Jacques Derrida in the context of "Psychoanalysis"

In philosophy, an aporia (Ancient Greek: ᾰ̓πορῐ́ᾱ, romanized: aporíā, lit. '"lacking passage", also: "impasse", "difficulty in passage", "puzzlement"') is a conundrum or state of puzzlement. In rhetoric, it is a declaration of doubt, made for rhetorical purpose and often feigned. The notion of an aporia is principally found in ancient Greek philosophy, but it also plays a role in modern post-structuralist philosophy, as in the writings of Jacques Derrida and Luce Irigaray, and it has also served as an instrument of investigation in analytic philosophy.

In philosophy, deconstruction is a loosely defined set of approaches to understanding the relationship between text and meaning. The concept of deconstruction was introduced by the philosopher Jacques Derrida, who described it as a turn away from Platonism's ideas of "true" forms and essences which are valued above appearances. American literary critic and major proponent of deconstruction Barbara Johnson describes the approach in this way:

Since the 1980s, these proposals of language's fluidity instead of being ideally static and discernible have inspired a range of studies in the humanities, including the disciplines of law, anthropology, historiography, linguistics, sociolinguistics, psychoanalysis, LGBT studies, and feminism. Deconstruction also inspired deconstructivism in architecture and remains important within art, music, and literary criticism.

Jean-François Lyotard (/liːoʊˈtɑːr/; French: [ʒɑ̃ fʁɑ̃swa ljɔtaʁ]; 10 August 1924 – 21 April 1998) was a French philosopher, sociologist, and literary theorist. His interdisciplinary discourse spans such topics as epistemology and communication, the human body, modern art and postmodern art, literature and critical theory, music, film, time and memory, space, the city and landscape, the sublime, and the relation between aesthetics and politics. He is best known for his articulation of postmodernism after the late 1970s and the analysis of the impact of postmodernity on the human condition. Lyotard was a key personality in contemporary continental philosophy and authored 26 books and many articles. He was a director of the International College of Philosophy founded by Jacques Derrida, François Châtelet, Jean-Pierre Faye, and Dominique Lecourt.

In philosophy, temporality refers to the idea of a linear progression of past, present, and future. The term is frequently used, however, in the context of critiques of commonly held ideas of linear time. In social sciences, temporality is studied with respect to the human perception of time and the social organization of time. The perception of time in Western thought underwent significant changes in the three hundred years between the Middle Ages and modernity.

Examples in continental philosophy of philosophers raising questions of temporality include Edmund Husserl's analysis of internal time consciousness, Martin Heidegger's Being and Time, J. M. E. McTaggart's article "The Unreality of Time", George Herbert Mead's Philosophy of the Present, and Jacques Derrida's criticisms of Husserl's analysis.

Hauntology is a music genre, movement or a loosely defined stylistic feature that evokes cultural memory and aesthetics of the past. It developed in the 2000s primarily among British electronic musicians, and typically draws on British cultural sources from the 1930s to the 1960s, including library music, film and TV soundtracks, psychedelia, and public information films; often through the use of sampling.

The term was derived from philosopher Jacques Derrida's concept of the same name. In the mid-2000s, it was adapted by theorists Simon Reynolds and Mark Fisher. Hauntology is associated with the UK record labels Ghost Box and Trunk Records, in addition to artists such as the Caretaker, Burial, and Philip Jeck. Music genres hypnagogic pop and chillwave descended from hauntology.

Deconstructivism is a postmodern architectural movement which appeared in the 1980s. It gives the impression of the fragmentation of the constructed building, commonly characterised by an absence of obvious harmony, continuity, or symmetry. Its name is a portmanteau of Constructivism and "Deconstruction", a form of semiotic analysis developed by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida. Architects whose work is often described as deconstructivist (though in many cases the architects themselves reject the label) include Zaha Hadid, Peter Eisenman, Frank Gehry, Rem Koolhaas, Daniel Libeskind, Bernard Tschumi, and Coop Himmelb(l)au.

The term does not inherently refer to the style's deconstructed visuals as the English adjective suggests, but instead derives from the movement's foundations in contrast to the Russian Constructivist movement during the First World War that "broke the rules" of classical architecture through the French language.

The gaze (French: le regard), in the figurative sense, is an individual's (or a group's) awareness and perception of other individuals, other groups, or oneself. Since the 20th century, the concept and the social applications of the gaze have been expanded by phenomenologist, existentialist, and post-structuralist philosophers. Jean-Paul Sartre described the gaze (or the look) in Being and Nothingness (1943). Michel Foucault, in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975), developed the concept of the gaze to illustrate the dynamics of socio-political power relations and the social dynamics of society's mechanisms of discipline. Jacques Derrida, in The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Come) (1997), elaborated upon the inter-species relations that exist among human beings and other animals, which are established by way of the gaze.

Différance is a French term coined by Jacques Derrida. Roughly speaking, the method of différance is a way to analyze how signs (words, symbols, metaphors, etc) come to have meanings. It suggests that meaning is not inherent in a sign but arises from its relationships with other signs, a continual process of contrasting with what comes before and later. That is, a sign acquires meaning by being different from other signs. The meaning of a sign changes over time, as new signs keep appearing and old signs keep disappearing. It is central to Derrida's concept of deconstruction, a critical outlook concerned with the relationship between text and meaning.

However, the meaning of a sign is not just determined by the system of signs present currently. Past meanings leave "traces", and possible future meanings "haunt". The meaning of a sign is determined by the interaction between past traces, future haunts, and the system of signs present right now.