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<font face="tahoma" size=2>Greetings:<br>
When Adlai Stevenson was criticized for being too intellectual, he
quipped "Eggheads of the world united, all you have to lose are your
yolks!" When I posted the eulogy on Derrida, I thought that I
had, once again, wasted some of my precious yolk, but I was surprised at
the responses I got. Thank you, dear visionaries. I even have an
invitation to give a sermon at a local church on the topic. So,
here's a critical essay on Derrida with which I agree.<br><br>
</b></font><font face="Verdana" color="#990000"><b>THE APPROPRIATE
DECLINE OF DECONSTRUCTIONISM.<br>
The Death of the Author<br>
</font><font face="Verdana">by Richard Wolin</font> <br>
</b><font face="Verdana">Only at <b>TNR Online<br>
</b>Post date: 10.13.04 <br>
</font>Anyone who tries to account for Jacques Derrida's success in North
America is faced with a paradox. During the early 1980s, when his
fortunes began to ebb precipitously in France--articles on his philosophy
had slowed to a trickle of two or three per annum--in the United States
deconstruction became something of an academic cottage industry.
Translations of his books, conferences devoted to his thought, as well as
endless commentaries trying to explicate the obscurities of
"so-called deconstruction" proliferated. <br>
The irony is that American academics--most of whom were clustered in
comparative literature departments--attempting to ride the crest of the
Parisian theoretical avant-garde were "always already" (to
employ a pet Derrideanism) behind the times. For, by the mid-'70s,
Derrida's exotic brand of "post-structuralism"--which had
proclaimed that the ends of metaphysical "closure" pursued by
first-generation, hard core structuralists like Claude Lévi-Strauss,
Jacques Lacan, and Michel Foucault, could never be achieved--had become a
dead letter. <br>
Nineteen sixty-seven was Derrida's breakthrough year. He published three
successful books and, for a brief, shining moment, became the toast of
the Left Bank. Structuralism had become intellectually hegemonic. The
claims of Derridean "<i>différance</i>"--viz., that all claims
to determinate meaning were self-undermining--appeared revolutionary and
refreshing. Yet, already by the following year, his hermetic,
"negative semiotics"--a semiotics of "absence" rather
than "presence"--had become an object of satirical derision. In
<i>Structuralist Mornings</i>, the novelist Clément Rosset subjected
deconstructionist pretense (specifically, the Derridean habitude of
writing <i>sous rature</i> or crossing out words) to biting parody:
"I write a first sentence, but in fact I should not have written it,
excuse me, I will erase everything and I'll start over again; I write a
second sentence, but after thinking about it, I should not have written
that one either." <br>
In France, the Derridean gambit foundered quite soon. Like the
structuralists, Derrida prided himself on his discursive
"<i>illisibilité</i>," or "unreadability." But after
the breakthrough of the May '68 revolt, when structuralist platitudes
concerning the "end of history" and the "end of man"
were refuted on the streets of the Latin Quarter,
"unintelligibility" had become a distinct liability. In the
eyes of the May generation, Derrida was associated with the structuralist
old guard. Deconstruction was perceived, not unjustly, as part and parcel
of an elitist, self-enclosed, mandarin academic idiom. In the eyes of his
critics, Derrida was never able to live down his famous bon mot,
"There is nothing outside the text." The exclusive emphasis on
"textuality" in his work, combined with the studied
indifference to the political exterior or "outside,"
constituted a final nail in deconstruction's coffin. <br>
Toward the late '80s, deconstruction also underwent a major crisis in
North America. In the eyes of his acolytes, the Master's frequent
proclamations concerning the "death of the subject" seemed to
malign and belittle the idea of human agency itself--and, thus, the
prospect of progressive political change. If all meaning were, as Derrida
claimed, indeterminate, if moral and epistemological questions were
ultimately "undecidable," what was the point of political
commitment? When all was said and done, wasn't deconstruction merely an
elaborate and convoluted prescription for political quietism? <br>
In 1987 the Paul de Man and Martin Heidegger scandals
broke--coincidently, within months of each another. In a stroke,
deconstruction's key North American benefactor (de Man) and its leading
philosophical inspiration (Heidegger) were exposed for their compromising
associations with Nazism. Derrida did nothing to enhance deconstruction's
credibility when he claimed: 1) that Heidegger had become a Nazi due to a
surfeit of "metaphysical humanism" and 2) de Man's 1941
newspaper articles endorsing the deportation of Europe's Jews were
actually the work of a closet <i>résistant</i>. Could it be that the
claims and suspicions of deconstruction's vigorous detractors were true
after all? <br>
But the ultimate paradox besetting deconstruction lies elsewhere. It
hinges on the fact that a methodology that promoted itself as
"critical"--as the exemplar of political and textual
criticism--quickly degenerated into a variant of run-of-the-mill academic
corporatism. Each time deconstruction was exposed to criticism, the
Derridean faithful predictably circled the wagons. Deconstruction had
become a new Scripture or Holy Writ. And in the eyes of true believers,
its progenitor could do no wrong. Anyone who dared to criticize the credo
was branded as a heathen or non-believer. Deconstruction had its moment
in the intellectual limelight. But, appropriately, that moment was
fleeting. <br><br>
<font face="Verdana" color="#990000"><b>Richard
Wolin</font><font face="Verdana"> is the author of <i>The Seduction of
Unreason: The Intellectual Romance with Fascism from Nietzche to
Postmodernism</i> (Princeton University Press). <br><br>
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