8
Deconstruction
The Uses and Limits of Perversity

Deconstruction and the Cultural Displacement

Deconstruction, associated especially with French poststructuralism, was the intellectual fashion of the 1970s and 1980s, though it elicited considerable hostility, as well as fervent partisanship. To detractors, it seemed prejudicially radical, unwittingly conservative, or merely nihilistic. By the early 1990s, some of its themes had become almost commonplace, though its day seemed to have passed. Critics grew more aggressive, portraying deconstruction as discredited, its earlier vogue as an embarrassment, to be explained in terms of the idiosyncrasies of French intellectual life and American literature departments.^[1] However, just as deconstruction had not merited the privileged, all-encompassing role some had claimed for it, neither could it be convincingly dismissed as a mere fad. As a broad impulse, it had a deeper historical significance—and ongoing value. But even those who sought to place deconstruction in historical perspective did not agree about its center of gravity and wider cultural implications.

Used most rigorously, "deconstruction" characterized the current that developed from Jacques Derrida's understanding of texts, but the term was often

[1] Quentin Skinner, for example, observes that deconstruction "has only recently been discredited," in "The Past in the Present," New York Review of Books , 12 April 1990, 39. Quoting Leo Bersani, John Ellis notes the "arrogant frivolity" of the constant antibourgeois posture of French intellectual life, but he also traces deconstruction to the French context of the mid-1960s, especially to the rigidities of the French university system. In that context, he suggests, the deconstructionist concern with "authoritarianism" had some basis, but in the more pluralistic United States, the radical antiauthoritarianism of intellectuals embracing deconstruction was merely facile, though it expressed diffuse discontents, especially with the state of literary studies. See John M. Ellis, Against Deconstruction (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 83–84.

applied in a looser way to encompass Michel Foucault and other French poststructuralists. Foucault and Derrida differed, and each found reason for some pointed criticism of the other. After Derrida charged that Foucault, in Madness and Civilization , had been too much the conventional historian in his way of using evidence and the narrative form, Foucault attacked Derridean deconstruction as a rhetorical bag of tricks.^[2] Such sniping helped persuade others that sympathy to one of the two entailed antipathy to the other.

Despite important differences of emphasis, Foucault and Derrida had much in common, and they can usefully be treated in tandem. They turned from structuralism for analogous reasons, and in doing so each accepted fundamental terms of what I have called the reduction to history. In response, each sought to develop a radical strategy—Foucault especially through encounter with Nietzsche, Derrida partly through encounter with Heidegger.

A certain willful extravagance has marked both strands of deconstruction; thus, in part, the recent hostile reaction. Moreover, some of the most astute critics charged that deconstruction was simply an apocalyptic recasting of relatively familiar themes. John Searle and Richard Rorty have emphasized that among philosophers, at least, there are few foundationalists to be found, so if the Derridean brand of deconstruction is no more than antifoundationalism, it is not very exciting.^[3] Derrida's unraveling of Husserl is congruent with the other assaults on the quest for certainty, or foundations, or a transcendent standpoint, that have marked the long revolution in philosophy over the past century or so.

By the late 1980s, moreover, the fruits of the deconstructive approach had come to seem predictable and unenlightening. Rorty refers to the "dreary and repetitious discovery of tiresomely familiar 'inherent strains and contradictions'" that came to mark deconstructive criticism in the United States.^[4] There

[2] Jacques Derrida, "Cogito and the History of Madness," originally a lecture delivered in 1963, reprinted in his Writing and Difference , trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 31–63. Foucault's response, first published in 1972, is translated by Geoff Bennington as "My Body, This Paper, This Fire," Oxford Literary Review 4 (1979): 9–28. On the dispute between the two thinkers, see Ann Wordsworth, "Derrida and Foucault: Writing the History of Historicity," in Post-Structuralism and the Question of History , ed. Derek Attridge et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 116–125. Defending Derrida from Foucault's counterattack, Wordsworth denies that Derrida's mode of deconstructive questioning can be dismissed as textual reductionism or mere "pedagogy." See also Christopher Norris, Derrida (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 214–221.

[3] Richard Rorty, Essays on Heidegger and Others (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 109–112, 125. Rorty here endorses an influential review essay by Searle, discussed below. Attempting to account for the extravagance of Derridean deconstruction, Rorty charged that Derrida had overemphasized the extent to which claims to closure are at work in the culture. In the same vein, Rorty argued that Derrida was simply making the familiar anti-Cartesian point, to be found, for example, in both Peirce and Wittgenstein, "that meaning is a function of context, and that there is no theoretical barrier to an endless sequence of recontextualizations" (p. 125).

[4] Ibid., 107. In the same way, R. B. Kershner asked, "How many times can we demonstrate that a given text is 'decentered,' or that it undermines its own apparent unity and referentiality, before acute boredom sets in? Derrida himself has avoided this trap, but it has proven more difficult for his epigones to do so." See R. B. Kershner, "Dances with Historians," Georgia Review 45, no. 3 (Fall 1991): 599.

was something comparably tedious in the way historians began routinely invoking Foucault and his understanding of power and knowledge. Even when critics distinguished the masters from the epigoni, they often disagreed over how the masters themselves were to be taken. Was Derrida offering rigorous arguments, or was he essentially an ironist in his approach to the philosophical tradition?^[5] Was Foucault to be taken seriously as a historian, or was he trying to subvert historical understanding itself?

Foucault and Derrida each reacted against the vogue of structuralism, with its quest for a new science of culture. Structuralism was trapped in its own historically situated modes of discourse, so it was a casualty of the eclipse of metaphysics and the reduction to history.^[6] But their encounter with the structuralist enterprise remained central, affording a distinctively French angle that enabled Foucault and Derrida to expand our sense of the postmetaphysical terrain.

Deconstruction, understood loosely, is bound up with the recent expansion

[5] Even Geoffrey H. Hartman and Jonathan Culler, two of the most influential proponents among American literary scholars, disagreed sharply. Hartman accented the irony in Saving the Text: Literature/Derrida/Philosophy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981). In On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982), Culler criticized Hartman for failing to take seriously enough the rigor of Derrida's argument. While recognizing that Derrida had made noises of both sorts, Rorty endorsed Hartman's reading and found Culler too anxious to find theorems that literary critics could then apply. See Rorty, Essays on Heidegger , 119, 128. Rorty's treatment of Derrida as "a kind of writing" prompted criticism from one of Derrida's most persistent and lucid partisans, Christopher Norris, who played up instead what he took to be Derrida's distinctively philosophical bite. See especially Norris's "Philosophy as Not Just a 'Kind of Writing': Derrida and the Claim of Reason," in Redrawing the Lines: Analytic Philosophy, Deconstruction, and Literary Theory, ed. Reed Way Dasenbrock (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 189–203, and Rorty's response in Essays on Heidegger , 107–118. Although both Rorty and Norris wanted to distinguish Derrida from the bulk of his American literary followers, their accents differed even as they did so. Rorty found the thinking of Paul de Man, rather than that of Derrida himself, at the root of the excesses and confusions in American deconstruction. Norris, in contrast, valued the rigorous unmasking that he found in de Man, yet he was contemptuous of "what passes for 'deconstruction' among American literary intellectuals." Whether "deconstruction" was taken to be a method for textual interpretation or an invitation to loose, unphilosophical free play, he found the American version to be "distinctly alien" to Derrida's own concerns. See Norris, Derrida , 14, 18–20, 159; and Christopher Norris, The Contest of Faculties: Philosophy and Theory after Deconstruction (London: Methuen, 1985), 9–10, 15, 70–77, 85–96. The most influential effort in English to take Derrida seriously as a philosopher has been Rodolphe Gasché, The Tain of the Mirror: Derrida and the Philosophy of Reflection (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986). In addition, see Rorty's critical but respectful account of Gasché in Essays on Heidegger , 121–128, and Gillian Rose, Dialectic of Nihilism: Post-Structuralism and Law (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984), for an influential critique of Derrida's apparently philosophical categories.

[6] Geoff Bennington and Robert Young suggest that the "post" of poststructuralism reintroduces history; see their "Introduction: Posing the Question," in Post-Structuralism and the Question of History , ed. Attridge et al., 1–2. Key documents in the break from Lévi-Strauss and structuralism were Derrida's "Structure, Sign, and Play" (1966), reprinted in Derrida, Writing and Difference , 278–293; and Roland Barthes, S/Z , trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974; orig. French ed. 1970). Barthes had earlier influenced Derrida, but he seems to have been at least partly under Derrida's influence at this point, when he eschewed the reductionism of structuralist narratology and began exploring, even celebrating, the openness that resulted from the dissolution of the author as the ultimate authority. See Norris, Derrida , 219, 242; and Norris, Contest of Faculties , 28–29.

of the historiographical focus. Ever more of what we are seems to have been historically constructed, so virtually anything may be subjected to historical unearthing and thereby shown to be merely a contingent historical outcome, as opposed to natural, given, grounded. Such deconstruction may be reconstructive in its cultural aims. In the case of gender, for example, to show that a present configuration that had seemed natural was in fact historical is to allow a new way of making cultural sense of sexual difference. By the early 1990s, the scope for such deconstruction had become a commonplace. A spate of books excavated the constructed, historically specific element in everything from Africa to accuracy to homosexuality.^[7] As an ongoing cultural possibility, such deconstructive historical inquiry might afford the critical moment necessary to balance the hermeneutic strand, understood as the search for consensus, as the moment of bringing back together, in the wake of disagreement and criticism.

Foucault and Derrida serve that enterprise in some respects, yet each found something else more important. In devising their deconstructive strategies, they were responding to the kinds of preoccupations that led Nietzsche and Heidegger to their posthistoricist extremes, and in some ways they expanded possibilities along the axis that Nietzsche and Heidegger had established. However, French deconstruction also included an element of overreaction that tended to compromise the reconstructive possibility and to blur the point of the posthistoricist extremes. Whatever the reasons, Foucault and Derrida have been more widely viewed as antihistorical thinkers than as thinkers serving a renewed culture of history. So how do the historical and the antihistorical themes come together in their thinking?

Foucault and the End of Man

After publishing his innovative Madness and Civilization in 1961, Foucault made clear his wider ambitions in The Order of Things (1966) and The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969).^[8] In specifying his starting point, he offered some

[7] See, for example, Donald MacKenzie, Inventing Accuracy: A Historical Sociology of Nuclear Missile Guidance (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990). Though it preceded the peak of Foucault's influence among historians, Allan Megill's quasi-neopositivist, slightly tongue-in-cheek "The Reception of Foucault by Historians," Journal of the History of Ideas 48, no. 1 (January–March 1987): 117–141, remains a helpful introduction to the subject.

[8] Foucault reflected frequently on his own intellectual evolution, noting especially the import of the Days of May uprising of 1968 and pinpointing the changes in his conception of power. See, for example, Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977 , ed. trans. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon, 1980), 115–116. This is not the place to consider Foucault's life and death, both the subject of recent controversy in light of his homosexuality and AIDS. See Alan Ryan, "Foucault's Life and Hard Times," New York Review of Books , 8 April 1993, 12–17, for an introduction to the recent literature. The most influential recent biography, Didier Eribon's Michel Foucault , trans. Betsy Wang (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), finds homosexuality central to Foucault's intellectual itinerary. See also Jerrold Seigel, "Avoiding the Subject: A Foucaultian Itinerary," Journal of the History of Ideas 51, no. 2 (April–June 1990): 273–299, for a sensitive reconsideration of Foucault's intellectual itinerary, especially his ongoing concern with subjectivity and freedom, in light of his homosexuality.

particularly forceful characterizations of the reduction to history. At the outset of The Order of Things , he adapted Jorge Luis Borges's "Chinese" classification to show the merely historical constructedness of what we take to be natural ways of dividing things up.^[9] And he insisted that what we are, our very subjectivity, is fundamentally historical. The notion that "man," the human subject, afforded a stable object for human self-understanding was itself a historical product. Far from being a discovery, the coming to light of something hitherto concealed, "man" was an invention, even a mere "effect of a change in the fundamental arrangements of knowledge."^[10]

Foucault's periodization was slightly idiosyncratic. Rather than emphasize the Cartesian break, he argued that this focus on "man" became possible with the crystallization of the modern epistème toward the end of the eighteenth century. It was only then, with the disappearance of "discourse" and the shift of language toward objectivity, that it became possible to envision apprehending human being objectively and scientifically. Thus "man was constituted at a time when language was doomed to disappear." In our own time, however, that whole epistème seemed to be ending; it seemed possible that "man is in the process of perishing as the being of language continues to shine ever brighter upon our horizon." Indeed, man might be simply "erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea."^[11]

With these apocalyptic notions, Foucault popularized the idea that something fundamental to our self-understanding was dissolving in our own time. In one sense, the "man" that was ending was the more or less Marxian version, with an essence that might be realized through some sort of "emancipation." History no longer admitted of such grandiose and teleological metanarratives. But though he focused in The Order of Things on the relatively recent modern epistème, Foucault implied that what was ending was something deeper and older—essentially the metaphysics that led us to posit essences and to take stability as privileged in the first place.

For us, what most obviously ends is the notion that human being is defined by some stable essence that we are capable of apprehending. Although he was hardly the first to make this argument, Foucault has been a major source of the postmodern notion that "man," which once seemed the transcendent and enduring subject, dissolves into impersonal systems that are historically specific. As Ian Hacking has put it, "It is a Foucaultian thesis that every way in which I can think of myself as a person and an agent is something that has been constituted within a web of historical events. Here is one more step in the destruction of Kant: the noumenal self is nothing."^[12]

[9] Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences , trans. Alan Sheridan Smith (New York: Random House, Vintage, 1973; orig. French ed. 1966), xv.

[10] Ibid., 387.

[11] Ibid., 385–387.

[12] Ian Hacking, "The Archaeology of Foucault," in Foucault: A Critical Reader , ed. David Couzens Hoy (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), 36.

So the reverse side of the end of man is the eruption of history.^[13] In The Order of Things , Foucault described how during the nineteenth century "man as such is exposed to the event," or radically historicized. Among the responses were various attempts—from Karl Marx to Oswald Spengler to social science—to interpret the whole of history, but history overflowed all such efforts: "Since the human being has become historical, through and through, none of the contents analyzed by the human sciences can remain stable in itself or escape the movement of History." Those contents can only be directed at "synchronological patternings within a historicity that constitutes and traverses them." Moreover,

the forms successively taken by the human sciences, the choice of objects they make, and the methods that apply to them, are all provided by History, ceaselessly borne along by it, and modified at its pleasure. The more History attempts to transcend its own rootedness in historicity, and the greater the effort it makes to attain, beyond the historical relativity of its origin and its choices, the sphere of universality, the more clearly it bears the makes of its historical birth . . .; inversely, the more it accepts its relativity, and the more deeply it sinks into the movement it shares with what it is recounting, then the more it tends to the slenderness of the narrative, and all the positive content it obtained for itself through the human sciences is dissipated.

History, then, "surrounds the sciences of man with a frontier that limits them and destroys, from the outset, their claim to validity within the element of universality."^[14]

At best, the reach of science is limited, as for Saussure, to the synchronic dimension that abstracts from the disruptive flow of time. But that synchronic dimension was bound to seem ever more artificial as the experience of the historicity of things, including finitude and incompleteness, became more intrusive. Thus Foucault suggested that we can only approach ourselves historically.^[15] And we need to do so, for our fundamental problem is how we came to understand ourselves as we have. Thus Foucault invited a radically new form of

[13] The periodization Foucault developed, in seeking to specify this complicated historical relationship, has bred some uncertainty. In White Mythologies: Writing History and the West (London: Routledge, 1990), 20, Robert Young suggests—plausibly—that man dissolved at the end of the eighteenth century as the classical age of reason gave way to the historicizing modes of the nineteenth century. The transition Foucault had in mind was ultimately more complex, however, and thus his suggestion that it is only in our time that man disappears. Indeed, confidence in the scope for a suprahistorical science of man seems to have reached its peak around 1960. So whereas the nineteenth-century eruption of history was central in one sense, its way of historicizing proved a kind of holding action, as I emphasized in chapters 2 and 3. And thus my emphasis on the more radical break that came with the crisis of the first historicism around the beginning of the twentieth century. "Man," of course, had been the latest incarnation of what I have called metaphysics, and in the wake of that break we have come ever more lucidly to grapple with postmetaphysical cultural possibilities. Foucault's own efforts were moves in that ongoing exploration.

[14] Foucault, The Order of Things , 370–371.

[15] Michel Foucault, "What Is Enlightenment?" trans. Catherine Porter, in The Foucault Reader , ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 45–46.

historical questioning that does not take a certain human essence or transcendent subjectivity for granted. As he put it in a 1977 interview,

One has to dispense with the constituent subject, to get rid of the subject itself, that's to say, to arrive at an analysis which can account for the constitution of the subject within a historical framework. And this is what I would call genealogy, that is, a form of history which can account for the constitution of knowledges, discourses, domains of objects, etc., without having to make reference to a subject which is either transcendental in relation to the field of events or runs in its empty sameness throughout the course of history.^[16]

At the same time, Foucault made explicit the reflexivity essential to any acceptance of the reduction to history. Our assumptions, categories, and objectives are themselves historical resultants, yet they tend to remain unthought, to be hidden or held back. So as we question the past, we need to be attentive to the historical constructedness of our own ways of asking and knowing, bringing them to critical awareness, putting ourselves at risk.^[17]

Foucault, then, explicitly embraced Nietzschean genealogy as he proposed a more radical role for historical inquiry. In his noted essay "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History," first published in 1971, he probed as no one had before the concerns that led Nietzsche to his novel genealogical approach. Nietzsche, Foucault tells us, had reacted against the too-easy historical consciousness of the nineteenth century, which had led historians to assume "that words had kept their meaning, that desires still pointed in a single direction, that ideas retained their logic." Still drawing on the residues of metaphysics, the mainstream historical approach had not been radical enough in grasping the historicity of things. Nietzsche, in contrast, had come to feel that everything we believe immutable in what we are—even the most basic instincts and sentiments—has a history, has come to be as it is through a process of development. Even the physiology of our bodies is historical, because it depends on what we do with our bodies, on nutrition, work, and rest, and these, too, are historically specific.^[18]

Whereas conventional, metaphysically grounded historical thinking sought "origins," Nietzsche's sense that history is radically ungrounded led him to eschew any such approach. As Foucault puts it, the long-standing emphasis on origins "is an attempt to capture the exact essence of things, their purest possibilities, and their carefully protected identities, because this search assumes the existence of immobile forms that precede the external world of accident and

[16] Foucault, Power/Knowledge , 117.

[17] Michel Foucault, "The Subject and Power," afterword to Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics , 2d ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 209. See also Paul Bové, "The Foucault Phenomenon: The Problematics of Style," foreword to Gilles Deleuze, Foucault (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), xiii-xix, for an excellent sense of what such disciplinary reflexivity would entail.

[18] "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History" is included in Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews , ed. Donald F. Bouchard, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977). See p. 139 for the passage quoted.

succession." The origin, in short, was assumed to be "the site of truth," prior to the fall into the capricious change of history, so the quest for origins is the refuge of metaphysics against history.

However, if the genealogist refuses to extend his faith in metaphysics, if he listens to history, he finds that there is "something altogether different" behind things: not a timeless and essential secret, but the secret that they have no essence or that their essence was fabricated in a piecemeal fashion from alien forms. . . . What is found at the historical beginning of things is not the inviolable identity of their origin; it is the dissension of other things. It is disparity.^[19]

What we find in the past, then, are not pristine "origins" but mere "beginnings," a haphazard intersection that ends up as some present configuration only as the result of the contingent historical concatenation that follows, not because the present resultant was somehow implicit from the outset. And the difference has fundamental implications for the status of the present, for "historical beginnings are lowly: . . . derisive and ironic, capable of undoing every infatuation." We come to sense that what seems true to us today started as some particular error and only became hardened into truth "in the long baking process of history."^[20]

Thus, as noted in chapter 4, the postmetaphysical form of historical understanding new with Nietzsche was fundamentally debunking, unmasking. And this, of course, is unnerving to us, just as it was to Nietzsche. As Foucault puts it, "we want historians to confirm our belief that the present rests upon profound intentions and immutable necessities. But the true historical sense confirms our existence among countless lost events, without a landmark or a point of reference."^[21]

All that is left to us, then, is the genealogy that probes "the details and accidents that have attended every beginning." Whereas conventional history had tended to find "continuity," the step-by-step unfolding of a present implicit in the past, genealogy focuses on the errors, the accidents, the contingencies through which whatever there is, has come to be. In this sense its focus is not continuity but dis continuity, which is to be true to the singularity of the single event, "the singular randomness of events." And genealogy seeks this singularity "in the most unpromising places, in what we tend to feel is without history," even by attending to what did not become actual.^[22]

The metaphysical belief in eternal truth had led mainstream historians to

[19] Ibid., 142–143. See also p. 181.

[20] Ibid., 143–144. See also pp. 146, 154, for the overall argument, and pp. 145, 148, on Nietzsche's use of Entstehung (emergence) and Herkunft (descent), as opposed to Ursprung .

[21] Ibid., 155.

[22] Ibid., 139–140, 144, 146, 154–155; see also pp. 175–176. In addition, see Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge , trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Harper and Row, Colophon, 1976; orig. French ed. 1969), 3–17, 166–177, for Foucault's way of contrasting conventional history, taken as developmentalist in assumption and implication, with the sense of discontinuity that had informed The Order of Things .

seek to be objective by plugging into the realm of what is completed and fixed. The genealogical approach, in contrast, rests on the reflexivity that follows from the eclipse of metaphysics. Historians are not sovereign over the events of the past but part of the history they study; their categories are themselves historical resultants. Historical knowledge is finite, provisional, interested.^[23]

When brought to this point, Foucault's line of argument includes much that, it might be argued, had been discussed for decades everywhere but France. But Foucault, thanks partly to his confrontation with Nietzsche, interjected these ideas into humanistic discussion with renewed bite, based on a deeper sense of their implications. Only now, Foucault felt, were we ready to grasp Nietzsche's novel experience of the historicity of things and the import of the genealogical approach he had offered in response.

For Foucault, as for Nietzsche, history might claim our attention as never before, although it would have to be approached without a good deal of conventional baggage. So we must be wary of the widespread tendency to characterize Foucault, because of his assault on historical "continuity," as an antihistorical thinker. In a 1977 interview, Foucault claimed to be flabbergasted at the way his emphasis on discontinuity had been misconstrued. As in his earlier essay on Nietzsche, he identified "continuity" with a progressive developmentalism implying a reassuring anthropocentrism. These metaphysical residues, he felt, were still at work in much historical writing. In his effort to counter them, he was specifying an alternative approach to history, not turning from history altogether.^[24] With no metaphysical frame affording an evolutionary shape, all that remains is the naked history itself, with its quirks and contingencies and relative discontinuities. As Foucault framed the crucial distinction in 1979, "The time of men does not have the form of an evolution, but precisely that of a history."^[25]

It was tempting to view Foucault as a radically antihistorical thinker partly because in The Order of Things , especially, he seemed to be concerned with mapping successive cultural strata that were simply discontinuous; there seemed no scope for explaining change over time, how each stratum emerged from the preceding. But he later insisted that he had intended, in a subsequent work, to try to account for the change at work in The Order of Things . The point was not simply to shift from delineating an explanatory structure to describing a singular configuration or event but to realize "that there are actually a whole order of levels of different types of events differing in amplitude, chronological breadth, and capacity to produce events." And, crucially, these ruptures or discontinuities do not defy understanding: "History has no 'meaning,'

[23] Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice , 153, 156–157, 158.

[24] Foucault, Power/Knowledge , 111–112. See also Foucault's account of his own development in the introduction to The Archaeology of Knowledge , 3–17, esp. pp. 5, 8, 12, 14.

[25] Michel Foucault, "Is It Useless to Revolt?" Philosophy and Social Criticism 8, no. 1 (Spring 1981): 8.

though this is not to say that it is absurd or incoherent. On the contrary, it is intelligible and should be susceptible of analysis down to the smallest detail."^[26]

Understanding, in other words, may require shifting from one layer to another to do justice to the quirks and contingencies in the coming to be of anything in history. To play up discontinuity is not to turn away from historical inquiry but to show, as Croce and Gadamer did not, how such inquiry might be radical, genuinely disruptive. Up to this point, then, Foucault's emphasis on discontinuity is precisely congruent with a radical but reconstructive understanding of deconstruction.

In a series of historical works, Foucault probed such discontinuities as he sought to illuminate present modes of understanding and the societal practices bound up with them. In general terms, his overall aim was "to create a history of the different modes by which, in our culture, human beings are made subjects."^[27] This entailed showing, above all, how we have come to divide our experience as we have, thereby warranting the particular sciences, from linguistics to economics to biology, through which we have developed our particular ways of studying and conceiving ourselves. He also probed what he called "the dividing practices" by examining the historical process through which we have come to confer normality on some and to marginalize others through various categories, procedures, and institutions—madness and illness, criminality and punishment, hospitals and prisons. Finally, he asked how we came to turn ourselves into sexual subjects, to conceive ourselves as sexual beings—as opposed to other ways we might have come to conceive ourselves.

Although he helped popularize the notion that even sexuality has been constructed historically, with certain forms taken as normal and others marginalized as "deviant," Foucault's own history of sexuality was more broadly encompassing, focusing on our particular way of relating to our bodies by conceiving and organizing pleasure. In probing as deeply as he did, Foucault envisioned not merely freeing up repressed forms of sexuality but opening the way to "desexualization," a new general economy of pleasure not based on sexual norms.^[28]

Foucault's approach to all these modes of human self-definition was loosely congruent with the more rigorous form of deconstruction that Derrida developed. To understand how "sanity" or "normality" or "rationality" got constituted historically, we must attend to the marginalized or excluded term in the binary opposition at issue. Each of those categories took on its historically specific meaning as we defined certain individuals as insane, or irrational, or ill, or delinquent, thereby marginalizing them.

[26] Foucault, Power/Knowledge , 113–114.

[27] Foucault, "The Subject and Power," 208.

[28] Foucault, Power/Knowledge , 190–191.

By unearthing the contingencies in fundamental societal practices, Foucault's histories compelled a reassessment of certain of those practices. Indeed, no one has better shown how deconstructive historical inquiry can serve criticism and change. Yet, as critics have noted, there was at the same time something curiously bloodless about Foucault's histories. Purposes other than societal reconstruction seemed to have been at work in them, purposes that I seek to identify below.

Foucault came to recognize that what had attracted his historical attention were particular constellations of power, bound up with particular claims to knowledge. So during the 1970s, the two-sided coin of power/knowledge came more clearly into focus as the object of study. And at first this seemed to deepen the reconstructive potential of the form of historical inquiry he advocated.

Foucault admitted that he himself had first viewed power in the conventionally negative way, as a juridical prohibition that might then be resisted by appeal to rights. But when working on Discipline and Punish during 1971–1972, he was struck by the positive function of power in constituting whatever there is—some particular configuration of knowledge or pleasure, for example. Power is everywhere, as the glue that, in a situation of nothing but history, enables things to come together as some particular present world. Yet the traditional legal and institutional categories, reflecting the tendency to see power as negative, could not account for its positive dimension in a world reduced to history: "for power relations we had no tools of study."^[29]

In probing the constructive role of this diffuse power, Foucault fastened on the interrelationship between power and a particular claim to knowledge and casting of truth. "Each society has its régime of truth, its 'general politics' of truth: that is, the types of discourse which it accepts and makes function as true; the mechanisms and instances which enable one to distinguish true and false statements, the means by which each is sanctioned; the techniques and procedures accorded value in the acquisition of truth; the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as true." Specific effects of power are attached to the true, so "'truth' is linked in a circular relation with systems of power which produce and sustain it, and to effects of power which it induces and which extend it."^[30]

At first glance, Foucault might seem simply to be recasting the familiar notion that what passes for truth is merely ideological or superstructural, but he explicitly eschewed the "ideology" category. In light of the reduction to history, he found it essential to posit a nonreductionist concept of power, not bound up with some class subject or some ambiguous notion of ideology, implying that there are degrees of blindering or distortion to be measured

[29] Ibid., 119, 183–184; Foucault, "The Subject and Power," 209.

[30] Foucault, Power/Knowledge , 131–133.

against a criterion of objective truth. Because there is nothing else, no "really" true standard, the aim cannot be to unmask some ideological claim to truth. All we can do instead is to see "historically how effects of truth are produced within discourses which in themselves are neither true nor false."^[31]

What is most generally at work in any present configuration is a particular regime of power/knowledge that is open to historical questioning. The resulting understanding may nurture attempts to resist some aspect of our present world. To probe the present configuration of power by examining the expansion of the state and the web of relationships among government, business, and societal institutions such as the family might enable us, first, to pinpoint objects of struggle, then to adapt the methods of struggle to the present realities of power. The forms of struggle must change just as power does.^[32]

By thus destabilizing things, does Foucault invite, or at least have room for, a global unearthing of the whole regime of power/knowledge that holds sway at present? In some of his moods, he seemed to envision a post-Marxist radicalism, with no metanarrative of telos and liberation, no claim to strong totality, yet still pointing the way to a global uprooting of our historically specific system of power/knowledge. Thus, in part, his appeal at a time when the radical tradition centering on Marxism was in crisis.^[33]

With our deeper sense of the historicity of things, we come to see that the target of present struggles is not simply an institution or practice "but rather a technique, a form of power," bound up with the way knowledge has come to circulate and function. We seek not simply to free the individual from a totalizing state "but to liberate us both from the state and from the kind of individualization which is linked to the state. We have to promote new forms of subjectivity through the refusal of this kind of individuality which has been imposed on us for several centuries."^[34]

Although the resulting transformation would be global in one sense, it would open the way to various "local" forms of criticism and resistance. The metanarrative of liberation has fallen away, so there is no role for the universal intellectuals who once seemed to enjoy privileged access to the truth of things.^[35] Rather, Foucault accented the scope for the specific intellectual with a definite

[31] Ibid., 118. See also Barry Smart, "The Politics of Truth and the Problem of Hegemony," in Foucault , ed. Hoy, 157–173, esp. pp. 170–171, for an excellent discussion of Foucault's divergence even from Gramsci, who, with his accent on "hegemony," seems the Marxist thinker closest to Foucault.

[32] Foucault, "The Subject and Power," 212–216, 224; Foucault, Power/Knowledge , 187–188.

[33] Two influential assessments of the scope for using Foucault to recast the radical tradition are Barry Smart, Foucault, Marxism, and Critique (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983); and Mark Poster, Foucault, Marxism and History: Mode of Production versus Mode of Information (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984).

[34] Foucault, "The Subject and Power," 216. See also Foucault, Power/Knowledge , 122–123, 133.

[35] Foucault, Power/Knowledge , 80–81, 130–132. See also Smart, "Politics of Truth," 167, 169.

area of expertise. Even in his studies of particular domains of control, Foucault did not pretend to indicate alternatives but only to open the way for those more directly involved to speak up and resist. Such local criticism might take advantage of subjugated forms of knowledge. In any case, a genuine alternative could only be local, because what most needed to be undone was the pretense of universal knowledge.

But though Foucault's form of radical historical inquiry seems at first to serve action and the endless remaking of the world, some of his accents suggest a premium on ongoing resistance itself, apart from any reconstructive aim. Indeed, those accents tend to compromise the reconstructive potential of his mode of deconstruction.

Moreover, Foucault's whole enterprise rested on his own historical account, which was apparently intended to help clarify our present self-understanding and thus our present possibilities. Yet surely a historical account is but another human construction, another deployment of power/knowledge. In what sense, then, does history remain a distinguishable and reliable mode of self-understanding, and what is the status of Foucault's own historical account? Not only is any particular historical account a historical product but so is our sense that history is the way to approach things. So perhaps Foucault's approach was too conventional. Derrida thought so; thus his attempt at a more radical reduction.

Derrida and the Dissolution of Metaphysics

Speaking in 1968, Derrida suggested that "if the word 'history' did not in and of itself convey the motif of a final repression of difference, one could say that only differences can be 'historical' from the outset and in each of their aspects."^[36] To move beyond structuralism was to admit a fundamental historicity, but Derrida found "history" too loaded to characterize a poststructuralist world. Thus, in dissolving stable essences and meanings into a play of differences, he did not explicitly invoke history as Foucault did. Moreover, changes in the character of Derrida's work by the mid-seventies seemed to carry him ever further from any concern with history. But even the more playful accents of his maturity responded to the change in the overall cultural framework that has been at issue for us in this study. Those accents presuppose earlier, apparently more rigorous categories that Derrida elaborated in an effort to make provisional sense of the postmetaphysical situation before deciding

[36] Jacques Derrida, "Différance," in Margins of Philosophy , trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982; orig. French ed. 1972), 11. This piece is also included in Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl's Theory of Signs , trans. David B. Allison (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973); see p. 141 for a slightly different translation of the passage quoted.

how to respond. And though they different from Foucault's, those categories, too, sought to make deeper sense of the reduction to history.

Derrida became associated in the English-speaking world with literary theory, but he was trained as a philosopher and established his reputation through a sustained, rigorous assault on the Western metaphysical tradition. He studied with Jean Hyppolite and read Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger intensively during the early 1950s. By the end of that decade, however, his encounter with the thinking of Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot, and Roland Barthes had begun to interest him in a subject long off-limits for serious philosophy—the implications for philosophy of its own textuality and thus, more generally, the relationship between philosophy and literature.

By the early 1960s, Derrida was confronting Husserl and Lévi-Strauss, exploring the limits of each in light of his new interest in textuality. Especially influential was his critique of structuralism in "Structure, Sign, and Play," first presented at a conference at Johns Hopkins University in 1966 and a major vehicle for his influence in the United States. Then in a series of works centering on Of Grammatology (1967), Derrida offered a historical deconstruction of the philosophical tradition, from its ancient Greek roots through Rousseau and Hegel and on to Husserl, Saussure, and Lévi-Strauss, showing how the tradition not only claimed more than it could deliver but sought to hide what it could not encompass—and to hide the attempt to hide as well. Like Nietzsche, Croce, and Heidegger, Derrida sought to put the whole thing into question, but his confrontation with Lévi-Strauss and structuralism enabled him to approach the tradition from a French angle—and thus to make a distinctive contribution.

Derrida's historical account rested on his seemingly extravagant insistence that the Western tradition has privileged speech and "suppressed" writing, which is in fact prior in some sense. This notion has appeared arbitrary, perverse, or merely silly to numerous critics, and Derrida had to amend and stretch it considerably. Yet even in its earlier formulations, it made a fundamental point about the metaphysical tradition and its limits.

Derrida was not claiming that writing literally preceded speech in the evolution of language. At issue, rather, were two ways of understanding language and the human relationship with it, each of which carried a particular set of assumptions. Privilege to speech was bound up with all that made the Western tradition fundamentally metaphysical. That tradition assumed there is a certain way things are and that language mirrors or represents the way things are. When we speak, language seems direct, unmediated, pure, transparent, self-present. It seems to put us in immediate touch with things. Writing, in contrast, is more obviously compelled to take its own "languageness" seriously, so it has seemed derivative, at one remove from speech. Indeed, as we have afforded priority to speech, we have had to devalue and even suppress writing, because writing is always already slipping and destabilizing the restricted economy of language and representation. Writing continually undermines our image of

stable truth, immediate presence, pure origins—and thus metaphysics itself.^[37]

To make it clear that what he had in mind in opposing writing to speech was not simply marks on a page, or even some "textuality" that could be clearly separated from some real world "outside," Derrida used the term "archewriting" for the problematic side of language, for all that eludes our assumption of an easy correspondence with a stable reality, for all that subverts our assumption that through language we can reduce the world to rational sense. Part of the point was to show that our philosophical tradition had inevitably been wound around contingency and circumstance, despite its tendency to believe itself pure, suprahistorical. Indeed, that tradition had always hidden, and hidden from, its own historicity.^[38]

But thanks to the deconstructive history that Derrida offered in his works of the late 1960s, we can at last begin to see through our tradition and out the other side. Derrida's history focused on all that got marginalized or covered over as our tradition developed. Although he remained especially concerned with the recent outcome of the tradition in Husserl, Saussure, and Lévi-Strauss, he devoted particular attention to Rousseau and his cult of origins and to Hegel and his teleological conception of history.

With its assumption that truth, purity, self-presence, and stable identity were to be found in a "state of nature," the cult of origins was at one with the bias for speech and the attendant suppression of writing. Rousseau was an especially tempting target because his longing for original purity and transparency was bound up with a self-conscious preoccupation with the problematic nature of writing.

Although he wanted to attribute inequality and other negative characteristics to a "fall" into civilization, Rousseau could not conceive the original state of nature without codes and conventions that entailed difference, even hierarchy and repression. He discovered, but tried to deny, that no matter how far back we push, we find instability, slippage; there was always already a "supplement," something that could not be contained within a consistent logic. There was not, for example, some healthy original sexuality, with deviance resulting from the fall into civilization. Rousseau sensed, but hid the fact, that the desires underlying sexuality are inherently contradictory; admitting of no complete satisfaction, they are a source of endless instability.^[39]

Just as Vico insisted on "metaphor," Derrida insisted on "writing" to show

[37] See especially Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology , trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 229. See also Norris, Derrida , 69, 71, 83–84.

[38] Derrida, Of Grammatology , 70–71; Norris, Derrida , 87, 93, 122, 188–189, 193.

[39] Thus Derrida's conclusion to Of Grammatology , "The Supplement of (at) the Origin," 313–316; see also p. 229. In addition, see Jacques Derrida, Limited Inc. , trans. Samuel Weber (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1988), 93, where he holds that the notion of pure, unproblematic origins rests on privileging one term in an undecidable, unstable dualism. See also Norris, Derrida , 34, 50–51, 86, 91, 105–106, 118, 121, on Derrida's treatment of Rousseau and the cult of origins.

that appeal to origins affords no stable, suprahistorical truth of things. As soon as human beings can be said to be human at all, they are caught up in a language that is already in motion, referring, differentiating, deferring. Language confers meaning, but at any point, meaning refers backward, since it functions only in relationship with preexisting terms, and defers forward, since it is never stable and finished.^[40]

Denial of an end entailing completion and closure is thus the other side of the denial of pure, privileged origins.^[41] For the most part, belief in the purity of origins had been bound up with the ahistorical chord of the Western metaphysical tradition. There is a certain way things are, evident at the origins, so history either obscures what things really are or can be dismissed as superficial squiggling. But Hegel, especially, twisted the cult of origins around so that the truth, implicit at the beginning, was to be found only at the other end, as the outcome of a historical process. History became at once meaningful and teleological. But Hegel, Derrida insisted, had been no more successful than Rousseau. Derrida featured in Hegel the strains and contradictions that resulted from his metaphysical effort, including his subordination of "writing" to "speech."^[42]

As the problems with enterprises like those of Rousseau and Hegel became clear, Husserl, Saussure, and Lévi-Strauss sought more self-consciously to establish some basis for certainty, science, stable meaning. But again Derrida fastened on what they left out, on what eluded their attempts to integrate and control. These were last-ditch efforts, and as such each made especially clear the impossibility of the whole enterprise of Western metaphysics, with its suppression of writing. Derrida's determination to confront the legacies of Husserl and structuralism in tandem enabled him to make his powerful contribution to the assault on metaphysics—and to reach his distinctive understanding of what remains, of what can be said, once metaphysics has dissolved.^[43]

Structuralism had featured the sense in which signs have meaning only through their place in a synchronic system of contrasts and differences. But Derrida fastened on what was being bracketed as it did so, the endless disruption of the structured system, the instability occasioned by the excess of meaning, which is forever eluding the form, the structure, the logic. In chapter 3 it was noted that Croce, writing at the same time as Saussure, featured the endless novelty of language, the individuality of every usage, as opposed to the synchronic system in terms of which particular uses of language can be meaningful

[40] See, for example, Derrida, Of Grammatology , 158–159, for suggestions that recall Vico's move.

[41] Richard Rorty notes that Derrida's "great theme is the impossibility of closure"; see Essays on Heidegger , 92. See also Norris, Derrida , 89.

[42] Norris, Derrida , 75; Derrida, Margins of Philosophy , 69–87.

[43] See especially Derrida, Writing and Difference , 154–168. See also Norris, Derrida , 225–227, on the import of confronting Husserl and structuralism in tandem.

at any one time. Derrida's reversal paralleled Croce's, but his need to confront the structuralist enterprise led him to deepen the point considerably. Even on its own terms, Derrida showed, the synchronic system is never self-contained, complete, and stable. Meaning is not synchronically present in language at all, and Derrida found it necessary to propose new terms to characterize what happens instead. Because, as Christopher Norris has put it, meaning "is always subject to a kind of semantic slippage (or deferral)," Derrida coined the word différance "to suggest how meaning is at once 'differential' and 'deferred,' the product of a restless play within language that cannot be fixed or pinned down for the purposes of conceptual definition."^[44]

For Derrida, then, language is not the synchronic system but the diachronic chain of disruptions and deferrals. Meaning is an endless web, each part of which depends on and refers to others, so that we never get a full, final grasp of what is being referred to. Meaning is always deferred; there is always further différance. When we seek the level of settled meaning or certain interpretation, we find no stopping place but only "traces" of earlier traces, as sequences, linkages, referring us back, back, endlessly back.^[45]

But we cannot think simply in terms of a single chain of meaning or truth. As David Hoy has emphasized, Derrida was not denying the possibility of truth but admitting the plurality of truths, even as he fastened on Nietzschean play.^[46] In this sense, Derrida avoided the Nietzschean overreaction from a metaphysical confidence in truth to a claim that there are only lies or fictions. What the postmetaphysical situation involves is an undecidable infinity of possible truths and readings, a luxuriant overflow, an ongoing dissemination of meaning. The term "dissemination" makes it clear that there is no dialectic that reabsorbs in some higher synthesis what gets marginalized when we assert this or that.^[47]

In deconstructing the philosophical tradition during the 1960s, Derrida was at once developing an interpretive strategy and seeking to characterize what is left, or what is happening, if metaphysics falls away altogether. His way of working back through the tradition owed much to Heidegger, but he felt that Heidegger had gotten trapped in the metaphysical tradition he was seeking to sidestep. Thus Heidegger's alleged nostalgia for some original, now-forgotten

[44] Norris, Derrida , 15. For Derrida's fullest elaboration of this key category, see "Différance" (1968), in Margins of Philosophy , 1–27 (also in Speech and Phenomena , 129–160).

[45] Christopher Butler, Interpretation, Deconstruction and Ideology: An Introduction to Some Current Issues in Literary Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 62.

[46] David Couzens Hoy, "Jacques Derrida," in The Return of Grand Theory in the Human Sciences , ed. Quentin Skinner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 57. Hoy here follows especially Jacques Derrida, Spurs: Nietzsche's Styles , trans. Barbara Harlow (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 103.

[47] Derrida made the point in an especially arresting way in discussing Mallarmé's image of fold upon fold. See "The Double Session," in Dissemination , trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981; orig. French ed. 1972), esp. pp. 252–273.

experience of being, for a time when language was in touch with the ultimate truths of experience. Although Derrida did not do justice to Heidegger's later thinking, his determination to avoid the taint of metaphysics that he found even in Heidegger enabled him to deepen our characterization of the postmetaphysical situation.^[48] Indeed, Derrida derived some of his key categories by thinking through Heidegger's emphasis on the epochal character of being and treatment of the ontological difference between being and beings.

Différance , in a certain and very strange way, [is] "older" than the ontological difference or than the truth of Being. When it has this age it can be called the play of the trace. The play of a trace which no longer belongs to the horizon of Being, but whose play transports and encloses the meaning of Being: the play of the trace, or the différance , which has no meaning and is not. Which does not belong. There is no maintaining, and no depth to, this bottomless chessboard on which Being is put in play.^[49]

There was much dispute, however, about the status of such categories, which Derrida worked out to his satisfaction by the mid-seventies. Some, like Rorty, charged that Derrida was simply offering another metaphysics, establishing transcendental conditions of possibility. In response, Derrida insisted "that the trace is neither a ground, nor a foundation, nor an origin."^[50] And indeed différance, trace, and dissemination were not metaphysical categories but simply ways of characterizing a world that cannot be fixed, that opens to the play of interpretations. So Derrida had no need to repudiate them as he moved on to the more playful responses that Rorty preferred. Those playful responses presupposed the world that his earlier categories characterized.

Leftist critics, especially, have worried that Derrida was proposing a reduction to textuality that would preclude access to a real, "outside" world and thus the possibility of concrete change. Marian Hobson has shown convincingly that this line of criticism fundamentally misconstrues Derrida's point. Accusing critics like Edward Said of a "stunning misunderstanding" of Derridean terms like "différance" and "trace," she contends that "far from collapsing what Said deems to be outside the text back onto it and into it, these concepts are exploring what could be called the historical nature of thought without using any kind

[48] In Of Grammatology , 50–51, Derrida stressed the need to follow Husserl and Heidegger through to the very end; at that point, scope for play opens. For Derrida's treatment of Heidegger, see especially Margins of Philosophy , 21–27, which makes it clear that Derrida, in hammering out his own radical categories, was responding to the perceived inadequacies of Heidegger. See also pp. 64–67, 123–136; as well as Jacques Derrida, Positions , trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981; orig. French ed. 1972), 9–11, 52. In addition, see Norris, Derrida , 160–161.

[49] Derrida, Margins of Philosophy , 22.

[50] Derrida, Positions , 52. Rorty, Essays on Heidegger , 102, finds Derrida's response here "puzzling." See also Rorty's assessment of Derrida on pp. 112–113, 117.

of position of even momentary transcendence."^[51] And Hobson goes on to show that what Derrida was seeking to characterize was essentially the postmetaphysical history at issue in this study. Although seeking a way of thinking about radical contingency, with no origin, direction, or goal that would afford a measure to history, Derrida was not denying the coherence necessary for a kind of historical trajectory. On the contrary, says Hobson, "Derrida's trace is itself a trajectory. The back and forth makes a set of plies—strands in a yarn or rope, which provide the strength through tension. We are left not with a scatter of points but with a trajectory."^[52]

The approach to texts that Derrida developed as he worked back through the philosophical tradition came to be known as "deconstruction" in the precise, delimited sense of the term. His encounter with structuralism and the workings of structured systems enabled him to develop an actively deconstructive approach without the implication, prominent in Heidegger's second stage, that we might achieve some definitive uprooting or recovery.

Although Derrida was not offering just another position within Western metaphysics, neither did he believe that the tradition was simply foolish, a trivial mistake that now simply dissolves. It remains inescapable for us—a destiny or fatality—as much for Derrida as for Heidegger. So we must continue to address our particular history, reading the philosophers, but now in a deconstructive way.^[53]

Whether it was featuring the purity of beginnings, the completeness of ends, or the logical consistency of a structured system, the metaphysical tradition had always had to deny or marginalize something—something that kept sticking out nevertheless. So Derrida featured the strains and contradictions, the attempt to marginalize, the effort to hide the fact that the intelligibility of a philosophical claim always presupposes a larger space that is not made intelligible.^[54] In this way he uncovered the undecidability, instability, deferral, and dissemination that have always been fundamental to the philosophical tradition.

In its more general form, Derrida's deconstructive strategy could be applied to any text, showing that the text cannot fully situate, control, or exhaust the matter at hand and disrupting the text's effort to impose limitations on its own meaning or implication.^[55] The loose ends stick out, despite the effort of the text to exclude or hide them. And with the end of metaphysics, there can be no "transcendental signified," so the deconstructive reader can show that appeals

[51] Marian Hobson, "History Traces," in Post-Structuralism and the Question of History , ed. Attridge et al., 101–115. The quoted passage is on p. 102.

[52] Ibid., 113; see also p. 109.

[53] Derrida, Writing and Difference , 288.

[54] Throughout his Derrida , Norris characterizes effectively what Derridean deconstruction may unearth, including even the prelogical possibility of logic. See p. 183 for this example, as well as pp. 61, 77, 79–80, 82–83, 86.

[55] Derrida, Positions , 23–24. See also Butler, Interpretation , 61, 80.

to reality in the text are simply efforts to claim an unwarranted authority over subsequent interpretation. As "method" such deconstruction could become formulaic and mechanical, but Derrida was showing, as no one had before, how to probe the diachronic workings of language. Here, perhaps, was where to look and how to proceed if we seek a more radical kind of historical questioning in a postmetaphysical world.

In seeking to undermine the pretenses of philosophy, Derrida sought to work into the distinctions on which its whole self-understanding has rested, showing that they do not hold up. This did not entail simply inverting the binary oppositions at work and assigning priority to the hitherto suppressed term. Not even writing is to be assigned privilege through such a reversal, as if the point was finally to grasp, once and for all, that everything is motion, flow, happening, or event. The point is to destabilize dualistic opposition itself, for it is through systems of such oppositions that we believe we fix the world.^[56] By showing how the terms intersect, presupposing and affecting each other in undecidable ways, we demonstrate not only that philosophy cannot deliver what it claims but ultimately that our world itself cannot be stable, centered, self-identical in the way that the metaphysical tradition led us to expect.

In the same way, Derrida was not simply reversing some reality-textuality dichotomy to offer a textualist recasting of idealist metaphysics, suggesting that only textuality is real. Rather than saying "everything is language," or some such, he proposed to shake us from the metaphysical prejudice that we capture and fix the world in language. Thus his concern was with what he called the "other of language," but that "other" was not to be conceived simply as an independent reality that language does, or does not, mirror or represent.^[57] Language, textuality, representation, reality—we may go on adding terms that serve in various dichotomies, but those terms are all linked in an undecidable, tension-ridden way. So, again, rather than simply reversing the hierarchy, deconstruction burrows its way "beneath" our usual dualistic distinctions, even including reality and textuality, reality and representation. There is no clear line between them.

Thus, in trying to characterize the sense in which philosophy is literary, Derrida insisted that even the notion of metaphor was misleading because it implies

[56] Norris, Derrida , 23–24, 56, 133. See also Brook Thomas, The New Historicism and Other Old-Fashioned Topics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 123, for an especially effective way of making the point. Derrida was not opting simply for Nietzschean play as opposed to some binary alternative; rather, he was seeking to put even that opposition in play. Play has meaning only in tandem with the alternative, so there is no end, no moment of deliverance.

[57] See Derrida's comments in his illuminating interview with Richard Kearney, Dialogues with Contemporary Continental Thinkers: The Phenomenological Heritage , trans. Richard Kearney (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), 123–124. See also Norris, Derrida , 121, 142–144, 213. On p. 213, Norris argues convincingly that Derrida's often-cited dictum, "There is no 'outside' to the text," makes the same point, that there can be "no ultimate appeal to 'lived' experience," no stopping point.

an independent reality to which the metaphorical text refers—indirectly, figuratively. When we work back from the philosophical text seeking a reassuring connection to some preexisting real world, we find no stopping point, no solid ground.^[58] The founding concepts of metaphysics are instances not of metaphor but of catachresis —"a violent production of meaning, an abuse which refers to no anterior or proper norm."^[59] If we insist on the literal-metaphor distinction, it, too, can be destabilized as undecidable.

Derrida's first response, then, was to subject the texts through which we organize our world to such disruptive deconstructive readings. But a number of questions intrude themselves about the purposes of this strategy, and even the most sympathetic students of Derrida do not answer them in the same way. Once we get Derrida's point, do we need to keep the deconstructive pressure on, or have we liberated ourselves to go on to something else? Beginning with Glas in the midseventies, Derrida himself began trying out radically new kinds of writing, seeking more actively to force open the tradition. Glas was an encounter with Hegel that Derrida characterized as "neither philosophy nor poetry" but "a reciprocal contamination of the one by the other, from which neither can emerge intact." Indeed, Derrida noted explicitly that in Glas and other such works he was trying to introduce new forms of catachresis.^[60] In one sense, he was simply extending the deconstructionist enterprise in these later works, going back to the tradition, finding ever more imaginative ways to disrupt it, open it, play with it. But was Derrida thereby offering us a richer understanding of our history, or did the element of play take precedence, affording self-creation, edification, or entertainment? Whatever Derrida's purposes in his later works, can the deconstructive strategy serve ongoing reconstruction, endlessly yielding some provisional reality, or is the notion of reconstruction itself suspect? Is dissemination and even catachresis compatible, on some level, with Gadamerian gathering, or coming back together?

In his Radical Hermeneutics , Caputo emphasized the negative value of Derridean deconstruction in endlessly puncturing authoritarian pretense. Others sought to show how deconstruction could serve reconstruction, building up something to replace what dissolves. In his often-cited Marxism and Deconstruction , Michael Ryan sought to show that Derrida might serve to open and expand Marxism.^[61] Perhaps most relentless in drawing out the critical yet

[58] Derrida, Of Grammatology , 15; Butler, Interpretation , 20; Norris, Derrida , 82, 170.

[59] Derrida in Kearney, Dialogues , 122–123. See also Derrida's "White Mythology" (1971), in Margins of Philosophy , 207–271.

[60] Derrida in Kearney, Dialogues , 122–123. See also Jacques Derrida, Glas , trans. John P. Leavey, Jr., and Richard Rand (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986; orig. French ed. 1974), and the accompanying Glassary by John P. Leavey, Jr.

[61] John D. Caputo, Radical Hermeneutics: Repetition, Deconstruction, and the Hermeneutic Project (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987); Michael Ryan, Marxism and Deconstruction: A Critical Articulation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982). Ryan worried, however, that Derridean deconstruction, taken alone, points to nihilistic passivity. See esp. pp. 37–40.

reconstructive potential in Derrida was Christopher Norris, who sought ultimately to combine Derrida with Habermas.

Part of Norris's effort was to rescue Derrida from the popular understanding of deconstruction that he associated especially with American literary intellectuals. What Derrida offered was neither a technique for textual interpretation nor a license for a more inventive, playful mode of reading. Rather, his way of attending critically to our language, starting with the language of philosophy, afforded the key to "real changes in the present institutional structures of power, knowledge and politics." And Norris insisted repeatedly that this enterprise entailed rigorous analysis; there was nothing playful about it.^[62]

Norris's suggestion is surely plausible. By drawing our attention to the way what has come to be said plays off, even precludes, what is not said, Derrida significantly deepened our sense of what might be questioned. This critical approach to language might help us grasp the contingency of sociocultural practices and to discern what changing them would entail. But of course the conventional radical tradition, too, might be subject to deconstruction. Based on categories like domination and emancipation, it, too, had been constructed historically around absences, margins, preclusions. So deconstruction could not be assumed to buttress some existing radical position. Indeed, by indicating what had been unquestioned in our own thinking, it invited a form of reflexive self-criticism. And this reflexivity entailed putting everything at risk.^[63]

We have seen that Foucault, by pointing to the constructedness of relations of power/knowledge, showed how we can contest existing practices in a radical but reconstructive mode. In a sense, Derrida cut deeper by showing how any such constructedness works in language. However, Foucault was more obviously looking beyond the philosophical tradition. So whereas Derrida showed how to probe language in our quest for answers, Foucault showed that all cultural practices may be questioned on the same basis, in terms of some defining, historically specific discourse. It would seem, then, that Foucault and Derrida, taken together, might afford the radical but reconstructive component missing in the combination of historicism and hermeneutics discussed in the last chapter. In both Foucault and Derrida, however, the premium on disruption was so relentless and exclusive that the scope for reconstruction remained uncertain at best.

[62] Norris, Derrida , 26. See also p. 109, where Norris insists that Derrida's approach "requires a rigour and a scrupulous adherence to the letter of the text which could scarcely be further removed from [the] popular idea of what 'deconstruction' is all about," and pp. 21, 24, 27, 112–113, for variations on the same theme. Marian Hobson similarly criticizes the overemphasis on undifferentiated "free play" among some of those embracing Derridean deconstruction; see "History Traces," 103–104.

[63] Though more a critic of Derrida than a supporter, Christopher Butler is especially good on the uses of the critical approach to language that can be developed from Derridean deconstruction. See Interpretation , 20–22, 64.

The Premium on Disruption

At some points Foucault's way of emphasizing the "other" or underside of power, "that which responds to every advance of power by a movement of disengagement," seems to suggest the scope for change, for it "forms the motivation for every new development of networks of power."^[64] New forms of power emerge through the intransigence of freedom vis-à-vis the power relations that have crystallized so far. But rather than emphasize the scope for reconstructive action, Foucault insisted on leveling things out; whatever happens, the outcome will simply be another instance of power, which conflates with subjugation, domination: "Domination is in fact a general structure of power whose ramifications and consequences can sometimes be found descending to the most incalcitrant fibers of society." The construction or coming to be of the world necessarily entails "a multiform production of relations of domination."^[65] Wherever we look in history, then, we find only some particular power configuration that is subject to condemnation. Thus Rorty charged that "Foucault's work is pervaded by a crippling ambiguity between 'power' as a pejorative term and as a neutral, descriptive term."^[66]

Foucault's refusal to allow distinctions among crystallizations of power drew the criticism of both liberals and radicals. As liberals charged, he could not admit that the development of the liberal state over the past three centuries might have increased choice and decreased suffering.^[67] And Foucault's suggestions that all dominant forms of power are suspect encompassed even the dominant opposition. Marxism, too, had come to dominance through exclusion, subjugation, spurious claims to privilege. Thus radical critics from Fredric Jameson to Jean Baudrillard charged that Foucault offered only a futile neoanarchism, a useless protest.^[68]

Foucault's way of reducing everything to the same level precluded the measure of positive identification with something in particular that would afford a foothold for criticism to serve positive reconstruction. Seeking to pinpoint what was missing in both Foucault and Jean-François Lyotard, Rorty referred to "the extraordinary dryness of Foucault's work[,] . . . a dryness produced by a lack of identification with any social context, any communication. . . . It is as if thinkers like Foucault and Lyotard were so afraid of being caught up in one

[64] Foucault, Power/Knowledge , 138.

[65] Foucault, "The Subject and Power," 226; Foucault, Power/Knowledge , 142. See also Foucault, Power/Knowledge , 188; and Mark Philp, "Michel Foucault," in Return of Grand Theory , ed. Skinner, 75–76, for indications of Foucault's way of conflating power with domination.

[66] Rorty, Essays on Heidegger , 195.

[67] See especially the influential critiques by Michael Walzer, "The Politics of Michel Foucault," and Charles Taylor, "Foucault on Freedom and Truth," both in Foucault , ed. Hoy, 51–102. See also Rorty, Essays on Heidegger , 194–195.

[68] See Bové, "The Foucault Phenomenon," xxix, for a good summary of these charges and references to several examples.

more metanarrative about the fortunes of 'the subject' that they cannot bring themselves to say 'we' long enough to identify with the culture of the generation to which they belong."^[69]

In the final analysis, Foucault seemed to allow only a grim, endless, ritualistic kind of resistance, a struggle against power itself, with its tendency to organize a world, to crystallize things into something in particular.^[70] Rather than portray his own effort as an exercise of power intended to respond to the challenges of his own time and contribute to the next moment of truth and reality, he found it necessary to subvert the whole ideal of truth and reality in our culture, as merely one aspect of this historically specific power configuration. Because even the notion of "objective reality" confirmed the extant order, he sometimes suggested that lying and rhetoric were necessary instruments in the ongoing struggle.^[71] And he insisted on the fictional nature of historical works—including, of course, his own—even while conceding that some fictions may function as "true."

I am well aware that I have never written anything but fictions. I do not mean to say, however, that truth is therefore absent. It seems to me that the possibility exists for fiction to function in truth, for a fictional discourse to induce effects of truth, and for bringing it about that a true discourse engenders or "manufactures" something that does not as yet exist, that is, "fictions" it. One "fictions" history on the basis of a political reality that makes it true, one "fictions" a politics not yet in existence on the basis of a historical truth.^[72]

Up to a point, this passage usefully characterizes the element of creativity in historical truth and the broadly political role that historical accounts play in shaping the next moment. But because he had other axes to grind, Foucault gave the insight a particular spin, folding historical truth within politically inspired fiction. During his lifetime, at least, his dismissive characterizations of "objective reality" and historical truth led practicing historians to view his historical works with suspicion. Specialists in early modern Europe like Lawrence Stone and H. C. Erik Midelfort pinpointed what they found to be unacceptable license in Foucault's handling of the historical evidence.^[73] But while they

[69] Richard Rorty, "Habermas and Lyotard on Postmodernity," in Habermas and Modernity , ed. Richard J. Bernstein (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986), 172.

[70] Foucault, "The Subject and Power," 211–212, 221–223, 225.

[71] Allan Megill, Prophets of Extremity: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1985), 243–244, 252–254.

[72] Foucault, Power/Knowledge , 193. See also pp. 118, 131–132.

[73] H. C. Erik Midelfort, "Madness and Civilization in Early Modern Europe: A Reappraisal of Michel Foucault," in After the Reformation: Essays in Honor of J. H. Hexter , ed. Barbara C. Malament (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1980), 247–265; and Lawrence Stone, "Madness," New York Review of Books , 16 December 1982, 29–30. See also New York Review of Books , 31 March 1983, 42–44, for an exchange between Foucault and Stone occasioned by Stone's essay.

continued to put off many mainstream historians, Foucault's characterizations increasingly seemed to others to justify an overtly political element in the construction of historical accounts—or fictions.

But Foucault was not settling for this relatively familiar instrumentalist understanding of historical interpretations as effective fictions. He argued that the categories around which our mental life has come to be organized, and even what we take to be our intelligence itself, are historically specific and necessarily imply a precluded other that might be liberated: "by creating a space for the operation of truth and falsity, by situating the free supplement of error, categories silently reject stupidity. In a commanding voice, they instruct us in the ways of knowledge and solemnly alert us to the possibilities of error, while in a whisper they guarantee our intelligence and form the a priori of excluded stupidity." Much like Derrida, however, Foucault envisioned not simply a reversal that would make "stupidity" privileged instead of intelligence; nor was his simply a romantic emphasis on the superiority of feeling, sentiment, imagination, or some other "Other" of conceptual intellect. Rather, he wanted to keep the tension before us, to operate in the crease, thus endlessly resisting the imperious demands of intelligence. If anything, we might afford privilege to paradox: "The philosopher must be sufficiently perverse to play the game of truth and error badly."^[74]

Derrida's premium on perversity paralleled Foucault's. As Caputo has emphasized, Derrida's dialectic was always negative, his praxis always disruptive.^[75] Even if it did not call simply for straightforward reversal, Derridean deconstruction explicitly afforded privilege to what has been marginalized, to uncanonical texts, to the blind spots or the margins of texts. And although Norris was surely right to deny that Derrida simply offered interpretive license, neither could Derrida consistently be made the reconstructive radical that Norris was seeking. Derrida's approach was ultimately too playful. Thus Rorty accented Derrida's refusal to take philosophy seriously and lauded the comic element in Derrida's mature work, which included a systematic evasiveness as Derrida played with the status of his own texts.^[76]

Rorty was prominent among those distinguishing the playful "later" Derrida from the earnestly philosophical Derrida of the works prior to Glas in 1974. But the more playful approach followed from the sense of the cultural situation that Derrida had already developed. As early as 1966, in "Structure, Sign, and Play," he explicitly welcomed the opening to a more playfully active interpretation that seemed to follow once we grasp that the language in which we are enmeshed is neither solidly referential nor solidly structural but endlessly

[74] Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice , 188, 190.

[75] Caputo, Radical Hermeneutics , 189–196, esp. pp. 189–190.

[76] Rorty, Essays on Heidegger , 113; see also pp. 117–118.

open, lacking a stable center or stable points of reference.^[77] As we interpret texts, there is no privileged authority that can either limit us or judge us, holding us responsible. We are free to read in an innocently active way, disseminating new meanings—even new truths—but without seeking even provisionally to close the circle by bringing understanding of the text back to the coherence of a unified—even "true"—account. Such reading even involves finding ways not to pretend to do so, to subvert any claims to do so.

The playful, endlessly disruptive thrust of Derridean deconstruction has prompted critics like John Ellis to emphasize that Derrida's thinking is antithetical to any constructive approach. It is incongruent, for example, with Marxism, or with the feminist attempt to unmarginalize women's voices.^[78] Such approaches seek to overcome a historically specific situation, putting something deemed superior in its place, but Derrida's accent on the instability of things was so extreme that it undercut the foothold necessary both for criticism and for constructive action. More generally, Ellis showed that Derrida's premium was on subversion itself, as opposed to replacing a subverted idea with a better one.

So the Foucault and Derrida currents converged in their mistrust of authority and their premium on disruption. In the final analysis, the sort of reconstruction Ellis had in mind was not the point for either thinker, and the question is why they wanted to do something else instead. But even critics like Ellis who effectively pinpointed the elements of extremity found it difficult to account for the priorities of deconstruction. Still thinking in terms of the "intellectual progress" through which better ideas supersede older ones, Ellis could not see the rationale for Derrida's way of keeping ideas in eternal purgatory. He was simply puzzled by Derrida's premium on endlessly putting the whole thing into question, on backing off from the finitude of particularizing language, on subverting the whole central/marginal dichotomy and thus the possibility of discerning/judging degrees of importance.^[79]

To explain such apparent extravagance, some, at least some of the time, repaired to reductionist categories, referring to the authoritarianism of the French university system, or to the uncertainties of radicalism after 1968, or to the resentments these particular individuals felt as intellectuals and outsiders.^[80] But others sensed that the extremity in deconstruction stemmed from deeper impulses, perhaps reflecting new preoccupations coming to the fore with the eclipse of metaphysics.

[77] Derrida, Writing and Difference , 292–293. Though helpful, Butler's account in Interpretation , 86, seems better to characterize the embrace of Derridean deconstruction by literary intellectuals than the basis for Derrida's own more playful response by the mid- 1970s.

[78] Ellis, Against Deconstruction , esp. p. 96.

[79] Ibid., 41–42, 53–54, 69–71, 73, 75, 78, 81–82, 87, 93–94, 140–141, 151.

[80] Ibid., 83–84; Butler, Interpretation , 88. See also Perry Anderson, In the Tracks of Historical Materialism (London: Verso, 1983), 38–42.

In a brief but brilliant article, Rorty maintained that Foucault's enterprise mixed two purposes that were better kept separate. Foucault wanted to help people, but as an intellectual he was also seeking personal autonomy and self-creation. In his quest to help people he bent over backward to respect their autonomy, so he declined to take over their vocabularies or to relate them to the wider historical process. The extreme, anarchical tendency in Foucault was "the result of a misguided attempt to envisage a society as free of its historical past as the Romantic intellectual hopes to be free of her private past."^[81] Rorty was suggesting, then, that a loosely Nietzschean concern with self-creation, necessarily standing opposed to reconstructive, history-making action, undermined Foucault's desire to help people, to make a difference in the wider world around him. At issue was a tension between ways of relating to the world as historical, but though Rorty's discussion was especially suggestive, it left only a few indications of what those might entail.

Norris, as part of his effort to save Derridean deconstruction for radical reconstructive purposes, distinguished Derrida from "Foucault, Deleuze or the adepts of post-structuralist apocalyptic discourse," whom he associated with a leap into some unknown, beyond reason and critical thought.^[82] Norris was suggesting, then, that some quasi-religious concern had made Foucault too extreme to serve reconstruction.

Rorty was still more explicit in finding something "religious" at work in the vogue of Derridean deconstruction, although he considered Paul de Man far more responsible than Derrida for the mixture of elegy and polemic that set the tone for the movement in the United States. Reading literature in a de Manian mode became a kind of religious ritual for a postmetaphysical age. In contrast with scientific, philosophical, and everyday uses of language, literature always attends to its own relationship with reality; literary language always manifests the impossibility of the full presence, the oneness with things, that we desire. So by endlessly encountering the literariness of language, deconstruction offered what Rorty called "a way of mourning a Deus absconditus , of participating in a divine absence[,] . . . an ascetic practice that confronts one ever and again with 'the presence of a nothingness.'"^[83]

[81] Rorty, Essays on Heidegger , 195–196.

[82] Norris, Derrida , 224–225. See also 216–217, 222, for Norris's effort to separate Derrida from Foucault.

[83] See Rorty, Essays on Heidegger , 113–118, for this reading of de Man and his influence; the quoted passage is on p. 114. On p. 116n, Rorty refers in a similar vein to "the worship of a Dark God, the celebration of perpetual absence." See also pp. 129–139, esp. p. 131, for Rorty's analysis "De Man and the American Cultural Left." In developing this point about deconstruction, Rorty draws partly on one of de Man's closest and most influential colleagues, J. Hillis Miller, in The Ethics of Reading (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), pp. 41–59, esp. pp. 53–54, 57–58. Miller makes it clear that the "reading" at issue is a mode of human interaction with the world, not a delimited encounter with literary texts. See also Miller's much earlier The Disappearance of God: Five Nineteenth-Century Writers (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963), for his sense of the overarching religious issue. On pp. 9–12, he portrays historicism as the desolate outcome of the disappearance of God by the end of the nineteenth century. Rorty may be too quick to dismiss attempts like those of de Man and Miller to work through the ruins of the old to new forms of religiosity. But he argues convincingly that Derrida cannot serve de Man's project, because Derrida did not assume that our way of conceiving the dualism of language and reality is at last the right one, or that we have finally discovered what language and reading have been all along.

When he considered Derrida himself, Rorty accented Derrida's playful side. In Rorty's account, in fact, Derrida sought to make the whole philosophical tradition look enigmatic by treating it as a joke.^[84] Yet that response, too, seems to manifest preoccupations new to a world of nothing but history.

In any case, a premium on enigma, systematic evasion, or ritualistic participation in divine absence is utterly incongruent with an emphasis on endless reconstruction. The problem is how to account for these impulses and how to place the overall extremity of deconstruction in perspective.

Plausible Extremity

One possibility, which convinces up to a point, is to say that the claim to a spurious authority is ongoing and so must endlessly be disrupted. Whatever comes to be always seeks to mask its own historicity and constructedness; our concepts always tend to harden, hiding their instability. Because we can expect no definitive deliverance from metaphysical temptations, deconstruction is endlessly necessary, at least as one cultural moment among others, to loosen, to disrupt, and thereby to subvert the "logocentric" conception of things that takes the world as graspable in language.^[85]

Derrida noted that philosophers were trying to erect suprahistorical theories even in response to insights akin to his own about difference and instability. Thus his noted encounter with Searle, who developed an influential theory of speech acts largely from J. L. Austin's form of ordinary language philosophy. Like Wittgenstein in his later works, Austin offered insights into the radical pluralism, the unsystematic nature of language, that were congruent with the wider retreat from metaphysics. Although he remained too much the conventional philosopher for Derrida's taste, Austin was more interested in following problematic cases as they broke down prior speech act classifications than in incorporating them into some overarching theory. Searle, in contrast, sought to develop from Austin's insights a rigorous theory of speech acts, laying out classifications, as if philosophy could specify in advance how language must work to make sense. Thus Derrida sought to deconstruct speech act theory by pinpointing what Searle had played down or marginalized in systematizing

[84] Rorty, Essays on Heidegger , 117–118.

[85] This is Norris's implication throughout Derrida ; see esp. pp. 16, 60, 84, 184.

Austin's insight.^[86] Whether Derrida's assault was successful remains in dispute, but Searle's response to Austin made it clear that even as we abandon foundationalism, we may seek to fix, to classify, to specify in advance, as opposed to getting on with our business, using language, putting it to work.

It might be argued, then, that deconstruction provides the cultural lubricant that is endlessly necessary to bring human being together with the process of endless deferral. To be sure, the world is in slippage in any case, but the constant lubrication frees up human creativity, so that we mesh in a history-making mode with this slipping world of interlacing contingencies. In fact, however, Foucault and Derrida each seem to have had deeper reasons for placing priority on ongoing resistance, disruption, and destabilization.

The impetus toward extremity in deconstruction derived from the universe of new preoccupations, stemming from the reduction to history, that we found emerging first in Nietzsche and Heidegger. The premium on endless loosening, distancing, and disrupting responded not simply to an ongoing metaphysical tendency but to a new sense of confinement, even suffocation, in a post metaphysical world. At first, the extremity in Foucault seems to differ from the extremity in Derrida, both in origin and in cultural implication. Foucault seems more earnest and at least quasi-political, Derrida more playful. Foucault criticized precisely the apparently apolitical implications of Derrida's more playful approach.^[87] For each, however, there was something suffocating, yet also insubstantial and inadequate, about a world newly experienced as merely historical. Seeking to respond, each moved back and forth between Nietzsche and Heidegger, interlacing themes from each, thereby thickening the web of postmetaphysical extremity.

Part of what compromised the reconstructive potential of deconstruction was an element of quasi-Heideggerian alienation. It is evident well before Foucault and Derrida in the late reflections of the cultural critic Walter Benjamin, who is worth considering briefly as a link between Heidegger and this wider cultural tendency. Loosely within the orbit of T. W. Adorno and the Frankfurt school, Benjamin was one of the most imaginative of the generally Marxist cultural critics of the twentieth century. Especially in his "Theses on the Philosophy of History," however, a Heideggerian element came together with his radicalism, resulting in a blurring that compromised both.^[88]

[86] Derrida, Limited Inc. In Essays on Heidegger , 86n, 103n, Richard Rorty endorses Searle's criticism of Derrida for attributing to Austin traditional motives and attitudes that he in fact avoided. But though Derrida may not have done justice to Austin, he effectively criticized metaphysical assumptions common to both Austin and Searle. In Derrida , Norris accents Derrida's feeling that he was considerably closer to Austin than to Searle; see pp. 179–186, 189–190.

[87] See Hoy, "Jacques Derrida," 58–60, for a good summary.

[88] Walter Benjamin, Illuminations , ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969), 253–264, esp. p. 255. The "Theses" date from 1940. On p. 46 of her introduction to Illuminations , Hannah Arendt notes that Benjamin, without realizing it, was closer to one side of Heidegger than to the subtle Marxism of his friends. Julian Roberts similarly suggests that the later Benjamin had more in common with Heidegger than he was willing to admit. See his Walter Benjamin (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1983), 91.

Benjamin resented the domination by the historical victors, including the selective remembering and enforced forgetting that seemed to be involved in any actualization in history. What is ultimately troubling in this syndrome is not some isolable power configuration, or even the strong notion of progress that justifies the victors, but the mechanisms through which any and every moment comes to be through history. In the nature of things any reality will be particular, resting on the power of the victors and the particular remembering and forgetting that are bound up with their victory. The appropriate mode of response to such a world was ultimately more religious than political. Indeed, a way of reappropriating the whole of history was central to Benjamin's image of redemption. "A chronicler who recites events without distinguishing between major and minor ones acts in accordance with the following truth: nothing that has ever happened should be regarded as lost for history. To be sure, only a redeemed mankind receives the fullness of its past—which is to say, only for a redeemed mankind has its past become citable in all its moments."^[89] Short of such redemption, Benjamin implied that we may respond through a kind of ritualistic disruption that recalls Heidegger's mature strategy. We refuse to distinguish major and minor events, thereby keeping the whole of what has happened alive "for its own sake," in defiance of the endless resulting in some actual present through some particular winning and marginalizing.

In the last analysis, however, Benjamin remained suspended between radical politics and religious alienation. His condemnation was so global that it undermined the foothold necessary for his historical deconstruction to result in reconstruction, yet the element of hope against hope for radical change impeded the disengagement necessary for an alternative, more or less Heideggerian religiosity.

Despite the power of his historical questioning, Foucault ended up in a similar ambiguity. Like Benjamin, he wanted to be radical, but extremity got the upper hand in his thinking, so even historical inquiry served him not so much to prepare subsequent action but to disrupt in a ritualistic way. Power is wherever anything has resulted; the winning that has resulted in that power has always entailed exclusion; that power pretends to an unwarranted authority and is tantamount to domination. What Foucault offered, in response, was a neoexistentialist, self-justifying, and, yes, "humanistic" gesture of resistance to power itself, to the mechanisms through which any world at all comes to be. As he put it in 1979, "My ethic is . . . 'anti-strategic': to be respectful when something singular arises, to be intransigent when power offends against the universal. A simple choice, but a difficult work. It is always necessary to watch out

[89] Benjamin, Illuminations , 254.

for something, a little beneath history, that breaks with it, that agitates it; it is necessary to look, a little behind politics, for that which ought to limit it, unconditionally."^[90]

Still, to achieve purity, integrity, in response to the mechanisms of world-resulting as history, it is not enough to pull back and disengage altogether. Precisely because the reduction to history was a crucial datum for Foucault, he envisioned that we keep resisting and disrupting power in its historical specificity ; we cannot resist it in general, or simply turn our gaze heavenward. Because the target of resistance is necessarily different at any moment, we need different strategies. In our own time, for example, commodification is central to the diffusion of power, so we have to learn to resist that. And we still need historical understanding—in order to understand how to resist such particular crystallizations of power.

Paul Bové, disputing Gilles Deleuze's claim to find a "utopian" element in Foucault, insisted that there is instead only endless subversion—subversion even of any such utopian aspiration. Bové suggested, consistently enough, that in Foucault's world perhaps only "failure" can be counted as success, the only genuine mode of opposition.^[91] This is true even for the opposition intellectual, of course, for even the dominant modes of opposition came to dominance through the same particularizing mechanisms. Any such premium on failure-as-resistance reflects the ultimate in alienation from the mechanisms of world-making as history, which, by definition, entails succeeding, winning, excluding.

Foucault's response may be seen as loosely religious in the sense that it stemmed from this sort of alienation, which was ultimately deeper even than Heidegger's. Heidegger was alienated from the particular world resulting from our particular history, but Foucault resented "history" itself, the way the world happens, the mechanisms bound up with the coming to be of anything at all. Although the element of religious disengagement Heidegger afforded was spare and limited, his orientation was more hopeful than Foucault's because to resist closing up in the actual and to attune oneself to the giving itself was, first, to experience positively the fact that there is anything at all and, second, to hold open for a different dispensation, a different actuality. For Foucault, in contrast, resistance becomes an end in itself—again, an existentialist gesture of authenticity.

Moreover, for all his debt to Nietzschean genealogy, Foucault's radicalism was ultimately anything but Nietzschean, because the mode of affirmation Nietzsche envisioned was to dissipate precisely the postmetaphysical resentment we find in Foucault. For Nietzsche, power was simply the neutral glue of world-resulting and not "domination," understood as inherently illegitimate.

[90] Foucault, "Is It Useless to Revolt?" 9.

[91] Bové, "The Foucault Phenomenon," xxix-xxxvi; see esp. p. xxxvi. See also Thomas, The New Historicism , 47, on the antireconstructive thrust of Foucault.

To be sure, power for Nietzsche might well entail domination, but it can be exercised with a good conscience in light of Nietzsche's affirmative embrace of the particularity of the world. For Nietzsche, critical discrimination among power configurations remained possible, and a particular configuration may be subject to condemnation as life-debasing. It will not be so, however, simply because it is an instance of power and entails the exclusion or concealment that any instance of power entails.

Although it was more playful, Derrida's response stemmed from the same family of preoccupations as Foucault's. An acute sense of confinement to our particular history was central to his thinking from the outset. Referring to the developing radical critique of the bases of the tradition, a critique to which Nietzsche, Freud, and Heidegger seemed to have been central, Derrida noted,

But all these destructive discourses and all their analogues are trapped in a kind of circle. This circle is unique. It describes the form of the relation between the history of metaphysics and the destruction of the history of metaphysics. There is no sense in doing without the concepts of metaphysics in order to shake metaphysics. We have no language—no syntax and no lexicon—which is foreign to this history; we can pronounce not a single destructive proposition which has not already had to slip into the form, the logic, and the implicit postulations of precisely what it seeks to contest.^[92]

So our particular history continues to happen no matter what we say, no matter how radically we deconstruct it. We may "seek to contest," but we are "trapped," in the sense that whatever we say or do grows from, belongs to, and returns to the idiosyncratic history that surrounds us.

Still, we may resist, even establish a fleeting measure of personal autonomy, though only through an ongoing encounter with endlessly suffocating history. We noted that Derrida, like Heidegger, found it essential to continue working through the texts of our tradition, but he concluded that unprecedented approaches were necessary if he was to avoid simply assuming a place behind Heidegger in the Western lineage.^[93]

We have noted that a kind of playfulness was central to Derrida's response virtually from the start. At first, Derridean play seemed a form of the innocent, posthistoricist self-affirmation that Nietzsche had posited. In 1966, in fact, Derrida explicitly linked his approach to Nietzsche's notion of "the innocence of becoming." As an antidote to the sense of loss and even guilt that threatened to befall us in this newly decentered world, Nietzsche had envisioned the "joyous affirmation of the play of the world and of the innocence of becoming, the affirmation of a world of signs without fault, without truth, and without origin

[92] Derrida, Writing and Difference , 280–281.

[93] Derrida, Margins of Philosophy , 134–136. See also Rorty, Essays on Heidegger , 118n, for a good characterization of Derrida's move.

which is offered to an active interpretation."^[94] Rather than trying to get something right or claiming some definitive overcoming of our predecessors, we have fun uncovering the inevitable destabilizing elements in the efforts of others to do so. Or we play reflexively with our own tendency to cover over and marginalize all that does not fit. The game was innocent because the players claimed to be doing nothing more than keeping the thing in play—and having some sophisticated fun in the process.

To understand interpretation as play undercuts any pretense, of the sort that crept into the wider current of deconstructive criticism, that the interpreter enjoys a privileged epistemological status vis-à-vis the author, a status enabling the interpreter to reveal the blindness of the author. It is crucial that for Derrida everything is leveled out. We keep in mind that we are playing, so we avoid the temptation to claim objectivity or some privileged meaning. For the obvious questions about the status of his own texts, Derrida was more than ready. Indeed, he welcomed the occasion they afforded him to play to the next level "down." Although in one sense his accounts of Hegel, Nietzsche, and other historical figures presuppose the sort of objective truth to the texts that he wanted to destroy, he assured us that his own texts have no decidable meaning.^[95]

Despite the fun, however, there was something grimly relentless about Derrida's approach.^[96] His sense of suffocation made him increasingly preoccupied with the bizarre, contingent character of the process whereby whatever anyone writes is taken up by those who follow—and enters history. Because they were doomed to write, philosophers from Plato on laid themselves open to all manner of unauthorized interpretations. In "Otobiographies" (1979), Derrida pondered both Nietzsche's preoccupation with the future fate of his own writing and the actual fate of his writing—so far. Nietzsche's masks, pseudonyms, and dissimulation had not prevented the Nazis from bending him to their own purposes. Like Nietzsche, we all die before our name; what becomes of what we write always eludes our intention or control.^[97] So Derrida himself became more self-conscious about his own place in the endless chain of partial interpretations as he became "Derrida," as his own work was disseminated in, for example, American literary deconstruction. Even more than Nietzsche, he did his

[94] Derrida, Writing and Difference , 292.

[95] For example, on pp. 135–137 of Spurs , his analysis of Nietzsche's treatment of women, Derrida reassures us that Spurs itself has no decidable meaning. See also Butler, Interpretation , 62–63, 77–79.

[96] As Frederick Crews has put it, Derrida had no way out of the web of inherited ideas "he has doomed himself to deconstruct ad infinitum and thus to retain in a limbo of combined attention and nonassertion. His contentment with that annotative role marks him as an intellectual nihilist, though a learned and exuberant one." Frederick Crews, "In the Big House of Theory," New York Review of Books , 29 May 1986, 40–41.

[97] Derrida, "Otobiographies," in The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation , ed. Christie V. McDonald, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Schocken, 1985), 1–38. See esp. pp. 9, 28–29, 31–32, 36, 38.

best to obstruct expository treatment of his texts.^[98] Thus the ever more imaginative modes of disruption that characterized his work. With Glas in 1974, he began using several voices and producing several texts at once.

Derrida's preoccupations recall those that led Foucault to shift his ground in order not to be fixed, trapped, suffocated. Responding to charges that he was seeking simply to sidestep or one-up his critics, Foucault suggested that a deeper preoccupation was at work.

Do you think that I would keep so persistently to my task, if I were not preparing—with a rather shaky hand—a labyrinth into which I can venture . . . in which I can lose myself and appear at last to eyes that I will never have to meet again. I am no doubt not the only one who writes in order to have no face. Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same: leave it to our bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are in order. At least spare us their morality when we write.^[99]

Although Foucault was most obviously concerned to elude the present regime of power, he was responding to the snares of the world as historical itself, with its tendency to make something arbitrary and unforeseeable, delimited and particular, of what we do, say, are.

But it was Derrida who most consistently pursued this theme. He understood that subsequent treatment of his own thinking would inevitably delimit and impoverish it by treating it in some particular, contingent way, precisely as we are doing now. To put it in Heideggerian terms, much is held back or conceals itself as "Derrida" passes into the cold but malleable marble of the tradition. In 1966, Derrida had welcomed the Nietzschean innocence that seemed to become possible in a postmetaphysical world, but it quickly came to seem that though we are no longer responsible in the old sense, we cannot simply flow innocently either. We are left with particularizing as history, which occasions resentment; we must actively confront our history—not to build on it but to spite it.

Although his responses constitute a single consistent strategy, Derrida leaves us in tantalizing uncertainty. Is it that we find ways of perpetually undercutting ourselves to avoid stating a position that time and history will undercut? Is it that we one-up even history itself, by doing what it will do—erase, though leaving traces—before it gets the chance? Or is it that we simply give in to the inevitability of history, which will do with us as it will, and passively but poisonously set ourselves up for further deconstruction?^[100]

However it is characterized, Derrida's playful response proved distinctly

[98] Norris, Derrida , 64, 187, 194–195, 199–200.

[99] Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge , 17.

[100] In an exchange in the New York Review of Books , 2 February 1984, 48, John Searle notes this tendency in Derridean deconstruction—and finds something essentially phony about it. My point is that a plausible postmetaphysical preoccupation is at work in this way of relating to the ongoing particularizing, so the tendency need not be characterized so dismissively.

non-Nietzschean, despite his endorsement of the innocence of becoming in 1966. For Nietzsche claimed, at least, to have dissolved the basis for precisely the sense of historical suffocation that preoccupied Derrida. Nietzschean innocence of becoming entails innocence even in the face of an endlessly capricious history. The key to such innocence was not the allegedly "fictional" basis of all human construction but the experience of eternal recurrence, the endlessness of this same particular world. Insofar as I grasp and affirm this endlessly particularizing world as all there is, I am freed from the anxious preoccupation that what I do will be swallowed up by a history imposing its own meaning on what I have done. In affirming the whole as particular, the Nietzschean affirms not only the past and present but also the "future"—what history will make of what I do, the fact that particularizing will encompass this as well. There is nothing I can do about it—but I feel no need to do anything about it. Because it rests on affirmation of an interconnected whole, Nietzschean play is not to one-up history.

Although Derrida sometimes conflated "history" with Hegel and then found in Hegel the source of the problem, it is crucial that even weak, postmetaphysical history, with no specifically Hegelian admixture, was sufficient to occasion his preoccupations. Indeed, it is precisely the absence of any controlling telos that makes my belonging to history so appalling; not only does history make what it will of whatever I do but it does so capriciously, contingently.

From one perspective, both Foucault and Derrida seem less consistent than Nietzsche and Heidegger, less able to embrace a postmetaphysical and posthistoricist orientation. Thus the resentment and shrillness in their responses. It is axiomatic that, as extremes, their strategies do not serve history-making reconstruction, but neither do they afford affirmative self-creation or religious disengagement. From this perspective, Foucault offers a resentful ritual of perversity, Derrida, a futile play of shadows.

But it is possible to view the responses of each thinker more sympathetically. cally. Even if we grasp the preoccupations that occasioned the earlier responses of Nietzsche and Heidegger, we may not find those responses convincing. And because neither Foucault nor Derrida was content simply to recapitulate the extreme moves of the two earlier thinkers, each was able to broaden our sense of what we may experience, and how we may respond, in a merely historical world. Our modes of relationship with that world may include ritualistic disruption and play, each of which reflects both religious alienation and concern for personal autonomy. On occasion we may seek to disengage from the actual, attuning ourselves to what was not said, to what was hidden or held back, even if we do not believe, with Heidegger, that in doing so we attend to the sending or particularizing itself. Severed from Heideggerian religiosity, this approach to our history becomes ritualistic disruption. Though it affords no disengagement, let alone deliverance, it still may constitute a privileged moment in our experi-

ence. Or we may, on occasion, find ourselves unconvinced by Nietzsche even as, backing away from Crocean faith in history, we find our own autonomy to be of ultimate interest in a postmetaphysical world. In such moods, we may find the play of futility precisely the right way of relating to the history happening around us.

Overreaction and Preclusion

Up to a point, then, the extremity in deconstruction may be taken as plausible, even insofar as it stands in tension with the reconstructive potential. There is room for both in a postmetaphysical culture; the tension is at least appropriate—and possibly fruitful. But another dimension, involving dualistic conflation and overreaction, led deconstruction to prejudicial characterizations that tended to preclude any scope for a reconstructive orientation.

Certain well-known features of the French intellectual tradition, culminating in structuralism, helped nurture this tendency toward overreaction. The Cartesian and positivist traditions remained especially strong in France well into the twentieth century, and, as a consequence, French intellectuals were much less concerned than their German and Italian counterparts with the problems surrounding historicism. In historiography the French developed the Annales paradigm, which was brilliantly innovative in certain ways but limited in others—especially because of its still-positivistic orientation.^[101] Hegel came late to France; Alexandre Kojève's lectures of 1933–1939 were especially central.^[102] But Hegel was taken very seriously at that point, so in France the shadow of Hegelianism lay over any understanding of the world as historical, any association of knowledge with history, any attempt to conceive alternatives to the positivism of the Annales school. In Germany and Italy, Hegel had been a more familiar feature of the landscape, so German and Italian intellectuals proved better able to conceive the world as historical in a post-Hegelian way.

The ongoing concern with science and certainty in France led to structuralism, but by the 1960s thinkers like Foucault and Derrida were beginning to find the structuralist enterprise unsustainable on its own terms. In seeking an alternative orientation, poststructuralists looked partly to Nietzsche and Heidegger, but their way of conceiving the new cultural challenge reflected French preoccupations. They viewed time and historicity as especially disruptive,

[101] See Massimo Mastrogregori, Il genio dello storico: Le considerazioni sulla storia di Marc Bloch e Lucien Febvre e la tradizione metodologica francese (Naples: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 1987), for a balanced assessment of the French historiographical tradition from an Italian perspective. Because historicist traditions were so strong in Germany and Italy, historians in those countries were slow to embrace the Annales approach.

[102] Michael S. Roth, Knowing and History: Appropriations of Hegel in Twentieth-Century France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), is invaluable on these dimensions of the French intellectual landscape.

undermining the possibility of knowledge; and they understood "history" in a quasi-Hegelian way, entailing a certain baggage. Conceiving the alternatives in extreme terms, they proved especially prone to assume that, though we now find ourselves without it, we need the sort of grounding that the old metaphysics claimed to provide.

Moreover, French thinkers from Lévi-Strauss to Foucault were especially prone to afford privilege to some "other" of the dominant historical process—to nature as opposed to culture, even to the uncivilized as opposed to the would-be civilizers.^[103] Thus it has been hard to sort out the elements that have made the French response at once so distinctive and so influential. In some of its guises, French thinking seems an innovative response reflecting a deepening sense of the unity of the world, in all its historical specificity. In others, it seems a mere overreaction against largely discredited metaphysical and Eurocentered pretenses.

In a widely read critique of Derridean deconstruction, the American philosopher John Searle pinpointed a major source of this overreaction. Thanks especially to Wittgenstein and Heidegger, wrote Searle, the search for foundations central to the philosophical tradition has come to seem simply misguided. Yet Derrida's response to the absence of foundations ended up mirroring the Cartesianism he claimed to reject.

Derrida correctly sees that there aren't any such foundations, but he then makes the mistake that marks him as a classical metaphysician. The real mistake of the classical metaphysician was . . . the belief that unless there are foundations something is lost or threatened or undermined or put in question.

It is this belief that Derrida shares with the tradition he seeks to deconstruct. Derrida sees that the Husserlian project of a transcendental grounding for science, language, and common sense is a failure. But what he fails to see is that this doesn't threaten science, language, or common sense in the least. As Wittgenstein says, it leaves everything exactly as it is.^[104]

[103] See Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 268–270, for an especially cogent characterization of this tendency.

[104] John R. Searle, "The Word Turned Upside Down," New York Review of Books , 27 October 1983, 77–78. This essay, nominally a review of Jonathan Culler's On Deconstruction , proved a major document in the developing controversy over deconstruction. See the follow-up exchange, including a critique of Searle's review by Louis H. Mackey and a reply by Searle, in New York Review of Books , 2 February 1984, 47–48. While endorsing parts of Searle's critique, Richard Rorty charged that Searle was himself too caught up in conventional notions of philosophy to grasp Derrida's overall point. Derrida was not doing amateurish philosophy of language, as Searle assumed, but asking metaphilosophical questions about the value of such philosophy. See Rorty, Essays on Heidegger , 93n–94n. Although I agree that Searle missed much of what Derrida was up to, Searle's charge that Derrida labored under the shadow of the metaphysics he rejected seems to me on target. Derrida himself found Searle's piece to be "an article of unbridled resentment." See his afterword to Limited Inc. , 125.

But while the eclipse of metaphysics leaves everything the same in one sense, in another it surely does not, and thus our need to reassess our cultural proportions. The deconstructionist current has made a greater contribution to that effort than Searle's characterization suggests. Provocative though they are, Derrida's categories—dissemination, slippage, undecidability, différance, erasure, trace—deepen our understanding of what "there is" in a postmetaphysical world. It remains true, however, that deconstruction sowed confusion about postmetaphysical possibilities because, just as Searle suggested, the shadow of metaphysics made it too rigidly dualistic and extreme in characterizing the alternatives.

One critic after another noted the French tendency to overplay metaphysical authority, to fight the straw ghosts of Hegel and Husserl, to beat horses that seemed quite dead to others within the postmetaphysical space. Rorty argued that over the last two hundred years the discourse of high culture has been chattier, more fluid and playful than Derrida recognized. Except occasionally and rhetorically, nobody claims that there is universal agreement on conditions of intelligibility or rationality.^[105] Others charged that American literary intellectuals fastened on Derridean deconstruction only because they assumed that old-fashioned positivism was lurking everywhere else, as if no one else had caught on that language does not simply mirror reality.^[106]

Inflating the metaphysical danger, the deconstructionists tended to assume that theirs was the only alternative and thus to preclude competing ways of characterizing postmetaphysical possibilities. Indeed, they tended to go from one extreme to the other. Searle noted Derrida's eagerness to conclude "that without foundations we are left with nothing but the free play of signifiers." And Gerald Graff charged that an "understandable but misconceived reaction against positivistic certainty" had led Geoffrey Hartman and other deconstructionist critics to invoke the ghost of authoritarian rationalism "in such a way as to make irrationalism look like the only alternative. The fact that there is no 'last judgment' in criticism is used to make judgment as such sound suspect."^[107]

Most important, for our purposes, the deconstructionists' extreme characterizations sowed confusion about the place of history in a postmetaphysical

[105] Rorty, Essays on Heidegger , 99–101.

[106] See, for example, Ellis, Against Deconstruction , 37–38; and Searle, "The Word Turned Upside Down," 78–79. Brook Thomas notes another aspect of the deconstructionist tendency to fight straw persons when he observes that ideas of progrssive, linear time were long since undermined; we did not need Paul de Man to make the point, effective though his characterizations proved. See Thomas, The New Historicism , 106–107.

[107] Searle, "The Word Turned Upside Down," 79; Gerald Graff, Lierature against Itself: Literary Ideas in Modern Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 145. Graff was an early, persistent, and particularly astute critic; see, for example, his "Deconstruction as Dogma," Georgia Review 34 (1980): 404–421. See also Ellis, Against Deconstruction , 49, 66, 122–123. 137–140, on the tendency of deconstructionists to go from one extreme to the other.

world. It has been widely assumed, in fact, that French deconstruction definitively refuted the "humanist historicism" that apparently attaches to virtually any notion of history.^[108] But their tendency to overreaction led the French to load all sorts of unnecessary, prejudicial baggage onto "history" and thereby to preclude the recasting of reality, continuity, and truth necessary for a postmetaphysical understanding of the world as historical.

Although Foucault, in The Order of Things , offered a suggestive analysis of the nineteenth-century inflation of history, his way of characterizing historicism and hermeneutics did not do justice to their scope for development in a postmetaphysical way. He argued plausibly that historicism was an effort to posit a measure of coherence in a world reduced to partial perspectives and individual bits and pieces. Hermeneutics served that wider effort by providing a method for understanding across time and difference. But Foucault found historicism so concerned to establish partial totalities and relative justifications that it precluded attention to finitude as such and ultimately to what the possibility of relative coherence required. So Foucault distinguished historicism from what he called "the analytic of finitude," which

never ceases to use, as a weapon against historicism, the part of itself that historicism has neglected: its aim is to reveal, at the foundation of all the positivities and before them, the finitude that makes them possible; where historicism sought for the possibility and justification of concrete relations between limited totalities . . . the analytic of finitude tries to question this relation of the human being to the being which, by designating finitude, renders the positivities possible in their concrete mode of being.^[109]

Foucault thus found something superficial in the historicist emphasis on knitting together a world; thus the premium he placed on the analytic of finitude as one aspect of his larger deconstructive strategy of playing up what is hidden or excluded as anything comes to be. But in radicalizing historicism and hermeneutics, Croce and Gadamer went beyond Dilthey to incorporate precisely the deeper understanding Foucault had in mind. It provide possible to conceive partial totalities as finite, to reconceive understanding and justification for a finite world, and thereby to cease worrying about relativism. In a sense, Croce and Gadamer showed how we might carry the analytic of finitude with us as we proceed, in a fully reflexive mode, with the endless reconstruction of the world.

As I have emphasized, there are plausible reasons for eschewing this reconstructive

[108] See, for example, Michael Roth's characterizations in a review essay in History and Theory 27, no. 1 (1988): 70–80. On p. 73, following Gilles Deleuze, he notes that Foucault's is "a project that rejects the assumptions of humanist historicism." See also Megill, Prophets of Extremity , 271–274, 295–298.

[109] Foucault, The Order of Things , 367–373. The quoted passage is on p. 373.

but still postmetaphysical response, and, if stretched a bit, Foucault's premium on the analytic of finitude can point the way to one form of the posthistoricist extremity that has emerged as an alternative. But his way of framing the opposition suggests that the analytic of finitude is privileged because it grasps the deeper suppositions of historicism in a way that historicism itself cannot. In this sense, Foucault was not doing justice to the scope for an alternative to Dilthey's brand of historicism.

Although Foucault brilliantly drew out the implications of Nietzschean genealogy, his accents even in "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History" ended up quite different from Nietzsche's own. Foucault featured three uses of historical writing that assaulted what he took to be the still-metaphysical underpinnings of mainstream history: "parodic, directed against reality," "dissociative, directed against identity," "sacrificial, directed against truth."^[110] In accenting each, he afforded privilege to disruption in an effort to keep the elements suspended, to prevent reconstructive reassembling.

Most basically, Foucault wanted to puncture the identity we derive from history as we connect ourselves to the past in a certain way: "the purpose of history, guided by genealogy, is not to discover the roots of our identity but to commit itself to its dissipation." We may do so by calling attention to the masks and disguises, or to the alternate identities that are constantly proliferating, reappearing, but that somehow get marginalized. Or we may show how what seems a stable identity dissolves into intersecting but competing systems that cannot be combined in a stable synthesis. Thus, as Foucault put it, genealogy "seeks to make visible all of those discontinuities that cross us." And rather than claim to criticize past injustices on the basis of some present truth, we disrupt the present claim to knowledge—and with it the injustice essential even to that claim. We do not exempt even ourselves but reflexively disrupt our own claims.^[111]

Foucault was true to Nietzsche in pointing out that because things emerge "in between," in a "nonplace," with no purpose or intention behind them, no one is responsible for them. But when he went on to contend that in refusing "the certainty of absolutes," genealogy "disperses, . . . liberating divergence and marginal elements," Foucault not only departed from Nietzsche but fell into the dualistic characterization typical of deconstruction: such endless dispersal is the only alternative to the pretense of metaphysical certainty.^[112]

This rigid dualism led Foucault to find something spurious and authoritarian in any effort to let things come together by finding continuities and similarities, by inventing concepts and, beneath them, the categories that shape the world.

[110] Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice , 160–164.

[111] Ibid., 162, 164.

[112] Ibid., 150, 152–153.

No matter how lucid and unpretentious the enterprise might be, no matter how weak and provisional the results are taken to be, any such shaping entails suppressing "the anarchy of differences." So Foucault's priority was on disruption to liberate singularity and difference: "On the one side, [cognitive categories] can be understood as the a priori forms of knowledge, but, on the other, they appear as an archaic morality, the ancient decalogue that the identical imposed upon difference. Difference can only be liberated through the invention of an acategorical thought."^[113]

Let us recognize, again, that there may be plausible reasons for this extreme response, affording privilege to disruption and difference. Even our cognitive software is particular, finite, and comes to be only as something else is held back. But the element of dualistic overreaction led Foucault to assume that categories or concepts are inherently suprahistorical, fixed, stable, yet even Croce's way of conceiving concepts as ragged, ad hoc, provisional, merely practical, eludes Foucault's characterizations. By means of an implicit conflation with metaphysics, Foucault precluded weak, postmetaphysical ways of conceiving categories and concepts—including those like reality, identity, continuity, and truth that are bound up with the world as historical.

In the same way, Foucault contrasted his own disruptive approach with dialectics, which "does not liberate differences" but "guarantees, on the contrary, that they can always be recaptured"—as if endless disruption was the only alternative to a teleological dialectic. And he opposed masks and theater to "reality," which he associated with Platonism and metaphysics.^[114] He was suggesting not only that masks and theater were the only alternative to metaphysics but also that what is left, with the eclipse of metaphysics, has the lightness of masks and theater. And thus he afforded privilege to all that prompts us to experience ourselves and our world as a series of masks, with no weight, with nothing for keeps.

Despite periodic disclaimers, Foucault's characterizations tended to conflate "continuity" with progress and Hegelian telos and thus to preclude the weaker conception of continuity that others had already posited. Not only did that weaker conception eschew progress and telos but it had plenty of room for rupture and relative discontinuity as well. It neither assumed nor required the metaphysical justification that Foucault associated with any emphasis on reality, identity, or continuity. As we approach the present historically, we may indeed feature the discontinuities as we loosen and deconstruct our world, showing how it came to be. But we produce a different provisional continuity as we go on to reconstruct, partly by answering our historical questions as we do. This is

[113] Ibid, 181–187; the quotation is on p. 186.

[114] Ibid., 171, 192, 196, and, for the passage quoted, p. 184.

true even insofar as the new power-knowledge construction is content to remain local and specific.^[115] To establish some provisional continuity simply serves the moment of "gathering," or coming back together, that balances the ongoing disruption. Such an understanding of continuity does not require positing the unity of being in the old metaphysical way, yet it was against that conventionally metaphysical view that Foucault measured his own position.^[116] He had room only for the old metaphysics and his own one-sided emphasis on disruption.

This tendency toward dualistic overreaction led Derrida, too, to impose prejudicial baggage on "history," especially through conflation with Hegelianism. He noted, for example, that "history and knowledge . . . have always been determined . . . as detours for the purpose of the reappropriation of presence."^[117] Even more radically than Foucault, Derrida sought to disrupt the historical approach in general by deconstructing the linearity it required. Not only was linearity arbitrary and exclusionary but it was inherently "Hegelian" in its implication of privileged origins and ends.

Also like Foucault, Derrida understood his categories to be antithetical to hermeneutics, which he viewed as an attempt to reestablish coherence by deciding among possible interpretations and settling on some definitive meaning. This attempt inevitably fails; we cannot decide how to distinguish proper from improper, or possible from impossible, readings. So hermeneutics can only cover over the endless dissemination to which the world has been reduced. In pretending to determine meaning where no determinate meaning exists, hermeneutics was still operating within the framework of metaphysics.^[118] Derrida was assuming that any alternative to endless disruptive decentering involves a metaphysical claim to definitive meaning.

In his playful encounter with the Western tradition in The Post Card , Derrida posited two postal systems. One is policed, legalistic, and efficient, while the other, as Norris has put it, "opens up a fabulous realm of messages and meanings that circulate beyond any assurance of authorized control."^[119] So again there are two alternatives, characterized in terms of one extreme or the other. And of course Derrida's accent was on freeing up all that the dominant tradition had repressed or marginalized. Again and again, he, like Foucault,

[115] Compare Mark Philp, "Michel Foucault," 76–78. Although his account is excellent overall, Philp's way of accenting the "local" blurs the constructive potential of Foucault's thinking.

[116] See, for example, Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice , 186–187.

[117] Derrida, Of Grammatology , 10. (Emphasis in original.) See also pp. 85–87.

[118] Hoy, "Jacques Derrida," 54, 56–57, 63–64, is especially good on Derrida's reading of hermeneutics. On pp. 63–64, Hoy notes the overreaction that results from Derrida's assumption that hermeneutics insists on a final reading.

[119] Norris, Derrida , 116, 188, 192–193; Jacques Derrida, The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond , trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).

afforded an a priori privilege to the other, to difference, partly because he allowed no other alternative to the old authoritarian metaphysics.^[120]

Their preoccupation with showing that "the disruptive movement of time" undermines system, completeness, and thus any hope of definitive knowledge kept Foucault and Derrida from considering what happens as that disruptive movement proceeds.^[121] That it continually disrupts is not in doubt, but because there is still a web of influence, there is not blank flux but thick and messy continuity. In fact, Foucault and Derrida grasped precisely this particularizing continuity, but their responses tended prejudicially to preclude any affirmative, constructive way of relating to the world that endlessly results from dissemination, slippage, and the play of power.

Although he implied that his own reaction against metaphysics precluded history, Derrida could not help positing a measure of continuity and coherence sufficient for a postmetaphysical form of history to survive even his own extreme reduction. "Defer," for example, is a category that entails not only temporality but also continuity. In insisting that "no element can function as a sign without referring to another element which itself is not simply present," Derrida was not positing merely a synchronic structure. He tells us that "this interweaving, this textile, is the text produced only in the transformation of another text," and the notion of "transformation" entails the essential measure of temporality and continuity.^[122] To say that nothing simply "is," without presuppositions and effects, without itself being a presupposition and effect of other things, is already to have posited the prior and the subsequent and the connectedness necessary for continuity and history.^[123] That history is even linear; the "line" is ragged and thick but still finite and particular.

As a major intellectual presence, moreover, Derrida at once responded to the traces of earlier ideas and left traces of his own for us to respond to, as we are doing now, incompletely, provisionally, undecidably—but still particularly, in this way and not that. The particularizing continues as a particular understanding of Derrida and his cultural place emerges—incompletely, provisionally, undecidably. Despite all Derrida's efforts to preempt anything we can say about him, he becomes part of a continuous history as some provisional understanding of him emerges; the tradition grows the encompass him. As noted

[120] The same quick conflations, limiting us to one extreme or the other, were evident in the uses that others made of Derrida. John Caputo, for example, featured the value of Derridean disruption, but he had room for only one alternative, which entailed totalizing metaphysics, police, the shedding of blood. If these are the only alternatives, then any accent on positive construction will be conflated with metaphysics. Thus, for example, Caputo assumes that construction entails giving a definition of justice. See Caputo, Radical Hermeneutics , 195–196.

[121] The phrase is from Mark C. Taylor's introduction to Deconstruction in Context: Literature and Philosophy , ed. Mark C. Taylor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 16.

[122] Derrida, Positions , 26. As noted above, Marian Hobson has put it nicely in discussing Derrida's notion of the trace: "we are left not with a scatter of points but with a trajectory." See Hobson, "History Traces," 113.

[123] See also Ryan, Marxism and Deconstruction , 50, on this implication in Derrida.

above, his premium on disruption responded to his preoccupation with precisely that. Conversely, we deal with him now in full knowledge that we cannot fix him definitively, getting him "right." But that is not what we are trying to do, or what the ongoing construction-resulting of some particular world requires.

In stressing undecidability, Derrida showed that as we go about interpreting the world, we cannot specify in advance what is to count and what is possible. But "deciding" does occur—as a continuing process, event, or happening. Although we have no basis for choosing a definitive interpretation, we go on offering particular, partial interpretations, some of which prove influential, helping to shape the culture's understanding of whatever "text" is in question. Through the competitive interaction of interpretations, some consensus develops, some authority is established, some meaning is conferred, and our particular history endlessly results.^[124] The event of interpretive understanding continues, taking its direction from the interpretations that in fact are offered and prove influential.

Even on Derrida's own terms, then, it is undeniable that, unstable and provisional though it is, a particular world endlessly results even as the dissemination and slipping continue. The question is what we make of that world, how we experience it and relate to it. In this sense, the issue that Derrida raises is "ethical," just as Norris has emphasized.^[125] But it is necessary to do justice to the alternatives that open from Derrida's conception before any genuinely ethical decision is possible. Derrida's insight into the mechanisms of the world does not require his own cultural strategy in response.

How we relate to the endlessly slipping world and to this provisional moment depends on our assessment of the mechanisms through which things come to be. Does the world seem so light and capricious that we are struck mostly by the futility of what we do? Or does a purely historical world seem so heavy that we can hope for some measure of autonomy only through a single-minded emphasis on resistance and disruption? And what about the competitive interaction through which some prove powerful, through which the winners win? We can invariably find power, authority, and exclusion. Are they to be understood as instances of coercion and domination? There is no right answer to these questions. As we have taken pains to emphasize, extreme responses are possible. But deconstruction, in its prejudicial mode, has precluded even consideration of the moderate answers.

In overreacting, deconstruction sometimes overemphasized the heaviness

[124] Without accenting the happening of history, John Ellis contributes effectively to this side of the reconstructive alternative; see Against Deconstruction , 128–129.

[125] Norris, Derrida , 225. Norris argues that Derrida points us beyond the epistemological concerns that have long dominated our intellectual life. Once we realize that we cannot synthesize structuralism and phenomenology into a new epistemology, we confront a choice of direction that is essentially ethical.

of the world, sometimes the lightness. On the one hand, it assumed that a claim to metaphysical authority attached to the resulting of anything at all. Indeed, the deconstructionists tended to conceive power and authority in such a way that even persuasion is domination.^[126] To be convinced is to be determined or hoodwinked, because we take whatever has convinced us to be justified in a final and exhaustive way. In postmetaphysical terms, however, the particular consensus and authority that has won so far is provisional and tension-ridden and makes no claim to strong authority.

On the other hand, deconstruction sometimes portrayed the actual world as light and inadequate, precisely because it lacks the grounding and stability that we have come to associate with "reality." Derrida tells us that rather than the stuff that metaphysicians used to talk about, that simply was what it was, "there are only, everywhere, differences and traces of traces," because meaning is never settled and dissemination continues. There is no outside to the text, nothing outside the text.^[127] Fine, except that Derrida's way of saying "only traces" and "nothing outside" betrays the shadow of metaphysics, the standard of something else. Thus there seemed something inadequate about a world with a texture of this sort; the lack of a procedure for deciding seems somehow debilitating. But why the implication of inadequacy? Who said something was missing?

We have seen that even a world reduced to the play of traces has some measure of solidity and coherence. And our experience of that world may be sufficiently affirmative that we seek to mesh with its endless incompleteness and slippage in a history-making mode. Thus we may accent the scope for ongoing reconstruction, for endlessly renewing the common world, as opposed to either the stifling authority or the futile lightness of that world.

Once we have pinpointed both the plausible extremity and the prejudicial overreaction, we can see how aspects of deconstruction can mesh with historicism and hermeneutics to serve such reconstructive purposes. Deconstruction and hermeneutics have sometimes been viewed as cultural allies, but primarily by those accenting the antimetaphysical or postmodern elements they share. It has been harder to understand how they might complement each other once the common antimetaphysical elements are taken for granted, and the task is to discern the contours of a postmetaphysical culture. Indeed, with Gadamer trumpeting the authority of tradition, and Foucault and Derrida endless disruption, hermeneutics and deconstruction have seemed antithetical.^[128]

[126] See, for example, Michael Roth's characterization in his review essay in History and Theory 27, no. 1 (1988): 73.

[127] Derrida, Positions , 26; Derrida, Of Grammatology , 158.

[128] Derrida and Gadamer interacted directly at the Goethe Institute in Paris in 1981. Although the outcome was disappointing, their encounter elicited some illuminating comment. See Dialogue and Deconstruction: The Gadamer-Derrida Encounter , ed. Diane P. Michelfelder and Richard E. Palmer (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989).

Although Gadamerian hermeneutics emphasized the moment of reconstruction and gathering, it did not pretend to the decidability, to the complete and determinate reading, that Derrida associated with hermeneutics in general. In the hermeneutic and historicist mode of experience, we know that there are only traces bearing traces, undecidable texts piled on earlier undecidable texts; we know that meaning is unstable, that we go on disseminating new meanings. But these titillating ways of characterizing the postmetaphysical situation are neither as damaging nor as liberating as they seem.