SUNY series in Contemporary Studies in Philosophy and Literature – serie

This book addresses the question of deconstruction by asking what it is and discussing its alternatives. To what extent does deconstruction derive from a philosophical stance, and to what extent does it depend upon a set of strategies, moves, and rhetorical practices that result in criticism? Special attention is given to the formulations offered by Jacques Derrida (in relation to Heidegger's philosophy) and by Paul de Man (in relation to Kant's theory of the sublime and its implications for criticism). And what, in deconstructive terms, does it mean to translate from one textual corpus into another? Is it a matter of different theories of translation or of different practices? And what of difference itself? Does not difference already invoke the possibility of deconstruction's "others"? Althusser, Adorno, and Deleuze are offered as exemplary cases. The essays in this volume examine in detail these differences and alternatives.The Textual Sublime is particularly concerned with how a text (philosophical or literary) sets its own limits, borders, and margins, how it delimits what constitutes the text per se and how it invokes at the same time what is not determinately in the text. The textual sublime is that aspect of a text that deconstruction shows to be both an element of the text and what surpasses the text, what takes it outside itself (in view of alternatives and alterities) and what ties it to differing philosophical, rhetorical, historical, and critical practices.

This book brings together diverse aspects of postmodernism by philosophers, literary critics, historians of architecture, and sociologists. It addresses the nature of postmodernism in painting, architecture, and the performing arts, and explores the social and political implications of postmodern theories of culture.The book raises the question of whether postmodernism is to be seen as one more epoch or period within a succession of eras, or as a challenge to the modernist practice of periodization itself.The nature of the subject and of subjectivity is explored in order to resituate and contextualize the autonomous subject of the modern literary traditions.Postmodern approaches to philosophy, both analytical and continental (including the work of Deleuze, Derrida, Foucault, Rorty, and Cavell) are scrutinized and compared with a view to the question of foundationalism and with respect to philosophy's historical reflection on its own exclusionary practices.After the Future discusses the ramifications of technology and programs for the renewal of community in a radically pluralistic society. It also discusses the question of language and the diverse ways of distinguishing the articulate from the inarticulate.

Dialectic and narrative reflect the respective inclinations of philosophy and literature as disciplines that fix one another in a Sartrean gaze, admixing envy with suspicion. Ever since Plato and Aristotle distinguished scientific knowledge (episteme) from opinion (doxa) and valued demonstration through formal final causes over emplotment (mythos), the palm has been awarded to dialectic as the proper instrument of rational discourse, the arbiter of coherence, consistency, and ultimately of truth.The matter becomes more complicated when we recognize the various uses of the term "dialectic" in the tradition, some of which complement and even overlap the narrative domain. By confronting these concepts with one another, either de facto or ex professo, the following essays not only raise anew the ancient questions of the identities of philosophy and literature, but do so in the context of recent "postmodern" challenges to their relative autonomy.