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deconstruction
Deconstruction is a term associated with the French philosopher Jacques Derrida. Most schematically it aruges that the history of western thought has privileged the word and presence, so that thought is better than speech (speech is diluted thought), and speech is better than writing (speech requires the presence of the thinker/talker, writing introduces the possibility of misinterpretation).
Deconstruction argues (and demonstrates) that absence is actually a condition of all meaning, it is what makes language possible as a semiotic system, and that philosophy's traditional privileging of presence over absence actually conceals this. (Other relatively simple examples of the same terms, though used in different contexts, include the idea of origin, justice and law, and nature and society).
It is very important to recognise that deconstruction does not destroy or offer to replace these terms, it merely argues (in extraordinary detail) that in any system (whether logical, political, ideological, institutional, etc) that claims self definition or completeness it is possible to find a fracture, a point where that system actually needs what it thinks it has excluded to actually be.
Writing requires absence, but so does speaking. Law requires an act of authorising force (an unjust expression of force) to be law, and the entire category of the natural is only founded on the prior definition of the social.
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