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Deconstructing and Reconstructing Artists with PhDs

This paper applies the contest in poststructuralist political philosophy between deconstruction and reconstruction to the question of how fine art contributes to knowledge. The value of this move lies in the fact that the deconstruction–reconstruction dispute, when applied to the art–knowledge question, shows that conceiving of art and knowledge as a binary distinction is too simplistic, and that categories are in a state of movement in such a way that prevents any clear cut division between art and knowledge, where this lack of division is a positive outcome. The basis for discussion is the deconstruction–reconstruction contest in philosophy over the political effectiveness of deconstruction and, in particular, Jürgen Habermas’s assertion that Jacques Derrida’s perpetual playing with categories denies the possibility of real-world, political reconstruction. At the centre of the Derrida–Habermas dispute, the author argues, is a difference over how movement between categories (what Cazeaux terms ‘cross-categoriality’) is understood to account for the cognitive and political effectiveness of art, aesthetics and deconstruction. Cazeaux does not argue for one side over the other, but demonstrates that the emphasis on cross-categoriality puts us in a position where we can recognize how subjective aesthetic judgments, through the crossing of categories, act upon the network of concepts used in knowledge claims.