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Texas Studies in Literature and Language 44.1 (2002) 16-33



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Literal Opposition:
Deconstruction, History, and Lancaster

Robert Epstein


Given his mistrust of the concept of history, and history's corresponding mistrust of deconstruction, it is striking that Derrida, in defining his hallmark concepts, often employs the language of historical periodization. On différance: "I would say, first off, that différance, which is neither a word nor a concept, strategically seemed to me the most proper one to think, if not to master . . . what is most irreducible about our 'era.'" 1 On logocentrism: "The epoch of logocentrism is the moment of the global effacement of the signifier." 2 To be sure, Derrida was aware of the seeming paradox, and explained that "although I have formulated many reservations about the 'metaphysical' concept of history, I very often use the word 'history' in order to reinscribe its force." 3 Still, medievalists, always acutely sensitive to the differentness of their period of study, might well be inclined to wonder about its place in the history of deconstruction, and in the deconstruction of history: Are the Middle Ages in the era of différance? Are they in the epoch of logocentrism?

From the Derridean perspective, the answer is certainly yes. Derrida insists that "there has never been anything but writing; there have never been anything but supplements, substitutive significations which could only come forth in a chain of references." 4 No historical period--not even the Middle Ages--can be conceived as a Golden Age when readers dwelt in the immediate presence of the referent, before the fall into deferred textual meaning.

Nevertheless, the question of the relationship of the Middle Ages to what Derrida calls "our 'era'" is made pertinent by the special ambivalence of medievalists for post-structuralist theory. Not so long ago, when literary critics first brought deconstruction to bear upon medieval texts, they tended to characterize the texts as complicit in their own deconstruction. Marshall Leicester, after outlining a deconstructive reading of Troilus and Criseyde, explained, "What interests me is that Chaucer seems [End Page 16] to have anticipated such reading and to have done it himself in his own writing." 5 Just as Leicester described Chaucer as being "like Derrida," R. A. Shoaf pointed to the most explicitly semiotic passages of Le Roman de la Rose to make the same claim for Jean de Meun. 6 Such depictions of medieval poets as deconstructionists avant la lettre met with a stinging rebuke by David Aers. This vision of "Chaucer the deconstructionist," Aers maintained, "is the product of an attempt to appropriate his writing for the projects of an alien tradition." Aers declared further, "Chaucer lived before Descartes; he lived before the Enlightenment's attempt to develop a tradition-free, absolutely certain Reason with an autonomous absolutely self-present human subject; and he lived before the problems of this project were confronted by its heirs." 7

With this exchange, medieval literary studies was confronting (belatedly, of course) the conflict between historicism and deconstruction. 8 There were real and significant differences between the two sides, and ultimately this debate has benefited the field as a whole. We should note, however, that both sides, in their own ways, viewed the Middle Ages as exceptional. The deconstructionists claimed that the Middle Ages anticipated post-structuralism, and that medieval thinkers understood the true nature of semiotics in a way that others, from the rise of the early modern through to Derrida, could not. Historicists countered that the chronological precedence of the Middle Ages makes deconstruction foreign to the entire period. In both views, the medieval period possesses an unalterable alterity, in relation to the modern era in general and in relation to deconstruction in particular.

This debate occurred, for the most part, ten to fifteen years ago, but it seems even more remote than that, because it seems largely resolved. We have all absorbed the language and much of the underlying semiotics of deconstruction. At the same time, the predominant form of medieval literary criticism is a theoretically informed historicism. In...

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