Post-structuralism, including its postmodern aspects, need not be perceived as fundamentally ahistorical or apolitical. The term indicates a relationship to structuralism and its Aufhebung or self-overcoming.12 One of the best-known concepts of post-structualist theory, “deconstruction,” propounded a method of reading literature that appeared to shelve permanently any appeal to transcendent historical meanings in favor of an arid “textuality” and hopelessly self-contradictory interpretations. The term “deconstruction,” coined by Algerian-born French philosopher Jacques Derrida (1930–), is often misconstrued as meaning “to take apart,” rather in the manner of a small child opening a package. Deconstruction instead refers to a method of paying attention to the inherent instability within written texts, an instability that becomes visible through a “close reading” which pays particular attention to the “traces of difference.” These traces may be obscure, but they reveal contradiction and contestation, or places in which an author attempts to control a discursive field that is already cracked along its own fault lines. Texts are never entirely coherent and thus they deconstruct themselves, as a close reading can reveal. They present the appearance of totality, completion and closure, and yet contain within themselves the traces of their own illusoriness, their own construction.