The Post
How
long will it be, if ever, before we can dispense with the post?
Perhaps the post implies its own removal at some stage--so we can say we
are no longer post anything, we are what we are.
But the removal of the post must occur subsequently to the putting into
abeyance of that to which the post is prefixed.
Otherwise the old order (e.g., colonialism) would return.
I do not intend to remove the post, nor to reveal perhaps that behind it
lies some coherent positive philosophy. Rather,
I want to suggest that what the post disguises perhaps does not exist. But that this perhaps not, as the supplement to a certain
deconstruction, implies a kind of necessity, a necessary undecidability, without
which there would be no theory at all.
What
follows is an expanded version of the text of a talk, originally presented at a
workshop seminar organized by The Centre for Advanced Studies at the National
University of Singapore, under the rubric “Experience and Interpretation
across Domains.” I had been
specifically asked to talk about deconstruction in the context of theories of
postmodernism. The talk was
interrupted early on, partly owing to my invitation for participants to do so,
and it degenerated into disjointed discussion, so was not presented in full on
the day. Two weeks of e-mail
discussion followed and the present version includes interpolations based upon
some of my replies to selected responses. The
argument is an attempt to ward off in advance those responses that may have been
determined by expectations based on premature or prejudicial understandings of
the term deconstruction, and it begins with an attempt to problematise (easy to
do as it happens) the prefix post-. The
paper cannot be regarded as having been a success.
I prefer to see it as a rather good failure. It takes the form of a series of lemmas.