Leave it to the MIT Press Essential Knowledge Series to produce the seemingly impossible: an accessible introduction to an idea that defies explication.
Deconstruction — the neologism that Derrida originally coined in translating Heidegger’s term “Destruktion” for the clearing and unconcealing of the originary ideas hidden by binary oppositions of the Western metaphysical tradition — points not to a method, or to a form of analysis or criticism, but to a “general strategy” for thinking about, within, and through the binary oppositions that both characterize all language (structuralism) and embed tacit and imbalanced values within and underneath all discourse.
Facets of this strategy include inversion, in which power imbalances are subverted, but not destroyed (for mere inversion would never escape from the binary thinking that deconstruction is problematizing in the first place), as well as emergence, in which inversion is remixed with the irruption of new thinking (often via neologisms or paleonymy) that both maintains and transcends the event horizon of the original opposition.
Examples worked through include the deconstruction of the speech/writing (phallogocenteic) binary and the irruption of arche-writing; the cyborg paleonymy in relation to the human/machine and human/beast binaries; the deconstructed relationships between original/copy and remix/original; and the virtual paleonymy stemming from the real/illusion or essence/appearance binary that has dominated Western metaphysics and axiology since Plato.
This is truly a fantastic work, first and foremost from Gunkel, who somehow manages the impossible, with clarity, brevity, depth, and wit; and from the MiT Essential Knowledge Series, whose editing and presentation has now produced (for me so far) three for three outstanding works: Nihilism, Cynicism, and Deconstruction.