Which structuralist thinkers did Jacques Derrida criticize in his early work?

In his early work, Jacques Derrida engaged in a critique of major thinkers associated with the structuralist movement, including the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, and the intellectual historian and philosopher Michel Foucault.1

Derrida’s critique was central to his development of deconstruction, a method used to examine and displace the hierarchical binary oppositions—such as speech versus writing or nature versus culture—that he argued were inherent in Western philosophy. By challenging the structuralist assumption that cultural phenomena could be analyzed as stable, self-contained systems of signs, Derrida helped lead a shift toward poststructuralism, which remained skeptical of the possibility of establishing a definitive, universal science of meaning.12