ABSTRACT
With its origins in philosophy and literary theory, deconstruction at first blush might appear to be only marginally useful to the political theorist. Unlike other interpretive techniques, such as those developed by the Cambridge School, Leo Strauss, or Marxian scholars, deconstruction’s beginnings lack a discernibly political pedigree and may seem more at home in philosophy, literary criticism, and cultural studies. The techniques of the Cambridge School, for instance, were developed by political theorists with the express purpose of interpreting classical works of political philosophy. Likewise, Straussian thought originated with one of the most important political philosophers of the twentieth century. And while Marx harbored revolutionary as opposed to academic ambitions, there can be no serious question concerning the political content of an interpretive framework based on the ubiquity of class struggle. In contrast, deconstruction began as an interloper from other disciplinary realms. Nevertheless, in recent decades it has been broadly adopted by many political theorists. Given its origins, many have asked why this form of critical inquiry should be considered at home in political theory. Indeed, because deconstruction has not had the benefit of a clearly political
origin, its intellectual ambitions reside, according to many, in a literary sanctuary divorced from the realities of social and political life. Consequently, political theorists have occasionally challenged the validity of deconstruction for political theory, resenting its loosening of the term “political” to comprise ideas and forms of analysis that belong to the aesthetic, literary, and cultural realms. The connection to empirical reality is too attenuated, some complain, to make this form of critique meaningful for the discipline’s purposes. For example Catherine Zuckert, a Straussian theorist, maintains that deconstruction remains incapable of
offering concrete, empirical change in the social sphere. She insists that, contrary to its supporters’ claims, deconstruction makes it “extremely difficult, if not impossible to justify programmatic political change.”1 For this reason, as she views it, deconstruction at its most arcane bears an “anti-activist, if not strictly speaking a conservative thrust.”2 Thus for Zuckert as for many others, deconstruction fails as an agent of change despite its cachet and reputation as a tool for critical intervention. She and others argue that its progressive veneer only hides its apolitical nature. Indeed, Zuckert concedes that “Derrida’s work is not conservative;”3
rather, the result of deconstruction is that we “may be freed from complete domination, but we are not freed to do much.”4
