Deconstruction Deconstruction is the name given by French philosopher Jacques Derrida to an approach (whether in philosophy, literary analysis, or in other fields) which rigorously pursues the meaning of a text to the point of undoing the oppositions on which it is apparently founded, and to the point of showing that those foundations are irreducibly complex, unstable or impossible.Deconstruction generally operates by conducting close textual readings with a view to demonstrating that the text is not a discrete whole but that it instead contains several irreconcilable, contradictory meanings.