Watch out for literary critics. They can get feisty.
The D. Crew vs. Bad Politics
No question has vexed deconstruction as much as the question of politics.
Almost from the beginning, haters accused Derrida and friends of holding themselves above the political. Deconstructionists refused, these people said, to get their hands dirty in the hyper-political 1960s, when hand-dirtying was de rigueur… and anything short of commitment to a revolution was siding with the enemy.
According to the haters, Derrideans preferred to dwell in the philosophical ether. They spent their time spinning out exquisite readings of already widely read classics, not saving lives. Sadly, we think, this accusation stuck to deconstruction like glue, and controversies like the de Man affair didn't help.
Neither did Derrida's allegiance—critical and endlessly complicated though it always was—to Herr Heidegger's.
But deconstruction did, eventually, join the political fracas. In its own way, of course. With critiques of violence. Throughout the 1990s, and well into the first decade of the new millennium, theorists loyal to Derrida took pains to articulate deconstruction's politics. They tried hard, in other words, to show that deconstruction wasn't what its detractors said it was: apolitical and hopelessly out of touch.
During the last decades of his life, Derrida himself turned to politics with increasing explicitness and urgency. Maybe he got tired of all the haters' attacks.
Meanwhile, people as different as Spivak and Hartman worked tirelessly to defend deconstruction. This theory's biggest advocates have always worked to show people how helpful it can be to radical causes of all kinds. And, you know, we're pretty convinced.