Poststructuralism as deconstruction

Jacques Derrida's Of Grammatology [De la grammatologie] was first published in French in 1967. It is the most overtly poststructuralist book to be considered here, since its first part deals explicitly and at length with structuralist theories of language through the works of Ferdinand de Saussure and Roman Jakobson, among others. However, in Of Grammatology, as elsewhere, deconstruction works within what it follows. The meaning of “post” in poststructuralism is therefore not a final “after” in the sense of a hurdle now passed. Instead, the “post” means “with but also different”. Deconstruction is still structuralism, but opened up and transformed.

This transformation takes place through an undermining of structuralism's most fundamental claims to absolute truths, for example, concerning the priority of speech over writing. More widely, Of Grammatology develops Derrida's deconstruction of Husserl's phenomenology (begun in Derrida's 1962 introduction to Husserl's Origin of Geometry). It also extends the critique of “presence” in phenomenology, and of nature and essence in structuralist theories of language, into the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

Poststructuralism must be thought of as deconstruction, and not the opposite. This is because poststructuralism is nothing other than the series of works that have come to define it. There is no separate determining definition of poststructuralism. This explains why it has been introduced here in terms of a very bare form (the folding of limits back on to knowledge) and of a series of positive and negative properties.