From the Perspective of Transcendental Idealism, A

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From the perspective of transcendental idealism, a phenomenological investigation into the phenomenon is actually a self-examination of reason in its various comportments amidst existence. In this way, being is grounded in thought and this thought, as reason, has various dimensions and aspects in a way that is isomorphic with the nexus of the imagination. (p. 99)

It is likely that a reader approaching the Critique for the first time will find discussion like this too hard to understand. When Luchte moves on to the Dialectic, the discussion becomes slightly more accessible – the arguments of the Paralogisms, Antinomy and Ideal are all presented relatively clearly and in sufficient depth. The section on the Antinomy is particularly useful as it nicely places the Third Antinomy within the context of the project of the Critique of Practical Reason and points the way forwards towards the next step in Kant’s system. The guide also contains a useful discussion of the Doctrine of Method – a section which is often unfairly overlooked in guides to the Critique. Luchte ends the guide with a chapter on the influence and reception of the ideas within the Critique. This chapter nicely illustrates the ways in which Kant’s arguments in the Critique have affected the various types of philosophy that came after him including Neo-Kantianism, German Idealism and the divide between analytic and continental philosophy. This part of the guide would be especially useful for those wishing to understand the considerable, and often un-credited, impact of Kantian philosophy. It is here that Luchte’s discussion seems most comfortable and accessible and certainly makes for an interesting read. It is to Luchte’s credit that this book attempts the very noble, and too often overlooked, task of placing the important arguments contained in the Critique within the broader context of Kant’s influence on various other philosophers, particularly those within the continental tradition. However, the writing style and the slightly confusing presentation of several important arguments, such as those of the Aesthetic and Analytic, may mean that this book is not an ideal introductory guide to the Critique. That being said, the guide may be of more use to those who already have some knowledge and understanding of Kant’s arguments and who wish to further explore the influence of the Critique on various other philosophical traditions.

Katie Harrington University of Sheffield

Derrida On Time, by Joanna Hodge. London and New York: Routledge, 2007. Pp. 256, hardcover. ISBN 978-0-415-43091-3. £60.00

The death of Jacques Derrida on 9 October 2004 has led unsurprisingly to a proliferation of secondary works that attempt to grapple with his vast oeuvre (see, for example, Douzinas 2007; Eaglestone and Glendinning

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2008; Fagan et al. 2007). Joanna Hodge’s excellent contribution to this literature identifies Derrida’s rethinking of time as central to the lasting significance of his legacy. Of particular interest to readers of the Kantian Review is Hodge’s original reading of Derrida’s work as primarily a response to the writings of Immanuel Kant as well as those of Edmund Husserl. Seasoned Kantian scholars and phenomenologists, perhaps more so than those relatively new to these traditions or the intricacies of early Derridean thought, will surely welcome Hodge’s painstakingly detailed engagement with this significant topic. Organised into five parts and ten chapters, the book begins with an examination of the theme of time and temporality, primarily, though not exclusively, in Derrida’s pre-1990s texts. In Part One, Hodge traces the influence of Kant and Husserl on Derrida and reads his conceptions of différance, trace and iteration as fundamental disruptions of linear notions of time. Parts Two and Three then locate Derrida’s rethinking of time, as something curved and ‘marked by loopings, hesitations and precipitancy’ (p. x), in relation to the broader phenomenological tradition and, in particular, the work of Emmanuel Levinas, Maurice Blanchot, Paul Ricoeur and Jean-Luc Nancy. Parts Four and Five offer wide-ranging discussions of the connections between phenomenology and negative theology; the temporal register of the messianic and the promissory structure of democracy; the multiple, discontinuous and ultimately secret characteristics of time; and the question of the relation between time and history. In the Preface, Hodge frames her book ‘as a response to the writings of Derrida, read as in the first instance a series of responses to Kant, which are blocked, deflected and rerouted by the chance encounters of those re-rout- ings’ (p. viii). According to Hodge’s reading in chapter 1, Kant imposes a series of delimitations on his treatment of space and time in the Critique of Pure Reason, which are characterized by ‘determinations of permanence, succession and co-existence’ (pp. 18, 21). On this view, the Kantian account prioritizes a conceptualization of time predicated upon horizons, a temporalization of consciousness and a metaphysics of presence (p. 18). By contrast, it is argued that Derrida disrupts and displaces this paradigmatic framing through a reconceptualization of experience ‘released from the stabilisations of metaphysical definitions’ (p. 21). Central to this reconceptualization is Derrida’s notoriously obscure term différance, which, despite performing a pivotal role in Hodge’s analysis, is left somewhat assumed. In Positions (1981) Derrida refers to différance as the ‘systematic play of differences, of traces of differences, of the spacing by means of which elements are related to each other’ (Derrida 1981: 24). The difference between différance and difference is not audible in French: whenever we say différance it is unclear or ‘undecidable’ whether or not we are referring to différance or saying the French word for ‘difference’. Hence, it is only in the written form that the difference between différance and difference is discernible. As well as challenging what Derrida considers to be an historic privileging of speech over writing in Western thought, the use of the term différance is an attempt to illustrate that meaning is always unstable, differ- ing and deferring: on the move, so to speak. Therefore, meaning does not kantian review, volume 14–1, 2009 139 REVIEWS reflect a linear temporal logic of the kind Hodge attributes to Kant, but is rather construed as a complex series of traces gesturing in forward and recursive loops. As such, Hodge argues that thinking in terms of différance opens up a conception of experience that is ‘better, more adequately under- stood as the repeated passage to various different kinds of limit, conceptual, kinetic, and kinaesthetic, and as the stalling of such passage, in a turning back from the limit’ (p. 21). For Hodge, Derrida’s rethinking of time goes hand in hand with a critical engagement with the phenomenological tradition (p. 24). It is via Husserl that Derrida is said to derive the conclusion that time is ‘irreduc- ibly aporetic’ and, following the logic of différance, ‘can only be studied by attending to the paradoxes of its specific articulations in language and text’ (p. 25). Whilst Derrida’s treatment of Husserl is affirmatory in key respects, Hodge also highlights significant points of divergence between the two thinkers. In particular, she argues that the former disputes three central Husserlian distinctions between immediate presentation and medi- ated presentification; between reduced time and the cosmic time of worldly occurrences; and between static and genetic phenomenology (p. 34). Reflecting his encounter with Kant, Derrida thus works with, yet also inter- rupts, Husserl’s phenomenological parameters. Hodge presents différance as the main force of this interruption but emphasizes that: ‘it is . . . not that Derrida performs a “step beyond” these parameters, but that they are unstable, thus permitting différance to exceed them’ (p. 81). This theme of the interrogation of the limits of experience frames Hodge’s insightful treatment of some of Derrida’s later texts, notably Spectres of Marx (1993). In this context the key Derridean tropes of spectrality and hauntology are read as attempts to hypothesize a form of phenomenology without presence (p. 95). Again, it is precisely the security of the distinction between presence and absence, and its implication for rethinking time, which Hodge’s analysis focuses upon. A privileging of différance opens up the possibility of an alternative temporal register of the trace as a past that has never been present. Further problematizing both Kant and Husserl, Derrida’s future is one that remains radically undecided. The former rely on a conception of the horizon that forecloses the future ‘as programmed in advance by what has already occurred’ (p. 99). On the other hand, Derrida takes the Nietzschean aphorism, ‘the future can only be of the nature of the perhaps’, seriously in favour of a notion of futurity that is open to the coming of the other’ (Derrida 2002: 225). Hodge explores the obvious influence of religious and theological thought on Derrida’s conceptualization of time in the later parts of the book. Central to this exploration is the notion that ‘religion and theology are designed to give expression to structures and experiences of time which are otherwise repressed, or obscured’ (p. 136). At this juncture Hodge argues that the political theology attributable to Husserl is rejected by Derrida (ibid.). Here, for the first time explicitly in Hodge’s discussion, the fascinating issue of the political implications of Derrida’s rethinking of time is raised. However, apart from a brief account of Derrida’s well-known use of the model of the promise to Abraham in order to analyse the temporal

140 kantian review, volume 14–1, 2009 REVIEWS structure of democracy, there is a sense in which this core thematic is ultimately left rather hostage to fortune. Questions about how Derrida’s distinct treatment of time might reorientate ethical-political relationality and praxis are not given the attention they perhaps deserve. Certainly more indication of what Hodge believes to be the ethical-political impact of her assessment of Derrida would have been welcome. Nevertheless, this impressive scholarly work constitutes an important engagement with one of the greatest thinkers on time of our time. Nick Vaughan-Williams University of Exeter

References

Douzinas, Costas (ed.) (2007) Adieu, Derrida (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan). Derrida, Jacques (2002) Negotiations: Interventions and Interviews, 1971–2001, trans. and ed. Elizabeth Rottenberg (California: Stanford University Press). Eaglestone, Robert and Glendinning, Simon (eds) (2008) Derrida’s Legacies: Literature and Philosophy (London and New York: Routledge). Fagan, Madeleine, Glorieux, Ludovic, Hasimbegovic, Indira and Suetsugu, Marie (eds) (2007) Derrida: Negotiating the Legacy (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press).

Kant and Skepticism, by Michael N. Forster. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2008. Pp. x + 154, hardcover. ISBN 9780691129877. $29.95/£17.95

This short but punchy book discusses Kant’s relation to what Forster identifies as three varieties of scepticism: ‘veil of perception’ scepticism, Humean scepticism, and Pyrrhonian scepticism; it also considers how that relation shaped Kant’s metaphysical project, and whether in the end this succeeds, both in itself and in the light of its anti-sceptical ambitions. Forster takes his position here to be controversial in two connected respects: first, in the emphasis he puts on Pyrrhonian scepticism as Kant’s target compared to scepticism in its other forms; and second, in his claim that Kant’s ‘reformed metaphysics’ is conceived to withstand this variety of scepticism, as much as the Humean kind which is more usually taken to be its focus. I will follow the structure of Forster’s extremely lucid and well-presented discussion, and begin by setting out the distinction he offers between the three types of scepticism mentioned above, and his argument for the centrality of Pyrrhonism; I will then consider how Forster thinks this influences Kant’s metaphysical outlook; and finally I will discuss Forster’s criticisms of Kant’s position. Beginning, then, with the three varieties of scepticism, Forster character- izes the first as ‘veil of perception’ scepticism, which focuses on the issue kantian review, volume 14–1, 2009 141