The Age of Deconstruction

Rei Terada The Age of Deconstruction Old age or youth—one no longer counts in that way. —Specters ofMarx (on Cathy Caruth and Deborah Esch, eds., Critical Encounters: Reference and Responsibility in Deconstructive Writing [New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1995]; and Anselm Haverkamp, ed., Deconstruction is/in America: A New Sense ofthe Political [New York: New York UP, 1995]) This is a time of self-reflective turns in deconstruction. 1989 and 1993 conferences reviewing deconstruction's history and inquiring into its fortunes have given rise to two collections of essays: Cathy Caruth's and Deborah Esch's Critical Encounters: Reference and Responsibility in Deconstructive Writing and Anselm Haverkamp's Deconstruction islin America: A New Sense of the Political (both 1995). Both volumes reread deconstruction's now-classic texts (Critical Encounters favors de Man, Deconstruction is/in America favors Derrida), yet they also reach out toward less expected textual material, broadening deconstruction's research base. Both also hope to show interests in reference and politics that might always have been found in deconstruction . The papers collected by Caruth and Esch turn outward, taking apprehensions about deconstruction's political potential seriously and demonstrating their falseness on philosophical grounds. To a degree unusual for a collective effort, this volume possesses a central thesis—that deconstruction's connections to politics can best be understood through notions of indirect reference and radical responsiveness —and treats this thesis in scholarly detail. Critical Encounters, then, addresses an audience of academic nonspecialists in a specialized, coherent language. Deconstruction is/in America, on the other hand, is an unruly, dissident book that doesn't always choose its words carefully , yet profits from impetuousness. It proposes versions of Critical Encounters' arguments, but makes others as well about deconstruction 's institutional situation in the U.S. (reflected in the title of the conference and book) and about its timely untimeliness (here the contributors write in the spirit of Derrida's conference address, "The Time is Out of Joint"). Deconstruction is/in America may be one of only a few collections that actually gains by its conference roots: most of its twelve- and thirteen-page papers proceed with brisk narrative force. The efforts of Rodolphe Gasché, Samuel Weber, and Avital Ronell, for example, are here both substantial and crisp. This more readable volume , however, may come to a conclusion that's harder to read. 300 the minnesota review The core of Critical Encounters is Cathy Caruth's elegant essay "The Claims of Reference," which first appeared in The Yalejournal ofCriticism in 1990. It is, for me, exemplary of its kind of argument. Caruth interprets such works of de Man's as "The Resistance to Theory" as asserting that "linguistically oriented theories do not necessarily deny reference, but rather deny the possibility of modeling the principles of reference on those of natural law, or we might say, of making reference like perception " (Critical Encounters [hereafter CE] 92). Reference that did not resemble what we think of as direct perception might be more like the experience of resistance, an experience de Man associates with falling. In the example of falling, "gravity" marks the self's contact with reality. Yet "gravity" must be expressed in two symptomatic ways: as a mathematical formula that corresponds only to other formulae, or as a "referential " term that "seemfs] a pure fiction" (94). In theory as in the model of gravity, "direct or phenomenal reference to the world means, paradoxically , the production of a fiction," and our consciousness of resistance to that fiction may also guide us. Deconstruction, then, may deploy conventional ideas of reference, but does so as part of its effort to discover unknown and more demanding phenomena that elude those ideas. Further, if deconstruction rejects simple reference, Caruth argues, it equally rejects formalisms that hope to bypass reference. While philosophy often "incorporates its loss of reference . . . into the conceptual gain of . . . the philosophical system"—believing it builds a strong formalism on a ground cleared ofconfusing references—de Man's writing, far from embracing formalism, clings to reference just at the telling point where it breaks down (96). De Man adheres to a frictive point between the fiction of reference and the counterfiction of formalism, as it were...