Year: 1995
Type: article
Abstract: One of the distinguishing characteristics of post-structuralist theory is its radical claims about the textuality of human experience. In the view of philosopher Richard Rorty, the theoretical writings of Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault are both characterized by a new theory of textuality that Rorty designates strong textualism. Derrida, Foucault, and other strong textualists, Rorty comments, write as if were nothing but texts. A number of scholarly approaches to the past, including literary new historicism and some variants of post-modern history, have accepted some form of strong textualism. The problem of textuality is central to the entire movement of post-modernism and has serious consequences for the practice of history. Strong textualism effectively deconstructs the conventional historical categories of and context. For strong textualists, context is not a fixed background against which texts are read. Foreground and background are each textualized and the connections between them must be read inter-textually. Opposition to Derrida's radical theory of textuality has been voiced by historians on both the left and right of contemporary academic politics. For critics on the right, Derrida is cast as the most recent in a long line of neo-Nietzschean nihilists, while on the left Derrida is cast as the author of the latest narcissistic French intellectual fad. Derrida's radical claim that there is nothing outside of the text has been mistakenly interpreted to mean that is no material reality, literally nothing outside of language. It makes more sense to interpret this claim
Author: Saul Cornell
Language: English
Subfield: History
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W1774442891