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PARTISAN REVIEW
of political and military inferiority to its rival superpower. This is
not the place to go into Revel's detailed discussion, but I can at least
give his list of the failures of our presidents in dealing with the Rus–
sians, beginning with Eisenhower. Suffice it to say that Eisenhower,
with John Foster Dulles as his Secretary of State, never once sug–
gested to the Russians after the 1953 riots in East Germany that they
withdraw their forces and indicate their future policy towards East
Germany by signing a treaty of peace. From statements made at the
time by Beria, we know that the Russians fully expected us to demand
this of them, and Beria indicated that he was ready to make conces–
sions to us . Kennedy yielded to Khrushchev in Vienna, permitting
the Russians to build a wall dividing the city, an action in no sense
envisaged in our agreements with them; he then told the masses of
Berlin assembled to hear an American President,
"Ich bin ein Berliner."
Johnson accepted the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia, which
none of his liberal advisors had foreseen, and Nixon agreed to the ar–
rangements with North Vietnam, which, with Soviet backing, they
were soon to violate. Ford signed the Helsinki accords legitimizing
the Soviets' hold on Eastern Europe, in return for which they were
supposed to respect the human rights of their dissidents, and moder–
ate their expansionist policies. As we know, the Russians have not
kept their part of the bargain, and they become extremely hostile
when this is noted by our journalists. Carter was completely "sur–
prised" by the highly characteristic action of the Russians in invad–
ing Afghanistan . And after all that President Reagan was accused
as a warmonger by the Democratic Party's candidates for the presi–
dency in practically the same terms as those used by Gromyko and
Chernenko.
In 1980, at a conference held at Cerisy to discuss the writings
(on writing) of Jacques Derrida, Lacoue-Labarthe, a young French
philosopher, wanted to know why the philosopher who had launched
the method of deconstruction, and had set about deconstructing
Rousseau, Husserl, Heidegger, Saussure, and Lacan, had so far
spared Marxism, which, said Lacoue-Labarthe, is the most intimi–
dating of contemporary ideologies. The answer of Derrida, who was
present at the conference, is not given in his own words but in a
restatement by the editors who published the volume
Les Fins de
L'homme.
I am assuming their summation to be a correct version of
Derrida's thought. He declared (according to the editors) that the
reason he did not wish to deconstruct Marxism was this: he did not
want to weaken its force as a revolutionary ideology (that force is, by
