Theory & Event

Catherine Keller and Anne Daniell have assembled a collection of essays that ought to be of interest to readers of Theory and Event. Published as part of the SUNY series in ‘Constructive Postmodern Thought’, this volume contributes to an emerging research field of increasing philosophical and cultural importance. The ‘end of metaphysics’ scenarios dominated 20^th century philosophy. But the analytic and continental paradigms that gave us these scenarios are fragmenting and giving way not only to “the strangest hybrids of Frego-Husserlianism, or even Wittgensteino-Heideggerianism” (Deleuze, 1996: 143), but also to new and creative ‘crossovers’, ‘assemblages’, or what Whitehead called ‘contrasts’ and ‘contrasts of contrasts’. Placing the process tradition of speculative thought — and especially Whitehead- in contrast with contemporary French thought yields a potentially rich seam of unexpected relations and interconnections offering opportunities to revitalize the metaphysical traditions in both Anglo- American and Franco-German contexts.

However, as readers of Whitehead will know, contrast is not achieved without difficulty often risking incompatibility and exclusion. Staging diversities as contrasts requires ‘complexity’ — a delicate labor of poised or critical ‘balance’ that prolongs or draws out the ‘intensity’ and heightens the ‘satisfaction’. Sustaining contrasts are rare, but there are moments in this volume where such efforts appear to be genuinely ‘in process’.

Although the process traditions are immensely rich and diverse appearing as a leitmotiv throughout the entire history of philosophy, professional philosophy in the 20^th century has had little time for process. Given that Process and Reality — one of the great works of process philosophy - was published in 1929 this is somewhat ironic. For the most part process philosophy in the 20^th century has been kept alive outside academic philosophy on the fringes of literature, in the margins of educational and pedagogical studies, in the interstices of ecological and environmental discourses, here and there in the sciences, but perhaps most especially in theology. Whitehead’s discussions of God and theology, taken up in the works of Charles Hartshorne and others have created a veritable process theology industry —‘religion in the making’ indeed — complete with a ‘process studies’ center, an assortment of lectures, conferences, high priests and a number of publications dedicated to “the success of this movement toward a postmodern world” (xi). Although it is perhaps not surprising then that seven of the ten contributors to this volume are based in departments of theology, it is surprising and worth further remark that the ‘introduction’ to the series, of which Keller and Daniell’s volume is a part, bears signs of the difficulty of achieving complex contrasts. Here David Griffin situates the series and what he calls ‘constructive postmodern thought’ in the context of a competing battery of modernisms and postmodernisms and against a whole slew of eliminativisms, nihilisms, and relativisms:

closely related to literary-artistic postmodernism is philosophical postmodernism inspired variously by physicalism, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Martin Heidegger, a cluster of French thinkers-including Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucualt, Gilles Deleuze and Julie Kristeva – and certain features of American Pragmatism. By the use of terms that arise out of particular segments of this movement, it can be called deconstructive, relativistic or eliminative postmodernism

(viii).

Apart from the curious idea that all these thinkers are part of one or indeed any movement, none would embrace the term ‘postmodernism’. For a thinker like Deleuze postmodernism is a ‘cliché’, the reduction of thought to the shameful marketing and selling of concepts like products. Foucault was uninterested in postmodernism and when questioned about it in interviews he pleaded ignorance, claiming provocatively that he ‘wasn’t up to date’ and nor could he see what problem was being addressed ‘by people we call postmodern’. Derrida would no doubt want to open an interminable discussion on the ‘dating’ of the ‘post’, on the undecidable and aporetic nature of the ‘postal’ principle, of its non-arrival and its promise of the ‘end’ that never comes. Something similar could be...