The aspect of deconstructive practice that is best known in the United States is its tendency towards infinite regression. The aspect that intersts me most, however, is the recognition, within deconstructive practice, of provisional and intractible starting points in any investigative effort; its disclosure of complicities where a will to knowledge would create oppositions; its insistence that in disclosing complicities the critic-as-subject is herself complicit with the object of her critique; its emphasis upon "history" and upon the ethico-political as the "trace" of that complicity...
-Gayatri Spivak, "Draupadi"
Everything in this remark needs to be opposed. It is not that the aspect of "deconstructive practice" that Spivak brings out here is not an aspect of what Derrida is constantly talking about--that is, the remark does not need to be opposed because it is a misinterpretation of what Derrida said (a useless fiction, especially in this case). It needs to be opposed because it takes what Derrida says and grafts it onto a logic of complicity. Before we get into what "complicity" means here, we have to remark that even the graft is not in itself bad: this is not a logic that is foreign to "deconstructive practice," indeed (as many remarks of Derrida himself testify). However, it is clear that the logic of complicity is one that relies upon concepts that this practice from the get-go disrupts. In short, Spivak wants to act as if this graft works only one way--for her it is the "positive" aspect of "deconstructive practice." But in grafting this practice to this logic, the logic is necessarily disrupted by the practice. Complicity is not the end-all, be-all of this "practice." It is, therefore, precisely what cannot be totally "disclosed," what can work as a "starting point" for analysis.
But what is this logic of complicity? Why does it contain that which this "deconstructive practice" disrupts? Well, we can see what Spivak says: the complicity is like a point, a point "where a will to knowledge would create oppositions." It is that which her practice (I'll refer to "deconstrutive practice" this way, indirectly, as Spivak's practice, since I find the phrase awkward and misleading) discloses. But shouldn't we be suspicious of any assertion that said Derrida was trying to effectively disclose something? Or even that what he did in effect, as a byproduct, disclosed something? Disclosure in Derrida is interrupted as soon as it begins. Now, Spivak is saying that we should pay attention to the trace of this disruption--this is what is amazing about her practice to her, and what constitutes that point, that "provisional" "where" with which to begin furthering her practice along. And this would be right, except that she thinks of this trace as a trace of complicity. And here everything goes awry. Again it is not an issue of whether this is wrong--Spivak is usually always technically right, which is why she is hard to criticize (and so resistant to criticism)--but about how the particular way this being-right is colored, such that, if it were taught or disseminated or overheard--and here is the crucial point, the crucial point in the history of the interpretation of Derrida in the United States--it would be misunderstood. One can say this is just moving the accusation of misunderstanding one step back. Perhaps this is right. But that would be precisely to overlook what is historically significant about the transmission of Derrida in the United States: the fact that it was taught precisely as what could allow students to find in texts points where Western discourse was complicit in atrocities. In short, it is what allowed his theory to become criticism.
Now, I am saying that we need to oppose complicity as a logic with which to interpret this theory of Derrida's (one that is not even totally a theory, and what I say only has a weak relationship to other theory--however, I keep calling it this because the conclusions here might indeed apply to theory in general in the US). I don't personally assert this, either: it is where the theory is already going in America as we speak. Doesn't this mean extracting and extricating the theory from criticism, then? In the end, I would say, yes. The theory has to cease its critical function, which is precisely a pragmatic function of finding complicities. Only then can it become theory--that is, a theory of those complicities, whatever they may be. And insofar as this is the case, it is only the case for criticism understood in the most boring, colloquial sense of the word: that is, as a statement with negative value judgement implied. Insofar as this is an argument for theory after criticism, it is also an argument for criticism after criticism.
This is not to say that this theory or criticism would be a discourse free of complicity: it means, however, that theory would not become, as it has in Spivak's case--and, I would argue, Zizek's (though he is getting better--one might summarize this whole effort of opposition I am arguing for under his motto, "forget, but never forgive") as well as Stanley Fish's (also Laclau, in a big way)--theory would not become primarily the effort to avoid those complicities. One can fight to free theory from criticism and move it towards the realm of description (which is what I'll call theory sans complicity for now), without it also extricating it from any complicity it might participate in. The difference is, however, that this description does not confuse what it describes as something that is "disclosed," or "recognized." In short, it does not make the mistake of thinking that the only form of working against a bad situation--whether this opposition be ethical, political, or whatever--is looking for and pointing out its complicity. Political opposition, for example, without this pragmatism would be precisely that criticism which we are saying is after or beyond criticism.
Perhaps most important, this description would not see what is described as a "starting point"--opposed, that is, to something that isn't. We would get the feel for how what Derrida says is precisely a trace that allows no pragmatic way of orienting oneself to it. With respect to "deconstructive practice," this means rediscovering in it precisely that "tendency towards infinite regression" that Spivak dismissed. It remains, I think, to be felt in the US--we have been too busy with historicist studies and politics. History and politics, as well as ethics, might only be able to really be addressed if we make this felt or at least widely and in a dim way sensed.
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