After inconclusive battles over structuralism, academic critics are now fighting about "deconstruction."… A Nietzschean edition of ancient skepticism, [deconstruction] holds that language does not convey meaning, but complicates and ultimately cancels it. Words lead only to other words, not to a speaking "self" nor a world or ideas spoken about. What then is language like? Derrida recalls a graffito, "Don't read this." The sentence performs the act of commanding, and so does not refer to anything. In order to grasp the order and obey it, you must already have disobeyed it. Deconstructors have shown considerable ingenuity in inventing an analytic rhetoric that can reduce every text to just such a self-canceling, self-referential paradox. In [Spurs: Nietzsche's Styles], Derrida muses for a dozen pages over a scrap found among Nietzsche's papers, on which was written, "I have forgotten my umbrella," in quotation marks. Was this a quotation from a...