Over the past four decades, scholars in the American humanities have used deconstruction — a style of interpretation pioneered by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida — to question the binary oppositions that structure society and enforce power relations. One example: The historian Joan Wallach Scott deconstructed the categories of “man” and “woman” and helped launch the field of gender history. While fueling trailblazing work such as Scott’s, deconstruction has conjured rather extreme, sometimes downright hysterical, responses. In the American press, vilification stretches back to the 1980s, when conservatives regularly launched polemics against deconstruction, condemning it as a movement against Western civilization. There has also been little love lost for deconstruction among members of the American left, from Marxists to Liberals, many of whom faulted Derrida and his epigones for an inadequate commitment to truth that made it impossible to develop a political philosophy.
But the left and right alike have misunderstood deconstruction — and the “de Man affair” certainly did not help matters. In 1987 it was revealed that the Yale professor Paul de Man, who had died four years earlier and was Derrida’s closest friend in American intellectual life as well as the most prominent exponent of deconstruction in the United States, had written pro-Nazi articles — at least one explicitly anti-Semitic — in 1941 and 1942 during his youth under the German occupation of Belgium. Derrida’s deconstructive readings of his friend’s wartime writings proved highly controversial; at one point, Derrida suggested that de Man’s criticism in his article “The Jews in Contemporary Literature” of “vulgar anti-Semitism” could be interpreted as support of a refined anti-Semitism and a clandestine critique of the “vulgarity of anti-Semitism.” Derrida’s interpretation was red meat for hungry enemies of deconstruction, who offered it as proof of deconstruction’s nihilism. Since then, it has been difficult to conduct a dispassionate conversation about deconstruction.
It is into this contentious legacy that Theory at Yale arrives — marketed as an important first: a book-length history of the Yale School of Deconstruction. But Theory at Yale is instead a series of artful deconstructive readings of “the event of ‘theory’ in the American academy,” with “theory” chiefly referring to “a certain kind of reflection on language and literature that garnered the tag ‘deconstruction’ in the 1970s, and in distorted form became a minor mass-media topic in the 1980s.” Marc Redfield — a professor of English and comparative literature at Brown University — makes it admirably clear that he is not interested in “a systematic, detailed account of the work of the four Yale Critics.” His study is “not at all the same as a properly descriptive or historical account.” In fact, Redfield explains, “narratives” — “biographical, intellectual, and institutional” — “are appendages to an argument that … has little to do with the Yale Critics as a group, or with individual oeuvres in a traditional sense.”
Readers of Theory at Yale should thus not expect crude psychological portraits as in Evelyn Barish’s 2014 biography of Paul de Man. Yet, in a sense, Barish’s and Redfield’s books are inverted images of each other. While The Double Life of Paul de Man is shot through with, as Redfield notes, “anger, fascination, and ignorance” toward de Man and deconstruction, Theory at Yale is almost consumed by Redfield’s investment in replicating and protecting the deconstructive method of reading. Rather than offer a historical analysis of deconstruction in the United States, Theory at Yale is in many respects an artifact of it.
Redfield documents how the Yale Critics and deconstruction were represented in mass media and scholarly journals during the second half of the 1970s. Critics considered the New Haven scholars to have committed the “aesthetic offense” of “overblown writing,” as well as that of “elitism, self-indulgence, and obscurantism.” Redfield argues that deconstruction garnered this attention “because it was processed as a threat, or at least an insult, to (elite) aesthetic-humanist education.” Here, Redfield amplifies Herman Rapaport’s 2001 argument that the willful failures of Anglo-American academics to understand deconstruction led to its demonization. In contrast to Rapaport, however, Redfield condenses the reception of the Yale Critics and their deconstruction in the 1970s and early 1980s to the danger that deconstruction posed to aesthetic ideology — fantasies that upheld various humanist projects in the North American academy.
With great agility, Redfield then discovers linguistic instability at work in not only lyric poetry, but literary critics’ readings of lyric poetry as well. Redfield identifies acts of deconstruction in two case studies: an exchange between the Yale Critic J. Hillis Miller and the romanticist M.H. Abrams in the early 1980s over the meaning of a Wordsworth poem, and Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels’s 1982 paper, “Against Theory.” Readers who find pleasure in deconstructive reading will certainly enjoy Redfield’s interpretations. But observers who seek to be more than spectators of this curious interpretive sport will most likely feel shut out. Redfield never significantly widens or deepens the scope of his readings beyond his eternally returning conceptual point that acts of deconstruction undercut texts’ stable meanings.
For instance, as soon as Redfield introduces the story of Harold Bloom’s career, he shifts to treating it as a text that demonstrates the challenge of deconstructive reading. Redfield notes that Bloom boasts about his ability to perfectly recite “any line or passage or even vast work of poetry” from broad periods of the Western canon. But rather than situate Bloom’s outlandish claim within the context of the larger literary-critical community at the time, Redfield takes Bloom’s claim as a text and, predictably, finds in it an act of deconstruction. He suggests that Bloom, intentionally or not, “smuggled a bit of deconstructive contraband into” the recorded conversation: As the “tape recorder … thanks to a process of inscription … exposes and exploits the ‘writing,’ the iterability and self-difference, that inheres in voice and makes it possible.”
There are many more moments in Theory at Yale when a reader hoping to learn about the “strange case of deconstruction in America” might be disappointed to find its continual enactment. At one point Redfield argues that John Guillory, in his influential Cultural Capital (1993), astutely interprets de Man’s theory of reading as an “unconscious mimesis of the form of bureaucratic labor” in the American academy during the 1970s, but at the same time overlooks that de Man’s theory covertly advances a critique of its own institutional conditions of production. At this point in Theory at Yale, readers might feel as though they have become privy to internecine battles between deconstructionists and rival schools of interpretation rather than an analysis of deconstruction itself.
Redfield neither over-promises nor misrepresents his goals, and as a series of deconstructive analyses, Theory at Yale is spot on. But while curating a legacy, he (wittingly) neglects to meaningfully engage historical scholarship and methodologies. Redfield’s biographical, intellectual, and institutional accounts ultimately serve to supplement his conceptual point that the power of deconstruction — above all de Manian reading — not only triggered but also has been demonstrated by the existence of hysterical misreadings of deconstruction in America. Ultimately, Redfield’s study falls in with other past and more recent attempts to explain this strange intellectual and cultural phenomenon. There is a story to be told — of the rise and fall of deconstruction in the American academy — but it must be narrated from a different vantage point. Such a history cannot participate in the tying or untying of the “conceptual knot” of deconstruction, but must offer a proper historical exploration of how and why deconstruction appeared, thrived, and then receded.
