The Unbearable Lightness of Deconstruction

Abstract

Philosophical works are sometimes launched with a narrative 'hook', a short, snappy opening line. 'All men, by nature, desire to know.' 'Man was born free and is everywhere in chains.' Such openings signal that a potentially important inquiry is under way, a search after truth, or perhaps (in Jurgen Habermas's useful phrase) a beckoning towards 'mutual understanding'. In recent years, however, writers variously described as post-structuralist, postmodernist, or deconstructionist, have repudiated any such nobler mission for philosophy. They contend that philosophy, especially when understood as the search for universal validity claims, serves rather to mask a will to power and domination. Of course, such writers are not above deploying their own narrative hooks, often variations on the sentiment that, once upon a time, there was a discipline called philosophy. In overtly deconstructionist works, however, the rhetorical effect of such pithy openings is to camouflage the oxymoronic blend of prolixity, turgidity, and lightness in the ensuing writing. For one of the oddities of deconstruction is the apostolic zeal with which the gospel of the essential opacity of language is not only preached, but practised. It is as though deconstructors have sworn on a stack of Nietzsche, Heidegger and Derrida paperbacks that they will always abide by the doctrine of the 'opacity of the signifier'. The appropriation of the theories of Jacques Derrida, especially but not only by influential sectors of the literary establishment, has spawned much of this end-of-philosophy Kulturkritik. Although most deconstructionist writing exhibits an uncouth density, it may also convey, as if in apology for its own turgidity, an unctuous lightness or coyness. This takes the form of a hyperconscious awareness of its own status as mere writing. It is most evident in the practice of purportedly writing 'sous rature' (under erasure), a tactic borrowed by Derrida from Heidegger, set forth in Of Grammatology, and pronounced de rigueur by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak in her influential translator's preface to that work.1 Habermas, borrowing the term from Karl-Otto