The classical poststructuralist metaphysics of inscription constrains its institution of difference within a horizon of ineradicability on the one hand, and of actuality on the other. But poststructuralism does not simply hold that difference is ontologically inert. Rather, it posits that difference is constitutive of and determinative of ineradicability, an assertion which is grounded in a transcendent understanding of that notion. This transcendence in turn depends upon an account of difference that transcends it, one grounded in a mode of being that transcends ontology and the notion of determinations.

But if the transcendent understanding in poststructuralism rests upon an account of difference that transcends it, the possibility of ontological (or dialectical) reduction, like the idea that difference must be a matter of causality, cannot be excluded. One account of transcendence in poststructuralism is precisely to allow for realist