Deconstruction is a term used in philosophy, literary criticism, and the social sciences, popularised through its usage by Jacques Derrida in the 1960s^[1]. The Oxford English Dictionary defines deconstruction as "A strategy of critical analysis [...] directed towards exposing unquestioned metaphysical assumptions and internal contradictions in philosophical and literary language."^[2] Derrida developed the term deconstruction in relation to his critical engagement with phenomenology, structural linguistics, politics, aesthetics, feminism and literature in the 1960s. The term is also related to the traditions of hermeneutics as it works with questions of how texts should be read and interpreted and immanent critique as a deconstruction demonstrates problems or contradictions that are already operating within the deconstructed text. Concerning deconstruction Derrida states that

[F]rom about 1963 to 1968, I tried to work out - in particular in the three works published in 1967 - what was in no way meant to be a system but rather a sort of strategic device, opening its own abyss, an unclosed, unenclosable, not wholly formalizable ensemble of rules for reading, interpretation and writing. This type of device may have enabled me to detect not only in the history of philosophy and in the related socio-historical totality, but also in what are alleged to be sciences and in so-called post-philosophical discourses that figure among the most modern (in linguistics, in anthropology, in psychoanalysis), to detect in these an evaluation of writing, or, to tell the truth, rather a devaluation of writing whose insistent, repetitive, even obscurely compulsive, character was the sign of a whole set of long-standing constraints. These constraints were practised at the price of contradictions, of denials, of dogmatic decrees"^[3]

Derrida has on occasion tried to clarify some possible misunderstandings of deconstruction. He has stated, for example, that deconstruction is not a methodology. Today the term deconstruction is popular far beyond Derrida's own usage of it and is most closely associated with continental philosophy and literary criticism. Paul de Man is a prominent practitioner of his own interpretation of deconstruction and the most famous member of what came to be referred to as the Yale School of deconstruction.