Postmodern realism

See this Ph.D. thesis on the topic. Amen to this statement in the abstract, not typical of kennilingus pomo reductionism:

"Against the critiques which have been levelled at postmodernism I will argue that critical realism is theoretically best placed to mediate the various postmodern positions and concerns by developing a reading of critical realism which places critical realism firmly within the context of postmodernism as an alternate postmodernism. Yet if critical realism can be understood within postmodernism, postmodernism can equally be understood within a more encompassing, more mediated realism."

Being a Derrigaga, I was impressed with Chapter 2 wherein the author supports Derrida as a critical realist, not the relativistic boogeyman of kennilingus. In fact, from p. 89: "That is to say, différance cannot be contained or articulated within language but operates as the hidden domain of the real."
Reminds me a lot of Bryant's analysis of Derrida in "Time of the Object." 

Just perusing a couple of sections on metaphor, and its necessity and inescapability, the thesis could have been 'fleshed out' on this with Lakoff & Johnson's Philosophy in the Flesh. Alas, they and their ideas on the matter were not referenced.

Chapter 4.3 on hauntology reminds me of this Caputo analysis:
"Žižek provocatively suggests an odd kind of 'positive' unbelief in an undead God, like the 'undead' in the novels of Stephen King, a 'spectral' belief that is never simple disbelief along with a God who is never simply dead (101). God is dead but we continue to (un)believe in the ghost of god, in a living dead god. If atheism ("I don't believe in God") is the negation of belief ("I believe in God"), what is the negation of that negation? It is not a higher living spirit of faith that reconciles belief and unbelief but a negation deeper than a simple naturalistic and reactionary atheism (like Hitchins and Dawkins). Belief is not aufgehoben but rather not quite killed off, even though it is dead. It is muted, erased but surviving under erasure, like seeing Marley's ghost even though Scrooge knows he is dead these twenty years; like a crossed out letter we can still read, oddly living on in a kind of spectral condition. Things are neither black nor white but shifting, spectral, incomplete. We have bid farewell to God, adieu to the good old God (à Dieu), farewell to the Big Other, Who Makes Everything Turn Out Right, Who Writes Straight with Crooked Lines, who maketh me to lie down in green pastures. Still, that negation of negation does not spell the simple death of belief but its positive mode in which belief, while dead, lives on (sur/vivre). This unbelief would be the 'pure form' of belief, and if belief is the substance of the things that appear not, Žižek proposes a belief deprived of substance as well as of appearance. Žižek mocks Derrida mercilessly, but when spaceship Žižek finally lands, when this buzzing flutterbug named Žižek finally alights, one has to ask, exactly how far has he landed from Derrida's 'spectral messianic.'"

This idea led me to write a poem using a bastardized form of haiku that I call haikukachoo:

I see a ghost on the horizon
calling me to follow.
When I get there
loose rags on a tattered fence.
I look up and he's still there
on the horizon, beckoning.