[First published in English Studies in Canada 18.1 (1992): 83-103.

[Index: Jacques Derrida]

[Date: 1992]

Ellis on Deconstruction: A Second Opinion

Michael H. Keefer

The book review section of English Studies in Canada has customarily been
reserved for the evaluation of books by members of the Canadian academic literary
community. The appearance in the June 1991 number of a review of John M. Ellis's
Against Deconstruction would therefore seem to indicate (since Ellis is not, I think,
Canadian, and does not address himself to Canadian scholars, unless as members of a
larger scholarly community) that this is a book of unusual importance.
Such is indeed the reviewer's opinion. David Jeffrey, who shares Ellis's
puzzlement that the incoherence he patiently analyzes should have acquired such wide
appeal, describes Against Deconstruction as an expos of a project [Ellis] takes finally
to be an insult to critical intelligence, even granted the debatable terms it proposes, and
judges it to be so thorough-going, so cogently argued, and so patently destructive, that it
seems to this reviewer either essentially unanswerable by contemporary versions of
deconstruction or, at the very least, so fundamentally corrosive of their central positions
that an effort to sustain them can only be at the expense of further commitment to
discussion and debate (243).
The rhetorical anticlimax of this last sentence may produce an odd effect of
diminuendo (from point of view can a commitment to discussion and debate be regarded
as disabling? Could any position, sensible or otherwise, be sustained without such a

commitment?).1 Yet this anticlimax also reveals a degree of openness that, given the
strength of Professor Jeffrey's convictions, is surely commendable. While viewing Ellis's
prosecution of deconstruction as an open-and-shut case, he has nonetheless left the door
ajar.
To what end? it might be asked, if any effective rejoinder is out of the question.
But perhaps, drawn by the echoes of Ellis's forensic vehemence, a flneurone who
would count himself neither as a partisan nor as an enemy of deconstruction, yet who has
strolled (not without incident) on both sides of the street2may take this occasion to slip
into the courtroom.

I
I re-emerge (several hours later) with disconcerting news. On one issue at least
his challenge to Jacques Derrida's critique of SaussureJohn Ellis is thoroughly
stimulating. And he is occasionally trenchant, as when he argues, in opposition to the
practitioners of what as been called Teflon Theory, that there is no room in [theoretical
argument] ... for claims of exemption from logical scrutiny, for appeals to an undefined
unique logical status, for appeals to allow obscurity to stand unanalyzed... (1989: 159). 3
One might well applaudas Christopher Norris, one of the foremost British
deconstructionists, has in a muted way already done (134-36)4his brisk exposure of
1 Actually, Professor Jeffrey's sentence could mean either that any effort by deconstructionists to sustain
their central positions will cost them a further commitment to discussion and debateor,
alternatively, that given the mauling they have had at Ellis's hands, they can hope to sustain their views
only if they forego any commitment to further debate. The reader is thus left to choose between an
anticlimax and a paradox. I have chosen the former, as making better sense. But deconstructionists,
should there be any about, might prefer to regard this sentence as a tidy illustration of their claim that
When one writes, one writes more than (or less than, or other than) one thinks (Johnson 46)and to
maintain that the ambiguity of Jeffrey's at the expense of indicates, in effect, a polite willingness on
his part to listen to whatever deconstructionists have to say, so long as they remain silent.
2 I have on two occasions discussed texts by Derrida in some detailin University of Toronto Quarterly
55.1 (1985), and, in more measured tones, in the 1989 volume of this journal. Since John Ellis has
difficulty in distinguishing between the theories of Jacques Derrida and those of Stanley Fish, I should
perhaps add that I have also criticized Fish, in an essay published in University of Toronto Quarterly
56.4 (1987) that had impolite things to say about more traditional modes of textual criticism and literary
interpretation as well. I have since developed some of the latter points in the introduction to my edition
of Marlowe's Doctor Faustus (Peterborough: Broadview, 1991).
3 Ellis's gesture of exclusionhis announcement that there is no room for this or thatmay
nonetheless seem disturbing, especially given the eccentricity of his own philosophical judgments (he
dismisses Kant and Hegel as obscure, and Husserl as a kind of philosophical simpleton [1989: 147,
142]).
4 Of course, having expressed sympathy with Ellis's insistence that deconstructionor those who speak

these and similar tactics of evasion.

And yet Ellis's book seems to me, on balance, neither thorough-going nor
important. He has in effect rounded up a number of the usual suspects (some of them
only very tenuously related to the writings of Jacques Derrida), and invoked against them
the full penalty of the lawin the form of theory understood as a means of regulation
and control. What annoys everyone, Ellis asserts, is the flood of critical writing that
the present randomly pluralistic theoretical consensus permits; what will presumably
please this same everyone is a genuine, rather than illusory form of theory designed
to provide some check on and control of the indigestible, chaotic flow of critical writing
through reflection on what is and what is not in principle worthwhile (1989: 156, 159).
Several questions spring at once to mind. Would it be imprudent to inquire what
form of check or regulation might be envisaged for those who do not find this project of
flood control, with its implications of nostalgia for a mythical status quo ante diluvium,
to be itself either compelling or worthwhile? Are we to understand theory as a species of
heresiology, and Ellis's Against Deconstruction as situating itself in a tradition
inaugurated in the second century of this era by Irenaeus of Lyons with his treatise
Against Heresies? Should exclusionary gestures of this kind be acknowledged as implicit
in any description of literary studies as a discipline, or are other less restrictive
conceptions of what we are engaged in also available? But intriguing though such
questions may be, I will defer any discussion of them until later, for other, perhaps
smaller, issues are more immediately pressing.
The first is a matter of Ellis's definition of his target. With all due allowances
made for the elisions necessary in a short polemical book, I would like to ask how close
Ellis comes to honouring his own ideal of theoretical discourse as a site where one
careful attempt to analyze and elucidate the basis of a critical concept or position is met
by an equally exacting and penetrating scrutiny of its own inner logic (1989: 159). The
second overlapping issue I will consider is one of methodology. Logic is very much in
play throughout Ellis's polemic, both in his contemptuous dismissal of the claim of
deconstructionists to be working with a non-traditional logic and in his recurrent
arguments to the effect that Derrida's positions are either intrinsically foolish or else
in its namebe held accountable to the standards of logical rigour, argumentative consistency and
truth (134), Norris argues that Derrida's writings meet these standards, while Ellis's book, which in
other respects as well is glaringly inadequate, does not. I differ with Norris's view of the logic of
deconstruction; elsewhere in this essay I have avoided dwelling on aspects of Ellis's book already
discussed by Norris.

entail absurd or self-contradictory consequences. To what extent is this dismissal

justified, and how adequate is Ellis's own logic as a basis for literary-theoretical inquiry?

II
First, then, how carefully does Ellis define the object of his attack? There is, I
believe, a wide gap between his own practice and the ideal of theoretical discourse that
he advances. For although Ellis inveighs against intellectual laziness (1989: 135), he is
not himself a very scrupulous reader. To be sure, all the signs of scrupulosity are there. In
his first reference to Derrida's Of Grammatology, for example, he remarks that
I have cited the English version of the published translations of
Derrida throughout this book but in each case have checked them
against the original French to make sure that they do not introduce
changes of emphasis that would have any significant bearing on
the course of my argument. Responsibility for any distortion of
the issues discussed here because of the translation is thus also my
responsibility, not solely that of the translator. (1989: 18n1)
But one's faith in this admirable declaration may be shaken when, later in the
same chapter, Ellis informs us that Derrida's notion of the deferral of meaning is
elaborated most fully in the essay 'Diffrance,' the closing chapter of his La Voix et le
Phnomne (translated under the title Speech and Phenomena) (1989: 52n44). This
magisterial allusion to the French text happens to be wholly misleading. Differance
spelled without an accent aiguis indeed the last essay in the book Speech and
Phenomena: And Other Essays on Husserl's Theory of Signs. But the text of which this
essay is a translation is entitled La diffranceand it does not appear in La voix et le
phnomne. As the translator of Speech and Phenomena indicates in a prominently
placed note that Ellis apparently did not read, La diffrance was first published in the
Bulletin de la socit franaise de philosophie 62.3 (1968), and was reprinted that same
year in the collective work Thorie d'ensemble (Speech 129). (One might add that the
essay subsequently appeared in Derrida's Marges de la philosophie [1972]; in the
translation of that book, Margins of Philosophy, it bears the title Diffrancethat
Ellis ascribes to the French text.)

The most charitable explanation of this little gaffe would be that a scholar with an
intimate knowledge of the primary texts has in this one instance made the mistake of
relying on a perhaps overcharged memory. But Ellis's cavalier way with his sources may
by this point already have strained the reader's generosity. In the opening pages of
Chapter One, Ellis takes aim at Derrida's claim to be moving beyond the exclusionary
categories of traditional logic. His tactic is not to analyse a paragraph, even, from one or
another of Derrida's writings; rather, he finds it sufficient to examine a brief passage from
an essay by Barbara Johnsonon the grounds that since it takes its cues from Derrida's
writings, it can claim his authority (1989: 5). The gesture is breathtaking: one might by
the same token ascribe the authority of Aristotle to any one of his innumerable
commentators, that of St. Paul to Faustus the Manichaeanor, since Professor Ellis is a
Germanist, that of Goethe and Nietzsche together to Oswald Spengler.5
When on the next page Ellis declares that Johnson is certainly abstracting from
Derrida's writings in a way that does not distort them (1989: 6), the reader may suspect
that the emphatic adverb in this sentence at once represses and reveals the first stirrings
of synderesisof a bad scholarly conscience. But Ellis's conscience does not prevent him
from doing his best to give a distorted impression of one of the texts from which Johnson
quotes. Many readers will feel a twinge of irritation when Derrida writes that It is thus
not simply false to say that Mallarm is a Platonist or a Hegelian. But it is above all not
true. And vice versa (Derrida, Dissemination 207; qtd. in Ellis 1989: 6). But how should
we categorize the following comments by Ellis?
Presumably, one could pursue a serious and subtle inquiry into the
particular ways in which Mallarm shares common features with,
or is indebted to, Plato or Hegel and the ways in which he does
not.... By the time the inquiry has been pushed to any reasonable
degree of depth, the question whether Mallarm is or is not a
Platonist will begin to seem rather trite and anyone who insists on
that level of generality will only seem to be interrupting and
disrupting something that has gone well beyond this elementary
level of analysis. Derrida's statement that it is neither true nor
5 Professor Jeffrey seems oblivious to the oddity of Ellis's manoeuvre: he writes, with no
apparent awareness of possible tension between the expressions italicized below, that Ellis
builds his critique solely on the authorized representations of deconstruction. He makes
extensive use of statements by Derrida and by Jonathan Culler, Christopher Norris, Barbara
Johnson, and other self-proclaimed apostles (244; my italics).

false to say that Mallarm is a Platonist works only on that level

of generality, and is therefore surely devoid of substantial content.
(1989: 6-7)
I am tempted to call this passage dishonest. For at no point does Ellis indicate that
the Derridean paradox that he cites from Barbara Johnson's essay is not simply an
isolated aphorism. How many readers, then, will suspect that it is drawn from a text, The
Double Session (Dissemination 173-286), in which for more than one hundred pages
Derrida conducts what might well be described as a serious and subtle inquiry into the
particular ways in which Mallarm shares common features with ... Plato [and] Hegel?
Is it possible that Ellis did not bother even to skim this text before sitting down to refute
its author? Or is his emphatic adverbsurelyonce again the sign of a bad
conscience?
Elsewhere in Ellis's book, a different kind of carelessness is evident. In Chapter
Five his principal target turns out to be American reader-response theory and neopragmatism, which Ellis blandly conflates with deconstruction on the grounds that their
major points are virtually the same (1989: 113). Although there has indeed been an
overlapping of these and other tendencies in North American critical practice, Jacques
Derrida and Stanley Fish might well be surprised to find themselves so casually tossed
into the same bucket. To be fair, one should remark that blatant misrepresentations of
one's opponents are common enough in polemical writings: Jonathan Culler, for example,
has found it convenient to assume that opponents of structuralism must all be
practitioners of a simple-minded thematic criticism (20). Misrepresentation on this scale,
however, does not sit well with Ellis's ideal of theory as an exacting and penetrating
scrutiny (1989: 159).
Chapter Four is slipshod in a different sense. In refuting the view that all
interpretation is misinterpretation, Ellis repeats this catch-phrase twenty-seven times in
less than sixteen pagesthough only once does he quote a passage by any theorist in
which something resembling it occurs. (The passage in question is ten words in length.) 6
6 Ellis quotes, from Culler's On Deconstruction, the words that I have italicized in the following passage:
According to the paleonymic strategy urged by Derrida, misreading retains the trace
of truth, because noteworthy readings involve claims to truth and because
interpretation is structured by the attempt to catch what other readings have missed
and misconstrued. Since no reading can escape correction, all readings are
misreadings; but this leaves not a monism but a double movement. Against the claim
that, if there are only misreadings, then anything goes, one affirms that misreadings
are errors; but against the positivist claim that they are errors because they strive

One reason for this reticence may be an awareness on his part that the various more or
less sceptical approaches to interpretation that this slogan reductively summarizes are by
no means the exclusive property of deconstructionists.
One such approach is, I think, implicit in any cultural materialist understanding of
textual transmission. Hamlet, for instance, has been effectively decontextualized by the
passage of nearly four centuries; it comes to us mediated (which is also to say
recontextualized) by discursive factors of which its first shapers had no inkling; and we
turn to it with ideologically conditioned motivations that differ in many respects from
those of its Elizabethan audiences. What, then, would it mean to claim that even the most
historically scrupulous contemporary readings of this play are not also misreadings? A
related sense of the conditioned and conditional nature of interpretation can be derived
from post-Heideggerian hermeneuticsas when Hans-Georg Gadamer writes that
according to Heidegger's description of the hermeneutical circle, the understanding of
the text remains permanently determined by the anticipatory movement of foreunderstanding.... The circle, then ... describes understanding as the interplay of the
movement of tradition and the movement of the interpreter (261).
On the other hand, it is by no means evident that deconstructionists would as a
group subscribe to the view that all interpretation is misinterpretation. Paul de Man, for
example, proclaims that Technically correct rhetorical readings may be boring,
monotonous, predictable and unpleasant, but they are irrefutable. Although with
characteristic irony he complicates this declaration by adding that such readings can
rightly claim to contain within their own defective selves all the other defective models
of reading-avoidance, referential, semiological, grammatical, performative, logical, or
whatever, and that they still avoid and resist the reading they advocate (19), his
position is clearly unlike any of the ones attacked by Ellis.
It is of course Harold Bloom who most forcefully equates reading with
misreading, and declares that there are no right readings, because reading a text is
necessarily the reading of a whole system of texts, and meaning is always wandering
around between texts (Kabbalah 107-08). And indeed Ellis describes Bloom as a leading
advocate of the view of interpretation he wishes to refutea writer who, though allied
with deconstructive critics, is also an independent figure who reaches this position by his
toward but fail to attain a true reading, one maintains that true readings are only
particular misreadings: misreadings whose misses have been missed. (Culler 178)

own path (1989: 97n1). What exactly Bloom's position is Ellis does not trouble to tell
us.7 Nor does he remark that Bloom's alliance with deconstruction is, to say the least,
problematic. Bloom did in 1979 edit the book Deconstruction and Criticism, which
contained essays by himself, Derrida, Paul de Man, Geoffrey Hartman, and J. Hillis
Miller, but he has since described the title as my personal joke, which no one can ever
understand: I meant that those four were deconstruction, and I was criticism. He adds,
Nothing is more alien to me than deconstruction (Salusinszky 68). In the same
interview, Bloom clarifies his differences with this theoretical tendency by recounting a
conversation with his colleague de Man:
The trouble with you, Harold, he would say with a smile, cupping
my head in his hands and looking at me with an affection that
always made me want to weep, is that you are crazy: you do not
believe in the 'troot.' I would look at him, shake my head sadly and
say:
No, I do not believe in the 'troot' because there is no 'troot,'
dear Paul.
There is no method: there is yourself, and you are highly
idiosyncratic.
And you clone, my dear: I dislike what you do as a teacher,
because your students are as alike as two peas in a pod.
(Salusinszky 67)
Jonathan Culler may be right to suggest that in Derrida's view of reading truth has
no more than a residual or trace function: 'misreading' retains the trace of truth, because
noteworthy readings involve claims to truth and because interpretation is structured by
the attempt to catch what other readings have missed and misconstrued (178). But
Derrida has himself denied ever having espoused an equation of interpretation with
misinterpretation. In Culler's agonistic view of interpretation one may detect more than a
7 Here, to supply the deficiency, is a passage from Bloom's Kabbalah and Criticism: An empirical
thinker, confronted by a text, seeks a meaning. Something in him says: 'If this is a complete and
independent text, then it has a meaning.' It saddens me to say that this apparently commonsensical
assumption is not true. Texts don't have meanings, except in their relations to other texts, so that there is
something uneasily dialectical about literary meaning. A single text has only part of a meaning; it is
itself a synecdoche for a larger whole including other texts. A text is a relational event, and not a
substance to be analyzed. But of course, so are we relational events or dialectical entities, rather than
free-standing units (1975: 106). Whatever one may think of this position, it is at least more interesting
than the banal suppositions that Ellis attaches to the slogan All interpretation is misinterpretation, and
then so easily refutes.

trace of the theories of Harold Bloomwhile Derrida, rather than proclaiming

misapprehension as a general principle, seems to have been concerned (most particularly
in his exchange with John Searle) to argue that insofar as positive theories of linguistic
apprehension have been instituted though a systematic idealization, an exclusion of socalled parasitic, deviant, transgressive, or marginal cases, they are adequate neither in
theoretical terms nor as an account of actual usage. As he himself wrote (as a time when
Ellis's book may already have been in press):
I do not think nor have I ever said that any interpretation is
inevitably a false interpretation, and any understanding a
misunderstanding. Why? In what way? This is what I discuss and
argue at length (for I am one of those who love arguing, as can
be seen), for instance in Sec [i.e. Signature Event Context] and in
Limited Inc.... The relation of mis (mis-understanding, misinterpreting, for example) to that which is not mis-, is not at all
that of a general law to cases, but that of a general possibility
inscribed in the structure of positivity, of normality, of the
standard. All that I recall is that this structural possibility must
be taken into account when describing so-called ideal normality,
or so-called just comprehension or interpretation, and that this
possibility can be neither excluded nor opposed. An entirely
different logic is called for. (Limited 157)
There is no reason to take a statement like this at face value: Derrida may in this
passage be revising an earlier position, or he may be refusing to admit the direct
implications of his own arguments. But I do not see how one could even tentatively judge
such possibilities without reading those of his writings that are relevant to the mattera
labour that John Ellis, on the evidence of Against Deconstruction, would find
superfluous. It is, after all, easier to refute an opponent on the basis of suppositious
arguments extrapolated from reductive slogans than it would be to engage with the
possibly more challenging arguments which that opponent's writings may contain.
More could be said about Ellis's distortions of deconstructive theory and practice.
In Chapter Three, for example, he conflates Derrida's early practice of deploying
metaphysical terms sous rature with the quite different notion (of which he cites no
published instances) that deconstructive literary criticism makes a similar use of, and

indeed requires ... the literal, obvious meaning sanctioned by tradition and authority
in the form of a unitary traditional interpretation, which is then subverted and preserved
by the deconstructive reading as though in eternal purgatory instead of being laid to
rest (1989: 74, 81). But even if one felt that deconstructive readings tended all too often
(in de Man's words) to be boring, monotonous, predictable and unpleasantand,
moreover, far from irrefutableit would be hard not to lose patience with shadowboxing of this kind.

III
I turn therefore to the issue of logic. I have already quoted Derrida's claim that, if
one wishes adequately to analyse the structural possibility of error or aberration that he
sees as inscribed in the standard of the normal, An entirely different logic is called for.
Is such a logic possible?
John Ellis thinks not. He quotes amusingly from an essay by a deconstructive
adept who, asserting that deconstruction has supplanted the old logic of binary
oppositions, proceeds to pin down the 'unclear' logic of deconstruction by setting it in
binary opposition to traditional logic: the clearest distinction between traditionalist and
deconstructive logic resides in.... Without completing the quotation, Ellis is able to
comment that binary logic is needed to characterize deconstructive logic, and to
suggest that claims for an 'other' logic have often been too lightly made without being
adequately thought through (1989: 8-9n3).
But will such a gesture as this suffice to dispose of Jacques Derrida, or even of the
Derridean whose sentence Ellis does not complete? It seems to me that two further
interrelated questions need to be posed. First, is the word logic being deployed here in
more than one sense, and if so, how significant are the differences? And second, is the
relationship between a traditional or binary and a putative Derridean logic one of
supersession or rather one of supplementarity?
In common usage the word logic occurs in a variety of senses. These range
from the popular logic of events or logic of facts (where logic is a sign of the
persuasive force of things beyond our control) to expressions like the logic of
liberalism (where the reference is to an ideology, a particular manner of arguing or

repertoire of arguments) to Aristotelian or modal or symbolic logic (where logic

means a formalized system of rules that define the legitimacy of different forms of
argument) and finally to a generalized recognition that any such system involves the
deployment of binary structures of signification.
Let us accept that the rational mind operates in terms of binary oppositions: does
it therefore follow, as Ellis seems to assume, that the binary terms with which we reason
must be mutually exclusive categories, and that there can thus effectively be only one
formalized logic and one way of using the word logic? What, one wonders, would he
make of Edmund Burke's logick of taste, of the comment of a writer in Mind, more
than a century ago, that in Germany Logics swarm as bees in spring-timeor indeed of
one John Ellis's remark that the alternative views of war and society of the sixties'
generation had their own logic (1989: 82)?
Although Ellis (who complains of the equation of obscurity and profundity that
has been readily available in European thought since Kant and Hegel) [1989: 147])
might not like the idea, it is clearly possible to speak, as a writer for the Encyclopaedia
Britannica did in 1882, of the metaphysical logic of Hegel ..., the formal logic of
Kant.8 Why not also, then, of a Derridean logic of supplementarity, or a Derridean
logic of the margin? And if the dialectic of Hegel has accustomed us to the notion that
the categories of thought need not be fixed, mutually exclusive entities, but may rather be
dynamically interrelated in a number of ways, can we not entertain the possibility that
Derrida's attempts to provide a vocabulary with which to talk about the slippage of terms,
the interpretation of categories, and the challenge posed to regulative codes by hard
cases and parasitic or transgressive instances may permit a more accurate account of
what is going on around us (and within us) than might otherwise be available?
What Derrida speaks of as la logique de la marge (Marges xix) does not, as I
understand it, imply the same level of formalization as does syllogistic logic or formal
logicbut as anyone who has wrestled with the complex meanings of Derridean terms
like tympanum or hymen can attest, it is also far removed from the unformalized and
ideological plane of an expression like the logic of neo-conservatism. In my opinion,
this intermediate level of formalization does not detract either from the rigour and
strenuousness of the arguments Derrida conducts or from the importance of what he is
attempting. As he himself claims of the essays brought together in Margins of
8 This and the preceding unreferenced quotations are derived from the Oxford English Dictionary.

Philosophy:
If they appear to remain marginal to some of the great texts in the
history of philosophy, these ten writings in fact ask the question of
the margin. Gnawing away at the border which would make this
question into a particular case, they are to blur the line which
separates a text from its controlled margin. They interrogate
philosophy beyond its meaning, treating it not only as a discourse
but as a determined text inscribed in a general text, enclosed in the
representation of its own margin. Which compels us not only to
reckon with the entire logic of the margin, but also to take an
entirely other reckoning: to recall, doubtless, that beyond the
philosophical text there is not a white margin, virginal and empty,
but another text, a weave of differences of forces without any
present center of reference (History, politics, economy,
sexuality, etc.: everything which was said not to be written in
books...). (xxiii)9
One may want to remember that the etymology of context (con plus the past
participle of texere, to weave) suggests something woven into a text that is itself,
Derrida would claim, a weave of differences. The logic announced here thus appears to
be one that would seek (among other things) to make visible within the text the traces of
those exclusions and repressions by means of which it was instituted. In challenging any
fixed sense of identity, this activation of context also brings into play the notion of
supplementarityand with it, another set of Derridean coinages: supplment, diffrance,
pharmakon, parergon. Whatever one's opinion of the value of these deliberately elusive
terms, the logic involved is evidently a double-edged one. The French verb suppler
means both to supplement and to supplant; and it is characteristic of Derrida's arguments
that they likewise both complicate and cast doubt upon the philosophical structures that
they inhabit. There may be good reasons for finding this a troubling tactic, but if this is
the kind of relation in which Derrrida's texts stand to the philosophical tradition of which
9 I have made some minor changes to the translation of the last sentence quoted here. Derrida wrote, in
that sentence: Ce qui oblige non seulement tenir compte de toute la logique de la marge, mais en
tenir un tout autre compte: rappeler sans doute qu'au-del du texts philosophique, il n'y a pas une
marge blanche, vierge, vide, mais un autre texte, un tissu de diffrences de forces sans aucun centre de
rfrence prsente (tout ce dont on disaitl''histoire', la 'politique', l''conomie', la 'sexualiti', etc.que
ce n'tait pas crit dans des livres...). (Derrida 1972: xix)

they are a part, I fail to see why the scholar whom Ellis mocked could not legitimately
declare Derrida's logic to be one that unsettles and challenges exclusionary binary
opposites, and then proceed to explain in what respects it differs from a logic that, like
Ellis's, assumes the distinction between p and not-p to be settled and impermeable.10 The
ensuing explanation might well be a feeble one. But what would that tell anyone but the
most blatant sophist about the validity of Derrida's work?
With respect to John Ellis's own logic, I have two points to make. His arguments,
first, are on occasion too elliptical to be valid. He wishes, for instance, to show that
because of their supposedly unconstrained insistence on textual indeterminacy,
deconstruction and reader-response criticism tend to reduce texts to an indiscriminate,
shapeless chaos of meanings (1989: 127)as a result of which, any identification of the
specific features of a text becomes problematic. Three critical studies by a fellowGermanist, James McGlatherya book on E.T.A. Hoffmann, a second one on Kleist, and
an article on Kafkaprovide Ellis with an example of this. By McGlathery's account,
Ellis says, all three writers turn out to be obsessed with sexual guilt and
unacknowledged sexual shame (1989: 130). This, with no further analysis, prompts the
comment that
By now, a judgment of this situation will be irresistible: this
recurrent idea has its source in the mind of the scholar concerned,
not in the work of Hoffmann, Kleist, and Kafka. That there is
some overlap in the thematic concerns of different authors is not
difficult to believe; but that a variety of very different writers
really all have the same predominant concern is another matter.
Surely, no one should pay much attention to criticism when it is,
as here, clear that the ideas expressed have little to do with the
10 This seems an appropriate point at which to correct a curious slip on the part of Professor Jeffrey, who
declares that At the psychological level merely narcissistic, philosophically [the deconstructive] theory
of meaning echoes that found in nineteenth-century logical positivism (a theory not now of much
interest to philosophers of language). That Derrida's garbling of Saussure was meant to serve as ardent
anti-essentialism is clear; that the project he erects on this foundation is incoherent, at least partly as a
result of his garbled Saussure, is equally clear (245). Whether or not Derrida garbles Saussure, it seems
evident that Jeffrey is himself garbling Elliswho in his second chapter wrote that Newton Garver, in
his preface to the English translation of La voix et le phnomne, sees that the logocentric error
diagnosed by Derrida really amounts to the theory of meaning inherent in logical positivism (Ellis 42).
Moreover, Jeffrey's nineteenth-century logical positivism is an oxymoron: he is presumably confusing
the nineteenth-century positivists (Auguste Comte, Ernst Mach) with the logical positivists (Moritz
Schlick, Rudolf Carnap, and others), whose activities as a group are usually held to have begun with the
founding of the so-called Vienna Circle in 1923.

writers who are the claimed subject of the criticism. (1989: 13031)
But the one thing that is clear to me from this passage is that Ellis has not earned the
right to the conclusion he draws. He has not shown that McGlathery's analyses of
Hoffmann, Kleist, and Kafka are undifferentiated; indeed (as the recurrence of his
emphatic surely may in itself be taken to indicate), he has shown nothing at all. To this
I would add that the first volume of McGlathery's study of Hoffmann, the only one of his
writings that I have consulted, is a sturdily documented and thoroughly traditional piece
of critical scholarship in which there is not the slightest trace of deconstructive or readerresponse methodology. Odder still, this book contains an acknowledgment that as two
recent studies by John M. Ellis, a British-American critic, have shown ..., there is much
to be gained by a willingness to see sexual implications in the riddles posed by
Hoffmann's tales... (38).
A related weakness in Ellis's logic stems from the all too frequent recurrence in
his arguments of what I would describe as a kind of logical monadism. By this I mean
that he repeatedly seems ready to assume that the doctrines of Jacques Derrida must in
some mysterious manner by fully present in any fragment, however small, of his
writings. Ellis's second chapter, it should be said, escapes censure on these grounds: in
challenging Derrida's interpretation of Saussure he quotes liberally from both of them,
and the result is a forceful argument that deserves close study. But elsewhere Ellis does
not put himself to equal trouble. Thus, in his first chapter, he can refute Derrida's logic on
the basis of a total of thirty-three words quoted (in English) by Barbara Johnson from two
separate books. Given Derrida's views on the subject of metaphysical presence, there is a
mordant irony to thisan irony that can only be redoubled if one remembers how often
Derrida's readers have complained that, for all his love of lapidary paradoxes, he is far
from being the most concise of philosophers.
However, a further irony reflects back more distinctly upon Ellis himself. Derrida
is sometimes betrayed by his very expansiveness into what seem, upon analysis, to be
clearly fallacious statements. But Ellis is seldom there to catch him out: an unfortunate
consequence of that recurrent reluctance to engage in serious reading that may be
attributable to what I have called logical monadism, or that might equally well be
ascribed to something Ellis says is encouraged by deconstruction and reader-response
theory, although he seems to suffer from it as wellintellectual laziness (1989: 135).

IV
One scholar, then, has taken a run at another (who happens to be the most
frequently abused, as well as the most frequently cited theorist alive); his polemic,
although it receives a glowing review in English Studies in Canada, turns out on close
examination to be a rather shoddy piece of work. How important is all this? The only
reasonable answer must be: Hardly at all.
And yet there may be a sense in which this little episode is symptomatic of
something that should be of more than passing concern to readers of this journal. In 1988
Jacques Derrida complained that
Everywhere, in particular in the United States and in Europe, the
self-declared philosophers, theoreticians, and ideologists of
communication, dialogue, and consensus, of univocity and
transparency, those who claim ceaselessly to reinstate the classical
ethics of proof, discussion, and exchange, are most often those
who excuse themselves from attentively reading and listening to
the other, who demonstrate precipitation and dogmatism, and who
no longer respect the elementary rules of philology and
interpretation, confounding science and chatter as though they had
not the slightest taste for communication or rather as though they
were afraid of it, at bottom. Fear of what, at bottom? Why? That
is the real question. What is going on at this moment, above all
around deconstruction, to explain this fear and this dogmatism?
Exposed to the slightest difficulty, the slightest complication, the
slightest transformation of the rules, the self-declared advocates
of communication denounce the absence of rules and confusion.
And they allow themselves then to confuse everything in the most
authoritative manner. (Limited 157-58)
I must confess that my first reaction on reading this passage three years ago was a
kind of guilty pleasure. (So: the anxieties of living in a situation in which the rules of
discourse are routinely transgressed have rebounded on a writer whose own

transformation of the rules was perhaps more profound than he wished to

acknowledge? Too bad!) However, this response gave way to a recognition that Derrida's
complaint is justifiedand not only with regard to his treatment at the hands of
journalists and ideologues. It does indeed seem bizarre that reputable critics and
philosophersthe examples of Howard Felperin's Beyond Deconstruction and Jrgen
Habermas's Philosophical Discourse of Modernity come immediately to mindshould
feel at ease with the notion of publishing extended critiques of Derrida's work in which
not a single text is quoted or even named. For if one wishes to defend certain rules of
evidence, certain standards of interpretation and argumentation, does it make sense to
throw these same rules and standards to the wind for the sake of obtaining a merely
rhetorical advantage over a particular opponent?
The Greek word kann, meaning rule or standard, refers more strongly in
Hellenistic usage to the principles governing comparison, selection, and ordering, than to
any system of texts that may result from these processes. This same word also means
measuring rodand before that, it would seem, meant simply rod or stick. In the
behaviour of scholars who cast aside the rules and standards that they themselves profess,
and proceed to belabour an opponent with any old stick that lies to hand, one can, I think,
identify a regression that is as much ethical as etymological.
In the text from which I have just quoted, Derrida claims to be underscoring a
situation that is unfortunately typicaland politically very seriousat a juncture that I
will not hesitate to qualify as worldwide and historic; which is as much to say that its
scope can hardly be exaggerated and that it deserves serious analyses (Limited 157).
Three years ago this claim seemed to me to be very precisely an exaggeration, and a selfinterested one as well. But in the interim the controversy over political correctness,
which has been simmering on American campuses for nearly a decade, has burst upon us.
The same words now have a different ring.
Let us consider just one Canadian product of this controversy, the issue of
Maclean's magazine that was timed to coincide with the 1991 Learned Societies
Conference and carried a cover photograph of two gagged models dressed to represent
academics. The integrity of the first of two stories that developed this theme can be
judged by the fact that its subtitlethe declaration in block capitals that A NEW WAVE
OF REPRESSION IS SWEEPING THROUGH THE UNIVERSITIES (Fennell 40)
was supported in the text by a list of exactly four incidents. One of thesethe harassment

of anthropologist Jeanne Cannizzo at the University of Toronto by activists who

interpreted as racist an exhibit she had curated at the Royal Ontario Museum in 1990
seems genuinely disturbing. A second case, that of Philippe Rushton at the University of
Western Ontario, is troubling in a quite different sense, insofar as it appears to suggest
that what most Canadians would regard as overtly racist discourse has been found
acceptable within the academic discipline of psychology.11
What remains of the wave would scarcely fill a teacup. It appears that feminists
at Acadia University wrote to protest the reproduction in the university calendar of an
Alex Colville painting that they believe dehumanizes women. The Maclean's story does
not tell us whether their letter was rude or insensitivenor in what sense Colville, who in
addition to being a superb artist is also the chancellor of Acadia University, was
repressed by it. And it appears, finally, that unidentified feminists at a Vancouver
Shakespeare conference criticized the bard for being sexist and racist (Fennell 41). On
the other hand, the murder of fourteen women in 1989 at the cole Polytechnique de
Montral, on the supposition that female students at such an institution must be
feminists, did not qualify for mention in the Maclean's story as an instance of
repression within the universities. How could it, if feminists and other politically
correct people are by definition the agents, not the victims, of repression?
The editors of Maclean's might respond to such comments, if at all, by pointing to
the balanced declaration with which this article ends: Canadians will increasingly have
to occupy the middle groundtaking the most worthy ideas from the reformers, while
keeping the best of the Western tradition (Fennell 43). Setting aside the gross distortion
involved in the assumption that advanced work in the human sciences is automatically
opposed to the Western tradition, connoisseurs of journalistic balance may want to
consider how much space the second cover story about the universities in this same issue
of Maclean's (Jenish and Lowther) gives to statements of opinion abut political
correctness. By my count, the article is weighted by a ratio of more than eight to one in
favour of those like President Bush who want to persuade us that a monolithic leftist
11 The Rushton case does raise the issue of free speechbut also, more distinctly, that of professional
competence. Any scholar has the right, within the limits of our legislation against the dissemination of
racial hatred, to air claims about race, sexuality, and intelligence. But if the scientific work adduced in
support of these claims is racially motivated and methodologically unsound, it is by no means evident
what right such a person has to air them as a university professor. Nor is it evident, given that the
attributes in question cannot be meaningfully studied in abstraction from a social context, and that no
social context untainted by systemic racism is available, in what sense work of this kind could ever
claim scientific respectability.

conspiracy is threatening free speech and deforming the study of literature and the human
sciences on this continent. Perhaps it would be worth asking why, if ideologically
motivated intolerance had indeed become a major problem on our campuses,
exaggeration and slanted reporting on this scale should be required to make us aware of
the fact.

V
But have I been digressing? Is an allusion to the political correctness furore, in
which George Bush and other supposed defenders of free speech seem to be trying very
hard to close down certain forms of literary-theoretical discourse (while at the same time
accusing those whom they would like to intimidate and silence of McCarthyism), wholly
irrelevant to the issues raised by John Ellis's polemic Against Deconstruction?
I think not. For if the wilful distortions by Maclean's magazine of the current
situation in our discipline and our universities seem scandalous, so also (if on a different
scale) do Ellis's misrepresentations of contemporary literary theory. And, given the
manner in which journalistic attacks upon political correctness have fed upon earlier
misrepresentations of literary-theoretical work, one might anticipate that Ellis's
formulations will resurface in future journalistic accounts of academic literary criticism
as a senseless and irrational, yet simultaneously menacing and transgressive subculture. 12
Indeed, Ellis has himself provided some useful signposts for journalistic mudslingers: in
an essay published in 1990 in the London Review of Books, he describes the politics of
Radical Literary Theory as a disaster of simple-mindedness, and likens the
overlapping of deconstruction and Marxism in contemporary theory to the Hitler-Stalin
12 David Lehman has already written, in Signs of the Times, that John Ellis in his book Against
Deconstruction alternates between contesting deconstructive notions and proving that the valid parts of
the theory could be gleanedwithout the excess doctrinal baggagein the works of linguists and
philosophers who preceded Derrida by many years (75-76). But Lehman's book, though openly
prejudiced against literary theory, is above the level of mere journalism; moreover, in the passage to
which Lehman is referring, Ellis makes a serious attempt to document his claims (1989: 37-44).
Characteristically, though, while in this passage Ellis takes Newton Garver's comments on certain
parallels between La voix et le phnomne and the later Wittgenstein as evidence that Derrida is both illread and unoriginal (1989: 42n34), he ignores Garver's further remark hat Derrida's concept of
diffrance seems to me to be original with him and to be highly interesting, as well as his judgment
that Derrida's critique of Husserl is a first-class piece of analytical work in the philosophy of language
(Derrida 1973: xxiv, ix). (It should be remarked that this positive assessment has recently been
challenged by J. Claude Evans.)

pact of 1939 (1990: 8).

It could of course be argued that what we are witnessing in such polemics as John
Ellis's, as in the much larger phenomenon of the political correctness furore, is a
reaction against certain kinds of excess. I am willing to concede the legitimacy of John
Ellis's irritation with Teflon Theoryand indeed to add that during the controversy
which followed the rediscovery of Paul de Man's wartime writings some of those,
including Derrida, who wrote in his defence, engaged in sophistries of a kind that did
credit neither to the rhetoric of deconstruction nor to themselves. 13 But I find it hard to
escape the conclusion that Ellis's violations of the ideal of theoretical discourse that he
himself enunciates surpass the worst such offences on the part of deconstructionists.
Let us also admit that there have been recent occasions in the United States when,
as in the Cannizzo case in this country, over-zealous or injudicious opponents of racism,
misogyny, and homophobia within the universities may have infringed upon the rights of
other people.14 A principled stand is called for in such casesand more distinctly, I
would insist, in the far more numerous instances in which people within the universities
have been wronged on account of their subversive methodological commitments or
political views, have been subject to racial or sexual harassmentor, more subtly, have
been and still are victimized by a systemic racism, misogyny, and homophobia.
Those who take such a stand will very quickly find themselves in opposition to
the drum-beaters of the American rightabout whose high-minded professions of
humane values there is no need to be nave. To give just one example, Dinesh D'Souza,
13 I refer to certain of the essays which appeared in Hamacher, Hertz, and Keenanand most particularly
to Derrida's Like the Sound of the Sea Deep Within a Shell: Paul de Man's War (which appears also in
Derrida 1989). While honouring Derrida's grief and his wish to defend the memory of a close friend, I
would at the same time argue that his reading of de Man's wartime journalism evades and obfuscates
some of the hard issues which those writings present to us.
14 The most notorious instance of the suppression of free speech by the politically correct turns out,
however, to have been a malicious fiction created by unprincipled journalists and members of the rightwing National Association of Scholars. A lecture by two members of the NAS was delivered at the State
University of New York at Binghamton on March 14, 1991. According to a videotape and audio
recording of the event, and also to the evidence of eyewitnesses (including a student newspaper reporter,
a reporter for a local TV station, an on-campus plainclothes policeman, and members of the faculty), the
lecture was interrupted for some four minutes by a student in the audience, who was then restrained by
other students, among the head of the Black Student Union. The lecture was delivered without further
interruptions and was followed by a question and answer session, after which the lecturers and their
audience dispersed peaceably. A quite different account of this event, derived from NAS members,
appeared in the Binghamton Press & Sun-Bulletin in early April. According to this version, a violent
mob had imitated the tactics of the Nazis' heyday, Stalin's reign of terror, and Mao's cultural
revolution. This story was taken up by the Wall Street Journal in an editorial entitled Return of the
Storm Troopers (April 10), and subsequently by the New York Post, under the titles Outrage at SUNYBinghamton, and The Brownshirts and the Cowards. (See Beers 34-35, 64).

author of the much-discussed book Illiberal Education, has written in a conciliatory tone
that It is not always possible in disputes like those that have arisen in American
universities for a reasonable person, in good conscience, to take any side; there is a good
deal of excess all around. The middle ground seems to have disappeared on campus, and
whether it can be restored is an open question (Illiberal 52). But are his own
credentials as a bemused would-be occupant of this middle ground any better than
those of Maclean's magazine? D'Souza does mention, among the supposedly scattered
forces still engaged in resistance to the victims' revolution that he blames for this
unhappy situation, the off-campus Dartmouth Reviewas editor of which in the early
1980s he says (in curiously bland terms) that he witnessed first-hand engagement with
the administration... (Illiberal 18-19). What he neglects to say is that this
engagement took place over Dartmouth College's efforts to attract women, blacks, and
native Americans as studentsand that under his direction the Review published a series
of violently racist attacks on minority groups at Dartmouth.15
While D'Souza's recent past cannot be taken to invalidate the arguments of his
book, it may tarnish somewhat his claim to the good conscience of a neutral witness.
His past (which also includes the writing of an adulatory biography of the evangelist
Jerry Falwell, published in 1984) may in addition raise the possibility that he has chosen
and manipulated his evidence in the service of an extremist agenda 16although the more
charitable hypothesis that he has failed to understand his evidence will on occasion seem
more persuasive. (Where else could literary scholars learn that Much of modern literary
criticism is based on the surprising premise that poems and novels do not mean anything
in particular, and that this notion, which is shared by numerous schools of criticism
15 During D'Souza's tenure at The Dartmouth Review, the paper published an interview with a former
leader of the Ku Klux Klan, illustrating it with a staged photograph of a black man hanging from a tree
on the Dartmouth campus, and an article on affirmative action written in what was supposed to be a
parody of black speech ('Now we be comin' to Dartmut and be up over our 'fros in studies, but we still
not be graduatin' Phi Beta Kappa'); it once ran the slogan 'The only good Indian is a dead Indian' on its
back page; and it printed documents stolen from the office of the Gay Student Alliance, that revealed the
homosexuality of at least two Dartmouth students who did not wish it to be made public (Menand
101).
16 It seems worth noting that D'Souza, in claiming that Stanford University's revised liberal arts survey
course substitutes radical third-world texts for European classics in a wholesale manner, does not bother
to mention that seven of the eight tracks available to students in this course retain the traditional
structure. Since the presence of a significant number of European classics in the eighth track as well
the only one he discussescannot be disguised, D'Souza objects to the manner in which these are
taught, finding it an indignity to suggest (in the words of the course outline) that Shakespeare in The
Tempest drew on contemporary reports of natives in the newly discovered 'new world' (D'Souza
1991s: 70-71). Has D'Souza perhaps not bothered to read this play?

based on the denial of textual meaning: formalism, hermeneutics, psychoanalytic theory,

semiotics, structuralism, Marxism, deconstructionism, can be traced back to Ren
Wellek and Austin Warren's Theory of Literature [Illiberal 177]?)
I believe there is a similar need for scepticism with respect both to the arguments
and, more important, the goals of polemicists like John Ellis who would like to re-define
literary theory as a system of checks and controls, the principal function of which could
only be to silence critical work that those with power in such matters felt to be
subversive. Of course, since theoretical writing of any kind tends to imply that certain
critical orientations are more interesting than others, it might be remarked that dominant
theories, whether New Critical or deconstructive, have already tended to displace and
thus to silence those other forms of criticism that by their criteria are not of interest. But
this has never been more than a secondary effect of literary-theoretical discourse, a byproduct of the preoccupation of theorists with issues of representation, context, authority,
intention, and the like.
What would be the results of making reflection on what is and what is not in
principle worthwhile (Ellis 1989: 159) into the primary function of literary theory? One,
I suspect, would be a gradual re-moulding of the literary theorist into the image of the
cultural commissar;17 another might be a legitimizing of academic muggings of the sort
perpetrated by John Ellis upon his fellow-Germanist James McGlathery.
To conclude. In evoking the current political correctness controversy as a
context within which contemporary debates over literary-theoretical matters must now
unavoidably be situated, I do not mean to suggest that we should mute our discussions for
fear of their being taken up and distorted by journalists or unscrupulous politicians.
Prudential arguments are seldom very appealing; and it is now perhaps late in the day to
warn that should literary scholars fall into the habit of routinely identifying this or that
group among their peers as kettle-menders, Visigoths, head-bangers, jackdaws, gangsters,
or what you will, there is some chance that the word will start to get around in a manner
that may not reflect credit on the level of intellectual discourse within the profession as a
whole.
17 I am thinking of Stalin's cultural commissar A.A.Zhdanov, who on the basis of his moral and political
principles had no difficulty in determining what was or was not worthwhile: his literary interventions
included the declaration that there could be no place in Soviet literature for a satirist like Zoshchenko,
or for poets like Osip Mandelstam and Anna Akhmatova who sought to deprive literature of its high
ideological and social significance and to drag it down into the morass of meaninglessness and
cheapnessand no place either for the bestial malice of theorists like Merezhkovsky (Craig 518-21).

But there may be better reasons for subjecting to a cool and sustained examination
the tone in which we conduct our debates, the kinds of argumentation and of evidence
that we regard as acceptable, and the forms of closure and exclusion that our arguments
imply. For if we would like journalists and politicians, on those occasions when they
deign to take notice of literary scholarship, to make some effort to tell the truth about us,
do we not have a prior obligation to tell the truth about one another? And if, whatever our
methodological commitments, we are willing to accept as valid, let alone to praise, such
declensions as those of John Ellis from the standards of our discipline, with what degree
of integrity can we uphold those standards ourselves?

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