Politics of the Linguistic Turn: A Derridean Afterword

Abstract

This thesis explores the ways that the work of Jacques Derrida, particularly ‘deconstruction’, has been presented over the past four decades within the debate over the ‘linguistic turn’. The thesis focuses in particular, on the opposition between those who endorse and those repudiate the practical value of Derridean philosophy for history. It conducts three case studies, the first of which explores the rhetorical strategies of historians and historical theorists in their characterizations of Derrida and his ideas within two leading disciplinary journals, The American Historical Review and History and Theory. The second case study, explores the argumentative strategies used in some key texts dealing with deconstruction, in which critical discussion of Derrida either generalizes his philosophy or explicates it in details (or both). This second case study attempts to show how respective use of these strategies leads to comparatively different implications for deconstruction’s significance to history. The third case study examines the texts of Gabrielle Spiegel, a medieval historian who has become a leading authority on postmodernism among historians. Spiegel’s corpus is analysed to demonstrate the political nature of her arguments against Derrida, which confine and deflate his significance within the linguistic turn. The goal of the thesis is ultimately to understand the structures of the discourse on Derrida within the discipline of history, in order to understand why he has been a figure of controversy who is so often marginalized, rejected or vilified, and to show how the rhetoric of this debate has left historians with an impoverished understanding of both Derrida and deconstruction.