Thesis Deconstruction is not “anything goes”, and its critics should stop saying it is
Its coordinates: 6.10 Philosophy of Language · 6.10.1 Reference · 6.10.2 Speech Acts
Where it stands
Every few months someone in a thread like this one says that Derrida licensed readers to make texts mean whatever they like. I want to argue that this is a caricature, and that it mostly comes from one misquoted sentence.
The sentence is il n'y a pas de hors-texte, from Of Grammatology (1967). It is usually rendered "there is nothing outside the text", which sounds like a denial that the world exists. A closer rendering is "there is no outside-text": no reading gets to stand on a ground outside language and context from which it could check the text without itself being a reading. That is a claim about the conditions of reading, not a permission to ignore what the words say.
Second, in the same book Derrida insists that a careful reading has to begin with what he calls doubling commentary, the patient reconstruction of what the author consciously said, and he describes it as an indispensable guardrail. Without it, he says, criticism could go in any direction. Deconstruction is what happens after the guardrail, when you find that the text's own key oppositions (speech over writing, nature over culture) do not hold still. It is a very slow and literal kind of reading.
So my thesis: deconstruction is a constraint account with unusually high demands, not a licence. The people who abuse it exist, but every method has its abusers. Objections welcome; I have heard most of them across my shop counter in one form or another.