A Concluding Amen

This chapter claims that deconstruction is hanging on by a prayer. Deconstruction is a way of hanging on by a prayer, a way of hanging on to a prayer. Amen is not the end of deconstruction's prayer but its beginning and sustaining middle, something that precedes and follows and constantly accompanies all its works and days. The chapter then describes how Jacques Derrida has said that one can be flexible on the point of putting deconstruction in a nutshell and occasionally interrupt or transgress the absolute prohibition against nutshells. As Derrida says in the “Roundtable,” “sometimes it is not a bad thing.”