First, the matter of a definition: what exactly are we to understand by the word "deconstruction"? In practice, deconstruction is exemplified primarily in the critical readings made by the contemporary French philosopher Jacques Derrida, of a series of texts in the history of Western philosophy, from Plato to Descartes, Roussea and Hegel to Husserl and Heidegger, and of a series of more recer texts in the history of structuralism and post-structuralism, from Saussure to Lévi-Strauss, Lacan and Foucault.