized interpreter is every reader, since no guild holds a method that escapes situatedness; authority in interpretation is itself one of the things to be interrogated.
- What counts as a good reading
- A reading is adequate when it exposes the text's internal tensions and its own interpretive interests honestly, and refuses to disguise a situated reading as the text's one obvious meaning.
Genealogy
This method arose in the contemporary period (Entered biblical studies in the 1980s and 1990s from the work of Jacques Derrida and poststructuralist literary theory).
Key proponents: Jacques Derrida, Stephen D. Moore, A. K. M. Adam, David Jobling.
Key texts: Of Grammatology by Jacques Derrida; Literary Criticism and the Gospels by Stephen D. Moore; What Is Postmodern Biblical Criticism? by A. K. M. Adam.
The Procedure
These are the same steps The Workshop will walk you through.
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Identify the text's ruling binary
Find the hierarchy the text appears to assume, such as spirit over body, insider over outsider, or speech over writing, and state which term it privileges.
Why this step matters: Deconstruction begins with the oppositions a text depends on, because its leverage lies there.
How to do it: Name the binary in the text's own vocabulary and show where the privilege is asserted.
What goes wrong here: Importing a fashionable binary the text does not actually organize itself around.
You record: The text's governing binary and its hierarchy. Done well when: The binary is demonstrated from the text's language, not assumed.
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Reverse and displace the hierarchy
Show how the text itself supplies resources that unsettle its privileged term, and follow the resulting instability without resolving it.
Why this step matters: The deconstructive move is not the critic's violence but the text's self-subversion, attended to carefully.
How to do it: Quote the passages where the subordinate term proves indispensable or the privileged term fails, and let the tension stand.
What goes wrong here: Simply enthroning the subordinate term, which keeps the binary intact and misses the displacement.
You record: The text's self-subversion documented. Done well when: The reversal is effected by the text's own words, cited, not by the critic's assertions.
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Listen for the suppressed voices
Ask whose voices the text margins, silences, or speaks for, and reconstruct what the text looks like from their position.
Why this step matters: Postmodern reading joins deconstruction to an ethics and politics of the margin.
How to do it: Attend to minor characters, unnamed figures, and reported speech, and mark the difference between reconstructing their position and inventing it.
What goes wrong here: Ventriloquizing the silenced in ways that merely echo the critic's own program.
You record: The text from its margins. Done well when: Reconstruction is flagged as reconstruction and tied to textual traces.
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Confess the reading's situatedness
State who is reading, from where, in whose interest, and what this reading cannot see.
Why this step matters: The approach's own rule applies to itself: a deconstructive reading is also situated and also open to deconstruction.
How to do it: Name your location and interests as concretely as you named the text's, and invite the counter-reading your account predicts.
What goes wrong here: Exempting the critic's reading from the suspicion applied to everyone else's.
You record: A situatedness statement for the reading. Done well when: The statement is specific enough to be argued with.
Inputs Required
- A text read with close literary attention
- Knowledge of the text's reception and of the interests its standard readings serve
- Familiarity with deconstructive and poststructuralist theory
Outputs Produced
- A documented case of the text's self-subversion of its own hierarchy
- A reading from the text's margins with its suppressed voices reconstructed
- An explicit confession of the new reading's own situatedness
Quality Criteria
Under this method, a good reading is one that meets these tests:
- Deconstructive moves are performed on the text's actual language, not on summaries of it
- The reading refuses to install a new single meaning in place of the one displaced
- The critic's interests are disclosed with the same rigor demanded of others
Common Errors
- Treating deconstruction as a technique for making texts mean anything at all
- Claiming the approach has no commitments, when its attention to margins is itself an ethical commitment
- Mistaking the identification of a binary for a completed deconstructive reading
Strengths
- It has permanently heightened the field's attention to power, marginality, and interpretive interest
- It exposes real tensions in texts that harmonizing readings suppress
- It enforces honesty about the situatedness of all interpreters, including its own practitioners
Weaknesses and Critics
- Its results are difficult to falsify, since counter-evidence can always be read as further play
- It struggles to say why any reading should bind a community, which churches and courts require
- Its theoretical idiom can become a guild dialect that excludes the ordinary readers it claims to liberate
Anthony C. Thiselton: Thiselton, while appropriating much from postmodern thought, objected that thoroughgoing deconstructive reading dissolves the possibility of the text genuinely addressing and transforming the reader, and he defended a hermeneutics in which texts retain a givenness that can judge their interpreters. (New Horizons in Hermeneutics (1992) and Thiselton on Hermeneutics (2006))
Mieke Bal: Bal pressed the approach from within literary studies, arguing that deconstructive biblical criticism often remains captive to the very master narratives it attacks, and that its practitioners can aestheticize political questions instead of engaging them. (Lethal Love: Feminist Literary Readings of Biblical Love Stories (1987) and Bal's subsequent methodological essays)
Internal Schools
Derridean deconstruction proper: This school works closest to Derrida's texts, treating deconstruction as an event texts undergo rather than a method critics apply, and resisting programmatic use.
Postmodern biblical criticism: This school, represented by Moore and Adam, translates poststructuralist insights into a practice for biblical studies, often combined with ideological and postcolonial criticism.
Exemplar Readings
Deconstructing the Centurion's Faith (Matthew 8 and Luke 7 in postmodern reading): The reading tracks how the parallel accounts position the centurion as both outsider and model insider, shows the text's insider and outsider hierarchy unsettling itself, and refuses to stabilize the story into a single lesson about faith or ethnicity.
Reading the Book of Esther from the Margins (Esther 1-2, the case of Vashti): The reading follows the deposed queen whom the narrative discards in its first chapter, reconstructs the text's economy of male honor from her position, and asks what the comedy of reversal costs the women it uses and forgets.
What This Method Cannot Do
This method cannot deliver the stable, binding interpretations that communities need in order to confess, legislate, or preach with a shared text, because its charter is to keep meaning in play. It also cannot exempt itself from its own critique: a deconstructive reading that claims final insight into a text's instability performs the very arrest of meaning it forbids.
Site Stance
The site has not yet assigned its stance on this method. The stance assignments wait on the named reviewers, the same naming the Christian Assessment verdicts wait on. The method stands here in full in the meantime: a stance discloses the site's judgment, and it never filters what a reader may read or run. The stance values and their criteria stand on the criteria page.
Run This Method in the Workshop
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Across the Site
This method belongs to the Philosophical Hermeneutics family. Its sources stand in the References register; its family stands among the site's tools; the positions it produces can be compared in the Diptych.
Primary Sources
- Of Grammatology by Jacques Derrida (1967)
- What Is Postmodern Biblical Criticism? by A. K. M. Adam (1995)
Secondary Sources
- Literary Criticism and the Gospels: The Theoretical Challenge by Stephen D. Moore (1989)
- New Horizons in Hermeneutics by Anthony C. Thiselton (1992)