Abstract
Since Plato, philosophy relegates literature as fiction to not only untruth; but the appearance of essence itself as mimesis, imitation, sophistry in performing truth without being truth. Meanwhile, consciously or unconsciously, philosophy, in pursuit of answers to questions of the meaning of being, truth, existence, reality, mind, etc., refuses to be literary or fails to do so when engaged in its own logical or systematic activity. However, literature presents the double possibility of doing for philosophy what it cannot do for itself: it germinates possibilities for philosophical expansion and creativity of new ideas and concepts, even though literature would never admit this as its essence or telos; and literature forms the horizon of non-conceptual intelligibility that philosophy can only dream of intuiting but refuses to consider anything but concepts. Raising the philosophical question of literature admits that literature’s value lies in resisting philosophical totalization of its essence or truth. This is not just because literature is open to infinite interpretability as to what it is or what great literary works mean or evokes meaning in and for us who delight in them. Rather, the relation between the philosophical exclusion of literary possibilities for its own manifestation (Nietzsche and Kierkegaard being great exceptions) and inversely literature harboring secret possibilities for philosophical genesis within their own texts awaits a complex articulation. This is an asymmetric, double movement. Literature may be valuable in isolation or be an end unto itself. But more so, literature can serve as an engine of growth for other fields, such as philosophy, or perhaps fields outside the humanities, for example auto-ethnography or narrative analysis in the social sciences.
Derrida was one of the great epochal thinkers of the last seventy-five years. Some argue he, along with thinkers like Paul de Man, changed how we think about the relation of philosophy to literature (Gasché, 1988; Bennington, 2014). He contributed to twentieth-century philosophy’s creative departures from the history of metaphysics and the hierarchy that was created by Plato and maintained all the way to Hegel; namely philosophy as the highest enterprise of human thought reigning above literature and the arts and religion. Even Aristotle concludes his Nicomachean Ethics with this maxim: that perfect virtue embodied in complete happiness occurs in thought contemplating itself as divine activity and the divine we find in the philosopher, which unlike other human vocations, embodies contemplative life. Derrida, like Heidegger before him, will challenge this entire history of metaphysics in the West and its presumptive hierarchy of knowledge and creativity. They would turn to literary works and poetry for the well-spring of philosophical transition and departure from metaphysics - a logic of truth’s relation to being and vice versa - precisely by burrowing deeper into its other side to see what traditional ontology or logic cannot see. Traditional philosophy’s incommensurability with literature (both what is contained in and the container that is a text), its denial, repression, and exclusion, is what Derrida seeks to interrogate philosophically; but with new phrases, terms, and therefore possibilities to assemble tools of a strict methodological criticism that exceeds the history of distinctions and relations between philosophy and literature. One does not ask such questions about what philosophy, literature, or the relation is; rather, the presuppositions buried in the history of how those questions have been posed is what the deconstructive enterprise seeks to reveal.
Hence, to demonstrate the philosophical value of literature for the humanities, for the university as a whole, and for the future of humanity and society, we will analyze Derrida’s brief but profound reflection on Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet in “Aphorism Countertime” (in Derek Attridge, ed., Acts of Literature, New York: Routledge, 1992). [First published in French as “L’aphorisme a contreemps” in 1986.] Not only does it open a space for new philosophical questions on time and death, given the break Heidegger’s revolutionary thought institutes with the history of Western philosophy; it reinforces abiding themes of love, family, and mourning that constitute the core of our human experience. We now turn to a close reading of Derrida’s text while keeping Heidegger’s resources in the background, particularly his original presentation of how death in existential terms differs from biological-physical, psychological, or anthropological notions of dying and death.