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PARTISAN REVIEW
THE INFLATION OF THEORY
DECONSTRUCTION AND CRITICISM. By Harold Bloom et al.
Sea–
bury Press. $16.95.
SPURS: NIETZSCHE'S STYLES. By Jacques Derrlda.
Translated by
Barbara Harlow. University of Chicago Press. $8.95.
A THEORY OF LITERARY PRODUCTION. By Pierre Macherey.
Trans–
lated by Geoffrey Wall. Routledge and Kegan Paul. $19.75.
After inconclusive battles over structuralism, academic
critics are now fighting about "deconstruction."
Deconstruction and
Criticism
aims to be a report from the trenches. Its chief dispatches are
essays by Paul de Man and Jacques Derrida, the inventors of decon–
struction. A Nietzschean edition of ancient skepticism, it holds that
language does not convey meaning, but complicates and ultimately
cancels it. Words lead only to other words, not to a speaking "self" nor
a world or ideas spoken about. What then is language like? Derrida
recalls a graffito, "Don 't read this. " The sentence performs the act of
commanding, and so does not refer to anything. In order to grasp the
order and obey it, you must already have disobeyed it. Deconstructors
have shown considerable ingenuity in inventing an analytic rhetoric
that can reduce every text to just such a self-canceling, self-referential
paradox. In
Spurs,
Derrida muses for a dozen pages over a scrap found
among Nietzsche's papers, on which was written, "I have forgotten my
umbrella, " in quotation marks . Was this a quotation from a book? A
report of an overheard conversation? An example to be used in some
argument? Perhaps Nietzsche really had forgotten his umbrella. The
scrap is undated and unsigned, so we cannot be absolutely sure where
or when it was written nor even whether Nietzsche wrote it. Perhaps,
Derrida ponders, Nietzsche's whole works are just like this: you can
question them endless ly, but never decide anything.
Deconstruction's conception of language and literature are, I
think, wrong. De Man and Derrida do not account-they don 't even
try-for our ordinary, successful use of language to communicate
about a shar-ed world, nor do they account for the self-reference which
is essential to their reading of texts. But even literature has two faces–
the network of connections from word to word and the usage by which
words bind users and the world. Deconstruction seems plausible
because it carries into critical theory an extreme version of some
