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Robert Wess Reading Michael Sprinker Michael made a difference—a very positive difference—in the lives of many others, far more so than any other person I've ever known. The difference he made in my life began during our years as colleagues at Oregon State. When I first met him in 1977, he practiced deconstruction. We got to know one another through contentious arguments about it. I was trained as a neo-aristotelian at the University of Chicago. Some of the newer developments in theory started while I was at Chicago, but they didn't make their way into any of my classes. By the time I met Michael, I had moved away from my training to some extent through work on Kenneth Burke, but the new theory was still alien to me. Were it not for Michael I might very well, like many in my generation, have dug in my heels and spent a career missing the boat on the issues of the day. Michael helped me make a transition in my own career and part of that transition was the 1981 summer we spent together in New Haven, in a Paul de Man summer seminar. An early sign of Michael's emerging interest in Marxism occurred during 1978, when he attended Edward Said's summer seminar. In a letter from early in the summer he jokes that Said put him "on the chopping block as the local Derridean," (June 1978) but in a later letter, he adds, [Altogether the Marxists arebecoming more and more interesting to me—at least the better ones among them like Lukács, Althusser, and Benjamin. Said and I have fought tooth and nail over the methodological issues these people raise, and he has taught me a certain respect for Marxism as a discipline of thought. So I'm afraid I shall be full of remarks on base and superstructure to go with my usual deconstructive rag when I return to Corvallis. (July 1978) What happens to deconstruction in Michael's thought after his thought becomes Marxist? On the one hand, at times it seems to disappear altogether. In his Proust book, for example, appearing during the heyday of ''rethinking Marxism"—to borrow the title of a well-known journal—it was typical of Michael to flaunt categories of Marxist sdence in an "in your face" table of contents: Chapter 1: Base and superstructure Chapter 2: Class and class struggle Chapter 3: Ideology Chapter 4: Revolution On the other hand, signs recur of a continuing interest in possible areas of overlap between deconstruction and Marxism, not only in the de Man 150 the minnesota review summer seminar but also in published work, particularly the later work on Derrida. Perhaps the area of potentially the most significant overlap may be discerned by juxtaposing two of Michael's texts: (1) his interview with Derrida, "Politics and Friendship," which appeared in The Althusserian Legacy, published in 1993; and (2) his essay, "The Legacies of Althusser," which appeared in Yale French Studies in 1995. The Derrida interview might be supplemented with a passage from the introduction to Ghostly Demarcations, where Michael confirms, in the context of the topic of ideology and the issue of its permanence, that "[Derrida] does indeed write 'in the tradition of a certain Marxism, in a certain spirit ofMarxism'" (3; see Specters 92). An exchange near the conclusion of the interview merits spedai attention . The context of the exchange is Derrida's exposition of his idea of—in his phrase—"democracy to come," which in one sense is a negotiation between the singularity of events and the generality of concepts. Derrida: The law of iterability which I recalled earlier but which I cannot explain here ... is decisive here for defining the possibility, chance, risks involved in such a negotiation between singularity and concept. This negotiation is indispensable: it is included with the rules, but "in the last instance" ... it is without rule and guaranteed rigor. Sprinker: Precisely. Derrida: This is perhaps what politics is! Sprinker: What I was going to say in response to what you said earlier . . . [I]n order to realize this sort of slightly unrealizable revolutionary "democracy to come," in...

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