Deconstruction and Everyday Life, Or How Deconstruction Helped Me Quit Smoking

Derridean deconstruction has often been accused of not being relevant to the anaysis of 'real life' contexts and phenomena. This article develops a critique of such a perspective on the basis of its inadequacy with regard to the thinking of the everyday. Everyday life is a key area of cultural study today and this argument presented here, developed through a reading of several texts of Derrida, Heidegger and other thinkers, attempts to go beyond naive, unphilosophical claims about the everyday as an object of inquiry - often based on a naive narturalistic notion of the everyday. In doing so it shows how a detailed engagement with deconstruction might lead to a productive rethinking of what is taken for granted about the supposed immediacy of experience.