Reading Theory: An Introduction to Lacan, Derrida and Kristeva. - book reviews

The title accurately describes this book. In his preface, Michael Payne declares his intention to examine Lacan's, Derrida's and Kristeva's rhetorical strategies. But he does not mean a formal, systematic study according to the classical categories of composition (ideas, arrangement, style) although he attends to these elements as inseparable from close reading. For example, he emphasizes the complex use of indirect free style by these "three masters of it," because of "the scandalous extent of the misreading and destructive ... misrepresentation" of these authors by readers unwilling to grapple with complex verbal strategies (160). Payne also eschews analysis by rhetorical categories because he wishes to reveal the "elegant structure" of the argument, which only a sequential, beginning-to-end reading provides. Rather, his rhetorical analysis is applied informally in the pursuit of "two modest aims": "to provide a reading of major texts by Lacan, Derrida, and Kristeva and to trace the outlines of the reading theories they propose" (vii). By intensive reading clarified by historical and intertextual contexts of each of the authors, he achieves a series of brilliant explications.

Payne proceeds in five steps (vii). First, in chapter 1, he examines three short articles that serve as introductions to the three authors' works: Lacan's "Seminar on The Purloined Letter'" (1956), Derrida's "Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences" (1966), and Kristeva's "The System and the Speaking Subject" (1973). Next, in chapter 2, he explains seven of the nine papers that Lacan selected for the English-language edition of Ecrits, his collected essays published from 1936 to 1966 (1966). While the original French volume is "like a vast novel or narrative poem" manifesting "continuing tension between the temporal and the spatial as Lacan rewrites his past in the interests of constructing a monumental theoretical text," the papers Lacan chose for Ecrits: A Selection retain "on a smaller scale the architectural shape of the French edition" (26). In chapter 3 Payne comments on key sections of Derrida's Of Grammatology (1967), "his most important book" and "classic statement of and about deconstruction" (vii), "a detailed formulation of Derrida's theories of written language." Chapter 4 studies the first third of Kristeva's La revolution du langage poetique (1974), the only part translated at present. Revolution in Poetic Language is her "most far-reaching theoretical text, as well as the one that links her work most directly to Lacan's Ecrits and Derrida's Of Grammatology" (162). Chapter 5 pulls together how each experiments with ways of writing about paintings: Lacan on Holbein's The Ambassadors (from The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-analysis), Kristeva on Holbein's The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb (from Black Sun), and Derrida on Van Gogh's Old Shoes (from The Truth in Painting). Payne discusses texts translated into English for the convenience of English-speaking readers, but he frequently supplements the translations with reference to the original versions.

Payne's estimation of these authors is extraordinarily high: "No other psychoanalyst has brought to Freud's texts as intellectually and imaginatively powerful a reading as Lacan's"; in the "Heideggerian tradition of theories of writing and textuality no one has made a contribution equal to Jacques Derrida's" (110).

I find the texts considered here extraordinarily stimulating in the vitality

of their thought, in the

art of their prose, and in the rewarding difficulty of their arguments. If

what Lacan writes about

he human subject, what Derrida writes about language, and what Kristeva

writes about the social

practices of the speaking subject are true, then massive reassessments not

only of the humanities

and human sciences but also of human understanding itself are urgently

needed. The claims of

these texts are far-reaching and powerful....

These texts can "transform and... liberate human beings" (ix) because by undermining the "sense of static identity or individuality," they enable us to disrupt and wrest ourselves free from the social and signifying structures into which we were born (ix).

I will concentrate on Payne's "two modest aims": to interpret some texts through close attention to rhetorical technique and to explain the "reading theories" propounded by the texts. Since, however, the complex original texts and therefore Payne's explanations defy the brevity required of a review, I must focus on only one of his subjects, Derrida.

Payne admires Derrida for reasons similar to those expressed by Christopher Norris. In book after book, Norris has defended "the disciplined rigour of [Derrida's and de Man's] arguments" (The Contest of Faculties 74) and has distinguished them from the old New Critics like W. K. Wimsatt and Cleanth Brooks, from their followers in the United States like Geoffrey Hartman, and from the postmodernists like Jean Baudrillard. Payne finds in Derrida's work such a power of scrupulous thinking and consequential argument as to make it impossible to label him a New Critic, poststructuralist, or even a deconstructionist.

Derrida's "Structure, Sign, and Play" is a "brilliant" condensation of Of Grammatology. After briefly establishing the historical context, Payne explains how Derrida opens the essay, how he develops his argument regarding the "structurality of structure," and what his primary purpose is. Woven throughout the essay is a formulation of close reading -- from structure to center to presence to history, all of which depend upon metaphor and metonymy, and all of these producing distance, reflection on, disruption of, metaphysics and history, as we become aware of how much everything is discourse in the sense of being signifieds enmeshed in language and myth. Close reading produces disruption (deconstruction) because metaphorical displacements are "always already" occurring. Derrida illustrates his theory of deconstruction by a critique of Claude Levi-Strauss's The Elementary Structures of Kinship, in which he discovers a process of self-questioning whereby Levi-Strauss calls into question the categories he uses. In conclusion, Derrida explains philosophy as a process of childbearing and questions the metaphor "poststructuralism" because, according to Derrida, philosophy always follows a path to new philosophical thought that has been previously marked by philosophy. Thus Derrida traces his own intellectual lineage back to Rousseau and Nietzsche. Payne explains the ideas of the essay (Derrida's deconstructive reading theory), places those ideas in history, and shows how Derrida "is attending with great care to the textuality" (the organization and the figurative language) of the text.

Likewise in his chapter on Of Grammatology, Payne pursues reading theory and rhetorical technique. Derrida's "concentration on what transpires in the reading of a text" draws attention to his style, "the complex ways of Derrida's essay" (111). Section by section Payne reads Derrida's exploration of the past. The opening preface and exergue provide distinctly different functions (111-16). The preface outlines the structure of the text: theory in part 1, tested in part 2 by an interpretation of the Enlightenment via Rousseau's Essay on the Origin of Languages. Grammatology in part 1, chapter 1; Saussure in chapters 2-3; Levi-Strauss in part 2, chapter 1; Rousseau through Jean Starobinski, in chapters 2-3; Vico, Condillac, and Warburton in chapter 4.

Payne's exergue, in generic contrast, is prophetic. Derrida's grammatology will produce a critical reading of the past as a text revealed by neglected texts. This text of history will be as free as possible from predetermined historical and philosophical categories and will extend meaningfully from the eighteenth century to the present. Derrida focuses upon unexamined metaphysical assumptions and the disruption of those assumptions by "multiple alterities" (114). Religion, social history, and philosophy, which "disguise ethnocentrism as logocentrism," contrast to grammatology, which is liberating (but bound by metaphysics), multiple and interdisciplinary (but never unified), oppositional, reflexive, underground, marginal (115). Grammatology works to bring about the future "by exploiting the stresses and cracks in the structure of the present historical-metaphysical age" (116).

Part 1, chapter 1, "The End of the Book and the Beginning of Writing," continues in this prophetic genre by elaborating the new and fuller way of reading suggested in the exergue, a way that expands and deepens -- that liberates -- a "book" (authorial control, unified design, closure, motionlessness, objectivity) into "writing" (plurivocity, awareness of bounding metaphors, reversibility, a book's potential for dislocating itself), which has always been present in books, was and is "always already" ("toujours de ja") at work in language and texts, a reality glimpsed by Rousseau. Eventually Derrida employs the term "deconstruction" to identify the process he has been examining: that is, for Payne, "the stress created by these gaps in texts (between what they want to say and what they do say) and to the detection of such gaps" (121), which are already there waiting to be perceived. Thus grammatology becomes "the science of writing that studies and celebrates deconstruction's way," which is to "dislocate logocentrism, a movement always already begun ... even in such texts as [Aristotle's] De interpretatione or the Gospel of John" (123), which makes grammatology/deconstruction a "monstrosity." As part of the movement against essentialism, dogmatism, and absolutism in religion and politics and for the production of differance, of differing and deferring, deconstruction functions between structuralism (meaning in structures) and poststructuralism (meaning outside structures) by establishing its critique of the fissures of a text "on the foundation supplied by that text itself" (124).

I have never read a more lucid explanation of these ideas. But Payne, following Derrida, repeatedly reminds us that this defining distorts the science of grammatology. Asking the question "What is ... ?" and offering a classical commentary, both of which instruments for making meaning Payne employs as a matter of course, reflect the "impossible desire of language to limit (define) the unlimited and to make present the permanently elusive" (121), the yearning for transcendence, for the transcendent signifier, for the finalities of religion or philosophy or criticism, which it is the project of grammatology to undermine. "Deconstruction questions the dream of logocentrism," a statement which applies to Of Grammatology, to Reading Theory, and to this review as well because deconstruction examines the crevices always already within closure.

Payne's discomfort with this thoroughly self-critical mode is often explicit: for example, [i]ndeed, [Derrida's] challenge undermines the possibility of deriving any comfort or satisfaction from saying, as here, what is fundamental to his project or of enumerating the distinguishing features of deconstruction, as I have just done" (124). All thought and argument and insight must be subjected to the concept of differance, where the "horizon perpetually recedes as one moves forward on thought's path" in a process of "simultaneous arrival and postponement, approaches and displacements" (129). Payne places this "critical reading" between classical commentary and the chaos of irresponsible, uninformed reading (131, 147). Commentary-explication, recovering the meaning of a writer -- necessary in order to protect a text from drivel (131-32), but Derrida's questioning the "need to ask what is... and the need to find final answers, his agenda to make enigmatic (through his notions of erasure, trace, arche-writing [137-38], and so on) what one thinks one understands by generalizing terms ironically subverts all commentary. Of this paradox of his craft, Payne is thoroughly aware: to give one more example, he claims that section I of chapter 3 in part I of Of Grammatology to be the "center of Derrida's text" (as I found Payne's discussion of part 1, chapter 1, central) were it not "for Derrida's many warnings about centers" (148). He ends his commentary on Of Grammatology by saying not what grammatology is but what deconstruction does: it "celebrates the play in otherwise static structure, points to crevices and openings in conceptualizations that aspire to be definitive." In his final sentence Payne reminds us that "Derrida does these things while making himself continuously susceptible to his own critique, which is more ruthless than anyone else's" (155). Derrida's relentless search for the truth extends even to the writings of his mentor, Martin Heidegger: "Derrida refuses to allow the issue of truth to be sacrificed. `The task of a destruction of the history of ontology,' as Heidegger calls it, continues to be Derrida's principal project, nonetheless when it exposes the terrible fallibility of Heidegger himself' (231). And in accomplishing so well his modest aim of explaining Derrida's "ruthless" theory of reading, Payne has deconstructed (disrupted by critically reflecting on) his own book: "such questions as the ones that begin this paragraph (`What, precisely, is ...') manifest the impossible desire ... to limit (define) the unlimited" (121).

These unsettling arguments about the "temporal processes of writing and reading" -- "event, birth, deconstruction, trace, dissemination, desire, deferring, supplement, absence, appropriation, reappropriation, play, forgetfulness, closure" (110) -- are, we are told, presented in Derrida's experimental style in furtherance of Payne's second purpose:

Indeed, Derrida has conducted wonderfully inventive experiments with the printed page.

... Although Of Grammatology is more traditional in typography [than later

works like

Glas or Cinders], it is nonetheless radical and highly inventive in its

strategies of allusion

and metaphorical argumentation.

In chapter 1, Derrida "appropriates all of the tropological resources of language in the age of Rousseau but then pushes the narrative of this age to the point of its exhaustion in the attempt to go beyond it" (120). 1 wish that Payne had given us more pointed analysis of Derrida's "experimental" style, had found space for a stylistics of Of Grammatology. But the complexity of Derrida's ideas demanded full attention, leaving the second main intention undeveloped.

On the other hand, Payne assiduously and convincingly exhibits the logic of Derrida's elegant arguments, constantly showing how Derrida advances his case in two or (usually) three steps, which make sense at that point and as a part of his whole.

A danger in Payne's account of Derrida is Payne's neglect of Derrida's vulnerability to attack as an ultrarelativist. Many critics denounce Derrida, Jean Baudrillard, Jean-Francois Lyotard, and postmodemists-poststructuralists in general for their extreme epistemological skepticism that undermines the importance of truth-seeking and therefore of politics by diluting issues of truth into issues of discourse, of textuality. In Derrida's constant questioning of centers, of definitive conceptions, of closure, finality, commentary, as represented by Payne (who perceives in these qualities the liberation from all despotisms), Derrida seems systematically, corrosively negative to many readers. For example, Harold Fromm in Academic Capitalism and Literary Value sides with Robert Scholes and John Ellis in indicting Derrida's "hypocrisy" for "avoiding any reference to truth or falsity, in which deconstructionists do not believe" (212).

Christopher Norris has written several books to defend Derrida from this charge. In his latest book, The Truth About Postmodernism (1993), Norris again distinguishes Derrida's emancipatory skepticism from Baudrillard's and Lyotard's (and from Stanley Fish's and Richard Rorty's) extreme skeptical relativism. Norris's argument is particularly engaging in his Uncritical Theory (1992), in which he confronts Baudrillard's irony and language games (and the neopragmatists' consensus values) with the brutal events and systematic deceit of the Gulf War. Although Payne does not confront such issues directly (discussion of Derrida's social writings -- his editing of a collection of essays extolling Nelson Mandela, for example -- would have been helpful), certainly Payne would also deny any complicity on Derrida's part in eroding rational and veridical grounds for opposing oppression and atrocity, and in fact he suggests how Derrida's questioning provides a foundation for opposition to today's countless tyrannies.

Other Works Cited

Derrida, Jacques. Cinders. 1987. Ed. and trans. Ned Lukacher. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1991.

_____. Glas. 1974. Trans. John P. Leavey, Jr. and Richard Rand. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1986.

_____. Of Grammatology trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1976. Trans. of De la grammatologie. Paris: Minuit, 1967.

_____. "Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences." The Structuralist Controversy. Ed. Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato. Johns Hopkins UP, 1972. 247-72. Rpt. in Writing and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1978. 279-93, 339. _____. Truth in Painting. 1978. Trans. Geoff Benington and Ian McLeod. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987.

Fromm, Harold. Academic Capitalism and Literary Value. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1991. Kristeva, Julia. Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia. 1987. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia UP, 1989.

_____. Revolution in Poetic Language. Trans. Margaret Waller. New York: Columbia UP, 1978. Trans. of La revolution du langage poetique: L'avant-garde a la fin du [xix.sup.e] siecle, Lautreamont et Mallarme. Paris: Seuil, 1974.

_____. "The System and the Speaking Subject." Rpt. in The Tell-Tale Sign: A Survey of Semiotics. Ed. Thomas A. Sebeok. Lisse: De Ridder, 1975. 47-55.

Lacan, Jacques. Ecrits: A Selection. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Norton, 1977. Trans. of Ecrits. Paris: Seuil, 1966.

_____. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-analysis. 1973. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Norton, 1978.

_____. "Seminar on The Purloined Letter.'" 1956. Trans. Jeffrey Mehlman Yale French Studies 48 (1972): 38-72.

Levi-Strauss, Claude. The Elementary Structures of Kinship. 1949. Trans. James Harle Bell, John Richard von Sturmer, and Rodney Needham 2nd ed. Boston: Beacon, 1969.

Norris, Christopher. The Contest of Faculties: Philosophy and Theory Deconstruction. London: Methuen, 1985.

_____. The Truth about Postmodernism. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1993.

_____. Uncritical Theory: Postmodernism, Intellectuals and the Gulf War. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1992.

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