Deconstruction Deconstruction is a theory about language and literature that developed in the 1970s, in large part as a reaction to the primacy of Structuralism and Semiotics in literary criticism. Its original premises were first formulated by the French philosopher and critic Jacques Derrida , whose works converted a number of U.S. academics. What most characterizes deconstruction is its notion of textuality, a view of language as it exists not only in books, but in speech, in history, and in culture. For the deconstructionist, language is everything.
Language directs humanity and creates human reality.
Yet, upon close examination, words seem to have no connection with reality or with concepts or ideas. Related to textuality, the notion of intertext refers to the broader cultural background, the context that saturates the text with innumerable and nonverbal conventions, concepts, figurations, and codes. Given the silent and hidden links of a text to its cultural and social intertext, the text's content and meaning are, essentially, indeterminate. Texts, therefore, are unreadable, and the practice of interpretation may be defined as misreading. Deconstruction has been regularly attacked as childish philosophical skepticism and linguistic nihilism.