on Christopher Norris's Deconstructive Turn

Philosophers may mean what they say but, as the Mad Hatter reminded Alice, this is not at all the same thing as saying what they mean. In a deconstructionist perspective, philosophers, no less than ordinary mortals once they start to speak or write, are inevitably caught up in a play of rhetoric that turns their meaning into contradiction, shatters the mirror of truth into fragments. It is impossible to say just what one means: language takes over, and indeed, the very notion of a meaning prior to utterance may be a product of language, a retrospective fiction.

Christopher Norris claims that his collection of essays represents, in a sense, 'the revenge of literary theory on that old tradition of philosophical disdain or condescension stretching back at least to Plato's Republic'. Deconstruction, for Norris, has a philosophic rigour of its own: and its reading strategies, which have been most widely deployed in literary criticism, can be turned against philosophical texts - even those which most actively resist deconstruction - and reveal their aporiae, their blind-spots of contradiction. Philosophy like literature, can be seen to be ineluctably implicated in rhetoric; the distinction between the two disciplines, and the traditional privileging of philosophy as a means of truth, can thus be challenged.

Both Anglo-American linguistic philosophy and French deconstruction, despite their manifest differences, are linked, Norris suggests, by the premise that - as Frege puts it - 'meaning determines reference': linguistic structures shape the reality to which they ...