Acknowledgements

I first started thinking about deconstruction as a graduate student in the Ideology and Discourse Analysis programme in the Department of Government at the University of Essex in the late 1990s where David Howarth introduced me to Jacques Derrida.It was only several years later, however, that I started thinking more systematically about deconstruction, first teaching it at the Essex Summer School and then, pushed by Julia Mourão Permoser, writing an article on deconstruction as method.Since then, deconstruction has been a staple of my work, sometimes explicitly, mostly implicitly.This book is the result of those two or so decades thinking about and with deconstruction.In the course of writing the book, I have been fortunate to be part of inspiring academic environments at several institutions.The School of Politics and International Relations at Queen Mary University of London has been my academic home for almost two decades and has provided me with research leave and, most importantly, with fantastic colleagues and a flourishing intellectual environment.I presented draft chapters from the book in the TheoryLab in the School, and I am immensely grateful for colleagues taking the time to read my work and feed back on it.From 2019 to 2021, I was Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow in the Department of Political Science at the University of Copenhagen (funded by the European Union's Horizon 2020 grant agreement no.7940037).While there, I was fortunate to be part of the Political Theory Research Group, and I would like to thank Christian Rostbøll, Lars Tønder and Andy Poe for feedback and for many inspiring conersations about political theory.In the Department of Law at the University of La Rioja, I found an intellectual home for the last decade, most recently as a Collaborating Researcher.I would like to thank the Department for their hospitality