MEMORISING POLITICS OF ANCIENT HISTORY
| Published date | 01 May 1987 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2230.1987.tb02584.x |
| Date | 01 May 1987 |
REVIEW ARTICLE
MEMORISING POLITICS
OF
ANCIENT HISTORY
DIALECTIC
OF
NIHILISM: POST-STRUCTURALISM
AND
LAW.
By
Gillian
Rose.
[Oxford: Basil Blackwell,
1984.
viii
and
232
pp.,
paperback
f9.951.
GILLIAN
Rose’s
Dialectic
of
Nihilism
should really be called
Back to Hegel.
But what is this dialectic heralded by the title she has chosen?
The
ceaseless return
of
‘‘law’’
in
the mask
of
Dionysus, old wine in new
bottles. And “Post-Structuralism”?
A
group of Parisian false prophets,
heresiarchs waving a banner which is a palimpsest: beneath “The End
of
Metaphysics” can be glimpsed the word “Law.”
Dialectic
of
Nihilism
begins with Kant, proceeds briefly through some German and Austrian
legal theorists, lingers with Heidegger, zooms through Bergson, Deleuze,
Saussure and LCvi-Straws, and concludes with separate chapters devoted
to Derrida and Foucault. This is not another book on Paris since the
tvknements.
So
it
would be wrong to criticise it either for its limited range
(why
only
Deleuze, Derrida and Foucault?)
or
for its rather casual
approach to intellectual history-for example, its omission
of
the very
influential Koj6ve.I Rather, we are presented with a
grand rkit
of
the
repetition
of
errors at compound interest.
Yet can one “critique” be directed at such a diverse ensemble? Ltvi-
Strauss, for example, may have promised more than he has delivered. One
can find his demonstrations
of
deep structures articulating Amerindian
“mythemes” unconvincing. Either LCvi-Strauss has delivered the goods
or
left his promise unfulfilled.2 Clearly, a rather particular method of
proceeding is required
if
such a plurality
of
writers and projects is
to
be
housed within the same work. And it is this way
of
proceeding, which
involves a resort
to
Philosophy, which is what is most stimulating and
yet
most unconvincing about this book.
Rose’s project is
in
fact outlined by one of her targets, Derrida, in his
essay on LCvi-Strauss:
“The
step ‘outside philosophy’ is much more difficult to conceive than
is generally imagined by those who think they made it long ago with
cavalier ease, and who
in
general are swallowed up in metaphysics
in
the entire body
of
discourse which they claim to have disengaged
from it.”3
In Rose’s hands, this requires two methods. First, there is what she calls
“grammatical hermeneutics,” which serves as a seismograph for the “grip”
of metaphysics upon contemporary thought. Secondly, and more elliptically,
she attacks sociology, because
it
“blinds”
us
to law.
I
See especially his
Inrroducrion
10
/he Reading
of
Hegel
(2nd ed., Paris, 1947, Eng.
tr.
London, 1980)
For
his influence, see Descombes’ excellent
Modern French Philosophy,
(Paris, 1979, Eng.
tr.,
Cambridge, 1980) pp.27-48.
See Sperber,
On
Anthropological Knowledge
(Paris, 1982, Eng.
tr.
Cambridge, 1985)
pp.64-93.
’
Wriring and Difference
(Paris, 1967, Eng.
tr.
London, 1978) p.284.
384
MAY
19871
REVIEW
ARTICLE
385
Who Lies Inside
Dialectic
of
Nihilism
“is an attempt to retrieve and rediscover a tradition
which has been tendentiously and meretriciously ‘deconstructed.’ The
newly vaunted demise of metaphysics has been cast as a theoretical
jurisprudence which, nevertheless, leaves law as unknowable as it finds
it
.
.
.”4
In poststructuralism, we face “the prospect of newly insinuated
law dissembled as a nihilistic break with knowledge and law, and tradition
in general”.’
“The various claims
. . .
that metaphysics has teen surpassed, have
turned out to be rhetorical-whether advanced against the knowledge
of God (Kant), against the positing of abstract entities (Comte),
against the traditional Aristotelian categories (Heidegger to Derrida)-
in the strong, original meaning of rhetoric as guard and guide to the
law
. . .
The invariable reversal
of
such attempts to cashier metaphysics
reveals in each case a speculative jurisprudence:
a
story of the identity
and non-identity
of
law and metaphysics retold by the rhetor in the
mask
of
the histor.”6
What we have witnessed, in poststructuralism, is
“.
.
.
the moment at which the rationality
of
the critical philosophy
based on the drama of the fictions of Roman law-persons, things and
obligations-is phantasised into an Orientalism which borrows the
identity
of
wandering Dionysus
or
Persian Zoroaster, but which, in its
celebration
of
writing, returns the concept of tradition to an Hebraic
setting
.
”’
Against the “foolhardy innovation”’ of the Poststructuralists,
Dialectic
of
Nihilism
is “an attempt to return
to
the beginning, to the
locus
classicus
which we share: Kant’s strange way of not answering his own question”:
the question which “founds the idea of method we still revere and grounds
the oppositions which still condition us-metaphysics and science; theory
and practice; freedom and necessity; history and form”.’O
A
grand ambition
then: “to draw us back into the antinomy of culture, into the tradition
which still holds us, and
so,
to open it again
. . .
under the title
.
.
.
of
jurisprudential wisdom,”” which re uires, as Nietzsche wanted, that we
“know more not
less
about the law.
3%
That Deep Romantic Chasm
The principal weapons for the attack on poststructuralism are what
Rose
calls “grammatical hermeneutics.” We can look in due course at how they
are used. We begin with some general remarks concerning what this
“method” seems to assume.
The starting point
is
the recognition that we are caughtI3 in the language
which we have inherited, a language which
is
constitutive
of
a long, deep,
Dialectic
of
Nihilism,
p.1.
Ibid.
p.7.
Ibid.
p.208.
Ibid.
p.209.
Ibid.
p.210.
Ibid.
p.211.
lo
Ibid.
pp.211-212.
I’
Ibid.
p.212.
I*
Ibid.
p.209.
Cf.
Jarneson,
The Prison-House
of
Language
(Princeton,
1972).
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