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Deconstruction

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on March 22, 2016 • ( 10 )

Deconstruction involves the close reading of texts in order to demonstrate that any given text has irreconcilably contradictory meanings, rather than being a unified, logical whole. As J. Hillis Miller, the preeminent American deconstructionist, has explained in an essay entitled Stevens’ Rock and Criticism as Cure (1976), “Deconstruction is not a dismantling of the structure of a text, but a demonstration that it has already dismantled itself. Its apparently solid ground is no rock but thin air.”

Deconstruction was both created and has been profoundly influenced by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida. Derrida, who coined the term deconstruction, argues that in Western culture, people tend to think and express their thoughts in terms of binary oppositions (white / black, masculine / feminine, cause /effect, conscious /unconscious, presence / absence, speech writing). Derrida suggests these oppositions are hierarchies in miniature, containing one term that Western culture views as positive or superior and another considered negative or inferior, even if only slightly so. Through deconstruction, Derrida aims to erase the boundary between binary oppositions—and to do so in such a way that the hierarchy implied by the oppositions is thrown into question.

Although its ultimate aim may be to criticize Western logic, deconstruction arose as a response to structuralism and formalism. Structuralists believed that all elements of human culture, including literature, may be understood as parts of a system of signs. Derrida did not believe that structuralists could explain the laws governing human signification and thus provide the key to understanding the form and meaning of everything from an African village to Greek myth to a literary text. He also rejected the structuralist belief that texts have identifiable “centres” of meaning–a belief structuralists shared with formalists.

Formalist critics, such as the New Critics, assume that a work of literature is a freestanding, self-contained object whose meaning can be found in the complex network of relations between its parts (allusions, images, rhythms, sounds, etc.). Deconstructionists, by contrast, see works in terms of their undecidability. They reject the formalist view that a work of literature is demonstrably unified from beginning to end, in one certain way, or that it is organized around a single centre that ultimately can be identified. As a result, deconstructionists see texts as more radically heterogeneous than do formalists. Formalists ultimately make sense of the ambiguities they find in a given text, arguing that every ambiguity serves a definite, meaningful, and demonstrable literary function. Undecidability, by contrast, is never reduced, let alone mastered in deconsctruction. Though a deconstructive reading can reveal the incompatible possibilities generated by the text, it is impossible for the reader to settle on any permanent meanings.

Deconstruction is a poststructuralist theory, based largely but not exclusively on the writings of Derrida. It is in the first instance a philosophical theory and a theory directed towards the (re)reading of philosophical writings. Its impact on literature, mediated in North America largely through the influences of theorists at Yale University, is based 1) on the fact that deconstruction sees all writing as a complex historical, cultural process rooted in the relations of texts to each other and in the institutions and conventions of writing, and 2) on the sophistication and intensity of its sense that human knowledge is not as controllable or as convincing as Western thought would have it and that language operates in subtle and often contradictory ways, so that certainty will always elude us.

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Deconstruction by Joshua Kates LAST REVIEWED: 26 July 2017 LAST MODIFIED: 26 July 2017 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780190221911-0010

Deconstruction initially translates a term coined by the French philosopher (and arch-deconstructionist) Jacques Derrida. Rather than its current common usage of analyzing or criticizing something intensively, deconstruction indicates arriving at a new thought or perspective by taking apart an already existing one (or taking apart an already existing one thanks to framing it through something new)—thus de- con -struction. In the anglophone context, deconstruction soon became the signature of the literary scholar and Belgian émigré Paul de Man, as well as of Derrida. Initially de Man and Derrida were predominantly read in departments of literature; consequently, deconstruction was often viewed, and sometimes still is, as a technique for reading and interpreting texts. The so-called Yale School, including J. Hillis Miller, Geoffrey Hartmann, and Harold Bloom—important scholars in their own right—were associated with literary deconstruction, though not each of them would describe his own work in this way. At this same period, along with the development of literary deconstruction, what became known as “American Continental Philosophy” arose, focusing on Derrida’s writings in particular. Though initially including a small band of researchers, today such philosophy is widespread. Derrida’s work is discussed extensively by these scholars, while it currently has less visibility in the literary context. Deconstruction and some analogue of its operation are, however, today not confined to just the fields of literature and philosophy. Sometimes under its own steam, but also in part owing to Derrida’s shifting interests, deconstruction became, and in part remains, a working approach in fields such as architecture, religious studies, law, feminist and political theory, as well as others.

Owing to its taking apart of an already existing standpoint, deconstruction, by definition, makes reference to approaches and texts other than its own. In its early stages, these precursors were largely found in philosophy (especially phenomenology) and structuralism, fields with which many working literary critics (as well as legal scholars, architects, and others) were not especially familiar. Thus the need for introductions was initially especially acute and these continue to appear sporadically, now often with the aim of including Derrida’s later writing as well as his earliest; his 1954 The Problem of Genesis in Husserl’s Philosophy (in which some of his axial concerns are already visible; see Derrida 2003 , cited under Texts by Founders ) having been published in English only in 2003 and in France in 1990. Bennington 1993 , Lüdemann 2014 , and Smith 2005 all focus on Derridean deconstruction, with Bennington giving a broad overview organized by topic, and Lüdemann and Smith offering more detailed textual exegesis. Culler 1982 , Currie 2013 , Leitch 1983 , and Norris 1991 treat deconstruction’s literary avatars, as well as its philosophical ones. Leitch offers a more experimental mode of exegesis and Currie offers a general evaluation of the movement.

Bennington, Geoffrey. “Derridabase.” In Jacques Derrida . Edited by G. Bennington, and J. Derrida. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993.

Bennington’s portion of Jacques Derrida, “Derridabase,” remains one of the best introduction to Derrida’s work in English. It presents a series of clearly written presentations of many of Derrida’s key concepts and major themes, which preserves a good deal of their complexity. (This is one of a number of volumes that Derrida has published with friends or former students, in which his contribution accompanies, but remains entirely separate from, theirs.)

Culler, Jonathan. On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism . Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982.

A wide-ranging introduction to deconstruction, drawing on Culler’s own extensive previous work in structuralist methodologies. It includes discussions of Derrida’s work extending up until the early 1980s as well as of other critics who take a deconstructive bent.

Currie, Mark. The Invention of Deconstruction . Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137307033

Currie’s is in part a highly self-conscious retrospective intellectual history of the emergence of literary deconstruction in the United States, focusing equally on Derrida and de Man. It includes discussions of key texts as well as key concepts. Though perhaps challenging for the complete beginner, it both corrects many still common misunderstandings and supplies a wide-ranging evaluation of this project as a whole.

Leitch, Vincent B. Deconstructive Criticism: An Advanced Introduction . New York: Columbia University Press, 1983.

Appearing a year after Culler’s work, Leitch’s is an equally broad survey, which, in part, canvasses a different set of literary critics, some affiliated with the journal boundary 2 .

Lüdemann, Susanne. Politics of Deconstruction: A New Introduction to Jacques Derrida . Translated by Erik Butler. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014.

A more recent introduction that canvasses both Derrida’s initial foray into deconstruction and his later, largely political works, in which he speaks of justice as indeconstructible. One highlight is its more extended and granular interpretation of Derrida’s Of Grammatology than its predecessors (see Derrida 1976 , cited under Operation, Occasions, Consequences ).

Norris, Christopher. Deconstruction : Theory and Practice . New York: Routledge, 1991.

Originally published in 1982, this is a revised edition, now containing an appendix on Derrida’s important methodological text, “Afterword.” Norris is an exceptionally clear writer who brings in moments in the history of philosophy in his treatment in an accessible way.

Smith, James K. Derrida: Live Theory . London: Continuum, 2005.

Written in an almost telegraphic style, this volume provides an exceptionally clear presentation of key phases of Derrida’s thinking, including important debates and a treatment of his work’s reception.

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18 What Is Deconstruction?

At its core, deconstruction argues that all texts and ideas are composed of a series of oppositions or binary pairs, such as good/evil, presence/absence, or male/female. These binary pairs are often assumed to be stable and objective, but deconstruction asserts that they are actually unstable and subjective, and that true shared meaning is an impossible goal. This is why I have placed “the gap” at the center of our target.

Deconstruction involves closely analyzing a text or idea to reveal these underlying binary pairs and the ways in which they are unstable and contradictory. It seeks to undermine the notion that language can provide objective meaning or truth by exposing the ways in which language undercuts its own meaning, privileges certain meanings, and contains hierarchies of meaning.

According to deconstruction, there is no definitive interpretation of a text or idea, but rather multiple possible meanings that are always in flux. Deconstruction also emphasizes the role of the reader or interpreter in shaping the meaning of a text, arguing that the reader’s own biases and assumptions play a crucial role in the way a text is understood.

Deconstruction has been widely influential in literary and cultural studies, as well as in philosophy, and has been used to analyze a wide range of texts and ideas. It has also been the subject of much debate and criticism, with some arguing that it is overly skeptical or nihilistic in its approach to meaning and truth.

Learning Outcomes

Consider a wide range of alternatives to a habitual way of approaching texts. (CLO 1)
Understand how formal elements in literary texts create meaning within the context of culture and literary discourse (CLO 2.1)
Apply knowledge of formal elements of literature and vocabulary in analysis and discussion of literature (CLO 2.3)
Understand how to perform close readings of texts (CLO 4.2)
Be exposed to the diversity of human experience, thought, politics, and conditions through the application of critical theory (CLO 6.4)
Understand that interpretation is inherently political, and that it reveals assumptions and expectations about value, truth, and the human experience (CLO 7.1)

A Note about Structuralism (and Post-Structuralism)

While we will not use structuralism in this class, it’s important to be aware of its existence because deconstruction, also called post-structuralism, is a response to structuralism. Structuralism is a theoretical approach that emerged in the social sciences and humanities in the mid-20th century. It views phenomena as systems of interrelated parts or elements, and emphasizes the underlying structures and patterns that shape those phenomena.

In literature, for example, a structuralist analysis might focus on the underlying rules or patterns that govern the construction of a narrative or a character’s development. In linguistics, structuralists study the grammar and syntax of languages to identify the underlying rules that govern their structure.

Structuralism is often associated with the work of French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, who applied its principles to the study of cultures and societies. According to Lévi-Strauss, cultures are structured like languages, with underlying systems of symbols and meanings that shape the way individuals think, communicate, and behave.

One of the key principles of structuralism is the idea that meaning is not inherent in individual elements, but rather emerges from the relationships and patterns that exist between them. Structuralists also emphasize the importance of context and the ways in which different elements are interdependent and cannot be understood in isolation.

While structuralism has been influential in a variety of fields, it has also been criticized for its tendency to prioritize abstract systems over individual experiences and for its potential to oversimplify complex phenomena.

Structuralism isn’t really used in literary criticism anymore, though it continues to be used in linguistics and anthropology. Post-structuralism/deconstruction are more popular critical methods for literary scholars, so we will focus our time in this section on deconstruction. However, if you are interested in learning more, you can read Claude Levi-Strauss’s essay, “The Structural Study of Myth,” to see how this theory functions in relation to texts. We will not practice applying structuralism to a text; instead, we will work with application using deconstruction as our critical method.

An Excerpt from Deconstruction Scholarship

Hold on tight! As we learned in the introduction, deconstruction is about exposing the gaps in meaning. In the excerpt from a chapter below, Jaques Derrida tries to explain his concept of différance . Before you attempt to read Derrida, I recommend watching this video from philosophy professor Ellie Anderson.

From “Différance” by Jacques Derrida (1982) (translated by Alan Bass)

I will speak, therefore, of a letter. Of the first letter, if the alphabet, and most of the speculations which have ventured into it, are to be believed. I will speak, therefore, of the letter a , this initial letter which it apparently has been necessary to insinuate, here and there, into the writing of the word difference ; and to do so in the course of a writing on writing, and also of a writing within writing whose different trajectories thereby find themselves, at certain very determined points, intersecting with a kind of gross spelling mistake, a lapse in the discipline and law which regulate writing and keep it seemly. One can always, de facto or de jure , erase or reduce this lapse in spelling, and find it (according to situations to be analyzed each time, although amounting to the same), grave or unseemly, that is, to follow the most ingenuous hypothesis, amusing. Thus, even if one seeks to pass over such an infraction in silence, the interest that one takes in it can be recognized and situated in advance as prescribed by the mute irony, the inaudible misplacement, of this literal permutation. One can always act as if it made no difference. And I must state here and now that today’s discourse will be less a justification of, and even less an apology for, this silent lapse in spelling, than a kind of insistent intensification of its play. On the other hand, I will have to be excused if I refer, at least implicitly, to some of the texts I have ventured to publish. This is precisely because I would like to attempt, to a certain extent, and even though in principle and in the last analysis this is impossible, and impossible for essential reasons, to reassemble in a sheaf the different directions in which I have been able to utilize what I would call provisionally the word or concept of différance , or rather to let it impose itself upon me in its neographism, although as we shall see, différance is literally neither a word nor a concept. And I insist upon the word sheaf for two reasons. On the one hand, I will not be concerned, as I might have been, with describing a history and narrating its stages, text by text, context by context, demonstrating the economy that each time imposed this graphic disorder; rather, I will be concerned with the general system of this economy. On the other hand, the word sheaf seems to mark more appropriately that the assemblage to be proposed has the complex structure of a weaving, an interlacing which permits the different threads and different lines of meaning—or of force—to go off again in different directions, just as it is always ready to tie itself up with others. Therefore, preliminarily, let me recall that this discreet graphic intervention, which neither primarily nor simply aims to shock the reader or the grammarian, came to be formulated in the course of a written investigation of a question about writing. Now it happens, I would say in effect, that this graphic difference (a instead of e), this marked difference between two apparently vocal notations, between two vowels, remains purely graphic: it is read, or it is written, but it cannot be heard. It cannot be apprehended in speech, and we will see why it also bypasses the order of apprehension in general. It is offered by a mute mark, by a tacit monument, I would even say by a pyramid, thinking not only of the form of the letter when it is printed. as a capital, but also of the text in Hegel’s Encyclopedia in which the body of the sign is compared to the Egyptian Pyramid. The a of différance, thus, is not heard; it remains silent, secret and discreet as a tomb: oikesis. And thereby let us anticipate the delineation of a site, the familial residence and tomb of the proper 1 in which is produced, by différance, the economy of death. This stone (provided that one knows how to decipher its inscription) is not far from announcing the death of the tyrant. 2 And it is a tomb that cannot even be made to resonate. In effect, I cannot let you know through my discourse, through the speech being addressed at this moment to the French Society of Philosophy, what difference I am talking about when I talk about it. I can speak of this graphic difference only through a very indirect discourse on writing, and on the condition that I specify, each time, whether I am referring to difference with an e or différance with an a. Which will not simplify things today, and will give us all, you and me, a great deal of trouble, if, at least, we wish to understand each other. In any event, the oral specifications that I will provide (when I say “with an e” or “with an a”) will refer uncircumventably to a written text that keeps watch over my discourse, to a text that I am holding in front of me, that I will read, and toward which I necessarily will attempt to direct your hands and your eyes. We will be able neither to do without the passage through a written text, nor to avoid the order of the disorder produced within it—and this, first of all, is what counts for me. The pyramidal silence of the graphic difference between the e and the a can function, of course, only within the system of ptionetic writing, and within the language and grammar which is as historically linked to phonetic writing as it is to the entire culture inseparable from phonetic writing. But I would say that this in itself (the silence that functions within only a so-called phonetic writing) quite opportunely conveys or reminds us that, contrary to a very widespread prejudice, there is no phonetic writing. There is no purely and rigorously phonetic writing. So-called phonetic writing, by all rights and in principle, and not only due to an empirical or technical insufficiency, can function only by admitting into its system nonphonetic “signs” (punctuation, spacing, etc.). And an examination of the structure and necessity of these nonphonetic signs quickly reveals that they can barely tolerate the concept of the sign itself. Better, the play of difference, which, as Saussure reminded us, is the condition for the possibility and functioning of every sign, is in itself a silent play. Inaudible is the difference between two phonemes which alone permits them to be and to operate as such. The inaudible opens up the apprehension of two present phonemes such as they present themselves. If there is no purely phonetic writing, it is that there is no purely phonetic phone. The difference which establishes phonemes and lets them be heard remains in and of itself inaudible, in every sense of the word. It will be objected, for the same reasons, that graphic difference itself vanishes into the night, can never be sensed as a full term, but rather extends an invisible relationship, the mark of an inapparent relationship between two spectacles. Doubtless. But, from this point of view, that the difference marked in the “differ( )nce” between the e and the a eludes both vision and hearing perhaps happily suggests that here we must be permitted to refer to an order which no longer belongs to sensibility. But neither can it belong to intelligibility, to the ideality which is not fortuitously affiliated with the objectivity of theorein or understanding. 3 Here, therefore, we must let ourselves refer to an order that resists the opposition, one of the founding oppositions of philosophy, between the sensible and the intelligible. The order which resists this opposition, and resists it because it transports it, is announced in a movement of différance (with an a) between two differences or two letters, a différance which belongs neither to the voice nor to writing in the usual sense, and which is located, as the strange space that will keep us together here for an hour, between speech and writing, and beyond the tranquil familarity which links us to one and the other, occasionally reassuring us in our illusion that they are two. What am I to do in order to speak of the a of différance? It goes without saying that it cannot be exposed. One can expose only that which at a certain moment can become present, manifest, that which can be shown, presented as something present, a being-present 4 in its truth, in the truth of a present or the presence of the present. Now if différance (and I also cross out the ) what makes possible the presentation of the being-present, it is never presented as such. It is never offered to the present. Or to anyone. Reserving itself, not exposing itself, in regular fashion it exceeds the order of truth at a certain precise point, but without dissimulating itself-as something, as a mysterious being, in the occult of a nonknowledge or in a hole with indeterminable borders (for example, in a topology of castration). 5 In every exposition it would be exposed to disappearing as disappearance. It would risk appearing: disappearing. So much so that the detours, locutions, and syntax in which I will often have to take recourse will resemble those of negative theology, occasionally even to the point of being indistinguishable from negative theology. Already we have had to delineate that différance is not, does not exist, is not a present-being (on) in any form; and we will be led to delineate also everything that it is not, that is, everything; and consequently that it has neither existence nor essence. It derives from no category of being, whether present or absent. And yet those aspects of différance which are thereby delineated are not theological, not even in the order of the most negative of negative theologies, which are always concerned with disengaging a superessentiality beyond the finite categories of essence and existence, that is, of presence, and always hastening to recall that God is refused the predicate of existence, only in order to acknowledge his superior, inconceivable, and ineffable mode of being. Such a development is not in question here, and this will be confirmed progressively. Différance is not only irreducible to any ontological or theological—ontotheological—reappropriation, but as the very opening of the space in which ontotheology—philosophy—produces its system and its history, it includes ontotheology, inscribing it and exceeding it without return. For the same reason there is nowhere to begin to trace the sheaf or the graphics of différance. For what is put into question is precisely the quest for a rightful beginning, an absolute point of departure, a principal responsibility. The problematic of writing is opened by putting into question the value arkhe . 6 Also, by decision and as a rule of the game, if you will, turning these propositions back on themselves, we will be introduced to the thought of différance by the theme of strategy or the stratagem. By means of this solely strategic justification, I wish to underline that the efficacity of the thematic of différance may very well, indeed must, one day be superseded, lending itself not only to its own replacement, at least to enmeshing itself in a chain that in truth it never will have governed. Whereby, once again, it is not theological. I would say, first off, that différance, which is neither a word nor a concept, strategically seemed to me the most proper one to think, if not to master (thought, here, being that which is maintained in a certain necessary relationship with the structural limits of mastery) what is most irreducible about our “era.” Therefore I am starting, strategically, from the place and the time in which “we” are, even though in the last analysis my opening is not justifiable, since it is only on the basis of différance and its “history” that we can allegedly know who and where “we” are, and what the limits of an “era” might be. Even though différance is neither a word nor a concept, let us nevertheless attempt a simple and approximate semantic analysis that will take us to within sight of what is at stake. We know that the verb differer (Latin verb differre ) has two meanings which seem quite distinct; 7 for example in Littre they are the object of two separate articles. In this sense the Latin differre is not simply a translation of the Greek diapherein, and this will not be without consequences for us, linking our discourse to a particular language, and to a language that passes as less philosophical, less originally philosophical than the other. For the distribution of meaning in the Greek diapherein does not comport one of the two motifs of the Latin differre , to wit, the action of putting off until later, of taking into account, of taking account of time and of the forces of an operation that implies an economical calculation, a detour, a delay, a relay, a reserve, a representaton—concepts that I would summarize here in a word I have never used but that could be inscribed in this chain: temporization. Differer in this sense is to temporize, to take recourse consciously or unconsclously, in the temporal and temporizing mediation of a detour that suspends the accomplishment nor fulfillment of “desire” or “will,” and equally effects this suspension in a mode that annuls or tempers its own effect. And we will see, later how this temporization is also temporalization and the becoming-time of space and the becoming-space of time, the “originary constitution” of time and space, as metaphysics or transcendental phenomenology would say, to use the language that here is criticized and displaced. The other sense of differer is the more common and identifiable one: to be not identical, to be other, discernible, etc. When dealing with differen(ts)(ds), a word that can be written with a final ts or a final ds, as you will, whether it is a question of dissimilar otherness or of allergic and polemical otherness, an interval, a distance, spacing, must be produced between the elements other, and be produced with a certain perseverance in repetition. 8 Now the word difference (with an e) can never refer either to differer as temporization or to differends as polemos . 9 Thus the word différance (with an a) is to compensate economically—this loss of meaning, for différance can refer simultaneously to the entire configuration of its meanings. It is immediately and irreducibly polysemic, which will not be indifferent to the economy of my discourse here. In its polysemia this word, of course, like any meaning must defer to the discourse in which it occurs, its interpretive context; but in a way it defies deriving from the present participle (différant), thereby bringing us close to the very action of the verb differer, before it has even produced an effect constituted as something different or as difference (with an e). 10 In a conceptuality adhering to classical strictures “différance” would be said to designate constitutive, productive, and originary causality, the process of scission and division which would produce or constitute different things or differences. But because it brings us close to the infinitive and active kernel of differer, différance (with an a) neutralizes what the infinitive denotes as simply active, just as mouvance in our language does not simply mean the fact of moving, of moving oneself or of being moved. No more is resonance the act of resonating. We must consider that in the usage of our language the ending -anc e remains undecided between the active and the passive. And we will see why that which lets itself be designated différance is neither simply active nor simply passive, announcing or rather recalling something like, the middle voice, saying an operation that is not an operation, an operation that cannot be conceived either as passion or as the action of a subject on an object, or on the basis of the categories of agent or patient, neither on the basis of nor moving toward any of these terms. For the middle voice, a certain nontransitivity, may be what philosophy, at its outset, distributed into an active and a passive voice, thereby constituting itself by means of this repression. Différance as temporization, différance as spacing. How are they to be joined? Let us start, since we are already there, from the problematic of the sign and of writing. The sign is usually said to be put in the place of the thing itself, the present thing, “thing” here standing equally for meaning or referent. The sign represents the present in its absence. It takes the place of the present. When we cannot grasp or show the thing, state the present, the being-present, when the present cannot be presented, we signify, we go through the detour of the sign. We take or give signs. We signal. The sign, in this sense, is deferred presence. Whether we are concerned with the verbal or the written sign, with the monetary sign, or with electoral delegation and political representation, the circulation of signs defers the moment in which we can encounter the thing itself make it ours, consume or expend it, touch it, see it, intuit its presence. What I am describing here in order to define it is the classically determined structure of the sign in all the banality of its characteristics—signification as the différance of temporization. And this structure presupposes that the sign, which defers presence, is conceivable only on the basis of the presence that it defers and moving toward the deferred presence that it aims to reappropriate. According to this classical semiology, the substitution of the sign for the thing itself is both secondary and provisional: secondary due to an original and lost presence from which the sign thus derives; provisional as concerns this final and missing presence toward which the sign in this sense is a movement of mediation.

1. Translator’s Note: Throughout this book I will translate le propre as “the proper.” Derrida most offen intends all the senses of the word at once: that which is correct, as in le sens propre (proper, literal meaning), and that which is one’s own, that which may be owned, that which is legally, correctly owned–all the links between proper, property, and propriety. 2. TN. The last three sentences refer elliptically and playfully to the following ideas. Derrida first plays on the “silence” of the a in différance as being like a silent tomb, like a pyramid, like the pyramid to which Hegel compares the body of the sign. “Tomb” in Greek is oikesis, which is akin to the Greek oikos (house) from which the word “economy” derives (oikos) house and nemein–to manage). Thus Derrida speaks of the “economy of death” as the “familial residence and tomb of the proper.” Further, and more elliptically still, Derrida speaks of the tomb, which always bears an inscription in stone, announcing the death of the tyrant. This seems to refer to Hegel’s treatment of the Antigone story in the Phenomenology. It will be recalled that Antigone defies the tyrant Creon by burying her brother Polynices. Creon retaliates by having Antigone entombed. There she cheats the slow death that awaits her by hanging herseff. The tyrant Creon has a change of heart too late, and (after the suicides of his son and wife, his family) kills himseff. Thus family, death, inscription, tomb, law, economy. In a later work, Glas, Derrida analyzes Hegel’s treatment of the Antigone. 3. TN. “. . . not fortuitously affiliated with the objectivity of theorein or understanding.” A play on words has been lost in translation here, a loss that makes this sentence difficult to understand. In the previous sentence Derrida says that the difference between the e and the a of différance / différence can neither be seen nor heard. It is not a sensible–that is, relating to the senses–difference. But, he goes on to explain, neither is this an intelligible difference, for the very names by which we conceive of objective intelligibility are already in complicity with sensibility. Theorein–the Greek origin of “theory”–literally means “to look at,” to see; and the word Derrida uses for “understanding” here is entendement, the noun form of entendre, to hear. 4. TN. As in the past, etre (Sein) will be translated as Being. Etant (Seiendes) will be either beings or being, depending on the context. Thus, here etant-present is “being-present.” For a justification of this translation see Derrida, Writing and Différance, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), Translator’s Introduction, p. xvii. 5. TN. ” . . a hole with indeterminable borders (for example, in a topology of castration).” This phrase was added to “La Différance” for its publication in the French edition of this volume and refers to the polemic Derrida had already engaged (in Positions, elaborated further in le Facteur de la verite) with Jacques Lacan. For Derrida, Lacan’s “topology of castration,” which assigns the “hole” or lack to a place (“a hole with determinable borders”) repeats the metaphysical gesture (albeit a negative one) of making absence, the lack, the hole, a transcendental principle that can be pinned down as such, and can thereby govern a theoretical discourse. 6. TN. The Greek arkhe combines the values of a founding principle and of government by a controlling principle (e.g. archeology, monarchy) will propose here will not be elaborated simply as a philosophical discourse operating according to principles, postulates, axioms or definitions, and proceeding along the discursive lines of a linear order of reasons. In the delineation of différance everything is strategic and adventurous. Strategic because no transcendent truth present outside the field of writing can govern theologically the totality of the field. . Adventurous because this strategy is not a simple strategy in the sense that strategy orients tactics according to a final goal, a telos or theme of domination, a mastery and ultimate reappropriation of the development of the field. Finally, a strategy without finality, what might be called blind tactics or empirical wandering if the value of empiricism did not itself acquire its entire meaning in its opposition to philosophical responsibility. If there is a certain wandering in the tracing of différance, it no more follows the lines of philosophy of its symmetrical and integral inverse, empirical-logical discourse. The concept of play keeps itself beyond this opposition, announcing, on the eve of philosophy and beyond it, the unity of chance and necessity in calculations without end. 7. TN. In English the two distinct meanings of the Latin differre have become two separate words: to defer and to differ. 8. TN. The next few sentences will require some annotation, to be found in this note and the next two. In this sentence Derrida is pointing out that two words that sound exactly alike in French (differents, differends) refer to the sense of differre that implies spacing, otherness–difference in its usual English sense. Les differents are different things, les differends are differences of opinion, grounds for dispute–whence the references to allergy (from the Greek allos, other) and polemics. 9. TN. However, to continue the last note, difference (in French) does not convey the sense of active putting off, of deferring (différance in what would be its usual sense in French, if it were a word in common usage), or the sense of active polemical difference, actively differing with someone or something. (“Active” here, though, is not really correct for reasons that Derrida will explain below.) The point is that there is no noun-verb, no gerund for either sense in French. 10. TN. Such a gerund would normally be constructed from the present participle of the verb: differant. Curiously then, the noun différance suspends itself between the two senses of differant–deferring, differing. We might say that it defers differing, and differs from deferring, in and of itself. Here is a link to the translation.

Close Reading in Deconstruction

In New Criticism, we learned to do a close reading of a text that focused on looking for elements of the text that deonstrated complexity and contributed to unity. A deconstructive close reading is similar in practice, but instead, we want to emphasize the instability of meaning and the idea that texts contain contradictions.

Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to perform a close reading of a text using deconstruction as your critical method:

1. Choose a Text: Select a text that you want to analyze closely. This could be a literary work, a philosophical essay, a political speech, or any other written or spoken material such as an advertisement or TikTok video.

2. Initial Reading: Begin by reading the text once through without any specific agenda. This reading helps you grasp the surface meaning and overall structure of the text. In this reading, pay attention to your subjective reader response.

3. Identify Binary Oppositions: Deconstruction often focuses on binary oppositions or pairs of contrasting terms within a text (e.g., good vs. evil, presence vs. absence; light vs. dark; feminine vs. masculine). Identify these binary oppositions in the text. These will be essential to your analysis.

4. Question Assumptions: Start questioning the assumptions that underlie these binary oppositions. Deconstruction seeks to reveal how these opposites are interdependent and how they undermine each other. Look for instances where the text blurs the lines between these opposites.

5. Look for Ambiguities: Deconstruction thrives on ambiguities and contradictions within a text. Pay close attention to passages or phrases that are open to multiple interpretations or that seem to contradict themselves.

6. Identify Hierarchies: Examine whether the text establishes hierarchies between the binary opposites. Which member of the binary opposition is preferred or privileged?

7. Trace Patterns and Reversals: Look for patterns or instances of reversals in the text. Derrida argued that texts often contain moments where the binary oppositions are subverted or reversed. Identify such instances and analyze their significance.

8. Analyze Language and Wordplay: Deconstruction places a heavy emphasis on the linguistic aspects of a text. Pay attention to wordplay, language choices, and the way language constructs meaning. Consider how certain words or phrases may carry hidden connotations.

9. Formulate Your Thesis Statement: Based on your analysis, formulate your interpretation of the text. Highlight the ambiguities, contradictions, and hidden meanings you’ve uncovered. Discuss how the text challenges traditional binary oppositions and hierarchies.

10. Write Your Analysis: Organize your findings into a coherent analysis. Start with an introduction that introduces the text and its context. Then, present your analysis in a structured manner, using evidence from the text to support your claims. Conclude by summarizing your key insights.

Keep in mind that deconstruction is a challenging and often abstract method of analysis. It requires careful attention to language and a willingness to embrace ambiguity and uncertainty in the text. It’s also important to engage with the work of other scholars who have applied deconstruction to similar texts to refine your own interpretation.

Applying Deconstruction Techniques to Literature

To learn more about how to apply deconstruction techniques to a text, we will read “The Glass Mountain” by Donald Barthelme. Donald Barthelme is widely considered to be the father of postmodern fiction. As we have learned thoughout this course, literature and criticism exist in conversation with each other. Just as Archibald MacLeish’s poem “Ars Poetica” demonstrates the theory behind New Criticism analysis, Barthelme’s short story demonstrates awareness of the theoretical underpinnings of deconstruction. Ask yourself some questions as you read:

What is the genre of this short story? (Note: It will be helpful if you are not already familiar with these works to look up “The Glass Mountain” from the Yellow Fairy Tale Book by Andrew Lang)
Why are the lines numbered?
How are direct quotations used? Are they real or spurious? (you may have to do some Internet research to answer this question)
What is the glass mountain?
What does the narrator hope to achieve by climbing the glass mountain?
Who are his “acquaintances”?
What is the symbol?
What is the point of this story?

“The Glass Mountain” by Donald Barthelme

2. The glass mountain stands at the corner of Thirteenth Street and Eighth Avenue.

3. I had attained the lower slope.

4. People were looking up at me.

5. I was new in the neighborhood.

6. Nevertheless I had acquaintances.

7. I had strapped climbing irons to my feet and each hand grasped sturdy plumber’s friend.

8. I was 200 feet up.

9. The wind was bitter.

10. My acquaintances had gathered at the bottom of the mountain to offer encouragement.

11. “Shithead.”

12. “Asshole.”

13. Everyone in the city knows about the glass mountain.

14. People who live here tell stories about it.

15. It is pointed out to visitors.

16. Touching the side of the mountain, one feels coolness.

17. Peering into the mountain, one sees sparkling blue-white depths.

18. The mountain towers over that part of Eighth Avenue like some splendid, immense office building.

19. The top of the mountain vanishes into the clouds, or on cloudless days, into the sun.

20. I unstuck the righthand plumber’s friend leaving the lefthand one in place.

21. Then I stretched out and reattached the righthand one a little higher up, after which I inched my legs into new positions.

22. The gain was minimal, not an arm’s length.

23. My acquaintances continued to comment.

24. “Dumb motherfucker.”

25. I was new in the neighborhood.

26. In the streets were many people with disturbed eyes.

27. Look for yourself.

28. In the streets were hundreds of young people shooting up in doorways, behind parked cars.

29. Older people walked dogs.

30. The sidewalks were full of dogshit in brilliant colors: ocher, umber, Mars yellow, sienna, viridian, ivory black, rose madder.

31. And someone had been apprehended cutting down trees, a row of elms broken-backed among the VWs and Valiants.

32. Done with a power saw, beyond a doubt.

33. I was new in the neighborhood yet I had accumulated acquaintances.

34. My acquaintances passed a brown bottle from hand to hand.

35. “Better than a kick in the crotch.”

36. “Better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick.”

37. “Better than a slap in the belly with a wet fish.”

38. “Better than a thump on the back with a stone.”

39. “Won’t he make a splash when he falls, now?”

40. “I hope to be here to see it. Dip my handkerchief in the blood.”

41. “Fart-faced fool.”

42. I unstuck the lefthand plumber’s friend leaving the righthand one in place.

43. And reached out.

44. To climb the glass mountain, one first requires a good reason.

45. No one has ever climbed the mountain on behalf of science, or in search of celebrity, or because the mountain was a challenge.

46. Those are not good reasons.

47. But good reasons exist.

48. At the top of the mountain there is a castle of pure gold, and in a room in the castle tower sits…

49. My acquaintances were shouting at me.

50. “Ten bucks you bust your ass in the next four minutes!”

51. …a beautiful enchanted symbol.

52. I unstuck the righthand plumber’s friend leaving the lefthand one in place.

53. And reached out.

54. It was cold there at 206 feet and when I looked down I was not encouraged.

55. A heap of corpses both of horses and riders ringed the bottom of the mountain, many dying men groaning there.

56. “A weakening of the libidinous interest in reality has recently come to a close.” (Anton Ehrenzweig)1

57. A few questions thronged into my mind.

58. Does one climb a glass mountain, at considerable personal discomfort, simply to disenchant a symbol?

59. Do today’s stronger egos still need symbols?

60. I decided that the answer to these questions was “yes.”

61. Otherwise what was I doing there, 206 feet above the power-sawed elms, whose white meat I could see from my height?

62. The best way to fail to climb the mountain is to be a knight in full armor–one whose horse’s hoofs strike fiery sparks from the sides of the mountain.

63. The following-named knights had failed to climb the mountain and were groaning in the heap: Sir Giles Guilford, Sir Henry Lovell, Sir Albert Denny, Sir Nicholas Vaux, Sir Patrick Grifford, Sir Gisbourne Gower, Sir Thomas Grey, Sir Peter Coleville, Sir John Blunt, Sir Richard Vernon, Sir Walter Willoughby, Sir Stephen Spear, Sir Roger Faulconbridge, Sir Clarence Vaughan, Sir Hubert Ratcliffe, Sir James Tyrrel, Sir Walter Herbert, Sir Robert Brakenbury, Sir Lionel Beaufort, and many others.2

64. My acquaintances moved among the fallen knights.

65. My acquaintances moved among the fallen knights, collecting rings, wallets, pocket watches, ladies’ favors.

66. “Calm reigns in the country, thanks to the confident wisdom of everyone.” (M. Pompidou)3

67. The golden castle is guarded by a lean-headed eagle with blazing rubies for eyes.

68. I unstuck the lefthand plumber’s friend, wondering if–

69. My acquaintances were prising out the gold teeth of not-yet dead knights.

70. In the streets were people concealing their calm behind a faÃ§ade of vague dread.

71. “The conventional symbol (such as the nightingale, often associated with melancholy), even though it is recognized only through agreement, is not a sign (like the traffic light) because, again, it presumably arouses deep feelings and is regarded as possessing properties beyond what the eye alone sees.” (A Dictionary of Literary Terms)

72. A number of nightingales with traffic lights tied to their legs flew past me.

73. A knight in pale pink armor appeared above me.

74. He sank, his armor making tiny shrieking sounds against the glass.

75. He gave me a sideways glance as he passed me.

76. He uttered the word “Muerte”4 as he passed me.

77. I unstuck the righthand plumber’s friend.

78. My acquaintances were debating the question, which of them would get my apartment?

79. I reviewed the conventional means of attaining the castle.

80. The conventional means of attaining the castle are as follows: “The eagle dug its sharp claws into the tender flesh of the youth, but he bore the pain without a sound, and seized the bird’s two feet with his hands. The creature in terror lifted him high up into the air and began to circle the castle. The youth held on bravely. He saw the glittering palace, which by the pale rays of the moon looked like a dim lamp; and he saw the windows and balconies of the castle tower. Drawing a small knife from his belt, he cut off both the eagle’s feet. The bird rose up in the air with a yelp, and the youth dropped lightly onto a broad balcony. At the same moment a door opened, and he saw a courtyard filled with flowers and trees, and there, the beautiful enchanted princess.” (The Yellow Fairy Book)5

81. I was afraid.

82. I had forgotten the Bandaids.

83. When the eagle dug its sharp claws into my tender flesh–

84. Should I go back for the Bandaids?

85. But if I went back for the Bandaids I would have to endure the contempt of my acquaintances.

86. I resolved to proceed without the Bandaids.

87. “In some centuries, his [man’s] imagination has made life an intense practice of all the lovelier energies.” (John Masefield)6

88. The eagle dug its sharp claws into my tender flesh.

89. But I bore the pain without a sound, and seized the bird’s two feet with my hands.

90. The plumber’s friends remained in place, standing at right angles to the side of the mountain.

91. The creature in terror lifted me high in the air and began to circle the castle.

92. I held on bravely.

93. I saw the glittering palace, which by the pale rays of the moon looked like a dim lamp; and I saw the windows and balconies of the castle tower.

94. Drawing a small knife from my belt, I cut off both the eagle’s feet.

95. The bird rose up in the air with a yelp, and I dropped lightly onto a broad balcony.

96. At the same moment a door opened, and I saw a courtyard filled with flowers and trees, and there, the beautiful enchanted symbol.

97. I approached the symbol, with its layers of meaning, but when I touched it, it changed into only a beautiful princess.

98. I threw the beautiful princess headfirst down the mountain to my acquaintances.

99. Who could be relied upon to deal with her.

100. Nor are eagles plausible, not at all, not for a moment.

1 A (probably) spurious quotation by a (probably) fictitious person. 2 Names chosen or invented at random to represent English knighthood. 3 Former President of France. The quotation is probably spurious. 4 “Death.” 5 One of a series of fairy tale collections edited by Andrew Lang. 6 Traditional English poet (1878-1967); he became Poet Laureate of England in 1930.

“The Glass Mountain” is from City Life . Pocket Books, 1978.

After completing a close reading of the text, you’ll want to come up with a thesis statement that you can support with the evidence you’ve found.

Example of Deconstruction thesis statement: In “The Glass Mountain,” the impossiblity of achieving shared meaning through text is demonstrated through the text’s subversion of the fairy tale genre and a mockery of traditional symbolism.

While ChatGPT clearly still has some shortcomings as a writer, one of its strengths is pattern analysis. I asked ChatGPT to read the short story above and suggest some ideas for a deconstructive analysis of the text. Here are some of the ideas it came up with that would be worth exploring:

Binary Oppositions: The story establishes several binary oppositions, such as climbing vs. failing to climb the glass mountain, newness vs. familiarity in the neighborhood, and the conventional vs. unconventional means of attaining the castle. Deconstruction would involve questioning the stability and interdependence of these oppositions.
Language and Wordplay: Barthelme’s use of language and wordplay is significant. The repetition of phrases like “I unstuck the [plumber’s] friend,” and the playful use of insults by acquaintances, highlight the importance of language in constructing meaning. Deconstruction would involve exploring how these linguistic elements challenge or subvert conventional interpretations.
Symbols and Meaning: The story introduces symbols like the glass mountain, the golden castle, and the beautiful enchanted symbol/princess. Deconstruction would inquire into the shifting and multiple meanings these symbols carry and how they resist fixed interpretation.
Contradictions and Ambiguities: Throughout the story, there are contradictions and ambiguities, such as the purpose of climbing the glass mountain, the nature of the castle’s inhabitant, and the fate of the beautiful princess. Deconstruction would focus on how these contradictions disrupt traditional narratives and hierarchies.
Intertextuality: The story references external texts and quotes, such as the ones from Anton Ehrenzweig, M. Pompidou, and “The Yellow Fairy Book.” Deconstruction would investigate how these references add layers of meaning and ambiguity to the narrative. (My note: most of these are fake references, just like ChatGPT provides fake references)
Narrative Perspective: The narrative perspective shifts from first-person to third-person at various points, raising questions about the reliability and authority of the narrator. Deconstruction would examine how these shifts impact the reader’s understanding of the text.
Metafictional Elements: The story contains metafictional elements where the narrator reflects on the act of storytelling and interpretation. Deconstruction would explore how these metafictional moments disrupt the boundaries between fiction and reality.

In a deconstructive analysis of “The Glass Mountain,” you would aim to reveal how these elements interact, contradict, and undermine each other, ultimately challenging the stability of meaning within the text. Deconstruction invites readers to question the assumptions and hierarchies embedded in the text and to recognize the inherent ambiguity and complexity of language and narrative.

Source: https://chat.openai.com/share/ea6ac091-27e9-439a-aaa5-600def26738f

Deconstruction’s Limitations

What is the point of a critical method that seeks to expose the gaps in meaning? As with any critical method, deconstruction has its limits and potential drawbacks. These include the following:

Complexity and Obscurity: Deconstruction is known for its complexity and abstract nature. This can make it difficult for both scholars and general readers to grasp and apply effectively. Deconstructive analyses can be dense and challenging to understand, which can limit its accessibility and practicality. This can lead to misunderstandings and even misrepresentation of both its goals and its methods.
Skepticism and Relativism: Deconstruction’s emphasis on the instability of meaning and the critique of binary oppositions can lead to a form of skepticism and relativism. While this can be a valuable tool for questioning established power structures and hierarchies, it may also create a sense of nihilism. If there’s no possibility of shared meaning, then what is the point?
Lack of Constructive Solutions: Deconstruction is often seen as a critical method that deconstructs existing texts and ideas but doesn’t necessarily offer constructive solutions or alternative interpretations. Critics argue that it can be overly focused on critique without providing a clear path forward for understanding or interpreting texts.
Challenges to Traditional Authority: While I see this as more of a strength than a limitation per se, it’s worth noting that deconstruction’s challenge to traditional forms of authority in literature and philosophy can be unsettling for those who prefer more stable and conventional interpretations.
Overemphasis on Textuality: Deconstruction’s focus on the text and language can sometimes lead to an overemphasis on textual analysis at the expense of considering broader contextual factors, such as historical, cultural, or authorial intentions. This narrow focus may limit the scope of interpretation. Subsequent critical methodologies often use deconstructive approaches in conjunction with a consideration of context.
Ethical Concerns: Some critics argue that deconstruction’s relativistic approach can be ethically problematic, as it may undermine moral and ethical judgments or lead to a lack of responsibility for the implications of certain texts. For me, personally, I worry that we are now living in the post-truth society that deconstruction anticipated more than 50 years ago, where “alternative facts” carry as much weight as regular boring facts.

Despite these limitations, deconstruction remains a valuable and influential critical method, particularly for its ability to challenge dominant interpretations and reveal hidden complexities within texts. However, its application should be balanced with other critical approaches and consideration of broader contextual factors to provide a more comprehensive understanding of literature and culture.

Structuralism and Deconstruction Scholars

These are some influential practitioners of structuralism and deconstruction

Ferdinand de Saussure (Structuralism)
Claude Levi-Strauss (Structuralism)
Jacques Derrida (Deconstruction)
Umberto Eco (Semiotics)
Roland Barthes (Deconstruction)
Jonathan Culler (Deconstruction)
Paul de Man (Deconstruction)
Richard Rorty (Deconstruction)

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Introduction

Deconstruction in philosophy

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Table Of Contents

deconstruction , form of philosophical and literary analysis, derived mainly from work begun in the 1960s by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida , that questions the fundamental conceptual distinctions, or “oppositions,” in Western philosophy through a close examination of the language and logic of philosophical and literary texts. In the 1970s the term was applied to work by Derrida, Paul de Man , J. Hillis Miller, and Barbara Johnson, among other scholars. In the 1980s it designated more loosely a range of radical theoretical enterprises in diverse areas of the humanities and social sciences, including—in addition to philosophy and literature—law, psychoanalysis, architecture, anthropology, theology, feminism, gay and lesbian studies, political theory, historiography, and film theory . In polemical discussions about intellectual trends of the late 20th-century, deconstruction was sometimes used pejoratively to suggest nihilism and frivolous skepticism . In popular usage the term has come to mean a critical dismantling of tradition and traditional modes of thought.

The oppositions challenged by deconstruction, which have been inherent in Western philosophy since the time of the ancient Greeks, are characteristically “binary” and “hierarchical,” involving a pair of terms in which one member of the pair is assumed to be primary or fundamental, the other secondary or derivative. Examples include nature and culture , speech and writing, mind and body, presence and absence, inside and outside, literal and metaphorical, intelligible and sensible, and form and meaning , among many others. To “deconstruct” an opposition is to explore the tensions and contradictions between the hierarchical ordering assumed (and sometimes explicitly asserted) in the text and other aspects of the text’s meaning, especially those that are indirect or implicit or that rely on figurative or performative uses of language . Through this analysis, the opposition is shown to be a product, or “construction,” of the text rather than something given independently of it.

In the writings of the French Enlightenment philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau , for example, society and culture are described as corrupting and oppressive forces that gradually develop out of an idyllic “state of nature” in which humans exist in self-sufficient and peaceful isolation from one another. For Rousseau, then, nature is prior to culture. Yet there is another sense in which culture is certainly prior to nature: the idea of nature is a product of culture, and what counts as “nature” or “natural” at any given historical moment will vary depending upon the culture of the time. What this fact shows is not that the terms of the nature/culture opposition should be inverted—that culture is really prior to nature—but rather that the relation between the terms is not one-sided and unidirectional, as Rousseau and others had assumed. The point of the deconstructive analysis is to restructure, or “displace,” the opposition, not simply to reverse it.

For Derrida, the most telling and pervasive opposition is the one that treats writing as secondary to or derivative of speech . According to this opposition, speech is a more authentic form of language, because in speech the ideas and intentions of the speaker are immediately “present” (spoken words, in this idealized picture, directly express what the speaker “has in mind”), whereas in writing they are more remote or “absent” from the speaker or author and thus more liable to misunderstanding. As Derrida argues, however, spoken words function as linguistic signs only to the extent that they can be repeated in different contexts , in the absence of the speaker who originally utters them. Speech qualifies as language, in other words, only to the extent that it has characteristics traditionally assigned to writing, such as “absence,” “difference” (from the original context of utterance), and the possibility of misunderstanding. One indication of this fact, according to Derrida, is that descriptions of speech in Western philosophy often rely on examples and metaphors related to writing. In effect, these texts describe speech as a form of writing, even in cases where writing is explicitly claimed to be secondary to speech. As with the opposition between nature and culture, however, the point of the deconstructive analysis is not to show that the terms of the speech/writing opposition should be inverted—that writing is really prior to speech—nor is it to show that there are no differences between speech and writing. Rather, it is to displace the opposition so as to show that neither term is primary. For Derrida, speech and writing are both forms of a more generalized “arche-writing” ( archi-écriture ), which encompasses not only all of natural language but any system of representation whatsoever.

The “privileging” of speech over writing is based on what Derrida considers a distorted (though very pervasive) picture of meaning in natural language, one that identifies the meanings of words with certain ideas or intentions in the mind of the speaker or author. Derrida’s argument against this picture is an extension of an insight by the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure . For Saussure, the concepts we associate with linguistic signs (their “meanings”) are only arbitrarily related to reality, in the sense that the ways in which they divide and group the world are not natural or necessary, reflecting objectively existing categories, but variable (in principle) from language to language. Hence, meanings can be adequately understood only with reference to the specific contrasts and differences they display with other, related meanings. For Derrida, similarly, linguistic meaning is determined by the “play” of differences between words—a play that is “limitless,” “infinite,” and “indefinite”—and not by an original idea or intention existing prior to and outside language. Derrida coined the term différance , meaning both a difference and an act of deferring , to characterize the way in which meaning is created through the play of differences between words. Because the meaning of a word is always a function of contrasts with the meanings of other words, and because the meanings of those words are in turn dependent on contrasts with the meanings of still other words (and so on), it follows that the meaning of a word is not something that is fully present to us; it is endlessly deferred in an infinitely long chain of meanings, each of which contains the “ traces” of the meanings on which it depends.

Derrida contends that the opposition between speech and writing is a manifestation of the “ logocentrism ” of Western culture—i.e., the general assumption that there is a realm of “truth” existing prior to and independent of its representation by linguistic signs. Logocentrism encourages us to treat linguistic signs as distinct from and inessential to the phenomena they represent, rather than as inextricably bound up with them. The logocentric conception of truth and reality as existing outside language derives in turn from a deep-seated prejudice in Western philosophy, which Derrida characterizes as the “ metaphysics of presence.” This is the tendency to conceive fundamental philosophical concepts such as truth, reality, and being in terms of ideas such as presence, essence, identity, and origin—and in the process to ignore the crucial role of absence and difference.

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> Deconstruction

Book contents

Frontmatter
Introduction
1 Russian Formalism
STRUCTURALISM: ITS RISE, INFLUENCE AND AFTERMATH
2 Structuralism of the Prague School
3 The linguistic model and its applications
4 Semiotics
5 Narratology
6 Roland Barthes
7 Deconstruction
8 Structuralist and poststructuralist psychoanalytic and Marxist theories
READER-ORIENTED THEORIES OF INTERPRETATION
Bibliography

7 - Deconstruction

from STRUCTURALISM: ITS RISE, INFLUENCE AND AFTERMATH

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2008

The movement known as ‘deconstruction’ is, at the time of writing, not much more than twenty years old. It achieved self-consciousness only in the 1970s. In retrospect, however, it is often dated to 1966 – the year in which the French philosopher Jacques Derrida read a paper called ‘Structure, sign and play in the discourse of the human sciences’ (reprinted in Writing , pp. 278–94) at a conference on structuralism at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. That paper, which was marked by an explicit break with the assumptions of structuralism, was promptly heralded as the emergence of ‘poststructuralism’. But this term was, and has remained, hopelessly vague. It acquired whatever sense it had from a wave of the hand in the direction of Derrida and Michel Foucault.

These two profoundly original thinkers did not, however, think of themselves as belonging to a common movement, nor as motivated by some special hostility to structuralism. Each of them had a distinct agenda, reacting to quite different traditions and focusing on quite different topics. Derrida's early work, the work which had the most influence on deconstructionism, was a continuation and intensification of Heidegger's attack on Platonism. It took the form of critical discussions of Rousseau, Hegel, Nietzsche, Saussure, and many other writers, including Heidegger himself. By contrast, though Foucault too was greatly influenced by Heidegger, the books which made him famous were histories of institutions and disciplines, rather than works of philosophy. These books had a distinctively political cast, whereas Derrida's earlier writings only occasionally touched on political topics.

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Deconstruction
By Richard Rorty , University of Virginia
Edited by Raman Selden
Book: The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism
Online publication: 28 March 2008
Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521300131.009

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General Literary Theory & Criticism Resources
African Diaspora Studies
Critical Disability Studies
Critical Race Theory
Deconstruction and Poststructuralism
Ecocriticism
Feminist Theory
Indigenous Literary Studies
Marxist Literary Criticism
Narratology
New Historicism
Postcolonial Theory
Psychoanalytic Criticism
Queer and Trans Theory
Structuralism and Semiotics
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Literary Research

Literary Research: Deconstruction and Poststructuralism

What are deconstruction and poststructuralism.

"Deconstruction posits that meaning, as accessed through language, is indeterminate because language itself is indeterminate. It is a system of signifiers that can never fully “mean”: a word can refer to an object but can never be that object. Derrida developed deconstruction as a response to certain strains of Western philosophy; in the United States, deconstruction was the focus of a group of literary theorists at Yale, including Paul de Man and Geoffrey Hartman. Used as a method of literary critique, deconstruction refocuses attention on a work as open-ended, endlessly available to interpretation, and far beyond the reach of authorial intention. Deconstruction traces how language generates meaning both within a text and across texts, while insisting that such meaning can only ever be provisional."

Brief Overviews:

Deconstruction (A Companion to Literary Theory)
Deconstruction and Post-Structuralism (Bloomsbury Handbook of Literary and Cultural Theory)
Deconstruction and Poststructuralism (Literary Theory Handbook)
Deconstruction (Oxford Research Encyclopedias)
Deconstruction and Poststructuralism (Routledge Companion to Critical and Cultural Theory)
Post-structuralism (The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms)

Notable Scholars:

Jacques Derrida

Derrida, Jacques., and John D. Caputo. Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida . Fordham University Press, 1997.
Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology . Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016.
Derrida, Jacques. Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs . Northwestern University Press, 1973.
Derrida, Jacques. Writing and Difference . University of Chicago Press, 1978.

Hélène Cixous

Cixous, Hélène. Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing . Columbia University Press, 1993.
Cixous, Hélène, and Susan. Sellers. The Hélène Cixous Reader . Routledge, 1994.

J. Hillis Miller

Miller, J. Hillis. The Ethics of Reading: Kant, de Man, Eliot, Trollope, James, and Benjamin . Columbia University Press, 1987.
Miller, J. Hillis, and Julian Wolfreys. The J. Hillis Miller Reader . Edinburgh University Press, 2005.

Michel Foucault

The Foucault Reader (various editions)
The Essential Works of Michel Foucault , 1954-1984 . Edited by Paul Rabinow and James D. Faubion, Translated by Robert Hurley, New Press, 1997.

Dits et écrits: 1954-1988 , Gallimard, 1994.

Introductions & Anthologies

Also see other recent eBooks discussing or using deconstruction in literature and scholar-recommended sources on deconstruction , post-structuralism , Jacques Derrida and J. Hillis-Miller via Oxford Bibliographies.

Definition from: " Deconstruction ." Glossary of Poetic Terms. Poetry Foundation.(24 July 2023)

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Reading and Responsibility: Deconstruction's Traces

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2 Deconstruction Today: Literature, Postcolonialism and the Secret

Published: May 2010
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This chapter begins by following Jacques Derrida, writing in ‘Some Statements and Truisms’, in distinguishing between deconstruction and deconstructionism . Deconstruction without the -ism is something else – indeed, ‘it’ is not a ‘thing’. The spread of Derrida's work has been remarkable: no figures have been found about the number of languages into which it has been translated, but it is no doubt the equal of any twentieth-century philosopher or cultural critic. Running counter to the Derridean influence on postcolonial studies is a strong current of resistance by those who feel that the pursuit of ‘theory’ has been to the detriment of material analysis and actual achievements on the ground. The secret of literature is closely connected, for Derrida, to his understanding of democracy.

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Deconstruction

M. h. abrams (essay date spring 1977).

SOURCE: Abrams, M. H. “The Deconstructive Angel.” Critical Inquiry 3, no. 3 (spring 1977): 425-38.

[ In the following essay, which many critics consider the strongest and most influential critique of deconstruction, Abrams points out the limitations of deconstruction in literary criticism. ]

—Shelley, Prometheus Unbound

We have been instructed these days to be wary of words like “origin,” “center,” and “end,” but I will venture to say that this session had its origin in the dialogue between Wayne Booth and myself which centered on the rationale of the historical procedures in my book, Natural Supernaturalism. Hillis Miller had, in all innocence, written a review of that book; he was cited and answered by Booth, then re-cited and re-answered by me, and so was sucked into the vortex of our exchange to make it now a dialogue of three. And given the demonstrated skill of our chairman in fomenting debates, who can predict how many others will be drawn into the vortex before it comes to an end?

I shall take this occasion to explore the crucial issue that was raised by Hillis Miller in his challenging review. I agreed with Wayne Booth that pluralism—the bringing to bear on a subject of diverse points of view, with diverse results—is not only valid, but necessary to our understanding of literary and cultural history: in such pursuits the convergence of diverse points of view is the only way to achieve a vision in depth. I also said, however, that Miller's radical statement, in his review, of the principles of what he calls deconstructive interpretation goes beyond the limits of pluralism, by making impossible anything that we would account as literary and cultural history. 1 The issue would hardly be worth pursuing on this public platform if it were only a question of the soundness of the historical claims in a single book. But Miller considered Natural Supernaturalism as an example “in the grand tradition of modern humanistic scholarship, the tradition of Curtius, Auerbach, Lovejoy, C. S. Lewis,” 2 and he made it clear that what is at stake is the validity of the premises and procedures of the entire body of traditional inquiries in the human sciences. And that is patently a matter important enough to warrant our discussion.

Let me put as curtly as I can the essential, though usually implicit, premises that I share with traditional historians of Western culture, which Miller puts in question and undertakes to subvert:

The basic materials of history are written texts; and the authors who wrote these texts (with some off-center exceptions) exploited the possibilities and norms of their inherited language to say something determinate, and assumed that competent readers, insofar as these shared their own linguistic skills, would be able to understand what they said.
The historian is indeed for the most part able to interpret not only what the passages that he cites might mean now, but also what their writers meant when they wrote them. Typically, the historian puts his interpretation in language which is partly his author's and partly his own; if it is sound, this interpretation approximates, closely enough for the purpose at hand, what the author meant.
The historian presents his interpretation to the public in the expectation that the expert reader's interpretation of a passage will approximate his own and so confirm the “objectivity” of his interpretation. The worldly-wise author expects that some of his interpretations will turn out to be mistaken, but such errors, if limited in scope, will not seriously affect...

(This entire section contains 6356 words.)

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the soundness of his overall history. If, however, the bulk of his interpretations are misreadings, his book is not to be accounted a history but an historical fiction.

Notice that I am speaking here of linguistic interpretation, not of what is confusingly called “historical interpretation”—that is, the categories, topics, and conceptual and explanatory patterns that the historian brings to his investigation of texts, which serve to shape the story within which passages of texts, with their linguistic meanings, serve as instances and evidence. The differences among these organizing categories, topics, and patterns effect the diversity in the stories that different historians tell, and which a pluralist theory finds acceptable. Undeniably, the linguistic meanings of the passages cited are in some degree responsive to differences in the perspective that a historian brings to bear on them; but the linguistic meanings are also in considerable degree recalcitrant to alterations in perspective, and the historian's fidelity to these meanings, without his manipulating and twisting them to fit his preconceptions, serves as a prime criterion of the soundness of the story that he undertakes to tell.

One other preliminary matter: I don't claim that my interpretation of the passages I cite exhausts everything that these passages mean. In his review, Hillis Miller says that “a literary or philosophical text, for Abrams, has a single unequivocal meaning ‘corresponding’ to the various entities it ‘represents’ in a more or less straightforward mirroring.” I don't know how I gave Miller the impression that my “theory of language is implicitly mimetic,” a “straightforward mirror” of the reality it reflects, 3 except on the assumption he seems to share with Derrida, and which seems to me obviously mistaken, that all views of language which are not in the deconstructive mode are mimetic views. My view of language, as it happens, is by and large functional and pragmatic: language, whether spoken or written, is the use of a great variety of speech-acts to accomplish a great diversity of human purposes; only one of these many purposes is to assert something about a state of affairs; and such a linguistic assertion does not mirror, but serves to direct attention to selected aspects of that state of affairs.

At any rate, I think it is quite true that many of the passages I cite are equivocal and multiplex in meaning. All I claim—all that any traditional historian needs to claim—is that, whatever else the author also meant, he meant, at a sufficient approximation, at least this, and that the “this” that I specify is sufficient to the story I undertake to tell. Other historians, having chosen to tell a different story, may in their interpretation identify different aspects of the meanings conveyed by the same passage.

That brings me to the crux of my disagreement with Hillis Miller. His central contention is not simply that I am sometimes, or always, wrong in my interpretation, but instead that I—like other traditional historians—can never be right in my interpretation. For Miller assents to Nietzsche's challenge of “the concept of ‘rightness’ in interpretation,” and to Nietzsche's assertion that “the same text authorizes innumerable interpretations ( Auslegungen ): there is no ‘correct’ interpretation.” 4 Nietzsche's views of interpretation, as Miller says, are relevant to the recent deconstructive theorists, including Jacques Derrida and himself, who have “reinterpreted Nietzsche” or have written “directly or indirectly under his aegis.” He goes on to quote a number of statements from Nietzsche's The Will to Power to the effect, as Miller puts it, “that reading is never the objective identifying of a sense but the importation of meaning into a text which has no meaning ‘in itself.’” For example: “Ultimately, man finds in things nothing but what he himself has imported into them.” “In fact interpretation is itself a means of becoming master of something.” 5 On the face of it, such sweeping deconstructive claims might suggest those of Lewis Carroll's linguistic philosopher, who asserted that meaning is imported into a text by the interpreter's will to power:

“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.” “The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that's all.”

But of course I don't at all believe that such deconstructive claims are, in Humpty Dumpty fashion, simply dogmatic assertions. Instead, they are conclusions which are derived from particular linguistic premises. I want, in the time remaining, to present what I make out to be the elected linguistic premises, first of Jacques Derrida, then of Hillis Miller, in the confidence that if I misinterpret these theories, my errors will soon be challenged and corrected. Let me eliminate suspense by saying at the beginning that I don't think that their radically skeptical conclusions from these premises are wrong. On the contrary, I believe that their conclusions are right—in fact, they are infallibly right, and that's where the trouble lies.

It is often said that Derrida and those who follow his lead subordinate all inquiries to a prior inquiry into language. This is true enough, but not specific enough, for it does not distinguish Derrida's work from what Richard Rorty calls “the linguistic turn” 6 which characterizes modern Anglo-American philosophy and also a great part of Anglo-American literary criticism, including the “New Criticism,” of the last half-century. What is distinctive about Derrida is first that, like other French structuralists, he shifts his inquiry from language to écriture, the written or printed text; and second that he conceives a text in an extraordinarily limited fashion.

Derrida's initial and decisive strategy is to disestablish the priority, in traditional views of language, of speech over writing. By priority I mean the use of oral discourse as the conceptual model from which to derive the semantic and other features of written language and of language in general. And Derrida's shift of elementary reference is to a written text which consists of what we find when we look at it—to “un texte déjà écrit, noir sur blanc.” 7 In the dazzling play of Derrida's expositions, his ultimate recourse is to these black marks on white paper as the sole things that are actually present in reading, and so are not fictitious constructs, illusions, phantasms; the visual features of these black-on-blanks he expands in multiple dimensions of elaborately figurative significance, only to contract them again, at telling moments, to their elemental status. The only things that are patently there when we look at a text are “marks” that are demarcated, and separated into groups, by “blanks”; there are also “spaces,” “margins,” and the “repetitions” and “differences” that we find when we compare individual marks and groups of marks. By his rhetorical mastery Derrida solicits us to follow him in his move to these new premises, and to allow ourselves to be locked into them. This move is from what he calls the closed “logocentric” model of all traditional or “classical” views of language (which, he maintains, is based on the illusion of a Platonic or Christian transcendent being or presence, serving as the origin and guarantor of meanings) to what I shall call his own graphocentric model, in which the sole presences are marks-on-blanks.

By this bold move Derrida puts out of play, before the game even begins, every source of norms, controls, or indicators which, in the ordinary use and experience of language, set a limit to what we can mean and what we can be understood to mean. Since the only givens are already-existing marks, “déjà écrit,” we are denied recourse to a speaking or writing subject, or ego, or cogito, or consciousness, and so to any possible agency for the intention of meaning something (“vouloir dire”); all such agencies are relegated to the status of fictions generated by language, readily dissolved by deconstructive analysis. By this move he leaves us no place for referring to how we learn to speak, understand, or read language, and how, by interaction with more competent users and by our own developing experience with language, we come to recognize and correct our mistakes in speaking or understanding. The author is translated by Derrida (when he's not speaking in the momentary shorthand of traditional fictions) to a status as one more mark among other marks, placed at the head or the end of a text or set of texts, which are denominated as “bodies of work identified according to the ‘proper name’ of a signature.” 8 Even syntax, the organization of words into a significant sentence, is given no role in determining the meanings of component words, for according to the graphocentric model, when we look at a page we see no organization but only a “chain” of grouped marks, a sequence of individual signs.

It is the notion of “the sign” that allows Derrida a limited opening-out of his premises. For he brings to a text the knowledge that the marks on a page are not random markings, but signs, and that a sign has a dual aspect as signifier and signified, signal and concept, or mark-with-meaning. But these meanings, when we look at a page, are not there, either as physical or mental presences. To account for significance, Derrida turns to a highly specialized and elaborated use of Saussure's notion that the identity either of the sound or of the signification of a sign does not consist in a positive attribute, but in a negative (or relational) attribute—that is, its “difference,” or differentiability, from other sounds and other significations within a particular linguistic system. 9 This notion of difference is readily available to Derrida, because inspection of the printed page shows that some marks and sets of marks repeat each other, but that others differ from each other. In Derrida's theory “difference”—not “the difference between a and b and c …” but simply “difference” in itself—supplements the static elements of a text with an essential operative term, and as such (somewhat in the fashion of the term “negativity” in the dialectic of Hegel) it performs prodigies. For “difference” puts into motion the incessant play ( jeu ) of signification that goes on within the seeming immobility of the marks on the printed page.

To account for what is distinctive in the signification of a sign, Derrida puts forward the term “trace,” which he says is not a presence, though it functions as a kind of “simulacrum” of a signified presence. Any signification that difference has activated in a signifier in the past remains active as a “trace” in the present instance as it will in the future, 10 and the “sedimentation” of traces which a signifier has accumulated constitutes the diversity in the play of its present significations. This trace is an elusive aspect of a text which is not, yet functions as though it were; it plays a role without being “present”; it “appears/disappears”; “in presenting itself it effaces itself.” 11 Any attempt to define or interpret the significance of a sign or chain of signs consists in nothing more than the interpreter's putting in its place another sign or chain of signs, “sign-substitutions,” whose self-effacing traces merely defer laterally, from substitution to substitution, the fixed and present meaning (or the signified “presence”) we vainly pursue. The promise that the trace seems to offer of a presence on which the play of signification can come to rest in a determinate reference is thus never realizable, but incessantly deferred, put off, delayed. Derrida coins what in French is the portmanteau term différance (spelled - a nce, and fusing the notions of differing and deferring) to indicate the endless play of generated significances, in which the reference is interminably postponed. 12 The conclusion, as Derrida puts it, is that “the central signified, the originating or transcendental signified” is revealed to be “never absolutely present outside a system of differences,” and this “absence of an ultimate signified extends the domain and play of signification to infinity.” 13

What Derrida's conclusion comes to is that no sign or chain of signs can have a determinate meaning. But it seems to me that Derrida reaches this conclusion by a process which, in its own way, is no less dependent on an origin, ground, and end, and which is no less remorselessly “teleological,” than the most rigorous of the metaphysical systems that he uses his conclusions to deconstruct. His origin and ground are his graphocentric premises, the closed chamber of texts for which he invites us to abandon our ordinary realm of experience in speaking, hearing, reading, and understanding language. And from such a beginning we move to a foregone conclusion. For Derrida's chamber of texts is a sealed echo-chamber in which meanings are reduced to a ceaseless echolalia, a vertical and lateral reverberation from sign to sign of ghostly non-presences emanating from no voice, intended by no one, referring to nothing, bombinating in a void.

For the mirage of traditional interpretation, which vainly undertakes to determine what an author meant, Derrida proposes the alternative that we deliver ourselves over to a free participation in the infinite free-play of signification opened out by the signs in a text. And on this cheerless prospect of language and the cultural enterprise in ruins Derrida bids us to try to gaze, not with a Rousseauistic nostalgia for a lost security as to meaning which we never in fact possessed, but instead with “a Nietzschean affirmation, the joyous affirmation of the play of the world and of the innocence of becoming, the affirmation of a world of signs without error [ faute ], without truth, without origin, which is offered to an active interpretation. … And it plays without security. … In absolute chance, affirmation also surrenders itself to genetic indeterminacy, to the seminal chanciness [ aventure ] of the trace.” 14 The graphocentric premises eventuate in what is patently a metaphysics, a world-view of the free and unceasing play of différance which (since we can only glimpse this world by striking free of language, which inescapably implicates the entire metaphysics of presence that this view replaces) we are not able even to name. Derrida's vision is thus, as he puts it, of an “as yet unnamable something which cannot announce itself except … under the species of a non-species, under the formless form, mute, infant, and terrifying, of monstrosity.” 15

Hillis Miller sets up an apt distinction between two classes of current structuralist critics, the “canny critics” and the “uncanny critics.” The canny critics cling still to the possibility of “a structuralist-inspired criticism as a rational and rationalizable activity, with agreed-upon rules of procedure, given facts, and measurable results.” The uncanny critics have renounced such a nostalgia for impossible certainties. 16 And as himself an uncanny critic, Miller's persistent enterprise is to get us to share, in each of the diverse works that he criticizes, its self-deconstructive revelation that in default of any possible origin, ground, presence, or end, it is an interminable free-play of indeterminable meanings.

Like Derrida, Miller sets up as his given the written text, “innocent black marks on a page” 17 which are endowed with traces, or vestiges of meaning; he then employs a variety of strategies that maximize the number and diversity of the possible meanings while minimizing any factors that might limit their free-play. It is worthwhile to note briefly two of those strategies.

For one thing Miller applies the terms “interpretation” and “meaning” in an extremely capacious way, so as to conflate linguistic utterance or writing with any metaphysical representation of theory or of “fact” about the physical world. These diverse realms are treated equivalently as “texts” which are “read” or “interpreted.” He thus leaves no room for taking into account that language, unlike the physical world, is a cultural institution that developed expressly in order to mean something and to convey what is meant to members of a community who have learned how to use and interpret language. And within the realm of explicitly verbal texts, Miller allows for no distinction with regard to the kinds of norms that may obtain or may not obtain for the “interpretation” of the entire corpus of an individual author's writings, or of a single work in its totality, or of a particular passage, sentence, or word within that work. As a critical pluralist, I would agree that there are a diversity of sound (though not equally adequate) interpretations of the play King Lear, yet I claim to know precisely what Lear meant when he said, “Pray you undo this button.”

A second strategy is related to Derrida's treatment of the “trace.” Like Derrida, Miller excludes by his elected premises any control or limitation of signification by reference to the uses of a word or phrase that are current at the time an author writes, or to an author's intention, or to the verbal or generic context in which a word occurs. Any word within a given text—or at least any “key word,” as he calls it, that he picks out for special scrutiny—can thus be claimed to signify any and all of the diverse things it has signified in the varied forms that the signifier has assumed through its recorded history; and not only in a particular language, such as English or French, but back through its etymology in Latin and Greek all the way to its postulated Indo-European root. Whenever and by whomever and in whatever context a printed word is used, therefore, the limits of what it can be said to mean in that use are set only by what the interpreter can find in historical and etymological dictionaries, supplemented by any further information that the interpreter's own erudition can provide. Hence Miller's persistent recourse to etymology—and even to the significance of the shapes of the printed letters in the altering form of a word—in expounding the texts to which he turns his critical attention. 18

Endowed thus with the sedimented meanings accumulated over its total history, but stripped of any norms for selecting some of these and rejecting others, a key word—like the larger passage or total text of which the word is an element—becomes (in the phrase Miller cites from Mallarmé) a suspens vibratoire, 19 a vibratory suspension of equally likely meanings, and these are bound to include “incompatible” or “irreconcilable” or “contradictory” meanings. The conclusion from these views Miller formulates in a variety of ways: a key word, or a passage, or a text, since it is a ceaseless play of anomalous meanings, is “indeterminable,” “undecipherable,” “unreadable,” “undecidable.” 20 Or more bluntly: “All reading is misreading.” “Any reading can be shown to be a misreading on evidence drawn from the text itself.” But in misreading a text, the interpreter is merely repeating what the text itself has done before him, for “any literary text, with more or less explicitness or clarity, already reads or misreads itself.” 21 To say that this concept of interpretation cuts the ground out from under the kind of history I undertook to write is to take a very parochial view of what is involved; for what it comes to is that no text, in part or whole, can mean anything in particular, and that we can never say just what anyone means by anything he writes.

But if all interpretation is misinterpretation, and if all criticism (like all history) of texts can engage only with a critic's own misconstruction, why bother to carry on the activities of interpretation and criticism? Hillis Miller poses this question more than once. He presents his answers in terms of his favorite analogues for the interpretive activity, which he explores with an unflagging resourcefulness. These analogues figure the text we read as a Cretan labyrinth, and also as the texture of a spider's web; the two figures, he points out, have been fused in earlier conflations in the myth of Ariadne's thread, by which Theseus retraces the windings of the labyrinth, and of Arachne's thread, with which she spins her web. 22 Here is one of Miller's answers to the question, why pursue the critical enterprise?

Pater's writings, like those of other major authors in the Occidental tradition, are at once open to interpretation and ultimately indecipherable, unreadable. His texts lead the critic deeper and deeper into a labyrinth until he confronts a final aporia. This does not mean, however, that the reader must give up from the beginning the attempt to understand Pater. Only by going all the way into the labyrinth, following the thread of a given clue, can the critic reach the blind alley, vacant of any Minotaur, that impasse which is the end point of interpretation. 23

Now, I make bold to claim that I understand Miller's passage, and that what it says, in part, is that the deconstructive critic's act of interpretation has a beginning and an end; that it begins as an intentional, goal-oriented quest; and that this quest is to end in an impasse.

The reaching of the interpretive aporia or impasse precipitates what Miller calls “the uncanny moment”—the moment in which the critic, thinking to deconstruct the text, finds that he has simply participated in the ceaseless play of the text as a self-deconstructive artefact. Here is another of Miller's statements, in which he describes both his own and Derrida's procedure:

Deconstruction as a mode of interpretation works by a careful and circumspect entering of each textual labyrinth. … The deconstructive critic seeks to find, by this process of retracing, the element in the system studied which is alogical, the thread in the text in question which will unravel it all, or the loose stone which will pull down the whole building. The deconstruction, rather, annihilates the ground on which the building stands by showing that the text has already annihilated that ground, knowingly or unknowingly. Deconstruction is not a dismantling of the structure of a text but a demonstration that it has already dismantled itself. 24

The uncanny moment in interpretation, as Miller phrases it elsewhere, is a sudden “ mise en abyme ” in which the bottom drops away and, in the endless regress of the self-baffling free-play of meanings in the very signs which both reveal an abyss and, by naming it, cover it over, we catch a glimpse of the abyss itself in a “vertigo of the underlying nothingness.” 25

The “deconstructive critic,” Miller has said, “ seeks to find” the alogical element in a text, the thread which, when pulled, will unravel the whole texture. Given the game Miller has set up, with its graphocentric premises and freedom of interpretive maneuver, the infallible rule of the deconstructive quest is, “Seek and ye shall find.” The deconstructive method works, because it can't help working; it is a can't-fail enterprise; there is no complex passage of verse or prose which could possibly serve as a counter-instance to test its validity or limits. And the uncanny critic, whatever the variousness and distinctiveness of the texts to which he applies his strategies, is bound to find that they all reduce to one thing and one thing only. In Miller's own words: each deconstructive reading, “performed on any literary, philosophical, or critical text … reaches, in the particular way the given text allows it, the ‘same’ moment of an aporia. … The reading comes back again and again, with different texts, to the ‘same’ impasse.” 26

It is of no avail to point out that such criticism has nothing whatever to do with our common experience of the uniqueness, the rich variety, and the passionate human concerns in works of literature, philosophy, or criticism—these are matters which are among the linguistic illusions that the criticism dismantles. There are, I want to emphasize, rich rewards in reading Miller, as in reading Derrida, which include a delight in his resourceful play of mind and language and the many and striking insights yielded by his wide reading and by his sharp eye for unsuspected congruities and differences in our heritage of literary and philosophical writings. But these rewards are yielded by the way, and that way is always to the ultimate experience of vertigo, the uncanny frisson at teetering with him on the brink of the abyss; and even the shock of this discovery is soon dulled by its expected and invariable recurrence.

I shall cite a final passage to exemplify the deft and inventive play of Miller's rhetoric, punning, and figuration, which give his formulations of the mise en abyme a charm that is hard to resist. In it he imposes his fused analogues of labyrinth and web and abyss on the black-on-blanks which constitute the elemental given of the deconstructive premises:

Far from providing a benign escape from the maze, Ariadne's thread makes the labyrinth, is the labyrinth. The interpretation or solving of the puzzles of the textual web only adds more filaments to the web. One can never escape from the labyrinth because the activity of escaping makes more labyrinth, the thread of a linear narrative or story. Criticism is the production of more thread to embroider the texture or textile already there. This thread is like a filament of ink which flows from the pen of the writer, keeping him in the web but suspending him also over the chasm, the blank page that thin line hides. 27

To interpret: Hillis Miller, suspended by the labyrinthine lines of a textual web over the abyss that those black lines demarcate on the blank page, busies himself to unravel the web that keeps him from plunging into the blank-abyss, but finds he can do so only by an act of writing which spins a further web of lines, equally vulnerable to deconstruction, but only by another movement of the pen that will trace still another inky net over the ever-receding abyss. As Miller remarks, I suppose ruefully, at the end of the passage I quoted, “In one version of Ariadne's story she is said to have hanged herself with her thread in despair after being abandoned by Theseus.”

What is one to say in response to this abysmal vision of the textual world of literature, philosophy, and all the other achievements of mankind in the medium of language? There is, I think, only one adequate response, and that is the one that William Blake made to the Angel in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. After they had groped their way down a “winding cavern,” the Angel revealed to Blake a ghastly vision of hell as an “infinite Abyss”; in it was “the sun, black but shining,” around which were “fiery tracks on which revolv'd vast spiders.” But no sooner, says Blake, had “my friend the Angel” departed, “then this appearance was no more, but I found myself sitting on a pleasant bank beside a river by moon light, hearing a harper who sung to a harp.” The Angel, “surprised asked me how I escaped? I answered: ‘All that we saw was owing to your metaphysics.’”

As a deconstructive Angel, Hillis Miller, I am happy to say, is not serious about deconstruction, in Hegel's sense of “serious”; that is, he does not entirely and consistently commit himself to the consequences of his premises. He is in fact, fortunately for us, a double agent who plays the game of language by two very different sets of rules. One of the games he plays is that of a deconstructive critic of literary texts. The other is the game he will play in a minute or two when he steps out of his graphocentric premises onto this platform and begins to talk to us.

I shall hazard a prediction as to what Miller will do then. He will have determinate things to say and will masterfully exploit the resources of language to express these things clearly and forcibly, addressing himself to us in the confidence that we, to the degree that we have mastered the constitutive norms of this kind of discourse, will approximate what he means. He will show no inordinate theoretical difficulties about beginning his discourse or conducting it through its middle to an end. What he says will manifest, by immediate inference, a thinking subject or ego and a distinctive and continuant ethos, so that those of you who, like myself, know and admire his recent writings will be surprised and delighted by particularities of what he says, but will correctly anticipate both its general tenor and its highly distinctive style and manner of proceeding. What he says, furthermore, will manifest a feeling as well as thinking subject; and unless it possesses a superhuman forbearance, this subject will express some natural irritation that I, an old friend, should so obtusely have misinterpreted what he has said in print about his critical intentions.

Before coming here, Miller worked his thoughts (which involved inner speech) into the form of writing. On this platform, he will proceed to convert this writing to speech; and it is safe to say—since our chairman is himself a double agent, editor of a critical journal as well as organizer of this symposium—that soon his speech will be reconverted to writing and presented to the public. This substitution of écriture for parole will certainly make a difference, but not an absolute difference; what Miller says here, that is, will not jump an ontological gap to the printed page, shedding on the way all the features that made it intelligible as discourse. For each of his readers will be able to reconvert the black-on-blanks back into speech, which he will hear in his mind's ear; he will perceive the words not simply as marks nor as sounds, but as already invested with meaning; also, by immediate inference, he will be aware in his reading of an intelligent subject, very similar to the one we will infer while listening to him here, who organizes the well-formed and significant sentences and marshals the argument conveyed by the text.

There is no linguistic or any other law we can appeal to that will prevent a deconstructive critic from bringing his graphocentric procedures to bear on the printed version of Hillis Miller's discourse—or of mine, or of Wayne Booth's—and if he does, he will infallibly be able to translate the text into a vertiginous mise en abyme. But those of us who stubbornly refuse to substitute the rules of the deconstructive enterprise for our ordinary skill and tact at language will find that we are able to understand this text very well. In many ways, in fact, we will understand it better than while hearing it in the mode of oral discourse, for the institution of print will render the fleeting words of his speech by a durable graphic correlate which will enable us to take our own and not the speaker's time in attending to it, as well as to re-read it, to collocate, and to ponder until we are satisfied that we have approximated the author's meaning.

After Hillis Miller and I have pondered in this way over the text of the other's discourse, we will probably, as experience in such matters indicates, continue essentially to disagree. By this I mean that neither of us is apt to find the other's reasons so compelling as to get him to change his own interpretive premises and aims. But in the process, each will have come to see more clearly what the other's reasons are for doing what he does, and no doubt come to discover that some of these reasons are indeed good reasons in that, however short of being compelling, they have a bearing on the issue in question. In brief, insofar as we set ourselves, in the old-fashioned way, to make out what the other means by what he says, I am confident that we shall come to a better mutual understanding. After all, without that confidence that we can use language to say what we mean and can interpret language so as to determine what was meant, there is no rationale for the dialogue in which we are now engaged.

“Rationality and Imagination in Cultural History: A Reply to Wayne Booth,” Critical Inquiry 2 (Spring 1976): 456-60.

“Tradition and Difference,” Diacritics 2 (Winter 1972): 6.

Ibid., pp. 10-11.

Ibid., pp. 8, 12.

Richard Rorty, ed., The Linguistic Turn (Chicago and London, 1967).

Jacques Derrida, “La Double séance,” in La Dissémination (Paris, 1972), p. 203.

Derrida, “La Mythologie blanche: la métaphore dans le texte philosophique,” in Marges de la philosophie (Paris, 1972), p. 304. Translations throughout are my own.

Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, trans. Wade Baskin (New York, 1959), pp. 117-21.

Derrida, “La Différance,” in Marges de la philosophie, pp. 12-14, 25.

Ibid., pp. 23-24.

In the traditional or “classical” theory of signs, as Derrida describes the view that he dismantles, the sign is taken to be “a deferred presence … the circulation of signs defers the moment in which we will be able to encounter the thing itself, to get hold of it, consume or expend it, touch it, see it, have a present intuition of it” (ibid., p. 9). See also “Hors livre” in La Dissémination, pp. 10-11.

Derrida, “La Structure, le signe et le jeu dans le discours des sciences humaines,” in L'Écriture et la différence (Paris, 1967), p. 411.

Ibid., p. 427. Derrida adds that this “interpretation of interpretation,” which “affirms free-play … tries to pass beyond man and humanism. …” On the coming “monstrosity,” see also De la grammatologie (Paris, 1967), p. 14.

Derrida, “La Structure, le signe,” p. 428. “We possess no language … which is alien to this history; we cannot express a single destructive proposition which will not already have slipped into the form, the logic, and the implicit postulates of that very thing that it seeks to oppose.” “Each limited borrowing drags along with it all of metaphysics” (pp. 412-13).

J. Hillis Miller, “Stevens' Rock and Criticism as Cure, II,” The Georgia Review 30 (Summer 1976): 335-36.

Miller, “Walter Pater: A Partial Portrait,” Daedalus 105 (winter 1976):107.

See, for example, his unfolding of the meanings of “cure” and “absurd” in “Stevens' Rock and Criticism as Cure,” I, The Georgia Review 30 (Spring 1976): 6-11. For his analysis of significance in the altering shapes, through history, of the printed form of a word see his exposition of abyme, ibid., p. 11; also his exposition of the letter x in “Ariadne's Thread: Repetition and the Narrative Line,” Critical Inquiry 3 (Autumn 1976): 75-76.

“Tradition and Difference,” p. 12.

See, e.g., “Stevens' Rock,” I, pp. 9-11; “Walter Pater,” p. 111.

“Walter Pater,” p. 98; “Stevens' Rock, II,” p. 333.

“Ariadne's Thread,” p. 66.

“Walter Pater,” p. 112.

“Stevens' Rock, II,” p. 341. See also “Walter Pater,” p. 101, and “Ariadne's Thread,” p. 74.

“Stevens' Rock,” I, pp. 11-12. The unnamable abyss which Miller glimpses has its parallel in the unnamable and terrifying monstrosity which Derrida glimpses; see above, p. 432.

“Deconstructing the Deconstructors,” Diacritics 5 (Summer 1975): 30.

“Stevens' Rock, II,” p. 337.

Cite this page as follows:

"Deconstruction - M. H. Abrams (essay date spring 1977)." Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism, edited by Janet Witalec Project Editor, Vol. 138. Gale Cengage, 2003, 25 June 2024 <https://www.enotes.com/topics/deconstruction/critical-essays/criticism-overviews-and-general-studies#critical-essays-criticism-overviews-and-general-studies-m-h-abrams-essay-date-spring-1977>

G. Douglas Atkins (essay date fall 1980)

SOURCE: Atkins, G. Douglas. “J. Hillis Miller, Deconstruction, and the Recovery of Transcendence.” Notre Dame English Journal 13, no. 1 (fall 1980): 51-63.

[ In the following essay, Atkins explores the charge of lack of spiritual concern leveled against deconstructionist critics, pointing out that their writings reinterpret rather than negate questions of the spiritual. ]

Following publication of Charles Dickens: The World of His Novels (1958), The Disappearance of God (1963), and Poets of Reality (1965), J. Hillis Miller became known as one of the most knowledgeable and articulate spokesmen for religion in modern literature. These works, and others, not only testify powerfully to Miller's interest as a literary critic in religious questions, but they also reveal his own deep religious convictions. A member of what was originally The Society for Religion in Higher Education, Miller has frequently contributed to conferences dealing with the growing interest in literature and religion, and his work has been reprinted in collections on religion in modern literature. 1 As he put it in a subtle and judicious essay “Literature and Religion,” written for the Modern Language Association volume on Relations of Literary Study, “the religious commitment of the critic, or lack of it, cannot be considered irrelevant to his work.” 2

Through the mid-1960s Miller wrote under the influence of the important Swiss critic Georges Poulet, a practitioner of the “criticism of consciousness.” This critical method, which explores the existential situation of authors treated and which seeks to identify the critic's consciousness with the author's, is particularly interested in metaphysical and ontological questions and seemed quite congenial to, if not constitutive of, Miller's own religious inclinations. Beginning in the late 1960s, however, as attested by The Form of Victorian Fiction (1968) and the revision of an essay entitled “Georges Poulet's ‘Criticism of Identification’,” Miller came under the influence of the important contemporary French philosopher Jacques Derrida, known as the father of deconstruction. Miller's last book, Thomas Hardy: Distance and Desire (1970), and approximately two dozen subsequent essays on a variety of topics reflect his adoption of deconstructive critical procedures. Indeed, owing in large part to Miller's reputation and influence, deconstructive criticism is the rage in America, and is likely to remain so for some time.

Indebted to Saussure, Freud, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, deconstruction proceeds from a recognition that meaning is a matter not of identity but of difference; as Saussure argued, meaning arises from the differential relations among terms. If this is so, Derrida points out, each term must always already carry a “trace” of the other, for “any other alternative, any attempt to save the value of full presence would lead to the postulation of a point of origin not different from itself (an indifferent origin), thus destroying the essentially differential quality of language.” 3 Armed with the “trace” and differance, as he spells it (to indicate that the French verb différer means both “to differ” and “to defer”), Derrida deconstructs the idea of simple origin and presence. On this view, the origin is dialogical, being divided from itself, within itself, and the presence of absence (the “trace”) means the absence of presence, there being no such thing as the thing-in-itself. Deconstructed are such concepts as unity, identity, truth, the center, the logos —all those privileged terms, in fact, of what Derrida calls logocentric metaphysics. 4 The Derridean position seems diametrically opposed to the “criticism of identification” Miller formerly embraced.

Does Miller's switch from Poulet to Derrida and to the “tradition of difference” entail a marked change in religious outlook? A careful study of Miller's criticism, both before and after this conversion, should allow us to penetrate more deeply than has been done before into the far-reaching implications of deconstruction, as well as to shed light on the critical odyssey of Miller himself.

On the surface at least, deconstruction appears a dangerous threat to many of our most cherished traditions and institutions. Not surprisingly, many “outraged” voices have risen against it and its practitioners, including many of the best known and most respected scholars and critics in this country. Their numbers include M. H. Abrams, Wayne Booth, Gerald Graff, and E. D. Hirsch. These and other commentators point to the threat deconstruction poses to the humanist tradition, many of them alleging that nihilism is inherent in deconstruction. One of the more recent attacks on deconstruction appears in terms directly relevant to our concerns here, and since it picks up previous charges I shall concentrate on it as a specially relevant synecdoche.

Writing in The Georgia Review, Harold Fromm discusses the supposed absurdity and nihilism of this new movement: “When Derrida speaks in Of Grammatology of the ‘End of the Book and the Beginning of Writing’ he has described the present situation. But when the integrative whole symbolized by the book turns into the indeterminate and open-ended ‘text’ of ‘writing,’ we are in a world without value.” Fromm goes on, “In methodology like this, the Logos has been discredited while in its place is offered a plenitude of psychological detritus in which all data, like sparrows and hairs, must not only be noticed but must be cherished as well. And since they are not being cherished by an absent God, they must be noticed and cherished by a seemingly present Man. Formerly, value was derived from presentness in the consciousness of God. Can equally plausible value be derived from mere presentness in the consciousness of Man?” 5 Though Fromm's concern is admirable and his worry perhaps understandable, his objection to deconstruction, at least as embraced and practiced by Miller, is to those same features of modernism this movement precisely appears to confront. The charges Fromm brings against deconstruction are, I shall attempt to show, based on a shallow understanding of the principles involved. As a matter of fact, Fromm's attack evidently stems from a desire to salvage transcendence; he writes: “at present, in a period of ‘absence,’ with God beyond the horizon, the very notion of transcendence becomes suspect, if not unintelligible. … Without the assurance of ‘presence,’ it can no longer be believed that anything whatever possesses unlimited value, nor do literary texts constitute an exception.” 6 Actually, Miller's critical journey, I shall argue, is an attempt to recover transcendence, lost by modernism.

Miller's odyssey begins in his “Geneva” phase, which has been studied by Sarah Lawall, Vernon Ruland, and Vincent Leitch. 7 Certainly a most important aspect of Miller's work at this time is the recent history of Western consciousness, which he traces in The Disappearance of God and Poets of Reality. Focusing on De Quincey, Browning, Emily Brontë, Arnold, and Hopkins, the earlier book describes the absence of God in the nineteenth century, culminating with the climax of Hopkins' own spiritual journey, wherein he accepts the Catholic doctrine of the Real Presence and so, according to Miller, rejects “three hundred and fifty years which seem to be taking man inexorably toward the nihilism of Nietzsche's ‘Gott ist tot’.” 8 But if Miller sees Hopkins and other nineteenth-century writers “stretched on the rack of a fading transcendentalism,” his own belief at the time “in a progressing history of metaphysical insight” 9 leads him towards a presence which fills the absence experienced by the Victorians. He thus ends The Disappearance of God :

Only in Browning, of the writers studied here, are there hints and anticipations of that recovery of immanence which was to be the inner drama of twentieth-century literature. Browning alone seems to have glimpsed the fact that the sad alternatives of nihilism and escape beyond the world could be evaded if man would only reject twenty-five hundred years of belief in the dualism of heaven and earth. If man could do this he might come to see that being and value lie in this world, in what is immediate, tangible, present to man, in earth, sun, sea, in the stars in their courses, and in what Yeats was to call “the foul-rag-and-bone shop of the heart.” But Browning, like De Quincey, Arnold, Hopkins, and Emily Brontë, was stretched on the rack of a fading transcendentalism, and could reach a precious unity only by the most extravagant stratagems of the spirit. 10

In Poets of Reality Miller goes beyond this point, tracing, in Conrad, Yeats, Eliot, Thomas, Stevens, and Williams, a “journey beyond nihilism toward a poetry of reality,” a journey that the critic experiences from within and indeed parallels in his own being. The starting point, for the twentieth century, is the recognition that God is dead, murdered by humanistic egotism: “when God and the creation become objects of consciousness, man becomes a nihilist. Nihilism is the nothingness of consciousness when consciousness becomes the foundation of everything. Man the murderer of God and drinker of the sea of creation wanders through the infinite nothingness of his own ego. Nothing now has any worth except the arbitrary value he sets on things as he assimilates them into his consciousness. … In the emptiness left after the death of God, man becomes the sovereign valuer, the measure of all things.” 11

Escape from subjectivism, according to Miller, involves “following the path of nihilism to the end, [whereby] man confronts once again a spiritual power external to himself.” Specifically, the mind must “efface itself before reality … abandoning the will to power over things.” 12 Emerging here is a new ontology, the idea of God resembling that discussed in the 1960s by such theologians as Paul Tillich, Thomas J. J. Altizer, and Leslie Dewart: “a God who is no longer transcendent or supreme, but immanent and omnipresent throughout reality.” 13 As Miller stresses “a new dimension of intimacy” 14 wherein mind and world unite, obliterating the age-old dualism of subject and object, the idea of God reappears under a new name, described now as the living presence of reality. Thus, writes Miller, “God is not the stillness and distance of transcendence, off somewhere beyond or above his creation. He is everywhere, in all his plenitude. Eternity is here and now, in each man's heart, in each grain of sand and field mouse squeaking in the corn.” 15 Just as the traditional image of God as a being out there somewhere was being excoriated by Bishop Robinson in Honest to God and the “death of God” theologians, Miller was attacking idealist thinking. His position shines through when he asserts that “Eliot can only become a Christian when he ceases to be an idealist.” 16

If Miller was committed to the idea of immanence even before he discussed its discovery in the six writers treated in Poets of Reality, it was shortly after publication of that book that he realized the inadequacy of this apparent solution. The point is especially clear when Miller's treatment of William Carlos Williams in that book is compared with that printed in 1970 in a special issue of Daedalus. In the book he had written, “In the work of Yeats, Thomas, and Stevens can be witnessed the difficult struggle to go beyond the old traditions. Williams goes farthest. He begins within the space of immanence and his work is a magnificent uncovering of its riches.” 17 The 1970 essay takes up similar themes. In terms consonant with Poets of Reality, Miller writes that “ Spring and All is based on an affirmation of the supreme value of presence and of the present, and on a repudiation of all that is derived, repetitive, and copied. … Authentic life exists only in the present moment of immediate experience.” Miller argues, in fact, that Williams rejects whatever stands between man and “the living moment”: symbolism, subjectivism, supernaturalism. This project Miller describes as a version of the “‘deconstruction of metaphysics’.” 18 The result of Miller's return to Williams becomes distinctly Derridean as he shows how Williams' project fails. The hope had been for authentic creation, for the realization of a world pristine in its primal novelty. Realized, however, is a repetition of the way it has always been, a dead imitation. As in everything else, “like the tradition lying behind it, [Williams'] theory of art is unable to free itself from the theories it rejects.” 19

Williams' “break” with tradition, his deconstruction of metaphysics, his attempt to grasp immediate presence—these now point Miller in the direction charted by Derrida. Realizing that such deconstruction as Williams thought he was accomplishing can never be complete, that the belief one has broken out only reflects one's imprisonment, Miller writes, “like Aristotle's mimesis, Williams' imagination is both part of and more than nature, both immediate and mediatorial—imitation, revelation, and creation at once. Like the long tradition he echoes, Williams remains caught in the inextricable web of connection among these concepts.” 20 Revealed in Williams' predicament is a point crucial to Derridean thinking: the falsity of binary oppositions and all dualisms, inscribed in the Western tradition, because of the “trace.” According to Derrida, “Neither/nor is at once at once or rather or rather. ” 21 Rather than the triumph of one term of an opposition over the other, as in the frequent dualisms nature/culture, progress/stasis, inside/outside, soul/body, truth/falsehood, literature/criticism, the “trace” keeps differance in play: the terms are inextricably linked, the one requiring the other, like host and parasite. 22

Thus, contrary to the belief in progress and breakthrough expressed in Poets of Reality, Miller now writes that there is at once “both progress and stasis.” 23 This is, in fact, the central issue in the Daedalus essay, designed to show that Williams did not, indeed could not wholly succeed in the deconstruction applauded in the book. In the place of progress, breakthrough, and claimed undoing of traditions appears the humbling recognition that such undoing is also a preserving. Explaining the peculiar operation of differance with regard to his own work in the essay, Miller declares, “My interpretation, in its turn, both destroys the text it interprets and, I hope, revivifies it. Such a ‘deconstruction’ puts in question the received ideas of our tradition. At the same time my reading keeps the text alive by reliving it. It works back through its texture, repeats it once more in a different form, in a version of that transit through the texts of our heritage called for by Jacques Derrida.” There is absolutely no “question of a breakthrough beyond metaphysics or of a ‘reversal of Platonism.’ This reversal has been performed over and over through the centuries, from the Stoics to Nietzsche and the radical philosophers of our own day, and yet Platonism still reigns. … [T]here is no progress in human history, no unfolding or gradual perfection of the spirit. There are only endlessly varied ways to experience the human situation.” 24

Interestingly paralleling the essay on Williams and completed around the same time is Miller's revision of a 1963 essay on his old mentor, Poulet. In 1971 Miller reprints in shortened and slightly revised form that earlier laudatory piece, adding several pages of critical comment on Poulet to it and so dramatizing the Derridean position that one both undoes and preserves, at once. Miller now understands that Poulet is driven by the same desire as Williams: “the quality of presence. ” 25 But again, despite his profound differences with Poulet, Miller knows better than to set up himself or Derrida as the opposite of Poulet. Statements like the following are crucial to an understanding of Miller's odyssey from “Geneva criticism” to deconstruction:

It would seem that the tradition represented by Derrida and that represented by Poulet must be set against one another as an irreconcilable either/or. A critic must choose either the tradition of presence or the tradition of “difference,” for their assumptions about language, about literature, about history, and about the mind cannot be made compatible. The more deeply and carefully one reads Poulet's criticism, however, the more clearly it emerges that it challenges its own fundamental assumptions. … 26

Difference within thus mitigates difference between. Moreover, though for Derrida not sameness but difference is primary, indeed originary, he shares with Poulet the important “reliving of the fundamental texts of our tradition,” 27 preserving as he undoes.

Just as no simple negative relation exists between Derrida and Poulet, so none exists between Miller's deconstructive and his earlier criticism. Miller himself affirms the point in a new preface written for the 1975 reprinting of The Disappearance of God. He writes that “I am no longer quite the same person I was when I wrote it, and I would not write it in quite the same way today. [Still] I find myself … more or less in agreement with the interpretations I proposed of my five authors.” 28 The conclusion, in any case, is the same as that reached in the Williams essay and the 1971 piece on Poulet: “it appears that the relation between my present work and that of over a decade ago is more than simply negative. It may be in the nature of literature that investigations of it initiated according to a given hypothesis will lead, if carried far enough, to insights which call that hypothesis into question.” 29

Now, because of the “trace,” the presence and immanence Miller had earlier yearned for, and indeed posited, are apparently inseparable from the absence and transcendence he thought he was going beyond. Transcendence reappears, however, not merely as the inescapable “opposite” of immanence; it is also manifest in deconstruction's basic principle of undoing/preserving. Precisely in this fashion deconstruction suggests, despite the charges of Fromm and others, one route to the recovery of transcendence that Western man has long craved. For if undoing produces the realization that what we thought of as ground, as reality, is no ground, then we have with that awareness transcended the “real,” if only momentarily. With difference, of course, a gap forever remains, completion and identity being impossible this side of death.

Interestingly, as early as his first book, in 1958, Miller glimpsed the sense of transcendence I am laboring to describe. There he wrote, referring to Great Expectations, that Pip “must accept the fact that he can in no way transcend the gap between ‘the small bundle of shivers growing afraid of it all and beginning to cry’ and the wind, sun, sky, and marshland, the alien universe—in no way, that is, but by willingly accepting this situation.” 30 In the same book, Miller even shows awareness of the value in tracing nihilism through to the end, of the validity of Chesterton's remark that you know nothing until you know nothing, writing that “Dickens' last heroes and heroines come back to life after a purifying descent into the dark waters of death, but they come back to assume just that situation which was given one in society. The difference is that their contact with the negative transcendence has liberated them to a new attitude toward their situation. …” 31 Miller puts essentially the same point in figurative terms, smacking of the Biblical, in discussing Our Mutual Friend : “When one has recognized that gold is dust, one can go on to make gold of dust. Out of dust can come gold, out of death, life. Gold forced upon us, or accepted as an absolute value in itself, is dust, but so long as we are free to value the world we can make gold.” 32

The significance of these crucial points concerning transcendence Miller did not at that time fully grasp; to take one of his favorite metaphors, they were threads in the critical fabric he wove, but not ones he chose to follow through to their end. By the late 1960s Miller was more aware that the way of seeing is all, and as a Derridean emphasized in The Form of Victorian Fiction what he had previously only glimpsed:

Each man must return from an encounter with [“the elemental realities of death, physical nature, and human feeling”] to reengage himself in society. This new involvement will be made from the perspective of a prior disengagement which sees society as it is. This means reentering society by improvising one's role in it as a game. Society cannot be anything but a system of conventional rules, exchanges, and substitutions which are like metaphors. As long as a man takes the metaphor as reality he is deluded. When he sees through the metaphor and takes responsibility for living according to it, he is still caught in a play, but now he sees the game as a game. 33

Undoing/preserving, this vision is transcendent. It is thus liberating, allowing one to build and to create but always with the awareness that that created is a human fabrication.

Clarification of, as well as support for, my point that deconstruction hopes to recover transcendence appears if we broaden our treatment to take in others influenced by Derrida. In the work of one of these, John Dominic Crossan, a Biblical scholar and literary critic, the metaphor of play that Miller uses in the quotation above functions to herald transcendence. Thus Crossan writes in The Dark Interval: Towards a Theology of Story that “the excitement of transcendental experience is found only at the edge of language and the limit of story and … the only way to find that excitement is to test those edges and those limits.” 34 Parables do this supremely well, revealing the possibility of transcendence. They

give God room. The parables of Jesus are not historical allegories telling us how God acts with mankind; neither are they moral example-stories telling us how to act before God and towards one another. They are stories which shatter the deep structure of our accepted world and thereby render clear and evident to us the relativity of story itself. They remove our defences and make us vulnerable to God. It is only in such experiences that God can touch us, and only in such moments does the kingdom of God arrive. My own term for this relationship is transcendence. 35

The point here is the subversion of final words about “reality,” thus the recognition of the fictionality of all things, and the freedom, the ability to let go, that follows therefrom.

Like Derrida and Miller, Crossan agrees with Roland Barthes that “literature is unreality itself; … far from being an analogical copy of reality, literature is on the contrary the very consciousness of the unreality of language. ” 36 He pursues this insight, developing the implications of The Dark Interval, in a book on comic eschatology in Jesus and Borges. Focusing again on game and story, Crossan aims to dismantle eschatology and recover transcendence through an intense focus on biblioclasm. That is, he shows how Jesus extends Mosaic iconoclasm into language itself; Jesus' language thus “is an attack on form within all the major traditions of Israel's inheritance. Such content is intrinsically eschatological, forcing world and language to its knees before the aniconic God of Israel.” 37 More specifically, insisting that it is “only by a full and glad acceptance of our utter finitude [that we can] experience authentic transcendence,” Crossan seems to echo Miller. Jesus, he says, uses “paradoxical aphorism or antiproverb to point us beyond proverb and beyond wisdom by reminding us that making it all cohere is simply one of our more intriguing human endeavors and that God is often invoked to buttress the invented coherence. There is nothing wrong,” adds Crossan, “with making a whole of one's existence as long as one does it in conscious knowledge that world is our supreme play and that we encounter the Holy in its eschatology.” 38 As with Miller, then, transcendence reappears, this time as a leap into the darkness, as a self-conscious way of seeing.

The work of another recent critic makes even clearer, I think, the possible congruence of deconstruction and Biblical thought. In a marvelously rich and suggestive book which brings into subtle and illuminating synthesis results from Biblical archaeology, contemporary anthropology, history, and literary criticism, Herbert N. Schneidau argues Derrida's indebtedness to the Yahwist vision. According to Schneidau, the Bible, literature, and Derridean thought share a characteristic ambivalence, what I have been calling the undoing/preserving central to deconstruction. Thus, just as the Hebrews both criticize and nourish culture in their “sacred discontent,” so literature, in Pound's phrase, goes on trying to “make it new” even as it knows the impossibility, bequeathing to the West a strongly Hebraic sense despite Hellenistic influence. 39 The key, as with Miller and Crossan, seems to lie in recognizing the fictionality of all things, by which transcendence is achieved. The following passage from the close of Schneidau's chapter “In Praise of Alienation” establishes the point as it gathers up several themes we have been discussing:

We are condemned to freedom, not because God is dead but because he is very much alive, as an agent of disillusionment in a basic sense. In this condition, it is not remarkable that we are nihilistic: what is remarkable is that we can become aware of it and can acknowledge intermittently the “nothingness of consciousness when consciousness becomes the foundation of everything.” So with all self-deceptions: their extent is not as remarkable as our awareness of them. We have reached out for the apple of self-knowledge, and in doing so have alienated God, nature, and each other; but by pressing our self-awareness to its extreme, where we become alienated from ourselves, we find that this is not the end of the story. The Fall is only the beginning of the Bible. To be thus “decentered” … is the precondition of insight: thus it is a felix culpa, good news for modern man of a somewhat unlikely kind. 40

Miller aligns himself directly with the positions articulated by Schneidau and Crossan, writing in “Tradition and Difference” that “there would appear to be no escape from the prison of language except by way of a radical theory of fictions and of the interpretation of fictions.” 41

With the condition carefully traced by Miller whereby the human consciousness “becomes the foundation of everything,” man is in obvious need of such decentering. As we have seen, deconstruction, like the Bible, becomes a valuable agent of the demythologization of some of our most cherished stabilities. We may gradually realize that our grand schemes of order are fictional constructs made by ourselves and the vanity of human wishes. Even the self that we seek to protect and that itself seeks to be the measure of all things turns out to be a fictional construct. For deconstruction, in contrast to the autonomous consciousness of modernism, posits no single self but several selves. If the self is a linguistic construction, coming into being in and through language rather than preceding and being simply expressed by language, we may have to rethink personality in terms of personae.

Consonant with the Biblical tradition, at least as it is described by Crossan, Schneidau, and others, deconstruction offers a way to transcend the nihilism that Miller finds in twentieth-century life and literature and that Fromm for one condemns. Indeed, deconstruction appears to offer an alternative to nihilism that escapes the difficulties posed by the “solution” reached in Poets of Reality. For the immanence praised there seems caught in the metaphysical system of binary oppositions and so trapped in desire of presence. Transcendence, understood in the ways I have discussed, is rooted in the necessary awareness both of the seductive and pervasive lure of presence and of its impossibility.

The foregoing obviously places deconstruction in a much more favorable light than its often-shrill detractors would allow. My aim throughout this essay has been to clarify deconstruction by exposing some of the misconceptions held by these critics and to show what Miller and some other deconstructionists think they are doing and desire. I have tried not to judge the project I have described, nor the adequacy of the transcendence recovered, hoping to understand that project for what it tries to accomplish and holding judgment in abeyance, at least for the moment. Opponents of deconstruction often judge the project without clear understanding of its directions and aims.

Can we say, in conclusion, that what “in many respects appears to be the swan song of Biblical theology, the culmination of its bimillenial death march, may be just what is needed to bring Scripture into a second coming”? 42 If so, thanks will be due to some unlikely thinkers, notably including Derrida and Nietzsche. Just as Nietzsche writes that “the ‘glad tidings’ are precisely that there are no more opposites,” Derrida posits “the end of opposition in the bosom of the divine,” urging us to “perfect the resemblance between Dionysus and Christ.” 43 J. Hillis Miller shows strong agreement with these positions—and continuing Christian concern. 44

See, for example, The Christian Critic Series volume Gerard Manley Hopkins, eds. James F. and Carolyn D. Scott (St. Louis: B. Herder, n.d.), which reprints “The Creation of the Self in Gerard Manley Hopkins” from Journal of English Literary History, 22 (1955), pp. 293-319, and Religion and Modern Literature: Essays in Theory and Criticism, eds. G. B. Tennyson and Edward E. Ericson, Jr. (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1975), which reprints “Literature and Religion” (see note 2 below).

Miller, “Literature and Religion,” in Relations of Literary Study, ed. James E. Thorpe (New York: Modern Language Association, 1968), p. 125.

Alan Bass, “‘Literature’/Literature,” in Velocities of Change, ed. Richard Macksey (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1974), p. 345.

For accounts of Derridean thought and deconstructive procedures, see Vincent B. Leitch, “The Book of Deconstructive Criticism,” Studies in the Literary Imagination, 12 (1979), pp. 19-39, and my own essay “The Sign as a Structure of Difference: Derridean Deconstruction and Some of Its Implications,” forthcoming in a volume on semiotics edited by Richard DeGeorge.

Harold Fromm, “Sparrows and Scholars: Literary Criticism and the Sanctification of Data,” The Georgia Review, 33 (1979), pp. 262, 269-270. See also Gerald Graff, “Fear and Trembling at Yale,” The American Scholar, 46 (1977), pp. 467-478.

Fromm, “Sparrows and Scholars,” p. 275.

See Sarah Lawall, Critics of Consciousness: The Existential Structures of Literature (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1968), Vernon Ruland, Horizons of Criticism: An Assessment of Religious-Literary Options (Chicago: American Library Association, 1975), and Vincent B. Leitch, “A Primer of Recent Critical Theories,” College English, 39 (1977), pp. 138-152.

Miller, The Disappearance of God: Five Nineteenth-Century Writers (1963; rpt. Cambridge, Mass. and London: Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, 1975), p. 312.

Miller, The Disappearance of God, p. 359; Lawall, Critics of Consciousness, p. 208.

Miller, The Disappearance of God, p. 359.

Miller, Poets of Reality: Six Twentieth-Century Writers (1965; rpt. New York: Atheneum, 1974), pp. 1, 3-4.

Miller, Poets of Reality, pp. 7, 8.

Lawall, Critics of Consciousness, p. 202. I have treated the relationships between the “Yale Critics” (Bloom, de Man, Derrida, Hartman, and Miller) and these theologians in “Dehellenizing Literary Criticism,” College English, 41 (1980), pp. 769-779.

Miller, Poets of Reality, p. 312.

Miller, Poets of Reality, pp. 123-124.

Miller, Poets of Reality, p. 179.

Miller, Poets of Reality, p. 358. A similar position appears in Miller's introduction to the Twentieth-Century Views volume on Williams, which he edited (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, 1966), pp. 1-14.

Miller, “Williams' Spring and All and the Progress of Poetry,” Daedalus, 99 (1970), pp. 417, 419.

Miller, “Williams' Spring and All and the Progress of Poetry,” p. 427.

Miller, “Williams' Spring and All and the Progress of Poetry,” p. 429.

Quoted in “Translator's Preface,” Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1976), p. lxxii.

On this point, see Miller, “The Critic as Host,” Critical Inquiry, 3 (1977), pp. 439-447.

Miller, “Williams' Spring and All and the Progress of Poetry,” pp. 429, 430.

Miller, “Georges Poulet's ‘Criticism of Identification’,” in The Quest for Imagination, ed. O. B. Hardison, Jr. (Cleveland: Case Western Reserve Univ. Press, 1971), p. 210. Cf. Miller, “The Literary Criticism of Georges Poulet,” Modern Language Notes, 78 (1963), pp. 471-488.

Miller, “Georges Poulet's ‘Criticism of Identification’,” p. 216.

Miller, “Georges Poulet's ‘Criticism of Identification’,” p. 217.

Miller, The Disappearance of God, p. vii.

Miller, The Disappearance of God, pp. xii-xiii.

Miller, Charles Dickens: The World of His Novels (1958; rpt. Bloomington and London: Indiana Univ. Press, 1973), p. 274.

Miller, Charles Dickens, p. 333.

Miller, Charles Dickens, p. 327.

Miller, The Form of Victorian Fiction (Notre Dame, Ind. and London: Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 1968), pp. 109-110. Cf. Miller's point in Thomas Hardy: Distance and Desire (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, 1970), p. 154, that “the only happy love relationship for Hardy is one which is not union but the lovers' acceptance of the gap between them.”

Crossan, The Dark Interval: Towards a Theology of Story (Niles, Ill.: Argus, 1975), pp. 45-46.

Crossan, The Dark Interval, pp. 121-122.

Quoted in Crossan, Raid on the Articulate: Comic Eschatology in Jesus and Borges (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), pp. 39-40.

Crossan, Raid on the Articulate, p. 178.

Crossan, Raid on the Articulate, pp. 148, 73.

See Derrida's essays on Jabès and Levinas in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago and London: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1978).

Schneidau, Sacred Discontent: The Bible and Western Tradition (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1976), p. 49.

Miller, “Tradition and Difference,” Diacritics, 2 (1972), p. 11.

McKenna, “Biblioclasm: Joycing Jesus and Borges,” Diacritics, 8 (1978), p. 28. See also Robert Detweiler, Story, Sign, and Self: Phenomenology and Structuralism as Literary-Critical Methods (Philadelphia: Fortress Press and Missoula, Mont.: Scholars Press, 1978).

Quoted in McKenna, “Biblioclasm: Joycing Jesus and Borges,” pp. 29, 27, 22.

Work on this essay was made possible by a grant from the University of Kansas General Research Fund (#3314-20-0038) for which I am very grateful. A shorter version of this essay was presented to the College English Association in 1980. Two essays on Miller appeared after the present essay was completed: William E. Cain, “Deconstruction in America: The Recent Literary Criticism of J. Hillis Miller,” College English, 41 (1979), pp. 367-381, and Vincent B. Leitch, “The Lateral Dance: The Deconstructive Criticism of J. Hillis Miller,” Critical Inquiry, 6 (1980), pp. 593-607. I have responded to Cain in “The Both/And Nature of Deconstruction,” College English, 42 (1980).

"Deconstruction - G. Douglas Atkins (essay date fall 1980)." Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism, edited by Janet Witalec Project Editor, Vol. 138. Gale Cengage, 2003, 25 June 2024 <https://www.enotes.com/topics/deconstruction/critical-essays/criticism-overviews-and-general-studies#critical-essays-criticism-overviews-and-general-studies-g-douglas-atkins-essay-date-fall-1980>

G. Douglas Atkins (essay date 1981)

SOURCE: Atkins, G. Douglas. “The Sign as a Structure of Difference: Derridean Deconstruction and Some of Its Implications.” In Semiotic Themes, edited by Richard T. DeGeorge, pp. 133-47. Lawrence: University of Kansas Publications, 1981.

[ In the following essay, Atkins discusses the ideas of Derrida, a leading practitioner of deconstruction, defending him from accusations of nihilism and undermining the humanistic tradition in literature. ]

A major force to be reckoned with in contemporary literary criticism is Jacques Derrida. Derrida's star has risen precipitously since his participation in 1966 in a Johns Hopkins international symposium, where he took structuralism, and particularly Lévi-Strauss, to task and inaugurated deconstructive criticism in America. The following year he published La Voix et le phénomène: introduction au problème du signe dans la phénoménologie de Husserl, De la grammatologie, and L'écriture et la différence, all of which are now available in English. In 1972 Derrida published three more books: La dissémination, Positions, and Marges de la philosophie. His monumental, and probably untranslatable, Glas appeared in 1974. That these books and various essays, several already available in English, are changing the face of literary criticism is apparent in several ways: Derrida and his theories have been embraced, in varying degrees, by such influential American critics and theorists as Paul de Man, Geoffrey Hartman, and J. Hillis Miller, all of Yale, where Derrida teaches each fall; numerous essays and books have begun to appear from others influenced by Derrida, including Joseph Riddel's study of William Carlos Williams, Pietro Pucci's recent book on Hesiod, Naomi Schor's study of Zola, and Howard Felperin's Shakespearean Representation; sessions on deconstruction have become prominent at the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association; journals devoted to deconstructive criticism, such as Glyph, are now published, and deconstructive criticism regularly appears in PMLA and Diacritics ; and, not least important, frequent attacks on Derrideanism by traditionalist critics and scholars appear in publications ranging from The New York Times to The New Republic to Critical Inquiry.

Among the charges in these attacks are the claims that Derrida and his followers are needlessly obscure and that deconstructive criticism is nihilistic and deeply antithetical to the so-called humanist tradition. Many of these charges stem, in my view, from a misunderstanding of Derrida. His work is admittedly complex, his arguments often convoluted, and his style increasingly difficult. Still, I hope to shed some light on Derrideanism and to clear away some of the confusions surrounding the theory that so many regard as threatening and dangerous. Though my effort here will be limited, I hope to provide the kind of general introduction and consideration that has rarely been attempted on Derrida; most discussions in which Derrida figures prominently assume a basic knowledge of his thought or else proceed to offer an alternative without themselves evincing a grounding in that thought.

One cannot hope to understand Derrida apart from his undoing/preserving of the concept of the sign central to modern linguistics. Modern linguistics is often said to begin with Ferdinand de Saussure's Cours de linguistique générale. Probably Saussure's most important argument was that no intrinsic relationship obtains between the two parts of the sign, the signifier and the signified. In his own words, “The bond between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary … the linguistic sign is arbitrary. ” 1 This is due to the differential character of language. Because the sign, phonic as well as graphic, is a structure of difference, signs being made possible through the differences between sounds, that which is signified by the signifier is never present in and of itself. Word and thing, word and thought, sign and meaning can never become one.

Derrida plays constantly with this discovery that the sign marks a place of difference. But whereas Saussure and Saussurian semiology rest with the binary opposition signifier/signified, Derrida puts such terms sous rature, that is, “under erasure.” He writes a word, crosses it out, and prints both word and deletion, for though the word is inaccurate it is necessary and must remain legible. This idea of sous rature is an analogue of the undoing/preserving play that everywhere characterizes, indeed creates, Derridean thought (“Neither/nor is at once at once or rather or rather ” 2 ) and so distinguishes it from Saussurian.

Derrida carefully analyzes the sign and the concept of difference, noticing several things. He recognizes, first of all, that the possibility of the sign, the substitution of the sign for the thing in a system of differences, depends upon deferral, that is, putting off into the future any grasping of the “thing itself.” But space as well as time bears on the concept of difference in a fundamental way. The temporal interval, the deferring into the future of any grasping of the thing, irreducibly divides all spatial presence. In other words, if perception of objects depends upon perception of their differences, each present element must refer to an element other than itself. The never-annulled difference from the completely other precisely opens the possibility of thought. As Jeffrey Mehlman has remarked, “Derrida's effort has been to show that the play of difference, which has generally been viewed as exterior to a (spatial or temporal) present, is, in fact, always already at work within that present as the condition of its possibility.” 3

Involved in the constitution of the sign, according to Derrida, is the “trace” of a past element that was never fully present. That element was never fully present because it must always already refer to something other than itself. This “trace” refers to what can never become present, for the interval separating sign from thing must always reconstitute itself. Now it would seem that Derrida has unarguably gone beyond Saussurian linguistics, for as Alan Bass has written, “Any other alternative, any attempt to save the value of full presence would lead to the postulation of a point of origin not different from itself (an in-different origin), thus destroying the essentially differential quality of language.” 4 Derrida coins the word differance to describe the structure of the sign, which is always already marked by both deferring and differing (both senses occur, of course, in the French verb différer ).

A few more remarks may be in order here on the important “trace,” which creates the undoing/preserving that I have called fundamental to Derrida's thought. After defining “trace” as “the part played by the radically other within the structure of difference that is the sign,” Gayatri Spivak proceeds to term it “the mark of the absence of a presence, an always already absent present, of the lack at the origin that is the condition of thought and experience.” 5 Because the structure of the sign is determined by the “trace” or track of that other which is forever absent, the word “sign” must itself be placed “under erasure.” Derrida writes, “the sign is that ill-named thing, the only one, that escapes the instituting question of philosophy: ‘what is … ?’” 6 The “trace” thus destroys the idea of simple presence, the desire of which, argues Derrida, characterizes Western metaphysics. The idea of origin is similarly destroyed, for origin is always other than itself, the idea of origin depending upon the production of temporal and spatial difference that must precede any origin.

Derrida would thus replace semiology with grammatology. “The sign cannot be taken as a homogeneous unit bridging an origin (referent) and an end (meaning), as ‘semiology,’ the study of signs, would have it. The sign must be studied ‘under erasure,’ always already inhabited by the trace of another sign which never appears as such.” 7 The term “grammatology” is itself expressive of Derridean strategy, for it reflects an unresolved contradiction. Whereas the “grammè” is the written mark, the sign “under erasure,” “logos” is at once “law,” “order,” “origin,” and “phonè,” the voice. What the “grammè” does, as I have suggested, is precisely to deconstruct the authority of the “logos” and so of the privilege always afforded to the spoken word, itself supposedly an indication of presence. Grammatology is, then, as a term an example of sous rature, of the undoing yet preserving of apparent opposites. The undoing is, of course, no more necessary than the preserving, for without the latter another term would be privileged in a new hierarchy, simple opposition being maintained though reversed, and the “trace” ignored. With the “trace,” however, one thing is defined not simply by its difference from another but by its difference from itself, a “trace” of the radically other always already being present. Derrida is perhaps most forceful on this point in his 1966 deconstruction of Lévi-Strauss, where he undoes yet preserves the latter's well-known binary opposition engineer/ bricoleur : “From the moment that we cease to believe in such an engineer … as soon as it is admitted that every finite discourse is bound by a certain bricolage, … the very idea of bricolage is menaced and the difference in which it took on its meaning decomposes.” 8

It is fair to say, with Spivak, that Derrida is thus asking us “to change certain habits of mind: … the origin is a trace; contradicting logic, we must learn to use and erase our language at the same time.” 9 The implications of this are numerous and radical, for they reach, attack, subvert the roots of Western thought, defined by Derrida as logocentric and fundamentally desirous of presence. The desire of presence appears, in J. Hillis Miller's words, as “Time as presence, the other as presence, the presence of consciousness to itself, language as the pure reflection of the presence of consciousness, literary history as a history of consciousness, the possibility of reaching an original presence from which all the others derive.” 10 Since Miller has admirably described the way in which Derrida deconstructs this fundamental desire of presence at every turn, and since it should be clear from my own account above how difference renders presence in these senses impossible, I shall not dwell on the point but turn instead to others not so well treated in the commentary.

We might begin with the question of truth. In brilliant analyses of Plato, 11 Derrida associates writing, the structure of difference marked by the “trace,” and so the disappearance of a present origin of presence, with the Platonic idea of epekeina tes ousias (the beyond of all presence). Because Plato posits that which cannot be viewed directly (i.e., the sun) as the origin of the visible, Derrida is able to demonstrate that the presence of the thing itself, the unity of referent and signified, is inseparable from the concept of grammatical difference. If the origin of the thing itself is, as Plato asserts, the invisible “beyond” of all presence, the thing itself can obviously never be present. Truth defined as absolute presence, as presence of the eidos, thus becomes simultaneously possible and impossible. As the “trace” requires, the thing itself is doubled, true and not-true. This duplicity, born with the “trace,” is what makes truth possible, thereby destroying truth. Contradicting logic, Derrida thus undoes/preserves “truth.” I might point out in passing that such alogical moments in Derrida, and they are obviously basic to his thought, render him suspect in traditionalist minds, but what is too easily neglected is the exacting and rigorous nature of these deconstructions. Nothing could be less subjective and less arbitrary.

An important immediate consequence of the never-annulled “trace,” and so of truth/untruth, is the ubiquity of textuality. That “the central signified, the original or transcendental signified” is revealed to be “never absolutely present outside a system of differences … extends the domain and the interplay of signification ad infinitum. ” 12 Bass is correct in stating, “Once one has determined the totality of what is as ‘having been’ made possible by the institution of the trace, ‘textuality,’ the system of traces, becomes the most global term, encompassing all that is and that which exceeds it.” 13 According to Derrida, there is simply nothing outside textuality, outside “… the temporalization of a lived experience which is neither in the world nor in ‘another world’ … not more in time than in space, [in which] differences appear among the elements or rather produce them, make them emerge as such and constitute the texts, the chains, and the systems of traces.” 14 Derrida proposes, in fact, a “double science,” a science of textuality. Once we rethink the metaphysical concept of “reality” in “textual” terms (there are no philosophical regulations of truth, the thing itself being a sign and all “facts” being in “fact” interpretations, as Nietzsche argued), we are left with a world of texts, all of which possess a certain “fictive” or “literary” quality. In this situation of the fictionality of things, literature seems to occupy a privileged place, though now all texts, including philosophical and scientific ones, come to be understood as also fictive.

In this pervasive breakdown of the relationship to truth and reality, literary criticism is no more exempt from textuality than philosophical and scientific works. Whether or not it has traditionally done so, criticism now decides the meaning of a text. Criticism too is a desire of presence. But “meaning” as a privileged term refers to something outside textuality, outside the system of differences: “a text's meaning is the truth that is present ‘behind’ or ‘under’ its textual surface that criticism makes fully present by placing it before us.” 15 The “trace,” of course, makes meaning so conceived, like truth and presence, impossible. To repeat, there is no originating, privileged signified outside the system of differences and so no “meaning.”

The deconstructive critic, in practice, tries to avoid the strong ultimate temptation to seek meaning. Such a temptation is inevitable, for we naturally want to resolve contradictions and to break out of the endless chains of substitutions, which “condemn” us to endless interpretation. We desire a haven outside contingency and temporality, which “meaning,” “truth,” and an originating signified offer. Indeed, the fact of differance seems responsible for this situation: it generates the desire to do the impossible, to unify, to locate a reference outside the system of differences that will bestow meaning, “making equal” as Nietzsche puts it (his term is Gleich machen ). In any case, author and critic share the desire, and the deconstructive critic must be acutely conscious of the desire in both the authors he studies and in himself. As Spivak writes, “The desire for unity and order compels the author and the reader to balance the equation that is the text's system. The deconstructive reader exposes the grammatological structure of the text, that its ‘origin’ and its ‘end’ are given over to language in general … by locating the moment in the text which harbors the unbalancing of the equation, the sleight of hand at the limit of a text which cannot be dismissed simply as a contradiction.” 16

The deconstructive critic, therefore, aware of the differential quality of language and recognizing the fact of the “trace,” seeks the moment in any text when its duplicity, its dialogical nature, is exposed. Here, as elsewhere, Freud anticipates deconstructive procedure. In The Interpretation of Dreams, for example, he suggests that the reader or interpreter should direct his gaze where the subject is not in control: “There is often a passage in even the most thoroughly interpreted dream which has to be left obscure. … At that point there is a tangle of dream-thoughts which cannot be unravelled and which moreover adds nothing to our knowledge of the content of the dream.” Derrida extends this point, modifying it: it is the case that such a tangle adds nothing to our knowledge of the content of the dream-text in terms of what it sets up by itself. “If, however, we have nothing vested in the putative identity of the text or dream, that passage is where we can provisionally locate the text's moment of transgressing the laws it apparently sets up for itself, and thus unravel—deconstruct—the very text.” 17 The deconstructive critic thus seeks the text's navel, the moment when any text will differ from itself, transgressing its own system of values, becoming undecidable in terms of its apparent system of meaning. 18 “Reading must always,” says Derrida, “aim at a certain relationship, unperceived by the writer, between what he commands and what he does not command of the patterns of the language that he uses. This relationship is not a certain quantitative distribution of shadow and light, of weakness and force, but a signifying structure that critical reading should produce.” 19 This undoing, made necessary by the “trace,” and so by the duplicitous quality of words and texts, must not be confused with the simple locating of a moment of ambiguity or irony that is somehow incorporated into a text's system of (monological) meaning; rather, it is the moment that threatens the collapse of that entire system.

Nor is it enough simply to neutralize the binary oppositions of metaphysics. Derrida insists that there is always “a violent hierarchy. One of the two terms controls the other (axiologically, logically, etc.), holds the superior position. To deconstruct the opposition is first … to overthrow the hierarchy.” 20 But only first, for another necessary step follows in which the reversal just effected must be displaced and the apparent winning term placed sous rature. To reverse the hierarchy, then, only in order to displace the reversal; to unravel in order to reconstitute what is always already inscribed. As we have seen at every point, the “trace” creates this undoing/preserving oscillation. It is an oscillation that continues endlessly, for one deconstructive act leads only to another, a deconstructive reading being subject itself to deconstruction. No text, it is clear, is ever fully deconstructing or deconstructed.

Having discussed some of the important implications of Derrideanism, I wish now to consider major charges levelled at the position. Earlier I mentioned three specific charges brought against Derrida and his followers (obscurity, nihilism, and threatened destruction of humanistic values), and to these I return.

Undeniably, Derrida's work, as well as that of his “disciples,” is demanding and difficult. It is also different from the prose we in America and England are accustomed to. I submit, however, that Derrida et al. are not perversely obscure. Part of the problem is that Derrida draws on authors we know hardly at all, notably Nietzsche and Heidegger and, moreover, that he deals with abstract issues alien to the Anglo-American empirical tradition. Another real difficulty lies, I think, in our expectations as readers, for most of us, more influenced by British empiricism than we would care to admit, expect language, and especially literary-critical language, to be a mirror reflecting truly the nature and contents of the “object” being described. Derrida's point, as we have seen, is precisely that writing is never a simple means for the presentation of truth. What this means, in part, is that even criticism and philosophy must be read scrupulously and critically, teased for meaning; they must, in other words, be interpreted and in exactly the same way as poetry, for example. Language always carries the “trace,” whether the text in question be poetic, critical, philosophical, psychological, or what have you. Language may be a medium in a ghostly sense (as Geoffrey Hartman puckishly suggests), but it cannot be a medium in the sense of a neutral container of meaning. Derrida and his followers not only advance this argument but they also frequently, increasingly, express these points in the form in which they write. In Glas, for example, Derrida consciously cultivates a plural style, à la Nietzsche, as a way of confounding apparent opposites and switching perspectives.

Sometimes linked with the charge of obscurity is the claim that Derrideanism leads to the abandonment of the usual interpretive procedures. This claim, as well as the charges of nihilism and antihumanism, is made by, among others, M. H. Abrams in a response to J. Hillis Miller's review of the former's Natural Supernaturalism. Abrams' essay, entitled “The Deconstructive Angel,” is perhaps the most influential attack on Derrideanism to date. 21 According to Abrams, deconstructive criticism places even the most arbitrary reading on an equal footing with the most rigorous, for there appears no way of determining right from wrong readings. But Miller, for one, explicitly denies that “all readings are equally valid or of equal value. Some readings are certainly wrong. Of the valid interpretations all have limitations. To reveal one aspect of the work of an author often means ignoring or shading other aspects. Some approaches reach more deeply into the structure of the text than others.” 22 In practice deconstructive criticism is certainly not arbitrary or slipshod. A look at such deconstructionists as Miller and Paul de Man will show just how rigorous and exacting such an interpretive procedure can be. The theory itself, on which this practice depends, insists, despite what Abrams says, on using customary interpretive procedures. Deconstructive criticism goes with traditional reading, preserving as well as undoing. According to Spivak, a deconstructive critic first deciphers a text “in the traditional way,” and Derrida is even more direct on this point: “[Without] all the instruments of traditional criticism, … critical production would risk developing in any direction at all and authorize itself to say almost anything. But this indispensable guardrail has always only protected, it has never opened, a reading.” 23 Failing to understand the “trace,” Abrams, like other opponents of Derrida, focuses on the undoing side of the undoing/preserving oscillation.

Should deconstruction allow for the creation in a text of simply any meaning the reader or interpreter wished, it would, I think, deserve the epithet “nihilism.” I am giving the name “nihilism” to that situation wherein the mind is regarded as the arbiter, even the creator, of all values. According to Miller, in a book written before he knew Derrida, “Nihilism is the nothingness of consciousness when consciousness becomes the foundation of everything.” 24 I wish now to consider the question of nihilism in Derrida, hoping that we will emerge with a better understanding of his position. I shall focus on nihilism in the sense given above, believing that the results of such an inquiry will at least suggest the way a response would go to other aspects of nihilism.

As I remarked in passing earlier, the original and originating differentiation seems to generate the dream of primal and final unity, which is, however, always deferred, never present here and now. We can never “make equal” or get outside the generating system of differences to locate a reference that will bestow order and meaning. There is no Transcendental Signified, we might say, only incarnation. Myth, though, as Herbert N. Schneidau well argues, serves to make us think that totalization and meaningfulness are possible, comforting us with reassurances regarding a “cosmic continuum.” 25 But still the gap remains, no matter how hard we try to close it. Perhaps the humanistic tradition is best described as one attempt at closure, positing a meaningful world.

For Derrida, like Nietzsche before him, this attempt reveals the force of desire and the will to power. Whether we speak of a written text or life, to have meaning reflects the will to power. Miller puts it well in his review of Abrams' Natural Supernaturalism, the oxymorons of which title express “the force of a desire” for unity: “The reading of a work involves an active intervention on the part of the reader. Each reader takes possession of the work for one reason or another and imposes on it a certain pattern of meaning.” Miller goes on to point out that in the third book of The Will to Power Nietzsche relates “the existence of innumerable interpretations of a given text to the fact that reading is never the objective identifying of a sense but the importation of meaning into a text which has no meaning ‘in itself’.” 26 According to Nietzsche, “Our values are interpreted into things”; “‘Interpretation,’ the introduction of meaning—not ‘explanation’ (in most cases a new interpretation over an old interpretation that has become incomprehensible, that is now itself only a sign)”; “Ultimately, man finds in things nothing but what he himself has imported into them”; “In fact, interpretation is itself a means of becoming master of something.” 27 Man gives—creates—meaning, then, expressing a will to power as he attempts to improve upon the way things are.

For Nietzsche and Derrida the question is what to do with the recognition that meaning is a construct brought by the “subject,” a fiction made by the force of our desire. Subjectivists and at least some hermeneuticists and Bultmannians seem all too ready to accept a situation which appears to privilege the autonomous consciousness, reversing previous hierarchies and installing fiction in the place of truth and reality. Taken only so far, Nietzsche himself may be viewed as agreeing with this sense of the fictionality of things whereby “believing is seeing” and interpretation is all there is. Clearly, Derrida is not nihilistic in the sense I defined above, for he insists throughout that consciousness is no origin, no foundation, there being no foundation. He undoes the truth/fiction, reality/consciousness polarities but not, with the advocates of the autonomous consciousness, so as to set up the second term in the place of the first. Fiction can no more exist without truth than truth without fiction; they are accomplices, the system of differences and the “trace” making truth (im)possible. By the same token, the subject “in itself,” as center, origin, and goal, is no more possible than the object “in itself.”

In Derrida, Miller, and others appears a radical understanding of the fictionality of things, which goes beyond nihilism and the autonomous consciousness to a recognition of the doubleness of what is, of the complicity of truth and fiction. Deconstructionists wish to avoid the interpretive mastery or closure that imports meaning into texts and the world. Dangers lurk, of course, including the strong possibility that “the desire of deconstruction may itself become a desire to reappropriate the text actively through mastery, to show the text what it ‘does not know’.” Even the deconstructive critic forgets that his own text is necessarily self-deconstructed. He assumes that he at least means what he says. Indeed, even if he declares his own vulnerability, his statement occurs in the controlling language of demonstration and reference. The situation is frustrating but humbling—and inescapable—allowing still another glimpse of the vanity of human wishes. Struggling with the desire of deconstruction, Spivak describes the situation as follows:

a further deconstruction deconstructs deconstruction, both as the search for a foundation (the critic behaving as if she means what she says in her text), and as the pleasure of the bottomless. The tool for this, as indeed for any deconstruction, is our desire, itself a deconstructive and grammatological structure that forever differs from (we only desire what is not ourselves) and defers (desire is never fulfilled) the text of our selves. Deconstruction can therefore never be a positive science. For we are in a bind, in a ‘double (read abyssal) bind,’ Derrida's newest nickname for the schizophrenia of the ‘sous rature.’ We must do a thing and its opposite, and indeed we desire to do both, and so on indefinitely. Deconstruction is a perpetually self-deconstructing movement that is inhabited by differance. No text is ever fully deconstructing or deconstructed. Yet the critic provisionally musters the metaphysical resources of criticism and performs what declares itself to be one (unitary) act of deconstruction. 28

Still, deconstruction may disillusion us about mastery as it demonstrates just how precarious our grasp on meaning is. We are and are not masters, therefore no masters. But we must be careful not to fall into the trap of believing in linear progress, supposedly resulting from this enlightenment and demystification. Nor should we pine with a Rousseauistic (and humanist?) nostalgia for a lost security as to meaning which we never in fact possessed. Rather than with either faith in progress or nostalgia for “lost” presence, Derrida would have us look with a “Nietzschean affirmation —the joyous affirmation of the freeplay of the world and without truth, without origin, offered to an active interpretation. … [This affirmation] plays the game without security.” This “interpretation of interpretation,” Derrida adds, which “affirms freeplay … tries to pass beyond man and humanism, the name man being the name of that being who, through the history of metaphysics or of ontotheology—in other words, through the history of all of his history—has dreamed of full presence, the reassuring foundation, the origin and the end of the game.” 29

For Derrida, as for Schneidau discussing the mythological consciousness, the humanist tradition represents mastery, totalization, closure, nostalgia for a full presence, and the desire of meaning. The charge that Derrida threatens this tradition is, obviously, valid. Yet, as we have seen, that threat is by no means either nihilistic or simply negative. For many, Derrideanism offers a way through—if not out of—what Schneidau calls “the bankruptcy of the secular-humanist tradition.” 30 Indeed, in Sacred Discontent Schneidau links Derrida with a very different tradition, the Yahwist-prophetic, arguing that Derrida's work is consonant with the Biblical message, which always goes counter to the mythological sense of a “cosmic continuum.” Derridean deconstruction, according to Schneidau, is akin to the way in which the Bible insists on the fictionality of things, alienating us from the world, which it empties of meaning, reminding us constantly of the vanity of human wishes. Yet the Bible's attitude is always ambivalent, at once criticizing and nourishing culture. Schneidau's highly suggestive, and somewhat surprising, argument is far too complex for me to summarize here. A good idea of the nature of that argument, however, may be gleaned from the end of the chapter “In Praise of Alienation,” which presents differance as far from nihilistic and which sees Derrida as, like the Bible, a positive alternative to mythological and humanist understanding:

we are [always] open to sudden revelations of meaninglessness or arbitrariness. … Sooner or later we are afflicted by the feeling that nothing matters, or “makes any difference,” i.e., that we are unable to supply the differentiations which in primitive cultures are articulated by myth, so that our lives and purposes are reduced to entropy. We may flee to various cults, but doubt will have its turn at these. Thus latent Yahwism works within us, leavening all the lump. We are condemned to freedom, not because God is dead but because he is very much alive, as an agent of disillusionment in a basic sense. In this condition, it is not remarkable that we are nihilistic: what is remarkable is that we can become aware of it and can acknowledge intermittently the “nothingness of consciousness when consciousness becomes the foundation of everything.” So with all self-deceptions: their extent is not as remarkable as our awareness of them. We have reached out for the apple of self-knowledge, and in doing so have alienated God, nature, and each other; but by pressing our self-awareness to its extreme, where we become alienated from ourselves, we find that this is not the end of the story. The Fall is only the beginning of the Bible. To be thus “decentered” (and … to be acutely conscious of the fictionality of things) is the precondition of insight: thus it is a felix culpa, good news for modern man of a somewhat unlikely kind. 31

Whether Schneidau is right about the ultimately Biblical and Yahwist nature of Derrida's thought is a most important question but beyond the scope of this paper to determine. What we can say here is that Schneidau does not come to grips with Derrida's insistence that differance “is not theological, not even in the most negative order of negative theology. The latter … always hastens to remind us that, if we deny the predicate of existence to God, it is in order to recognize him as a superior, inconceivable, and ineffable mode of being.” 32 For our limited purposes in the present essay, whether Schneidau is right or wrong about Derrideanism (despite reservations I, for one, think he is in the main correct) is less important than the possibility he suggests of Derrideanism as an attractive, and positive, alternative to nihilism, the autonomous consciousness, and “the bankruptcy of the secular-humanist tradition.”

It may be, as Schneidau suggests, that Derrida offers a long-awaited alternative to certain forms of nihilism. Certainly the challenge he offers cannot be ignored. Since it is unlikely that either benign neglect or wishing will make deconstruction go away, we must come to grips with it, explore its implications, and evaluate it fairly. There are signs that just this kind of thoughtful analysis is underway in religion and theology as well as in criticism and philosophy. 33 Much remains to be done, the work will be difficult, but the prospects are exciting. 34

Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, trans. Wade Baskin (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1959), p. 67.

Jacques Derrida, Positions (Paris: Minuit, 1967). Parts of this book, the whole of which is due soon from the University of Chicago Press, have been translated in Diacritics, 2, No. 4 (Winter 1972), pp. 6-14, and 3, No. 1 (Spring 1973), pp. 33-46.

Introductory note to Derrida's “Freud and the Scene of Writing,” which Jeffrey Mehlman translated for his collection, French Freud, Yale French Studies, 48 (1973), p. 73.

Alan Bass, “‘Literature’/Literature,” in Velocities of Change, ed. Richard Macksey (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), p. 345. Bass's essay, to which I am much indebted, first appeared in MLN in 1972.

Gayatri Spivak, “Translator's Preface,” in Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), p. xvii.

Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 19.

Spivak, p. xxxix.

Jacques Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” in The Structuralist Controversy: The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man, ed. Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972), p. 256.

Spivak, p. xviii.

J. Hillis Miller, “Georges Poulet's ‘Criticism of Consciousness’,” in The Quest for Imagination, ed. O. B. Hardison, Jr. (Cleveland: Case Western Reserve University Press, 1971), p. 216.

See esp. Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978); “La pharmacie de Platon” in La dissémination (Paris: Seuil, 1972), pp. 69-197; and “White Mythology,” trans. F. C. T. Moore, New Literary History, 6 (1974), pp. 1-73.

Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play,” p. 249.

Bass, p. 349.

Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 65.

Bass, p. 350.

Spivak, p. xlix.

Spivak, p. xlvi. The Freudian passage is quoted on this page.

That the “trace” makes texts undecidable means that they can never be saturated with meaning. At some point syntax must overflow the apparent meanings, syntax being the principle of textual arrangement, of differentiation.

Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 158.

Translation as it appears in Diacritics, 3, No. 1 (Spring 1973), p. 36.

M. H. Abrams' “The Deconstructive Angel” appeared in Critical Inquiry, 4 (1977), pp. 425-38. J. Hillis Miller's review was “Tradition and Difference,” Diacritics, 2, No. 4 (Winter 1972), pp. 6-13.

J. Hillis Miller, Thomas Hardy: Distance and Desire (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1970), p. ix.

Spivak, p. lxxv. Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 158.

J. Hillis Miller, Poets of Reality: Six Twentieth-Century Writers (1965; rpt. New York: Atheneum, 1974), p. 3.

Herbert N. Schneidau, Sacred Discontent: The Bible and Western Tradition (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1976).

Miller, “Tradition and Difference,” pp. 6, 12.

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1968), pp. 323, 327, 342.

Spivak, pp. lxxvii-lxxviii.

Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play,” pp. 264-65.

Schneidau, p. 180.

Schneidau, pp. 48-49.

Jacques Derrida, “Differance,” in Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl's Theory of Signs, trans. David B. Allison (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), p. 134.

See esp. John Dominic Crossan, Raid on the Articulate: Comic Eschatology in Jesus and Borges (New York: Harper & Row, 1976); Robert Detweiler, Story, Sign, and Self: Phenomenology and Structuralism as Literary-Critical Methods (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, and Missoula, Mont.: Scholars Press, 1978); and Andrew J. McKenna's review of Crossan's book, “Biblioclasm: Joycing Jesus and Borges,” Diacritics, 8, No. 3 (Fall 1978), pp. 15-29.

I gratefully acknowledge the generous support of The School of Criticism and Theory, the University of Kansas Center for Humanistic Studies, and the University of Kansas General Research Fund.

"Deconstruction - G. Douglas Atkins (essay date 1981)." Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism, edited by Janet Witalec Project Editor, Vol. 138. Gale Cengage, 2003, 25 June 2024 <https://www.enotes.com/topics/deconstruction/critical-essays/criticism-overviews-and-general-studies#critical-essays-criticism-overviews-and-general-studies-g-douglas-atkins-essay-date-1981>

Steven E. Cole (essay date winter 1988)

SOURCE: Cole, Steven E. “The Dead-end of Deconstruction: Paul de Man and the Fate of Poetic Language.” Criticism 30, no. 1 (winter 1988): 91-112.

[ In the following essay, Cole focuses on the critical theory of de Man, suggesting that his deconstruction of meaning in literature leads not to liberation from tradition, but to a logical dead end. ]

Perhaps no contemporary theorist is more difficult to analyze than Paul de Man, although the difficulties are not precisely what his admirers have supposed. In the flood of commentary which has appeared since his death (and this is true even of Jacques Derrida's remarkable Memoires 1 ), one finds less analysis than a kind of mimetic homage in which the acolyte gestures mysteriously at texts whose profundity is insured by their resistance to comprehension. Thus, in a memorial volume of essays, we are told that de Man “will also teach us, once again, in his own voice, how to read in new and unexpected ways, how to contend with the impossibility of reading,” 2 and warned that the attempt to find a value system in de Man's deconstruction must confront “a mystery about which no moral imperative to leap from textuality to subjectivity or history can tell us more than de Man's stubborn labyrinths of rigor, resistance, and profoundly meaningful unreliability.” 3 In such proclamations (and they are virtual commonplaces of de Man commentary) de Man's work stands as sacred writ, immune to the searching historical and sceptical suspicion which it embodies.

What explains this extraordinary protectiveness towards de Man's work? In large part, it seems to stem from an uneasiness about the actual content of what de Man has to say, a largely unspoken awareness that for all its logical brilliance and subtlety, de Man's writing is profoundly unsettling and depressing. Certainly this would explain the nervous, almost embarrassed, generosity of the memorial tributes which have been published: the recurrent theme is an apology for the experience of loss occasioned by de Man's death, yet seemingly made impossible by his work. 4 Yet it would be wrong to seize upon such an apparent discrepancy between work and world as evidence that de Man has in some way been refuted. For as we shall see, the significance of de Man's work is not its denial of the ontology of experience; it is rather its insistence that such an ontology, while inescapable, must also remain intractably inexplicable, and more important, that such inexplicability exposes the emptiness of political or social praxis.

Unfortunately, there is a continuing reluctance to take de Man at face value—a refusal to accept that positions which deny absolutely the possibility of either affirmable meaning or value really mean what they say. The reason for this seems obvious—for some time de Man's work has been seen as central to a more general project that would argue that the indeterminacy of linguistic meaning is subversive of politically or psychologically objectionable structures whose power inheres in their pretension to determinism. 5 But there is a terminological difficulty here: “subversion” is a notoriously slippery term, particularly in the absence of any shared agreement about that which is being subverted. Thus, while Paul Bové argues that “the deconstructive reversal of the New Critical project … authorizes the redeployment of critical energies into a new alignment of forces which preserves the integrity of the institution while providing original and praeter-naturally subtle insight into both the operations of textuality and the primordiality of writing,” 6 de Man himself wryly accepts what he calls the “supreme insult” that his work is “just more New Criticism. I can live with that very easily, because I think that only what is, in a sense, classically didactic, can be really and effectively subversive” ( RT [ The Resistance to Theory ] 117). The dilemma here is fundamental to any effort at situating de Man's work: the attempt at locating a realm of thematic significance, whether this be ethical, political, or historical, seems frustrated by de Man's own anticipation of, and dismissal of, that attempt. Small wonder that Wallace Martin argues that it is simply wrong to believe that in de Man “the theory being advanced is some form of idealism, scepticism, or negative theology.” 7 This is wrong, according to Martin, because “de Man is aware of this danger, is increasingly vigilant in attempting to avoid it, and presumably resigned in advance to being misunderstood, since his theory is designed to explain why such misunderstandings are inevitable” (p. xxxii).

What is missing here is, of course, any sense of what de Man's “vigilance” is designed to protect: the critical orthodoxy which has made de Man's work seem immune from the supposed banalities of ethical or political criticism is remarkably silent about what a de Manian response to those criticisms might be. As we can see in Bové and Martin, the standard response to criticisms of de Man is to claim that de Man has a subversive relationship to some tradition which the critic is struggling to defend, the implication being that subversiveness is in and of itself a sufficient end for criticism. There is, however, an enormous difficulty with this position, which, following Whitehead, we might characterize as a fallacy of misplaced concreteness. If there is indeed a relationship between criticism and the politically objectionable, then that relationship can only be addressed by showing how criticism might help to subvert political institutions which are, presumably, external to criticism itself: the reification of subversion as an intrinsic good mistakenly transforms the dialectic of oppression and liberation from a characteristic possessed by real social institutions into a structural framework governing the analysis of any intellectual position. The point is a simple one: no argument can be seen as either oppressive or subversive without a specification of its real political consequences. And it is here that the claim that de Man's work is somehow “subversive” becomes extraordinarily curious. For while the rhetoric of subversion may tempt one to believe that the overcoming of any dominant tradition is necessarily politically liberating, in de Man's “subverting” of New Criticism, precisely the opposite conclusion is reached.

As we shall see, de Man never dissents from the New Critical belief that a coherent description of value requires the specification of a realm of experience ontologically autonomous from empirical determination: in this very abstract sense, value might be seen as subversive of empirical institutions. But what de Man's developing analysis of the ontology of autonomy insists is that experience itself is ultimately a delusion. The inexorable necessity of language as that which both defines the conditions and possibility of experience, and which equally makes the terms governing experience ontologically meaningless, leads de Man to a belief that the very relational structures (structures embodying the relations of individuals to each other, and to their material conditions) which determine political existence are necessary delusions, at best an inescapable burden. Far from providing the basis for a radical critique of existing social institutions, de Man's final insistence on linguistic indeterminacy cedes to existing institutions an inevitability from which there is no escape. The conclusion which de Man unflinchingly accepts (although this is largely ignored by his defenders) is that, if meaning is indeed indeterminate, then the positive arguments required by the project of political amelioration are as condemned to error as any other discourse. By seeing the derivation of de Man's insistence that all meaning is a delusion from his earlier, New Critical, hope that poetic language offers the possibility of existential and ontological reconciliation (and nothing in de Man's position allows the bracketing of political meaning as somehow exempt from this claim), we can begin to understand the enormous problems involved in claiming, as deconstruction wants to, that indeterminate usages of language are politically liberating. 8 My argument will thus be that de Man's project is finally (although unintentionally) therapeutic: by exposing the aporias which mark the ideology of linguistic autonomy which is the unacknowledged premise of most contemporary literary theory, de Man's work demonstrates the necessity of a radical rethinking of both the origins and the aims of literary studies.

In trying to situate de Man's early work, it is important to keep in mind an essential premise of all the New Critics: statements about values are different fundamentally from statements about facts—different both in the way that they are expressed, and in the way that they are justified. 9 New Criticism further argued that the difference between facts and values requires that values themselves be conceived in three related ways: first, they are immune from the determinations of the empirical world; second, they emerge from a private realm of experience; and third, their expression requires a non-referential use of language. 10 At no point in his work does Paul de Man ever question either the distinction between facts and values, or the conception of value upon which New Criticism relies; indeed he assumes throughout his work that the New Critical description of value is the necessary presumption for any claim that value statements can articulate successfully the powers which are customarily claimed for them. Rather, his work is designed to show the impossibility of construing a realm of value which is empirically undetermined, privately produced, and linguistically articulated. He does this, however, not to propose a more adequate formulation of shared value, but rather to deny its possibility.

We can see the beginnings of this position in an early essay on the New Critics, where de Man argues that the formalist method is governed by an ontological contradiction: it presumes an adequacy of language to experience (his example of this is I. A. Richards) which must ignore the constitutive role which language plays with regard to experience. From this perspective he argues that “the problem of criticism is no longer to discover to what experience the form refers, but how it can constitute a world, a totality of beings without which there would be no experience.” 11 But it would be a mistake to assume that the emphasis must accordingly be on the social construction of the world, for de Man argues that “the problem of separation inheres in Being, which means that social forms of separation derive from ontological and metaphysical attitudes” ( BI [ Blindness and Insight ] 2 240). De Man's critique of New Criticism is thus from the beginning less a challenge of its premises, than an insistence that those premises must be explored more finely. His quarrel with Richards is not against the general claim that there exists a uniquely poetic realm of language, but rather against the conclusion from that claim that poetic language can be seen to exhibit “an adequation of the object itself with the language that names it” ( BI2 244). Further, in his very formulation of the issue of representation as the relationship of linguistic construction to Being we can see de Man's acceptance of the New Critical belief that the unity of experience is the telos of literary analysis, the value which literary analysis is to disclose. Thus he argues that “the foremost characteristic of contemporary criticism is the tendency to expect a reconciliation from poetry; to see in it a possibility of filling the gap that cleaves Being” ( BI2 245). What is mistaken about this criticism is not the aim, but its confidence about the ease with which that aim might be achieved: de Man criticizes Jean Pierre Richards's phenomenological optimism for its deluded belief that consciousness can reveal ontological substance, but he characterizes the project of reconciliation as the “supreme wager” to which is opposed only “the sorrowful time of patience, i.e., history” ( BI2 243). As we shall see, de Man's subsequent work is a nuanced exploration of the reasons for the loss of this wager, and the consequent necessity of submitting to the aimless movement of history.

In a later essay, apparently written in the mid-1960's, de Man examines more closely the relationship of intentionality to formalist analysis. He argues once more that New Criticism was mistaken in believing that literary analysis might reveal an adequation between representation and Being, focusing now on the intentionality of the representation, and drawing a contrast to the status of natural objects: “The intentional object requires a reference to a specific act as constitutive of its mode of being.” 12 What is interesting here is that de Man seems to accept the possibility that some usages of language can refer transparently to a natural world. He distinguishes between entities such as a stone “the full meaning of which can be said to be equal to the totality of their sensory appearances,” and a chair: “the most rigorous description of the perceptions of the object ‘chair’ would remain meaningless if one does not organize them in function of the potential act that defines the object” ( BI 23-24). This distinction seems to bracket intentionality as relevant only to a class of perceptions whose origin is not natural, but in drawing this distinction de Man assumes a class of natural entities whose perception, and finally whose meaning, is relatively unproblematic. Further, the claims which de Man now wants to make about the nature of poetry require this distinction: he is able to single out a class of intentional objects which raise unique ontological dilemmas only if he is able to contrast that class with a realm of objects possessing a fundamentally different ontology. (The ontological dilemma of intentional objects is defined by their difference from natural objects.)

Needless to say, at this stage of the analysis de Man's position is indistinguishable from I. A. Richards's; where in the earlier essay he had seemed to differ from Richards in denying any possible adequacy of representation to the objects being represented, he now, like Richards, would seem to grant representational adequacy to descriptions of natural objects. There is, however, a genuine difference between the two positions. De Man's critique of Richards stems from a disagreement about the range of objects which de Man would describe as intentional, and which Richards would describe as having affective components. While Richards is willing to accept with tranquility the existence of natural objects whose being will never be reconciled with consciousness, de Man assumes throughout his work that the fundamental dilemma of existence is precisely such reconciliation. Thus, in a passage which we examined above, he insists that even social separation is ontological in origin, and this belief is perhaps the source of what seems a shocking early judgment: “the central moment of Ulysses, the carefully prepared encounter between Bloom and Steven Dedalus … indicates, surely, the total impossibility of any contact, of any human communication, even in the most disinterested love.” 13 Far from rejecting New Critical assumptions about poetic unity, de Man changes (and in some way raises) the stakes of what would count as reconciliation, and in doing so heightens also the thematic consequences, the value, of such reconciliation.

Indeed, what is at stake in both the essays on the New Criticism is precisely a thematic question about what sort of knowledge, what sense of value, is offered by the conception of literary language which de Man finally wants to advance. De Man argues that, far from his understanding of intentionality comprising a threat to the New Critical project, it is instead its completion: “the intentionality of the act [of the work of literature], far from threatening the unity of the poetic entity, more definitely establishes this unity” ( BI 25). While descriptions of natural objects (insofar as they are descriptions) defy unity because they necessitate a distinction between the describer and the described, an act which is intentional “reflects back upon itself and remains circumscribed within the range of its own intent” ( BI 26). For this reason, such an act is both unified and “constitutes a perfectly closed and autonomous structure” ( BI 26). Thus, it would be a mistake to argue that the unity of a poem can have an organic model, since “the structural power of the poetic imagination is not founded on an analogy with nature, but … is intentional” ( BI 28). In this sense de Man does seem to disagree with New Criticism. But the rejection of the metaphor of organicity is designed not to reject New Criticism, but rather to prepare the ground for a sweeping endorsement of its most fundamental premise:

True understanding always implies a certain degree of totality; without it, no contact could be established with a free knowledge that it can never reach, but of which it can be more or less lucidly aware. The fact that poetic language, unlike ordinary language, possesses what we call “form” indicates that it has reached this point. In interpreting poetic language, and especially in revealing its “form,” the critic is therefore dealing with a privileged language: a language engaged in its highest intent and tending toward the fullest possible self-understanding. The critical interpretation is oriented toward a consciousness which is itself engaged in an act of total interpretation. The relationship between author and critic does not designate a difference in the type of activity involved, since no fundamental discontinuity exists between two acts that both aim at full understanding; the difference is primarily temporal in kind. Poetry is the foreknowledge of criticism. Far from changing or distorting it, criticism merely discloses poetry for what it is.

Thus, the value of poetic language, (the value which the critic reveals in his analysis of poetry), is that it exhibits a reconciliation, a totalization, of consciousness and the (intentional) objects of its experience. Further, and perhaps more important, as we have seen, de Man wants to stake the possibility of ameliorating social separation precisely on the possibility of such totalization; the failure of the project he describes would leave us condemned to “the sorrowful time of patience” where “any contact” or “human communication” would indeed be impossible. And de Man himself, at the close of his essay, seems certain the project will fail: he praises Benjamin's definition of allegory “as a void ‘that signifies precisely the non-being of what it represents’” and argues that “the temporal labyrinth of interpretation” leads to the “negative totalization” which “constitutes the real depth of literary insight” ( BI 35). What is perhaps too obvious to need mentioning is that this failure (which is for de Man in fact a triumph) demands an initial acceptance of the ontological premise that “the problem of separation inheres in Being”—given this, the conclusions, both about language and about totalization, follow inevitably, but in the absence of the premise, the conclusions are incoherent.

The discussion so far has been intended to block one easy approach to de Man's obvious reliance on New Critical assumptions about poetic unity in his early criticism. This approach would argue that de Man is relying only on a technique of exegesis, and not on the thematic defense of that technique, and would thus make de Man an early instance of the general naturalization of New Critical technique in American theory. But such an approach would not only be overly easy, it would be wrong. For as we have seen, de Man's early dissent from New Criticism is not a denial of the ontological imperative of reconciliation, but rather an insistence that the terms of the reconciliation need to be rethought. In particular, de Man's apparent acceptance, by the late 1950's, that an argument about reconciliation requires a distinction between referential and non-referential language, leads to an insistence that the representational status of non-referential language must be explored much more carefully if conclusions about reconciliation are to be sustained. 14

This is clearest in his seminal essays of the 1960's, “The Intentional Structure of the Romantic Image” and “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” where de Man interrogates more finely than he had earlier the claim that poetic language should be read as a reconciliation of tensions, arguing that this reconciliation can be conceived either as the delusory unity posited by symbolic constructions, or a wiser and more authentic allegorical acceptance of the negative relationship between consciousness and nature. In the latter instance, the reconciliation produced by poetic language is an acknowledgment of its own fictionality, an acceptance of its failure to endow nature with human meaning. But this wisdom, as de Man calls it, is importantly an act of value, an insight into the (negative) truth of existential Being, and it is his continued reliance in these essays on tacit assumptions about how poetic language can be seen to produce value and meaning that separates this work from the deconstructive essays of the 1970's.

Thus, in “The Intentional Structure of the Romantic Image,” de Man challenges the attempt to construe poetic language as having an origination analogous to nature: “the natural object, safe in its immediate beginning, seems to have no beginning and no end,” while “entities engendered by consciousness”—such as a poem—have “a beginning [which] implies a negation of permanence, the discontinuity of a death” ( RR [ The Rhetoric of Romanticism ] 4). Further, while “in everyday use words are exchanged and put to a variety of tasks,” and thus “are not supposed to originate anew,” (“they are used as established signs to confirm that something is recognized as being the same as before”), “in poetic language words are not used as signs, not even as names, but in order to name ” ( RR 3). Having defined a realm of poetic language which is distinct both from the natural world and from normal uses of language, de Man concludes that poetic language offers “a possibility for consciousness to exist entirely by and for itself, independently of all relationship with the outside world, without being moved by an intent aimed at a part of this world,” and he argues that this “leaves the poetry of today under a steady threat of extinction, although, on the other hand, it remains the depository of hopes that no other activity of the mind seems able to offer” ( RR 16-17). Similarly, in “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” de Man argues that both allegory and irony involved a demystification of the attempt by symbolic poetic language to establish what he terms a “pseudo dialectic between subject and object” ( BI2 206): “Both modes are fully demystified when they remain within the realm of their respective language but are totally vulnerable to renewed blindness as soon as they leave it for the empirical world. Both are determined by an authentic experience of temporality which, seen from the point of view of the self engaged in the world, is a negative one” ( BI2 207).

In both these essays de Man assumes the possibility that poetic language, precisely because its rhetoric disrupts external referentiality, can adequately represent the negative relationship of consciousness to externality. Further, it is the representational adequacy of poetic language which allows de Man to conclude that his analyses reveal a “depository of hopes” of “an authentic experience of temporality”—de Man is able to discover in poetry a reconciliation of consciousness to its own delusions about the external world precisely because consciousness is not deluded about the adequacy of poetic language to represent that reconciliation. But while de Man is squarely within the New Critical tradition in assuming that the representational adequacy of poetic language is fixed by its difference from referential language (poetic language can represent consciousness because its meanings are determined by consciousness rather than the external objects which determine referential meaning), his assumption that reconciliation must itself involve a demystified severing of the relationship of consciousness to an external world (as opposed to the New Critical dream of reconciliation as the adequation of consciousness and externality) contains a proleptic anticipation of his later argument that poetic language is itself an external entity with no relationship to consciousness. For by pushing the ontological dualism which he inherited as much from New Criticism as from phenomenology to its logical conclusion that the terms of the duality have no genuine interaction, de Man insures that any analysis aimed at a recuperation of meaning is doomed to failure.

De Man's shift in emphasis from the relationship of consciousness to poetic language, to the impossibility of representation in poetic language itself, indicates clearly his refusal to settle for conclusions unwarranted by the terms of his analysis. Just as the definition of poetic language as non-referential blocked any claim that poetic language offered a reconciliation of consciousness and external experience, so now the developing critique of representation itself leads to an increasing recognition that the very arguments used to deny a reference to externality in poetic language apply equally to the claim that poetic language refers to consciousness. In retrospect, the argument seems fairly obvious. If predication involves an unwarranted imposition of non-natural qualities onto natural objects, then only an analysis of consciousness which was able to show that consciousness is itself non-natural could insure that predicates attached to the experience of consciousness were not as unwarranted as those attached to nature. But the unresolvable dilemma is that the attempt at offering the necessary analysis of consciousness involves a usage of language which it had been the aim of the analysis to defend. By using as part of its analysis the very terms which it had been designed to analyze, the defense of consciousness as non-natural (and thus as representable) finds itself caught in a vicious circle which finally requires the abandonment of consciousness itself. The naming of consciousness is as delusory as the naming of nature.

This insistence on the interpretive aporia which results from a distinction between literal and figural meaning provides the unifying focus of the essays collected in Allegories of Reading. In discussing Julie, de Man argues that “any reading always involves a choice between signification and symbolization, and this choice can be made only if one postulates the possibility of distinguishing the literal from the figural.” 15 But this choice is contaminated by the necessity of relying, in making the distinction, on the very realms which a naive reading would have assumed are already distinct: the literal defines the figural, and the figural defines the literal. As de Man argues, “the situation implies that figural discourse is always understood in contradistinction to a form of discourse that would not be figural” ( AR [ Allegories of Reading ] 201). In an analysis of Nietzsche, de Man is clear about the consequences of this dilemma for any attempt at delimiting a realm of language which might adequately represent the self: “the idea of individuation, of the human subject as a privileged viewpoint, is a mere metaphor by means of which man protects himself from his insignificance by forcing his own interpretation of the world upon the entire universe. … The attributes of centrality and of selfhood are being exchanged in the medium of the language. Making the language that denies the self into a center rescues the self linguistically at the same time that it asserts its insignificance, its emptiness as a mere figure of speech. It can only persist as self if it is displaced into the text that denies it” ( AR 11-12). The paradox to which de Man points is that the nature of figural language denies the very hope which its initial identification as an autonomous realm has been designed to secure.

There is thus a decided shift in de Man's work in the 1970's from his earlier analysis of the phenomenology of being to an emphasis on the contradictions which emerge from an analysis of the realm of language—the figural—which had been earlier assumed to represent that being unmediatedly. But it would be a mistake to conclude that de Man's concerns have changed in any fundamental way, that he has moved from the attempt to find in a certain kind of language the confirmation of a phenomenological project to a focus on the nature of language itself. Rather, de Man's shifting view of language is necessitated by the very failure of the phenomenological project itself: the increasing attention to language in itself comes about not because of an arbitrary shift in commitment, but rather because of an increasing recognition of the impossibility of identifying a specialized realm of language which might secure for consciousness its dream of autonomy. Thus, de Man's insistence on the mutually contradictory realms of the rhetorical and the literal can be understood finally only by examining the phenomenological consequences of this insistence. De Man's position changes not because of a greater understanding of language in itself, but rather because he realizes that figural language cannot confirm the phenomenological project of an autonomous consciousness which he had assumed throughout his work is the telos of literary analysis. More important, because de Man never abandons his belief that figural language offers the best chance for representing an authentically autonomous consciousness, his realization that the hopes he had rested in figural language are delusory inevitably produces the phenomenological conclusions at which we will now look.

In the essay on The Triumph of Life which he contributed to Deconstruction and Criticism, de Man offers perhaps his most direct statement of the phenomenological consequences of the deconstructive analysis of language. There, he focuses on Shelley's attempt at finding in Rousseau a confirmation of the power of language to posit an ontologically adequate realm of temporal experience. De Man argues that the arbitrariness and intrusiveness of language makes such adequation impossible: “The positing power of language is both entirely arbitrary, in having a strength that cannot be reduced to necessity, and entirely inexorable, in that there is no alternative to it” ( RR 116). Here de Man moves decisively beyond the phenomenological hope, best exemplified by Heidegger's reading of Nietzsche, that a recognition of the intrusive nature of human consciousness, a self-conscious overcoming of consciousness, might allow a reconciled acceptance of being-in-itself. 16 Instead, de Man's argument is that our very awareness of nature, and finally of our own existence, is contaminated in an absolute way by the very language which makes possible that awareness. Our representations of experience are “punctured by acts that cannot be made a part of it” ( RR 117). But this arbitrariness of language is both inescapable and inexorably understood. In representing, for example, the relationship of the stars and the sun, we are made aware both that the appearance of the sun is only retrospectively understood as part of a temporal sequence of events, as a part of “a dialectical relationship between day and night, or between two transcendental orders of being” ( RR 117) and equally that the inevitability of such retrospection must blind us to a more ontologically frightening knowledge which we also cannot escape: “the sun does not appear in conjunction with or in reaction to the night and the stars, but of its own unrelated power” ( RR 117). What de Man wants to show here is that language grips us in the power of a necessity of representation which is both inescapable, and yet which we know to be false: language serves here as a purely arbitrary intrusion between consciousness and world, and thus the realms of value and facticity, far from emerging unscathed from their putative origins, are in fact rendered meaningless through their mediation in language. The “unrelated power” which de Man here ascribes to the sun might seem to contradict this general assertion of indeterminacy, but de Man's argument would surely be that “power” is itself a trope produced by the representational inevitability of language, and as such is reducible neither to an empirical world which might anchor its status as a fact, nor to a consciousness which might proclaim its value. The knowledge which is produced by our analysis of language is purely negative: it is a knowledge of the impossibility of knowing.

The obvious question is how such knowledge is possible, and for de Man the answer is to be found in our attempts to come to terms with death, or more precisely, in our awareness of the inadequacy of our attempts to represent death. Thus, in analyzing Shelley's attempt at finding in the dead Rousseau a monument to life, de Man identifies a threat to representation which culminates in a crisis of reading: “to read is to understand, to question, to know, to forget, to erase, to deface, to repeat—that is to say, the endless prosopopoeia by which the dead are made to have a face and a voice which tells the allegory of their demise and allows us to apostrophize them in our turn” ( RR 122). Our very awareness of death requires a recognition of the arbitrariness of representation, since the very terms by which we represent death are contaminated by their denial of death, by their construal of the dead as somehow alive. Further, de Man cautions explicitly against the Heideggerian hope (which had been his own hope in his earlier work) that this negative insight might somehow provide a sustaining knowledge: “No degree of knowledge can ever stop this madness, for it is the madness of words. What would be naive is to believe that this strategy, which is not our strategy as subjects, since we are its product rather than its agent, can be a source of value and has to be celebrated or denounced accordingly” ( RR 122). Instead, for de Man the analysis of death culminates in pure nihilism: “nothing, whether deed, word, thought, or text, ever happens in relation, positive or negative, to anything that precedes, follows, or exists elsewhere, but only as a random event whose power, like the power of death, is due to the randomness of its occurrence” ( RR 122). 17

The difficulty of knowing how to respond to a claim such as this is exhibited by an oddly defensive discussion of Jonathan Culler. According to Culler, de Man's concern with “truth and knowledge” here protect him (and by implication deconstruction) from the attack that deconstruction relies upon an easy denial of truth, and later Culler ridicules what he calls the “rumors” that deconstruction “eliminates meaning and referentiality.” 18 But the clear thrust of de Man's argument is to eliminate meaning, and for reasons that are precise and coherent. Perhaps Culler was misled by de Man's own denial that his position is nihilistic ( RR 122) for what Culler assumes is that a “commitment to the truth of the text when exhaustively read” (p. 280) protects deconstruction from the charge of a nihilistic denial of meaning. But de Man's position is more subtle, and more unnerving, than this. Having assumed from the beginning of his career that truth must itself be autonomous, and having accepted further that it is the self which must serve as the ground of the autonomy of truth, de Man's position culminates in a recognition that it is solely by virtue of its death that the autonomy of the self can be preserved. Further, the nihilistic denial of any relation is logically congruent with the insistence on autonomy as the necessary ground of truth: if death confirms the possibility of autonomy, and thus reveals truth, then its random denial of relation makes it impossible to sustain any description of meaning or truth which is predicated upon relation. Finally, because language is itself ontologically implicated in a plurality of determinations, in an endlessly proliferating web of relations, it must prove inadequate to the randomness and solitariness of death, and it is further such inadequacy which will expose the ultimate failure of language. It is only in death that de Man discovers both the ultimate fate, and the triumph, of autonomy, for it is only in death that we can be said to exist autonomously.

In an essay which he apparently wrote near the end of his own life, de Man returns to the issue (which he had first raised in his analysis of formalist criticism) of how history relates to literary language, setting the discussion in an eerily appropriate context of mourning. For what de Man never ceases to realize is that his analysis of the ultimate privacy of experience requires some acknowledgment of those aspects of experience which are not private. He contrasts a deluded form of mourning which desires a “consciousness of eternity and of temporal harmony” with more genuine mourning which can “allow for non-comprehension and enumerate non-anthropomorphic, non-elegiac, non-celebratory, non-lyrical, non-poetic, that is to say prosaic, or, better, historical modes of language power” ( RR 262). What our experience of history should teach us, de Man seems to be saying, is a mournful refusal to impose on our experience those assertions of the self—the anthropomorphic and so on—which must involve a denial of relation which cannot be sustained. A clearer sense of the prosaic quality of history, its insistence on treating us as referentially related rather than lyrically autonomous (lyric autonomy is of course for de Man now itself exposed as relational), can be found in de Man's claim that Rousseau's hopes for political amelioration are less significant than his analysis of political identity itself:

What the Discourse on Inequality tells us, and what the classical interpretation of Rousseau has stubbornly refused to hear, is that the political destiny of man is structured like and derived from a linguistic model that exists independently of nature and independently of the subject: it coincides with the blind metaphorization called “passion,” and this metaphorization is not an intentional act. … If society and government derive from a tension between man and his language, then they are not natural (depending on a relationship among men), nor theological, since language is not conceived as a transcendental principle but as the possibility of contingent error. The political thus becomes a burden for man rather than an opportunity. …

( RR 156-57)

It is important to note here that this “burden” is the result not of contingent aspects of particular political institutions, but rather of “political destiny” itself. Further, although de Man refers to an ethical realm treating the “relationship among men” as distinct from the political, his understanding of the political itself refers not merely to the positive institutions by which the state maintains its power, but more generally to the complex relational structures which constitute any community. (Given the constraints which his own analysis of the illusion of relation would place upon him, it's difficult to imagine how de Man could describe an ethical realm which differs from his description of the political. Indeed, de Man states quite explicitly that his focus is “the considerable ambivalence that burdens a theoretical discourse dealing with man's relation to man” [ RR 157].)

If we add to the present discussion de Man's earlier claim that from the perspective of death, relations are themselves delusions which must be abandoned, we are now in a position to see the ultimate conclusions to which de Man's position leads. Having identified language as the repository of the hope for experiential reconciliation, while insisting at the same time that the nature of language makes such hope a delusion, de Man is forced to conclude that those aspects of experience which are “structured like and derived from a linguistic model” (and death is the sole aspect of experience for which this cannot be said) must be accepted as a burden. Uncompromisingly committed to the principle of autonomy, de Man's position thus ends in a mournful acceptance of the burden of community, and an ascetic insistence that truth is to be found only in death.

In books which have little else in common, Jonathan Culler and Eugene Goodheart have each argued that the signal quality of contemporary literary theory is its sceptical denial of the authority of rules, of the possibility of finding a determinate ground for our actions. 19 Culler attacks Charles Altieri's Wittgensteinian attempt at showing that rules are embedded in the very actions which are their manifestation, arguing that while it is true that “we have experience of determining and grasping meanings,” it is mistaken “to treat this experience as if it were a ground for the philosophical refutation of scepticism” (p. 140). The reason such an argument is mistaken is because a “redescription will alter rules or place an utterance in a different language game,” and thus the attempt at seeing rules as immanent in practices cannot account for the proliferating and indeterminate nature of practices themselves (p. 140). The implication is that the sole possible response to scepticism is to establish determinate rules which cannot be challenged by the practices they describe. Goodheart accepts that this is the sceptical challenge, and tries to meet it by arguing that proliferating contingencies are themselves an aspect of determinate meaning: “Uncertainty or scepticism need not be the perspective from which we view all the seasons of our lives or the texts that occupy our lives. What is missing from the radically skeptical view of privilege is a historical sense of the conditions under which certain views emerge and are felt to have authority, including the skeptical view” (p. 178). While they disagree about the success of the sceptical critique, Culler and Goodheart are united in their belief that a successful challenge to scepticism involves a demonstration that scepticism is itself logically impossible.

This argument may seem initially to parallel the positions we have been examining. As we have seen, Paul de Man's work proceeds out of an assumption that the success of our criteria for explaining our shared construal of the external world (the success of the empiricist account of referential language) requires the articulation of equally successful criteria if we are to explain our shared construal of experience. But in trying to ground such criteria in the assumption that experience must be conceived as autonomous, he ends in the sceptical conclusion that criteria for construing experience must fail. He argues that the best that we can do is mournfully accept the prosaic determinations of our experience while insisting as well on the ultimate failure of those determinations, on the essential privacy of experience. It is this sceptical acceptance of the very criteria whose truth has been denied by the analysis of experience which is missing in both Goodheart's and Culler's description of scepticism. De Man refuses to deny that our experience of the world is importantly marked by assumptions about shared experience; rather his argument is that an examination of the best case which he believes can be made for why shared experience is possible (the argument that shared experience is possible because it emerges out of a realm of experiential autonomy which is the defining characteristic of being human) must fail to account for the essential privacy and non-relatedness of experience in itself.

The point here is that de Man's scepticism does not challenge the existence of what Wittgenstein called shared forms of life, but rather the adequacy of our attempts to explain why we participate in these forms. As Saul Kripke has argued, the most unsettling aspect of Wittgenstein's critique of the appeal to criteria as the ground of our knowledge is the perfectly plausible possibility that what we agree to account as shared knowledge has been arrived at through innumerably different and contradictory explanatory criteria. 20 While Kripke's focus is narrow—he wants to show that our agreement about the simplest mathematical operations masks the logical possibility that we have arrived at that agreement through radically different and incommensurable rules—his insistence that rules or criteria are themselves ultimately private (they cannot be derived from public practices) is precisely the claim that de Man wants to make about experience. Thus, when Kripke argues that agreement about as simple a mathematical function as 2+2=4 cannot account for the possibility that in arriving at the correct answer, you were relying upon a standard “plus function,” while I was relying upon a non-standard “quus function,” he is close to de Man's belief that the terms of the relation are themselves described by the relation. To use Kripke's terms, de Man's position is that analysis of as simple a relational statement as “I love you” would reveal the possibility that the two agents denoted by the statement are, in their very agreement about the meaning of the statement, engaged in logically contradictory activities—that one is “plusing” while the other is “quusing.” Kripke's point (and it is one that de Man would agree with) is that nothing about private experience (intention, say, or emotional attitudes) can either be deduced from the contexts or rules determining shared activities, or be used to help explain such activities.

In insisting that shared experience is an inescapable fact of human existence, and is equally at best irrelevant to, and at worst destructive of, the private contingencies of individual experience, de Man is curiously close to Hobbes's insistence that political union is the necessary public shield against man's private brutality. Like de Man, Hobbes sees in language the vehicle of a shared perception which is both the defining characteristic of human community, and the defense of such community against the capriciousness of private perception. Here, for example, is Hobbes's attempt to derive from the origin of language the foundation of human community: “But the most noble and profitable invention of all other, was that of SPEECH, consisting of names or appellations, and their connexion; whereby men register their thoughts, recall them when they are past, and also declare them to one another for mutual utility and conversation.” 21 But this apparent tranquility about the power of language to give a publicly shared order, an enduring relational coherence, to experience is challenged by Hobbes's later insistence that individual experience poses a continual threat to public order: “I put for a general inclination of all mankind, a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death” (p. 161). Here we can see that the community which Hobbes finds confirmed in the relational possibilities of language gains its authority because of its negative relationship to individual experience: the private drive for power which determines individual experience is defeated by publicly shared institutions which perpetuate community at the expense of individual need. Like de Man, Hobbes sees political institutions as an inescapable, but necessary, burden.

What this linkage of de Man and Hobbes allows us to see is that the focus of a genuine sceptical critique is not on the logical failure of criteria, but rather on the representational failure of public institutions which those criteria are designed to explain. De Man's denial of public experience is thus a denial that the available models of such experience can be said to represent adequately the dimensions of private experience to which they are claimed to be related. We can contrast the resulting belief that public experience is a burden to be endured with Hegel's belief that public modes of ordering experience entail an obligation of adherence precisely because they embody the moral content of the individual. 22 As Sabina Lovibond puts it, “such obligation emanates from an ‘ethical order with a stable content independently necessary and subsistent in exaltation above subjective opinion and caprice—an order whose ‘moments are the ethical powers which regulate the life of individuals.’” 23 This relationship of the individual to the ethical community gains its authority because the individual both perpetuates the community, and discovers himself within the community, by maintaining his obligation to active participation. What de Man wants to argue is that this relationship to community must inevitably fail because of the representational inadequacy of the available terms for self discovery.

In The Claim of Reason, Stanley Cavell argues that the consequence of what he calls the “sceptical recital” of the impossibility of having certainty about the experience of others is tragedy: “both skepticism and tragedy conclude with the condition of human separation, with a discovering that I am I; and the fact that the alternative to my acknowledgment of the other is not my ignorance of him but my avoidance of him, call it my denial of him.” 24 But while the traditional approach to tragedy focuses on the role which the failure of moral agency plays in producing separation, Cavell instead shifts the focus to how separation is produced by the failure of what should be structures of social inclusion: “suppose that there is a mode of tragedy in which what we witness is the subjection of the human being to states of violation, a perception that not merely human law but nature itself can be abrogated. The outcast is a figure of pity and horror; different from ourselves, and not different” (p. 419). What the sceptical critique insists is that the inclusionary failure of public structures is an abrogation of, a denial of, our construal of the human. It is thus simply too easy to claim either that scepticism is itself merely a denial of the authority of rules, or that an adequate response to scepticism is to show the impossibility of denying the very rules which are being denied. The sceptic is denying (tragically) the pull of objectivity, the claim of any externality on his existence, and he is doing so because he cannot see himself in any of the available external models. Further, in denying that such seeing is possible, the sceptical retreat into privacy robs us of our certainty that we are in turn being allowed to see, and it is here that Cavell understands tragedy as turning in on itself, as moving from the triumph of exclusion to the failure of inclusion. 25 One version of such a failure is produced by de Man's exposure of the aporias which mark the attempt to find in autonomous experience as stable an ontological foundation for human community as that which external reality is presumed to offer for empirical knowledge: beginning in the attempt to find in autonomous experience the reality of human existence, de Man's project ends in a denial that reality allows any confidence that the relational structures necessary for construing the human can be sustained. With regard to the tradition he is deconstructing, de Man is finally quite literally correct: in reality, there is no relation. The only response possible to his scepticism is to show that somewhere else, there is. 26

In a deliberate echo of de Man, Derrida asks, “Is it possible, when one is in memory of the other, in bereaved memory of a friend, is it desirable to think of and to pass beyond this hallucination, beyond a prosopopeia of prosopopeia?” ( Memoires for Paul de Man, trans. Cecile Lindsay, Jonathan Culler and Eduardo Cadava [New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1986], p. 28).

Shoshana Felman, “Postal Survival, or the Question of the Navel,” Yale French Studies, 69 (1985), 50.

Barbara Johnson, “Rigorous Unreliability,” Yale French Studies, 69 (1985), 80.

See especially the tributes of J. Hillis Miller, Geoffrey Hartman, and A. Bartlett Giamatti in “In Memoriam,” Yale French Studies, 69 (1985), 3-21.

The debate about the political implications of deconstruction is enormous, and largely amorphous. Within this debate, defenses of de Man have taken two forms: either it is asserted that critics of de Man simply do not understand what he is saying, or it is asserted that the implications of his thought are more subversive than has generally been recognized. For an example of the first defense see Daniel T. O'Hara, The Romance of Interpretation: Visionary Criticism from Pater to de Man (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1985), pp. 205-35. For examples of the second defense, see Dominick La Capra, History and Criticism (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1985), pp. 105-5 and Samuel Weber, Institution and Interpretation (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1987), pp. 150-51. Wlad Godzich has combined the two approaches in his “Afterword” to Institution and Criticism, p. 155, and in his “Foreword: The Tiger on the Paper Mat,” in Paul de Man, The Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1986), pp. ix-xviii (hereafter cited as RT). While there have been numerous criticisms of de Man's politics, there has been little or no attempt at showing the derivation of his political positions from his assumptions about language. For example, Jonathan Arac in his recent book, Critical Genealogies: Historical Studies for Postmodern Literary Studies (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1987), criticizes de Man for ignoring “human relationships,” arguing that “these are the elements, no less than the figures, from which to construct a history of the contingencies that have put us in the odd place that we are” (p. 253). But Arac seems unwilling to criticize the premises about language and indeterminacy which have produced the conclusions from which he dissents. Other criticisms of de Man include Gerald Graff, Literature Against Itself (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1979), Edward Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1983), and Frank Lentricchia, Criticism and Social Change (Chicago: Chicago Univ. Press, 1983). There is an excellent overview of the general dispute about poststructuralism and politics in Jonathan Arac's “Introduction” to Postmodernism and Politics, ed. Jonathan Arac (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1986), pp. ix-xliii.

Paul Bové, “Variations on Authority,” in The Yale Critics: Deconstruction in America, ed. Jonathan Arac, Wlad Godzich, and Wallace Martin (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1983), pp. 16-17.

Wallace Martin, “Introduction,” in The Yale Critics, p. xxxii.

As Rudolf Gasché has argued, it is important to distinguish between deconstruction as a literary project and deconstruction as a philosophical project. In what follows, my focus is clearly the literary uses which have been made of deconstruction, although contra Gasché, I would want to argue that a similar political critique could be made of deconstruction in its purely philosophical modes. See Rudolf Gasché, The Tain of the Mirror: Derrida and the Philosophy of Reflection (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1986), pp. 255-70 and “Deconstruction as Criticism,” Glyph, 9 (1979) 177-215.

See John Crowe Ransom, The New Criticism (Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1941), pp. 281-91.

See Cleanth Brooks, Modern Poetry and the Tradition (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1939), p. 175, and The Well Wrought Urn (New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1947), p. 232.

Paul de Man, “The Dead-end of Formalist Criticism,” in Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, 2nd ed., ed. Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1983), p. 232 (hereafter cited as BI2).

Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1971), p. 24 (hereafter cited as BI).

Qtd. in Yale Critics, p. 106.

This position begins to be worked out in the essays on Yeats collected in Paul de Man, The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1984) (hereafter cited as RR).

Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading: Figural Reading in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1979), p. 201 (hereafter cited as AR).

See, for example, Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, 4 vols., The Will to Power as Art, vol. 1, trans. David Farrell Krell (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1979), pp. 34-53.

These passages have become something of a crux for commentary on de Man. The best available discussion is Jonathan Arac, “To Regress from the Rigor of Shelley: Figures of History in American Deconstructive Criticism,” boundary 2, 8(3) (Spring, 1980), 251-53.

Jonathan Culler, On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism After Structuralism (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1982), p. 280.

See Culler, On Deconstruction, and Eugene Goodheart, The Skeptic Disposition in Contemporary Criticism (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1984).

See Saul Kripke, Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1982). A similar argument has been made by Norman Bryson, Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1983), pp. 40-41.

Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. C. B. Macpherson (London: Penguin Books, 1968), p. 100.

See Charles Altieri. Act and Quality: A Theory of Literary Meaning and Humanistic Understanding (Amherst: Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 1981), pp. 308-31, for a powerful attempt at using Hegel's understanding of Geist to construct a model of literary value. It is indicative of the topsy-turvy politics of contemporary criticism that Altieri's heterodox position on literary meaning is frequently labeled elitist by poststructuralist orthodoxy. See, for example, Paul Bové's review of Act and Quality in Contemporary Literature, 24 (1983), 379-86.

Sabina Lovibond, Realism and Imagination in Ethics (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1983), p. 64.

Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1982), p. 383.

Cavell develops this idea in “Knowing and Acknowledging,” in Must We Mean What We Say? (London: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1976), pp. 238-66.

It is not my intent here to claim that Cavell's notion of “acknowledgement” provides an adequate alternative to de Man's scepticism. Indeed, the weakness of consensual theorists such as Cavell, Richard Rorty, and John Rawls is their refusal to consider the function of material institutions in producing the alienation from consent which they deplore. Rather, my argument is that the challenge which de Man's work presents is to provide a conceptually adequate description of acknowledgement which escapes the sentimentality of both traditional bourgeois humanism and its poststructuralist alternatives. I pursue this argument in an as yet unpublished paper, “A Defense of Naivete: Sentimentality and the Politics of Criticism.”

"Deconstruction - Steven E. Cole (essay date winter 1988)." Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism, edited by Janet Witalec Project Editor, Vol. 138. Gale Cengage, 2003, 25 June 2024 <https://www.enotes.com/topics/deconstruction/critical-essays/criticism-overviews-and-general-studies#critical-essays-criticism-overviews-and-general-studies-steven-e-cole-essay-date-winter-1988>

Archibald A. Hill (essay date 1988)

SOURCE: Hill, Archibald A. “Deconstruction and Analysis of Meaning in Literature.” In Language and Cultures: Studies in Honor of Edgar C. Palomé, edited by Mohammad Ali Jazayery and Werner Winter, pp. 279-85. Berlin, Germany: Walter de Gruyter, 1988.

[ In the following essay, Hill discusses Hartman's deconstructionist interpretation of selected poems and posits that deconstructionist critics confuse textual with contextual meaning. ]

As an academic who has spent a good many years in teaching both literature and linguistics, and in watching and even participating in literary and linguistic analysis, I can not help being repelled by some of the recent developments in literary study. I refer to that school of litterateurs who call themselves deconstructionist, revisionist, or hermeneutical critics. The school certainly has attracted a great deal of attention, even notoriety. 1 I believe that any one who reads such manifestos of this school as Deconstruction and Criticism, or Criticism in the Wilderness, will be familiar with the two main tenets of this group. They are, first that there is no such thing as a text of a poem—only the separate, individual, and subjective texts set up in the minds of the hearers and readers. The second tenet is that all such individual textual interpretations are to be judged altogether as art forms, so that all are equally true or false, though not all are equally rich and learned. 2

In what follows I shall largely confine myself to specific criticisms of lyric poetry by Gregory Hartman. This is not because I feel that Hartman is especially extreme, or indeed, wrong-headed, but because he offers detailed interpretation of the texts of a number of poems in such a fashion that they can be fully tested.

Thus in discussing Leda and the Swan, he gives an interpretation of the syntax of the lines

What is at issue here is the identity of the word Being. It seems clear that it is a participle, referring to Leda. Yet Hartman asks the question “Who is (the) Being so caught up?” He is evidently interpreting Being as a noun, referring, not to Leda, but to an unknown.

Hartman also finds alliteration as an ornament and part of the design in the line

I do not agree that there is meaningful alliteration here. The two pronouns are weakly stressed in normal pronunciation, and so would lose the initial consonant. Moreover, though helpless has a poetic strong on the first syllable, in pronunciation it has secondary stress. I thus think that the four occurrences of the letter h are not part of a design in sounds, but are simply the result of chance.

In the line

he speaks of a caesural pause, before vague. Yet in my speech there is not merely one pause in the line, but three. By pause I mean the entity that by linguists of my generation was called a “single-bar juncture”. That is, terrified and vague belong to different order classes of modifiers, and thus require single bars before and after vague. The result is that both modifiers equally modify the head of the phrase, fingers. The verb which follows, push, begins a new phrase, and is thus also preceded by a single bar. It would seem that Hartman recognizes only single bars that fall near the middle of the line, like the classical caesura. One wonders how Hartman would handle the line from Shelley— An old, mad, blind, despised and dying king.

A final example of what seems to me mistaken interpretation of Leda and the Swan is in Hartman's comment on the name Agamemnon, of which he says

“Agamemnon”, similarly, is more and less than a name. It is a sound shape with a curious hum and a recursive inner structure. The m's and n's bunch together, so that “Agamemnon dead” is the climactic “And” writ large. The consequence leaves the cause behind, for who could bear that visionary knowledge, that AND? Only a nonperson, a god, or a woman metamorphosed into divine impassibility. 3

The passage, as I have said, seems to me mistaken. I am, however, aware that there is some evidence that sound-symbolism exists. Experiments on vowel sounds like /iy/ and /ow/ have shown that if a random audience of speakers of English are told that one of these vowels indicates something little, they normally tend to pick /iy/ as the indication of littleness. But it is also true that this kind of symbolism does not lead very far. For instance, the meaning of the English words big and small is the exact reverse of the expected vowel qualities. Further, in the analysis of literature, sound symbolism is nearly always quite overlaid and obscured by the meanings and associations of the words. As for Agamemnon, the sounds are normal English and in normal English combinations, so that I fail to see how they can indicate a “climactic AND writ large”.

After leaving Leda and the Swan, Hartman ([ Criticism in the Wilderness ] 1980: 126) goes on to Emily Dickinson, and says of her all-purpose mark of punctuation, the dash—

Why does this formal mark, this hyphen with zero meaning, have intraverbal force? Perhaps because it is like the line between dates on tombstones. It may be an arbitrary sign or it may be nakedly mimetic. In any case, the decorous proposition that nature is style is radicalized: this elliptical, clipped mark evokes style as nature. That hyphen-hymen persephonates Emily. At every pause, which it institutes, it can remind us of her wish to be a bride of quietness.

It is true that here Hartman seems to realize that Emily's hyphens have the function of indicating pauses. But he is surely going to extremes when he finds in such pauses (pauses occur in all speaking and writing) an indication of a wish to be a “bride of quietness”. What they do certainly indicate is phrasal and sentence boundaries, something Hartman does not mention. That is a sentence like He spoke roughly, like a bully is different from He spoke, roughly like a bully.

I am quite aware that Hartman achieves a richness and impressiveness in his writing about literature, and that therefore his criticism has deep literary value. Thus no less a critic than Helen Vendler (1983: 163) has said of it that

If [Americans] possessed an ampler range of thought (and Hartman wants to import into our culture the Frankfurt school and the Hegelian philosophical tradition as well as a broad canon of European literature), our discourse would be deeper, fuller, and freer, too.

Yet as I have indicated, no matter that Hartman's discourse is deep, full, and free, it seems to me mistaken. I shall now try to state the source of the mistake, and trace something of its history. First of all, there are two kinds of meaning, the meaning of the sum total of the text of a discourse, poem, story, or everyday utterance, and the meaning of words considered in relation to other words like them in meaning or form, considered without relation to the contexts in which they occur.

In textual analysis, it is characteristic that words or constructions which might be ambiguous out of context, are disambiguated by the surrounding context, linguistic or extra-linguistic. Here is a typical isolated, and therefore ambiguous sentence. From where we stood, we could see a cow and her calf. One might not realize the ambiguity, but note how the meaning is changed if the total discourse runs something like this:

We climbed the cliff and looked out to sea. Two great shapes appeared in the open water. From where we stood we could see a cow and her calf.

That is cow and calf here do not refer to bovines, but to whales. If on the other hand, I consider the possible meanings of calf out of context, I would have to list at least the young of bovine species such as cows and buffaloes, the young of marine species such as whales and dolphins, and the fleshy part of the lower human leg.

In everyday discourse, the words normally occur in contexts fully known to hearer and speaker, so that the meaning is fully plain. In literary discourse, two things happen. First, the nonlinguistic context is seldom clear, and must be derived from the text itself, and second, the text is permanent, since it remains as written or printed words on the page. The normal way of interpreting, therefore, is to make a conscious study of all the possible meanings of the words in the text, and only then to decide on the total meaning. All too often, indeed, the reader of literature will lose his way in all kinds of subjective reverie. In the somewhat silly cow and calf utterance that I have used, the reader may think of all sorts of associations with cows—milk, horns, mooing, cud, barns, and hay—forgetting that these have nothing to do with whale cows and calves. In effect such a reader has indeed created a subjective text quite different from that actually given on the page.

The distinction between the two kinds of meaning, textual meaning, and noncontextual word-meaning, greatly interested the well-known linguistic scholar, Ferdinand de Saussure, who was the author of the dichotomy between langue and parole. Unfortunately de Saussure seems to have understood langue somewhat better than parole, since he outlines families of noncontextually defined words like education, training, etc., and by similarity in form, education and formation, etc. As to textual meaning, that which falls in parole, he says only that “the mind naturally discards associations that becloud the intelligibility of discourse” (Saussure [ Course in General Linguistics ] 1959: 126-127).

As might be expected, de Saussure has been seized on as furnishing valued confirmation of deconstructionist views of literary meaning, based altogether on the associations of individual words, not on interpretation of words as found in context. For a linguist of my particular variety, it is richly ironic that a linguistic work as well known as the Course should be interpreted as the foundation for a school of analysis that is fundamentally antilinguistic.

It should be remembered that de Saussure's work preceded the detailed work in sentence phonology of the second quarter of this century, and the rigidly nonintrospective analysis of scholars like Bloomfield. Only after it was made clear that matters such as pause, stress, and pitch in their totality, were a part of linguistic signalling, and thus part of the text, and after Bloomfieldians like the late Martin Joos put meaning onto the Bloomfieldian foundation, could linguistic interpreters make something like a coherent theory of contextual meaning. I refer here primarily to the Joosian statement that the meaning of any word in context is that possible meaning which adds least to, or changes least, the totality of the context. All other possible meanings are irrelevant to the text under examination (see Hill [ Constituent and Pattern in Poetry ] 1976: xi—xii et passim).

If the student relies solely on noncontextual meanings, he will be led away from any close study of the phonology, syntax, and structure of the text, to the belief stated by Bloom and Hartman that all interpretations are equally true or false. Thus Hartman has ample precedent for regarding Being in Leda not as a participle but as a noun. He also has precedent for deriving his idea of the meaning of a poem from visual rather than audible signals, as he does with Emily's use of hyphens. He, furthermore, has ample precedent for the reverie about a sound-symbolism occasioned by the name Agamemnon. He finally has precedent for something else which he does not do, though others of the deconstructionists regularly practice it. This is the use of etymology as part of the meaning of a word. 4 Such uses of etymology are a part of what Hartman has called, in another connection, the “overloading of language”.

I believe, then, that the deconstructionists make a fundamental mistake in confusion of meaning as part of langue and as part of parole. The mistakes of specific interpretation which I have discussed seem to me to derive altogether from this basic confusion. Hartman has made an eloquent plea for uncertainty of interpretation as a valuable analogy for the uncertainty of ultimate truth. Surely there is room for this ultimate uncertainty, but it also surely should not be allowed to keep the student from making a reasonable hypothesis about the contextual meaning of poems.

In going through the program of a recent meeting of the MLA, I found no less than thirteen discussions, advertisements of books and the like, concerned with deconstructionist topics. No other kind of study of literature came anywhere near that number.

For the first of these beliefs, see this passage by Bloom (1979: 7):

When I observe that there are no texts, but only interpretations, I am not yielding to extreme subjectivism, nor am I necessarily expounding any particular theory of textuality … Emerson made my observation before me, in many contexts, and many others had made it before him.

For the second belief, see Hartman (1980: 282):

On every side there is a self-incriminating lust for evidence. Hermeneutics is an art that grows out of perplexity, out of finding an enigma where we expected a kerygma. Evidence fails or is disabled, and unusual or ungovernable types of interpretation come into play … No wonder some are scared witless by a mode of thinking that seems to offer no decidability, no resolution. Yet the perplexity that art arouses in careful readers is scarcely licentious. It is the reality; it is only as strange as truth.

The discussion of “Leda and the Swan” is found in Hartman (1980: 21-36).

Miller (1979: 217-253) prefaces his essay with nearly three full pages devoted to the whole set of words related etymologically to “parasite”. The etymologies are right enough, but deconstructionists sometimes employ shaky etymologies. Thus Bloom (1979: 1) states that meaning is closely related to moan. “A poem's meaning is a poem's complaint, its version of a Keats' Belle Dame, who looked as if she loved and made sweet moan.” The etymology is rejected by the OED, and Webster III says merely that “perhaps” the two words are related. In any case, I find it surprising to say that a poem, no matter how happy its tone, is moaning.

Bloom, Harold

1979 “The breaking of form”, in: Bloom et al. (1979), 1-37.

Bloom, Harold—Paul de Man-Jacques Derrida—Geoffrey H. Hartman—J. Hillis Miller

1979 Deconstruction and criticism (A Continuum Book) (New York: Seabury Press).

Hartmann, Geoffrey

1980 Criticism in the wilderness. The study of literature (New Haven: Yale University Press).

Hill, Archibald Anderson

1976 Constituent and pattern in poetry (Austin: University of Texas Press).

Miller, J. Hillis

1979 “The critic as host”, in: Bloom et al. (1979), 217-253.

Saussure, Ferdinand de

1959 Course in General Linguistics, edited by Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye in collaboration with Albert Heidlinger, translated by Wade Baskin (New York: Philosophical Library).

"Deconstruction - Archibald A. Hill (essay date 1988)." Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism, edited by Janet Witalec Project Editor, Vol. 138. Gale Cengage, 2003, 25 June 2024 <https://www.enotes.com/topics/deconstruction/critical-essays/criticism-overviews-and-general-studies#critical-essays-criticism-overviews-and-general-studies-archibald-hill-essay-date-1988>

Hent de Vries (essay date 1999)

SOURCE: de Vries, Hent. “Deconstruction and America.” In Traveling Theory: France and the United States, edited by Ieme van der Poel and Sophie Bertho, pp. 72-98. Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1999.

[ In the following essay, de Vries presents an overview of issues raised by deconstruction theory as it was introduced and flourished in the United States. ]

Much has changed since October 1966, when the famous conference on structuralism took place at Johns Hopkins University, introducing the work of a remarkable group of contemporary French thinkers in the United States. The conference, which featured lectures by Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan, and Jacques Derrida, among others, had been organized by the newly founded interdisciplinary Humanities Center. It was intended to inaugurate a two-year-long series of seminars and conferences which “sought to explore the impact of so-called ‘structuralist’ thought on critical methods in humanistic and social studies.” 1 This concise description of the basic tenets of the program hardly captured the actual direction of things to come. Already in their preface to the second edition of the symposium's proceedings, dated November 1971, Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato felt the need to distance themselves from the—indeed, somewhat surprising—title they had given to the volume when it was first published in hardcover in 1970: The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man: The Structuralist Controversy :

Today we may question the very existence of structuralism as a meaningful concept, for not the least of the paradoxes generated by what has come to be known as the structuralist controversy is the fact that as an operative concept it is more evident in the language of its detractors and popularizers than in the express statements of those who are supposed to be its main proponents. … Although the intellectual inheritance was clear, with its preoccupation with articulated sign-systems and the repudiation of the hermeneutic enterprises of the last century, evidence was already available in the Johns Hopkins symposium of the ensuing moment of theoretical deconstruction. The spaces had begun to open, not only between neighboring camps but in the conceptual matrix of ‘structures’ itself.

Much more than structuralism, then, was at stake here. And what has come to be known as poststructuralism—a phenomenon associated by the editors with the name and practice of “theoretical deconstruction”—would soon turn out to be more elusive and intractable, transformative yet difficult to grasp (and this not only intellectually, indeed theoretically), but also academically, institutionally, politically, and even geographically. If there was any ‘traveling’ of ‘theory’ in the case of ‘theoretical deconstruction,’ it certainly was not a fixed set of theorems that moved from France, or Paris rather, to arrive in America intact. Nor could the ‘ensuing moment of theoretical deconstruction’ in retrospect simply be said to have taken place first in France and then in America; and, it is hardly accurate to claim that it took place in America alone. What, then, had been the modes of this ‘reception’ of deconstruction “in America”? Can one still speak of ‘reception’ when the received finds its origin no less than the source of its originality not only in the assumed addressor but at least as much in the addressee? Should the very concept of ‘reception’ and ‘influence’ not be problematized by a more complex and paradoxical understanding of the logic of ‘inheritance’?

Many reasons could be given to explain why the departure from a seemingly original ‘conceptual matrix of structures’ was no accident at all. With the benefit of hindsight, it is clear why from its very inception the reception of French thought and its absorption into poststructuralism was already marked by an internal or structural movement of transposition that in advance obstructs every attempt to reconstruct its intellectual history, to pinpoint its sources, or to predict its further displacements.

The fate and very phrase ‘deconstruction in America’ would confirm a certain logic of the supplement. The supplementary determinations that helped shape ‘its’ very concept and practice (if there ever was one, just one, indivisible, located in or imported into just one nation) could be said to have radically transformed ‘its’ seemingly characteristic features. Deconstruction, then, would be nothing outside or beyond the different forms and modalities of its transference.

In this contribution I will demonstrate to what extent the ‘history’ of deconstruction in the United States—a ‘history’ which was ‘effective’ in a way that eludes the hermeneutic paradigm, of effective history or Wirkungsgeschichte —has a special bearing on the paradoxical nature and different manifestations of ‘traveling theory’ notably ‘between’ France and the New World, ‘from’ France ‘to’ the United States and ‘back.’ The central questions I will seek to answer are the following: How could the ‘moment of theoretical deconstruction,’ more than any of the other intellectual interventions commonly associated with poststructuralism and la pensée 68, serve as a privileged example of la pensée voyageuse ? Could this moment of theoretical deconstruction be said to exemplify a thought and an intellectual practice that are neither here nor there, which are if not simply nomadic, exiled, or migrating, then at least underway, forever on the way, or, as Derrida writes so often, always yet to come, à venir ? 2 Would the geopolitical difference opened up by the geographical distance imposed by the Atlantic simply be irrelevant here?

In his opening remarks to The Structuralist Controversy, Richard Macksey seemed to suggest as much when he recalled that, from its very foundation at Johns Hopkins, the academic setting of the epoch-making conference had been conceived as a “community of scholars” resting

firmly on the ideal of an international exchange, on a transatlantic dialogue. Someone suggested, more than a century ago, that Daniel Coit Gilman [Hopkins's first president, who served from 1875 through 1901], at the time he was planning and staffing this University, was trying to say that for the intellectual life “il n'y a plus d'Atlantique.” 3

But this apodictic statement— il n'y a plus d'Atlantique —is cited here as an extended welcome, a gesture of hospitality, rather than as a description of how things really are. Would we still be interested in construing a genealogy of this ‘intellectual life’ or in retracing its lines of influence, its patterns of responses, as well as the responses to these responses, if this geographical space and everything it entails or symbolizes were no longer there, or if it had never been there? Can thought, especially the thought that is said to “travel,” remain unaffected by space, especially by this most empty, or desolate, or even unnoticed of all spaces?

“DECONSTRUCTION IN AMERICA”

The example of deconstruction illustrates that ‘theory traveling’ cannot be understood as the exportation or importation of a body of teachings in a neutral and homogenous space. Its fate was marked in advance by a historically, institutionally, and politically overdetermined trajectory whose end is not in sight. Derrida's Mémoires for Paul de Man, presented in part as the Wellek Library Lectures at the University of California at Irvine, in 1984, set out by explaining why, after a long and painful hesitation, Derrida had finally decided not to devote his meditations to the subject of deconstruction in America, as he had been invited to do. “Deconstruction in America” had been the subtitle of a book published the year before, on the Yale critics. 4 Ten years later, when, on the occasion of a conference at New York University on the actual state of deconstruction in America, Derrida was asked once again to comment on the intersection of the two terms, “deconstruction” and “America.” His stance had not changed. This time, it seemed as if Derrida's reservations had already left their mark in the very ambiguity of the title of the conference proceedings: “Deconstruction is/in America.” 5 The slashed title hesitates between the language and the implications of ontology, of attribution and predication (“S is P”) on the one hand, and those of topography or topology, on the other. It also suggests that the one cannot be thought without the other. Could the signifier “America” and everything for which it stands cover the topics and the dislocations of deconstruction? And in what sense could this mapping of one onto the other help convey a “new sense of the political,” as the subtitle to the proceedings volume suggests?

Before taking up this question, it is useful first to return to Mémoires for Paul de Man. These begin by complicating the premise of any simple logic of ascription and influence:

Can we speak of “deconstruction in America”? Does it take place in the United States? First in Europe, and then in America—as some too quickly conclude, thereby raising the questions … of reception, translation, appropriation, etc.? Do we know first of all what deconstruction represents in Europe? … contrary to what is so often thought, deconstruction is not exported from Europe to the United States. Deconstruction has several original configurations in this country, which in turn … produce singular effects in Europe and elsewhere in the world. We would have to examine here the power of this American radiation in all its dimensions (political, technological, economic, linguistic, editorial, academic, etc.). 6

Derrida suggests that only against the background of these “original configurations” could we understand the implications of the fact that deconstruction is often perceived by some Europeans—he cites Umberto Eco—as “a sort of hybrid growth,” “as an American label for certain theorems” (Derrida, 14). But the ‘hybridity’ of the phenomenon called ‘deconstruction’ might very well be that which constitutes it from within and in advance. Indeed, as a truly “hybrid growth,” it hardly allows a clearcut distinction between a given or imported set of “theorems,” conceived in Europe, and their supposed labeling under the heading “made in America.” Against this background, Derrida can claim that there is, properly speaking, no “proper place,” no “proper story,” for this phenomenon, this (“thing”) called “deconstruction in America.” For this phenomenon, more precisely the very phenomenality of this ‘phenomenon’ which does not let itself be reduced to a mere empirical phenomenon, “consists only of transference, and of a thinking through transference, in all the senses that this word acquires in more than one language, and first of all that of the transference between languages” ( Mémoires, 14-15). It is precisely the introduction of this psychoanalytical notion of ‘transference’ (of Übertragung or transfert ) that makes the transition to that most concise of all ‘definitions’ of deconstruction possible and imperative. Nonetheless, Derrida presents it with great caution, well aware of its provisional and, perhaps, preliminary character as well as of its risks: “If I had to risk a single definition of deconstruction, one as brief, elliptical, and economical as a password, I would say simply and without overstatement: plus d'une langue —both more than a language and no more of just one language.” 7 This, then, would be the battlecry, the shibboleth, of deconstruction, rather than its axiom, its working hypothesis, or its credo. “ Plus d'une langue —both more than a language and no more of just one language,” deconstruction would, by its very definition, resist any attempts to recuperate its meaning and effects, either theoretically or empirically, that is to say, in a definition: “more than one language” does not constitute a sentence, is not a proposition of the kind S is P. In the sense in which J. L. Austin understands meaning, therefore, this phrase does not have a meaning. 8

As such, this ‘definition’—beyond or before all definition, strictly or properly speaking—should make us careful not to identify its ‘practice’ or ‘event’ too quickly with the gradual or abrupt emergence of a new French, American, or Franco-American paradigm or episteme : “there is no sense in speaking of a deconstruction or simply deconstruction as if there were only one, as if the word had a (single) meaning outside of the sentences which inscribe it and carry it within themselves” ( Mémoires, 17).

In its originary and unending ‘transference,’ the phenomenon of “deconstruction in America,” should, as a consequence, be characterized by pointing to its “essential and thus uncontrollable overdetermination” ( Mémoires, 13). In other words, in describing its past, its present states and stakes, the periodization of its institutionalization, to say nothing of its canonization, one would have to take stock of that which precedes and exceeds the forms of its theoretical ‘objectivation.’ But what, then, if anything, ‘is’ the “moment of theoretical deconstruction” mentioned and cited above?

Time and again, Derrida reminds us that ‘transference’ entails not only a process of linguistic or conceptual translation and that it involves much more and much less than a ‘work’ of mourning (or Trauerarbeit ). In ‘transference,’ we are, first of all, dealing with a ‘love story’ which, as is known all too well, is also a story about an irrevocable loss before and beyond any possible expectation and calculation. Seen in this light, the point of deconstruction would not so much be ‘theory’ (poststructuralist or other); rather, it would be something—“some ‘thing’”—that lets itself be better approached in and through ‘theory’ than elsewhere or otherwise. As Derrida stresses in a different context, we are dealing here with matter that literature (notably ‘modern’ literature) accommodates more easily than philosophy, and which nonetheless cannot be reduced to mere literature.

Nevertheless, one could begin to describe a structurally incomplete series (or seriature ) of somehow related ‘aspects’ that reveal its ‘reception’ “in America.” Derrida explicitly mentions them as “ ethical aspects,” and acknowledges that it is often “in the name of morality and against the corruption of academic mores that the most venomous—and sometimes the most obscurantist—discourses are directed against deconstruction.” This “does not exclude the faith, the rigorous ethical sense, and even what we might call the Puritan integrity of certain partisans of deconstruction).” Secondly, and more intriguingly, Derrida recalls its “ religious aspects,” meaning that

it is impossible to understand American forms of deconstruction without taking into account the various religious traditions, their discourses, their institutional effects, and above all their academic effects; while opposition to deconstruction is often made in the name of religion, we see at the same time the development of a powerful, original, and already quite diversified movement that calls itself ‘deconstructive theology.’

( Mémoires, 16)

Perhaps the most striking fact about this series of multiple determinations, to which others, such as political or technological ambivalences, could and should be added, is that they are all analyzed in the light of their “ academic aspects.” It is this circumstance that causes Derrida to conclude that, ‘in America’ and elsewhere “deconstruction is also, and increasingly so, a discourse and a practice on the subject of the academic institution, professionalization, and departmental structures that can no longer contain it” ( Mémoires, 16).

What does it mean for deconstruction to revolve around the academic institution, and this “increasingly so”? What does it mean, moreover, that the institutional character of the university cannot be regarded as fundamentally philosophic or theoretical in nature? Before answering these questions, it is appropriate first to reconsider the different stages that have helped to prepare it, form its background, and determine the present stakes involved.

WAVES AND WAKES

After at least three different ‘waves’ of deconstruction, which neither simply washed ashore nor sprung up in America ‘itself,’ a phase has been reached in which deconstruction, as some untiringly point out, seems in the process of ‘phasing out.’ After an initial phase dominated by theoretical aspirations of literary scholars, after the philosophical rebuttal of this first appropriation in view of quasi-transcendental infrastructures, and after the attempt to address its singular ethico-political and quasireligious stances, a certain malaise seems to announce itself. How should we understand this supposedly imminent disappearance of deconstruction as an easily identifiable theoretical and institutional project?

In a provocative meditation, Barbara Johnson describes this constellation in terms of The Wake of Deconstruction, a title that evokes at least three different meanings and thereby, once more, plus d'une langue. The “wake” not only “allude[s] to a service for the not-yet-buried dead, but also to the expanding wedge of ruffled water that results from the passage of a ship (or whale) and also, somewhat less grammatically, to a state of non-sleep.” 9

In the wake of deconstruction, Johnson suggests, we find ourselves in an ambiguous state in which mourning and alertness follow and condition each other. This condition and conditioning would result from the peculiar presence and ‘practice’ of a mode of ‘thinking’ of which it is difficult, indeed impossible, to decide whether it was not moribund, death-bound, or dead-born from the very start, or whether, as dead, it still lives on, haunting those who are unable to come to terms with its apparent survival and its no less apparent demise. “Perhaps,” Johnson notes, “the death of deconstruction [was] inescapable because deconstruction makes it impossible to ground thinking in any simple concept of ‘life’” ( Wake of Deconstruction, 19).

From the very moment of its inception and reception, deconstruction would already have had to submit ‘itself’ to a process of ‘writing,’ ‘archivization,’ and ‘theoretization,’ by which it was also inevitably displaced and exposed to a certain death. This ‘self-difference,’ which affects the very determination and demarcation of ‘the intellectual life’, on this side of the Atlantic or overseas, would be inseparable from it.

Rather than “beaming ‘live’ meanings directly from one mind into another,” Johnson writes, all speaking and writing would have to “use” and, for that matter, institute “conventional, external (‘dead’) ‘systems of signs,’ resorting to language and to more than (one) language” (Johnson, 18). Johnson recalls Freud's “A Note upon a Mystic Writing-Pad” as discussed by Derrida in “Freud and the Scene of Writing,” in Writing and Difference. 10 Here, the analogy between the ‘functioning of the mental apparatus’ with a ‘magic slate’ would make it clear how the mind is composed of different ‘layers’ which protect it not only against “direct stimuli,” but at the same time enable its “responsiveness” and “memory” (Johnson, 18). Johnson cites Derrida who analyzes this paradoxical structure as follows:

No doubt life protects itself by repetition, trace, différance (deferral). But we must be wary of this formulation: there is no life present at first which would then come to protect, postpone, or reserve itself in différance. The latter constitutes the essence of life. … This is the … condition on which we can say that life is death.

( Wake of Deconstruction, 18)

In Johnson's reformulation, this means that “with memory as its ever more complex constitutive structure … the ‘living’ psyche derives its specificity from its own ‘dead’ traces” ( Wake of Deconstruction, 18).

This also applies to the psyche as it ‘thinks through transference.’ Deconstruction as a “thinking through transference” could not claim any immediacy or pure intellectual life on either side of the ocean, before or after its purported ‘reception’ and repetition, “in America,” in the academy, or elsewhere.

What would this mean for the status of deconstruction as a ‘traveling theory’? How would this help to situate the wake of deconstruction in its relation to the university and to the phenomenon of ‘theory’? To answer this question, one should, first of all, establish what precisely has been the movement of the intellectual tide that has made possible the present state of the wake—in all its ambiguity of wakefulness and mourning. Only then will we be able to raise yet another, more difficult question: What does this wake make possible, in turn? For is it not precisely the circumstance that deconstruction was never quite alive which explains that it will never truly die either? And is this not the reason why its much discussed wake might well be the very form of its ‘promise’, of its ‘future’? If this were the case, no historical or sociological analysis could make up its balance, store it in an archive, or write its obituary without, at the same moment, presupposing or reinventing what it thus seeks to neutralize, to appropriate, or to exorcise. As such, these analyses could never claim or hope to synchronize deconstruction's essential or structural anachrony, diachrony, or indeed its dia-anachrony. Deconstruction would continue to cast its shadow over all theories about its genealogy, its present place in the university, its future, or its presumed end.

It is perhaps no accident that Derrida rearticulates the question of deconstruction's relation to mourning and the wake (its own and that of others) in a keynote address presented at a conference in New York devoted to the question that interests us here. He explains the difficulty of determining the fate of deconstruction in or, for that matter, as America, as follows:

It remains necessary, no doubt, to attempt to analyze the becoming, the genesis, and the decline of what is thus reduced to a fashion, a school of thought, an academic current, or a method. But even there where they do not fall into unfortunate stereotypes, even there where they are more rigorous and more lucid, these historico-sociological analyses encounter several limits: a) they miss the most acute aspect of deconstruction, that which exceeds, in their very deconstructibility, the themes, objects, methods, and especially the axiomatics of this historical or sociological knowledge; b) they already incorporate and import from deconstruction what they attempt to objectify; c) they most often resemble performatives disguised as constatives: they would like to make happen what they claim to describe in all neutrality. For more than twenty-five years, in fact, we have been told that deconstruction is dying or that it is ‘on the wane.’ And in a certain way this is true! Since it has been true from the beginning, and that's where the question is, since deconstruction begins by being in poor shape (being out of joint) and even by dying, since all that anyone talks about, one must stop believing that the dead are just the departed and that the departed do nothing. One must stop pretending to know what is meant by ‘to die’ and especially by ‘dying.’ One has, then, to talk about spectrality. 11

It is at this point that Derrida returns to his earlier reading of Hamlet, in Specters of Marx, in particular to his fascination with the phrase that more than anything else evokes a “madness about dates,” to wit: “The time is out of joint.” Hamlet who pronounces this sentence is “the heir of a specter concerning which no one knows any longer at what moment and therefore if death has happened to him” (30). And this temporal structure, which is also a structural diachrony or, more precisely still, a contretemps, seems to reveal the very conception, the filiations, and the purported waning of deconstruction as well. And this not only “in America”:

The diagnoses and the prognoses are here at once more true and (as many signs also attest) less true than ever. This implies that the teleological schema (birth, growth, old age, sickness, end or death) can be applied to everything, and to everything about deconstruction, except, in all certitude and in the mode of a determinate knowledge, to that which in it begins by questioning, displacing, and dislocating the machine of this teleology, and this opposition between health and sickness, normality and anomaly, life and death.

(“Time Is Out of Joint,” 30-31)

As Derrida's invocation of the specters of Hamlet reminds us, the traditional—the historical, philological, at any rate monoor multidisciplinary—‘scholar’ is neither at ease nor sufficiently vigilant to respond to the uncanny injunctions of this night of the living dead in which our most common distinctions fade away in a gray zone, and this even to the point of collapsing in on themselves. Traditional scholarship, Derrida suggests, wants deconstruction either alive or dead. Tertium non datur. The exclusivity of this principle of the excluded third explains its unbelief and its intolerance vis-à-vis this ‘phenomenon’ that lives on by outliving itself, against all odds:

A traditional scholar does not believe in ghosts—nor in all that could be called the virtual space of spectrality. There has never been a scholar who, as such, does not believe in the sharp distinction between the real and the unreal, the actual and the inactual, the living and the non-living, being and not-being (“to be or not to be,” in the conventional reading), in the opposition between what is present and what is not, for example in the form of objectivity. 12

Marx, Derrida suggests, was the only ‘scholar’ who, in his best moments, did not shy away from addressing the specter. Marx—a certain Marx, at least—could be said to have sketched out the contours of any future hauntology ( hantologie ) that would manifest itself, not so much as a theoretical critique, but as a vigilant discourse on the vigils—indeed, all the future wakes—of thought. Needless to say, such an “hauntology” is, in turn, not confined to one discipline or one canon, nor is it simply, directly, or immediately theoretical. Derrida takes the ‘category’ of ‘hauntology’ to be “irreducible, and first of all to everything it makes possible: ontology, theology, positive or negative ontotheology” ( Specters of Marx, 51). If anything, it would resemble a “dimension of performative interpretation, that is of an interpretation that transforms the very thing it interprets” ( Specters of Marx, 51). Derrida continues that this comes down to adopting a “definition of the performative as unorthodox with regard to speech act theory as it is with regard to the 11th Thesis on Feuerbach” ( Specters of Marx, 51). On this reading, truly or responsibly to interpret ‘the world’ means ipso facto to ‘change’ it, and vice versa. And all ‘theory’—notably all academic, that is mono-, multi-, and interdisciplinary scholarship—tends to forget this. Inevitably, or by its very definition. Deconstructive, indeed, is the ‘moment’ of ‘theoretical deconstruction.’ But what is this ‘moment’ before and beyond its determination as a dialectical, historical, or temporary stage or, for that matter, momentum?

One is tempted here to invoke the remark with which Derrida reminds us that he has “often had occasion to define deconstruction as that which is—far from a theory, a school, a method, even a discourse, still less a technique that can be appropriated—at bottom what happens or comes to pass [ ce qui arrive ]. It remains, then, to situate, localize, determine what happens with what happens, when it happens. To date it.” 13 This last sentence supplements what could otherwise be all too easily misread as a mere quasi-ontological inquiry into the abysmal and shifting ‘grounds’ of knowledge and ‘theory’. More than that deconstruction consists in a pre- and post-discursive practice or intervention, and this, first of all, in the academy.

BEFORE AND BEYOND ‘THEORY’

One of the most debated truisms of the past few decades might well be that the modern academy is marked by a certain malaise. In an elliptical reading of Kant, entitled, “Mochlos—ou le conflit des facultés,” Derrida introduces the term malaise in the larger context of a wide-ranging diagnosis. He suggests that the dominance of a certain philosophical interpretation of the university as a concept has contributed to the seemingly omnipresent feeling of discontent with respect to its task and future.

Derrida characterizes this apparently general sentiment as a profound malaise, or even mal-être, in order to stress that much more than an intra-institutional or regional crisis (intramural or curricular, disciplinary or even interdisciplinary) seems at stake here. 14 The malaise in question, he implies, does not let itself be simply reduced to the debates on the transformation of the humanities, of philosophy, of literary and cultural studies and their respective canons in the light of ever more rapidly emerging competing paradigms, some of which have come to dominate the academic scene in the United States, and, less dramatically, in Europe. Provided there is such a thing as a single localizable place for this sickness unto being called mal-être, the malaise has to be situated elsewhere.

Derrida locates the malaise in the paradoxes and aporias that haunt the principle of reason and, most significantly, its articulation into supposedly separated domains, such as that of the theoretical and the practical, the constative and the performative, the quest for truth and the need to act, as well as the scholarly and the public. The malaise would be produced by the tense, contorted relation between Enlightenment and politics that defines the academy at least since Kant.

The English version of “Mochlos” was published for the first time as the introductory chapter of a volume of essays presented at a conference devoted to “Our Academic Contract: The Conflict of Faculties in America” (University of Alabama, 1987). Derrida's text, however, was first delivered as a lecture at Columbia University, in 1980, on the occasion of the centenary of the founding of its graduate school. It was later republished in its original version in Du droit à la philosophie, a book which documents what is perhaps Derrida's most explicit institutional (if not his most political) work to date. It collects lectures, reports, notes, an interview, as well as an extensive, newly written introduction, all centering on a single theme. This theme, Derrida stresses, does not simply consist in a recollection, once more, of the task that has been engaged under (or in) the name of ‘deconstruction,’ in France, America, and elsewhere. Rather, what is at stake in this volume of more than six hundred pages is to describe in what sense this critical engagement of deconstruction “obliges” us to rethink the institution, most notably the “institution of philosophy” ( Du droit, 29), and this “to the point of asking oneself what founds or, rather, engages the value of critical interrogation” ( Du droit, 108). More in particular, this work would pose the question as to what precisely constitutes or determines our present responsibility ‘in’ and ‘for’, as well as ‘before’, that relatively new and typically Western institution called the university.

Along the lines of his reading of Kant's The Conflict of the Faculties, Derrida, in his contribution to the 1987 conference devoted to “The States of ‘Theory,’” argues that the phenomenon of deconstruction and the theory with which it is often, and often overhastily identified, cannot claim any proper institutional place for itself.

In this, it could be suggested, it resembles the ‘lower faculty’, the faculty of philosophy of the Kantian academy, the heart of the modern university, which, as Derrida demonstrates in “Mochlos” and in some other pieces collected in Du droit à la philosophie, has to operate on both sides of the line that is said to demarcate the theoretical and the practical, the constative and the performative, the university's inside and its outside. Just as only the paradoxical position of the lower faculty of philosophy can promise a reversal and displacement of the existing hierarchical order, deconstruction and theory seem all the more effective or, rather, the more responsible, the more they acquiesce in their paradoxical marginality and affirm a certain aporetics.

Perhaps no better illustration of this aporetics can be given than the ones Derrida provides in the aforementioned commemorational and inaugural lecture. Here, Derrida explains what it means for deconstruction to revolve in all its central aspects around the institution, notably that of the university, and, more precisely still, around the institution of this institution. Here, too, Derrida explains how the double meaning of the word institution —as a founding “act” and as a founded edifice—is related to philosophy, to the institution of philosophy, without necessarily being in itself strictly or even primarily philosophical. And, if ‘theory’ as well as the academy in which it takes part must be understood as being instituted, this means that it is the effect of an instantiation that no longer lets itself be comprised within the logic of what it is said to found. Therefore, the institution of theory is never philosophical, academic or, for that matter, theoretical as such. And this could be said a fortiori of the injunction which, in turn, calls the said institution (or the institution of its institution, of its academic edifice) into being.

Before even differentiating between so-called theory and deconstruction as well as deconstructionism, Derrida notes in the 1987 Irvine lecture that theory is not “ a scientific theory; it isn't a theorization or a set of theorems”; moreover, theory is not a philosophy, in Kant's or any other generally accepted sense:

No philosopher— stricto sensu —in no tradition and in no philosophical institution of the world, including this country [America], will recognize [the] concept of ‘theoria’ or of theoretics in what is done, said, published under the name of ‘theory’ in some American departments of literature. 15

Also, if theory does not follow the rules of any known episteme or paradigm, without, therefore, being reducible to the realm of mere doxa ; if theory does not stand for “ a theory” in particular, then this formula (theory or, if you like, the ‘moment of theoretical deconstruction’) comes to stand for nothing but “the opening of a space, the emergence of an element in which a certain number of phenomena usually associated with literature will call for trans-, inter-, and above all ultra-disciplinary approaches, which, up to now, met nowhere, in no department, in no area of any discipline” (“Some Statements,” 82).

The reason why this “exportation of discourses outside of their field,” which is also their “mutation” (83) cannot, does not, must not want to claim the title of a “science or a philosophy” is because

it has been accompanied, carried on, provoked, penetrated (… no classical schema of causality seems relevant here ) by a form of questioning and writing … which destabilized the axiomatics, the founding and organizing schemas of science and philosophy … that allowed one to think this new configuration in the mode of self-consciousness.

(“Some Statements,” 83; italics added)

Derrida proposes to think of this “irreducible emergence” as an “effect” of deconstruction, which affects not only the theses and methodologies of science and philosophy, but also, more significantly, the epistemological or theoretical claims of literary criticism (whether that of “New Criticism, formalism, thematism, classical or Marxist historism”), as well as the steady institutionalization of those discourses which belong to “theory”: the neo- and poststructuralisms, the linguistically informed versions of psychoanalysis, feminism, to name only a few.

Rather than belonging to any of the isms, rather than indicating a school of thought of its own, the word deconstruction would stand for the “principle of dislocation” to which all the aforementioned disciplines remain forever subjected. This principle could itself, in turn, neither be located nor dislocated. Deconstruction would be undeconstructable. Rather than being a mere element of the ‘series’ of isms, the principle of deconstruction would, first of all, introduce into this series “an element of perturbation, disorder, or irreducible turmoil” (“Some Statements,” 84).

To describe this principle and its effects in greater detail, Derrida introduces a ‘quasi-concept’ which mimics and displaces Heidegger's notion of ‘thrownness’ ( Geworfenheit ) as much as it reiterates Antonin Artaud's subjectile, namely that of the jetty. In his use of this neologism, Derrida distinguishes, on the one hand,

the force of the movement which throws something or throws itself ( jette or se jette ) forward and backward at the same time, prior to any subject, object, or project, prior to any rejection or abjection, from, on the other hand, its institutional and protective consolidation, which can be compared to the jetty, the pier in a harbor meant to break the waves and maintain low tide for boats at anchor or for swimmers. Of course, these two functions of the jetty are ideally distinct, but in fact they are difficult to dissociate, if not indissociable.

(“Some Statements,” 84; italics added)

The first aspect of the word jetty is that of ‘destabilization’ or even ‘devastation.’ The second is that of stabilization, of ‘stating’ and of ‘ stasis ’ (“Some Statements,” 84). Even though every positive or negative formulation of the task of deconstruction would—necessarily—adopt the form of the static mode of the jetty, this very same form would still allow something else to be seen.

Any statement would betray that, as such, deconstruction ‘itself’ already signals the first ‘resistance to theory’, in the sense of theoretization. In advance, deconstruction thus takes the formless form of a destabilization and devastation of all attempts at stabilizing or erecting a ‘theory’ in thematic and static statements, which would allow one to define the state or the states of ‘theory’ and ‘theories’. 16 This would be another way of saying that deconstruction resists theory because it is neither a positive or ontic science nor a totalizing system that has come to replace the absolute knowledge of speculative reflection:

it not only doesn't fix the text in a thematic or thetic station, a stanze, but it also first deconstructs … the hierarchizing structure, which, in philosophy, as a general metaphysics, a fundamental ontology, a transcendental critique or phenomenology, orders a multiplicity of regions, discourses, or beings under a fundamental or transcendental agency. The deconstructive jetty institutes itself neither as a regional theory (for example, literature) nor as a theory of theories. It is in this way that it is a form of resistance.

(“Some Statements,” 86)

This resistance is the concrete, indeed ethico-political form of the rest, the remaining or remaindering or restance which Derrida articulates throughout his writings. It does not consist in taking a position “against theory,” for in its primary gesture it precedes or exceeds all positioning, theoretical and otherwise. And this is the sole reason that this resistance is, paradoxically, in a position to solicit, evoke, and provoke the ‘hyperactivity’ of theoretical repositioning that has marked the academy since the late 1960s and which interests us here.

This repositioning, in turn, resists the resistance that had called it into being: “This time the resistance institutes—it is indeed essentially instituting—the consolidating and stabilizing structure of the jetty” (88). It can do so with more success by being more or less to the point and thus more or less responsible, as the following quotation demonstrates. But nothing is guaranteed here:

The … stabilizing jetty which resembles the destabilizing jetty most, is what is called poststructuralism, alias deconstructionism. It's not bad. It isn't an evil, and even if it were one, it would be a necessary evil … there is deconstructionism in general each time that the destabilizing jetty closes and stabilizes itself in a teachable set of theorems.

This second moment and mode of the jetty is thus to be regarded as both inevitable and “ risky ” (89), it cannot be avoided, but it is always in danger of perverting the first. Inevitable, indeed necessary, but no less risky, would therefore be any attempt to stress the philosophical or theological underpinnings of deconstruction, its preoccupation with infrastructures or with the quasi-transcendental, no less than, for example, its interest in the mystical, the tradition of negative theology. All this is not to say that Derrida would insist on making

a distinction between the destabilizing jetty (for example deconstructions) and the stabilizing jetty (for example, the reappropriations and the reactions in the form of deconstructionism, Marxist or new historicist theories, or discourses ‘against theory’), as a distinction between the movement which gives momentum, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the inert fallout which, in a style that would remind us of Bergson, would take momentum and life [for example, the “intellectual life”] back down, towards inert solidity. 17

The relation between the two contradictory and, at bottom, incommensurable moments or modes of the jetty should be described completely otherwise, for example with reference to a singular “topology.” For whereas the ‘stabilizing jetty’ is a ‘station’ or edifice that ‘stands’, ‘institutes’, ‘erects’, and, indeed, ‘edifies’, the ‘destabilizing jetty’, Derrida writes, “neither goes up nor down … it may well not go anywhere.” 18 It thus follows a different movement than the reversal of high and low hoped for by Kant. And it would pay for this dubious ‘freedom’ by having even less “status,” institutional or otherwise, than the philosopher in his conflict with the faculties. Unlike the well-known forms of historical or social critique, and with more consequence and rigor, deconstructions would forge their path by way of what has been termed the “passage through the transcendental.” 19 This passage could not hope to bring this thought somewhere else. For, among other things, it consists in the experience of a wandering (rather than marching) through the institutions, revisiting the acts of their foundation, and reenacting these acts in events of commemoration.

Neither low nor high, neither left nor right, the destabilizing jetty of deconstruction could not even be said to have “existence,” in any strict sense of the word: “There is no manifesto for it, no manifestation as such” (93). All this explains why Derrida concludes on an ironic note by acknowledging that the adversaries of deconstruction are only too aware of this. He recalls a speech, reported to him, in which John Searle, “once he had explained his views on literature, announced to his audience that for twenty years deconstruction hasn't existed, or, more precisely, that it has consisted of … a ‘mist’ hiding everything” (“Some Statements,” 93-94). Derrida's response to this somewhat disingenuous, skeptical evaluation of the theoretical and institutional relevance of deconstruction is as consequent as it is disarming. Indeed, Derrida counters, deconstruction “has neither consistency nor existence, and besides, it wouldn't have lasted long anyway if it had. Especially in the States” (“Some Statements,” 94).

The ‘moment of theoretical deconstruction’ precedes its becoming an institution and a mere set of methodological rules. For this reason alone, it escapes all theoretization, all objectivation, all archivization. Deconstruction is the injunction of all ‘theory’ and as such no longer (or not yet) determinable in terms of the common analytical distinctions of the descriptive and the prescriptive, the constative and the performative, the academic and the public, and even the profane and the sacred. Yet, paradoxically, it is precisely this constitutive indeterminacy that makes all the difference in the world, institutionally and otherwise, “especially in the States.” Let me suspend for a moment my interpretation of this final supplementary remark and turn instead to some of the theoretical and practical implications of what has been discussed so far.

That the injunction of ‘theory’ is said to precede its cultural and institutional manifestations, no less than its conceptual determinations, is precisely what makes it at once vulnerable and invulnerable to critique and, indeed, to deconstruction. Vulnerable, since this injunction and the theoretical moment or momentum it is said to provoke must have the features of a merely spectral—non-empirical and non-historical—appearance, of an apparition, which has no direct observable and calculable effects. Invulnerable, since there can be no question of treating ‘theory’, notably the injunction of ‘theory’, as an academic discipline, methodology, or program among others. As a consequence, the deconstructive injunction of ‘theory’ would have never been really or fully part of the structuralist or, for that matter, of the poststructuralist controversy. By its very orientation, it would from the very outset have been forced to remain at a distance from the by now familiar debates around the academic canon, multiculturalism, and the politics of recognition, to say nothing of feminism, postcolonial theory, and the more widely accepted denominator of cultural studies. Or, to put it differently: deconstruction's relationship to these ‘transformations’ of the academic institution would be that of a ‘belonging without belonging’, their conceptual formalization as much as the intensification of their ‘tensions’ or aporias:

In the last two centuries, literary studies, and more widely, the humanities, have played a determining role in the self-awareness of the ‘great’ English and American universities. They consolidated exactly that which had given them their structure: national tradition, the works in the canon, the language, a certain social or ethnic hegemony, and so on. This situation is changing, as is all too clear. What is called ‘deconstruction’ is concerned with (theoretically) and takes part in (practically) a profound historical transformation (techno-scientific, political, socio-economic) which affects the canons, our relation to language and to translation, the frontiers between literature, literary theory, philosophy, the ‘hard’ sciences, psychoanalysis and politics and so on. … It is a question of assuming these tensions, of ‘living’ them as much as of ‘understanding’ them. Those who fear and wish to deny the inescapable necessity of these transformations try to see in deconstruction the agent responsible for such changes, when in my eyes it is above all else a question of trying to understand them, of interpreting them, so as to respond to them in the most responsible fashion possible. 20

This at least formal or analytical distance—a distance that is not simply or easily discernible at the empirical level—could be explained by pointing to what Geoffrey Bennington, in Jacques Derrida, calls the deconstructive “passage through the transcendental” (271). The latter betrays the phenomenological, Husserlian context of Derrida's earliest writings, but it continues to haunt the most recent texts (“Some Statements” makes reference to Husserl's “ Philosophie als strenge Wissenschaft, ” or “Philosophy as an Exact Science”).

It is the “passage through the transcendental”—which is a detranscendentalizing movement in its own right: a passing over of the transcendental—which explains why the deconstructive jetty must be distinguished from all the historicist or culturalist attempts to relativize or secondarize the very notion of ‘the transcendental’, as well as from misreading it as if this notion were nothing but a relic of metaphysical ‘transcendence’. Deconstruction claims that, in so doing, these academic projects are caught in exactly the same kind of performative contradiction they so desperately seek to avoid. Bennington describes this predicament as follows:

any attempt to explain transcendental effects by invoking history must presuppose the historicity of that same history as the very transcendental which this system of explanation will never be able to comprehend … it is the very concept to which appeal is made to explain everything that will never be understood in the explanation. That is basically the stumbling block of any empiricism whatsoever. 21

In spite of—or thanks to—its turbulent reception in literary departments, through the subsequent appropriation by philosophers, theologians, architects, legal scholars and others, Derrida's work would thus circle back, not to some original point of departure, not to France, nor, to be sure, to some continental, European, style of philosophizing, irrecuperable by the American academy; but precisely to a being ‘out of joint’ that made it possible as much as impossible, moribund no less than vital, in the first place.

Needless to say, the statement and prescription cited above—“one cannot and one should not attempt to survey or totalize the meaning of an ongoing process”—could easily provoke the anger of Marxists or new historicists to whom one (rightly or wrongly) ascribes the endeavor of reclaiming matters like the relevance of ‘history’, the ‘social process’, or ‘the political’. 22 Yet, interestingly enough, Derrida gives this anticipated critique all its due:

If deconstructionism were what it is accused of being, and when it is and where it is formalist, aestheticist, ignorant of reality, of history, enclosed in language, word play, books, literature, indifferent to politics—I would consider Marxism and new historicism absolutely legitimate, necessary, urgent. Moreover I believe in a certain necessity, sometimes in a certain novelty, if not of the theory at least of the style of investigation, and thus of certain objects or areas of research, of what presents itself under the title of Marxism or new historicism. … It doesn't seem to me that any rejection of these attempts is desirable or interesting. But as theories, this Marxism and this new historicism have at least one trait in common … in the present stage of their critique. It is that they institute themselves in reaction to a deconstructionist poststructuralism which is itself either nothing but a figure or a stabilizing reappropriation of deconstruction or else a caricatural myth projected by Marxists and new historicists out of self-interest or misunderstanding. 23

A difference and a conflict, therefore, remain. For, if it is stated that the deconstructive ‘jetty’ is intrinsically “motivated” by the call for history (92), it is no less clear that it must also begin by problematizing most of our dominant understandings of history, whether they are informed by Hegel, Marx, Heidegger, or the heralds of the end of history. And it must do this without falling, in turn, into the mere “archivism” or “documentalism” (93) of the historicisms, old or new. Here, again, the task of thinking would be to complicate the alternatives for metaphysics, on the one hand, and for mere empiricism, on the other. The deconstructive call for ‘history’ would be neither one for mediation or sublation, nor one that relies on the mere enumeration of facts. If anything, it could be said to retrace the implications and effects of a spectral logics of inheritance or, in order words, of a logics of spectral inheritance which is, consequently, the inheritance of a specter, in all its uncannyness and monstrosity, that casts its shadow well beyond any determinable past, present, and future.

Against this backdrop, we can understand why Derrida, in retrospect, can note that the Johns Hopkins conference of 1966 might well have had all the characteristic features of a seismic event rather than, say, a change of paradigm or the imposition of yet another episteme:

What is now called ‘theory’ in this country may even have an essential link with what is said to have happened there in 1966. … What is certain is that if something happened there which would have the value of a theoretical event … this something only came to light afterwards and is still becoming more and more clear today. But what is also certain is that nobody, either among the participants or close to them, had any thematic awareness of the event; nobody could take its measure and above all nobody could have or would have dared to program it, to announce or present it as such an event. This is certain; and it is just as certain that if somebody claimed today to program or present a similar event, that person would be mistaken—no doubt about it.

This statement, Derrida acknowledges, has an unmistakable “ prescriptive connotation,” but one, he hastens to add, that has to be circumscribed with much caution, for this “prescriptive connotation,” despite all its resemblance with a performative utterance, is not ethical or political in the strict sense of these words. 24 Nor, Derrida continues, is this singular prescriptivity, tied as it is to the injunction to invent and to do “less boring and more original things,” the expression of mere “taste” and “an aristocratic aestheticism”: it would merely affirm the fact that “something would finally have a chance of happening or taking place, that's all. It isn't certain, it isn't predictable—simply, it is better that something happen. That's all: that something happen, that's what is better, that's all ” (80-81; italics added).

The injunction in question, then, would have to be situated before and beyond ‘theory’, before and beyond every ethicopolitical imperative or aesthetic practice. But no less before and beyond ‘all historical and social reality’. Is this possible? But why, then, does this reveal itself nowhere with more clarity and institutional effects than in the United States?

NOWHERE—BUT IN AMERICA

“Especially in the States.” Derrida's remarkable exclamation, quoted above, recalls the recurring reference, notably in his Mémoires for Paul de Man, to the difficulties involved in understanding the phenomenon of “Deconstruction in America.” In order to explain his hesitation to speak about this topic (directly), Derrida gives several reasons for avoiding the subject. First of all, he writes, “one cannot and one should not attempt to survey or totalize the meaning of an ongoing process. …” 25 ‘Surveying’ or ‘totalizing’ the phenomenon in question—‘surveying’ or ‘totalizing’ any phenomenon whatsoever—would mean to arrest its ‘process’ and take away its promise, its to-come, its à venir. Something, Derrida admits, which, as far as ‘deconstruction’ is concerned, he is in no hurry to do.

In the second place: “In order to speak of ‘deconstruction in America,’ one would have to claim to know what one is talking about, and first of all what is meant or defined by the word ‘America.’ Just what is America in this context?” (18). One could be tempted to think that deconstruction could have taken place nowhere else but in “America,” and that the formulation ‘deconstruction in America’ comes close to expressing a tautology. On this reading, deconstruction would even be another name for “America,” just as “America” would be a name, perhaps the most proper name for ‘deconstruction’.

And yet, Derrida distances himself from this confusing interpretation. If in a secret way deconstruction were to ‘be’ America, it would, as Specters of Marx suggests, be no less identifiable than ‘perestroika’. The significance of the latter was hardly that of a successful transposition of an American socio-political model onto its apparently obsolete Soviet-Russian counterpart. It was no accident, then, that his keynote address at the conference “Whither Marxism?”—which was to evolve into Specters of Marx —was less a scholarly exposition of Marx or a classical modern interpretation of Marx than a “political position-taking.” Derrida explains: “It was uttered first of all in America, but surely also on the subject of America, and doubtless, to an extent that remains to be determined, against a certain America in the new world order that is attempting to impose itself today.” 26 Here, the target would once more be engagement with the religious; for Derrida's target is, first of all, a certain “evangelicalism,” represented most vocally by Francis Fukuyama's The End of History, as well as by the advocates of the so-called New World Order. The latter are contrasted by a Marxian “messianicity” that is said to distinguish itself at least analytically from all concrete “messianisms” that have erupted throughout the history of the positive religions, notably the religions of the Book. Moreover, this Marxian “messianicity” would resemble a certain “Jewishness” that is characterized, first of all, by an “openness toward the future” rather than by an allegiance to any particular doctrine of faith, to any ritual, or to any geopolitically determinable location. It is this openness, then, that prevents the names of deconstruction and America from becoming each other's pars pro toto, that is to say, interchangeable. Instead of calling deconstruction and America each other's proper name, instead of determining them as each other's most proper name, we should, rather, view these ‘names’ as “two open sets which intersect partially according to an allegorico-metonymic figure. … ‘America’ would be the title of a new novel on the history of deconstruction and the deconstruction of history” (32).

Nowhere—but in America. The very formulation ‘in America’, Derrida seems to suggest, is marked by an ambiguity that affects the very coherence of the topological determination it seems to provide. In the first place, Derrida writes, “if deconstruction is in America, ‘in’ can indicate inclusive as well as provisional passage, the being-in-transit of the visitor” (28-29). In the second place, the ‘in’ of the statement ‘deconstruction is in America’, reveals a further complication. That which is said to be ‘in’ America is, by definition, not itself America: “If D is in A, it is not A; if D is A, it is not in, etc.” (29).

What, then, would keep the fiction of ‘America’ alive? Especially, now that for the ‘intellectual life’ il n'y a plus d'Atlantique? And why, moreover, does this insight determine one of the most important features of ‘theory’, ‘especially in the States’? Clearly, one would have to avoid invoking here the common and at bottom stereotypical phantasma of “America” as an indeterminate, open, and endless space in which a transdisciplinary ‘theory’ can break new ground more easily than in the stratified topography of the ‘old world’ and its privileged institutions. What explains the supplementary remark—“especially in the States”—is, perhaps, the following.

Even if it is claimed that for the ‘intellectual life’ il n'y a plus d'Atlantique, it remains no less true that beneath the transatlantic airlifts, linking the American and the European university, there lies an ocean that is more abysmal in its depth and breadth than the gorge that surrounds the campus where Derrida presented his reflections on “The Principle of Reason: The University in the Eyes of Its Pupils.” Derrida makes much of the singular topology of the Cornell campus, whose gorge has to be bridged even though it, in all its deadly sublimity, is said to protect the essence of this university. 27

Something similar could be maintained for the relation France—U.S. as it redefines itself through “theories” traveling back and forth, “crossing frontiers,” as Geoffrey Bennington puts it, “in the airported style of a cultural and linguistic nomadism.” 28 To be sure, the theoretical movement of abstraction, of the formalization that is indissociable from the ‘passage through the transcendental’, is possible only on the condition of a certain desertification, of an endless navigating that seeks to traverse the distance between continents.

Yet, it should be clear from what is said above that ‘theory’, let alone the injunction of ‘theory’, is hardly a specimen of some ‘nomadic thinking’. The latter would conceive of the task of thinking by assuming the possibility of a being able to go elsewhere, to change places. Whatever its peregrinations, the ‘nomadic thinking’ would still somehow, paradoxically, presuppose the confines of a place, for example, of a given institutional context, with respect to which it seeks to situate itself, if only by opposition, negation, or denial. ‘Theory’, by contrast, and in particular the injunction of ‘theory’ that calls it forth or interrupts its inherent tendency to stabilize itself in a theory, operates along different lines and according to a different topology or topolitology. Deconstruction would not be a march through, let alone around, the institution, but the incessant renegotiation of its demarcations. Rather than exiling itself from the institutional space, rather than ignoring its intrinsic aporias, the deconstructive injunction would intervene in an institutional setting while continuing to displace its very structural limitation. In so doing, it could not only transform the conditions of the debate, but also (and, perhaps, first of all) analyze and enhance a transformation in progress or, so to speak, en route. As a traveling theory, deconstruction would have no premeditated destination; its destiny is nowhere in particular. And if this, paradoxically, is nowhere clearer than in America, then the reason for this is hardly that deconstruction is more at home in America than elsewhere, let alone that deconstruction ‘is’ America, or vice versa. 29

The Structuralist Controversy: The Languages of Criticism and The Sciences of Man, ed. Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato, 2nd ed. (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins Press, 1972), xv.

Why, moreover, has Derrida chosen on more than one occasion to pursue his analyses—for example, those devoted to the relation of responsibility to the secret and to ‘figures of death’—with special reference to “‘American’ examples such as “The Purloined Letter,” “Bartleby the Scrivener,” “The Figure in the Carpet,” The Aspern Papers, etc.”? Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, trans. David Wills (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1995), 10n5.

Richard Macksey, “Lions and Squares: Opening Remarks,” The Structuralist Controversy, 2.

J. Arac et al., The Yale Critics: Deconstruction in America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983).

Deconstruction is/in America: A New Sense of the Political, ed. Anselm Haverkamp (New York and London: New York University Press, 1995).

Jacques Derrida, Mémoires for Paul de Man, trans. Cecile Lindsay, Jonathan Culler, Eduardo Cadava, and Peggy Kamuf (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986; rev. and augmented ed., 1989), 14.

Ibid., 15; translation modified.

Jacques Derrida, “The Time Is Out of Joint,” Deconstruction is/in America, 27.

Johnson, The Wake of Deconstruction (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1994), 17.

Sigmund Freud, “A Note upon a Mystic Writing-Pad,” SE XIX, 227-32 (first published 1924); Jacques Derrida, “Freud and the Scene of Writing,” in his Writing and Difference (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1978).

Derrida, “The Time Is Out of Joint,” 30.

Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning & the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 11.

Derrida, “The Time Is Out of Joint,” 17.

Derrida, Du droit à la philosophie (Paris: Galilée, 1990), 403.

Derrida, “Some Statements and Truisms about Neologisms, Newisms, Postisms, Parasitisms, and Other Small Seismisms,” trans. Anne Tomiche, in The States of “Theory,” History, Art, and Critical Discourse, ed. David Carrol (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 81.

“Deconstruction resists theory because it demonstrates the impossibility of closure, of an ensemble or totality on an organized network of theorems, laws, rules, methods”; ibid., 86.

Ibid., 93; italics added.

“The destabilizing jetty doesn't go up. On the contrary, it is the stabilizing jetty that goes upwards. It stands; it is a standing, a station, or a stanza; it erects, institutes, and edifies. It is edifying, essentially edifying. The destabilizing jetty goes neither up nor down; it may not go anywhere; “Some Statements,” 93.

Geoffrey Bennington and Jacques Derrida, Jacques Derrida (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 271.

Jacques Derrida, Points … Interviews, 1974-1994, ed. Elisabeth Weber, trans. Peggy Kamuf et al. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 413.

Geoffrey Bennington and Jacques Derrida, Jacques Derrida (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 281-82. Bennington goes on to argue that the ‘point’ here is hardly

to endorse the structure whereby “regional” disciplines necessarily appeal for their legitimacy to a last instance—i.e. philosophy—even thought of as “fundamental ontology,” but to show how any attempt to unseat philosophy from a classically defined region can only replace in the final instance something which will play the part of philosophy … every system excludes or expels something which does not let itself be thought within the terms of the system, and lets itself be fascinated, magnetized, and controlled by this excluded term, its transcendental's transcendental.

(283-84; italics added)

One might object that this account is in danger of resembling a strategy of mystification, according to which deconstruction would (have to) take on a contemporary form of mysticism. But the risk of the mystical and its mystifications is inevitable where, precisely, the question of foundation, institution, whether of the State, the law or the university, is at issue.

Derrida, “Some Statements,” 90.

Ibid.; italics added.

Derrida, Mémoires for Paul de Man, 17.

Derrida, “The Time Is Out of Joint,” 32.

Derrida also speaks of “l'abîme d'un océan” with reference to his teaching in Paris and at Yale, in Parages (Paris: Galilée, 1986), 13.

Geoffrey Bennington and Jacques Derrida, Jacques Derrida, 332.

It comes as no surprise, then, that Derrida responds with reservation to the eagerness on the part of some to reduce ‘deconstruction’ or whatever is undertaken in its name to a predominantly American academic affair that is solely concerned with the formalization of certain principles of ‘reading’:

Some very interesting things have happened in this regard in the United States. It would require long analyses—that I have begun here and there. But I am very suspicious concerning this very frequent and very interested calculation that consists in referring me back to the United States or putting me under American house arrest. What is one trying to do or to defend in this way? I leave you to imagine it. No, I spend only a few days, a few weeks in the United States each year. Whatever may be the intensity of this experience, whatever may be the generosity but also the aggressivity (you have no idea) that I encounter there, the things that count for my work are also going on elsewhere, outside of Europe, in Europe, and for example, yes, in France.

(Derrida, Points, 351)

"Deconstruction - Hent de Vries (essay date 1999)." Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism, edited by Janet Witalec Project Editor, Vol. 138. Gale Cengage, 2003, 25 June 2024 <https://www.enotes.com/topics/deconstruction/critical-essays/criticism-overviews-and-general-studies#critical-essays-criticism-overviews-and-general-studies-hent-de-vries-essay-date-1999>

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Deconstruction: An American Tale

Lampooned as a dangerous import from Paris, deconstruction is in fact a distinctively American phenomenon.

Gregory Jones-Katz

September 30, 2016

The year of the United States Bicentennial found French philosopher Jacques Derrida feeling rather intimidated. The University of Virginia—founded by Thomas Jefferson—had invited him to compare America’s Declaration of Independence to France’s Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen. The philosophe balked. Rather than analyze the two foundational texts, he chose instead to speak solely on the Declaration. Though Jefferson was its principal author, Derrida observed, the document’s “signer” was “the ‘good people’”—the American nation—who used the text to “declare themselves free and independent.” Yet, because there was no “signer . . . before the text of the Declaration which itself remains the producer and guarantor of its own signature,” it remained undecidable whether “the ‘good people’” existed before or rather came into being with the Declaration. This document, Derrida argued, showed how the American people both proclaimed and constructed their identity.

With this one claim Derrida assimilated one of America’s founding texts into his philosophical project, locating the deconstructive stance and style of reading—ironic, reflexive, demanding, prescient, undermining dualisms and foundational truths—at the heart of the nation. If that were the case, could it really be true, as so many academics on the Left and the Right during the 1970s and ’80s claimed, that deconstruction was a destructive import from Paris’s Rive Gauche, one that threatened literature, history, perhaps even truth, justice, and the American way to boot?

Though the specter of the European theorist persists, deconstruction was largely an indigenous creation.

Viewing deconstruction as a foreign mode of interpretation obscures the fertile soil in which it took root and flourished in the Untied States. Central to the story of deconstruction, but often neglected, are the various American contexts that cultivated and disseminated deconstructive undertakings. Even though the image—to some, the bogeyman—of the European theorist persists, the truth is that deconstructive literary theory was largely an indigenous creation. This change of perspective throws new light on the scapegoating of French Theory for the decline of the humanities. As it turns out, what began as a rarified method of reading literature practiced in seminar rooms and lecture halls has permeated many arenas of American life, including quite a few far beyond the academy.

If one had to pinpoint ground zero for the eruption of deconstruction onto the American stage, it would have to be Yale, where a group of literary critics, theorists, and philosophers of literature—Harold Bloom, Paul de Man, Geoffrey Hartman, and J. Hillis Miller—executed deconstructive readings with great élan and to great intellectual and pedagogical effect during the ’70s and early ’80s. Barbara Johnson, a graduate student and then professor of French and comparative literature during this period, explained in a 1987 interview that Yale’s comparative literature department played a key role not so much in domesticating as in generating deconstructive practices in America, and it did so on distinctly American terms. By promoting a pluralism that undermined a national canon and aimed to increase the prospect of communication across cultures—quintessential mid- to late-twentieth century Cold War American values—the discipline of comparative literature itself nurtured deconstructive stances, both at Yale and elsewhere. The first deconstructive courses in U.S. departments of literature were offered in Yale’s comparative literature department, for example, beginning with a class on Nietzsche taught by de Man in 1971. By the early ’80s, several generations of American academics venerated de Man’s work, while their European counterparts were just beginning to discover him.

Yale’s institutional history and its relation to contemporary American politics and social life helped to disseminate deconstructive thinking throughout the United States. Until the mid-seventies, Yale had boasted several prominent New Critics, including the movement’s most recognizable figures: Cleanth Brooks, W. K. Wimsatt, and Robert Penn Warren. Their work, popular in American literature departments and high school English classes following World War II, stressed “close reading,” viewing works of literature as self-contained, self-referential aesthetic objects. The upheavals of the sixties, however, produced a younger generation of literary critics with a longing for an interpretive theory that emphasized the political and social dimensions of literature, as well as differences and divisions within it—precisely those aspects of prose and poetry that the New Critics fused into an autonomous and unified whole. By subverting the New Critical way of reading, the Yale Group—who in their distinctive ways considered great poetry not a harmony realized via paradoxes, ironies, and ambiguities but a dissonance achieved by way of contradictions, inconsistencies, and uncertainties—tilled propitious soil in the American academy.

What began as a rarified method of reading literature has permeated many arenas of American life.

A younger generation of American literary critics saw deconstructive writers mirroring the politics of the time. As Johnson observed, while “there’s no political program . . . I think there’s a political attitude, which is to examine authority in language.” Such political power in language came issuing forth from the Nixon White House, the television news anchor, the professoriate. There was also the political valence of the literary figures, topics, and themes celebrated by Geoffrey Hartman, Harold Bloom, and Paul de Man. Through the ’60s and into the early ’70s, Yale School members played a large role in revising the reputation of Romantic poets and writers, such as William Wordsworth and William Blake, whom modernist writers such as T. S. Eliot had portrayed as puerile and politically unsophisticated. In deft deconstructive hands, however, the Romantics become masters of the unsettling paradox, the poignant irony, and the disturbing ambiguity of democratic and individualist commitments. All told, the potent mix of institutional, political, and intellectual contexts at Yale in the seventies amplified the zeal among younger critics for the deconstructive enterprise.

Cultivated at Yale, deconstruction began to ramify to other departments and locales. Consider the influential 1976 debate, “The Limits of Pluralism,” that took place at the first session of the Modern Language Association’s Division on Philosophical Approaches to Literature. This panel signaled a shift in the orientation of American literary criticism toward more self-consciously philosophical methodologies and marked the wider attention given across America to questions about the constraints of identity and meaning. In the turbulent early ’70s, pluralist discourse experienced a resurgence, driven in part by the enduring Civil Rights struggle and the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which brought a steady influx of Asian and Latino immigrants to America. The abstract philosophical concerns at “The Limits of Pluralism” about the limits of textual meaning echoed larger political and social concerns about the parameters of pluralism. The MLA session also helped build deconstructive inroads into American English literature departments. Far from what some saw as the anti-pluralism and radical skepticism (and implied Anti-Americanism) of Miller’s style of reading, many English professors felt Miller offered teachers a vision for how to fulfill their pedagogical duty. As odd as it may seem to some readers today, American teachers of literature, as early as 1976, considered deconstruction as an affirmative rather than a negative interpretive practice.

While deconstructive criticism began to jump from departments of comparative literature to departments of English literature by the mid ’70s, the work of Derrida, who trained as a philosopher in the continental phenomenological tradition at France’s elite École Normale Supérieure, remained largely ignored (at best) or vilified (at worst) throughout North American departments of philosophy. There are several reasons for the poor reception. The first translated works of or about Derrida portrayed his claims as the latest example of a long line of French solipsism, relativism, and nihilism. Other portrayals failed to transpose the French intellectual contexts of Derrida’s work into the literary critical scene in the United States. In still other accounts, Derrida’s deconstruction was portrayed as an enemy of the analytic philosophical tradition dominant in Anglo-American departments of philosophy since the ’50s. Gaining prominence in part due to Cold War fears of the politicization of knowledge, this tradition modeled philosophical thinking on the sciences, valorizing its socially and historically disengaged conception of truth, language, and method. The perceived division between analytic and continental philosophical traditions in the American academy was further exacerbated by a string of broadsides in high-profile publications against deconstruction. While the authors of these publications may have intended to protect the purity of philosophy and core goals of the humanities more broadly, such textual assaults, launched from both the Left and the Right, obscured the exciting, innovative, and increasingly diverse deconstructive work pursed in the United States.

In fact, deconstructive undertakings began to appear with more frequency and more variety during the eighties in disciplines and fields across the humanities and social sciences. Derrida himself recognized, in a 1979 interview, that “deconstruction” was being applied in ways that he could not have predicted nor had any intention of controlling. The word was making unexpected leaps, creeping into almost every nook and cranny of the American academy and beyond. All the while, the deconstructive endeavors of the Yale School continued to ferment in departments of literature, and did so via teaching, publications, and lectures. To give just a few examples: Barbara Johnson helped make Derrida’s work accessible to Anglophone readers and cemented Mary Shelley’s place in the Romantic literary canon. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (a student of Miller at Yale) penned groundbreaking deconstructive work that helped create the field of queer studies. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (another student of de Man) applied deconstructive interpretive tactics to diverse theoretical engagements and textual analyses in feminism, Marxism, and postcolonialism. Others developed deconstruction’s concerns by questioning the binary oppositions that structure society and enforce power relations. Joan Wallach Scott’s rejection of traditional gender categories, for instance, helped launch the field of gender history, and Judith Butler (who received her Ph.D. in philosophy from Yale) extended that work to shape a generation of scholarship and activism. By the late ’80s, deconstructive reading had moved from literature to history and society at large.

If Reagan’s America can be said to have consolidated and reinforced traditional values in the public sphere, a ’90s America instead advanced diversity and difference, and deconstructive techniques rapidly spread in this environment. Take artistic life, for example. In 1988, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City offered a “deconstructivist architecture” exhibition . Though only a minority of the architects included, such as Peter Eisenman, directly engaged Derrida’s work, what united them, MoMA’s exhibition pamphlet explained, was their use of “twisted volumes, warped planes, and clashed lines” to “intentionally violate the cubes and right angles of modernism. Despite their radical appearance the projects . . . are essentially traditional forms that have been subverted or displaced.”

We talk now of deconstructing not just texts and philosophical systems, but recipes and men’s wear.

Today, deconstructive habits of mind within the academy are largely considered not so much controversial as passé. Still, there remains the question of how and why the deconstructive tradition became such a formidable pattern of thought in the United States. To answer that question, Americans might—in an ironic twist—consider the February 2014 protests in France against the legalization of same-sex marriage. Those protestors objected to the equality advanced by the new grade school pedagogy ostensibly inspired by American gender theory, above all that of deconstructionist Judith Butler. “La théorie du genre,” according to French protestors, originated on the other side of the Atlantic. We might also consider why, as Fredric Jameson noted in 2015, Americans tend to believe the “good tidings” of theory—including deconstruction—were brought from Europe, while Chinese literary scholars, say, consider theory an American invention. These perceptions of the origin and flow of ideas should give pause to those who consider deconstruction essentially French.

Though it began as an academic theory, deconstruction has come to pervade even popular culture in English—a remarkable accomplishment if one is accustomed to hearing about the social irrelevance of the humanities. We talk now of deconstructing not just texts and philosophical systems, gender binaries or sites of political power, but recipes and men’s wear . Even if we no longer hear distant echoes of Derrida or de Man in these formulations, the ubiquity of the word in our cultural vocabulary points to a distinctively American phenomenon. With the academic culture wars largely behind us, it is time to soberly deconstruct conventional wisdom about the history of deconstruction.

Gregory Jones-Katz is a cultural and intellectual historian. He is Lecturer in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen, and his work has appeared in Intellectual History Review , Raritan: A Quarterly Review , and Derrida Today .

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Reverse logistics in the construction industry: status quo, challenges and opportunities.

1. Introduction

1.1. advocating rl in the construction industry, 1.2. research objectives, 2. materials and methods, 3.1. publication and growth trend, 3.2. publication sources, countries and authors collaborative network, 3.3. keywords co-occurrence analysis, 4. discussion, 4.1. barriers to rl implementation, 4.1.1. policy and legal barriers, 4.1.2. cognitive barriers, 4.1.3. economic barriers, 4.1.4. supply chain management barriers, 4.1.5. technical and equipment barriers, 4.1.6. barrier resolution strategies, 4.2. optimizing the rlsc, 4.2.1. optimization of material flow, optimization of rl network, optimization of logistics technology, 4.2.2. optimization of financial flow, optimization of financial network, optimization of cost, 4.2.3. optimization of information flow, 4.3. conceptual framework for rlsc ecosystems, 5. conclusions, author contributions, data availability statement, conflicts of interest.

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Click here to enlarge figure

Author	Research Methodology	Scope of the Study
Couto and Couto [ ]	Literature review + Case	Portugal
del Río Merino et al. [ ]	Literature review + Case	EU
Tingley and Davison [ ]	Case + Model	Britain
Yuan, [ ]	Literature review + Focus group	China
Jaillon and Poon [ ]	Literature review + Case	China
Ajayi et al. [ ]	Focus group + Questionnaire	Britain
Chileshe et al. [ ]	Questionnaire	Australia
Hosseini et al. [ ]	Literature review	Global
Rameezdeen et al. [ ]	Interviews + Model	Australia
Thai [ ]	Literature review	Global
Tingley et al. [ ]	Interviews	Britain
Nikmehr et al. [ ]	Questionnaire + Model	Iran
Zaman et al. [ ]	Literature review + Case	America
Machado et al. [ ]	Literature review	Global
Balasubramanian and Shukla [ ]	Interviews	The United Arab Emirates
Cai and Waldmann [ ]	Literature review	Global
Akinade et al. [ ]	Focus group	Britain
Bao et al. [ ]	Case + site visit + Interviews	China
Correia et al. [ ]	Literature review + Questionnaire	Brazil
Koc and Okudan [ ]	Literature review + Focus group + Model	Turkey
Bao and Lu [ ]	Case + site visit + Interviews	China
Charef et al. [ ]	Literature review	Global
Pimentel et al. [ ]	Literature review + Focus group + Model	Portugal
Jayasinghe et al. [ ]	Interviews + Model	Australia
Wu et al. [ ]	Literature review + Questionnaire	China

	Approach				Objective
Author	Two-Stage Stochastic	Game Theory	MILP	MINLP	Cost or Profit	Social Impacts	Environmental Impacts
Rahimi and Ghezavati [ ]	×		×		×	×	×
Jahangiri et al. [ ]	×		×		×
Trochu et al. [ ]	×		×		×		×
Shi et al. [ ]				×	×		×
Yao et al. [ ]	×	×	×		×
Lin et al. [ ]			×		×		×
Trochu et al. [ ]	×		×		×	×	×
Xu et al. [ ]			×		×		×
Pan et al. [ ]			×		×

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Chen, X.; Qiu, D.; Chen, Y. Reverse Logistics in the Construction Industry: Status Quo, Challenges and Opportunities. Buildings 2024 , 14 , 1850. https://doi.org/10.3390/buildings14061850

Chen X, Qiu D, Chen Y. Reverse Logistics in the Construction Industry: Status Quo, Challenges and Opportunities. Buildings . 2024; 14(6):1850. https://doi.org/10.3390/buildings14061850

Chen, Xiaomin, Dong Qiu, and Yunxin Chen. 2024. "Reverse Logistics in the Construction Industry: Status Quo, Challenges and Opportunities" Buildings 14, no. 6: 1850. https://doi.org/10.3390/buildings14061850

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Deconstruction
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What Is Deconstruction?
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Deconstruction
deconstruction, form of philosophical and literary analysis, derived mainly from work begun in the 1960s by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, that questions the fundamental conceptual distinctions, or "oppositions," in Western philosophy through a close examination of the language and logic of philosophical and literary texts. In the 1970s the term was applied to work by Derrida ...
On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism on ...
Deconstruction has been variously presented as a philosophical position, a political or intellectual strategy, and a mode of reading. Students of literature and literary theory are doubtless most interested in its power as a method of reading and interpretation, but if our goal is to describe and evaluate the practice of deconstruction in ...
PDF DECONSTRUCTION: THEORY AND PRACTICE. By Christopher Norris. London and
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Used as a method of literary critique, deconstruction refocuses attention on a work as open-ended, endlessly available to interpretation, and far beyond the reach of authorial intention. Deconstruction traces how language generates meaning both within a text and across texts, while insisting that such meaning can only ever be provisional." ...
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18 What Is Deconstruction?

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A Note about Structuralism (and Post-Structuralism)

An Excerpt from Deconstruction Scholarship

From “Différance” by Jacques Derrida (1982) (translated by Alan Bass)

Close Reading in Deconstruction

Applying Deconstruction Techniques to Literature

“The Glass Mountain” by Donald Barthelme

Deconstruction’s Limitations

Structuralism and Deconstruction Scholars

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