[lbo-talk] do people still read post-structuralism?

Joanna 123hop at comcast.net
Tue Nov 3 18:53:28 PST 2009


Shag writes

"I've never understood what people think is wrong with deconstruction. *shrug*"

There's nothing wrong with it per se. Essentially it is just a technique of close reading. What differentiates it from close reading (l'explication de texte), which was a school room exercise in France and a reactionary lit crit movement in the U.S., is that it blends close reading with a de-natured Marxism. That is, it pretends to include history but only always ultimately to exclude it and to revert to the "text" as the all explanatory methaphor. I could also say something about the wilfully obscurantist language that it chooses and the politically reactionary nature of this choice, but that's an old argument that I don't want to go through again.

Joanna



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