Romanticism and the Unfinished Project of Deconstruction

Abstract

This article looks back at the author's first book, Dark Interpreter, in the context of her subsequent work in British Romantic literature, contemporary theory, and Romantic and Idealist philosophy. It argues that Theory is not simply a presentist or futurist, and allegedly “progressive,” thought form; if seen as a problematized and recursive continuation of the history of ideas, it always folds a “going forward” into a “going back.” The author thus revisits Dark Interpreter in terms of what Foucault calls a “return and retreat of origins,” which her subsequent work has tried to unravel, so as to continue “the unfinished project of deconstruction.” She distinguishes this deconstruction from the more purely literary critical form it took in Yale deconstruction, linking it instead to an interdisciplinary and deconstructively encyclopedic mode of knowledge anchored in philosophy and literature that goes back to the Romantics and to a German Idealism concerned with what Derrida calls “the margins of philosophy” – a mode that is also explored (albeit differently) in Nicholas Halmi's The Genealogy of the Romantic Symbol.