All communication involves faith; indeed, some linguisticians hold that the potential obstacles to acts of verbal understanding are so many and diverse that it is a minor miracle that they take place at all.

Interestingly, this speech by Prospero does not contrast the unreality of the stage with the solid, flesh-and-blood existence of real men and women. On the contrary, it seizes on the flimsiness of dramatic characters as...

Readers are less and less seen as mere non-writers, the subhuman ”other” or flawed derivative of the author; the lack of a pen is no longer a shameful mark of secondary status but a positively...

It is capitalism, not Marxism, that trades in futures.

You can tell that the capitalist system is in trouble when people start talking about capitalism.

Not all of Derrida’s writing is to everyone’s taste. He had an irritating habit of overusing the rhetorical question, which lends itself easily to parody: ‘What is it, to speak? How can I even speak...

Negativity is often looked upon [in the USA] as a kind of thought crime. Not since the advent of socialist realism has the world witnessed such pathological upbeatness.

The New Testament is a brutal destroyer of human illusions. If you follow Jesus and don’t end up dead, it appears you have some explaining to do. The stark signifier of the human condition is...

Deconstruction insists not that truth is illusory but that it is institutional.