Thomas de zengotita biography of martin
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But along the margins, perhaps more is possible. Any other outcome would surely have been an insult to writers like Derrida, who were straining to grasp the ungraspable, and for whom meaning was supposed to be a moving target.
It is common to view Derrida as a Nietzschean force intent on tearing meaning down—certainly that’s the rap postmodernism generally receives when it comes to post-truth politics—but de Zengotita’s choice to focus on the concept of “différance” instead of deconstruction emphasizes a more positive side of the theorist.
Since no one sign contains or owns meaning in the way that the Cartesian subject may be understood to possess his thoughts, each sign is dependent on the others and part of a constantly shifting constellation. Indeed, whereas Derrida’s theorizing was in fact quite abstract, Foucault’s big idea was at its core an empirical observation.
While Descartes’ ideas were pointing in a certain direction (from a traditional Catholic perspective, down), Descartes remained devoutly religious throughout his life, underscoring an important difference between early and later modern thinkers. Events such as the Copernican Revolution and discovery of the New World had confronted Descartes and his world with the shock of the new, but the ultimate destination charted by Descartes’ ideas would be reached gradually over several hundred years, as de Zengotita’s biographically orientated survey of modern theorists reveals.
De Zengotita highlights this fact, it seems, to counter the narrative that postmodern thinkers were engaged exclusively in intellectual mischief or indefensible abstraction. Derrida’s analysis is not, then, ultimately nihilistic. In Descartes’ calculus the subject had become more than in charge, it was the only thing you could know was categorically there.
Although in de Zengotita’s calculus Derrida believed there were no “pure foundations, no pure starting points of the kind modernists were obsessed with discovering or defining,” the fact that the Cartesian system doesn’t accurately describe the nature of meaning doesn’t mean there isn’t any meaning. Hence, it took a long time after the birth of skepticism for the sense of solidity in the world to erode and for us to experience the full postmodern condition.
For Locke, ownership was established via labor—not via God or some external force, but by the subject binding objects to itself through work. The tone and the particulars of a moral system partly flow from the personality of the thinker making the articulation.
The philosophical arc delineated by de Zengotita shows how, similar to the Road Runner running off a cliff and managing to stay in the air because he doesn’t know the trouble he’s in, early modern philosophers enjoyed the fruits of skepticism without fully feeling the consequences. Postmodern Theory relates how Nietzsche denied the possibility of objectivity, claiming the “Cartesian ego” was an artifact of a grammar that insisted on a ‘subject’ for what was actually a flow.” Bringing “his hammer down on the illusion of representational adequacy,” argues de Zengotita, Nietzsche “exposed the self and all its concepts as ‘…Lies in a Nonmoral sense,’ generalizations imposed on an irreducibly particular and ever-changing reality in the service of survival and convenience.” Revealing many of the hollow illusions that propped up the Cartesian philosophical world of the day, Nietszche set the table nicely for his postmodern descendants, performing the role of harbinger for 20th century philosophers such as Michel Foucault.
He holds a B.A., M.A, and Ph.D.
De Zengotita illustrates how Judith Butler’s ideas allowed for that combination, effectively bridging pure French postmodernism and the thing that postmodernism ultimately became in America. That consolidation might look something like this: the world changed enormously, and change brought with it a desire to understand, on the basest of levels, the new hierarchy of elements of human consciousness (subject, object, context).
It allows for something like a self but admits that there is no fixed truth about it. As thinkers attempt to better conceive of the subject’s place in the universe, they often attempt to insert the “And” of a moral structure into the picture.
While Locke and Kant privileged the place of the individual without really contending with the paradoxes of self-generated meaning, de Zengotita argues that by the nineteenth century some awareness of those paradoxes was clearly looming, making “anxiety…the dominant influence on 19th century European minds.” What else could explain modernity’s “implacable determination to define,” to control by placing ideas into system, other than some deep fear over a lurking agent of chaos?
in anthropology from Columbia University and teaches at the Dalton School and New York University.[1] His book Mediated: How the Media Shapes Your World and the Way You Live in It (2005) won the Marshall McLuhan award in 2006 and, in 2010.[2] He co-wrote the narration for a film directed by Adrian Grenier entitled Teenage Paparazzo.[3]
His most recent book, Postmodern Theory and Progressive Politics: Toward New Humanism was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2018.[4] He is presently at work on a book called Toward a New Foundation for Human Rights: a Phenomenological Approach which is due out in 2020 from Stanford University Press.
De Zengotita graduated from Columbia University in 1973 and received his Ph.D.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, for example, argued that meaning came not only out of the subject’s imagination or will, but also from context.