Charles,
What you call "practical-critical" activities from a Marxist perspective and what I call discourse/practice from a post-marxist/poststructural standpoint may be more similar than many people would assume. Actually, your point about contradictions within and outside a system is quite well taken. I personally don't work in the dialectical tradition any more, but I came from that political-philosophical background, cut my teeth in theory through Marxist activism, and have respect for people who are trying to interpret the world from that framework. ( I am a post-marxist, not an anti-marxist, my politics is very much embedded in a radical marxist vision, but I digress).
^^^^ Manjur, if I might start a little comradely argument on some of this, I must say frankly that I have a problem with the mild implication from the term "post" that this position has achieved something sort of "beyond" Marxism. It is not a nostalgic protest, but rather , after many debates and analyses of this dispute, I conclude that these various trends have _not_ gone beyond the theoretical advances of Marx, Engels and Lenin. I'm not saying that Marxism doesn't have to develop its theory , as history goes on. I am saying that Nietzscheans through Derridaeans have not shown me that they don't take steps backward from Marxism's advances. Sorry to be so corny and old fashion about it. I lack subtlety sometimes.
We can't make the revolution based on theories that lead to a sense of helplessness.
In what sense do you mean laws are metaphors. Metaphors from what other area of life ?
Peace and Power !
^^^^^
Of course, people from different discourses can communicate. Other wise human communication beyond a minuscule primordial community would not have been possible. To use Gadamer's expression, human interaction is possible through "fusion of horizons." Actually, discourses don't have well defined, precise boundaries (we all have to be careful not to take the spatial metaphors too literally). We participate in multiple overlapping discourses simultaneously. There is always an element of human agency (something that is undertheorized in Foucault and Derrida) in sorting out those discourses for ourselves, whether we consciously articulate them or not.
But the funny thing is that just because I use the language of Enlightenment modernity (e.g., internal logic) it does not make logic or the law of identity a universal phenomenon. We can communicate only through the language that is available to us. But that does not make that language a a transparent representation of some sort of a universal axiom. Laws and logics are metaphors whose origin we have forgotten, as Nietzsche argued. Even the statement "we can never be certain about truth and knowledge" itself is an uncertain, irreducibly metaphorical statement. And I don't think language offers us any way out of that eternal trap. The difference between true believers and epistemological-anarchist types like me is that, in stead of trying to develop a meta-narrative of certainty to wish away that messiness of knowledge and reality, we recognize our sense of helplessness.
Manjur