American deconstruction stripped political radicalism from French theory into a hermetic textual technology.

Evidence

The overall thrust of American deconstruction was in any case highly rechnicist, shorn of whatever political radicalism there might have been in the original French formation; the net effect was to make the text entirely hermetic. If the New Critics had privileged the isolated text in order to contemplate its beauty and principle of coherence, deconstruction isolated it for identifying the principle of dissolution inherent in irs very textuality; but the closure of the text, its hermetic distancing, was in either case the precondition for its reading. That Frye, Bloom and de Man were all attracted, in their respective ways, by versions of the irrational, the religious and the Romantic contributed to a structure of feeling in American literary criticism which was implicirly already hostile to rationalism and therefore particularly receptive to sloganeering against the Enlightenment, and so on, when the fashion arrived from Paris. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 229

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Ahmad’s broader critique of postcolonial/discourse theory as materially evasive; the hermetic text is the enabling move that lets discourse-determinism obscure class structure. — connects to: The radical literary-theory current was absorbed into poststructuralism and de-radicalized — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 243; Deconstruction and structuralism, not Western Marxism, formed the theoretical ground of 1980s American criticism — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 239; Academic theory domesticated 1960s political dissent into textual culture — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 23 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• The radical literary-theory current was absorbed into poststructuralism and de-radicalized #corroborates (0.95) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 243
• Academic theory domesticated 1960s political dissent into textual culture #corroborates (0.90) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 23
• Colonial discourse analysis emerged from radical theory’s retreat from immediate activist struggles #expands (0.72) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 365
• Deconstruction and structuralism, not Western Marxism, formed the theoretical ground of 1980s American criticism #expands (0.70) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 239