Historians are perhaps more familiar with the voids and multiple voices from which historical evidence arises, whereas literary critics have been more used to the stable presence of the completed work of literature before them. The attention to multivocity within texts, reminiscent of Bahktin's “heteroglossia,” makes the deconstructive method of reading particularly fruitful for intellectual historians. Derrida's manner of explication, however, has proven less than imicable. His writing style is notoriously dense, and while his style reflects the themes of his theory – refusing, for example, to make direct assertions or definitive claims for truth – many readers find him unusually difficult to understand. Playfully suggesting a myriad of meanings and metaphors within writing (his term, “écriture” emphasizes the written word deliberately, in opposition to Saussure's langue and parole), Derrida uses puns and etymologies less to “bombinate” than to suggest the “always already” existing mutliplicity of meanings within as well as “against the grain” of the text. Critics may dismiss such work as self-referential or self-indulgent in its reliance on the intellect of the deconstructive reader, but Barthes' “pleasure” and Derrida's “play” draw attention to the richness of language as well as to the range of the reader's responses to the text. The result of deconstructive readings, according to some, is relativistic anarchy; for others, deconstructive readings offer a liberating insight into what has been unsaid as well as said, the “traces” and silences of a discursive universe.