Ferdinand de Saussure
Ferdinand de Saussure is the godfather of linguistics whose concepts and philosophies he conceived in a series of works became the foundation for exploration of how to find meaning in a text. Saussure is also considered one of the co-founders of semiotics. Derrida begins his comprehensive overview of deconstructionist analysis with an in-depth review and critique of Saussurian structuralism.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Rousseau is a major figure in the text, as a good chunk of Derrida’s book is devoted to analyzing the great French thinker’s work titled Essay on the Origin of Language. Although none of this book can be even closely termed an “easy” read, Derrida really cranks up the difficulty quotient in this particular analysis. This essay is far from the only work of Rousseau’s that comes under the microscope of Derrida’s analysis as, in fact, there is perhaps no other subject in the text whose work is so comprehensively explored. Through the analyses of these texts, Rousseau becomes a central figure in Derrida’s identification of binary opposition as elemental obstruction to interpreting meaning in a work of literature.
Claude Lévi-Strauss
Claude Lévi-Strauss is another of the major leading figures in the development of structuralism. Understanding structuralism is key to fully understanding what Derrida is deriving at with deconstructionism. Working from the groundwork laid by Saussure, Lévi-Strauss continued to build upon the fundamental notion of divergence between the spoken word and the written word with the ironic conclusion being a simplification of the difference. The section devoted to Lévi-Strauss notably differs from the sometimes almost impenetrable language he uses in writing about Rousseau relative to the widely acknowledged assertion that Derrida is launching an attack as much as he is offering analysis.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Almost every major important work of philosophy written in the 1800’s and the early 20th century inevitably introduces Hegel as a central character. Well, perhaps not Hegel himself so much as his specter which hangs over all revolutionary thought. The centerpiece of Hegelian dialectics (despite never actually showing up in his writing) is the concept of establishing a thesis which naturally produces its opposite known as an antithesis which together create and argument that produces a synthesis. Like Marx in the application to economic theory, Derrida turns this concept on its head in his argument that the synthesis produced by the binary opposition of a thesis with its antithesis can never fully be separated from that original binary structure and deconstructionism is built upon a foundation of rejecting such structural opposition.
