1. One feature that garnered initial interest in a French context (which propagated rather quickly to scholars of French literature and philosophy working in American universities) was Derrida's efforts to displace the understanding of Heidegger's work that had been prevalent in France from the period of the ban against Heidegger teaching in German universities, which amounts in part to an almost wholesale rejection of the influence of Jean-Paul Sartre and existentialist terms. In Derrida's view, deconstruction is a tradition inherited via Heidegger (the French term "déconstruction" is a term coined to translate Heidegger's use of the words "Destruktion" - literally "destruction" - and "Abbau" - more literally "de-building").

Heideggers Denken führt die phänomenologische Methode seines Lehrers Edmund Husserl umdeutend weiter.