Literature as well as criticism – the difference between them being delusive – is condemned (or privileged) to be forever the most rigorous and, consequently, the most unreliable language in terms of which man names and transforms himself. (de Man 1979, p. 19)

This sentence by the critic Paul de Man is a fair sample of the kind of thinking about literature which is currently termed deconstruction. It bristles with the sort of paradox which that thinking finds at work not only in literary texts but in criticism, philosophy and all varieties of discourse, its own included. What can it mean to reject the distinction between literature and criticism as merely delusion? How can a language be at once the most ‘rigorous’ and the most ‘unreliable’ source of knowledge? In what conceivable sense can man ‘transform’ himself through a process of naming somehow made possible by this rigorous unreliability? These are not problems that either resolve themselves on a more careful reading or simply settle down (like religious belief) into a system of self-supporting paradox. Rather they operate, as more than one disgruntled critic has remarked of de Man, as a positive technique for making trouble; an affront to every normal and comfortable habit of thought.

[From the Introduction]

To present ‘deconstruction’ as if it were a method, a system or a settled body of ideas would be to falsify its nature and lay oneself open to charges of reductive misunderstanding. Critical theory is nowadays a reputable academic business with a strong vested interest in absorbing and coming to terms with whatever new challenges the times may produce. Structuralism, it is now plain to see, was subject from the outset to a process of adaptation by British and American critics who quickly took heart from what they saw as its ‘practical’ or ‘commonsense’ uses. What started as a powerful protest against ruling critical assumptions ended up as just one more available method for saying new things about well-worn texts. By now there is probably a structuralist reading, in one guise or another, of just about every classic of English literature. A few minutes' search through the index of any learned lournal is enough to show how structuralism has taken hold in the most respectable and cherished quarters of academic study. Old polemics are quietly forgotten because the ground has meanwhile shifted to such an extent that erstwhile opponents find themselves now in a state of peaceful alliance. To trace this history in detail would provide an instructive example of the capacity of Anglo-American academic criticism to absorb and homogenize any new theory that threatens its sovereign claim.

[From "Roots: Structuralism and New Criticism", chapter 1 of Christopher Norris' Deconstruction: Theory and Practice (1982/1991)]