SOURCE: "Deconstructive Methodology," in The Tain of the Mirror: Derrida and the Philosophy of Reflection, Harvard University Press, 1986, pp. 121-76.

An Excerpt from Writing and Difference

It would be easy enough to show that the concept of structure and even the word "structure" itself are as old as the epistēmē—that is to say, as old as Western science and Western philosophy—and that their roots thrust deep into the soil of ordinary language, into whose deepest recesses the epistēmē plunges in order to gather them up and to make them part of itself in a metaphorical displacement. Nevertheless, up to the event which I wish to mark out and define, structure—or rather the structurality of structure—although it has always been at work, has always been neutralized or reduced, and this by a process of giving it a center or of referring it to...