 The term “deconstruction,” like “postmodernism,” has taken on many meanings in the popular imagination.  However, in philosophy, it signifies certain strategies for reading and writing texts.  The term was introduced into philosophical literature in 1967, with the publication of three texts by Jacques Derrida: Of Grammatology (in English 1974), Writing and Difference (in English 1978), and Speech and Phenomena (in English 1973). This so-called “publication blitz” immediately established Derrida as a major figure in the new movement in philosophy and the human sciences centered in Paris, and brought the idiom “deconstruction” into its vocabulary. Derrida and deconstruction are routinely associated with postmodernism, although like Deleuze and Foucault, he does not use the term and would resist affiliation with “-isms” of any sort. Of the three books from 1967, Of Grammatology is the more comprehensive in laying out the background for deconstruction as a way of reading modern theories of language, especially structuralism, and Heidegger's meditations on the non-presence of being. It also sets out Derrida's difference with Heidegger over Nietzsche. Where Heidegger places Nietzsche within the metaphysics of presence, Derrida insists that “reading, and therefore writing, the text were for Nietzsche ‘originary’ operations,” (Derrida 1974 [1967], 19), and this puts him at the closure of metaphysics (not the end), a closure that liberates writing from the traditional logos, which takes writing to be a sign (a visible mark) for another sign (speech), whose “signified” is a fully present meaning.