1. Jonathan Loesberg is correct, I believe, in seeing deconstruction as a useful means of establishing “the value of analyzing historical and political questions with certain techniques of literary and aesthetic interpretation”; this, in the hope that it “will provide an exit from all political, institutional, and conventional constraints.” Loesberg quotes a passage from Limited Inc., which ought to give the lie to the charge that deconstruction is politically inert, or merely relativist, commenting: “This version of deconstructive politics bases itself on Derrida’s claim that since all conventions are violable, they can be enforced only by some form of police, combined with the suggestion that one could simply not invoke conventions and step outside the police state. Thus Derrida ends his argument with Searle: ‘I will not claim the copyright because ultimately…there is always the police and a tribunal ready to intervene each time that a rule [constitutive or regulative, vertical or not] is invoked in a case involving signatures, events, or contexts…If the police is always waiting in the wings, it is because conventions are by essence violable and precarious’ ” (Loesberg, Jonathan, Aestheticism and Deconstruction: Pater, Derrida, and De Man [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991] 161–162).

2. A number of observers take the view that there is an “hegemony of literary theory over the past generation” (Reed Way Dasenbrock, ed. Literary Theory After Davidson [University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 1993] 186) at college and university level, and that “a complex combination of analytic and post structuralism conventionalism currently ‘holds the field’ ” (Stanley Fish, quoted in Dasenbrock 185).