ABSTRACT
This chapter began as part of a symposium on Marxism today. It moves through a necessarily guilty reading of the reception of the 'post' in educational research and then turns to its primary interest, the uses of deconstruction in thinking about the improvement of educational policy and practice through research, by way of a focus on reinscribing praxis under conditions of postmodernity. The chapter deals with an example of 'applied Derrida' those troubles the concept of praxis in the context of writing a book about women living with HIV/AIDS. Derrida's 'there is nothing outside the text' from Of Grammatology is, according to John Caputo, 'one of the most thoroughly misrepresented utterances in contemporary philosophy'. The chapter considers the efforts of co-researcher and Chris Smithies to tell the stories of women living with HIV/AIDS to ask hard questions about necessary complicities, inadequate categories, dispersing rather than capturing meanings, and producing bafflements rather than solutions.
