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Intimations of the Finite: Thinking Pragmatically at the End of Modernity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 June 2011

David C. Lamberth
Affiliation:
Florida State University

Extract

In the years since the uprisings of the late 1960s swept the cultures of Europe and America, the emergence of a radical critique of modernity and the heralding of a corresponding transition into postmodernity have increasingly occupied the minds of many cultural critics, theologians, philosophers, and historians alike. These three decades have witnessed the development of a wide array of differing cultural, social, and conceptual possibilities: the academy, for example, has seen the growth of gender studies and inquiries dedicated to previously marginalized communities, as well as the advancement of postmodern theories of culture, action, and knowledge among practitioners of philosophy, sociology, and theology, among others. The story is by now familiar, and while cataloging these changes itself would be an interesting endeavor, suffice it here to underscore that the interests, orientations, foci, and theoretical approaches of the academy have all changed significantly at the end of the twentieth century.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © President and Fellows of Harvard College 1997

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References

1 The valence of the term “postmodern” is itself a significant problem for these discourses. While “poststructuralist” might at times be more applicable (as in the case of Foucault), in this essay I use “postmodern” generally to indicate at a minimum those discourses in which: (a) the viability of modernity is a question, and (b) the inapplicability of the premodern is a foregone conclusion.

2 See, for example, Foucault, Michel, The Archaeology of Knowledge (New York: Pantheon, 1972)Google Scholar ; idem , The Order of Things (New York: Vintage, 1970)Google Scholar ; and idem , Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Pantheon, 1977)Google Scholar.

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6 See ibid., 140. The reference is to Foucault, Michel, Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988) 35Google Scholar.

7 See , Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, parts 1 and 2, esp. 7-8, 2728.Google Scholar

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11 By this I refer to the relationships Marx theorizes among the development of the productive forces, the relations of production, and the quasi-epiphenomenal superstructure that includes ideology and consciousness.

12 For an interesting discussion of Marx on justice, see Wood, Allen, “Marx on Right and Justice,” in Cohen, Marshall, ed., Marx, Justice, and History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990) 106–34Google Scholar.

13 E.g., Calvin, John, Institutes of the Christian Religion (ed. McNeil, John T., trans. Ford Lewis Battles; Philadelphia: Westminster, 1960) 203–7 (1.16.5-7).Google Scholar

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18 E.g., Derrida, Jacques, Of Grammatologie (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974).Google Scholar

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20 , Asad, Genealogies of Religion, 79.Google Scholar

21 Completing, that is, in a sense that could be adequate to humans as subjects. One reason that the discourse of the agent does not need the discourse of the subject is that the agent discursive field of the agent is by itself already overdetermined with respect to causality. As such, then, the subject-oriented discourse is not necessary for any explanation.

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23 CorneI West's criticisms of James in The American Evasion of Philosophy ([Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989] esp. 6465Google Scholar ) are then generally correct in my view, insofar as one takes them as criticisms of James the individual. Whether James's ideas are amenable to accommodating a more critical stance, however, is another question.

24 James, William, Manuscript Lectures (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988) 367Google Scholar

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27 See , James, “Does Consciousness Exist?” (319Google Scholar , esp. 4ff.) and “A World of Pure Experience” (21-44, esp. 32ff.) in idem . Essays in Radical Empiricism; see also Pragmatism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975) esp. 95113Google Scholar (“Pragmatism's Conception of Truth”).

28 Mic 6:8.

29 , James, Pragmatism, 142.Google Scholar

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31 Locke, John, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975) 620Google Scholar (4.10.4). Locke goes on to question the sufficiency of rationality in rendering God finite; however, he himself finds that we only have sufficient reason to know God as finite. See ibid., 630 (4.10.19).

32 , James, A Pluralistic Universe, 141.Google Scholar

33 James's text has “philosophy” where I have placed “theology.” See , James, A Pluralistic Universe, 149Google Scholar.