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enment. Marx remains a figure to conjure with on the textual left , to
be sure, but he is increasingly a Marx reread in the light of anti–
Enlightenment thinkers such as Benjamin, Derrida, or Althusser.
There are historical ironies here: tendencies that were formerly
identified with the Left-Enlightenment rationality and proletarian
or critical realism-have suddenly been transposed to the Right ,
and classic reactionaries like Nietzsche and Heidegger have emerged
as new heroes of the Left. This reversal of previous alignments
becomes explicable, however, when we consider that the Enlighten–
ment tradition has increasingly become associated not with freedom
and democracy, but with the exploitation of those ideals in the inter–
ests of commerce and social control. As for the Soviet interpretation
of Marxism and Marxist esthetics, since the thirties it has hardly dis–
guised its authoritarian character, and one can't exaggerate the
importance of the reaction against Communist Party dictatorship in
accounting for French avant-garde attitudes. From the viewpoint of
the textual left, Enlightenment reason and Soviet scientism share the
same arrogant overconfidence in positivist epistemology-an over–
confidence that in both cases has resulted in a manipulated or engi–
neered society.
One can here begin to understand the current conflation of lan–
guage and politics, in which the vocabulary of epistemology and
rhetoric is invested with large political import. Roland Barthes, for
instance, goes so far as to assert that all language is "quite simply
fascist," since its classifications order reality for us in ways over
which we have no choice . Barthes's assumption is that underlying
the system of modern technocracy is the empiricism and positivism
of the Enlightenment, with its premise of a hard objective world of
essential fact to which language can literally be made to correspond;
modern social control presumably rests on mutual agreements, on
essentials that can't be altered, such as the nature of man, the forms
of gender and race, and the brute nature of reality itself. These
agreed-on essentials are coded within the logic and structure of lan–
guage-in what Derrida calls "juridico-political contracts" and
"political-linguistic conventions" - hierarchical oppositions into
which language carves up experience: reality vs. thought, objective
vs. subjective, fact vs. interpretation, normal vs . abnormal, science
vs . literature, literal vs. figurative, speech vs. writing, real vs. fic–
tive, reason vs. madness, male vs. female. Each of these oppositions
proposes a primary term and a derived or inferior one: thus speech
