what's so special about deconstruction?

[Terri]

Dave Monroe wrote:
> 
> Again, something about which I'd normally throw in
> rather more than the proverbial two cents, but ... but
> I do want to get whatever I've left to say about Ch.
> 14 out of the way over the next several hours or so,
> so ... so some caveats here ...
> 
> Conversational pragmatics (always a difficulty when it
> comes to deconstruction, no?) aside here, "general
> ideas" seem inimical to "deconstruction."  "Uncover"
> not only implies, presupposes that pesky surface/depth
> binary, that Platnoic notion that "truth" is something
> hidden beneath "mere" appearances, 

Just being pesky and picky, but the Platonic notion of Truth
should be confused with 
something hidden Beneath appearances, mere or otherwise. The
Platonists argue that what appears to be real is merely
intimations of a transcendent reality--Noumenal. 
Remember too, that for Plato the noumena are knowable by us,
not so for Kant. 

For the reality that is beneath, where the surface reality
is mere manifestation of the 
underlying true reality, also known as Materialists, see in
the Greeks--Democritus, in the Moderns, Nietzsche, Marx,
Freud, Weber, Einstein, Wittgenstein (converted by Tolstoy
btw, also of this group), Eastern--Lao Tzu, also, Newton,
Machiavelli, Shakespeare and dare I say, Thomas R. Pynchon.