In order to reveal the fictional/hierarchical nature of western Enlightenment metanarratives, deconstructionists sought to demonstrate

...that the categories presented in a culture as symmetrical binary oppositions-- [good/evil, center/margin, material/ideal]--actually subsist in a more unsettled and dynamic tacit relation according to which, first, term B is not symmetrical with but subordinated to the term A; but, second, the ontologically valorized term A actually depends for its meaning on the simultaneous subsumption and exclusion of the term B; hence, third, the question of priority between the supposed central and the supposed marginal category of each dyad is irresolvably unstable, an instability caused by the fact that the term B is constituted as at once internal and external to term A. (Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet 9-10)