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PARTISAN REVIEW
much read. That is of interest to us. It's a fear; it terrorizes some
people.
WILLIAM PHILLIPS: Before we close I would like to present some facts.
Far from being suppressed in this country, structuralist writing and
thinking has been spreading enormously and rapidly, and celtainly
in the universities. Obviously it's not spreading in the market place
but if we can judge by
Partisan Review,
we are flooded by structural–
ist pieces, the way years ago you had Marxist approaches, women's
approaches, black approaches, gay approaches, and so on.
It
is
taking the proportions of a tide among teachers and graduate
students, and I think we have
to
revise what seems to me a paranoid
theory of censorship. Ten years ago
Partisan Review
began to carry
pieces explaining structuralism, as well as pieces by Barthes and
Foucault.
It
never occurred to us to censor those.
PETER BROOKS: Since I introduced the idea of censorship, I should
justify myself. What I mean precisely is a foreclosure, perhaps
repression would be the best word, of the kind of responsible,
intelligent investigatory cultural discussion of these works that
Stanley Cavell was talking about, precisely by the people who had
some idea that there were eighteen other voices crisscrossing the text
of Derrida's work, not people who have read a couple of essays in
translation and extract the essence from the philosophy of Derrida
and indeed do tag them and label them. I don't recognize structural–
ism in a great deal of the work that's been discussed this morning but
that's not a point I want to pursue at the moment.
It
seems to me that
what's happened, and we're all aware of it, is the strange division of
labor. There's been an industry created around people like Derrida in
the academy but there has been, I'll change my word from censorship
to repression, outside, partly because, as Stanley Cavell was suggest–
ing, this is enormously threatening stuff if you take it seriously.
WILLIAM PHILLIPS: But Peter, isn't there a contradiction? You're really
describing this as a highly specialized discipline and at the same time
you're saying that there's some kind of-not censorship but
repression-preventing this work from reaching slightly more popu–
lar levels. I don't know that established critics really represent the
popular thinking in this country.
PETER BROOKS: I see what you're saying and I see the thrust of that but
it seems to me that if you say that this is some of the most interesting
work that's going on in our time, and in some places it's taken the
place that experimental work held in poetry and the novel in earlier
generations, then it seems to me the organs of high mass culture have
