Deconstructing Derrida

As readers of this space know, we frequently subject academics to what we view as constructive criticism. As travelers through the blogosphere may have noticed, they sometimes answer those critiques.

“Someone named Candace de Russy (on the usually unbearably dreadful National Review blog on the university situation ‘Phi Beta Cons’) cites someone else named Laura Ventura at Accuracy in Academia to the effect that the fact that the journal Critical Inquiry has more citations of Derrida and Marx than of C. S. Lewis and Thomas Jefferson is an indication of the journal’s ‘anti-American, anti-war, and anti-Christian’ stance,” Bucknell sociologist Alexander T. Riley writes. “Well, well, well.”

“What precisely, one hastens to ask, in Derrida’s work have they honed in on, in their painstakingly expert reading, as evidence for this?” Ironically, Riley devotes more than 1,000 words to an attack on Dr. de Russy’s 99-word and Miss Ventura’s 364-word post.

For the record, Candace de Russy, one of the most gracious of ladies as well as a force and talent to be reckoned with, serves on the board of trustees of the State University of New York. Law student Laura Ventura is an intern at AIA who is acquitting herself quite admirably.

Phi Beta Cons, meanwhile, is the National Review online site dedicated to academic doings. In addition to Dr. de Russy, Phibetacons features some of the stellar minds and talents of what might be called the academic right, including my friends George Leef of the John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy and Anne Neal of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni.

You know, if Bucknell had such a faculty, the school would improve dramatically, although we understand that Dr. Riley outclasses his colleagues. Nonetheless, department chairs such as Candace, George and Anne would elevate Bucknell above its present incarnation as a second-rate version of Berkeley.

We should note that, although hardly a conservative himself, Riley has defended the usually beleaguered Bucknell conservatives, who view him as a “stand-up guy.” That said, back to his hero. “I should love to ask Ventura and her echo de Russy precisely WHAT by Derrida they have read and to request a summary of that material,” Riley writes.

As it happens, my predecessor, Dan Flynn, dissects Derrida to a fare-thee-well in his book Intellectual Morons, showing much more than just one sentence from the father of deconstruction:

• “Emancipation from this language must be attempted but not as an attempt at emancipation from it, for this is impossible unless we forget our history. Rather, as the dream of emancipation. Nor as emancipation from it, which would be meaningless and would deprive us of the light of meaning. Rather, as resistance to it, as far as is possible. In any event, we must not abandon ourselves to this language with the abandon which today characterizes the worst exhilaration of the most nuanced structural formalism” and

• “The stage is theological for as long as its structure, following the entirety of tradition, comports the following elements: an author-creator who, absent and from afar, is armed with a text and keeps watch over, assembles, regulates the time or the meaning of representation, letting this latter represent him as concerns what is called the content of his thoughts, his intentions, his ideas. He lets representation represent him through representatives, directors or actors, enslaved interpreters who represent characters who, primarily through what they say, more or less directly represent the thought of the ‘creator.’ Interpretive slaves who faithfully execute the providential designs of the ‘master.’”

“From Candide to Les Miserables, works translated from French have had few problems reaching English-speaking readers,” Flynn notes. “Derrida’s work, his apologists contend, somehow differs.”

“My hope as a man of the left, is that certain elements of deconstruction will have served or—because the struggle continues, particularly in the United States—will serve to politicize or repoliticize the left with regard to positions which are not simply academic,” Derrida himself said in the 1990s. For example, he planned to apply theoretical deconstruction to actual building construction.

“We have to refuse the hegemony of functionality, of the aesthetic, and of dwelling,” Derrida wrote. “It’s a move to free architecture from all those external finalities, those extraneous goals.”

That theoretical goal proved difficult to attain. “The French found this out the hard way in the 1980s when they built a public park on deconstructionist principles,” Flynn writes. “Complete with a bridge that abruptly stops without going anywhere and a running track that crosses through a barroom, the monstrosity was a $200 million, taxpayer-funded reality check on deconstructionist architecture.”

Perhaps Riley, who, from what we understand, is blogging from France, can visit this park, walk that bridge and run that track. Maybe some earmarking senior Republican U. S. senators already have.

The other part of Riley’s complaint against the two ladies is their use of the contrasting example of C. S. Lewis. “Maybe, just maybe, if I might dare to suggest without marking myself as a left-wing, anti-American, anti-Christian theorist, maybe Lewis is not cited much because…well, he didn’t write much in the way of theory, literary, political, social, or otherwise?,” Riley suggests.

We suggest that he visit the C. S. Lewis website which features 35 works of not only fiction that Lewis wrote but also collections of essays, papers and lectures on, yes, subjects “literary, political, social” and “otherwise.”

Malcolm A. Kline is the executive director of Accuracy in Academia.