Customer Reviews

Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life (Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics)

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is perhaps the clearest account of Derrida's thought I've ever read. Achieving such a high level of clarity when dealing with "ultratranscendental" topics could have been no simple task, so Hagglund deserves commendation. I am confident that anyone who reads this text will have very little trouble understanding it (though the ideas are themselves quite intricate) and will come away with a much better understanding of Derrida and his relationship to several other philosophers. I certainly have benefited from reading it. The text doesn't even seem to be overtly pursuing an argument of its own in a way that might skew the reader's understanding of Derrida--but that might just be the result of a genius' ability to disguise his artifice. In any case, it's a really pleasant read.

I agree wholeheartedly with the first customer review. This book is all those things he finds and much more. Especially, it is an excellent place to begin study of what is now a wide-ranging discussion of Derrida.

Maybe it is too much to expect in a single study, still, Hagglund's interpretation (IMHO, and I have not studied as many of D's texts as he has) includes a glaring omission. It has been 25 years since I read D's "Ousia and Gramme" that sets the tone for what Hagglund employs as the fundamental element in D's phenomenology--"time," understood as calculation. (D treats time like a bookkeeper--the bottom line is necessarily something counted.) D mistakenly interpreted Heidegger in that essay as having offered no alternative to "vulgar" time. That allows D to modify Aristotle's analysis of time so that the ecstasies of past, present, future become determinant (perhaps as "absolute"? horrors!). Consequently, Hagglund's interpretation ignores Heidegger's conception of "world," not as the planet nor as context but as pre-given for human self-understanding.

Hagglund's rhetorical insistence that D's "autoimmunity" be understood in terms of violence (e.g., rather than mere "conflict") provides drama that D appreciated. But it has already allowed Hagglund's detractors to use the equally valid rhetoric of negotiation available in D to discredit Hagglund (e.g., John Caputo, "The Return of Anti-Religion: From Radical Atheism to Radical Theology," "Journal of Culture and Religious Theory," 11.2 (2011).). Only time will tell whether the style difference becomes sound and fury without settlement.

Most unfortunate is that Hagglund's interpretation lends itself to a caricature. Heraclitus told us that we cannot step into the same river twice. Hagglund's interpretation (like Mallarme's poetic "There is no present") denies we can step into the same river once. (Second thoughts: In SOCIAL ONTOLOGY, M Eldred insists on an ontological break as a "primal split." That then allows human freedom to be understood as out of nothingness. I don't know what to make of that, in view of my esteem for Eldred.) A bit more of existentialism (preferably of the Heidegger variety) affirming that "The time is now" (e.g., "not to choose is also to choose") might have blended the flow of rhetoric with the flow of time.

So Derrida on the "autoimmune," which informs many of his later writings, is very promising; not so the "trace," if it requires a break in time (but developing thought may alter my opinion).