Abstract

The problem, then, is well-known: how to conceive and enact metaphysics given the exhaustion of its prefigured possibilities. In the Introduction I suggest how metaphysical closure gets enacted, and this by looking at Kierkegaard's authorship. The notion here is that of transgression, exceeding the limits inherent to metaphysics while preserving them as limits. I argue that Kierkegaard is decisive because he renders thinking open to the possibility of what is radically other than thought. ;In Chapter I, I trace an unexpected reading of Categories I through the Aristotelian corpus and discover a post-metaphysical science. This "science of paronymy" is a science of derivations, deviations, dispersions, and dissipations of sense. I argue that metaphysical discourse can be constituted according to this science as an autonomous language activity. I try to show how, since metaphysics, although having sense, does not properly refer, is therefore not parasitic upon the parasitic. ;This science has as its proper object the metaphysical determination of time from Aristotle on. This is because it is only on the basis of and in terms of a certain interpretation of time that language can be rendered as the recollection of some primitive and originary sense. ;Whereas the first part of my dissertation is abstract, the remainder of it is a series of concrete studies on the interpretation of time offered by Aristotle , St. Augustine , Husserl , and Kierkegaard . Whereas Husserl, I argue, is dedicated to forestalling any objection to the self-adjudicating legitimacy of metaphysics--and thereby forestalling any attempts at foreclosing on it--nonetheless by the time of his late studies of time we can witness the general dissolution of the quest for the absolute. Kierkegaard, I argue, is able to bring the absolute to bear on our thinking by denying its immanence in thought, by appealing to the sourcelessness of thought and by announcing the other to thought as its source. This paradox can neither be shown nor said, but rather must be performed.