L I T E R A RY T H E O RY: A N H I S T O R I C A L I N T R O D U C T I O N
humanities. This field cannot be thought as a whole: it resists totalization. Not because of its infinitude: but as a result of the absence of a centre which would control and arrest the play of substitutions.2 This “movement of play … is the movement of supplementarity. One cannot determine the centre and exhaust totalization because the sign which replaces the centre, which supplements it, taking the centre’s place in its absence – this sign… occurs as a surplus, as a supplement.” (Ibid., p. 289)3 Due to these conflicting aspects of Derrida’s influence – stressing, on the one hand, the responsibility for humanities, and, on the other hand, the pervasiveness of “the play of substitutions” establishing their discourse – the position of deconstruction at American universities has been rather problematic. On the one hand, Derrida himself complains that the American academics tried to “domesticate” deconstruction as a general “method for reading and for interpretation” (“Letter to a Japanese Friend”, in A Derrida Reader, p. 273), on the other hand, there have been attempts to get rid of deconstruction as an irresponsible game clashing with requirements of political correctness. The greatest threat to deconstruction was the discovery (in 1987) of the collaborationist journalism of Paul de Man published during the Nazi occupation of his native Belgium. De Man’s moral failure was overstated as the failure of deconstruction. One journalist called deconstruction “a vast amnesty project for the politics of collaboration during World War II” (Newsweek, Feb. 15, 1988, p. 65). The fact that deconstruction was adopted by many American critics does not imply that their theoretical positions were close to that of Derrida. In his book From the New Criticism to Deconstruction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988) Art Berman has shown that “the Americans have been using structuralism and post-structuralism for purposes of their own; they have not been simply following European practices.” (p. 60) The basic distinction in European (mainly French) and American critical writing “is the concept of 2
The term “play of substitutions” means the appearance of changes and modifications of any system which occur at random, without having been prescribed in its structure, and do not allow a rigid classification according to some central principle or value. Take different versions of the Promethean myth. In some of them Prometheus is a trickster and a thief, in others he is a creator of mankind. This is difficult to explain by means of the structural opposition trickster vs. god because Prometheus never has a divine role, not even in Shelley’s famous dramatic poem. 3 This passage of Derrida’s lecture describes the function of words like mana or taboo which are supplied for something non-existent, like the direct contact with the sacred or the name of the totem deity, but have a number of supplementary meanings in numerous cultural contexts and activities.
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