The Fall of Literary Theory. Liana Vrajitoru Andreasen
in academic circles, as well as at the bar where all graduate students congregate? Yet “theory” was all but abandoned and almost everyone was quick to disavow it before the cock crew thrice: 9/11 happened and “proved” that the world is still structured in binaries of good and evil; then Jacques Derrida died in 2004 and apparently he was resurrected as a philosopher, so literary studies could breathe a sigh of relief, and then English and American departments rushed to embrace the much more reasonable, practical teaching of paper-writing as a disembodied skill without content that can be quantified and assessed without the need, even, for human interaction.
In other words, we have fallen from theory, or theory itself has been exposed as a fallen, failed project dripping with nihilistic relativism. Or so we have been led to believe by the more vocal detractors. Even in the late 80s and in the 90s, when theory was the golden child of literary studies, there was a lot of resentment due to the imposition of unreadable essays and books in the analysis of literary texts, seemingly rendering them meaningless and a free for all of interpretation. In Against Deconstruction, known detractor of Derrida, John M. Ellis, was bent on proving that deconstruction is needlessly complicated, and what its obscure language hides is that, in fact, it offers no new idea: instead of dismantling Saussure’s ethnocentrism, for example, it reasserts it. Following Ellis, Denis Dutton was “debunking” deconstruction, as if it were simply a pesky conspiracy theory with the sole purpose of creating books, and books about books.
In more conservative circles, such as in the words of British professor of Aesthetics, Roger Scruton, “Derridizing a text” turns readers away from the meaning of a text and imposes a sort of metalinguistic dictatorship, by virtue of the fact that, apparently, deconstruction is closely related to other words that start with de-: decrepitude, depravity, derision, destruction. That was written back in 1993. Terry Eagleton has long mocked postmodernism and deconstruction in particular for being deluded enough to believe they could “crack” the tyranny of social totality. In fact, Eagleton claims, the theorists themselves have been inside that totality all along, but in their comfortable chairs in Ithaca or Irvine, where they could afford to be “deliciously indeterminate” without really having much to offer. In the end, he dismisses it as methodologically incoherent and even dangerous to literary studies, as it encourages dilettantism for the sake of trying to keep up with more legitimate studies that have true depth of knowledge.1
Sometimes, it was only hear-say that kept people away from exploring these challenges to Western thought. Various critics were making claims about the failure of poststructuralism and deconstruction without having read Jacques Lacan or Jacques Derrida, and dismissed them offhand as altogether too French for the sound American or English mind to accept. What is more, such second-hand critique of “deconstructionist” thought, as they called it, drew attention to an assumed relativism and claimed that deconstruction tried to level all values, all texts, all audiences and so forth, making them all equally meaningless.
In a book that came out in 1999, Catherine Burgass doubts that literary theory truly can (or did) have an impact on politics, and even scolds impotent (though sincere) theory for its political failures, as “there is a certain amount of bad taste in the failure to attend closely to the world outside text or conceptual structure while claiming to address its social, political or economic problems.”2 Again, the claim is that postmodern thought is too relativistic to have political power; in other words, there is no reconstruction offered after deconstruction.
Moreover, there was a real concern that deconstructing the center would only take power away from those at the margins, who would be discouraged from participating in the structure of society if they were persuaded of the arbitrary nature of power; the powerful, on the other hand, would most likely not be willing to relinquish their power. The gap between the rich and the poor, or between any other powerful/powerless pairs is not, however, caused by the skepticism of deconstruction. Contrary to some interpretations, deconstruction has never encouraged marginalized groups to give up identity (as a source of power)—a suggestion that belongs in a Buddhist temple. To be clear, while I use deconstruction’s concepts to critique deeply rooted ways to understand identity (and I add the concept of the fall, as will be seen), taking power away from the marginalized is not even remotely my purpose. The issue at stake in deconstruction (and by extension in this book) is not to see who will blink first and inadvertently let the Other grab the reins. The issue is this: the self and the Other must find ways to end the judgment of each other’s (and their own) identities for allegedly being fallen, corrupted. That judgment, I believe, is the essence of conflict, and my approach will show the process by which such judgment occurs.
Back to challenging traditional social systems, anyone who knows what deconstruction in effect deconstructs should realize that an attempt to offer a specific system in return for the one it poked holes in would amount to yet another return to the potential for systemic violence. “Changing the world” is a gross misrepresentation of the shift in mentality that is encouraged by poststructuralist thought, which can have positive effects if pursued in a subtle way and over decades. Burgass claims that what she (mistakenly) calls relativistic thought cannot work in the real world because it asks for a suspension of judgment. Not one poststructuralist thinker that I have read has asked for institutions of law and order to be taken down and everything and everyone to be declared equally valuable, never to be weighed in judgment again. The changes that a theorist would hope for are internal shifts, an internal questioning of the rationale for judgment and different, possibly new but at the very least rethought ways to interact in the world. That is not revolutionary thought, and it needn’t be seen, then, as a failure, since it has never ceased taking place, and has been taking place before it was even given a name (such as deconstruction).
Yet whatever denomination one prefers—postmodernist theory, poststructuralist analysis or deconstruction—the debunking of this line of inquiry has finally been itself debunked. As I mentioned before, one way in which deconstruction and Derrida in particular have been redeemed in academic circles was that philosophers, not English scholars, have come to the rescue. This is ironic, of course, given that Derrida himself was called a charlatan and kept away from the cookie jar philosophers were apparently hiding in the pantry. Simon Critchley, English philosopher who came to Derrida’s defense in the ‘90s, recalls the scandal that erupted when Cambridge tried to offer Derrida an honorary doctorate, and eighteen respected philosophers from all over the world signed a letter protesting this, citing his lack of clarity and rigor and likening him to the Dadaists. In the end, Cambridge did award him the doctorate, but with very few philosophers on board.3
Today, Derrida has been embraced by philosophers (when the dust settled in the departments of literary studies). David Wood places him in the long line of Platonists, and in more direct kinship with the thinkers who challenged self-identity (when it is stripped of relationality), such as Nietzsche, Heidegger or Derrida’s friend Levinas.
But this book is not about Derrida and his detractors, or the fact that now he is a “legitimate philosopher,” or even particularly about Derrida. Nor is this book an attempt (and there have been many) to give another definition to deconstruction or poststructuralism, though of course clarifications, when needed, will be offered. My first task is to ask new questions. Why, first of all, have we divorced “theory” from political action (with a sigh of relief, for some)? Why, on the other hand, are we quick to dismiss this invaluable method of thinking about texts from our English classes, where complex thought is needed? Why, also, should we accept the claim that deconstruction is a failed project and that it did not, does not, and will not ever prove of use outside of writing papers or books? Do we even understand enough what the purpose of deconstruction was to begin with, before we can claim that it has failed? To say that, if it did not trigger a clear revolution, inside or outside the university, then deconstruction did not succeed and should be left to die is to ignore the enormous outreach that the practice of poststructuralist and desconstructive analysis in the classroom has been part of, once the students have left the classroom with a new awareness of what takes place within their lives and at a global scale, I would dare say. To believe that, for example, gay marriage is just a random result of moving around justices in the Supreme Court is a willful blindness to the decades of slowly