ABSTRACT
Deconstruction's relevance to ideas like custom is made imperative by Western thought's reliance on foundationalist philosophy which tends to deny, oppress and exclude opposites of preferred ideas. To apply deconstructionism to the search for a deconstructionist theory of custom, we may need to show the link in general between deconstructionism and normative theory. A good starting point for deconstructing custom might be to analyse the relationship between State practice and opinio juris. The inversion of hierarchies involves identifying hierarchical oppositions - the preferred idea "A", and the subservient idea "B", and then immediately reversing the status of the ideas in the hierarchy. The theme of supplement and metaphysics of presence alerts us to the danger of over-simplifying the relationship between thought on the one hand, and language on the other. Evidence of free play of texts points to ambiguities and risks that we expose ourselves to whenever we participate in the act of communicating, whatever the context.
