This volume of essays is beautiful and haunting, as well as haunted: nowhere does Derrida simply or unthoughtfully dismiss De Man's past, nor does he shrink from admitting the almost unassimilable fact of this history. Rather, he uses it--as well as De Man's death itself--to think through problems both interpretive and ethical. Those interested in the truth behind De Man's past would do well--as, I suspect, another reviewer here has not--to carefully research that past, like Derrida and other scholars have. De Man's wartime writings are undeniably deplorable, but one must also--as Derrida does--read them carefully and, perhaps, with reference to a whole lifetime of later work. (De Man was very young at the time of the earliest writings, and in the position of making an ethical choice which proved extraordinarily difficult to tens of thousands of other French men and women of the period, the vast majority of whom responded, it must be admitted, little better than De Man.) Most important, the interested reader is encouraged to discover what "deconstructionism" (a practice, not a school) is and what it is not: one thing it decidedly is not, however, is "an intellectually disreputable philosophy which claimed that works of art may be freely interpreted by observers without consideration for the creator's intentions." The reviewer here seems to be thinking of New Criticism (a theoretical and methodological school much earlier than--and vastly different from--deconstructionism, led by folks like the famous duo Wimsatt and Warren, as well as Cleanth Brooks, I.A. Richards, John Crowe Ransom, and others.) It was the New Critics who proclaimed against the "intentional fallacy" (the belief that criticism ought to attempt to ferret out the author's true, final "intention" in the work); a fairly conservative product of a conservative era (the 1940s and 50s), New Criticism was hardly a bastion of cultural relativism. Deconstruction, on the other hand, suggests that texts--like language--often exceed and undo the intentions of the author; they manifest unavoidable contradictions and crossed committments, and this undecidability renders a simple, singular reading impossible. As an exemplary model of this practice, turned toward questions of ethics, commitment, and friendship, this is a lovely and important volume.