Jacques Derrida - An initial attempt (Special thanks to H.J. Silverman)

Post-modernism (or at least post-modern thought) is not simply "anything goes". The post-modern questions the modern by asking how the modern marks its owns limits and margins.

For Derrida, this questionning involves the deconstruction of texts. Texts to him are not just the written but what is inscribed.
This is related to historicity, it is the relationship between an object's subjective history (science of study) and its origins as an object (possibly without any subjective meaning). This is the gap between the 'beginning' and the 'origin'. According to Silverman, this is beginning of the post-modern. (this keeps leading me to mentally paraphrase the Garden Lake philosophical question - If a tree falls in the forest, does it make a sound?)

Derrida discusses the opposition between speaking and writing, claiming speaking has been given primacy in recent times. Derrida's deconstruction encourages a resistence to this by "originary writing" (archi-ecriture), writing which is neither speaking nor the writing that is opposed to it (rap?). This is the post-modern.

Borrowing from his interpretation of Heidegger (and Husserl) who promoted the notion of a ontico-ontological difference (the difference which arises out of the relation of being to BEING)