ABSTRACT
"Deconstruction," Geoffrey Hartman explains, refuses to identify the force of literature with any concept of embodied meaning and shows how deeply logocentric or incarnationist perspectives have influenced the way think about art. Either one can believe in a magical theory of all language, as the Kabbalists, many poets, and Walter Benjamin did, or else one must yield to a thoroughgoing linguisitc nihilism, which in its most refined form is the mode called Deconstruction. In contemporary critical terms, the subject as a self-conscious entity cannot exist without a "deconstruction" of its aspirations; but that deconstruction remains a dead abstraction outside of the context of the "presence" which it defines. Obscured is the sense of the unconscious as a mysterious power transcending consciousness. From the perspective of defensiveness, personality is stressed over impersonality, the ego over the ego's relation to the unconscious.
