A sceptical approach to the possibility of coherent meaning initiated by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida. Derrida is self-consciously evasive, but the drift is that there is no privileged point, such as an author’s intention or a contact with external reality, that confers significance on a text. There is only the limitless opportunity for fresh commentary or text (a linguistic version of the idealist belief that we cannot escape the world of our own ideas). However, a deconstructionist reading of a text subverts its apparent significance by uncovering contradictions and conflict within it. The very use of a term (e.g. ‘male’ or ‘free’) may suppress or marginalize an opposite (‘female’, ‘oppressed’) which, by being excluded, is somehow regarded as having had its rights trampled upon. Sometimes, since it is impossible to say very much without using terms upon which this trick can be pulled, or therefore to take up a significant vantage point above a text, it is supposed that deconstruction leaves everything as it was; its attempt to think the unthinkable proceeds with puns and jokes as much as by recognizable argument. The apparently wilful obscurity of much deconstructionist writing has tended to outrage more orthodox philosophers. See Derrida, différance, postmodernism, poststructuralism.