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problems with Lentricchia's conOation of Foucault and Derrida,
which minimizes fundamental differences over which the two have
quarreled. Yet whatever his faults of detail, Lentricchia anticipated
what has subsequently become an open fissure in the deconstruc–
tionist camp. (One even hears lately of "right" deconstruction and
"left" deconstruction.) The followers of Paul deMan and Eugenio
Donato are attacked for their apolitical stance by Foucauldians (or
sometime Foucauldians) like Edward Said or by Marxist-Derrideans
like Gayatri Spivak and Michael Ryan. The deManians and
Donatans retort by "putting in question" the "privileged" vocabu–
lary of history, materialism, and power of those who convert decon–
struction into a political weapon.
Derrida himself seems to vacillate between these polarities, as is
seen most dramatically perhaps in the recently translated
Positions,
where he toe-dances manfully in response to hard political questions
from his interviewers on the French Left.
If
one ponders the by now
well-known Derridean maxim, "there is nothing outside the text,"
one can see how deconstruction can easily be what we might call
politically
ambidextrous.
On the one hand, the maxim can mean that
since" reality" is only a text, there is no possibility of exerting our–
selves politically to change things, nor is there an extratextual stand–
point from which a critique of established reality could be formula–
ted. On the other hand, "there is nothing outside the text" can also
be taken to mean that, since social "reality" is not substantial or
natural but textual, it is readily susceptible to radical alteration.
If
we accept the latter interpretation, deconstruction becomes a form
of activism; it aims, in the words of a younger advocate, Gregory
Jay, "to awaken the critical faculties of this generation, and to teach
them to read sceptically the text of the world they are inheriting."
Only a razor's edge, then, divides the political from the apolitical
versions of deconstruction, and it may not always be possible to dis–
tinguish in deconstructive exercises between a pure textualism
aimed primarily at generating another explication for
Yale French
Studies
and a textual leftism, as I shall term it, aiming at a social
revolution.
It's obvious that the literary politics of the textual left could
hardly be more remote from the proletarian criticism of the thirties,
with its bias toward social realism and scientific analysis of ideology.
Indeed, from the viewpoint of textual leftism, proletarian criticism
was reactionary-a reversion to the naive positivism of the Enlight-
