Derrida has described his work as "a general strategy of deconstruction which would avoid both simply neutralizing the binary oppositions of metaphysics and simply residing, while upholding it, in the closed sphere of these oppositions." But it would be misleading to say that he is trying to bring metaphysics to an end. He would certainly prefer if it had never begun, but, having happened, it is not open to the question of beginning, middle, or end. Besides, it would be lonelier without the loneliness. Like any honest heretic, Derrida has to retain what he attacks if only to pervert it. He does not claim to have stepped beyond metaphysics but to have read the metaphysicians in a spirit of suspicion. If we were speaking naively within the philosophic terms, we would say that he is a skeptic, but that term has meaning only within a naive relation between...