ABSTRACT
The language of postmodern texts carries with it processes of self-overcoming by which, in the language, the reader undergoes movements that are different from those in metaphysical discourses. We will use the Nietzschean term self-overcoming and emphasize the Nietzschean inheritance in the postmodern suspicions of completeness, presence, unbroken continuity, identity, teleology. … Those suspicions are woven into patterns of words that bring the reader, who reads in the patterns, to the transforming horizon of the patterns, a horizon that verges on possibilities that carry the reader beyond the patterns. Postmodern words might leave one without the book that they seem to compose, or with a non-word (e.g., différance) to which the words seem to give place, or at a confluence of regularities that highlights the fragmentary and arbitrary histories of the regularities (e.g., Foucault's The Order of Things). The processes of self-overcoming are seldom noted in postmodern writing, partially because people in this strand of language have paid attention more to twentieth-century discourses and thoughts from which they continue to take their departures, and partially because self-overcoming has moved silently and unnoticed in much of postmodern language. Self-overcoming, however, governs the movements in postmodern language as authors make their various claims. These claims move within processes that simultaneously destructure, decenter, or deconstruct their own veridical presence. This is not a dialectical process. Reconciliation of conflict, self-positing, polarities, or subjectivity do not control the discourse. Postmodern discourses are processes that simultaneously form structures and lead to the alteration of the forming processes. In these processes34 metaphysical styles and thoughts may take place, not only as objects of discussion, but as aspects of the language that are also being overcome by movements that have been suppressed or overlooked by metaphysical discourses.
