Barbara Johnson on Derrida
and deconstructive reading
from "On Writing" in Lentricchia and McLaughlin, eds, Critical Terms
for Literary Study:
Just as Freud rendered dreams and slips
of the tongue readable rather than dismissing them as mere nonsense
or error, so Derrida sees signifying force in the gaps, margins, figures,
echoes, digressions, discontinuities, contradictions, and ambiguities of
a text. When one writes, one writes more than (or less than, or other than)
one thinks. The reader's task is to read what is written rather than simply
attempt to intuit what might have been meant.
The possibility of reading materiality,
silence, space, and conflict within texts has opened up extremely productive
ways of studying the politics of language. If each text is seen as presenting
a major claim that attempts to dominate, erase, or distort various "other"
claims (whose traces nevertheless remain detectable to a reader who goes
against the grain of the dominant claim), then "reading" is its extended
sense is deeply involved in questions of authority and power. One field
of conflict and domination in discourse that has been fruitfully studied
in this sense is the field of sexual politics. Alice Jardine, in Gynesis
(1985), points out that since logocentric logic has been coded as 'male'
the "other" logics of spacing, ambiguity, figuration, and indirection are
often coded as "female," and that a critique of logocentrism can enable
a critique pf "phallocentrism" as well....
The writings of Western male authorities
have often encoded the silence, denigration, or idealization not only of
women but also of other "others." Edward Said, in Orientalism (1978),
analyzed the discursive fields of scholarship, art, and politics in which
the "Oriental" is projected as the "other" of the European. By reading
against the grain of the writer's intentions, he shows how European men
of reason and benevolenced could inscribe a rationale for oppression and
exploitation within their very discourse of Enlightenment.