Someone chronicling the past twenty-five years of Anglo- American intellectual life might describe it as the time when textuality triumphed, when the forces of deconstruction, led by Jacques Derrida, successfully stormed the Bastille of logocentrism, demonstrating that all writing, whatever its pretensions, was prolific with tropes, unstable, decentered. The writer could go on to show how the professors of English colonized the other university departments. She would point out how often anthropologists, historians, philosophers, psychologists, economists, law professors, and even scientists were compelled to give up their belief in transparent language and confront their work's rhetorical dimension.

Richard Rorty found figurative biases in the purportedly neutral language of analytical philosophy; Stanley Fish excavated legal rhetoric; Hayden White located the major historians' master tropes; Clifford Geertz focused on how anthropologists represent themselves as authors; Donald McCloskey analyzed the rhetoric of his fellow economists. Progressively more scientists gave Thomas Kuhn - whose paradigm functions as a sort langue in which the parole that is the individual datum acquires its sense - an extended hearing. Everyone in the university, it sometimes seemed, had to learn to read all over again as the pupils of the literature professors: there was nothing, and no one, outside of the text.

But the story our fictive chronicler told would be at best a partial one. The struggle between philosophy and poetry was ancient in Plato's time, and it would be presumptuous, as I have been arguing throughout this book, to think that we have terminated it in ours.