Hedgehogs, Hedgemony, and Praxis

(Cross-posted at "Credge-thog", the Critical Theory blog.)

At first glance, the hedgehog may appear to be a simple holdover from a naive, pre-modern era, before Foucault and Derrida stormed in like angry echidnas to show us all what was what (if, indeed, what is ever what.) But nothing - except, maybe, for post-Enlightenment positivism - could be further from the truth. As I will demonstrate, the hedgehog is a living, breathing representation of the problems of grappling with signification after the destruction (one might even say 'deconstruction') of the false structuralist edifice. Like the 'completed' sign, which promises some inner core of meaning but frustrates all of our attempts to uncover it, the complete hedgehog offers a tantalizing glimpse of a small, cuddly creature, but any effort to penetrate its spiky shell proves irritatingly impossible and even quite painful. Furthermore, just as the objectively grounded, transcendent meaning that the sign implies cannot actually be coaxed from its linguistic form, a small hedgehog hiding in a long, dark plastic tunnel will not be persuaded to come out and reveal itself by anyone except for the very most dedicated amateur hedgehog enthusiasts.

Seriously, it won't, though. No matter how many mealworms you offer it. Even if you sit there for a whole hour, whispering sweet hedgehog nothings, just trying to draw the damn thing out into the daylight. It's enough to make you give up on hedgehogs altogether and go get a sledge-dog instead.