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found politically wanting. As for Yale in particular, Jacques Derrida
has expressed disappointment that his colleagues there have served
"the dominant political and economic interests of American society."
The Yale group, though, tends to be castigated not so much for fail–
ing to bring about social change as for not trying to do so in the first
place . Thus Terry Eagleton has recently indicted the Yale critics for
a reading of Derrida that "eradicates all traces of the political from
his work. " (On the other hand , Eagleton is willing to grant that
Geoffrey Hartman "has explicitly repudiated such an accusation, and
there is evidence that de Man believed himself to be a socialist .")
Frank Lentricchia gets at what particularly annoys radicals about
Yale when he criticizes Paul de Man for having "no
desire
to employ
the literary in the redemptive work of social change" (italics added) .
By refusing to acknowledge the politics of deconstruction, then,
the Yale critics eventually disgusted the radicals . But the same re–
fusal involved them in silence about the political uses to which their
work was put . Were they chiefly naive, self-deceived, or evasive about
their place in the radical scheme of things? Whichever it was, by the
1980s explicit accounts by literary Marxists were making it impossible
even for Yale any longer to ignore politics. Furthermore, American
literary criticism in the 1980s grew to be at least as politicized as de–
construction at its inception in France in the 1960s . In fact, the poli–
tics ofliterary theory in America reached the point where William E.
Cain could recently report with approval :
In literary theory circles, Marxism has acquired a special status
and is now the predominant subject and system of belief in de–
bates about the politics of interpretation. No one dares to utter a
liberal doctrine .
Perhaps the most important result of Marxist dominance has
been the demystification of deconstruction. Writing as a Marxist,
Terry Eagleton is free to turn the tables and accuse deconstruction of
the same authoritarianism that it routinely finds inherent in bour–
geois criticism. Deconstructionists , writes Eagleton, exercise "the
privilege
of those who can afford not to know" and "the
authoritarian
abrasiveness of informing you that you do not know what you are
saying" (italics added). More insultingly still , Eagleton writes that
they deserve the Gramscian epithet "hegemonic," the ultimate in
poststructuralist political damnation .
