One particular kind of deconstruction is a critique of binary oppositions. According to Derrida, there are many such oppositions in Western thought: for example life/death, presence/absence, and so on. Derrida says that in each opposition one of the pair is privileged over the other… However, the other one of the pair is always essential to the first.” —Nazenin Ruso in Pamela Lightsey’s Our Lives Matter
When I take walks at this time of year, I notice the way the changing leaves signal shortening days and cooling temperatures. The spring, the fall, the dawn, and the dusk each mark the meeting of natural variations. We experience the summer, the winter, the light, and the night not as seasons and times that stand on their own but as things that gain their meaning through contrast.
We also use contrasted pairs to build identity in the social world. The United States and the USSR spent their Cold War enmeshed as opposites. Some Adventists likewise imagine that the Roman Catholic church is their mirror image, and that oppositional pair defines their sense of what they are, what they’re not, what they do, what they don’t do, what they won’t allow in, and what they must push out. The US used its political capital in the 20th Century to react to what it thought the USSR’s government was planning or doing, and so its oppositions shaped what it became.
“The other one of the pair is always essential to the first.”
When a political campaign frets about incoming refugees or terrorists plotting around the corner, it’s demonstrating the principle that every oppositional self needs an other and every “Us” needs an Other.
The next time you notice people defining themselves in terms of what they aren’t, look for the other member of their oppositional pair. How is that Other essential to them?