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Deconstruction in Context: Literature and Philosophy
"There is no rigorous and effective deconstruction without the faithful memory of philosophies and literatures, without the respectful and competent reading of texts of the past, as well as singular works of our own time. Deconstruction is also a certain thinking about tradition and context. Mark Taylor evokes this with great clarity in the course of a remarkable introduction. He reconstitutes a set of premises without which no deconstruction could have seen the light of day." – Jacques Derrida
"This invaluable philosophical sampler brings together many of the threads out of which deconstruction is woven. taylor's anthology does not make deconstruction easy; much more usefully, it provides a meticulous guide to the sources – and significance – of the difficulties. – Barbara E. Johnson
"The book will be of great value as a set of readings with authoritative explanation for all those interested in the current relations of literature and philosophy. It is the best book of its kind I know. – J. Hillis Miller, Yale University
"This invaluable philosophical sampler brings together many of the threads out of which deconstruction is woven. taylor's anthology does not make deconstruction easy; much more usefully, it provides a meticulous guide to the sources – and significance – of the difficulties. – Barbara E. Johnson
"The book will be of great value as a set of readings with authoritative explanation for all those interested in the current relations of literature and philosophy. It is the best book of its kind I know. – J. Hillis Miller, Yale University
- GenresPhilosophy
454 pages, Paperback
Published October 15, 1986
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About the author
Mark C. Taylor
52 books35 followersMark C. Taylor, Ph.D. (Religious Studies, Harvard University, 1973; B.A., Wesleyan University, 1968), is a philosopher of religion who chaired the Department of Religion at Columbia University 2007–2015. Previously, he was Cluett Professor of Humanities at Williams College (Williamstown, Massachusetts), where he began his teaching career in 1973.
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October 28, 2020
An ambitious anthology of modern and post-modern philosophic writings, from Kant to Derrida, including Hegel, Husserl, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Blanchot, among others. I want to only focus on one essay, included in this anthology, written by Emmanuel Levinas, entitled "The Trace of the Other" (pp. 345-359), which consists of excerpts from "La Trace de L'Autre," translated by A. Lingis, Tifdschrift voor Philosophie (Sept. 1963), 605-23. Levinas wrote the essay in 1963, 11 years prior to publication of his magnum opus Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence, 1974; and yet the essay contains the essential elements of the book, densely compressed into some 15 pages. Notably, it has an important and in depth discussion, found nowhere else in such depth, on the relationship between the Other and God, which is critical to understanding Levinas. Also noteworthy is the summary of Levinas's analyses of western philosophy's understanding of being or consciousness as the movement within the same, the movement of the ego returning to itself, secure and unaffected by the alterity--the movement which Levinas will later term in Otherwise Than Being as the movement of being or essence, or conatus essendi.
I think the essay, "The Trace of the Other," is on the par with his other important, better known essay, "God and Philosophy." This 1963 essay was incorporated in his 1964 essay, "Meaning and Sense," translated by Alphonso Lingis as slightly modified by Adriaan T. Peperzak and inserted in the anthology, Emmanuel Levinas: Basic Philosophical Writings, eds. Adriaan T. Peperzak, Simon Critchley, and Robert Bernasconi (as Chapter 3). Peperzak writes in the short introduction to "Meaning and Sense:"
To say 'I' is to assert the identity of the same. "I am from the first the same--me ipse, an ipseity--that I can identify every object, every character trait, and every being" (345). Everything is or means for the sake of or with respect to the I who relates to the "outside" always and already "for me." Nothing lies beyond my horizon. For the I nothing can be absolutely other. "The alien being is as it were naturalized as soon as it commits itself with knowledge. In itself--and consequently elsewhere than in thought, other than it--it does not have the wild barbarian character of alterity. It has a meaning" (345).
"Being bears in itself the possibility of idealism" (346).
"Western philosophy coincides with the disclosure of the other where the other, in manifesting itself as a being, loses its alterity" (346).
"The One [in Plato and Plotinus] is not beyond being because it is buried and hidden; it is buried because it is beyond being, wholly other than being" (347).
Then, how is my relationship with the absolutely other possible? How is a relationship with otherwise than being possible? "Must we with the--from the first unthinkable--contact with transcendence and alterity renounce philosophy?" (347) This question was asked long before Derrida broached it in his landmark essay, "Violence and Metaphysics," written in 1963 and published in 1964. Derrida indicates that soon after his essay was written in 1963 (though not yet published until 1964) Levinas's essay, "The Trace of the Other," appeared in 1963. See Writing and Difference, p. 311. But the same issue was already raised by the ancient Greeks anyway when they declared: "Not to philosophize is still to philosophize," as Derrida himself quotes in his essay. But see Levinas's "God and Philosophy," Of God Who Comes To Mind, in which he responds: "Not to philosophize would not be to philosophize still." In Otherwise Than Being, 1974, Levinas states that the objections raised against his attempt to think beyond being are "facile" and "familiar" (155).
Again, Levinas asks: "Does there exist a signifyingness of signification which would not be equivalent to the transmutation of the other into the same?" (348)
Levinas proposes a term "work" as such a signification: "A work conceived radically is a movement of the same unto the other which never returns to the same" (348). The term will later be changed to the now famous word: saying. To this movement toward the other without return to self, Levinas proposes Abraham's journey: "To the myth of Ulysses returning to Ithaca, we wish to oppose the story of Abraham who leaves his fatherland forever for a yet unknown land, and forbids his servant to even bring back his son to the point of departure" (348). Despite the extravagant adventures, Ulysses always experiences such events only on the way home. Even to hear the sirens, he binds himself to the mast while letting his ears open to the luring sounds, lest he be led astray from the homeward bound, lest he be drawn to the other. Despite the horrendous blood shed and violence at the heart of his home, in the banquet hall, at the hearth, no trace of blood were left to be seen when his wife Penelope wakes up from her sleep (she had during the entire time of the bloody slaughter) to meet the returned husband for the first time after so many years. Ulysses returns home, unchanged, despite the invasion of the suiters and the subsequent slaughter of them. This is the grand narrative of the adventure of consciousness or being in the western thought! How poignant Levinas's analysis is here.
In introducing the new notion of 'work,' Levinas conceives a different way of the work outlasting the author. He says: "The future for which the work is undertaken must be posited from the start as indifferent to my death. A work, distinguished from games and from calculation, is being-for-beyond-my-death" (349). Levinas is not invoking 'the death of author' here but a notion of work that speaks beyond and long after author's death, like the work of Talmud, whose meaning must be rekindled and revised by later generations of readers, to be revived as a fresh 'saying' beyond the said, like an amber rekindled by a breath that blows air into the ashes. Levinas indeed says this somewhere, perhaps in his Talmudic Lessons.
In a surprise turn, Levinas furthermore links the term, work, with the term, liturgy. "I should like to fix the work of the same as a movement without return of the same to the other with a Greek term which in its primacy meaning indicates the exercise of an office that is not only completely gratuitous, but that requires, on the part of him that exercises it, a putting out of funds at a loss. I would like to fix it with the term 'liturgy'" (349-50). "Liturgy, as an absolutely patient action.. [..] is ethics itself" (350). "The liturgical orientation of a work does not proceed from need" (350). Liturgy empties itself of its funds in its exercise of gratuitous duty; it is not an act of fulfilling one's needs but that of desire aiming at the desired while hollowing itself out the more one desires, the desire that feeds itself by desire like Plato's winged thought rising up to truth and beauty, being fed by the thought; the metaphysical desire, as repeatedly articulated in Totality and Infinity. In desire or ethics, the ego "leave[s] [its] home to the point of leaving oneself" (OB 182). In other words, it substitutes itself for the Other even to the point of being a hostage, completely unrelated to itself, to its identity, its choice, its past, or its future. "The relationship with another puts me into question, empties me of myself, and does not let off emptying me--uncovering for me ever new resources" (350-51). The I loses its sovereignty, its freedom as the origin of the relation. It becomes the one-for-the-other, as Levinas puts it in OB, or in the present essay: "The I before another is infinitely responsible" (353). It becomes infinite responsibility: "the more I face my responsibilities the more I am responsible," like desire (354).
If the face of the Other comes from 'beyond,' how is 'beyond' to be conceived? Levinas says: "the beyond is not a simple background from which a face solicits us, is not 'another world' behind the world" (354). The face of my neighbor, the You, is here, concrete, facing me here and now -- not to be identified with the features, forms, images, and themes. But the face enters into my horizon from the beyond, from the exteriority. "The other proceeds from the absolutely absent. His relationship with the absolutely absent from which he comes does not indicate, does not reveal this absent; and yet the absent has a meaning in a face" (355). The You comes from nowhere, from the absent, neither from me nor from you. It is beyond the dual relationship of the face-to-face: "The relationship which goes from a face to the absent is outside every revelation and dissimulation, a third way excluded by these contradictories. How is this third way possible?" (355).
This "third way" is not to be confused with the third, the neighbor's other and all others, who is said to be present in the "eyes that look at me" in the face-to-face ("The third party looks at me in the eyes of the Other--language is justice." TI 213). The "third way" refers here to the remoteness of the He, as in the Hebrew Bible. Levinas for the moment will refer to it only as a trace: "In the presence of the other do we not respond to an 'order' in which sifnifyingness remains an irremissible disturbance, an utterly beyone past? Such is the signifyingness of a trace. A face is in the trace of the utterly beyone, utterly passed absent, withdrawn into what Paul Valéry calls ' the deep yore, never long ago enough,' which cannot be discovered in the self by an introspection" (355). "No memory could follow the traces of this past. It is an immemorial past" (355).
[To be continued below.]
I think the essay, "The Trace of the Other," is on the par with his other important, better known essay, "God and Philosophy." This 1963 essay was incorporated in his 1964 essay, "Meaning and Sense," translated by Alphonso Lingis as slightly modified by Adriaan T. Peperzak and inserted in the anthology, Emmanuel Levinas: Basic Philosophical Writings, eds. Adriaan T. Peperzak, Simon Critchley, and Robert Bernasconi (as Chapter 3). Peperzak writes in the short introduction to "Meaning and Sense:"
The third stage [of the essay "Meaning and Sense"] is concentrated in section 9, where Levinas briefly indicates how ethics leads to religion in the radical sense of an inescapable relationship to a nonthematizable X that has received various names, such as "He" or "the Other," or "God." It is interesting to note that "La signification et la sense" incorporated the text of Levinas's paper "La trace de l'autre (The trace of the other)," which he gave in 1963, about two years after the publication of Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority (1961), at the Institute Supérieur de Philosophie in Leuven (Belgium). It was his first attempt to answer a fundamental question left open n that book: how is it possible that the alterity of "the Other(l'Autre)" is understood as alterity of the human Other (Autrui) and as alterity of the Most High (du Très Haut)" (TI 34, my emphasis). A later and more elaborate answer is given in the essay "God and Philosophy," chapter 8 of this volume [Emmanuel Levinas: Basic Philosophical Writings, also found in Of God Who Comes to Mind, trans. Bettina Bergo].I want to highlight some parts of the essay, "The Trace of the Other."
To say 'I' is to assert the identity of the same. "I am from the first the same--me ipse, an ipseity--that I can identify every object, every character trait, and every being" (345). Everything is or means for the sake of or with respect to the I who relates to the "outside" always and already "for me." Nothing lies beyond my horizon. For the I nothing can be absolutely other. "The alien being is as it were naturalized as soon as it commits itself with knowledge. In itself--and consequently elsewhere than in thought, other than it--it does not have the wild barbarian character of alterity. It has a meaning" (345).
"Being bears in itself the possibility of idealism" (346).
"Western philosophy coincides with the disclosure of the other where the other, in manifesting itself as a being, loses its alterity" (346).
"The One [in Plato and Plotinus] is not beyond being because it is buried and hidden; it is buried because it is beyond being, wholly other than being" (347).
Then, how is my relationship with the absolutely other possible? How is a relationship with otherwise than being possible? "Must we with the--from the first unthinkable--contact with transcendence and alterity renounce philosophy?" (347) This question was asked long before Derrida broached it in his landmark essay, "Violence and Metaphysics," written in 1963 and published in 1964. Derrida indicates that soon after his essay was written in 1963 (though not yet published until 1964) Levinas's essay, "The Trace of the Other," appeared in 1963. See Writing and Difference, p. 311. But the same issue was already raised by the ancient Greeks anyway when they declared: "Not to philosophize is still to philosophize," as Derrida himself quotes in his essay. But see Levinas's "God and Philosophy," Of God Who Comes To Mind, in which he responds: "Not to philosophize would not be to philosophize still." In Otherwise Than Being, 1974, Levinas states that the objections raised against his attempt to think beyond being are "facile" and "familiar" (155).
Again, Levinas asks: "Does there exist a signifyingness of signification which would not be equivalent to the transmutation of the other into the same?" (348)
Levinas proposes a term "work" as such a signification: "A work conceived radically is a movement of the same unto the other which never returns to the same" (348). The term will later be changed to the now famous word: saying. To this movement toward the other without return to self, Levinas proposes Abraham's journey: "To the myth of Ulysses returning to Ithaca, we wish to oppose the story of Abraham who leaves his fatherland forever for a yet unknown land, and forbids his servant to even bring back his son to the point of departure" (348). Despite the extravagant adventures, Ulysses always experiences such events only on the way home. Even to hear the sirens, he binds himself to the mast while letting his ears open to the luring sounds, lest he be led astray from the homeward bound, lest he be drawn to the other. Despite the horrendous blood shed and violence at the heart of his home, in the banquet hall, at the hearth, no trace of blood were left to be seen when his wife Penelope wakes up from her sleep (she had during the entire time of the bloody slaughter) to meet the returned husband for the first time after so many years. Ulysses returns home, unchanged, despite the invasion of the suiters and the subsequent slaughter of them. This is the grand narrative of the adventure of consciousness or being in the western thought! How poignant Levinas's analysis is here.
In introducing the new notion of 'work,' Levinas conceives a different way of the work outlasting the author. He says: "The future for which the work is undertaken must be posited from the start as indifferent to my death. A work, distinguished from games and from calculation, is being-for-beyond-my-death" (349). Levinas is not invoking 'the death of author' here but a notion of work that speaks beyond and long after author's death, like the work of Talmud, whose meaning must be rekindled and revised by later generations of readers, to be revived as a fresh 'saying' beyond the said, like an amber rekindled by a breath that blows air into the ashes. Levinas indeed says this somewhere, perhaps in his Talmudic Lessons.
In a surprise turn, Levinas furthermore links the term, work, with the term, liturgy. "I should like to fix the work of the same as a movement without return of the same to the other with a Greek term which in its primacy meaning indicates the exercise of an office that is not only completely gratuitous, but that requires, on the part of him that exercises it, a putting out of funds at a loss. I would like to fix it with the term 'liturgy'" (349-50). "Liturgy, as an absolutely patient action.. [..] is ethics itself" (350). "The liturgical orientation of a work does not proceed from need" (350). Liturgy empties itself of its funds in its exercise of gratuitous duty; it is not an act of fulfilling one's needs but that of desire aiming at the desired while hollowing itself out the more one desires, the desire that feeds itself by desire like Plato's winged thought rising up to truth and beauty, being fed by the thought; the metaphysical desire, as repeatedly articulated in Totality and Infinity. In desire or ethics, the ego "leave[s] [its] home to the point of leaving oneself" (OB 182). In other words, it substitutes itself for the Other even to the point of being a hostage, completely unrelated to itself, to its identity, its choice, its past, or its future. "The relationship with another puts me into question, empties me of myself, and does not let off emptying me--uncovering for me ever new resources" (350-51). The I loses its sovereignty, its freedom as the origin of the relation. It becomes the one-for-the-other, as Levinas puts it in OB, or in the present essay: "The I before another is infinitely responsible" (353). It becomes infinite responsibility: "the more I face my responsibilities the more I am responsible," like desire (354).
If the face of the Other comes from 'beyond,' how is 'beyond' to be conceived? Levinas says: "the beyond is not a simple background from which a face solicits us, is not 'another world' behind the world" (354). The face of my neighbor, the You, is here, concrete, facing me here and now -- not to be identified with the features, forms, images, and themes. But the face enters into my horizon from the beyond, from the exteriority. "The other proceeds from the absolutely absent. His relationship with the absolutely absent from which he comes does not indicate, does not reveal this absent; and yet the absent has a meaning in a face" (355). The You comes from nowhere, from the absent, neither from me nor from you. It is beyond the dual relationship of the face-to-face: "The relationship which goes from a face to the absent is outside every revelation and dissimulation, a third way excluded by these contradictories. How is this third way possible?" (355).
This "third way" is not to be confused with the third, the neighbor's other and all others, who is said to be present in the "eyes that look at me" in the face-to-face ("The third party looks at me in the eyes of the Other--language is justice." TI 213). The "third way" refers here to the remoteness of the He, as in the Hebrew Bible. Levinas for the moment will refer to it only as a trace: "In the presence of the other do we not respond to an 'order' in which sifnifyingness remains an irremissible disturbance, an utterly beyone past? Such is the signifyingness of a trace. A face is in the trace of the utterly beyone, utterly passed absent, withdrawn into what Paul Valéry calls ' the deep yore, never long ago enough,' which cannot be discovered in the self by an introspection" (355). "No memory could follow the traces of this past. It is an immemorial past" (355).
[To be continued below.]
July 8, 2024
Took me two years on and off with this one. Difficult but definitely worth trudging through if you want a compilation on the thought of deconstruction in philosophy. Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Sartre, and surprisingly Kant’s essays were the easier ones to read for me. Wittgenstein’s essay felt like a mental puzzle but it wasn’t frustrating to read unlike my experience with Hegel or Levinas.
Good stuff in here, will revisit once I am more versed in deconstruction as a whole.
Good stuff in here, will revisit once I am more versed in deconstruction as a whole.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews