在欧陆哲学与文学批评中，解构主义（法语：déconstruction；英语：deconstruction）是一个由法国后结构主义哲学家德希达（Jacque Derrida）所创立的批评学派。德希达提出了一种他称之为解构阅读西方哲学的方法。大体来说，解构阅读是一种揭露文本结构与其西方形上本质（Western metaphysical essence）之间差异的文本分析方法。解构阅读呈现出文本不能只是被解读成单一作者在传达一个明显的消息，而应该被解读为在某个文化或世界观中各种冲突的体现。一个被解构的文本会显示出许多同时存在的各种观点，而这些观点通常会彼此冲突。将一个文本的解构阅读与其传统阅读来相比较的话，也会显示出这当中的许多观点是被压抑与忽视的。

Deconstruction is a critical outlook concerned with the relationship between text and meaning. Jacques Derrida's 1967 work Of Grammatology introduced the majority of ideas influential within deconstruction. According to Derrida and taking inspiration from the work of Ferdinand de Saussure, language as a system of signs and words only has meaning because of the contrast between these signs. As Rorty contends "words have meaning only because of contrast-effects with other words...no word can acquire meaning in the way in which philosophers from Aristotle to Bertrand Russell have hoped it might—by being the unmediated expression of something non-linguistic (e.g., an emotion, a sense-datum, a physical object, an idea, a Platonic Form)". As a consequence meaning is never present, but rather is deferred to other signs. Derrida refers to the - in this view, mistaken - belief that there is a self-sufficient, non-deferred meaning as metaphysics of presence. A concept then must be understood in the context of its opposite, such as being/nothingness, normal/abnormal, speech/writing, etc.