>These are the desires and resentments generated by the grotesque superstructures of anti-discrimination law, the fields of race, gender, and sexuality, where fortunes can be made or lost on the interpretation of a joke or a gesture. “I just want, as a woman in the workplace, to be treated with respect, and not as a sexual object.” Well, yes, but “respect” and “sex” are historical, deeply tradition-laden concepts, which require elaborate translations if their meaning is to be determined outside of a given institution’s Code of Conduct (which has processed those terms through political structured legal innovations)—or even if we are to make sense of that Code of Conduct in a given case. The actual desire here is to have the option to be a plaintiff in a particular kind of lawsuit, presided over by a particular type of judge, produced by a law school within a system of law schools dominated by a particular judicial and political philosophy, and therefore upon certain funding institutions
Yes, in the first passage you quote I'm not representing the thinking of an activist but, rather of those downstream form the activist. Still, if you ask the radical feminist to explain what, exactly, dismantling the patriarchy looks like, it might not be all that different--they have some vague picture of roles they might be playing, people they'd be bossing around or defying, etc.
You make an implicit distinction between GA and the systems of thought which produced it. Certainly the "systems" can be deconstructed--that's what GA does in distinguishing itself from, e.g., Girard or Derrida (although I'm not sure "deconstruct" is exactly right here). But what's the deconstruction of the originary hypothesis itself, effortless or not?
Contending with the social construction (and hence locality, rather than universality) of meaning and motivation is the central problem that has defined vast swathes of political and philosophical thought. Acknowledging it results in a radical and unending deconstruction of meaning, and it always has. You can see this problem being acknowledged as early as socrates's noble lie.
The first sign would have been both local and universal, since it would have taken place in a singular event, while initiating the terms of all other subsequent signs. "Social construction" and "deconstruction" elide the question of a first sign--for them, we start in the middle. But there must have been a first sign, unless you think there could have been a 1/100th of a sign, then a 1/50th of a sign, and so on, until we get a "whole" sign. The oiginary hypothesis assumes the sign must have emerged "full blown," all at once, and therefore in a unique event. The first sign is also the emergence of the human and hence why there is "social construction" in the first place. The social does get "constructed," doesn't it? How?
Deconstruction is ultimately only applicable to declarative sentences, which have "meanings." Can you deconstruct a greeting--two people saying "hello" to each other? What does "hello" "mean"? You can restate it as a declarative--something like "In making this gesture I greet you and invite you to greet me in turn"--but that's not what it is (it's how a computer might represent it). The forms of greeting are, of course socially constructed (hugs, handshakes, nods, etc.) but why is it not more important that in every human order there are ways in which people recognize each other's presence, precisely in a way specific to that community--and that this distinguishes humans from all other species? If we start from here, rather than from the deconstructability of all meaning, we end up in a different place, don't we?