文本越轨者

The classicist Allan Bloom has called de- construction “a circus performance.” The con- servative columnist Roger Kimball has called it “linguistic subterfuge.” Others have called it much worse. One commentator, an admirer, couldn’t decide whether deconstruction was a form of “tyrannicide” or a “game.” Another said that it was “the most bankable product ever to emerge on the market of academic discourses.” For more than two decades, through the pitched battles of the Eighties canon wars— over which books were essential to a college education— theory, an eclectic body of philo- sophical writings by a handful of middle- aged Frenchmen, held sway on campuses and, more remarkably, in the American imagination, where it loomed almost comically large. …