The mythical countertextual : from Derrida to Badiou

Abstract

The modern era stages a confrontation between humanity and its finitude. God is dead. The thing in itself, the world as it is in itself, us as we are in ourselves, are all recognised as being ultimately beyond our cognitive grasp. The realisation that the act of thinking cannot be fully taken into consideration in the thought that is produced by that act, forces the yawning of the chasm out of which a veritable plague of dualisms emerge. No matter how hard or deeply we think, a part of who or what we are – perhaps the constitutive part – remains irrevocably in the shadows. Without being able to take account of this in a way that might allow us to subtract it from what already counts as knowledge, to reveal the pure datum unsullied, as it were, by human hands, such knowledge – which might previously have been considered absolute – is revealed as irredeemably relational. To say what something is, is always, on some level, to say what it is for us. What this means is that even that of which we are most sure must, in the last analysis, be considered subjective. It is in this regard that Badiou speaks of ‘disobjectivation’ and of ‘the destitution of the category of object’, characteristics of what he refers to as ‘the age of poets’ [manifesto for philosophy, 72].)