The Barren Epistemology of Jacques Derrida

This book presents a critique of Derrida from a Nietzschean perspective. Questioning the often-advertised association between Nietzsche and Derrida, it focuses instead on important differences and incompatibilities between Nietzsches naturalistic paradigm and Derridas textual paradigm. Peter Bornedal argues that Nietzsches position points us toward a pragmatic and constructionist epistemology based on a naturalist world-view, which was cutting-edge in his days, while Derridas epistemology reduces theories of knowledge to a general textualism. In short, Nietzsche is not the predecessor of deconstructionor, generally, postmodernismthat he is often portrayed to be. His thinking does not advocate postmodernisms suspension of truth, reason, logic, and understanding, but rather replicates the paradigms of emerging disciplines of his day, such as biology, psychology, cognitive science, and linguistics. His thinking is not playfulness for its own sake and does not defend formal transcendentalist principles such as diffrance. The Barren Epistemology of Jacques Derrida: A Critique of Deconstruction from a Nietzschean Perspective argues instead that Derridas introduction of the supposedly novel diffrance-logic may be analyzed as a transcendentalist validation of logical errors often addressed in earlier Western thinking in order to be avoided, such as the contradiction in Aristotle, or the paralogism in Kant. With this critical view, the work re-examines diffrance-thinking and questions whether inconsistencies are manufactured rather than discovered in deconstructionist interpretation.