Deconstruction is a critical outlook concerned with the relationship between text and meaning. Jacques Derrida's 1967 work Of Grammatology introduced the majority of ideas influential within deconstruction.[1] According to Derrida and taking inspiration from the work of Ferdinand de Saussure,[2] language as a system of signs and words only have meaning because of the contrast between these signs.[3][4][5] As Rorty contends "words have meaning only because of contrast-effects with other words...no word can acquire meaning in the way in which philosophers from Aristotle to Bertrand Russell have hoped it might—by being the unmediated expression of something non-linguistic (e.g., an emotion, a sense-datum, a physical object, an idea, a Platonic Form)".[6] As a consequence meaning is never present, but rather is deferred to other signs. Derrida refers to the - in this view, mistaken - belief that there is a self-sufficient, non-deferred meaning as metaphysics of presence. A concept then must be understood in the context of its opposite, such as being/nothingness, normal/abnormal, speech/writing, etc. [7][8]

Finally, Derrida argues that it is not enough to expose and deconstruct the way oppositions work and then stop there in a nihilistic or cynical position, "thereby preventing any means of intervening in the field effectively".[9] To be effective, deconstruction needs to create new terms, not to synthesize the concepts in opposition, but to mark their difference and eternal interplay. This explains why Derrida always proposes new terms in his deconstruction, not as a free play but as a pure necessity of analysis, to better mark the intervals. Derrida called undecidables, that is, unities of simulacrum, "false" verbal properties (nominal or semantic) that can no longer be included within philosophical (binary) opposition: but which, however, inhabit philosophical oppositions, resisting and organizing it, without ever constituting a third term, without ever leaving room for a solution in the form of Hegelian dialectics (e.g. différance, archi-writing, pharmakon, supplement, hymen, gram, spacing).[10]

In the 1980s, the Postmodernism era, deconstruction was being put to use in a range of theoretical enterprises in the humanities and social sciences,[11] including law[12][13][14] anthropology,[15] historiography,[16] linguistics,[17] sociolinguistics,[18] psychoanalysis, feminism, and LGBT studies. In the continental philosophy tradition, debates surrounding ontology, epistemology, ethics, aesthetics, hermeneutics, and philosophy of language still refer to it today. Within architecture it has inspired deconstructivism, and it remains important in general within art,[19] music,[20] and literary criticism.[21]