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Crafting the Philosophy of the Void
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13424 |
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BOOK WORLD
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9 / 1987 |
8,297 Words |
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Ewa M. Thompson
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DECOSTRUCTION IN CONTEXT
Literature and Philosophy
Edited by Mark C. Taylor
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986
445 pp., $16.95
Taylor's book is an anthology of philosophical writings from Kant to the present time. But it is not a run-of-the-mill survey of philosophy but rather an anthology a these. It argues that post-Kantian European philosophy has increasingly focused on the problem of language, and that this interest has peaked in the writings of the proponent of "deconstruction" Jacques Derrida. The anthology is put together with a view to demonstrating that the traditional Western concept of language, as essentially a system of names, cannot be accepted by the postmodern mind. It follows that the assumptions about ways of knowing and the nature of being, which an average educated person takes for granted, are likewise invalid and must be changed.
The book does not make good bedtime reading, and its audience will be found at universities rather than in the society at large or among politicians. Yet the matters discussed here are of fundamental importance. Taylor attempts to show a growing refinement in the understanding of language, philosophy, and religion in the humanities divisions of Western universities, and he implies that as their understanding of language has grown, the old notions of the anthropomorphic Deity and of a reasonably well-ordered body of knowledge about reality had to join the fairy tales of childhood.
According to Taylor, the road to Derrida traverses the writings of such major promoters of Hegel as Alexandre Kojeve; it makes a detour through the linguistics of Saussure, Husserl's phenomenology, Wittgenstein's logical positivism, and Kierkegaard's and Sartre's existentialism. The shaper of modern sensibility Friedrich Nietzsche is of course included. After Nietzsche comes Heidegger, arguably the densest of the major European philosophers of recent times, and he asks some profound questions. The post-Heideggerian territory includes the French writers Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, Bataille, and Blanchot. Finally, we arrive at a key essay by Derrida explaining his notion of difference and offering a justification for a deconstruction of texts.
The selection criteria are eclectic. Phenomenology and logical positivism can be said to have influenced virtually all twentieth-century philosophers. The absence of Descartes blurs a profound distinction between Cartesian and Aristotelian rationalism, and it suggests that Kant rather than Descartes is "the grandfather figure" of postmodernity. Yet it is Descartes and not Kant that should have been placed at the beginning of this book. Also, the inclusion at the end of several minor French writers shows the ambience in which Derrida has flourished in the twentieth century. Other than Descartes, however, there are no major omissions so far as modern European philosophy is concerned.
The anthology can serve as an example of how terms of discourse are insinuated into the consciousness of educated men: by a philosophical "public relations" campaign aimed at academic circles, and by intellectual advertising, which purports to show how the hermeneutics trend called deconstruction is the last word in language theory. It is through books like this one that
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