ABSTRACT
Very often deconstruction is viewed as just an offshoot — or a somewhat more 'philosophical' sub-branch — of that wider cultural phenomenon that goes under the name of postmodernism. It is often assumed – sometimes on the strength of Rorty's account – that deconstruction in general, and Jacques Derrida's work in particular, is just another version of this postmodern 'turn' against the values of truth, reason, criticism, and conceptual analysis. It is just this charge that Jurgen Habermas brings against Derrida: that he has set out deliberately to blur the 'genre-distinction' between concept and metaphor, reason and rhetoric, or philosophy and literature. In fact Derrida's target is not so much 'philosophy', 'theory' or 'system' as such but rather the idea that any progress toward a more rigorous treatment of metaphor in the texts of philosophy must go by way of a consciousness fully in possession of the requisite concepts.
