Reading as Resistance and Value

Abstract

This book attempts to do literary criticism as if reading were resistance rather than identification. It does its work in the light of recent ‘post-structuralist’ theories in that it tries to do literary criticism ‘after theory’.³ It is concerned, therefore, with the question of whether or not we can now still read individual texts, how we might do it and what the results might look like. Part of the resistant atmosphere of the following pages is indicated by my desire to resist three possible tendencies and yet still be able to practise a significant discussion of literature and its uses. In the first place, I resist a structuralist insistence that discussions of literature are general and scientific, revealing general rules for literary texts but having nothing to do with specific texts. Secondly, I resist the assumption that post-structuralism has also done away with the discussion of individual works of literature by destroying the Book and replacing it with the general text, or intertext. And, finally, since I want to continue to be able to discuss individual texts in a deconstructive way, I must resist my own tendencies to drop back into a simple formalism like that of the old New Criticism. In part, this resistance entails deliberately using notions of form, as in the discussion of Orwell for instance, and arguing that by inverting our ideas of form it is possible still to be discussing ‘literature’, as a distinct and valuable mode of discourse, and yet to make the discussions of literature not merely literary.

Emancipation from this language [of form] must be attempted. But not as an attempt at emancipation from it, for this is impossible unless we forget our history. Rather, as the dream of emancipation. Nor as emancipation from it, which would be meaningless and would deprive us of the light of meaning. Rather, as resistance to it, as far as is possible. In any event, we must not abandon ourselves to this language with the abandon which today characterizes the worst exhilaration of the most nuanced structural formalism. Criticism, if it is called upon to enter into explication and exchange with literary writing, some day will not have to wait for this resistance first to be organized into a ‘philosophy’ which would govern some methodology of aesthetics whose principles criticism would receive.

(Jacques Derridal¹)

Let us say, provisionally, that the critic, employing a new language, brings out a difference within the work by demonstrating that it is other than it is.

(Pierre Macherey²)