Meta-modernism

Some excerpts from a Caputo interview. The first could be aimed at a kennilingual obsession with boundaries and meta-paradigms, which seems more inherent to the modernist project.

"The...paradigmatic modernist would be Kant, who divides the world up into three critical domains.... And so modernism is very emphatic about drawing borders between things and enforcing those borders, policing those borders. Kant’s philosophy is a kind of meta-philosophy of meta-critique, which is a kind of science of science which polices borders. So it makes for very strong distinctions between subject and object, between politics and between public and private."


This one debunks the notion that deconstruction is purely negative, a fallacy promoted by modernistic formalists that cannot get past their own dualistic definitions.

"Deconstruction...is a very affirmative operation, despite the fact that it’s about dissolving those kinds of borders, because it’s trying to get at something which the borders tend to close off, and which are blocked by rigorously formalistic conceptions of things.... The affirmation comes first. That’s the not the case with the word. The word 'deconstruction' is grammatically negative, so it makes it sound like the negation comes first."