regulate and control—to dominate the plurality and heterogeneity of

experience.4
Theorists who are concerned about the political implications of unity
and totality tend
to be antiformalists: that is, they resist the containing power of form.
But in the process
they maintain the traditional formalist premise that forms totalize and
unify. Indeed, I
want to suggest here that formalist and antiformalist critics have
shared a specific
presumption about the politics of literary form that has endured and
flourished, virtually
unchanged, since the era of the New Critics: the assumption that
literary forms can be
easily mapped onto political communities—that there is an effective
homology between
the bounded wholeness of the lyric poem, for example, and the
bounded wholeness of a
nation. As Marc Redfield puts it, “The polished sides of the well-
wrought urn mirror the
providential order of the political itself.”5
The two strands of critique I have been describing come together in
the work of
deconstruction. Jacques Derrida argued famously that no work of
literature can ever
achieve a closed unity, since each word takes on its identity in and
through its relation
to other traces or marks that are not in fact contained in any given
object but unfold in
the unending process he called différance. This matters a great deal, in
Derrida’s work,
because the desire for bounded wholeness has grave political
consequences. He
painstakingly shows how the relation between inside and outside—
between what
properly belongs and what can be expelled or abjected—grounds the
whole project of