Reader-Response under review: art, game, or science?

Style, Winter, 1995 by Terence R. Wright

The attempts to construct a less narrowly textual "Marxist Deconstruction," the subject of the first of the two chapters in the final section of Crossing Borders, are seen by Holub to have foundered on the rocks of a similarly narrow understanding of textuality. Holub notices that deconstruction was initially scorned by "left-leaning" American critics of the early 1970s (111) and welcomed primarily by professors of literature in the 1980s. He cites Miller's paper at the MLA session on "the fall of deconstruction" in 1990 (the lower case initials presumably to alert us to the doubtfulness of this "event") along with the departure of Michael Ryan, Michael Sprinker, and Gayatri Spivak, the principal exponents of such a radical version of deconstruction, into areas such as film, politics, and feminism, as indicative of the failure of deconstruction to fuse with Marxism to "form the core of a progressive political critique" (142-43).

The second of Holub's chapters in this final section of Crossing Borders focuses on the two big scandals that rocked deconstruction in the 1980s, concerning the political affinities of Heidegger and de Man. Holub is scathing about the way in which aleconstructive critics refused to face up to these "facts." He is also damning about "the uncritical imitation that deconstruction has suffered at the hands of limited and unskilled epigones" who "frequently populate scholarly conferences," trotting out "the most trendy words and phrases" of the master (193). Holub's tone grows increasingly polemical, especially in long footnotes to this chapter, that deplore the "unanimous approval" accorded to Derrida's account of "Paul de Man's War" by "his faithful coterie of deconstructors." Holub's dismissive references to "the cultlike character of deconstruction," the "litany of praise for the high priest" of the "deconstructive church," and the "strict adherence to the deconstructive party line" (227-28), betray an animosity that vitiates what promised to be an interesting exercise in the history of recent critical ideas. What's more, Holub's announcement of "the self-induced demise of deconstruction" (193) contradicts his transparent need to attack it. Reports of its demise, indeed, seem to be have been greatly exaggerated.

Derrida himself, of course, is very much alive and writing. One of his recent books, Specters of Marx, attempts precisely to make "deconstruction form the core of a progressive political critique." Derrida wants to resist the triumphant chorus, led by Francis Fukuyama, that proclaims, "to the rhythm of a cadenced march . . . . Marx is dead, communism is dead, very dead, and along with it its hopes, its discourse, its theories, and its practices" (52). Derrida insists that his reading of Marx is not an academic exercise, a conversation with "a ghost that goes on speaking," but a genuine attempt to carry out his injunction "not just to decipher but to act and to make the deciphering [the interpretation] into a transformation that 'changes the world'" (32). Derrida promises "a performative interpretation . . . . an interpretation that transforms the very thing it interprets" (51). What Derrida is doing here is reading Marx's will, submitting the relevant documents to a double reading that is both attentive to the intention of the deceased (in the form of commentary) and aware of the ambiguities, the difficulties, in the text. We are all, he claims, heirs of Marx and need to read his "unique mark in history" carefully and responsibly (91-92).