Editing Deconstruction (section)

===Alternative definitions===
The popularity of the term deconstruction, combined with the technical difficulty of Derrida's primary material on deconstruction and his reluctance to elaborate his understanding of the term, has meant that many secondary sources have attempted to give a more straightforward explanation than Derrida himself ever attempted. Secondary definitions are therefore an interpretation of deconstruction by the person offering them rather than a summary of Derrida's actual position.
* [[Paul de Man]] was a member of the [[Yale School]] and a prominent practitioner of deconstruction as he understood it. His definition of deconstruction is that, "[i]t's possible, within text, to frame a question or undo assertions made in the text, by means of elements which are in the text, which frequently would be precisely structures that play off the rhetorical against grammatical elements."<ref>{{cite book|last1=Moynihan|first1=Robert|title=A Recent imagining: interviews with Harold Bloom, Geoffrey Hartman, J. Hillis Miller, Paul De Man|date=1986|publisher=Archon Books|location=Hamden, Connecticut|isbn=9780208021205|page=156|edition=1st}}</ref>
* [[Richard Rorty]] was a prominent interpreter of Derrida's philosophy. His definition of deconstruction is that, "the term 'deconstruction' refers in the first instance to the way in which the 'accidental' features of a text can be seen as betraying, subverting, its purportedly 'essential' message."<ref>{{cite book|last1=Brooks|first1=Peter|title=The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism: From Formalism to Poststructuralism|date=1995|publisher=Cambridge University Press|location=Cambridge|isbn=9780521300131|page=171|edition=1st}}</ref>
* According to [[John D. Caputo]], the very meaning and mission of deconstruction is:<blockquote>"to show that things - texts, institutions, traditions, societies, beliefs, and practices of whatever size and sort you need - do not have definable meanings and determinable missions, that they are always more than any mission would impose, that they exceed the boundaries they currently occupy"<ref>{{cite book|last1=Caputo|first1=John D.|url=https://archive.org/details/isbn_9780823217557/page/32|title=Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida|date=1997|publisher=Fordham University Press|isbn=9780823217557|edition=3rd|location=New York|page=[https://archive.org/details/isbn_9780823217557/page/31 31]}}</ref></blockquote>
* [[Niall Lucy]] points to the impossibility of defining the term at all, stating: <blockquote>"While in a sense it ''is'' impossibly difficult to define, the impossibility has less to do with the adoption of a position or the assertion of a choice on deconstruction's part than with the impossibility of every 'is' as such. Deconstruction begins, as it were, from a refusal of the authority or determining power of every 'is', or simply from a refusal of authority in general. While such refusal may indeed count as a position, it is not the case that deconstruction holds this as a sort of 'preference' ".<ref>{{cite book|last1=Lucy|first1=Niall|title=A Derrida Dictionary|date=2004|publisher=Blackwell Publishing|location=Malden, Massachusetts|isbn=978-1405137515}}</ref>{{Page needed|date=September 2017}}</blockquote>
* David B. Allison, an early translator of Derrida, states in the introduction to his translation of ''Speech and Phenomena'': <blockquote>[Deconstruction] signifies a project of critical thought whose task is to locate and 'take apart' those concepts which serve as the axioms or rules for a period of thought, those concepts which command the unfolding of an entire epoch of metaphysics. 'Deconstruction' is somewhat less negative than the Heideggerian or Nietzschean terms 'destruction' or 'reversal'; it suggests that certain foundational concepts of metaphysics will never be entirely eliminated...There is no simple 'overcoming' of metaphysics or the language of metaphysics.</blockquote>
* [[Paul Ricœur]] defines deconstruction as a way of uncovering the questions behind the answers of a text or tradition.<ref>{{cite book|last1=Klein|first1=Anne Carolyn|title=Meeting the Great Bliss Queen: Buddhists, Feminists, and the Art of the Self|date=1994|publisher=Beacon Press|location=Boston|isbn=9780807073063|url=https://archive.org/details/meetinggreatblis00kleirich}}</ref>{{Page needed|date=November 2013}}