Deconstructing Deconstructing Deconstructing Deconstructing?

Over the last eight years or so, I’ve watched as the word “deconstruction” has moved from a word only used in Derridean philosophical circles to something used far more frequently.¹ People are deconstructing their faith, and that’s probably the most common use of the word now. But arguably, people are deconstructing all sorts of things: romantic relationships, friendships, social norms.² And sometimes this can be helpful. Sometimes this can help us escape from potentially damaging and hurtful environments.

But I want to explore some of the consequences of this deconstruction that perhaps we are not talking about.

The idea of “deconstruction” implies the existence of a structure, and indeed, a structure that exists because it has been constructed. But we too often mistake human construction for meaningless construction. We reason that since other humans have built up this architecture of meaning around us, we can only really be who we are once we remove these structures from around us. To that, I simply say “not so fast, champ! (That's short for champion.)”³ We have to be extremely careful about this.

First, we have to interrogate our own perception. Am I perceiving things correctly, and it is therefore the structure that needs to change? Or is something causing a distortion of my perception? This is something that can only be answered in relation to the external world and to our fellow world-builders. Ultimately, we do not rest within ourselves.⁴ We are “curiously unfinished” at birth, and the biological process of becoming human occurs while the human being is “in interaction with its external environment.”⁵ The tension between my personhood, the external world, and the man-made nature of that world is palpable and unresolvable. As I swim between the three, I can easily become confused as to what must remain, as to whether the inconsistencies I experience are evidence of a false structure, whether these inconsistencies are genuine inconsistencies in the external world or only appear as such because of my limited view. I speak and think within the confines of language—how limiting! I live within human-shaped values and feel guilty when I contravene them—perhaps these values should not exist at all!⁶ Yet, we find ourselves “in a universe in which inconsistencies are not a sign of our epistemological confusion, of the fact that we missed ‘the thing itself’, but, on the contrary, a sign that we have touched the real.”⁷ In a very real sense, these moments of questioning (moments that we are now very much encouraged to follow to the point of deconstruction) are the very tension providing the cosmic touch to our constructions.

As Peter Berger notes, the “socially established nomos is fundamentally a shield against terror.”⁸ When “the walls come down, we lose our moral and cognitive bearings.”⁹ Without God, human beings would be “left alone in a world with no divine order, no cosmic justice.”¹⁰ This is why Kierkegaard can be interpreted as describing despair as both an “excellence and a defect ... the sign of a human being’s connection to God, his highest possibility.”¹¹

When we deconstruct, what occurs? We find ourselves in anomy. But what Berger doesn’t particularly explore in this text is the relation of place and its loss when we enter anomy. However, this thread is not entirely absent from his work: these “finishing touches” man applies to the world-building process, these constructions, are culture, and he describes culture as a sort of “second nature” to man.¹² What is nature without the place it occupies? When we deconstruct, we experience not only anomy but atopos, a placelessness. Atopos is Greek for “‘no place’ but also ‘bizarre’ or ‘strange’—[and so] we feel estranged when out of place.”¹³ We would “hate to be in a wasteland” and so, facing structureless placelessness, we “resort to elaborate stratagems to avoid the void that looms before us.”¹⁴

We, unfortunately, need look no further than the sense of “place” destroyed during the wildfires in Los Angeles at the beginning of 2025. Quite a number of people died, either directly or indirectly, as a result of the fires. But what has much of the conversation been about? Homes lost. Neighborhoods destroyed. Local cafes ruined. It is not too dissimilar to what Philip Marsden found when researching the importance of Place for Rising Ground: a woman was forced to leave her village in 1915, where she was separated from her father, her sister died from disease, and her two uncles were shot on the side of the road. But “the real wound for her was not the loss of her family but of her land.” She “recounted the deaths with a muted detachment. But recalling Lake Van filled her eyes with tears.”¹⁵ It was the atopos that really destroyed her.

Photo by Jake Hinds on Unsplash

Place provides structure. It is no wonder, then, that as we increasingly devalue place, we increasingly see deconstruction as a guaranteed form of escape from something unnecessary and trapping. When someone realizes that they might benefit from deconstruction, one must be careful not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. We should certainly interrogate our ideologies, the frames through which we interpret the world. But in this interrogation, we must recognize that ideology resides “primarily in stories created by subjects to deceive themselves.”¹⁶ When people (at least in religious circles) talk about deconstruction, it’s often a type of stepping-away from an ideology that others have used to deceive them. However, we must be so careful not to deceive ourselves in the process. And we’re much better at deceiving ourselves than others. Think about how good we are at finding banal excuses for things, only to look back to see how silly we were being. This is well-illustrated in Haruki Murakami’s Killing Commendatore where the protagonist, having discovered his wife’s affair, reflects on the cues that he missed: “We hadn't had sex for months. Even when I tried to get her to, she’d come up with all kinds of reasons to turn me down. Actually, I think she’d lost interest in having sex for some time before that. But I’d figured it was just a stage. She must be tired from working every day, and wasn’t feeling up to it. But now I knew she was sleeping with another man.”¹⁷ The protagonist is faced with a clear issue between himself and his wife, and yet instead of confronting that issue, he merely excuses it, deceiving himself that everything is fine.

We can easily engage in this same self-deception, these “elaborate stratagems,” when deconstructing from our faith: the idea that life without the (often genuinely oppressive) idea of Christianity we’ve been taught will be genuinely freeing, leaving me to be my authentic self and discover deeper meanings of life without the chains of an ideology that only enslaved me to the pleasure and power of another.

Of course, the Allegory of the Cave from Plato’s Republic is the story of breaking free from a limiting worldview. But this allegory is so enduring because no matter where you are in life, you’ll always be a cave-dweller in need of escape. The Allegory is Sisyphian in its scope. And this is why, for Camus, one “must imagine Sisyphus happy.” Because it is only in the act itself that one can overcome its limitations. This is not unlike the biblical story of Abraham and Isaac: to make sense of this paradoxical command from God, that Abraham should kill his one and only son through which God will fulfill his covenant requires this same level of thinking: not only must one imagine Sisyphus happy, but one must imagine Abraham happy too.¹⁸

Deconstruction never has the final say. To echo the displaced people of Los Angeles, “we must rebuild!” We need to rebuild because we need somewhere to dwell. We need a world. And so, whether you have deconstructed, constructed, or somewhere in between, it is in Aristotle’s insistence of discernment that you find the proper axis to evaluate our dwelling-place, and this is a spiritual task.¹⁹ And it is spiritual precisely because one cannot discern alone. There is a hand, reaching out for you. A fellow prisoner who has truly escaped and felt the sunshine and seen the trees. He has returned and holds out his hand for you. Will you take it?

1. This statement does not account, of course, for the plentiful discussion about deconstruction as a result of Derrida’s thinking to the extent that he actually entered the mainstream consciousness for a while. In college literature departments, one still encounters the concept of deconstruction. However, as I explore in footnote #2, we have fallen far from Derrida’s deconstruction and I argue against the idea that the “deconstruction” that contemporary exvangelicals and the like are enacting is the same deconstruction as the Derridean methodology.

2. I don’t explore the detail of deconstructing these various aspects of our human lives in this particular essay, but rather I maintain a broad view on the consequences of contemporary deconstruction. In fact, I echo C.S. Lewis’ argument in The Abolition of Man (which I recently explored here) about education, but for deconstruction: we have removed the organ but expect the function. Deconstruction today is less “deconstructive” and more “destructive,” and it has little-to-no resemblance to Derridean deconstruction which not only holds an important place in criticism, but actually operates as a positive force, as a form of building-up.

I also, here, echo Kierkegaard’s argument about the state of irony in his present age (compared to the irony of Socrates): it is without an anchor, simply zapping everything dry, emptying everything out. This is not proper irony, and it is not the same sort of deconstruction that Derrida discusses. Now, I do recognize the difficulty in discussing a sort of “proper” deconstruction, but for the sake of simplicity, I think it is important to draw the distinction (and, I think, a distinction Derrida would approve of) between our contemporary deconstruction (of faith, social norms, friendships, etc.) to the Derridean deconstruction. Of course, Derrida himself viewed friendship as an integral element of existence.

3. In memory of David Lynch.

4. Peter L. Berger, The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (New York: Anchor Books, 1990). p. 4.

5. Id. at 4-5.

6. See Berger, supra, at 9.

7. Slavoj Žižek, Hegel in a Wired Brain (London ; New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020). Ebook.

8. Berger, supra, at 22.

9. Ibid.

10. Clare Carlisle, Philosopher of the Heart: The Restless Life of Søren Kierkegaard, 2020. p. 41.

11. Id. at xii.

12. Berger, supra, at 6.

13. Edward S. Casey, Getting Back Into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place-World, Studies in Continental Thought (Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1993). p. x.

14. Ibid.

15. Philip Marsden, Rising Ground: A Search for the Spirit of Place (Great Britain: Granta, 2014). pp. 22-23.

16. Slavoj Žižek, Hegel in a Wired Brain (London ; New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020). p. 23.

17. Haruki Murakami, Killing Commendatore (London: Harvill Secker, 2018). p. 22, emphasis mine.

18. There is more to come on the relation between the Story of Isaac and the Allegory of the Cave. We will leave this here for now.

19. See T. V. Smith, ed., From Aristotle to Plotinus, 2nd ed., Philosophers Speak for Themselves (Chicago: Phoenix Books, 1956), p. 1: “Man can be rational in following rules which he has not made, and this is honorable. Discerning the reasonableness of rules which man follows or makes is not only honorable, but spiritual.” (Emphasis mine.)