otherness is not enough

Apparently this needs to be repeated… Otherness is not enough.

The fact that some philosophers are interested in the “other” of all representation and accessibility does not make them object-oriented thinkers avant la lettre.

If you say “Derrida/Adorno/Heidegger/etc. already knew that there was something escaping presence,” this is true, but it isn’t the point. (Or rather, it’s only half the point. It’s a perfectly good start.)

The question is: why do humans have to be on the scene to be haunted by these negative traces of otherness? Sorry, but this is just plain old Kantianism, however craftily varied.

The “otherness” we were talking about earlier today is not just some cryptic underbelly of human experience. It’s the fact that relationality between any two entities stumbles over the incommensurability between reality and representation. The stone in its own right can never be the stone as encountered by another stone. It has nothing to do with specifically human finitude, but is a paradox built into the difference between object and relation.

So no, you don’t get to say: “Derrida doesn’t reduce the world to a text, because he cares about the other of the text.” The question is: what the hell are texts doing in a basic ontological proposition to begin with? They don’t belong there any more than cotton balls or meteors do.