Author: Anais Spitzer

Publisher: A&C Black

Published: 2011-06-02

Total Pages: 346

ISBN-13: 1441100202

Philosophy, Aesthetics And Cultural Theory Is An Interdisciplinary Series In Continental Philosophy, Cultural Theory, And The Arts, Edited By Hugh J. Silverman, Stony Brook University, New York, USA `[This] is a compelling study of the intimate, complex, and often unexpected aspects of the relationship between philosophy and myth ... This is an eloquent, forceful, and altogether timely contribution in a world in which new myths purport to be unquestionable, while philosophy bides its time in self-absorbed conceptual retreat. Its publication marks a new step in deconstructive thinking, after which deconstruction will never again be the same.' `This book is a gift precisely in the Derridean sense described within it. Its gift is that it is a tour de force. The book leads its reader on a profound and clear, even if complex, exploratory voyage into and out of the maze of Jacques Derrida's web of deconstructive thought. While making this trip, the book weaves a radical argument against the notion that philosophical logic transcends mythic qualities of understanding. It shows compellingly that philosophy's knowledge of truth is inescapably embedded in myth.' Bombarded by narratives that terrorize and repress, we may often consider myth to be constrictive dogma or, at best, something to be readily disregarded as unphilosophical and irrelevant. However, such dismissals miss a crucial aspect of myth. Harnessing the insights of Jacques Derrida's deconstruction and Mark C. Taylor's philosophical reading of complexity theory, Derrida, Myth and the Impossibility of Philosophy provocatively reframes the pivotal relation of myth to thinking and to philosophy, demonstrating that myth's inherent ambiguity engenders vital and inescapable deconstructive propensities. Exploring myth's disruptive presence, Spitzer shows that philosophy cannot separate itself from myth. Instead, myth is an inevitable condition of the possibility of philosophy.