> I've likened deconstruction to that which occurs when a small child
> asks an adult a question and upon hearing the answer asks, 'but why?.'
> Invariably, the adult and child go back and forth until the adult becomes
> frustrated and says 'because I said so, that's why.' (now there's an
> attempt at closure!).
and this is a bad thing? it might be annoying, but it doesn't seem to be bad, especially insofar as the 'i said so, that's why' is an indication not just of closure, but where along the lines of explanation that closure takes place. i find the latter quite interesting to note.
> In a narrow sense, seems to me that deconstruction
> is a way of reading in which the reader is consciously ambivalent,
> discerning differences between meaning and what an author asserts.
not quite. it's about discerning present gaps and limit points, in much the same way as discerning the absent question of the value of labour _power_ was the point of departure for marx's critique of political economy, and in much the same way as discerning the exclusion of women from the pantheon of classical humanism was the point of departure of feminism. discerning the differences between assertion and meaning is a more psychoanalytic practice. in regard to ambivalence, this is another term for dialectics, without the diachrony. there is a difference between an ambivalent positioning and the tracing of ambivalences in works is there not; as much as there is a difference between regarding capitalism as founded on the production of s-v and productivism. that one can slide into the other is true, but there is no automatic collapse of one into the other is there?
> Given above, deconstruction can be political practice, an effort to
> take apart a thought system's reasoning and, perforce, political
> structures and social institutions that sustain it. But deconstructors
> generally seem to have been evasive and a(un?)historical.
is it evasion or do you read it as an evasion because it isn't the kind of things you would call for? on history, see my reply to curtiss's post.
> Derrida's
> _Specters of Marx_, for example, is consistent (necessarily so?) with
> previous work in its lack of frankness even as he engages Marx/Marxism.
well, there is certainly something very missing in _SoM_; but i wouldn't say it's frankness.
> Derrida, in suggesting as he does in
> _SofM_, that deconstruction is an attempt to radicalize Marxism, may
> be ok with marxism (lower case) and/or marxisms (plural). But if
> Marxists have caricatured/distorted deconstruction in holding that it
> reduces everything to interpretation, a 'derridean extravance' of
> multiple and unstable identities is a difficult base upon which to
> build a political/social movement with its eyes on the prize. In that
> sense, we'll probably continue to disagree about the appearance/omission
> (perhaps remission is more appropriate) of class.
surely though, you don't beleive that theory is the place in which the building of a political movement takes place? it might inform that movement or be used as a weapon, but it doesn't decide that one way or other.
> Surely you don't mean to suggest that it is regrettable that I've not
> been reading some of the folks you mention.
no, i don't think i've ever suggested there is a list of books everyone has to read. but i do think if you're going to make assertions about a body of theory then it helps to have actually read enough of them for such claims to be based on more than a feeling. otherwise, i think it should be a discusion about this or that book that one has read.
> I have read some Nancy & Lacoue-Labarthe. As I recall, the former's
> _The Inoperative Community_ positioned culture clash and imposed
> homogeneity as polar and undesirable opposities
i haven't read _inoperative community_ as thoroghly as i should have, and i don't have it on my shelf, but why aren't these a false dichotomy? surely this is the way in which debates over multiculturalism for instance have been conducted.
> and then posited an
> idealistic community of freedom and pluralism.
i doubt very much whether they argue for pluralism, in the liberalistic sense of positing identities as external to the process of interaction, antagonism and organisation. freedom also shouldn't be read in liberal terms -- see Nancy's _The Experience of Freedom_.
> Claims about otherness
> and heterogeneity notwithstanding, Nancy may not as far from removed
> from liberalism as radical appearances suggest. As for the latter,
> his _Heidegger, Art and Politics_, in suggesting differences between
> marxism and fascism are akin to spats between friends, in effect,
> repeats the totalitarian thesis. And his antipathy for Adorno, who
> he takes to task for writing favorably about National Socialist
> poet Baldur von Schirach (apparent evident of the 'co-belonging' of
> fascism and marxism), is hypocritical given his apologia for
> Heidegger which amounts to the claim that everyone - 'left' and
> 'right' - has been deceived by the world-historical changes of the
> 20th century.
if you feel there is nothing to be answered or analysed in the historical and theoretic relationships between stalinism and fascism and social democracy, then i guess there's not much more that can be explored here.
there is a perspective on those which has little to do with the thesis of totalitarianism, and much more to do with those forms as particular responses to and enclosures of labour. a very european debate, and one which may well sound strange to the ears of those in the US, for the simple reason that things like the extent of national state ownership has been pretty negligible in the US.
Angela _________