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decided . Derrida's announced radicalism must be regarded as no
more than a common position in French intellectual circles. And
while it is true that Jonathan Culler, the author of
On Deconstruction:
Theory and Criticism After Structuralism ,
the most frequently cited intro–
duction to the subject , "in fact was an S.D.S. activist in the late '60s,"
he should not be regarded as a radical either, since for him "the last
true revolution is feminism ." From a theoretical point of view, Alter
added, "it is hard to see how Deconstructive analysis, conceptually
removed as it is from historical process, can address itself to concrete
political realities." Of course it is exactly the point of deconstruction
to circumvent concrete political realities in favor of another kind of
assault on culture: success or failure is no measure of this decidedly
political intention.
When one turns to American deconstruction , the political ele–
ment is obscured because of a problem of definition. The movement
in this country is understood originally to have comprised a core of
members within the Yale University Department of English . But
there remains considerable disagreement over how the department's
members- Harold Bloom, the late Paul de Man, Geoffrey Hartman,
andJ . Hillis Miller-should be described . It is often said that Bloom
does not really practice deconstruction . Denis Donoghue has gone so
far as to assert that the only American member of the Yale depart–
ment who did was Paul de Man (Jacques Derrida is a regular, but
visiting member of the department), and that "Geoffrey Hartman is
one of the most vigorous opponents of Deconstruction." On the other
hand, when the Yale critics collaborated on a volume of their work
in 1980, they titled it
Deconstruction and Criticism;
all of them, more–
over, can be found listed in the bibliographies of deconstruction (as
can Edward Said).
The problem of defining who is a deconstructionist is typical of
the confusions that have prevented clear statements about the pur–
poses of deconstruction. Yet it is not really necessary to puzzle over
the differences among its practitioners . For the unnoticed fact is that
most writing done under the names of poststructuralism and decon–
struction concerns itself very little with the act of analysis itself. That
act has been described by Vincent B. Leitch as the undermining of
confidence in discourse through a technique of "repetition." As Leitch
explains :
The deconstructive interpreter carefully traces and repeats cer–
tain elements in the text, which may include the figures, the con-
