The highest moral command, perhaps the only one, is to respectrnthe Otherness, the alterity of every Other in the world.rnImposing our metanarrative on others is intellectual colonialism,rnas bad as, no, worse than the literal colonialism of the Europeanrnempires of the 19th century. A passion to show up eachrnearlier generation’s metanarrative, its indifference to alterityrnand the Other, became a feeding frenzy. The intellectual watersrnturned red with the Oedipodean slaughter of the textual fathers.rnThe early promise of the first generation of heroes, RolandrnBarthes, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, was tornbe fulfilled in the abolition of Platonism, capitalism, and patriarchy,rnthe disappearance of the subject and the author. Inrn1989, however, it was Soviet communism that disappeared. Arnprofound cultural despair filled the European scene. One byrnone, the intellectual heroes were found with feet of clay. A diligentrnBelgian archivist showed that De Man had written 170 articlesrnfor the leading newspaper in Brussels during the Nazi occupation,rnincluding a major piece for their anti-Jewish issue.rnFoucault turned from intellectual archaeology and genealogyrnto a study of the social construction of sex. It was no purely intellectualrnbreakthrough. When he visited homosexual bathhousesrnin San Francisco, he indulged himself as he did not darernto do in Paris. Norris laments that he died just as his work wasrnbeginning to show an appreciation for the critical evaluation ofrnevidence. The knowledge that a man is dying of AIDS concentratesrnhis iriind wonderfully. Barthes also passed on, leavingrnfor posthumous publication what his editors called his linguisticrnstudies in North Africa, page after page of which recordedrnwhat little Moroccan boys said while he was having sex withrnthem,rnPaul de Man had declared that history, and presumably biographyrnas well, is only “a written text.” The postmodernistsrnignored the moral context in which their movementrnthrove and concentrated on showing that our pride in thernaccomplishments of science, technology, democracy, literaturernwere fatally flawed by our failure to appreciate the unique specialness.rnOtherness, absolute alterity of other cultures and otherrnpeople. Eighteenth-century Enlightenment Europe thoughtrnit could not only dominate the world politically, but also understandrnit intellectually. The second was a worse ambitionrnthan the first. The suicidal insanity of the two world wars andrnthe Cold War that followed ended Western schemes for worldrndomination. (At least for public consumption. America stillrnseeks to be a world leader and to impose its presence by meansrnof gunboat humanitarianism from Somalia to Haiti.) We stillrnthink that we can explain the rest of the world. Palestinianrnscholar Edward Said argued in Orientalism and other booksrnthat we had merely turned the East into an Other, constructedrnout of what we were not, not out of the facts. Feminists arguedrnthat scientific statements about women were similarly constructedrnout of male confusion of the desire to know with therndesire to dominate. Foucault spoke of powerAnowledge.rnFoucault wrote passionately of the suppression of the Othernessrnof the mad or the criminal. Feminists like Julia Kristevarnsought a fuller life for oppressed women. Edward Said showedrnthat colonialism’s oppression of the Easterner was not just thernresult of this or that corrupt regime or mistaken policy, butrnrooted in the Western Enlightenment’s delusion of a universallyrnvalid knowledge, that ended up amounting to self-aggrandizement.rnBut if we are trapped in the closed box of language.rnwith no objective reality to correct, falsify, or confirm our notions,rnon what basis do we condemn or approve? The DeconstructivernTurn was good at showing up false certainties in science,rnprogress, and other Western accomplishments. On whatrnbasis did it condemn the West for being trapped in its own linguisticrnconventions, when that is the human condition? Ifrnthere is no objective reality, physical or moral, how can we denounce,rnor even criticize, the Holocaust Revisionist for his denialrnof the gas chambers, or Israel for her treatment of the Palestinians,rnor men for their subjection of women?rnNorris has worked hard to find evidence that some leadersrnhave refused to follow the dogma of the sovereignty of the linguisticrnall the way to the end of its barren cul-de-sac. Thernbloody ethnic conflicts of the last few years have shaken EdwardrnSaid. Julia Kristeva has declared in her recent books on the immigrantrnas Other that we all have an Other inside us, which wernmust confront and understand, and if we can do that with ourselves,rnwhy not with more conventional Others, North Africanrnimmigrants or women? She has even gone so far as to declarernthat Nazi Germany went wrong not through obsession with Enlightenmentrnideals of general humanity, but through too greatrnan insistence on the reality of the local self and the Other. Thernparagraph in which she ventured this view sent Shockwavesrnthrough the critical establishment. Although true believers inrnthe linguistic Iron Curtain between “reality” and language havernlong since moved beyond oppressive bourgeois morality on almostrnevery subject from plagiarism to buggery, there remainsrnone moral certainty: Nazi Germany was evil. As Leo Straussrnpointed out, the reductio ad Hitlerum has become the facilernrefutation of choice. When Kristeva played the Nazi card, shernwas challenging the rest of the players to fold then and there.rnShe was at least partly right. German intellectual life was influencedrnby historical visions that insisted on the profound differencesrnbetween cultures. Many of today’s cries against thernunfairness of judging other cultures by our standards can berntraced back to Spengler’s Decline of the West, where he attemptsrnnot without success to show that even so seemingly objectiverna science as geometry functioned differently in antiquityrnand the modern Western, or Faustian, culture. Still the greatrntotalitarian regimes, German National Socialism, RussianrnCommunism, and American Liberalism, each took from thernEnlightenment an ideal of objective truth by which they couldrnjudge the world. For Hitler’s government, that truth was foundrnin biology, and those judged unworthy by the standards of thatrnobjective science could be killed. The Marxist took economicsrnfrom the Enlightenment, and so the small landowner had torndie. In each case, we can see that the Nazi killing the Jew andrnthe Marxist killing the small farmer was killing the refutation ofrnhis theory. Liberalism believes in the individual, whose naturalrnor human rights trump all other suits. There is no more completernrefutation of that vision than the family and within thernfamily the pregnant woman, an individual filled with new andrndifferent life, a true Other, by yet another Other. So Liberalismrnproclaims the killing of the unborn baby as a basic human right.rnThe nonliberal, fresh from seeing the Nazi and the Jew, thernCommunist and the small farmer, sees the Enlightenmentrnideologue killing the refutation of his theory. The feministrndenounces the death camps before walking into the abortionrnclinic. Kristeva’s vision of the Other inside each one of us isrna brilliant theoretical insight. She does not profane it byrnconfronting it with the Other that lives inside every pregnantrnwoman.rnJANUARY 1996/1 7rnrnrn