Deconstruction paradoxically requires political resistance to stay silent and unprogrammatic

Evidence

But it is impossible now to anticipate the nature of this ‘law’ and ‘force’. Commenting on the paintings, Derrida says: ‘their silence is just. A discourse would compel us to reckon with the present state of force and law. It would draw up contracts, dialecticize itself, let itself be reappropriated.’ … So the resistance to apartheid must remain inarticulate, must not seek to formulate a political programme and strategy: any attempt to do so would simply involve reincorporation into ‘the present state of law and force’ and perhaps even into the ‘European discourse of racism’. If this argument is valid, then the resistance was lost long ago: far from being silent, it is indeed positively garrulous, resorting to define itself to a variety of different discourses — social democracy, Stalinism, black exclusivism, syndicalism, revolutionary socialism, even Islamic fundamentalism. But the contention of these discourses — the stuff of any real liberation struggle — for Derrida presumably amounts merely to variations on the theme of the ‘present state of law and force’. — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism, 321

Categorization

• XREF: This is the heart of the Marxist critique against postmodernism: deconstruction’s refusal to programmatize undercuts the very liberation struggle it claims to support. — connects to: Organic and political traumas blur because both are blows against meaning — Catherine Malabou, The New Wounded: From Neurosis to Brain…, 4366; Masses’ silence functions as counterstrategy against power — Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 288; Institutionalizing a critical field can strip it of political meaning (+9 more)
• DEEPTHINKING: The argument that any political programme is necessarily ‘reappropriation’ — so resistance must stay silent — is dense enough to be a lasting insight about the political limits of poststructuralist theory.

Broader Connections

• A critique of silencing can itself reproduce the silence it indicts #complicates (0.80) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 308
• Masses’ silence functions as counterstrategy against power #corroborates (0.78) — Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 288
• Institutionalizing a critical field can strip it of political meaning #qualifies (0.75)