Deely’s “Brief Excursus on ‘Deconstruction’”

[essius]

Deconstruction is a project to which any and very text is thus (indeed!) a-priori liable. But, what needs to be noticed-and what seems constantly to escape the notice of deconstructionist epigones-is that the ultimate source of the passions in the environmental interaction (both cultural and physical) of human animals with material surroundings objectified in turn imposes indirect limits on the deconstructive process, just as more directly there is also need for consideration at times (though far from always, and deconstruction as a method marks a great advance in the understanding oft his matter) of the “intentions of the author”. (Deconstruction as a process normally tends legitimately and systematically to leave out of consideration authorial intention as a factor in the construal of texts. Yet there are times when such intention as textual factor cannot be omitted from consideration without some distortion of sense at critical junctures, so far as linguistic signs have not only a customary and iconic dimension but also and always a stipulative dimension as well, which is exactly what separates them within the class of “customary signs” from the purely customary signs of the “brute” animals overlapping within the semioses of human animals, and conversely.)
-John Deely, Semiotics Seen Synchronically: the View from 2010, p. 66