Reply to de Maeseneer

Abstract

I am indebted to Yves De Maeseneer in the care with which he has brought out the entirely negative intentions of Postmodernity’s Transcending. I want to address two matters in my reply: first to comment on his raising of the question of the relation of Postmodernity’s Transcending to his reading of Adorno; and second, to provide an answer to the question he poses to me at the very end of his paper. Before any of these however, it is well to remind ourselves, what kind of nihil, nothing, negativity, lies at the basis ofWestern Metaphysics, beyond metaphysics, and in my own work. Are they all the same? Or does negation manifest itself in different ways? De Maeseneer notes two odd things about Postmodernity’s Transcending: first, that I have paid insufficient attention to a nothing that he finds as a possibility in the work of Adorno; second, that a certain kind of negation fails to appear in the book...