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cepts, or the motifs in a work. As he or she repeats the selected
elements, the critic unleashes the disruptive powers inherent in
all repetition.
Having rendered the text before him inchoate, the deconstructive
critic characteristically concludes that he has succeeded in exposing
the naivete of the old uncertainties about writing: that authorial in–
tent is communicated through the written word and that readers
share a common experience of reading.
But has he actually done so? The truth is that one can read
through the Yale critics - or through Edward Said, Roland Barthes,
and Derrida-or one can read through the journals
Boundary, Critical
Inquiry, Critical Texts, Diacritics, Enclitic, Georgia Review,
and
Glyph,
without finding more than a few stray lines that trouble to perform
the deconstructive task described by Leitch. Instead, the vast pre–
ponderance of writing in the field concerns theory.
The virtual absence of practical criticism does not make decon–
struction's claims any less challenging, but it does put them in per–
spective. Rather than testing particular poems or prose texts, as is
sometimes made to seem the case, deconstruction challenges tradi–
tional views of literature through general propositions. Inasmuch as
these propositions have been intimately bound up with politics from
the beginning, one can hardly be said to understand them in the
pure isolation with which deconstruction is treated by most literary
critics.
When it comes to placing the Yale critics, it follows that their
theoretical agreements are far more important than the often men–
tioned variations among them. Thus Harold Bloom, whose relation–
ship to deconstruction is usually said to be the most problematical of
all, advances a personal theory of what he calls "misprision," which
comes down to asserting that all interpretations of literature, includ–
ing his own, are really misreadings. (Paul de Man, along with Stan–
ley Fish ofJohns Hopkins, holds that all readings are correct, which
amounts to the same thing.) Like his colleagues, Bloom discusses his
theory far more than he practices it. But more importantly, misprision
is quite compatible with deconstruction's overall program of spread–
ing indeterminacy.
Where does the theoretical compatibility of the Yale critics with
deconstruction place them with respect to the radical politics of the
original French deconstructionists? As we have seen, in the new
Marxified climate of literary opinion deconstruction itself has been
