ABSTRACT
This essay represents the partial fulfilment of a promise made explicitly in an article on Ethics and the Between, in which I sketched the complex refiguration of Platonism that is a depth feature of Desmond’s text.1 There I wondered whether Desmond’s refiguration repeated in some significant respects that refiguration of Platonism enacted by Giambattista Vico in the first half of the eighteenth century. If a good, promise keeping is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, thinking of a more historically proximate template for the basic commitments that drive Desmond’s discourse than Plato or classical Neoplatonism better serves as a hermeneutic key for a discourse that articulates its constructive vision hand-inhand with a searing critique of the reduction of discourse to science or its simulacrum. On the other hand, the risks are also obvious. First, in proposing Vico as a template, one might easily be taken to be arguing that there exist detailed substantive continuities between Desmond and Vico that can only be accounted for by the influence of the latter on the former. Second, in adducing Vico as a template, there is the real danger of mummifying Desmond’s discourse, which is a thinking that is constitutionally explorative and open. Furthermore, when one recalls that Desmond is supposed to be repeating a thinker who himself is judged to represent a repetition of Platonism, the danger of mummification threatens to increase exponentially. The third difficulty is also non-trivial. Texts such as Being and the Between and Ethics and the Between are expansive, perhaps even encyclopaedic, while being multigenred, plurivocal and stylistically complex. Thus, relative to the modern canons of philosophical discourse, they are obscure. To avail oneself of Vico, whose discourse in The New Science and elsewhere has similar structural traits,2 is to risk illuminating the obscure by the even more obscure (obscurum per obscurius).
