# Deconstruction **Domain:** Philosophy / Textual Analysis / Cultural Theory **Doc Type:** Interpretive Method **Maturity:** Developed ## Definition **Deconstruction** is an interpretive practice associated especially with Jacques Derrida that examines how texts and conceptual systems depend on distinctions they cannot fully stabilize. It attends to exclusions, reversals, supplements, and tensions through which an apparently secondary term helps constitute the privileged one. Deconstruction is not simple destruction and does not claim that every distinction is meaningless. It reads closely enough to show where a system's own operations complicate its declared hierarchy. ## Corpus Context The journal applies this logic to speech and silence, presence and absence, form and formlessness, and other [[wiki/Binary Opposition|binary oppositions]]. ## See Also [[wiki/Poststructuralism|Poststructuralism]] · [[wiki/Semiotic Twins|Semiotic Twins]] · [[wiki/Ambiguity|Ambiguity]]