Excerpt from
Deconstructing the Election: Foucault, Derrida and GOP Strategy

By Win McCormack
(The Nation)
March 26, 2001

The history which bears and determines us has the form of a war rather than that of a language: relations of power, not relations of meaning.

–Michel Foucault,
Power/Knowledge

Michel Foucault would have been fascinated by late-twentieth-century presidential campaigns.

–Lynne Cheney,
Telling the Truth

Since the late 1980s, when they discovered with horror certain French-derived theories of social science and literary analysis that long before then had taken root among left-leaning academics in the United States–essentially replacing Marxist dialectics as weapons of intellectual struggle, in reaction against the failure of radical politics in the 1960s–American conservative intellectuals have held these particular theories under siege. In such books as Tenured Radicals (1990) by New Criterion managing editor Roger Kimball, Illiberal Education (1991) by ex-Reagan White House domestic policy adviser (and former Dartmouth Review editor) Dinesh D'Souza and Telling the Truth (1995) by ex-National Endowment for the Humanities chairwoman and future Vice Presidential spouse Lynne Cheney, and in innumerable interviews, stump speeches and talk-radio tirades, representatives of the American conservative movement have denounced the exponents of these theories for attempting to lure students away from traditional cherished academic ideals like objectivity and truth toward a cynical, despairing view of history, politics, literature and law.

 

to top
link to full article
Comment on it |