Post-Deconstructive Thought and Criticism

Since deconstruction's heyday in literary criticism, perhaps most prominently represented in the major works of figures such as Paul de Man, J. Hillis Miller, and Barbara Johnson, Jacques Derrida's influence has continued to make a significant and enduring mark on scholarship within the humanities. Within UK French studies alone, significant critical and philosophical engagements with Derrida by figures such as Geoffrey Bennington, Marian Hobson, and Christina Howells ensured that, throughout the 1990s and the first two decades of the twenty-first century, generations of students and scholars continued to be introduced to the philosophical and critical insights of deconstructive thought.¹ Derrida's influence in relation to our understanding of literature and literary themes or questions has continued to make a decisive impact.² Yet it has also generated significant research which exceeds the scope of the literary, taking in questions of anthropology, technology, and cybernetics, or wider ethical themes such as hospitality that push deconstructive thought further into more developed explorations of some of its concerns, for example, issues relating to sexual difference or perspectives on animals and the limits of the human.³ Even if one were to restrict oneself to UK French studies, the scope and impact of Derrida's continued influence is far in excess of what can be accounted for in a short survey or overview.

Given this broad and very diffuse influence, another approach to the 'present state' of post-deconstructive thought and criticism is necessary. Indeed, the very 'présence' of an 'état présent' would itself necessarily be placed under erasure from a post-Derridean perspective. Assuming then, with Derrida, that any instance of presence is composed in a kind of stretching between the retention of an immemorial past that was never present and the projection towards a future which is without identity, what follows proposes a rather different kind of 'état présent', namely a survey of recent texts by still living and writing French philosophers whose profound engagements with deconstruction date back to their earliest careers. Thinkers such as François Laruelle, Jean-Luc Nancy, Bernard Stiegler, and Catherine Malabou have taken up and developed deconstruction in ways which echo Derrida's thought but which, at the same time, emerge as distinctly un-Derridean. So what follows will show how each of these four thinkers have transformed the deconstructive legacy in their most recent works. It will also situate these works within the more general context of the contemporary critical and scholarly reception of each thinker. This will yield an image of the present state of post-deconstructive thought and criticism which foregrounds the non-identity of deconstruction, its past, its 'present', and its possible futures. The image, admittedly partial, which emerges here is perhaps surprising insofar as these thinkers embrace, in very different ways, a dimension of material immanence or worldly existence which return them to (albeit entirely novel) kinds of realism or ontological discourse, modes of thinking that Derrida would no doubt have questioned or refused.⁴ The materialist, realist, or (quasi-)ontological inflection of these four thinkers has produced scholarly responses which have increasingly opened humanities-oriented, critical work onto engagements with the sciences, with ecology and the environment, or with physical and biological existence. Alongside wider developments over the last twenty years that go under the names of 'new materialism', 'speculative realism', 'eco-criticism', or even 'animal studies', the recent development and critical-philosophical reception of Laruelle, Nancy, Stiegler, and Malabou can arguably be said to have produced (however unlikely this may seem) something like a post-Continental or post-deconstructive naturalism.⁵

Such a turn towards the sciences and a concern with the physical or the biological is paralleled in areas such as cognitive criticism and cognitive literary studies that aim to move beyond or explicitly contest the legacies of (post-)structuralist and deconstructive 'theory'. Within UK French studies the most accomplished and brilliant example of this would be Terence Cave's Thinking with Literature: Towards a Cognitive Criticism.⁶ The naturalistic turn that can be identified in the thought of Laruelle, Nancy, Stiegler, and Malabou, is one which is shared, albeit with...