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A French philosopher who developed deconstruction, a method of close reading that treats a text's apparent stability as something to be pried open rather than taken for granted, working through the linguistics of Saussure and the phenomenology of Husserl and Heidegger. Over more than forty books he became one of the central figures of post-structuralist thought, with an influence that spread well past philosophy into literary theory, law and architecture, even as he resisted the labels — postmodern, post-structuralist — that came to be attached to him.