The Event of the Advent
Mark Currie, The Invention of Deconstruction
Palgrave Macmillan, 252pp, £50.00, ISBN 9781137307026
reviewed by Niall Gildea
The relationship between deconstruction and historical scholarship is famously and multifariously fraught. On one level, deconstruction remains widely misrecognised as ahistorical in its attitude to language and signification; on another, it remains widely caricatured as methodologically anti-historical in its disclosure of classical metaphysics’ survival in modern epochs; on still another, certain extant historical accounts of deconstruction are often hagiographies of Jacques Derrida, which regard deconstruction less as a philosophical attitude and more as some exilic ‘force’ of thought.
The Invention of Deconstruction offers a corrective to the mutual misprisions of deconstruction and history, and a rigorous historical account of deconstruction between 1967 and 1984 – the period in which it supposedly ‘broke America’. In this respect, it could be seen as in sequence with Edward Baring’s excellent The Young Derrida and French Philosophy, 1945-1968 (Cambridge University Press, 2011), which deftly charts the philosopher’s intellectual development up until the time at which Currie’s book begins.
However, unique to this text is a highly nuanced temporal schematic, which allows Currie to treat deconstruction with both paramount fidelity and exemplary scrutiny. Broadly, Currie’s argument is that in order to approach a rigorous, demythologised history of deconstruction, we need to take seriously the interrelation between what its texts say about time, and what kinds of understandings of time are brought to bear in deconstructive work. We need to attend to time as both theme and property of the deconstructive analysis; and in so doing we shall grow aware that ‘the deconstructive analysis’ in the singular is itself a myth that is largely sustained through a widespread blindness concerning the question of time in deconstruction.
One advantage of this unexpected, helical hermeneutic is that it allows Currie a fresh angle on the validity (or otherwise) of Rodolphe Gasché’s influential contention, at the outset of The Tain of the Mirror (1986), that something of Derrida’s philosophical import is lost when deconstruction, via the ‘Yale School’, becomes ‘deconstructive literary criticism’. Because the accrual of this loss begins when literature is foregrounded as the deconstructive milieu par excellence, the loss perceived by Gasché also entails a supplementation; hence, the passage from Derrida to ‘deconstructive literary criticism’ (glibly, from Derrida to ‘Derridean’) is popularly regarded as an instance of what Derrida terms usure: the wearing away of deconstruction’s philosophical content somehow actually produces its proximity to literature and literary study. This highly influential domestication narrative has set the terms for almost every debate in which deconstruction has been involved.
Currie’s intervention here is to address the temporal blind-spot which makes this narrative so appealing and convenient. Gasché, and others, proceed from the notion that the dissemination and appropriation of a Derridean metalanguage in the USA was basically an instantaneous process – hence the idea of it ‘breaking America’. Very little attention has been paid to how and when specific elements of deconstruction’s conceptual vocabulary gained purchase in the North American academy. Currie foregrounds the diachronic aspect of this transmission; by doing so he elucidates, in uncommon detail, the problematic relationship that deconstruction (in the singular) had with itself in this period.
In a crucial second chapter, Currie challenges the received wisdom – still often rehearsed in the UK – that New Criticism in the USA, having defeated literary historicism sometime in the 1930s, enjoyed an unchallenged hegemony within the academy until the advent of structuralism in the late 1950s. This retrospective construction of New Criticism peaks in the early 1980s and is one means by which deconstruction itself has been constructed: deconstruction was said, by de Man and others, to constitute, or at least participate, in an episode of ‘European polemic’ disrupting ‘American calm’. Revisiting largely-forgotten contemporary interventions in, and discussions of, New Criticism, Currie suggests that in fact ‘The context for the reception of Derrida’s work […] was not a consensus of any kind, inherited from New Criticism, but an ongoing battle between history and form in which the American academy had already been embroiled for many years.’
In exposing the New Criticism-as-hegemonic-paradigm claim as an anachronistic orthodoxy, Currie goes on to locate an influential current in the North American publication of de Man’s and Derrida’s texts – organised around the journals Diacritics and New Literary History – which tendentiously presented them as a body of work which rejuvenated the debate between historicism and New Criticism. This nascent corpus was figured as manifesting the return of a new, sexier historicism to countermand the New Critical hegemony, or as a practice which retained New Critical methodology in its treatment of questions of history – and these were the more neutral positions. (This is a striking point if we recall that it was around this time in Britain that deconstruction began to gain a reputation for being foremost, among a wave of ‘Continental’ thought, which treated history in a purportedly downright cavalier manner; few critiques of deconstruction in the UK figured it either as a resuscitation of historical scholarship, or as a means of strengthening formalist practice through the corrective introduction of an historical interest.)
In these very early American receptions, then, deconstruction was a focal point for renewed oppositions between history and language, historicism and formalism. It is only really in the middle of the 1970s that the more familiar interpretation – of deconstruction as a radical critique, or mutation, of structuralism – emerges, largely thanks to Jonathan Culler’s Structuralist Poetics (1975). This movement, in Currie’s analysis, appears just as reductive as the earlier one, since it was at this point that the question of history in Derrida’s work began frequently to be occluded altogether. That all of this had taken place by the time Gayatri Spivak’s translation of Of Grammatology (1975) was published is, in retrospect, very surprising. The depth of Currie’s survey of this ‘pre-history’ of deconstruction troubles productively the notion that the Grammatology marked the beginning of Derrida’s institutional reception in the US. What Spivak’s translation did do (thanks in part to its lengthy preface) was contribute to the discussion the thematisation of the spatial and temporal elements of translation; this supplementation entailed a suspicion of the distinction between ‘original’ and ‘derivative’ texts, and perhaps, Currie ruminates, is fundamental to the ‘interpretative freedom and free-for-all that erupted around Derrida’s work in the second half of the 1970s’.
(Also intriguing here is the apparent almost total absence of philosophy from these early tugs-of-war over Derrida’s work. We might hazard a guess that the philosopher sceptical of deconstruction, seeing the ‘shambolic’ nature of some of the literature/history debates appearing around it in the 70s, at that time would have been quietly confident that the whole enterprise would tumble into irrelevance by the decade’s end.)
What actually happened, as the 80s began, was a new phase, galvanised in part by Gasché’s essay ‘Deconstruction as Criticism’ (1979), which emphasised the idea that Derridean deconstruction had from the outset been ‘domesticated’ in America as a form of textual criticism; in this regard it anticipates The Tain of the Mirror. The depiction was of a philosophy (Derrida’s) already tamed by the literary-critical academy in a gesture of infidelity to its ‘radical’ character. This latest interpretive preoccupation brought its own infidelity: the foregrounding of this putative radicalism couldn’t help but figure Derrida’s own work as originary, and thus portray it in much ‘stronger’ terms than conceived by Derrida himself: a core component of Derrida’s project was always to critique the genealogy by which ‘strong’ terms – for example those in a dialectic – become manifest and normative.
It is as part of this paradigm in deconstruction’s reception that de Man’s work is conceived as the primary representative of ‘American deconstruction’, and hence as the first symptom of deconstruction’s ‘fall’ from ‘philosophy’ to ‘criticism’. What depreciates in this degeneration is precisely the value of history, so we ended up with a myth of the pre-American Derrida who attended to questions historical and linguistic, versus the Americanised deconstruction, which either excised historicity from its milieu, or translated diachronic matters into synchronic, structural, textual ones. Currie is alive to the historical and hermeneutic confusion that this gesture itself attests to.
This chapter, and Currie’s book at large, is a retrospective critique of the blithe retrospection which attended the American reception of Derrida’s work from the start, and even from before that, in the simplistic myth of New Criticism with whose easy consensus it posited deconstruction as ‘breaking’. Currie underlines an infidelity continuous in all of these phases of reception, namely that they do not pause to consider the irony of this retrospective haste in relation to Derrida’s suggestion, in ‘Structure, Sign and Play’, that the event may in fact be produced by the possibility of the retrospection that ostensibly follows it. This logic of supplementation is most concisely articulated in that very paper which arguably triggered the widespread American dissemination of Derrida’s thought, and the releasing of a newfound performative or productive force of Derrida’s remark, when it is situated against this uncanny institutional response to it, comprises the brilliant insight which in many ways is at the heart of The Invention of Deconstruction.
To reintegrate the temporal dimension of deconstruction qua philosophy and institutional event, and use the pursuant insights as a means of understanding its histories: this is a telescopic version of the book’s method. Revisiting successive constructions of deconstruction that had in common a certain mythopoetic inflection of the act of retrospection, Currie gives us a retrospective of deconstruction that is alive to the dangers of its genre, and, moreover, to the fact that Derrida’s work is a corpus in which those dangers are consistently and not infrequently pointed out. In this chiasmus of methodology and theme, Currie advises circumspection over retrospection, in a gesture which overtly looks ahead to a prefix we find paradigmatic to Derrida’s later oeuvre, whilst giving us grounds to suspect it was there all along.
The Invention of Deconstruction offers a corrective to the mutual misprisions of deconstruction and history, and a rigorous historical account of deconstruction between 1967 and 1984 – the period in which it supposedly ‘broke America’. In this respect, it could be seen as in sequence with Edward Baring’s excellent The Young Derrida and French Philosophy, 1945-1968 (Cambridge University Press, 2011), which deftly charts the philosopher’s intellectual development up until the time at which Currie’s book begins.
However, unique to this text is a highly nuanced temporal schematic, which allows Currie to treat deconstruction with both paramount fidelity and exemplary scrutiny. Broadly, Currie’s argument is that in order to approach a rigorous, demythologised history of deconstruction, we need to take seriously the interrelation between what its texts say about time, and what kinds of understandings of time are brought to bear in deconstructive work. We need to attend to time as both theme and property of the deconstructive analysis; and in so doing we shall grow aware that ‘the deconstructive analysis’ in the singular is itself a myth that is largely sustained through a widespread blindness concerning the question of time in deconstruction.
One advantage of this unexpected, helical hermeneutic is that it allows Currie a fresh angle on the validity (or otherwise) of Rodolphe Gasché’s influential contention, at the outset of The Tain of the Mirror (1986), that something of Derrida’s philosophical import is lost when deconstruction, via the ‘Yale School’, becomes ‘deconstructive literary criticism’. Because the accrual of this loss begins when literature is foregrounded as the deconstructive milieu par excellence, the loss perceived by Gasché also entails a supplementation; hence, the passage from Derrida to ‘deconstructive literary criticism’ (glibly, from Derrida to ‘Derridean’) is popularly regarded as an instance of what Derrida terms usure: the wearing away of deconstruction’s philosophical content somehow actually produces its proximity to literature and literary study. This highly influential domestication narrative has set the terms for almost every debate in which deconstruction has been involved.
Currie’s intervention here is to address the temporal blind-spot which makes this narrative so appealing and convenient. Gasché, and others, proceed from the notion that the dissemination and appropriation of a Derridean metalanguage in the USA was basically an instantaneous process – hence the idea of it ‘breaking America’. Very little attention has been paid to how and when specific elements of deconstruction’s conceptual vocabulary gained purchase in the North American academy. Currie foregrounds the diachronic aspect of this transmission; by doing so he elucidates, in uncommon detail, the problematic relationship that deconstruction (in the singular) had with itself in this period.
In a crucial second chapter, Currie challenges the received wisdom – still often rehearsed in the UK – that New Criticism in the USA, having defeated literary historicism sometime in the 1930s, enjoyed an unchallenged hegemony within the academy until the advent of structuralism in the late 1950s. This retrospective construction of New Criticism peaks in the early 1980s and is one means by which deconstruction itself has been constructed: deconstruction was said, by de Man and others, to constitute, or at least participate, in an episode of ‘European polemic’ disrupting ‘American calm’. Revisiting largely-forgotten contemporary interventions in, and discussions of, New Criticism, Currie suggests that in fact ‘The context for the reception of Derrida’s work […] was not a consensus of any kind, inherited from New Criticism, but an ongoing battle between history and form in which the American academy had already been embroiled for many years.’
In exposing the New Criticism-as-hegemonic-paradigm claim as an anachronistic orthodoxy, Currie goes on to locate an influential current in the North American publication of de Man’s and Derrida’s texts – organised around the journals Diacritics and New Literary History – which tendentiously presented them as a body of work which rejuvenated the debate between historicism and New Criticism. This nascent corpus was figured as manifesting the return of a new, sexier historicism to countermand the New Critical hegemony, or as a practice which retained New Critical methodology in its treatment of questions of history – and these were the more neutral positions. (This is a striking point if we recall that it was around this time in Britain that deconstruction began to gain a reputation for being foremost, among a wave of ‘Continental’ thought, which treated history in a purportedly downright cavalier manner; few critiques of deconstruction in the UK figured it either as a resuscitation of historical scholarship, or as a means of strengthening formalist practice through the corrective introduction of an historical interest.)
In these very early American receptions, then, deconstruction was a focal point for renewed oppositions between history and language, historicism and formalism. It is only really in the middle of the 1970s that the more familiar interpretation – of deconstruction as a radical critique, or mutation, of structuralism – emerges, largely thanks to Jonathan Culler’s Structuralist Poetics (1975). This movement, in Currie’s analysis, appears just as reductive as the earlier one, since it was at this point that the question of history in Derrida’s work began frequently to be occluded altogether. That all of this had taken place by the time Gayatri Spivak’s translation of Of Grammatology (1975) was published is, in retrospect, very surprising. The depth of Currie’s survey of this ‘pre-history’ of deconstruction troubles productively the notion that the Grammatology marked the beginning of Derrida’s institutional reception in the US. What Spivak’s translation did do (thanks in part to its lengthy preface) was contribute to the discussion the thematisation of the spatial and temporal elements of translation; this supplementation entailed a suspicion of the distinction between ‘original’ and ‘derivative’ texts, and perhaps, Currie ruminates, is fundamental to the ‘interpretative freedom and free-for-all that erupted around Derrida’s work in the second half of the 1970s’.
(Also intriguing here is the apparent almost total absence of philosophy from these early tugs-of-war over Derrida’s work. We might hazard a guess that the philosopher sceptical of deconstruction, seeing the ‘shambolic’ nature of some of the literature/history debates appearing around it in the 70s, at that time would have been quietly confident that the whole enterprise would tumble into irrelevance by the decade’s end.)
What actually happened, as the 80s began, was a new phase, galvanised in part by Gasché’s essay ‘Deconstruction as Criticism’ (1979), which emphasised the idea that Derridean deconstruction had from the outset been ‘domesticated’ in America as a form of textual criticism; in this regard it anticipates The Tain of the Mirror. The depiction was of a philosophy (Derrida’s) already tamed by the literary-critical academy in a gesture of infidelity to its ‘radical’ character. This latest interpretive preoccupation brought its own infidelity: the foregrounding of this putative radicalism couldn’t help but figure Derrida’s own work as originary, and thus portray it in much ‘stronger’ terms than conceived by Derrida himself: a core component of Derrida’s project was always to critique the genealogy by which ‘strong’ terms – for example those in a dialectic – become manifest and normative.
It is as part of this paradigm in deconstruction’s reception that de Man’s work is conceived as the primary representative of ‘American deconstruction’, and hence as the first symptom of deconstruction’s ‘fall’ from ‘philosophy’ to ‘criticism’. What depreciates in this degeneration is precisely the value of history, so we ended up with a myth of the pre-American Derrida who attended to questions historical and linguistic, versus the Americanised deconstruction, which either excised historicity from its milieu, or translated diachronic matters into synchronic, structural, textual ones. Currie is alive to the historical and hermeneutic confusion that this gesture itself attests to.
This chapter, and Currie’s book at large, is a retrospective critique of the blithe retrospection which attended the American reception of Derrida’s work from the start, and even from before that, in the simplistic myth of New Criticism with whose easy consensus it posited deconstruction as ‘breaking’. Currie underlines an infidelity continuous in all of these phases of reception, namely that they do not pause to consider the irony of this retrospective haste in relation to Derrida’s suggestion, in ‘Structure, Sign and Play’, that the event may in fact be produced by the possibility of the retrospection that ostensibly follows it. This logic of supplementation is most concisely articulated in that very paper which arguably triggered the widespread American dissemination of Derrida’s thought, and the releasing of a newfound performative or productive force of Derrida’s remark, when it is situated against this uncanny institutional response to it, comprises the brilliant insight which in many ways is at the heart of The Invention of Deconstruction.
To reintegrate the temporal dimension of deconstruction qua philosophy and institutional event, and use the pursuant insights as a means of understanding its histories: this is a telescopic version of the book’s method. Revisiting successive constructions of deconstruction that had in common a certain mythopoetic inflection of the act of retrospection, Currie gives us a retrospective of deconstruction that is alive to the dangers of its genre, and, moreover, to the fact that Derrida’s work is a corpus in which those dangers are consistently and not infrequently pointed out. In this chiasmus of methodology and theme, Currie advises circumspection over retrospection, in a gesture which overtly looks ahead to a prefix we find paradigmatic to Derrida’s later oeuvre, whilst giving us grounds to suspect it was there all along.