This work is a critical description and evaluation of the deconstructive double reading that Jacques Derrida applies to texts of the philosophical tradition in order to demonstrate how fundamental binary hierarchical oppositions of Western thought are deconstructed, overturned, or "deconstructed" by the text itself in which they are inscribed.
In the first part of the book, it is noted that there is a certain tension or even contradiction between the two different "gestures" that constitute deconstructive reading: namely, between the first reading, which reproduces or "replays" the authorial or textual intention (the wanting-to-say of a text) and the second reading, which deconstructs the meanings that have been determined and recognized in the first reading. The general position of deconstruction is that all textual meanings are "ambiguous" as a result of a "primary" difference (differance). While such a conception makes possible the deconstruction of semantically determined and recognizable claims in the second reading, it makes the realization of such claims almost impossible, as required by the first reading.
The issues raised in the first part are further analyzed in detail in the second part through the detailed presentation and thorough critical examination of an "example" of deconstructive reading: Derrida's reading of "Essay on the Origin of Languages" and Jean-Jacques Rousseau's "Confessions" in "On Grammatology".