At the Oklahoma Conference on Contemporary Genre Theory in 1984, Barbara Johnson, at the opening of a symposium with J. Hillis Miller and Louis Mackey, called for a dialogue between Marxism and deconstruction that would take the form of an interchange between the realm of ‘discourse’ and the ‘realm of historical and political action’:

This then, would be the manifesto of the encounter between textual deconstruction and active politics. Its description of a possible relationship is shared both by those like Barbara Johnson who are identified as deconstructive critics, and by those like Said and Eagleton who attack deconstruction for having failed to effect such a shift from textual subversion to the subversion of power in the world of action, and who argue that deconstruction cannot perform such a shift.

Forgive me for speaking in my own tongue. It's the only one I ever spoke with Paul de Man. It's also the one in which he often taught, wrote and thought. What is more, I haven't the heart today to translate these few words, adding to them the suffering and distance, for you and for me, of a foreign accent. We are speaking today less in order to say something than to assure ourselves, with voice and with music, that we are together in the same thought. We know with what difficulty one finds right and decent words at such a moment when no recourse should be had to common usage since all conventions will seem either intolerable or vain.

If we have, as one says in French, ‘la mort dans l’âme,’ death in the soul, it is because from now on we are destined to speak of Paul de Man, instead of speaking to and with him, destined to speak of the teacher and of the friend whom he remains for so many of us, whereas the most vivid desire and the one which, within us, has been most cruelly battered, the most forbidden desire from now on would be to speak, still, to Paul, to hear him and to respond to him. Not just within ourselves (we will continue, I will continue to do that endlessly) but to speak to him and to hear him, himself, speaking to us. That's the impossible and we can no longer even take the measure of this wound.

Derrida admits his work occupies a marginal cultural sphere. Collections of love letters and autobiographical reviews of Parisian art displays have little perceivable immediate pertinence to such questions as the proletarianization of peasants or the poisoning of the world by transnationals. Nevertheless, capitalism is not merely political and economic, but also cultural and social, not merely economically exploitative, but also patriarchal and racist. Indeed, to succeed as political-economic domination, capital requires power in these other spheres. Writing critiques of bourgeois models of communication and representation, philosophizing, and so on may not be the best way to seize state power, but unless they pretend to be a substitute for other forms of struggle (i.e., the Frankfurt School), they can have an important place. In fact, I would argue that a narrow focus on questions of political-economic power, at the exclusion of other plural, multisectoral critiques and reconstructions, can be as selfdefeating as a narrow focus on cultural concerns. It is not accidental, after all, that Lenin's crude philosophic objectivism accompanied an equally crude vision of socialism. Without further apologies, then, I will try to show that the critical methods of Marx and Derrida can be compared and that deconstruction can be articulated with critical marxism. There are four reasons why this comparison is possible: first, because Derrida follows Marx as a critic of metaphysics; second, because the deconstructive rewriting of the classical dialectic removes the justification for the conservative marxist model of a linearly evolutionary and finalistically resolutive progress to socialism, while implicitly furthering a politics predicated upon a more realistic assessment of the antagonistic forces and irreducible differences that characterize capitalist social and productive relations; third, because deconstruction can provide the principles necessary for a radical critique of capitalist-patriarchal institutions that is not merely oppositional but undermines from within the legitimating grounds for those institutions and fourth, because deconstruction can supply conceptual models for the economic and political institutions required in egalitarian and nonhierarchic socialist construction.

Yes, in a foreign land. We must have come across each other most often in a foreign land. These encounters retain an emblematic value for me. Perhaps because they took place elsewhere, far away, but more surely because we never separated without a promise; I have not forgotten. Nor have I forgotten what Michel de Certeau writes of writing in the mystical text: through and through, it is also a promise.

To me, it is as if these encounters in the other's country (by which I also mean the interruption immediately marking them, the separation which tears apart their very event) described in their own way the paths taken by thought as it intermingles with the word given in writing: at the heart of the same time, of a single time, the opening and the cut. And this is already a citation from La Fable mysti que

Angelus Silesius … identifies the graph of the Separate (Jah, or Jahveh) with the boundlessness of the ‘yes’ (Ja). The same phoneme (ja) makes the cut and the opening coincide, the No Name of the Other and the Yes of the Will, absolute separation and infinite acceptance:

A chance encounter in the singularity of a ‘graph,’ the coincidence of the cut and the opening. We will have to come back to this again and again.

Of these encounters which from the start were separations, I will say nothing, that is, nothing directly. Instead I will go on murmuring, for myself, a few place names.

What is to be done, at present? The question is on everybody's lips and, in a certain way, it is the question people today always have lying in wait for any passing philosopher. Not: What is to be thought? But indeed: What is to be done? The question is on everybody's lips (including the philosopher’s), but withheld, barely uttered, for we do not know if we still have the right, or whether we have the means, to raise it. Perhaps, we think more or less discreetly to ourselves, perhaps the uncertainty of ‘what is to be done?’ is today so great, so fluctuating, so indeterminate, that we do not need even to do this: raise the question.

Especially if the question were to presuppose that one already knows what it is right to think, and that the only issue is how one might then proceed to act. Behind us theory, and before us practice - the key thing is knowing what it is opportune to decide in order to embark on specific action. But this is what is presupposed most ordinarily by the question. And ‘what is to be done?’ means, in that case, ‘how to act’ in order to achieve an already given goal. ‘Transforming the world’ then means: realising an already given interpretation of the world, and realising a hope.

But we do not know what it is right for us to think, or even properly to hope. Perhaps we no longer even know what it is to think nor, consequently, what it is to think ‘doing’, nor what ‘doing’ is, absolutely.

President William Jefferson Clinton

Mrs. Hillary Rodham Clinton

The White House

1600 Pennsylvania Ave, NW

Washington, DC 20500

United States of America

Paris, November 15 1996

Mr. President, Madame First Lady,

At a time when the entire world welcomes the reelection of the President of the United States and the reaffirmation of his place in the highest office, permit us to address ourselves directly to you, and to do so on a personal level, at once public and private. For, in speaking the language of the heart as much as that of the law and right, we appeal to you above all out of duty and in the name of justice in order to beseech you, Mr. President, Madame First Lady, to make your voice heard.

In effect, a terrifying tragedy runs the risk of leading an innocent man to his death. Imprisoned for fifteen years, judged and sentenced under conditions that appear more than suspect to the entire world, there is a chance that an American will pay with his life tomorrow for what could only be a police conspiracy and a miscarriage of justice. It is common knowledge today, in your country and everywhere else, that the trial of Mumia Abu-Jamal has been marred, from the very beginning, by many serious procedural irregularities. Countless violations of the rules have been the focus of credible and meticulous publications (dossiers, interviews, books, films). Irrefutable testimony has demonstrated that the conduct of his trial was led astray by pressure groups and a partial judge (recently affirmed in his position and notorious for holding the record for death sentences among American judges); and all this in order to punish at all costs, without sufficient proof or evidence, the past of a political activist (in the 70s, a young ‘Black Panther’, then a radio journalist, ‘the voice of the voiceless’). Since then, Mumia Abu-Jamal has often been considered, justifiably, alas, a political prisoner under threat of death in a democracy.

The Social Production of ‘Empty Signifiers’

An empty signifier is, strictly speaking, a signifier without a signified. This definition is also, however, the enunciation of a problem. For how would it be possible that a signifier is not attached to any signified and remains, nevertheless, an integral part of a system of signification? An empty signifier would be a sequence of sounds, and if the latter are deprived of any signifying function the term ‘signifier’ itself would become excessive. The only possibility for a stream of sounds being detached from any particular signified while still remaining a signifier is if, through the subversion of the sign which the possibility of an empty signifier involves, something is achieved which is internal to significations as such. What is this possibility?

Some pseudo answers can be discarded quite quickly. One would be to argue that the same signifier can be attached to different signifieds in different contexts (as a result of the arbitrariness of the sign). But it is clear that, in that case, the signifier would not be empty but equivocal-, the function of signification in each context would be fully realised. A second possibility is that the signifier is not equivocal but ambiguous-, that either an overdetermination or an underdetermination of signifieds prevents it from being fully fixed. Yet this floating of the signifier still does not make it an empty one. Although the floating takes us one step towards the proper answer to our problem, the terms of the latter are still avoided.

The first of these statements runs against the mainstream of contemporary architectural thought, whether ‘modernist’ or ‘post-modernist,’ by refusing to favor space at the expense of action. The second statement argues that although the logic of objects and the logic of man are independent in their relations to the world, they inevitably face one another in an intense confrontation. Any relationship between a building and its users is one of violence, for any use means the intrusion of a human body into a given space, the intrusion of one order into another. This intrusion is inherent in the idea of architecture; any reduction of architecture to its spaces at the expense of its events is as simplistic as the reduction of architecture to its facades.

By ‘violence,’ I do not mean the brutality that destroys physical or emotional integrity, but a metaphor for the intensity of a relationship between individuals and their surrounding spaces. The argument is not a matter of style: ‘modern’ architecture is neither more nor less violent than classical architecture, or than Fascist, Socialist or vernacular variations. Architecture's violence is fundamental and unavoidable, for architecture is linked to events in the same way that the guard is linked to his prisoner, the police to the criminal, the doctor to the patient, order to chaos. This also suggests that actions qualify spaces as much as spaces qualify actions; that space and action are inseparable and that no proper interpretation of architecture, drawing or notation can refuse to consider this fact.

As Harold Bloom puts it in the opening essay of the Yale School's nonmanifesto, Deconstruction and Criticism-. ‘Reading well is not necessarily a polite process … Only the capacity to wound gives a healing capacity the chance to endure, and so to be heard.’1 I hope, therefore, that my hosts will understand the spirit in which I will use them as the starting point for the depiction of a much larger configuration, and that by the end of this paper I will not have bitten off more of the hand that feeds me than I can chew.

In January of this year, shortly after the death of Paul de Man, I received a call from Robert Con Davis inviting me to attempt the painful and obviously impossible task of replacing de Man in a conference in which Geoffrey Hartman, Hillis Miller, and Paul de Man had been asked to speak about genre theory in relation to their own work. I was invited to speak, however, not about my own work but about de Man’s. The reasons for this are certainly understandable. I could easily sympathize with the conference organizers’ impulse: there is nothing I could wish more than that de Man had not died. But the invitation to appear as de Man's supplement - supplemented in turn by a panel of my own choosing - gave me pause. For it falls all too neatly into patterns of female effacement already well established by the phenomenon of the Yale School - and indeed, with rare exceptions, by the phenomenon of the critical ‘school’ as such. Like others of its type, the Yale School has always been a Male School.

This chapter is about Derrida and literature. I use deliberately the blandest, most innocent, least question-begging conjunction. I want to put my remarks in the context of an ideological story that is making the rounds. Of course it does not have currency with you and me, dear reader. We know better. But the traces of this story's force are widely visible. A recent book by Jonathan Loesberg, Aestheticism and Deconstruction: Pater, Derrida, de Man2 defends Derrida and de Man from the claim that they are ahistorical by arguing that neither is really interested in reading works of literature. Of Derrida, Loesberg says: ‘Because Derrida embeds his analysis of literary language within his analysis of foundational philosophy, it has as little relevance to the interpretation of actual literary works as his philosophical discussion has to the status of particular propositions’ (106). Later he asserts categorically that ‘de Man's theory of literary language will no more produce practical criticism than does Derrida’s’ (116). Where did this strange contrary-to-fact story about Derrida's and de Man's lack of interest in doing literary criticism come from, and what is its ideological function?

Rodolphe Gasche was the first to argue in detail that Derrida is a technical philosopher in the wake of Husserlian phenomenology and that de Man, myself, and other American ‘deconstructionists’ have falsified his work by using it in literary criticism.

The first time I saw Jacques Derrida (it must have been in 1962) he was walking fast and sure along a mountain's crest, from left to right, I was at Arcachon, I was reading (it must have been Force et signification), from where I was I could see him clearly advancing black on the clear sky, feet on a tightrope, the crest was terribly sharp, he was walking along the peak, from far away I saw it, his hike along the line between mountain and sky which were melting into each other, he had to travel a path no wider than a pencil stroke.

He wasn't running, fast, he was making his way, all the way along the crests. Going from left to right, according to the (incarnate) pace of writing. Landscape without any border other than, at each instant, displacing him from his pace. Before him, nothing but the great standing air. I had never seen someone from our century write like this, on the world's cutting edge, the air had the air of a transparent door, so entirely open one had to search for the stiles - later I would call this tableau:

- Circumcision of the world –

‘Alone, very alone on a line - a line of poetry,’ as it says on page 107 of Schibboleth.

Drawing the inner margin of the universe, thus the universe, nobody in person, the ultimate surveyor of ultimity.

‘To see oneself always placed at the head, if one may say so,’ this is how we recognize him, placed at the head, on the crest, at the peak.

I saw a ghost last night. More important, I heard a ghost. I was addressed by a ghost, we were addressed by a ghost.

Was it the ghost of William Shakespeare? The ghost of Karl Marx? The ghost of deconstruction (yet again risen from the dead)? Or of deconstruction in America?

Or even the ghost of Jacques Derrida? One of the many ghosts of Jacques Derrida?

It said many things, but in saying everything that it had to say it also said: ‘Remember me!’

During yesterday afternoon’s session, Philip Lewis posed a question to Hillis Miller, who had been discussing the responsibility entailed in the act of reading. Where does this responsibility come from? he wanted to know. Who lays it upon me? Who calls me to be responsible? And to whom, for whom, before whom am I responsible?

Called upon to identify the source of the responsibility that calls upon him when he reads, Miller gave a somewhat evasive answer, talking about fidelity to the original text and his Protestant upbringing. This evasiveness was not surprising; it is a discomfiting question, without a single or a simple answer.

Last night, Derrida gave one answer (or reminded us that we already know one answer - if we know the best-known work in English literature).

Responsibility comes from a ghost, or the ghost; the revenant which is also an arrivant. The ghost lays me under an obligation to recognize my responsibility. The ghost says to Hamlet, ‘Remember me’ - once in so many words but by implication continuously throughout the play. ‘Remember me’ is an injunction, in this context, to act, to kill a man, a ‘high public official’ a king. It is a call to justice.

Introductions

How do feminism and deconstruction go together, if at all? Does deconstruction need to be feminized? Or does feminism need to be deconstructed? In either case, it would be possible to be seduced by a narrative of initial mistrust and final reconciliation. However, I am not going to tell the kind of story in which feminism learns to love the hand that corrects the error of her ways, learns to appreciate proper theoretical rigor. Nor am I going to propose that what we need is either a kinder and gentler deconstruction or a deconstruction that can be put back in touch with real problems by the mediating action of women. Thus, rather than introducing feminism and deconstruction to each other or tracing the story of their partnership, I want to argue that there is an interest in setting these two ways of thinking (which do not make a pair) alongside each other, and that this interest does not simply reside in the question of what either one may usefully learn from a partnership with the other.

So, not ‘how do they go together?’ but ‘how are they beside each other?’. Initially, the two seem to have little in common. Feminism seems to be a political project, whereas deconstruction appears more philosophical or literary. By this account, their mutual interests do not converge. Such an argument does indeed have some merit in so far as convergence is not the right way to characterize the interaction between feminism and deconstruction.

We used to play until it was pitch dark: I dreamt of becoming a professional footballer Jacques Derrida1 According to a recent video collection of the finest goals scored in World Cup football, ‘the greatest goal of all time’ was scored by Carlos Alberto playing for Brazil in the 1970 World Cup Final. Late in the game, after a period of sustained midfield possession against Italian opposition, Rivelino releases Jairzinho on the left wing: he beats Facchetti at right back and plays a square ball to Pele who is patrolling the area outside the Italian eighteen yard box. Pele traps the ball and, at walking pace, rolls it into empty space towards the corner flag. Suddenly, the Brazillian right-back comes hurtling into view to connect with the ball which rockets into the back of the Italian net. Brazil 4, Italy .

Forget, for a moment, the strike on goal and, instead, savour the pass. On receiving the ball Pele seems disinterested, strolling lazily about in an imperious fashion. Brazil are already 3-1 up, they are into the last 10 minutes of the game, certain not to lose. Time is suspended before the release of the ball. Pele rolls the ball… to nowhere, into an empty space with no receiver in sight. But in slicing across empty space the pass anticipates and creates, from nothing and in nowhere, a move of exquisite precision: beyond the televisual frame, and out of position, a defensive player - who by his own admission did not (nor was he supposed to) score many goals for the national side - arrives to complete the move. Pele's pass, in the words of Eric Cantona, the celebrated and notorious French poet-philosopher of the soccer field, was a ‘poem’.

All research - and not least that which operates within the range of the central question of Being - is an ontical possibility of Dasein. Dasein's Being finds its meaning in temporality. But temporality is also the condition which makes historicality possible as a temporal kind of Being which Dasein itself possesses, regardless of whether or how Dasein is an entity ‘in time’. Historicality, as a determinate character, is prior to what is called ‘history’ (world-historical historizing).

‘Historicality’ stands for the state of Being that is constitutive for Dasein's ‘historizing’ as such; only on the basis of such ‘historizing’ is anything like ‘world-history’ possible or can anything belong historically to world-history. In its factical Being, any Dasein is as it already was, and it is ‘what’ it already was. It is its past, whether explicitly or not. And this is so not only in that its past is, as it were, pushing itself along ‘behind’ it, and that Dasein possesses what is past as a property which is still present-at-hand and which sometimes has after-effects upon it: Dasein ‘is’ its past in the way of its own Being, which, to put it roughly, ‘historizes’ out of its future on each occasion. Whatever the way of being it may have at the time, and thus with whatever understanding of Being it may possess, Dasein has grown up both into and in a traditional way of interpreting itself: in terms of this it understands itself proximally and, within a certain range, constantly. By this understanding, the possibilities of its Being are disclosed and regulated.