Jaques Derrida was born in Algiers in 1930. He has studied and taught in both Paris and the United States. Derrida is often regarded as the father of post structuralism or deconstructionism. 

His books include Writing and Difference and Of Grammatology. Of Grammatology was translated into English by

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.

Derrida, and his deconstructionist counterparts, attempt to demystify the lingering epistemologies of the Enlightenment and the construction of Western thought in general.

This demystification involves breaking down the arbitrary categories that Western science and philosophy has used in the past to understand the world. These categories include "self/other", "signifier/signified", and "mind/body". Derrida sees these dichotomous categories as problematic because meaning is lost when philosophers and scientists try to distill ideas down into fixed concepts.

Derrida critiques structualism and the idea of a “law of cental precence” . Derrida finds that too many Western thinkers try to find a unified center in any given concept or social system when in reality there are heterogeneous and complex relationships occurring that cannot be simplified into a particular structure. Structuralism is also a contradictory epistemology in Derrida's mind because  it assumes the center is somehow both inside and outside of the structures it produces. According to Derrida, post-structuralist thought is based on discourse analysis. Understanding the world through discourse represents a decentralized way of looking at the interworkings of the world because discourses cannot exist outside of themselves.

Foucault adopts Derrida’s discourse theory.

Foucault's analysis of the diffusion of power throughout society and his idea that 

power relationships permeate the idea of truth and knowledge itself can is very similar to Derrida’s work.