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PARTISAN REVIEW
one has put one's ideas in question, what then? Derrida recognizes,
albeit regretfully and ashamedly, that we can displace the concepts of
our system of intelligibility only from within the system, only by
recourse to concepts borrowed from the system itself.
This philosophically "conservative" aspect of Derrida's work
has received less attention than the "subversive" aspect. And when
it does receive attention, Derrida's philosophical conservatism tends
to be equated with
political
conservatism. Lentricchia, in a
Salmagundi
essay written since
After the New Criticism
and adopting a
more critical line toward Derrida, complains that "Derrida appears
to have instituted in his massive and continuous order of reason an
epistemic force of monolithic determination, more efficient in its
repressive work than anything dreamed of by Foucault." According
to Lentricchia, since Derrida takes reason to be "an order too cun–
ning and powerful to step outside of," he has left no room for politi–
cal resistance, no ground for hope." Yet like Foucault and Derrida
himself, Lentricchia writes as if" the order of reason" has had and
can only have
one
kind of social use, namely some oppressively
"monolithic determination." A modest response would be that the
order of reason has had many uses, some of them oppressive, some
of them less so; that probably these uses are too many and too vari–
ous to permit any classification of all of them in anyone political
category; that resistance to oppression in human history has invoked
the order of reason at least as often as has oppression itself.
It
was
once commonly assumed among Leftists that the very "massive and
continuous" character of this order of reason, its universalism, was
what liberated mankind from the particularism of the feudal age.
Even as recently as the American civil rights, antiwar, and feminist
movements, dissenting groups have justified their causes in this
universalist vocabulary.
But so, of course, have the opponents of those dissenters, whose
hypocritical appeals of "Let us reason together" have combined
with naive and totalitarian Leftism to make the universalist vocabu–
lary suspect. This seems a clear case of the abuse of a thing discredit–
ing the thing, but we can't right such an abuse as long as we refuse
to distinguish epistemology from politics-that is, as long as we
insist that objective knowledge is discredited every time it is invoked
to justify an oppressive action.
If,
as Derrida claims, "the police is
always waiting in the wings" to enforce linguistic conventions-and
this is a self-flattering assumption-then perhaps it's the police who
