Spectre and impurity

history and the transcendental in Derrida and Adorno

Nigel Mapp

pp. 92-124

in: Peter Buse, Andrew Stott (eds), Ghosts, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 1999

Abstract

These remarks are, I suppose, metacritical in a sense. They wish to oppose the dominating falsities and complicities of postmodernist and historicist criticisms and theories. But that engagement will remain pretty much implicit, emerging indirectly through a rather abstract rehearsal of the political and philosophical questions concerning, demanding, and outstripping abstraction itself, questions no thinking of difference can bypass without falling into something worse. I will be taking to heart Walter Benjamin's observation that a truly materialist thought can be found only the far side of "the frozen waste of abstraction".² To name problematical names, this piece is in fact the propaedeutic to another confrontation of dialectics with deconstruction. These are the bodies of writing which promise, in various and countervailing ways, a thinking of non-identity or difference that does not relapse into dogmatic materialism or particularism — idealism's bad inversions, the unthematized abstractions of so much other theory. Now, while this is already to state a convergence of key interests, some kind of jejune synthesis of the writers who are my principal concern — Theodor Adorno and Jacques Derrida — is not being proposed here.

Cited authors

Derrida Jacques

Adorno Theodor

Benjamin Walter