The Division of Literature, or, The University in Deconstruction.

Gross, David S.

Peggy Kamuf. Chicago. University of Chicago Press. 1997. vii + 259 pages. $42 ($16.95 paper). ISBN 0-226-42323-9 (42324-7 paper).

The Division of Literature is an interesting, unusual book. It is also frustrating, jargony, and willfully obscure. The political conclusions and implications favored by the author are all too typically those of what one might term the American professorial deconstructionist. But the book is erudite, thought-provoking, and richly diverse in sources and in objects of scrutiny.

The author, Peggy Kamuf, is a professor of French and comparative literature, and the remarkable concatenation of nineteenth- and twentieth-century French and American writers she discusses represents comparative literature at its best and is probably the most interesting aspect of the book. She begins with Poe and Baudelaire and proceeds by way of Kant and some contemporary "culture wars" voices such as Gerald Graff, John Guillory, Tony Bennett, and George Will, then an extended discussion of such nineteenth-century French pedagogical figures as Condorcet, La Harpe, l'abbe Gregoire, Hegel, and Taine on science, such twentieth-century French educational thinkers as Lanson and Peguy, finally to the most detailed discussion in the book, of Melville's Confidence Man and Benito Cereno, and a conclusion by way of Emily Dickinson. This heterogeneous collection provides the occasion for some interesting observations. Kant dominates the first half, in ways which are often interesting, and the treatment of Melville is especially original, thoughtful, and quite convincing.

The ostensible "subject" of the book is the place of "literature" in the modern university, the pseudo-universality of the university, and the arbitrary nature of all its divisions. It is in fact a defense of Derridean deconstruction and a demonstration of its utility, through a close deconstructionist reading of Melville. The reading of Melville is by far the more successful. The critic's "playful" use of the language of the credit-banking system as a way into The Confidence Man yields remarkable results, for which she deserves credit. As an engagement in the so-called "culture wars" the book is less persuasive. Kamuf jumps through elaborate hoops in order to arrive at the all-too-predictable conclusion that deconstruction wins over opponents on both the Right and the Left, since the failure of both camps to endorse radical indeterminacy ensures their slide into totalizing and the totalitarian. Her triumphant endorsement of the indeterminacy of all meaning is certainly a point that has been insisted upon sufficiently over the last thirty years. Moreover, her claim that the only value to "literature" is the indeterminacy it brings to all meanings - thereby functioning as a condition of possibility for all divisions of the university - is at once too broad and sweeping and too limited.

Kamuf refers to "the fact that every act of meaning is possible only because it is impossible to guarantee its certain delivery at an intended destination." It is typical of the deconstructionist position that she states as "fact" the radical impossibility of determining the factual! In her reading of Melville "the disquieting suspicion begins to stir that none of this holds up or together, that it is from the first step divided and therefore full of blanks and bottomless holes, to the point that one gets lost, I lose myself - the 'I' loses itself." Surely it is not to me alone that such writing seems precious. It is a shame that Kamuf's obvious insight and erudition are linked to such self-indulgent obscurantism, to the point where the very real value of her book is lost, in Stephen Crane's fine phrase, "in a mysterious fog of theory."

David S. Gross University of Oklahoma