Epochal closure of metaphysics

Let us begin with the following hypothesis: in the epochal condition of modernity, the discourse of Occidental metaphysics names being as potentiality and grasps this potentiality of being as Subject. In itself, it is barely a new thesis – the thesis that the principle (arché) of the Subject is the legitimising principle of the hegemonikon called ‘modernity’. In his posthumously published book Broken Hegemonies (2003), written with such elegance and sophistication combined with a rare originality, Reiner Schurmann draws our attention to the tragic denial that gives rise to hegemonies, showing us how each hegemony, founded upon such an arché, is destined to its possible destitution when the arché is deprived of its power to elicit from us ‘normative obligations’. Hegemony expires when its principle of ground becomes impoverished. The legitimising principle of a hegemonic epoch, so it appears, acts like a ‘foundation’ or ‘ground’ – the ‘why’ – of every hegemonic regime and determines each mode of being in the context of constituted phenomenality. Deconstruction at the epochal closure of metaphysics amounts to making manifest the fragility, the precariousness or the destitution of the ultimate arché of hegemonies and to showing, beneath the tragic denial, the irreducible differend that calls forth incommensurable traits to their belonging-together, to the event of their disjointure without subsuming them, by a dialectical cunning of Reason within an overarching totality.

Deconstruction in this phenomenological mode (a phenomenological deconstruction) manifests itself here less as method than as tragic task, which is that of manifesting the differend that lies as the ‘undertow’ of each hegemonic regime, as that which would destitute each hegemonic regime in turn from within. And a peculiar phenomenology it is, which is neither a phenomenology with noetic-noematic coincidence nor one of grasping a phenomenon within the context of constituted phenomenality. It is rather a phenomenology that manifests the limit of the constituted order and that – in order to display the para-doxa, the tragic that eludes (precisely at the instance it is repressed) the maximising thrust of language – opens up, once again and infinitely, the possibility of the ‘singularity to come’.