The survival of truth after Derrida

Abstract

Although Jacques Derrida, not Michel Foucault, is the principal subject of this paper, I want to begin with Foucault's brilliantly succinct definition of his project as 'that which is susceptible of introducing a significant difference in the field of knowledge, at the cost of a certain difficulty for the author and the reader, with, however, the eventual recompense of a certain pleasure, that is to say of access to another figure of truth' (Foucault, 1997, p. vii). I cite this definition because it directly contradicts a scandalously mistaken representation of the work of Foucault and Derrida. That mistaken notion is that their work sets out to undermine and discredit truth, value, aesthetic pleasure, and ethically responsible political action. In fact, precisely the opposite is the case. Both Foucault and Derrida relentlessly and systematically labour to establish a critically vital foundation for truth, value, meaning, pleasure, and moral action. Far from denying meaning in language, they assert that language is replete with meaning. They are likewise champions of truth, value, pleasure, and morality when these are reflective, responsible, and critically grounded (see particularly Norris, 1987, pp. 54-6,150-5). In order to proceed with my principal claim, which is, that truth not only survives but flourishes after Derrida, I must briefly distinguish deconstruction and poststructuralism from postmodernism, with which they are often mistakenly identified. Postmodernism is a cultural style, like classicism and romanticism; and like those styles, it can never be securely defined, though it can be described. A place to start is with modernism, which is given a useful definition by James Joyce's Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, for whom the essential characteristic of works of modern art is unity. For him aesthetic unity consists in the integrity of the various parts of the aesthetic object, the eventual consonance of all momentarily apparent discords, and the ultimate clarity of a work's purpose or meaning. In different degrees and in different ways, postmodernism and poststructuralism call this ideological aesthetic of modernism into question. Poststructuralism works within the ideology of modernism, calling into question its presuppositions, examining the grounds of truth, meaning, and value in the interest of providing truth, meaning, and value with a more stable