Review: The Post-Structuralist Condition

Author(s): Philip Lewis

Review by: Philip Lewis
Source: Diacritics, Vol. 12, No. 1 (Spring, 1982), pp. 2-24
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
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to Diacritics
 THE POST-STRUCTURALIST
CONDITION

PHILIP LEWIS

Vincent Descombes. LE MEME ET L'AUTRE. QUARANTE-CINQ ANS DE

PHILOSOPHIE FRANCAISE. Paris: Minuit, 1979.

Josue V. Harari, ed. TEXTUAL STRATEGIES: PERSPECTIVES IN POST-STRUC-

TURALIST CRITICISM. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979.

I. Structuralism
Buried deep within the February 16, 1981 issue of Newsweek magazine
(on page 95 of this issue adorned with a close-up photograph of U.S. Budget
Director David Stockman on the cover, with three chilling verbs, CUT, SLASH,
CHOP, set in red-bordered yellow letters to the left of his face and on line
with his eyes, upper lip, and chin respectively), tucked away under the rubric
"Education" at considerable remove from the lead story reporting on pro-
posed reductions of aid to students in various programs and on the recom-
mendation to halve federal subsidies for the arts and humanities-a
somewhat unlikely article turns up. Headlined "Unquiet Flow the Dons," the
article contains an account, composed in vintage Newsweekese, of a con-
troversial academic tenure case at Cambridge University. The Newsweek
writers tell us that a thirty-one year old teacher named Colin MacCabe, author
of a weighty book on Joyce, was recently denied tenure because of his "new-
wave views of English literature" and that two senior dons who supported him
(one was apparently Frank Kermode, deemed by Newsweek to be "Cam-
bridge's most distinguished don") were ousted from the faculty appointments
committee. So much for the not-so-bare facts. Newsweek goes on to offer an
explanatory account. Here is a sample of the news magazine's confident
insight.

The Cambridge conservatives, like most literary scholars, teach

that literature contains eternal moral values. An author, whatever the
prevailing custom and culture, sets out to make a point that is as eas-
ily understood by a fifteenth-century Englishman as a twentieth-
century Ethiopian. Other scholars who refer to themselves as struc-
turalists see no such clarity and consistency in literature. Influenced
by French critical thought, they say a novel can mean different things
to different people at different times.... Furthermore, argue the
structuralists, a writer is influenced more by his unconscious mind
and the structure of language itself than by his life and times. Some
structuralists ignore a book's content and concentrate on its sentence
construction - and even reduce novels to mathematical equations.
DIACRITICS Vol. 12 Pp. 02-24
0300-7162/82/0121-0002 $01.00 ? 1982 by The Johns Hopkins University Press
 MacCabe does not go that far. He describes himself as a "post-structuralist"
and says he considers a book's historical context. But he also analyzes literature
by studying its linguistic rules and examining the Freudian influences on the
author.

Now these statements would certainly elicit many a gloss, including some from
English professors who would feel compelled to stress the sentence construction of
Newsweek's utterly imitable prose. For our purpose, which is initially to underscore the
need to set our reflection on post-structuralism in an institutional context, two remarks
will suffice.
(1) However objectionable the journalistic version of the MacCabe affair may be, a
scholarly critique of its distortions and omissions would hardly reduce its impact or its
interest as a public product of academic controversy. As a somewhat wryly woven tale
recounted for society-at-large about some slightly implausible, tragi-comic academic
characters, it reminds us that, in academia, intellectual positions can sometimes have con-
siderable stakes and cause high tensions. Newsweek points out that MacCabe's suspect
ties to structuralism, post-structuralism, and French avant-gardism do not just endanger his
livelihood; they also serve as the catalyst that reactivates and focuses a larger, long-term
debate, where the issue being joined is really "how English literature should be taught at
Cambridge"- and, we might well add, in recognition of Cambridge's symbolic place in
Anglo-American higher education, how English literature should be taught--period.
Moreover, if this affair made it into the popular press, it is surely because the battle for
power in the Cambridge English department spilled over into the Cambridge senate and
produced a crisis in university governance. Newsweek makes it appear that MacCabe's
new-fangled critical stance somehow posed enough of a threat to set off a full comple-
ment of institutional defenses. The politicization of the debate centering on the aims and
method of MacCabe's work surely bears a chilling message for potential victims of the
evaluative process or, more generally, for all who are participating dependents in the
university's self-regulatory exercises. How many astute scholars, knowing such a brouhaha
were in store for themselves and their community, would still, by dint of conviction, risk
espousing the cause of -or even tolerating - structuralism or post-structuralism? Vincent
Descombes' splendid analysis of the structuralist position in Chapter III of Le Meme et
I'autre will help us not simply to detect the political stakes of the controversy opposing so-
called traditionalists or humanists to the structuralists or post-structuralists, but also to
appreciate-by way of the French example-the fact that the problem brought to the
fore by these -isms of the 1960's and 1970's is fundamentally political.
(2) It is necessary to reckon seriously -not dismissively -with the journalistic view of
such theoretical currents as structuralism and deconstruction (concerning the latter,
predictably distortive reports appeared in the Newsweek of June 22, 1981 [pp. 80, 82] and
the European edition of Newsweek [May 11, 1981, pp. 46-47]). The reason for this is simple,
hence easily overlooked: what Newsweek affirms in characterizing the post-structuralist or
the deconstructionist, far from just representing the "outside" view of reporters who
merely look in, listen to strange talk, and develop their own story, comes straight from
academic authorities. It consists precisely in the facile reductions and confusions to which
teachers and students, whether adversaries or not, have themselves resorted in describing
the invading -isms to one another. Newsweek's sketch of MacCabe's position is actually
quite instructive. MacCabe calls himself a post-structuralist, according to Newsweek, yet it
seems that he is being taken to be a structuralist. This is all the more exasperating because
we discover, upon inspecting the article closely, that whatever differences there may be
between structuralism and post-structuralism are hopelessly muddled. It is as if one should
assume the guise of the post-structuralist in order not to be condemned and dismissed as a
structuralist, yet in a comic twist it turns out that by playing the post-structuralist one may
well be dismissed as a structuralist anyway. Are we to conclude that those parties at Cam-
bridge who feel threatened by the French intellectual imports, structuralism and post-
structuralism, may not be all that much concerned with what these two labels mean? Or
indeed that there is no clear, generally accepted notion of what distinguishes them? Yes;
yes. Although the term "post-structuralist" has become a commonplace in recent years, it

diacritics / spring 1982 3

turns out that in practice distinctions other than the vapid period designation (the struc-
turalist epidemic of the sixties gave way to the post-structuralist malaise of the seventies)
are hard to draw and that, in many quarters, the respective epithets refer more or less inter-
changeably to the same set of symptoms. This observation, concerning the conceptual
elusiveness of post-structuralism, points to an intolerable situation precisely on the level
of our first remark, concerning the serious import of the politicized controversy for Mac-
Cabe and for institutionally aware scholars in general: if theory and method are to affect
academic careers and major educational policies (and they are bound to do so), then those
who judge and decide have a need and a responsibility to secure a cogent understanding
of the basic terms and ideas at issue and to draw the relevant distinctions in considering
individual cases. But what if access to a clear and tenable understanding is difficult, if not
impossible? One can only surmise that MacCabe's chances for a sympathetic appraisal
were not enhanced by the indefinition or slipperiness of the post-structuralist label with
which he was associated. And faced in the early 1980's with the continuance of that confu-
sion, one must indeed ask whether scholars' communal need for a concerted understand-
ing of post-structuralism can be met at all.
Josue V. Harari's hefty anthology, promisingly entitled Textual Strategies: Perspectives
in Post-Structuralist Criticism, happens to underscore the pertinence of this last query.
Unmistakably a product of the academic communities most severely infested with the
germs of French theory (Columbia, Cornell, Johns Hopkins, and Yale are the key American
sites), it proclaims unequivocally that "its aim is to provide a general introduction to post-
structuralist theories and practices for students and critics of literature... ." [p. 9]. Yet
Harari, in his substantial introductory essay, "Critical Factions, Critical Fictions," is at
pains to strike a note of cautious pluralism. When he opposes post-structuralism to struc-
turalism in conceptual terms (notably on pp. 26-31), he first takes care to recoil from
answering decisively the conventional question that he raises, "what is post-structuralism?"
"The question is less ambitious than it might appear; it does not seek a clear or unified
answer, but only tentative answers that may perhaps be reduced, in the end, to nothing
more than a panorama only slightly different from that offered by structuralism. For this
reason, among others, post-structuralism - like structuralism - invites a plural spelling ..."
[p. 27]. The profiles of structuralism and post-structuralism may then be only slightly differ-
ent; and given that the most noteworthy of the structuralists in the literary-critical zone,
Roland Barthes, also turns out to be the most noteworthy of the post-structuralists, and
that Barthes regards his post-structuralism not as a rejection of his structuralism but as a
critical displacement of it [p. 31],1 perhaps we should forgive those skeptical guardians of
our intellectual well-being who would confound the adjacent -isms, who would take the
later disorder as a mere mutation of the earlier one. Nevertheless, there is at least a slight
difference. Harari, after many others, identifies structuralism above all by its grounding in
the Saussurian account of the sign and signification, then differentiates post-structuralism
from it by emphasizing Derrida's critique of the structuralist semiology. Derrida would go
further than structuralism's attempt at "a radical dismissal of the speaking subject" [p. 29]
by putting the sign itself, spared in the initial assault on the subject, into question. But
even here, in the decisive shift "away from the [structuralist] problematics of the subject
to the [post-structuralist] deconstruction of the concept of representation" [p. 29], the two
stances "exhibit a certain complementarity" [p. 30]. Derrida's attack is a kind of anti-
structuralist structuralism: using the tools of structuralism against structuralism, the
deconstruction of representation "relies on structuralist premises in order, paradoxically,
to show that structuralism has not fully pursued the implications of those premises" [p.

1 Barthes is a delicate example. In prefaces, short reviews and interviews, he readily promulgated over
the years pithy programmatic formulations about shifts in his own thinking or in the course of
theoretical trends that his writings, as textual performances, compel us to modalize. His essay in Tex-
tual Strategies, "De I'oeuvre au texte," offers the thematization of a "textualist" move "beyond" struc-
turalism in an essay that remains nonetheless attached to the elucidatory project of structuralism and is
quite straightforwardly structuralist in its procedure and vocabulary. Similarly, as Jonathan Culler
remarks in a forthcoming study, the reversal carried out in S/Z (extracting a model from the text rather
than using one supplied by poetics) hardly makes S/Z "post-structuralist." Indeed it is in many respects
the apogee of Barthes's structuralism.

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30]. One may then wonder if Derrida, by pursuing those implications, does not become,
complicitously, more structuralist than the structuralists, if his post-structuralism is not
finally an arch- or hyper-structuralism. If post-structuralism is nothing more than the
advent in due course of structuralism's auto-critical moment, its pursuit of its own integ-
rity, what sense does it make to insist on the notion of post-structuralism? Why denomi-
nate a new outlook, promote concerns about a new wave of Gallicillic infiltration, if we
simply confront an inherent evolution, a predictable change of accent or key? Why move
to design an anthology so as to consecrate still another -ism, or perhaps to signal the
decline of structuralism into a f(r)actious ideology- rather than, for example, to collect
some of the most capacious and innovative structuralist criticism so as to invalidate the
view of structuralism as nothing but theory without practice, analysis without interpreta-
tion? 2

Harari's reasoned response to such questioning may well be consonant- indeed,

strategically compliant-with a loose, ambiguous use of the term post-structuralism: it
could refer variously, depending on the circumstances, to surviving structuralism in its cur-
rent forms, to an anti-structuralism opposed on principle to structuralist theory, or to
approaches neither structuralist nor anti-structuralist, simply different from structuralism
and posterior to it. Such a response is well grounded in evident facts. For a certain
pluralism is unmistakably the order of the day. There have been, in the wake of struc-
turalism, a number of critical factions. Thus, to observe that the structuralist movement
lost its homogeneous look in the late sixties and was supplanted by a plurality of strategies
is by no means an anthological fiction. However, if structuralist premises and procedures
keep on informing the very attack on or divergence from structuralism, the undeniable
fact of this critical factiousness would seem far less telling than the persistence of struc-
turalist principle: the fact would manifest the varieties of structuralist inquiry as the theory
is pursued, put into practice. But it is of course hardly the fact of dispersion per se, it is
rather the conditions giving rise to it, and then the nature and extent of such relations as
still exist among the factions, that should tell us whether a distinction of the post-
structuralist from the structuralist is warranted and worthwhile. Textual Strategies, insofar
as it is constitutive of a sense or topography of post-structuralism, assuredly tends to rein-
force Harari's judgment that structuralist modes of thought persist in much of the recent
work inseminated by French theories. Owing to the conceptual confusion that he
recognizes and that we are far from clearing up, we can venture to qualify the formidable
essays gathered in the collection only in an approximate, intuitive fashion. At the very
least, however, we can readily note that a majority of the essays would have passed a
decade or more ago as vintage structuralist writing.3

2A major virtue of Textual Strategies is that, its claims to introduce post-structuralism notwithstand-
ing, it goes far toward achieving exactly this goal of illustrating structuralism's exegetical fecundity. In
this respect, it is superior to other anthologies of structuralism with which I am acquainted, and while
some would object that it is too heavily weighted toward the philosophical zone of structuralist prac-
tice, that psychoanalysis and anthropology are inadequately represented, etc., it can well be recom-
mended as a pedagogical tool (its extensive notes on contributors, which include critical bibliographies,
along with its general bibliography, organized in the main according to standard disciplinary categories,
clearly presuppose a didactic function).
3Considering the essays in particular, we would of course have to introduce numerous qualifications
of this general comment. For example: (a) Rene Girard's intriguing discourse on Shakespeare seems to
me to be neither structuralist nor potentially post-structuralist; it is Girardian; and part of its fascination
stems from the eccentricity of that viewpoint. (b) Edward Said's essay, uneasily balanced between struc-
turalist and anti-structuralist theses, and tonally harmonized with a traditional academic humanism, is
also hard to situate, though it is assuredly not post-structuralist. (c) Eugenio Donato's splendid reading
of Bouvard et Pecuchet comes closer than any other to complying with what we shall term the post-
structuralist condition. It is conceived in the furnace where the alloys of structuralism are burned down
into residues that are carried over into the radical Nietzscheanism of Klossowski and Lyotard.

diacritics / spring 1982 5

 But what allows us to make such a judgment? Here Descombes provides some admi-
rably incisive guidance. Discussing the role of structuralism in philosophy, where the
impact of semiology was to put phenomenology dramatically into question, he notes that:
to the phenomenological account of meaning as expression, semiology opposed the
Saussurean model of signification; to the description of phenomena through eidetic reduc-
tion, structuralism opposed the deconstruction of discourse; to the focus on the subject's
lived experience of the world, structuralism opposed its account of the convention-bound
constitution of experience. Within the structuralism evoked by these motifs, it is impor-
tant, Descombes emphasizes, to distinguish (1) the method of structural analysis, (2) the
semiological account of meaning and communication, and (3) the philosophical critique
spawned by structuralism, which targets semiology as well as phenomenology.
(1) Descombes acerbically dismisses a notion of structuralism (frequently pro-
pounded, he notes, by literature professors [p. 103]), whereby the meaning of a work would
depend on the arrangement of all its parts in a unified whole. That view is merely an aged
formalism, anchored in the romantic notion of a "living whole." The strong sense of struc-
ture, no longer organic or architectural, is given by mathematics and actualized in com-
parative activity. Structural analysis begins by constituting a model of formal relations
within a given set of elements; it then proceeds to use that model to compare the structure
of the initial set to that of another one--for example, to compare the relations among the
gods in one society's pantheon to the same set of relations in another society's pantheon
[p. 105]. According to this scheme, "what is structured is not the thing itself, as literary
criticism often imagines (so much so that on occasion it will draw attention to the struc-
ture as the feature of originality in the work under study!), but the set, of which this thing
may be considered as one representation, in comparison with other sets. This is why struc-
turalism moves from the structure to the model; it reconstructs or reproduces the given
that it sets out to analyze" [pp. 86-87].4 The exemplary practitioner of structural analysis
in this strong sense is Michel Serres, whose stunning contribution to Textual Strategies,
"The Algebra of Literature: The Wolf's Game," is a high point in the collection. In main-
stream literary studies, poetics is the discipline that appropriates the method of structural
analysis and pursues a comparative inquiry grounded in the construction of models.
(2) Descombes points out that structural analysis existed long before the structuralist
movement, which emerged only when the method was applied to sign-systems. This
association of method and object underlies Jonathan Culler's assertion that "it would not
be wrong to suggest that structuralism and semiology are identical" [Structuralist Poetics
(Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1975), p. 6]. For semiological structuralism, the key move con-
sists in looking at social life as the representation of a model provided by information
theory: language (Saussure's system of differential oppositions) is treated reductively as a
code, a system for exchanging messages; as such, the language system is the pivotal struc-
ture enabling the comparative study of diverse cultural components. Once the com-
munication model, positing the priority and independence of the code, determines the
parameters of analysis, attention shifts away from the sender and from the content of the
message toward the receiver and the medium, toward the relation of the decoder to the
chain of signifiers. This shift presides over three canonical theses of semiological struc-
turalism, which Descombes recalls in these studiously lapidary formulae: (a) "The signifier
precedes the signified'" (b) "Meaning arises out of non-meaning"; (c) "The subject submits
to the law of the signifier" [pp. 95, 96]. Of Descombes' very succinct, very incisive com-
mentaries on these propositions, the second (b) is particularly instructive. We can perhaps
summarize his point and orient it to our heuristic concerns by bracketing some
philosophical ramifications and casting the "question of the signifier" restrictively, in
terms of the communication model used by Descombes to initiate his account of
semiology.

4 Page references to Descombes' book are to the French edition cited at the head of this article except
for substantial quotations. We have taken quotations of a half-dozen words or more from the published
translation: Modern French Philosophy trans. L. Scott-Fox and i. M. Harding [London: Cambridge
University Press, 1980]. It is noteworthy that the book was originally commissioned by Cambridge Press
for its new Modern European Philosophy series and thus was authored expressly for an English-speaking
public.
 Given the predominance of the code, which determines what messages it is possible
to transmit, the problem is how to express the unknown, how to make new meanings, to
produce messages for which the possibilities already built into the code do not allow. The
solution lies in the articulation of non-sense, of messages that seem devoid of meaning
insofar as they are not anticipated by the code. Such "poetic" messages depart from con-
vention, confronting us with original meaning effects. (Textual Strategies contains an excel-
lent illustration of the structural principle at work here, Gilles Deleuze's essay on Alice in
Wonderland [pp. 277-95], which is adapted from his Logique du sens [1969].) In the now
famous examples cited by Descombes, Levi-Strauss' "floating signifier" and Lacan's "slip-
ping metaphor," we encounter situations in which the communication system is momen-
tarily overloaded and thereby pressed into conveying what its semantic code and rules of
combination would not allow it to express. In each case, the overload--initially
unintelligible and decoded as non-sense -occurs when the link of signifier to signified is
unsettled. In the first (metonymic) instance, the floating signifier - the archetypal case is
doubtless an allusive term, used to invoke something other than what it normally
signifies -names the ineffable reality to which no message already inscribed in the code
corresponds. In the second (metaphoric) one, the substitution of one signifier for another
one that convention would have dictated yields, through a condensation effect, a new
meaning to which both the expected but repressed signifier and the substitute signifier
contribute. In any imaginable case, including the major one of transgressing syntactic
norms, the meaning-effect occasioned by the play of signifiers remains immersed in
discourse and is therefore subject to decoding. Repetitions of the new meaning-effect
enable receivers to integrate the unfamiliar meaning into the established discursive
framework. Hence the process of meaning-generation is such that the language system
"violated" by an extra-conventional message, by non-sense, is nonetheless open to it: the
sense liberated by the independent activity of the signifier can thus be incorporated into
the coded repository of possible meanings. On this account, it is evident that sense-making
is always governed by the language system and that meaning can no longer be regarded
naively as the property of a perceiving subject; meaning can never be simply the direct
statement of the subject's experience. Rather, the subject is subjected to the language
shared with others and in which the possibilities for meaning are given in advance. "The
meaning of the message is not the meaning of experience, nor is it the meaning experience
would have, prior to all expression, if this were possible. It is the meaning that experience
can receive in a discourse which articulates it according to a certain code -that is, in a
system of signifying oppositions" [p. 98].
(3) When the outlines of semiology are sketched in this fashion, so as to make
transparent a displacement or decentering of the subject, the grist for a critical struc-
turalism, apt to engage in a controversy with "humanism" over the status of the subject,
becomes amply apparent. It suffices for the structuralist to expose the incidence of the
system wherever the humanist would suppose the priority (and the dignity, responsibility,
and so forth) of the human subject. But as Descombes shows with admirable lucidity, the
great polemical outpouring of the mid-sixties, with clamorous attacks on Levi-Strauss and
Barthes in the vanguard, really made very little theoretical sense. If critical structuralism
purportedly insists on dethroning the subject, it certainly desists, necessarily, from
eliminating it. For example, in the communication process that we have just outlined, the
place of the sender of a message, no longer privileged, is understood in relation to the con-
ditions imposed (a) by the code and (b) by the context of enunciation, in which the
receiver's capacity to decode the message is a primary determinant. In this frame, the
speaking subject caught up in discourse is indeed up against it, so to speak, but still, in a
strong sense, operative, still is an indispensable term in a functionally understood process.
The production of a message is the effect of an overdetermination into which the role of
diverse functions, including that of the subject, must be factored. Furthermore, as we have
noted, the exchange model promotes the value of the receiving subject even as it dis-
counts the role of the sender. This is not to say that the total investment in subjectivity is
comparable to that which informs a phenomenological account of meaning (the two
models are not commensurable); but it is to point out the residues of the subjectivist
model itself (the subject as end as well as origin of articulated meaning) in the structuralist

diacritics / spring 1982 7

account. Hence the lack of grounds for taking either the shift in focus from the transmit-
ting subject to the receiving subject or the change in the suppositions governing the
account of verbal relations between the subjects as decisive breaks capable of initiating a
liquidation of subjectivity. Indeed, such a conclusion is so little foregone that the perti-
nent question is not simply whether there is a decisive difference, with respect to subjec-
tivity, between the demoted locutor and the promoted interlocutor. it is also necessary to
interrogate the latter with respect to that "fullness of the subject" which Harari, in his
estimable pages on Levi-Strauss, takes to be undermined by the ethnologist's privileging of
the system. To what extent is the "fullness of the subject" actually recovered by the move
to privilege the receiver? In terms of social relations in which theory might find an institu-
tional base for application, an obvious case in point would be the relation of analysand to
psychoanalyst, which happens to be very prominent in the literature of structuralism. Here
the question would bear on the status of the analyst as "master listener." s
in all events, from a theoretical standpoint Harari's formula for the structuralist proj-
ect that Derrida's intra-structuralist critique will attack -"a radical dismissal of the speak-
ing subject"-seems hyperbolic. Descombes points out that the extravagant views attrib-
uted by public opinion to a fantasized structuralist orthodoxy fit so badly with the overt
and quite traditionally rationalist thrust of the general scientific project outlined by Levi-
Strauss that something quite different from methodological or epistemological issues had
to be at stake [pp. 124-25]. Similarly, on the literary side of the ledger, Harari's scrupulous
delineation of narrative studies as envisaged by Barthes and his fellow structuralists [pp.
22-26] demonstrates irrefutably that the structuralist literary theory which came under
virulent attack, far from being a doctrinaire monolith, was in fact a modest, resolutely ten-
tative proposal. So again, why all the fuss? And we can carry this vein of questioning still
further. Reading the work of pioneer structuralists such as Levi-Strauss and Barthes does
not really show us that structuralism, as it aged, gradually became aware of its own limita-
tions and problems, but rather that an acute self-critical awareness was there from the
start and reinforced the scientific spirit of the structuralist enterprise. At the risk of stray-
ing into zones mined with metaphysical traps, the leading structuralists strove for a con-
vergence of the scientific and the critical that does not stop at methodological discipline,
that is not content with the ploy, characteristic of structuralist writing, of specifying gaps
or unresolved problems. Owing in part to the inevitable consideration of ethnocentricity in.
the field of anthropology, the structuralists could not ignore the subject-centered structure
of their research activity and did not shrink from attempting to rethink their involvement
in their work through the understanding of intersubjective relations afforded by that work.
(Of innumerable attempts at rethinking the subjectivity of writing activity with categories
stemming from the analysis of discourse, Barthes's essay "To Write: An Intransitive Verb"
[The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man, eds. R. Macksey, E. Donato
(Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1970), pp. 134-44] and Foucault's contribution
to Textual Strategies, "What is an Author?" are among the more spectacular.)
Now the theorists' concern for their own implication in their scientific enterprise has,
incontrovertibly, a double edge. For if it is informed by the scientific scruple requiring the
pursuit of logical consequences (it becomes necessary to revise the notion of the theoriz-
ing subject), it is no less consonant with humanist principles requiring a critical stance
toward anthropocentrism (it remains necessary to weigh the role of that subject's self-
interest in the scientific venture). This is to say that the concern for consistent application
of theory to all the contexts it is capable of embracing is doubled by a reflection with
ethical and philosophic overtones which, however groping and discreet, cannot help but
be inflected by a suspect, yet tenacious humanist ideology. The contradiction with which
that ideology saddles the researcher is well-known: on the one hand, it imposes the myth
of a neutral, disinterested science, yet on the other hand it calls for a critical exposure of
that myth. Once the notion of a neutral, disinterested science is put into question, the

5 We should note that this question is a complicated one. Descombes, following Francois Roustang
[Un Destin si funeste (Paris: Minuit, 19761], broaches it in his L'Inconscient malgre lui [Paris: Minuit,
1977] in regard to Lacan. The diverse reader-oriented theories of literary criticism are likewise subject to
critical interrogation on the status of the addressee: to what extent is the possibility of a privileged expe-
rience of full presence simply transferred from author to reader?

8
theorist's incessantly critical relation to that ideology can no longer be comfortable or
stable, is not translatable into a simple-minded credo. The effort to forge a critical theory,
far from justifying an attack because it abandons humanism in favor of a new, unmiti-
gated "scientism," will prove susceptible to objections from within structuralism for
precisely the opposite reason: because it remains complicitous with a traditional align-
ment of scientific rationalism and subjectivist humanism even while purporting to disrupt
it. By no means did this kind of suspicion emanate solely from the deconstructive analysis
of the sign-system that Harari underscores; it was also crucial, as Descombes shows in
some detail [pp. 140-43, 149-54] to the theoretical alliance of structuralism and Marxism
forged by Althusser (a major offshoot of structuralism that Textual Strategies inexplicably
ignores).6 Indeed, while Descombes deals out an exceedingly stern rebuttal of Althusser's
revisionary structuralism, his account emphasizes the crucial historical significance of the
Marxist move toward a critical appropriation of structuralist methods that might have con-
stituted, had socio-political developments not undermined it, an inaugural and veritable
post-structuralism. According to Descombes' critique, however, Althusser's position turns
out to emblematize the very complications and recuperations to which we have been
pointing here. Precisely in his conception of general or dialectical theory, Althusser's strin-
gent anti-humanism--his combative denunciation of the links between (humanist)
ideology and idealism from the standpoint of a materialist view of knowledge as scientific
production - lapses back into "the humanization of the identity of the subject and object"
[p. 148, Descombes' italics], into a totalizing synthesis of subject and object or man and
nature that reproduces the framework of Sartre's existential humanism [p. 149]. Thus even
the critical, revisionary strain of structuralist theory is subject to entrapment in the posi-
tions and models it challenges, and this insuperable condition of the inquiry, repeatedly
diagnosed and exacerbated by Derrida, brings (auto-)critical questioning on the struc-
turalist horizon to a kind of impasse, a reflexive knot tightened by the returns of an inerad-
icable human subject. So here again, this time for want of attention to the auto-critical
vein in structuralism, the polemical attack depicting structuralism as a subject-destroying
anti-humanism seems curiously disjoined from the complexities of the structuralist prob-
lematics. And once again, the question raised in retrospect is why the structuralist position
was egregiously misconstrued. This question - what is at stake in the controversy spawned
by the third, critical structuralism that Descombes distinguishes?--will not go away.

II. Deconstruction
We now have in place Descombes' tripartite delineation of structuralism: (1) a con-
cept of structure and method of comparative analysis; (2) a disciplinary base in semiology
that furnishes models for the pursuit of interdisciplinary inquiry; (3) a critical orientation or
strategy alert to the anomalies of theory and ultimately skeptical of its own theses. In
terms of this scheme, when earlier we reckoned that a majority of the essays in Textual
Strategies could pass for orthodox structuralist texts, we were in effect assuming the

6American Marxist critiques of structuralism, as well as Marxist appropriations of structuralist

descriptive techniques and deconstructive procedures, are also neglected. Here again, qualifying the
quite major experiments of Jameson - to cite only the most obvious example - as "post-structuralist"
would seem ill-advised (uncongenial to his project), but such work is without doubt more decisively
after and beyond structuralism, while vigorously attuned to it, than many of the essays of Textual
Strategies.

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diacritics / spring 1982 9

dominance of features (1) and (2), and following Descombes, we would take them to typify
work deservedly labeled structuralist. A determination that a separate post-structuralism
has emerged would thus appear to depend on the relation of (3), critical structuralism, to
the basic sine qua non of "straight" structuralism constituted by (1) + (2). The question is
whether the auto-critical, counter-theoretical impulse we have encountered in (3) has
developed to the point of taking us out of the structurahst arena into distinctly different
territory. So far, while amassing evidence of the continuity between the three struc-
turalisms, we have not addressed head on the crux of Harari's contention that a
deconstructive foray against the pivotal sign-system (the privilege of which straight struc-
turalism would preserve) has enacted a crucial shift toward post-structuralism. When he
opposes structuralism to post-structuralism by ascribing to the latter "the deconstruction
of the concept of representation," Harari introduces a distinction that neither Descombes
nor Francois Wahl (in Qu'est-ce que le structuralisme [Paris: Seuil, 1969], pp. 299-441)
would seem to admit. By Wahl's account, interestingly supported by elements of
Foucault's archeology that he cites, the long-term emergence of structuralism as an inter-
disciplinary phenomenon coincides with a process of sharpening disengagement from
models of imitation or representation and, concomitantly, with a validation of arbitrary
scientific constructs designed not to represent, but to explain. The Saussurean concept of
the sign is of course the princeps illustration of this trend. If the difference between (a) the
sign composed of signifier and signified and dependent for its value on the system of dif-
ferences and (b) the classical notion of the sign as the representation of an object
endowed with intrinsic value, is a decisive one, it is clearly because the modern concept of
the sign imposes a view of signification that is not immediately dependent on representa-
tion, not strictly reducible to it, that is indeed apt to disqualify commonsensical views of
it. For in order to understand representation as a secondary activity quite different from
perception, it is necessary to determine how effects of presenting and representing take
place within particular semiotic frames. We cannot begin naively with the object in the
real world given to be apprehended transparently by a passive subject; we also have to
ascribe the status of a given to the operation of the system whereby the object is
represented in relation to the other components of the object-world. The act of representa-
tion thus becomes a complex act of differentiation, of putting what is represented in its
distinct place, constituting the object rather than duplicating it, and as such, it is depen-
dent on the terms and relations built into the system of differences that provides for its
realization. This means, quite concretely, that the sign-system which determines the
organization of representations inevitably furnishes us the sole means of analyzing the
production of representations componentially; and this amounts to recognizing, in turn,
that semiotics constitutes the instrument enabling "the deconstruction of representation,"
and indeed that a kind of preliminary deconstruction accompanies the elaboration of a
semiology.
In principle, then, Wahl's attribution to structuralism of a resistance to classical
notions of representation seems unexceptionable. The resistance was, moreover, quite
explicitly formulated in some of Barthes's earliest structuralist essays. For example, in
"L'lmagination du signe" (1963), Barthes distinguished three types of relation in the sign.
The first, symbolic relation is the naive, representative one (the cross represents Christian-
ity) devalued by structuralism, whereas the other two, paradigmatic (relating sign to sign in
systems of differences) and syntagmatic (associations of signs in discourse), were the func-
tional relations, productive not of representations but of significations, that structuralist
inquiry privileges. Or, to cite a more pointed example, suppose we consider the monumen-
tal work on narrative, genre, and discursive relations of Genette, a relatively staid struc-
turalist, as it is compounded in his Mimologiques [Paris: Seuil, 1976]. Encountering here a
lucid and thoroughgoing exposure of the problematics of mimesis, with all its traps and
quandaries, we can hardly fail to grasp the deconstructive power of the structuralist appa-
ratus. To be sure, a certain security fostered by Genette's formal constructs and a massive,
shrewdly pacific discourse may tend to obscure a passably disconcerting message that
analysis of the diverse representational schemes tested over the centuries suggests. Were
one so minded, this placid structuralism of a scientific bent, evidently devoted to the
elaboration of a framework for description and explanation, could be plied, quite as read-

10
ily as, say, a Derridean deconstruction, to painting the horizon of a phantasmagorical
world of mimetic fallacies and irresolvable fictions. The point is not, of course, that either
the philosophic or the literary-historical onslaught on mimetics would necessarily take
such a course (and also not, assuredly, to suggest to what sort of "vision" an uncompro-
mising deconstruction of mimeticism would eventually lead), but rather that structuralism,
even in its tamer forms, is already well along with the deconstruction of representation,
and that the question it raises-that critical structuralism will confront as a refractory
problem - is above all how far to carry that deconstruction.
To recognize that the deconstruction of representation is underway in straight struc-
turalism is clearly enough to agree with Descombes that deconstruction itself, as a prac-
tice by no means limited to the seminal work of Derrida, belongs part and parcel to struc-
turalism [p. 96]. As Descombes reminds us, the origin and import of the term are essentially
philosophical. Deconstruction is Derrida's translation of Heidegger's Destruktion, and in
the context of the structuralist campaign against the naivete of phenomenology, it is what
replaces the description of phenomena. According to Descombes, deconstruction's aim is
to develop a theory of philosophical discourse, just as poetics aims to build a theory of
poetic discourse [p. 98]. This analogy is highly instructive. In the first place, it underscores
the positive sense of deconstruction. Contrary to notions sometimes harbored by literary
critics, the practice of deconstruction can be oriented to the production or expansion of
theories. By no means is it inherently destined to regenerate endlessly rhetorical binds or
logical aporias; by no means can the deconstruction of a text invariably be reduced to a
formula of its own futility whereby the text ultimately unveils the inadequacy of the very
(self-)representation it seeks to achieve. (Perhaps we should recall here in passing, in a
necessarily shorthand formulation, a less pretentious conclusion toward which struc-
turalism has been drawn as deconstructive elaborations have placed theories of poetic or
philosophic discourse under strain: it is no longer reasonable to suppose that "representa-
tion of the thing itself" is the essential activity or aim of texts. The status of the mimetic
function of texts, undeniably important, is nonetheless unsettled, and the problem for
theory lies in the difficulty of thinking textuality otherwise, as it were, of recasting textual
theory in a framework not ruled by mimeticist presuppositions. This problem, in its turn,
will not go away .. .) In the second place, putting deconstruction into analogy with poetics
allows us to connect the practice of deconstruction with the methods used to derive the
terms and principles of a poetics. Descombes mentions one such technique, the com-
parison of a poem to a prose "translation" or to a rendering of the poem's referential con-
tent; such an exercise (the technical difficulty of which does not concern us here) serves to
expose features that are specific to the poetic idiom, such as the supplemental rules that
distinguish poetic syntax from that of prose. This process - a determination of distinctive
features and operative constraints for which Saussurean linguistics furnishes the
model- yields an account of a working mechanism (the machine metaphor is apt in the
case of a text, whether poetic or philosophic, because the structuralist account being
sought considers the operation of the mechanism - how the textual motor runs - without
regard for the operator or for the objective product of its operation); a deconstruction
seeks to understand that mechanism by disassembling it.
Confronting Descombes' suggestive analogy linking poetics in literature to
deconstruction in philosophy, it seems necessary to ask if the latter, in dismantling texts so
as to derive the generic principles to which they adhere, does not merely revive a classic
form of descriptive analysis comparable to step two of Descartes' famous method (divi-
sion of the object under study into the smallest possible component parts).7 The com-
parative analytic procedure invoked by Descombes can be traced to Saussure's general
preoccupation with delineating the systems of differences operative on the various levels
of a natural language. Its usefulness as a tool for exposing and relating differences has

7Harari points out very clearly that this is not the case with Derrida (p. 37). But one might wish to
quibble with his suggestion that de-sedimentation would be a better term for the technique of
deconstruction. While deconstruction and dissemination clearly have somewhat different connota-
tions, they are still, structurally, in close phase with one another. In both, the negative prefix (de-, dis-) is
plied by the dominant positive concept (construction, semination) to a function of active textual work.
De-sedimentation is not quite in parallel with this semantic co-tension.

diacritics / spring 1982 11

been demonstrated in various zones of poetics (J akobson's microscopic analyses of poems
are pronounced examples of applied description in this vein), and insofar as this process
casts the articulation of discourse - poetic or philosophic- not as free expression, but as
rule-governed activity, its theorizing impetus is deconstructive. Yet the deconstructive
potential of the comparative technique is limited: as a discovery procedure, it gives mixed
results, foundering when the crossing from formal features to meaning is undertaken; and
as a device for divulging differences and their systemic relations, it goes only so far,
yielding only those discriminations that comply with the presumed homogeneity of the
system. As we noted with respect to Genette's enterprise, we commonly associate a con-
structive, rather than a critical image with research in poetics; we tend to validate poetic
theory because it builds systems, develops a framework of potential explanations that can
be put to practical use, applied to particular texts. The elucidation that poetics grounds
with its elaboration of an autonomous textual system can then be limited to the opera-
tional understanding we invoked above with the machine metaphor, and as such, can
hardly be regarded as anything other than a reinforced form of critical mastery, a kind of
technological control over texts that understands them--makes them intelligible,
representable -as manifestations of a logical structure. As Francois Rastier remarks, the
object of poetics, virtual literature, is still visible "only inside the ideological system that
has defined our arts and classified our discourses" [Etudes de stylistique poetique (Paris:
Larousse, 1971), p. 81]. How then could poetics conceive of its object as anything other
than the underlying truth, the latent origin, the transcendental ground of Literature? We
confront here, in effect, a particular case of the general question on the relation of scien-
tific structuralism to traditional humanism that we have already underscored: does struc-
turalist poetics not surreptitiously protect or resurrect the truth of a subjectivist humanism
that would retain the individual subject's domination over an object that is, originally and
finally, that subjecting master's own creation? Does not structuralist criticism at its
strongest succeed in satisfying a more recent strain of the positivist critic's most tenacious
desire: a definitive version of the text, a celebration of the text as origin?
These heavily loaded critical questions about the project implicit in the structure of
poetics are themselves oriented by an eminently structuralist interrogation. The
deconstructive slant of this auto-critical inquiry is not dictated by the comparative
analytic procedure we have linked to Saussurean linguistics; rather, it stems from a pursuit
of the analysis, which is not closed off or diverted to an application of the general to the
particular once the system of differences is in place. The pursuit is governed by a concept
of presupposition. Within the history of structuralism, the principal source of this
approach is Hjelmslevian glossematics. (If it is surprising that Textual Strategies, like sev-
eral other treatments of structuralism and its avatars, takes no note of Hjelmslev's
pioneering work, it is not just that Hjelmslev was important for the French structuralists; it
is because glossematics contributed decisively to the emergence of one of structuralism's
most prominent recent spin-offs, the sub-field of pragmatics, in which linguistics and
philosophy have been negotiating a remarkable merger.) Oswald Ducrot, in his discussion
of linguistics in Qu'est-ce que le structuralisme ["Le structuralisme en linguistique," pp.
18-96; see especially pp. 69-89], treats glossematics as a significant advance over
Saussure's conceptions of the autonomy of the linguistic order, noting as well that
Hjelmslev brought the concept of linguistic structure much closer to structuralism's
strong, mathematically based concept of structure -as a set of formal relations entirely
separable from the object that it structures--than it had been in Saussure's Course on
General Linguistics. Glossematics applies the concept of structure directly to natural
languages, treating a langue as a combinatorial, a structure presiding over the formation of
elements of speech into utterances. To study language is thus above all to discover and to
formulate the rules of combination that govern intra-lingual operations, so that the value
of linguistic concepts lies in their capacity to express certain possibilities or impossibilities
of grouping elements in language-use. Hjelmslev appealed to a notion of presupposition
for the purpose of constructing the combinatorial: finding the rules of combination
required asking what had to be presupposed so that a given element could be posed or
actualized in an acceptable utterance; the rules would then be derived from the set of
necessary presuppositions. Now this type of structuralist questioning, readily extendable

12
into the zone of semantics and predictably quite familiar in a wide range of disciplines,
conveys a crucial slant of deconstructive insight-one which, moreover, distinguishes it
irrevocably from the Cartesian project of finding the parts that, when fitted together in the
proper order, compose the (whole) truth. No longer directly concerned with knowledge or
truth per se, but with the production of knowledge or truth effects, the structuralist attends
less to causal sequences than to possibility conditions. In its generalized, epistemological
form, the prototypical question would parallel closely Hjelmslev's question about
language: what are the conditions that make it possible to articulate a given utterance as
truth? While from discipline to discipline questions shaped on this model may not, by
themselves, constitute adequate discovery procedures for structuralist theory-builders,
they do serve unfailingly as powerful detective devices that gainfully supplement com-
parative techniques. Moreover, they confer on the deconstructive (philosophic) strain of
structuralism a sense of direction entirely concordant with a persistent underlying project
of structuralism in anthropology and linguistics, the elaboration of general principles of
intelligibility. To the extent that deconstruction steers an extension of this tack and
therewith a return to the register of epistemology, it reinforces the classically Kantian
inflection of the structuralism to which it belongs. From this we may wish to infer, later on,
that a post-structuralism, were it to exist as a concerted movement or doctrine, would arise
from a certain evasion, or forgetting, of the ensnarements of epistemology.

III. Nietzscheanism

In Le Meme et I'autre, Descombes weaves a larger narrative in which structuralism is

but one chapter, albeit in many respects a central one. Analyzing those forces in modern
French philosophy that have been identified as major ones by the general public, he tells a
tale of radical changes in the philosophic climate: from the return to Hegel of the thirties,
we pass in the forties and fifties to the ascendancy of phenomenology, coupled with a
political ambience generally favorable to Marxism; then, in the sixties and seventies, struc-
turalism and the "philosophies of difference" complement their critical rejection of
phenomenology and Marxism with what Descombes qualifies as the "Nietzscheanism of
the last twenty years" [p. 219]. Yet the most telling theme, replayed throughout the nar-
rative, concerns what does not change in the course of these reversals. Among the possible
designations of this constant, a key one would be, precisely, the irrepressibility of an
epistemological dilemma. No one has quite managed to extricate philosophic discourse
from an idealist, still essentially Cartesian problematics in which priority ultimately reverts
to the mission of an individual subject: to secure knowledge of self and world. Yet the
generation of Deleuze, Derrida, Foucault and Lyotard, rereading the history of western
philosophy after the alerts sounded by Nietzsche and Heidegger, has at least sustained an
extraordinary resistance to the return of idealist schemes. Indeed, it is typically to forms of
idealist recuperation - reinvestments in the subject, (self-)consciousness, reflexivity,
mimeticism, dialectical resolution--that deconstruction calls attention. Insofar as it
exposes such instances of recuperation as structurally determined, it shows the folly of
any attempt to overcome or escape them once and for all. Consequently, the only possibil-
ity that a deconstructive critique can presume to open up is that of thwarting them with a
tactical resistance. Hence the aptness of the main title selected by Harari for Textual
Strategies: the term strategy takes for granted the necessity of pursuing critical combat
from within the system - within language - that already prevails, while the term textual
suggests that the implements of the strategy are of the order of written language. Given
these strategic parameters, the problem with the deconstructive critique that focuses on
possibility conditions would seem to be, simply enough, the difficulty of confining it-of
keeping it on the (practical) field of play where it promotes the understanding of systems
and their operations, and off the perimetric sidelines of theory/metaphysics where the
merciless paradoxes of epistemology stand ready to trip any players who stray out of
bounds. In short, the problem for deconstruction is to ward off a logical reversion, enabled
by its own interrogatory moves, toward the type of epistemological question that will
rebound against its own operations. Or, more approximately but concisely stated, its prob-
lem is to avoid the destructive step of deconstructing deconstruction.

diacritics / spring 1982 13

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To illustrate this problem, and to gain some sense of why it is that a thoroughgoing
escape from the pitfalls of epistemology onto an authentically post-structuralist horizon
has not so far been feasible, let us quickly recall Hjelmslev's deployment of a deconstruc-
tive strategy for unearthing the rules governing the use of a natural language. What hap-
pens when either (a) the rule-discovery process leads to a determination that the system
rests on an irresolvable contradiction, or (b) the pursuit of basic principles reaches a point
where the deconstructive strategy subtends a reflexive questioning onto itself?
We have already introduced an example of case (a), the structuralist account of
meaning according to which the generation of sense is a function of non-sense: in order to
be an open system capable of incorporating new meanings, language has to enforce the
violation of its own prescriptive rules, the internal logic of its sense-determining operations
depends on an illogical outside factor that it has variously to exclude and to integrate. On
this structuralist account, a basic condition necessary for language-use as we conven-
tionally understand it is therefore the ambivalent status of that outside -or, in terms of
the time-worn opposition of same to other that Descombes remobilizes in his title and
throughout his study, the ambivalence of the other, its indeterminate relation to the same.
In Descombes' narrative, a transparent function of this powerfully abstractive opposition
is to differentiate the structuralist problematics from the dialectical modes of thought that
it displaced. For the dialectician, the question is whether the other will be reduced to the
same, or else whether a synthesis of the same and the other (and so eventually of reason
and madness) will be attempted [p. 25]. By way of contrast, the philosophers of the struc-
turalist period ascribe both these alternatives to a defective "logic of identity"8 because
both fail to respect the difference between the same and the other, both subordinate dif-
ference to identity. Structuralist thought is then a "thought of difference" [p. 93]; the
reduction of differences is the generic name of the diverse recuperations that deconstruc-
tion- a cultivation of the workings of difference-will resist. In this context, the ambiva-
lent status of non-sense will not be taken as a disabling contradiction, even though the
simultaneous necessity of excluding and including it appears to conflict with the principle
of non-contradiction that presides over the detection of the ambivalence. Rather, it will be
taken as a sign of the irreducibility of the other, as a manifestation of heterogeneity. As
such, the other is encountered as a limit, an impedance that no dialectical current can
cross. Likewise, it marks for deconstruction the limit of its own investigation, the point of
disarticulation at which further deployment of its analytic procedures - because it could
only result in recuperation, in assimilation of the other to the same - would be impertinent
and counterproductive. As a limit inhabited by irreducible difference, irrepressible ambiv-
alence, the other is not subject to inscription as an origin or end or absolute; it has to be
left on the outside where it is rather a condition, a requisite foil of a thought that cannot
control it.
The theoretical possibility of a post-structuralist thought (which Descombes' narrative
tends to situate, in the end, as a practical impossibility, as a destination toward which one
can move, but which one cannot reasonably expect to reach) can doubtless be glimpsed
here on the reef of alterity. The philosophic project -to bespeak the other without com-
promising its alterity - would indeed fall out beyond the field of deconstructive activity.

8Descombes' translators generally render la logique de I'identite as "identity principle." In most

cases this makes for an adequate, fluid, more colloquially English formulation than the more literal and
Gallicistic "logic of identity.'" However, I have frequently retained the latter so as not to lose the expres-
sion's capacity to refer to an entire ratiocinative system, to a dialectical process at work throughout the
order of the same.

14
No doubt deconstruction beckons toward this project since its unsparing devastations of
the same weaken the defenses that screen out or repress the conditioning function of the
other. But because its discovery of the other transpires in the dimension of the same, in a
discourse that knows its incapacity to approach concretely the other it spies from a
distance, to treat the other as anything more than an abstract condition, deconstruction
could not reckon directly with the other without itself being different. To approach the
other requires a further step toward a discourse of the other. While strategic elaborations
in the direction of this post-structuralist project are perceptible not only in the works of all
the celebrated structuralist "thinkers of difference," but in Blanchot, Klossowski, Levinas,
and others whom Descombes has no occasion to invoke, perhaps the most explicit
delineation of the project, or at least the most evident in thematic terms, occurs in the
work of Foucault. From his "archeological" account of the fundamental reason (language,
the same)/madness (silence, the other) dichotomy, Foucault derives a "non-dialectical
philosophy of history" [p. 137] to which a continuum of otherness-the celebrated
absence d'oeuvre posited in Madness and Civilization - is vital. It is easy enough to sup-
pose, either from a logical or an historical standpoint (Foucault's standpoint often being
indistinct), that the otherness had to exist alongside the known reality of the same, and to
characterize that otherness negatively, by opposition to conventional historical
knowledge, as the unthought or excluded elements that the edifice of history leaves aside
as it defines itself. The difficulty that Foucault then confronts vigorously is to find a
positive access to that otherness and to give voice to its alerity.
Descombes stresses the fact that Foucault raises his questions philosophically, but
then opts to address them, tangentially, through an innovative, though confoundingly
elusive historical discourse. Unfazed by the formidable display of erudition, Descombes
comments trenchantly where others might question deferentially: "Foucault's position as
regards this [whether he is writing history or instead proposing a new historiography] is far
from clear .... But Foucault's historical works elude discussion, in that the gist of their
argument remains indeterminate" [p. 116]. "The conjunction of positivism and nihilism in
the same intelligence produces a surprising mixture. .... It would be possible to construct
other narratives with the same data, and Foucault himself is the first to play with these
possibilities ... His histories are novels" [p. 117, translation modified]. Yet the lack of clar-
ity and direction in Foucault's argumentation is concomitant with its interest and strength
insofar as the elusiveness derives from the archaeologist's unique manner of recounting
history and carries out his aim to dislodge history from the unerring dominance of dialec-
tics, reason, the regimen of identity. The furtive incidence of the other on history and on
thought would thus appear momentarily through the cracks of a mobile discursive prac-
tice, would be the product of a forceful textual strategy, an effect of fiction. What might
be regarded as a post-structuralist departure in Foucault's writing is precisely what cannot
be made manageable and intelligible, what cannot be measured by a reality principle or
verification procedure, what cannot be pinned down by homogeneous interpretation. Of
other strategies for articulating the other, of post-structuralist departures in the works of
other structuralists, we might say much the same: they entail adventurous writing that
seeks in some sense to exceed the logic of identity, and precisely not by "identifying" the
other in the manner of deconstructive analysis, but rather by fabricating embodiments or
inscriptions of the other, by factoring heterogeneity into the text.
By this definition of a post-structuralist project, and on this view of tentative moves
toward it that critical structuralism has enabled, it remains imprudent to speak confidently
of an emerging post-structuralist discourse.9 If a single decisively post-structuralist work

9When Frank Lentricchia, in After the New Criticism [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980],
writes confidently of post-structuralism (notably in chapter 5, "History or the Abyss: Poststructural-
ism"), he is obviously working with his own quite different definition. Lentricchia is not far from
Harari's viewpoint in Textual Strategies. By and large, he equates post-structuralism with Derrida's cri-
tique of structural anthropology and semiology, and is thus at odds with our view of the structuralism/
deconstruction dyad as an interlocking pair. But I would not want to emphasize this terminological
dissension unduly. What seems important and worthwhile in After the New Criticism is first Lentric-
chia's reading of Derrida against a certain American appropriation of deconstruction that is masterfully
thematized in the work of ]. Hillis Miller, and subsequently his attempt, however hazardous, to ferret
out of Derrida and Foucault what we might term a "deconstructive historicism." This latter project is

diacritics / spring 1982 15

exists outside of literature, that work is by all odds, exemplarily, Derrida's Glas (1974). And
beginning with "Tympan," the exquisite overture to Marges (1972), a number of Derrida's
shorter works also pursue a commentarial trajectory--para-philosophical, para-literary,
thus generically unmoored, and in a heavily supercharged sense textual - that persistently
extends outward from deconstruction, toward a symphonic writing that we might place,
more aptly than under the sign of deconstruction, under the titular cipher of La dissemina-
tion (1972). Note of Glas or of other post-1972 texts in the disseminatory vein is taken in
Textual Strategies solely in the bibliographical entry on Derrida [p. 429]. This is puzzling in
the first place because one would expect an anthology dealing with post-structuralist
criticism to accentuate whatever in a given author's work seems most advanced or most
critical in relation to the structuralist background (whereas Harari grants that Derrida's
essay in Textual Strategies, "The Supplement of Copula," lies squarely in the deconstruc-
tive vein of his work on the history of western thought). It becomes still more puzzling, in
the second place, when we consider Harari's conclusion in "Critical Factions/Critical Fic-
tions" [p. 68-72]. The accent there falls quite unequivocally on the textuality of criticism.
Developing an explicitly Derridean concept of text, Harari takes an uncompromisingly
modern position: ". . . criticism is not a simple 'adjunct' to the so-called primary text but is
a continuous activity which is intrinsic to and extends the text. Hence the critic is, as well,
a producer of text. ... Criticism has reached a stage of maturity where it is now openly
challenging the primacy of literature. Criticism has become an independent operation that
is primary in the production of texts. This is the one point [my italics - P.L.] toward which
all the contributions in this volume necessarily converge, and it is precisely this point
which is at stake in the modern battleground of 'literature' and 'criticism'" (pp, 70-71). In
the jumble of this half-baked passage, there is an insistent central claim, one which,
although overdrawn, happens to be more or less congenial to the view we have just pro-
posed of an inchoate post-structuralist project: the boundaries between literature and
criticism, text and commentary, are overridden by the textual strategies deployed in the
wake of structuralism. The key factor, the one point at stake, is the critic's appropriation
of the right to write creatively, to produce primary text. If this is so, it does then seem a bit
odd that the work offered in illustration of a post-structuralist tack would not be the
writing that goes furthest toward justifying this claim. It seems odd not just in the case of
the one, relatively less adventurous essay by Derrida, but in regard to the whole collection.
For if the textual practice were indeed the key consideration, would Lacan and Lyotard,
Bloom and Hartman- to name only big names who consistently wager on the power of
ambitious, exploratory writing-be absent while some choice samples of pedestrian
writing are included? For want of an explanation as to why relatively straight, low-voltage
writing was generally preferred over more radical, challenging texts that might have been
picked, we can only surmise that the anthologist's principle of selection is not to be found
in this one point of convergence, arrived at after the fact. Had such a standard been
respected, the book would doubtless have been relieved of some of its essentially struc-
turalist baggage and enlivened with more instances of the post-structuralist departures to
which we have alluded.10
In the case of our second question (b) concerning the deconstruction of the
deconstructive strategy itself, we have so far asserted simply that the problem for

one that, in principle, our account of the structuralism/deconstruction pairing would strongly support,
even though Lentricchia's performance as a historian of criticism prompts a host of reservations and
seems incommensurable with the approach he envisages.
10Lest this remark be misconstrued, I should perhaps point out that it is not meant to be a reflection
of my own limited involvement in the production of Textual Strategies (contrary to what the preface
avers, I did not "style the manuscript," but I was paid by Cornell Press to check some of the transla-
tions, and as an editor myself, I was happy to offer assistance with some of the nitty-gritty problems that
Josue Harari had to overcome). My cordial contacts with the editor simply confirmed my judgment,
already formed and at the time strongly reinforced by Foucault's essay in Textual Strategies, "What is
an Author?," that the editor's function, in making up an anthology, an issue of a journal, or whatever, is
heavily overdetermined, and thus that diverse institutional constraints would have to be factored into a
serious attempt to account for it. A selection principle could not be intelligently conceived if it were
naively supposed that an editor would exercise "free choice." Rather, the conception has to be strategic
and to entail a complex calculation - all the more so when the editor also has to author a contribu-

16
deconstruction is precisely that of fending off such questions, which are bound to drive
the inquiry into epistemological quicksand - into a strangling sense of its entrapment in
logocentrism, metaphysics, mimeticism, and so forth. But as we have also suggested, for a
deconstruction that is underway the problem is a limited, logistical one: where should the
analysis be terminated, and what might then be done with its results? We can of course
argue for limiting the inquiry more or less arbitrarily, first by invoking its discovery of its
own limiting conditions, and second, on strictly practical grounds, by invoking the conven-
tion whereby no theory is called upon to commit the "reflexive fallacy" of applying its
own first principles to itself (such a move being logically untenable since it denies the
firstness of the first principles). For better or for worse, however, the study of language
makes it hard to hold back these potentially disabling questions. A methodological prob-
lem-that of validating the language of the analysis-is sure to arise within linguistics
owing to a distinctive feature of natural languages, their self-referential capacities. A cor-
ollary of this power is the necessity of using "ordinary" language to study language, the
impossibility of representing language non-linguistically. For the analyst, these common-
place observations do not remain trivial. The inescapability of the position inside language
eventually complicates the task of separating the structure (made up of language) from
what is structured (the make-up of language). On the one hand, prior to employing
language as an instrument or vehicle of knowledge, we need an understanding of
language, its principles and proper use, its aptitude for expressing and conveying truth. But
on the other hand, we cannot obtain such prior knowledge of language without first utiliz-
ing language to produce it. So how can the structuring language (in which knowledge is
articulated) and the structured language (about which knowledge is articulated) be sorted
out when from the start the one appears to be the same as the other? Clearly this all too
familiar dilemma generated by the coalescence of the object of study with the instrument
of study corresponds to the general relation of reflexivity in which a subject takes itself as
object. Critical structuralism would rightly espy here still another return of the cogito, still
another attempt - at that fatal point where the epistemological question resurrects - to
locate the foundation of research in a reflexive structure. Whether in thought or in
language, the founding move of identification on the model of the cogito is one that
affects the articulation of the same (the subject, structuring language) and the other (the
self as object, structured language) on the inside of discourse, in their coincidence. As
such, it constitutes the inquiry as an idealist process of containment in which, container
and content being one and the same, the internal relation of reflexion is self-sufficient. In
linguistics, moreover, where the reflexive relation takes hold as soon as discourse on
language begins, the constitutive move would seem to be somewhat less idealistic, to be
shored up by the "objective reality" of language functioning as a social system. Yet the
immediacy of the reflexive relation, far from serving as a satisfactory ground for the
inquiry into language, actually magnifies the difficulty of determining a ground. On what
basis can already constituted language be established as the proper mode for the
representation of language, which is to say, as the proper mode of representation for itself?
The question can only be answered in a meta-language, a secondary discourse on the
language of/under inquiry that remains in the language and already relies on - repeats the
articulation of-the reflexive relation that is in question. Thus the meta-discourse,
whatever answer it may supply, effectively begs the question. Reflexivity is not a ground,
not an origin, but a form, the fold in the fabric of the same that channels the recuperative
power of the logic of identity; and in the guise of first principle, reflexivity can only serve
to mask the absence of a ground.
Deconstructive accounts of language theory (one of which is cannily expounded in
Vincent Descombes' first book, L'lnconscient malgre lui [Paris: Minuit, 1977]) are sure to
disable the claims of meta-language and discourage recourse to it; yet insofar as the

tion. For example, owing to pressure from the publisher, this calculation has to include a judgment on
the commercial prospects of the collection; and for Josue Harari, who is extremely well versed not only
in the varieties of theoretically oriented criticism, but also in the politics being played out on the con-
temporary critical stage (cf. pp. 71-72), it presumably had to include as well an effort to measure the
probably repercussions of the work on a professional barometer.

diacritics/ spring 1982 17

language of deconstruction itself turns out to be--necessarily - a meta-language, or at
least has to employ meta-lingual formulations in analyzing language, the demonstration is
hollow, the deconstruction reflects on itself. But the deconstructive process always knows
that it is, itself, impaired by the critique it effectuates insofar as its use of language is at
issue, just as it knows that it can never reach that utopic point where analysis would yield
a definitive constitutive premise, rooting the inquirer's language outside the hold of reflex-
ion. This continuing awareness, an inquisitive condition that we earlier ascribed to the
insuperable entrapment of critical structuralism in the positions and models it challenges,
is another insistent form of reflexivity that inevitably inflects the deconstructive operation
itself. For the most part, the inflection is a slight one, a certain tentativeness or condi-
tionality or impositivity that shadows deconstructive investigation and surfaces when the
analysis reaches the point of reflecting squarely on itself. The resulting reserve is clearly
not a paralysis of analysis that precludes conclusion; we might say that it is both literally
and figuratively a kind of analytic self-consciousness, a diffidence that keys the conclu-
sions to a register on which only a studied underplay is possible, on which only muted
notes that betoken an indispensable concession to the unthinkable outside of language
can be struck. This is to say that at its limit the deconstructive ploy barely differs from
other reflections on language, indeed from any other epistemological reflection that
recognizes the modeling sway of the cogito: like all those other reflections, deconstruction
comes up against the paradoxical relation between its discourse and its theses. While the
latter typically declare the incapacity of language to ground itself, the inaptitude of
speech acts to justify their claims to make true or consistent statements, and so forth, they
also make such declarations unconditionally; the discourse is informed by assumptions
about its own expressive adequacy that are not, and indeed cannot be, consistent with
those theses. At this point, where the deconstructive inquiry, faced with justifying its own
language, falters in a manner that inquiries into other reflexivities (knowledge, perception)
have long made familiar, the pressure to think past deconstruction toward post-
structuralism is undeniable. The situation is not the sort of impasse that disables
deconstruction as a critical practice, but rather one that inclines us to take measure of
our monotonously recurrent discovery - that certain forms of interrogation (epistemologi-
cal, metaphysical, representational) invariably turn up lame-and to consider the
possibility of abandoning them, to ask if some insight afforded by the deconstructive
enterprise might not point toward tactics that centuries of attempts to dispense with
metaphysics have failed to develop. And in particular, can one draw conclusions, however
tentative, that would lead toward post-structuralist departures other than Derrida's double
science? For if Descombes is ready to concede that Derrida's strategy of double-edged,
irrecuperable writing on the general text of logocentric culture does in some measure
depart from the reigning logic of identity, he nonetheless treats the double science rather
dismissively (ignoring Glas, "Pas," La V6rite en peinture and other texts published by Der-
rida between Marges, in 1972, and 1978): in his view it inscribes Derrida's rejection of a
possible empiricism and his reaffirmation of an interminable struggle with Hegel.

It is then in a laconic opposition to the strategy of Derrida (as well as that of Foucault,
which is to say, to those projects which have captivated the Anglo-Saxon audience for
which Le Meme et I'autre was composed) that Descombes' narrative trajectory traces an
implicit answer to the question we have finally reached. At the same time, the end-point of

the story - the intellectual aftermath of May 1968 in France--brings back to the fore the
institutional question about the seemingly excessive reaction to structuralism that we
have been holding in abeyance. By deferring the question, we have of course allowed for
the possibility that the concoction of the post-structuralism in the late seventies might
itself have something in common with the reaction to structuralism in the sixties. In accord
with Descombes, we insisted from the start on the popular reception of ideas and theories:
the narrative in Le Meme et I'autre, while far more subtle and perspicacious than a story in
a newsmagazine, is nonetheless lucidly and resolutely oriented by the kind of socio-
political gauge that functions in a number of J.-F. Lyotard's recent works (particularly
notable: Instructions paiennes [Paris: Galilee, 1977]; Rudiments paiens [Paris: U.G.E. 10/18,

18
1977]; La Condition post-moderne [Paris: Minuit, 1979]). Since an unstated kinship with
Deleuze and Lyotard is apparent in L'Inconscient malgre lui, it is not surprising to find that
the concluding chapter of Le Meme et I'autre accentuates the project of Lyotard; and since
the political status of philosophy is the crucial threat in Descombes' narrative, it is not sur-
prising that Lyotard's critical account of the link between thought or theory and authority
or power, coupled with his distinctive inflection of an anti-Oedipian discourse on desire,
comes off as the most advanced form of the dominant Nietzscheanism in recent French
philosophy. Let us first take note very rapidly of Descombes' theses on the questions now
before us- the political implications of structuralism, the direction of Lyotard's program
for outdistancing the critical practice of deconstruction-and then conclude with a
remark on the political sense of opposing recourse to a notion of post-structuralism.
According to Descombes [pp. 126-30] structuralism was subject to widespread
resistance for one eminently sound reason: the fundamental thesis of semiology-the
exteriority of the signifier in relation to the subject, the priority of the given language and
its determining codes in relation to the individual- and, to be sure, the application of that
thesis in analyses of contemporary culture and society, serve to unveil a telling analogy,
drawn forcefully by Levi-Strauss, between myth and political ideology. The one and the
other effect the reintegration of an individual into his community through symbolic
effects, each appropriates the narrative of an origin or of a privileged episode and the
forms of ritual in order to sustain a set of social relations. For the structuralist, the crucial
factor in this symbolic process is not the theme, which lies on the side of assured mean-
ings, but the form, the system of signifiers. Descombes invokes Lacan's analysis of institu-
tions and the orthodoxies on which they rely: in every case the orthodox position is upheld
by the observance of prescribed forms; for the orthodoxy it is the identity of signifiers that
counts, not the meanings with which various individuals may invest them. This critical
insight, specifying the gravity of meddling with the signifying forms that knit a community
together, is of course an ancient one, and its socio-political impact has been witnessed and
weighed before. In France, for example, the history of literary-philosophical polemics
offers an exceptionally revealing episode, Pascal's analysis of Jesuit orthodoxy in the Pro-
vinciales (Descombes' ready example, focusing on the literary orthodoxy, is Mallarme's
sense of the socially subversive significance of tampering with poetic form). Pascal's
critical attack prefigured the situation Descombes discusses not simply because Pascal
exposed quite as clearly and cleverly as Levi-Strauss or Lacan the vital role of the signifier
as an institutional bond, but because Pascal carried out his exposure with the precise
polemical end of combatting an institutional enemy: he saw that publicly analyzing the
function of the forms would serve to disclose their fragility and instability, that the cri-
tique could thus be a weapon in his attempt to rattle the institution, to pressure it toward a
rethinking of its relations with the individual subjects who belonged to it. The church
instantly perceived the menace and reacted forcefully to it. Descombes reckons that
something similar occurred in France in the 1960's, though with different reigning ortho-
doxies (for intellectuals, the key ones were the Communist party and the schools of
psychoanalysis). In its most general form, his thesis refers to political ideology: insofar as
structuralism suggested that the established political wisdom of industrial society was
analogous to the mythic narratives of primitive societies, it was questioning the power that
all social institutions exert over their subjects, it was exposing political ideologies as
myths; and by inviting individuals to understand their subjection to the rituals of politics it
was threatening the symbolic efficacity of the discourses through which institutions hold
their sway. The initial reaction against structuralism can thus be regarded as a sensible,
conservative institutional response to a possibility opened up by semiology: a critical
study of dominant discourses that would attend to the conflicts repressed by ideological
myths.
Just as the reaction of structuralism in the 1960's can only be understood in relation
to its critical potential vis-a-vis ideologies and their institutions, the intellectual disarray of
the 1970's can only be appreciated, Descombes contends, as a bi-product of the political
events of May 1968 [pp. 196-200]. While Descombes insists, after many others, on the
discrediting of the French Communist Party and certain classic Marxist dogmas, it is
significant for us that he turns, in analyzing the impact of May '68 on philosophy, to the

diacritics / spring 1982 19

institution of education. The key point in the analysis simply carries forward the insight
that primes Descombes' view of the structuralist controversy of the mid-sixties: in aca-
demia, conflict can take place only in the forms of dialogue sanctioned by the profes-
sional authorities, only in the language and decorum of scholarship. The contestations of
May '68 were impertinent and subversive precisely because the revolting students
breached the established forms, dispensed with the language of intellectual dialogue, dis-
dained academic authority, treating claims to knowledge as just another myth. It was as if
the insurrectional forces unleashed in May '68 had for a moment understood the dialecti-
cal trap that prevents us from opposing knowledge or reason with anything other than
knowledge or reason and come to grips with it on the political level: since power can only
be challenged by another power, since power can only be seized and held by a force that
takes on the forms -discursive, organizational, ideological--of power, the most radical
contestation of power has to entail an explosive dismissal of the prevailing forms, one that
disperses the manifestations of power and introduces new modes of interpersonal rela-
tions.

Now this reasoning appears to point toward a certain anarchy as the one potential
escape from the canonical dialectical scheme that recognizes in the powerlessness of the
dispossessed a negativity that, deployed in revolution against authority, would simply
become the greatest of all powers. According to this heady post- or para-revolutionary
scenario, political discovery would then decisively supercede theory: political action
would enable the breakthrough to a certain alterity by sweeping away the old concentra-
tions of authority and allowing a new mode of collective decision-making to emerge spon-
taneously, to spring up from hitherto impossible displacements of power. Yet Descombes'
analysis is no more attentive to the logic of a sophisticated political resistance to the
assimilatory power of the same than it is to the hard history of May '68: it also weighs the
fact that May '68 was an abortive revolution, that it demonstrated simultaneously the non-
viability of the anarchic adventure (which could only be short-lived), and the consequent
irrepressibility of the dialectical opposition between the old order and a new, substitute
order. For as soon as the new and unfamiliar situation became susceptible to critical
review, it was inevitably understood in relation to the immediate past and perceived as an
alternative not so other as some might first have thought. Once again, then, the same out-
come returns: dialectical logic cannot be defeated dialectically. Even when the strategy of
resistance eschews direct opposition, the dialectic is bound to recover and to continue
winning on its own terrain. And once again, the history of an assault on form repeats itself:
the adherence to prevailing forms that is the enabling condition of institutional order is
forcibly restored. For the class of intellectuals, this devastating recuperation might appear
at first glance to bequeath a single, overriding question: how to deal with the dissolution
of a widely shared (if loosely conceived) Marxist ideology. For philosophy, however, that
was hardly the sole question, or even the principal one. If the misfires of May '68 had to be
read as general historical evidence that the strategic means of contestation advanced by
structuralism --exposing myths and contradictions, violating forms, liberating
signifiers- could not effectively weaken the hold of dialectics (of the same: knowledge,
reason, the logic of identity, and so forth), then the question would indeed be a genuinely
post-structuralist one: what strategy other than the demythifying, form-dislocating moves
of an aggressively critical structuralism could be contrived?
Descombes does not formulate the question in quite these terms. Neither does he pre-
sent Lyotard's work as simply an answer to it. There is assuredly more to Lyotard than a
response to the difficulty of deriving from structuralism's ultimate ploy - the Deleuzian
move to aggregate elements of Marxism and elements of Freudianism in an essentially
Nietzschean conception of desire as a productive force-a strategy capable of fending
off the recuperative pressures of the same. Nonetheless Descombes' narrative, which
stresses Lyotard's differences with Deleuze, does allow us to situate Lyotard's enterprise in
these restricted terms. In particular, we can readily transfer Descombes' version of
Lyotard's starting point (the disillusionment of a militant socialist who discovers that
socialism is just another mythical or religious orthodoxy, actually less revolutionary in its
philosophy than capitalism) into the context of the history of structuralism that we have
sketched. Here Lyotard appears to begin with an uncompromising, literally exhaustive

20
application of critical structuralism in all its dimensions to the political horizon of logo-
centrism. This is not to say that Lyotard privileges the political (in every sense he privileges
nothing, to the point of spurning philosophical nihilism); rather, he shows, with a sharply
honed clarity and alacrity that Foucault's excavations of comparable insights usually lack,
how and why all the disciplinary discourses of our culture are translatable into a discourse
of authoritative power. It is the enshrinement of power in discourse, its consecration in the
speech of the body politic, that invests the logic of identity with its overwhelming positiv-
ity. Knowledge is truth because it can impose itself, because it is articulated on a com-
manding relation of authority described by its enunciation in the logocentric medium. The
stakes of the structuralist controversy are fundamentally political because the order
(nature and structure and force) of the questions raised - the problems of knowledge or
ethics just as much as those of historical explanation or social theory--is in the last
analysis political. For the order of discourse is that of the collective relations that
language underwrites, and the structuralist project of a general critique of prevailing
discourses directly threatens to undermine those relations. For understanding the reaction
against structuralism, it is then the threat it poses to institutional authority, rather than the
theme of the decentered subject, that is decisive.
Yet as we have observed, it is also no more than a threat; and Lyotard is quicker than
most to understand that the threat to the order - indeed, the realization of a critique that
goes so far as to tamper with discursive/political forms, to venture a reordering - may only
serve to consolidate it and is even the necessary condition of its strengthening. At this
point, the very notion of a critique, of critical philosophy, is problematized. To the extent
that the critique itself can function only in opposition to the order, only by staking out its
own counter-claims to truth, it is bound to be co-opted, bound to play into the hands of

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the dialectical logic of the same by re-enacting the irrepressible process of recuperation
we have so often - by now too often - encountered. So often, too often: to the point of
discovering an imperative to withdraw from a future repetition of the same critical and
inherently auto-critical self-stymying analysis. Thus Lyotard would desist from the project
of critical philosophy, would give up the assault on form, and not so much by rejecting

it-- which would be, through opposition, to reaffirm it-- as by forgetting it, by reverting to
the hither side of its very premise, which is that a decisive judgment on truth can be
reached. Descombes' account of this reversion toward a kind of pre-Platonic, pre-Christian
paganism centers on Pierre Klossowski's reading of Nietzsche's eternal return, which
Lyotard appropriates and extends in his own telltale rewriting of the history of philosophy.
Klossowski carries the reading well beyond the notion, already powerfully deconstructive,
that the concept of the eternal return disables all thought that finds its ground in an origin
or first principle. Here is Descombes' superb distillation of the Klossowskian radicaliza-
tion:

The liquidation of the identity principle which lies behind this negation of all
assignation of an origin, or an original, implies that the appearances of identity or
regularity which confront us are masks. All identity is a sham. The same is always
an other posing as the same, and it is never the same other that is concealed
behind the same mask. The mask we think of as the same is never really the same
mask; nor is anyone who thinks it is the same, the same, etc. Precisely because this
is so, the doctrine of eternal recurrence can in no way propose a principle of dif-
ference, opposable to the principle of identity. As Klossowski explains, the Nietz-
schean supposition boldly opposes the principle of identity with the appearance

diacritics/ spring 1982 21

 of a principle, a false principle masquerading as a true one. The doctrine of eternal
recurrence, he says, is the parody of a doctrine. The philosopher of difference is
therefore an impostor, his philosophy is a mystification. [p. 183]

This understanding allows for a literal rereading of the Nietzschean dictum according to
which the "real world has become a fable": the world is but a fable, is only the material of
a narrative; our view of historical time is but a fiction, the eternal return itself appears in
the lapsing of that interluding story of the world, the resurgence of the ludic "time of
myth" [p. 215] in which the history of events is just one story, one round in the ongoing
sequence of narrative. The condition of that return, Descombes remarks, is precisely the
"active forgetting of the past," and in the anti-theoretical, anti-critical, anti-structuralist
philosophical project of Lyotard, to meet that post-structuralist condition is to carry
through the paradoxical move of "actively forgetting." But is there a strategy that makes it
possible to revert from history-which takes the world as a truth, given to be stated by a
unified logos -to myth, which takes the world as a collection of stories to be endlessly
retold? Is there a way to revert from logos to muthos? How can we spin tales without
privileging events? By what ruse can we forget the truth of the logos?
Both Descombes, in L'Inconscient malgre lui, and Lyotard, in his works from
L'Economie libidinale (1973) to the present, forge strategies that command a detailed
attention we cannot undertake to energize here. In particular, the final chapter of
L'Economie libidinale and the epilogue of L'Inconscient malgre lui propose delicately
original strategies for dealing with their own language--that of logocentrism -and
resisting recuperation that deserve to be set off against Derrida's double science. A
manifestation of the difference between Derrida and Lyotard that we can readily mention
here, and that parodies, by virtue of its theoretical tenor, the post-structuralist condition-
ing undertaken by Lyotard, lies in what we might refer to approximately as the substance
of Lyotard's position: all discourse is in fact - that is, as fabricated -narrative; to forge the
passage from logos to muthos is to show that the logos itself dissimulates a narrative -of
power -that is its core; to philosophize a-theoretically, a-critically, is to assume the pagan
mask of the poet-raconteurs whom Plato banished from his republic, it is to recast the
world, no less rigorously than poets or mathematicians who willingly construe their work
as ingenious artifice, as fiction carved out of language; it is to assume, to put into play, the
notion that philosophy's burden is not to achieve proof, but conviction, and thus that the

philosopher's task is as much a matter of rhetoric--style or tone - as it is of argument.

From our retarded critical standpoint in the structuralist arrears of Lyotard, the force of his
post-structuralist sortie lies in the lapidary positivity of such propositions, a positivity for
which the beguilingly unmanageable assertion that all discourse is narrative, endowed
with the property of being applicable to itself, reflexively infallible, is the enabling condi-
tion. The narrativist gambit can only be a position, a practice, a devil's advocacy; it cannot
be a dogma, cannot produce a theory, since in affirming itself as (hi)story it denies the
pretentions of theory. The art of Lyotard's writing works at making this vigorously positive,
anti-doctrinal assertion irrecuperable, and owing to that art--a writing practice that is
singularly out of phase with classical philosophical discourse - Lyotard's proximity to the
disseminatory vein of Derrida's recent work seems very pronounced. In each case, the
address and tone are astonishing. Their differences, insofar as they emerge more on such
matters of substance as the object to which philosophy should now attend than in style,
are perhaps less decisive than the gaily dissimulatory appearances (among which,
Descombes' tale of modern French philosophy) might lead us to believe.

IV. Conditionality
There is, then, a post-structuralist condition: (1) a state or climate, marked by intellec-
tual disarray, brought on by the pervasive sense that critical structuralism itself, in its most
radical articulations, could not escape from dialectical recuperation; (2) a prerequisite, a
slant with which discourse must comply, stipulating that the logically irreducible duality
of logos and muthos be forgotten, here by allowing the logos to be remembered only as a

22
story, there by inscribing the one undecidably in the other;11 (3) an impulse or pressure to
cultivate artifice, affabulation - an infection, as it were, that invades philosophic writing
and promotes its resistance to the regimen of the same. No doubt this knotted, multi-
dimensional conditionality we have sifted out of Descombes' remarkable narrative is itself
stated here in a still structuralist, still critical discourse that already tends to betray it.
Indeed, our descriptive account- deconstructive in its focus on a possibility condition for
post-structuralist discourse - abashedly threatens to reduce it to theory, to subject it to a
vengeful domestication. No doubt Descombes, in his introductory, almost didactic
recounting, manages to avoid undue recuperations primarily because his mode of presen-
tation is precisely that of narrative, because in framing his discourse he wittingly and tell-
ingly sets his story about the contemporary situation in a circumscribed past. The story
disallows a full-blown return of theory. Thus, to a certain extent, it incorporates the narra-
tivizing tactics dictated by the post-structuralist condition. But why, it will be asked, this
concern for resisting recuperation? Since reappropriations will inevitably occur anyway,
since one is being perpetrated here and now, why not go along with a transmutation of the
post-structuralist condition into a post-structuralism?
It is out of the question to reply here in post-structuralist terms, even though it is
equally impossible for us to fall back on this or that form of intellectual altruism so as to
anchor our scruples in a self-satisfied commitment to truth or adequate representation.
(Though we still hold to quite traditional descriptive and argumentative scruples that
explain in part our enthusiasm for Le Meme et I'autre, it is by dint of habit, of an overdeter-
mined posture that is absolutely not at issue in this question.) It is a matter here of reckon-
ing what is at stake in the conditional status of a post-structuralist discourse for the struc-
turalist. More concretely, for the critical structuralist, caught between the theoretical
aporetics of a logocentrism from which there is presumably no viable exit, and the prac-
tical fecundity of a cognitive project that is demonstrably very far from being exhausted, it
is still, again, vis-a-vis the emerging post-structuralist horizon, a matter of plotting a
strategy for dealing with the other: the other being, at this (dis)juncture, no longer the out-
side pole of a dialectic, but an uncanny (strange and familiar) accompaniment, a condi-
tioning resistance working - in, out of, on, aside from - the same. And once again, still
again, as we grapple with the wagers of French Nietzscheanism, the lesson of Descombes'
narrative about structuralism applies. No less ineluctably than in the case of structuralism,
the response to the post-structuralist condition has to be a political one: the form of the
response delineates a position with respect to the institution that surrounds and seeks to
contain it. To construct the post-structuralist condition as a post-structuralism would
amount to converting a potential for disruption, an outlet for tension and invention, into a
theory or doctrine; to providing the institutions of philosophy or criticism with assimilable
representations that they can ensconce under their authority; to promoting oppor-
tunistically a complicity with the reigning order that the narrativist policy enables its
adherents, not to overthrow (narrative discourse belonging, too, to logocentricity), but to
check. In the academic world, a convenient example of just this sort of co-optative
assimilation is the formation of anthologies, which can come into existence only when
their field of inquiry is ready to normalize the trend they represent. (Textual Strategies is,
then, a sign that, for literary criticism, structuralism- and perhaps also a certain fantasy
about a coming post-structuralism - has become fully assimilable in its diverse guises.)
The price of recuperation may seem entirely reasonable in professional or theoretical
terms; the gain in security may well offset the lost pleasure of skidding onto unknown
surfaces. The steeper payments exacted by moves to tame the conditional through
familiarizing representations of it are ethical and esthetic: cut back or suppressed are
possibilities for experimentation, innovation, refinement, articulation of relations as yet

11 The double allusion here is of course to Lyotard and to Derrida, specifically to Lyotard's appeal to
a "logic of occasion," Derrida's to factors of undecidability. Descombes invokes these logical motifs
[pp. 216-17, 176-77 respectively] with a dryness and brevity that convey a certain lack of enthusiasm
for Lyotard's demonstration, and a distinct dissatisfaction with Derrida's. Nonetheless, we would sug-
gest that the relationship and potential for articulation between these two argumentative strategies
would be an avenue well worth exploring.

diacritics / spring 1982 23

unrepresentative of an order- possibilities that the indefinition - the unsettled tonality,
the "as-if-ness" or underdetermination -of the conditional mode allows to ferment. The
post-structuralist condition does not, after all, program some naive "liberation" of desire
or of knowledge; it does not prefigure some unthinkable detachment that would at last
come to yield an "expression" of otherness. For having forgotten this outmoded project,
the venture is craftier, more cunning, even mischievous: it aims to resist the order of
sameness with a conditioning apt to sustain and perhaps enhance the prospects for those
creative inventions and relations that the recuperative power of the identity principle
stands all too ready to foreclose. We might say figuratively that it is a matter of injecting
elbow-room or breathing-space into our congested cultural eco-system. For critical struc-
turalism, the challenge is to benefit from the conditioning effected by post-structuralist
departures without dissolving it, to appreciate the conditionality -the necessarily unful-
filled, tendentious, provisional character-of those effects. Make them definitive, predict-
able, doctrinal, take away the incalculable effects of chance and indeterminacy, and they
will lose their force and interest, their power to enable disruptions without which the same
would be an order of intolerable indifference. Hence one message to draw from the
counterposing moves of Descombes, Lyotard, and others to condition structuralism with
its narrative is a renewed sense of structuralism's conditionality--which is to say, of its
historiality. Much of the tale of structuralism remains to be told! Already told, to be sure,
is the story of a difficult conciliation between the critical, cognitive, scientific project of
structuralism and the moral or esthetic values that transparently inform post-structuralist
discourse. For the structuralist, to resist organized moves to assimilate--to impose
discipline on- the post-structuralist condition is doubtless to refuse, in a gesture of micro-
political concern that no one should exalt, to relinquish the dream of a beautiful and
moral science. The resolution to hold out for the conditional against the doctrinal clearly
entails a conviction, a strategic judgment as well, that establishmentarian complicities
constitute one precise terrain on which a struggle for positive values is possible and
imperative.

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