What does ‘deconstruction’ mean? Towards the end of his life, Derrida liked very much to say that, if there was one thing that had to be deconstructed, as a matter of urgency, it was deconstruction, the word deconstruction. Deconstruction had become something in the academic repertory. To give it a meaning was, in a sense, to misappropriate it. I still think that, for him, the word ‘deconstruction’ had not been academized at all. It was an indication of a speculative desire, a desire for thought. A basic desire for thought. That was ‘his’ deconstruction. And that desire, like any desire, began with an encounter, an acknowledgement. Like all the structuralists of the 1960s, like Foucault for example, Derrida accepted that the experience of the world is always an experience of discursive imposition. To be in the world is to be marked by discourses, marked even in our flesh, body, sex and so on. Derrida’s thesis, Derrida’s conclusion, the source of Derrida’s desire is that, whatever form that discursive imposition may take, there is a point that we can call a vanishing point [point de fuite]. I think that, here, the expression has to be taken in the most literal of senses. A vanishing point is a point which, of course, flees the rule of the dispositif of imposition.
-Badiou in Pocket Pantheon