ABSTRACT
The term Deconstruction was first used by the German philosopher Martin Heidegger and became associated with Jacques Derrida (1930-2004), the Algerian-born French philosopher. Derrida was a Post-Structuralist who studied the nature of signs and “deconstructed” some of the leading structural systems. Whereas the Structuralists tried to construct systems intended to uncover the universal order of cultural expressions, Derrida deconstructed them. He opposed both Saussure’s view of signs as fixed within closed systems and the logocentric belief in essential meanings.
