Deconstruction — Philosophical strategy elaborated by Jacques Derrida from the 1960s onward (Of Grammatology, Writing and Difference, 1967). The word translates and displaces the Destruktion (or Abbau) that Heidegger had proposed for the history of ontology, yet it is neither a method in the Cartesian sense nor a nihilistic destruction: it is a reading that dismantles (dé-construire) the hierarchical binary oppositions of Western metaphysics — speech/writing, presence/absence, nature/culture, intelligible/sensible — showing that the subordinated term inhabits the dominant one as its condition of possibility. Derrida calls logocentrism (and phonocentrism) the tradition’s tendency to privilege living speech, full meaning, and a “metaphysics of presence.” The procedure operates in two stages: (1) inversion — revealing that the hierarchy is arbitrary and that the marginalised term is constitutive; (2) displacement — introducing an “undecidable” (such as différance, trace, pharmakon, supplement) that exceeds binary logic. Différance (a deliberate neographism) designates the simultaneous play of differentiation and deferral that precedes all full presence and all fixed meaning; it is closely tied to the notion of the trace, which marks the absence inscribed in every sign. Derrida insists that deconstruction is not external to metaphysics — it operates with and against texts, inhabiting their margins. Taken up in the United States by the so-called Yale School (Paul de Man, J. Hillis Miller), its influence extended to literary theory, law (Derrida, Force of Law), architecture, and political theory.
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