Debates in Continental Philosophy: Conversations with Contemporary Thinkers

Confronting Imagination

Stony Brook Colloquy Confronting Imagination Q: I would like to begin by asking when and how you became interested in philosophy and literature. Was there a moment when you realized you would make these fields a lifelong investigation? RK: I think it was probably when I was at secondary school in Ireland. I had a very good French teacher who had just come back from Paris and had read a lot of Heidegger, Sartre, Ricceur, and Derrida . This would have been in the early seventies. So I got my philosophy mainly through the literature of Sartre, [Simone] de Beauvoir, and [Albert] Camus. It was existential phenomenology through a literary detour. When I went to university, I did a joint degree in philosophy and literature. I was going to go to the Abbey Theatre in Dublin to become a professional actor. In my application to the Abbey, I submitted a philosophical dissertation as to why I wanted to study acting. The director of the Abbey at the time said I was welcome to study acting , but he recommended that I should go and study philosophy first. I never got back to the Abbey. After my undergraduate work, I did my MA with Charles Taylor in McGill University (Montreal), which was on the philosophy of art, and then my Ph.D. with Paul Ricceur in Paris on the phenomenology of imagination. Over the last few years, I have been writing more poetry and fiction. I have just finished my second novel; the first one came out two years ago. Philosophy and literature were always my two interests, my Janus-face as it were. My 261 literature is contaminated by philosophy, and my philosophy is contaminated by literature. The English critics didn't really like my novels ,........,they thought they were too Francophile and philosophical. But the Continentals liked them. The first novel sold about 3,000 copies in England and 30,000 copies in German, French, and Czech translations . As one of the English reviewers pointed out, the Germans have been mistaken in their judgment before! Q: Philosophy and literature as a joint venture for you is very much displayed in your book The Poeticd ofModernity (1996). I would like to specifically ask how you came to focus on the relationship between poetics and ethics. RK: I would say it was when I was doing the doctorate with Paul Ricceur in Paris in the late seventies. Two of my main interlocutors at the time were Derrida and Levinas. It was before Derrida started to talk about law, justice, ethics, and so on. Although he would say the ethical dimension was already in his work, it just wasn't visible for me or most other people at the time. In 1977, when I was writing my Poetique du POddW !eJ Derrida was very much on the literary side of things, moving more and more towards an aesthetic Nietzscheanism. That's how it was understood , at any rate. Derrida's "Violence and Metaphysics" essay on Levinas was seen as a farewell to ethics, as a challenge to a phenomenological relationship with the other. There seemed to be a tension between Derrida the poeticizer and Levinas the ethicizer. And there I was with Ricceur, trying to do a hermeneutic mediation between these two extremes. Subsequently I found a poetics at work within Levinas, which I tried to tease out in my essay on "Levinas and the Ethics of Imagining" in The Poeticd ofModernity. And of course, there is an ethics at work in Derrida, as he now constantly points out. Q: You say in Poeticd ofModernity that Kierkegaard criticizes Kant for segregating poetics and ethics. Do you find yourself trying to do something similar, that is, criticizing this segregatory practice? RK: I try to conjugate the two. But I think that Kant, in the Third Critique, actually provides us with a very good pretext for this. When he says, for instance, that "beauty is the symbol for morality," he is, in effect, saying that reflective aesthetic judgment has a huge contribution to make to morality. In fact, I would say it is a discreet corrective within Kant to his own morality. The categorical imperative in the Second Critique, The Critique ofPracticaLReadonJ is actually an impractical morality. Because the categorical imperative is so rationalistic and 262 • Stony Brook Colloquy abstract, it ignores the attempt in certain sections of the Third Critique to counterbalance the...