Whatever the meaning of the "post" these days, it is pervasive, elusive and marked by a proliferation of conflicting definitions that refuse to settle into meaning. Efforts to accommodate/incorporate the "post" in educational research have not been easy. In the pages of the "Educational Researcher" alone, McLaren and Farahmandpur (2000) warn against "the decline of class politics," textualism, "toothless liberalism and airbrushed insurgency," nihilism, localism and relativism, all wrapped up in "a facile form of culturalism" that paralyzes progressive politics. Constas (1998) offers a typology of the postmodern noteworthy for its use of the very logic that the "post" sets out to undo (St. Pierre, 2000; Pillow, 2000). Howe contrasts "postmodernists" and "transformationists" and worries about "paradigm cliques" (1998, p. 20). Harold Bloom (1975) has famously argued that all readings are misreadings, given the weight of perspective on what people see and how they see it. This essay adapts Bloom's thesis to read the space of the range of discussion concerning the "post" in educational research as symptomatic of the anxieties attendant upon the collapse of foundations and the end of triumphalist versions of science. In order to make the project doable, the author concentrates on the reception of Derrida as a "part-for-whole" or synecdoche for the heterogeneous "post" of postmodernism, including deconstruction. Her interest is in three gestures of thought at work in the reception of the "post" in much of educational research in what might be said, at the risk of a proper reading, to lead to a mistaken identity. The three gestures of thought are: (1) charges of nihilism/textualism; (2) conflating ideology critique and deconstruction; and (3) compelling understanding too quickly in terms of the uses of deconstruction in educational research. The author concludes with an example of "applied Derrida" that troubles the concept of praxis in the context of writing a book about women living with HIV/AIDS (Lather & Smithies, 1997). (Contains 8 notes.)