Tiresias

Commentary to Matthew Pfaff´s “Alterity, Truth, and Comparative Literature”
Andreea Marinescu (University of Michigan)


The essay “Alterity, Truth and Comparative Literature at the Threshold of an Era” is an unabashed attack on what the author deems as “a harmful tendency to emphasize absolute particularism and relativism” from the part of thinkers of the concept of alterity in Continental philosophy and postcolonial studies. The author seeks to trace a “lineage of alterity” from Husserl to Lévinas to Derrida to Spivak in order to show how the emphasis on difference keeps us away from some paradigm of universality, which she deems necessary for the study of literature. In lieu of this the author argues for (a return to?) universalist concepts of truth and beauty; she sees Alain Badiou’s thought as a promising avenue to accomplishing that goal.
The author blames the “relativist tendency” of the humanities for their increased alienation within the university and for the students’ preference for the sciences (which seem to conserve an absolute idea of the beauty of nature or numbers). This particular type of accusation seems unfounded for me, since it strikes me more as a case of “blaming the victim” and does not engage with other possible reasons for the (precarious?) state of the humanities within a university that functions more and more like a corporation. Nonetheless, I think that the essay could be a fruitful starting point for a debate, not on why the humanities is losing ground to the sciences or, for that matter, the business school, but rather for a closer look at deconstruction’s alleged pernicious relativism and the possible consequences of Badiou’s universalist thought. I guess I am still waiting to be convinced on how is it that issues as fundamental as justice and the responsibility before a singular other can be dismissed as being “relative”… and how is it that an emphasis on non-negotiable idealist notions of beauty is supposed to save the humanities from perishing?