> so then, what's the difference between deconstruction and socratic
> elenchus?
The short answer is, deconstruction was a specifically telecommunicatory idealism -- very powerful and alluring in some ways, but a speculative compromise-formation between neo-national signifiers and a multinational signifieds. Deconstruction doesn't really have a theory of aesthetics per se, and in that sense is the ironic twin of Habermasian discourse-theory. (By contrast, the Socratic philosophies dwell in a very different universe, of craft labor and mercantile accumulation, but that's a whole different story.)
Deconstruction was never central to my own development as an intellectual, but that's just because I ran into Jameson and Adorno first. For many others, though, Derrida was profoundly provocative and stimulating, and enabled them to critique the orthodox forms of existentialism, structuralism, and the other Cold War ideologies of the day.
-- DRR