Fido the Yak

Has philosophy eroticized the question? Improperly? That is, in a way that would disguise its true beauty? Or its original difficulty? You see, I've picked up Caputo's Radical Hermeneutics: Repetition, Deconstruction, and the Hermeneutic Project (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987). The difficulty I'm going to have is that I'm going to prematurely conclude that the distinction between metaphysics and hermeneutics is specious, or perhaps not rigorously followed. Caputo is, it cannot be denied, a true believer in repetition, a belief redolent of metaphysics. By all means let's go to Berlin twice and compare notes.

So we have now a kind of ébranler of the question, a trembling that Caputo and possibly some other philosophers find exciting. This is why he is passionate in his disdain of metaphysics, a disdain I could easily agree with given certain understandings. "Metaphysics always makes a show of beginning with questions, but no sooner do things begin to waver a bit and look uncertain than the question is foreclosed. The disruptive force of the question is contained; the opening it created is closed; the wavering is stilled" (p. 1). This objection comes from a thinker whose metanarrative demands that all philosophy question majuscular B Being as presence, as if questions alone weren't demanding enough. There are reasons, then, to suspect that Caputo's hermeneutics will put a question or two into foreclosure, despite his being the George Bailey of philosophical questions.

Can we turn the tables on our lovely question? Are you androgynous? Are you comfortable with your sexuality, lovely question? Are you underwater? Just thought I'd ask.

Labels: Augustine, Caputo, Kierkegaard, mortgages, questions, repetition, sexuality

posted by Fido the Yak at 12:45 PM.