The Lucid Vigil: Deconstruction, Desire and the Politics of Critique by Stella Gaon, New York: Routledge, 2019

Misunderstandings, misreadings, and dismissals of deconstruction and, more generally, the work of Jacques Derrida have been persistent both within and outside academic circles. In spite of previous attempts to show that deconstruction is affirmative and not destructive (Derrida, 1997), that it involves a serious engagement with scholarly work and not a random attack on it or a celebration of incoherence (Naas, 2002), and that it does not spell the end of agency or subjectivity (Peters & Biesta, 2009), Derrida’s work on deconstruction continues to be lumped in with relativism and the desire to undermine the search for truth. Concerns about “alternative facts” and other “post-truth” inventions during the Trump regime produced a new series of attacks against alleged “postmodernists,” including Derrida. In a 2017 interview, Daniel Dennett declared “the postmodernists … responsible for the intellectual fad that made it respectable to be cynical about truth and facts” (Cadwalladr, 2017). In his 2018 Post-Truth, Lee McIntyre called postmodernism “the godfather of post-truth” (p. 150), and explicitly discussed deconstruction’s role in it: In this context of accusations about cynicism and willy-nilly questioning, Stella Gaon’s central claim that deconstruction is driven by “the desire for an unrelenting, lucid vigilance with regard to the (impossible) conditions of critical reason itself” (p. 12, italics in original) is timely and relevant. In The Lucid Vigil, Gaon argues that deconstruction involves a serious, scholarly commitment to critique that does not spare any position from which a critique is offered. Moreover, she explicitly connects deconstruction to postmodernism by arguing that the postmodern attitude, defined by Lyotard (1979/1984) as “incredulity toward metanarratives” (p. xxiv), should be understood not as a free-floating “mood of scepticism” (Gaon, 2019, p. 69) but as a commitment to a questioning and critique driven by a vigilance for the “deconstructive potential” (p. 69) of any principle, standard, or assumption that grounds a claim. One of my most vivid memories of my time as a PhD student is the day I found and began to read John Caputo’s More Radical Hermeneutics (2000). I did not know much about this “Jacques Derrida” whose work he discussed, but I had been studying hermeneutics in the work of Gadamer and Ricoeur. I had been unable to understand how and why the hermeneutic attempts to understand an object of interpretation, and the cyclical return to interrogate earlier interpretations, would ever come to an end, and what would justify such closure. Then I stumbled upon Caputo’s description of Derrida’s uncompromising and unrelenting commitment to tracing the trace, interpreting the interpretation, and critiquing the critique: “Derrida sticks our head back into the text whenever hermeneutics comes up for the air of living speech, its eyes bulging and a look of panic on its face” (p. 54). Finally! I thought. Someone who understands that, if one takes critique seriously, nothing can be declared off limits for critique, and the critical process has no end. I therefore appreciate Gaon’s insistence on the lucid vigil as a “radical, ethical-political critique … without apology, without guarantee and without respite” (p. 251); that is, as a desire for sticking our head back into the text. One of Gaon’s key claims is that critique is driven by a desire that cannot be justified from within the mode of critique, i.e., reason. Critique’s reliance on reason cannot rationally justify itself. Gaon seeks to understand the genesis of the desire for critique; that is, the force that sets it in motion and keeps it going. Gaon turns to psychoanalysis and, in particular, the work of Jean Laplanche to answer the question. In short, it is the tension …