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The event of the thing: on post-deconstructive realism
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In this dissertation, I argue that, instead of furnishing a self-identical basis for the metaphysical edifice it underlies, the thing re-defined in terms of its otherness destabilizes metaphysics from below. “The Event of the Thing”, then, charts a path between idealism and realism, exploring the implications of this re-definition for a number of key Derridian themes (such as tracing, supplementarity, the event, and the gift). In the course of this exploration, I accentuate the thingly resistance to idealization emanating from within idealization itself.
If the thing “is” the other, then what it holds in store is the possibility of an event, the arrival of the impossible. The first half of my dissertation theorizes the infrastructure of such an event insofar as it departs from Heideggerian Ereignis. This departure is characterized by a certain dispossession or ex-propriation of the subject unable to reduce the thing to an object and, hence, structurally incapable of claiming the thing as his or her own. Next, I consider the effects of the thingly event in light of the Derridian modification of Husserl’s intentionality thesis. While subjective intentions aim at an object, in our relation with things the direction of “aiming at…” changes, rendering the thing spectral and allowing it to affect us even as we, failingly, attempt to capture it as an object. Thus, the elucidation of the ex-propriative event of the thing makes a contribution to the critiques of humanism and subject-centered idealism.
In the second half of the dissertation, I point out the consequences of the event of the thing for the deconstruction of psychoanalysis, commodity fetishism, and aesthetics. I interpret fetishism as a tendency to idealize the thing, to abstract from it its particularity and to render subjectivity possible. Yet, in art, the ineluctably material element of the thing transformed by the artist limits the idealist adventure of pure imagination, at the same time that the trace of the latter inscribes itself in the body of the thing. In this sense, aesthetic practice results in the thingification of the work and in the becoming-work—hence, the becoming-other—of the thing.