Recovering the Mask of Ordinary Life: Encounters with Nihilism and Deconstruction

Comedy has, therefore, above all, the aspect that actual self-consciousness exhibits itself as the fate of the gods. These elementary Beings are, as universal moments, not a self and are not equal. They are, it is true, endowed with the form of individuality, but this is only in imagination and does not really and truly belong to them; the actual self does not have such an abstract moment for its substance and content. It, the Subject, is raised above such a moment, such a single property, and clothed in this mask it proclaims the irony of such a property wanting to be something on its own account. The pretensions of universal essentiality are uncovered in the self; it shows itself to be entangled in an actual existence, and drops the mask just because it wants to be something genuine. The self, appearing here in its significance as something actual, plays with the mask which it once put on in order to act its part; but it as quickly breaks out again from this illusory character and stands forth in its own nakedness nd ordinariness, which it shows to be not distinct from the genuine self, the actor or from the spectator.

—G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit

It is as if the people who speak out of, and, (whom we understand to be speaking) on behalf of, postmodernity and those who speak out of and on behalf of its totalizing and totalitarian antagonists have lived different histories and now speak from incongruent and incommensurate experiences. The gulfs which separate them, even leaving aside the polemics of the popular press, resist the most subtle tuning of “difference.” How many twentieth centuries have there been? How many modernities have there been? How many perspectivisms have been arrayed against how many differently construed traditional monisms? The trajectory of unacceptable differences, that escape even the playful category of difference, can hardly be traced without creating a filigree. One thinks of one definition of lace: a thousand holes tied together with string. It is not surprising that in the midst of these rhetorical questions, to which everyone has an answer, three books that situate the question of the nature of postmodernity within a poetics rather than within a rhetoric of history should be rather overlooked, especially by people working in literature.

The three books by William Desmond, Art and the Absolute: A Study of Hegel’s Aesthetics (Albany: SUNY, 1986); Desire, Dialectic, and Otherness (New Haven: Yale UP, 1987); and Philosophy and Its Others: Ways of Being and Mind, (Albany: SUNY, 1990), constitute a picture of the world that has refused to reduce history to a series of catastrophes and which maintains instead a sense of tragic meaningfulness in art and in the natural world constructed by and inhabited by humanity.

Desmond offers a thoughtful and richly articulated account of what he calls “metaxological mindfulness”, a kind of intermediary life of consciousness, in-between-ness that rescues thought from the mania of the one and the frenzy of the many; in addition his project moves towards a poetic visionary coda, a vision on which inhabitants of this brazen planet of postmodernity have long since given up: for both of these reasons he rewards an encounter by Postmodern Culture.

Metaxological in-between-ness substitutes for the edgy life on the edge that Desmond sees as the corrosive outcome of deconstruction, which was itself an outcome of Heidegger’s [deliberate?] misunderstanding of Hegel. While he does not engage his adversaries directly, the shadows of Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida and to a lesser extent Lyotard fall continually across his page. The most striking difference between Desmond and the masters of suspicion against whom he arrays his forces is that, unlike them, he has not taken the linguistic turn. By this I mean that when both Desmond and Derrida struggle with the process by which art (literature...