Abstract
These remarks are, I suppose, metacritical in a sense. They wish to oppose the dominating falsities and complicities of postmodernist and historicist criticisms and theories. But that engagement will remain pretty much implicit, emerging indirectly through a rather abstract rehearsal of the political and philosophical questions concerning, demanding, and outstripping abstraction itself, questions no thinking of difference can bypass without falling into something worse. I will be taking to heart Walter Benjamin’s observation that a truly materialist thought can be found only the far side of ‘the frozen waste of abstraction’.2 To name problematical names, this piece is in fact the propaedeutic to another confrontation of dialectics with deconstruction. These are the bodies of writing which promise, in various and countervailing ways, a thinking of non-identity or difference that does not relapse into dogmatic materialism or particularism — idealism’s bad inversions, the unthematized abstractions of so much other theory. Now, while this is already to state a convergence of key interests, some kind of jejune synthesis of the writers who are my principal concern — Theodor Adorno and Jacques Derrida — is not being proposed here.
Erkenntnis, die den Inhalt will, will die Utopie.
Theodor Adorno1
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
‘Cognition, which wants content, wants a utopia.’ Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialektik, in Gesammelte Schriften (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1973), vol. 6, p. 66; Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973), p. 56; translation modified. (Hereafter ND in the text.)
Both Derrida and Adorno are suspicious of the value of radicality itself: cf., for examples, ND, 158/155; Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: the State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York and London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 88, 92, 184n. (Hereafter SM.)
Adorno never discussed Derrida, to my knowledge; Derrida hardly ever mentions Adorno. Criticism of Derrida normally fixes on his perceived Heideggereanism. Few Derrideans have discussed Adorno at any length. But see Rodolphe Gasché, ‘Yes Absolutely’, Inventions of Difference: On Jacques Derrida (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1994), pp. 199–226;
Christoph Menke, Die Souveränität der Kunst: Ästhetische Erfahrung nach Adorno und Derrida (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1991);
Michael Ryan, Marxism and Deconstruction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), pp. 73–81;
and on Heidegger, Alexander García Düttmann, Das Gedächtnis des Denkens: Versuch über Adorno und Heidegger (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1991). Derrida’s reflections on dialectics concern Hegel above all (see below).
Some significant critics of Derrida attack Adorno too over his misprised debts to Hegel: Gillian Rose, ‘From Speculative to Dialectical Thinking — Hegel and Adorno’, in Judaism and Modernity: Philosophical Essays (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), pp. 53–63;
cf. Andrew Bowie, ‘“Non-Identity”: the German Romantics, Schelling, and Adorno’, in Tilottama Rajan and David L. Clark (eds), Intersections: Nineteenth-Century Philosophy and Contemporary Theory (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), pp. 243–60.
See Derrida, ‘Cogito and the History of Madness’, in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978), pp. 31–63.
Jacques Derrida, Glas, trans. John P. Leavey, Jr and Richard Rand (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), p. 244a (G hereafter).
G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977). See, for example, the discussion of the German and French Enlightenments in §578, pp. 351–2.
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith, 2nd edn (London: Macmillan, 1933); on dogmatism, see, for example, B xxxv–vii; Kant’s criticisms of transcendent metaphysics are pursued in the Transcendental Dialectic (A 293–704/B 349–732). Derrida’s fullest readings of Kant centre on the third Critique: see The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1987); ‘Economimesis’, trans. Richard Klein, Diacritics 11:2 (1981), 3–25. See also ‘On a Newly Arisen Apocalyptic Tone in Philosophy’, trans. John Leavey, Jr, in Peter Fenves (ed.), Raising the Tone of Philosophy: Late Essays by Immanuel Kant, Transformative Critique by Jacques Derrida (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), pp. 117–71; and Chapter 2 of Richard Beardsworth, Derrida and the Political (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), pp. 46–97.
In fact, Kant and Hegel distinguish Humean empiricism from Greek scepticism (for example, Hegel A., Logic [Part I of the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences], trans. William Wallace, 3rd edn [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975], §39, pp. 64–5). Hume does not query the certainty of sense-impressions, only the necessity of any knowledge inducing upon them.
Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B 73. Cf. Hegel, Faith and Knowledge, trans. Walter Cerf and H. S. Harris (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1977), pp. 76–8.
In the second part of the second edition’s Transcendental Deduction, B 129–69. For the instructive account that informs my comments here, see Robert B. Pippin, Hegel’s Idealism: the Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 24–41.
Hegel, Faith and Knowledge, pp. 69ff. Two of Kant’s other genuinely speculative notions are transcendental apperception (see especially Hegel, Difference between the Systems of Fichte and Schelling, trans. H. S. Harris and Walter Cerf [Albany: State University of New York Press, 1976]);
and the intuitive intellect (this last — Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar [Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1987], §§76–7, pp. 283–94 — is discussed by Hegel, who releases it from its regulative status, in Faith and Knowledge, pp. 88ff.).
Pippin, Hegel’s Idealism, pp. 31, 37. On the deduction, see also Dieter Henrich, ‘The Proof-Structure of Kant’s Transcendental Deduction’, Review of Metaphysics 22 (1968–9), pp. 640–59;
and cf. Henry E. Allison, ‘Reflections on the B-Deduction’, in Idealism and Freedom: Essays on Kant’s Theoretical and Practical Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 27–40.
Gillian Rose, Hegel Contra Sociology (London and Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Athlone Press, 1981), pp. 102–3.
Hegel, Science of Logic, trans. A. V. Miller (London: Allen & Unwin, 1969), pp. 131–7. See Rose, Hegel Contra Sociology, pp. 188ff.
On the determinations of the movement from consciousness to self-consciousness to sociality, epistemology to politics, see, for example, Robert B. Pippin, ‘You Can’t Get There from Here: Transition Problems in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit’, in Frederick C. Beiser (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Hegel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 52–85.
On the paradoxical concept of a ‘pure’ intuition in Kant, see Adorno, Against Epistemology: a Metacritique. Studies in Husserl and the Phenomenological Antinomies, trans. Willis Domingo (Oxford: Blackwell, 1982), pp. 145–7.
ND, 23/12: ‘Dissatisfaction with their own conceptuality is part of their meaning, although the inclusion of nonconceptuality in their meaning makes it tendentially their equal and thus keeps them trapped within themselves. The substance of concepts is to them both immanent, as far as the mind is concerned, and transcendent as far as being is concerned. To be aware of this is to be able to get rid of concept fetishism.’ Cf., on pure concepts, ND 53, 139ff./62, 135ff. And on all these issues, see Simon Jarvis, Adorno: a Critical Introduction (London: Polity, 1998), an important book to which my essay’s sketchy exposition is heavily indebted.
Cf. ND, 149/145–6; Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London: New Left Books, 1974), p. 152;
and the comments on immanent and transcendent critique in Adorno, ‘Cultural Criticism and Society’, Prisms, trans. Samuel Weber and Shierry Weber (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981), pp. 17–34.
Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (London: Athlone, 1997).
See Geoffrey Bennington, ‘Derridabase’, in Derrida and Bennington, Jacques Derrida, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1993), pp. 278–9.
Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), pp. 60–2.
Cf. Derrida, ‘The Pit and the Pyramid: Introduction to Hegel’s Semiology’, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), pp. 69–108 (pp. 78–81); ‘Ousia and Grammè: Note on a Note from Being and Time’, Margins of Philosophy, pp. 29–67 (pp. 48ff.).
See also Geoffrey Bennington, ‘Deconstruction and the Philosophers (The Very Idea)’, in Legislations: the Politics of Deconstruction (London and New York: Verso, 1994), pp. 11–60 (especially pp. 30–44).
See Derrida, Mémoires: for Paul de Man, trans. Cecile Lindsay et al., 2nd edn (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), p. 64.
Rodolphe Gasché, The Tain of the Mirror: Derrida and the Philosophy of Reflection (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1986).
Cf. the arguments concerning uncompletable reflection in, for instance, Dieter Henrich, ‘Fichtes ursprüngliche Einsicht’, in Henrich A. and Hans Wagner, Subjektivität und Metaphysik (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1966), pp. 188–232.
Bennington, ‘Derridabase’, p. 199. Cf. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals, in The Birth of Tragedy and The Genealogy of Morals, trans. Francis Golffing (New York: Doubleday, 1956), pp. 189–90.
See Derrida A., ‘Ulysses Gramophone: Hear Say Yes in Joyce’, in Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge (New York and London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 253–309 (for instance, pp. 279, 296–300); Bennington, ‘Derridabase’, pp. 202–3.
Cf. Derrida, Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1989), pp. 94, 129–36n.
Cf. Walter Benjamin, ‘Critique of Violence’, in One-Way Street and Other Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter (London: New Left Books, 1979), pp. 132–54;
Derrida, ‘Force of Law: “The Mystical Foundation of Authority”’, trans. Mary Quaintance, in Drucilla Cornell, Michel Rosenfeld, David Gray Carlson (eds), Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice (New York and London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 3–67.
Cf. Simon Critchley, ‘On Derrida’s Specters of Marx’, Philosophy and Social Criticism 21:3 (1995), 1–30.
See Gillian Rose, Dialectic of Nihilism: Post-structuralism and the Law (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984), pp. 131–70; Judaism and Modernity, pp. 65–88;
and Peter Dews, The Limits of Disenchantment: Essays on Contemporary European Philosophy (London and New York: Verso, 1995), pp. 31–3.
Cf. Gillian Rose, Mourning Becomes the Law: Philosophy and Representation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 65–76.
J. M. Bernstein, The Pate of Art: Aesthetic Alienation from Kant to Derrida and Adorno (Cambridge: Polity, 1992), p. 284n.
For examples, see Ernesto Laclau, ‘“The Time is Out of Joint”’, in Emancipation(s) (London and New York: Verso, 1996), pp. 66–83; Beardsworth, Derrida & the Political;
Simon Critchley, The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas (Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1992).
On institutions, see, for example, Derrida, ‘Languages and Institutions of Philosophy’, trans. Sylvia Söderlind et al., Recherches Sémiotiques/Semiotic Inquiry 4:2 (June 1984), 91–154; ‘Mochlos; or, The Conflict of the Faculties’, trans. Richard Rand and Amy Wygant, in Richard Rand (ed.), Logomachia: the Conflict of the Faculties (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1992), pp. 1–34. And on absolute (or dialecticizable) difference, cf. Dews, Limits of Disenchantment, p. 85.
My reading of these pages is indebted to Simon Critchley, ‘A Commentary upon Derrida’s Reading of Hegel in Glas’, Bulletin of the Hegel Society of Great Britain 18 (Autumn/Winter 1988), pp. 6–32; and Bennington, ‘Derridabase’, pp. 299–302.
On these topics, cf. Derrida, Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
Jacques Taminiaux, Dialectic and Difference: Modern Thought and the Sense of Human Limits, ed. Robert Crease and James T. Decker, pbk edn (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1990), pp. 55–77 (p. 70). Taminiaux reads these parallels out of Hegel’s and Heidegger’s privileging of Kantian productive imagination, the abyssal root of finite transcendence.
Cf. Taminiaux, ‘From One Fundamental Ontology to the Other: the Double Reading of Hegel’, in Heidegger and the Project of Fundamental Ontology, trans. Michael Gendre (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991), pp. 145–59.
Karl Marx, Capital: a Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin, 1976), pp. 176–7.
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 1999 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Mapp, N. (1999). Spectre and Impurity: History and the Transcendental in Derrida and Adorno. In: Buse, P., Stott, A. (eds) Ghosts. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230374812_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230374812_5
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-0-333-71144-6
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-37481-2
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature & Performing Arts CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)