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Trickster God of postmodernism has begun to crumble under the weight of the analytical pressure Delany has applied to it. In its form, then, “Wagner/Artaud” is a classic deconstruction—an analysis which “dissolves the borders that allow us to recognize [a theme] in the first place” (NFW 8).
    The notion of reading a metaphor or theme into its own radicalness is given its most explicit consideration in “Reading at Work, and Other Activities Frowned on by Authority: A Reading of Donna Haraway’s ‘Manifesto for Cyborgs.’” As in “Wagner/Artaud,” the privileged critical method is the argument from empirical evidence—and as in “Wagner/Artaud,” the steady accumulation of evidence leads to an overturning or inversion of the guiding theme: through an extended consideration of Haraway’s notion of cyborg-as-metaphor, Delany arrives at the notion of metaphor-as-cyborg. A significant distinction between the two essays is that in “Wagner/Artaud,” Delany supplies the guiding metaphor, whereas in “Reading at Work,” the guidingmetaphor in question is Haraway’s, which Delany proceeds to re-frame. This process of re-framing continues on many levels throughout the essay: over its course, we are given a reading of Haraway’s essay, and a reading of that reading; we are given a Lacanian reading of castration imagery in pop culture, and a reading of Lacanian readings in general; we are given an explication of the notion of radical metaphor, even as the form of the explication is revealed to follow from the conclusion it itself yields up. In terms of sheer economy of means, the number of simultaneous readings Delany manages to orchestrate in this 32-page essay is a bit dizzying. And as with “Wagner/Artaud,” the vertiginousness of our experience is in direct proportion to the rigor of our own reading—a reading which reveals, once again, the cohering and dissolution of a rhetorical object (in this case, the traditional conception of metaphor itself) within a posited discursive space.
    But beyond the textual transformations going on inside “Reading at Work,” there are texts outside the essay with which it is clearly engaged as well. Readers familiar with contemporary theory will recognize in the discussion of castration and the images of theft and reciprocity clear references to the “Purloined Letter” debate, inaugurated by the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan’s analysis of Poe’s short story. Although it is in no way necessary to be familiar with this debate to follow Delany’s argument, we might nevertheless want to consider the relation between them. In Lacan’s conception, the paralysis that seems to fall upon each character in “The Purloined Letter” after he or she gains knowledge of possession of the letter is an image of the “truth of castration,” a metaphor for the subject’s entry into the Symbolic realm. “The letter,” says Lacan, “always arrives at its destination”: castration is inevitable. 21 Jacques Derrida counters that this image of inevitability is an artifact of the phallocentrism underlying psychoanalytic thought—an artifact conjured up by the surrounding discourse in order to ensure its own stability. Against this image Derrida posits the notion of the material contingency of society, which the image of castration exists specifically to conceal and contain. By this conception, the “truth of castration” is not that “the letter always arrives at its destination,” but rather that
    . . . a letter can always not arrive at its destination. Its “materiality” and “topology” are due to its divisibility, its always possible partition. It can always be fragmented without return, and the system of the symbolic, of castration, of the signifier, of the truth, of the contract, etc., always attempts to