Letters

Correspondence from Chronicle readers.

‘What Was Deconstruction?’ Was Also Asked 30 Years Ago

June 7, 2022

To the editors:

I enjoyed reading Tim Brennan’s piece--“What Was Deconstruction?”--but there was something nagging at me about the title, and then I remembered I had written an article 30 years ago with the same title! It was a bit saddening to see that, just as “theory” is now well entrenched in a 60-year rut, the critique of theory is itself in a rut about half as long. My own take, three decades ago, was not as casually dismissive as Professor Brennan’s. Unlike Brennan, I actually tried to name some of the (legitimate) reasons for the popularity of Derrida’s critique of the “white mythology” of Western philosophy. And this led me to address the utter failure of post-1945 Marxism (especially in France) to embrace the anti-colonial (and often Islamic and anti-Marxist) resistance to French colonialism in Algeria. This story was then repeated in the New Left’s (again, non-Marxian) resistance to the American war in Vietnam a decade later. When Derrida landed in Baltimore to speak at a conference at John Hopkins in 1966, his timing could not have been better. The American counter-culture’s resistance to a perverse version of Western rationality embedded in Rand Corporation analyses of the war (a battle for “hearts and minds” indeed) was miraculously mirrored in Derrida’s Heideggerian critique of the entire Western philosophical tradition, starting with the earliest of the “great books” still then being enthusiastically taught at Columbia University and the University of Chicago. It is surely true, as Brennan suggests, that much of the utopian (or at least anarchic) hope that Derrida’s acolytes put in his work was doomed to be disappointed. But then, after four years of Trump, and the real possibility of four more, what liberating academic fashion in the humanities of the last hundred years can Brennan point to that did not, in the end, disappoint?

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To the Editor:

I enjoyed reading Tim Brennan’s essay, “What Was Deconstruction?” (The Chronicle Review, June 3), but there was something nagging at me about the title, and then I remembered I had written an article 30 years ago with the same title! It was a bit saddening to see that, just as “theory” is now well entrenched in a 60-year rut, the critique of theory is itself in a rut about half as long. My own take, three decades ago, was not as casually dismissive as Professor Brennan’s. Unlike Brennan, I actually tried to name some of the (legitimate) reasons for the popularity of Derrida’s critique of the “white mythology” of Western philosophy. And this led me to address the utter failure of post-1945 Marxism (especially in France) to embrace the anti-colonial (and often Islamic and anti-Marxist) resistance to French colonialism in Algeria. This story was then repeated in the New Left’s (again, non-Marxian) resistance to the American war in Vietnam a decade later.

When Derrida landed in Baltimore to speak at a conference at John Hopkins in 1966, his timing could not have been better. The American counter-culture’s resistance to a perverse version of Western rationality embedded in Rand Corporation analyses of the war (a battle for “hearts and minds” indeed) was miraculously mirrored in Derrida’s Heideggerian critique of the entire Western philosophical tradition, starting with the earliest of the “great books” still then being enthusiastically taught at Columbia University and the University of Chicago. It is surely true, as Brennan suggests, that much of the utopian (or at least anarchic) hope that Derrida’s acolytes put in his work was doomed to be disappointed. But then, after four years of Trump, and the real possibility of four more, what liberating academic fashion in the humanities of the last hundred years can Brennan point to that did not, in the end, disappoint?

Vincent P. Pecora
Professor of English
University of Utah
Salt Lake City