Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. ISBN 0-8166-3356-8

Peter Zima

In the past reviewers tried to inform readers about the main topics and arguments of a book. This review pursues quite different goals, for its author tends to act as a preacher or an apostle of Derrida who seems to be in need of an ideological defence which presupposes a clear opposition between right and wrong. It’s all quite straightforward: ‘In order to show the limitations of Deconstruction and Critical Theory, one need not demonstrate why Derrida’s theory is correct and why Zima’s is not.’ Like in Marxism-Leninism, the correct point of view (without quotation marks, of course) has been fixed once and for all – and along with it the teleological nature of the argument. It  is against this kind of ideological, i. e. dualistic and monological discourse that Zima wrote his book. Some readers may have noticed that.