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To the Editor
We would like to thank Dr. Hoffman for his response to our essays, providing as it does an opportunity to clarify certain matters implicit in our argument. Particularly, we want to address his mistaken notion that we employ “deconstruction” in order to create a false separation between our ideas and what he calls modern conflict theory.
Dr. Hoffman suggests that our “embrace” of paradox is a value judgment. So it is. We all make value judgments. Dr. Hoffman presents the word analyze as if there were no values in it. But there are: in his view, if we understand him correctly, the analysts attempts to understand the meaning behind a conflict in order to resolve it. In other words, modern conflict theory values resolution, if not as a state of mind, then at least as an act or process.
The force of deconstruction is somewhat different: one deconstructs, but at the very same moment one constructs as well. Founded, indeed, on what Barnaby Barratt calls “the postmodern impulse of psychoanalysis,” deconstructive theory, as developed by Jacques Derrida, suggests not only that there is always an excess of meaning, which is the reason we are to look into the gaps in a text (the analogy is