Thoroughly postmodern Pynchon

[Terrance]

On Eliade, I think the charges of Nazism are false. 



Derrida rejects the assumption that a linguistic sign
constitutes a static unit of reality derived from a larger
structure or system. What he says, is that the sign's
construction through difference can never truly recall the
totalizing system of which it was  a part, and the totality
is never available to the reader, who is left instead with a
constant play of differences. 

If  totalization no longer has any meaning, it is not
because the infiniteness of a field cannot be covered by a
finite glance or a finite discourse, but because the nature
of the field -- that is, language and a finite language --
excludes totalization. 
This field is in effect that of play, that is to say, a
field of infinite substitutions only because it is finite,
that is to say, because instead of being an inexhaustible
field, as in the classical hypothesis, instead of being too
large, there is something missing from it: a center which
arrests and grounds the play of substitutions. 

And of course the status of the center cannot be fixed any
more than the play of the signs about it, for the basic
concept of the center issues from the process of
signification which can be shown to be figural and divided,
always already in motion, a series of endless substitutions. 

This is the Creative principle at work. It can be traced
first to Nietzsche and ultimately to the Sophists.