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Contemporary Cultural Theory

described it as ‘a form that posits some prior text of which it
claims to be a commentary, appropriating portions—and in
particular terminological subsections—from that text provision-
ally to say something which the text does not exactly say as such
in its own voice or language’ (Jameson, 1995, p. 78).

Demystification as relativisation
This might appear little more than a peculiarly obtuse form of
literary criticism—and so it was interpreted by the Yale School
of American ‘Derrideans’ (cf. Bloom et al., 1979). But for Derrida
himself, deconstruction has been as much a philosophy and a
politics as a type of literary criticism. So when he famously
insisted that there ‘is nothing outside of the text’, he would add that
‘in what one calls...real life... there has never been anything
but writing’ (Derrida, 1976, pp. 158–9). Real life is thus itself a
text and can, therefore, be deconstructed. Indeed, he has explic-
itly argued that deconstruction should interfere ‘with solid
structures, “material” institutions, and not only with discourses
or signifying representations’ (Derrida, 1987, p. 19). Derrida’s
insistence on the indeterminate openness of meaning is clearly
intended as subversive of all authoritarianisms, whether episte-
mological, ethical or political, and of the fear of change that often
inspires such authoritarianism. Hence his concluding invocation
at Johns Hopkins of ‘the as yet unnamable which is proclaiming
itself and which can do so... only under the species of the
nonspecies, in the formless, mute, infant, and terrifying form of
monstrosity’ (Derrida, 1978, p. 293). A Derridean politics is thus,
above all, a politics of demystification through relativisation.
For all the mobility of Derrida’s thought, it betrays no obvious
line of movement, such as in Barthes’ from structuralism to post-
structuralism, or Foucault’s from ‘archaeology’ to ‘genealogy’.
Indeed, Derrida’s work resists such classification. He has
written widely on subjects as diverse as the social organisation
of higher education, the nuclear arms race, art and aesthetics,
literary criticism, Marxism, archiving and email, friendship,
psychoanalysis, forgiveness and reconciliation, but always as
the philosopher, always the deconstructionist (Derrida, 1983;

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