Why was Jacques Derrida associated with poststructuralism in the United States?

Jacques Derrida was associated with poststructuralism in the United States primarily because his work emerged as a critical response to the structuralist movement that gained prominence in the 1960s.1

While structuralists sought to analyze cultural phenomena as general systems of signs with underlying, rule-bound structures, Derrida’s early work—specifically his deconstruction of thinkers like Ferdinand de Saussure, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Michel Foucault—challenged the possibility of creating a detached, scientific "metalanguage" to describe these systems.12

By demonstrating that meaning is never fully present but is instead endlessly "deferred" through an infinite chain of differences, Derrida’s approach was viewed by American intellectuals as a movement beyond structuralism. Consequently, he was categorized as a poststructuralist because his philosophy was skeptical of the structuralist ambition to establish a general science of meaning, emphasizing instead that inquiry is inevitably shaped by interpretive practices.134