Binary opposition

Classical structuralism, as it comes through Lévi-Strauss's anthropology, charts many cultural relations as binary oppositions: cooked against raw, low against high, cold against hot.

Put simply Classical structuralism, in Lévi-Strauss's hands, maps much of culture as pairs of opposites: raw and cooked, high and low, hot and cold.

The crisis that opens many myths is one of too little difference, not too much: boundaries blur, distinctions collapse.

Put simply Lévi-Strauss: many myths open with a crisis of too little difference, not too much. The lines that keep things distinct blur and break down.

In the text In "The Structural Study of Myth" (1955), Lévi-Strauss writes that "mythical thought always progresses from the awareness of oppositions toward their resolution"; "a crisis of distinctions" is Girard's phrase in Violence and the Sacred.

Enlightenment reason was possible only once madness had been defined: there is no reason without an unreason to set it against, which makes the asylum the Enlightenment's dark side.

Put simply Foucault: the Enlightenment's idea of reason needed an idea of madness to define itself against. Without unreason there is no reason. That makes the asylum the Enlightenment's dark side.

Shore sees parallels between reason's dependence on madness, Beauvoir's self-definition through an other and Wolff's Eastern Europe, invented as the West's Enlightenment contrast.

Put simply Shore sees parallels between reason defined against madness (Foucault), the self defined against an "other" (Beauvoir), and Eastern Europe, which the historian Wolff says the Enlightenment West invented as its contrast.

To deconstruct is to take apart, not merely to smash. The target is stability itself: any meaning that claims to be settled, decisive and self-anchoring, structuralism's binaries among them.

Put simply Derrida: to deconstruct means to take apart, not just to smash. What he takes apart is any meaning that claims to be settled and to hold itself in place, including structuralism's neat paired opposites.

Structuralism's central pairs, nature and culture, empirical and rational, sensible and intelligible, are in some measure ideological constructs: never as tidy as they look, and always open to being undone.

Put simply Derrida: the paired opposites structuralism relied on, such as nature versus culture, are partly ideological constructions. They are never as tidy as they look and can always be undone.

Eagleton's hostile illustration of deconstruction: man becomes himself only by endlessly shutting woman out as his opposite, so his identity hangs on, and is endangered by, what he excludes.

Put simply Eagleton, a hostile critic of deconstruction, illustrates how it unravels opposites: man defines himself by constantly shutting woman out as his opposite, so his identity depends on, and is endangered by, what he excludes.