Barbara Johnson on Derrida and deconstructive reading

from "On Writing" in Lentricchia and McLaughlin, eds, Critical Terms for Literary Study:
Just as Freud rendered dreams and slips of the tongue readable rather than dismissing them as mere nonsense or error, so Derrida sees signifying force in the gaps, margins, figures, echoes, digressions, discontinuities, contradictions, and ambiguities of a text. When one writes, one writes more than (or less than, or other than) one thinks. The reader's task is to read what is written rather than simply attempt to intuit what might have been meant.
The possibility of reading materiality, silence, space, and conflict within texts has opened up extremely productive ways of studying the politics of language. If each text is seen as presenting a major claim that attempts to dominate, erase, or distort various "other" claims (whose traces nevertheless remain detectable to a reader who goes against the grain of the dominant claim), then "reading" is its extended sense is deeply involved in questions of authority and power. One field of conflict and domination in discourse that has been fruitfully studied in this sense is the field of sexual politics. Alice Jardine, in Gynesis (1985), points out that since logocentric logic has been coded as 'male' the "other" logics of spacing, ambiguity, figuration, and indirection are often coded as "female," and that a critique of logocentrism can enable a critique pf "phallocentrism" as well....
The writings of Western male authorities have often encoded the silence, denigration, or idealization not only of women but also of other "others." Edward Said, in Orientalism (1978), analyzed the discursive fields of scholarship, art, and politics in which the "Oriental" is projected as the "other" of the European. By reading against the grain of the writer's intentions, he shows how European men of reason and benevolenced could inscribe a rationale for oppression and exploitation within their very discourse of Enlightenment.