¹ There was, however, a ‘shock-horror’ rumour circulating in the early 1980s, to the effect that de Man's sympathies were Republican.

² In the case of universities, this seems to be true only when the surrounding political order is also liberal. In the apartheid era the South African universities (at least, the English-speaking ones) put up a splendid resistance to the Nationalist government's attempts to limit academic freedom, control admissions, etc. Their reward was to be ostracized by British and American universities. Not one of the latter, so far as I know, has subsequently raised even a peep of protest about the current (nongovernmental) political attempts forcibly to ‘Africanise’ the University of the Witwatersrand (i.e. to limit academic freedom, control admissions, etc.).

³ ‘On veut rendre l'ecriture imprenable, bien sur’ (Derrida, Jacques, Glas, FT. edn., p. 76Google Scholar; quoted in Culler, Jonathan, On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism After Structuralism [London: Routledge and Kegan Paul 1983], p. 136)Google Scholar. The deconstructionist aspiration to lofty unfalsifiability (akin, one might say, to some kind of ‘will to power’) has often been noted. It bears, moreover, a curious inverted resemblance to the confident foundationalism it purports to reject.

On the first of these points see e.g. Sim, Stuart, Beyond Aesthetics: Confrontations with Poststructuralism and Postmodernism (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf 1992), p. 59Google Scholar; Scruton, Roger, Upon Nothing (Swansea: University College of Swansea, 1993), pp. 14–16Google Scholar. On the second (to which I shall return), see Merquior, J. G., From Prague to Paris: a Critique of Structuralist and Post-Structuralist Thought (London and New York: Verso 1986), p. 233Google Scholar: ‘Far from rejecting the foundationalist outlook, Derrida offers a mirror-image of it … in the end Derrida shares the belief that for determinate meanings to obtain, language must have an absolute foundation.’ Some of this diagnosis is credited by Merquior to Abrams, M. H., ‘How to do things with texts’, Partisan Review (1979) pp. 566–588Google Scholar.

⁴ These constitute his posthumously-compiled Course in General Linguistics. All references to Saussure in the main text above are to this work, tr. Baskin, Wade, intro. Jonathan Culler (London: Fontana 1974)Google Scholar.

⁵ Common sense and everyday usage (both generally anathema to poststructuralists) suggest that where there is a sign, it must be a sign of something, and that that something, whatever its true metaphysical status, is the referent, or thing referred to. For deconstruction and poststructuralism generally, however, signs refer only to other signs (whatever that is supposed to mean), and so on into infinity. I can see that the sign ‘cat’ signifies the furry quadruped of that name; but what the animal itself may be a ‘sign’ of (barring mere folklorique associations such as luck, witches, nine lives, walking by itself etc.) is anyone's guess. Underlying the whole preposterous notion there is almost certainly a confusion (possibly deliberate, but in any case not worth unravelling here) between natural and non-natural signs, i.e. between symptoms and signals, and also one between reference proper (which is after all held to be impossible) and other forms of relation.

⁶ Saussure, Course, p. 67ffGoogle Scholar.

⁷ Ibid., p. 113.

⁸ From Barthes’ inaugural lecture at the College de France, quoted in Merquior, From Prague to Paris, p. 158. Presumably, therefore, if Barthes thought, through the use of language, to compel his audience's assent, he must have been fascist too, while they (if he succeeded) were both victims of and collaborators with fascism.

⁹ I was irritated to discover, after writing that sentence, that Terry Eagleton has also made the comparison in his Literary Theory (Oxford: Blackwell 1983)Google Scholar. Worse, he even uses the word ‘cat’, as I have done, to illustrate the arbitrariness of the sign. (Though I suppose that is merely one of the many familiar uses of a cat.)

¹⁰ Harris, Roy, Reading Saussure: a Critical Commentary on the Cours de Linguistique Generate (London: Duckworth 1987), p. xvGoogle Scholar.

¹¹ Course, p. 120.

¹² Some would argue that the whole (originally) Lockean notion of there being a ‘concept’ or ‘idea’ intermediary between the signifier and the referent (yet which is also somehow still part of the ‘sign’) is otiose and misleading. For them the true ‘signified’ is simply the referent, whatever its status (tangible, abstract or wholly imaginary). See, e.g., Merquior, From Prague to Paris, pp. 231–232:

Saussure himself … stresses that the ‘same signified’ exists both for French ‘boeuf’ and for German ‘Ochs’. If indeed the same concept works both sides of the Rhine, could it be by dint of a translinguistic reference to the same animal, which insists on grazing outside the world made of Whorf's … signifieds?

Again, consider the following:

Nothing is gained … by introducing the idea of concepts into the theory of the sign … the sign signifies the thing (table, mountain, God, idea of civil obedience, whatever), not the concept of the thing. Otherwise, we should be involved in an infinite regress, with signs standing for concepts standing for concepts standing for concepts and so on.

The signified cannot be in the sign, or part of it, in the way that the signifier is the sign. The reality of the signified is not part of the sign, but a condition of application of the sign. (Geoffrey Thurley, Counter-Modernism in Current Critical Theory [London and Basingstoke: Macmillanl983],p. 172)

¹³ Course, p. 120.

¹⁴ Ibid., p. 121.

¹⁵ Of course, I am not saying that the logical properties of linguistic systems cannot be studied independently of what sentences obeying the rules of such systems might actually mean in any specific case. What I am saying is that syntax in general depends upon the possibility of reference in general.

¹⁶ While preparing this lecture for publication, I have discovered some apparent echoes in this and the previous paragraph of Raymond Tallis's excellent Not Saussure: a Critique of Post-Saussurean Literary Theory (London: Macmillan 1988), pp. 72–74Google Scholar. Having consulted his book some months earlier, in haste, and without taking notes, I was not conscious of any borrowings while writing; but if borrowings they were, I happily acknowledge them now.

¹⁷ It seems as though Merquior would wish generally to dissociate Saussure from this assumption (see note 12 above), in other words to orphan the movement he (Saussure) fathered.

¹⁸ As should be obvious to anyone who reflects upon the heroes of The Idiot and Parsifal, both ‘holy fools’.

¹⁹ Compare H. P. Grice, in his seminal article ‘Meaning’ (1957), on the importance of context in the interpretation of utterances: ‘A man who calls for a “pump” at a fire would not want a bicycle pump’ (Grice, Paul, Studies in the Way of Words [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1989], p. 222)Google Scholar.

²⁰ A paper given at Boston University in November 1994, as part of the Andrew Mellon Seminar series, under the general rubric of ‘Theory and Description’. The text given here is substantially that delivered a year later at the Royal Institute of Philosophy. For publication I have added a certain amount of extra material, some of it new, but most being restored from cuts enforced by the lecture medium. This note is as convenient a place as any to record my gratitude to Bob Hale, John Leake, Gregory McCulloch, Anthony O'Hear, Christopher Ricks, Roger Scruton, Jon Westling and David Womersley, for their various comments and suggestions.

²¹ This mysterious term, though central to deconstructionist discourse, is never clearly defined, either by Derrida or by his expositors. (Presumably to do so would be to succumb to what it condemns.) See Derrida, Jacques, Of Grammatology, tr. Spivak, G. (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press 1976), p. 43Google Scholar; Ellis, John M., Against Deconstruction (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1989), p. 30ff.Google Scholar Culler's attempt to reduce it to some kind of intelligibility is probably the best that can be hoped for (On Deconstruction, pp. 89–110Google Scholar). See also Merquior, From Prague to Paris, p. 214Google Scholar.

²² See Culler, , On Deconstruction, pp. 107–110Google Scholar; Derrida, Of Grammatology, pp. 7–8, 20, 166Google Scholar.

²³ Something like this holds, I believe, even in the case of fictional utterance or story-telling, which, contrary to what most of the literature alleges, conforms fairly uncontroversially to a standard speech-act pattern, which is simply this: ‘I invite you to imagine that S.’ What I can and do dissociate myself from, and am understood as author to be dissociating myself from, is the intention of actually uttering S, the body or content of the fiction, in propria persona. I put S1 mentally in inverted commas, as though it were reported speech, even though it is I who have devised it. (No wonder Plato wanted the poets banished.) From this perspective there is no substantive difference between spoken and written fictions, since in neither of them is the author immediately ‘present’.

²⁴ There is an important sense, as I have just conceded, in which speech might seem to be ‘prior’, and of course speech existed before writing; but the idea that philosophers generally have ever accorded anything other than purely temporal priority to spoken language is preposterous. So is Derrida's whimsical attempt to reverse what he sees as the speech/writing ‘hierarchy’. On these matters Derrida's critics are pretty well unanimous (and his defenders strangely silent). See e.g. Ellis, Against Deconstruction, Ch. 2; John Searle, ‘The word turned upside down’ (review of Culler's On Deconstruction), New York Review of Books, 27 October 1983 (quoted Merquior, From Prague to Paris, p. 216); Scruton, Upon Nothing, pp. 18–21.Google Scholar For a more charitable view (M. H. Abrams's) see note 31 below.

²⁵ A vague notion of what this might mean can be gathered from Derrida, Writing and Difference, tr. Bass, Alan (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul 1978), pp. 279–280, 292Google Scholar, and Of Grammatology, p. 12. For a clearer account, see Culler, On Deconstruction, p. 92ff.Google Scholar

²⁶ ‘The first work of throughgoing deconstruction … to come down to us, so striking in its wholesale anticipation of the contemporary project as to demand reconsideration of the cultural and philosophical context that could have conditioned it, is the fifth-century BC treatise On Not Being, or On Nature by Gorgias, the argument of which was summarized by Sextus Empiricus: “Firstly … nothing exists; secondly … even if anything exists, it is inapprehensible by man; thirdly … even if anything is apprehensible, yet of a surety it is inexpressible and incommunicable to one's neighbour.” “Against the Logicians”, I. 65.’ (Felperin, Howard, Beyond Deconstruction: the Uses and Abuses of Literary Theory [Oxford: Clarendon Press 1985], p. 104n.)Google Scholar

See also Fish, Stanley: ‘modern anti-foundationalism is old sophism writ analytic’ (quoted Sim, Beyond Aesthetics, p. 97)Google Scholar; Norris, Christopher, Deconstruction: Theory and Practice (London: Methuen 1982), pp. 60–61Google Scholar (on Nietzsche's view of Socrates’ victory, in the Gorgias, over the sophist Callicles): ‘Truth is simply the honorific title assumed by an argument which has got the upper hand—and kept it—in this war of competing persuasions.’ Norris seems not to consider the converse possibility, that truth, just because it is the truth, is dialectical trumps (i.e. maximally persuasive), and therefore that an argument which exemplified it might deservedly ‘get the upper hand’.

Norris's is like the view that history is written by the victor, or the opinion of Thrasymachus (who celebrated the alleged fact) or of Marx (who deplored it) that ‘justice is the interest of the stronger’. In later writings such as Deconstruction and the Interests of Theory (London: Pinter 1988)Google Scholar and What's Wrong with Postmodernism (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf 1990)Google Scholar Norris tends more towards a humanist quasi-realism (aligning himself with, e.g., Karl-Otto Apel and the later Habermas). However, this could simply be a tactical self-distancing from the de Man debacle, of the kind that I began by noting.

²⁷ It is essentially what realists, in Derrida's caricature of realism, are supposed to believe in, viz. the ‘thing in itself or ‘metaphysical presence’ (see e.g. Of Grammatology, pp. 49–50). I shall return to this question.

²⁸ Derrida nowhere commits himself to so plain and unequivocal a statement. (His habit is never to commit himself to anything, which in part accounts for his stylistic oddities: see Scruton, Upon Nothing, pp. 2–6Google Scholar, which centres on Derrida's simultaneous ‘taking back’ of anything that he might seem to be asserting.) But it is the underlying principle of his entire discourse. The ensuing paradox—that deconstruction cannot be true either—is fleetingly noted (in relation to de Man) by Culler (On Deconstruction, pp. 278–279; cf. also p. 149), who seems blithely unruffled by it.

It should nevertheless be observed that when it suits him Derrida is perfectly capable of claiming that ‘in no case is it a question of a discourse against truth or against science. … I repeat, then …: we must have [il faui] truth. … Paraphrasing Freud, … we must recognize in truth “the normal prototype of the fetish”. How can we do without it?’ (Positions, tr. Bass, Alan [London: Athlone Press 1981], p. 105).Google Scholar But even there, in that reference to ‘the fetish’ there is something like a ‘taking back’. A more spectacular, full-blooded example can be found in Christopher Norris's account of Derrida's recent quasi-realist (sc. anti-postmodernist) ackslidings. The following extract is surely walking on water (and a deux too, by the look of it):

Derrida's aim … is not to argue that the humanistic disciplines lack any critical force; that they are products, one and all, of a self-deluding enterprise blind to its own real motives. Rather, he is defending the principle of reason, the enlightenment desire for clarity and truth, in so far as that project can be ‘deconstructed’ to reveal what it harbours of a hidden agenda all the more powerful for its rhetoric of Kantian disinterest. (Deconstruction and the Interests of Theory, pp. 195–196: italics mineGoogle Scholar)

²⁹ This observation, or something like it, has frequently been made. See, e.g., Felperin, Beyond Deconstruction, pp. 132–133Google Scholar; Eagleton, Literary Theory, p. 139Google Scholar; Culler, On Deconstruction, p. 147Google Scholar; Berman, Art, From the New Criticism to Deconstruction (Urbana: University of Illinois Press 1988), pp. 217, 257Google Scholar (citing Geoffrey Hartman's view of Derrida's Glas), 279; Abrams, M. H., ‘Construing and Deconstructing’ in Rajnath, , (ed.), Deconstruction: a Critique (Basingstoke: Macmillan 1989), p. 32CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Juhl, P. D., ‘Playing With Texts’, in Hawthorn, J. (ed.), Criticism and Critical Theory (London: Edward Arnold 1984), p. 71; etc.Google Scholar

³⁰ ‘The whole text [sc. Glas] bristles with “witty” puns whose quality the reader may assess by knowing that on page 7 Hegel is assimilated to an eagle because the French pronunciation (egl'/aigle) uncannily captures something of the magisterial coldness of the philosopher, “an eagle caught in the ice”. This goes on for almost three hundred pages’ (Merquior, From Prague to Paris, p. 211).Google Scholar

³¹ Of Grammatology, pp. 8–9, 40–41, 44, 158–159Google Scholar, etc. See also Culler, On Deconstruction, pp. 101–102Google Scholar; Tallis, Not Saussure, pp. 220–223Google Scholar. A very fair–minded account is given by Abrams in Rajnath, Deconstruction, p. 36Google Scholar

Derrida is not claiming that the invention of writing preceded speech in history; he is deploying a device designed to get us to substitute for the philosophical idiom of speaking the alternative idiom of writing, in which we are less prone to the illusion, as he conceives it, that a speaker in the presence of a listener knows what he means independently of the words in which he expresses it, or that he establishes the meaning of what he says to the listener by communicating his unmediated intention in uttering it.

³² Derrida sometimes calls it ‘palaeonomy’: ‘the “strategic” necessity that requires the occasional maintenance of an old name in order to launch a new concept’ (Positions, p. 71). See also Culler, On Deconstruction, p. 140Google Scholar.

³³ ’This is my starting point: no meaning can be determined out of context, but no context permits saturation’ (Derrida, ‘Living On: Border Lines’, in Bloom, Haroldet al., Deconstruction and Criticism [London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979], p. 81)Google Scholar.

³⁴ Cf. Thurley, Counter-Modernism, p. 189Google Scholar: ‘We can “know” something, as Russell pointed out, without having to claim that we know everything about it, nor do we have to make the definition of the nature of a thing synonymous with everything that is relevant to its “absolute” nature—its Ding-an-sich-ness.’

³⁵ On the other hand, as also already noted, ‘traces’ seem not wholly to be distinct from ‘differences’, or from whatever is thought (invisibly or otherwise) to mediate them:

The principle of difference compels us … to consider every process of signification as a formal play of differences. That is, of traces. …

Whether in the order of spoken or written discourse, no element can function as a sign without referring to another element which itself is not simply present. This interweaving results in each ‘element’ … being constituted on the basis of the trace within it of other elements of the chain or system. This interweaving, this textile, is the text … Nothing, neither among the elements nor within the system, is anywhere ever simply present or absent. There are only, everywhere, differences and traces of traces. (Positions, p. 26)

Positions, being a series of interviews, makes Derrida's eponymous ‘positions’ clearer than they would otherwise be. The book is also, in Merquior's phrase, ‘mercifully short’.

³⁶ One might remark, for what little it may be worth, that Derrida was brought up in French Algeria, the son of a rabbi. That is, he belonged to a not wholly assimilated minority within a dominant colonial culture. He may well have learned both how to exclude, and what it is like to be excluded. And his reckless readings could well be kin to the wilder allegorical flights and creative ‘readings-into’ characteristic of midrash (Jewish scriptural exegetics): ‘So many things are omitted and taken for granted [in the Torah], that an open invitation was given … to fill in the tantalizing lacunae of the text. The result [was] a vast playground of rabbinic fancy’ (Lehrman, S.M., The World of the Midrash [London and New York: Thomas Yoseloff 1961], p. 11). Another analogy might be those writers who allege, on the evidence of ciphers ‘discovered’ in the text, that Bacon wrote Shakespeare. The difference, however, is that both midrashists and Baconians offer to uncover the hypothetical author's (God's or Bacon's) intended meaning, whereas Derrida, and deconstructionists generally, have freed themselves from any obligation to recognize what George Eliot called an ‘equivalent centre of self, and thus in effect usurp the (usually known) authorship. Some commentators have suggested that Derrida owes something to the cabbalistic tradition.Google Scholar

³⁷ In poetry a meaning may regularly be foregrounded, even (so to speak) endorsed, despite (and by) being explicitly ruled out. When Marvell's mower calls the glow-worms ‘country comets’, saying that they foretell, not the death of princes, but only the fall of the grass, he implicitly sees the death of princes as part of the natural cycle, like the mowing. Yet he does so whilst positively denying any connection between the two orders of phenomena. (See ‘The Mower to the Glo-Worms'.)

³⁸ Of Grammatology, p. 166. See also Culler, On Deconstruction, pp. 108–109. To put the point more brutally, and thus make its triviality obvious, meaninglessness is dispelled (or, if you must, ‘repressed’) by meaning. (And a good thing too, especially where practical considerations are at stake, as they must sometimes be even for Derrida. See note 28 above.)

³⁹ See Said, ‘The Text, the World, the Critic’ in Harari, J. V. (ed.), Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism (London: Methuen 1979), esp. p. 181ffGoogle Scholar.

⁴⁰ See Tallis, Not Saussure, p. 223; Culler, On Deconstruction, p. 99.

⁴¹ Hartman, Geoffrey, Saving the Text: Literature/Derrida/Philosophy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press 1981), p. 33Google Scholar. See also, for comment, Merquior, From Prague to Paris, p. 238 and n; Culler, On Deconstruction, p. 137n.

⁴² According to Richard Rorty, ‘deconstruction stands … in the same relation to “normal” criticism and philosophy as “abnormal” sexuality or science do to their “normal ‘counterparts—“each lives the other's death and dies the other's life’” (Felperin, Beyond Deconstruction, p. 139, quoting Rorty, ‘Philosophy as a Kind of Writing’, in Consequences of Pragmatism [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1982], p. 107). One may take Rorty's point, whilst denying that there is or could be any such thing as ‘abnormal’ science. ‘Abnormal’ science is simply pseudoscience, viz. magic.Google Scholar

⁴³ See e.g. Eagleton, Literary Theory, pp. 141ff; also (more generally) Norris, Deconstruction and the Interests of Theory (London: Pinter 1988Google Scholar) and What's Wrong with Postmodernism: Critical Theory and the Ends of Philosophy (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990)Google Scholar.

⁴⁴ See Barthes, Roland, ‘From Work to Text’, in Harari, , Textual Strategies; Culler (on Derrida's idea of a ‘general text’), On Deconstruction, p. 130Google Scholar.

⁴⁵ See Kaufmann, Walter (ed. and tr.), The Portable Nietzsche (New York: Viking Press, 1967), pp. 42ff.Google Scholar

⁴⁶ That distinction (between ‘act’ and ‘fact’) is meant merely to note that some designations (e.g. ‘nylon’, ‘penicillin’, ‘quark’) are proposed and adopted deliberately, while most are inherited, accepted and used unselfconsciously, without question. But each kind is founded on consensus, and the consensus in each case on convenience. The distinction lies merely in the type of consensus. It has an obvious political parallel in the distinction between a legitimacy based on contract (Locke and liberalism) and one presupposed in ‘tacit consent’ (Hume and conservatism).

⁴⁷ See Abrams in Rajnath, Deconstruction, p. 42.

⁴⁸ See note 3 above, esp. the quotation from Merquior. Here is as good a place as any to note that the deconstructionist account of, and assault on, language and meaning are closely analogous to the Left's view of, and characteristic hostility to, free markets. For both language and the market are spontaneous, consensual systems of exchange, whose values (meanings and prices) are the outcome of innumerable single transactions. Both (like another such system, culture) naturally defy the attempts of individuals to force them to conform to their own preferred overall patterns. Individuals can only do so, in either case, by recourse to the organs of government, and even then not without unforeseen, undesired and in general hugely counter-productive consequences. There seems to be agreement among commentators, irrespective of their sympathies, that, though structuralist by descent, deconstruction grew out of les evenements de mai 1968 and (as I began this paper by observing) is a broadly leftwing phenomenon. (See, e.g., Berman, From the New Criticism, p. 102; Eagleton, Literary Theory, pp. 142ff.; Felperin, Beyond Deconstruction, p. 213; Scruton, Upon Nothing, pp. 7–19, 31. See also note 60 below.)

Later, however, the movement split not once but twice, one wing of it (what I go on in the main text to call its aesthetic or ludic tendency) either retreating into an ironic, postmodernist quietism (Lyotard et al.), or plunging defiantly into a brash, near-nihilistic celebration of junk culture. (The latter, to the Left, is the natural outcome of the rule of the market, and perhaps plausibly enough. But one can support the market without thinking it ought to rule. Indeed, if it is truly to be free and we are to benefit from it, it must itself be subject to regulation. See the present writer's ‘The Politics of Equilibrium’, Inquiry, 35 [1992], esp. pp. 430–431.)

⁴⁹ The Rule of Metaphor, tr. R. Czerny (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul 1978), p. 285. The relevant passage is cited in the course of Christopher Butler's sensible discussion of Nietzsche's and Derrida's view (in ‘On Truth and Lie’ and ‘White Mythology’ respectively) that metaphysics is the ghost of (officially) dead metaphor (Butler, Interpretation, Deconstruction and Ideology [Oxford: Clarendon Press 1984], p. 2Off.Google Scholar For another summary of Derrida's ‘metaphorics’ see Abrams in Rajnath, Deconstruction, p. 59. ‘White Mythology’ is to be found in Margins of Philosophy, tr. Bass, Alan [Brighton: Harvester Press 1982])Google Scholar.

My own view of this etymologistic (and thus very un-Saussurean) notion may be deduced from my comments above concerning the disjunction between the history and the current use of the word ‘silly’. I deny that previous meanings (or indeed any other meanings irrelevant to the matter in hand) have any power automatically to influence or determine the sense in which, or intention with which, an expression is being employed. Cf. Ricoeur again: ‘It is use in discourse that specifies the difference between the literal and the metaphorical, and not some sort of prestige attributed to the primitive or the original’ (Rule of Metaphor, p. 291, quoted Butler, p. 139). To be fair, however, Derrida does admit that ‘to read within a concept the hidden history of a metaphor is to privilege diachrony at the expense of system’, i.e. is un-Saussurean (Margins of Philosophy, p. 215). On the all-decisive importance of relevance, see Sperber, Dan and Wilson, Deirdre, Relevance: Communication and Cognition (Oxford: Blackwell 1986)Google Scholar.

⁵⁰ ’The statement about language, that sign and meaning can never coincide, is what is precisely taken for granted in the kind of language we call literary … A work of fiction asserts, by its very existence, its separation from empirical reality, its divergence, as a sign, from a meaning that depends for its existence on the constitutive activity of this sign … It is always against the explicit assertion of the writer that readers degrade the fiction by confusing it with a reality from which it has forever taken leave’ (de Man, Paul, Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism [New York: Oxford University Press 1971], p. 17)Google Scholar.

⁵¹ I hope I may be forgiven for here making explicit the allusion to Das Rheingold. For some reason, as I write, the creations of Sir Richard Rogers spring to mind.

⁵² The exchange is summarized and illustrated at some length in Culler, On Deconstruction, pp. 110–134. See also Norris, Deconstruction: Theory and Practice, pp. 11 Off.

⁵³ I have no space here to argue out this point about fictional discourse, but a hint as to the direction such an argument might take may be gathered from note 23 above.

⁵⁴ Much the same is true of Norris (Deconstruction and the Interests of Theory, pp. 79–80). He, like Derrida, confuses a sentence (which is ‘iterable’) with a speech-act (which, being an event, is not). As it happens, a passage he cites from Donald Davidson, and uses (erroneously) as a stick to beat Searle with, makes the distinction plain: ‘the same declarative sentence may have the same meaning when used to make an assertion, to tell a joke, to annoy a bore, to complete a rhyme, or to ask a question’ (Davidson, Inquiries, p. 269). The very fact that a sentence can be thus used in different speech-acts makes it clear that it is not, of itself, the same thing as a speech-act; and that the ‘meaning’ of which Davidson is speaking is not illocutionary but abstract and inert, the sentence's so to speak ‘dictionary meaning’ (as of a single word), which is mobilized (and further determined) only in actual utterance (rather as a word is in a sentence).

⁵⁵ At the original time of writing I had not seen Abrams's admirable dissection of J. Hillis Miller's so-called ‘double’ reading (i.e. first ‘straight’ and then ‘deconstructive') of Wordsworth's ‘A slumber did my spirit seal’ (see Abrams in Rajnath, Deconstruction, pp. 47–60). The analysis, like Miller's piece, raises profound questions about how, and at what precise point, a reading ceases to be plausible and becomes fantastic (i.e. ceases to be a reading and becomes something else, say a ‘reading-into’).

⁵⁶ Twenty-something years ago, at a fairly grand academic dinner, I was placed next to a lady whose critical opinions now command worldwide celebrity and respect. I mentioned To the Lighthouse, a work I still hold in some esteem. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘well, really, it's all about presence and absence, isn't it?’ Since then, oft when on my couch I lie in vacant or in pensive mood, those words come unbidden to mind, and everything just seems to fall into place (particularly so much as pertains to the nature and requisites of academic success).

⁵⁷ Though clearly overawed by de Man's brilliance, the everscrupulous Culler nevertheless confesses that he cannot actually discover which metaphor de Man is referring to (the nearest candidate appears rather to be a synecdoche: Culler, On Deconstruction pp. 244–245 and n). The metaphor which springs to my mind is that of the Emperor's New Clothes.

⁵⁸ The final couplet is this: ‘How could such sweet and wholesome hours / Be reckoned but with herbs and flowers?’ Taken rhetorically, the question implies that the hours spent in the garden were indeed innocent (as the speaker has constantly been at pains to stress), and could not be better emblematized than by the said floral clock. When, however, it is taken literally (to mean something like ‘How could anyone possibly think that such sweet and wholesome hours … etc.?’), invisible ironic quotation marks appear round sweet and wholesome, and but changes its meaning from ‘except’ to ‘merely’. The irony spreads to the speaker's protestations concerning the harmlessness of his retreat, and proves justified by the powerful intimations of sensual temptation and moral peril (as of Eden just before the Fall) underlying the idyllic surface descriptions. Contrary to the immediate closing suggestion, there is another, weightier ‘reckoning’ to be made.

⁵⁹ I am certainly not convinced by Norris's repetitious, mantra-like insistence, in reply to Ellis (Against Deconstruction), on Derrida's ‘rigorous critique’, ‘analytical work of the highest order’, ‘sustained analytical grasp’, ‘high level of sustained argumentative force’, ‘logical rigour, consistency and truth’, ‘highly disciplined process of argument’, ‘sheer critical acumen and intellectual grasp’, ‘stylistic brilliance’, ‘rigorously consequential logic’, ‘extreme analytical precision’, ‘meticulous analytical close reading’, ‘maximum degree of analytical clarity and rigour’.

All but one of those phrases occur in thirteen consecutive pages (pp. 145–157) of Norris's What's Wrong with Postmodernism. Barring a couple of short, drab and (given the exorbitance of the claims) wholly unpersuasive quotations, not one is accompanied by a scrap of evidence, nor, I believe, could any easily be found among the reams upon reams of Derrida's vague, inflated, inconsequential ramblings. I do not doubt Norris's sincerity (at least as perceived by himself), but the cumulative effect of his assertions is largely one of bluster, as of one whose bluff has been called. Derrida's critics, he says on p. 160, will have to show precisely where his arguments go wrong. Derrida's disciples, it seems to me, will have to show, not so much where his arguments go right, as where there are any to be found at all.

⁶⁰ Since it featured in both my lecture and the original seminar paper I have, on revision, let this quasi-structuralist explanation stand, despite its implausibility (which the sentence immediately following in the main text merely underscores). The ballyhoo concerning de Man's Nazi past is surely sufficient testimony to the importance of deconstruction's ideological content. Nor can one imagine that absolutely any ‘alternative’ literary theory (e.g. one that ascribed all authorship to extra-terrestrials) might have served the same turn.

Though nearly everywhere mixed up indiscriminately with Marxism, feminism, psychoanalysis and the ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ generally, in France and the US deconstruction was very largely an elite phenomenon. In Britain, by contrast, its chief stronghold was the humanities departments of polytechnics (all of them ‘new’ universities since 1992), where it observably fed on academic and social ressentiment. Deconstruction is not, I think, fully understood unless it is seen, at least in one of its aspects, as part of a Gramscian ‘counter-hegemonic’ project, in which ‘great’ or canonical literature is treated as somehow reinforcing the politico-cultural status quo, and as thus to be ‘deconstructed’, ‘read against itself, put on a level with junk culture, and so on. (And the Gramscian project is fully compatible with the ‘upward mobility’ already noted, since it involves the so-called ‘long march through the institutions’.) At the same time, however, and with all that said, I still think the elementary point (main text, following) about the appeal of, and need for, theory simply qua theory is valid.

⁶¹ Merquior, From Prague to Paris, pp. 247, 253ff.

⁶² According to Roger Scruton (Upon Nothing, pp. 2, 28–36), its actual significance is theological. See also the same author's Modern Philosophy: an Introduction and Survey (London: Sinclair-Stevenson 1994)Google Scholar, Ch. 30 (’The Devil’).

⁶³ Hawkes, Terence, Structuralism and Semiotics (London: Methuen 1977)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Belsey, Catherine, Critical Practice (London: Methuen 1981)Google Scholar.