“An impressive testament to the scope, substantiality, energy, and fertility of contemporary ‘post-structuralist’ theoretical activity. The volume is simultaneously an annunciation, incarnation, chronicle, and critique of one of the central intellectual movements of our time. What gives the collection its significance are both the sophistication and originality of the individual pieces and also their double-edged convergent conclusion: namely, that while ‘the structural allegory’ - or the use of a ‘language paradigm’ for the analysis of human thought, culture and life - has been of revolutionary intellectual import, its implications of social-political ‘praxis’ appear to be incoherent, pessimistic, nihilistic, paralyzing, or, at the least, impotent.” --Barbara Herrnstein Smith, University of Pennsylvania