ABSTRACT
Litotic philosophic voices seduce and succeed through their pretended neutrality, through the conceit that they are disinterested sites in which reality itself achieves its true voice. Nietzsche's shrill voice is modest, in contrast, because it speaks for no one save its proper name. If Nietzsche's work resists paraphrase, and Heidegger's work suggests that paraphrase must purchase its success by obscuring the matter of thought—descending to chatter, to idle talk [Gerede]—Derrida's writings may be read as extended reflections on the impossibility of paraphrase and characterization. They may alternatively be read as an extended performance in which the received categories of literary and philosophical reflection are successively called into question. And yet—or perhaps "therefore"—the most neutral and apparently uncontroversial characterization of the conceptual space Derrida occupies can be made problematic, as is illustrated by his own remarks on the term "deconstruction." Derrida's vocabulary shifted after 1967 from terms such as consciousness, intentional object, intentional act, and intuition of essences.
