The Rhetoric of the Logic of Both/And

Abstract

Against McGowan, it could be argued that the ‘oft-commented upon failure for a dialogue to develop between continental and Anglo-American philosophy’ is not the result of something as ill-defined as a postmodernist ‘propensity’ to accept contradictions. Nor, it could be argued, is this failure the consequence of a more specific disagreement — the result, say, of a disagreement between postmodernists and analytic philosophers who accept classical logic over the question of whether the Liar sentence (‘This sentence is false’) is a true contradiction. After all, there is dialogue between classical logicians who suggest that the sentence is not a true contradiction and dialetheists who claim that it is.¹ And so if postmodernists did make a provocative case for why the Liar sentence ought to be regarded as a true contradiction, one would expect to find classical logicians engaging them just as they engage dialetheists.

The prevalence of the logic of contradiction in postmodern thought is perhaps so obvious as to escape notice. Certainly the continental propensity to accept contradiction explains much of the oft-commented upon failure for a dialogue to develop between continental and Anglo-American philosophy. Marxism, structuralism, poststructuralism, and other derivatives of Hegelianism (including psychoanalysis) all render visible contradictions that are somehow both immanent and hard to discern. Marx and Freud still retain (in the notions of a communist society and in the cure) some hope for eventual overcoming of contradiction, but structuralism and poststructuralism find in contradiction (binary oppositions or the antinomies revealed by a deconstructive reading) both beginning and end.

(McGowan, 1991: 49)