Very well said, esp. with regard to deconstruction's left-Hegelian re-affirmation of its missing interlocutor. Stuart Barnett writes in his "Introduction" to _Hegel After Derrida_ (Ed. Stuart Barnett. NY: Routledge, 1998):
***** After 1968, French philosophy devoted itself to the exploration of discourse and language. In as much as Hegel was equated with a humanist neo-Marxism, the relentless emphasis on language and discourse was perceived to be a renouncing of Hegel altogether. The fact that this emphasis was thoroughly anti-humanist [Yoshie: I disagree with S. Barnett here -- I say postmodernism is humanism by other means and most postmodernists are regrettably thoroughly moralist, as he says as much elsewhere] underscored this sense of renunciation. Yet it is not difficult to argue that French philosophy sought thereby to return to Kojève's insight that discourse was arbitrary not only in its distance from any referent but also in the manner in which it can refashion and recombine its constituent elements. French philosophy was also perhaps recalling Kojève's insight that discourse was a mediated suicide -- a suicide that implicated the very idea of man....
Despite the emphasis on language and discourse, the terms of the interaction of the master and slave -- which still seems to form the primal scene of French philosophical thought -- dictated the means by which anti-Hegelianism could be conceptualized. A key element in this scenario is the force of desire....
...Foucault emphasized the Kojèvian notion of the master/slave dialectic. Indeed, it would not be too much of an exaggeration to suggest that the crux of Foucault's work is a fascination with the drama of self-consciousness. From the story of Pinel's use of a mirror to treat mad inmates who believed they were the king of France to the relentless controlling gaze of the Panopticon, to the ever-expanding discourse on the care and regulation of the self in all matters sexual, Foucault has spun an apparently historical narrative to present the philosophical drama of Kojève's master and slave. As Kojève presented it, the struggle of the master and slave is the confrontation of two consciousnesses....It is this moment of self-recognition -- and thus auto-constitution -- of the slave [through his recognition of the other as master and himself as slave] that forms the primary focus of Foucault's work....Foucault has passed on an intractable dilemma to his followers: the price of fascinating and compelling analyses of power seems to be a commitment to a notion of power that is stripped ultimately of any historical or political specificity....The reason is clear. What Foucault was examining was what he believed to be a fundamental aspect of consciousness. History provided material with which to present a philosophical -- indeed, Hegelian -- argument....
Wherever the emphasis lies, then, the current critical temper seems caught in a Hegelian labyrinth. It is a Hegelianism, moreover, that need never mention the name Hegel. As Paul de Man reminds us: 'Few thinkers have so many disciples who never read a word of their master's writings.'
It is thus not too far-fetched to suggest that one could recast the story of the post-war French philosophy (and recent American literary theory and criticism) as the story of Hegelianism by other means.
It is Derrida who has sought to confront this Hegelianism of our age. From the early essays such as 'The Pit and the Pyramid' and 'A Hegelianism Without Reserve' to the extended study _Glas_ and the recent writings on the political, Hegel has provided a constant point of reference for the articulation of deconstruction....[O]ne could argue that it is _the_ task of deconstruction to come to terms with Hegel....Hegel defines what forms the ultimate task of deconstruction: the imperative to disrupt the virtual self-realization of onto-theology in speculative idealism. The means of this self-realization -- the _Aufhebung_ comprises the decisive site of investigation for deconstruction....Derrida underscores in the interview with Jean-Louis Houdebine and Guy Sarpetta in _Positions_ that the key 'concept' of _différance_ was deployed in order to make a strategic intervention in Hegelian thought. 'If there was a definition of _différance_,' Derrida states, 'it would be precisely the limit, the interruption, the destruction of the Hegelian _relève wherever_ it operates...'.
_Glas_ in turn examines what in Hegel resists the Hegelian dialectic. Derrida...expounds...: 'In effect I believe that Hegel's text is necessarily fissured: that it is something more and other than the circular closure of its representation.' (22-7) *****
So deconstruction wants to use Hegel against Hegel (and discourse against Descartes); some like Derrida do so knowingly, others unknowingly. The problem with deconstructive 'opposition' to Hegelianism and Humanism (under which it wrongly subsumes the entirety of Marxism) is that it mistakes what Hegel says for actual history (and what Descartes says for an actual human being). Hence its endless struggle against phrases ("the Plan," "Authority," "Lenin," "Modernism/Modernity," "Reason," "Truth," etc.). While it is said that postmodern philosophy was given birth by Althusser, postmodern philosophers forget to apply to themselves the most (perhaps the only) important insight of Althusser's that draws upon Marx's theses on Feuerbach: let's not get trapped by the wrong problematic.
Now back to modernism. From another perspective on modernism and deconstruction (moving away from architecture toward literature and painting), we may see deconstruction as a restatement of the modernist aesthetic in ethical terms.
In his article _The Concept of Force as Modernist Response to the Authority of Science_ [Modernism/Modernity 5.2 (1998) 77-93], Charles Altieri uses the following two citations as epigrams:
***** An organization of forms expresses a confluence of forces. . . . For example, if you clap a strong magnet beneath a plateful of iron filings, the energies in the magnet will proceed to organize form. It is only by applying a particular and subtle force that you can bring order and vitality and thence beauty into a plate of iron filings, which are otherwise as ugly as anything under heaven. Ezra Pound
This is what Suprematism means to me--the dawn of an era in which the nucleus will move as a single force of anatomized energy and will expand within new, orbiting spatial systems. . . . I think that freedom can be attained only after our ideas about the organization of solids have been completely smashed. . . . There is only energy. Therefore everything is linked and at the same time separate in its own motion. . . . Expressing this dynamic functioning is the primary purpose of consciousness. Kasimir Malevich *****
This influence of literary and painterly modernisms on deconstruction expresses itself as its covert voluntarism. A deconstructive perspective (incorrectly) assumes (like Sorel) the world of undifferentiated matter and energy, which remains formeless without a violent form-giving discourse.
Yoshie