No one has demonstrated more effectively than Derrida the degree to which the "symbolic systems" of structuralism are dependent on traditional metaphysical assumptions; and no one has argued more forcefully against the narrow, deterministic closures and the rigid, a priori laws such systems would impose on a reading of literary texts. The advantages of Derrida's own critical method, moreover, are enormous. Rarely, in our tradition, has there been a more logically rigorous method of reading so admirably suited to the complexities and the contradictions of literary texts.

Derrida offers the possibility of a criticism that would depend neither on the immanent transcendental "Geist" of the Hegelian tradition, nor, equally important, on the kind of negative theology that characterizes the Heideggerean-existentialist-structuralist tradition (represented today, in France, by Lacanian psychoanalysis). And it is, for that reason, one of the rare modes of criticism able to cope with the radically ambiguous...