BETWEEN POLITICS AND METAPHYSICS: REFLECTIONS IN THE WAKE OF GILLIAN ROSE

Can we find a way of talking about metaphysics that doesn't immediately descend into the quagmires of fantasy, the sort of thing Nietzsche excoriated in the context of religious discourse as talking about unreal objects and causes? But why should we want to find any way at all of talking about metaphysics? In what we are constantly told to regard as a post-realist age (told by whom, though?), the project of speaking with generality about the real or actual has become marginal; we are frightened of generating a discourse that seems to aim at rivalling our talk about talk itself, to aim at the grasp of structures or 'conditions' or 'transcendentals' in a way that sidesteps the fundamental contemporary axiom in so much of our speaking about reflection and method—the axiom that language cannot, ultimately, have any 'matter' but itself. Violating this axiom raises the spectre of claims to presence, to privilege or to totalising vision; and we (who?) know that these are the claims that we must resist on pain of losing what language is, and thus losing the only thing we can now find to say of our human essence —that it is constructed and enacted in speech, which is 'essentially' without privilege, in the sense that it is not amenable to closure or stasis. No position is or could be available that would have the right to arrest the process of exchange. And, if we are to find room here for the sacred, it will be only in absences, blanks and pauses in the exchange, unthematisable and alien to will and reflection. This will do only if we fail to read 'reality' or 'actuality' as difficult. My parenthetical questions in the last paragraph were not frivolous asides: there