ABSTRACT
I After so much complex argumentation I should perhaps offer my reader the courtesy of a generalized summing-up. To do so might seem to fly in the face of at least one major deconstructionist principle: that conclusions are simply not to be had, or only in so far as one ignores the problems thrown up by textual close reading. In Chapter 4-on Descartes and Husserl-I explored the implications of this argument by pursuing a rhetorical (or ‘literary’) reading of texts that set out to ground or refurbish the very conditions of rational thought. Such is the idea of ‘deconstruction’ most widely entertained by its AngloAmerican proponents and detractors alike. On this account, the upshot of a deconstructive reading is to show how concepts reduce to metaphors, or how philosophic arguments come down in the end to a variety of narrative pretexts and alibis. By some, this move has been taken to portend a turning of the tables on philosophy itself, a demonstration that its texts are just one kind of writing among many, with no special claim to authority and truth. The undoing of philosophic reason would then go along with a marked elevation of literary criticism as a discourse of henceforth unlimited scope and interpretative power.
