Endnotes
1. Jonathan Loesberg is correct, I believe, in seeing deconstruction as a useful means of establishing “the value of analyzing historical and political questions with certain techniques of literary and aesthetic interpretation”; this, in the hope that it “will provide an exit from all political, institutional, and conventional constraints.” Loesberg quotes a passage from Limited Inc., which ought to give the lie to the charge that deconstruction is politically inert, or merely relativist, commenting: “This version of deconstructive politics bases itself on Derrida’s claim that since all conventions are violable, they can be enforced only by some form of police, combined with the suggestion that one could simply not invoke conventions and step outside the police state. Thus Derrida ends his argument with Searle: ‘I will not claim the copyright because ultimately…there is always the police and a tribunal ready to intervene each time that a rule [constitutive or regulative, vertical or not] is invoked in a case involving signatures, events, or contexts…If the police is always waiting in the wings, it is because conventions are by essence violable and precarious’ ” (Loesberg, Jonathan, Aestheticism and Deconstruction: Pater, Derrida, and De Man [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991] 161–162).
Seen from this point of view, the most modest seminar group, even one whose subject matter is not overtly political, could function as a nuclear legislative council of sorts––or an anti-legislature, if its topic of discussion happened to be the abolition of regulation.
2. A number of observers take the view that there is an “hegemony of literary theory over the past generation” (Reed Way Dasenbrock, ed. Literary Theory After Davidson [University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 1993] 186) at college and university level, and that “a complex combination of analytic and post structuralism conventionalism currently ‘holds the field’ ” (Stanley Fish, quoted in Dasenbrock 185).
I think that this view is mistaken, and take up position alongside critics such as Stein Haugom Olsen (The End of Literary Theory, Cambridge, UK:Cambridge University Press, 1987), who though conceiving of a “central role for some form of intentionalism in the identification and interpretation of a literary work” (26), warns against the continuing use of an unexamined notion of intention: “Even today [Olsen writes] there is a strong need to be constantly aware of the highly insidious theoretical assumption about the critical importance of the causal connection between the author and the work” (32).
