Insight Editions · No. 58
Deconstruction
Theory and Practice
Christopher Norris
Christopher Norris introduces deconstruction through Derrida and its literary and philosophical reception, examining structuralism, textual interpretation, American criticism, and debates over truth and relativism.
A study guide to Deconstruction by Christopher Norris. Shared free for personal reading; not for sale and not endorsed by the authors or publishers. Please read and buy the original.
The Book in Brief
The argument in brief
- Roots. Structuralism and the New Criticism each sought order in the text; deconstruction turns their methods against their own closure.
- Derrida's lever. Western thought ranks speech over writing; Derrida shows the "secondary" term (writing, the supplement, différance) is already at work in the first.
- Nietzsche and Marx. Concepts are worn metaphors; Marxist "science" rests on unexamined visual tropes, a view Norris later regrets pushing so far.
- America. Yale splits into wild (Hartman, Miller), rigorous (de Man) and dissenting (Bloom) styles; Derrida spars with Searle.
- Self-correction. The Afterword and Postscript defend truth, critique and classical logic against Rorty, Fish and Baudrillard, and disown passages that fed relativist history-as-text.
The book's path: 1982 primer, then two self-corrections.
About this book
Deconstruction: Theory and Practice by Christopher Norris, 2002. This is a chapter-by-chapter study of the book, with summaries, maps, tables and diagrams; short quotations keep their page references. It is shared free for personal study, is not for sale, and is not endorsed by the author or publisher. Please read and buy the original.
Insight Editions · rajeshrmahapatra.com/insight-editions
Crisis and Criticism
De Man's sentence bristles with paradox: it calls the line between literature and criticism "delusive" and pairs rigour with unreliability. Such paradoxes neither dissolve on careful reading nor ask for faith like Christian theology; critics complain they work as "a positive technique for making trouble". Deconstruction revives the link between "crisis" and "criticism".
Two dismissals that miss the mark
Paul de Man complains that deconstruction has either been "dismissed as a harmless academic game" or "denounced as a terrorist weapon". Both reactions are understandable; both, Norris argues, are equally wide of the mark. Deconstruction is the active antithesis of everything criticism ought to be if one accepts its traditional values. Beneath the oldest conflicts of critical method there has always existed a tacit agreement: literary texts possessed meaning, and criticism sought a knowledge of that meaning with its own claims to validity. Deconstruction challenges the distinction between "literature" and "criticism" implied by those principles, and challenges the idea that criticism provides a special kind of knowledge precisely because its texts do not aspire to literary status.
Two dismissals Norris rejects; Hume's limit remains.
Derrida/Spivak on the strange status of prefaces.
Preface as deferred involvement
The Introduction anticipates tracts of argument that must be rehearsed in detail if the reader is to be convinced. Meanwhile Norris takes "ambiguous comfort" from Derrida on prefaces in Of Grammatology: they claim a summarizing power of abstracted systematic statement that denies the process of thought involved in writing, yet they also subvert the authority traditionally attached to "the text" itself. The book is therefore a preface, not a handy objective survey of method. Its applied lesson is the powerlessness of ready-made concepts to explain or delimit the activity of writing.
Norris takes "ambiguous comfort" from Derrida on prefaces: written last, placed first as authorial command, they claim a summary the text then undoes. Gayatri Spivak's preface to Of Grammatology puts it: "each act of reading 'the text' is a preface to the next". The book is itself a deferred involvement with Derrida, not an "objective" survey; its one lesson is "the powerlessness of ready-made concepts" to delimit writing.
Roots: Structuralism and New Criticism
Culler and the competent reader
Jonathan Culler's Structuralist Poetics (1975) became a set text because it is commonsensical and rejects more extreme theory. Theory, for Culler, provides a legitimating framework for insights a "competent" reader could reach anyway. He borrows loosely from Chomsky: as an innate grammar governs sentences, a "grammar" of response governs reading. But literary codes must be acquired, so competence becomes trained judgement, locating a reading "within the conventions of plausibility defined by a generalized knowledge of literature". Norris calls this structuralism at its most conservative: the text keeps stable meanings, the critic is a faithful seeker of truth. Culler's last chapter voices doubts about Derrida.
Deconstruction is "post-structuralist" because it denies that structure is objectively "there" in a text, or that meanings mirror a deep mental "set". It suspends the assumed correspondence between mind, meaning and method.
From Kant to Saussure: the prison-house of concepts
Critics call structuralism "Kantianism without the transcendental subject". Kant (1724-1804) answered Hume's scepticism by conceding that the mind cannot know the world directly, but grounding philosophy in the a priori regularities of understanding. Structuralism repeats this divorce of mind from reality. Saussure held that the sign joins signifier and signified arbitrarily and that meaning arises from differences within a system. Knowledge is structured by codes; reality is "carved up" by each language's patterns of sameness and difference (later Sapir and Whorf). Culler takes the Kantian response: relativism is checked by a reader with "a sense, however undefined, of what one is reading towards".
Kantianism without the transcendental subject.
Culler's example is William Empson's reading, in Seven Types of Ambiguity, of Arthur Waley's Chinese couplet: "Swiftly the years, beyond recall. / Solemn the stillness of this spring morning." Culler finds binary oppositions of time-scale and concludes one seeks terms to place "on a semantic or thematic axis". Like Chomsky's speaker or Kant's transcendental subject, Empson used the rules without knowing them. Culler's poetics thus makes a double prescription: reading rests on naturalised codes, and texts offer enough structural hold for it.
New Critic into structuralist?
Culler's equation of structure with competence is exactly what deconstruction challenges. Structuralism has proved no menace, as American New Criticism proved none: its devices (irony, paradox, tension) aimed not to rationalise poetry but to fence it off. W. K. Wimsatt's "verbal icon" and the "heresy of paraphrase" made the poem a sacrosanct object, distinct from the critic's prose. Both became eminently teachable disciplines.
Barthes: every metalanguage can become an object.
Philip Thody's Roland Barthes: A Conservative Estimate (1977) shows the domesticating move: a dazzling stylist hiding a decently methodical thinker. Norris replies that paradox is the root, not the ornament: "A doxa (a popular opinion) is formulated, intolerable; to free myself of it, I postulate a paradox; then this paradox turns bad... and I must seek further for a new paradox." Thody keeps the New Critical wall between literary figure and critical prose. Barthes's student who equated subjectivity with narcissism was trapped in "the old paradigm: subjectivity/objectivity".
The faith behind New Criticism
The New Critics sought in poetry a truth beyond reason, linked to Christian belief. Walter Ong ("Wit and Mystery"): the trail of wit leads to "the heart of Christian doctrine". R. P. Blackmur: "Only in analogy are the opposites identical", recalling Augustine's claim that every poem holds "some of the substance of God". Keeping criticism in rational prose protected the mystery of poetic truth. Yet Allen Tate felt the "intolerable" strain of criticism's "middle position between imagination and philosophy", and Blackmur admitted the intellect too depends on conventions.
How New Criticism's wall began to crack.
Two modes of deconstruction
In 1970 Hartman still found going beyond formalism "too hard for us", short of Hegelian absolute spirit. By the end, Norris distinguishes two modes: Hartman's and Barthes's stylistic freedom that turns interpretative style against method, and a tougher, argumentative mode led by Derrida and, in America, Paul de Man, whose readings are "rigorously argued". In weaker hands, Norris warns, deconstruction can become "a theoretical vogue as uniform and cramping as the worst New Critical dogma".
Structuralism as teachable creed
To present deconstruction as if it were a method, a system or a settled body of ideas would falsify its nature. Structuralism began as protest and was absorbed as one more method for saying new things about old texts. Culler's poetics makes structuralism commonsensical: theory legitimates insights a competent reader could reach anyway. The New Critics' "heresy of paraphrase" and Wimsatt's "verbal icon" likewise became eminently teachable; erstwhile detractors reconciled themselves to a creed that scarcely challenged the proprieties of critical discourse. The same is true of structuralism in its early, scientistic guise. Academic discourse has little to fear from a "scientific" criticism that leaves the poem's autonomy and the critic's prose intact.
From protest method to deconstruction's vigilance.
Early Barthes aimed at a full-scale science of the text modelled on Saussure and Lévi-Strauss. The aim met its own limit: style became an intimate probing of its own possibilities, frequently suggesting theoretical insights but just as often foreclosing them. When Barthes writes that concepts "come to constitute allegories, a second language, whose abstraction is diverted to fictive ends", he is already practicing the self-undoing that Norris will later call deconstruction's second mode. Thody's domesticating reading (dazzling stylist, methodical thinker underneath) is the academic move Norris rejects: paradox is the root, not the ornament.
New Critical faith and its strain
Behind New Criticism Norris finds Christian analogy. Ong's trail of wit leads to "the heart of Christian doctrine"; Blackmur recalls Augustine that every poem holds "some of the substance of God"; keeping criticism in rational prose protected the mystery of poetic truth. Yet Tate felt the "intolerable" strain of criticism's middle position between imagination and philosophy, and Blackmur admitted the intellect depends on conventions. Hartman's essay on Milton ("Adam on the Grass with Balsamum") exuberantly breaks New Critical assumptions about language, style and the place of theory. By chapter's end Norris has two modes on the table: stylistic freedom (Hartman, Barthes) and argumentative rigour (Derrida, de Man). The warning stands: in weaker hands deconstruction becomes "a theoretical vogue as uniform and cramping as the worst New Critical dogma".
Empson's couplet and the double prescription
Culler's exhibit is William Empson on Arthur Waley's Chinese couplet: "Swiftly the years, beyond recall. / Solemn the stillness of this spring morning." Culler finds binary oppositions of time-scale and concludes one seeks terms to place "on a semantic or thematic axis". Like Chomsky's speaker or Kant's transcendental subject, Empson used the rules without knowing them. Culler's poetics thus makes a double prescription: reading rests on naturalised codes, and texts offer enough structural hold. Deconstruction denies that structure is objectively "there" or that meanings mirror a deep mental "set". It suspends the assumed correspondence between mind, meaning and method.
Culler's double prescription and its suspension.
Jacques Derrida: Language Against Itself
The "ruling illusion of Western metaphysics" is that reason can dispense with language. Derrida's readings therefore resemble literary criticism more than philosophy: rhetorical analysis becomes indispensable for any discourse. This reverses a prejudice as old as Plato, who expelled the poets and set reason against rhetoric, provoking "defences" of poetry from Sidney to I. A. Richards and the New Critics.
Two ways criticism kept philosophy out
F. R. Leavis made criticism the communication of "lived" or "felt" response, guided by "relevance", "maturity" and "an open reverence before life". When René Wellek asked him for a rationale (1937), Leavis replied that theory would betray the wholeness of response. The New Critics contained philosophy differently: they translated its questions into aesthetic paradox and tension objectively "there" in the poem, a circular rhetoric that repressed rather than solved the problems. Derrida arrived in America as a liberating force, putting the critic in rivalry with the philosopher. For de Man, literature becomes "the main topic of philosophy and the model of the kind of truth to which it aspires", and philosophy "an endless reflection on its own destruction at the hands of literature".
Blindness and insight
De Man's Blindness and Insight (1971) finds in each critic a blindness inseparable from insight. The New Critics' "verbal icon" undoes itself: the ambiguities they praised to contain them turn "unitarian criticism" into "an ironic reflection on the absence of the unity it had postulated". Form is "an operative fiction", a product of the interpreter's rage for order: the critic "entered into the hermeneutic circle of interpretation, mistaking it for the organic circularity of natural processes". Since critical texts "are not scientific", the "discrepancy between meaning and assertion is a constitutive part of their logic". Criticism loses method but gains rhetorical interest.
De Man: the New Critics' blindness inside their insight.
Language, writing, différance
Structuralism rests on Saussure: language is a differential network without one-to-one links between signifier and signified (bat/cat, bag/big). He made linguistics synchronic and split speech (parole) from system (langue); structuralism extended this to every cultural code (see Terence Hawkes). Barthes even made linguistics the master-science: "we are... a civilization of the written word".
In "Linguistics and Grammatology" (Of Grammatology) Derrida fastens on Saussure's treatment of writing as derivative. Barthes had accepted the speech/system relation as "dialectical", yet his "speaking mass" metaphor still privileged speech.
From Saussure's linguistics to a grammatology.
| Speech (logocentric view) | Writing (as degraded) |
|---|---|
| Presence, living voice | Absence, lifeless trace |
| Sound and sense fused | Alien, depersonalised medium |
| Intention guaranteed | Dissemination, public drift |
| Natural, original | Supplementary, parasitic |
Derrida's "extraordinary case" is that writing is the precondition of language, writing in an enlarged sense: the "free play" or undecidability in every system, the "endless displacement of meaning". Speech already belongs to a "generalized writing" disguised by the metaphysics of presence. Saussure's phonocentrism shows in his refusal to treat hieroglyphs, algebra or formal languages: "This logocentrism, this epoch of the full speech, has always placed in parenthesis... all free reflection on the origin and status of writing."
Deconstruction is not simple reversal. Derrida does not claim graphic writing is more basic than speech; unexamined, the speech/writing opposition stays "a blind prejudice... common to the accused and the prosecutor". Structuralism was a necessary stage. Nor is "writing" a concept in a hierarchy: like "structure" it would be kidnapped by a tame methodology. Hence Derrida's shifting terms, chiefly différance, suspended between "to differ" and "to defer", its anomalous a visible only in writing, and the supplement.
Rousseau: the dangerous supplement
Rousseau's Essay on the Origin of Languages treats speech as natural and writing as a "supplement", just as civilisation corrupts nature. Derrida shows Rousseau contradicts himself: the supplement is "the root of the matter", entering all intelligible discourse. On music, Rousseau prefers Italian melody to French harmony, which entered by degeneration as "the calculus of intervals was substituted for nicety of inflection". But no music beyond a primitive cry lacks harmony; song is already "a modification of the human voice". Rousseau writes "as if evil supervened upon a good origin", as if song and speech "had not always already begun to separate themselves".
Rousseau's supplement turns against his origin myth.
Rousseau's South (passionate, vowel-rich, innocent) and North (consonantal, efficient, decadent) form a mythology of origin. "Our language... has already substituted too many articulations for too many accents... it is already eaten by writing." The result is "an originary supplement... totally unacceptable within classical logic": it marks a lost plenitude and compensates for it, nowhere present yet everywhere presupposed.
Lévi-Strauss: the writing lesson
Lévi-Strauss's structural anthropology seeks deep regularities beneath myths, sometimes an algebraic formula. Derrida reads him as heir to Saussure's phonologism and Rousseau's nostalgia. In "The Writing Lesson" (Tristes Tropiques) the anthropologist laments that writing brought the Nambikwara hierarchy, economy and "participation in a quasi-religious secret". Derrida notes, from Lévi-Strauss's own evidence, a tribe already marked "with a spectacular violence".
The evidence lies in the texts themselves, not in an outside method or a Marxist "superior knowledge". Writing is not external to language, as from Plato to Saussure; it emerges within the theme of speech. Hence Derrida's much-quoted phrase: "Il n'y a pas de hors-texte" ("There is no 'outside' to the text").
Why linguistics was the battleground
Structuralism debated the precise status of linguistics. Saussure had argued that language was but one of many semiological systems, yet in practice linguistics dictated methodological priorities. Derrida's intervention aimed to wrench structuralism away from its residual attachment to a Western metaphysics of meaning and presence. Barthes accepted the speech/system relation as dialectical, yet his "speaking mass" metaphor still privileged speech. Where Barthes accepts the paradox as part of a larger semiology, Derrida refuses simply to accept it. The operations that escape the self-consciousness of speech are "precisely those which escape... its deluded sense of the mastery of concept over language".
Derrida drives Saussure to grammatology.
It is not a question of rejecting the entire Saussurian project or denying its historical significance. Rather it is a matter of driving that project to its ultimate conclusions. Once différance is fixed, Derrida perceives the same process at work in the structured economy of differential features Saussure described as the precondition of language. The term marks both spatial difference and temporal deferral: meaning is never fully present because every sign points elsewhere and postpones arrival.
Rousseau's music and the South/North myth
Rousseau's Essay prefers Italian melody to French harmony, which entered by degeneration as "the calculus of intervals was substituted for nicety of inflection". Song is already, as Rousseau's own Dictionary of Music admits, "a kind of modification of the human voice". The South (passionate, vowel-rich, innocent) and North (consonantal, efficient, decadent) form a mythology of origin. "Our language... has already substituted too many articulations for too many accents... it is already eaten by writing." The "originary supplement" is totally unacceptable within classical logic: it marks a lost plenitude and compensates for it, nowhere present yet everywhere presupposed. The same logic governs Rousseau on education and masturbation: each "supplement" both completes nature and reveals that nature was never self-sufficient.
From Plato to the slogan
Writing is not external to language, as from Plato to Saussure; it emerges within the theme of speech. The much-quoted "Il n'y a pas de hors-texte" follows: no pure unwritten origin stands outside the play of differences. Derrida will later gloss it as "there is nothing outside context". Norris stresses that the evidence for these readings lies in the texts themselves, not in an outside method or a Marxist "superior knowledge" of production. That claim sets up the politics chapter and the American career alike.
Différance is not a concept among others
Deconstruction is not simple reversal. Derrida does not claim graphic writing is more basic than speech; unexamined, the speech/writing opposition stays "a blind prejudice... common to the accused and the prosecutor". Structuralism was a necessary stage. Nor is "writing" a concept in a hierarchy: like "structure" it would be kidnapped by a tame methodology. Hence the shifting terms, chiefly différance, suspended between "to differ" and "to defer", its anomalous a visible only in writing. Saussure's refusal to treat hieroglyphs, algebra or formal languages shows the logocentric parenthesis around "all free reflection on the origin and status of writing". Literary texts (Mallarmé, Valéry, Genet, Sollers) are often less deluded than philosophy because they acknowledge their rhetorical status; the same paradoxes run through criticism, linguistics and anthropology.
Why différance cannot harden into a method.
From Voice to Text: Derrida's Critique of Philosophy
Husserl's project
Edmund Husserl (d. 1938), founder of phenomenology, sought foundations no sceptic could doubt. He would "bracket" every assumption that might be delusion and found philosophy on the structures of experience that remain. He saw a crisis in Western thought: the hard sciences had split from interpretative fields, and a naive positivism produced logics with no grounding in reflective thought. Like Descartes, he would doubt everything doubtable, but break the "charmed circle" of consciousness by showing how the mind takes possession of experience through structured perception. The "transcendental ego" was to guarantee knowledge without lapsing into psychologism; Husserl's later texts insist ever harder that it is not the everyday empirical self.
Expression and indication
Husserl distinguishes expressive signs, alone endowed with meaning (Bedeutung) because intention "animates" them, from indicative signs, "lifeless" tokens of arbitrary sense. Derrida recognises Rousseau's pattern: life and breath on one side, death and exteriority on the other. Expression is tied to "pure logicality": logic is rebuilt from acts of consciousness that grasp their own production. Expression is the "breath" or "soul" of meaning; language its body.
The logic is "simple but devastating". Language could be self-present meaning only with total access to the thought behind it, but we cannot have "a primordial intuition of the other's lived experience". So all language is partly indicative: "Whenever the immediate and full presence of the signified is concealed, the signifier will be of an indicative nature". Tradition calls this "the process of death at work in signs"; Derrida shows it defines all language, written or spoken.
Husserl's two signs collapse into one web.
Time and the living present
In The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness (1929) Husserl makes the "living present" the point from which memory is ordered, separating retention (immediate traces) from representation (distant recall). Derrida notes that Husserl must treat the present as compounded of retentions and anticipations, never an isolated instant. The two then differ not as "perception and non-perception" but as "two modifications of non-perception". No privileged locus of consciousness controls time; a "movement of difference" inhabits "the pure actuality of the now".
Working inside metaphysics
Derrida no more "rejects" Husserl than Saussure or Lévi-Strauss; he picks texts for the rigour of their questions. Asked by Julia Kristeva (Positions) how he can dismantle metaphysics in its own language, he answered that "in every proposition or in every system of semiotic research... metaphysical presuppositions coexist with critical motifs". Every text is partly complicit; the most rigorous reading stays open to deconstruction of its own concepts.
Genesis and structure
In "Genesis and Structure" (Writing and Difference) Derrida finds Husserl caught between two valid but exclusive explanations: a genetic one, how the transcendental ego constitutes reality ("the search for the origin and the foundation of the structure"), and a structural one, "a form or function organized according to an internal legality". Husserl saw structuralism's danger early: "a certain structuralism has always been philosophy's most spontaneous gesture". Speech and Phenomena attacked origins; this essay admits both irreducible systems.
'Genesis and Structure': two irreducible orders.
"Force and Signification" adds that structuralism reflects only "the accomplished, the constituted, the constructed", and compares its results to a city laid waste by catastrophe. Derrida's aim is not to restore expressive presence but to show structure functioning as a metaphor to contain the unruly energies of meaning. Structuralism and phenomenology are locked in a reciprocal aporia: neither emerges intact, each depends on the other for its moments of maximum insight.
Merleau-Ponty and the surplus of meaning
The textbook story has structuralism grow out of phenomenology and then outgrow it. But phenomenology held that meaning is a creative excess over structure. Maurice Merleau-Ponty: we use available meanings to "follow up an intention which necessarily outstrips, modifies and in the last analysis stabilizes" them, "an excess of the signified over the signifying". In Signs (1964) he calls language "a surpassing of the signifying by the signified which it is the very virtue of the signifying to make possible".
Two approaches meet at an opening in structure.
Merleau-Ponty sees meaning on the brink of structure; Barthes sees structures producing new sense. Derrida says structuralism lives on "the difference between its promise and its practice": the practice elevates form over force; the promise survives in its self-critical strain. "What I can never understand, in a structure, is that by means of which it is not closed." Husserl shows "the principled... impossibility of closing a structural phenomenology".
Why voice mattered to Husserl
Derrida attaches such importance to freeing structuralism from Saussure's phonologism because the same privilege of voice organizes phenomenology. Husserl's "phenomenological reduction" separates the basic constitutive structures of consciousness from contingent indication. Expression seems to offer immediate presence of meaning to the speaking subject; indication is banished "to a region of exterior darkness", as remote as possible from the life-giving sources of language. Like Rousseau's feared writing, indicative signs seem to threaten the purity of expression. Derrida's pressure: "Although discourse would not be possible without an expressive core, one could almost say that the totality of speech is caught up in an indicative web."
Husserl's split undone by the indicative web.
Pharmacy: inside metaphysics, not outside it.
Plato's pharmakon and working inside
In "Plato's Pharmacy" the pharmakon is both remedy and poison: writing helps memory and destroys living memory. Derrida does not claim to step outside metaphysics into a pure science of writing. To pursue the workings of rhetoric inside philosophy is to glimpse the possibility of reversing philosophy's age-old repression of writing, giving rise to "a writing within which philosophy is inscribed as a place within a system which it does not command". Mostly deconstruction must "bore from within", using philosophy's own concepts. The pressure brought to bear can be twisted against a text's intentions without wholly undermining the project's seriousness: that is the difference between deconstruction and mere dismissal.
Genesis, structure and Merleau-Ponty's surplus
"Genesis and Structure" shows Husserl torn between genetic accounts of meaning's origin and structural accounts of its conditions. Ideas of "origin" and "foundation" are always already inscribed in a differential structure. Merleau-Ponty's theme of the creative or intentional "surplus" in meaning explains the rift between structuralism and phenomenology: meaning exceeds any code that would close it, yet is never a pure act of sovereign consciousness. The Matisse brushstroke case makes the point concrete: twenty unformulated conditions define a line that exists only through the intention to paint a picture "which did not yet exist". By deconstructing the play of concept and metaphor behind these two philosophies, Derrida arrives at his own formulation of those surplus problems.
Nietzsche: Philosophy and Deconstruction
Some brand Nietzsche a precursor of Nazism; Norris grants the charge rests on a partial reading promoted by followers, and that his "doctrinaire mythology" earned guilt by association. "Influence" is the wrong word: Derrida shows writing exceeding the proprietary claims of the history of ideas. Nietzsche offers a style sceptical of all truth claims, his own included, yet he too stays partly a prisoner of the conventions he questions; to break with them entirely risks madness (his last sixteen years produced only jottings).
Truth as a marching army of metaphors
Philosophers, Nietzsche argued, are dupes of a "truth" kept alive by effacing the metaphors that produced it. Reason crushed philosophy's imaginative life as it destroyed the Dionysian element in Greek tragedy; Socrates stands with Christ in his inverted pantheon as "the pale destroyer".
The view that language is radically metaphorical has precedents: the German Romantics, Coleridge, and I. A. Richards (The Philosophy of Rhetoric, 1936): "Thought is metaphoric." Richards still hopes to "translate more of our skill into discussable science", a metalanguage outside figure. His earlier "emotive" theory of poetry, taken up by the New Critics, fixed a gulf between poetry and knowledge. Derrida, following Nietzsche, treats "science" as part of reason's repressive ideology, born of the Greek equation of truth and logic. "Structure, Sign and Play" sets Lévi-Strauss's refuge in structure against "the Nietzschean affirmation... of the play of the world and of the innocence of becoming".
Nietzsche's genealogy of truth from metaphor.
Plato, the sophists and a motorcycle
Nietzsche's genealogy traces philosophy to Socratic dialectic, which he calls a rhetorical ploy that monopolised reason. In the Gorgias Socrates shows that rhetoric lacks reason and moral self-knowledge; Nietzsche replies that Socrates is himself a wily rhetorician. Truth is the honorific title of the argument that wins. The sophist comes closer to wisdom by admitting that thought is bound to rhetoric.
Phaedrus returns to the pre-Socratics, who had the courage of their metaphors: Thales' water, Anaximenes' air, Heraclitus' fire. "Everything is analogy", dialectic included; the dialectician simply fails to notice.
Writing and philosophy
Plato's Phaedrus holds his fiercest attack on writing: presence versus absence, living speech versus the dead letter. Historians explain this by writing's novelty in Greece; Derrida finds a self-perpetuating metaphysics of presence. F. M. Cornford (Before and After Socrates, 1932) praises sages whose truth passes "by the example of their lives, not by any record they bequeath in writing", knowing "the letter is destined to kill".
Plato separates "good" writing, inscribed on the soul by reason, from "bad" literal script. The figurative writing becomes more real than the literal, a "simulated immediacy". Theology seconds this: God's writing on the soul against fallen inscriptions; "the intelligible face of the sign remains turned toward the word and the face of God". Derrida's task is not to invert literal and figurative but to determine "the 'literal' meaning of writing as metaphoricity itself". The conclusion: there is no literal meaning. Even Saussure's bar between signifier and signified keeps the Platonic split of sensible and intelligible.
Plato's two writings and Derrida's reversal.
Beyond interpretation?
Nietzsche refuses to specify terms for his own correct interpretation. His many styles and paradoxes, his "dance of the pen", hold reading at the level where signification has not congealed into concept. That raises a puzzle for Derrida: how can deconstruction find a hold on texts that already call for an end to interpretation?
Heidegger, Spurs and the umbrella
Spurs (1979) answers with "fantastical juggling", images and even faked etymologies, aimed at Heidegger's reading of Nietzsche. Heidegger (1889-1976) sought a hermeneutic return to pre-Socratic thought, distinguishing Being from beings, and read Nietzsche as the last metaphysician, reason up against its limits. Derrida borrows Heidegger's device of writing words sous rature (crossed out), as in "the sign is that ill-named thing". But Heidegger grounds authentic thought in a moment of Being or plenitude before discourse, another craving for origins. He is thus Derrida's "nearest tactical ally" and "major modern antagonist".
Two readings of Nietzsche, two ends.
Derrida links Nietzsche's image of Woman ("her seductive distance... the ever-veiled promise") to writing as the non-truth of philosophy. Given Nietzsche's misogyny ("Don't forget to take your whip"), feminists and philosophers will be baffled, Norris admits. Barthes's A Lover's Discourse (1979) likewise eroticises language with Nietzsche as a constant source, but in a glancing, impressionistic way; Derrida engages the metaphors strenuously. With Marx, Nietzsche stands among the great demythologisers; between them they mark out post-structuralism's rival claims.
Nietzsche against the tyranny of reason
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) remains for most modern philosophers what he was for his contemporaries: a scandal wrapped in layered styles. Only by suppressing its origins in metaphor had philosophy, from Plato to the present, maintained the sway of a tyrannizing reason. Truth becomes "a mobile marching army of metaphors, metonymies and anthropomorphisms... coins which have their obverse effaced". Concepts raise the contingent into the necessary "by a constant (though unrecognized) leverage of tropes". Structuralism in its early, scientistic guise still sought a truth beyond the mazy detours of language; Nietzsche refuses that escape.
Truth as mobile army of metaphors.
Gorgias, Phaedrus and the service manual
In Plato's Gorgias, dialectic wins by placing questions with strategic skill and forcing the opponent into weakness. Pirsig's narrator "Phaedrus" finds Plato and Aristotle misrepresenting the sophists: Socrates and Plato do "that which they accuse the Sophists of doing". "Dialectic, which is the parent of logic, came itself from rhetoric." Aristotle reduced rhetoric to classified parts, as a service manual reduces a motorcycle. The novel never names Nietzsche, though its manner of engaging philosophic issues is everywhere prompted by a Nietzschean spirit of critique. Conviction among the great philosophers, Nietzsche notes elsewhere, is carried to posterity "by the example of their lives, not by any record they bequeath in writing".
Spurs, the umbrella and sous rature
Spurs takes aim less at Nietzsche than at Heidegger's influential reading, which Derrida regards as both exemplary and limiting. Heidegger places Nietzsche in "a hermeneutic space of the question of truth (of Being)" as the last metaphysician. Derrida reads the notebook line "I have forgotten my umbrella" as structurally liberated from intention: its context is irretrievable, and play with possible meanings concludes that meaning may be absent. The sexual question "suspends the decidable opposition of true and non-true"; Heidegger's reading "idles offshore". Marks of erasure (sous rature) acknowledge both the inadequacy of a concept and the necessity of using it: "the sign is that ill-named thing, the only one, that escapes the instituting question of philosophy".
Signifier/signified under erasure
Even Saussure's cardinal distinction between signifier and signified, for all its radical potential, remains open to Nietzschean suspicion once concepts are seen as worn metaphors. Derrida's marks of erasure acknowledge both inadequacy and necessity. Beyond interpretation, the question is whether a reading can escape the will to truth entirely; Spurs answers by suspending decidable opposition rather than by announcing a new method. Norris already warns that the ludic Nietzsche can become an evasion of paternal law rather than a critique of it.
Cardinal distinction still open to tropological doubt.
Between Marx and Nietzsche: The Politics of Deconstruction
The Positions interview
In Positions (1981), Jean-Louis Houdebine and Guy Scarpetta of Tel Quel press Derrida to ally différance with Marxist contradiction. Derrida answers that Marx and Lenin have yet to be read rigorously, not by seeking "a finished signified beneath a textual surface" but by tracing the heterogeneity of texts that break with Hegel yet remain governed by metaphysical themes. Dialectical materialism is "shot through with metaphors disguised as concepts"; one must investigate "all the sediments deposited [in it] by the history of metaphysics".
Derrida on Hegel
Derrida's long silence on Marx was a strategic postponement. His chapter on Hegel in Writing and Difference, read through Georges Bataille, does not mention Marx. Hegel's "restricted economy" is invaded by a "general economy" of writing: "Since no logic governs... because logic is an interpretation, Hegel's own interpretation can be reinterpreted, against him." Hegelian history can be read "from left to right or from right to left, as a reactionary movement or as a revolutionary movement, or both at once". Elsewhere Derrida promises "the premises for a non-Marxist reading of philosophy as ideology".
Nietzsche first brought such scepticism to Hegel: even Aristotle's laws of logic express our present inability to think beyond them, and concepts raise the contingent into the necessary "by a constant (though unrecognized) leverage of tropes". Derrida challenges Hegel's "ontological unity of method and historicity". This echoes Lévi-Strauss's "History and Dialectic" against Sartre: history is shifting configurations ("Events which are significant for one code are no longer so for another"), and Sartre's "totalization" lends events "a spurious intelligibility". Lévi-Strauss would "socialize the Cogito" rather than ground history in a sovereign consciousness, and he treats historical knowledge as one code among others, with no privileged claim to totality. Derrida pushes further: if dialectic itself is an interpretation, the Hegelian-Marxist idea of history as a necessary, self-unfolding process loses its foundation. Norris notes the danger and the gain together: the argument frees Marxism from teleology, but it can also seem to dissolve history into reversible readings.
Derrida on Hegel: dialectic undone by writing.
Jameson and Eagleton
Fredric Jameson treats interpretation as perpetual "transcoding" and hopes structuralism will "reopen text and analytic process alike to all the winds of history", loose phrasing after tight argument. Terry Eagleton sees that an infinitely plural text resists Marxist criticism. In Criticism and Ideology (1976) he attacks Tel Quel's libertarian textualism as "a mirror-image of bourgeois social relations" and contrasts the "taken-for-granted" post-atheism of Marx with the "always-to-be-validated" post-atheism of Nietzsche, which keeps every value in question.
Eagleton's ladder of light, read as metaphor.
Nietzsche contra Marx?
Jameson and Eagleton are opposite faces of one dilemma: Jameson dissolves history into free play, leaving method an optional gesture; Eagleton claims a knowledge beyond rhetoric that criticism cannot reach "in other than figurative terms". Althusserian Marxism is a form of deconstruction that halts where science can extract ideology's hidden message. Once criticism enters the labyrinth, it leads back to Nietzsche rather than Marx: "a lesson in perpetual self-defeat", but more rigorous than "the compromise assurances of post-structuralist Marxism". Pierre Macherey grants that "the real, as it is formulated in the discourse of the work, is always arbitrary", yet still imagines a critical science that sees through all textual constraint (see Catherine Belsey, Critical Practice, 1980). Belsey herself concedes that "there is no metalanguage", yet still hopes theory can expose the "classic realist text" from outside. Each version of post-structuralist Marxism stops at the point where its own discourse would come under suspicion, and Norris reads this halt as a failure of nerve rather than a principled limit.
Foucault, Mehlman and Said
Michel Foucault goes furthest in drawing Nietzsche's lessons for history: historical consciousness wears a mask of neutrality, but its forms are "aspects of the will to knowledge: instinct, passion, the inquisitor's devotion, cruel subtlety, and malice". His "dissociating view" shatters "the unity of man's being", "risking the destruction of the subject who seeks knowledge".
One Marx text, two deconstructive readings.
Foucault's essay on Deleuze contrasts dialectic's categories, which "guarantee the objectivity and operation of concepts", with repetition that "constantly returns to the same position". This does not condemn theory to self-occupied abstraction: texts and strategies compete for domination in a field no single method governs. Said's Orientalism (1978) shows the practical use: exposing the ethnocentric metaphors of scholars who made "the Orient" lazy, wily and irrational is a challenge on rhetorical ground, not a science unmasking ideology. Texts refuse "a hermetic, Alexandrian textual universe"; novelists show an "unwillingness to cede control over the text".
Strategic silence and Hegel via Bataille
Derrida's long silence on Marx was a strategic postponement, not indifference. His chapter on Hegel in Writing and Difference, read through Georges Bataille, never names Marx yet prepares the ground: Hegel's "restricted economy" is invaded by a "general economy" of writing. "Since no logic governs... because logic is an interpretation, Hegel's own interpretation can be reinterpreted, against him." Hegelian history can be read "from left to right or from right to left, as a reactionary movement or as a revolutionary movement, or both at once". Elsewhere Derrida promises "the premises for a non-Marxist reading of philosophy as ideology".
Strategic silence on Marx, then worldly return.
Politics chapter: two Marxist poles and Said's exit.
Transcoding, pluralism and the halt
Jameson treats interpretation as perpetual "transcoding" and hopes structuralism will "reopen text and analytic process alike to all the winds of history", loose phrasing after tight argument. Eagleton attacks Tel Quel's libertarian textualism as "a mirror-image of bourgeois social relations" and contrasts Marx's "taken-for-granted" post-atheism with Nietzsche's "always-to-be-validated" post-atheism. Althusserian Marxism becomes a form of deconstruction that halts where science can extract ideology's hidden message. Macherey grants that "the real, as it is formulated in the discourse of the work, is always arbitrary", yet still imagines a critical science that sees through textual constraint. Belsey concedes "there is no metalanguage" yet hopes theory can expose the "classic realist text" from outside. Each version stops where its own discourse would come under suspicion: Norris reads the halt as a failure of nerve.
Foucault's dissociating view and Said's worldly text
Foucault draws Nietzsche's lessons furthest for history: historical consciousness wears a mask of neutrality, but its forms are "aspects of the will to knowledge: instinct, passion, the inquisitor's devotion, cruel subtlety, and malice". His "dissociating view" shatters "the unity of man's being". On Deleuze he contrasts dialectic's categories, which "guarantee the objectivity and operation of concepts", with repetition that "constantly returns to the same position". Texts and strategies compete for domination in a field no single method governs. Said's Orientalism (1978) shows the practical use: exposing ethnocentric metaphors is a challenge on rhetorical ground, not a science unmasking ideology from outside. Novelists show an "unwillingness to cede control over the text"; texts refuse "a hermetic, Alexandrian textual universe".
The American Connection
Derrida answered disciples and opponents with "prolix and mind-wrenching texts designed for translation"; in some the play "seems to outrun any content of serious argument". Yet his most radical effect may be to change what counts as "serious" criticism. Institutionally, Yale and Johns Hopkins spread deconstruction in its textual, largely apolitical form; the Marxist challenge came from outside until Fredric Jameson joined Yale. Derrida himself warned that deconstruction "always in a certain way falls prey to its own work", and "one should be able to formalize its rules". Much American enthusiasm rests on the promise of free play untrammelled by rules.
| Name | Mode | Signature move | Norris's verdict |
|---|---|---|---|
| Geoffrey Hartman | Wild, "Skywriter" | Criticism crosses into literature | Circles formalism's fringes |
| J. Hillis Miller | Wild, etymological | "The Critic as Host" | Absolves the critic of limits |
| Paul de Man | Rigorous, "canny" | Rhetoric versus grammar; performative | Closest to early Derrida |
| Harold Bloom | Dissenting, prophetic | Misprision of strong poets | Halts deconstruction at the will |
Hartman: deconstruction on the wild side
Geoffrey Hartman opens "The Interpreter: A Self-Analysis" with "I have a superiority complex vis-à-vis other critics, and an inferiority complex vis-à-vis art." Origins are delusive and texts belated, so the critic should join "the dance of meaning" with a Nietzschean swagger: "Longinus is studied as seriously as the sublime texts he comments on; Jacques Derrida on Rousseau almost as interestingly as Rousseau." "Writing is living in the secondary, knowing it is the secondary."
Criticism in the Wilderness (1980) attacks "the Arnoldian concordat" (criticism as handmaid), handed down through Eliot as a British code of manners, and seeks an American voice through Heidegger, Derrida and Benjamin. Hartman defends Carlyle's rant against Arnold, sets Wilde's "The Critic as Artist" beside Nietzsche, and mocks a "Common Sense" school against the "Skywriters" who march under Hegel's banner. It is "not a matter of 'knowing' Derrida or Heidegger" but of steeping oneself in their corpus. Norris's judgement: Hartman "frolics in the aftermath" of deconstruction's rigour; his Hamlet-style close ("stand, and unfold yourself") stays "round and about" formalism's fringes rather than beyond them.
The Yale field: three responses to Derrida.
Hillis Miller: host and parasite
J. Hillis Miller's "The Critic as Host" (1977) unpicks the twin etymologies of "host" and "parasite" until the text is as parasitic as the critic, answering M. H. Abrams's charge that deconstruction is parasitic on "normal" readings: the norm contains its deviations. Miller came from the Geneva School (Poulet, Starobinski, Richard, Rousset), which sought "a coincidence of the mind of the critic and the mind of the author". That Romantic dream of communion (Wordsworth's "spots of time") gave way in Thomas Hardy: Distance and Desire (1970) to language as "a medium within which he already dwells", and the critic adding his weaving to "the Penelope's web of the text". If interpretation is endless, the critic is absolved of responsibility for limiting it.
W. K. Wimsatt saw the danger in "Battering the Object" (1970), calling it the "personalist heresy" and enlisting Jakobson's definition of poetic language ("projects the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection onto the axis of combination") for poetic autonomy, proof of the kinship between New Criticism and classic structuralism.
Paul de Man: rhetoric and reason
Hartman split Yale into "canny" and "uncanny" critics; de Man is uncanny in his results and canniest in argument. "Critics' moments of greatest blindness with regard to their own critical assumptions are also the moments at which they achieve their greatest insights." "The rhetoric of crisis states its own truth in the mode of error."
Allegories of Reading (1979) began as history and became a theory of reading. On Proust's passage about reading in Swann's Way, de Man shows images of inward contemplation crowded by outside sensations, a "hidden system of relays" that reconciles inner and outer. Metaphor seems to unify, yet "there is no limit to what tropes can get away with", and Proust's epiphanies dissolve into metonymic detail. The reading is "unthinkable", de Man admits, by a logic "dominated by truth and error", yet figurative power commands our provisional assent to the "totalizing world" Proust's metaphors create. Earlier, in Blindness and Insight, de Man had turned the same tools on the American New Critics: their organic metaphors of the poem as a living, self-sufficient unity were undone by their own practice, which kept discovering irony and ambiguity that no organic whole could contain. In effect the New Critics deconstructed their own theory, finding the disunity it denied.
De Man reverses metaphor's priority over metonymy.
De Man reads Rilke's "pure figuration" as sustained "only at the cost of a subterfuge". The reader chooses between deconstruction and a naive reading that yields to "a normative pathos or ethical coercion". Frank Lentricchia (1980) detects Sartrean bad faith turned into rhetoric. But de Man's Nietzsche shows that critique must itself persuade: it is "structured as rhetoric", and Nietzsche "advocates the use of epistemologically rigorous methods as the only possible means to reflect on the limitations of those methods".
Deconstruction at the limit
Against Derrida, de Man argued in Blindness and Insight that a text contains its own deconstructive reading. Persuasive rhetoric finally escapes deconstruction: "A statement of mistrust is neither true nor false: it is rather in the nature of a permanent hypothesis." On the Social Contract, the State as entity (État) and as principle of action (Souverain) mirrors the constative/performative split. In the Confessions, excuses threaten to "exculpate the confessor, thus making the confession... redundant", and "Rousseau's text... prefers being suspected of lie and slander rather than of innocently lacking sense". Language "dissociates the cognition from the act"; we try only to be "as rigorous a reader as the author had to be".
Austin, Searle and Limited Inc
J. L. Austin distinguished performatives (promising, naming, marrying) from constatives, with "felicity" conditions of sincerity, form and context; jokes, stage speech and quotation are "etiolated" or "parasitic". In "Signature Event Context" Derrida argues that performatives work only through iterability, transfer across contexts: is not what Austin excludes "the determined modification of a general citationality... without which there would not even be a 'successful' speech-act?" Signatures too depend on repetition and so lie open to forgery.
Speech acts: the Austin-Derrida-Searle triangle.
Derrida's piece on Shelley's "The Triumph of Life" in Deconstruction and Criticism (1979), the Yale manifesto, barely touches the poem, crossing it with Blanchot's L'Arrêt de mort and running a footnote to the translator the length of the text. Here Derrida writes more like Hartman and Miller than de Man; American debate drew him toward the ludic.
Harold Bloom: the troper, not the trope
Harold Bloom began with Shelley (1959), defending him against Eliot, Tate and T. E. Hulme's "spilt religion", using Martin Buber's "I-thou". The Anxiety of Influence (1973) makes literary history an Oedipal "family romance": strong poets misread ("misprision") their precursors through defensive tropes and "revisionary ratios". Norris notes Bloom never asks how this applies to women poets. His tradition is "Protestant, radical and Miltonic-Romantic" (Spenser, Milton, Blake, Shelley, Lawrence, Yeats, and through Emerson, Wallace Stevens) against Eliot's "Catholic, conservative and... classical" line. Kabbalah and Criticism (1975) and Poetry and Repression (1976) heighten the esoteric tone.
Bloom keeps a will behind the trope.
Bloom shares deconstruction's rejection of the self-possessed poet and of fixed origins, but halts it to keep "a working-space of presence" for the strong imagination. Kabbalah, where "all language is nothing but semantic tension raised to apocalyptic pitch", answers both the New Critics' sealed icon and deconstruction's neutral intertextuality. Even Hartman worries that loosening "book-centeredness" risks homogenising literature with philosophy, and finds Derrida's citations "a highly frustrating clair-obscur". Bloom and de Man reach similar conclusions from opposite premises: both oppose a facile use of deconstruction.
Arrival at the right moment
Deconstruction arrived in America at just the right moment for critics like Hartman who had begun to fret under New Critical constraints. It offered criticism free to explore stylistic possibilities without a strict demarcation between creative and critical writing. Hartman often taxes patience with virtuoso style and uses interpretative problems as a sounding-board for private struggles; all the same, his writing conveys the exhilarating spirit Derrida's influence brought. He and Miller have been readiest to follow Derrida's ideas to the limit of interpretative freedom. Norris's judgment hardens: Hartman's impressionistic style remains fixed at a level of self-occupied rhetorical juggling that never really breaks with the old antinomies of formalist dogma. His criticism moves not so much "beyond formalism" as round and about its ambiguous fringes.
Wild-side freedom that never quite exits formalism.
Miller from Geneva to the endless web
During the sixties and early seventies Miller was much influenced by the Geneva School (Poulet, Starobinski, Richard, Rousset). Poulet and colleagues thought of criticism as beginning and ending in "a coincidence of the mind of the critic and the mind of the author", recreating "the exact tone" that persists through a writer's work. For Miller this was a welcome break with American formalism and an alternative to Freudian and Marxist methods that had not yet overturned New Criticism's pedagogic rule. The Romantic dream of communion (Wordsworth's "spots of time") gave way in Thomas Hardy: Distance and Desire (1970) to language as "a medium within which he already dwells", the critic adding his weaving to "the Penelope's web of the text". If interpretation is endless, the critic is absolved of responsibility for limiting it. Wimsatt saw the danger as the "personalist heresy" and enlisted Jakobson's definition of poetic language for poetic autonomy, proof of the kinship between New Criticism and classic structuralism.
De Man: from history to a theory of reading
Allegories of Reading (1979) began as history and became a theory of reading. On Proust's reading scene in Swann's Way, images of inward contemplation are crowded by outside sensations, a "hidden system of relays" that reconciles inner and outer. Metaphor seems to unify, yet "there is no limit to what tropes can get away with"; Proust's epiphanies dissolve into metonymic detail. The reading is "unthinkable" by a logic "dominated by truth and error", yet figurative power commands provisional assent to the "totalizing world" Proust's metaphors create. Earlier, in Blindness and Insight, de Man turned the same tools on the American New Critics: their organic metaphors of the poem as living unity were undone by their own practice, which kept discovering irony and ambiguity no organic whole could contain. In effect the New Critics deconstructed their own theory.
De Man: New Critics undo their own theory.
On Rilke, "pure figuration" is sustained "only at the cost of a subterfuge". The reader chooses between deconstruction and a naive reading that yields to "a normative pathos or ethical coercion". Lentricchia (1980) detects Sartrean bad faith turned into rhetoric. But de Man's Nietzsche shows that critique must itself persuade: it is "structured as rhetoric", and Nietzsche "advocates the use of epistemologically rigorous methods as the only possible means to reflect on the limitations of those methods". Against Derrida, de Man argued that a text contains its own deconstructive reading. Persuasive rhetoric finally escapes deconstruction: "A statement of mistrust is neither true nor false: it is rather in the nature of a permanent hypothesis."
Contract, Confessions and the performative limit
On the Social Contract, the State as entity (État) and as principle of action (Souverain) mirrors the constative/performative split. In the Confessions, excuses threaten to "exculpate the confessor, thus making the confession... redundant", and "Rousseau's text... prefers being suspected of lie and slander rather than of innocently lacking sense". Language "dissociates the cognition from the act"; we try only to be "as rigorous a reader as the author had to be". Once embarked on his narrative, Rousseau is caught in the very structure of excuse that confession was meant to close.
Speech acts: Austin's exclusions and Derrida's reply
According to Austin, language serves purposes not all accountable as statements of fact. Performatives may be explicitly marked ("I hereby declare...") or depend on context. What sets them apart is "felicity": sincerity, form and context. Jokes, stage speech and quotation are "etiolated" or "parasitic". Derrida's "Signature Event Context" asks whether what Austin excludes is not "the determined modification of a general citationality... without which there would not even be a 'successful' speech-act". Signatures confer authenticity that depends on repetition, on capacity for being detached from "the present and singular intention" of their production, and so lie open to forgery. Searle replies that iterability is "a necessary condition of the forms of intentionality" in speech acts, and that "Derrida's Austin... bears almost no relation to the original". Derrida's rejoinder quotes nearly all of Searle, renames him "SARL", and asks whether a speech-act theorist claiming universal truths can hold copyright. The exchange shows Derrida absorbing more than a little of the ludic propensity of his American disciples (de Man excepted).
Bloom's family romance and the will
Bloom began with Shelley (1959), defending him against Eliot, Tate and Hulme's "spilt religion", using Buber's "I-thou". The Anxiety of Influence (1973) makes literary history an Oedipal "family romance": strong poets misread precursors through defensive tropes and "revisionary ratios". Norris notes Bloom never asks how this applies to women poets. His tradition is "Protestant, radical and Miltonic-Romantic" against Eliot's Catholic, conservative, classical line. Kabbalah and Criticism and Poetry and Repression heighten the esoteric tone. In the coda to Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate (1977) Bloom calls for rhetoric "re-entering the space of the will-to-persuasion" against "serene linguistic nihilism". If language is a species of metaphor, a "figure of figures", then it is up to the strong-willed interpreter to assert the possibility of meaning. Kabbalah, where "all language is nothing but semantic tension raised to apocalyptic pitch", answers both the New Critics' sealed icon and deconstruction's neutral intertextuality. Even Hartman worries that loosening "book-centeredness" risks homogenising literature with philosophy. Bloom and de Man reach similar conclusions from opposite premises: both oppose a facile use of deconstruction.
Triumph of Life and the ludic pull
Derrida's piece on Shelley's "The Triumph of Life" in Deconstruction and Criticism (1979), the Yale manifesto, barely touches the poem, crossing it with Blanchot's L'Arrêt de mort and running a footnote to the translator the length of the text. Here Derrida writes more like Hartman and Miller than de Man; American debate drew him toward the ludic. Norris treats this as evidence of a tactical-cultural shift, not as the essence of deconstruction. The Searle rejoinder, with its mock-solemn games and renaming, indulges Yale taste for verbal jousting while still pressing a serious claim about iterability and copyright.
American debate pulls Derrida toward play.
Conclusion: Dissenting Voices
Some critics think Bloom yields hostages where a direct offensive is needed; Murray Krieger (1979) tries to coax deconstruction down by likening it to New Criticism. More serious objections hold that scepticism is self-refuting: by what privilege are the sceptic's own arguments exempt (M. H. Abrams, 1978)? Deconstructors expect careful reading while denying language's power to secure it, open to what Jürgen Habermas calls the "transcendental tu quoque".
Two traditions that never meet
Richard Rorty's "Philosophy as a Kind of Writing" (1978) describes two rival traditions: philosophy as rational dialogue seeking communicable truth, with scepticism only clearing error, and philosophy as writing, raiding the mainstream with paradox and style. Today the line falls between Anglo-American common sense and the continental strain from Hegel through Nietzsche to the French. They do not truly compete; their clashes are chance encounters, as Derrida ends the Searle exchange: "Will it have taken place, this time? Quite?"
Rorty's two traditions and the tu quoque.
Wittgenstein and Graff
Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) abandoned the picture theory of meaning for language games (1953): problems arise from expecting language to mirror the world, so scepticism is a misplaced scruple from a false epistemology. Saussure's gap between signifier and signified looks paradoxical only if one expects direct reference. Sceptics are driven into bewilderment by failing to notice the variety of possible "fits" between language, logic and reality. On this view the appeal to ordinary language, with its tacit sanctions, is a saner way to live with the arbitrary sign. Structuralist attacks on "realist" fiction (Barthes among others) seemed to assume readers could not tell verisimilitude from reportage, forgetting that fiction has always known its own fictionality. A Wittgensteinian would reject readings like Barthes's S/Z as "perverse and myopic" about how language adapts to narrative convention.
Graff takes a flatly moralistic line: deconstruction is "textual fiddling while Rome burns", sharing with the New Criticism a sophisticated escapism that denies literature power over real experience. Modernism began (Eliot, Joyce) as a protest against realist monopoly and hardened into an institutional escape-route; the same drift appears in the postmodern fiction of Thomas Pynchon and Donald Barthelme. The trouble is that Graff lumps his opponents together as enemies of reason without engaging their case.
Gerald Graff's Literature Against Itself (1979) uses this to attack deconstruction, taking Frank Kermode (The Sense of an Ending) to task for last-ditch manoeuvres, yet arguing like Kermode. Wittgenstein's "if you tried to doubt everything you would not get as far as doubting anything. The game of doubting itself presupposes certainty" returns argument to flat common sense; explaining scepticism historically (New Critics back to Kant) does not dispose of its puzzles. Graff says Barthelme's stories are trapped in artifice "though... this very strategy itself makes a statement": "one or the other, but surely not both". The result is "a desperate moral imperative" rather than a critique.
Narrative causality and the double reading.
Why deconstruction will last
"Deconstructionist theory can only be as useful and enlightening as the mind that puts it to work." Opponents such as Denis Donoghue (The Sovereign Ghost, 1976) and Krieger defend poetic presence and imagination against Derrida's supposed nihilism; neither answers Derrida, but both show the unsettling power of his texts. Deconstruction has staked out new ground for the old quarrel between literature and philosophy; analysis has never been pressed so far, and criticism has never shown such intellectual and stylistic courage. To ignore that claim is to mistake it for "a short-lived swing of literary-critical fashion".
Bloom as opponent from within
Bloom sets up as the opponent from within, meeting the deconstructors point for point on rhetorical ground of their own choosing. He thinks deconstruction stops short of the will that tropes. Norris's larger point is that the tu quoque ("you too use language") has little force against de Man or Derrida, who earned their scepticism through long reading. Disciples who pick up free play ready-made turn deconstruction into "an ineffectual gesture". Thought breaks with its presuppositions only by constantly rehearsing that break (the lesson of Of Grammatology).
Why ready-made deconstruction fails Norris's test.
Dissenting voices misread suspension as denial.
Rorty's two traditions
Richard Rorty treats Continental and Analytic philosophy as traditions that never really meet. To see them as locked in dispute, or as competing for the same objective, is according to Rorty a plain misapprehension. Their sporadic skirmishes (Searle versus Derrida) are misread as deep conflict. Norris grants the descriptive force of the split but refuses the conclusion that philosophy should become merely "a kind of writing". The later Afterword and Postscript will make this refusal the book's second spine.
Graff's dead-end and the lasting claim
Gerald Graff mistakes deconstruction for a simple denial that language communicates. His line of argument reaches a dead-end where he simply ignores, rather than thinking through, the issues raised. Deconstruction does not deny communication; it suspends that view to see "what happens when the writs of convention no longer run". The Daniel Deronda "double reading" case shows how claimed paradoxes can be category mistakes already available to structuralism's story/plot distinction. Norris closes the 1982 book predicting that deconstruction will last where it retains the argumentative power of Derrida or de Man at their best, and fade where it becomes routine ingenuity. That diagnosis largely held as American deconstruction became a reading-machine, then yielded to New Historicism and cultural studies.
Further Thoughts on Deconstruction, Postmodernism and the Politics of Theory
Hostile usage makes "deconstruct" mean taking things apart "in a spirit of game-playing nihilist abandon", a symptom of the permissive 1960s, relativism and canon revision. A milder version treats it as a middle-voice verb: the critic actively hunts contradictions, or the texts themselves undo naive readings and criticism keeps track, avoiding complicity with a logocentrism that runs (in Eagleton's phrase) "from Plato to Nato". Either way, the readings of Derrida and de Man bear no resemblance to "out-and-out hermeneutic licence". Norris even admits that campus novels and accessible primers, his own included, fed the vogue.
Rigour versus the wild side, revisited
Reviewers objected to the book's split between rigorous (Derrida, de Man) and wild (Hartman) deconstruction, which seemed to divide Derrida's own work into argued texts (Speech and Phenomena, Margins of Philosophy) and playful ones. One cannot sort Glas, Derrida's commentary on Hegel and Genet, into philosophical content and textual play. Derrida is most successful in drawing out "the logic of the supplement" exactly where his readings are most rigorous: "White Mythology", "Plato's Pharmacy", "The Double Session". Even so, his achievement must be judged "against the highest standards of philosophical accountability".
White Mythology properly read
Norris wishes he had pressed further on "White Mythology". Following Nietzsche up to a point, Derrida shows that every philosophical concept, including "concept", traces back to sublimated metaphor: "the entire philosophical delimitation of metaphor already lends itself to be constructed and worked by 'metaphors'". But the argument "comes back like a boomerang" for literary critics who use it to cut philosophers down: one cannot discuss metaphor without a concept of metaphor already worked out by philosophy. "Each time that a rhetoric defines metaphor, not only is a philosophy implied, but also a conceptual network in which philosophy itself has been constituted." The question "can these defining tropes... still be called metaphors?" is strictly undecidable.
White Mythology: neither side wins.
Derrida's Afterword to Limited Inc
The standard account of the Searle exchange, which Norris's own Chapter 6 promoted, treated it as a farcical non-encounter. That reading did harm: it let analytic philosophers dismiss Derrida unread, and let literary critics dismiss philosophy. In "Afterword: Toward an Ethic of Discussion" (1989) Derrida insists that his Austin essay exposed real difficulties; that Searle misread him; that Searle plays fast and loose with distinctions; and that his own reading of Austin is more rigorous.
Searle had charged Derrida with rigid binary thinking: "unless a distinction can be made rigorous and precise, it isn't really a distinction at all". Derrida turns this round: if Searle drops the axiom, "to each word will have to be added 'a little', 'more or less', 'up to a certain point'", and his whole theory collapses into "empiricist confusion". Deconstruction respects philosophy's exigencies up to its limits, where aporias and "unthought axiomatics" show. Austin himself resembles Derrida more than Searle, resisting the urge to sort speech acts into proper and parasitical (see Shoshana Felman, 1983; Henry Staten on Wittgenstein, 1984). Norris compares himself to Kermode's man offering cigarettes in no-man's-land and shot at by both sides: analytic philosophers, traditionalist critics, textualist purists and postmodernists.
Limited Inc (1989): rigour, not play.
Against the postmodern-pragmatist reading
Jean Baudrillard declares enlightenment and critique dead; Rorty's "Philosophy as a Kind of Writing" makes philosophy one voice in "the conversation of mankind", its concepts optional items in a contingent "final vocabulary". Norris marks his own shift from approving Rorty in Chapter 7: if that view won, questions of interpretive validity could not even be raised.
Chapter 5 revisited: Marx and deconstruction
Chapter 5 is "where I would want to make the largest changes". Scoring points off Althusserian Marxism by exposing its sublimated metaphors proves nothing, since figural elements do not impugn theoretical adequacy. The closing flourish ("Nietzsche remains at the last a disturbing threat") was "a somewhat facile triumphalist gesture" built on a partial reading of "White Mythology", which in fact debates Marxist and Leninist theories of language, knowledge and "empiriocriticism". Honesty requires he let those passages stand.
The climate had changed: a right-wing consensus in Britain and America, events in Eastern Europe, and a "failure of intellectual nerve on the left" as Marxism Today's "New Times" commentators dumped base/superstructure and science/ideology. Baudrillard (The Mirror of Production, 1975, echoing Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature) dissolves use-value and exchange-value into media simulation (see also Sloterdijk, 1988). Derrida answers: "the value of truth... is never contested or destroyed in my writings, but only reinscribed in more powerful, larger, more stratified contexts", where one can invoke "good faith, lucidity, rigour, criticism, and pedagogy".
Norris separates deconstruction from postmodernism.
Ten years on: what deconstruction became
In the decade since 1982, "deconstruction" reached a pitch of visibility that forced Norris to separate rigorous Derridean work from a widespread exercise that treats vigilance toward logocentrism as a licence for style. One would need to ignore a high proportion of Derrida's most significant work to regard him as first and foremost a philosopher of free play. Attacks that grant philosophical acumen only to dismiss the topic as scarcely warranting attention, and welcomes that cut philosophers down to size by calling reason a contingent "final vocabulary", both miss the texts. Habermas casts Derrida as a latter-day sophist betraying "the unfinished project of modernity", often via second-hand sources including primers like this one. Ellis demands reasons but wrongly assumes none exist. Rorty and Fish welcome Derrida as an ally in demoting philosophy to "a kind of writing".
Afterword separates fashion and dismissal from the work.
White Mythology without the shortcut
"White Mythology" is often misread as proving that all concepts are metaphors, hence that philosophy has no special authority. Derrida's actual pressure is finer. The appeal to criteria of clarity and obscurity already shows that "the entire philosophical delimitation of metaphor already lends itself to be constructed and worked by 'metaphors'". There is no properly philosophical category to qualify the tropes that conditioned the fundamental oppositions: the words "turn", "trope" or "metaphor" are no exception. Yet the analysis can proceed only by means of basic philosophical distinctions from Aristotle to the present. The essay does not licence a quick reminder that concepts are optional items in a contingent vocabulary. That Rortyan shortcut is exactly what Norris now rejects.
Limited Inc Afterword: distinctions and guardrails
Derrida's 1989 Afterword to the Searle debate answers Searle's axiom that "unless a distinction can be made rigorous and precise, it isn't really a distinction at all" by affirming it as philosophy's own: "What philosopher ever since there were philosophers... when a distinction cannot be rigorous and precise, it is not a distinction at all." Hostilities typified by the debate should yield to an ecumenical approach that seeks genuine points of contact. Derrida's point is not that we should abandon reading Austin; it is that Austin's exclusions (fiction, citation, "parasitic" speech) mark a problem inside the theory of the serious speech act. Against extreme anti-intentionalism, Of Grammatology requires "doubling commentary" with "all the instruments of traditional criticism"; without that indispensable guardrail, critical production would risk authorizing itself to say almost anything. De Man: "no reading is conceivable in which the question of its truth or falsehood is not primarily involved". Neither resembles Fish's view that interpretive conventions "go all the way down".
Chapter 5 revised: Marx without textualist ease
Norris revisits Chapter 5's Nietzschean tilt. Showing that Marxist distinctions (use-value/exchange-value among them) amount to a local variation on an enlightenment paradigm is one thing; dissolving critique into a postmodern-pragmatist ethos whose chief desire is to get out from under all philosophical concepts is another. Deconstruction and Marxism need not be enemies if both keep standards of rigour, validity and truth. The false definition of the deconstructionist "supposes a bad... and feeble reading of numerous texts, first of all mine, which therefore must finally be read or re-read".
Ecumenical contact without surrender
Norris urges an approach that seeks genuine points of contact across the Analytic/Continental hostilities typified by Derrida/Searle, without surrendering philosophy as a specialized activity with standards of rigour, validity and truth. The pragmatist line that treats Derrida as the latest sophist in a chain from Greece through Nietzsche to postmodern neo-pragmatism makes the attempt to keep enlightenment values of reason, truth and critique look futile. Norris's evaluative tone has shifted: where 1982 approved a Nietzschean pressure on Marxist science, 1991 insists that pressure does not dissolve critique. Felman's work on speech acts (1983) is noted as showing complications that will not fit tidy schemes; that is not a reason to stop reading Austin carefully.
1991: contact without dissolving critique.
Deconstruction, Philosophy and the Ethical Turn
A primer and its editor
The book was written for students of English and Comparative Literature when no such primer existed. Series editor Terence Hawkes insisted on accessibility: Norris's Marcuse-derived "a rigorous effort of conceptual desublimation" became "a rigorous effort of conceptual desublimation, or 'waking up'", hammered out in red-biro sessions in pubs around Cardiff and Penarth. The New Accents relaunch marks a quarter-century of the series. Instead of a new bibliography, Norris keys references to a list of works cited and promises to say which parts are still reliable.
Almost every sentence needs a footnote
Ten years after the Afterword, Norris finds almost every sentence in need of a footnote. He now writes on epistemology, logic and philosophical semantics from Cardiff's Philosophy Section. The book was written for students of English and Comparative Literature when no such primer existed. Hawkes insisted on accessibility: a Marcuse-derived "rigorous effort of conceptual desublimation" became desublimation "or 'waking up'", hammered out in red-biro sessions in pubs around Cardiff and Penarth. The New Accents relaunch marks a quarter-century of the series. Instead of a new bibliography, Norris keys references to works cited and promises to say which parts are still reliable.
Philosophical readers versus pragmatist capture.
Gasché, Bennington and the concept/metaphor trap
Rorty asks us to read Derrida as "bad cousin Derrida" to "honest old uncle Kant", ignoring early analytic texts on Husserl, Plato and Rousseau. Norris and Rodolphe Gasché read late texts as performative elaborations of early arguments, with "quasi-transcendental" reasoning that continues Kantian critique while questioning its "unthought axiomatics". Geoffrey Bennington (1994) scolded Norris for still using oppositions like concept/metaphor and for the subtitle "theory and practice". Norris blushed, then concluded this "radical" stance was thoroughly orthodox. His turn came between The Deconstructive Turn (1983) and The Contest of Faculties (1985). He concedes Hartman's 1985 complaint about being corralled "on the wild side": literary critics need not meet philosophers' criteria, but that does not make the philosophical reading wrong.
Classical logic, Priest and the Searle damage
Derrida "nowhere denies" that we must think by classical logic (identity, non-contradiction, excluded middle) to locate the stress-points where it meets its limit. When he reverses the received order between concept and metaphor in "White Mythology", he insists that such analysis proceeds only by logico-conceptual resources from Aristotle onward (Harrison 1999; Lawlor 1991; Morris 1991; Norris 2000a). Graham Priest's paraconsistent logic now treats supplementarity, différance and "parergonality" as serious topics. Chapter 4 fell in too readily with "all concepts are metaphors"; the Searle exchange was a "dialogue of the deaf" that harmed relations between traditions. There is some truth in the charge against Searle's fixed preconceptions, but it scarcely does justice to the whole analytic reception.
Boom's aftermath and the ethical risk
Deconstruction lost its high profile in US English departments to New Historicism, Cultural Materialism, Feminism, Gender Studies, Gay and Lesbian Criticism and Postcolonial Theory. Each owes it a debt, often treating it as a taken-for-granted thesis about value-laden binaries ripe for strategic reversal. Norris counts this among deconstruction's most positive legacies, matched by Derrida's commitments to gender equality, international justice and refugees' rights. Critical legal theory fastened on anomalies, aporias and performative contradictions. The late ethical texts are immensely subtle and convey outrage at Fukuyama's "end of history" and at misery linked to the World Bank and IMF. But resistance is hard when alternatives rest on "unredeemable promise", a "weak messianic" thought that blocks practical political ends.
Ethical turn: subtle texts, thin political purchase.
Abraham, cats and theological capture
Derrida's commentary on Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling treats Abraham's readiness to sacrifice Isaac as rejecting all human ties. Norris calls the Kierkegaard text "morally repulsive", able to justify barbarity through appeals to inward faith, and recalls Heidegger's rhetoric of "authentic" commitment to National Socialism. In "Violence and Metaphysics" Derrida had already noted the troubling resemblance between Levinas's ethics and Kierkegaard's leap. Heidegger's view of animals as Weltarm ("poor in world") hints at ranking beings by capacity for the question of Being. In Aporias Derrida remarks with inscrutable irony that feeding one's cat involves deciding to feed that cat rather than all others; Norris's dry reply is that such reflections can render ethics "pretty much irrelevant for most practical purposes". He resists theological readings (Caputo, Taylor, Ward, and the misspelled "Pitstock") that pass over the early denial that deconstruction is negative theology. Derrida's essay on Kant against Hamann and Jacobi ironically replays Habermas's charge of a "poetico-metaphorical" perversion of reason: a charge Norris thinks unjustified, though some recent passages invite it.
What still stands from 1982
Norris promises to say which parts remain reliable. The mappings of speech/writing, supplement, différance, the Yale field and the Austin/Searle triangle still stand as pedagogical cores. Chapters 4 and 5 need the heaviest revision where they fed "all concepts are metaphors" and history-as-text. He rejects "pious huffing and puffing" that made deconstruction a cover for collaborators (Hirsch, Kimball, Lehman), yet admits he was "much too ready" to accept de Manian undecidability against truth, fact and accountability for past actions. The closing praise of Derrida as Kantian "genius" sits beside regrets for fogey-baiting, point-scoring against Culler, and the facile claim that history is a textual construct.
Postscript: what to keep and what to disown.
Against Rorty's "bad cousin Derrida"
Rorty asks us to read Derrida as "bad cousin Derrida" to "honest old uncle Kant", ignoring the early, analytic texts on Husserl, Plato and Rousseau and taking the late, literary ones as the real lesson. Norris and Rodolphe Gasché read the late texts as performative elaborations of early arguments, with "quasi-transcendental" reasoning that continues Kantian critique while questioning its "unthought axiomatics". The past decade saw a widening rift between literary-textualist and philosophical readings.
Two ways to read early and late Derrida.
Purist reviewers (Geoffrey Bennington, 1994) scolded Norris for still using oppositions like concept/metaphor, starting with the subtitle "theory and practice". He blushed, then concluded this "radical" stance was thoroughly orthodox. His turn came between The Deconstructive Turn (1983) and The Contest of Faculties (1985). He concedes Hartman's 1985 complaint about being corralled "on the wild side": literary critics need not meet philosophers' criteria.
After the boom
Deconstruction lost its high profile in US English departments to New Historicism, Cultural Materialism, Feminism, Gender Studies, Gay and Lesbian Criticism and Postcolonial Theory. Each owes it a debt, but often treats it as a taken-for-granted thesis about value-laden binaries (text/context, male/female, high/low, centre/margin) ripe for strategic reversal. Norris counts this among deconstruction's most positive legacies, matched by Derrida's commitments to gender equality, international justice and refugees' rights.
| Late Derrida text | Theme | Norris's worry |
|---|---|---|
| "Force of Law" (1990) | Justice beyond all law; "not deconstructible" | Justice cut off from specifiable action |
| The Other Heading (1992) | Europe, autonomy and federation | Ties to early readings unclear |
| Specters of Marx (1993/1994) | "A certain" Marxism; messianic promise | Promise that by definition eludes achievement |
| The Gift of Death (1992; trans. 1995) | Kierkegaard's Abraham; faith over ethics | Fideism beyond shared human values |
The ethical turn and its risks
The late texts are "immensely subtle" and convey outrage at Francis Fukuyama's "end of history" and at the misery caused by the World Bank and IMF. But resistance is hard to muster when alternatives rest on "unredeemable promise", a "weak messianic" thought that blocks practical political ends. Derrida's commentary on Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling treats Abraham's readiness to sacrifice Isaac as rejecting all human ties. Norris calls the Kierkegaard text "morally repulsive", able to justify barbarity through appeals to inward faith, and recalls Heidegger's similar rhetoric of "authentic" commitment to National Socialism. Derrida himself, in "Violence and Metaphysics", had noted the troubling resemblance between Levinas's ethics and Kierkegaard's leap. Heidegger's view of animals as Weltarm ("poor in world") hints at a willingness to rank beings by capacity for the question of Being.
Norris's worry about the ethical turn.
Norris resists theological readings (Caputo, Taylor, Ward) that pass over the early Derrida's denial that deconstruction is negative theology (compare Almond's Ibn 'Arabi in the Synthesis). Derrida's essay on Kant against Hamann and Jacobi ironically replays Habermas's charge of a "poetico-metaphorical" perversion of reason: a charge Norris thinks unjustified, though some recent passages invite it.
Norris's three verdicts on his own book.
The postscript is signed Cardiff, September 2001. Since publication Derrida died in Paris on 9 October 2004; the posthumous seminars (The Beast and the Sovereign, Death Penalty, Heidegger: The Question of Being and History) continue to appear, bearing out Norris's emphasis on sustained philosophical argument. Norris, who spent his later career at Cardiff, continued his work on realism, logic and deconstruction.
Main Points
Main Points
- Hierarchies hide dependence. Speech over writing, presence over absence, concept over metaphor: Derrida shows each privileged term needs the one it excludes.
- The supplement adds and replaces. Rousseau's writing, education and masturbation both complete and displace a nature that was never full.
- Différance defers and differs. Meaning never arrives present; signs work by difference and postponement.
- Concepts are worn metaphors. Nietzsche's "mobile army of metaphors" holds, but philosophy alone can define metaphor, so neither side wins ("White Mythology").
- Theory has visual roots. "Theory" comes from thea; Marxist "science" leans on light and space, though figures do not refute it.
- Rigour beats play. De Man and early Derrida earn their scepticism; Hartman and Miller often take it ready-made.
- Blindness yields insight. Critics see most at the points where they are blind to their own assumptions (de Man).
- Rhetoric performs. Texts both state and act; the performative escapes full deconstruction.
- Iterability opens every speech act. Promises and signatures work by repetition, so citation and forgery are always possible.
- Distinctions must be rigorous. Derrida to Searle: "when a distinction cannot be rigorous and precise, it is not a distinction at all".
- The guardrail of commentary. Faithful "doubling commentary" protects reading, though it never opens one.
- Deconstruction is not postmodernism. Truth is reinscribed, not destroyed; Rorty, Fish and Baudrillard misread Derrida.
- History is more than text. Norris disowns passages that fed revisionist historiography after the de Man revelations.
- Classical logic finds the limits. Only by thinking by identity and non-contradiction can one locate aporia (Priest's paraconsistency).
- The ethical turn needs content. Justice "not deconstructible" and the messianic promise risk losing touch with practical politics.
Frameworks and mental models
| Name | What it says | Use it when |
|---|---|---|
| Reverse and displace | Invert a hierarchy, then unsettle the new one | A pair of terms ranks one as primary |
| Logic of the supplement | An addition reveals a lack in the origin | Something "extra" turns out necessary |
| Blindness and insight | A method's best results come at its blind spots | Assessing a critic's assumptions |
| Constative / performative | What a text says vs what it does | Statement and effect pull apart |
| Iterability | Signs work only if they can be repeated elsewhere | Someone appeals to pure intention |
| Earned scepticism | Doubt is credible only after rigorous reading | Telling critique from mere licence |
The Derrida cluster in this series
| Name | Link to this book |
|---|---|
| No. 21 Writing and Difference | Primary source for "Freud and the Scene of Writing", the Bataille essay on Hegel, "Violence and Metaphysics" and "Structure, Sign and Play" |
| No. 22 Stocker, Derrida on Deconstruction | A later guidebook reading Derrida as a philosopher, the line Norris takes in 1991 and 2002 |
| No. 16 Almond, Sufism and Deconstruction | Tests the negative-theology question Norris raises in the Postscript, against Ibn 'Arabi; Almond resists Norris's "serious philosopher" Derrida |
| No. 14 A Companion to Derrida | Covers the late ethics, justice, hospitality and religion Norris queries |
| No. 24-26 Nancy volumes | Nancy's freedom and community extend the ethical-political turn; No. 26 sets Nancy among radical democrats |
The deconstructive move and its two uses.
Who's who (selected)
| Name | Role in this book |
|---|---|
| Jacques Derrida | Central subject; speech/writing, supplement, différance, Limited Inc, late ethics |
| Paul de Man | Rigorous American ally; blindness/insight; wartime scandal after 1982 |
| Geoffrey Hartman | "Wild side" Yale; answerable style; Skywriters vs Common Sense |
| J. Hillis Miller | Host/parasite etymologies; Geneva School past |
| Harold Bloom | Dissenting troper; anxiety of influence; will vs trope |
| John Searle | Speech-act opponent; "Sarl"; copyright spat |
| Richard Rorty | Pragmatist welcome Norris rejects; "kind of writing" |
| Terry Eagleton / Fredric Jameson | Marxist poles of the 1982 politics chapter |
| Edward Said | Worldly text; Orientalism as rhetorical challenge |
| Jürgen Habermas | Modernity's unfinished project vs sophistry charge |
| Rodolphe Gasché / Geoffrey Bennington | Philosophical readers Norris sides with / is scolded by |
| Graham Priest | Paraconsistent logic for supplement and différance |
Four-step checklist distilled from the synthesis.
Synthesis checklist as a left-to-right path.
- Yale is a choice, not a school. Hartman/Miller (freedom), de Man (rigour) and Bloom (will) answer Derrida differently; institutional Yale and Johns Hopkins spread the textual form.
- Phonocentrism is not the whole charge. Logocentrism names the deeper privilege of presence; Searle often attacks the narrower claim.
- Said's worldly text outranks pure textualism. Even in 1982 Norris prefers historicizing density to hermetic Alexandrianism.
- Self-revision is part of the argument. The Afterword and Postscript model how to correct a primer without pulping it.
- Negative theology is a misreading. Early Derrida denies the equation; Caputo-style theological capture is a late temptation Norris resists.
- Genius breaks rules that extend thought. Norris's closing Kantian praise is compatible with rejecting fogey-baiting and history-as-text.
- Diagram the hierarchy before you reverse it. Speech/writing, metaphor/metonymy, constative/performative: map the ranking, then show dependence.
- Hierarchies hide dependence. Speech over writing, presence over absence, concept over metaphor: Derrida shows each privileged term needs the one it excludes.
- The supplement adds and replaces. Rousseau's writing, education and masturbation both complete and displace a nature that was never full.
- Différance defers and differs. Meaning never arrives present; signs work by difference and postponement.
- Concepts are worn metaphors. Nietzsche's "mobile army of metaphors" holds, but philosophy alone can define metaphor, so neither side wins ("White Mythology").
- Theory has visual roots. "Theory" comes from thea; Marxist "science" leans on light and space, though figures do not refute it.
- Rigour beats play. De Man and early Derrida earn their scepticism; Hartman and Miller often take it ready-made.