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Reading a fifteen-year-old piece of deconstructionist criticism by an eminent scholar, and it contains all the tricks that have made so much of deconstruction feel worn out. Here are the ones I've spotted in this piece so far.
1. The inversion of opposites: B is opposite to A, so in a way, B is necessary to A and is, in fact, the more important of the two.
2. Etymological essentialism: Word X and Word Y share an Indo-European root, which shows that they actually mean something similar (regardless of speaker or context).
3. Making critical mountains out of molehills: Writer C misquoted Writer D. This is not merely a mistake that we can ignore in the spirit of generosity. Instead, we must discover the ontopathology of everyday language that could enable such a transposition.
4. "Rhetoric" means "tropes" and tropes are a kind of shadow metaphysics. Ekphrasis requires an excursus on Bergson's or Husserl's account of temporality.
