The Edinburgh Companion to Poststructuralism, page 5
Kantian idealism, Hegel in particular. Key here is Heidegger’s reading of the history of philosophy and how it has, implicitly and explicitly, functioned as the interpretative frame through which poststructuralism itself approaches
the history of philosophy. This, for Lumsden, explains why Hegel, at least
in the case of Deleuze and Derrida, is the confluence and culmination of all the problematic strains that run through modern philosophy.
In Chapter 2, ‘From Marxism to Poststructuralism’, Choat shifts the
focus away from Hegel to his most celebrated student Marx, showing how
poststructuralism is neither pro- nor anti-Marx, but rather, expresses an
endless confrontation with, discussion on, and reinterpretation of Marx and Marxism. Arguing that there is a fragmentation of Marxism that is both a
condition and an effect of its use by poststructuralism, Choat claims that
attempts to portray poststructuralism as a rejection of Marxism are deeply
flawed: to the contrary, Marxism should be considered a crucial influence on poststructuralism, and even where it is critical, poststructuralism offers an illuminating and innovative reading of Marxism. In this respect, poststructuralism thus implores us both to rethink Marxism and to acknowledge its
continued relevance.
In the third chapter, ‘From Structuralism to Poststructuralism’, Lundy
aims to outline the significance of what he calls ‘the image of structural-
ism’ and how that image allows for a fuller understanding of the shift from structuralism to poststructuralism. However, this, as Lundy points out and
clearly shows, is a rather problematic enterprise. For if we are to make sense of the shift from structuralism to poststructuralism, and if we are to make sense of the shifts and movements between poststructuralism and any other
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‘ism’ (German Idealism, Marxism, Postmodernism or whatever), then the
manner in which we make sense will itself require analysis and critique. In this regard, Lundy’s chapter explicitly and helpfully brings into focus some important and broader questions (questions already implicit in the previous two chapters): namely, what is it that drives us to think about and theorise the emergence of poststructuralism in the way we do, and what is the significance of the notion of poststructuralism for us today? This is a question that we will again pick up on in the final and concluding chapters.
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Chapter 1
Poststructuralism and Moder n European
Philosophy
Simon Lumsden
emergence
poststructuralism and modern european pHilosopHY
The relation of poststructuralism to modern philosophy is an enormous topic.
The sheer number of poststructuralist figures and the even more diverse
range of modern philosophers make it difficult to do justice to the complex and diverse nature of the relation. One thing that is central to poststructuralist thought, as it is in the other great strand of twentieth-century European thought, hermeneutics, is a mindfulness that the concepts and approaches
it has developed cannot be understood in isolation from the philosophical
tradition. Gadamer sees his thought on a continuum with the tradition; his
own philosophical innovations have to be understood as an ongoing conver-
sation with prior developments (Gadamer 1997). Moreover, that tradition
creates the philosophical ground framing all contemporary discussion and
interpretation. Poststructuralism does not see itself as on a continuum with the philosophical tradition in the way that Gadamer’s hermeneutics does,
nevertheless it recognises philosophical and literary precursors and accepts the Heideggerian argument as to the fundamentally embedded character
of all understanding. This is not to say that poststructuralism simply
appropriates Heidegger’s hermeneutical schema in the way that Gadamer
does. This is certainly not the case. However, poststructuralism does accept Heidegger’s rejection of there being some kind of metaphysically given
way in which the world is and also Heidegger’s rejection of a subject who
could distance herself or make transparent all the conditions that frame her understanding. That is, for poststructuralism as with philosophical hermeneutics, there is no point outside of the discursive horizon in which we
find ourselves from which one could take an objective or reflective view and pass judgement on ourselves and the world unencumbered by history and
language. Such reflective distance is impossible. However, poststructuralism adopts a number of distinctive strategies in relation to the tradition and of Untitled-2 37
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course presents a different view of experience, knowledge and tradition to
the standard hermeneutical approach.
Where the standard modern approach to its own history aspires to disclose
to ourselves the previously disguised conditions that make us and our world what it is, the poststructuralist view is neither concerned with a transparent self-understanding nor does it think this could be possible. Foucault, for
example, takes the Kantian claim that there is a set of universal and necessary conditions, to which we could appeal in order to explain ourselves, to be exclusive of a variety of alternative histories and pathologies that are in fact able to give a much better account of the full richness of our historicity. Derrida, while less concerned with the multiplicities of our historicity, shares a similar questioning of the ideals of a unitary and comprehensive
knowledge, and strives at every turn to show how that programme is always
undermined by what it excludes, by determinations that the philosophical
systems do not have the resources to explain and which expose the limits
of thought. His is a philosophical programme that announces the pass-
ing of philosophy as a grand unitary and systematic project. Deleuze too
offers a counter-narrative to this grand metaphysical project that fits neatly within the poststructuralist fold because he has similar concerns about the philosophical tradition. However, his approach shares much more in common with standard metaphysics than Foucault or Derrida to the extent that
his project is concerned to give expression to the multiplicity of being. He develops a set of concepts, stripped of the anthropocentricism of modern
philosophy, which attempt to capture being in its diversity and multiplicity.1
He presents a philosophical programme that is not stable and coherent but
rather that is able to capture the openness, movement, flow and heterogene-
ity of thought. In so doing he sets up the conditions by which his project can be genuinely creative rather than reactive.
What all these thinkers have in common is a strategic relation to the tradition. None have the modernist hubris that would take their view to be the
next step in the linear progress of history’s self-correcting path. That is, poststructuralism considers the canonical thinkers and concepts that have
defined modern philosophy to be unsurpassable in such a straightforwardly
modern manner. The relation they take to the tradition is ambivalent, play-
ful, supplemental, while at the same time undermining the coherence and
integrity of the modern narrative.
Understanding the relation of poststructuralism to modern philosophy
requires the exploration of the poststructuralist reception of some of the
key themes that run through the modern tradition: self-consciousness,
autonomy, self-determination, reason, tradition, identity, difference and
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historical teleology. Rather than examining the nature of the relation of
poststructuralism to the modern tradition as such for the purposes of this
chapter I have instead concentrated on the relation of poststructuralism
to post-Kantian idealism, and Hegel in particular. There are a number of
reasons for this, practically, to make this a manageable project, but there are also good reasons for focusing on the relation of poststructuralism to
German idealism. First, Kant and German idealism from the perspective
of poststructuralism represent the culmination of modern philosophy and
metaphysics; secondly, because the debates, tensions and dualisms (the
concept-intuition distinction, the limits of reason, the rational legitimation of norms and so on) that emerge in the wake of Kant’s critical thought are
the defining problematics for much of what follows in both German idealism
and poststructuralism. However, to understand why poststructuralism takes
German idealism as both the fulfilment and the denouement of metaphysics
cannot be told without discussing the influence of Heidegger.2 It is the contention of this chapter that Heidegger’s reading of the history of philosophy is for the most part the interpretative frame through which poststructuralism approaches the history of philosophy and explains why Hegel, at least
in the case of Deleuze and Derrida, is the confluence and culmination of all the problematic strains that run through modern philosophy.
Despite the diversity of approaches of poststructuralism there is a com-
mon ground. My approach in examining this relation has been threefold:
to focus on modernity itself as a defining problem for poststructuralist
thought, secondly to examine the relation of key poststructuralist thinkers to Kant and German idealism, and thirdly, an examination of the critique of the subject. This latter point brings together the previous two points since the role subjectivity plays is peculiarly modern. What modernity considers
meaningful is not the given or a world created by God but a meaningfulness
which is always subject relative. The authoritative subject is the way the
enlightenment anchors meaning in a world it has set in motion and stripped
of all its pre-modern certainties. As we will see, the reason this critique of the metaphysics of the subject is the defining frame through which poststructuralism approaches modern philosophy is because of the influence of
Heidegger.
Enlightenment and Disenchantment
Enlightenment thought is commonly argued to have disenchanted the
world.3 It put to rest forever the idea that there was a given cosmic order that in and of itself gave meaning to nature and human life. Nature became
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quite literally meaningless in this context, stripped of any teleology or
divinely ordained organisation it comes to be understood instead for the
empirical sciences and much of philosophy as just the causal play of forces.
In contemporary philosophy it is often characterised as the ‘space of
causes’.4 The disenchantment of nature and the enlightenment challenge
to the established orthodoxies in social, political and religious life did not automatically produce a new authority able to take the place of traditional authorities. The cultivation of an alternative and unifying authority was the great challenge of the enlightenment project, without which a malaise of
scepticism and nihilism might be the only outcome of the undermining of
established authority. Only reason was put forward as capable of giving any meaning or structure to the natural world and human life itself. But the
authority of reason was simply assumed. The standards by which it sought
to legitimate its authority – self-determined freedom, causation, science,
coherence, universality and so on – were not reflectively established as the standard bearers of secular truth.
It was not until Kant that the authority of reason itself was critically
examined. He attempted to place reason under the same kind of critical lens with which the enlightenment had examined everything else. The enlightenment had released belief, norms, values and the basis of judgement from
their secure mooring in the established orthodoxies of religion and tradition.
However, in order for the enlightenment’s knowledge claims to be justified
as well as the capacity for reason to establish moral claims, reason itself had to be self-authorising. That is, reason had to be able, by its own resources, to reflectively establish its own authority and claims. Reason in short had to be self-grounding. Enlightenment reason had set us adrift from faith, tradition and dogmatic authority but it had not yet shown that it could secure its own claims. The enlightenment had removed the foundations of belief systems,
and had in effect set the world in motion, but the disenchanted world had to be anchored in reason without which the enlightenment claims for freedom
would be ungrounded and human life would be forever at sea. Kant’s critical philosophy attempted the self-grounding of reason itself as the way to solve this problem. Reason for many early modern and enlightenment figures
paradoxically was simply assumed to be able to make sense of the natural
order. Early modern thinkers had in effect argued that there was a given way in which the world was that reason had access to and over which reason had
epistemic authority. Kant made no such assumption. For Kant reason could
only make such a claim if it was itself self-grounding and aware of its own limits. Only then could reason claim for itself the capacity to ground the
categories by which we make judgements and the norms of our social world.
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Reason’s capacity for self-legitimation has become central to modernity’s
own self-understanding (Pippin 1991). It is not the place here for a detailed examination of these legitimation claims and especially not of the complex
means by which Kant claimed reason, conceptuality and normativity could
be self-authorising. The important issue is that he thought reason, concepts and norms had to be able to ground themselves without appeal to anything
beyond their human determination. The project of expanding and legitimating the character of self-determined freedom, which underwrites the
enlightenment and idealist programme, was taken up by Fichte and Hegel
(see Pinkard 2002). As we will see shortly, poststructuralism’s dissatisfaction with their more robust articulation of self-determination was instrumental
in defining its philosophical identity.
Despite its disenchantment of nature and the questioning of established
beliefs, the enlightenment’s metaphysical and epistemological assessment
of the world was continuous with pre-modern thought in so far as it also
still seemed to assume the idea of an ordered whole. It is the methodologi-
cal, ethical and metaphysical features of that whole that poststructuralism contests. Despite the German idealist transformation of the enlightenment
project poststructuralism still takes its concerns to be continuous with the traditional metaphysical assumption that there is an ordered whole. German
idealism simply shifts the metaphysical perspective from the object to the
subject. The way reason, the whole and its legitimation were conceived
precluded difference, singularity, grace, otherness and so on. There were
of course precursors to this poststructuralist critique of modernity. The
exclusivity of the enlightenment and Kantian approaches, which appeared
to allow for nothing other than a rational and human determination of the
world, had been challenged by Romanticism, especially in the thought of
Schelling and Jacobi (Beiser 1987). The romantics offered a comprehensive
and cogent contestation of core elements of the enlightenment programme.
The romantic critique of the enlightenment is not for the most part a direct reference point for poststructuralism, though it does have a direct influence on poststructuralism through Heidegger.5
Romanticism accepted many of the core innovations of Kantianism; for
example, they rejected empiricism on essentially Kantian grounds: the
sensed world could not be known in its immediacy (Larmore 1996). While
the romantic view of life, nature, society and state challenges the Kantian view it does so without making appeal to a natural given or by invoking a
pre-modern harmony or order. The romantics contested the centrality of
autonomy, for them the focus on a rational self-determining subject as the
sole domain of freedom was asserted at the price of belonging and being
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at home. The enhancement of individualism that is the result of modern
freedom comes at the price of our alienation from history, culture and
nature. Romanticism proposes a new ideal of home and of a harmonious
life as a way of overcoming this alienation and of reclaiming the diverse
non-rational ways in which we are embedded in the world. Our allegiances
to various forms of life, norms and values – or to put it otherwise, the various ways in which we orientate ourselves in and towards the world – cannot be
understood as rational choices or acts of rational self-legitimation (Larmore 1996: 38–9). Moreover the focus on autonomy appeared to reject forms of
life or ways of being-in-the-world that did not accord with abstract rational principles. The romantics wanted to reclaim and reassert the value of shared forms of life that were not and could not be rationally legitimated in this sense.
