ABSTRACT
Introduction Deconstruction is a form of textual practice (one cannot really say ‘analysis’ or ‘interpretation’ since it rejects the assumptions such terms involve), derived from the work of the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, which aims to demonstrate the inherent instability of both language and meaning. Derrida is possibly best approached as the latest, and in many ways the most radical, exponent of philosophical scepticism, a tradition whose brief has been to undermine the timehonoured assumptions of Western philosophical enquiry-assumptions such as that truth is not a relative notion, or that words have determinate meanings.
