The Birth of Counter Theory
7
philosophical apparatus might appear useful when studying certain literary texts,
such as Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea, Albert Camus’s The Stranger, Robert
Musil’s The Man Without Qualities, or even Bret Easton Ellis’s American
Psycho, Philosophy has its own object of study and cannot be considered as an
interpretative method of literary texts or narrations; if it were, there would
simply be no need for English academic programs, nor for departments of
Literature. To state the obvious, Philosophy and Literary Studies, in spite of
sometimes intersecting, have to be deemed separate fields of the Humanities.7
The enthusiasm with which literary studies embraced deconstruction is to
be explained in part by the very nature of Derrida’s writings, which are in the
end much closer to poetry than th