‘Beckett is my hero (it’s alright)’

Abstract

"The first thing is to wind the clock back a bit. Derrida was the expression of the philosophical avant-garde, where philosophy done in a Heideggerian way ended up at its most radical. So, in that sense, Derrida was suddenly the person that everybody, whatever their political orientation, was reading. The context for that reading, certainly for me, was Hegel’s critique of Kant. This is still very much where I situate the problematic of things that interest me, insofar as Kant’s Copernican revolution establishes the cognitive meaninglessness of dogmatic metaphysics and the moral defensibility of a certain metaphysical view, the primacy of practical reason, which has a certain dimension I would still want to very much defend. Ethics, in a sense, for me has to be Kantian to a certain extent, and Lévinas — in that sense — is an echo of certain Kantian preoccupations. There is that remark about Kant as the Moses of the German nation. I think Kant has been structurally Jewish rather than German for that whole tradition. But then, the other side of that is Hegel’s critique of Kant. The problem with Kant is that he leaves us in a formalism, an empty formalism, of pure duty without any relationship to effective social praxis. That critique goes through into early Marxism