Deconstruction, literature and ideology

Abstract

Summary This paper attempts to show how deconstruction is liable to misunderstanding and non recognition (especially in South Africa and in the USA) because of the fact that it is divorced from its materialist base and because of the failure to understand it as essentially a critique of Western metaphysics, as a deconstruction of (Hegelian) idealism in all its ramifications, and not of texts as such. When texts are read/written, they are used to illustrate concepts and to unearth codes of society structured by ideology. Thus The Theory of the Text, in fact, necessitates a sociology of literature. The deconstructionist needs to know exactly what he or she is trying to escape from and needs to make visible the hidden ideologies and thereby supplying intertextually validated alternative interpretations. This is allowed for by Barthes, but Barthes did not bother to undertake it, thus ignoring a central discovery of the Bakhtin school: that the ideological nature of meaning implies that the sign, when used, is...