Gianni Vattimo Research Articles

Interpretation and Nihilism as the Depletion of Being: A Discussion with Gianni Vattimo About the Consequences of Hermeneutics

Interpretation and Nihilism as the Depletion of Being: a discussion with Gianni Vattimo about the consequences of Hermeneutics. Sebastian Gurciullo (bio) and Gianni Vattimo 1 Sebastian Gurciullo: What is the significance of the title of your recent book, Oltre l’interpretazione, Beyond Interpretation, what sort of movement is suggested by the “oltre” or “beyond”: where to, to what, and why?[1] Gianni Vattimo: In a sense it is meant to mean something like going beyond the limits of current hermeneutics. I have the impression, as I say in the introduction to Beyond Interpretation, that hermeneutics has become a sort of general attitude. Almost everybody recognizes that we know only by interpreting, even in the theory of paradigms proposed by Thomas Kuhn, for instance. People in the experimental sciences are not scandalized by the idea that we interpret, but this recognition does not apply to the consequences of hermeneutics. As a matter of fact, I wanted to call this book “Consequences of Hermeneutics”, as a play on a title of one of Richard Rorty’s books[2], but this title was already used by my American publishers for a collection of essays of mine so I had to change it.[3] The question is therefore: Is hermeneutics simply a philosophy which theorizes that any knowledge is interpretation or is it something more than this? Now, when I say all knowledge is interpretation, is this still an interpretation or not? This was a question Nietzsche posed to himself some hundred years ago. So probably what I want to mean by “beyond” is the fact of asking myself explicitly, “what kind of a philosophy is hermeneutics?” because it cannot be a metaphysical description of the hermeneutical character or essence of all knowledge, because this knowledge of the hermeneutical essence of knowledge, would itself be an interpretation. So what kind of truth, in other words, can we expect from hermeneutics? Not a truth which claims to be the description of a state of affairs, but something different. And if we follow this line of thinking, in my opinion, we discover that the very truth of hermeneutics as a philosophical theory is tied to a nihilistic philosophy of history. It is only because something has changed in our perception of reality that we can speak reasonably of the interpretive character of knowledge. Consequently I have developed, in an a sense, a hermeneutical noseology, a theory of knowledge or epistemology, that is only possible if we accept an ontological nihilism. There is a history of Being which in a certain moment offers itself in the form of a peremptory objectivity, a strong reality, and then in our time offers or presents itself in the sense of something which is much more vague, much less peremptory, much less authoritarian. 2 SG: In the preface to Beyond Interpretation you observe that your proposal of “il pensiero debole”, or “weak thought”[4] as this expression has been translated into English, has been misunderstood, that it has been “taken in too narrow and literal a sense”. Can you elaborate on what kinds of misconstrual of the meaning of weak thought developed and what your intended meaning was? GV: I have in mind a couple of ways of misinterpreting “il pensiero debole”. First, it was the popularity of this “school” of philosophy, so to speak, in Italy, starting in 1980 and particularly with the publication in 1983 of the collection of essays under the title Il pensiero debole.[5] People immediately interpreted il pensiero debole as a sort of rejection of any rational claim of reason, and in the intellectual climate at the time there was already a sort of mistrust in the claims of scientific rationality. Its the sort of thing that happens in Also sprach Zarathustra, where the animals of Zarathustra believe that the theory of the eternal recurrence is simply the idea that there is no fixed meaning, everything is possible, as a sort of negatively nihilistic interpretation of the death of God: God is dead, everything is possible, everything is permitted, everything is allowed, and so on. So, pensiero debole was interpreted in the 1980s in Italy as a sort of revindication of the pragmatic and also...

After Ontology: Literary Theory and Modernist Poetics (review)

Reviewed by: After Ontology: Literary Theory and Modernist Poetics Donald G. Marshall William D. Melaney. After Ontology: Literary Theory and Modernist Poetics. Albany, NY: State U of New York P, 2001. x + 260 pp. Melaney’s line of thought places the modern, modernism, and post-modernism in complex relation. A postmodern critique of the modern in philosophy prepares the way for both an interpretation of modernism as a general cultural phenomenon and a way of reading specific modernist texts. Modern philosophy began when Descartes founded knowing and being on the certainty of the subject’s self-reflection. Kant’s “Copernican revolution” confirmed while reversing Descartes, making subjectivity not the foundation but the limit of possible experience. Kant’s critical philosophy made meaningless the Cartesian opposition of subject vs. object, thinking substance vs. extended substance. But it generates a fresh split between theoretical and ethical, pure and practical reason, knowledge and ethics. When he discovered a third form of a priori in the reflective judgment of beauty in art and teleology in nature, he thought he had found a bridge between pure and practical reason. But this also required restricting the experience of the beautiful to a harmony among the subject’s interior faculties, so that the artwork’s autonomy deprived it of its cognitive claim to truth. To recover the artwork’s claim to truth, Hans-Georg Gadamer argued, the artwork must be reconnected to being through its subject matter, its Sache. But this reconnection could not be effected through the old concept of mimesis. Instead, it is effected by the infinite mediation of language. The self that experiences the artwork is not a subject, whether understood as foundation or as limit. It exists in time and belongs to a world that exists in time, that is, the world borne to us as tradition. This line of thought explicitly follows Heidegger to replace subjectivity with a responsive and therefore dialogical self and to recover the truth claim of the work of art inherent in its temporality. Truth and Method concludes with an analysis of the radiance of beauty. Melaney notes Gianni Vattimo’s claim that Gadamer thus reverts to a unified ontology, abandoning Heidegger’s rift between earth and world—an objection I find unconvincing. Jacques Derrida deconstructs Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgment but also Heidegger’s “Origin of the Work of Art,” on which Gadamer relies. Focusing on the concept of frame, Derrida argues in “Parerga” that Kant cannot resolve the opposition of inner and outer, the autonomy of the aesthetic and the demands of practical reason. In Derrida’s analysis, Kant cannot establish the unity of subjectivity through aesthetics even by recourse to the sublime or the symbol. Discursivity and temporality—différance—intervene. Confronting Meyer Scha-piro’s response to Heidegger’s “Origin of the Work of Art,” Derrida dissolves the unity of art and world under the concept of truth. Into this gap steps the figure of the artist, not as a unified subject nor as a source of truth, but as a site where temporality and the trace of the other weave a text rather than establish a work. This is the territory of the ethical, as Derrida understands it. Melaney absorbs not only these results but also the double reading through which Derrida reaches them. He pursues the ethical and connects it with language and the discourse of legitimacy through Nietzsche, Lacan, Lyotard, and Foucault. Returning to [End Page 193] Derrida, Melaney uses the concepts of undecidability, trace, and différance to disclose both a modern and a postmodern moment in the (inherently aporetic) modernist text. The modernist artist thus opens a rupture between the modern and the postmodern, but the modernist text must also be recontextualized in a general quest for justice. Melaney understands this to require analyzing the response of a group of modernist texts to a common intertext. He therefore proceeds to examine Eliot’s and Pound’s differing uses of Hamlet, Dante, and Ulysses, concluding with Yeats’ recovery of history and community, but in a way that asks us to “remain at home in the unanswerable” (167). In Eliot, the intertext disrupts the relation of author to work by...

In the world, but not of the world

In this article, I discuss the prospects of Christianity in the modern world from a philosophical perspective (section 1). In order to do so, I analyse in the second section Gianni Vattimo’s and Charles Taylor’s views of the problems of modernity. They interpret modern civilisation as being threatened by the violence of instrumental (technological and political) reason (Vattimo), and by the impasse of subjectivism (Taylor). In the third section, I query Vattimo’s answers to the question of how to overcome the problems of modernity. From a philosophical perspective Vattimo focuses on the idea of weak thinking and the historicity of the subject in order to counter the violence of objectifying reason. From a religious point of view, he refers to the idea of a completely secularised Christianity, with the notion of love as its essential characteristic. But these answers do not put an end to the violence of instrumental reason, since they are based upon the identification of this violence with objectification and do not take into account the possibility of a violence of subjectivist reason. Moreover, the commandment of love as the essence of Christianity is of no help to confine secularisation and subjectification, and the violence they produce. The categorical status of this commandment is at odds with Vattimo’s view of the hypothetical, historical and subjectivist character of humankind. Therefore, every appeal to this commandment is but an arbitrary choice, and can by no means put an end to the violence of the finite, historical subject. As a conclusion (section 4), I discuss an alternative answer to question whether Christianity can contribute to the solution of the problems of modern civilisation. I present the Christian view of God’s transcendence as a way of stressing the substantiality of the true and the good, without thereby falling back into a metaphysics of objectivity and violence.

The religious philosophy of Gianni Vattimo

The religious philosophy of Gianni Vattimo

Reviews

Books reviewed:David Westerlund and Ingvar Svanberg (eds), Islam Outside the Arab WorldDavid Marshall, God, Muhammad and the Unbelievers: A Qur'anic StudyRichard King, Orientalism and Religion: Postcolonial Theory, India and ‘The Mystic East’M. P. Weitzman, The Syriac Version of the Old Testament: An IntroductionA. Bach (ed.), Women in the Hebrew Bible: A ReaderCarolyn Osiek, The Shepherd of HermasLeif E. Vaage and Vincent L. Wimbush (eds), Asceticism and the New TestamentGerd Theissen, A Theory of Primitive ChristianityNorman Kretzmann, The Metaphysics of Creation: Aquinas's Natural Theology in Summa contra gentiles IIGabriel Audisio, The Waldensian Dissent: Persecution and Survival, c.1170–c.1570Alister E. McGrath, Thomas F. Torrance: An Intellectual BiographyTimothy J. Gorringe, Karl Barth Against HegemonyRichard Bauckham and Trevor Hart (eds), Hope against Hope: Christian Eschatology in Contemporary ContextStephen R. Haynes and John K. Roth (eds), The Death of G‐d Movement and the Holocaust: Radical Theology Encounters the ShoahKeith E. Yandell, Philosophy of Religion: A Contemporary IntroductionMichael J. Murray (ed.), Reason for the Hope WithinGianni Vattimo, trans. Luca D?•Isanto and David Webb, BeliefRobert Merrihew Adams, Finite and Infinite Goods: A Framework for EthicsSue Patterson, Realist Christian Theology in a Postmodern AgeChristopher Southgate (ed.), God, Humanity and the Cosmos: A Textbook in Science and ReligionHolmes Rolston III, Genes, Genesis and God: Values and their Origins in Natural and Human HistoryJ. Wentzel van Huyssteen, The Shaping of Rationality: Toward Interdisciplinarity in Theology and ScienceDeuk‐Hoon Park, Christian Praxis and Economic JusticeDavid L. Edwards, After Death? Past Beliefs and Real Possibilities

BOOK REVIEWS

Journal Article BOOK REVIEWS Get access Religion Edited by Jacques Derrida Gianni Vattimo Stanford University Press, 1998. 211 pages. $49.50. John D. Caputo John D. Caputo Villanova University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Volume 68, Issue 1, March 2000, Pages 171–174, https://doi.org/10.1093/jaarel/68.1.171 Published: 01 March 2000

Human Rights in Transition

The legitimisation of the intervention of the west in Kosovo by references to human rights has brought to the surface an inherent problem of universal human rights: the tension between the intention to reduce violence and the claim to universality. This legitimisation of violence on the basis of a universalistic ethical code meant that there was no space from which an effective opposition to the intervention could be argued. The Kosovo war has therefore strengthened the view that violence is in some cases “inevitable,” while the disappearance of the opposition has created a new type of “total war.” This could mean that human rights are losing their power of de-legitimising violence, and are being transformed into a coinage of power politics. The paper discusses how human rights could be re-thought in such a way that they can de-legitimise violence even when a new strong and “universal” foundation is no longer possible. Referring to the work of Gianni Vattimo, the paper discusses the problem of violence as a manifestation of the metaphysical tradition of western thinking and its quest for secure foundations. It argues that human rights as a reduction of violence must be thought post-metaphysically and proposes an under- standing and practice of human rights located between the nihilistic hermeneutics of Gianni Vattimo and the neo-pragmatism of Richard Rorty. This understanding of human rights could de-legitimise the new type of organised violence born during the Kosovo war, and allow an understanding of democratic transition beyond the model of a “catching-up process.”

Existentialism and the Return to Religion

There are some good reasons to think that future historians will characterize twentieth century century of secularism. As century began, Nietzsche's declaration that God is dead, made some years earlier, was still reverberating. Three years into century, Bertrand Russell's famous essay, A Free Man's Worship, was published.1 The essay is widely interpreted a powerful renunciation of religion in favor of an ethical humanism. Then came existentialism. Despite its religious beginnings in Kierkegaard and Buber, existentialism established itself in twentieth century a thoroughly secular philosophy. As David Cooper puts it, existentialism as defined by Sartre, made notion of a religious existentialist a virtual contradiction..2 While existentialism is no longer an influential philosophy, its secular messages have been well absorbed. However, it remains to be seen whether secular trend will continue into new millennium. According to some observers, it is too hasty to assume that it will. Indeed, Gianni Vattimo claims that end of twentieth century has witnessed a to religion.3 Given standard view of existentialism, it may be taken for granted that if there is a return to religion then it cannot be via existentialism. The trouble is that philosophy has habit of demonstrating that what is taken for granted turns out to be otherwise. At least, wish to demonstrate that this is so in case of existentialism. Specifically, aim of this essay is to show that philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas is essentially an existentialist philosophy and if so, then, far from being a dead end, existentialism could well be main route for a return to religion. Levinas' account of subjectivity is discussed in Section I. In Section II, defend claim that Levinas' philosophy of subjectivity is essentially existentialist. In Section III, religiousness of that philosophy is explored. In his various writings, Levinas employs term l'Autrui, often translated the Other, to refer to one's fellow human beings, indefinite neighbors, strangers, widows and orphans, and term 1 'Autre, often translated the other, to refer to what lies beyond totality that is one's own being, beyond what constitutes one's essence, a realm to which Other belongs. The world that one knows is called the le dit, because all things in that world are known through what is said about them, through our own thematization or conceptualization of them. The realm of other is called the saying, le dire, because we are aware of it only through what it says to us rather than through our thematization. As a totality, belong to world of said, having an essence that can be thematized, a being that can be conceptualized; for instance, thematized and conceptualized in science or in traditional philosophy. However, this is utterly devoid of any subjectivity. In response to this, in Totality and Infinity, Levinas embarks on a phenomenological journey, tracing subjectivity of I.4 As is case with any classical phenomenology, Levinas begins with mundane experiences of I, showing that acquires its unique identity, or its unicity, by separating or isolating itself from what is not itself in activity of enjoyment. It is in that one is aware of one's own happiness and unhappiness, thus aware of one's own ipseity. For Levinas, enjoyment . . . is (TI, 117) and isolation is structure of unicity of I. The phenomenology of allows Levinas to conclude that self sufficiency of enjoying measures egoism or ipseity of Ego and same. Enjoyment is a withdrawal into oneself, an involution (TI, 118). In enjoyment, see all things in terms of my own being because in it I am absolutely for myself (TI, 134). Yet, in very process of enjoying, come to be aware that am much more than my own enjoyment. …

In the Separation of the Crisis

A catchall no doubt, the notion of the post-modern currently allows a number of very different theoretical or philosophic positions to classify (and thus dispense with) heterogeneous intellectual projects whose sole common feature is that they clash with the expectations and presumptions of the positions in question. In spite of the categorical refusal on the part of Jacques Derrida to embrace postmodernity or identify his thought as post-modem, deconstruction is frequently viewed from such a perspective. Often it is even considered as defining the post-modern. But instead of rehashing the arguments which attempt to assimilate deconstruction to post-modernity, or of elaborating the reasons given by Derrida himself for definitively removing his thought from such a classification, I propose to examine Gianni Vattimo's thesis which holds that the fate of a consistent, rigorous, and philosophically valid notion of the post-modem depends upon the transformation and radicalization of hermeneutics. (And yet this gesture by which Vattimo reclaims post-modernity for a philosophical hermeneutics leads him at the same time to deny any association of deconstruction with post-modernity.) This surprising thesis warrants a debate for several reasons. Not only has Vattimo given incontestable philosophical rigor to the concept of the post-modem, but in connecting the idea of post-modernity to the future of he has also sketched a new conception of this philosophic discipline. Moreover, his thesis has the merit of transforming the interest and the stakes of the potential debate between post-modernity and deconstruction. The following pages will not, however, attempt to engage this debate in an explicit manner. Their sole purpose is to delimit as precisely as possible the nature of post-modern hermeneutics as proposed by Vattimo, as well as what distinguishes it from other current forms of hermeneutics. In this way, a future debate will be made possible. Such a debate could not take place without one's first taking into account the fact that hermeneutics in Vattimo's sense no longer shares the essential preoccupations of contemporary forms of and that, therefore, it is hardly, in itself, a hermeneutics. Hermeneutics, claims Vattimo, constitutes the koine of contemporary philosophical culture. If one were to name a tendency within contemporary thinking which could be considered as the current philosophical koine, comparable to that of Marxism in the 50s or structuralism in the 60s, one would probably have to recognize that, today, this role is being played by hermeneutics, he writes.' In thus underscoring its current expansion and fecundity (the reference is to the 80s), Vattimo is not of course claiming that the totality of contemporary Western thought is driven by hermeneutics. As examples of this tendency, Vattimo mentions thinkers whose works, clearly, are explicitly hermeneutical, such as Hans-Georg Gadamer, Paul Ricoeur, and Luigi Pareyson, but also Jurgen Habermas and Karl-Otto Appel, who, according to him, have constantly reworked originally hermeneutic themes. But in order to show just how much the hermeneutic thematic is at the center of contemporary thought, Vattimo also brings up the work of Richard Rorty and, surprisingly enough, goes as far as to mention in the same context American deconstruction. Indeed, the radical reading that characterizes the famous Yale school is cited as proof of the diffusion of hermeneutics throughout contemporary literary theory. We can leave aside the precise reasons that lead Vattimo to assert an affinity between hermeneutics and American deconstruction. However, we must underscore that, while thus claiming a hermeneutic orientation in literary criticism, Vattimo recognizes that this particular direction assumed to have been taken by hermeneutics is equally marked by other influences (essentially that of Derrida).,,2yet this seems to suggest unequivocally that, for Vattimo, Derridian deconstruction---deconstruction in its proper sense-remains in the margins, if not at the exterior, of that philosophical koine that he sees as emerging more and more clearly. …

Return of the Century: Time, Modernity, and the End of History in Angela Carter's 'Nights at the Circus'

Set at 'the cusp of the modern age, the hinge of the nineteenth century', Nights at the Circus,2 Angela Carter's fin de siecle fantasy anticipates the new century as an era of radical transformation and change. However, it is also a text fascinated with modernist myths of origin: from the threshold of the twentieth century it returns to the 'prehistory' of the modern, as constructed by modernism, represented by such motifs as animals, folk and peasant culture, childhood, the wilderness of Siberia, and the colonial 'others' of empire. In The End of Modernity, Gianni Vattimo argues that modernity is 'dominated by the idea that the history of thought is a progressive enlightenment which develops through an ever more complete appropriation and reappropriation of its own foundations': These [foundations] are often also understood to be 'origins', so that the theoretical and practical revolutions of Western history are presented and legitimated for the most part as recoveries, rebirths, or returns.3 A return to origin could be read, then, as evidence of a complicity with the

Reviews

Books reviewed:L. E. Keck et al. (eds), Numbers, Deuteronomy, Introduction to Narrative Literature, Joshua, Judges, Ruth, 1&2 SamuelS. E. Gillingham, One Bible, Many Voices: Different Approaches to Biblical StudiesMichael D. Goulder, The Psalms of the Return (Book 5, Psalms 107–150): Studies in the Psalter IVJames D. G. Dunn, T. & T. Clark, The Theology of Paul the ApostleD. Mendels, Identity, Religion and Historiography: Studies in Hellenistic HistoryWilliam Horbury, Jewish Messianism and the Cult of ChristJames S. McLaren, Turbulent Times? Josephus and Scholarship on Judaea in the First Century CEJ. Neusner and B. Chilton, Jewish‐Christian Debates: God, Kingdom, MessiahBen Pink Dandelion, Douglas Gwyn and Timothy Peat, Heaven on Earth: Quakers and the Second ComingAdnan Aslam, Religious Pluralism in Christian and Islamic Philosophy: The Thought of John Hick and Seyyed Hossein NasrW. Cantwell Smith, Believing: An Historical PerspectiveW. Cantwell Smith, Faith and Belief: The Difference Between ThemNorman Doe, Canon Law in the Anglican Communion: A Worldwide PerspectiveG. R. Evans, Discipline and Justice in the Church of EnglandAlan Falconer (ed.), Faith and Order in Moshi: The 1996 Commission MeetingLewis S. Mudge, The Church as Moral Community: Ecclesiology and Ethics in Ecumenical DebateT. F. Best and D. Hellar (eds), Eucharistic Worship in Ecumenical Contexts: The Lima Liturgy – And BeyondTimothy Bradshaw ed, Grace and Truth in the Secular AgeJosé Comblin, Called for Freedom: The Changing Context of Liberation TheologyKaren Kilby, Karl RahnerRosemary Radford Ruether, Women and Redemption: A Theological HistoryIan Markham, Truth and the Reality of God: An Essay in Natural TheologyJohannes A. van der Ven, Formation of the Moral SelfRobin Gill (ed.), Euthanasia and the ChurchesRichard Swinburne, Providence and the Problem of EvilJohn Polkinghorne, Science and Theology: An IntroductionJohn P. Burgess (ed.), In Whose Image? Faith, Science and the New GeneticsStephen Platten (ed.), Seeing Ourselves: Interpreting Contemporary SocietyJacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo (eds), ReligionUrsula King (ed.), Faith and Praxis in a Postmodern Age

Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo (eds.), Religion. Trans. by David Webb and others

Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo (eds.), Religion. Trans. by David Webb and others

The Space of Time

The Space of Time

Ancients, Moderns, and PostmodernsPolitical Philosophy 1: Rights: The New Quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns. By Luc Ferry and Franklin Philip Political Philosophy 2: The System of Philosophies of History. By Luc Ferry and Franklin Philip Political Philosophy 3: From the Rights of Man to the Republican Idea. By Luc Ferry , Alain Renaut , and Franklin Philip The

Previous article No AccessReview EssayAncients, Moderns, and Postmoderns Political Philosophy 1: Rights: The New Quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns. By Luc Ferry and Franklin Philip Political Philosophy 2: The System of Philosophies of History. By Luc Ferry and Franklin Philip Political Philosophy 3: From the Rights of Man to the Republican Idea. By Luc Ferry , Alain Renaut , and Franklin Philip The Ennobling of Democracy: The Challenge of the Postmodern Era. By Thomas L. Pangle The End of Modernity: Nihilism and Hermeneutics in Postmodern Culture. By Gianni Vattimo and John R. Snyder The Transparent Society. By Gianni Vattimo and David Webb Gregory Bruce SmithGregory Bruce Smith Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Polity Volume 27, Number 4Summer 1995 The Journal of the Northeastern Political Science Association Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.2307/3234965 Views: 2Total views on this site Copyright 1995 Northeastern Political Science AssociationPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Forward Into The Past

Forward Into The Past Jim Hicks Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern. Trans. Catherine Porter. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1993. Illich, Ivan. In the Vineyard of the Text. A Commentary to Hugh’s Didascalicon. Chicago: U. of Chicago, 1993. In his 1985 recension of the debate on postmodernism, Gianni Vattimo suggests that the arguments of each then major figure (Lyotard, Habermas, Rorty) are determined (and undermined) by an illegimate appeal to “the state of things”—some version or other of the postmodern present (Vattimo 105). Whether or not metanarratives have been invalidated, whether the project of modernism is down but not yet out, and whether or not philosophy has lost its role as the unifier and arbiter of knowledge, the question is in some sense the same: where are we now and where do we go from here? Although Vattimo’s own attempt to respond to such questions (which suggests “piety,” “weakness,” and “mourning” as key elements to a truly pomo stance) seems either intentionally perverse or downright funny, his reminder that “condition,” “project,” and “consensus” are each present-tense nouns remains a good place to begin, even in a now much-widened debate. Two recent books which should be of particular interest to readers of Postmodern Culture deliver additional stories about the state of things at present. Clearly not your common or garden variety contributions to this field, both works suggest that the present and future of Western civilization ought to be found in recalling our premodern past. As an intervention into the contemporary critical fray, the book by Bruno Latour is the more direct. His title, We Have Never Been Modern, would seem to suggest his basic rhetorical strategy: “Stop all the bickering, whining and posturing . . . modernism, postmodernism, modernity, it never happened, it’s all a joke, it never happened.” Such an unfriendly tone, such an obvious attempt to grab the spotlight (and to foreclose the careers of so many, in so many fields), coming from someone other than a sociologist and historian of technoscience, from someone less beloved by those postmodern critics who have already made his acquaintance, from someone who wasn’t speaking, after all, in the name of Science, would no doubt cause only a ripple, passing through the critical pool as an instant of uncomfortable silence, a few heavy, disturbing seconds before the subject is changed. But when Science talks, people listen. When Science talks, we wait for an explanation. It is, of course, precisely such expectations in regard to science that Bruno Latour has long opposed. In a marvelous series of books, including Laboratory Life (with Steven Woolgar, 1979), Science in Action (1987) and The Pasteurization of France (1988), Latour argues that neither science nor society can be studied in isolation, that both are determined by means of the complex web of translations which join them together. Thus, science, when it does speak, is heard only by subscribers to its network: a favorite analogy of Latour’s is to the termite, whose existence is impossible outside of its tunnels. We Have Never Been Modern is explicitly a work which elaborates such translations (between “the emerging field of science studies” and “the literate public” [ix]), thus marking at most a new deviation in his work. Latour justifies this turn, in part, by telling a story about the present. That story begins with Latour himself, engaging in the act which he characterizes as “modern man’s form of prayer” (2), i.e. reading our daily paper. The stories that he finds there are familiar: the ozone hole, Professor Gallo’s laboratory, frozen embryos, and others. (If Latour had picked up an American paper, he might have pointed to stories about big business, condoms, guns and bible studies in our public schools, animal rights, pornography and sexual harassment, etc.) Diverse as they are, such stories have in common the manner in which they knot together nature and culture: A single thread links the most esoteric sciences and the most sordid politics, the most distant sky and some factory in the Lyon suburbs, dangers on a global scale and the impending local elections . . . . The horizons, the stakes, the time frames, the actors—none of these is commensurable...

"Irrationability" and <em>The End of Modernity</em> by Gianni Vattimo

Irrationability and The End of Modernity by Gianni Vattimo This review essay is available in Studies in 20th Century Literature: http://newprairiepress.org/sttcl/vol16/iss2/8

Technology and Weakness. Ecology according to Nietzsche, Heidegger and “Weak Thinking”. With a preface by Gianni Vattimo

Technology and Weakness. Ecology according to Nietzsche, Heidegger and “Weak Thinking”. With a preface by Gianni Vattimo

The End of Modernity: Nihilism and Hermeneutics in Postmodern Culture

Gianni Vattimo reexamines the roots of modernism and postmodernism in Nietzsche, Benjamin, and Heidegger. Exploring the links between concepts of nihilism and destiny in nineteenth-century humanism, Vattimo follows these trends in aesthetic and scientific theory from Benjamin to Bloch, Ricoeur, and Kuhn.

The End of Modernity: Nihilism and Hermeneutics in Post-modern Culture (review)

Reviews195 The End ofModernity: Nihilism and Hermeneutics in Postmodern Culture, by Gianni Vattimo; translated with an introduction by Jon R. Synder; Iviii & 190 pp. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988, $27.50. This collection ofessays is the first book to appear in English by one of Italy's most popular philosophers. Vattimo has hosted a regular series of television shows in Italy and has ten books to his credit on figures as diverse as Aristode, Schleiermacher, Nietzsche, and Heidegger. Indeed, it is Nietschze and Heidegger —together with Gadamer, with whom he studied and whose Truth and Method he has translated into Italian—that provide the philosophical sources in his own exploration of postmodernism. In a useful introduction, the translator takes us through some of the background to postwar Italian philosophy, which has been characterized principally by a commitment either to Marxism, especially in Gramsci's distinctive interpretation, or to phenomenology and existentialism. Although Vattimo evidendy began in the early 1960s by flirting with a form of Heideggerian existentialism, he soon moved to a philosophical nihilism, and this view is distinctive of the essays translated here, which were written between 1980 and 1984. Nihilism is not easy to characterize, but basically it consists in the project of collapsing objective truth into subjective value, a project which, in its Nietzschian version, is associated with a perspectival view of knowledge, morality, politics, etc. What Nietzsche had in mind as the target for his nihilism is, however, an open question, and it is debatable whether it extended much beyond Christian morality and those philosophical systems which in one way or another attempt to "rationalize" that morality, or which can be seen as providing its sources (e.g., Stoicism). To complement Nietzsche's vision with Heidegger's project of overcoming the metaphysical preoccupation with Being certainly gives it the appearance of something altogether more universal, but readers doubtful as to whether this is anything more than an appearance will not find much in these essays to convince them otherwise. This is not to say that Vattimo simply grafts Heidegger onto Nietzsche; on the contrary, in his introduction he spends some time spelling out their similarities and differences. The central theme that they share, he believes, is the impossibility of overcoming Western metaphysics , since the provision of such a means could itself only be a move within metaphysics. Such an argument is, of course, very familiar diese days, from the writings of Derrida and others, and Vattimo adds nothing new. The most problematic part ofVattimo's project is his association ofmodernity with secularization, an association that seems to lie at the heart of his advocacy of postmodernism. That the modern era (the era from roughly die end of the sixteenth century onwards) is characterized by a wholesale secularization of religious values, standards, and conceptions is a thesis which has a wide currency 196Philosophy and Literature in the German tradition of philosophical anthropology to which Vattimo owes so much. If one accepts this thesis, developed in most detail by Vattimo's early teacher Karl Lowith, together with Nietzsche's criticism ofChristian values, and an appreciation of the difficulty any mere secularization is going to have in trying to go beyond the religious values it takes as its raw material, then the path to postmodernism seems assured. But why should we accept the secularization thesis? Vattimo seems unaware of the debates surrounding the thesis, and especially the very detailed (and to my mind decisive) objections to the idea that modernity is to be characterized in terms of a secularization raised by Hans Blumenberg in his Legitimacy of tL· Modern Age, a book which is not even mentioned, despite its central relevance to what Vattimo wants to argue. There is litde in Vattimo's book to challenge modernists, or to inspire postmodernists , and while some of the discussion of hermeneutics is interesting, even here we find nothing novel or especially engaging. University of SydneyStephen Gaukroger Redrawing the Lines: Analytic PhUosophy, Deconstruction, and Literary Theory, edited by Reed Way Dasenbrock; 263 pp. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989, $35.00 cloth, $14.95 paper. The Anglo-American analytic tradition has been coming into increasing "contact " with Continental philosophy, often by means...

Lost in the funhouse: Baudrillard and the politics of postmodernism

‘Forget Foucault’ was Baudrillard’s title for a nifty piece of polemics which, in the current French manner, staked his claim to be ‘post-’, just about everything, post-structuralism and Foucault included.1 I think we would do well to forget Baudrillard, though not without treating his texts to more in the way of argued critique than Baudrillard sees fit to provide when dealing with his own precursors and rivals on the intellectual scene. Baudrillard is undoubtedly the one who has gone furthest toward renouncing enlightenment reason and all its works, from the Kantian-liberal agenda to Marxism, Frankfurt Critical Theory, the structuralist ‘sciences of man’, and even — on his view — the residual theoreticist delusions of a thinker like Foucault. The nearest equivalents are Richard Rorty’s brand of postmodern neopragmatist anti-philosophy and the strain of so-called ‘weak thought’ (not unaptly so called) that has lately been canvassed by Gianni Vattimo and other Heideggerian apostles of unreason.2 But one suspects that Baudrillard would reject these comparisons, regarding them as moves in a pointless game whose rule-book has been endlessly re-written and should now be torn up for good and all.