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time as the New Left." Ryan gave it as his opinion that "deconstruc–
tion cannot be called a New Left philosophy," but continued (in
what he considered to be terms of praise):
Nevertheless it projects certain recognizably new leftish traits: an
emphasis on plurality over authoritarian unity, a disposition to
criticize rather than obey, a rejection of the logic of power and
domination in all their forms, an advocation of difference against
identity, and a questioning of state universalism. It goes one step
further and argues for the flawed and structurally incomplete, if
not contradictory, nature of all attempts at absolute or total
philosophic systems.
No more than the symbolically revolutionary language of de–
construction itself has the forthrightness of this and other recent
statements by Marxists breached the virtual gentlemen's agreement
among critics to not mention the politics of deconstruction. Indeed,
the philosopher John Searle omitted politics altogether from his per–
suasive refutation of deconstruction in
The New York Review of Books
in 1983. A year earlier in the same journal, Denis Donoghue came
no closer to explicitness than ending his critique of deconstruction
with the following, obscure afterthought:
And there is the politics of Deconstruction: like Structuralism, it
is antibourgeois, and particularly hostile to the ego-psychology
which a bourgeois ideology is supposed to offer its members as a
consolation prize .
Donoghue appears to comprehend the politics of deconstruction, but
he does not quite reveal to the reader what they might be.
The few observers to speculate on whether deconstruction and
Marxism are related to one another have tended to be dismissive. As
a British critic put it, "deconstruction is so obviously anti-dialectical:
how could it possibly join forces with 'dialectical materialism'?" (De–
spite this particular dismissal, English critics, writing as they do from
within a considerably Marxified academic environment, are by and
large far closer to the French than the Americans in their openness
about the politics of deconstruction.) Writing in 1983, the American
critic Robert Alter similarly asked if there was "some deep affinity
between Deconstruction and political revolutionism." Not really, he
