Nineteenth-Century Literary Criticism | Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich - William Desmond (essay date 1985)

William Desmond (essay date 1985)

SOURCE: Desmond, William. “Hegel, Dialectic, and Deconstruction.” Philosophy and Rhetoric 18, no. 4 (1985): 244-63.

[In the following essay, Desmond contends that, despite their differences, Hegel's dialectic is an important precursor to the theory of deconstructionism.]

I

The topic of deconstruction is one of the most controversial, if not the most controversial issue, in recent literary theory. A measure of this controversy is the manner in which advocates of deconstruction and its antagonists tend to square off against one another, each confronting his opposite with highly combative rhetoric. The very term “deconstruction” itself carries something of this agonistic spirit. Traditionalists, non-deconstructionists, tend to respond with a matching animus. Yet what is at stake in the controversy is not always adequately spelled out. The deconstructionists do not always present a clear...

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