If your desire to know what I meant is sincere, i will cut this piece of my dis into our discussion, hoping that my academese is not to inappropriate and that you understand I'm trying to get at the idea of deconstruction clearly and quickly... here's more on deconstruction as I understand it... Perhaps the most important deconstructive concept was differance. This term was developed by Derrida and explained in Positions as a word which foregrounded the play of differences, to forbid at any moment, or in any sense, that a simple element be present in and of itself, referring only to itself (26). As Danny J. Anderson pointed out in his essay, Deconstruction, differance emphasized that meaning was trapped in the system of language where each element has significance only by virtue of its difference from other elements of the system: Meaning is not present, as an essence, within any linguistic unit (Atkins and Morrow 141). The central reading strategy of Deconstruction was to determine hierarchies of opposing meanings. In Andersons words, Deconstruction must demonstrate that the opposition is always already other, that it works because the repression of differance within the very terms of the opposition, and that such repression is the mark of the drive toward power and mastery. (143) Deconstruction sought to subvert the idea of one meaning in a text so that it unraveled the rhetorical thread of the text. It denied closure in a text. Instead of the New Critical idea of tension (including irony, paradox, and ambiguity) in an organic form, Deconstruction sought to find contradiction in polysemantic forms. Deconstruction opened literature by subverting the very ideas the canon of literature was based on. Hierarchies based on logocentrism were put into question by Deconstruction because the possibilities of its foci of attention, language, knowledge, meaning and interpretation, were never fixed. Deconstructive criticism was a process of showing the difficulties and contradictions of any interpretation. Instead of finding truth, Deconstruction found the repressive forces that are engaged in power struggles between language, knowledge, meaning and interpretation. Perhaps one of the best statements defending Deconstructions critical position was made by Barbara Johnson in the preface to her book, The Critical Difference: It is not, in the final analysis, what you dont know that can or cannot hurt you. It is what you dont know you dont know that spins out and entangles that perpetual error we call life. (xii) Literature was not the civilized location of truth, but a creative wilderness where contradictions of language, knowledge, meaning and interpretation struggle to survive. (See Criticism in the Wilderness by Geoffrey Hartman for a practical demonstration of this idea.) The power and authority of a literatures significance in its struggle between known and unknown was almost always at the center of deconstructive criticism. ***** (sorry for tranlation probs and ommissions of italics, apostrophes and quotes) (Also scottie, if you've read this far I think I was mistaken or perhaps loose to use "sublimate" when "subvert" was the stronger word choice...;)will