The Wake of Deconstruction

Is deconstruction dead? Was it ever alive? What gives these questions their urgency is what Barbara Johnson sees as the continuing determination by journalistic commentators to misrepresent, to misread, or not to read the writings by such theorists as Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man. Similarly, at the heart of the problem for her is the determination of feminist and other politically engaged writers to assert the disabling consequences for activism that deconstructive reading promotes. The celebration of ambiguity and other forms of polysemy in contemporary literary theory, she argues, has been strangely yet persistently falsified as a denial of meaning.