The idea has got around - among 'advanced' thinkers of various political persuasions - that realist epistemologies are a thing of the past, that truth values in criticism have now been discredited (or shown up as just a figment of bourgeois ideology); that history and politics are textual ( = fictive) phenomena on a par with poems, novels, or whatever other 'kinds of writing' you care to name; and that henceforth the only 'discourse' that counts is one that cheerfully acknowledges all this, along with such assumed faits accomplis as the 'deconstruction' of the humanist subject as a locus of ethical choices, conflicts and responsibilities.

LRB 23 April 1992 | PDF Download