The intellectual debate that continues to surround the term ‘deconstruction’ has now become broadly divided into two camps. On the one side we see deconstructive readings absorbed easily into introductions and anthologies of critical or literary theory. ‘Deconstruction’ is one package amongst others in an increasingly less controversial field. On the other hand the past five years have seen a series of books which forcefully argue that what often passes as ‘deconstruction’ bears little relation to those texts of Jacques Derrida in whose name it is often given. These studies proceed to give variously oriented readings of Derrida's work in its relation to, for example, Hegel, Heidegger or Freud. In fact, ‘Derrida studies’ has become an elusive sub-discipline practised by a small group of thinkers in which radical claims about literature, philosophy and psychoanalysis often seem undercut by the sheer difficulty and erudition needed to follow the progress of the arguments. The result, for the reader, is an increasing sense of two things: (a) of the proportional relationship between difficulty and a feeling of arbitrariness and, correspondingly, (b) a certain amount of dullness. ‘Derrida studies’ seem in increasing danger of becoming an arcane minority interest located somewhere between French studies and a sort of literary-history of philosophy.

When writing on texts in which the very possibility of meta-language is a vexed issue, the mode of one's own study itself becomes of importance. It is well known that terms such as ‘clarity’ or ‘lucidity’ are metaphors that too easily mask prejudice.