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Rajan's Fractile History
Deconstruction and the Remainders of Phenomenology. By Tilottama Raj an. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002. xxi + 363 pages.
After Poststructuralism: Writing the Intellectual History of Theory, ed. Tilottama Rajan and Michael J. O'Driscoll. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002. vi + 344 pages.
Tilottama Rajan's Deconstruction and the Remainders of Phenomenology is a difficult but important book whose project is clearly stated: "This book is not about phenomenology per se. It is rather about the 'fragments' of phenomenology that produce deconstruction and continue to disconcert both deconstruction and its permutation into poststructuralism. For this reason, although phenomenology was so dominant as to exert an anxiety of influence by the sixties, I have tried to present it as unfinished" (23). I concur. What one calls deconstruction and poststructuralism is the "future" of phenomenology upon which one can now look back and historicize, as Rajan does. Indeed, if French Theory has suffered from a rather long history of misunderstanding, it has everything to do with the fact that phenomenology is rarely considered to be of relevance, since most Anglo-American academics see it as a relic that got dropped by the wayside during the decade of the 1970s.
This view of phenomenology is not too surprising, since the cornerstone of Jacques Derrida's (and Michel Foucault's) thinking had always been reputed to be the rejection of consciousness as a legitimate philosophical concept, consciousness having been replaced by language or what Raj an calls "ultratextualism." In his Speech and Phenomena (1973), Derrida presumably invalidated phenomenology in its Husserlian incarnation, never mind the Husserlians who protested to the contrary, precisely by way of critiquing Edmund Husserl's dependency upon voice and his overlooking the overdeterminations of the sign. Given the turn away from Husserl and towards Martin Heidegger, whose notion of Dasein dispenses with Husserlian epistemology, one can see the rejection of classical phenomenology by means of bracketing consciousness itself while, at the same time, engaging expression in terms of semiotic issues: hieroglyph, sign, gramme, écriture, and so on. In other words, by means of bracketing consciousness (intentionality, or vouloir dire), one could examine the "exteriority" of expression in ways that were quite alien to commonsense assumptions concerning the intentionality of meaning or the incarnation of feeling in...