ABSTRACT
Deconstruction can be, and often is, thought of as a set of methods for approaching written texts and other materials. As a set of methods, deconstruction may offer worthy advice, but nothing really new to anyone; and it is certainly not the intention of deconstructionists to be worthies. Derrida's writings are much more concerned to develop a philosophy, and specifically a philosophy of language and culture, than to propose a set of methods for approaching texts. At the heart of this philosophy is a scepticism about the possibility of truth, arising from the sense that people are always caught in a web of words, words which are not sustained in their meaning by some referential link to reality but only by their differential relation to each other. Scepticism about the possibility of truth can produce either depression or frivolity. In Derrida's case it produces frivolity.
