The Victorian Freak Show: The Significance of Disability and Phy ...

that the political, libratory work often prioritized within cultural studies is resonant with Foucault's later work. He came to accept “that power relations are never seamless but are always spawning new forms of culture and subjectivity, new opportunities for transformation. Where there is power…there is also resistance” (Bordo 27). Because ideology is practiced and enforced at the level of the subject—though such practice is the result of diffused power rather than autonomous actions—the opportunity to challenge a dominant force is also in the hands of the subject.

For other twentieth-century theorists, however, structured accounts of the operations of language and ideology are fundamentally problematic. Foucault had a sometimes contentious relationship with his former student, philosopher Jacques Derrida, who once suggested that a brief, faulty reading of Descartes in Foucault's Madness and Civilization undermined the coherence of the entire book's argument. ⁵ Foucault famously attacked Derrida's obscurantist writing style and accused Derrida of terrorizing his colleagues with ideas so vague and contradictory that they were nearly impossible to refute. Yet contradiction is at the heart of Derrida's writing: his most consistent rhetorical approach is an attack on the search for certainty within language and metaphysics. Derrida accepts the structuralist assertion that language is essential for thought and depends on arbitrary relationships between signifiers and the signified, but because (as Saussure suggests) signifiers only have meaning in relationship to their differences from other signifiers, Derrida argues that a meaningful relationship between signifier and signified is always deferred. He coins the term “différance” to describe the gap between the components of a sign in which there is room for freeplay and thus an inherent absence of fixed meaning. As structuralist systems depend upon language, all structures share that same instability. The critical act of deconstruction is a search for paradoxes that unmake the meaning of a text.

In practice within the Anglophone critical tradition, Derridean deconstruction has perhaps been applied more literally, systematically, and