Christopher Norris

One gets the impression from Riffaterre’s book that he enjoys playing single-minded hedgehog to the foxy representatives of Parisian post-structuralist fashion. Despite some fairly arcane terminology, he is basically an old-style formalist whose forays into theory are largely in the service of traditional interpretative ends. The literary text, for Riffaterre, is an object of patient and erudite close-reading, a ‘monument’ whose utterly distinctive character the critic sets out to describe and explain. At bottom, there is not much difference between this kind of ‘structuralist’ activity and the techniques of verbal analysis perfected by ‘old’ New Critics like Wimsatt and Brooks. Of course there is a shift of technical idiom, from the homespun rhetorics of Ambiguity, Irony and Paradox to a post-Saussurian language of signifier and signified, text and intertext. But Riffaterre’s commitment to the structuralist project stops well short of dissolving the poem into a play of circumambient codes and conventions beyond all reach of formal analysis. His readings are squarely opposed to the current mood of ‘textualist’ euphoria which merges poem and commentary in an endless exchange of productive signification. Criticism has its work cut out, he thinks, in explaining what it is about the nature of literary texts that both marks them out clearly as ‘literary’ and preserves their meaning against the ravages of time and cultural change. There is much here that would gladden the heart of a rearguard New Critic, but little – besides the somewhat de rigueur terminology – that a current post-structuralist would want to take on board.–

Philosophers are understandably aggrieved when literary critics presume to instruct them in the finer points of textual interpretation. Particularly irksome is the claim of conceptual rhetoricians like Paul de Man that philosophy has not yet caught up with ‘elementary refinements’ that criticism has long since taken for granted. Deconstruction goes furthest towards contesting the status of philosophy by showing how its concepts finally come down to the ‘unmasterable’ play of linguistic figuration. There is a striking example of de Man’s mercilessly consequential logic – deployed to most ‘illogical’ ends – in his reading of Kantian aesthetics, collected in the Shapiro and Sica volume. This essay deconstructs the Critique of Judgment by pressing its concepts and categories to the point where they yield up a series of perverse rhetorical manoeuvres at odds with any self-respecting ‘philosophic’ argument. It is tropes, not concepts, that structure the economy of Kantian reason and enable its crucial transitions from stage to stage of ‘enlightened’ critique. From the deconstructive viewpoint, de Man’s is a reading of exemplary rigour and scrupulous textual awareness. To most analytic philosophers – those trained up, let us say, on the regulative mastery of concept over trope – such ‘rigour’ looks more like mere semantic juggling, the sort of thing which had better be confined to university departments of literature.–

Why these books should have come to a male reviewer is perhaps more a question for the editor than myself. All the same, it is an issue that can hardly be ducked in the context of present-day feminist debate. Is it possible for a well-disposed male heterosexual to ‘read as a woman’, overcoming all the gender-based habits and assumptions imposed by a rigidly patriarchal culture? Jonathan Culler argues as much in the opening chapters of his recent book On Deconstruction. For Culler, this serves as a paradigm case of the way that deconstructionist strategies of reading can work to undo such naturalised categories as ‘male’ versus ‘female’, conceived in biological or essentialist terms. It is not enough for feminist critics to identify subjectively with women writers, or with those elements of repressed female experience there to be uncovered in the texts of patriarchal tradition. Such thinking is the first stage only, since it cannot do more than put up local resistance and leave the opposition male/female firmly in place. What is needed, Culler argues, is a systematic process of displacement which interrogates the logic underlying such assumptions and shows it to rest on a certain blindness to its own textual workings. Thus Freud’s discourse on female sexuality reveals all the symptomatic twists and distortions of a theory bent upon establishing power over that which would otherwise elude its control. Hysteria and penis-envy are just two of those mythic explanations which Freud has to invent by way of warding off this threat to the phallocratic order of things.

This book is by far the most sustained and intelligent critique of post-structuralist theory yet published in Britain or America. It is argued from an adversary stance, but with a vigour and passion all too rare among opponents of ‘theory’ in whatever threatening shape or guise. According to Rose, it is the fault of post-structuralism, not that it has become too much embroiled in theoretical issues, but that it has failed to think through the problems bequeathed by philosophers in the critical tradition descending from Kant. That tradition she sees as having set the main terms for a debate whose categories are centrally those of jurisprudence, or the individual subject and his or her standing before the law. Post-Kantian philosophy is heir to certain problems in the nature of its own grounding concepts which cannot be simply pushed aside in the name of some radical break with ‘Western metaphysics’. Such gestures are a species of intellectual nihilism, a refusal to engage with hegemonic structures of reason, legality and ethical discourse alike. Taking issue with Foucault and Derrida especially, Rose argues that post-structuralism has not come out – as its proponents would claim – on the far side of those problems and antinomies that dominate classical reason. Rather, it has attempted to exclude them de jure from its own more ‘radical’ or liberated discourse, only to reveal how far it is in thrall to those same (unrecognised) critical motifs. In short, these thinkers have opted for a rhetoric of militant unreason, thereby depriving thought of any power to criticise its own concepts and categories.’