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views of reality - terms that apply to any normative supposition that
objective values or meanings exist. Whoever hews to fixed meanings
is said to participate in an act of "control" in literature analogous to
the control that the imperialist-bourgeois state supposedly imposes on
the exploited and the downtrodden. The State of Letters is conceived
of as a surrogate for the political state, and as the battle against both
escalates, so too does the language of deconstruction. Thus Jacques
Derrida assaults the putative controllers of bourgeois reality by say–
ing that when it comes to critical discourse, "the police is always
waiting in the wings to enforce linguistic conventions." And Roland
Barthes declares that all language is "quite simply fascistic."
Most literary observers of deconstruction have contrived to
ignore the unmistakably political thrust of such expressions. As a
result , it was not until the early 1980s that the politics of deconstruc–
tion began to be made explicit - and then only by Marxists grown
disenchanted with the alliance they had maintained with the move–
ment. Thus Edward Said's criticism of the poststructuralists - the
most prominent of whom are the deconstructionists - implied that
these were critics who had always harbored politically revolutionary
intentions. In Said's disappointed view, though, all of their attempts
to be radical had acted to only "further solidify and guarantee the
social structure and the culture that produced them." This formula
of dismissal has been taken up increasingly by younger Marxists
since it appeared in Said's
The World, The Text, and the Critic
in 1983,
with the result that one of them could recently state that "the most
current means for detecting the bankruptcy of a certain theory or
method is to uncover its political blindness, its irrelevance to any
program for 'radical social change.' "
One user of this formula - the British Marxist, Terry Eagleton
- praises deconstruction for having helped to "keep the revolution
warm," but dismisses it all the same. Revealingly, he traces the ori–
gins of deconstruction to the failed revolutionism of the 1960s, most
particularly the student uprising of 1968 in Paris. "Unable to break
the structures of state power," he writes, literary critics sympathetic
to the student movement developed in poststructuralism a movement
that "found it possible instead to subvert the structures oflanguage."
For Roland Barthes in particular, he reports , the enemies of the stu–
dent movement "became coherent belief systems of any kind."
In
Marxism and Deconstruction
(1982), Michael Ryan similarly
pointed out that "deconstructive philosophy emerged at the same
