and one point on content

This is somewhat unfair, because as stated I haven’t read Marder’s book. But this passage cited by Cogburn is the sort of thing that worries me (and here I’m turning to the content, not the style which I quite frankly dislike):

“If we are to learn how to hear the pro-vocative challenge, how to attune ourselves to the calling forth that proceeds from and summons us to the eventfulness of the thing and the thinghood of the event, we ought to learn, in the first place, not to precomprehend the source of the call in terms of a fixed ontological entity vaguely synonymous with the object.”

What it boils down to is that I doubt this book will uphold realism at all. What it sounds like to me, especially from the dig at “a fixed ontological entity vaguely synonymous with the object,” is that the book is going to spend quite a bit of time belittling “naive” realism, while claiming that Derrida was already on the trail of a deeper, more profound sense of it. Essentially, I suspect that it will simply be a hijack operation on the word “realism” rather than an attempt to push Derrida in a different direction. I worry that it will be a “Derrida already saw this” sort of book, and we’ll have SPEP business as usual, simply with the term “realism” now on a list of good words rather than banished ones. Derrida and Derrideans will not have to give an inch– that’s my suspicion.

By contrast, I do not defend “a fixed ontological entity vaguely synonymous with the object,” but an ontological entity called, literally, an object. Whether or not it is “fixed” depends on whether you mean that it has some identity apart from its contexts (yes) or that it lasts eternally (no). Those two issues are often confused in continental circles, or at least left imprecise enough that it’s hard to tell whether they’re being confused.

But again, this is just my reaction to the passage cited. Perhaps there are some surprises in Marder’s book, and if the book catches on then I’ll read it despite my strong stylistic objections. In my opinion, even Derrida isn’t able to pull off that sort of style. No offense, I just don’t think that’s the best sort of philosophical prose.