The French philosopher Jacques Derrida became famous during the peak of "structuralism," when through the method of deconstruction he inaugurated what would remain known as "post-structuralism." Derrida's deconstructive reading and his critique of thought through the use of concepts such as "difference," "trace," "phallogocentrism," etc., managed to provoke ruptures in the dominant representation of Western philosophical thought and language for itself.

In his discussion with the French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, Derrida tries to deconstruct a common belief that insists on speaking about the danger of the "erasure" of the subject and therefore the need for a "return to the subject," which does not bother to trace the philosophical presuppositions and consequences of the critical gesture towards the metaphysics of the subject and the displacement of its centrality within philosophical discourse, as articulated, among others, in the reflections of Nietzsche, Heidegger, Lacan, Althusser, and Foucault.