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Even though Deconstruction has
empowered women’s writing and theorising, it has come to be
regarded as an ‘essentially negative operation,’ one that
destroys everything we are told we ought to love. Love, itself,
is the subject of Peggy Kamuf’s essay and she attempts to show
that it is not love we ought to preserve from de(con)struction
but how (and here I lose her completely) "we will be
approaching the figure of love as affirmation that deconstructs
the opposition between preservation and destruction, love,
therefore, as that which, like deconstruction, takes place along
the divided, ruined border of this alternative." Perhaps
she means that love exists in borderline territory, one which
breaks up oppositions between preservation and destruction,
attachment and alienation, union and separation. In my view,
such obscure sentence constructions should themselves be
deconstructed, not to find security in hybridity, but to be
utterly destroyed.
Robert Young’s
essay is good, especially when he traces postcolonial studies to
its roots in French Algeria. The discipline’s pet haters like
Aijaz Ahmad have always tried to discredit it by calling it a
Western construction. Young shows how postcolonialism was
developed as an anti-Western strategy after the French debacle
in Indochina and Algeria. He connects many theorists who had a
hand in developing poststructuralism with the history of
Algeria: Althusser had been deported to Algeria, Derrida and
Cixous were descendants of Jews exiled from Spain in the 15th
century into Algeria, the Tunisia-born Memmi studied at the
University of Algiers, Fanon worked there and Lyotard undertook
military service; Bourdieu also conducted his researches in the
1950s in Algeria and frequently met up with Derrida. Young also
elucidates how identity has come to mean ‘not sameness but
difference’ in that it immediately summons up its opposite,
difference. It is through "difference that the English will
differentiate themselves from the French, men from women, or
homosexuals from heterosexuals."
What would we then
call Derrida: a ‘foreign body’ that penetrates the body of
its host with beneficent effects or a baneful virus that
destroys the vital functions? Maud Ellman assigns him the role
of both "poison and remedy—that heals what it harms,
revitalises what it violates."
The Chambers
Dictionary used the word ‘Deconstruction’ for the first time
in 1993 and to this day, in all subsequent editions, the
definition appears unchanged. This definition required all
readers to "eradicate all philosophical or other
assumptions when approaching a text." In other words, it
directed us to abandon all assumptions and still find a way to
approach the text. A better definition would be one the OED
gives us, one that calls Deconstruction a ‘strategy’
associated with the writings of Derrida, which seeks to expose
‘unquestioned metaphysical assumptions.’ But as the author
shows us, deconstruction can best perhaps be defined as ‘the
impossible,’ ‘what remains to be thought.’
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DECONSTRUCTION
is yesterday’s news. Often it is believed that ‘theory’ is a
virus or a parasite. And so the old guard waits patiently for the
body politic to restore itself to equilibrium and maintain its
bodily fluids after the ‘ghost’ has retreated and new passionate
recruits have settled down to a more sedate and stable conservatism.
But this book on Deconstruction shows that ‘theory’ as a set of
critical approaches has opened new and exciting horizons not just
for feminists and postcolonialists but also for those working with
drugs, love, film, the confession, visual art, weaving and
technology. Nicholas Royle gives us an interesting literary cocktail
by roping in established critics from Derek Attridge, Geoffrey
Bennington to Maud Ellman and Robert Young.
