Centering deconstructive politics positions the affirmative as a sovereign ventriloquist who reveals the truth of economics---destroys practical dialogue and recreates their impacts

230 Deconstruction and the “Political” The question of deconstruction’s relationship to contemporary politics has always been somewhat of a sore point. Most are by now familiar with the criticisms leveled against it for its deficiencies in this regard. These critiques have mostly centered on the issue of deconstruction’s inordinate focus on questions of textuality and reading—an issue best dramatized perhaps by Derrida’s oft-cited, controversial maxim, “There is nothing outside the text”—“il n’y a pas de hors texte.”24 Deconstruction’s detractors have alleged that this well-nigh exclusive preoccupation with semiotic themes, with the figuration and involutions of texts, has functioned at the expense of more worldly and practical concerns. The world might be crumbling all around us, they charge, but Derrida seems more interested in the contingencies of this or that phoneme—the amusing fact that in French Hegel’s name is the phonic equivalent of “eagle” (“aigle”). As those familiar with Derrida’s work know, in Glas (“dirge”) this chance homonymic equivalence gave rise to a rumination of some three hundred pages on analogous linguistic slippages and fissures.25 One of the first to raise such charges of practical-political irrelevance against Derrida’s negative semiotics of reading was Michel Foucault. In his response to Derrida’s unsparing critique of Madness and Civilization, Foucault pilloried deconstruction as nothing more than an idiosyncratic variant of the classical method of “éxplication de texte.” As Foucault observes with palpable condescension, deconstruction practices an “historically determined little pedagogy” characterized by “the reduction of discursive practices [which for Foucault, of course, are sources of “power”—R.W.] to textual traces: the elision of the events produced therein and the retention only of marks for a reading; the invention of voices behind texts to avoid having to analyze the modes of implication of the subject in discourses; the assigning of the originary as said and unsaid in the text to avoid replacing discursive practices in the field of transformations where they are carried out.” Thus, according to Foucault, Derrida offers us little more than an interpretive practice that “teaches the pupil that there is nothing outside the text” and “which conversely gives to the master’s voice the limitless sovereignty which allows it to restate the text indefinitely.”26 As the progenitor of deconstruction, Derrida is the master ventriloquist who in sovereign fashion determines which textual meanings become unraveled and how. Foucault’s major fear is that, in the hands of deconstruction, the critique of power and domination, one of the key outcomes of May ’68, would be supplanted by an exclusive orientation toward politically pointless textual analysis. Nor is Foucault the only critic to have challenged Derrida in this way. Edward Said has contended that Derrida’s highly formalized obsession with the abstruse terms of “archewriting”—that is, with “nonconcepts” such as the trace, grammatology, supplement, différance, dissemination, and so forth—ends up by “muddling . . . thought beyond the possibility of usefulness.” Said continues, The effect of [deconstructionist] logic (the mise en abime) is to reduce everything that we think of as having some extratextual leverage in the text to a textual function. . . . Derrida’s key words . . . are unregenerate signs: he says that they cannot be made more significant than signifiers are. In some quite urgent way, then, there is something frivolous about them, as all words that cannot be accommodated to a philosophy of serious need or utility are futile or unserious.27 231 Said’s reservations are akin to Foucault’s. Derrida’s preoccupation with an esoteric, negative semiotics of écriture remains self referential to the point of otherworldliness: in his hands, the world itself is eclipsed in favor of acts of interpretive bravado that are meaningful only to a loyal coterie of devotees. Other critics on the left have accused deconstruction of representing a linguistically sublimated version of 1960s radicalism. In their eyes it represents a form of ersatz praxis: instead of unmasking the ills of contemporary society, one exposes the traces of “metaphysics” or “presence” in the theoretical texts of Plato, Lévi-Strauss, Rousseau, Husserl, Levinas, J. L. Austin, and so forth. Nor has Derrida’s wellnigh exclusive orientation toward the works of European male thinkers endeared him to proponents of multiculturalism.28 Even former wholehearted supporters such as Gayatri Spivak have railed volubly against deconstruction’s long-standing refusal “to open onto an ‘outside’ constituted by ethico-political contingencies.”29 Needless to say, Derrida has not taken well to such criticisms. He believes that on the whole the political implications of his work have been seriously underestimated and misunderstood. Here, however, one might enquire as to how one could, from a strict deconstructionist standpoint, actually distinguish instances of misunderstanding from understanding in general. After all, when a theory is predicated on the maxims of dissemination and “iterability” (the implacable march of “signification”), claiming “all understanding is merely a species of misunderstanding,” one would like to know on what basis the founder of deconstruction can plausibly claim to have been misunderstood.30 In an era when the claims to “authorship” and other “transcendental signifieds” have been deconstructed, with what right can an author claim to have been misinterpreted?31 In his own defense Derrida has always insisted, “discourses on double affirmation, the gift beyond exchange and distribution, the undecidable, the incommensurable or the incalculable, or on singularity, difference and heterogeneity are also, through and through, at least obliquely discourses on justice, [ethics, and politics].”32 And in response to one critic’s accusation that “deconstruction is so obsessed with the play of difference that it ultimately ends up indifferent to 232 everything,” Derrida insists that “deconstruction is not an enclosure in nothingness but an openness towards the other.” Via such openness it seeks to “reevaluate the indispensable notion of responsibility” in ways that are fraught with ethical and political consequences.33 Elsewhere he does not shy away from immodestly insisting, “Deconstruction is justice. . . . I know nothing more just than what I call deconstruction.” And further: “Deconstruction is mad about this kind of justice. Mad about the desire for justice.”34