Sharon Bassett

Department of English
California State University-Los Angeles
Los Angeles, CA 90032

 

Desmond, William. Art and the Absolute: A Study of Hegel’s Aesthetics. Albany: SUNY UP, 1986;

 

Desire, Dialectic, and Otherness. New Haven: Yale UP, 1987;

 

Philosophy and Its Others: Ways of Being and Mind. Albany: SUNY UP, 1990.

 

Comedy has, therefore, above all, the aspect that actual self-consciousness exhibits itself as the fate of the gods. These elementary Beings are, as universal moments, not a self and are not equal. They are, it is true, endowed with the form of individuality, but this is only in imagination and does not really and truly belong to them; the actual self does not have such an abstract moment for its substance and content. It, the Subject, is raised above such a moment, such a single property, and clothed in this mask it proclaims the irony of such a property wanting to be something on its own account. The pretensions of universal essentiality are uncovered in the self; it shows itself to be entangled in an actual existence, and drops the mask just because it wants to be something genuine. The self, appearing here in its significance as something actual, plays with the mask which it once put on in order to act its part; but it as quickly breaks out again from this illusory character and stands forth in its own nakedness nd ordinariness, which it shows to be not distinct from the genuine self, the actor or from the spectator.

 

–G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit

 

It is as if the people who speak out of, and, (whom we understand to be speaking) on behalf of, postmodernity and those who speak out of and on behalf of its totalizing and totalitarian antagonists have lived different histories and now speak from incongruent and incommensurate experiences. The gulfs which separate them, even leaving aside the polemics of the popular press, resist the most subtle tuning of “difference.” How many twentieth centuries have there been? How many modernities have there been? How many perspectivisms have been arrayed against how many differently construed traditional monisms? The trajectory of unacceptable differences, that escape even the playful category of difference, can hardly be traced without creating a filigree. One thinks of one definition of lace: a thousand holes tied together with string. It is not surprising that in the midst of these rhetorical questions, to which everyone has an answer, three books that situate the question of the nature of postmodernity within a poetics rather than within a rhetoric of history should be rather overlooked, especially by people working in literature.

 
The three books by William Desmond, Art and the Absolute: A Study of Hegel’s Aesthetics (Albany: SUNY, 1986); Desire, Dialectic, and Otherness (New Haven: Yale UP, 1987); and Philosophy and Its Others: Ways of Being and Mind, (Albany: SUNY, 1990), constitute a picture of the world that has refused to reduce history to a series of catastrophes and which maintains instead a sense of tragic meaningfulness in art and in the natural world constructed by and inhabited by humanity.
 
Desmond offers a thoughtful and richly articulated account of what he calls “metaxological mindfulness”, a kind of intermediary life of consciousness, in-between-ness that rescues thought from the mania of the one and the frenzy of the many; in addition his project moves towards a poetic visionary coda, a vision on which inhabitants of this brazen planet of postmodernity have long since given up: for both of these reasons he rewards an encounter by Postmodern Culture.

 
Metaxological in-between-ness substitutes for the edgy life on the edge that Desmond sees as the corrosive outcome of deconstruction, which was itself an outcome of Heidegger’s [deliberate?] misunderstanding of Hegel. While he does not engage his adversaries directly, the shadows of Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida and to a lesser extent Lyotard fall continually across his page. The most striking difference between Desmond and the masters of suspicion against whom he arrays his forces is that, unlike them, he has not taken the linguistic turn. By this I mean that when both Desmond and Derrida struggle with the process by which art (literature?) can penetrate philosophy–a process which each regards as both essential and inescapable–Desmond argues (or “does philosophy,” what he would call “being mindful”) against the death of art. At the same juncture and for the same cause Derrida refashions the philosophic text itself, and puts the literary text directly adjacent to it. Derrida explains that he does it since the “agency of Being” (by which I understand him to mean ordinary metaphysics) alwaysappropriates, eats up and digests or “interiorizes” every limit that is put against it. By installing the texts of literary writers (Jean Genet, Michel Leiris) in the margins or blank spaces that surround philosophic texts, Derrida makes typographically possible what is metaphysically impossible. I will come back to a further consideration of the relation between literature and philosophy and the difference between metaphysics and typography that Derrida offers.

 
Hegel is the icon of wholeness and totality that sustains the tradition of western thought; Hegel is, at the same time, the (unacknowledged) father of the iconoclastic flight from wholeness and totality that characterizes postmodern thought. We are not lacking in philosophical and critical efforts to defend either icon or iconoclast and refute the other; we are at a loss for efforts to square the circle and have a Janus-faced Hegel seeing before and after. In his first book, Art and the Absolute: A Study of Hegel’s Aesthetics, Desmond sets out to use Hegel’s view of art as a way of denying that “a movement to wholeness must be identified with totalitarian closure.” While one can not say in the end that Desmond’s project is entirely successful (because he lacks the power to evoke the sensuous self- knowledge with which he credits art) his is a serious, thoughtful effort to maintain the contemporaneity of Hegel while at the same time offering a way for philosophy to be open to art specifically because it represents an absolute that does not inevitably erode into totalitarian closure.

 
For Desmond, Hegel’s system is fueled by an aesthetic vision. The Hegelian philosophic practice constitutes a quest or adventure organized and narrated in such a way as to expose the interaction between the panorama of choices and the active choosing by the mind operating in time. Rather than being a historicized version of the rationalist’s engine, Hegel offers a journey, a pilgrimage, or a quest as representations of wholeness. The journey is whole in the sense that it reflects the continual and multiple actualization of the faculty of choice, and it is open since the process is an ongoing effort to concretize or articulate the circumstances and actions that constitute the choosing. As Desmond explains in the process of characterizing deconstruction, “the issue of dialectic has to do with the question of the teleological thrust of articulation” (88). To see Desmond working the philosophical implications of articulation as a teleological enterprise, full of action and coherence, is to see him at his strongest and best. And, curiously enough, it is also to see a limitation in his project that in the end deprives it of having the polemical and rhetorical power it clearly intends to have.
 
To be articulate is to open up the spaces between words in speech, it is to allow silence into the undifferentiated stream of sound that is “noise”; and, especially, in the language of electronic transmission, it is to add the colors of rhetoric to the “white noise” of an untuned radio. It is a joint or hinge that must be itself motionless, empty, inactive so that the gate or door that is hung from it can move. It is the vulnerable part of the animal’s body that in life makes motion possible, but which in death enables the butcher’s knife to transform the body into convenient segments for eating. The aura that a word like “articulation” brings into a particular usage in discourse is immensely rich and diverse. Because Desmond is himself suspicious of the power of language, especially literary language, he does not seem to understand that to call upon this multiplicity is not to encounter a series of refutations or contradictions (what he would call an “equivocal” series). Nor does one find that claim in the theoretical texts written by the deconstructionists against whom he is writing.

 
While the Hegelian dialectic and the work of deconstruction have in common an interest in the teleological thrust of articulation, Desmond distinguishes between them in the following way:

 

where deconstruction seems to give us analysis without synthesis, dialectic insists that we return again to the original synthesis, now with the enrichment of having passed through the analysis. (98)

 

For Desmond, the implications of diversity and openness which seem on the surface to be the special contribution of deconstruction are in fact already implicit in the Hegelian dialectic. He offers a contribution to a “positive ‘deconstruction’ of the deconstructionist’s often too closed and fixed view of Hegel.”

 

Desmond’s defense of Hegel, learned and useful as it is, does not really respond in a serious way to the readings of Hegel that he finds inadequate in Heidegger and Derrida. And yet one finds in Heidegger and Derrida quite genuine appreciations of what Desmond says they reject in Hegel. In his late Identity and DifferenceHeidegger describes the “active nature of Being” which is itself an “unprecedented exemplar” with the following example from Hegel:

 

Hegel at one point mentions the following case to characterize the generality of what is general: Someone wants to buy fruit in a store. He asks for fruit. He is offered apples and pears, he is offered peaches, cherries, grapes. But he rejects all that is offered. He absolutely wants to have fruit. What was offered to him in every instance is fruit and yet, it turns out, fruit cannot be bought. (66)

 

One may grant that this is one of Heidegger’s more rudimentary evocations of Being. It is full of the unspecifiability that belongs to deconstruction, and, at the same time it is full of the unspecifiability that is characteristic of the concept of beauty that Desmond evokes. Fruit cannot be bought, beauty can not be . . . . What is the proper predicate for a sentence of which beauty is the subject?

 

The much reiterated, without being particularly understood, linguistic turn is precisely what is at stake when Desmond offers beauty as an alternative to nihilism. He sees “beauty” as an alternative to the closed wholeness which the deconstructionists seem to attribute to Hegel. The problem with beauty is the problem that Heidegger’s shopper has when he asks for fruit: beauty, like fruit, cannot be bought, cannot be parsed.

 
For Desmond, “beauty is the sensuous image of being“; [it] “presents us with a bounded harmonious whole, hence limited whole.” Desmond gathers up and makes use of Kant’s observations from Critique of Judgment that “art produces a second natureover and above the first nature of externality.” And finally, “Every merely escapist aesthetics of beauty must be derided; beauty rather must seek to accept and include within itself the divisive, destructive forces of complex conflicts.” The artist testifies to and verifies his or her honesty by being able to release and articulate the ugly (from within beauty) in a movement toward a “complex affirmation.”

 
This is the point at which one must raise essential questions about how and in what register it is appropriate to engage with and offer alternatives to either “deconstruction” or the work of Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida, and Nihilism. Is there a protocol? Is there a methodological context from within which a respectful engagement is possible? Is the “complex affirmation” either complex or affirming? How can a writer undertake a defense of Hegel against the negative and the denying (in order to offer a defense of the positive and the affirming), do so in the very rhetoric of the polarities that the tradition against which he argues calls into question. Moreover, how can he undertake, as Desmond does in his last volume, a defense of art, without–even if only to dismiss it–raising the question of the status of the literary text? Without, in fact, being really concerned with the fundamentally linguistic aspect of deconstruction?

 
When Desmond writes that “deconstruction is inextricably tied up with articulation” he has a perfect opening to the issue of the status of the text. And it is a point at which it would be possible to distinguish among the variety of issues and points of view that are collapsed into “deconstruction.”¹

 
Desmond’s thesis is that “the dialectical way represents an approach to the art work which preserves what I have called the principle of wholeness, while not necessitating us to discard the deep complexities and polarities disclosed by deconstruction” (96). Indeed he writes that, “the present chapter might be seen as contributing to a positive ‘deconstruction’ of the deconstructionist’s often too closed and fixed view of Hegel” (99).

 
But this very project of finding Hegel’s (self- generated) double, of finding the “absolving” and the “releasing” in Hegel’s Absolute rather than merely the “dissolving” and “enclosing”–of inviting us to read The Phenomenology of Spiritin a liberating and multivalent way–is undercut when Desmond goes on to read Foucault, for example, in a univocal, denatured way. He indicates that Foucault’s “post-Nietzschean announcement of the ‘death of man'” is a representation of modernity as a world in which, “man is played out, obsolete . . . harmony is dead . . . randomness and calculated purposelessness are to be the final gesture in the denunciation and dismantling of traditional art.” This view of Nietzsche, Foucault and assorted aspects of postmodernism are derived from a not exactly objective source, Jacques Barzun.

 
My point here is not to castigate Desmond for relying on secondary sources for his characterization of the “aesthetics of annihilation,” but rather to reproach him for missing an opportunity to link the reading of Hegel he offers with Foucault himself. One thinks of Foucault’s “Preface to Transgression.” This essay is fully as much an effort to de-totalize the dialectic and to open up the possibilities of affirmation as is Desmond’s own work:

 

Transgression opens onto a scintillating and constantly affirmed world, a world without shadow or twilight, without that serpentine "no" that bites into fruits and lodges their contradictions at their core. It is the solar inversion of satanic denial.²

 

And even when Foucault writes in the final paragraph of requiem of The Order of Thingsthat,

 

Taking a relatively short chronological sample within a restricted geographical area--European culture since the sixteenth century--one can be certain that man is a recent invention within it . . . As the archaeology of our thought easily shows, man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end.³

 

Foucault’s “archaeology” is read as “the denunciation and dismantling of traditional art” instead of as an attempt to understand and to know the relationship between traditional and modern art and experience. Foucault’s sense of crisis in the areas of community, nature, and gender does not mean that Foucault’s writing has causedthe crisis. One cannot help feeling that indeed the philosophical writers who write so urgently against nihilism are experiencing the same or collateral crises. It might be useful to distinguish the writers who attempt to understand or point the way toward the crisis from those who offer a solution to it. It is my own feeling that such solutions are premature and that understanding, pointing, and indicating the lived experience of our crises–in whatever form it takes–needs some answer besides dismissal.
 
If Desmond’s first book offers a revisited and doubled Hegel, a Hegel whose sense of the negative, whose cultivation of the negative is substantial and long-lived enough to put the post-Nietzschean, post-Heideggerian nihilists of our era to shame, his second book, Desire, Dialectic and Othernessis an extended and intricate defense of ontotheology. But again, while the attention given to an articulation and an unfolding of a rejection of nihilism is both engaging philosophically and lyrical in its envisioning of what he calls “desire’s tenacious witness to the primordial power of the yes” there is, in the reader, nevertheless a residue of doubt. And one’s doubt derives not so much from a sense that the affirming argument for the generative power of desire is inadequate, but rather from a sense that insufficient attention is paid to the urgency of the position against it.

 
For Desmond, “desire introduces disjunction into this submersion [in passivity, before the Fall] and sows the seed of a determinate self through the sense of difference and dissatisfaction” (21). The desiring self is both original and originating and at its best “tries to point not simply to what is specified but, more deeply to what does the specifying.” It is very much the Hegelian self who, as subject knowing the object, at the same time recognizes itself as a knowing object; it is the process by which the self individuates itself from itself in the act of knowing the world. But Desmond’s notion of origin is no more a fixed point in time than it is a fixed limit in space:

 

[The original self] is the movement between fixed beginnings and ends and, in the middle between them, is an end and a beginning, more radically moving, powerfully positive, and indeterminably rich. (65)

 

One needs to pull back for a moment: Deconstruction is tied up with “articulation,” Hegelian dialectic is the drive toward articulating the absolute, and the absolute (or originary) self (which comes up toward the end of Desire Dialectic and Otherness) is fueled by (the same?) urgent move toward articulation. In the case of the last or originary self it comes to know itself because its openness to otherness makes it possible for it to know itself. At this stage of his argument Desmond is concerned with ways in which deconstruction and the Hegelian dialectic share concerns and outcomes. It is essential for his case to show that deconstruction arises out of and subsides into nihilism while his own position, deriving from a development of the Hegelian position which he calls metaxologydoes not. The “metaxological” is that middle ground in which “the community of originals” comes into being. He finds the experience of the aesthetic, the sublime and agapeic love to be examples of living in the middle, in some new territory which is neither self nor other but somehow both at once, without there being any impairment of either element.

 
Earlier on, Desmond had used the example of Narcissus whose mistake is not that he falls in love with his image on the surface of the water but the fact that he makes no distinction between himself and other. He cannot have a self until he identifies in some way with that which is not him. For Desmond, Sartre and Hobbes are blood brothers with Narcissus: “in the war of all against all, the Leviathan who would tame all does not bear the olive branch, unfortunately, only the apotheosis of the ailment. When we hiss at this hell, we succeed only in stoking its chill fires” (174). The ailment in each case is the notion of the univocal, hence undifferentiated, self.

 
Desire, Dialectic and Othernessconcludes with a notion of what Desmond calls, following Hegelian terminology, “a post-Romantic symbol.” As I understand it, the “post-Romantic symbol” is an alternative to the images of totalization that are associated with the classical humanist or Judeo-Christian world and similarly an alternative to the radical inwardness of the Romantic or post-Cartesian world. Desmond makes each of these traditions serve as a lens of a binocular, in such a way that the overlapping of their lines of sight produces a three-dimensional, in the middle, or, finally “metaxological,” vision:

 

[A post-Romantic symbol] emerges from the metaxological intermediation of more than one infinity, the interior infinity of the original self and the suggestion of another infinity emergent in being itself. (201)

 

But Desmond is cautious not to equate this multitude of infinities with the Hegelian absolute. It will not tend, as Hegel had directed his absolute, toward the identity of identity and difference. The persistence of “otherness,” instead of being the sense of malaise that afflicts and paralyzes the Cartesian self, is fundamental, for Desmond, to the idea of being itself. Otherness is not the alternative to being, it is the necessary circumstance of being.

 

By pluralizing wholeness and infinity, Desmond sets the stage for his “community of originals.” He recognizes that there can be no claims for an explicit or ultimate explanation of the community he envisions. He aims instead toward “a kind of periphrastic philosophical image, culminating not in absolute knowledge, but in the acknowledgment of a radical enigma” (206). But language itself, the medium to which the Herculean efforts of “articulation” are confined, threatens continually to congeal again into the very imprisoning structures from which it had, with so much difficulty, seemed to have escaped. In embracing this limitation, this danger inherent in rhetoric if not in language itself, it may well be that Desmond puts himself in more intimate alliance with the deconstructive theorists against whom he has written his books than he realizes:

 

I have tried to minimize this drift by discerning the metaphor in the structure, thereby turning this limitation to some positive use. For our limits may be an indirect image of the ultimate otherness, a kind of ontological salutation of what is always beyond us. Facing into this final difference, one may consent to the community of being and seek to be divided oneself no longer. For we become patterned after what we love as ultimate. (206-207)

 

I recognize that there is very little in the work of, say, Derrida about what we may love as ultimate.⁴ But it does seem to be the case that for both Derrida and Desmond the struggle toward affirmation is a struggle with, against, and for the elements of rhetoric and poetry that both convey and cloud meaning. They choose different poems and different rhetorical moments. Desmond reads Hopkins, Yeats, Shakespeare and Hegel; Derrida reads Mallarme, Valery, Genet and Hegel. And when we come to look at their readings, at how they perform as readers, we come to understand the real problem that arises when one tries philosophically to refute or out-flank deconstruction as it is specifically and concretely practiced. For Desmond “aesthetic objects” (usually poems) come to exist as unambiguous and thematic messages to the world. The danger and possibility of the metaphor, the metaphor as metamorphosis, the power of which Desmond is entirely clear about in his own use (it enables him to minimize drift) seems to escape him when he uses literary texts like Learto justify and support his philosophical claims. He calls the argument of his book a “periphrastic philosophical image . . . culminating in the acknowledgment of a radical enigma.”

 
But is this not where deconstruction starts? Once the recognition occurs, in the conscious tradition of the tragic genre, the analytic modality is mobilized not just to perform a reductive expose but, in Desmond’s fine word, to “articulate” the enigma. Not that that is the end of the story, poem or figure. In a sense it is only the beginning. He writes in conclusion:

 

For here what is enigmatic is not a rationalization of ignorance too lazy to root out its own lack. It has nothing to do with a lack that we ourselves could will away. The world in its otherness is opened out, and we cannot will its closure. The over determined power of being invades us within and surrounds us without. We encounter a limitation, the confession of which need occasion no lamentation. Again, it is not enough just to say brusquely that the enigma is there and then go on as before, as if it made no difference. The talent is not for burial or for rusting, but for our ripe, originating return. (207)

 

Desmond’s final book, Philosophy and Its Others: Ways of Being and Mind sets out to conceptualize without conceptualizing (that is, without fixing and freezing) the pluralized metaxological community of otherness for which Desire, Dialectic and Othernesshad established the possibility. It might be useful at this point to distinguish two issues which occupy Desmond throughout his work and which finally do not seem to have much to do with each other. They are not in any case interdependent. The double project that I understand being under taken is 1) a refutation of the “nihilism” of post-Heideggerian “deconstructive” philosophical thinking and 2) a fleshing out of a community based on a radical embracing of otherness in which the self, obeying the charge to “be other,” becomes instead itself. This is what Desmond calls the metaxological community of intermediation. Intermediation I understand to be a point of intersection between a pure “mediation” (which is the loss of self for the sake of the other) and an equally pure “immediation” (which is loss of the other for the sake of the self). In separating Desmond’s double project it is possible to dismiss the first part as being of minor interest. Nihilism and deconstruction are so feebly envisioned that one feels that Desmond himself has hardly met a living practicing nihilist. On the other hand the second aspect of Desmond’s work, particularly his extensively developed characterization of the community of postmodernity, rewards closer attention.
 
The first part of Philosophy and Its Others, like Plato’s Republic or Dante’s Divine Comedyor other efforts to envision a thoughtful or philosophical community, indicates the most significant roles that individuals play. Each of the roles is envisioned vis-a-vis philosophy since philosophy can only fully become itself by “thinking its others” rather than merely thinking itself. While the exemplary figures of Socrates and Spinoza exist as tentative guides, Desmond wants other “configurations of human possibility that have been and still are crucial for philosophy.” He selects: the scholar, technician, scientist, poet, priest, revolutionary, hero, and sage.

 
The first half of the book consists of thinking through or living the intermediation between philosophy and each of these human possibilities. And each of them offers something concrete and essential that is missing from, and yet in some sense dependent on, philosophy. They are the other to philosophy that philosophy must encounter and at the same time they are themselves a kind of blindness. As he explains it:

 

If philosophy involves the mindful thought of being as metaxological, it deals with what as other is always, as it were, too much for it. But it is just this excess of otherness that we must patiently try to think. Likewise, since I see philosophical thought together with its others, I find it impossible hermetically to seal the mode of philosophical discourse itself. If philosophy is thought thinking itself and its others, just to that extent to be truly welcoming of the voice of the other means on occasion to be willing to voice one's own thought in the voice of the other. (11)

 

We can see here an amplification of one of Desmond’s significant themes. The multiplicity of his post-Hegelian community is one that is not based on the univocity of naive belief, nor on the equivocity of skeptical analysis, nor on the absorbing or dissolving power of the dialectic, but rather “to take seriously Aristotle’s saying that to on legetai pollachos, being is said in many ways.” The philosopher is the one who articulates and seemingly makes possible the conditions of what Desmond calls “middle mindedness.”

 

The philosopher knows middle thought to be an incessant alternation between extremes, endless conversation between thought and its others. Thinking mediates with itself but also makes war on itself, on its own perennial seduction to closure against otherness. Failing incitement from elsewhere, from external others, the philosopher is the type who picks a quarrel with himself. He make himself other. (60)

 

Having rerooted philosophy as a way of being, not in its own certainty but in its own self doubt, in its own “genial doubt,”⁵Desmond goes on to elaborate three ways in which it is possible to live such a life. He offers Being Aesthetic, Being Religious, and Being Ethical. The final, ethical, chapter leads us most directly to concerns about the nature of the metaxological community of otherness.

 
The underlying presence of Hegel’s work of art as absolute is everywhere present in this chapter. For example, when Desmond works with the idea of desire and its place in the ethical community he must find a way of moving from desire’s self-insistence to desire’s ability to “turn to the other as other.” He must escape the Nietzschean and Freudian configuration of the will as an absolute in itself. He does not do it by denying the power of will, for this would deprive being ethical of energy and dynamism. Desire itself must be more deeply thought:

 

To desire is to be driven by internal exigency, yet also it is to reach out to something other than oneself that one needs or lacks or loves. It testifies to the self's power as both demanding its own satisfaction and stretching beyond itself to things or selves other than self. . . . This inherent doubleness grounds the difference between an instrumental relation to the other and one that grants the other its intrinsic worth. (188)

 

It is characteristic of Desmond’s thought to discuss an entity that is seen from one side (the univocal side) as total and that is seen from the other side (the equivocal/skeptical side) as empty and meaningless, and to fashion some space in the middle within which the entity in question can function like an Hegelian work of art. So that, in other words, while it passionately tends toward completed wholeness, it is, by virtue of this very tending, always never whole.
 
This section on the possibilities of desire Being Ethical links up with the final movement of Desire, Dialectic, and Otherness where Desmond suggests that what he is doing is authorizing the “post-Romantic symbol.” And it is a symbol not in the fixed iconic or plastic sense but rather in the dynamic verbal sense that he attaches to the metaxological. It is the movement, in fact, from first love (“every being affirms its own being . . . this I am and this I will to continue to be”) to second love (“I know that my own being does not, cannot exhaust the fullness of being”). And we see that this post-Romantic symbol carries with it an even more Hegelian aura when Desmond links the many kinds of passion available to the image with which Hegel brings the Phenomenology of Spiritto a finale:

 

The Golgotha of the ethical will is the self- transformation of first love into second love. This transformation answers the question "What am I to be?" with a dread command: "Be other! You must change utterly!" But strangely, being other is just to be what we are, to become our promise. (190)

 

There is a final section called “Being Mindful: Thought Singing Its Other” where Desmond’s uncertain yet wholehearted commitment to the power of the aesthetic cannot help but disappoint after so much that has been skillful, deft and eloquent. But instead of dwelling on its deficiencies, I would rather look at the immediately preceding part of Philosophy and Its Otherswhich is itself (as its title suggests) an exemplification of “Being Mindful: Thought Thinking Its Other.”

 
Here Desmond turns his attention to three issues that are rarely as significantly present in contemporary thoughtful discourse as they are here: Logic, Solitude and Failure⁶. It is much more likely that we would read and write about Intuition, Intimacy with Others, and (perhaps) the Fear of Success. But for Desmond these three former and more somber concerns represent the determining otherness of philosophy; they are in fact the crucial alien others against which triumphalistic thought would inoculate us. But just as Desmond reminds us of Dostoyevsky’s remark that to know the quality of justice in a country it is necessary to visit the prisons, so, in this case, to know the quality of thinking it is necessary to visit what is ordinarily excluded from thought and penalized for existing. The meditation on logic speaks to the intractable order of the world of the other; the meditation on solitude speaks to the penal condition of solitary confinement where “to be alone with oneself thus is to be alone with nothing“; while the meditation on failure addresses “the fact that the outer action does not, cannot fulfill completely the intention of the inner self. Thus it is never enough to separate the inner and outer. This separation, in fact, is only a redefinition of failure” (252). So the efforts at totalization can never realize themselves in any kind of practice. And the philosophical world, because its way of being is so deeply implicated in the world of practice, is able to shield itself against what might otherwise imperil it.

 
But the figure of Narcissus returns. And it seems that the crucial other to the un-systematic systematic philosopher is the chimerical reality of language and rhetoric. The philosopher cannot examine his own tools. His words stand out on the surface with all the problematic stainless steel shimmer Desmond attributes to the Cartesian self. He trusts his words and so he has not met the adversary who combines and exemplifies logic, solitude, and failure: the language with which he works. Narcissus drowns not because he falls in love with himself, but because he does not recognize what is not him.

 
It is easy to understand why a philosopher who truly means to move philosophy away from the nihilistic and as well as the facilely therapeutic, who has already dealt with the poverty of the linguistic philosophers and who has set out to present an alternative to deconstruction, would not be in the mood to disassemble the very means without which his project seemingly could not exist.

 

Notes

 

1. See Desmond’s earlier article, “Hegel, Dialectic, and Deconstruction.” Philosophy and Rhetoric 18 (1985), 244-263. While Desmond’s view of deconstruction is rather limited and second-hand (he relies on anthologies like Deconstruction and Criticism from 1979), he is alert to the subtle presence of Nietzsche and Heidegger and to the implications of that presence.

 

2. Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, ed. Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), 37.

 

3. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage Books, 1970), 386-87.

 

4. Consider the remarkable material collected in his Memories for Paul de Man: Revised Edition (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989). See, for example, Derrida’s defense of de Man against the charge of nihilism. He gives him the plural affirmation of Molly Bloom (a formula of affirmation that Desmond also uses against nihilism):

 

Underlying and beyond the most rigorous, critical, and relentless irony, within that "Ironie der Ironie" evoked by Schlegel, whom he would often quote, Paul de Man was a thinker of affirmation. By that I mean--and this will not become clear immediately, or perhaps ever--that he existed himself in memory of an affirmation and of a vow: yes, yes. ( 21)

 

5. In his unlikely comparison of Chicken Little with the Buddha, Desmond makes the point that what ennobles the Buddha is that he is moved by genial doubt rather than anxious faith: “Where he can know the truth, he refuses only to believe. But his searching can cause disquiet” (144).

 

6. These are the three areas of concern to which Desmond devotes the final part of his study. I understand that for him it is the failure of modernist philosophy to encounter these issues, and by virtue of this failure the inability of modernist philosophy to speak to human exigency, that accounts for its fundamental nihilism.