You generously invited me to reply to Stanley Corngold's essay, a somewhat ambivalent assignment since I can hardly feel to be “addressed” by a discourse which, as is so often the case, addresses its own rather than my defenses or uncertainties. But since the tone of the essay suggests indictment rather than dialogue, and since the only alternative thus left to me is a plea for mercy, I welcome the opportunity to set the record straight on one specific point: the Nietzsche passage which is offered as the main exhibit to establish probable cause of my guilt.

I am grateful to Stanley Corngold for having pointed out a polarity (error/ mistake) that I have not explicitly thematized in these terms. If “mistake” is random and contingent (of the order of “can” or “may”) and “error” is systemic and compulsive (of the order of “must”), then I have stated, in a variety of terminologies, the impossibility of ever coming to rest on one or the other side of this distinction. I suppose the most sustained attempt to work out the problem is in the reading of a section of Nietzsche's posthumous fragments in my Allegories of Reading (chapter 6), in which “can” is opposed to “must.” But the gesture certainly recurs, contingently as well as compulsively, all too frequently.