Deconstruction For Beginners Paperback – January 8, 2008

In Deconstruction for Beginners, Jim Powell effectively caricatures Derrida’s ideas, using an entertaining caste of characters, which are fleshed out by his skills as a linguist and knowledge as a scholar. Any lover of satire will enjoy his spot-on mimic of the main lecturer/mansplainer, Mark Twain. Could be just me, but I love this sort of stuff.I already knew something about Deconstruction and can say that Powell's caricature of "phallogocentrism," a concept invented by Derrida, is hilarious! Derrida has also written about a rather spicy photo novel, involving lesbianism, which Powell caricatures with an authentic comical touch, while also explaining Derrida from the vantage of someone who masterfully understands the father of Deconstructionism (if "understands" is a word we can still say has meaning).None of the philosophical ideas that the book satirizes are Powell's per se, but rather, mainly, Derrida’s, Freud’s, Lacan’s, and Roland Barthes’, and all are touched on and illuminated. Continental literary theory is full of juicy stuff, as is Deconstruction for Beginners, which is as it should be. On his radar are Derrida's term, as mentioned, "phallogocentrism"—the idea that texts can be read from a standpoint of a male hierarchal society—but also such terms as Barthes’ "jouissance" (of the text), which can be "read" as the "orgasm of the text," a concept which was begging to be satirized and which Powell does extremely well in the closing love scene of this lively book.Finally, Powell also seemingly originates his own contribution to the field, or at least I have seen it nowhere else, in that he points out the Derrida didn't really invent (though he may have thought he did) Deconstruction, but that it has been taking place for thousands of years as anyone who has studied buddhism or Zen, or even Alan Watts, could tell you. But for anyone in the present age looking to quickly and effortlessly understand Derrida's version, this is your book!

The "for Beginners" series is a somewhat illusory series in the first place, because the first two titles, Marxism for Beginners and Freud for Beginners, were written independently by serious scholars who simply wanted to evangelize for their topics and who knew not to take the matter too seriously. Since then, the series has had spotty success, but the other titles have conformed generally to a light hearted style that masks a very weighty communication of particular information.With Deconstruction for Beginners, the book is almost all text, and the author(s) have that tragically po-faced approach that marks them as True Believers rather than fellows. They hector and lecture, rather than speak, through the pages. Instead of eliminating the difficulty of their subject, they seem to want to force their "beginner" to get a nose rubbed in the diffidence of original texts without guidance or perspective.The concept of the "for Beginners" series is good, but it has not been executed consistently, and this volume, in particular, stands out as a real stinker. It does nothing to attract students to deconstruction, nothing to help them over the hurdles, for it wants to hang onto the absurd priestly vestments of the cult of the difficult.

I bought this book in order to gain a better understanding of Deconstructive theory. I was open to the comic book format which is quite fun, and the illustrator,Joe Lee,captures the feel of underground comics. I didn't enjoy the pornographic nature of the writing. Jim Powell's explanations for deconstructive theory are at times entrenched in direct references to sexual acts and male and female genitalia. I'm not a fan of porn, and most people who are interested in deconstructive theory are probably not either.Despite the fact that the writer's lewd and carnally juicy explanations are helpful in understanding deconstruction,I didn't enjoy reading it. After a sincere effort at gleaning the information I was looking for, I threw this book in the trash.

A great guide to theory

Slightly disappointed. The book gets its point across, but this is very much a skippable book if you've read Derrida for Beginners (which I did). It explains deconstruction in similar terms in there and does it better. In "Derrida", Powell goes over every basic term of deconstruction and how they go interact together and goes over hypothetical questions a reader would have as he goes along. "Deconstruction" is illustrated as a discussion between a coyote, Mark Twain, a Derrida reader, Derrida a sex-crazed Buddhist icon and many others. It goes over many of the same concept, yet it doesn't have the satisfying methodology of its predecessor. Too bad, I was expecting a lot out of this one, but it didn't add much to what I've learned from the enlightening Derrida for Beginners. A little, but not much.

This book offers something for readers who know nothing of deconstruction, but also something for those who have read a lot about it. I have read a lot of books on deconstruction, but this is the only one that shows how deconstruction has worked in different cultures--notably, China and India. Besides, it is irreverent and hilarious, at one point inserting some Derridean quotes on ethics into an ribald erotic situation. The parallels between Nagarjuna's Madhyamika Buddhism and deconstruction are fascinating.

Derrida once said that he approved of the comic book treatments of his thought because they bypass and subvert the offical channels of knowledge proffered at universities. Powell's carnivalesque treatment of Derrida is certainly planted firmly in that groove.