course of struggles over who gets to construct what. Both philosophical schools can agree with Eagleton that 'if there are no values and beliefs not bound up with power, then the term ideology threatens to expand to the vanishing point'. ⁷ But, unlike Eagleton, both find this a reason to be dubious about the utility of the notion of 'ideology' (at least if it is supposed to mean more than 'a set of bad ideas').

The distinction that runs through The German Ideology between Marxist science and mere philosophical fantasy is an excellent example of a claim to have reached what Derrida calls 'a full presence which is beyond the reach of play'. ⁸ As a good Marxist, Eagleton has to echo the standard right-wing criticisms of Derrida when he says that 'the thesis that objects are entirely internal to the discourses which constitute them raises the thorny problem of how we could everjudge that a discourse had constructed its object validly' and goes on to ask 'if what validates my social interpretations are the political ends they serve, how am I to validate those ends?' ⁹ You cannot talk about 'distorted communication' or 'distorting ideas' without believing in objects external to discourses, and objects capable of being accurately or inaccurately, scientifically or merely fantastically, represented by those discourses.

Something, therefore, has to give. Feminist intellectuals who wish to criticize masculinist ideology, and to use deconstruction to do so, must (1) think of something new for 'ideology' to mean; or (2) disassociate deconstruction from anti-representationalism, from the denial that we can answer the question 'have I constructed the object validly (as opposed, for example, to usefully for feminist purposes)?'; or (3) say that the question of whether their criticisms of masculinist social practices are 'scientific' or 'philosophically well grounded', like the question of whether masculinism has 'distorted' things, is beside the point.

The best option is the last one. The first option is simply not worth the trouble, and I do not think that the second can be done at all. It seems to me unfortunate that some people identified with deconstruction have tried to reconstitute the Marxist matter--consciousness distinction -- as when de Man said that 'it would be unfortunate to confuse the materiality of the signifier with the materiality of what it signifies', and went on to define 'ideology' as 'the confusion of linguistic with natural reality, of reference with phenomenalism'. ¹⁰ The way to rebut the accusation that literary theory, or deconstruction, is 'oblivious to social and historical reality' is to insist that 'constitution of objects by discourse' goes all the way down, and that 'respect for reality' (social and historical, astrophysical, or any other kind of reality) is just respect for past language, past ways of describing what is 'really' going on. ¹¹ Sometimes such respect is a good thing, sometimes it is not. It depends on what you want.

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