Anthony Reynolds

I argue that American pragmatism can be understood as an effort to recuperate a sense of the animality of thought and thus as an example of what Deleuze and Guattari call a “becoming animal” within the field of philosophy. At issue in this becoming animal of pragmatism is the influence of Charles Peirce’s theory of abduction on the history of pragmatism from its origins to its more recent reception within Jacques Derrida’s (pra)grammatology and Brian Massumi’s speculative pragmatism. Predicated on the evolutionary notion that animal instinct is the source of language, thought, and inquiry, Peirce’s theory of creative inference, or “abduction” as he called it, has allowed generations of pragmatists to begin “shaking philosophy’s dust off their feet and following the call of the wild” (James); to recognize in the origin of their thought something like “the movements of a wild creature toward its goal” (Dewey); to define intellectual inquiry as “doing what comes naturally” (Fish), and to pursue such inquiry “without method” (Rorty). Emerging under the ostensible heading of a new “humanism,” pragmatism exceeds what Derrida calls “the anthropological limit” from the very start, relieving humanism of its exclusive claim to logocentrism by reinscribing the question if not the origin of the logos within the animal kingdom. Yet unlike Derrida whose rejection of biological continuism in the name of difference prevents him from committing fully to the logic of abduction, Massumi is able to rehabilitate Peirce’s theory of abduction as the foundation for his speculative pragmatism as a result of his commitment to a processual ontology that rejects binary oppositions in favor of “disjunctive syntheses” and “zones of indiscernibility.”

In this paper I examine the role of tragedy in the ancient emergence of philosophical interiority and in the recent return of exteriority that marks the birth of theory. I argue that tragedy names a kind of epistemic threshold between systems of knowledge predicated on exteriority and interiority. I conclude by arguing that Derrida’s late effort to articulate a messianic model of the tragic in Specters of Marx and elsewhere, his effort to “think the ghost,” both confirms and complicates tragedy’s place in the history of theory.

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The hostility of the current US administration for longstanding democratic institutions and values and indeed for government itself has been attributed to anxieties attending processes of globalization from the consolidation of global markets to the mass migrations of displaced peoples and refugees. Yet the underlying conditions for such hostility are as old as the United States itself and are indeed inscribed in its founding acts, documents and myths, within which political interiority of the nation state is insistently predicated upon a concept of departure or exteriority associated with the Puritan separatist colonies which Foucault describes as “heterotopias” or places defined precisely by their otherness or exteriority; the frontier culture in which Deleuze and Guattari discern the “destiny of American literature” as “that of crossing limits and frontiers, causing deterritorialized flows of desire to circulate, but also always making these flows transport fascisizing, moralizing, Puritan, and familialist territories”; and an emerging paradigm of global or “imperial sovereignty,” within which the United States maintains its global hegemony by interiorizing its foundational exteriority in what Donald Pease, relying on the work of Agamben, describes as “the internal externality of the exception.” 

As a result of this history, we are witnessing today a foreclosure of exteriority among American citizens, corporate subjects, and special interest groups whose hostility toward fundamental democratic institutions is conditioning the emergence of a tacit totalitarianism within and through those very institutions.  This paper examines the paradox of a recent foreclosure of exteriority predicated upon a foundational exteriority that has made the US a profoundly hostile host.