Deconstruction in a Nutshell is not an O’Reilly book, and there is no Learning Deconstruction, Programming Deconstruction or Create Advanced Network Applications With Deconstruction to go with it, more’s the pity.

I’ve been thinking recently about the distinction between radicalism and fundamentalism. Radicalism goes to the roots, fundamentalism to the foundations (to the base, Al-Qaeda). Neo-liberal economic doctrine is sometimes referred to by its detractors as “free market fundamentalism”. There was a time, however, when the thinkers behind neo-liberalism were considered radical. Some neo-liberals still do consider themselves to be radicals.

One of Geoffrey Hill’s Mercian Hymns begins, I was invested in mother earth, the crypt of roots and endings. By “roots” and “endings” we are also to understand linguistic roots, word-endings. Etymology as archeology is one of the pivotal tropes of Hill’s poetics. It’s significant that the place of roots and endings is a crypt, a place of sealed obscurity. To go to the roots, you have to go down into the crypt, down among the dead.

To be a radical, I think, is to be invested in a crypt rather than a foundation. There is a strain of liberal invective against “certainties” (that is, the other guy’s certainties) that I find tiresome: foundations are like fundaments, everybody’s got one. To borrow Richard Rorty’s terminology for a moment, the difference is in whether one places one’s trust in a foundationalism, a form of apologetics that attempts to disguise the contingency of its own foundations. Radicalism is the recognition that the roots go deeper and are more confused than foundationalism will allow (or can allow, if its apologetics is to succeed).

Christopher Walker was recently trying to persuade me that right-wing libertarianism rested on a sort of myth of restitution: man in the state of nature exercises a perfect liberty, based on self-ownership and the legitimate appropriation of whatever natural resources happen to be lying around, a liberty that is then compromised and eroded by coercive intervention on the part of the state (which, in the paranoid Randroid version of the story, represents the collective interests of those who cannot or will not prosper on their own initiative). The libertarian project is to restore this “pre-lapsarian” state of liberty, which is then projected as a political end, as something that should exist. This, Christopher tells me, introduces “teleology where it doesn’t belong” (I wonder where it does belong?).

Libertarianism, then, involves the confection of a pure origin, existing prior to the contingent accidents of history, which is then projected as a teleology, a simple end to which the complexities of the present can and must be reduced. Mutatis mutandis, I would say that this is the template, the “walking skeleton”, of every foundationalism as such (including at least “vulgar” marxism, which is all about the restoration of an alienated subject). Insofar as it conforms to this pattern, “free market fundamentalism” deserves the name.

So to Derrida, whom I would go along with Rorty in describing as an anti-foundationalist and a radical, a disturber of crypts, a spelunker of the complexities dissimulated by foundationalism’s “white mythology” of simple origins. Différance at the origin, one of the deconstructive mottoes that Derrida used to toss out occasionally, would make a good coda for the story I’m trying to tell here. Deconstruction is? Deconstruction is cryptanalysis.