Stanley Fish, working from Francois Cusset’s forthcoming book on French post-structuralism in American political life, suggests that, in the end, deconstructionism is an innocent epistemological mode:

All we lose (if we have been persuaded by the deconstructive critique, that is) is a certain rationalist faith that there will someday be a final word, a last description that takes the accurate measure of everything.

And that, in sum, is losing everything. Fish observes that we can still make truth-claims and subsequent arguments as to their validity. But these claims and arguments lose their titles to non-reflexivity, and thus bind up their arguments within the latticework of the argument itself. Or, in other terms, we can still make arguments about why things are true or not true, but such arguments can be as self-replicating as “I feel it to be true.”

I’m coming slowly to believe in something which I call ‘absurd rationality.’ I realize that the hyper-rational project reflects a mentally atrophied way of looking at the world. But to reject the idea that we as humans can attempt at making links towards the extrapersonal world out of hand is akin to the blank resignation Camus’s suicide victim. What is required of us it keep plugging at the genuine attempt for extrapersonal honesty even in the face of the impossibility of this project; we must sustain a crusade for something which we simultaneously know to be unwinnable, and, in so doing, commit ourselves to the process of small-e enlightenment rather than the endpoint of large-E Enlightenment.