ABSTRACT
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 self-defeating 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 380and 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.
