Alan White

Of Grammatolatry: Deconstruction as Rigorous Phenomenology?

We are here, according to our program, to discuss phenomenology and deconstruction. Before I do that, I would like to address a preliminary question: why discuss deconstruction at all? Deconstruction is, after all, a part of the “post-modernist contribution” that, according to an article in a recent academic journal, is itself nothing more that “a spectacular PR maneuver” that has “succeeded in repackaging and marketing—especially in English Departments all too well-known for intellectual under¬development—what had been previously bemoaned as ontological Angst into playfulness and joy: transcendental homelessness for the nie-generation”?1 Discussion of such a development might well have a place at meetings of the Modern Language Association, but we gather here under the auspices of the American Philosophical Association, and even if we cannot be certain that the APA contains no pockets of “intellectual underdevelopment,” it remains true that, as John Searle has reported, “deconstruction [has] found little appeal among professional philoso¬phers”—as opposed, of course, to literary critics.2