More Mazeppism

Back in law school (late 1980's-early 1990's), I read John D. Caputo's Radical Hermeneutics, a well-written book that articulated a very attractive case for Deconstruction. Even so, there was something that held me back from embracing Caputo's arguments. Something was missing. Yes, I know, that's the point of Deconstruction; but there was something else that I just couldn't put my finger on. So I put the book aside and struggled on my way reading mostly Wittgenstein and trying, as well, to come to terms with Rorty. Eventually, I was to make my peace with what Caputo has termed Rorty's "Yankee hermeneutics." It seems that during the same period, Caputo was coming to terms with Rorty as well. The result, in 2000, was Caputo's More Radical Hermeneutics: a book that inflects the "radical" (Deconstruction-conscious) hermeneutics of the earlier work with Rortian pragmatism. The result, I claim, is Mazeppism--or something very close to it.

Caputo now argues that, post-Heidegger, hermeneutics coalesces around two poles:

(1) Hermeneutics means "beginning where we are"--in Heidegger's "facticity." Caputo calls this the "pregiven fix in which we find ourselves, the confusing web of beliefs and practices, and proceeding from there as best we can; the hermeneutics of factical life means that we are under the necessity to think and act and hope, to press ahead, understanding full well the fix we are in..." (MRH, pp. 55-56).

(2) A second dimension (which Caputo credits to Gadamer's development of Heidegger's hermeneutics) "...lies in putting ourselves at risk, putting our own meanings, our own institutions, our own beliefs and practices, to the risk of the approach of the other, of the neighbor and the stranger" (ibid).

This second dimension seems to owe much to Derrida's late turn towards "hospitality" which, Caputo remarks, reflects the Jewish and Levinasian provenance of deconstruction (MRH, p. 57). I would suggest, instead, that it reflects the Jewish, yes, but more particularly Algerian provenance of Jacques Derrida. We should be mindful of the old proverb, "You can take the Deconstructionist out of Algeria, but you cannot take Algeria out of the Deconstructionist."

Mazeppism is a transgressive moral practice underwritten by a philosophical hermeneutics that looks like Rorty's "Yankee" or Caputo's "more radical" hermeneutics. It is built upon the assertion that, as M. Merleau-Ponty noted, one painter learns from another, "of whom he makes copies (Van Gogh of Millet)--to be himself, learn himself in the other, with and against him" (The Visible and the Invisible, p. 211).

My Mazeppist discourse is the marginalia of a transgressive moral praxis and a Yankee hermeneutics; it is transgressive reading/writing in the Romantic grain.