According to Stellardi, Heidegger and Derrida are, each in his own way, relevant here for several reasons, including the particular quality of their language, their proximity to poetic discourse, and their intensive recourse to occurrences that we are tempted to recognize as "metaphoric." They represent types of philosophical discourse that are at the same time powerful and controversial, and they make fundamental points concerning metaphor and its relationship to philosophy. Finally, their paths of thought, albeit different, seem to share an essential quality that can be described as "incompleteness," and this quality seems to have much to do with the special relationship their texts entertain with metaphor.

Stellardi also includes a discussion of the fundamental debate on metaphor between Derrida and Paul Ricoeur and a detailed examination of philosophy as a "mode of discourse" among (and in relation to) others. The result is an idea of philosophy as essentially imperfect and self-destructive, and yet indispensable in the economy of the modes of discourse.