The Honor of Thinking: Critique, Theory, Philosophy (review)

Rodolphe Gasché's The Honor of Thinking is striking in its sheer scope, as well as in its blend of erudition with invention. The collection consists of fourteen essays divided into three sections—"Criticism," "Theory," and "Philosophy"—each of which represents a mode of inquiry for which "thinking," as Gasché understands it, represents both a challenge and a potential transformation. Despite its anachronistic ring, the phrase "honor of thinking" signals the challenge that thinking, as Gasché develops this notion in the book's introduction, represents for critique, theory, and philosophy. Although Gasché first, in the introduction, examines this phrase in the context of Kant and especially Heidegger, its full significance only becomes clear in "Saving the Honor of Thinking," a chapter on Lyotard (to whom the book's title is dedicated).

From the outset, Gasché sharply demarcates theory, critique, and philosophy from thinking, acknowledging the necessity of all of these intellectual activities but emphasizing the need to reassess them in light of both their "structural limits" and their "enabling conditions." Thinking, Gasché argues, is not a "unified and separate undertaking" but is what "ceaselessly questions" and "expands on" the "inherent limits" of critique, theory and philosophy, continually reassessing the ground of assumptions on which each undertaking rests without simply collapsing the distinctions between them. Although Gasché understands thinking as "thinking in the legacy of Derrida," the sheer scope of authors dealt with by him here suggests that the fidelity to this legacy entails anything but an exclusive focus on this author.

The book's first chapter "Critique, Hypercriticism, Deconstruction," initially appeared among a series of responses to "Force of Law," Derrida's influential and controversial reading of Benjamin's "Critique of Violence" in the Cardozo Law Review. This essay, in particular, puts to rest any doubt that thinking, as Gasché understands it, is closely allied with deconstruction—and that both are to be sharply distinguished from critique. Reading Benjamin's Critique of Violence on a course parallel to that of Derrida, Gasché reconstructs in detail the steps through which Benjamin "attempts to identify a violence that cuts through the linkage of ends to means, identifying a [divine] violence so pure that all possible relations as a means to ends are cut off" (29). This violence that cuts, Gasché shows, is nothing other than criticism, the "divine and undecidable krinein" that has "its essence in decision itself" (33).

With Derrida, Gasché argues that the attempt to isolate divine non-mediated violence in its purity must, with necessity, ruin itself. Like the quasi-transcendental conditions of possibility and impossibility that Gasché has previously examined in Derrida's work, divine violence, as Gasché explicates it, both governs the distinctions that underlie Benjamin's text and "ruins" or "contaminates" them, "excluding the possibility of rigorous distinction." Yet if, Gasché argues, divine violence is non-phenomenal, what exactly is ruined, and what, if not "a text in its common understanding," is at stake? This is one of the many questions that Gasché explores in the remainder of the chapter, where he develops the relation between "critical division" and "its always singular appearing" which he establishes as the task of deconstruction: or of what, in the remainder of the book, he simply calls thinking (36).

In "The Sober Absolute," Gasché focuses on the concept of critique in Benjamin's dissertation on the Early German Romantics, with an eye towards Benjamin's repeated, if not systematic, criticism of Romantic philosophy for "having committed the philosophically unforgivable crime of mixing levels of thought" (40). Examining the footnotes and other marginalia in Benjamin's dissertation, Gasché focuses on those points at which he departs decisively from the Romantics. In contrast to the "continuity between lower forms of reflection and absolute reflection" that he finds in the Romantics (46), Benjamin, while acknowledging the necessity of thinking the Absolute, "parts company with [the Romantics] when they bring the Absolute into the intellect's range" (52). Gasché thus demonstrates that Benjamin's notion of critique, understood as infinite separation between the absolute...