There is nothing outside of the text. What we call the "real" is itself a structure of signs, endlessly referring to other signs, never arriving at a transcendental signified that would anchor meaning once and for all.
The supplement adds itself, it is a surplus, a plenitude enriching another plenitude, the fullest measure of presence.
-- but the supplement also supplements. It adds only to replace.
Language bears within itself the necessity of its own critique. Every concept is inscribed in a chain or in a system within which it refers to the other.
The center is not the center. The concept of centered structure is contradictory -- the center, which is by definition unique, constitutes that very thing within a structure which while governing the structure, escapes structurality.
Writing is not a mere supplement to speech; it is the condition of possibility for all signification. The absence that writing introduces is always already at work in the living present of speech.
Meaning is never simply present or absent. It is always deferred, displaced, divided against itself.
The trace is not a presence but is rather the simulacrum of a presence that dislocates, displaces, and refers beyond itself. The trace has, properly speaking, no place, for effacement belongs to the very structure of the trace. In this way the metaphysical text is understood; it is still readable, and remains read.
What we call "meaning" is never a self-identical presence waiting to be discovered. It is produced through difference -- through the play of differences that constitutes language itself. The sign is always already divided. Every attempt to fix meaning, to arrest the play of the signifier, is itself a textual operation that produces new deferrals.
The history of metaphysics has always been the determination of Being as presence -- presence in the form of the thing's objectivity, presence as substance/essence/existence, temporal presence as the now, the self-presence of the cogito, consciousness, subjectivity. Presence is a function of absence. Logocentrism -- the metaphysics of phonetic writing -- has been the most original and powerful ethnocentrism.
To deconstruct is not to destroy. Deconstruction is not demolition. It is rather an attempt to think the structured genealogy of philosophical concepts in the most faithful, interior way -- but at the same time to determine, from a certain exterior, what this history has been able to dissimulate or forbid. The outside is already inside.
There is no simple origin, no pure beginning. What we call the origin is always already a repetition, a trace of something that was never fully present. The origin is constituted retroactively, produced by the very system it is supposed to found. Every foundation is unfounded. This is the paradox that deconstruction inhabits without attempting to resolve.
Reading is never passive reception. It is an active production of meaning, a writing that supplements the text it reads. The reader does not discover a meaning hidden in the text; they produce meaning through the act of reading itself. The boundary between reading and writing dissolves in the general text.
Structure, sign, and play. The concept of structure and even the word "structure" itself are as old as the episteme -- that is to say, as old as Western science and Western philosophy. But the structurality of structure -- although it has always been at work, has always been neutralized or reduced by a process of giving it a center or of referring it to a point of presence.