[...] Deconstruction neither denies nor really affects the commonsense view that language exists to communicate meaning. It suspends that view for its own specific purpose of seeing what happens when the writs of convention no longer run.
[...] The end-point of deconstructive thought, as Derrida insists, is to recognize that there is no end to the interrogative play between text and text. Deconstruction can never have the final word because its insights are inevitably couched in a rhetoric which itself lies open to further deconstru…
[...] Nietzsche saw nothing but blindness and multiplied error in the various attempts to arrive at truth through logic or abstract reason. Philosophy had based itself unwittingly on a series of buried metaphors none the less potent and beguiling for their common and commonsense usage. Nietzsche ca…
[...] Deconstruction is therefore an activity performed by texts which in the end have to acknowledge their own partial complicity with what they denounce. The most rigorous reading, it follows, is one that holds itself provisionally open to further deconstruction of its own operative concepts.
[...] Thus Barthes (drawing on Saussure) refers metaphorically to 'the speaking mass' in a context which purportedly invokes the totality of language, but which appeals even so to actual speakers and their speech as the source of that totality. Barthes may state, as a matter of principle, that lang…
