Abstract

The antinomies which Adorno first sought to leave behind for the sake of dialectics and social theory still haunt critical discourse after deconstruction. The concept of world serves as an antinomy and provocative point of contact between a critical theory given over to rhetorical analysis, and the rhetorical destiny of philosophy, which the present study argues is both personal and cosmic. Theory has denied its linkage to the public imagination by downplaying the concrete and narrative elements of cosmic speculation, and by excluding access to a worldbound discursivity which evinces existential proportion. Phenomenology provides access to such issues, but now tied to neo-Stoic concepts of sequi naturam and world community. The present study organizes four chapters according to the antinomies of critical rigorism and cosmic speculation; concreteness and the practical imaginary; self-determination and exposure; and the antinomy of life in deconstruction and hermeneutics. Poems by Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost, and Susan Howe are interpreted. Chapter 5 investigates the problem of discourse and world in Malcolm Lowry's Under The Volcano, Richard Yates' Revolutionary Road, Doris Lessing's The Making of the Representative for Planet 8, and Italo Calvino's Mr. Palomar. The present study concludes that critical theory avoids a world concept at the expense of the very conditions which allow scholarship to resist being reduced to information. Theory would bring method flush with its linguistic rigors and thereby disarm practice of le vecu, of its worldbound spontaneity and intuition. The world for certain writers is less a metaphysical construct than a precarious hermeneutic framework by which discursive life concretely grasps its limits and choices against a teeming background which joins everyone, but not simply. Worldliness is exposure, not closure. To be exposed is to be without a "why" but not worldless. The life of exposure is not enabled by forgetting, but by wakefulness, even insomnia. Semiotic rigorism would be far more susceptible to the logics of hegemony and totality than worldbound discursivity