Deconstruction Is/In America. Anselm Haverkamp

Deconstruction Is/In America - Anselm Haverkamp


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has reproduced the ground to be deconstructed far more effectively than this ground, as a homeground, would have lent itself to deconstruction. In displacing the “Western Canon,” American literature and philosophy not only reproduced what they attempted to rewrite, but re-deconstructed what they found deconstructed (and, that is, already “in deconstruction”).

      It would be an extra task, and would take another time, to reconsider the reception of deconstruction in America in the light not so much of its detotalizing strategies, but of its pragmatic impact on the rethinking and rereading of crucial concepts. Not only the necessary defiguration of the old, but also the opening of new possibilities—call it refiguration. Deconstruction’s sensitivity to pragmatic issues is best documented in its growing interest in the performativity of acts and their institutional setting, a perspective more crucial than the much bedeviled, or else applauded, antiessentialism, not to mention the now out-of-fashion “play of signifiers.” I think, the once-feared danger of “domesticating” de-construction’s philosophical impact into a domestic brand of pragmatism—certainly a thing to be avoided—is less relevant than the opposite danger of taking the pragmatic acuity out of deconstruction and turning it back into a merely critical, even hypercritical “theory.” Deconstruction is a kind of pragmatism, insofar as it is able to replace a disabled pragmatism. It may even turn out to be pragmatism’s better equipped, and more pragmatic, version.

      Deconstruction, however, is also more than a kind of pragmatism, if only in that it aims beyond pragmatism’s anxieties of influence and desperation. The literary and philosophical issues of deconstruction have had, among many other important academic effects, a political effect and outcome, in which reading—the reading of difference—arrived at working results far from the alleged effects of mere irony and mere play. As it turns out, the terms “irony” and “play” are not what they merely seem. In literature’s ways of exposing rhetorically what in philosophy was meant to persuade “naturally,” authentically, difference turns up in the undisguised undecidability of figuration. Reading the literary and philosophical double bind: deciphering, more precisely, philosophy’s difference inscribed within literature’s indifference to this very philosophy’s authority was the model, and is still a model, for reading difference beyond the quests for identity. The “irony” needed in acknowledging what has to be decided, as well as the “play” needed in dealing with the consequences, are not merely tropes of a stimulus-response-like reaction-formation; they have to be taken on as figures of response, as responsibility.

      Not that we can ever be too sure about the “critical function” of literature’s disfigurative work. Not that we can ever be too clear about philosophy’s task “as such.” What is to be elaborated are the problems, if the responsibility of solutions is ever to be met. Therefore, a topology of impossibilities is needed rather than a system of the restricted possible. According to the much older pragmatism that was rhetoric (an art whose analytical potential has been on the agenda of deconstruction from the beginning), topology has to map the relevant topoi under consideration; a heuristics of differences to be reconsidered in their manifestations and underlying mechanizations—the gift, for example, or the crypt, or the secret. As far as inventiveness is concerned in these matters, poietic imagination in the precise sense, I see nobody to whom we owe as much as we owe to Jacques Derrida for his unfailing dedication to America.


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