Foucault and Derrida have been disseminated and transcribed in this country for several years now, most often as the common discourse of an analytic addressed against humanism, against the subject, and therefore against the very privilege of "literature" and "humanism." We are still averse to a criticism that opens up literature to other discourses, that entangles it in quasi-scientific methods alien to its self-referential, holistic, or "emotive" space, that "reduces" it, as it were, to philosophy, history, politics, economics (or as Derrida might say, simply to écriture), to the discursive. Yet Foucault and, especially, Derrida signify more than a threat of literature's other, the threat of the discursive to the imaginary. They question the hierarchical division itself, the division on which the very ground of literature's privilege has been erected and maintained. What is called "deconstruction," a term identified with Derrida if not with Foucault, challenges the "whole...