As Bernard Williams said about the difficulties of justifying ethics in the modern world, ‘there is no route back from reflectiveness’. We can try to forget the new thoughts, either individually or collectively, but in the long run there can be no stopping dissidents raising questions that are now simply ‘there to be raised’. Equally, in the past ten or fifteen years post-structuralist theory has so changed what it is possible to think about literature that (even if one wanted it) there is no way back to the relative theoretical innocence of the 1950s or 1960s. The new insights are now simply there to be had, expressed by such words as ‘essentialism’, ‘patriarchy’, ‘ideology’, ‘aporia’ ‘referentiality’ or ‘hegemony’. This is why counter-attacks that have tried to deny all legitimacy to the new reflections, either by saying that the whole movement is more or less intellectually fraudulent, or philosophically mistaken, or not really new after all, have not commanded widespread respect, for all the cogent arguments their proponents have sometimes made.

Consequently, we have not been forced to attend adequately to the uneasiness underlying intellectual resistance to post-structuralism, felt by many who otherwise accept the new, that some vital continuities with the past are in danger of being occluded. That the uneasiness continues to be expressed is a sign that, in the long run, there is no escape route from certain old thoughts either. My assumption here is that ultimately there is no evading any important way of thinking about ourselves deep enough to have made a permanent impress on the culture. There can only be temporary forgettings or suppressions.