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& #39;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& #39;s or Husserl& #39;s account of temporality.