Yoshie wrote:
"What is the shortest and plainest possible way to explain what 'deconstruction' (or post-structuralism in general) is (to marxists)? A left-Hegelian dialectics without sublation. The interpenetration of opposites, but no third term to sublate the opposition. Why left-Hegelian, instead of historical materialist? Because the primary categories of oppositions are idealist ones: the Subject and the Law. Marx's theses on Feuerbach apply to deconstructors/post-structuralists as well:
[theses 6, 9 and 10...]
In other words, 'Essence' returns in an 'anti-essentialist' philosophy via the way it imagines the most important categories + oppositions: the Subject (with Its Discontents)/an abstract human individual; and the Law/civil society. And this return is not a 'secret' one. As Zizek says, ideology doesn't 'hide' behind anything; it materializes itself (in this case, in the categories that preoccupy the post-structuralist philosopher) for all to see."
lentricchia made a similar case for why postmodernism should be seen as the return of left hegelianism. and, it is persuasive in some regards, especially given the open relation to Hegel and Hegelian categories in people like butler. but I'm not sure it works as grounds for a distancing of marxism from pomo. for a few reasons:
it's too confident that we don't 'return to Hegel after we read marx, too confident that marxism has achieved a sublation - in theory, no less. hence, all the claims that marx 'solved' the issues that the Hegelian and kantian schema were prone to once and for all. marx did not think this possible, and that is echoed by some versions of (vernacularly) pomo. Derrida for example is far from insisting on or even implying that an anti-essentialist stance is possible. an anti-essentialism, or anti-foundationalism, is bound to end up positing essentials, he argues, and as Yoshie notes.
there is far from a consensus amongst marxists what this touchstone or 'third term' is; and maybe those divisions are indicative that this 'third term' cannot be posed without re-establishing a hierarchy between the 'old' terms, or at least making it so tautological that it is says nothing.
there are those pomos who argue in more ontological terms, of an unavoidable predicament outside of history, but that is not true of all who are being lumped in here, by any means; and there are many marxists who use their explanatory or principal categories in similarly ontological ways.
marx's critique of Feuerbach is a rejection Feuerbach's predicates (what marx calls as idealisations) for a practical and historical one (human society). this is an important shift, crucial even. but this does not necessarily make it more materialist, less prone to idealisation, as a lot of sociology, or social constructionist, positions attest. there are subtle shifts in marx's thinking, which I think are important. as when he lambastes proudhon for thinking of society as a transcendent force. or, when he has a go at the Lassalleans: "The bourgeoisie have very good grounds for falsely ascribing supernatural powers to labour...".
the issue then is not that labour, society or history are not materialist categories and the law and subject are idealist ones; but that it is possible to have an idealist version of each of these, and no easier path to doing this than by the ascription of supernatural powers to any of those as categories, or the announcement of a discovery of the 'third term' in theory, or that any of them constitute the touchstone beyond the inclinations of metaphysics, or even that use of these categories as origin or end is anything other than a supernatural move. every time marx presents a category, he presents it as constituted by an internal antagonism; just like Derrida does - this is what avoids the collapse into a metaphysics of origin and end .... but it also makes for analysis interminable.
Yoshie is right: butler is one of us whether she likes it or not. and, whether we like it or not, we are also part of 'pomo'.
angela