The Deconstructive Imperative

Abstract

That deconstruction has always had a political thrust is above all legible in grand claims made regarding ultimate aims of such a project. For all its antior a-philosophical rhetoric, deconstruction in its earliest incarnations was less a method or mode of reading texts of all sorts than it was an attempt to delineate and exceed limits not only of traditional metaphysical doctrines, but of philosophical ground, derived from those doctrines, which (so we've been told) all Western thought, institutions and praxes inhabit. The fact that means for this tentative step outside metaphysics amounts to a methodical reading and commentary on texts of this tradition should not distract us from these a-philological aims. In early texts like Structure, Sign, and Play in Discourse of Human Sciences and Of Grammatology, Derrida proposed that most urgent task facing philosophers and literary critics was deconstruction of logocentric metaphysics, the necessity for a 'change of terrain.' 1 Why such deconstruction had become necessary was assumed to be self-evident. But nearstridency with which call has been echoed, particularly in United States, suggests that nothing less than fate of modern