In 1983, American philosopher John Searle reviewed Johnathan Culler's On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism for the New York Review of Books, writing,
"In Culler's book, we get the following examples of knowledge and mastery [attained from analysis of binary opposites and deconstruction]: speech is a form of writing (passim), presence is a certain type of absence (p. 106), the marginal is in fact central (p. 140), the literal is metaphorical (p. 148), truth is a kind of fiction (p. 181), reading is a form of misreading (p. 176), understanding is a form of misunderstanding (p. 176), sanity is a kind of neurosis (p. 160), and man is a form of a woman (p. 171). Some readers may feel that such a list generates not so many feelings of mastery as of monotony. There is in deconstructive writing a constant straining of the prose to attain something that sounds profound by giving it the air of a paradox, e.g., "truths are fictions whose fictionality has been forgotten" (p. 181).
