The movement known as ‘deconstruction’ is, at the time of writing, not much more than twenty years old. It achieved self-consciousness only in the 1970s. In retrospect, however, it is often dated to 1966 – the year in which the French philosopher Jacques Derrida read a paper called ‘Structure, sign and play in the discourse of the human sciences’ (reprinted in Writing, pp. 278–94) at a conference on structuralism at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. That paper, which was marked by an explicit break with the assumptions of structuralism, was promptly heralded as the emergence of ‘poststructuralism’. But this term was, and has remained, hopelessly vague. It acquired whatever sense it had from a wave of the hand in the direction of Derrida and Michel Foucault.

These two profoundly original thinkers did not, however, think of themselves as belonging to a common movement, nor as motivated by some special hostility to structuralism. Each of them had a distinct agenda, reacting to quite different traditions and focusing on quite different topics. Derrida's early work, the work which had the most influence on deconstructionism, was a continuation and intensification of Heidegger's attack on Platonism. It took the form of critical discussions of Rousseau, Hegel, Nietzsche, Saussure, and many other writers, including Heidegger himself. By contrast, though Foucault too was greatly influenced by Heidegger, the books which made him famous were histories of institutions and disciplines, rather than works of philosophy. These books had a distinctively political cast, whereas Derrida's earlier writings only occasionally touched on political topics.