New Left Review I/170, July-August 1988

Charles Taylor

Logics of Disintegration

This is a fascinating book on many levels. [*] Peter Dews: Logics of Disintegration: Post-Structuralist Thought and the Claims of Critical Theory, Verso, London 1987, pp. xvii & 268. It is first of all an excellent guide through the sometimes murky landscape of post-1960 French thought. Dews manages the exceptional feat of being both fair and clear in expounding Derrida, Lacan, Lyotard and Foucault. It is all too easy to make any of these sound very straightforward by giving a selectively simplified translation into familiar slogans. This seems to have been largely the fate of Derrida on the American scene. It is also fatally easy to retain the full complexity by simply reproducing their language, or at least their impenetrable style. Dews has managed, on the contrary, to get to the essentials of their respective positions through a clear exposition of the underlying arguments. This means that he relates them at the same time to their sources in Husserl, Nietzsche, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, among others. He manages his imposing cast of characters with deftness and economy. This is a work without unnecessary digression. The argument of certain passages is dense, and calls for repeated reading. But it repays the effort in clarity of understanding. The book casts floods of light on its subject.

’My institution subscribes to NLR, why can't I access this article?’