Preface (pp. vii-ix)

 

Many university philosophy programs have for some time offered courses in existentialism that treat Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Kafka, Camus, and Sartre as representatives of a popular and, for the most part, accessible mentality. In many college curricula, an existentialism course is listed at a sophomore level in order to encourage students with no formal background to consider the possibility of studying philosophy in a way that might have immediate application to their lives. In fact, when these courses were first introduced, they did attract many students who were looking for just the kind of insights that existentialism provided.

However, it was apparent early on that the doctrines of Heidegger and even Sartre could not be understood without some familiarity with phenomenology; and retrieving the intricacies of Hegel, Husserl, or Merleau-Ponty would have curtailed the amount of time instructors would be able to devote to the very writings that had drawn students to the course in the first place. In the light of this, some departments opted to develop an upper-division course in phenomenology and existentialism; others split nineteenth-century philosophy off as a separate course. Depending on who taught them, some of these courses were part of a sequence in the history of philosophy, whereas others were more topical, literary, or in the history-of-ideas mode.

 The development of continental philosophy especially since the 1960s soon made it apparent that further work on the curriculum was in order. Though some phenomenology and existentialism instructors made valiant attempts to keep their students abreast of what has happened in the last forty years, they generally failed to do justice to recent developments when they have tried to tack them onto existing courses. For many teachers, it was easier to yield the study of structuralist psychoanalysis, semiotics, deconstruction, critical theory, philosophical hermeneutics, poststructuralism, postcolonialism, and postmodernism to literature, history or language departments, or to reserve these movements for graduate students, rather than to develop new courses geared to undergraduates.

Resisting such temptations, I set out more than a decade ago to create just such a course. At professional meetings colleagues commented that the course might work for honors students but were doubtful about whether other students could handle the often arcane jargon that characterizes much of current continental thought. As in discussions of how modern philosophy courses should be taught, we also debated about whether I should limit the course to the study of three or four works by representatives of different perspectives (e.g., Derrida, Foucault, Habermas, Lyotard) or whether I should make the course more comprehensive by including other figures, even if that meant relying on secondary materials and not being able to analyze texts closely.

Based on my experience in teaching modern philosophy courses, I chose breadth over depth for two reasons. First, because a great deal of exchange and commentary characterizes the work of current continental thinkers, it is fruitless to consider them in isolation. Remarks about one another=s ideas so fill their texts that the instructor has to spend as much time talking about what is only alluded to in the text (and thus what is not immediately available to the student) as what is in the text. Second, the pedagogic elevation of major figures or works--and the marginalization or exclusion of others--undermines the effort in current continental philosophy to include literary authors, artists, and social theorists. A course limited to a canonical list of works by Derrida, Foucault, Habermas, and Lyotard would ignore their invitations to read sources other than Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, and Heidegger. Admittedly, the constraints of ordinary course planning require that some selection be made; but by leaving out Lacan, Kristeva, Adorno, Althusser, Gadamer, or Deleuze, we legitimate the narrowing of focus which they and their more well-known counterparts reject.

As I have observed in modern philosophy courses, students who are unimpressed with Descartes or Kant as exemplars of philosophical orthodoxy are often the ones who get excited by Condillac or Vico, precisely because these latter thinkers do not fit easily into the rationalist, empiricist, or idealist categories. A course devoted to thinkers who disrupt the principles underlying this nineteenth-century taxonomy would indeed be an odd place to impose another exclusive model of canonical domination, this time one that marginalizes Saussure, Althusser, and Baudrillard merely because they do not have a name recognition in the United States comparable to Derrida.

As anyone familiar with continental philosophers can attest, immersion in their texts without the support of secondary sources can be an overwhelming experience. Most undergraduates, even the bright ones, become frustrated with some of the texts in ways that far from endear them to any further study in the field. Having to wade through Derrida, Habermas, or Deleuze without already knowing a good bit about what they are up to guarantees that they will develop the same carping contempt for the ideas of these writers that one hears all too often from colleagues who have approached their own reading of these thinkers unprepared and uninformed.

In the American Philosophical Association=s newsletter on teaching philosophy (1993), I summarized the results of my early experience of teaching the course after several years. A revised and expanded version of that essay appeared as ATeaching Recent Continental Philosophy,@ in In the Socratic Tradition: Essays on Teaching Philosophy, ed. Tziporah Kasachkoff (Rowman and Littlefield, 1998; revised 2003). Indeed, my preface here extends the revision of the essay once again. Now as earlier I think that it is a mistake to expect that students will understand or appreciate this much new material if they are thrown solely into original sources. But without plunging into original sources they can hardly appreciate how current continental philosophers draw attention to the linguistic and material character of thought.

In this book I address this situation by including general background discussions or overviews of significant strategies, movements, and thinkers of current continental people. Before each of the readings I have added notes that highlight some of the main points developed by the author. The readings themselves have been selected either because they capture the spirit or main ideas of the writer and are relatively straight-forward or are now considered central in understanding the writer=s overall thought. In some cases they are short essays, in others they are selections from longer works. Together they provide the reader a sense of the character and concerns of continental philosophy in the past forty years.

In contrast to the approach adopted in currently available anthologies, this book makes two points in particular. First, in arranging thinkers and movements in a specific order and according to determinate groupings, I want to emphasize that, apart from chronology, there are scholarly reasons to associate these thinkers in exactly this way. Second, despite the widespread assumption that strategies such as deconstruction, poststructuralism, and postmodernism all refer to roughly the same thing, I argue that it is important for both scholarly and pedagogic purposes to differentiate these movements from one another. In this respect I recognize that any effort to provide a taxonomy or schema for these views seems to contradict the spirit of intertextuality and exchange that informs all of them. But for someone who initially confronts current continental philosophy, it is better to get a good sense of a position (even if it is later found to be in need of qualification) than to think that understanding the view is necessarily complicated by its inherent relations to other positions.

In short, this book is intended for anyone who wants to understand the major ideas and thinkers of current continental philosophy, and that means getting clear on the real differences of critical theory, structuralism, psychoanalytic feminism, deconstruction, poststructuralism, postcolonialism, and postmodernism. My specific arrangement of thinkers is intended to do just that.

 

Introduction (pp. 1-10)

 

Current Continental Philosophy: The Modern, the Postmodern[1]

 

Though they often differ significantly about their claims and methodologies, continental theorists generally agree that thinking is essentially historical. For them philosophic problems cannot be addressed apart from an awareness of the texts and historical contexts in which the problems are posed.[2] Because continental philosophy recognizes its own practice as historically and culturally embedded, it focuses on interpretation, translation, and commentary and does not draw a sharp distinction between the history of philosophy and doing people.[3]

This recognition of the cultural historicity of philosophy highlights how the human standpoint is finite and contingent, not a God-like point of reference outside experience. The Amythology of reason@ (in Hegel=s and Schelling=s words) that claims to transcend history negates historical activity and creates a nihilistic chasm between philosophy and life. The task of continental philosophy is to highlight how this crisis of nihilism is a product of bourgeois society, the hegemony of instrumental reason, and technological domination of natureCin short, modernity.[4] Continental thought responds to the crisis of modernity by raising a critical, emancipating consciousness of how the procedures of the natural sciences fail to describe our primary engagement with the world.

Unfortunately, many of the continental critiques of modernity have been so over-laden with the fashionable jargon of deconstruction and postmodernism that they, like earlier Marxist and psychoanalytic analyses, have been dismissed as nothing more than hand-waving gestures of enthusiasts. Indeed, despite the explosion of studies on modernity and postmodernity over the last quarter century, there is still a significant amount of confusion about what modernity is and whether postmodernity is merely an extension of the self-critique begun in the Enlightenment. As historians, literary theorists, and philosophers have noted, a great deal rides on the outcome of such investigations, for postmodernity proclaims nothing less than the end of history and people. Postmodernity seems to raise suspicions about the propriety of any perspective (including its own) by challenging the notion of propriety itself. But in doing so, it also seems to collapse history into historiography, literature into literary theory, and philosophy into the genealogy or archaeology of its practices.

It is best to begin, then, by identifying the presuppositions of modernity. As recent structuralist and poststructuralist theorists point out, modernity can be characterized in terms of three beliefs: (1) regardless of what we may know about everything else, we know our selves first and most clearly; (2) history is the progressive summary of the interactions of autonomous, naturally self-­interested individuals; and (3) an objective world of things is knowable only in terms of our representations or narrations. Features of these three beliefs are no doubt developed in classical and medieval thought, but it is in thinkers like Descartes and Locke that such ideas are expressed in a form recognized today as distinctly modern. Since the seventeenth century this substantialist, representa­tionalist mentality has become the norm (even among phenomenologists, existentialists, and more traditional interpreters of Hegel, Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche), and alternatives to it have been dis­missed or marginalized.[5]

By contrast, there are so many different senses of postmodern (postmodernism or postmodernity) floating about today that no one description could respect all of the ways the term has been appropriated by theorists and commentators. In art, architecture, and fashion, for example, postmodernism refers to mixing forms of high culture with those of popular culture in an eclectic, ironic, cynical, and even nihilistic pastiche.[6] In such settings, Campbell=s soup-can paintings, exposed ductwork, or ripped blue jeans and the grunge look signal less a revolt against particular conventions than a suspension of the notion of propriety itself. Because as many pick-ups and sport-utility vehicles as BMWs are parked out front of the postmodern Acountry club,@ we no longer know whether to expect denim or diamonds inside, or even what finding denim instead of diamonds would signal. So thanks to the suspension of determinate categories for intellection and cognition, we do not know how to understand Bubba when he tells us that he=s Aa member of the country club@Ca claim cut off from any ontological foundation in a postmodern mentality.

As this way of speaking about postmodernism has developed, the equally hot­-and-sexy vocabularies of poststructuralism, structural psychoanalysis, critical theory, psychoanalytic feminism, and deconstruction have emerged as well. The coincidence of their appearance has contributed to a widespread belief that all of these approaches are somehow linkedCthough exactly how they are tied together is always left unexplained. So it is not uncommon to see postmodernism, poststructuralism, and deconstruction treated as if they are similar enough to warrant their collapse into one another.

It is true that all of these strategies of thought share certain features that I will designate as postmodernCfor example, a suspicion about the possibility of universalizing or totalizing accounts of reason or truth. But I suggest that it is important not to confuse their specific contributions and emphases, for to do so would be to overlook their significant differences.

By couching the issue in these terms, I am suggesting that poststructuralism, like critical theory and deconstruction, needs to be situated within a broadly postmodern context. That context itself needs to be understood as a critique of modernity which cannot be explained by means of the same principles that define the modern mindset. Postmodernity cannot therefore be understood simply as the next phase of historical development beyond the modern era, for that would accept the legitimacy of the principle of historical continuity that a critique of modernity disallows. The postmodern does not merely come after modernity, for that would privilege the modernist penchant for totalizing pro­nouncements about history and thought. Rather, postmodernity thematizes the discrepancy between, on the one hand, sensual, political, and linguistic experi­ence and, on the other, attempts to provide a transcendent or transcendental rationale for experience independent from historical or ideological contingencies.

In short, postmodernity diagnoses the modern condition as one filled with the sense of its own novelty, its independence from the past, its affirmation of itself apart from any cultural, historical, or linguistic heritage. According to the modernist, ontological and social autonomy are possible only insofar they em­body that which cannot be represented in culturally, historically, or linguistically mediated terms.[7] For the postmodern, this is an unfulfillable expectation because rhetorical and social practices inscribe the conditions in terms of which discourse and reasoning are possible in the first place. Modernity=s claim to have transcended the past through its ability to under-stand culture, history, and language is thus blind to the fact that such a universalizing claim is itself intelligible only as a cultural, historical, and linguistic activity. The truth it claims to represent cannot be thought apart from the strategies of representation authorized as appropriate by the institutions and disciplines that define intelligi­bility.

This critique of modernity provides the general context for strategies that explain intelligibility without claiming for themselves (in a naive, self-deluding, or unself-critical way) a totalizing or transcendent grasp of the truth. Those strategies include poststructuralism, structural psychoanalysis, critical theory, psychoanalytic feminism, deconstruction, and postcolonialism. The negative tone of the postmodern critique of the unselfconscious presuppositions of rationality is thus counterbalanced by the positive contributions of these other strategies. But since each of these other approaches must invoke the critical themes of postmodernity as a propaedeutic to their own enterprises, each is often identified with postmodernity. It is important, then, to recognize that postmodernism is not the same as any of these other strategies, even though they assume that its characterization of modernity is correct and that it clears away obstacles to an appreciation of the ideological and linguistic commitments in terms of which thought is made possible and constrained.

As such, postmodernism is not really a theory as much as it is a concern for revealing the manipulative institutions and social structures that are embedded in modernist practices. Postmodernity is the condition that allows us to analyze and critique that form of rationality which associates reason with an autonomous (implicitly male) transcendental subject capable of identifying truth in ontological terms. It is not a global attack on all reason; nor is it a glorification of irrational­ity.[8] It is the reintroduction of a tension between theory and politics, truth and fiction, discourse and situation. It does not begin with the assumption that reason and unreason are simply given as dialectically united to one another. Rather, postmodernity circumvents the modernist fascination for binary oppositions of reason and madness, freedom and determinism, subject and object, identity and difference. As Mark Poster notes: AIn this postmodern world the line between words and things, subject and object, inside and outside, humanity and nature, idea and matter becomes blurred and indistinct, and a new configuration of the relation of action and language is set in place.@[9] In that new configuration, there is no overarching framework for thought, no neutral descriptive language, no permanent (i.e., APlatonic@) standard of rationality in terms of which a sufficiently Aanalytic@ philosophy could understand and evaluate competing claims.[10] By treating history as a function of reason, modernity tries to mask the contingency of reason and the forms of political power that shape the cognitive vocabulary of truth.

As postmodernists such as Lyotard and Rorty see it, modernity adopts a meta-narrative that claims to be true not only for Western European 18th-­century man but for all human beings. Such a metanarrative supposedly offers the prospect of the eman-cipation of the epistemological and moral subject and the attainment of universal truth in science, morality, and art. In that Enlightenment picture, the human race is engaged in a universal historical effort towards moral and intellectual self-realization.[11] Indeed, in that picture, history is the story of the progress of reason and individual freedom; in its terms all knowledge will ultimately be unified. The modern mentality assumes that societies can and should be changed by the power of reason according to universally valid criteria. For it, true humanity culminates in the cosmopolitan individual and in universal human nature, not in customs or contingencies. Through scientific and technological advances, culture is im­proved, productivity increased, and administrative techniques refined.[12] There is a truth about the world, though it is known through human representations which need constant revision and clarification in order to avoid the errors that creep in as a result of personal, social, cultural, or linguistic influences. The ultimate goal of philosophy, literature, and the sciences, though, is to get the facts about the world, history, or the self right.[13]

For the postmodernCespecially as understood in terms of postcolonial theoryCthe problem with this picture is that it overlooks the inherently egoistic, possessive, and domineering aspects of Western individualism and European humanism that dogmatically affirm the privilege of universal reason and the possibility for apprehending it in some form of immaculate perception.[14] In place of having God as the guarantor of knowledge, the Enlightenment substitutes reason as the totalizing activity of a rational, autonomous subject. Because this self-sufficient subject is responsible for its own delusions, it is also able to transcend them and to achieve intellectual and moral improvement through communication between local canons of rationality.[15]

As the postmodernist points out, though, Agood reasons@ are always local and context-relative practices supported by particular, historical human communities. The pursuit of a single standard of rationality or even consensus as a regulative ideal of discourse is both historically outmoded (as the failure of Marxist utopian socialism shows) and sinister (insofar as it attempts to suppress diversity).[16] Marxist socialism fails not because it is not true but because it believes its critique of capitalism is true and innocent of any ideological will to power.[17] By the same token, late capitalism=s elevation of individual consumption into an inalienable right undercuts any prospect for universal emancipation, insofar as it endorses liberalism=s transformation of truth into something subjective and rel­ative.

Such gratuitous affirmations of Athe truth@ are possible, of course, only by assuming that the subject, whether Marxist or liberal, can adopt a stance outside of the social, political, and linguistic legacy in terms of which rationality is defined.[18] Even when the project of intellectual or moral self-improvement is qualified by the requirement that society must validate steps in reasoning, the criteria for proper reasoning are themselves constituted nowhere else than in communal discourse.

Since there are no Aself-evident@ truths apart from a self to whom they are evident, the process by which selves are identified becomes a central concern for theorists trying to understand what is at the heart of modern appeals to the self-­authorizing character of reason. That is why the self or subjectivity takes on such importance for theorists working in a postmodern context. It is also why they all agree that none of their pronouncements transcends the historical and linguistic contexts in which all discourse is embedded.[19] We can trust ourselves not to be deluded into thinking we are acting rationally only if there is some way to verify that either the pursuit of a rational design for humanity or the disinterested pursuit of truth can occur independently of material relations of power, exclusion, and domination. But, of courseCand this is what the postmodernist insists onCwe cannot withdraw ourselves from those relations, not even if we think of ourselves with Voltaire as epistemologically and ontologically innocent of the hegemony of the bourgeoisie.

The modern mentality, epitomized by the Cartesian cogito, presumes to have escaped illusion and to be able to distinguish truth from error without acknowl­edging that such a move is based on an ethically uncertain decision. Even Descartes himself recognizes that the cogito cannot provide its own legitimacy, so he invokes God; but the invocation merely transfers the legitimacy of the self to something outside itselfCand this is precisely what the decenterings of poststructuralist thought invite. Self-assured and self-authorizing, the perceiving subject has no privileged stance for grasping the world, because the subject does not control the linguistic and cognitive means for assimilating what it knows.

This critical reevaluation of cultural, social, and political identity reveals how knowledge of the world, one=s self (as interpreter), and the (authorial) intentions of others is always mediated by material (bodily, political, linguistic) exchanges.[20] If the self, like the world, does not have an intrinsic nature intelligible apart from such mediation, then truth-claims about the self or the world must simply be unselfconscious suggestions about how we might speak rather than declarations about how things are.[21] Rather than saying that there is a right order of words to represent the way things are, the postmodern recommends that we examine how facts, contexts, and agents are them-selves functions of prevailing patterns of representation.[22] In that way, we make a positive contribution to what otherwise might be understood simply as a new version of skepticism.

Such enquiries can go in different directionsCas evidenced by the proliferation of strategies for dealing with the void created by the demise of modernity. Structuralism (as developed by Saussure, Lévi-Strauss, and the Annales histori­ans) indicates how the self and things in the world are intelligible in terms of their place in a network of relations. That network establishes the differentiation of objects and provides the means for making the self and the world intelligible. But structuralism endorses the view that there is something to be represented and a Aright order@ in which to make such representations.[23] In this regard, structural­ism retains the ontological commitments of modernity.

Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan, and Michel Foucault (in his early work) question the legitimacy of modernist premises from the beginning, so the shift from structural-ism to poststructuralismCfrom the view that the network of social, cultural, and linguistic practices represents some truth about the world or about the transcendental conditions of thought, to the view that such practices constitute what is represented as truth, world, and thoughtCnever really required that there be anything called poststructuralism in France.[24] By the time structuralism had begun to make in-roads into American intellectual life, it was almost indistinguishable from poststructuralism.

Unlike the early structuralists, though, poststructuralists not only situate issues of subjectivity, history, and truth in networks of signifiers displacing other signifiers; they also specify the thematic characteristics of those networks along lines intended to forestall any inclination to move beyond the immediacy of experience to some transcendent ground. By focusing on the body, political experience, and language, they indicate how intelligibility is still possible despite the postmodern suspension of subjectivity, rationality, and intentionality as reference points of human activity.

In Lacan=s structural psychoanalysis and Gilles Deleuze=s libidinal schizoanalysis, consciousness is not the other to the body but is the displacement of the sensual by the sensual, the production of a self by means of sensual differentia­tion. As Lacan argues, the self is inherently involved in, and thus split by, its engagement with others. Its identity and intelligibility are constituted by and in unconscious symbolic and social systems over which it has no control. This creates a sense of self-alienation that the subject attempts to overcome through endless desire to be recognized as an autonomous self. But the attempt to think a structure that will lift the body out of its sensual engagement only reaffirms how representation, ideology, and consciousness are functions of desire and power.[25] Even the organs of the body cannot account for its desires, for the significance of an organ is a function of a desire over which the body has no control. As Deleuze puts it, we must imagine a body without organs in order to avoid thinking that desire is a specific intentionality of the body, something which is simply an organic given and which refers to nothing other than itself for its own intelligi­bility.[26]

Though critical theory has its roots in Marxist thought, its poststructuralist version (developed by Adorno and Althusser) denies that any theoretical effort can grasp the totality of the real. Philosophy, unlike science, is essentially interpretation and ideology: it is the Aproblematic@ that makes expression possi­ble, and it provides the structure by which objects are identified and subjects are constituted (or more properly, subjugated) as autonomous, free individuals who are supposedly conceivable apart from society. Ideology identifies what can be known in the (false, imaginary) representations of social existence, but the science of Marxism reveals the process by which political, theoretical, religious, and even economic ideologies are characterized. In the ideological phase of Marxism, subject and history still are dominated by humanist elements; but in the scientific phase all relations are between terms of production rather than between persons (who are seen as ideological mystifications). The science of history is material reality; it is not about anything other than itself.[27] This is why Marxism could never be an ideology, for it does not represent anything. Interpretations cannot Ajustify@ reality or make it meaningful, because reality is always frag­mented. Philosophy thus must renounce the pursuit of totality; instead it must interpret unintentional reality and history as riddles that cannot be made meaning­ful other than by falsely appropriating them in terms of a commodity structure that glosses over social, political, economicCin a word, materialCdifferences.

Deconstruction resists the impulse to transcend the immediacy of experience by showing how the very possibility of thinking immediacy requires linguistic discrimination. As Jacques Derrida points out, though the text invites its own transcen­dence and tries to substitute extra-linguistic objects or ideas for its references to other linguistic expressions, it inevitably fails to fulfill its promise to efface itself. Language (the text) can never point beyond itself without already appealing to notions of Abeyond@ and Aitself@ that themselves are inherently linguistic. This is not to say that there is no such thing as truth or knowledge for the deconstructionist, only that truth and knowledgeC like the self and historyCare themselves functions of the socio-political-institutional discursive formations that inscribe Athe rules of competence, criteria of discus­sion and of consensus, good faith, lucidity, rigor, criticism, and pedagogy.@[28]

By challenging Enlightenment dogmas regarding subjectivity, history, and truth, these poststructuralist strategies (structural psychoanalysis, critical theory, and decon-struction) draw on postmodernism=s reorientation of what can be meant by cognitive and moral improvement. They focus attention on what we immediately experienceCthe body, social and political relations, languageCand often indicate how these three domains of experience are interwoven.

      Unlike much American feminist thought (which presumes the propriety of speaking about women authors, narratives by and about women, and gender stereotypes as potential deviations from the truth), French psychoanalytic feminism under­cuts the notion of the author, his/her sexual identity, and the identity of charac­ters. In general, French feminist criticism presents the feminine as the other to modernity=s dialectical representations. This form of feminism is not about a group of human beings in history whose identity is defined by that history=s representation of sexual decidability. Rather, Awoman@ problematizes the self, representation, and truth-history as the unrepresentable other to consciousness and metaphysical opposition.[29]

This way of presenting the feminine as some sublime other to intelligibility worries some American feminists who insist that inequalities and differences between males and females are part of the experience to which poststructuralist analyses refer. Insofar as Afeminism makes a general claim for the recognition of the specificity of female interests,@ it aspires to the modernist aim of autonomy.[30] But it does not endorse the egalitarian aims of humanism without at the same time criticizing the disparity between the actual material conditions of women and the lip-service given to their plight in liberal democracies.

In this way, American feminism repeats the two major objections raised against postmodernism by European critics such as Jürgen Habermas. First, any critique of the humanistic values of autonomy and subjectivity must assume some standard of truth (which seemingly is made impossible in postmodernity). Second, since relations of power are unintelligible apart from intentionality and purpose, recom­mendations to resist or overturn oppression and domination make no sense without endorsing the idea of the liberation of the self.[31]

To these objections Foucault replies that no notion of progress or civilized achievement can be invoked without first seeing how the concepts of autonomy and individuality are themselves intelligible only in terms of the play of powerCwhich is to say that they are rationalizations of specific interests and techniques of exclusion and repression. As is made evident as well in colonial discourse analysis, power is thus not something that one possesses; it is that which identifies forms of intelligibility. Foucault points out, however, that because subjects are merely representations and not ontological entities, they are not trapped within an irresistible system. The potential for liberation lies in the realization that the identity of the subject, like the validity of reason itself, is no more than an alibi legitimized by tradition, ideological commitments, and dominant economic interests.[32] Our hope, Foucault concludes, lies in an Aethics of transgression,@ a commitment to valorize heterogeneity, difference, and resistance to the impulse toward historical self-determination.[33] In this way we counter­act the violent imposition of regularity in discourse to which the intellectual is all too often a willing contributor.

 


[1]   Much of this discussion is from my APostmodernity, Poststructuralism, and the Historio-graphy of Modern Philosophy,@ International Philosophical Quarterly 35 (1995), 255-67.

[2]   See Simon Critchley, AWhat Is Continental Philosophy?@ in A Companion to Continental Philosophy, ed. Simon Critchley and William R. Schroeder (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1998), pp. 9-10; and William McNeill and Karen S. Feldman, Introduction to Continental Philosophy: An Anthology (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1998), pp. 1-2.

[3]   On the meaning of Acontinental philosophy,@ see Simon Critchley, Continental Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 32-53; Richard Campbell, AThe Covert Meta-physics of the Clash between >Analytic= and >Continental= Philosophy,@ British Journal for the History of Philosophy 9 (2001), 341-59; and Walter Brogan and James Risser, Editors= Introduction to American Continental Philosophy: A Reader (Bloomington: Indiana Univer-sity Press, 2000), 1-9.

[4]   Critchley, AContinental Philosophy,@ p. 12.

[5]   Cf. William R. Schroeder, AAfterword,@ in Companion, p. 630.

[6]   Cf. Douglas Kellner, APostmodernism as Social Theory: Some Challenges and Problems,@ Theory, Culture and Society 5 (1988), 239-43.

[7]   See Charles Whitney, Francis Bacon and Modernity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), p. 159.

[8]   See Mark Poster, Critical Theory and Poststructuralism: In Search of a Context (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), 5; and Karlis Racevskis, Postmodernism and the Search for Enlightenment (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1993), p. 3.

[9]   Poster, Critical Theory, p. 10.

[10]  See Campbell, AAnalytic and Continental,@ 343-56; and Critchley, Continental Philosophy, 41-51.

[11]  See Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), pp. xxiii-xxv; and Richard Rorty, Contin­gency, Irony, and Solidarity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 17-20. Cf. Sabina Lovibond, AFeminism and Postmodernism,@ New Left Review 178 (1999), 6.

[12]  See Annemiek Richters, AModernity-Postmodernity Controversies: Habermas and Foucault,@ Theory, Culture and Society 5 (1988), 611-19; and Richard Rorty, AHabermas and Lyotard on Postmodernity,@ in Zeitgeist in Babel: The Postmodern Controversy, ed. Ingeborg Hoesterey (Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 1991), pp. 84-97.

[13]  Cf. Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), pp. 139-52.

[14]  See Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman, eds., Introduction to Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), pp. 1-14.

[15]  Cf. Racevskis, Postmodernism, p. 4.

[16]  Lovibond, AFeminism,@ 6-7.

[17]  See Vincent Descombes, Modern French Philosophy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980), pp. 173-78, 181-82.

[18]  See Poster, Critical Theory, p. 30.

[19]  Ibid., pp. 7-8.

[20]  See Racevskis, Postmodernism, pp. 24-25.

[21]  Rorty, Contingency, pp. 3-11, 21-22.

[22]  Cf. Richard Kearney, Modern Movements in European Philosophy (Dover: Manchester University Press, 1986), pp. 291-96.

[23]  See Hayden White, The Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), pp. 231-32; and Walter Brogan and James Risser, Introduction to American Continental Philosophy: A Reader (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), p. 3.

[24]  See Philip Lewis, AThe Post-structuralist Condition,@ Diacritics 12 (1982), 2-24; and Racevskis, Postmodernism, p. 17.

[25]  See Jacques Lacan, Ecrits (Paris: Seuil, 1966), pp. 867-88; Lacan, Le Séminaire, Livre II: Le Moi dans la théorie de Freud et dans la technique de la psychoanalyse (Paris: Seuil, 1978), pp. 112; Racevskis, Postmodernism, pp. 33-35; Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), pp. 296-304; and Descombes, French Philosophy, pp. 152-67.

[26]  See Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester and Charles Stivale, ed. Constantin V. Boundas (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 129, 188-98; and Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, pp. 326-27. Cf. Ronald Bogue, Deleuze and Guattari (London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 92-95.

[27]  See Louis Althusser, AIdeology and Ideological State Apparatuses,@ in ALenin and Philosophy@ and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), pp. 158-77. Cf. Kearney, Modern Movements, pp. 299-318.

[28]  Jacques Derrida, AAfterword: Toward an Ethic of Discussion,@ in Limited Inc., 2nd ed. (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1989), p. 146. See Christopher Norris, Spinoza and the Origins of Modern Critical Theory (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991), pp. 128, 234-35.

[29]  See Alice A. Jardine, AGynesis,@ in Critical Theory Since 1965, ed. Hazard Adams and Leroy Searle (Tallahassee: Florida State University Press, 1986), pp. 562-70.

[30]  Rita Felski, AFeminist Theory and Social Change,@ Theory, Culture and Society 6 (1989), 231. Cf. Lovibond, AFeminism,@ 28.

[31]  See Racevskis, Postmodernism, pp. 53-58; and Seyla Behabib et al., Feminist Contentions: A Philosophical Exchange (New York: Routledge, 1995).

[32]  Racevskis, Postmodernism, pp. 63, 92.

[33]  See Michel Foucault, AOn the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress,@ in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), pp. 343, 351-62. Cf. Richters, AModernity-Postmodernity,@ 626-27, 637-39.