Towards a “radical acceptance of vulnerability”: Postcolonialism and Deconstruction

The possibility for the home to open to the Other is as essential to the essence of the home as closed doors and windows.

—Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity

The “virus of deconstruction”

Reflecting on Jacques Derrida’s lasting influence on a range of intellectual, cultural, social, and political practices, Derek Attridge opens his 2005 essay “Deconstruction Today” with a most intriguing hypothetical scenario, asking,

What would a map of deconstruction today look like? If deconstruction is, as both its enemies and its friends have claimed, a kind of virus, and we might be able to produce—on the model of the mappings you might see in a treatise on global diseases—a large chart of the intellectual world with its presence marked in red, how would the result appear?

(42)

Spinning this hypothetical scenario further by, as he says, adding “another colour, say blue, to signal the presence of an antibody fiercely resisting the virus of deconstruction,” Attridge suggests that the map of deconstruction has changed dramatically over the last thirty years. Where an early map would have displayed intense spots of red and blue, spots that were limited to the disciplinary domains of philosophy and literature and the geographical space of France and the United States, “today,” he says, “the map would look very different”:

Rather than red dots we would have to paint large areas of many countries and many disciplines in varying shades of pink, to show how widely deconstruction has permeated intellectual and creative activity even when no direct acknowledgement is made. Superimposed on the pink would be the red dots indicating the large number of teachers and scholars around the globe whose work is influenced directly by deconstruction; these would be more numerous, if perhaps more scattered, than in 1975. There would be fewer blue areas, though many would still be as intense.

(44)

In other words, thirty-odd years after its very localized emergence in France and the United States, the “virus of deconstruction” has spread to and infiltrated every corner of the globe, leaving only isolated pockets of resistance to its global conquest.

Why open this essay—which seeks to address the question of vulnerability via the vexed relationship between deconstruction and postcolonial studies—with what even Attridge himself acknowledges to be a “rather contrived metaphor” (44)? The answer is simple: contrived though it may be, Attridge’s metaphor of a map of the world being colored in with more and more red dots is intensely evocative in the context of postcolonial studies, where it cannot but conjure up a familiar image of imperialist take-over of the world through British rule. Just as the red dots of deconstruction have, according to Attridge, now spread virus-like beyond its original confines, so British rule once dotted the imperial map well beyond the geographical borders of “Mother England.” Somewhat surprisingly, Attridge himself does not draw this all-too-obvious parallel between what is ultimately a highly imperialist metaphor and an actual imperial history. Although he focuses on the field of postcolonial studies—as one of the areas “in which deconstruction […] made a formative contribution” (49)—he is not at all self-reflexive about the use of an imperialist metaphor in this context. Even as he proceeds to sketch the “Derridean influence on postcolonial studies” (48), he appears to be oblivious to the fact that, in doing so, he is implicitly associating not just deconstruction but also, by implication, the deconstructive strand of postcolonial studies with imperialist practices. A deconstructive postcolonialism, by involuntary association, here becomes an ideologically complicit extension of imperialism. Had Attridge been aware of this implied complicity, he might have had rather more to say about the postcolonial “blue dots”—the antibodies—that resist “the virus of deconstruction.” Granted, he does acknowledge that “[r]unning counter to the Derridean influence on postcolonial studies is a strong current of resistance by those who feel that the pursuit of ‘theory’ has been to the detriment of material analysis and actual achievements on the ground” (48); however, after a brief paragraph in which he juxtaposes “materialist” critic Benita Parry...