It is not a question of defending radical thought. Every
idea one defends is presumed guilty, and every idea that cannot defend itself
deserves to disappear. On the other hand, one must fight all charges of
irresponsibility, nihilism, or despair. Radical thought is never depressive. On
this point, there is nearly total misunderstanding. Ideological and moralistic
critique, obsessed with meaning and content, obsessed with the political
finality of discourse, never takes into account writing—the act of writing: the
poetic, ironic, allusive force of language, of the juggling with meaning. It
does not see that the resolution of meaning is to be found there—in the form
itself, the formal materiality of expression.
…
Critics,
being unhappy by nature, always choose ideas as their battleground. They do not
see that if discourse always tends to produce meaning, language and writing,
for their part, always create illusion; they are the living illusion of
meaning, the resolution of the infelicity of meaning by the felicity of
language. And this is surely the only political—or transpolitical—act that can
be accomplished by the person who writes.
