The alternative is to refuse the discourse of the 1AC in favor of deconstruction – that solves

There are many manifestations of the practical consequences of deconstructive resistance across a range of academic disciplines and activist sites. Drawing on the work of scholars and activists who have explicitly linked their radical political projects to deconstruction, whether through endorsing or critiquing it, this section provides two accounts of deconstruction read as a form of activism, followed by a brief snapshot of three examples of its praxio-logical utility in the contexts of feminist, queer, and post-colonial political interventions. Crucially, I am not trying to claim for deconstruction the successes of these latter movements, nor am I suggesting that the actors involved by any means do or should self-identify as proponents of deconstruction. To do so would be a crude and colonising appropriation. Rather, the point made is that the movements and interventions discussed share with deconstruction a commitment to disrupting prevailing norms and assumptions reflective of the second- and third-order critiques outlined above, specifically as regards problematising essentialised or naturalised agents of resistance. One pertinent account of the concrete consequences of deconstruction is provided by Martin McQuillan. He suggests it can be conceptualised as a form of ‘textual activism’: in deconstruction’s movements, he argues, ‘an intervention takes place (a textual activism) which produces the movement, history and becoming of a necessary political analysis which links the political to critical thought today’ (2008, p. 6). This is because deconstruction (unlike philosophy) reads. Such reading qua reading does not generalise from the exemplary but accepts the challenge of the exemplary to thought as an articulation of the troubling otherness which presents itself as an arrival in reading. Reading in this sense has very little to do with the quiet spaces of university libraries... Rather, this reading is an interminable, unconditional critical liveliness to the world around us, its histories and its futures. (2008, p. 6–7) In elucidating this notion of textual activism, McQuillan makes the point that deconstruction intervenes not simply at the level of thought or philosophy but rather in ways which have substantive material effects. Simply put, this is because the ways we think have a direct bearing on the ways we act; in the post-9/11 world, the stupefaction and mystification of domestic thought is inseparable from the military violence which is only one aspect of this world-wide struggle. Thus, critical reason and deconstruction are more important now than ever and this textual activism will be affiliated in unpredictable ways... to the material processes of the political. (2008, p. 9) McQuillan emphasises here the extent to which ‘textual’ readings and interventions are by no means dissociable from the concrete sphere of global politics. While certainly not their sole origin or source, socio-political framings and discourses of war and militarism in the post-9/ 11 world clearly functioned to provide the conceptual foundations and parameters without which the justifications proffered by statespersons in the USA and elsewhere for the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan could not have been convincing or indeed intelligible. Many scholars of global politics using Derrida’s thought have made similar points in a range of empirical con- texts (Arfi, 2012; Bulley, 2009; Edkins, 1999; Fagan, Glorieux, Hasˇimbegovic ́, & Suetsugu, 2007; Zehfuss, 2002). Concurrently, Paul Bowman frames deconstruction as a form of ‘martial art’. He suggests that ‘although Derrida mainly read and wrote (monstrously faithfully) about “mere” philosophical texts, these texts are to be understood as “indices of real history”, produced by and productive of particular biases: effects that have effects’ (2010, p. 38). This analogy emerges in part from the embeddedness of deconstruction in relations of violence: it is ‘construed as responding to challenges, intimately attentive, listening, sticking, yielding, inverting and displacing, always patient, calm and adaptive’ (2010, p. 40) in a manner reflective of martial arts, particularly t’ai chi. Bowman elaborates on parallel misreadings of deconstruction and t’ai chi as ‘philosophical, isolated, inward-looking, navel-gazing: as not really real’; both are framed as ‘digressions away from reality, truth, and direct, practical engagement’ (2010, p. 41). However, like t’ai chi, deconstruction has, he demonstrates, a series of concrete praxiological implications. For instance, deconstruction makes possible a form of engagement with political antagonists which emphasises ‘listening’: in contrast to simply denouncing and dismissing interlocutors, deconstruction ‘listens by sticking to the other... Derrida listened, stuck and yielded to the texts and institutions of philosophy, in order to invert and displace conceptual orders and foci’ (2010, p. 44). Bowman suggests that in academic contexts, this might mean, for instance, seeking to publish in journals other than those reflecting one’s own disciplinary and ethico-political commitments, dealing with difference in terms and contexts other than the familiar.