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tivity, the gains and losses, the advances and retrenchments of criti–
cism are inscribed in this term: strategy, reminding us of its obso–
lete-obsolete?-definition: 'A violent and bloody act.' "
How seriously to take such portentous literary
Realpolitik
is, of
course, a problem. Intellectuals perennially inflate their petty quar–
rels into crises of world-historical import-all the more so if they
happen recently to have lived through a period of high political
drama which, on abruptly ceasing, left unsatisfied revolutionary
emotions. When a recent reviewer in
Diacritics
praises Jacques
Derrida's overturning of the hierarchy of figurative and literal lan–
guage as a form of "grammatological Maoism," one can hardly help
wondering what Mao Tse-Tung would have made of this version of
his teachings. Even at their silliest and most pretentious, however,
such gestures oughtn't be wholly dismissed, and it's not enough to
point out that Derrida's writings are more likely to induce sleep than
apprehension in the minds of the ruling classes, in the unlikely event
the ruling classes were to pay these writings the slightest attention.
After all, one doesn't have to be a grammatological Maoist to recog–
nize that language and how we understand and interpret it has far–
reaching ideological implications, and that professors of literature
exert considerable influence on the politics of language, if not
through their publications then through their classes, and through
the general public diffusion of academic ideas.
This is not to say that the variety of structuralisms, poststruc–
turalisms, and reader-response criticisms can be reduced to a politi–
cal impulse. In Frank Lentricchia's recent
After the New Criticism,
the
American wing of deconstruction, headed by the Yale group of Paul
deMan, Geoffrey Hartman, and J. Hillis Miller, is depicted as a
group of formalists who perpetuate the apolitical influence of the old
New Criticism and betray the true radicalism of their master,
Derrida. More precisely, Lentricchia presents Derrida himself as
split between radical and apolitical impulses: there is the mandarin
Derrida, devoted to arid interpretive free play with texts and to a
philosophy of infinite repetition, and there is the historical-political
Derrida, whose work illustrates the way writing conceals yet reveals
its origins in historical and social production. This latter Derrida
lines up in Lentricchia's scheme on the side of Michel Foucault–
Lentricchia's master-whose work allegedly demonstrates that liter–
ature (and criticism) is "an act of power marked and engaged by
other discursive acts of power.... " Reviewers have pointed out
