Title:
|
Returning to the abyss : metaphor, or the negotiation between sensible and intelligible
|
This thesis aims to make an intervention in contemporary metaphor studies. It
eschews the problematic simplifications of most of the research stemming from
cognitive linguistics, and also challenges the view of the relations between sensible
and intelligible as a 'correlationist circle' put forward following the publication of
Quentin Meillassoux's After Finitude. In contrast, it argues that a further
development of the projects of philosophers such as Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida
and Jean-Francois Lyotard offers a way to re-examine the relationship between
sensible and intelligible, to explore what metaphor might tell us about a properly
post-Kantian materiality. That is to say, this thesis aims to develop a materiality
different to that of positivism, a materialism which embraces the vertigo induced by
attempting to leap the abyss between intelligible and sensible, sensible and
intelligible.
To achieve this aim, it starts with a simple hypothesis: that what we call
'metaphor' is the privileged manifestation of the abyssal relationship between
sensible and intelligible, and that, to cite Jean-Francois Lyotard, 'one never touches
the thing itself but metaphorically'. We then proceed to work through a number of
examples to try to follow the folds and reversals of this relationship, or perhaps
rather these relationships. First, we re-examine the ninth of Walter Benjamin's
'Theses on the Philosophy of History', in Harry Zohn's idiosyncratic but now iconic
translation, to examine not how it expresses or relates to Benjamin's wider corpus,
but rather how the relationship of this text with its textual double serves to resist the
repeated imprint of cliche. Secondly, we return to the scene of Jacques Derrida's
'Khora' and investigate how the 'metaphorical' schema of Plato's Timaeus, a creation
myth about the construction of the universe from the intelligible eidos, seems to open
up a fissure in one of the foundation stones of metaphysics. In order to help dispel
one of the persistent metaphysical fallacies about metaphor, we then attempt to
follow the return of this text to the sensible, in the form of architecture, as Peter
Eisenman and Derrida's proposed garden for Bernard Tschumi's Pare de Ia villette in
Paris. Finally, we examine Catherine Malabou's reworking of Hegelian 'plasticity' in
relation to neuroscience and try to work through the ways in which she attempts to
control the disseminative and metaphorical properties of the concept and its relation
to capital.
Throughout this text we seek to push logos to master a rhetoric or muthos to
which it is not adequate, and thus both show the fissures through which we might
feel the draft of the abyss below and better understand the phantasmal bridge that
constitutes that abyss in the very movement of its construction.
|