Post-structuralist poetics has invented a new kind of pastoral paradise. In this deconstructed dia-verse, freeplay is king. Wholes are out, pieces in; centers are displaced into margins; bricolage is the model for creation; the book itself, as a fiction of unity and coherence, is subverted by the corrosive action of its own textuality; the "self" is a comforting delusion, identity a mirage, the ego a slippery double agent; the father is more important as metaphor than as biological progenitor; language is not a medium of subjective expression and mastery but the instrument of the subject's "beneficent expropriation"' by an alien, metaphorical structure. It seems as if the so-called "uncanny critics"2 had managed to remove all anxiety from the fantasy prevalent among schizophrenics of the body fragmented into pieces. Their practice of assimilating everything to textuality makes of the human psyche a kind of avoidance machine, constantly displacing, substituting, replacing, sliding and slipping away. A-void-dance, a dance around the void. Nietzsche is, of course, the thinker most often cited to support the possibility of a joyfully affirmative attitude towards the abysmal world of freeplay. This attitude, Derrida claims in a now famous passage, "is no longer turned toward the origin, affirms freeplay and tries to pass beyond man and humanism, the name man being the name of that being who, throughout the history of metaphysics or of ontotheology-in other words, through the history of all of his history-has dreamed of full presence, the reassuring foundation, the origin and the end of the game."3 Note that Derrida says