... a system (or an 'arch', in Derrida's terms) will fall short of its ambition, break down, and another system will rise out of its ruins. Deconstruction is an unusual form of rhetorical criticism which persuades the reader of the inadequacies of language to express anything true about the real world. deconstructionist's claim is that the language we use to make distinctions never holds true-it is never powerful or precise enough. We see this by examining the language closely. Culler gives an example (which he has taken from Nietzsche) of this type of analysis. (3) He considers the statement: "A cause is something which produces an effect". The cause is considered logically and temporally prior to the effect. However, in our experience, the cause is only labelled as such after the effect. We sit on a pin; we feel pain; we look for the object which produced the pain. We say ...

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