Deconstruction as Narrative Interruption JAMES GILBERT-WALSH St. Thomas University ABSTRACT: Because of the way it prioritizes interruption and calls into question the very possibility of producing coherent, selfcontained narratives, the deconstructive work of Jacques Derrida is often thought to be intrinsically anti-narrative in its very structure; and yet there are those who insist that, to the contrary, deconstruction is a narrative exercise through and through. I maintain that both interpretive approaches fall prey to a serious misunderstanding of deconstruction. I will show that deconstruction should be viewed neither as a simple affirmation nor negation of narrative but rather as a radical perplexity in the face of narrative. Indeed, any serious engagement with deconstruction requires that we call into question the very nature, function, and limits of narrative practice. KEYWORDS: Narrative, perplexity, Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, deconstruction, Richard Rorty, interruption, Jurgen Habermas, phenomenology, poiesis.

What is Deconstruction? Of all the questions that might be put to Jacques Derrida, this one perhaps most warrants a straight answer. It was he, after all, who coined this term in the mid-1960s (Derrida, 1974, p. 10). It was he who, both in his written work and in interviews, came back to this term again and again as emblematic of his overall approach to reading texts (see Derrida, 1981, p. 6). And it was through these initial gestures of his that, for better or for worse, the term deconstruction gradually took on a life of its own: Initially, it moved beyond the realm of “philosophy proper” to permeate the discourse of the humanities and the social sciences;1 and eventually it settled into the common parlance of popular culture (one now finds critics and commentators “deconstructing” political platforms, TV sitcoms, Hollywood films, etc.). Given this legacy, non-specialists would seem within their rights to demand of Derrida a clear and accessible account of deconstruction – if only to set the record straight concerning what the term does and does not mean. Oddly, however, such an account is precisely what Derrida does not offer. Though he has much to say about deconstruction, he refuses to tell Interchange, Vol. 38/4, 317–333, 2007. DOI 10.1007/s10780-007-9034-z

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us in any direct fashion what it is. At one point, for instance, he states bluntly: “All sentences of the type ‘deconstruction is X’ or ‘deconstruction is not X’ a priori miss the point, which is to say that they are at least false” (1985b, p. 4). Remarks like this have caused more than a few raised eyebrows: taken by themselves they seem simply evasive, likely the words of a charlatan seeking to avoid exposure at all cost. Why isn’t Derrida more straightforward? Why does he fall back upon such ambiguous and perplexing replies? Surely he realizes that, by failing to produce even a brief synoptic narrative of deconstruction,2 he is strengthening his critics’ suspicions that deconstruction really has nothing coherent to say. Is it possible that such suspicions are valid? While there are likely many ways in which one might successfully leap to Derrida’s defense here and explain to non-specialists what he is doing, I propose that the most effective and interesting reply – the defense most in tune with what deconstruction actually does – commences by acknowledging a certain validity to these suspicions: There is indeed a sense in which deconstruction really does have “nothing coherent to say.” I would like to suggest, however, that both critics and proponents of Derrida’s work begin to miss the point when they take for granted this “having nothing coherent to say,” assuming its significance to be obvious rather than allowing themselves to be perplexed by it. Having something coherent to say, telling a story, producing a narrative – most of us assume that we know what this would mean (and, correlatively, what its negation would mean), at least on a common sense level. But can we be so sure? In Memoirs for Paul de Man, Derrida (1986) writes, I have never known how to tell a story. And since I love nothing better than remembering and Memory itself – Mnemosyne – I have always felt this inability as a sad infirmity. Why am I denied narration? Why have I not received this gift? (p. 3) It is tempting to interpret this passage as a simple acknowledgment of ineptitude in which Derrida says: “Like most people, I know very well what it means to tell a story successfully; I’ve just never been able to pull it off.” But what if Derrida is rather saying: “I have never known how to tell a story because I’m not even sure what successfully telling a story would mean; in fact, the more I think about narrative, the less I feel like I have even the faintest idea what it is”?

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By pursuing this second interpretive possibility, I will bring together what are, for me, two long-standing questions – the first, a point of perplexity, the second, a point of frustration: 1. Precisely what is narrative? 2. Why, despite the efforts of Derrida and several others over the past few decades, do so many severe mis-readings of deconstruction continue to be taken seriously? I will argue that these two questions are closely related inasmuch as many mis-readings of deconstruction are due, at least in part, to a lack of sufficient perplexity about narrative. In addition, I will explain why Derrida’s apparently evasive responses to the question “What is deconstruction?” are in fact as direct as they could possibly be, given that he is trying to take this perplexity seriously.

I. Deconstruction – What Does it do? Derrida is at times more forthcoming, if not about what deconstruction is then at least about what it does. In The Ear of the Other, for instance, he says that deconstruction “interrupts a construction” (Derrida, 1985a, p. 102). But what does it mean to say that deconstruction “interrupts” [interrompre]? To begin with, deconstruction typically engages what Derrida (1995) refers to as “philosophical desire:” The philosopher is someone whose desire and ambition are absolutely mad; the desire for power of the greatest politicians is absolutely minuscule and juvenile compared to the desire of the philosopher. (p. 139) [The philosopher’s] fundamental project is to render an account of all possible discourses and all possible arts. He wants to situate himself in a place where everything done and said can be thought, theorized and finally mastered by him. It is the place of absolute mastery, the project of absolute knowledge. Even if this takes this express form only in Hegel, absolute knowledge is indeed the truth of the philosophical project. (p. 140) Philosophical discourse, the mastery of every other possible discourse, tends to gather itself up in the philosophical utterance, in something that, all at once, the philosopher’s voice can say, bring together, utter. (pp. 140–141) To be sure, if Derrida expects such a sweeping, general synopsis to be taken seriously, he is obliged to supplement it with a great deal of clarification and justification; and this is precisely what much of his work provides via a close reading of the history of philosophy, thinker by thinker, text by text. For our purposes here, however, the general

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synopsis itself should suffice. The passages above indicate that “philosophical desire” pursues an absolute philosophical position: a “meta-account” or “meta-narrative” – not in the sense that it contains the content of every possible narrative, but rather in the sense that it has authority over all other narratives such that they find their ultimate justification only in it.3 What does deconstruction do in the face of this philosophical desire? It interrupts philosophy’s repeated attempts to compose this metanarrative. More specifically, it engages in philosophical inquiry, but turns this inquiry back upon itself, employing philosophy in order to bring philosophy, again and again, to acknowledge what it has necessarily marginalized or suppressed in order to hold together its supposed “all-encompassing narrative.” This is what Derrida (1981) means when he says “I try to keep myself at the limit of philosophical discourse” (p. 6). As he puts it, To “deconstruct” philosophy … would be to think the structured genealogy of philosophy’s concepts, but at the same time to determine – from a certain exteriority that is unqualifiable or unnamable by philosophy – what this history has been able to dissimulate or forbid, making itself into a history by means of this somewhere motivated repression. (Derrida, 1981, p. 6) But again, what does this mean? Precisely what kind of interruption is at work here? It is in trying to get a clear answer to this question that we begin to run across wildly disparate interpretations of Derrida’s “narrative interruption.” On the one hand, there are those who take deconstruction to be a silent – or perhaps more appropriately a silencing – interruption: the simple negation or destruction of narrative as such, a nihilistic gesture that is itself empty, without content. While this interpretation acknowledges that deconstruction does strive for narrative coherence in certain respects (e.g., in the passage I started with, Derrida is telling a story about his inability to tell stories), it insists that this is done only provisionally in order to then turn narrative back on itself so that it undermines its own coherence, negating itself. Some who hold this view are proponents and defenders of Derrida’s work. For instance, certain members of the “Yale school” of deconstruction tend to celebrate this negative practice as an undercutting of narrative hegemony. For them, the blind assumption that there are coherent and self-contained narratives, be they literary or non-literary, is something from which deconstruction can help liberate us. Paul de Man (1986b), in particular, puts forth the argument

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that all narratives – including those of “objective science” – are constituted, at least in part, by the very act of reading them, an act that can vary tremendously depending on the particular context in which it takes place (p. 15).4 Thus, for de Man, reading is no merely secondary, supplemental gesture: To assume that a narrative “is what it is” prior to its having been read (by a particular person, from a particular perspective, in a particular, contingent context) is to have already misunderstood it from the ground up. The consequent interruptive task of literary theory – and specifically of a literary theory informed by deconstruction – is to expose, again and again, the irreducibility of any text to a self-contained narrative with a univocal meaning. As Terry Eagleton (1983) puts it, the task of de Man’s deconstruction is to demonstrate “that literary language constantly undermines its own meaning” (p. 145). J. Hillis Miller (1979) speaks of this empty but ultimately liberating exposure in similar terms: “[Deconstructive] procedure is an attempt to reach clarity in a region where clarity is not possible. In the failure of that attempt, however, something moves, a limit is encountered” (p. 231). Granted, de Man is not suggesting that there really are coherent narratives that deconstruction must negate; its task is, rather, to negate the illusion of such coherence, to expose how texts, when read carefully, deconstruct themselves and thereby reveal their lack of positive content. But the effect, where narrative is concerned, is the same: What we can and should expect from deconstruction is, according to de Man (1986a), a story-less “state of suspended ignorance” (p. 19). Derrida himself seems, at times, to substantiate this view of deconstructive interruption. For instance, I try to respect as rigorously as possible the internal, regulated play of philosophemes or epistememes by making them slide – without mistreating them – to the point of their nonpertinence, their exhaustion, their closure. (Derrida, 1981, p. 6) Here, the negation of philosophical content – and thus of any possible philosophical narrative – appears to be the explicit goal of deconstructive practice. Moreover, this seems to dovetail with many of Derrida’s perplexing remarks about deconstruction, including the following excerpt from an interview with him: Q: One can put it in other terms: Is there a philosophy of Jacques Derrida? JD: No. Q: Is there thus no message? JD: No. (Derrida, 1995, p. 361)

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Yet there are many others who, while they would agree with de Man that deconstruction involves the explicit undermining of narrative coherence, are highly critical of such a nihilistic practice. For them, Derrida’s work is no liberating force but rather a pathological and irresponsible exercise. Nikos Salingaros (2004), for instance, writes: Since the 1960s, deconstruction has sought to undermine all wellordered structures. It needs something ordered … on which to act and then to destroy. ... It dismantles structure, logical statements, traditional beliefs, observations, etc. (p. 66) Rather than celebrate this negation, Salingaros (2004) immediately dismisses it as a “viral” attack on all “healthy” discourse: Derrida has called deconstruction a “virus,” i.e., an inert code that replicates itself by using a host. ... The virus requires a more complex host to invade and destroy, but cannot live by itself. (p. 66) Salingaros maintains that deconstruction, whatever it pretends to do, involves no will to liberate but only a “will to destroy” (p. 79). As he puts it, “[deconstruction] erases normal ways of thinking. ... It erases associations that form coherent thoughts” (Salingaros, 2004, p. 67). He proceeds to clarify what he takes to be the difference between deconstruction and healthy, coherent discourse: One characteristic of a coherent discipline is hierarchical complexity, in which correlated ideas and results define a unique internal structure. Like a valid bank note, this structure should be extremely difficult to counterfeit. That is not the case with deconstruction. (Salingaros, 2004, p. 77) Oddly, then, the respective readings of de Man and Salingaros indicate that deconstruction is both damned and praised on the basis of its purported undermining of narrative coherence. On the other hand, there are those who claim that the narrative interruption characteristic of deconstruction is not a silent negation of narrative but is rather one narrative voice breaking in upon another. On this view, deconstruction is a subversive production of interruptive narratives – indeed an exponential multiplication of these narratives. Moreover, this reading, like the previous interpretation, has been used both to defend and to attack Derrida’s work. Richard Rorty (1989), for instance, would agree with both de Man and Salingaros that deconstruction achieves the interruption of all real or imagined philosophical meta-narratives; however, he would claim that this takes place not through a simple negation of narrative but through a proliferation of “narrative experiments.” In order to

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understand what Rorty means by this, one must take into account his unorthodox redescription of philosophical practice: On the view of philosophy which I am offering, philosophers should not be asked for arguments against, for example, the correspondence theory of truth or the idea of the “intrinsic nature of reality.”... [Rather, my] “method” of philosophy is the same as the “method” of utopian politics or revolutionary science. ... The method is to redescribe lots and lots of things in new ways, until you have created a pattern of linguistic behavior which will tempt the rising generation to adopt it. ... It does not pretend to have a better candidate for doing the same old things which we did when we spoke in the old way. Rather, it suggests that we might want to stop doing those things and do something else. (Rorty, 1989, p. 9) In short, Rorty is exhorting philosophers to cease viewing themselves as arguers and as pursuers of the truth and to start viewing themselves as poietic “redescribers,” creators of narrative risks which offer fresh ways of looking at “lots and lots of things.” While his hope that these experiments will eventually congeal into a radically new “pattern of linguistic behaviour” might seem to reflect a desire for a new metanarrative, there is in fact something more radical at stake here: The goal of Rorty’s narrative experimentation is not merely the composition of an absolute all-encompassing story but rather the composition of an all-encompassing vocabulary as the context of and basis for all available stories – in other words, the philosopher’s ultimate task is to create a completely new orientation towards the world: We should restrict ourselves to questions like “Does our use of these words get in the way of our use of those other words?” This is a question about whether our use of tools is inefficient, not a question about whether our beliefs are contradictory. ... The proper analogy is with the invention of new tools to take the place of old tools. To come up with such a vocabulary is more like discarding the lever and the chock because one has envisaged the pully. (Rorty, 1989, p. 12) The reason that Rorty sees Derrida as a compatriot in this transformative struggle is that, in his view, Derridean deconstruction “create[s] a style so different as to make [his] books incommensurable with those of [his] precursors” (Rorty, 1989, p. 126). For Rorty, this style is precisely one of narrative experimentation: “Instead of paring down, the later Derrida proliferates. Instead of hoping, with Heidegger, always to ‘say the same’… he takes pains never to say the same thing twice” (Rorty, 1989, p. 126). On Rorty’s reading, “[Derrida] is trying to create

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himself by creating his own language game”(1989, p. 133), a goal which is, for Rorty, the most admirable one a philosopher could have. Granted, there are, as I have indicated, passages in Derrida’s work that seem to underscore deconstruction’s negative function. However, Rorty would be quick to point to other passages in which Derrida seems just as ready to describe deconstruction as a positive, productive exercise – as a “thinking of affirmation” (Derrida, 1995, p. 186),4 for instance. In any case, the main thrust of Rorty’s interpretation is clear enough: the value of deconstruction lies in its poietic multiplication of experimental redescriptions (i.e., narratives). And yet, whereas commentators like Rorty celebrate this purported productive aspect of deconstruction, critics like Jurgen Habermas are just as quick to condemn it. Like Rorty, Habermas (1987) sees deconstruction as an “uncontrollable happening of spontaneous text production” (p. 190),5 a proliferation of narratives. Unlike Rorty, however, Habermas fears that producing and preserving narratives while simultaneously abandoning meta-narrative means irresponsibly abandoning all narrative accountability; that is, on this view, deconstruction undermines the demand that narratives justify themselves and thereby leads to a dangerous relativism in which any story is as good as any other, regardless of what is at stake. Specifically, Habermas and many other critics of Derrida fear that, when deconstruction abandons argumentation, logical demonstration, objectivity, and so forth, as the stable criteria for evaluating the legitimacy of narratives, which narrative experiments succeed and which ones fail simply becomes a matter of power dynamics: The authority of philosophy is interrupted only to be replaced by the authority of rhetoric (Habermas, 1987, p. 188). As Habermas puts it: The frailty of the genre distinction between philosophy and literature is evidenced in the practice of deconstruction; in the end, all genre distinctions are submerged in one comprehensive, allembracing context of texts – Derrida talks in a hypostatizing manner about a “universal text.” What remains is self-inscribing writing as the medium in which each text is woven together with everything else. Even before it makes its appearance, every text and every particular genre has already lost its autonomy to an alldevouring context and an uncontrollable happening of spontaneous text production. This is the ground of the primacy of rhetoric, which is concerned with the qualities of texts in general, over logic, as a system of rules to which only certain types of discourse are subjected in an exclusive manner – those bound to argumentation. (1987, p. 190)

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To sum up, then: Habermas’ ultimate fears about deconstruction are more or less identical to Salingaros’ – but they stem from completely different interpretations of what deconstruction does; likewise, Rorty and de Man both nod their heads affirmatively at deconstruction while holding radically opposed views concerning its function. My question: What are we to make of all this? Why such a diverse and polarized range of interpretations of what deconstruction does?

II. Narrative Perplexity My initial point of perplexity – What is narrative? – might seem like a pointless question. Isn’t it self-evident what narrative is? Isn’t it simply common sense? On the one hand, it would be absurd to deny this obviousness: At various points in our lives, we engage in narrative, each of us, and we experience ourselves doing this. We know what it means to tell a story, to hear a story. The phenomenon of narrative is, quite often, right in front of us. And yet, on the other hand, as soon as we begin speaking or writing about narrative, things become more complicated. Indeed, much of the work currently being done in narrative studies is precisely an attempt to explore and map out the theoretical and practical implications of this too often ignored complexity.6 And, if we turn to philosophy, we quickly get a sense of just how elusive this narrative complexity is: As soon as we are no longer simply experiencing narrative but have begun trying to offer a clearly articulated response to the question “What is it?” (or when we’ve begun to do something that presupposes a response to this question), we have no choice but to employ vocabulary and interpretive structures that we ourselves did not choose but which have been handed down to us historically by our language and culture. Here is where things cease to be obvious: What if these terms and interpretive structures, as they have been passed down to us, serve to distance us from rather than bring us close to our experience of narrative, confusing or concealing the phenomenon of narrative rather than disclosing it? This is precisely the question that phenomenology asks, and it brings us back to Derrida and deconstruction: The goal of phenomenology – and of deconstruction inasmuch as it is a radicalization or at least a modification of phenomenology – is to: a) identify such dissimulative terms and structures, and b) modify them critically so that phenomena are, as much as possible, no longer concealed by them.7

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There are, to be sure, many directions that a phenomenological approach to the question “What is narrative?” might take. I would like, very briefly, to consider only one: If we assume that a definitive aspect of narrative is the disclosure of something (i.e., “telling a story” thought of as a revealing or a showing of some kind),8 one of the questions that we may legitimately ask is: How does narrative accomplish this disclosure? The predominant response to this question, rooted firmly in a strand of Western thought more than 2,000 years old: Narrative disclosure is achieved through the “poietic” composition of a product.9 Aristotle was perhaps the first thinker to carefully consider the distinction between two kinds of human action, poiesis and praxis; and this distinction, as it has been handed down to us, continues to inform and structure contemporary thought. Praxis is typically understood to be an action the purpose or goal of which lies in the action itself (e.g., the goal of the activity of dancing is usually nothing other than dancing itself) and poiesis is taken to be an action the purpose of which is external to the action.10 A poietic activity would be, for example, washing dishes. Most of us don’t wash dishes because we love the activity itself; rather, we do it because we want the end result external to the activity: clean dishes. According to the predominant, poietic interpretation of narrative, then, the disclosive goal of narrative is to produce, via the activity of “telling a story,” a gathered or totalized composition wherein all of the parts serve what is disclosed by the whole. To be sure, there is interruption here (e.g., digressions, shifts of focus, changes in point of view, changes in scene, questions raised, pauses for breath), but such interruption is always subordinate to composition, serving this higher, ultimately synthetic goal. Here, the intended narrative product guides the “story-telling” activity, just as the intended house I’m building guides my hammering one board to another; and here, things like questioning – and perplexity in general – are, at best, provisional interruptions: means for achieving a composition which will, when finished, resolve them. Granted, this is a sketchy oversimplification; but it reflects, in a nutshell, something held in common, even if only tacitly, by many contemporary views of narrative disclosure – including views voiced by some prominent figures in narrative studies.11 The question we must ask: Should this conventional view, this “narrative about narrative,” go without saying in a discussion of deconstruction?

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Each of the various readings of Derrida I mentioned before would seem to have already replied with a tacit “yes.” In fact, each of them – de Man’s, Salingaros’, Rorty’s, Habermas’ – function as if Derrida has given a clear answer to a disjunctive “either-or” question, a question which asks, What of this narrative interruption? What is it? Is it a composed story that interrupts the philosophical meta-narrative? Or is it rather an empty, purely negative non-story, a silent, skeptical erasure of all real or imagined narratives? Which is the correct interpretation? Each of the above readings has decided for one of these options. That is to say, each reading, whether it is for or against deconstruction, has adopted a poietic view of narrative disclosure and has decided that deconstruction is either for or against it.12 My hypothesis: Contrary to what any of these interpretations suggest, Derrida does not decide one way or the other, for he does not take for granted the view of narrative that they presuppose. Of course, one may then ask: Which view of narrative does he offer as an alternative to the poietic view? In the end, he offers no alternative: He has nothing coherent to say; he does not know “how to tell a story.” As I suggested at the outset, it is tempting to view this as a shortcoming on Derrida’s part. But is it? What if the problem is not that the poietic view of narrative is wrong and that we need to find a correct alternative? What if the problem lies, rather, in our insistent demand for a coherent and complete narrative about narrative? Derrida does not decide one way or the other about narrative – not because he’s indecisive, not because he’s being evasive, but because he is facing narrative head-on and is honestly perplexed by it. Consider the following passage, part of which I quoted earlier: [The philosopher’s] fundamental project is to render an account of all possible discourses and all possible arts. He wants to situate himself in a place where everything done and said can be thought, theorized and finally mastered by him. It is the place of absolute mastery, the project of absolute knowledge. Even if this takes this express form only in Hegel, absolute knowledge is indeed the truth of the philosophical project. To situate oneself in this place is simultaneously to project the greatest mastery over all the possible discourses of mastery, and to renounce it. The two things go together: it is the place at the same time of the greatest discretion, of the greatest effacement, of retreat, of modesty – a modesty

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haunted by the devil. That’s what interests me [italics added]. (Derrida, 1995, p. 140)

What Derrida is suggesting here is that, because the desire for mastery (the philosophical hubris which strives to disclose everything, to capture everything in a grand meta-narrative) must, in its quest, leave no stone unturned, it eventually has to turn its attention back upon its own disclosive gesture: Part of its self-assigned task is to narrate the narrative event itself. Here is where interruption happens, for this desire for mastery is forced to acknowledge that it cannot fully capture its own gesture within its story. That is to say, the gesture or event of “narration” can never be fully reduced to an element of the “narrative” which emerges from it and which is always already conditioned by it.13 So, paradoxically, for the sake of the story’s coherence and completion – indeed, for the sake of mastery – this desire must at a crucial point renounce mastery, arriving at a certain humility or modesty: neither a confident affirmation nor negation of narrative but rather a perplexity in the face of narrative, a perplexity in the face of a story about narrative that we have always already begun but are never able to finish. Contrary to Salingaros’ suggestion, it is not deconstruction that opts to be a “parasite” upon healthier discursive hosts. Rather, mastery and renunciation, affirmation and negation, are parasitic upon each other in all narrative practice: no interruptive renunciation without a desire for mastery, and no desire for mastery without an eventual interruptive renunciation. For Derrida, there is a radical inscrutability to the phenomenon of narrative that our own desire for mastery forces us to acknowledge – once we follow this desire through to its completion. His response to the question “What is narrative?” thus turns out to be, like his response to all ultimate “What is X?” questions, a further question mark, a point of perplexity. It is by insisting upon and maintaining this perplexity – this “having nothing coherent to say” – that deconstruction interrupts without putting forth (or negating) any positive narrative content. Granted, a skeptic could easily object that, in the end, this really is to decide against truth and against coherent meaning, since any composition that philosophy produces is ultimately subject to this deconstructive perplexity, revealed to be in some sense inadequate. The difficulty I have with this objection is its assumption that the only truth, the only phenomenal disclosure possible, is via what is captured in a narrative composition, in a philosophical position. And this is precisely the assumption Derrida is calling into question!

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What if – and I think Derrida is suggesting this – what if a truly rigorous phenomenology always eventually runs into an irreducible perplexity that no meta-narrative can adequately resolve? Wouldn’t such a phenomenology need to interrupt every meta-narrative in order to bear witness to this phenomenon? Wouldn’t an insistence on an adequate narrative be a resistance to the truth, a misrepresentation of this elusive phenomenon? Wouldn’t our phenomenological task be to acknowledge, rather than resolve, this perplexity? And precisely why do we assume that perplexity and the activity of questioning are but provisional poietic stepping stones to disclosure, mere instruments for the sake of acquiring narrative answers which are external to the questions which they hopefully resolve?14 Why don’t we take the phenomenon of the question itself more seriously as a phenomenon, as a disclosive event in its own right? This is perhaps not as unorthodox as it sounds. In fact, if one reads the history of philosophy carefully, one sees that the acknowledgment of an interruptive disclosure proper to questioning – a disclosure qua question which breaks in upon narrative without simply affirming or negating it – is hardly Derrida’s invention. Consider, for instance, the role of aporia in Socratic dialogue, where a perplexed, questioning hesitation in the face of confidently asserted but ultimately unjustified narratives is upheld as valuable in its own right.15 If one looks carefully, one also finds this acknowledgment in Aristotle, Plotinus, Aquinas, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and so on. So much for narrative. But what of our opening question, “What is deconstruction?” From what has been said thus far, it should be clear that deconstruction and narrative are inextricably bound up with one another; indeed, deconstruction is, in a sense, the most extreme manifestation of the desire for narrative mastery. Thus, it would seem that, just as “What is narrative?” is Derrida’s only possible response to the question “What is narrative?” likewise “What is deconstruction?” is, in the end, his only possible response to the question “What is deconstruction?”. Maybe this insistence on perplexity is an inadequate and disappointing response – a response which does nothing, leaving things “just as they were.” And yet, maybe it appears inadequate and disappointing only as long as we have already decided, presumptuously, that questions are not themselves disclosive but are merely instrumental for a disclosure external to them.

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Is it really fair to say that, in both theoretical and practical terms, Derrida’s work is an impotent disappointment, leaving everything “just as it was?” Perhaps – unless what it accomplishes is precisely a radicalized relation to perplexity, to questioning as such; unless the questions that it insists on holding open do in fact bear witness to a particularly elusive (un-narrate-able) kind of phenomenon; unless the most distressing theoretical and practical danger of all is our tendency to affirm or negate, prematurely and thoughtlessly, the many narratives that play such a determinative role in our day to day lives. Could it be that we need to consider our own disappointment carefully and critically? An interviewer once remarked to Derrida: Q. Some will say that in relation to a certain tradition of philosophy, which always had its moral component, your practice of philosophy is a little disappointing. Derrida’s (1995) response: JD: Well, if that’s true, let me place my hope in that “disappointment.” What is a disappointment? It urges you at least to ask yourself why you were waiting, why you were waiting for this or that, why you were expecting from this or that, from him or her. It is always the best incitement to questions and reflections. (p. 364) However we might evaluate and challenge deconstruction, it is time to leave behind the caricature that claims it to be a groundless and arbitrary free play of signification. Derrida’s work strives to bear witness to an elusive phenomenon, a phenomenon to which it is accountable. Like all phenomenology, it strives to “remember” something with which we have lost touch. In the case of deconstruction, however, what we have forgotten, what perplexity might help us recall, is precisely that which every narrative holds at arm’s length from us a priori. Here, once again, is what Derrida (1986) says about telling a story (the last bit of which – the most perplexing bit – I have withheld until now): I have never known how to tell a story. And since I love nothing better than remembering and Memory itself – Mnemosyne – I have always felt this inability as a sad infirmity. Why am I denied narration? Why have I not received this gift? But what happens when the lover of Mnemosyne has not received the gift of narration? When he doesn’t know how to tell a story? When it is precisely because he keeps the memory that he loses the narrative?” [italics added]. (p. 3)

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NOTES 1. This dissemination began with the Yale school’s literary reception of Derrida’s work in the 1970s (see for excample, the work of Paul de Man, Harold Bloom, Geoffrey Hartman, and J. Hillis Miller). 2. Granted, the nebulous term narrative is sometimes defined in such a way that a detailed response to the question “What is deconstruction?” might not qualify. For instance, causal-temporal sequence and character intention – elements which seem to be absent from a straightforward account of deconstruction – have sometimes been posited as essential constitutive elements of narrative (e.g., Bruner, 1996, p. 133ff.). Yet it is important to keep in mind that, however useful such precising definitions of narrative might be in certain contexts, one would be hard pressed to justify dividing philosophical accounts into tidy narrative and nonnarrative groupings. Hegel was perhaps the first to underscore explicitly that, for complex reasons, any comprehensive philosophical response to a “What is X?” type of question necessarily opens up into a historicalnarrative account. 3. Granted, one might well ask whether what this “philosophical desire” seeks is really a meta-narrative or simply a set of “meta-principles.” Indeed, there are those who have posited a distinction between narrative, on the one hand, and the kind of scientific discourse concerned with empirical observation and the rational justification of general principles, on the other (e.g., Bruner, 1987; O’Dea, 1994). While such a distinction may well open up promising avenues of inquiry, its legitimacy ultimately hangs upon whether terms like “narrative” and “science” have been adequately clarified in advance (and, as I argue in this paper, “narrative” has yet to obtain any such clarity). 4. Cf. Derrida, 1995, p. 83. 5. Indeed, Habermas (1987) lumps Rorty and Derrida together on this score (p. 206). He feels justified doing this because, in his view, Derridean deconstruction is “[a] literary criticism that in a certain sense merely continues the literary process of its objects” (Habermas, 1987, p. 188). 6. For an example of practical implications in the field of education, see the collection of essays Narrative Schooling: Experiential Learning and the Transformation of American Education. For an example of theoretical implications, see Jerome Bruner’s (1990) Acts of Meaning, wherein he claims that the “fragmented” discipline of psychology (p. ix) is finally, via an explicit engagement with narrative concerns, returning to the great psychological questions: “questions about the nature of the mind and its processes, questions about how we construct our meanings and our realities, questions about the shaping of mind by history and culture” (p. xi). 7. I am not necessarily referring to all discourse that goes by the name “phenomenology” but rather to the tradition that springs from and

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maintains an explicit dialogue with the work of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger (see, for instance, Husserl’s (1990) The Idea of Phenomenology and the introduction to Heidegger’s (1962) Being and Time). 8. A contentious assumption, perhaps, but one that is operative, at least provisionally, in many if not all of Derrida’s texts. 9. See, for instance, Aristotle, trans. 1997, pp. 1447a8–13, 1450a11–29, 1450b23–35. 10. See Aristotle, trans. 1962, pp. 1094a1-6. Note that I am suggesting only that our contemporary grasp of the terms “poiesis” and “praxis” can be traced back to Aristotle and to ancient Greek thought. I am not suggesting that we, today, clearly grasp what Aristotle and the ancient Greeks meant by these terms. Heidegger, for one, has much to say about our contemporary misreading of Aristotle on this score. 11. For instance, the narrative “acts” that Jerome Bruner (1990) has in mind in his influential book Acts of Meaning are precisely constructive or poietic acts. In his view, the proper aim of psychology is “to discover and to describe formally the meanings that human beings [create] out of their encounters with the world, and then to propose hypotheses about what meaning-making processes were implicated. It [focuses] upon the symbolic activities that human beings [employ] in constructing and making sense not only of the world, but of themselves” (Bruner, 1990, p. 2; cf. 1996, pp. 131ff.). 12. Granted, de Man rejects the very possibility of coherent narrative; nevertheless, this very rejection – his deconstruction “state of suspended ignorance” – seems to assume that narrative, were it only possible, would be precisely such a poietic achievement. 13. A “narrative difference” that echoes Heidegger’s ontological difference. 14. This appears to be the tacit assumption underlying de Man’s view that the goal of deconstructive practice is a “state of suspended ignorance:” He comes very close to acknowledging the perplexity at which deconstruction arrives, but he opts for ignorance rather than perplexity, disclosive “failure” rather than perplexed “disclosure” (cf. J. Hillis Miller, 1979, p. 231). 15. See, for instance, Socrates’ remarks concerning his own “perplexed wisdom” in the Apology (Plato, trans. 1997a, pp. 20c-23b); cf. Plato’s (trans. 1997b) Meno (pp. 80a-d).

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Bruner, J. (1990). Acts of meaning. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bruner, J. (1996). The culture of education. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. de Man, P. (1986a). Allegories of reading. New Haven: Yale University Press. de Man, P. (1986b). The resistance to theory. Theory and history of literature (Vol. 33). Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press. Derrida, J. (1974). Of grammatology (G. Spivak, Trans.). Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Derrida, J. (1981). Positions (A. Bass, Trans.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Derrida, J. (1985a). The ear of the other. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Derrida, J. (1985b). Letter to a Japanese friend. In D. Wood & R. Bernasconi (Eds.), Derrida and difference (pp. 1-5). Warwick: Parousia Press. Derrida, J. (1986). Memoirs for Paul de Man (Rev. Ed.). New York: Columbia University Press. Derrida, J. (1995). Points ... interviews, 1974-1994 (E. Weber, Ed.). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Eagleton, T. (1983). Literary theory: An introduction. Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell. Habermas, J. (1987). The philosophical discourse of modernity (F. Lawrence, Trans.). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Heidegger, M. (1962). Being and time (J. Macquarrie, & E. Robinson, Trans.).New York: Harper Collins. Husserl, E. (1990). The idea of phenomenology (W. Alston & G. Nakhnikian, Trans). Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Miller, J. (1979). Deconstruction and criticism. New York: Seabury Press. O’Dea, J.W. (1994). Pursuing truth in narrative research. Journal of Philosophy of Education, 28(2), 1661-1671. Plato. (1997a). Apology. In J. Cooper & D. Hutchinson (Eds.), Plato: Complete works. Indianapolis: Hackett. Plato. (1997b). Meno. In J. Cooper & D. Hutchinson (Eds.), Plato: Complete works. Indianapolis: Hackett. Rorty, R. (1989). Contingency, irony, and solidarity. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Salingaros, N. (2004). The Derrida virus. Telos, 126, 66-82.

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