Derrida will prefer to follow the more " fruitful paths ( formalization )" of a general semiotics without falling in what he considered " a hierarchizing teleology " privileging linguistics, and speak of ' mark ' rather than of language, not as something restricted to mankind, but as prelinguistic, as the pure possibility of language, working every where there is a relation to something else.

This structural difference is the first component that Derrida will take into account when articulating the meaning of différance, a mark he felt the need to create and will become a fundamental tool in his life long work: deconstruction.

In the deconstruction procedure, one of the main concerns of Derrida is not to collapse into Hegel ´ s dialectic where these oppositions would be reduced to contradictions in a dialectic whose telos would, necessarily, be to resolve it into a synthesis,

There is one statement by Derrida which he regarded as the axial statement of his whole essay on Rousseau ( part of the highly influential Of Grammatology, 1967 ), and which is perhaps his most quoted and famous statement ever.

Derrida states that “ Deconstruction is not a method and cannot be transformed into one .” This is because deconstruction is not a mechanical operation.

Derrida warns against considering deconstruction as a mechanical operation when he states that “ It is true that in certain circles ( university or cultural, especially in the United States ) the technical and methodological “ metaphor ” that seems necessarily attached to the very word “ deconstruction ” has been able to seduce or lead astray .” Commentator Richard Beardsworth explains that

For Derrida [...] this is irresponsibility itself.

Each deconstruction is necessarily different ( otherwise it achieves no work ) and this is why Derrida states that “ Deconstruction takes place, it is an event .” On the other hand, deconstruction cannot be completely untranscendental because this would make it meaningless to, for example, speak of two different examples of deconstruction as both being examples of deconstruction.

It is for this reason that Richard Rorty asks if Derrida should be considered a quasi-transcendental philosopher that operates in the tension between the demands of the empirical and the transcendental.

Deconstruction is therefore not a method in the traditional sense but is what Derrida terms " an unclosed, unenclosable, not wholly formalizable ensemble of rules for reading, interpretation and writing.

Derrida states that deconstruction is not a critique in the Kantian sense. This is because Kant defines the term critique as the opposite of dogmatism.

For Derrida it is not possible to escape the dogmatic baggage of the language we use in order to perform a pure critique in the Kantian sense.

For Derrida language is dogmatic because it is inescapably metaphysical.

Derrida argues that language is inescapably metaphysical because it is made up of signifiers that only refer to that which transcends them-the signified.

" By this Derrida means that all claims to know something necessarily involve an assertion of the metaphysical type that something is the case somewhere.

Many of today's academics that employ the term, cultural imperialism, are heavily informed by the work of Foucault, Derrida, Said, and other poststructrualist and postcolonialist theorists.

It is for this reason that Derrida distances his use of the term deconstruction from poststructuralism, a term that would suggest philosophy could simply go beyond structuralism.

Derrida states that “ the motif of deconstruction has been associated with " poststructuralism "" but that this term was " a word unknown in France until its “ return ” from the United States.

The popularity of the term deconstruction combined with the technical difficulty of Derrida's primary material on deconstruction and his reluctance to elaborate his understanding of the term has meant that many secondary sources have attempted to give a more straightforward explanation than Derrida himself ever attempted.

In an effort to clarify the rather muddled reception of the term deconstruction Derrida specifies what deconstruction is not through a number of negative definitions.

Although he avoided defining the term directly, Derrida sought to apply Martin Heidegger's concept of Destruktion or Abbau, to textual reading.

Authors other than Derrida have also used the term " deconstructionism " with different definitions .< ref >" Glossary Definition: Deconstructionism.

Following the war, from 1960 to 1964, Derrida taught philosophy at the Sorbonne, where he was assistant of Suzanne Bachelard ( daughter of Gaston ), Canguilhem, Paul Ricœur ( who in these years coined the term School of suspicion ) and Jean Wahl.

Différance is a French term coined by Jacques Derrida, deliberately homophonous with the word " différence ".

Derrida first uses the term différance in his 1963 paper " Cogito et histoire de la folie ".

Derrida thus explicitly refers the term différance to life, and in particular to life as the history of inscription and retention, whether this is genetic or technological ( from writing to " electronic card indexes ").

In contemporary literary and philosophical works concerned with gender, the term " phallogocentrism " is commonplace largely as a result of the writings of Jacques Derrida, the founder of the philosophy of deconstruction, which is considered by many academics to constitute an essential part of the discourse of postmodernism.

Logocentrism is the term Derrida uses to refer to the philosophy of determinateness, while phallocentrism is the term he uses to describe the way logocentrism itself has been genderized by a " masculinist ( phallic )" and " patriarchal " agenda.

In William Harmon ’ s A Handbook to Literature, for example, aporia is identified as “ a difficulty, impasse, or point of doubt and indecision ” while also noting that critics such as Derrida have employed the term to “ indicate a point of undecidability, which locates the site at which the text most obviously undermines its own rhetorical structure, dismantles, or deconstructs itself ” ( 39 ).

Post-structuralists such as Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida rejected structuralism's insistence on fixed meaning, its privileging of a meta-linguistic standpoint ; but continued all the more to problematize the human subject, favouring the term " the decentered subject " which implies the absence of human agency.

Derrida states that deconstruction is an " antistructuralist gesture " because " Structures were to be undone, decomposed, desedimented.

" At the same time for Derrida deconstruction is also a " structuralist gesture " because it is concerned with the structure of texts.

Nancy's work is an important development of deconstruction because it takes the challenge of deconstruction seriously and attempts to develop an understanding of political terms that is undeconstructable and therefore suitable for a philosophy after Derrida.

In Jacques Derrida's response, " Sokal and Bricmont Aren't Serious ," first published in Le Monde, Derrida writes that the Sokal hoax is rather " sad ," not only because Alan Sokal's name is now linked primarily to a hoax, not to science, but also because the chance to reflect seriously on these issues has been ruined for a broad public forum that deserves better.

Derrida said this phase was structural and that it was " the necessity of an interminable analysis " because " the hierarchy of dual oppositions always reestablishes itself ".

The memoir became cause for controversy, because shortly before Derrida published his piece, it had been discovered by the Belgian literary critic Ortwin de Graef that long before his academic career in the US, de Man had written almost two hundred essays in a pro-Nazi newspaper during the German occupation of Belgium, including several that were explicitly antisemitic.

Derrida suggested, however, that the success of Fukuyama's book was precisely because it served to cover up and conceal the contradictions and conflicts continuing to pervade late postmodern capitalism.

In one scene, Derrida comments that he would be most interested in hearing about famous philosophers ' sex lives because this topic is seldom addressed in their writings.

In Jacques Derrida's response, " Sokal and Bricmont Aren't Serious ," first published in Le Monde, Derrida writes that the Sokal hoax is rather " sad ," not only because Alan Sokal's name is now linked primarily to a hoax, not to science, but also because the chance to reflect seriously on this issue has been ruined for a broad public forum that deserves better.

In Of Grammatology, Derrida states that grammatology is not a " science of man " because it is concerned with the question of " the name of man.

In Jacques Derrida's response, " Sokal and Bricmont Aren't Serious ," first published in Le Monde, Derrida writes that the Sokal hoax is rather " sad ," not only because Alan Sokal's name is now linked primarily to a hoax, not science, but also because the chance to reflect seriously on this issue has been ruined for a broad public forum that deserves better.

For example, Searle notes that, in developing his " deconstruction " method, Jacques Derrida altered the truth value of one of Saussure's key concepts: " The correct claim that the elements of the language only function as elements because of the differences they have from one another is converted into the false claim that the elements [...] are ' constituted on ' ( Derrida ) the traces of these other elements.