(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 but surely challenging, in universities, the way students think. With a new set of tools (some taken directly from deconstruction) to challenge patterns of thought, students have been stepping into the real world, where undoubtedly they have made dents in deeply rooted mentalities. And I am not, again, randomly linking causes and effects just to suit an argument.
I also happen to be the product of the dissemination of poststructuralist and deconstructive ideas, as a student of a student of Derrida and having dedicated my graduate years to “theory.” I have no choice but to disseminate these ideas as I teach—it is not even because I have convinced myself that I have a doctrine to preach or because I am an idolater of Lacan and Derrida. Poststructuralist deconstruction is part of my teaching because it is now part of my thinking. This is precisely how I identify the type of impact I believe “theory” has had over a few generations already, and why literary analysis (with the help of theory) is the one bastion of de-centering thought that can never be forced to go away. It will continue to challenge power, no matter how much the funding for liberal arts studies is slashed. “Literature” is the safest way to question the world since, just as an example, the political discussion can be veiled under literary analysis, while students can safely hide behind characters, to avoid escalation during sensitive debates.
I have been teaching for over 15 years, and in all this time I have seen how the classroom offered the (mostly) safe type of environment where people were allowed to hit their own walls of prejudice, see their systemic thought mirrored in other students, dare to listen to different rationales than the ones they had come in with, and in the end, the dialogue has been changing practically before my eyes. At the college in South Texas where I teach, to continue with the convenient example of gay marriage (since it has recently won the legal debate), I have noticed the same gradual change, over the years, that the country has been noticing, until the minority became the majority and the voices of prejudice and intolerance became the exception, not the norm. I myself am the product of classrooms where I learned to deconstruct myself, most of all, and my bicultural identity. My own transformation is still spilling over into my classroom.
There should, therefore, be no question whether the theory of deconstruction or poststructuralist analysis should still be taught in literature classes or not. What should still be debated, perhaps, is how it can help cope with shifts in the political landscape and how “literature” (from the most ancient classic texts to contemporary works) can be made relevant in every new context. It would be up to the readers of this book to decide the way it should be taught, to what extent, and what can still be expected to result from the all-but-dismissed use of theory.
Aside from offering my own approach to theory through new uses of the concept of the fall, I also offer some practical applications. I will not deny that the chapters in the “Applications” section of this book may not seem very practical, as they delve quite deeply (though less abstractly, since they rely on literary texts) into the “theory” with which I challenge absolutist thought. Hopefully, at the end of the day they will show the usefulness (maybe not the easiness) of such a challenge, through a type of literary analysis that I believe can never be irrelevant.
To begin with, before we are ready to abandon concepts to competencies in literary studies and the humanities in general, we need to reexamine the purpose of reading and teaching literature to begin with. Roger Scruton would be happy to return to a formalist unfolding of meaning in front of students since, after all, a metaphor is always a metaphor. We don’t, presumably, want the poor student to wonder what kind of knowledge we possess if we can’t even pinpoint exactly where that meaning can be found, and on what page, and whether it will be on the test.
I am not merely a Derridean deconstructionist. To me, Derrida’s deconstruction is the logical conclusion of a line of thinking that began with the challenge brought to Saussurian structuralism, most notably by Lacan. Lacan’s challenge to the chain of signification and binary thought, combined with his struggle to connect the dots of signification and link them to the alienating desire for signification that founds identity, for which he found tools in Freud’s psychoanalysis, has enabled the different branches of poststructuralist thought to expand: Julia Kristeva’s injection of the feminine into the symbolic order, Jean Francois Lyotard’s interest in history as narrative of legitimation, Jean Baudrillard’s simulacra, Slavoj Žižek’s more politically charged voice as he refashions Marxism, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, who angered Lacan by challenging the Oedipus complex, Emmanuel Levinas’ ethical concerns with the face and the call of the Other, and, perhaps the most popular, Derrida’s deconstruction. Derrida, for one, mentored directly some of his followers, such as the group called the Yale School or those who were his friends over the years—Levinas, Paul de Man, Hélène Cixous, among others. However, in truth, the conversation did not go only in one direction, and many of the theorists and philosophers of the last decades of the 20th century were, whether they admitted it or not, relying on each other to shape their own ideas, even when they were bitterly disputing the nuances in how they differed or what brought them together.
But before we can decide if what is called theory (which, of course, can be many things) has failed, or was already doomed to fail as soon as it was formulated, it would be wise to pay attention to what it was meant to achieve in the first place, at least according to its more prominent stars. In Deconstruction and the Other, Derrida himself confesses that “the available codes for taking such a political stance are not at all adequate to the radicality of deconstruction …. I try where I can to act politically while recognizing that such action remains incommensurable with my intellectual project of deconstruction.”4 Following the same idea, Gayatri Spivak explains that deconstruction is not a political project, or it would be irresponsible to attempt to harness it to a political program. Take, for instance, the practice of Marxist theory, one I am very familiar with having grown up in a communist country before moving to the US. Marxist application is an example of how destructive a “theory” can become when coupled with politics. Marx’ theory critiquing capital should have never become a social experiment and should have remained just that, a critique. If changing the world hadn’t been taken so literally, Marxism would have had a less ambitious but more desirable effect if it had remained subtle and had let its impact be felt within a few generations. As it happened, it was the practice that killed the good intentions of the theory, and a place like North Korea is still feeling the direct effect of turning theory into a system. Yet, as will be seen later, if one attempts to redeem the theory by claiming that only the practice was misguided, wrong or fallen, then the theory will have the same potential for violence as before, if a new,
