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Hey, podcast listeners, if you're the kind of person who knows her way around phrases like the gender binary, or if you maybe have a battered copy of something by Jacques Derrida lurking around your bookshelves, then I probably don't have to sell you on today's topic.

This is it to the best of our knowledge extra about deconstruction, a literary and philosophical movement that was huge back in the early 80s. We're talking about the age of the talking heads, the Ramones, quailudes, skinny jeans. I was in college then, majoring in English and French, and you couldn't do that without reading the deconstructionists. I'm Anne Strain Champs, and nobody really talks that much about

deconstruction anymore, and yet it's everywhere. The way we talk about and analyze TV commercials,

song lyrics, fashion trends. In fact, public radio listeners, if it weren't for deconstruction,

we probably wouldn't have this American life. I'm actually

serious about that. Ira Glass got a degree in semiotics at Brown. He told an interviewer once that

his religion was semiotics, and you can hear the influence in his show all the time. So, I don't

actually remember that much about deconstruction or Derrida anymore, but luckily I'm married to a guy who does, and you know him too, Steve Paulson.

So Steve, why are we talking about deconstruction on the radio?

Because this is the 40th anniversary of the book that helped launch the whole deconstruction movement.

It's called Of Grammatology by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, actually originally published in the mid-60s, but then translated into English in 1976 by Giatry Chakravorty Spivak, who was an unknown scholar back then, a young emigre from India, but she is now an academic superstar. So this is a big deal. This is kind of a cultural event.

In certain circles. So this sounds like a classic Steve interview, and I know it's coming up. But first, for the uninitiated or those of us who just don't remember our deconstruction, what does it mean?

Well, there are a couple of basic ideas.

One is to unpack the relationship between a text and its meaning.

And by text, I don't just mean books.

It could be decoding an advertisement or a political platform, a school

curriculum, really anything where the meaning is not obvious. And there's a particular focus on

identifying what are called binary oppositions like black and white or good and evil,

male and female. Polarities. Polarities, yeah. The idea is that you cannot really understand one without knowing its opposite.

And those meanings are shaped by specific historical conditions and they keep changing over time.

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