Sce Reports 8

SCE REPORTS 8

DECONSTRUCTIVE CRITICISM:

DIRECTIONS

FALL, 1980 SCE REPORTS # 8 FALL, 1980 - "DECONSTRUCT1 VE CRI TIC ISM: DIRECT IONS"

Guest Editor's Foreword VINCENT B. LEITCH ...... 3

"Nothing Fails Like Success" BARBARA JOHNSON ...... 7

Responses:

"What is Deconstruction, and Why Are They Writing All Those Graff-ic Th~ngsAbout l t"? SCE Reports is pub1 ished by The, Society JOSEPH N. R I DDEL ...... 17 for Critical Exchange, a not4owrofit "Retr~evingHeidegger's De-Struction" corporation organized to encourage co- WILL l AM V. SPANOS ...... 30 operative research in criticism and theory. Material published in SCE Reports is copy- "The Art of Being Taken By Surpr~se" JERRY AL lNE FL l EGER ...... 54 righted by the Society, with rights re-assigned to authors upon publication. For informa- "Tak~ngand Being Taken" tion, contact: JERROLD E. HOGLE ...... '68 "Of Polit~csand Limits: Derrida Re-Marx" Leroy Searle, Secretary ANDREW PARKER ...... 83 Society for Critical Exchange 6273 19th Avenue N .E . NEWS AND NOT ICES ...... 105 Seattle, Washington 981 15 "A Selected Bibliography of Deconstructive Criticism" R1 CHARD A. BARNEY ...... Suppl emnt We grateful ly acknowledge the assistance of the English Departments of Mercer University and the University of Washington in the preparatiori of this issue. Special thanks to Allen Dunn and Steve Cole for production assistance.

a 1980, SCE SCE REPORTS

Some of the best minds of the present genera- tion have taken up deconstruction. Who are these people?

Several groups comprise the "corporation" of deconstruction. First, there is a loose band of French intellectuals, associated in the late 1960s and early 1970s with the journal TEL QUEL, including most prominently Roland Baxthes, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault and Julia bisteva. All in alpha- betical order. Second, a stellax enclave of Ameri- can literary critics, residing at Yale University since the early 1970s, encompasses Harold Bloom, Paul de Man, Geoffrey Hartman and J. Hillis Miller. Teaching regularly at Yale since the middle 1970s as a visiting professar, Jacques Derrida binds these two companies. Third, a klatch of young French intellectuals, linked with Derrida during the late Copyright @ 1980 1970s in connection with the Parisian publishing house Flammarion, adds to the group Sylviane Agacin- by ski, Sarah Kofman, Philippe Iacoue-Labarthe a& The Society for Critical Exchange, I nc. Jean-Luc Nancy. Fourth, a small cadre of American literary scholars, identified since the mid 19709 with the journal BOUNDAI1Y 2, involves Paul All rights reserved. The Society for BOG, Joseph Riddel and William V. Spanos. A number of Critical Exchange is a not-for-profit other ranking intellectuals, connected with one or corporation for the advancement of co- more of these groups or people, brings to the "move- operative research in criticism and ment" Gilles Deleuze, Eugenio Donato, Rodolphe Gas- chg , Barbara Johnson, Jacques Lacan, Jean-Rangois theory. For information, contact: Lyotard, Jeffrey Hehlman, EdHard Said and Cayatri The Society for Critical Exchange, Inc. Spivak. The list of "interested parties" is not nearly complete. One could add dedicated transla- 6273 19th Avenue N. E . tors, vehement opponents, emerging British devotees, Seattle, Washington 981 15 and still others. Positively or negatively, many minds are taken with deconstruction. SCE REPORTS SCE REPORTS

As a scholarly group, the "deconstructors" ex- hibit professional ties with or serious interests in and the Society for Critical Ecchange, I decided to phenomenology, structuralism, psychoanalysis, Marx- concentrate the meeting on "Deconstructive Criticism: ism and semiology. Any particular deconstructor may Directions." I convinced my colleagues on the Organ- devote herself to one, several or all of these izing Committee, then set out to recruit Barbara fields. In any case, the major forerunners are Max, Johnson, a young Yale deconstructor, to deliver tho Nietzsche, Freud, Saussure and Heidegger. And the main paper. After Professor Johnson agreed, I in- leading contemporary is unquestionably Jacques Der- vited Joseph Hiddel and William Spanos to serve on rida: his works constitute the canonical texts. the panel as respondents. Meanwhile, I sent out In America the major figure is Paul de Man. The through the MU NEWSLl3TTER a nationwide call for pro- most unforgiving purists might (and lately do) ex- posals on the announced topic, From the numerous communicate numerous pretenders and piddlers, but proposals received, three were selected8 Jerry Derrida and de Man remain singularly above any her- Aline Flieger, Jerrold Hogle and Andrew Parker all esy or vague suspicion. generously offered to contribute written responses to Barbara Johnson's position paper. Finally, T en- When in the mid 1970s deconstruction as a move- listed Richard Barney to put together a Selected ment expanded, taking in new adherents and numerous Bibliography of Deconstructive Criticism, which com- opponents, it reached a crisis stage, which has con- plements existing and forthcoming lists. All these tinued up to the present moment. The "doctrines" materials--the main paper, the responses and the bib- appear in danger of dilution or distortion. Sur- liography--make up Number 8 of the SCE HEPOdTS. prised, shocked or disturbed, the early "founders" sometimes express inchoate regret or knowing pessi- Taking up the topic "Deconstructive Criticism: mism at this turn of events. The charm of their Directions;' Barbara Johnson begins with the contin- churnings emerges in a snippy nostalgia. uing crisis: the diminishment of deconstruction through dilution and dogmatism, She suggests a Coming into the onrush of deconstruction in strategy, a tactics of ignorance, to keep vital the 1976, I was exhilarated to find an energetic alter- analytical energy of deconstruction, For his part native to pallid formalism tinged with histori- Joseph Hiddel questions whether or not deconstruc- cism, which my pooped-out teachers had all more or tion, as rigorously operated by Derrida and de Man, less propounded. What seemed a period of decay to has actually spread beyond a very few other practi- the "founders" of deconstruction struck me as a tioners. Along the way Riddel portrays several dom- time of intellectual frenzy and new freedom. I have inant modcs of reduction that turn deconstruction borne such sentiment for five years now. In this I into a domesticated systematics. Attacking decon- seem one part Miranda and one part Pollyanna. Al- struction frontally, William Spanos dramatizes together too youthful and naive. Withal too cute. Derridean practice as a falling off from Heider- A five-year smile. Yet the spread of deconstruction gerian destruction. He characterizes deconstructive remains good news to me. interpretation as an ahistorical and formalist critical mode, doomed to rapid institutionalization Charged with organizing the fifth annual joint and unavoidable collaboration with technocratic cul- Discussion Session of the Modern Language Association ture. SCE REPORTS SCE REPORTS

In her response, Jerry Aline Flieger extends the project of deconstruction by grafting its Barbara Johnson "strange logic" onto the Freudian-Lacanian logic of Yale University the Unconscious. In doing so, she demonstrates a striking consonance between the "analytics" of decon- NOTHING FAILS LIKE SUCCESS struction and of contemporary psychoanalysis. Dis- turbed by Johnson's "strategy of ignorance," Jerrold As soon as any radically innovative thought Hogle problematizes the ubiquitous desire-to-say or becomes an -ism, its specific groundbreaking will-to-meaning--the progranunatic intentionality-- force diminishes, its historical notoriety which drives all deconstructive analysis. He urges increases, and its disciples tend to become more inquiry into the suspicious "rational" discursive simplistic, more dogmatic, and ultimately more practices of deconstruction and into its increasingly conservative, at which time its power becomes complacent and predictable lust for sure success, institutional rather than analytical. The fact Taking off from Johnson, Andrew Parker examines the that what is loosely called deconstructionism ambiguous relationship of EIarxiat,discourse to is now being widely institutionalized in the Derridean deconstruction. fiather than confirming United States seems to me both intriguing and the apparent "absence" of Marx in Derrida's texts, paradoxical, but also a bit unsettling, although Parker situates the Marxist problematics, an en- not for the reasons advanced by most of its crypted "thematics," somewhere within the = of the opponents. The question I shall ask is the deconstructionist consciousness. following^ how can the deconstructive impulse retain its critical energy in the face of its In its most virile and virulent form deconstruc- own success? What can a reader who has felt tion shows itself more metacritical than critical: the surprise of intellectual discovery in a its objects of analysis are critical beliefs and work by Jacques Derrida or Paul de Man do practices. When it turns away from metacriticism, to remain in touch not so much with the content all involved--insiders and outsiders, friends and of the discovery kt with the intellectual foes, prophets and pests--get suspicious or uneasy, upheaval of the surprise? And sometimes plain nasty. The dynamics of such disturbance emerge variously and unconsciously in I would like to begin by examining briefly most discussions of deconstruction. The essays in two types of accusations commonly directed this issue testify one after another to this curi- zainst deconstruction I the literarily conserva- ous drama. The issue of the "meta" needs to register tive, which accuses deconstruction of going too on the record. Questions of lineage, pedigree and far, and the politically radical, which accuses rights remain. A disputed future looms. Boblems deconstruction of not going far enough. The of inheritance and fortune. Tax us. first type comes from well-established men of letters who attem~tto defend their belief in the bsic communicability of meanings and valiie~ against what is said to be the deconstructionists' relativism, nihilism, or self-indulgent love of meaninglessness. What I shall try to determine SCE REPORTS SCE REPORTS

is not whether misunderstanding is a mere accident or the inevitable fate of reading, but The logic behind such utterances is the logic rather what the relation is between deconstruc- of binary opposition, the principle of non-contradiction, often thought of as the very essence of tion and the type of logic on which these Logic as such. opponents' accusations of relativism and solip- The arguments can be reduced to the following logical formulas: sism are based. Consider the following sentences taken from well-known critiques of deconstructionr 1. If all readings are misreadings, In revisionist criticism the first con- then all readings are equally valid. sequence of calling discourse itself into question is the proposition that all criti- 2. If there is no such thing as an cism amounts to misreading, and thus one objective reading, then all readings are reading is as legitimate as another.' based on subjective preferences.

But if all interpretation is misinter- 3. If there is no absolute truth, then pretation, and if all criticism (like all everything is relative. history) of texts can engage only with a critic's own misconstruction, why bother 4. To criticize is to be skeptical; to carry on the activities of interpreta- to put in question is to dismiss. tion and criticism?2 In other words, if not absolute, then In the absence of any appeal to such a relative; if not objective, then subjective; if coercive reality to which the plurality of you are not for something, you are against it. Now, my understanding of what is most radical subjectivities can be referred, all perspectives become equally valid. 3 in deconstruction is precisely that it questions this basic logic of binary opposition, but not Certainty and piety of all kinds are in a simple, binary, antagonistic way. Consider the following passage from Derrida's Dissemination: systematically undermined in favor of a universal relativism of values and judgment. Just as the revisionists are led to reduce It is thus not simply false to say that the act of criticism to a given critic's Mallarm6 is a Platonist or a Hegelian. subjective preference, so do professors it is above all not true. And vice versa. relegate judgment of all sorts to the students' subjective preferences .& Instead of a simple ;either/orn structure, deconstruc tion attempts to elaborate a discourse What Deconstruction urges is not a that says neither "either/or", nor "both/andl' new system of thought but skepticism nor even "neither/norH, while at the same time toward all the old ways, which are construed not totally abandoning these logics either. The as really only one way.5 very word "deconstruction" is meant to undermine the either/or logic of the opposition "construe - SCE REPORTS SCE REPORTS -

tion/destruction". Deconstruction is both, it is that puts in question the very separability of the neither, and it reveals the way in which both pleasure principle and the reality principle, construction and destruction are themselves not something that continuously generates effects that what they appear to be. Deconstruction both can be explained by neither. Freud called this opposes redefines; it both reverses an something the death instinct, but this death opposition reworks the terms of that opposi- instinct is to be understood as what ceaselessly tion so that what was formerly understood by escapes the mastery of understanding and the them is no longer tenable. In the case of the logic of binary opposition by exhibiting some much publicized opposition between speech and "other" logic one can neither totally comprehend writing, deconstruction both appears to grant nor exclude. It is the attempt to write with to writing the priority traditionally assigned this "other" logic that produces the appearance to speech redefines "writing" as diffe'rance of obscurity in many deconstructive texts. Any so that it can no longer simply mean "marks on statement that affirms while using a logic a page" but can very well also refer to thbt different from the logic of binary opposition aspect of spoken speech that is no,rmally occulted will necessarily not conform to binary notions by traditional notions of what speech is. In the of "clarity". case of the opposition between objectivity and subjectivity, deconstruction seems to locate the Hence, if deconstruction focuses on the act moment of meaning-making in the non-objectivity of reading rather than on the objective meaning of the act of reading rather than in the inherent of a text, this in no way entails any greater givens of a text, but then the text seems degree of self-indulgence than the belief in already to anticipate the reading it engenders, conventional values does -- on the contrary, and at the same time the reader's "subjectivity" at its best it undoes the very comforts of is discovered to function something like a text, mastery and consensus that underlie the illusion that is, something whose conscious awareness of tht objectivity is situated somewhere outside meaning and desire is only one aspect of a complex the self. Thus, the incompatibility between unconscious signifying system which determines dec ons truc tion and its c onservative detractors consciousness as only one of its effects. To is an incompatibility of logics. While tradi- imply that subjectivity is structured like a tionalists say that a thing cannot be both A and machine, as Paul e Man does in his essay "The not-A, deconstructors open up ways in which A Purloined Ribbon'? is both to subvert the opposi- is necessarily but unpredictably already differ- tion between subject and object (since a machine ent from A. is considered to be an object) and to displace the traditional notion of what a subject is. If Now we come to the second type of critique the original opposition between subject and object of deconstruction, which accuses it of not living corresponds, as Gerald Graff would have it, to up to its own claims of radicality, of working the opposition between the pleasure principle with too limited a notion of textuality, and of and the reality principle, what deconstruction applying its critical energy only within an shows is that there is something else involved institutional structure that it does not question SCE REPORTS SCE REPORTS

has to include itself in its own consequences. and therefore confirms? This charge, which judges If there is nothing outside the text, then how deconstruction against its own claims to an can locus of research or action be considered unflagging critical stance, is one which decon- a priori as illegitimate? structi on must in fact continuously make against itself. Any discourse that is based on the The final reason for the conservatism of some questioning of boundary lines must never stop forms of deconstruction is more pervasive: in questioning its om. To reserve the deconstmc- questioning the nature of knowledge and causality, tive stance solely for literary criticism without deconstruction has often given nothing but nega- analyzing its institutional underpinnings and tive help in the attempt to read literature or economic and social relations with the world is philosophy with history and biography. In saying to decide where the boundaries of the very critique that history is a fiction, a text subject to of boundaries lie. To read a text apart from the ideological skewings and mystifications, and historical and biographical conditions and that it cannot be relied upon as a source of writings that participate in its textual network objective knowledge, deconstructive theory some- is to limit a priori the kinds ~f'~uestionsthat times seems to block all access to the possibility can be asked. Why, therefore, do some deconstruc- of reading explicitly "referential" documents in tors tend to avoid going beyond the limits of the con juaction with literary or speculative texts. literary text? Yet in practice, we find Derrida drawing upon Freud's life and letters in his analysis of There are, I think, three reasons for this Beyond the Pleasure Principle (in La Carte Fos- unwarranted restriction. The first is entailed m),and DeMan often beginning an article by the current institutionalization of decon- with a historical account that in sane way struction: the more it becomes entrenched as the doubles the rhetorical problem he is aboui to self-definition of some literary critics in discuss. The question, then, is how to use their opposition to other literary critics, the history and biography deconstmctively, how to more it will resist problematizing the institu- seek in them not answers, causes, explanations, tional conditions of literary criticism as such. or origins, but new questions and new ways in The other two reasons spring out of an over- which the literary and the non-literary texts alike simplified understanding of certain aspects of can be made to read and rework each other. deconstructive theory. To say, as Derrida has said, that there is nothing outside the text I would now like to outline a few general is not to say that the reader should read only remarks about how to avoid becoming too comfortable one piece of literature in isolation from in the abyss. To go back to the original objection history, biography, etc. It is to say that that "if all readings are misreadings then all nothing can be said to be & a text, subject to readings are equally valid," how is it possible the diffe'rance, the non-immediacy, of presence to maintain that some readings are better than or meaning. Even the statement that there is others in a way that cannot be entirely reduced nothing outside the text cannot be taken to be the to a binary opposition? Since it is obvious that absolute certainty it appears to be, since it SCE REPORTS SCE REPORTS

no deconstructor actually thinks all readings are question. This is true, but it is not enough. equally valid, what kind of evaluation does It can lead to a kind of infinite regress of dec onstruc tion permit? demystification, in which ever more sophisticated subtleties are elaborated within an unchanging The sentence "all readings are misreadings" field of questions. does not simply deny the notion of truth. Truth is preserved in vestigial form in the notion of How, then, can one set oneself up to be error. This does not mean that there is, some- surprised by otherness? Obviously, in a sense, where out there, forever unattainable, the one one cannot. Yet one can begin by transgressing true reading against which all others will be one's own usual practices, by indulging in some tried and found wanting. Rather, it implies 1) judicious time-wasting with what one does not that the reasons a reading might consider itself know how to use, or what has fallen into disrepute. rlght are motivated and undercut by its own What the surprise encounter with otherness should interests, blindnesses, desires, and fatigue, do is lay bare some hint of an ignorance one never and 2) tkt the role of truth cannot, be so knew one had. Much has been made of the fact that simply eliminated. Even if truth is but a "knowledge" cannot be taken for granted. But fantasy of the will to power, something still perhaps rather than simply questioning the nature marks the point frm which the imperatives of of knowledge, we should today reevaluate the the not-self make themselves felt. To reject static, inert concept we have always had of objective tmth is to make it harder to avoid ignorance, Ignorance, far more than knowledge, setting oneself up as an arbitrary arbiter. There- is what can never be taken for granted. If I fore, the one imperative a reading must obey perceive my ignorance as a gap in knowledge is that it follow, with rigor, what puts in instead of as an imperative that changes the question the kind of reading it thought it was very nature of what I think I know, then I do going to be. A reading is strong, I would there- not truly experience my ignorance. The surprise fore submit, to the extent that it encounters and of otherness is that moment when a new form of propagates the surprise of otherness. The ignorance is suddenly activated as an imperative. impossible but necessary task of the reader is If the deconstructive impulse is to retain its to set himself up to be surprised. vital, subversive power, we must therefore become ignorant of it again and again. It is No methodology can be relied on to generate only by forgetting what we know how to do, by surprise. On the contrary, it is usually surprise setting aside the thoughts that have most that engenders methodology. Derrida brings to changed us, that those thoughts and that know- his reader the surprise of a non-binary, undeci- ledge can go on making accessible to us the dable logic. Yet comfortable undecidability surprise of an otherness we can only encounter needs to be surprised by its own conservatism. in the moment of suddenly discovering we are My emphasis on the word "surprise" is designed ignorant of it. to counter the idea that a good deconstructor must constantly put his own enterprise into SCE REPORTS

Joseph N. Riddel UCLA NOTES What Is Deconstruction, and Why Are They Writing 1. Peter Shaw, "Degenerate Criticism", Rarper's, All Those Graff-ic Things About It? October, 1979, P. 97. Criticism (re: literary) has become a serious, 2. M. H.Abrams, "The Deconstruc tive Angel", w- if not outright dour, business, the academician's cal Inquirx, Spring 1977, p. 434. hedge against inflation of the word. pd any attempt to re-touch it (recall Mallarme's mocking 3. Gerald Graff, Literature A.gainst Itself, phrase about those who touched verse) is liable to Chicago1 The University of Chicago Press, 1979, arrest by the gendarmes of genre. Woe betide the pun-gent, for he threatens high seriousness. Worse awaits him if he walks amid the alien corn of French 4. Shaw, op. cit., p. 93. thought. One need not fish for examples of this touchiness which some want to call a "crisis." 5. Denis Donoghue , "Dec onstruc ting Deconstruction", Criticism today (here? now?) is in danger, we are The New York Review of Books, vol 27, No 10, p. 37. told, from laxness in the immigration laws. The deconstructive element has invaded the frontiers 6. Jacques Denida, La Diss&mination, Paris: Seuil, of grammar. 1972, p. 235. My English translation of this text, entitled Dissemination, is forthcoming from In her concise, economical response to today's the University of Chicago Press. most rancorous episode in the "crisis" (some natives call it the double-crossing?) of American humanism, 7. Paul de Man, "The Purloined Ribbon", Glyph 1, Barbara Johnson offers the decisive term for the 1977. "derangements" which, many protest, have in- filtrated literary discourse: the "other," or the 8. Op. cit., p. 65. "surprise" encounter of the "other. " Professor Johnson does not expand her observations upon the 9,Cf,, for example, Jeffrey Mehlman, "Teaching radical significance of this other, perhaps be- Reading", Diacritics (winter 1976) ; Gayatri cause it is altogether familiar (even in the form Chakravorti Spivak and Michael Ryan, "Anarchism of the unfamiliar or "uncanny") to the continental Revisitedto, Diacritics (summer 1978) ; John discourse with which she is more easily conversant Brenkman , "Deconstruction and the Social Text", than most of us. Yet, the "other" is precisely Social Text 1 (winter 1979); and Edward Said, what we have always thought our discourse dealt "Reflections on Recent American 'Left' Literary with--and "dealt" with effectively, instrumentally, Criticism", Boundary 2, vol. 8, NO 1, Fall 1979. even when we had to recognize the "other" in the existentialist sense of the "absurd." In other words, the "binary logica' which Professor Johnson demonstrates to be the reigning and privileged SCE REPORTS SCE REPORTS

structure of literary discourse (whether one thinks of this as the discourse of literature or the dis- universal," into manageable terms. You will re- course literature), has always been able to call Wimsatt's (literal) simile of criticism's account for the "other" within an orderly movement formulaic: "In each poem there is something (an --whether in the sublative movement of a dia- individual intuition--or a concept) which can never lectical triad, the regathering and return of be expressed in other terms. It is like the square historical and/or narrative becoming and narrative root of 2 or like pi, which cannot be expressed in closure, the intentional positioning of the rational numbers, but only as their m. Crit- imagination or consciousness, or the structural icism of poetry is like 1.414 ... or 3.1416 ..., stability of diacritical signs. not all it would be, yet all that can be had and very useful."l Criticism, then, marks its own In regard to our classical notion of limit as a logical boundary to that which over- "literature," the literary form contains the flows the limit. ~iterature'spure inside and "other," orders and displays, expresses or repre- inexhaustible depth incarnates the truth or sents, the uncanny; and the critical reading "universal" or has a "special relation to the world circumscribes the boundaries of the literary text, of universals ."2 its other, with its own proximal logic or boundary. This binarism, as Johnson argues, works because Now, it is this threat of criticism to over- it produces and reproduces the expected hierarchy run its limit and to contaminate the "literary" of relationships, the subordination of one term to space, which, according to Johnson, motivates the another, and one text to another, a structure in reactive hostility of American criticism to foreign which the lesser term often "turns out" (both in imports. Deconstruction is read as the anarchy of the sense of Tletheia and trope, reveal and con- discourse which threatens to undo the archT or pre- ceal) to be a completing and clarifying addition, sence (universal) of the Work so necessary to And it is the task of criticism, this logic of justify the "usefulness" of criticism. I will avoid criticism, to resist this addition, this logic of evoking the discourse of the parasite (para-site) doubling the text and putting it within frames, here; but will interject an aside on the rhetoricity enfolding the genre literature within the genre of Harold Bloom, which is often indiscriminately criticism--it is the task of criticism to resist its attacked for imitating the unbridled behavior of addition from becoming a "dangerous supplement," deconstruction and violating the generic limit of as the language of deconstruction reminds. Thus, criticism, arguing instead for literature's as literary criticism must stage and frame literature well as criticism's intertextuality, or simply that as its other by privileging the unity of the the two are never fully separable because of their literary discourse, or by marking how literature tropological nature. is at once the "other" of "reality" and its "proper" representation or "meaning." Criticism, then, What then of this "deconstruction" which as W. K. Wimsatt once augured, would be an threatens to displace literature with discourse, adequate, "approximate" discourse of understanding and thus not only, as Johnson notes, expose of/on literature, the discursive translation of an literature to relativistic commentary but, what "autotelic" or self-reflexive totality, a "concrete is worse, make it so relativistic that it cannot SCE REPORTS SCE REPORTS

relate its "presence," its unity of form, intention, meaning? Johnson is correct to note that friends and enemies alike to identify it as a part of the problem may be traced to the fear of "method," one among others, of that genre we call the "import," of the strange, though she seems to literary criticism. True enough, it is scaring agree with the conservative that deconstruction in the hell out of a lot of people, but they are the United States is an "-isms' and that any trans- about as clear about what scares them as they are lation of it or transaction with it ideologizes about the monstrous "great beast" of Yeats. it. Or then again, since she doesn't want to offend American criticism fears "seminal adventures.'' the critical left, does not ideologize it enough, Perhaps "deconstruction" belongs exclusively to thereby turning it into a conservative "method" or Derrida, and to a few of his philosophical acolytes. -ism, a kind of "fate of mis-reading," as it were. Surely as a form of literary criticism we see it in She is no doubt correct to say that "decon- this country in its decisive form only in the struction" as practical criticism is as much "readings" of Paul de Man, and some younger com- victimized by its friends as mis-represented by its paratists. But it is time to recognize that enemies, the former being those who appropriate Derrida simply did not invent a method for "it" (whatever it is) as a mode of, reading which literary criticism, and that any identification of produces what the latter condemn as predictable deconstruction as a mode of reading has to mark exercises, void of significance because they prate what can and cannot be appropriated, grafted, of the significance of the void. (Why is it that translated, and adapted to regional strategies. these new ideologues are always, as Denis Donoghue In other words, as Rodolph ~aschkhas shown, in churlishly asks in the essay Johnson quotes from what remains the most brilliant and precise ex- --asks in the spirit of humanism's need to "be- position of the question of "Deconstruction as lieve" in fictions it knows not to be true, as Criticism, "4 while deconstruction evolves from Wallace Stevens might have and did say--why must philosophical questions, it is not a derivative of the arbiters of critical law be so quick to a philosophical system, but inhabits that system indict the graduate students or the young pro- as a crux, as literature indeed inhabits philosophy fessoriate as epigones of "graphology"? What of and threatens its coherence or self-reflexivity. the humanist epigones of "Graff-ology," which is Deconstruction "-ism-ed," then, is not decon- always already epigonism? Why are those like struction, and something else must have had its Donoghue, who posture from the sinecure of "success. " humanistic "chairs" and from the ideological forum of liberal reviews which have more principal than Still, one must ask if there has been so much principle, so quick to attack the avatars of de- ideologizing of the strategy (and here I use construction for engineering a new "elite"?3) strategy in opposition to "method," though even strategy has its ideological tinge) as Johnson I am not altogether certain what Johnson means insists. Certainly the reactionaries, and Graff's by the "success" of deconstruction, or whether it work is a reductive example, contain the question has become an "-ism," except as it is miscon- by turning what they understand of deconstruction strued by those whom it threatens. Just as I am --having turned it first into a "buzz" word--into not at all convinced that it is practiced (as if it a series of summary ontological statements, and were a practice) with the consistency that allows SCE REPORTS SCE REPORTS

then denouncing those statements as illogical. of their limits. This seems to be Graff's way of reading anything, not simply philosophy, or philosophically oriented Considered strictly as literary criticism, essays, deconstructive or otherwise, and it is then, the strategy of deconstruction produces characteristic of the American way of applying something of an anomaly. If we understand literary philosophy rather than reading it. As Johnson shows, criticism as a form of commentary or analysis in these "strict constructionists" (and this is, after which a discursive text addresses a pure text, then all, a term of political rhetoric) of American deconstruction can only be understood as an inter- criticism understand discursive texts to make vention into and disruption of that classical "truth" statements as well as "value" judgments hierarchy, or an analytic of criticism. There which are at the same time "useful" and limited. seems to me a two-fold problem not addressed by One has only to follow Graff's picky way through Johnson, for reasons enough, but which must be --Of Gramatology, waiting for the sentence that considered in any assessment of the "fate of de- seems to cohere into dogmatic assertion, or what construction" (so different yet so like a "fate he thinks is a coherent statement about in- of reading"). The first I have previously coherence, to understand why so mttny think of de- mentioned in regard to the question of ideological construction as an up-to-date nihili~m.~ expropriation, or the tendency to import a strategy as a "method." The second touches on the Johnson's analysis of the present controversy, question of what this strategy produces when it is of the American dilution, of the dangerous con- grafted onto the American critical logic. In servatism of a strategy becoming an "-ism," could part both questions touch on how we have ex- not be more to the point, though one wishes she ploited a strategy that was derived from philosophy might have tried to respond to the new left and reinscribed into philosophy as an internal ideologues who want to appropriate "deconstruction" critique--a strategy, then, best understood in for a sortie beyond the text or want to resurrect terms of the Derridean title "Marges de la a dialectical "way" out of the abysm of the "text" philosophie" or that kind of commentary which and the conservatism they (and Johnson) fear will irrupts within the margins of texts, deploying and end in what Foucault called a stale pedagogy. manipulating the grounding concepts of the text in There is no time to take up the question here ex- / a way that exposes their archi-textural or cept to point out Gasche's answer once again, that fabricated nature. The European practice of de- such concerns begin by literalizing and materializing construction, therefore, is not simply another the notion of the text, depriving it of the supple- method, amending, correcting, and systematizing ness deconstruction had found, and thereby deceive earlier methods derived from a history or system us into thinking that such leaps, beyond the of thought. Rather it is a practice which question of language and the play of functions as athetic critique, a practice which signifiers, are easily made. This binds us to the questions the very basis of "method" and exposes fact that deconstruction, rather than confining the subterfuges by which a methodology establishes itself to the textual crypt, has been a rigorous its consistency, coherence, and authority. It exploration of all textual enclosures (and of the therefore cannot even be called an anti-method way all systems are composed as texts) and a marking or a nihilism, no matter how it works at disturbing SCE REPORTS SCE REPORTS

and undermining fixed concepts, any more than it can be expected to produce another and superior relegated to its margins and effaced. The re- method. marking deprivileges (or reverses) the figures (in the manner in which an erasure allows the trace of Yet, when deconstruction tries to describe the figure to become more evident), but then doubles its own practice, or to account for its own the emphasis. The erasure is therefore re- methodology by remaining self-conscious of its inscribed into the work as a part of the critical maneuvers, it can only, as Johnson reminds us, commentary. The originally privileged figure re- expose its own limits as the limit of method. turns as a ghost to undo itself, undermining its When, therefore, we read in Derrida what seems to own archaic and archeological privilege. The re- be his own discourse on his method, we may be inscription disrupts the method of reading but deceived into thinking his description of the produces, rather than a textual void, a hetero- strategy of reversal and intervention to be a geneity of readings, of meanings, that a logical self-fulfilling prophecy, and simply a negative commentary can no longer order or contain. dialectics. The reversal is read as a counter- method or malicious negation, and the inter- Thus Derrida in "Parergon," his essay on vention as a relativizing of all reading. Now, Kant's Critique of Judgment, and by extension on the strategy of reversal and intervention is not Kant's "aesthetics" as a crucial mediate region in itself easily understood in the descriptive or in his philosophical system, isolates and re-marks programmatic language which deconstruction has to the curious yet central emphasis in Kant ' s canon borrow from methodology (or metaphysics), and of a notion like boundary, border, margin, frame, there is no time here to take up the intricate or that which allows us to distinguish and dis- rhetorical maneuvers which allow deconstruction criminate the categories of thought as genre or to avoid the pitfalls and pratfalls of what we to move in an orderly and economic way from one ordinarily understand as criticism: a critique generic field to the other.6 Like so many other which explains the text in the mood which Derrida terms in the history of philosophy--which Derrida calls "doubling the commentary" or denounces it finds structurally necessary to maintain the as a failure of unity, either formal or symbolic. binary differences between inside and outside,

fl work and world, self and other, and so on--the Gasche, in the essay previously mentioned, notion of "parergon," which seems confined to Kant's has described the deconstructive strategy as the discussion of aesthetics (working in such a way locating of a dominant, privileged, or master term as to separate artistic space off from what it or concept (in a literary text, say, a symbol or represents) is first re-marked in its incoherence image cluster which orients all the others; in a (is the frame outside the work? is it an ornamental philosophical text, the apparent governing con- border or does it enhance the inside of which it cept), then re-marking the doubleness, ambivalence, is not integral, etc.?), and then is reinscribed and potential incoherence and non-sense of the into the discourse on aesthetics in a way to put grounding term/concept/figure. This may also its founding concepts in question. It therefore include, as in much of Derrida's work, the un- disrupts the orderly discourse between an inside covering of key figures which the text itself has text (say, literature) and an outside text (criticism on the one hand, reality on the other). SCE REPORTS SCE REPORTS

But perhaps more significantly, Derrida's critique reveals the crucial pivotal role aesthetics must For deconstruction not only challenged the privilege play in Kant's system, and indicates that the of literature by deprivileging it, but it re- problematic of the "parergon" inhabits the entire privileges or reinscribes literature into a dis- system. course on philosophy as its "other," as an intervention which produces critique. We are suddenly There is much more to be said about this essay asked to recognize the vertiginous and monstrous and this strategy, but suffice it here to point freedom of literature as the analytical scene. out that the deconstructive discourse, which Even when we continue to think of literature as an locates itself in the margins, in the asides, in autotelic, bounded field, we are asked, as in de the apparent suburbs of the text, exposes not only Man, to recognize the play between signs and figures the decentralizing play of that text but of the as an aporia, as an irreducible and illimitable entire system which seems to sustain and verify the play between what is in the broadest sense called coherence of the text. It exposes the "con- philosophy (a rhetoric of cognition) and poetry structed" system of philosphy-;in the case of Kant, (a rhetoric of persuasion). Moreover, the dis- it reveals how urgent is the mediate place of cursive critique itself is already bound up in aesthetics (also the place of man) in allowing one this aporia and cannot be purified of the very to move from the sensible to the supersensible, "literary" play it would at once command and re- man (and therefore the aesthetic) being the figure flect. The effectlreflect between two texts that are neither literary nor philosophical, both and of the eschatological and teleological. Thus the crucial and incoherent place of the border, edge, neither, produces a vertigo by breaching the frame (also m, ship, and therefore voyage, and coherent boundaries logic has erected in order to all the sygnification of transfer across borders, permit a clear reading. Or, to take the example etc.) in aesthetics which has to have a re- of Derrida's essay on Mallarm$ quoted by Johnson gulating function in the metaphysical system. (entitled "La double sgance"); it is not simply a critical reading of Mallarm6's work but an Now, the second problem to which I referred appropriated reading of that work as the work is is the fact that we have not simply tended to understood within a classical reading of it by J;P. import deconstruction in the form of a "method" Richard, a reading which established "Mimique" as or anti-method, but have displaced it from its the exemplum of literary self-reflexiveness. The function in critique to that even more regional essay, then, uses literature to deconstruct not quasi-science called literary criticism. We simply literature, but as a critical methodology expected it to perform in the missionary position we have come to call the "criticism of conscious- of a hermeneutic relationship, to provide us with ness ," and by extension, phenomenology. Derrida rich new "monological" readings of the text and isolates Mallarm'e's figure of the "hymen" as he hence to verify the internal unity or self- does Kant's "parergon," and explores the way it reflexiveness of the text's sign system. When it deregulates rather than regulates any mimetic play deferred, resisted, or simply refused all wise or mimetic discourse, thus disrupting the movement passiveness, when it re-doubled the commentary, from inside to outside necessary to the economy it had to be indicted as Satanic and anarchic. of representation as well as deflecting any internal mimesis so essential to a self-reflexive SCE REPORTS

reading of literature. NOTES No wonder, then, that the graff-ologists see 1. William K. Uimsatt, "The Concrete Universal,'' this as a threat to the discipline, as a nihilism, The Verbal Icon (New York: Noonday, 19581, p. 83. as a return of the repressed, or a revolt of the --- First pub. by Univ. of Kentucky Press, 1954. slave who defines and holds in thrall the master. Read it, that is, as if it threatens the very in- 2. Wimsatt, p. 77. stitutions which the new-leftists, comfortable within those same institutions, deride it for not 3. Donoghue, "Deconstructing Deconstruction," trashing. But one thing is irreducible--they have The New York Review of Books, Vol. 27, no. 10 to "read" it, however blindly, one way or another, ------(June 12, 1980), 37-41. even in that graff-ic mannerism which mimicks its own logic. But if the "strict constructionists" 4. Graff, "Deconstruction as Dogma, or 'Come mis-read it into an aberrant logic, by way of Back to the Raft Ag'in, Strether Honey!" containing it, they do it with unaccustomed Georgia Review, XXXIV (Summer 1980), 404-21. "dis-ease." If they want to purge the "deconstructive element" rather than submit to it, they 5. ~asche),"Deconstruction as Criticism," must remain appalled at the illiberalism such 5 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1979), power politics would demand. So their best pp. 177-215. strategy is probably loving accommodation, to welcome it in as just another neuter in the / 6. Derrida, "Parergon," La ~e'riteen peinture college of critical knowledge, as just another (Paris: Flammarion, 19781, pp. 21-168. perverse chapter in the critic's "More Joy of Reading. " SCE REPORTS SCE REPORTS

William V. Spanos technological "age of the world picture" and the SUNY at Binghamton consumer society that spirit elaborates. In the following all-too-brief remarks, I intend to ex- RETRIEVING HEIDEGGER'S DE-STRUCTION: plore some important aspects of this critical A RESPONSE TO BARBARA JOHNSON oversight. I want to suggest by such a disclosure that the Heideggerian de-struction is more "Levelling is not the action of one individual but capable than deconstruction, not simply of a more a reflective-game in the hand of an abstract adequate "defense" against the charge of relativ- power. " ism made in traditional humanistic criticism, but S+ren Kierkegaard, Two Ages also of a more effective critique of the "binary logic" of mastery -- "culture [or] anarchy ." In short, the Heideggerian destruction is more amena- ble to the literary, cultural, and socio-political In her essay "Nothing Fails Like Success," adversary purposes of the de-centered postmodern Barbara Johnson's defense of deconstructive crit- counter-memory. icism betrays the "blindness of its insight" of virtually all the practitioners of this method Since I cannot assume that my readers, both deriving from the authority of Jacques Derrida: humanists and, especially, deconstructors, are she overlooks, that is, the fact that deconstruc- conversant with Heidegger's Destruktion, or, at tion, as articulated and practiced by Derrida any rate, with its differential relationship to himself, has its source in and constitutes a deconstruction, I will "begin" for the sake of re-vision (not deconstruction) of Heidegger's de- orientation by recalling Heidegger's definition in struction of the metaphysical tradition. This the introduction of Being and Time which the over- oversight, the result, above all, of archivalizing sight of the deconstructors forgets: Derrida's Nietzschean text, making it the original Book of the deconstructed Word, as it were, not If the question of Being is to only precludes or at least minimizes an adequate achieve clarity regarding its own his- defense against the counter-critique of conserva- tory, a loosening of the sclerotic tradi- tive traditional humanist critics like Meyer tion and a dissolving of the concealments Abrams, Wayne Booth, Gerald Graff, and Dennis produced by it is necessary. We under- Donaghue, but also, and more important, against stand this task as the de-struction of the critique of those politically radical critics the traditional content of ancient ontol- like Edward Said, John Brenkman, Paul ~ove/,and ogy which is to be carried out along the Jonathan Arac, who accuse deconstruction "of not guidelines of the question of Being. living up to its own claims of radicality." That This de-struction is based upon the orig- is to say, this oversight succeeds in making inal experience on which the first and deconstruction not simply susceptible to institu- subsequently guiding determinations of tionalization, but also, if inadvertently, an Being were gained. instrument legitimating the spirit of the SCE REPORTS SCE REPORTS

This demonstration of the provenance is that the "beginning" that Heidegger wants to re- of the fundamental ontological concepts, trieve is not an absolute origin as it seems to be as the investigation which displays their understood both by his deconstructive critics and "birth certificate," has nothing to do his humanist disciples. It is, rather, as the with a pernicious relativizing of ontol- "existential analytic" of Being and Time bears wit- ogical standpoints. The de-struction has ness, a temporality grounded in Nothing (the just as little the negative sense of dis- absence of presence), that disseminates differ- burdening ourselves of the ontological ences, of which language (words as opposed to the tradition. On the contrary, it should Word) is the bearer. stake out the positive possibilities of the tradition, and that always means to fix its boundaries. These are factually given with the specific formulation of The primary function of deconstructive crit- the question and the prescribed demarca- icism is to demystify the privileged binary logic tion of the possible field of investiga- inscribed in the metaphysical rhetoric of the tion. Negatively, the de-struction is logocentric tradition: to expose the mise-en- not even related to the past; its crit- abime between signifier and signified, the ground- icism concerns "today" and the dominant less ground of mimesis or re-presentation; ie. to way we treat the history of ontology, show that language is not Adamic, does not "name" whether it be conceived as the history (bring to presence) the object it intends, but of opinions, ideas, or problems. How- "doubles" or "supplements" and thus always defers ever, the de-struction does not wish to it. More specifically, Derrida and especially bury the past in nullity; it has a posi- others like Paul de Man, J. Hillis Miller, Joseph tive intent. Its negative function Riddel, Eugenio Donato, and Barbara Johnson, who remains tacit and indirect. . . . practice deconstructive criticism, assume from the beginning that & texts, past and present, no ' In accord with the positive tendency matter what they attempt to signify, deconstruct of the de-struction the question must themselves, that is, are, by the very nature of first be asked whether and to what extent writing, replete with aporias that transgress and in the course of the history of ontology undermine the intended totalization of logocentric in general the interpretation of Being discourse. In Derrida's rhetoric, they are sub- has been thematically connected with the ject to the "play of difference," to the "move- phenomenon of Time. We must also ask ment of supplementarity" of writing. whether the range of problems concerning Temporality which necessarily belongs If totalization no longer has any mean- here was fundamentally worked out or ing, it is not because the infiniteness could have been. of a field cannot be covered by a finite

What should be marked, above all, in this passage, SCE REPORTS SCE REPORTS

glance or a finite discourse, but because Though the classical or humanistic effort to re- the nature of the field -- that is, lang- present the 'lconscious, voluntary intentional re- uage -- excludes totalization. This lationship that the writer institutes in his field is in effect that of play, that is exchange with the history to which he belongs" is to say, a field of infinite substitutions necessary to guard against the possibility of only because it is finite, that is to "say[ing] almost anything" about the text,4 such say, because instead of being an inex- traditionalist "doubling commentary ,'I devoid of any haustible field, as in the classical awareness of the duplicity of writing, closes off hypothesis, instead of being too large, rather than opens up a reading -- and only reveals there is something missing from it: a its deferring supplementarity, its "undecid- center which arrests and grounds the play ability," to the ironic deconstructive reader of of substitutions. One could say. . . the comentary: that the movement of play, permitted by the lack or absence of a center or . . .if reading must not be content with origin, is the movement of supplemen- doubling the text, it cannot legitimately tarity. One cannot determine the center transgress the text towards something and exhaust totalization. 2 other than it, towards a referent (a reality that ismetaphysical, historical, The writer, no matter who he is or when he writes, psychological, etc.) or towards a signi- can therefore never say what he wishes to say fied outside the text whose content could (vouloir dire). Thus the essential function of take place, could have taken place out- the interpreter is not, as it is for traditional side of language, that is to say in the critics, to interpret the writers intention, but sense that we give here to that word, to discover the blindness of his logocentric in- outside of writing in general. That is sight: why the methodological considerations that we risk applying here to an example The writer writes & a language and & a [Rousseau] are closely dependent on logic [the binary logic of logocentrism] general propositions that we have elab- whose proper system, laws, and life his orated above; as regards the absence of discourse by definition cannot dominate the referent or the transcendental absolutely. He uses them only by letting signified. &inothinn outside* himself, after a certain fashion and up [there is no outside-text; il n'y 5 to a certain point, be governed by the pas de hors-textel: system. And reading must always aim at a certain relationship, unperceived by This is, of course, hardly an adequate summary the writer, between what he commands and of an immensely complex and brilliantly articulated what he does not command of the patterns methodology of reading. But it is enough to of the language that he uses. suggest what is both valuable and problematic about it from the point of view of the Heideggerian SCE REPORTS SCE REPORTS

destruction. To the degree that it reminds us of Heideggerian destructive (which is also to say, what the humanistic tradition exists finally to "pro-jective") mode takes to be the first stage of make us forget -- of the unbridgeable abyss between the hermeneutic process. This destructive mode in- words and between words and their referents, of the vites an opening out of its horizonal focus on the groundlessness of the privileged metaphysical dis- question of being, in accordance with its discourse, i.e. that language does not "name" the closive imperative to take into consideration the earth, but fictionalizes and defers it and thus cultural, economic, and socio-political sites along that language as (objective) Truth constitutes a the continuum of being, those sites, that is, which violence against the earth -- the Derridean de- are the archeological concerns of such critical construction is useful to criticism as a theory of theorists as Antonio Gramsci, Theodor Adorno, Max reading which is simultaneously a socio-political tlorkheimer, Michel Foucault, Edward Said, and other activity or counter-praxis. That is, it is capable "worldly" critics of Enlightenment logic and its of thematizing the logocentric language of re- hegemonic institutional elaborations. I mean the presentation, of awakening us to the power in- study of "affiliation," as Edward Said calls it, scribed in and hidden by the "structurality" of the exposure of the usually invisible "network of traditional metaphysical humanistic binary dis- peculiarly cultural associations. . . between course. But, unlike the Heideggerian destruction, forms, statements, and other aesthetic elabora- its refusal of intentionality or, what is the same tions on the one hand, and, on the other, theory, its insistence on the autonomy of the text institutions, agencies, classes, and fairly (its "textuality") -- il n'y a pas de hors-texte -- amorphous social forces:" and the consequent interpretive imperative that "our reading must be intrinsic and remain within ...affiliation [in contrast with homology the textst6-- tends both in theory and in practice, and filiation, which "so far as human- especially by Derrida's academic disciples, to de- ists are concerned have created the historicize both the text and the reading process. homogeneously utopian domain of texts Instead, deconstruction pursues the secondary pur- connected serially, seamlessly, immedi- pose of demystification, the purely negative ironic ately only with other texts"] is what process of disclosing the unintended (or intended) enables a text to maintain itself as a aporias that "always already" breach all writing -- text and thus is covered by a range of literary or veridical -- whatever its occasion. circumstances: status of the author, Although, as Ms. Johnson says, deconstruction "at historical moment, conditions of its best. . . undoes the very comforts of mastery publication, diffusion and reception, and consensus that underlie the illusion that values drawn upon, values and ideas objectivity is situated somewhere outside the assumed, a framework of consensually held self ,'I this insistence on the purely writerly tacit assumptions, presumed background, nature of writing, this failure to acknowledge that and so on and on. In the second place, writing, however misunderstood and mystified its to study affiliation is to study and essence, has consequences in the world, minimizes, recreate the bonds between text and If it does not preclude, precisely what the world, bonds which specialization SCE REPORTS SCE REPORTS

of this methodological emphasis, differentiate be- and the institutions of literature have tween and situate the kinds of cultural/social/ all but completely effaced. Every text political power authorized or legitimated by, say, is an act of will to some extent, but Plato's Republic, Hegel's Phenomenology o_fi Spirit, what has not been very much studied [and or Bentham's Panopticon; Aristotle's Poetics, deconstruction tends to overlook] is the Samuel Johnson's The Preface to Shakespeare, or degree to which -- and the specific Percy Lubbock's The Craft of Fiction. In so far as cultural space by which -- texts are made the Heideggerian destruction acknowledges that permissable. To recreate the affilia- texts (language) are "the house of being," i.e. tive network is therefore to make make a difference in the shaping of a world, it can visible, to give materiality back to, be appropriated to locate historically and to dis- the strands holding the text to the criminate, acutely and in detail, between, say, the society that produced it. In the third prophesy/fulfillment structure (and rhetoric) of place, affiliation releases a text from --The Aeneid, which discloses its formal and thematic its isolation, and imposes upon the complicity with the divinely sanctioned Augustan scholar or critic the presentational pro- im~erialism:the well-made narrative plot of blem of historically re-creating or re- ~iHldin~'sTom Jones, which, in sublimating constructing the possibilities out of accident, affiliates itself with the formative which the text arose. Here is the place disciplinary goals of the deistically sanctioned for intentional analysis, and for the and empirically oriented humanism of the Enlight- effort to place a text in homological, enment: and the recollective or re-presentational dialogical or antithetical relationship narrative structure of the essentially sane and with other texts, classes, institutions, normal, "disinterested," observer in Joseph etc.7 Conrad's The Heart of Darkness, which, in ration- alizing its excesses, mystifies, normalizes and To be more specific, in freeing the signifier legitimates the hegemonic purposes of Western . from the transcendental signified that, according (British) capitalistic colonialism. Because of its to Derrida, remains vestigially in Heidegger's commitment to the textuality of texts--the absolute understanding of language, the Derridean revision absence of presence in the signifier-the decon- of the destruction minimizes the potential to dis- structive mode, on the other hand, must of neces- close and analyze not only the hidden violence that sity bypass such affiliations between text and informs the logocentric text, but also, and more world and such historical discriminations between important, the particular historical, cultural, and economies of power, in favor of its primary pur- socio-political sources, nature, affiliations, and pose: to disclose the transgressions-the plays effects of this violence at every site on the of difference that characterize all writing-- continuum of being. I say this despite or, indeed, against the impulse of logocentrism to totalize. because of the fact that Derridean deconstruction This methodological refusal to encounter language willfully denies the question of being, the as the temporal "house of being," not, as Ms. question of the temporality, the historicity of Johnson says, "an over-simplified understanding of being,as hors texte. Thus it cannot, on the basis SCE REPORTS SCE REPORTS

certain aspects of deconstructive theory," lies be- time, this tradition, which perceives meta-ta- hind the current institutionalization of decon- hysica, "deprives Dasein f its leadership in struction, its failure in praaice to cross over :uestioning and choosing."8 Though Heidegger him- the boundary line of literary criticism into the self was reluctant to explore this intention fully, economic and socio-political sites its hedges. In the destruction is intended to activate an opening other words, this theoretical necessity renders de- of the horizon of understanding or, rather, of constructive criticism, like the New Criticism it understanding to horizonality, to include the ostensibly repudiates, an academic discipline "worldliness" of the world: a liberating awareness rather than a historical interdisciplinary activity or remembrance that the prison house of logo- capable of "analyzing its institutional under- centrism exists not only at the site of meta- pinnings, and economic and social relations with physical thought per se, but, because language is the world." the house of being, all along the continuum of being from culture through economics to socio- politics. The destruction is not a nihilistic activity of thought that neutralizes its active Further, or perhaps, another'way of putting force. Rather, it is, paradoxically, a positive or this, the deconstructive mode, precisely because pro-jective interpretive activity in which thinking of its theoretical commitment to the autonomy of (theory) ,& doing-in-the-world (praxis). The dis- the text and, within this commitment, to the idea closure of the origins of the fundamental onto- of difference as textual difference, tends to be a logical concepts, we recall, negative hermeneutic activity. This is not only because it is, despite J. Hillis Miller's easy has nothing to do with a pernicious re- rhetoricah manoeuver to disarm the objectivist lativizing of ontological standpoints. critique, parasitic on canonized host texts, but The destruction has just as little the also, and more importantly, because, in translating negative sense of disburdening ourselves its possibilities into the empty, free-floating of the ontological tradition. On the realm of rhetoric and textuality, it undermines the contrary, it should stake out the will to praxis: thinking, that is, gets dissociat- positive possibilities of the tradition ed from doing. For Heidegger, we recall, the de- . . ..Negatively, the de-struction is struction is intended to retrieve (Wiederholen) the not even related to the past: j.&

question of being ( or rather be-3) from the criticism concerns- -- "today" and the dom- oblivion to which a sclerotic metaphysical thinking inant way we read the history of onto- has relegated it, in order to "free" human being-- logy, whether it is conceived as the his- "especially . . . that understanding (and its tory of opinions, ideas, or problems. possible development) which is rooted in the However, the destruction does not wish to proper Being of Dasein--the ontological under- bury the past in nullity; it has a standing1'--from the "world in which it is" and the ositive intent. Its negative function "tradition1'--the various but supplementary semiotic femains tacit and indirect. rtly empha- systems inscribed in the cultural Memory--in which sis, except the single italicized word.] it is "ensnared." In reifying or spatializing SCE REPORTS SCE REPORTS

The Heideggerian destruction, thus understood as a remembering of what a recollective metaphysics Understoodas I think Heidegger insists that it forgets, is both a historical and a dialogic pro- should be, this means that, in retrieving the be- ject in the sense that, as the etymology itself ing of being from the meta-physical tradition, the suggests, it is simultaneously de-structive and destruction also retrieves the idea of language as pro-jective. Like Foucault's and Said's "archeo- words from the re-collective tradition of the w. logical" projects, it activates critical conscious- (Derrida, of course, criticizes Heidegger's pheno- ness of the varieties of cultural and socio-poli- menology as a vestigial continuation of the logo- tical power that the supplementary epistbm'es of centric tradition in the degree to which it con- the ontotheological tradition have concealed in tinues to privilege speech [parole] as the agent their discourses. But in de-stroying (de- of recuperating or re-presenting presence. If, structuring) the intended totalized structures and however, Heidegger's phenomenological retrieval of the circular geo-metry of these panoptic dis- the logos as speech [legein] is understood as an courses, the destruction also dis-closes, acti- acknowledgement of dispersal [difference] as its vates, and nourishes the will to praxis. That is, primordial condition, this criticism is defused.) in breaching the panoptically inscribed structures Thus destroyed, this problematic phrase discloses of the ontotheological tradition, it opens up and a function of textual interpretation that is quite remembers the question of being as it was origin- different from that usually inferred. It not only ally posed: as a question of the be-a of being. activates, as in Foucault and Said, the poss- More specifically -- and in order to address, if ibility of recognizing and defusing the power and not to disarm the objection raade by Derrida that authority of metaphysical discourse and the the retrieval of the Seinsfrage is a recuperation affiliated semiotic elaborations of a civil of metaphysics, the destruction retrieves from the society grounded in a logocentric measure. It also traditional understanding of Being as Identity (the opens up, as I shall suggest, the possibility of a One, the Unmoved Mover, Causality, etc.) the discourse capable of rewriting--and rebuilding-- temporality of being, a being, that is, "grounded," the * on the groundless ground of a differen- not in Something but in nothing, in absence, in tial measure that, emerging from its occasion, which presence is infinitely deferred and in which, allows men and women to "dwell poetically'' in the therefore, temporality disperses Sameness, dis- "rift" occasioned by the strife that temporalicy seminates or makes (the) difference. The retrieval activates between world and earth.1° of the Seinsfrage, in short, is the retrieval of the ec-centricity, the ex-orbitance or, in For Derrida and his followers, deconstructive Heidegger's preferred word, the "careu-provoking criticism, on the other hand, is in essence a nega- err-ancy of being. tive, indeed, a nihilistic critical movement. To put it briefly and all too reductively, in abso- As I have said, the destruction of the tradi- lutely separating language (writing) from the world tion inscribed in canonical texts retrieves the outside to which it putatively refers, it precludes, idea of language as the "house of being." of necessity, admitting the question of language to be simultaneously a question of being, in favor of observing, pointing to and delighting in the SCE REPORTS SCE REPORTS

12 spectacle of the play of difference at the scene of trace. writing. Derrida's appropriation of Heidegger's notion of the ontological difference (that "Being" At worst, however, as Ms. Johnson herself admits, is not 5 being [Seiende] as it has been understood it becomes, as in an increasing number of Derrida's throughout the ontotheological tradition, but be- belated followers, a purely formal--and comfort- & [=]), translates the difference of being able--activity of exegesis, virtually devoid of into the levelled-out space of the textual dif- real awareness of the abyss--the uncertain temporal f drance. l1 This suggests that deconstructive crit- realm of radical difference or otherness--over icism understands the dismantling process not, as which this interpretive activity dances. It is in Heidegger, to be an opening up and releasement true, of course, that Ms. Johnson criticizes the of that which metaphysical thinking closes off and tendency of recent deconstructive critics to trans- forgets, but a disclosure of the false base of form this exegetical activity into an assured meth- canonical logocentric texts. In other words, de- odology and recalls them to the Nietzschean/ constructive reading remembers the supplementarity, Derridean affirmation of uncertainty: the doubling, of all writing, and thus the duplicity, the absolute undecideability, of all Much has been made of the fact that written texts, but not the pro-jective possibil- "knowledge" cannot be taken for granted. ities of being. Although deconstruction, like But perhaps rather than simply quest- destruction, calls into question the privileged ioning the nature of knowledge, we should status of the dominant philosophical discourse, it today re-evaluate the static, inert con- also "liberates" man from the prison-house of lan- cept we have always had of Ignorance. guage into an essentially similar nihilistic world. Ignorance, far more than knowledge, is At best, as in Derrida, it activates the what can never be taken for granted, If I perceive my ignorance as a gap in know- Nietzschean affirmation, that is the joy- ledge, instead of as an imperative that ous affirmation of the play of the world changes the very nature of what I think and of the innocence of becoming, the I know, then I do not truly experience my affirmation of a world of signs without ignorance. The surprise of otherness fault, without truth, and without origin, [difference] is that moment when a new which is offered to an active inter- form is suddenly activated as an im- pretation. This affirmation thus deter- perative. If the deconstructive impulse mines the non-center otherwise than as a is to retain its vital, subversive power, loss of center. And it plays without we must therefore become ignorant of it security. For there is a sure play: again and again. that which is limited to the substitu- -tion of given and existing, present, But this imperative, finally, cannot answer "the pieces. In absolute chance, affirmation critique of deconstruction, which accuses it of not also surrenders itself to genetic indeter- living up to its own claims of radicality, of work- mination, to the seminal adventure of the ing with too limited a notion of textuality, of applying its critical energy only within an SCE REPORTS SCE REPORTS

institutional structure that it does not question all becomes one, as it were. In thus curiously co- and therefore confirms." For, it seems to me, it ercing difference into identity, deconstructive is precisely this purely negative stance before the criticism paradoxically traps itself in precisely text--this restriction of deconstructive criticism what it would call into question with its decon- to the exposure of the mastering impulse behind the struction of the tradition of presence. Despite binary logic of logocentrism, for the sake of af- its intentions, it becomes, in tendency at least, firming ignorance (undecideabi1ity)--that not only the obverse face of the same coin: a negative blinds itself to the "negative capability," the violence that mirrors the positive violence of projective possibilities, disclosed by the metaphysical speculation. It is not, therefore, as Heideggerian destruction, but also ends in the Ms. Johnson asserts, the institutional success of metamorphosis of ignorance into empty formalism. deconstructive criticism that, as an increasing Limiting the function of deconstruction to calling number of examples in standard academic journals into question the "exclusive" eitherlor of logo- testify, has rendered it a self-replicating, pre- centric logic, in other words, all too easily and dictable, indifferent, and self-defeating pro- despite protestations to the contrary,ends, as fessional activity that confirms the institution Kierkegaard reminds us, in the futile hovering it would call into question. It is, rather, its "logic" of the neitherlnor, in a willed will-less- methodological failure, inherent, I submit, in ness that transforms the projective measure dis- Derridals project, to sit-uate the text in the closed by the destruction--the measure which is the world. To put it another way, this failure--this measure of man's occasion--into the certain, regula- successful desituation of language into the "scene tive, empty, and finally timeless methodology of of writingw--accounts not only for the academic "unmastered irony,"13 domestication of deconstruction--the divestment of its original adversary purpose: to interrogate the In thus reducing the signifiers emerging from humanistic impulse to reduce language, history, and addressing different historical/cultural sit- society, culture, to the Same--but also for its uations to a timeless intertextual (ironic) text, transformation into an indifferent instrument that deconstructive criticism ironically betrays its affiliates itself with, indeed legitimates, the affiliation with the disinterested--and indif- institutions that the humanistic discourse auth- ferent--"inclusive" formalism of the New Criticism orizes and elaborates. and ~tructuralism'~which it is one of its avowed purposes to repudiate. The deconstructive reader, Understood from the perspective of the like the New Critic and the Structuralist, become Heideggerian destruction, the deconstructive pro- a distanced observer of the "scene of textuality 1'3.5 ject that dominates the "advanced criticism" of our or, in Kierkegaard's term, an aesthete who per- time reminds us of Kierkegaard's recognition that ceives the text from the infinitely negative dis- the "present [Hegelian] age of reflection" is tance of the ironic mode. With his levelling gaze, positively capable of producing the illusion among he, too, like his adversaries, refines all writing, its intellectuals that, as speculative thinkers, in Derrida's own phrase, into "free-floating" they are active adversaries of the dominant culture texts. All texts thus become the same text. It and of the power structures that lie behind it: SCE REPORTS SCE REPORTS

A passionate, tumultuous age wants to Footnotes overthrow everything, set aside every- =. An age that is revolutionary but Martin Heidegger, "Introduction: The Exposition also reflecting and devoid of passion of the Question of the Meaning of Being," Being changes the expression of power into a and Time, tr. Joan Stambaugh in Basic Writings, dialectical tour de force: it lets every- ed. Joseph Farrell Krell (New York: Harper & thing remain but subtly drains the mean- Row, 1977, pp. 67-8. ing out of it; rather than culminating --in an uprising, & exhausts the inner Jacques Derrida, "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences," Writing and Difference, tr. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), p. 289. -its facticity &--while entirely private- Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, tr. Gayatri &_a dialectical fraud inter olates 5 Spivak (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University secret way of reading--that !t is not.16 Press, 1976), p. 158. For Paul de Man, of course, creative writing, unlike commentary As a form of "reflection," or as Edward Said has about it, is self-consciously demystified from aptly characterized it, an intellectual activity the start and exists to deconstruct the mystifi- "dominated by the spirit of refinement ,"I7 the deed expectations of the logocentric reader. constructive "play" of mind becomes, paradoxically, "The Rhetoric of Blindness: Jacques Derrida's perilously like an exemplary instance of this kind Reading of Rosseau," Blindness and Insight: of passionless revolutionary thinking, which trans- Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary forms the inner impulse to revolt against the old Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, order into an infinitely negative and ineffectual 1971), pp. 102-4. play of dialectics. Further, in emptying out the "inner actuality of relations in a tension of re- Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 158. flection that lets everything [power] remain," it becomes perilously similar, again in Kierkegaard's Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, P. 158. terms, to the garrulous "chatter" of a wit industry that ultimately, if unwittingly, validates and Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 159. serves the levelling hegemonic socio-political purpose of the "present age." Edward Said, "Reflections on Recent American 'Left' Literary Criticism," The Problems of Reading in Contemporary American Criticism: A Symposium, boundary 2, Vol. VIII (Fall 1979) p. 27.

J. Hillis Miller, "The Critic as Host," in Harold Bloom, Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, SCE REPORTS SCE REPORTS

poetry the taking of measure occurs. To write Geoffrey Hartman, 3. Hillis Miller, Deconstruc- poetry is measure-ta>ing, understood in the tion and Criticism (New York: The Seabury strict sense of the word, by which man first Press, 1979), pp. 217-53. receives the measure for the breadth of his being. Man is a mortal. He is called mortal 9. Martin Heidegger, "Introduction: The Exposi- because he can die. To be able to die means: tion of the Question of the Meaning of Being," to be capable of death as death. Only man Basic Writings, pp. 65-6. dies--and indeed, continually, so long as he stays on this earth, so long as he dwells. 10. I have conflated several essays of the later His dwelling, however, rests on the poetic. Heidegger in this last sentence, above all, HSlderlin sees the nature of the 'poetic' in "The Origin of the Work of Art," ". . .Poet- the taking of the measure by which the measure- ically Man Dwells. . . ," and "Building Dwell- taking of human being is accomplished." ing Thinking," in Poetry, Language, Thought, " . . .Poetically Man Dwells. . . ,I1 pp. 221- tr. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 22. It is, finally a "westering" measure, for 1971). The meaning of a meashre which is "the another etymological root of "occasion" is, of measure of itsoccasion"is implicit in the course, the cognate occidere (which "means" etymological roots of "occasion" immediately both "to fall," especially "to set," as in the from occasus ("to fall," "to drop," as in the case of the "movement" of the sun; and "to setting of heavenly bodies; and "to fall," die," "to perish'' from the present participle "to perish," "to die," as in de casibus virorum of which (occidens) the English work "Occident" illustrium--"of the fall of great men"). An corned. See my essay, "Postmodern Literature interpretive activity which is the measure of and Hermeneutic Crisis," Union Seminary its occasion, then, is not a constraining, Quarterly Review, Vol. XXXIV (Winter 19791, masterful and transcendent "geometry" having pp. 119-31. its ultimate model in the Platonic mousikk of the spheres. It is not, to appropriate Yeats' 11. A full treatment of the difficult distinc- rhetoric in "Sailing to Byzantium," the tion between "ontological difference" and "Oriental" measure of a golden bird singing difference would invoke, above all, Martin "of what is past, passing, or to come" from Heidegger, Identity and Difference, tr. Joan the infinitely negative distance of eternity, Stambaugh (New York: Harper & Row, 1979), but rather the measure of "Those dying genera- supplemented by the analysis of Temporality in tions--at their song," a measure that acknow- Being and Time; and Jacques Derrida, ledges man's "mortal dress" as the case. It "Differance," in Speech and Phenomena and is, in other words, the measure of "being-in- Other Essays on Husserl's Theory of Signs, tr. the-world, " of Da-sein (being there) "caught" David B. Allison (Evanston, Ill.: North- in that which passes. As Heidegger puts it in western University Press 1973), pp. 129-60, an essay on h3lderlints poetry, it is the de- supplemented by the discussion of the "trace" centered or ec-centric measure of mortality, and dif fgrance scattered throughout Of Gram- of dwelling on the context of morality: "In matology and the essays in Writing and Differ- -ence. SCE REPORTS SCE REPORTS

12. Jacques Derrida, "Structure, Sign, and Play in this sense consists in the bringing in of the the Discourse of the Human Sciences," p. 292. opposite, the complementary impulses; that is why poetry which is exposed to it is not of 13. S4ren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Irony, tr. the highest order, and why irony itself is so Lee M. Capel (Bloomington: University of constantly a characteristic of poetry which lndiana Press, 1971), pp. 336-42. See also is." Quoted in Cleanth Brooks, Modern Poetry my essay, "Heidegger, Kierkegaard, and the and The Tradition (New York: Oxford University Hermeneutic Circle: Towards a Postmodern Press, 1965), p. 41. Theory of Interpretation as Dis-closure,'' in Martin Heidegger and The question of Literature, 15. See Edward Said, "Reflections on Recent eft' ed. William V. Spanos (Bloomington: University Criticism," pp. 16-18. of Indiana Press, 1979), pp. 115-48. 16. SOren Kierkegaard, Two Ages: The Age of 14. I am referring, or course, to I.A. Richard's Revolution and the Present Age: A Literary

(and Cleanth Brooks's) distinction between two .Review. - ed. and tr. Howard V. Hong and Edna general types of poetry, that which leaves out H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University the opposite and discordant differential Press, 1978), p. 77. I am indebted to my qualities of an experience, excluding them editorial colleague Paul BOV& for bringing this from the poem (the poetry of the "objective" passage to my attention. imagination)nnd that which _includes them (the poetry of the ironic imagination): "The 17. Edward Said, "Reflection on Recent 'Left' structure of these two kinds of experiences criticism," p. 20. are different and the difference is not one of subject but of the relation inter se of the several impulses active in the experience. A poem of the first group is built out of sets of impulses which run parallel, which have the same direction. In a poem of the second group the most obvious feature is the extraordinary heterogeneity of the distinguishable impulses. But they are more than heterogeneous, they are opposed. They are such that in ordinary, non-poetic non-imaginative experience, one or other set would be supposed to give as it might appear freer development to the others. The difference comes out clearly if we consider how comparatively unstable poems of the first kind are. They will not bear an ironic contemplation. . . . Irony in SCE REPORTS SCE REPORTS

Jerry Aline Flieger difference in real lives, by subverting the intel- Rutgers University lectual establishment. Both objections to decon- structionim, however unlike they may appear, share THE ART OF BEING TAKEDI BY SURPRISE a common ground: traditionalists and radicals alike complain of the incapacity or refusal of the decon- Deconstructive criticism is a big success, and structive critic to take a stand, to endorse or that, as Barbara Johnson sees it, is the problem: demonstrate a clear meaning, to propose a real sol- can "dec~natructionism~~avoid being just another ution to a real problem, and to be willing to impose success story, absorbed into the intellectual main- that solution as the correct choice, be it intel- stream and sapped of its innovative force? Row can lectual or ethical. Deconstructionism, its opponents the l'deconstructive impulse" avoid being watered concur, is sli~pery;,unpredictable, full of sur- down by the very institution which promotes and prises to be taken seriously, teaches it? Johnson points out that the critical efficacy of deconstructionism is threatened not only Now Barbara Johnson seems to suggest in her by the sort of intellectual erosion which inevitably paper that the deconetructive critic must indeed accompanies the institutionalization of a thought be willing to fail in certain ways, since the effort system, but also by a certain conservatism inherent to mcceed at being absolutely l'logical"or "commit- in the deconstnlctive methodology Itself. Johnson ted" would imply a willingness to play by all the addresses both aspects of the problem faced by de- old rules of the intellectual game. This is too high constructive criticism today, responding firat to a price to pay, she suggests; for it is the old rules the accusations leveled against the method from op which seek to minimalize the role of surprise in the ponents on both ends of the ideological spectrum; critical process, vdorizing authority in the name and going on to suggest how deconetructive criticism of universal standards or intellectual rigor. Above my combat its own tendency to inertia or conserva- all, Johnson argues, deconstructionism must seek to tism. Johnson focuses her remarks on two kinds of maintain the continuing @'intellectual upheaval of "failureg1with which deconstructionism is often re- the surprise," by insisting on queetioning or prob- proached: the failure, on the one hand, to reaffirm lematizing the givens by which the critic operates. and conform to conventional values in literary criti- To this end, her own paper examines the goals and cism; and the failure, on the other hand, to subvert methods of the deconatructive critic, emphasizing these same values, to according to the non-tradi- the need to remain open to other perspectives, as tional or even radical values which deconstructionism well as the need to continue to take risks in read- seema to espouse. ing and interpretation. Tha deconstructive enterprise, she concludes, must not only continue to I would like to consider the ways in which both offer surprises to its readers, but it met also of these reproaches are bound up in issues of power: continue to leave itself open to the unexpected the power, in the first instance, to determine an insight from the unexpected quarter. Particularly, "authoritativeu interpretation for a literary text, @he argues, the deconstructionists need to pay and thus to dictate literary standards and preference; attention to the neglected domains of history and and the power, in the second case, to make a real biography, in order to radicalize their practice. SCE REPORTS SCE REPORTS

In this paper, I would like to suggest some ways want to avoid the slickness or slipperiness to in which the deconetructive critic might use the tools which the deconstructive method seems susceptible, of psychoanalysis to do what Johnson has proposed: that we need to attach our speculations to something is, to ground the Isslippery"practice of deconstruction concrete. But once we have pmblematized the without attenuating the surprising impact of its biscov- notion of an objective exterior "realitytt,just ery. While there are undoubtedly other bodies of theory what can we use to pin down the vunclearw logic --such as Marxist or linguistic theory- which have of deconstruction? What can the "sometking elsew served and will continue to serve as moorings for de- be shown to consist of? constructive criticism. the terminology and method of psychoanalysis do seem-particularly compatible with As I have already suggested, it seems to me deconstructionism, and might serve to clarify the more that the clearest dietinotion between tradition- hermetic aspects bf the approach for the uninitiated alist and deconstructive logio resides in the reader. I want, then, to discuss two aspects of the difference in their attitude toward the exercise relation between psyohoanalysis and deconstructionism, of power. As Johnson puts it, the "other logictt using Barbara Johnson's paper as a point of reference. of deoonstruction llundoes the very comforts of First, I would like to elaborate on how the L1logicof mastery and consensus that underlie the illusion othernessv8to which Johnson alludes coincides with the that objectivity is situated somewhere outside the ~~illogicalt~logic of the unconscious as revealed by self." The kind of t'comfortablemastery" of which psychoanalysis; and I want to suggest, moreover, how Johnson speaks is upheld by the appeal to a local- this logic may contribute to an esthetic of tssurprise" isable authority, and by ax^ identification with the rather than of "ma~tery.'~ Second, I would like to deal source of that authority as the holder of demonetrable, briefly with the isme of the inherent conservatism of logical truth. One needs only to look at the language deconstructionism, suggesting how psychoanalytic tools of the passages which Johnson cites in her paper to might be used to ground the method not only in histor- see that the traditionalists are engaged in a power- icity and biography, as Johnson proposes, but also in play. In the third quotation, for emple (~raff), our own practice of reading and teaching. the "validity" of a perspective is based on "coercive realityw, a reality which arbitrates, like a Johnson has done an excellent job of distilling sort of referee, among a nondiscriminating "plural- the essence of the traditionalist campaign against ectivities." Or coneider the fourth quota- the deconstructive heresy, a campaign based on ac- where wcertainty" is characterized as cusations of nihilism, relativism, and inexactitude. the aJ1 of "pietyn, which deconstruction (sacrile- After skillfully exposing the "binary logic" behind giouslyY) threatens. The bottom line of all of these these assumptions -a logic which grants canonic accusations seems to be the same: the vehement es- status to the "principle of non-contradictionft-- chewal of the ~~logicaluconsequence of deconstruc- Johnson asserts that deconstructive logic plays by tion, which is the abdication of the power to dictate other rules, based on a radically different logic taste. When Shaw complains, for instance, that where "something else is involved." "professors relegate judgment of all sorts to the studentst subjective preference," he is voicing the But just what is this "something else?" If we fear that the deconstructive method will lead not SCE REPORTS SCE REPORTS

only to "ekepticism toward all the old waysw (Dono- Freud goes on to say that evidence of this ghue), but will actually culminate in an anarchy "others1logic may be found in the dream-work, in of taste where (heaven forbid) 'I judgments of all Presumably these judg- certain linguistic phenomene like slips of the tongue sorts" become permissible. or the "double talkt1of joking, and in many forms of ments might exceed the text itself, and could, for art. It seems to me that one could add the non-bi- instance, include personal or political choices. nary logic of deconstruction to this list, at least The traditionalists seem bent on denouncing decon- on several counts. If we take, for instance, the atructioniam not only as a heresy, but as a eubver- characteristic of *ltimelesanessl*-that is, the way sion. in which primary procese functions without regard Johnson counters the traditionalist power-play to chronological order- we could draw an (admittedly with her exposition of the logic of deconstruction fanciful) analogy between this characteristic and the as a system which @@subvertsthe opposition between way in which Derrida's work, for example, constantly subject and object11and "displaces the traditional subverts the notion of llpriorityuor [email protected] notion of what a subject is." Significantly, John- axgument, for instance, concerning "which came first,11 son compares this "othert1logic to $he puzzling force speech or writing, is problematized in such a way of the death instinct , described by Freud in Be- that the traditional primacy of the spoken word is yond the Pleasure Frinciple as that inexplicable im- put into question. In Derrida'e work, chronology is pulse toward annihilation which operates inexorably, no longer a "logicalu determJxant of authority. if not logically, in human experience. But just how does this llother"logic work to subvert the eubject- The second characteristic of prinaary process as object distinction which functions as the main un- defined by Freud -"motility of cathexisw-- offers derpining of traditional logic? What is the contri- a similar analogy with deconstructive logic. Plotility bution of this "otherw logic to the esthetic of of cathexis can be described as both the inexhaustibil- surprise? !?hat does this non-binary logic have ity of libido or desire and the capacity of that de- in common with priaaxy process, the "logic" of the sire to express itself in a multiplicity of protean unconscious? forms: in joke, in symbol, in dream-work, in synptom formation. The libido is indiscriminate; it has the In his paper of 1915 entitled "The Unconscious,'' tendency to attach itself to any available object and Freud spells out the "rules" of a system radically to avail itself of any convenient ruse to find expree- opposed to conscious, binary, l@non-contradictory'l sion. The deconstructive process displays the same logic : sort of inexhaustible energy and the same richness of re>ource, relying heavily on the same sort of Let us sum up: exemption from mutual con- voverdeterminedu language (pun, condensation) which tradiction, primary process (motility of cathex- so often characterizes processes influenced by the 'is),essnees, and substitution of psychic workings of primary process. Moreover, as we have for external realitx --these are the character- seen, decmnstructioniam is frequently reproached with istics which we may expect to find in processes its lack of discrimination, its avoidance of value belonging to the system ~cs.l judgments of the *@logical11or traditional sort: one text seems as good as another, the traditionalists SCE REPORTS

complain, as a point of departure for the deconstruc- then, encourages the "reworking of the terns of tive process, an object of the critical "cathexis." an opposition," and contests the "principle of In other words, the very 31slipperiness"with which non-contradiction," by demonstrating that the deconstructive criticism is often reproached could most straightforward assertion is not "identicd" be compared to the ltunfixed"or mobile quality of to itself: it says what it means and "something the logic of primarJ. process. elseo at the same time. Thus the psychoanalytic method not only reveals the workings of a non-bi- The two remaining characteristics of this ttother" nary logic in the unconscious, but actually reveals logic -"exemption from mutual contradiction" and the ways in which conscious logic conceals contra- "substitution of psychic for external realityt1--fur- diction. nish even more striking parallels with the non-binary logic of deconstruction as described by Barbara John- The similarity between the final characteristic son. Johnson devotes several pws to a refutation of primary process --"substitution of psychic for of "either/or1# logic, making an appeal, as we have external realitytt- and the 'lother" logic of decon- seen, for a logic where "something else is involved." structive criticism is suggested by Johnson's dis- In Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious, Freud cussion of the problematizstio of the traditional describes dream/primary process logic in precisely understanding of subjectivity.6 Johnsonta argument these terms, as an ltillogicalllsystem which is cap- demonstrates how the deconstructive logic subverts able of "putting an 'andt where only an 'either/orl the dichotomies between external and internal, sub- is possible."2 Indeed, Freud maintains, in the one- jective and objective, by refusing to locate the iric mode "there is no such thing as an'either/orf , "moment of meaning-makingH either enclusively with- only a simultaneous juxtaposition is possible.w3 in or outside of the text. In fact, Johnson sug- Binary logic, then, the same logic which the decon- gests, "the reader's ' subjectivity"' itself "is dis- structive impulse subverts, is actually alien to covered to function something like a text, that is, the "other" logic of the unconscious. something whose conscious awareness of meaning and desire is only one aspect of a complex unconscious But deconstructive logic, as Johnson points out, signifying system which determines consciousness as does not simply exclude binary opposition: vfdeconstruc- only one of its effects.** tion," she maintains, "both opposes redefines; it -both reverses an opposition *reworks the terms of This notion of the textuality of subjectivity that opposition so that what was formerly understood is essentially Lacanian; and it is, moreover, a no- by them is no longer tenable.If This process, it seems tion which is important for an understanding of the to me, is not unlike Freud's 8~deconstsuction"of the "otherness" of deconstructive logic. Lacan, of course, process of negation: the therapist is charged to pay has problematized the traditional notion of subjectiv- the closest attention to that which the patient denies, ity --that "illusion of self" to which Johnson refers- since a negative statement conceals its "other" mean- by positing the lfintersubjectiveNnature of the self ing. (The patient's vehement assertion that the person or subject. For Lacan, one's 8tidentity1vis plural, in hie dream is his mother is translated by the detedned by an interaction, fn the Imaginary and therapist into its opposite. ) Freud's own method, blymbolic registers, with the unconscious processes SCE REPORTS SCE REPORTS

of others (as demonstrated in the celebrated "Schema as a somatic metaphor for the process of writing L" of intersubje~tivit~). Derrida, among others, itself. Derrida's highly Fmag3nstive reading of has argued along analogous lines concerning the #'in- Freud's theory of memory is but one striking ex- dividuality" of any text: one's "personal opinion" ample of the intermarriage between deconstructive is not "owned"; nor can one lay claim to the idea criticism and psychoanalytic thought. The appli- which he "authorizes", for his source is always plural: cation of this hybrid approach has also taken shape in the esthetic theory of Blanchot (L1&tretien in- If John R. Searle owes a debt to D. Searle fini) and Lyotaxd (~iscours. Figure). Lyotard, for concerning this discussion, then the "true" -instance, concentrates on the process of poetic pro- copyright ought to belong . . . to a Searle duction, a process which bears the imprint of the who is divided, conjugated, shared. What a 'lother" logic of the unconscious and thus is struc- complicated signature! And one that becomes turally analogous to dream in its genesis and expres- even more complicated when it includes my old sion ("Le Travail du r6ve ne pense pas," Discours, friend, H. Dreyfus, with whom I myself have To refer to Derrida's metaphor for writing worked . . . tlItttherefore feel obliged to Itla sc'ene de 1' Qcriture), one could say that the olaim my share o5the copyright of the Reply. F"'-deconstructive critic sees the unconscious as the But who, me? producer-director of the textual pmrformsnce. Even one's "own" ideas are, in other words, While the essays of Lyotard, Blanchot, and Derri- engendered intersubjectively. The boundaries between da on Freudian theory are indeed provocative, it does self and other, subject and object, inner and outer, seem to me that deconstructive criticism could develop are blurred: in the deconstructive method there is further along these lines, by undertaking a systematic not only a substitution of "psychic for external re- analysis of the role of the unconscious in the "die- ality," as in primary process, but there is actually semination" of the literaxy text, rather than content- a mingling of the two domaine. ing itself with mere reference to 3?reudian/~acanian thought. The affMties between deconstructive criti- The "other" logic of deconstruction, then, seems cism and psychoaaalysis are evident in the confluence to display certain fundamental similarities with the of terminology of the two thought systems: Freud's logic of the "other", the unconscious. Nor have the lVlibidourecalls Derrida'a concept of "d6sirn; "motiva- deconstructive critics themselves failed to take note ted forgetting" evokes Blanchot's "oubli"; Lyotardls of the areas of convergence between psychoanalysis and textual "jeu" refers to Freud's speculations on the deconstruction: the deconstructionists have turned fre- genesis of play; Derrida's notion of writing as "tracen quently and increasingly to psychoanalytic theory to corresponds to the Freudian notion of memory-trace, elucidate the "desiring", L'illogical" nature of the and so forth. A rigorous working out of the ramifi- literary text. cations of this "overdetermination" of terminology and subject matter would, it seems to me, provide In Derridatsessay, "Freud et la sckne de 1'6cri- a concrete point of departure for grasping the some- ture," for example, the mnemonic mechanism --that is, times mystifying practice of the deconstructive the formation of memory-trace in the brain- serves critic; while rescuing psychoanalytic criticism from SCE REPORTS SCE REPORTS

is fairly evident. Freudian theory has been devel- the tendency toward reductive interpretation. oped out of "real historiesn; and it directs its An intermarriage of psychoanalytic and deconstructive thought, moreover, could function finding8 back toward real therapeutic practice. to provide a sort of middle ground between deconr While problematising the notion of final "cure" or absolute Freudian theory never ceases to struction and its fltraditionalist" adversaries. address real issues, even if, until recently, it By referring to an established "science" like psycho- has insufficiently addressed questions of ideology. analysis, deconstruction could elucidate its theory And as the studies of scholars like John Brenkman and method without making undue concessions to binary logic. Hopefully this kind of clarification might and Frederic Jameson have demonstrated recently, help to avoid what Johnson calls the entrenchment psychoanalytic criticism is by no means incompatible of "self-definition of some literary critics in their with materid. or even political analyses. opposition to other litentry critics," especially since such an t~entrenchment~~,as Johnson points out, The second issue -that of the maintenance of contributes to the institutionalization and subsequent surprise or the laying bare of ignorance- io no conservatization of the deconstrucltive process. lees fecund for the psychoanalytic perspective; it contains, moreover, ideological implications of its I would like to conclude by looking briefly at own. Althusser has defined ideology in reference the issue raised by Johnson in the final section of to the Lacanian notion of flmisrecognition":it is her paper: which is, precisely, the problem of the the nature of ideology to be wmisrecogaizedtt,to conservatization of deconstructionism, and the neces- appear self-evident, to remain unexamined because sity to orient the method toward a radical practice. it seems to be a Riven of cultural experience. The If deconstruction is to live up to its own promise study of ideology, then, entails a laying bare of of radicality, Johnson axgues, it must be careful motives, an exposure of what is at stake in the main- not to do two things: it must not interpret the edict tenance of attitudes that pass as wobviousw or "cor- 7"there is nothing outside the text" as a justifioation rect." Similarly, the Lacanian concept of *smiarecog- for ignoring the real world; and it must never get too nitionu --a by which the subject advances an comfortable with its own success. In the first in- illusory, interested version of "truth1'- proble- stance, Johnson seems to be calling for a more mater- matizes the traditional understanding ot what it is ial context for deconatructionism; in the second case, to be vcorrectw or "incorrectM. she is calling for an interrogation of ways of see- ing which have become habitual. This entails, as she A working out of these issues, then, entails suggests, a willingness to change one's field of ques- a deconstruction of the clear distinction between tions, to identify and expose assumptions, to own up "truthffand lterrortt,and of the connection between to contradiction, to be taken by surprise. As John- "truth" and authority or power. In Lacan's system, son puts it, it is a question of "laying bare the one "recognizesH one's own "truth" only by owning ignorance one never knew one had." up to the limits of one's power: the submission to the Symbolic order is the necessary condition of As concerns the first issue -the grounding knowledge. Thus knowledge ceases to be allid with of deconstruction in historicity and biography- mastery or authority; paradoxically, it is only the usefulness of psychoanalytic technique and theory achieved when one allowe onemelf to be taken by SCE REPORTS SCE REPORTS

surprise. NOTES The use of Freudian-Lacanian theory, then, 1. Freud, "The Unconscio~s,~from General Psycholodcal can help to "deconstruct" the assumptions of binary Theory, New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1963, p. 135. logic, and can provide a theoretical underpining for the deconstructive enterprise. By elaborating 2. Freud, Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious, a logic based on a plural (intersubjective) or ter- Standard Edition, p. 62. tiary (oedipal) structure, rather than on the binary principle of non-contradiction, p:ychoanalyeis can 3. Freud, p. 205. furnish the theoretical tools necessary for deconstructive criticism to maintain ltts radical force, 4. Barbara Johnson, p. 4: ltIn the case of the opposition its innovative energy, and its potential for self-crit- between objectivity and subjectivity, deconstruction icism, And it is perhaps this self-critical faculty -seems to locate the moment of meaningwaking in the non- which is the most valuable of all, as Derrida seems objectivity of the act of reading rather than in the in- to suggest when he ass rts that '!,only lawhter gets herent givens of a text, but then the text seems already beyond the dialaoticp"' that is, beyond the constraints to anticipate the reading it engendereu of binary logic. And it is laughter, as Freud has demonstrated, which reveals the weakness which resides 5. Derrida, ttLimiteaINC a b c . . .,It Glyph 2 , Baltimore: behind every attempt at "mastery." Psychoanalytic Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977, p. 165. theory will permit the deconstructive critic to take him or herself a little less seriously, which is per- 6. Derrida, "De l16conomie g8n8rale,ttLt Qcriture et la diff6- haps finally one of the most ttsubversivewof projects. Paris: Seuil, 1977. SCE REPORTS SCE REPORTS

and most recently published articles. "The 'deadly Jerrold E. Hogle space' or 'difference' that runs through Billy Budd," University of Arizona she writes, "is not located between knowledge and action &ch to our surprise~~sthat which, TAKING AND BEING TAKEN within cognition, functions as an act; it is that which, within action, prevents us frcan ever knowing What does Professor Johnson mean by "the sur- whether what we hit coincides with what we under- prise of otherness," that pint of departure for stand.~~Moreover, even there the surprise of deconstruction which she urges us all to keep re- otherness extends its reference to that "'other' covering? If her "meaning" can be taken as what logic" which Rodolljhe ~asch6has already called the she "refers to" for a nument, then I find her "two steps" of deconstruction: the reversal of the calling up several pre-texts at once (and not sur- usual hierarchy and the rewriting of what is newly prisingly). First, of course, when she asks a priveleged.4 The effacements of possible meanings reading to "follow" whatever "puts in question by signifiers that seem secondary to signified the kind of reading it thought it was going to "passions" in Billy Budd are suddenly seen by the be," she sounds very much like PauJ de Plan pre- critic as the primary "w"of all the passions facing Carol Jambs and arguing against a reader's that seem to appear. The effacements are then re- quest for "singularity of meaning" that censors written out of the standard view of than to becane "marginal" elements in a text to prevent the "oc- de Manian mnents where "language conveys its own curence of La] di~ruption."~At the same time empty,.mechanical-function" prior to any production Johnson, like de Man, is generalizing the Jacobs of potential or constative waning ("Melville's suhnission to a "necessary incoherance" in order Fist," p. 583). These three violations shattering to suggest that reading should be open to cmnexpectations-"what has to happen," "what has to happen" instead of "what one would diffgrance, and the possibility of an inversion want to happen" (de Man's words again). What has that redefines what seems an.appendage-are the to happen, though, pretty clearly includes an un- main figures that I drift towards as I read the derstanding of Derrida's "prmrdial" otherness, "surprise of otherness" and as I share Johnson's the diffe'rance inaugurating and inaugurated by concern about anVantilraethcd" becoming a predictable the instituted that is never there as itself; and official procedure in criticism. we should enable ourselves to be surprised as he was in his awn reading by the ways "the canpletely Given these sedimentations of "surprise" and other is announced as such -- without any s-licity, "otherness," then, I nm want to ask the principal any identity, an resemblence or continuity -- within question that Johnson's paper raises for me: is what it is not .'IY After all, this differing and the deliberate return to the surprise of other- deferring constituting any word or transference, ness she advocates a viable solution to the pro- this "inside" that is "outside" of itself at its blem of a "ccmfortable undecideability"? Some of "core", this "always already" self-occulting motion the ways she makes her case (and how they refer to making authority and oppositions possible yet es- other statements of it) lead me to doubt that a caping them both, is what Johnson finds "drmtized" challenging "ignorance" can ever be opened up again in Melville's Billy Budd during one of her best-argued SCE REPORTS SCE REPORTS

by deconstruction. Can we so neatly "become iy- metaphysics of presence that we want to d~srupt, norant" of the "deconstructive impulse" that has and that is what Professor Johnson does to begin seized a number of us as much as we have seized the essay in this collection. 'lb be sure, 1 am upon it? Aren't we rather more likely, if we going after her for doing what w all do, what I follow Johnson's closing exhortation, to start a do, what Derrrda does and does unabashedly. It 1s project of reading by using "what has fallen into he who proposes, in one example, to free "Nietzsche disrepute" as a device ~rmittinqus to restate from the Heideggarian reading" by first offering the trace? Johnson herself shows us just how that the fonner "up to it ccmpletely, underwriting that is done when she "sets [her readed up to be sur- interpretation without reserve; in a certaln way prised by otherness" in her opening paragraphs on and up to the point where, the content of the Billy Budd. She cites several of the tale's inter- Nietzschean discourse being almst lost for the preters quite early, first show the surprising to question of being, its form regains its absolute diversity of responses to what seals a simple strangeness," its otherness or "what has to hap per^" story, and then to maintain that their one point in the face of what we have wanted to happen for of agreement is the "last testament" status of the too long (Of Gramnatologq[, p. 19) . still; tw pro- tale allowing it to gain "the metalinguistic au- blems remain just because of this quotation that thority to confer finality or intelligibility upon trumpet my principal question once again. On the all that precedes it" ("Melville's Fist," p. 568) . one hand, Derrida's procedure with IJietzsche, like Then she mes in for the kill: "Curiously enough Johnson's procedure with Melville, is not "for- [or perhaps "s~rprisingl~~,we find that Silly getting what e know how to do" but doing decon- -Budd ends not once, but no less than four times" struction itself, if not rhetorical maneuvers even and thereby shows that "to end is to repeat, and older. And, so, on the other hand, Johnson's closing to repeat is to be ungovernably open to revision" proposal seas a return to origins (the impossible diffkance (pp. 568-69). I firid that view con- or gesture of metaphysics) that repeats Derrida's vincing, but mainly because I have read somethi~g "surprise encounter" without much sense of dif- like it before in a wll-known study that Johnson ference at all. does not cite klelville's 'i"nematics of Form by Edgar ~ryden. Johnson's surprise is indeed "set Yet here I must step back a ment and look up," first in her diversion from one issue (dis- directly at my own rhetorical set-ups. I have agreement) into another that abruptly defers its been assuming, perhaps unfairly, that by "one's predecessor until the author has mre evidence, and own usual practices" Johnson is pointlng to the then in her "ignorance" of an opened-up ending which practice of deconstruction, naively perfond or she proceeds to open by countering an "authority" not, and that by "what has fallen into disrepute" already countered somewhere else. Apparelit1 "if she means what deconstruction has exposed, those the deconstructive impulse is to retain fit$ subversive power, we must therefore becane ignorant" assumptions aLx,ut interpretation that conceal an of subversions already performed. Either that, or ignorance which should always corr~nandus. How else we must select quotations or positions on the sane can I mke these staten~ntsaccord with (or defer to) her later urging that what we must forget is focus that we know in advance will present the the "deconstructive impulse" demanding the forgetting SCE REPORTS SCE REPORTS

itself? Perhaps the accord is different or not there in the way I see it, and perhaps I have of the question, the departure fm the closure raised questions about it within my own selective of self-evidence, the putting into doubt of a forgetting of what crosses it. Why have I left system of oppositions, all these movements ne- out that "judicious the-wasting with what one cessarily have the form of empiricism and of does not know how to use"? Why should I refuse errancy. [~fterall, we] must begin wherever to examine how "canfortable undecideability" can --we are and the thought of the trace, which be "surprised by its own conservatism"? The cannot not take the scent [or attraction towards answer to all these questions, I think, is one something] into account, has already taught us that I find in Johnson's reading of Melville, that it was impssible to justify a point of one that she finds in Derrida's readin of Lacan departure absolutely. Wherever we are: in a in her essay "The Frame of Reference, *I% and one text where we already believe ourselves to be. that Uerrida finds in Foucault's reading of Des- (ibid.) cartes or his own reading of Rousseau's intertext of supplents: however much a reading responds Yes, we nust wander only £ram what we can say and to and wants to be "affected by nonknowledge as verify already to open up the standard logic of by its future," it also "ventures '& deliberately" interpretation and statement. Eut we must do so in tawards an Fpollonian image that seeks to contain, a questioning gesture of "strength" (Johnson's overpower, and repress various diversions that "reading" that is "strong") sounding a good deal threaten to elude it (Of Grmtolq, p. 162) . like Harold Bloan's willing of a hyperbolic origin Deconstruction is a willed performance that makes or new voice fram old metaphors that it dethrones happen "what has to happen" or takes as much as it and reworks as if it were first. To say anything lets itself be taken whenever it reads (or rereads) at all we mst want-to-say (vouloir-dire, according a text-within-a-text. Reversal and rewriting may to Derrida) and must partially forget, not dem11- be existing threats in part of a text's drift when struction, but our lack of full camand over the a reader takes it on, but they surface only because language we reconfigure. We must try (as I have) they form "our intention," something Derrida acknow- to find accords, limited ranges of reference, focus- ledges as prior to any cogent reading he presents: sing concepts on non-concepts enabling us to project a "task of reading, " and then we must determine that We wish to identify a decisive articulation of wherever we are (now deconstruction, surely) will the loyocentric poch. For purposes of this take us somewhere that we have proposed as the goal identification 5r1Of of our will to power.7 seems to us the mst supposes that we have already prepared the exit, Hence Johnson's proposal for future subversions determined "he repression of writing as the fun- may have some viable elements, yet only if they take damental operation of the epoch, read a certain mre account of deconstruction's lust for self- number of texts but not all of then\. This achievement, or what Said calls a "beginning in a avowal of empiricism can sustain itself only characteristic way" that will always find itself as The opening by the strength of the question. the content of its f rame.8 Surprise may caw less from forjetting the strategies of deconstruction SCE REPORTS SCE REPORTS

beneath a set-up reading that is itself one of the texq would icaan" or assert as defineable (ibid.), strategies and more frcm an initial overindulgence groundless and what captures the focal text must therefore in what deconstruction usually finds: capture the critic precisely to insist on her need supplementarity, signs as tanbs, gaps in knowledge to cgmmd what no writer can carr~~ndabsolutely. or beginnings-again, ironic encounters between This conundrum inust arise "wherever we are," at cognitive projections and the sheer march of self- any stage of awaiting "sanething other" that we displacing elernenta. Once that has happened achieve with our interpretive assumptions, so de- the production of a critical reading (the reading- construction by its own standards must always mrk towards-an-essay that Johnson is actually talking through its own "conservatism," as Johnson says, about) can stop and face what it has not mastered and only at that juncture, as Johnson does not say, in and around its focus and so realize what its reach out for what it "does not know how to use." Derridean language cannot say, at least not in the The intentional aims of deconstruction, if it is state the critic employs it nor perhaps in the pre- to progress by disrupting itself, must be (1) the sent stages of Derrida's own mrk. Now the critic may confront quite early the "role of truth" (or finding of textual problem it cannot account for and (2) the quest for same adjustments in discourse textual horizon) that reading must establish as its that can take these problems on and open others. "otl~er"to be read and the plain fact that any read- If those ex-orbitings never occur, if essays such .ing is finally limited by "its own interests, blind- as "Melville's Fist" keep ticking off established nesses, desires, and fatigue." At that pint the Derridean notions in a literary example, however deconstructionist can turn towards her own project brilliantly, then Johnson is especrally right when the surprise that Derrida sees in his focal texts: she sees a future for deconstruction "in which ever mre sophisticated subtleties are elaborated We should begin by taking rigorous account of within an unchanging field of questions." this being held within (brise) or this surprise: the writer writes a language and a logic As it happens, I can even think of an area whose proper syselaws, and life his dis- other than the one in Johnson's ninth paragraph course by definition cannot duninate absolutely. where deconstruction has led us yet chosen to rest He uses 'them only by letting himself, after a on its current vocabulary without reopening and fashion and up to a pint, be governed by the system. And the reading must always aim at a surging past the conservatism of what it can certain relationship, unperceived by the writer, name. We now accept "meaning" or the predication of a signifier towards an enlergent signified (or between what he ca~~nandsand what he does not camand in the patterns of the language that presence) as the product, even the forgetting, of he uses. Grmtology, p. 158) a sliding difference-fran-itself tlut always defers (Of elsewhere before there is any "sense" to it. such meaning, as Professor Riddcl has said, is in fact Surprise now emerges as an oscillation of taking It "a formal construction" and therefore "a mirage, and being taken, being held within or holding. always already an Image" never at onc with itself. lo turns out to be sought by a "rigor" that wants to Yet what necessitates the transfon~~tionfrom the bc captured by "scmething other than [Can analyzed violent onset-of-the-other-in-what-is-other into SCE REPORTS SCE REPORTS

the "sense" of any mrdlsfuture as a relationship to its past and absent "meaning"? Why can ~errida's "to nothing that ccmes before or after" can always vouloir-dire be translated as a "will-to-significa- be- "a trope" or a thrust of relation engender- -7tion" or perhaps an inevitable "will-to-meaning," ing a "sequentialnarrative" that "means. " A1 1 he as Eugenio Donato intimtes?l1 Does the trace's can say is that "we impose, in our turn, on the self-occulting by self-displacement demand this sort senseless per of positional language the autho- of forgetting, or is that fairly cOmR3n explanation rity of sense and eaning."12 Yet how do we im- too sinp?le? These questions are avoided by Profes- pose authority if the mere positioning is not al- sor Johnson precisely where they might confront her ready differing and deferring within itself and in her reading of Billy Budd. As she approaches so driving towards smthing else to be pursued the narrator's "Platonic definition of Claggart's by a re-wsitioning that we may achieve? There evil-'Natural Depravity: a depravity according must ke a way beyond our current evasions to say to nature'," she glides too easily into a lack of why diffe'rance has to becm a will-to-meaning in "content" in the definition by first accepting F. B. at least one of its "other" form. Freanan's view that the phrase is "nothing but a tautology"; "Syntactically," she says, "the defini- No one has dealt with this problem, after tion fulfills its function, but it is empty of any all, Iwre than Jacques Derrida himself, yet I do cognitive information" ("Melville's Fist, " p. 583) . not find he has advanced this question much beyond We already know frm hrrida and her other examples wherellp5left it in "Cogito and the History of Mad- from Melville that any crossing from term to tern ness. Here, when he finds that Descartes' "I pints out a space (or "otherness") that is never think" is a hyperbolic "attempt-to-say" springing entirely filled up, even in assertions where tern up frm a madness of silent non-waning that re- are presented as identical with one another, There mains as the Cogito's "other," he also sees that is nothing surprising in that discovery any more this sudden "excess in the direction of the non- than there is in her set-up via Freeman. What is detennined" (p. 57) at once bems detennined mre surprising now is Melville's use of Platonic by an "econamy" of defining exchanges that is the identity-with-itself when the very syntax of "necessity from which no discourse can escape, difference (sanething "according to" salething for it belongs to the nleaning of meaning" (p. 53). else), not to mention "depravity" as un-natural "Wanting to say," in other mrds, as I only started in mst "natures," manifestly denies the to imply earlier, is "a zero point at which deter- self-sameness that makes tautologies so meaningless mined meaning and nonmeaning m together in their yet desireable. Sawthing must mean in terms of ccarmon origin," yet an origin which is only an sanething else and yet that difference must claim excess (p. 56). There can be no discourse without sane resemblence too. Why not just displacements the possibility of a meaning demanded by "an act of that differ and never claim otherwise? Is there force and a prohibition" keeping silent diversion shnply a hurnan desire for maning-by-resemblence veiled beneath "normality" (pp. 53-54), and that unrelated to the eruption of displacement? de Ym act is a sheer caning forth from non-sense that seems to say so whenever he wonders how a reaches out for relation and reassurance the mnt meaningless "positional act" connected it steps out fma drift where everything is other than what seems. Why must this be? What is the SCE REPORTS SCE REPORTS

for awhile at least, " "pre-papers ," discussions that necessary turn fran non-meaning to meaning that rrakes -are the readings we thought they were going to be. even my own discourse possible - and then keeps it Then we must return to the textual horizon to which from finally meaning beyond all threat of drift? I our mrk seems to respond and find mvements occur- grant that the taking of the excess as a point of ring that still escape our reading, even though we reference for interpretation, sometking "reflected" will never find all of them. The resulting essay as soon as it is "profferred" (p. 58), announces must be the struggle of extending an ever-inadequate that "meaning" is under way, however much it is vocabulary to face questions that beckon only at the always threatened. But why should there be a "pro- edges of our understandings. Of course, as Jonathan f erring" which already assums a "reflection" upon Culler said in this very forum last year, our cur- it? If meaning and non-meaning divide at a cmn rent system of prmtion and tenure (and rewards excess, what about the nature of that "origin" has thereafter) militates against all SUE$ "projects'' yet to be said? I think that such questions remain that could "take years to camplete." The mre because Derrida's later works and those of his fol-- copious the vitae, given good quality, the better lowers start with "the meaning of meaning" as pre- the chances for many scholars to chase after infla- sence and mrk to show that "Everything begins with tion (though there are exceptions). Why not latch reproduction" generating presence & a belated ob- on to some helpful, astonishing notions that can ject of desire (Writing and Difference, p. 211). be used in several readingsand can make sane works The usual strategies of deconstruction simply by- seem truly different from what they seemed before? pass the question, or rather they beg it, assuring I did. The answer is that there axes a pint when it answered by the metaphysics of presence which you can always tell what you are going to say as they set out to unsettle despite their need to write much as your readers can tell exactly what they will within it. In doing that, of course, they confess read under your name, and on the fact of that pro- the pawer of that metaphysics without entirely get- blem Professor Johnson and I are in something close tiny at what makes it necessary (though intpossible). to total agreement. We differ, as mst do, in our Thus I am now taken by surprise, not by diffGrance, ways of proposing solutions. I claim that her case but by my taking of everything towards a metaphysi- for re-emergent ignorance could encourage some cri- cal argument which I "want to say" but which I deny. tics to repeat the very strategies they should ques- Deconstruction must disrupt itself mst, must take tion and expand. Her "judicious time-wasting," un- itself towards being taken, by better explaining, less dified fran what I find in that sentence, of all things, the rational discourse which it always could simply be the first stages of an essay that is. knows its own surprise but pretends to let it happen. I prefer a reading and writing towards an ignorance True, this suggestion is risky, and in a very that is really imperative because it cannot be spoken basic way that Johnson's final call-to-ignorance or even thought without a good deal more wrk. I does not really force on writers of criticism. I believe that most of us have more time than we ac- ask, not just for essays ahtting what we cannot knowledge, or at least enough to articulate what we say (as I have), but for essays that we do not send do "not know how to use" on the way to a mastery out because they are too predictably deconstruction- that is its own best critic in its ability to see ist (and I've sent out my share). We must write, SCE REPORTS SCE REPORTS

NOTES what its readings evade. The alternative is to accept ourselves as mrthy of praise or blame from a 1. Foremrd to Jacobs' The Dissimulating Hamny deconstructionist "insider" who tells us what is (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1978), "proper to the form" if we wish to "do it." Decon- pp. ix, xi, and xii. struction at its best takes its aim at what is 9- proper "wherever we are," so I look for the time 2. Of Gramnatolcqy, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty when I will not "be taken" (or taken in) by m own Spivak (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, pattern of "proper" and fabricated surprises. x5 19761, p. 47.

3. "Melville's Fist: The Execution of Billy g,"Studies in lbnanticisn, 18 (1979), 599.

4. See ~asch6's"Deconstruction as Criticm" in Glyph 6: Textual Studies (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 19791, esp. pp. 183-94. 5. See Melville's Thematics of 170m: The Great Art of Tellinq the Truth (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 19681, pp. 209-15.

6. "The Frame of Reference: Poe, Lacan, Derrida, " Yale French Studies, 55/56 (19771, 457-505.

7. See Michel Foucault on what the author-function necessitates (even for the deconstructor) in "What Is an Author?", Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticissn, ed. ~osud~arari (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 19791, pp. 141-60.

8. See Said's Beginnings: Intention and Method (New York: Basic Books, 19751, pp. 4-26.

9. Even Johnson's laudable urging in that ninth paragraph that we "use history and biography &- constructively" sounds less like the hope for the "new questions and new ways'' that it claims to foster and wre like the refiguring of excluded merial within an established proqrm. Isn't SCE REPORTS SCE REPORTS

the emphasis placed once again on following Andrew Parker Derrida and de Ma, the leaders of the movement? The University of Chicago

10. "Decentering the Image: The 'Project' of OF POLITICS AND LIMITS: 'Amrican' Poetics?" in Textual Strategies, p. 347. DERRIDA RE-MARX 11. See Donato in "'Here, I~ow'/'AlwaysAlready': "Modern art, etc." Incidental Rerearks on Some Recent Characterizations --Marx , C;ncndrisse of the Text," Diacritics, 6, No. 3 (Fall 1976), esp. 26-27. The following might best be considered simply as an extended footnote to Professor Johnson's 12. "Shelley Disfigured" in Harold Blm, et al., comments concerning one of the types of "accusa- Deconstruction and Criticism (New York: Seabury tions" commonly directed against deconstruction-- Press, 19791, p. 64. that of "the politically radical, which accuses deconstruction of not going far enough." For 13. Revue de metaphysique et de morale, 3 and 4 the question raised by these particular "accusers" (1964), trans. and rpt. in Writinq and Difference, regarding "the politics of deconstruction" may trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, itself be viewed as a displacement of perhaps a 1978), pp. 31-63, I quote frcxn the latter version. more basic question--the question of Derrida's encounter with Marx, an encounter (to transpose 14. "The Critical Assumption," SCE Reports, 6 (Fall Derrida's own quotation from John Searle) which 19791, 83. "never quite takes place."1 It has long been acknowledged that Marx is conspicuously absent 15. My thanks to Debra Xurtz for typing the final from the list of Derrida's so-called "precursors," version of this essay. and that Marxist texts are mentioned only in passing (if at all) without themselves ever forming the putative objects of any extended reading.2 Such neglect, however, has been (and remains) "a serious ground for dissatisfaction among younger French and American intellectual^''^ who continually implore Derrida to take an unambivalent position (is he pro or contra?) in regards to the Marxist tradition. The nature of this "dissatisfaction" is clearly discernible, for instance, in the bizarre pas de dew performed by Derrida and his interviewers both in "Positions" and in "Ja, ou le faux-bond": each of these "dialogues" concludes with a sequence of increasingly insistent SCE REPORTS SCE REPORTS

and objects. Neither Derrida (as "reader") nor attempts on the part of his interviewers tehave Marx (as "text") are in any manner homogeneous Derrida definitively describe his relationship to entities: both are rather elements in a system of Marx; each of these attempts in turn elicits a unsymmetrical relationships which exceed the bound- lengthy response by Derrida which, however, only aries of their "proper" names.* This disseminated seems to have the effect of reinforcing his inter- plurality of reader(s) and text(s) undermines both viewers' frustration (thereby prompting them once the possibility of "an unambivalent attitude" to again to repeat their question to him in a slight- Marx as well as of a discrete, stable canon of ly different form . . . ) .4 Why this reticence on Marxist "principles" that would exist hors-texte. Derrida's part to "satisfy" his Marxist critics, Marx, in other words, is not to be memor4ed but and why do they feel that he "never goes far read. z enough"? Why (if not for "political" reasons) has Marx not drawn the same attention which Derrida What While Derrida and his interviewers are all does devote to the other "modern masters"? agreed that the process of reading is itself in- (in the words of one of his interviewers) precise- scribed in heterogeneous ways, it is, however, pre- ly is Derrida's "rapport au le materialisme his- cisely concerning the nature of this heterogeneity torique et au le materialishe diale~ti~ue"~(and that Derrida and his interviewers seem to diverge can this question be asked as such)? These are radically. For Jean-Louis Houdebine, "heterogene- the issues to be rehearsed below. ity" is that which names the outside of any idealist philosophy, what such philosophies cannot syn- thesize, transcend or "digest"; in its absolute resistance to any metaphysical reappropriation, One of the more extraordinary features of the heterogeneity (in Houdebine's words) forms "the "dialogues" referred to above is that--despite his motif of a (of the?) fundamental dialectical ma- interviewers' nearly continual protestations to terialist contradiction" and, as such, serves "as the contraryb--~erridadoes in fact manage to a reversal and at the same time a displacement specify many of the ways that he finds his own outside the domain of classical philosophy."9 work to accord with the history of the Marxist The major thrust of Houdebine's point here is to tradition. In the first place, he defuses the challenge the priority of Derrida's diff6race Marxists' most pressing concern by explaining that by claiming that this term is encompassed within the absence of Marx from his texts represents not the notion of heterogeneity conceived in its an objection to Marxism per se but a lacuna ex- "proper" materialist sense--and thus, by implica- plicitly calculated "to mark the loci of a theo- tion, that deconstruction is merely one moment retical elaboration which, from my standpoint in within the larger dialectic of Marxist-Leninism.1° any case, is yet to come."7 Having said this, however, Derrida is quick to insist that it For Derrida, however, such a formulation is makes little sense to 'fix his relationship to constantly fraught with the danger that, in priv- Marx in any determinative way (as if this were a ileging such notions as "heterogeneity" or even question of his personal opinion): any such re- "matter," one may simply be participating in the lationship is not a simp19 matter of subjects and SCE REPORTS SCE REPORTS

alteration without opposition (more, or less, than logic of that to which one is opposed. As he has oppositionag" is a tactic employed to resist the noted elsewhere: temptation of "both simply neutrazizing the binary The "contents" (of action or of discourse) oppositions of metaphysics and simply residing, that are apparently the most revolutionary while upholding it, in the closed sphere of these or the most subversive are, from the moment oppositions," we will find that deconstruction when certain rules of formal decency are re- will remain at variance with materialism in so far spected, perfectly recuperable, neutralized, as the latter tends to content itself with its own and assimilated by the s stems to which one self-definition as the specular outside or other pretends to oppose them. Y 1 of a (simply) opposed idealism.16 In failing to recognize this implication in the discursive Phrases such as '*the irreducible heterogeneity of structure of its "enemy," dialectical materialism matter" therefore continually run the risk of sim- will remain caught within the systematic logic of ply installing a new transcendental signified that its metaphysical "opponent": "can always turn up to reassure a metaphysical materialism."12 If an "outside" to metaphysics To the extent that it includes a system may "always become an 'object' again in the sub- named dialectical materialism, does11't jectfobject polarity or the reassuring 'reality' Marxism present itself as a philosophy of an hops-texte," then we must remain on our (whether elaborated or to be elaborated), guard since "the 'dialectic' of the same and the as a founded philosophical practice, as a other, of the inside and the outside, of the homo- ll~~nstru~tion"(to respond in a word to geneous and the heterogeneous, is," as Derrida your question)? I haven't known any stresses, "extremely devious. "l In short, Houde- Marxist discourse--considered as such or bine's master-concept cannot claim for itself a said to be such--which would respond nega- victory over (and beyond) metaphysics simply as tively to that question. Nor even, I the product of its (re)iteration: such concepts might add, which poses or recognizes this can succeed in calling idealism into question not as a question.17 through any predetermined insistence but only as The Marxist concept of "ideology," for example, in a result of the textual work which they occa- avoiding "questions of the Nietzschean and/or the sion.14 Heideggerian variety," represents merely one domain in which the residual operation of a traditional Replying in this way to Houdebine's question metaphysics can be detected--one which is marked (which, nonetheless, is repeated over and over "by a certain logic of representation, of con- again), Derrida also comments on the nature of sciousness, of the subject, of the imaginary, of Marxist systematicity. In another context, he mimesis, as well as by a pre-critical notion of has noted that "deconstruction does not oppose, illusion or of error . . . "18 Thus even the work but works, without working (if work is determined of such an avowedly "anti-humanist" as Althusser oppositionally), otherwi~e"~5--and such a formu- remains inscribed within the borders of "a very lation is pertinent here. For if Derrida's u- old-fashioned psycho-philosophy "I9 biquitous strategy of uncovering "a structure of . SCE REPORTS SCE REPORTS

well the [ideological] place it has circumscribed Both of these objections, however, While such remarks seem to indicate a gener- for itself) .23 ally negative attitude towards Marxism (at least can be considered as variations on a single ques- as presently formulized), Derrida nevertheless tion of boundaries: of Who comprehends Whom, of emphasizes the point that "deconstruction is not which theory--in its own comprehensiveness--can comprehend a wider range of phenomena (including [. .I an anti-philosophy or a critique of . the other). philosophy. Of Marxism less than any other."20 Unlike Marxism, deconstruction "is not a critical This question of limits is aptly phrased by operation, rather criticism is its object. [It] aims, at one moment or another, at the confidence Terry Eagleton, for whom deconstructive criticism expressed in the critical instance (one which is represents a problem "for a critic whose commit- decidedly critical/theoretical) concerning the ment to materialism extends beyond semantic boundaries" [my italics]. 24 John Brenkman' s reserva- ultimate possibility of decidability itself .lr21 Yet in so far as Marxist criticism remains ever tions are also paradigmatic of this concern: willing to be decihble--to construe itself as Deconstructive literary criticism has held rending the "veil" behind which the tme rela- off the problems posed by history and soci- tions lie--to this extent we mupt conclude that ety by Zimiting the construct to be decon- Marxism and deconstruction do not (simply) ouer- structed to the series of fundamental con- Zap. 22 cepts, oppositions, and value schemes that Derrida has found to organize idealist philosophy since Plato. The deconstructed system remains a purely speculative one. This Having outlined Derrida's brief (though sug- indefinitebroadening of history into the gestive) remarks expressed in his interviews con- area of metaphysics, accompanied by the cerning the nature of his rapport with Marx (a narrming of the general text, hides the rapport, we have learned, that cannot be [simply] evasion of all historical specificity; such articulated), we now will turn to some statements a strategy has a special appeal precisely made by various of his Marxist critics--for whom, because it allows the act of radical crit- of course, the "positions" taken by Derrida "do ique to witMrm from its actual historical, not go far enough." Whether as a direct response political, and institutional context .25 [my to the questions raised in the interviews or as a italics] generalized estimation of the implications of deconstruction, the "objections" posed to decon- Similarly, Christine Buci-Glucksmann finds it in- struction by Marxism fall into two categories: sufficient "to situate the internal contradiction those for whom Marxism and deconstruction are within Hegelian philosophy only at the level of mutually exclusive disciplines (in that deconstruc- the relationship of writing and method (cf . "Hors tion does not know its place, its own limits rela- livre" [in La Diss&Cnation]). What closes Hegel- tive to Marxism), as well as those for whom decon- ian philosophy in on itself (the cutting edge of struction is not sufficiently inclusive (in that its relationship to science and to the history of deconstruction is charged with knowing only too SCE REPORTS SCE REPORTS

less this discussion of the possibility of Pap- class struggle), or what simply does not offer it- prochement is posed once again as a question of self as an intra-textual opening [. . .], is there- hierarchies, of borders, of boundaries (even by included in Marxism" [my italics] .26 though the asymmetry of "at once more local and more general" offers a troubling pause). Can Some Marxists emphasize, however, that such the limits to this version of territorial warfare limits to deconstruction are not completely without be overcome? This is the question we will now remedy. 27 Implying that deconstruction is not consider below. "wholly irreconcilable with Marxism," Fredric Jameson finds that Derrida's practice of textuality "may be said to have left a place open for Marx- ism. "*' Proceeding from such a perspective, Professor Johnson's comments in "Nothing Michael Ryan itemizes just what deconstruction has Fails Like Success" do much to settle the claim been most lacking--an absence which only an alli- made by Marxists that "deconstructive theory ance with Marxism can (fu1)fill: sometimes seems to block all access to the pos- Deconstruction can derive 'from Marxism the sibility of reading explicitly 'referential' broad political and socio-historical outlines documents in conjunction with literary or speculative texts." The task for "deconstructionists," which it now lacks. Like bourgeois feminism as she argues convincingly, is not to "reject" which dictates its own limits--limits which the demands of history in any simplistic way but Marxist-feminists are beginning to overcome-- rather to find "new ways in which the literary deconstruction as it exists projects limits and the non-literary texts alike can be made to which can only be overcome by placing its at read and rework each other." Yet we must still once more local and more general undertaking (because the critique of logocentrism is ask ourselves why her discussion (as well as limited in comparison to social theory, but mine) is necessitated in the first place. For it nevertheless deals with a phenomenon if Derrida had only written both openly and at which characterizes all western, not only length on the texts of Marx and of Marxism, then bourgeois, rationality) within the frama~ork surely our discussions would lose their perti- nence: we then wouldn't have to ask about his of abroader revolutionary theory. If it is rapport with Marx (even if we reject the facile not to remain an academic sub-discipline, a Why is philosophical critique of philosophy and of ways this question has been posed). its institutions or an elitist literary Marx absent from Derrida's texts? HOW can we critical method, it must be joined to a account for his reticence without deciding pre- Marxist criti ue of race, class, and sex maturely what this absence means? exploitati~n.~~[my italics] Perhaps in a purely specuzative way. While, for Ryan, Marxism also can "benefit" from its encounter with deconstruction (he finds the While various theories have been offered to latter "a means of detecting and correcting resid- account for Derrida's "detachment" from this ual idealism in Marxist theory itself"), neverthe- SCE REPORTS SCE REPORTS

subject (and while--on their own terms--they are There is what you call this "encounter" more or less persuasive), such theories are perhaps [with Marx] which has seemed to me indeed, less successful in indicating the nearly patholog- for a long time, absolutely necessary. You ical nature of this situation it~elf?~~~hepsycho- may well imagine that I was not canpZeteZy tropic structures of the interviews discussed above unconscious of it. might provide a clue to what may be at stake in And yet, I am charged with the fault that Derrida's "omissioo" of Marx. In the first place, I denounce, as if people [actually, C. Buci- the questions put to Derrida by Houdebine and Glucksmann] were less in a hurry to criti- Scarpetta resemble in their blind insistency cize me or to debate me than first to adopt nothing so much as a compulsion to repeat [Wieder- my position in order to do hoZul?gsmang], a compulsion "which cannot ulti- u~atelybe reduced to a conflictual dynamic en- This "defensive" tone marks as well a discussion tirely circumscribed by the interplay between the in La Carte Postale in which Derrida..objects to reality principle [they do, after all, receive the translation of the phrase aufgelost 0 erden answers fitted to their questions] and the kijnnen (in a recent French $dition of The ma?^ pleasure rinciple [yet they revain "unsatis- Ideology) as peuvent &re deconstruites ["can be fied"~."~~Nor can this compulsion to repeat be deconstructed"]. Derrida comments: understood simply as a desire to master decon- Once the amalgram is accomplished, t$e struction, to subject Derrida to their own appropriation incorporated [incorporee] , mastery: we hear that "deconstruction" is to be What then is this function of traumatic abandoned, since k3: had alreudy said it. repetition if nothing--quite the reverse-- Who hears that "'deconstruction' Is to be aban- seems to justify it from the point of view doned"? Is this the translator's (surreptitious) of the pleasure principle? To master the motive? Can it be construed (without remainder) painful event, someone might say--but who solely as the product of malicious intent? If masters, where is the master here, to be Derrida is "over-reacting," is it coincidental mastered? Why speak so hastily when we that this behavior occurs in the proximity of do not know where to situate the agency Marx's name? that would undertake this operation of mastery. 31 In noting this conjuncture of a compulsion Neither, however, can Derrida assume this to repeat with the operation of a certain rhetoric position of mastery, for his is literally a of defense, we seem to find ourselves reading not "defensive1'position--a position characterized an interview between Derrida and his Marxist by a certain rhetoric of defense [meh]: critics but--Beyond the Pleaswe Principle, whose fourth chapter begins with Freud's "confession" The Lacuna to which you alluded [concerning that "what follows is speculation, often far- Marx], and do me the honor ofbelieving this, are explicitly calculated fetched speculation, which the reader will con- . . . sider or dismiss according to his predilection."34 SCE REPORTS SCE REPORTS

speech, between the spontaneity of conversation and Freud begins this chapter by noting that "the sys- a supplementary process of editorial revision? If, tem Pcpt.-Cs. [occupies] a position in space" that in addition to a compulsion to repeat, a mechanism poses specific problems of limits: of defense indeed inheres to the structure of the It must lie on the borderline between outside interviews, these then are tropes whose topograph- and inside; it must be turned toward the ex- ies "do not yield to the norms of formal logic: ternal world and must envelop the other psy- they relate to no object or collection of objects chical symptoms. 35 nor in any strict sense do ttey have either extension or inctusiveness [comprehension] "37 The ego is similarly described as a "boundary crea- . ture" [G~enmessn]eluding classification according This topographical indeterminacy is manifest, to a simple logical topography (as Margaret Fergu- moreover, in our inability to identify simply son explains): whose is the ego producing these "textual defen- Because Freud describes [the perceptual] ap- ses," whose is the ego that is both "the stake and paratus in terms of a "protective" function, the agent'' of such defensive maneu~erin~s.~~Rath- and because he specifical1)r relates the no- er than attributing this ego-function either to tion of protection against external threats Derrida or to anyfall of his interviewers (since to the ego's task of defending itself against the phenomena under observation cannot be reduced internal threats, the chapter provides a use- to the interplay of individual psyches), perhaps ful way of thinking about textual defenses-- we can suggest that what is at stake is the ego including Freud's own--as "productions of the of deconstruction (in the same way that Derrida ego." 1. . .] The distinction between "inter- authorizes us to think about the ego of psycho- nal" and "external" in the realm of textual analysis as it is [de]constructed in Freud's text). defense is, however, no less complex than By doing so, we might discover that the "connec- Freud suggests it is to be in the realm of tion" between this general effacement of limits psychic survival. j6 and Derridals defensiveness on the question of Marx is something that (in ~errida'sown words) If the interviews in question qualify as such "belongs to a different labyrinth and a different "textual defenses," it is because part of their crypt. "39 complexity resides in their similar problematiza- tion of the limits between "inside" and "outside." "What is a crypt?" As Derrida's essay "Forsf' Not only are the questions addressed to Derrida explains, a crypt is a defense mechanism taken to asked in terms of which discourse is more compre- extremes (or, if such a word existed, to intremes). hensive than the other (which, in "understanding" As Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok developed the the other, can situate the other in itself) but notion, a crypt is an uncanny ruse of the ego em- even the very form of the interview poses and re- ployed to mimic the operations of the ~nconscious!~ poses this same problematic of limits: when does While space does not permit a detailed elaboration "Positions1' end? with the termination of the dia- of this figure," what will be stressed is that a logue section or with the "final" exchange of let- crypt "literally" incorporates a foreign body with- ters? where are its borders between writing and SCE REPORTS SCE REPORTS

in the self, an action that ultimately exceeds the crypt, we can take up once more the question of possibility of distinguishing between the literal Marx's absence from Derrida's texts, and conclude and non-literal: that we have simply been looking in the wrong The cryptic enclave, between "the dynamic place. For when Derrida writes that "there is no unconscious" and the "Self of introjection," paradigmatic text: only relations of a cryptic forms, inside the general space of the self, haunting from mark to mark," or that all transla- a kind of pocket of resistance, the hard cyst tion is a matter of "economy" (of the oikos, the household) in its "rezlationship with time, space, of an "artificial unconscious.'' The interi- or is partitioned off from the interior. [. . counting words, signs, marks," we have found in- . .I The inner safe (the Self) has placed it- deed "a certain foreign body working over our self outside the crypt, or, if one prefers, household words."46 Just as Derrida finds a prop- has constituted "within itself" the crypt as er name in the sounds of the Freudian text,'7 so an outer safe. One might go on indefinitely we, too, can acknowledge such an (improper) pres- switching the place names around in this diz- ence in the texts of deconstruction: for the zying topology (the inside as the outside of cryptonym in question is, of course, that of the outside, or of the inside; the outside mark(s) {marque (s) IMarx. It is only fitting that as the inside of the inside, or of the out- it is Marx who is encrypted in the ego of decon- side, etc.), but total con-fusion is not struction: he is anasemically invoked in every possible [ ! 1. 42 re-marking of the mark (as teZo8 or target; as trace or residue; as minting or inscribing; as error or illsion [a stray mark, off the mark]-- "How do crypts find articulation?" Through cryptonyms which both "protect against a mortal the general topoi about which Marx has much to repetition of an excruciating pleasure and provide say). As the inside of the inside of deconstruc- a displaced expression of a desire which would tion's outside, or as the outside of the outside otherwise have to remain irrevocably silent. *'43 of deconstruction's inside, Marx inhabits within Cryptonyms work anusemicaZZy, establishing corres- the Zimits of deconstructive rhetoric a very pre- pondences between words not on any semantic basis carious bounded/boundless place: it is no wonder but through "lexical contiguity" or "formal conso- that the interviews bear this same (abyssal) nance"; the cryptonym is then treated as a synonym structure, for when the name of Marx is the sub- of the initial (interdicted) word of which it is a ject in question, the deconstructive ego is apt translati~n.~~(Derrida's play on the homonymity to be highly defensive. Hence Marx is not absent between the way Hegel is pronounced in French and from Derrida's texts as claimed: encrypted in the the word aigZe ["eagle"] might be understood as an crypt of its Self, deconstruction has Marx in illustration of these cryptonymic rules.45) Since protective custody. such a procedure can occur both within languages as well as between languages, the potential for cryptonymic substitution remains unlimited. While the discussion above has been somewhat With this pocket sketch of the workings of the less (or more) than serious, it was undertaken SCE REPORTS SCE REPORTS

NOTES if only to insist that there is something decidedly "wrong" about recent Marxist attacks on deconstruc- Jacques Derrida, "Limited Inc," Glyph, 2 tion, or about deconstructive attacks on Marxi~m,'~ (1977): 169. As Derrida remarks concerning this or even about some of the positive attempts to ar- formulation, it is above all with the structure ticulate the relationship between the two. I find of this "never quite" that this paper, too, will myself, for example, in complete agreement with be concerned (171). Michael ~yarhlucid critique of P. Lejeune's Le pacte autobiographique49 (a work of "bovine com- See, for example, Gayatri Spivak's "Trans- placency," to be sure) and yet dissent entirely lator's Introduction" to Derrida's Of Grammatology from the way that Ryan tries to make Marxism and (Baltimore, 1976): xxi and 318 n.19, as well as deconstruction ozlerzap on the question of "self- 3.-L. Houdebine's question to Derrida in "Posi- evidence." This Is not to say that both discourses tions," an interview to be discussed at some do not attack this nefarious concept, but that the length below [Positions (Paris, 1972): 83-41. cbject being attacked (even though it may bear the same name) may not be the same in each instance. Spivak, op. cit., p. 318 n.19. Ryan's use of phrases such as "Put the two critiques together and you get . . .'I or "This is the ltPositions"is the last of three interviews lesson of Marxism and deco~~structioncombined" in- published under the title Positions (Paris, 1972); voke an arithmetical model ("only like with liker1-- "Ja, ou le faux-bond" appeared in the journal E- only objects belonging to the same discursive or- graphe, #11 (1977): 84-121 and is a "continuation" der--"can be added togetherg')--an assumption which of the interview begun as "Entre Crochets" in the our discussion of crypts (where 1 + 1 may equal same journal, #8 (1976) : 97-114. Derrida's inter- 430) was meant to put in question. viewers in the former are Jean-Louis Houdebine and Guy Scarpetta (both of whom are associated with Marxism and deconstruction pose themselves in the Tel Quel col1ective);the interviewers in the dissimilar ways, each answering to a different ob- latter remain anonymous (the editors of the jour- ject: Marxism criticizes its objects (race, class, nal?). and sex oppression), deconstruction criticizes c~fticisrn.~~If they are to be related (as I hope "Ja, ou le faux-bond," p. 116. In this con- they will) this should occur on the basis of their nection it should be pointed out that the "unity" supplementarity (and not simple complementarity), I am attributing to 5 Marxist critique of Derrida of their "folding" and not mere "overlapping" into is in itself a strategic fiction. I am calling one another; in the same way that desire impinges "Marxist" those for whom Derrida's omission of upon need, so are Marxism and deconstruction con- Marx--as well as his reticence to discuss openly nected: anacZiticaZly. As a contribution directed those issues historically connected to Marx's towards a fuller mapping of this borderland be- "namett--isa matter for concern (and I include tween the two, this paper thus makes a pli for ad- myself among them). ditional re-man. e

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That such protestations are, in fact, nearly Jacques Derrida, La Carte Postale (Paris, continual is evidenced even in the structure of 1980): 286. the "Positions" interview (a topic to which we will return). l6 K,p. 305; and Positions, p. 56.

Positions, p. 85. l7 "Ja, ou le faux-bond," pp. 118-19. See "Signature Event Context," m, 1 la Ibid., p. 120. Having said this, however, (1977): 172-97, as well as "Limited Inc" concerning Derrida still insists "in the necessity of the the ways in which the written undermines the seem- problematic domain designated by the Marxist con- ing plentitude of personal "identity." It is, of cept of ideology, even if I judge that, in its course, a frequent topos of Derrida's writing that historical/theoretical situation, the state of a heterogeneous collection of texts both is and is the concept in the Marxist texts that 1 know cannot (completely) designated by the "uniqueness" of not measure up to the structure and the complexity their author's "proper" name. of the domain and the objects so designatedW(lbid., p. 119). Positions, pp. 126, 127. l9 Ibid., p. 121. lo As Richard Klein aptly explains, the point here is simply that "Houdebine comprehends Derrida." 20 Ibid., p. 119. See his "Prolegomenon to Derrida," Diacritics, 2:4 (Winter 1972): 31, which poses many of the same 21 Ibid., p. 103. questions that will be considered here. As we will notice, "comprehension" (as "inclusion" as well as 22 We will return to this problematic of m- "understanding") may, "in the last instance," be in our conclusion. what the question of Marx is all about. 23 Such a distinction between "inclusive" and l1 "Ja, ou le faux-bond," p. 105. For example, "exclusive"--as are all distinctions between "out- would there be something that we can call "ideal- sides" and "insides"--is merely an arbitrary heur- ist" philosophy if it weren't for the fact that istic. What is being stressed here is not some at- there was always already some version of material- tempt to differentiate the two but rather the com- ism to put it into question? mon structure of "-clusivity" they share.

Positions, p. 88. 24 Terry Eagleton, "Text, Ideology, Realism," in Literature and Society [Selected Papers from l3 Ibid., p. 90. the English Institute, 19781, ed. Edward W. Said (Baltimore, 1980): 149. l4 a,p. 88. * John Brenkman, "Deconstruct ion and the SCE REPORTS SCE REPORTS

36 Margaret W. Ferguson, "Border Territories Social Text," Social Text, 11 (1979): 188. of Defense: Freud and Defenses of Poetry," in -The Literary Freud: Mechanisms of Defense and 26 Christine Buci-Glucksmann, "~6construction ---the Poetic Will [Psychiatry and the Humanities, et critique marxiste de la philo~ophie,~'%, Volume Four], ed. Joseph H. Smith, M.D. (New Haven, #53 (1973): 32. 1980): 150, 155.

27 Any resemblance to the Platonic pharmakon Nicolas Abraham, "The Shell and the Kernal ," here is not necessarily unintentional. Diacritics, 9:l (Spring 1979): 28 [my Italics].

28 Fredric Jameson, The Prison-House of Lan- 38 Laplanche and Pontalis, p. 104. guage (Princeton, 19721, 177, 183-4. 39 La Carte Postale, p. 349. 29 Michael Ryan, "Self-Evidence," Diacritics, 10:2 (June 1980): 2. 40 "Fors," Georgia Review, 31:l (Spring, 1977) : 64-116 [translated by Barbara Johnson]. 29a~f. the discussions by Spivak, 9.cit., p. 318 n.19, and by Klein, op. cit., p. 31: the 41 For a detailed summary of this work, see former considers temporal matters, the latter Peggy Kamuf ,"Abraham's Wake," Diacritics, 9:l questions of political survival. (Spring 1979): 35. I also wish to thank Lorna Gladstone, whose dissertation [The University of 30 J. Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis. The Lan- Chicago, 19801 on "The Telling of the Wolf-Man's page of ~sychoanalysis,trans. Donald Nicholson-'-- Story" first introduced me to Abraham and Torok's Smith (New York, 1973): 78. work.

Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Con- 42 "Fors," pp. 74-5.

43 Kamuf, op. cit., p. 37.

32 Positions, pp. 84, 85, 72. My italics. 44 "Fors," pp. 106-7.

33 La Carte Postale, p. 285. 45 See Glas (Paris, 19741, p. 7.

34 Beyond the Pleasure Principle [Norton Ed.] 46 These are from Derrida's "Bqrderlines" in (New York, 1961): 18. Is it accidental that the Deconstruction & Criticism, Harold Bloom et ax. "subject" of much of La Carte Postale is--Beyond (New York, 1979), pp. 137, 169-70, as well as -the Pleasure Principle? from "Fors," p. 41. 35 Ibid., p. 18. 47 La Carte Postale, p. 333. SCE REPORTS SCE REPORTS

NEWS AND NOTICES 48 See J. Hillis Miller's "Response to Vincent Leitch" in Critical Inquiry, 6:4 SCE Sessions at MLA (Summer 1980), which says a few discouraging words about Marxism. I. Annual Business Meeting:

49 Ryan, 9.cit., passim. Monday, December 29, 1980 Mirror Room, Sheraton, 5:15 PM 50 Stephen Melville's dissertation [The University of Chicago, 19801 is very helpful 2. 302: Designing Courses in Criticism in posing this issue of what objects mean Monday, December 29, 1980 to disciplines; I thank him for sharing his 10:15-11:30 AM, Cedar, Hyatt work with me. Panel: Leroy Searle, Univ. of Washington Jeffrey Peck, Univ. of Washington Jeffrey Plank, Georgia Inst. of Wherever possible, existing translations of Technology Derrida's writing were employed. These include: 3. 356: Deconstructive Criticism: Directions "Positions," Diacritics, 2:4 (Winter, 1972) : 35-43. Monday, December 29, 1980 1 :45-3:00 PM, Arbor 4, Hyatt "Positions [cant.]," Diacrw, 3:l (Spring 1973): 33-46. Panel: Vincent 13. Leitch, Mercer Univ. "Response," Diacritics, 3 :2 (Summer Barbara Johnson, Yale Univ. 1973) : 57-9. Wiliiam Spanos, SUNY -Bingharnton Joseph Riddel , UCLA "Speculations-On Freud," Oxford (Papers printed In this issue of SCE Reports) Literary Bevi~,3:2 (1978): 78-97 [trans. Ian MacLeod]. Note: the following sessions include papers and

$' presentations by SCE members: SCE REPORTS SCE REPORTS

SCE Session at SAMLA Louisville, Kentucky November, 1981

TOPIC

"The Interpretation of the Social Sciences and Humanities: Toward a New Transdiscipline" Topic for SCE Session: 1981 MLA Chair: Gregory Ulmer Humanities University of Florida "The Return of the Text" Gainesville, Florida 32611

Sec'y: Matthew Marino For this session, we invite papers that English address the idea of "text1' in light of University of Alabama recent theory. We are especially inter- University, Alabama 35486 ested in papers that examine how changing concepts of "texts" may alter our conceptions of pedagogy, method, and literary history. Papers selected will be published in -SCE Reports #lo.

Deadline: April 30, 1981

Send papers and proposais to:

Professor Wallace Martin English Department University of Toledo Toledo, Ohio 43606 ANNOUNCEMENT OF SPECIAL ISSUE:

"Post Structural Theory and Practice"

NEW ORLEANS REV l EW

Send papers to: Bruce Henricksen Non Fiction Editor ---New Orleans Review Loyola University P. 0. Box 195 New Orleans, LA 70118

THE SOCIETY FOR CRITICAL EXCHANGE is a not-for-profit corporation founded in 1975 to encourage cooperative research in criticism and theory. The Society operates through a diversity of projects, independently and in cooperation with other organizations and institutions.

Membership and contributions are tax-deductible. Dues for members are $7.00 per year (regular) and $5.00 (students)

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