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Deconstruction: The New Nihilism
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19928 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
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4 / 1992 |
5,852 Words |
| Author
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Ward Parks
Ward Parks is associate professor of English at Louisiana
State University |
Among the forces contributing to the revolution that has overtaken humanistic study during the last two decades, none has been more decisive than deconstruction. Largely the brainchild of the celebrated philosopher Jacques Derrida, deconstruction originated in France in the late 1960s and quickly made its way across the Atlantic, establishing itself in literature departments as Yale and other elite schools. In these cloistered settings it flourished and prospered, to the point where, by the late 1970s and early 1980s, it had gathered an irresistible momentum in the small world of literary studies, winning for its adherents the laurels of prestige publication and academic appointment and dominating professional organizations such as the Modern Language Association.
In the last several years, as humanities departments have increasingly veered toward overt politicization, deconstruction may have surrendered some of its critical elan to Marxism, radial feminism, multiculturalism, and other movements that demand explicit ideological commitment. Yet the language and epistemology of deconstruction have so saturated contemporary critical thought that no new development can be born free of them. Indeed, the newly insurgent ideological criticisms, far from repudiating deconstruction, have incorporated it, selectively mapping certain deconstructive tenets onto new social and political territories.
What is deconstruction? Unfortunately, despite it pervasiveness in the current intellectual scene, deconstruction has resisted description, partly because of the innate elusiveness of its doctrines and partly because of the heavily jargoned styles of its leading expositors. The notorious opacity of major deconstructionist texts, often accompanied by an aggressive style of proselytization, accounts for the joke circulating not long ago: "How do you know a deconstructor?" "He's the one who makes you an offer you can't understand." Nonetheless, if one strips through the mystification, deconstruction can be understood, and moreover, it needs to be, since it has become central to the college education experience of many young people. I venture to characterize deconstruction, then, as a radically skeptical philosophy or critical theory that insists on the impossibility of coming to any knowledge of a reality external to language. It "proves" this by showing that any assertion is constituted on the basis of exclusions that bring about its own undermining, that any determination ultimately leads to its own contradiction. According to this view, language is meaningless, in the sense that it subverts its own movement and can never reach beyond itself. Even the human subject and the "reality" in which he acts, since they are
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