Deconstruction French: déconstruction is a literary theory and philosophy of language derived principally from Jacques Derrida’s 1967 work “Of Grammatology”.[1] The premise of deconstruction is that all of Western literature and philosophy implicitly relies on a metaphysics of presence.[2][3] Derrida terms the philosophical commitment to pure presence as a source of self-sufficient meaning logocentrism.[4] Due to the impossibility of pure presence and consequently of instrinsic meaning, any given concept is constituted and comprehended linguistically and in terms of its oppositions, e.g. perception/reason, speech/writing, mind/body, interior/exterior, marginal/central, sensible/intelligible, intuition/signification, nature/culture.[5] Further, Derrida contends that of these dichotomies one member is associated with presence and consequently more highly valued than the other which is associated with absence.

via Deconstruction – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.