Further Thoughts on Ontology

I have commented here before on what one might call my “methodological” objection to the Radical Orthodox ontology — namely, the fact that the Radox authors baldly assert their Neoplatonic ontology of hierarchical participation because of its supposedly benificent moral effects. I suggested that perhaps ontology, which at least etymologically is supposed to have some relation to how things “are,” should take science seriously. At the same time, I don’t think that ontology has to be the slave of science, which in practice would mean embracing the ontology of mechanical determinism.

I maintain that the trick the Radox authors attempt to pull would never have been able to succeed if the dominant strains of postwar philosophy had not fallen asleep at the ontological wheel. Analytic philosophy’s prohibition of ontological or metaphysical reflection system-building is well-known, and the dominance of Heidegger and his successors in continental philosophy (in its various institutional incarnations) led to a similar suspicion of metaphysical claims — most often quasi-moral objections to metaphysics as a “totalizing discourse” that is somehow directly oppressive (”Hegel caused the Holocaust,” etc.). Jean-Luc Nancy has undertaken to do a kind of post-Heideggerian ontology over the past couple decades, though I’m not sure he’s really “taking off” among Americans; there may also be someone in the analytic camp pursuing something along these lines, though I’ve not heard of it.

The shame here, though, is that during the prewar period, there was a real flowering of ontologies of the exact kind that I advocate — perhaps the biggest names there are Henri Bergson, Alfred North Whitehead, and William James. In each case, there is a recognition that the mechanical determinism (largely unconsciously) assumed by scientists is not adequately accounting to experience, and so the attempt is made to develop a more inclusive and realistic ontology.

Then in the postwar period, the whole thing apparently just shuts down in America, in both the analytic and continental traditions — the latter of which also spread to many other disciplines in the humanities where ontological reflection may have found a place. Certain contemporary developments — the rediscovery of Deleuze as a “real philospher,” the surprising prominence of Badiou in certain American circles, the aforementioned work of Nancy, Zizek’s more recent work — point toward the potential for a renewed interest in a truly contemporary ontology. The shame, however, is that in so many ways we in America at least have to reinvent the wheel because the prewar developments wound up getting prematurely cut off in our context.

Open Thread: Zizek on Heidegger

Zizek’s recent (long) article on Heidegger can be found here (link redirects to a PDF; download Foxit PDF Reader to reduce PDF loading times).

My main question about this article: Does it indicate a significant shift already since The Parallax View? (Subpoint: Are we witnessing the beginnings of Zizek’s coming “Islamic turn”?)

The Greatness of Derrida, pt. 2

My claim that Derrida is a “great” philosopher can only ever be anticipatory, because it seems to me that the only possible definition of a “great” philosopher is one who imposes himself on subsequent generations of philosophers, becomes unavoidable. It becomes nearly impossible to imagine being able to dispense with that philosopher when discussing topics he discusses — even if he is “wrong” (and don’t philosophers most often bring up other philosophers in order to disagree with them?), he is relevant and must be contended with.

The truly great philosophers are those who make the broadest “unavoidable” contributions. Hobbes and Rousseau, for instance, are unavoidable on questions of political theory, but many of their other contributions are completely avoidable and almost unknown — whereas Plato and Kant are relevant and compulsory in virtually every area they discuss. Derrida seems to me to have sufficient scope to become one of the truly great philosophers of the 20th Century — he has written on an amazingly wide range of figures and themes. Some of his work is overly bound up with past debates and may suffer because of that — most notably the stuff on structuralism, because it is presently unclear whether structuralism will be viewed in the long term as an historic moment in Western thought or as a fad — but the majority is on figures who already have a “timeless” quality. He also deals with “perennial” questions in creative ways, ways that don’t always immediately convince but are difficult to dismiss outright, and this is because he changes the way we go about asking the questions themselves.

Everything is contingent on whether he gets read, however, and this means specifically whether he gets read in a way that goes beyond his initial reception in “literary theory.” The prospects currently seem to be fairly good, insofar as his later work (which has generally been of less interest to literary types) has found a reception in other disciplines, most notably in my opinion, religious studies. Various institutional factors make me think that serious attention to Derrida in religion and theology will significantly contribute to the one thing that is necessary in order to “seal his fate” — that is, reading him above all as a philosopher moving forward the project of certain schools of “continental” thought (above all phenomenology).

I am here speaking of philosophy entirely in continental terms — that is, as it is practiced in Europe and in certain outposts elsewhere. Based on current evidence, it appears that the mainstream of Anglo-American philosophy will almost certainly never accept Derrida, and on this point I can only repeat Michael Naas’s remark: “it’s their loss” — and not necessarily at all Derrida’s loss. After all, Heidegger has managed just fine thus far without the imprimatur of Anglo-American philosophy departments.

A thought on Homo Sacer

I am beginning to suspect that, whatever else it is, Homo Sacer is an example of the Heideggerian “etymological argument”:

The life caught in the sovereign ban is the life that is originally sacred–that is, that may be killed but not sacrificed–and, in this sense, the production of bare life is the originary activity of sovereignty. The sacredness of life, which is invoked today as an absolutely fundamental right in opposition to sovereign power, in fact originally expresses precisely both life’s subjection to a power over death and life’s irreparable exposure in the relation of abandonment (83).

Walter Benjamin said we should look for the origin of the dogma of the sacredness of human life, and Agamben did so, by seeking out the original etymological meaning of the word–a very Heideggerian way of going about it. Beyond that typical move, there is another major feature of the book that is deeply Heideggerian: the epochal thinking that assumes the basic unity of the Western tradition. This is what underwrites things like, say, claiming to find the opposition between bare life and qualified life in Aristotle, but nevertheless basing his argument on a feature of ancient Roman law, or more generally his tendency to jump around between different thinkers and different eras without feeling he needs to make the genealogy explicit.

Foucault and Arendt are obviously more in the foreground, but I don’t think it’s possible to really understand Agamben’s procedure here without taking these important, though largely implicit, Heideggerian elements into account.