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Anselm Haverkamp

The first part of the following is a revised version of the author’s opening remarks to the conference Deconstruction is /in America in the fall of 1993, which appears in this volume in a rearranged and supplemented form. The second part underlines some of the political implications of the conference after the event. The sketchy character is deliberate, since the intention of the conference was not to arrive at a new narrative on the subject of deconstruction but to offer a highly selective approach to certain problems. That other problems are missing or remain underrepresented is a part of the problem to being with.

The reasons for looking back on Deconstruction in America are obvious enough. Looking back, certainly, is not the same as giving up, and in spite of the notorious task of facing the future in, and of, say, future deconstructions, the possibilities of such a facing ask for a review, an account of the future that has passed, the future left behind in the years of deconstruction in America. As the slogan “Deconstruction is America” suggests, that the fate of deconstruction in America is as hard to determine as the project of America. A conference that would reconsider the role of deconstruction in America over the last two decades would have to take into account the particular role of America for deconstruction: not only for the development of deconstruction’s philosophical and critical arguments, but for its political adaptation to, and involvement with what was left in American universities after the academic dispute of the Sixties and Seventies—that came under the heading of “The Structuralist Controversy”—had run its course.¹

Looking back on the seminal Johns Hopkins conference of that title some 25 years ago, we realize that this controversy closed an age-old debate on the limits of man and humanist principles of education rather than opening a new one—however manifest and visible the outline of the new may already have been at the time. The beginnings of deconstruction in America had to remain for a quarter of a century associated with bringing to an end an educational era whose aftermath had to be faced, while deconstruction’s own—and one is tempted to add, its substantial—contribution was to surface much more quietly. “A new sense of the political” seems the most persuasive name for this quiet advent whose agenda has never been destruction, nor resurrection, but a pursuit of happiness. “The Politics of Friendship,” about which the American Philosophical Association was recently reminded by Jacques Derrida, points in the direction of such a new sense of what politics might be, and might become, against the grain of what it has not ceased to be instead.² A sense to be recovered of a politics to come, to be approached.

There is, however, no happy success story to be told about deconstruction in America, and there is no salvation history to be related, as one would wish for, and fall for, in a country dedicated to success and salvation. On the contrary, one has to admit from the start that “nothing fails like success” in deconstruction, as Barbara Johnson put it when she saw the need to use history differently and decided “to use history deconstructively,” in order to avoid the false success of “answers, causes, explanations, or origins.”³ In order, that is, not to lose track of the problems, questions, and impasses. Among them, though not most urgently, the issues of self-interpretation and self-implication had to be taken into account, those auto-interpretive figures of self-deconstruction that make it difficult to tell the story of deconstruction in America in the form of a metahistory of bygone possibilities, remaining resistances, or persisting side effects.

When Derrida delivered the 1985 Wellek Library Lectures at Irvine, he discarded the title of Deconstruction in America in favor of Memoires for Paul de Man, who had died in December 1983, ten years ago now, and whose memory is implied in this conference, as the topic of this conference was already contained and explained in Derrida’s dedication of 1985. “Geopolitics does not suffice,” said Derrida at the time, but he was ready to “risk,” as he added (“with a smile”), “the following hypothesis: America is deconstruction—l’Amérique, mais c’est la deconstruction.”⁴ The image discarded—America as geopolitical enterprise—does not disqualify the “toponymy” of America for deconstruction, that is, America as deconstruction’s hypothetical “residence” at a specific moment, a moment whose historicality might be most appropriately captured by calling it in deconstruction. Deconstruction may be America to the extent that America is in deconstruction.

Beside the many good reasons why one could think so, it is important to note that it could be otherwise. Deconstruction could be everywhere, and is everywhere, but the fact that America happens to be an exemplary place for deconstruction is not a coincidence, the coincidence, say, of America’s nostalgia for the appeal of French thought. Deconstruction could not be turned into some generalizable humanism that would feed into America’s concern for Western values. It would not exist everywhere in the same way, as McDonald’s and Coca Cola do, the simulacra of America’s being worldwide. On the contrary, deconstruction should be expected to exist in different places in very different ways. No, what keeps it in America rather than elsewhere, say Europe, and gives it a specific American place value is a sense of difference in America that is different from Europe—although one could also say that it is Europe’s sense of difference, but in a very different way. And it is the additional difference, the differentiating momentum within that difference, that comes to count (as in any difference), and is to be investigated, through deconstruction.

Deconstruction in America, one could speculate, takes advantage of the difference America makes with respect to Europe; and pragmatism is the American name for this difference in the realm of philosophy, a difference which seems indifferent to what it has left behind, and keeps leaving behind, in This New—I quote from Stanley Cavell’s reading of Emerson—Yet Unapproachable America.⁵ Yet the hope against lost hopes, the loss of European hopes, to be precise, cannot be theory-hope again, according to older and newer pragmatists alike. Their declared indifference to philosophy and “theory as such” is no longer to be consoled by theory-hope.⁶ They remain inconsolable to the point of abandoning pragmatism itself—thus hoping to bring it back to where it began, to the vision of the new, yet still unapproachable America. Back to the old pragmatism’s vision of “making our future different from our past,” as Richard Rorty keeps underlining the difference in question, in the name of solidarity instead of objectivity, democracy instead of philosophy, or fairness as justice.⁷

It is here that pragmatism meets deconstruction, although for reasons other than neopragmatists seem able to see. It is not deconstruction’s antiessentialist, antifoundationalist side effect, let alone a new “kind of writing” that would account for this meeting.⁸ Rather, it seems to be pragmatism’s insistence on the impossible difference traditional philosophy kept promising without ever being able to deliver; to go, for example, for fairness, while justice may seem as yet, and maybe forever, unapproachable. The crucial place of A Theory of Justice for any pragmatist attempt toward making a difference, is also deconstruction’s topos for investigating the force of law and maintaining the difference in which legal regulations fall short with respect to the justice approached.⁹ Justice may be nothing but the name for this difference between legal practice and the law’s force, which both carries on this practice and, in carrying it out, transgresses what is carried out with respect to the justice to be done. Likewise fairness may be the best possible name for this imperative to transgress, rather than toward prosecution, enforcement, and execution. Justice may be, and may have to remain forever, out of reach, but nonetheless approachable—if and only insofar as fairness is, indeed, applied. How, if not pragmatically, with respect to a given situation, and given the time, can justice be assessed? No instance is better suited to exemplify the paradoxes of pragmatism than justice in America.

But more than just this remains to be said for the exemplary role of justice in the American “drama of consent.”¹⁰ After the first and, so to speak, primal difference that America had promised to accomplish with respect to the difference that Europe was unable to make—and European philosophy was unable to ensure—America had to take on, and has taken on, differences of another dimension that are completely incommensurable with the older, European one. In an America whose future is less approachable than ever the urgency seems desperate. As Cornel West expressed his frustration with Rorty’s Consequences of Pragmatism, “no philosophical case can be made for this civilization” as long as this pragmatism’s attitude is not up to coping with differences other than the European one.¹¹ One cannot but ask for a pragmatism newer than the one given up by Rorty and added by West to the nuisance of philosophy’s old European, and now renewed American, identity. But where should it come from? Within neopragmatism’s own historical account of paradigm shifts, the exhaustion of one paradigm cannot account for the succeeding shift, nor can this shift be in any way commensurable with the preceding set of assumptions—except for the problems left over, the mortgage to be transcribed to a new account.

In America’s multifaced landscape of differences, the European tradition has turned into a mortgage of uncanny proportions. Quite against the grain of leaving it behind, the European difference returns as the repressed and reveals what had to remain repressed in its difference. That great design of America as a radically open space to newcomers meant more than just the erasure of these newcomers’ histories; it meant the retroactive idolization of one particular difference erasing all others—including and foreclosing those others already implied and foreclosed before.¹² Thus, deconstruction in America may appear as the return of the repressed within America’s indifference to Europe, an indifference yet to be exhausted with respect to the differences yet to be expected. “Might one find some ground to deconstruct before there are any philosophical foundations in place?” wonders Stanley Cavell about America’s lack of metaphysical talent, its lack, as it were, of a philosophical homeground.¹³ This lack, as a matter of fact, has reproduced the ground to be deconstructed far more effectively than this ground, as a homeground, would have lent itself to deconstruction. In displacing the “Western Canon,” American literature and philosophy not only reproduced what they attempted to rewrite, but re-deconstructed what they found deconstructed (and, that is, already “in deconstruction”).

Within the succession of paradigms of knowledge and learning, deconstruction seems to have succeeded in opening up a new space for transformation within which pragmatism has to be replaced, its mortgage transcribed and its hopes, not to forget them, reiterated. In settling his account with Limited Inc, the linguistic orthodoxy of ordinary language politics, Derrida had already identified the tentative perspective of his Grammatology as “a sort of pragmatics,” or future “pra[gma]-grammatology (to come)”; a grammatologically articulated pragmatism that would also have to account for “the possibility of transgression [which] is always inscribed in speech acts”—and not just for the limitations usually associated with these speech acts’ institutionalized uses.¹⁴ Justice, again, is the most prominent, and most urgent, domain of application here, although the sphere of the “literary” would lend itself much more readily to a congenial linguistic analysis.

If the sphere of the “literary” (for the sake of a better term) was an exemplary case in point, the point consisted precisely not in opening up the aesthetic possibility of a “living in beauty,” set free from all normative expectations, or even from the strain of being ironic all the time.¹⁵ The rare uses that analytical philosophy and analytically minded critics have made of deconstruction in adapting the “literary” to the pragmatics of a democratically open, public sphere cannot, or should not have to, contend with shrugging off the obsolete aesthetic normativity and its hermeneutic twin, semantic holism. With a payoff like this, the “nihilistic” temptation of an advanced liberalism would have proved to be much greater than the all-pervasive fear of deconstruction’s destructive force.

Quite to the contrary, one must face frustrations like Cavell’s in Disowning Knowledge: the “failure to acknowledge” and “avoidance of love” in Shakespeare, encounters not to be compensated for in advance.¹⁶ An “aesthetics” of undisturbed living cannot compensate for philosophy’s failure to come to terms with what is, nor for skepticism’s desperation about what is to be done.

Rather, the skeptic’s acknowledgement of the possibilities of transgression asks for an ethics of reading prior to an ethics of what there is to be done or not to be done (and, finally, to be denied). However multiple the interpretations may be, and however flexible interpretors may become, there is simply no point in Doing What Comes Naturally, if it is only to console us with, and relieve us from, the burden of reading. To turn the tropes of persuasion into tropes of reasonable conviction asks for a responsibility beyond and, that is, before the mechanism of what comes naturally; it needs analysis in the first place. And no pathos can, in the second place, compensate for what has been missed in the first place—although one has to put up with the pathos in the first place, along with the loss of pathos in the end.¹⁷

It would be an extra task, and would take another time, to reconsider the reception of deconstruction in America in the light not so much of its detotalizing strategies, but of its pragmatic impact on the rethinking and rereading of crucial concepts. Not only the necessary defiguration of the old, but also the opening of new possibilities—call it refiguration. Deconstruction’s sensitivity to pragmatic issues is best documented in its growing interest in the performativity of acts and their institutional setting, a perspective more crucial than the much bedeviled, or else applauded, antiessentialism, not to mention the now out-of-fashion “play of signifiers.” I think, the once-feared danger of “domesticating” de-construction’s philosophical impact into a domestic brand of pragmatism—certainly a thing to be avoided—is less relevant than the opposite danger of taking the pragmatic acuity out of deconstruction and turning it back into a merely critical, even hypercritical “theory.” Deconstruction is a kind of pragmatism, insofar as it is able to replace a disabled pragmatism. It may even turn out to be pragmatism’s better equipped, and more pragmatic, version.

Deconstruction, however, is also more than a kind of pragmatism, if only in that it aims beyond pragmatism’s anxieties of influence and desperation. The literary and philosophical issues of deconstruction have had, among many other important academic effects, a political effect and outcome, in which reading—the reading of difference—arrived at working results far from the alleged effects of mere irony and mere play. As it turns out, the terms “irony” and “play” are not what they merely seem. In literature’s ways of exposing rhetorically what in philosophy was meant to persuade “naturally,” authentically, difference turns up in the undisguised undecidability of figuration. Reading the literary and philosophical double bind: deciphering, more precisely, philosophy’s difference inscribed within literature’s indifference to this very philosophy’s authority was the model, and is still a model, for reading difference beyond the quests for identity. The “irony” needed in acknowledging what has to be decided, as well as the “play” needed in dealing with the consequences, are not merely tropes of a stimulus-response-like reaction-formation; they have to be taken on as figures of response, as responsibility.

The legal debate should be mentioned first here but also, and not without legal implications, sexual politics. It was through the difference of the sexes, and not by coincidence, that this model of metaphor, or transference, was to be applied in the most rigorous way and delivered pragmatic impact.¹⁸ Deconstructive Feminism has practiced this mode of reading to the extent that there is, at present, hardly any other direction of criticism that could compete with it both in analytical refinement and pragmatic pertinence. Compared to this, the encounter of deconstruction with the Critical Legal Studies Movement was bound to remain metapragmatic; but as I have indicated there may be an additional point of constitutional importance to the metapragmatic role of legal theory in a country where the law is the law.

Not that we can ever be too sure about the “critical function” of literature’s disfigurative work. Not that we can ever be too clear about philosophy’s task “as such.” What is to be elaborated are the problems, if the responsibility of solutions is ever to be met. Therefore, a topology of impossibilities is needed rather than a system of the restricted possible. According to the much older pragmatism that was rhetoric (an art whose analytical potential has been on the agenda of deconstruction from the beginning), topology has to map the relevant topoi under consideration; a heuristics of differences to be reconsidered in their manifestations and underlying mechanizations—the gift, for example, or the crypt, or the secret. As far as inventiveness is concerned in these matters, poietic imagination in the precise sense, I see nobody to whom we owe as much as we owe to Jacques Derrida for his unfailing dedication to America.

Take the gift, for example. “For finally, if the gift is another name of the impossible, we still think it, we name it, we desire it. We intend it.”¹⁹ America is by now the age-old name for the thought, the desire, and the intention towards the impossible, like the gift (not a given, but to be given). Like that “other cape,” Cape Europe, as Derrida has called a collection of recent writings on deconstruction in Europe, America has become a paleonym, the recitation of an old name for some hope not altogether lost. Or is it lost, after all? Answering the French President François Mitterand’s hopeful remark on the future of Europe as “returning in its history and its geography like one who is returning home—chez soi,” Derrida asks, “Is it possible? Desirable? Is it really this that announces itself today?”²⁰ Cavell did not hesitate to confront “the place or the topic of the place” that America is for him as it was for Emerson and Thoreau with the European predicament, the essential, nostalgic Heideggerian version of being at home: “The substantive disagreement with Heidegger,” writes Cavell—as with Mitterand, wonders Derrida—is the disagreement shared by Emerson, Thoreau and Cavell himself, “that the achievement of the human requires not inhabitation and settlement but abandonment, leaving.”²¹ If the given is to be abandoned in favor of the impossible, of the gift that would have announced itself once in America and may announce itself today in Europe again, what politics does this announcement entail?

The handy reversal of terms which predicts the politics of de-construction as a deconstruction of politics is as well put as it is badly meant. Because it is the caesura of what is going on as politics that defines the “new sense of the political”—of politics deconstructed not in the sense of giving up the space of the political, but in the sense of keeping it deconstructible. Open to revision, but in a radical sense. Thus Derrida’s “The Politics of Friendship” cites the classical sources, through whom this topos politic is defined and in whose redefinition a new sense of the political is to be refound, remade and regained. This may not seem enough for those who overlook in this review the pragmatics of the caesura— a pragmatics involved in the application of rupture (as in the classical instance of strike)—and therefore complain about a “withdrawal from the specificity of politics and of empirical social research.”²² But is it not the very specificity of politics that asks for a refocusing within the frame given, “democracy,” and even of a refocusing of the frame as it is given and too easily taken for granted? The democracy that is as yet fully to come cannot be simply deduced, and thus be taken for coming, from a democracy as yet insufficiently reached. Unfortunately, one cannot say that the political critique and social research in question had come forward with what it had hoped for, and keeps hoping for on the premises of a critical theory that is obviously not critical enough to avoid turning hypocritical and cutting the wrong way now.

As Derrida has put it most pertinently in his closing remarks to this conference (I quote from memory): “What we have to do is to politicize the problems in a way that politics become just; not in politicizing as such and in itself, but in politicizing differently.” This includes a work of differentiating much easier to invoke than to carry out. A differentiation also of the politics of friendship, no doubt, that is still suffering from Euro-American self-centeredness, deeply buried in what Derrida most recently came to investigate as the “secret of European responsibility.”²³ But the patient work of deconstructing philosophy on the grounds of its particular European sources is not in itself Eurocentric, if it politicizes differently. It demands, as Gayatri Spivak has pointed out more than once, a decentering of deconstruction’s politics from its Euro-American homeground, the pretext of the Euro-American difference of this conference included. Deconstruction in America implies, and therefore will have to take care of, Americas beyond this America, in an America yet to be given.

In the world of difference to which America is more exposed than any other part of the world, Europe to follow, no principle of identity has to be erected. The state of difference in America asks for a differentiation of deconstruction’s “differing” the topos of difference with respect to the differences inscribed therein. “The challenge of deconstruction,” Rodolphe Gasché emphasizes, is the paradoxical necessity of taking the other as the other, other than me (and not just: the other me); it “is how to distinguish without judging and deciding; in other words how to do justice to what requires recognition on the basis of its singularity.”²⁴ That singularity is defined by difference and not to be mixed up with individuality in the older sense of an undivided, self-contained self, the subject of philosophical reflection. The politics of singularity, therefore, has to cope with another spacing, some “kind of asymmetrical and heteronomical curvature of the social space” according to Derrida’s description. Peter Eisenman has translated this spacial peculiarity into the time-qualification of a “present-ness” in architecture other than the time-effacing pomposity of the uniformly postmodern. Architecture as the pragmatic challenge to all utopias can be taken as the deconstructive chance of a nonutopian politics in many a sense, but most decidedly not in the sense of a preestablished symmetry to be imposed upon public places.

Let me risk an example, if only to do justice to the spirit of the place. Take the theatricality of a city like New York, a place in permanent destruction, in continuous decay, as it seems, but more precisely a city in permanent change, in gender trouble and racial controversy. It is here that one gets, now and then, a new sense of the political qua deconstruction. I do not refer to the corrupted state of city politics, which proves the old sense of the political to be “out of joint.” What I would rather refer to is how the failure of ordinary politics to “become just” has provoked a sense of the political expressing itself differently here—in mixed identities barely controlled by means of the police force and, by the way, only badly translated into the language of the media. A movie such as Paris is Burning, already noteworthy for its unfailing play on the Euro-American paleonym, had to compromise itself with the pathos of accredited concerns (the human interest stories of those involved), in order to deliver its message of drag and mimetic desire, of unsettling comedy. The discarded name of Harlem, which never comes up in the picture except in reference to the river, on whose distant banks the towers of wealth rise, points to no u-topos.²⁵ On the contrary, the utopian-minded Venus from the house of Xtravaganza dies shortly after the film was completed. Likewise the quotation of Paris stands for no burning other than the urgency of the performative. Nowhere else in America (and certainly not in the literal burning of L.A.) is the destabilization of established politics, the bastardization of race, the queering of gender more effective, and thus the constructive potential of deconstruction more obvious—not just in destroying the patterns of domination, and not only in ridiculing the pretensions of identity (both already considerable achievements in their own right) but in creating modes of transition, sex untroubled by gender, the frail acceptance of the other before and beyond affirmation. Sure, there is no such thing as ungendered sexes, but the parodic decomposition of gender—and there is hardly an example more significant these days—asks for the unconditional acceptance that is necessary for “becoming just.” Come, and see.