Body, Mind, and Deconstruction

In her commentary on Plato’s Parmenides, the Greek scholar Edith Hamilton said: “The argument runs on and on in words that appear to make sense and yet convey nothing to the mind.”¹

My feeling is that many academics feel the same way about deconstruction. It is not that they do not understand it; they do, but the knowledge seems to evaporate almost as soon as it is acquired. An unwillingness to retain an understanding of deconstruction derives, I think, from the radicalism with which it practices what Jacques Maritain has called the “denaturing of human reason.”² To master the language of deconstruction, to acquire that special understanding of “nonconcepts” such as difference, trace, supplement, or verbs such as to inscribe, to defer, to open up a text, one has to assume an intellectual posture that is deeply unnatural within the culture in which we live. To practice deconstruction means to achieve the ultimate degree of separation between the reading of texts and the experience of life. Writing and thinking deconstruction involves constant switching of the levels of discourse, from discourse proper to meta-discourse to meta-meta-discourse. This is why it is easy, having understood what deconstruction is all about, to forget it promptly.

A deconstructionist pays an exorbitant homage to time. He starts with a rather trivial observation that there is a difference between the fact that something is, and our thinking or writing that something is.³ A time lapse always occurs between the event and our thinking about it. Nothing happens in the present; everything is “always already” behind us, from the standpoint of time. There is no present tense, and therefore there is no presence. Deconstruction invokes the notion of deferral, of “being late” in regard to “what is”: our thought about it occurs after the “being” itself. On this notion of deferral, of being late, Jacques Derrida built his system of interpretation of literary texts whose central thesis is that nothing really is, that “being” as construed by Western metaphysics is an illusion. There exists only a system of writing, a printed page, a set of traces of something that apparently was but in fact never was. There is only “space” between concepts.

A deconstructionist assumes that the world changes continuously and radically, and that there occur in every culture “paradigm shifts,” or irreversible and fundamental changes in the consciousness of men. He seeks to effect a “paradigm shift” in the explication of literature, and to place thought in a sealed world in which it is no longer in contact with anything but itself. Deconstruction is a manifestation of the post-Cartesian retreat of the human mind upon itself, and it arguably represents the ultimate intellectualism which its predecessors managed to avoid. In a sense, it is a form of lust for pure spirituality which a physical person inhabiting a physical world is incapable of achieveing.⁴

In his book Three Reformers, Jacques Maritain made a distinction between two kinds of rationalism: one which goes back to Plato and Aristotle and relies on syllogism, and the other which goes back to Descartes and relies on intellectual intuition. The first is cognizant of the limitations and powers of the human intellect and of its dependence on the body. The second is “independent of external objects,”⁵ makes no distinction between “speculative order and historical sequence,” and is contemptuous of the body and the limitations of knowledge which it implies. It makes men into angels or mystics, that is to say, into thinking intellects independent of their bodies and independent of “time, movement, generation and corruption” in acquisition of knowledge. It sees cognition as intuitive, innate and independent of things. Maritain subscribes the first kind of rationalism, and he argues that what has passed for rationalism since Descartes is responsible for much of the sterility and pedantry of modern philosophy. He charges that the first move of Cartesian rationalism was to “disown reason,” and that Cartesianism produces men who ignore the testimony of the senses and their own physical nature. An understanding of Maritain’s critique of Descartes seems to me essential for the understanding of what deconstruction is all about, and whence it comes, and where it is heading. Deconstruction travels backward into Eastern philosophy and the negative theology of late Plato by way of Cartesianism.

Deconstruction Looks East

Jacques Derrida once said that deconstruction operates on the margins of philosophy. He should have said, on the margins of European philosophy. For it fits comfortably in the philosophy of the East and the wisdom of Lao-Tzu. This affinity with Asian thought deserves more attention than it has so far received.⁶ Both deconstruction and Taoism reject any philosophical system that accommodates Western metaphysics and the notion of a transcendent and personal Being. The antonym of deconstruction is not construction but being, in the sense in which scholastic philosophers used that word. In Derrida’s writings, thought finally breaks with being, and there is no positive reality that underlies the world of change. Like the philosophers of the East, the deconstructionists claim that there is nothing permanent in the empirical self. They seek to proclaim a rupture between the paradigm of post-modernity and the culture that preceded it. Derrida’s goal seems to be a post-Western, or post-European culture which will look toward the East rather than West for philosophical affinity. In the deconstructionist paradigm, meaning is “generated over time, by means of convention, and within particular contexts . . . [it] is ultimately language-bound, perception-bound, and bound to a given world-view or ideology.”⁷ And it dies alongside the ideology which gave it birth..

What are the common points between the intuitions of Taoism and Derrida’s theory of texts? Taoism’s way of looking at the world involves deleting from the philosopher’s vocabulary any idea if a center, of a personal God, or of the rules of logic, Lao-Tzu and other taoist thinkers used a concept which in English is rendered by the expression “the way.” It comprises both the meaning of Taoism and the instructions on how one should live. “The way” of Lao-Tzu is like Derrida’s absent center: it is impossible to speak of it inwords. One can grasp “the way” only by divorcing oneself from the idea that language, with its temporal and spatial dimensions and its grounding in the analogical imagination, is our only way of experiencing the world and expressing our experience. The fundamental anonymity and non-referentiality of texts which Derrida postulates is also characteristic of Lao Tzu’s view of the ultimate text: reality itself. Lao-Tzu says that reality is “nameless, indescribable, beyond telling; and therefore anything said about it is faulty . . . it cannot be defined by word or idea . . . [before it] words recoil.”⁸ The goal of “the way’ is to make the subject and the impersonal reality coalesce. Reality here is like presence in Derrida’s discourse; it is “always already” gone, absent, impossible to describe or come into contact with. A person who thinks he has mastered “the way” finds it slipping away; a person who tries to hold on to presence finds that he holds on to nothing.

A student of Taoism, Herrlee Creel, says that “The tao is unknowable in its essence. . . . Morally, Taoists philosophy is completely indifferent. All things are relative. Right and ‘wrong’ are just words which we may apply to the same thing, depending upon which partial viewpoint we see it from.”⁹ The use and definition of the word “tao” excludes any idea of intelligent cause.¹⁰ Like deconstruction, Taoism is a philosophical perspective which encourages what the Chinese scholar Da Liu calls, descriptively rather than reproachfully, “a completely aimless life.”¹¹ For that reason, it is “an unlikely basis for social organization.”¹² An adherent of tao will probably not take interest in social problems or participate in a political debate. A struggle for political liberty is unthinkable within the confines of Taoism. In the best of all conceivable worlds, a Taoist would be left alone to cultivate his garden. But our world is arguably not the best of all conceivable ones, and a society whose members practice Taoism in large numbers is likely to be taken over by those who thirst for power rather than for peace of mind.

In Taoism and in deconstruction, I perceive a way of approaching “what is” that is fundamentally alien to European, or Western, culture. The latter has displayed activism, a desire to improve things, an absence of fatalism or of passivity. Taoism is pessimistic about “what is” and about man’s ability to come into contact with it. The notion of empirical verification does not exist within the confinesof taoism. In contrast, the post-Socratic Greeks, the Jews and the Christians (and through them, European culture) have been rather upbeat about the possibilities of understanding reality. The philosophers of the East and Derrida thus stand on the opposite pole from the European tradition. They reject the notion of a center-bound intelligibility of the world. They voice an extreme pessimism in regard to the center, and abandon not only the idea of approaching it but even of conceiving of it. It is true that in European thought starting perhaps with Hegel, the center of what is also began to lose contours, was depersonalized and declared to be unapproachable. But until recently, philosophers still spoke of a conception of a center (e.g., Nietzsche). In confessing his inability to conceive of a center, in shifting the discourse onto the margins of the debate about the center, Derrida turns out to be the ultimate pessimist of modern times,

In Derrida’s metaphysics à rebours, language does not refer to any presence. It is a shadow incapable o conveying any essence, a trace of something that is no more and that never was, properly speaking. Knowledge travels by intuitive leaps. For Taoists and deconstructionsts, there is nothing more wrong than to say, “At the beginning was the Word.”

The bleakness of the landscape from which Derrida removed presence and which Lao-Tzu identified as the civilization of men can hardly be doubted. Man’s hold on language turns out to be illusory, and a proclamation of linguistic impotence is issued.¹³ This is a materialistic and fatalistic view. In deconstruction and in Taoism, undecidability is all. The linguist B. L. Whorf has conjectured that the non-Indo-European languages embody a nonlinear and atemporal conception of the world.¹⁴ Derrida wants to convince us that such a conception is applicable to the Indo-European languages as well. In Derrida, we get for the first time a distinctly non-Western, non-European theory of texts.

A crucial part of this non-Western approach is Derrida’s attempt to dislocate the joint which links speaking and writing, and undermine the ease with which we pass from speaking to writing and then back to speaking. The goal is to show the artificiality of our conception of writing as a record of speaking (and of presence), and thus to decouple speaking and writing. Of Grammatology is largely devoted to this task. But in European experience, there first was Socrates and then the Dialogues of Plato. There first was Christ and then the New Testament. Writing came after speaking as a way of preserving speaking and holding on to presence. In the European tradition, writing has been a way of holding on to the quiddity of things which Derrida wants to excise from our understanding. His is truly a negative philosophy, or negative theology if you wish, and it has been articulated centuries ago by some Eastern religious thinkers.

Souls without Bodies

In contrast, in the European tradition writing has been regarded not only as a record of speaking but as a way of confirming the physical and intellectual nature of man. Men gain understanding and a grasp on reality not by means of wordless mystical revelations but by a physical and mental effort combined. Every effort of the mind is also an effort of the body, and it requires the senses alert enough to provide the grounds for thinking and understanding. The deconstructionists pay little attention to the cooperation of man’s physical self and his mind in the activity of speaking and writing. They insist that texts have unnamable and non-rational beginnings, and that in a sense they produce men rather than the other way ’round.

In the deconstructionist paradigm, language has no direct connection with reality because reality is “always already” gone before it reaches language, and because language itself is only a play of differences. The corporeal world disappears from deconstructionist philosophizing. The deconstructionists reject the method of a patient production of certitude through a chain of syllogisms, and they do not see concepts in the light of one another. They say that in order to understand language, one fist has to look at writing and see it as an instance of a productive, in ontologically empty, relationship between the sign resources and the writing non-subject who makes partial use of these resources. They go farther than either Nietzsche or Freud in their denial of center. While Nietzsche and Freud taught us caution and advised against an overconfident use of language, they postulate that language is a means of mystification, a game that plays itself out through men. Deconstruction implants in us a notion of discontinuity between language and the testimony of the senses, between speaking and writing. As the critic Floyd Merrell rightly observed, Derrida wants to destroy the notion of language on which Christianity has been built.¹⁵ Derrida’s vision of writing and speaking is directly opposed to that of St. Paul. St. Paul warned us that the letter is deadly to the spirit, and European culture took him seriously. According to Derrida, the letter created the Spirit, and thus the Spirit is dead while the letter is alive—it is, in fact, the only reality of civilization.

While denying the spoken heritage of the letter, the deconstructionists trivialize its civilizing power and its invariable tendency to lead away from itself and toward the Spirit. They speak contemptuously of the “fetishism of the letter.” Their vision of the world outside the written letter is Rousseauistic: in feminist deconstructionism, the clerical letter is the law and authority, castrating and repressive, while orality is life-giving, anarchic, and erotogenic.¹⁶

Jacques Derrida has antecedents not only in the East but also in the Western tradition. Plato’s Parmenides and Sophists should be counted among these antecedents. However, until recently, European thought did not pay much attention to Parmenides. Undoubtedly this was due largely to Christianity which strongly affirmed a center, a being, a presence that was both personal and transcendent, and which discouraged speculation on such esoteric topics as the being of non-being.¹⁷ For most of the time during which our civilization has existed, we have ignored the eastward-looking Parmenides and instead have followed Plato’s and Aristotle’s models of syllogistic reasoning and their habit of seeing one truth in the light of another. The Socratic model of thinking was spiritualized by Christianity and it became the cornerstone of European and later Western civilization. Derrida urges us to abandon it and acquiesce to the possible consequences of his non-Western model of thinking and of texts.

Thus in a way, deconstruction pursues the idea that language is dependent on a transcendent and personal reality which exists beyond empirical reality. It pursues this idea in order to repudiate it. When such repudiations first became common over a century ago, it seemed that they would not necessitate a change in our approach to language. But recently, a perception began to develop that this repudiation has profound consequences for language itself, and that taoist writings, Parmenides, and Sophist must replace Aristotle and the Bible as arch-models of discourse. Derrida and his American followers realize that removal of the notion of the Deity from European languages will necessitate reformulating the definition of each and every word. When the personal and transcendent God ceased to be the rock-bottom premise of philosophers, when a wave of agnosticism rolled over the Reformation, it seemed at first that language as such was not affected, and that one could still use it in the same way in which it had been used when the Deity was the center. The deconstructionists realize that this is not so, and this realization may be their most important contribution.

The relation between deconstruction and Marxism has been clouded by a common but erroneous perception of the situation of Russian letters in the 1920s and 1930s. At that time, the so-called formalists and structuralists were in disfavor in Soviet Russia, and so-called “orthodox” Marxists dominated the scene. Thus a perception arose, later perpetuated by the professors of Russian literature in the United States, that there existed in Russia and elsewhere a fundamental hostility between the literature-oriented formalists and structuralists, and the politics-oriented Marxists. Since deconstruction is in some ways related to the first two trends, and since it has been declared a bourgeois invention by the Party propagandists in Russia, an antagonistic relationship between Marxism and deconstruction was assumed to exist.

However, it has to be remembered that even though the Russian formalists and structuralists were silenced, they too were Marxists. (The situation was more complex in the English-speaking countries where the “formalists,” or “the new critics” as they were usually called, ranged from Marxist fellow travelers such as Kenneth Burke to traditionalists such as T. S. Eliot.) They did, however, subscribe to a version of Marxism which happened to lose ground in their country. Their anti-metaphysical orientation was implicit rather than explicit: ostensibly, they were only interested in explicating poems and stories. They insisted that the word “intentionality” be removed from a critic’s vocabulary; that poetic language is non-referential; and that the “old” interpreters of literature confused words with things. In formalist criticism, ideas were downgraded, and “verbal texture” was upgraded. There were no rules in the formalist game; it was limited only by a critic’s imagination and his sense of intellectual honesty. Formalism eventually transformed itself into structuralism, and the new trend treated philosophical ideas as part of verbal texture. The deconstructionists further refined these propositions, and they appropriated for their own purposes the habits of the formalists. In deconstructionist criticism, ideas are used as crutches to traverse texts, or as makeshift tools of analysis produced by social circumstances, but their ennobling power is dismissed as illusory.

The Exploitation of Texts

While the formalists and the structuralists have succeeded in correcting some abuses of the fin-de-siècle literary criticism, their hastily formulated credos bred acceptance of studies which looked at the margins of words rather than at the words themselves.18 What in formalism was a technique for an appreciation of poetry, in deconstruction became a means of asserting the hollowness of culture. What the victorious Russian Marxists have been unable to achieve—the eradication of traces of the spiritual from language and literature—the deconstructionists have set out to do in earnest. The formalist and structuralist schools prepared the ground for Derrida’s assertion that, “The reading must always aim at a certain relationship, unperceived by the writer, between what he commands and what he does not command of the patterns of the language that he uses.”¹⁹ A reading should not protect or explicate, because there is nothing there to be protected or explicated. A reading can only pro­duce. Deconstruction offers proof that the seemingly innocuous postulates of the for­malists helped to open up texts to limitless exploitation.

The deconstructionists replaced “inten­tionality” by “ideology,” and thus further distanced themselves from the assumption that a reading should attempt to recover a meaning rather than create it. The Frankfurt school notion of ideology as a world view beyond the control of an individual and aris­ing out of his life situation fits comfortably in the deconstructionist context, and its con­tingency corresponds to the spiritual empti­ness of discourse in Derrida’s interpretation of it. Another Marxist-influenced view, that of Karl Mannheim, says that ideology is de­prived of such attributes as falsity or truthful­ness and is dependent on social conditions, on the historical moment and psychological proclivities of the subject, or on factors which render the subject powerless to decide about his own fate. “Total” ideology is a product of “false consciousness” which Mannheim ar­bitrarily assigned to those who disagreed with him. It is a trap into which entire epochs of human history are said to have fallen. This total ideology has nothing to do with human motivation but consists in the “structural dif­ferences in minds operating in different so­cial settings.”²⁰ Marxism and deconstruction share this concept of ideology and ignore the fact that our present knowledge depends on the correctness of our past knowledge, and is unthinkable without it. In deconstruction and in Western Marxism, thought knows it­self not by empirical verification but by an immediate grasp of itself.²¹

Deconstruction has been appropriated by Western Marxists as a tool to help explain the problem of “superstructure” posited but not explored by Marx. While the Russian Marx­ists tend to attribute cultural developments directly to the economic base of society, Western Marxists shun such simplistic ex­planations and opt instead for a relative autonomy of superstructure. They acknowl­edge indefinite delays in the influence ex­erted by the base and the dependence of su­perstructure on factors not directly traceable to economics. Viewed from this vantage point, the deconstructionist vision explains some of the mysteries of culture without linking them directly either to the GNP or to metaphysics. For that reason, some Marxist thinkers welcome deconstruction not as a marginal investigation but as a cen­tral one. Richard Terdiman said that decon­struction can be used to “evade and decon­struct the institutional mechanisms produc­ing signification” and thus to accomplish “an ideological critique” of bourgeois society,²² and Terry Eagleton hailed deconstruction as an ally in the struggle against that society.²³ In his view, deconstruction can be a means of “subverting” the existing culture. Eugene Vance said that the goal of deconstruction is to show that Western logocentrism has made writing “the primal instrument of power.”²⁴ If one can deconstruct Western writing and persuade the readers of its hollow insides, then the ancient power base of the exploiting classes will crumble and power will pre­sumably change hands.

Leon Trotsky was Vance’s predecessor in making this kind of argument. In Literature and Revolution (1924), he mounted an attack on those Russian literary critics who in his opinion diverged too far from the goal of so­cial change by assigning permanent value to words instead of class struggle. He accused these critics of a “fast ripening religious­ness,” of being “the followers of St. John” and believing that “In the beginning was the Word.” “But we believe that at the beginning was the deed. The word followed, as its phonetic shadow,” proclaimed the creator of the Red Army.²⁵ Like the deconstructionists, Trotsky despised the logocentric tradition in language. Language, for him, was a tool that could be appropriated by the leaders of society in order to manipulate the human material, a part of superstructure that had no presence in it. The deed, the power, the flexing of the muscle; this is what Trotsky saw in human civilization. Language appeared later as a “trace,” a “shadow,” or an “instrument of power.”

It is to be noted that both the philosophy of passivity such as the tao, and the philosophy of activism such as Marxism, proclaim the emptiness and marginality of language. De­construction takes a further step in the same direction and attempts to show that language can be “opened up” like an unoccupied house and displayed to the public as contain­ing nothing save an imagined metaphysical ballast. Out of this nothingness, Trotsky wanted to shape a weapon to help the revolution. He felt that language could be molded indefinitely, that newspeak was in­deed possible because language could be purged of concepts such as identity and non-contradiction. Granted that the leading deconstructionists in this country, such as J. Hillis Miller, Geoffrey Hartman, or the recently deceased Paul de Man, have not been political activists. However, the deconstruc­tionists certainly have done the homework for Trotsky’s followers by providing them with sophisticated arguments against pres­ence and by their wholesale opposition to “the natural, the given, the taken-for-grant­ed” in language.²⁶

Not that the deconstructionists have not been helped in some ways by the traditional historiography. For instance, in the knowl­edge which Western culture has of itself, Eastern Europe is conspicuously missing. The importance of these eastern marches for the very existence of the center has slipped the attention of all major cultural historians of the West. The knowledge of the Eastern European component of Western culture was suppressed by such German historians as Heinrich von Treitschke in the nineteenth century and by historians sympathetic to Russia in the twentieth. So it is easy for a Marxist deconstructionist to show that in the Second Reich, or in tsarist or commu­nist Russia, writing was and is an instrument of power. He of course does so not in order to defend Eastern Europe but to de-center the center. For instance, in The Invention of Tradition (1983), Eric Hobsbawm traces the way in which Bismarck’s Germany at­tempted to provide historical legitimacy for the merging of the Prussian and German states, and to that effect invented cultural “traditions” which ranged from music and architecture to public ceremonials and rituals.²⁷

The Opportunity for Conservatives

Which brings us to the problem of at­titudes to deconstruction of those scholars who see its basic assumptions as wrong and are skeptical of its professed goals. Does deconstruction offer any opportunities to a conservative critic? I would like to answer with a qualified “yes.” An observation made by T. S. Eliot in After Strange Gods seems to me relevant: “The essential of any important heresy is not simply that it is wrong; it is that it is partly right.”²⁸ On occasion, decon­struction succeeds in refining and correcting interpretations that need laundering, and as such it deepens our understanding of written texts. Hobsbawm’s study of nationalist sym­bolism in nineteenth-century Germany, and Hugh Trevor-Roper’s analysis of the invent­ed Highland tradition of Scotland tolerated by the English to prevent a revival of Scottish separatism,²⁹ are examples.

While the conservative critics too often en­gage in refutations and borrow terms of dis­course from others, the deconstructionists succeed on occasion in forcing texts to reveal their multiple meanings. While the conser­vatives too often pretend that the history of Western politics coincides with the history of Western values, the deconstructionists leave the familiar grooves of thought in order to explore areas that need to be explored. Some part of the deconstructionist effort can be diverted from its original aim and used by those whom the deconstructionists mean to render obsolete: the logocentric critics. Some part of the deconstructionist work can be treated as a fitting session, as trying on new clothes on old concepts. Rather than being dreadfully provoked by the deconstructionist sinners, one can follow them along a bit, and discover the methods by which they propose to sew reality’s new clothes.

The phenomenon of literary interpreta­tion is traceable to many causes. One of them is the educated man’s desire to get beyond the Mother Goose stage of reading, to analyze as well as enjoy a rhyme or a story. Before it is reflected upon, imaginative literature is not unlike Mother Goose in the effect it has on us: it charms and fascinates us, and it attracts our attention by means which we cannot clearly articulate. Interpretation makes one aware of the soft underbelly of meaning; it makes the subconscious conscious and the inchoate, expressible. Some deconstructionist inter­pretations do not achieve what Derrida wants them to achieve; they are just inter­pretations, and thus part of the hermeneutic tradition that can be traced back to what Scripture scholars did in the Middle Ages and what they still do today. While the goal of deconstructionism is “[to release] the signifier from the semantic restraints of the logocentric tradition,”³⁰ and is as such unac­ceptable, the way it goes about accomplish­ing its goal has to be mastered if one is serious about logocentrism.

The beginning and end of language are shrouded in mystery, and the logocentric critics have accepted this fact with too much docility. A degree of inexactitude is charac­teristic of language; we always see through a glass darkly. Some deconstructionists point out that the meanings which have been im­posed on words by imprudent thinkers fall into pieces under scrutiny. One has to “get to the other side” of this kind of deconstruction. A suspension of belief in the transcendent core of language is deadly only ifone makes it a habit and a foundation of one’s thinking. I would recommend to anyone the reading of journals such as Diacritics, not because I agree with their goals but because I see in the ways therein explored a fountainhead of new apologies for the old logocentrism. While the letter without the spirit becomes deadly, the spirit without the letter be­comes flabby.

Like Marxism, deconstruction is not inter­nally falsifiable, and is thus immune to criti­cism on its own terms. M. H. Abrams and Gerald Graff have tried to refute it, only to be dismissed as either not rigorous enough in their arguments,³¹ or as committing an error due to the limitations of their first prin­ciples.³² But while deconstruction cannot be internally disapproved, it can be partially ab­sorbed and bypassed, as has been the case with other significant theories. Some decon­structionist works may eventually be looked upon in the way in which an educated Greek must have looked upon the paradoxes of Zeno: while he was unable to demonstrate that Zeno was wrong, he knew that he was wrong. In The Open Society and Its Enemies, Karl Popper spoke of a nineteenth-century doctor who could unerringly diagnose tu­berculosis but was unable to define it. Pop­per’s conclusion was that we need not always produce definitions of things in order to know what they are. A similar point can be made about some deconstructionist claims. Others can be digested and assimilated.

The final lesson which deconstruction of­fers may paradoxically be this: it is impos­sible to fully master a language without rec­ognizing its analogical structure and its metaphysical dimension. Most people do not draw the ultimate conclusions from their use of language, and deconstruction offers an op­portunity to come to these conclusions. More than any other trendy philosopher, Derrida has shown how inconsistent and complacent are not only the ordinary users of language but also critics and thinkers. Without transcendence, language indeed seems to be merely a set of multivocal traces of socialization and historicization of man; the analytical strain of the Enlightenment turns out to be a delusion, just as Adorno thought; the “warring forces of signification” invite endless manipulation. Contrary to his declared intentions, Derrida has shown that the great works of literature are either a means of deception which can and must be deconstructed, or they are mysteriously linked with something that transcends them. The Russian poet Nikolai Gumilev ex­pressed this dilemma in a poem entitled “The Word” (“Slovo,” 1921) with which I would like to conclude these remarks:

In those primal days when God Almighty
Bent His face over the fresh world—then
The Word made the sun stand still in heaven,
The Word tore apart the towns of men.
+++
We forget that only the word is haloed
Here where earthly cares leave us
perplexed.
In the Gospel of St. John is written
That the Word is God: that is the text.

We have put a limit to its meaning:

Only to this life, this shallow shell.
And like bees in an abandoned beehive,
Dead, deserted words have a bad smell.³³

Notes

1. Edith Hamilton, Introduction to “Parmenides,” Plato, The Collected Dialogues, edited by Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univer­sity Press, 1978), 920.
2. Jacques Maritain, Three Reformers: Luther, Descartes, Rousseau (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1970), 79.
3. Floyd Merrell, Deconstruction Reframed (West Lafay­ette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1985), passim.
4. Maritain, op. cit.,78.
5. Ibid.,66; see also Thomas Molnar, God and the Knowledge of Reality (New York: Basic Books, 1973), x.
6. Merrell, op. cit.,32–35.
7. Ibid.,10.
8. Tao Te Ching: The Way of Lao Tzu, by R. B. Blakney (New York: The New American Library), 29.
9. Herrlee G. Creel, What is Taoism? and Other Studies in Chinese Cultural History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 3.
10. Stanislas Julien, Le Um de la vole ei de la vertu [1842], tr. by Herrlee Creel, op. cit.,30.
11. Da Liu, The Tao and Chinese Culture (New York: Schocken Books, 1979), 17.
12. lbid.,18.
13. The adherents of deconstruction might invoke here Hegel’s distinction between speculative and ratio­cinative uses of language. But human beings do not compartmentalize thought in this fashion, as Karl Marx proved shortly after appropriating some of Hegel’s im­portant insights. But even without invoking this exam­ple, it can be stated that experience indicates that both uses of language mingle in human thinking about all subjects, from practical to abstract. For a distinction be­tween speculation and ratiocination see G. W. F. Hegel, “Preface,” Phenomenology of Spirit, translated by A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), es­pecially 36, 43.
14. B. L. Whorl, Language, Thought and Reality: Selected Writings, ed. Carroll (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1956), 134–59.
15. Merrell, op. cit.,118. This notwithstanding such deconstructionist theologians as Mark C. Taylor and his recent Deconstruction in Context (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986).
16. Peggy Kamuf, Fictions of Feminine Desire: Disclosures of Heloise (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1982).
17. Molnar, op. cit.,5.
18. Jacques Derrida, of Grammatology, tr. G. Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 141–64.
19. Ibid.,158.
20. Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge [1936] (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1948), 51.
21. Maritain, op cit., 70.
22. Richard Terdiman, “Deconstructing Memory: On Representing the Past and Theorizing Culture in France since the Revolution.” Diacritics (Winter 1985), 33–34.
23. Terry Eagleton, The Function of Criticism: From ‘The Spectator” to Post-Structuralism (London: Verso, 1984), 97–100; 123–24.
24. Eugene Vance, “Medievalisms and Models of Tex­tuality,” Diacritics (Fall 1985), 60.
25. Leon Trotsky, Literature and Revolution (New York, 1957), 183. Trotsky was wrong: the critics whom he had in mind very soon abandoned their “metaphysi­cal” interests and began to march to the tune of the Revolution. Eventually, both Trotsky and the critics he had criticized were repudiated by the winning faction.
26. William E. Cain, The Crisis in Criticism: Theory, Literature, and Reform in English Studies (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), 246.
27. Eric Hobsbawm, “Mass-Producing Traditions: Eu­rope, 1870–1914,” Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge U. Press, 1983), 273–79.
28. T. S. Eliot, After Strange Gods (New York: Harcourt, 1934), 26.
29. Hugh Trevor-Roper, “The Invention of Tradition: The Highland Tradition of Scotland,” Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, op. cit.,15–42.
30. Donald Pease, “J.Hillis Miller: the Other Victorian at Yale,” The Yale Critics: Deconstruction inAmerica, edited by Jonathan Arac, Wlad Godzich, Wallace Martin (Min­neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 70.
31. Paul A. Bové, “Variations on Authority: Some Deconstructive Transformations of the New Criticism,” The Yale Critics, 3.
32. The Yale Critics, 11–12, 70–71, 81–82, 181.
33. Modern Russian Poetry, translated and edited by Vladimir Markov and Merrill Sparks (Alva, Great Brit­ain: McGibbon & Kee, 1966), 245, 247.