ABSTRACT
If the contemporary theoretical imbroglio seems a little more fluid than it did a decade ago, there is still a sense in which an alliance between critical realism and deconstruction would be seen by many within both camps as nothing less than ‘sleeping with the enemy’. Deconstruction, at least as commonly understood, is typically thought to be against all ontologising discourses. For deconstruction, ontology is out (Eagleton 1995; Soper 1996). Critical realism, on the other hand, explicitly argues for the necessity of ontology, while taking seriously the epistemological problematics of coming to know it. If the deconstructionist distrust of ontology is often interpreted as implying a form of linguistic idealism, the critical realist insistence on ontology is often read as a form of naïve realism. Both understandings are wrong. Critical realists are explicit in their denial of naïve realism, which they view as a form of empiricism; itself an anti-realist position. But in the case of deconstruction and linguistic idealism the issue is not as clear.
