'What is deconstruction? Nothing, obviously' inside Jacques Derrida's Letter to a Japanese Friend. For Jacques Derrida, «deconstruction does not consist of a set of theorems, axioms, tools, rules, techniques, methods» and language itself is unable to reveal the meaning; alternatively, an individual's understanding of a text is believed to be determined by context which is based on a number of components. Such as those who imply a text (the author) and those who infer the text (the reader). We say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay A deconstructionist's approach to language is not to direct our attention to the inability of language to communicate. Rather, to move us away from thinking that the sole purpose of language is to convey meaning. Derrida and the deconstructionists are not lurking to emerge from their dark lairs only to say “I got you! You made a mistake!" but remind us that the only purpose of language is not just to convey meaning. However, we must not neglect the critical aspect of language, which is its structure and nature, since the fluidity of language allows us to construct a wide range of interpretations. Derrida's expression "il n'ya pas de hors texte" has often been mistranslated as "there is nothing outside the text", it has been interpreted to mean something like "everything that is external to the actual text or texts we are considering is irrelevant and does not really exist". While in Derrida's debate it means "something like the opposite, that only the text exists since it is not possible to escape from the text". The literary critic Harold Bloom supports Derrida's approach that literature cannot have only one interpretation, further stating that "deconstruction, as it has been called, refuses to identify the force of literature with any embodied meaning and shows how deeply such logocentric perspectives or Incarnationists have influenced the way we think about art." The term "logocentric" refers to the presumption of unconditional truth that could be established through language. Although Derrida believed this to be unfounded due to the indeterminacy of language, as words could not be fixed to an exact meaning. Derrida has been allied with the "post-structuralism" movement and has been called post-structuralist on some occasions due to Derrida's affiliation with the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure whose work must be correctly inferred to understand Derrida's work, such as when Derrida states "one cannot announce monsters, one cannot say 'here are our monsters' without immediately turning them into pets." In relation to Derrida's comment, Saussure stated that the idea of ​​a "meaning" within a language is created from “signs” which have two parts. the signifier is the word/image and the signified is the idea/meaning of that signifier and the signifier points towards a signified meaning are the differences between them, therefore, they are a fragment of a systemic network as the signs point to different points of the signs to enable meaning For example, try to describe something without saying what it is not, you can't. If you tried to describe to someone what a 'dog' is, you would probably say 'animal', 'four-legged', similar to 'cat' and other words, other signs. Derrida declared that other signs were always, at all times present to the meaning of a sign, and called this the "trace" of the sign (which post-structuralism also recognized and criticized). However Derridaestablishes that «the trace is not presence but rather the simulacrum of a presence that dislocates, moves and sends beyond itself. The trace itself does not take place, since the cancellation belongs to the very structure of the trace." The concept of 'trace' was reconstructed by Derrida into 'différance', which refers to the idea that meaning impractically prevails in the opening between signs. Derrida said in an interview 'this spacing is at the same time active and passive production of the intervals without which the “full” terms would not mean, would not function'. Derrida's aim is to show that language is extremely subjective, in the sense that the connotation varies from reader to reader and changes from time to time. Therefore, the idea of ​​communal truth that can be achieved through philosophy or a single theory is unachievable. Derrida believes that a substantial part of the Western philosophical tradition has been derived from binary oppositions, the idea that one concept or terminology is deemed more ordinary and has more authenticity than the other. I will discuss Derrida's concept of the trace within Plato's Phaedrus, with reference to Derrida's Pharmacy of Plato later in this essay. Similar to deconstructionists, “poststructuralism is a style of critical reasoning that focuses on the moment of slippage in our systems of meaning as a way to identify.” Poststructuralism focuses on those moments when “we impose meaning on a space that is no longer characterized by shared social agreement on the structure of meaning.” They believe that this idea of ​​meaning slips between signs, this concept was called trace by Derrida. Post-structuralism tries to explain “how we manage to fill those gaps” in our knowledge. By determining the "slip points (...) the significant role of ethical choice is made clear - by this I mean decision-making guided by beliefs about virtue and oneself, not by moral or political principles". The post-structuralist Roland Barthes published his essay “The Death of the Author” (1967) explaining that: 'this paradoxical idea refers not to the empirical or literal death of a given author, but to the fact that in a radical sense, the author is absent from the text". Barthes' “The Death of the Author” criticized the tendency of literary criticism to 'explain' a text by putting into practice the author's life and presumed intentions. “Barthes and Michel Foucault are interested in thinking about literature in ways that do not depend on considering the author as the origin of the meaning of a text or as the authoritative presence in the text.” Barthes, Foucault and Derrida, in reality, all argue the same thing; it's all about the transparency of "meaning" (from the point of view of Barthes and Foucault, an author's meaning should not always be considered) and Derrida's thesis is that language cannot communicate meaning but only interpretations. Post-structuralist Foucault "What is an author?" (1969) is similar to Barthes' criticism of the author, who states: 'There was a time when the texts that we now call literary (narratives, short stories, epic poems, tragedies, comedies) were accepted, put into circulation and valorized without any question about the identity of their author; their anonymity created no difficulty since their antiquity, real or imagined, was considered a sufficient guarantee of their status'. Here Foucault accentuates the current foundations according to which «literary authorship has been integrally linked to legal changes and to questions of copyright and ownership of texts». In essence, Foucault's phrase "What is an author?" declares the glory of the “anti-authoritarian – energies of a writing or speech liberated from the conventional.