ABSTRACT
Deconstruction is commonly associated with the philosophy of Jacques Derrida. But there are also non-philosophers who say they engage in deconstruction, for example architects, anthropologists and literary critics. Derrida sort of deconstruction can best be described as an activity based on a Saussurean account of meaning, though in his hands Saussure’s theory becomes a negative one. The deconstruction of texts consists in examining books from many areas of science and scholarship: literature, philosophy, history, anthropology, architecture and biochemistry have all been tackled by Derrida and his followers. Deconstruction takes up the Saussurean notion of a kind of identity that can only be explained by difference and transforms it into the idea of an identity which can only be created by difference. Deconstruction is the undermining of logocentrism. It attacks the supposed difference between ‘speech’ and ‘writing’, the priority of the former over the latter, the concepts of truth and logical validity, and the possibility of an ideal language.
