Jacques Derrida

Derrida is the founding figure of philosophical deconstruction and one of the leading philosophers grouped under the postmodernism label, although he rejected the label.

"There is nothing outside the text." (*Of Grammatology*, II.2 — often misquoted; he means: there is no extra-textual presence to ground meaning, not that the world doesn't exist)

Derrida's training was phenomenological (his early work on Husserl); his deconstruction inherits the phenomenological method of careful descriptive reading even as it deploys it against phenomenological presuppositions.

"Speech and Phenomena" (1967) is a careful internal critique of Husserlian phenomenology that reads from within.

Différance — the constitutive deferral and differentiation that makes meaning possible — is processual in structure; meaning is an event, not a state.

"Différance is not a being, not a presence, but a movement of differing and deferring." (*Margins of Philosophy*, "Différance")

Derrida emerged from and against French structuralism (Saussure, Lévi-Strauss); his work absorbs structuralist insights while showing the structuralist project to be unstable.

"Structure, Sign, and Play" (1966, Johns Hopkins lecture) — the moment of post-structuralism's self-conscious break with classical structuralism.

The later Derrida, on ethics, hospitality, mourning, and the gift, has clear affinities to French existentialism. Levinas in particular is a central interlocutor.

"The Gift of Death" (1992) — sustained engagement with Heidegger, Kierkegaard, and Levinas on responsibility and singularity.