Metatheory and the Subject of Democracy in the Work of Ralph Ellison

Abstract

mensurate. Ellison speaks the language of the liberal, who affirms individualism, justice, and liberty; he also speaks the language of the communitarian, who extols the virtues of different traditions and who is critical of liberal neutrality toward alternative views of the good; lastly, he plays the role of the radical genealogist, who excavates and unmasks the self-understandings of American culture across racial lines.1 Ellison's work does not simply adopt these vocabularies in an ad hoc fashion; instead, he offers a critique and recuperation of them, and this critical gesture requires the creation of a metatheoretical space that contempo rary theory drives out, a space that is indispensable for improving our deliberations about democracy. Debates over language, politics, and subjectivity in recent theory have foreclosed the kind of metatheoretical reflection that Ellison's texts perform. These debates have not thematized competing accounts but dramatized them, as we see in Habermas 's debate with poststructuralism, in the exchange between communitarians and liberals, and in the arguments between identity politicians and poststructuralists.2 Theorists in the debates tie their ethical/political views to a grand assumption about linguistic ontology.3 The damage produced by these assumptions and the need for metatheoretical reflection emerge in a recent remark by Henry Louis Gates: