The Question of Philosophy and Poiesis in the Posthistorical Age: Thinking/Imagining the Shadow of Metaphysics

The widely and rapidly spreading devastation of language not only undermines aesthetic and moral responsibility in every use of language; it arises from a threat to the essence of humanity. . . . Much bemoaned of late, and much too lately, the downfall of language is, however, not the grounds for, but already a consequence of, the state of affairs in which language under the dominance of the modern metaphysics of subjectivity almost irremediably falls out of its element. Language still denies us its essence: that it is the house of Being. Instead, language surrenders itself to our mere willing and trafficking as an instrument of domination over beings.

—Martin Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” Basic Writings

We had to destroy Ben Tre in order to save it.

—An American military officer as reported by Michael Herr, Dispatches

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If there is anything that contemporary history—especially the Vietnam War—and the theory that in large part was instigated by it have disclosed to this postmodern generation of critics, it is that the European consciousness, which has become the “burden” of an “exceptionalist” America to assume in the face of its “betrayal” by the “Old World,” is essentially an imperial consciousness, insofar as it has, from the beginning, been oriented by a metaphysical perspective. This is the perspective that perceives the differential being of being meta ta physika, from after or above its disseminations, which is to say, from a panoptic perspective outside of and beyond time that, from that distance, reduces time to space, its anxiety-provoking intangibility to a region or domain to be grasped and mastered. This history and the theory it enabled have also disclosed that literature, from the beginning of the Western tradition, has been complicitous with philosophy (and with knowledge production, in general) in the formation of this imperial European consciousness. This is because the ideal European text mirrors in microcosmic form the macrocosm posited by the speculative metaphysical consciousness, that is, because this metatext is informed by a principle of presence that forcibly reduces time and the differences that time disseminates to an appearance that occludes its structure. By “the beginning of the Western tradition,” I mean, with Martin Heidegger, that founding epochal moment when the Romans translated the Greek understanding of truth as unconcealment (a-letheia) to veritas, the correspondence of mind and thing; when, in other words, the originative and thus always errant thinking of the Greeks was reduced to a derivative, end-oriented mode of inquiry (paideia) that was intended to inculcate virtu in the citizens of Rome and to render Rome the imperial metropolis of the orbis terrarum.¹ Despite this knowledge, however, the postmodern occasion has not adequately thought these revolutionary disclosures. To put it more specifically, we have not fully registered the cultural and political global significance of the knowledge disclosed by a contemporary theory that was instigated in large part by the self-de-structive practices of the West—particularly by the United States—in the last half of the twentieth century.

This failure of contemporary theory to adequately think the “other” of the world interpreted according to the thingness of beings—what, in some sense, we knew even before the Vietnam War by way of the disclosures not simply of the Heidegger of Being and Time but also of such writers as Franz Kafka (The Castle), Jean-Paul Sartre (Nausea), Nathalie Sarraute (Portrait of a Man Unknown), Jorge Luis Borges (“The Garden of the Forking Paths”), Eugène Ionesco (Victims of Duty), Harold Pinter (The Homecoming), Samuel Beckett (Watt), Jean Genet (The Blacks), Ralph Ellison (The Invisible Man), and LeRoi Jones (Dutchman and the Slave), all, and more, of whom were spontaneously committed to exposing the will to power over the being of being informing the accommodational tradition that has privileged closure—is symptomatically reflected in two related contemporary currents...