Deconstructive Criticism: An Advanced Introduction by Vincent B. Leitch (PDF)

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The ideal prelude to the study of deconstructive theory for the as-yet-uninitiated reader. Leitch uses in-depth analyses, surveys of historical background, and helpful overviews to address the questions posed by the major figures―Saussure, Lacan, Levi-Strauss, Heidegger, Derrida, Barthes Foucault―then penetrates and displays the subtle intricacies of their answers.

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Opiniones editoriales Review Deconstructive Criticism neither vulgarizes and oversimplifies deconstruction, nor protects it for an elite, and this is indeed a substantial achievement. — Terry Eagleton From the Back Cover In Deconstructive Criticism: An Advanced Introduction, Vincent B. Leitch provides the as-yet-uninitiated reader with a lucid and comprehensive understanding of established thought and the work currently being done in the field. About the Author Vincent B. Leitch is professor of English at Purdue University and author of Cultural Criticism, Literary Theory, Poststructuralism and American Literary Criticism from the Thirties to the Eighties, both from Columbia University Press. Leer más

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⭐When Vincent Leitch published DECONSTRUCTIVE CRITICISM in 1983, his goals were far from modest: he sought to ask two questions: what is a text? and what is interpretation? Leitch provides some detailed responses for both, most of which centers around what was still the burgeoning philosophy of deconstruction. Leitch announces proudly that he is “uncommitted to converting the wary or reluctant reader.” Yet, in the very next sentence, he deconstructs himself by adding that this text “nevertheless, inevitably, assumes a sympathetic stance toward deconstruction.” Such sweeping statements as “inevitably” and later on “always already” suggest the inner core weakness of deconstruction, a philosophy that requires a totalization of all aspects of its nature even as it seeks the destabilization of the totalization of a two millennia history of solid ground girding all rational thought.In his opening chapter “Foundations,” Leitch begins with a succinct theoretical summation of one of the forebears of deconstruction, Claude Levi-Strauss, who postulated a structuralist tenet that underlying all texts were hidden infrastructures of experience, a very definite impossibility as far as deconstruction was concerned. Leitch calls Levi-Strauss a “huckster” and a “shaman” who proffers no more than a “beguiling portrait of structuralism.” Leitch next considers Ferdinand de Saussure as a strange hybrid of a structuralist wanna-be and a deconstructionist to-be. Whatever linked western culture to a belief that underlying all thought was a unifying belief in the totality of all things called variously “God,” “Truth,” or “Logos” was now to be “problematized,” “called into question” or in plain English denied. Saussure, in Leitch’s words was a linguistic dinosaur, the last of his kind, one who “marks a closing of the long logocentric epoch.” This revelation must have come as news to those critical of deconstruction like John Ellis (AGAINST DECONSTUCTION) or David Lehman (SIGNS OF THE TIMES), both of whom assure their readers that logocentrism is alive and well.Part of the problem that Ellis and Lehman have with deconstruction is that the sweeping statements of its founder Jacques Derrida are so sweeping that even one statement of his that can be proven demonstrably false immediately lets Dorothy pull back the curtain of the Master Wizard revealing he who is busily pulling on the levers of fear and garbled logic. The remainder of this review will deal with a litany of these flaws and flubs.Leitch states that Saussure was a strong supporter of ethnocentrism, which had long privileged writing over the spoken word. In fact, the reverse is true; Saussure held that writing-based cultures represented only a minority of cultures, most of which had no written traditions at all. It takes some convoluted deconstructionist logic for Leitch to conclude that “Saussure’s text unwittingly opens the possibility that the graphie and not the phonè is the proper element of language for analysis.” From this, Leitch proclaims that we must distinguish between logocentric writing (the phonetic-alphabetic script) and his new and improved version “post-structuralist” writing, which “forces a break with normality.” Whatever this “break” means suggests that “No longer may we think of writing in the old way.” Leitch (through Derrida) rarely provides the needed rigorous analysis that any new mode of thinking must surely entail. Instead what Leitch presents is the rhetoric of grandiosity that sounds compelling but contains little that is. Consider the following from page twenty-seven: “We experience the dizziness, feel the danger, and sense the monstrosity which characterizes deconstruction.” It is this very appeal to the subjective eccentricities of emotion that permit the deconstructionist to use verbal legerdemain to induce the reader to watch the left hand while the right deftly obscures what would otherwise be glaringly obvious.Resting at the foundation of deconstruction lie two terms that permit the deconstructionist to defer endlessly all meaning in a vertiginous swirl of counter-logic: the trace and the supplement. With them, all goes well in a Derridean universe. Without them, the linguistic house of cards comes a tumbling down. The trace, as both Leitch and Derrida, explain it, is a “thing” and a “no thing” there but not there. “Mysterious and imperceptible,” claims Leitch, “the trace arises as a force and formation of writing.” Leitch compares the trace to an equally mysterious and imperceptible “no thing” in physics–the quark. And just as the quark can not be seen, heard, felt, sensed or goosed, so the trace. Ironically, if not proudly Leitch boasts: “The trace does not exist.” Yet he adds that the trace is the repository of wispy fragments of non-being that inhere in the absence of things whose very absence points to their remembered (or perhaps forgotten) non-presence. The supplement is one term or word that is crossed out so that in one sense it is supposed to be deleted but the deletion sign (the “crossed x’s) are still present; thus the deleted item is both there and not there simultaneously. This permits a signifier to be disconnected from its signified so it may “float” endlessly in a sea of non-being. Now all of this truly sounds like cotton candy poured over evanescent whimsy to produce exactly what Leitch claims trace to be–that which is not there. As for me, when I read of a new way of thinking, I prefer my cotton candy to be solid enough for me to digest. DECONSTRUCTIVE CRITICISM, then, is a celebration of a dog chasing its tail. I bet on a tie.

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