ABSTRACT
Deconstruction would disturb the distinctions which are necessary to the Kantian project of establishing the conditions of possibility of knowledge, beginning. Turning to the relationship between deconstruction and critique in the context of contemporary literary and cultural criticism, one would have to observe that, by and large, the term 'critique', as it is deployed in that field, seems to have rather more to do with Marx than with Kant. The widespread use of the term 'critique' in the sense of a demystification of what is taken to be natural or universal doubtless betrays some sort of debt, however indirect, to the ideological critique of Marxism. Derrida's conception of literature may be regarded as maintaining the tension of that impossible, inevitable self-reference, of that undecidable oscillation of auto- and hetero-reference. The differential instability prohibits the text from being 'only reflexive', since it always marks itself otherwise, and entails that the literary is neither simply 'in' nor 'outside of' the text.
