Philosophy and Freedom: Derrida, Rorty, Habermas, Foucault (review)

On seeing the title of John McCumber's Philosophy and Freedom: Derrida, Rorty, Habermas, Foucault, one might mistake it for another contribution to the already overfull catalogue of summarizing interpretations of late-twentieth-century Continental giants. In fact, McCumber's undertaking is far more ambitious, and, thus, both more exciting and more risky. His book aims at nothing less than inventing a discourse by which the titular thinkers might be situated, interrelated, and opened onto a new project of freedom. As McCumber reveals at the end of his effort, this means redefining freedom itself, discovering what it must be "if we are to come after Derrida, Rorty, Habermas, and Foucault" (152-53, emphasis in original). The possibility of "coming after" these four thinkers is the "historical" possibility to which McCumber addresses himself, and its historical nature reveals both the ambition of McCumber's book and its essential proximity to Hegel (153).

The introduction to Philosophy and Freedom summarizes the main themes of McCumber's Poetic Interaction: Language, Freedom, Reason (1989) and Metaphysics and Oppression: Heidegger's Challenge to Western Philosophy (1999), and casts the narrative of the present book as an extension of these earlier projects. From Metaphysics and Oppression he takes his account of ousia, from which moderns and postmoderns have—inchoately, partially, and unconsciously—sought freedom. If there is a villain in McCumber's tale, it is undoubtably Aristotle, whose metaphysics of ousia is the purest representative of the oppressive "domesticity" of Western thought. Aristotle took the structure of the upper-class Greek household—a pater familias presiding over a bounded and stable set of possessions (including wife, children, and slaves) that he orders and uses as he pleases—and made from it both the normative paradigm for all beings and the measure of their intelligibility (8-11). The structures of ousia thereby established continue to constitute the "single most basic norm" of human life, and the model of oppression as such (16).

Modern philosophy challenged this "ousiodic" thinking by divesting nature of teleology, loosing the passions, and overturning kingship in favor of the consent of the governed. However, it did so only by reinstating ousia-like mastery in the form of the subject, the property owner, and the sovereign will (11-14). It is only with Hegel and Heidegger, in McCumber's account, that philosophers began to challenge systematically ousia, such that philosophy deposed itself as the queen of the sciences and beings came to be seen as gathered around a constitutive absence, "an active nothing" (14). Because both Hegel and Heidegger challenged ousia in an obscure manner, however, their new, non-ousiodic philosophizing could not but fail to liberate us from ousia, even as it offers us the hope of a future liberation.

In the wake of this promising failure, Derrida, Rorty, Habermas, and Foucault have each taken up the task set by their predecessors. They have been unable to finish the job, however, because they each misidentify the target of their challenges. Thus, they aim their attacks at presence, rather than at ousia, and they reestablish structures of ousia within their own discourses, even as they challenge them elsewhere. In short, "they are unable to carry out their challenges reflectively—to convert them from mere, almost instinctual, gestures into fully explicit, consistent critiques" (16). McCumber devotes two dense chapters per thinker to making this conversion for them.

McCumber developed the framework for effecting this conversion in Poetic Interaction. As he summarizes in the present work, "freedom is intrinsic to language itself ... in that simply to engage in certain types of language-game is to achieve a sort of freedom" (17-18, emphasis in original). There are at least four of these intrinsically liberatory language-games—poetic interactions—in which the meanings of utterances cannot be ruled by the author, but must be freely made by the audience. Each is exemplified by...