296
PARTISAN REVIEW
There is no such thing as the essence of woman because woman
averts, she is averted of herself. Out of the depths, endless and
unfathomable, she engulfs and distorts all vestige of essentiality, of
identity, of property. And the philosophical discourse, blinded,
founders on these shoals and is hurled down these depth less depths
to its ruin. There is no such thing as the truth of woman, but it is
because of that abyssal divergence of the truth , because that untruth
is "truth." Woman is but one name for that untruth of truth.
What siren song lures people onto these reefs of nonsense? The essay
wends its mind-numbing way to the conclusion that those who believe
in truth, science, and objectivity are castrated old dogmatists, whereas
deconstructors make better lovers, because they understand that women
are incomprehensible.
Why all this is taken seriously by American academics is hard to
see, and the other essays in
Deconstruction and Criticism
do not help.
Geoffrey Hartman presents a tortured reading of Wordsworth to prove
you don't
have
to
deconstruct, though I cannot explain why he is so
timid about asserting this plain truth. Harold Bloom rightly objects
that deconstruction is unhistorical and that it monotonously finds the
same lesson in every text, and yet regards it as the only worthy rival of
his own well-known theory of influence.
J.
Hillis Miller quotes M. H .
Abrams's quotation of Wayne Booth's claim that deconstructive inter–
pretation is parasitical on the common sense interpretation. Miller
replies with some irrelevant fooling around on the etymology of
"parasite" before splitting the difference and conceding that decon–
struction also sets up "definitive" interpretations, but simultaneously
undermines them. The attractions of skepticism have been explained
sociologically by Gerald Graff: a philosophy of powerlessness suits an
increasingly marginal intelligentsia which has lost confidence. Cer–
tainly de Man 's and Derrida's chatter about death, violence, sex, and
the void might give a transitory thrill
to
a numbed academic, long
cloistered among adolescents. But it is depressing that anyone would
cheer an attack on truth, objectivity, facts, seriousness, and common
sense. This is an old game of European intellectuals, who vent their
resentment against "bourgeois hypocrisy" by purveying a subversive
rhetoric and driving politics to a stark opposition between absolutism
and anarchy. At the same time these bold thinkers have somehow not
gotten around
to
deconstructing the text of Marx or Engels or Lenin or
even the marxist aesthetics of Lukacs, Adorno, or Marcuse or the
faceless formulators of Soviet "cultural policy. " The issue here is nOt
evenhandedness, but political naivety.
