ABSTRACT
In the course of this book I have been trying to emphasize that deconstruction is not a method, a tool or technique for reading texts, especially not for reading literary texts. On the contrary, as Derrida has put it: ‘There is always already deconstruction, at work in works, especially in literary works’ (M 123). It is not a question of deconstructing Plato’s Phaedrus or Joyce’s Ulysses but rather of these texts being already in deconstruction. Likewise, it is not a question of deconstructing the law or institutions, but rather of thinking the law or institution as being always already in deconstruction. As we saw earlier, the founding of the United States of America (legally instituted through the Declaration of Independence) is based on the effects of an ‘undecidability between … a performative structure and a constative structure’ (DI 9). Or as Derrida has said apropos of the university: ‘the foundation of a university institution is not a university event’ (Moc 30). Deconstruction is not something brought in from the outside, like a band of ‘special forces’: it is a foreign body, already inside. It is a kind of founding excess, exorbitance or supplementarity.
