{"id":1629,"date":"2022-01-16T20:43:45","date_gmt":"2022-01-17T01:43:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/?p=1629"},"modified":"2022-01-16T20:46:41","modified_gmt":"2022-01-17T01:46:41","slug":"practicing-deconstruction-part-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/articles\/practicing-deconstruction-part-1\/","title":{"rendered":"Practicing Deconstruction, Part 1"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/files\/2022\/01\/Seventh-Sign-Demi-Moore-Cover-864x467-1.jpeg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-1630\" src=\"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/files\/2022\/01\/Seventh-Sign-Demi-Moore-Cover-864x467-1.jpeg\" alt=\"\" width=\"864\" height=\"467\" srcset=\"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/files\/2022\/01\/Seventh-Sign-Demi-Moore-Cover-864x467-1.jpeg 864w, https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/files\/2022\/01\/Seventh-Sign-Demi-Moore-Cover-864x467-1-300x162.jpeg 300w, https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/files\/2022\/01\/Seventh-Sign-Demi-Moore-Cover-864x467-1-768x415.jpeg 768w, https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/files\/2022\/01\/Seventh-Sign-Demi-Moore-Cover-864x467-1-800x432.jpeg 800w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 864px) 100vw, 864px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>3.1<\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>We can keep the questions rolling. To ask what it is that Derrideans mean to build is to inquire about the status of deconstruction in the world. Can deconstruction without betraying itself appear in the guise of its antithesis, which is construction? Derrida never tired of saying that deconstruction was not a negative philosophy, that it was fundamentally affirmative, cultivating in its readers a capacity to greet the future (rather than to fear it) and to welcome whatever or whoever seems on first appearance outlandish and inimical: \u201cDeconstruction always presupposes affirmation\u201d;\u00a0 \u201cI would even say that it never proceeds without love.\u201d<a href=\"#_edn1\" name=\"_ednref1\"><sup>[i]<\/sup><\/a> But let us wonder: Does the one-who-affirms also <em>make<\/em> something?\u2014something at least semi-enduring, something that other people could also grab hold of and put to their purposes or perhaps to our now shared purposes of mutual affirmation? Which, indeed, are the practices and institutions that can foster in me what Derrida calls an \u201copenness to the other\u201d?<a href=\"#_edn2\" name=\"_ednref2\"><sup>[ii]<\/sup><\/a> And is there anything that can help me act on that aperture? Who or what are the agents and instruments of deconstruction?<\/p>\n<p>All I\u2019m trying to say is that once Derrida has helped us see that we bear the responsibility to welcome the stranger, it would also be nice to have someplace for him to sleep. It is around such questions, upon attempting to devise a deconstruction that is more than attitudinal, that Derrida\u2019s thinking most obviously generates a series of puzzles. It is in the first instance easy enough to see why some socialists and feminists and neo-Jacobins have been drawn to deconstruction and above all to the concept of dissemination, which from one vantage is just another name for the literate multitude, <em>die Leser aller L\u00e4nder<\/em>. If I start from the idea that writing always exists in many hands at once, then I am ceding the accustomed power of the philosopher (or literary scholar or Supreme Court justice) to preside over interpretation by announcing what the text really means. I am interested rather in what my unseen, inglorious fellows might be thinking or saying or arguing about that same bit of writing and trying to guess the verbal materials that might make possible the alternative practices of these many others.<a href=\"#_edn3\" name=\"_ednref3\"><sup>[iii]<\/sup><\/a> At the same time, however, deconstruction means to convene a cadre of expert readers who can proleptically perform the multiple meanings that would otherwise emerge but slowly and in historical time, as a given text traveled its unpredictable circuit. And Derrida insists that such reading-with-the-multitude is difficult, arduously so, probably too difficult for you: <em>We don\u2019t know how to read yet \u2026 Has anyone ever really read anything? \u2026 There are perhaps a dozen good readers in the world<\/em>. Deconstruction posits at one and the same time the splendidly indiscriminate mass of transnational readers\u2014the bookish mobility\u2014and its own class of adepts, the aristocrats of <em>\u00e9criture <\/em>who are able to encompass in themselves the vastness of possible readings, to carry and indeed preempt dissemination by dint of their own resourceful verbality.<\/p>\n<p>But that\u2019s not the end of it. Deconstruction faces one kind of paradox when it settles on a fixed set of agents and another kind when it refuses thus to settle. The problem in this second case involves some of Derrida\u2019s most characteristic formulations, all of those <em>sans<\/em>-constructions and multifarious to-comes, since it is via such phrasing that deconstruction most obviously evades the problem of its bearers and real-world deputies. We might consider again the matter of deconstruction\u2019s \u201cmessianism without identifiable messiah,\u201d which one leading U.S. Derridean parses like so: \u201cWere the Messiah ever to show up in the flesh \u2026 that would be a disaster. The effect would be to shut down the very structure of time and history, to close off the structure of hope, desire, expectation, promise, in short, of the future.\u201d<a href=\"#_edn4\" name=\"_ednref4\"><sup>[iv]<\/sup><\/a> What we\u2019ll want to see is that the hatred for Jesus on display in these sentences\u2014and this from a Christian theologian\u2014is likewise a hatred of practice and of the completed emancipatory act. We are being requested to prefer the hope for justice to justice itself. Radical philosophers have hitherto done more than interpret the world; the point is not to change it. In 1988, Demi Moore starred in <em>The Seventh Sign<\/em>, a movie about the End of Days, in which Christ himself appears to urge his prophet to <em>stop<\/em> the Second Coming\u2014to prevent God from redeeming the world\u2014to perpetuate a world that the movie itself can\u2019t help but depict as cruel and damaged and unfed. It\u2019s a remarkable conceit: In <em>The Seventh Sign<\/em>, Jesus returns so as not to return, at which point the <em>parousia <\/em>slips into the position that action movies typically reserve for pandemics or alien invasions\u2014the position, I mean, of the Big Threat. Hollywood, like deconstruction, can conceive of the redeemed society only as an extinction event: <em>Jesus is coming! He must be stopped! <\/em>Here\u2019s Derrida: \u201cI would like him to come, I hope that he will come, &#8230; and at the same time, I am scared. I do not want what I want, and I would like the coming of the Messiah to be infinitely postponed.\u201d<a href=\"#_edn5\" name=\"_ednref5\"><sup>[v]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n<p>The important point, then, as we watch Derrida\u2019s near-Christianity tip over into this manifestly anti-Christian position, is to see how the same reversal happens over and over again in deconstruction, and always around those without-terms. The problem is succinctly explained: A rarefied messianicity in the abstract requires us to despise any particular messiah. The Derrideans can\u2019t afford to have that slot filled. The next step is simply to extend this point to utopias. It\u2019s easy to imagine a Derridean utopianism without utopias, which would in practice be doggedly anti-utopian, because it would have to oppose the construction of any fair and egalitarian institutions in particular. But then one would also have to oppose all \u201cothers\u201d on similar grounds. The messiah, indeed, is sometimes referred to as the <em>tout autre<\/em>, the entirely other, and messianicity is supposed to name the possibility of a future that will be unforeseeably unlike the present\u2014not another time, but an othertime\u2014so I am, in fact, only reformulating the point just made, by extending it to alterity in its ordinary, non-temporal mode. If we need a messianism without messiahs, then presumably we also need an alterity without others, too, because no particular other can maintain the purity of alterity-as-empty-slot. Any identifiable other begins shedding his or her alterity in the act of identification, starting with those possessive pronouns. If I know that the alterity in question is <em>her <\/em>alterity, then I already know too much. One could make this point dialectically; I just said \u201cidentify,\u201d after all, and Hegelian reciprocity games quickly produce the other-as-same. But one can also make the point experientially: People don\u2019t stay radically unknown to us. In this case, the dialectical and the experiential go together rather neatly: For me to be able to name somebody as an other, he or she has to be within my field of experience, and at that point, it is going to be difficult for the person in question to remain truly alien. My commitment to alterity thus requires me to reject all concrete others as insufficiently other, at which point the doctrine of alterity becomes just one more metaphysical system\u2014another philosophy asking me to expel others rather than welcome them\u2014and deconstruction hangs its head before its own wagging finger.<\/p>\n<p>What, after all, are Derrideans to <em>do<\/em>, while abiding in paradox and stepping up their devotion to unrealizable hyper-abstractions? Once you\u2019ve worked your way through <em>Glas<\/em>, how do you actively deliver yourself over to the momentum of non-presence? Those questions do, in fact, have answers. Derrida, this is to say, does finally identify at least three institutions capable of carrying non-identity into the world, however imperfectly\u2014three vehicles of differance\u2014and simply naming this trio will be the tidiest way of distinguishing deconstruction from negative dialectics, since none of the three serves a utopian or proto-messianic function in Adorno. They are 1) writing, 2) capitalism, and 3) empire. Let\u2019s just take them one by one.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"#_ednref1\" name=\"_edn1\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>[i] \u201cDeconstruction and the other,\u201d p. 167; <em>Points<\/em>, p. 83.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"#_ednref2\" name=\"_edn2\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>[ii] ibid., p. 173.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"#_ednref3\" name=\"_edn3\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>[iii] A question in that spirit: \u201cWhy should philosophy be the preserve of professional philosophers?\u201d See <em>Points<\/em>, p. 125.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"#_ednref4\" name=\"_edn4\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>[iv] Caputo in <em>Nutshell<\/em>, p. 163.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"#_ednref5\" name=\"_edn5\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>[v] Derrida in <em>Nutshell<\/em>, p. 24.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>3.1 We can keep the questions rolling. To ask what it is that Derrideans mean to build is to inquire about the status of deconstruction in the world. Can deconstruction without betraying itself appear in the guise of its antithesis, &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/articles\/practicing-deconstruction-part-1\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":115,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1629","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1629","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/115"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1629"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1629\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1632,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1629\/revisions\/1632"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1629"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1629"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1629"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}