‘JUNK’ MAIL

I had to grimace at the comment in Arend Flick’s otherwise valuable review (of “An Aesthetics”) that deconstruction is “now waning.” Perhaps that is true among readers of junk fiction; not so among those of us reading continental philosophy.

Since deconstruction complicates rather than simplifies issues . . . it may be correct to observe that those who are not willing to make the effort, as philosopher John Caputo writes, to “brush up their Hegel, Husserl and Heidegger,” have abandoned the challenge. Yet the expanding attendance each spring semester at Derrida’s lectures at Flick’s home university (UC Irvine) demonstrates the opposite.

P.S. I read Book Review even before Calendar. Enjoy the regular poem. I, for one, would like an expanded Book Review.

REXFORD STYZENS

LONG BEACH