PERM embrace the negative’s epistemological standpoint as a furthering of deconstruction that problematizes status quo epistemology. The friction between the 1AC and 1NC methodologies are able to induce new tropes of political reality via deconstructive juxtaposition.

Speaking of the hymen, Derrida emphasizes the role of the blank spaces of the page in the play of meaning. Analogically, Derrida himself often devotes his attention to the text in its margins, so to speak. He examines the minute particulars of an undecidable moment, nearly imperceptible displacements, that might otherwise escape the reader's eye. Reading Foucault, he concentrates on three pages out of 673. Reading Rousseau, he chooses a text that is far from "central." Reading Heidegger, he proceeds to write a note on a note to Sein und Zeit.

His method, as he says to Jean-Louis Houdebine, perhaps a little too formulaically, is reversal and displacement. It is not enough "simply to neutralize the binary oppositions of metaphysics. "We must recognize that, within the familiar philosophical oppositions, there is always "a violent hierarchy. One of the two terms controls the other (axiologically, logically, etc. ), holds the superior position. To deconstruct the opposition is first ... to overthrow [renverser] the hierarchy." (Pos F 57, Pos E. 1. 36) To fight violence with violence. In the Grammatology this structural phase would be represented by all those pages where, all apologies to the contrary, the polemical energy seems clearly engaged in putting writing above speech. But in the next phase of deconstruction, this reversal must be displaced, the winning term put under erasure. The critic must make room for "the irruptive emergence of a new 'concept,' a concept which no longer allows itself to be understood in terms of the previous regime [system of oppositions ] ." In terms of our book, this would be the aspect that "allows for the dissonant emergence of a writing inside of speech, thus disorganizing all the received order and invading the whole sphere of speech" (Pos E 1. 36 ) .

To locate the promising marginal text, to disclose the undecidable moment, to pry it loose with the positive lever of the signifier; to reverse the resident hierarchy, only to displace it; to dismantle in order to reconstitute what is always already inscribed. Deconstruction in a nutshell. But take away the assurance of the text's authority, the critic's control, and the primacy of meaning, and the possession of this formula does not guarantee much.

'Why should we undo and redo a text at all? 'Why not assume that words and the author "mean what they say?" It is a complex question. Here let us examine Derrida's most recent meditation upon the desire of deconstruction.

Derrida acknowledges that the desire of deconstruction may itself become a desire to reappropriate the text actively through mastery, to show the text what it "does not know." And as she deconstructs, all protestations to the contrary, the critic necessarily assumes that she at least, and for the time being, means what she says. Even the declaration of her vulnerability must come, after all, in the controlling language of demonstration and reference. In other words, the critic provisionally forgets that her own text is necessarily self-deconstructed, always already a palimpsest.

The desire of deconstruction has also the opposite allure. Deconstruction seems to offer a way out of the closure of knowledge. By inaugurating the open-ended indefiniteness of textuality-by thus "placing in the abyss" (mettre en ablme ) , as the French expression would literally have it-it shows us the lure of the abyss as freedom. The fall into the abyss of deconstruction inspires us with as much pleasure as fear. 'We are intoxicated with the prospect of never hitting bottom.

Thus a further deconstruction deconstructs deconstruction, both as the search for a foundation ( the critic behaving as if she means what she says in her text), and as the pleasure of the bottomless. The tool for this, as indeed for any deconstruction, is our desire, itself a deconstructive and gramma tological structure that forever differs from (we only desire what is not ourselves) and defers (desire is never fulfilled) the text of our selves. Deconstruction can therefore never be a positive science. For we are in a bind, in a "double ( read abyssal ) bind," Derrida's newest nickname for the schizophrenia of the "so us rature." 81 We must do a thing and its opposite, and indeed we desire to do both, and so on indefinitely. Deconstruction is a perpetually self-deconstructing movement that is inhabited by differance. No text is ever fully deconstructing or deconstructed. Yet the critic provisionally musters the metaphysical resources of criticism and performs what declares itself to be one ( unitary) act of deconstruction. As I point out on pages lxxxi-lxxxii, the kinship with Freud's interminable and terminable analysis, involving both subject and analyst, is here not to be ignored.