Abstract

One of the more telling symptoms of the postmodern condition is the tendency of criticism to renounce any claim to explanatory or evaluative competence vis-à-vis its objects, and in some cases even to deny that it differs from those objects. This is especially evident in American deconstructionists of the Yale school, who have, with Derrida, rediscovered Nietzsche's insight that all language, whatever the genre, is inescapably metaphorical. From the admitted difficulty of drawing absolute ontological distinctions between the language of literature and that of criticism, these critics infer that the attempt to maintain even a generic division between the two languages is at best a convenient fiction, at worst a repressive one.