Deconstruction

Deconstruction is a method of critical analysis developed by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, beginning with his 1967 book Of Grammatology. Deconstruction examines how a text, whether philosophical, literary or otherwise, can be shown to undermine or contradict its own apparent, stated meaning when read closely enough, often by revealing how the text quietly depends on the very concepts, distinctions or oppositions it claims to reject or treats as secondary. A central target of Derrida's deconstructive readings was the kind of binary opposition central to structuralist thought, such as speech versus writing or presence versus absence: Derrida argued that such oppositions, though usually presented as neutral, stable pairs, are in fact hierarchical, with one term consistently privileged over the other, and that close reading can show this hierarchy to be unstable and reversible rather than fixed or natural. Rather than proposing a positive alternative theory to replace the ideas it examines, deconstruction proceeds primarily as a practice of reading, showing how existing texts and frameworks already work against their own explicit claims from within. Derrida's deconstructive method is widely regarded as a founding practice of poststructuralist thought, extending and complicating the structuralist emphasis on underlying systems of meaning that had shaped French intellectual life in the decades before his own work.