LETTERS
To the Editor:
In response to Peter Shaw's
"The Politics of Deconstruction"
(PR
2, 1986), I would like to make
a few simple remarks: 1) Decon–
struction is not a trend. It is not an
ephemeral "literary orthodoxy" any
more than Hegelianism was one
hundred years ago. Hegel is still
with us, and I presume Derrida will
still be with us for a long time. De–
construction may be reread, misap–
propriated, or dismissed, but it will
not be buried. Only those ignorant
of the history of philosophical move–
ments believe that time will assuage
the professional insecurities decon–
struction triggers in hostile critics.
2) Deconstruction does not promote
the "dismissal of traditional Western
thought." Unless Mr. Shaw thinks
that Plato, Aristotle, Descartes,
Leibniz, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche,
Husserl, and Heidegger
all
belong
on the margins of Western culture,
he must be forced to place Derrida,
who writes on them extensively and
never dismissively, in a direct line
of philosophical inheritance. 3) De–
construction did not originate in
radical politics. For Shaw to claim
that political radicalism is "the move–
ment's most significant feature" is
preposterous enough to sound more
like wish-fulfillment than a report
on "the true nature of the phenome–
non set before" him. Shaw borrows
Eagleton's suspect claim that decon–
struction took its impetus from the
student riots of 1968. But in fact,
Derrida's first formulations of de-
construction preceded the riots by
a decade. He published several pro–
grammatic essays in the early sixties
and reached a mature, comprehensive
exposition by 1966. 4) Deconstruc–
tion does not perform "the replace–
ment of rationality with subjectivity."
First of all, rationality and subjec–
tivity do not exclude one another.
Secondly, Derrida is not a subjectiv–
ist. His essay
Speech and Phenomena
explicitly undermines the most in–
fluential school of subjectivism of
our time: Husserlian phenomenol–
ogy. Either Mr. Shaw has not read
this book, perhaps Derrida's most
important, or he misunderstands
his own terminology. 5) Shaw's claim
that "most writing done under the
names of poststructuralism and de–
construction concerns itself very lit–
tle with the act of analysis itself"
again betrays an alarming ignorance
of poststructuralist discourse. Appar–
ently, Shaw has relied on watered–
down popularizations of deconstruc–
tion by Culler, Leitch, Eagleton,
et al, which, indeed, concern them–
selves with theory alone. But if Shaw
realizes that the first book-length
deconstruction in this country was
neither an introduction to nor an
apology for Derridean theory but
rather a close reading of William
Carlos Williams's poetry and poetics
(The Inverted Bell,
by Joseph N. Rid–
del, an ingenious ex-New Critic
whose later publications on Ameri–
can literature are deconstructive
readings focussed relentlessly upon
the texts under analysis) and that
