Deconstruction and Political Critique: A Response to Stella Gaon

My response to Stella Gaon's erudite and thought-provoking The Lucid Vigil consists of three parts. First, I briefly indicate my approach to deconstruction, marked by feminism and interests in critical race theory, because it shapes my reading of Gaon's work. Second, I outline key contributions of the book and suggest their growing importance to new cultural and political contexts not directly engaged in the book, such as a post-critical turn in the humanities and the undermining of critique by AI. Third, following Gaon's own methodology, I suggest a retroactive re-interpretation of the primarily structural arguments of the book from the perspective of psychoanalytic and socio-historical insights developed in concluding chapters (11 and 12) concerning libidinal, cultural, and political dimensions of rationality and subjectivity. Questioning the oppositions between logic and rhetoric, heteronomy and autonomy, formalism and empiricism, libidinal fantasies and socio-historical codes of power, these chapters are not only the most original contribution of The Lucid Vigil, but they also open a possibility of new relations between deconstruction and theories of emancipatory politics.