Transgressive Remains: Approaching Philosophy’s Tears by (Not) Thinking Mythos

Spitzer, A. (2008). Transgressive Remains: Approaching Philosophy’s Tears by (Not) Thinking Mythos (Doctoral dissertation, Pacifica Graduate Institute, 2008).

ABSTRACT

Jacques Derrida spent a lifetime substantiating that systems and structures inevitably construct and fortify themselves through acts of exclusion, barring that which they cannot fully account for or think. Such acts have formed the very basis of the Western ontotheological tradition that, according to some, has reached its closure in the savoir absolu of G. W. F. Hegel’s speculative philosophy. Yet, even at the “end” of systematic thought, something still remains to be thought, which is nonetheless unthinkable within the framework of the metaphysics of presence. This unthought other is mythos and its inescapable relationship to logos. For the most part, philosophic discourse has upheld the founding Platonic distinction between mythos and logos wherein logos is privileged over and against mythos. In the history of philosophy the neglect of mythos has taken two forms: one in which mythos has been left out of discourse and, by extension, out of logos, and another in which mythos has been denigrated as an inferior, imperfect form of logos that is not yet sufficiently philosophical until, by way of sublation, it will be taken up into the domain of logos and become so. In the wake of postructuralism and within the emerging moment of complexity, the seamy web of mythos and logos must be thought otherwise.


In response to this urgent necessity, this study, through a close reading of selected works of Mark C. Taylor and Derrida, thinks mythos not as a Hegelian other that saturates and merges difference with identity, but as a disseminating, ever-differentiating other other. In part, this involves re-envisioning the relation of mythos and logos in terms of Taylor’s nontotalizing network and Derrida’s idea of the gift, which this analysis bids be viewed as a (dis)figure of the impossible. Cognizant that thought always contains something that it cannot properly think, philosophy’s other (mythos) is approached by not thinking within and to the limits of traditional philosophy, thereby exposing mythos as a nonfoundational foundation of logos. As such, mythos calls forth the “able-to-be-thought” (logos) and logos gives mythos a form in which it can begin to arrive to thought.