From the Archives: Part 94 of The Self and its Sources

Over the course of Virginia Woolf’s novel, The Waves, the internal monologues of the characters become shorter, and it becomes harder to distinguish who is speaking. In the end, only Bernard’s character remains speaking. He tries to sum up the story of the novel: “There are so many stories, stories of childhood, love, marriage and death; and none of them are true.

The agenda of literary or philosophical deconstruction: to rid ourselves of metanarratives – a story that operates as an interpretive key to all other stories. To rid ourselves of the idea that there could be one true story to which all the other stories relate and derive their meaning.

From the Archives: Part 63 of The Self and its Sources

Deconstruction: To extricate ourselves from the past is a bourgeois idea of liberty that is still very much at work in modern theory. Simone Weil had a hunger for determination