Sorry, SRS - don't know what happened there! Well I do - I let my thoughts get ahead of my fingers!

The book is 'How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered The World' by Francis Wheen, Harper Perennial, 2004 (ISBN: 0-00-714097-5). The relevant chapter is 4: 'the demolition merchants of reality' ps 78 - 116.

Wheen quotes an unidentified academic "sympathetic to Derrida" who admitted that "deconstruction, which began as a heresy, soon turned into a dogma, and hardened into a theology, sustained by a network of evangelists and high priests and inquisitors" (p 81).

I maintain that history teaches us that all such dogmas are dangerous and should be opposed. The pity is that deconstruction is probably a useful idea (of limited application?) - turning it into a dogma is not.

I would urge you to read all of Wheen's book - for me it has great explanatory power. Personally, I have found much that has happened in the last 2 or 3 decades dismaying and unsettling. Wheen attempts to explain how we got to where we are now - and it's not a pretty picture!