Richard Cohen

In many ways the whole of contemporary thought reduces to the search for new middle terms, such as 'desire', 'will to power', 'language', and "difference', to mediate, displace, or evade the classical philosophical dualisms, such as being and nonbeing, ideality and reality, mind and matter, is and ought. These dualisms--set up by the ancients, pursued by the moderns, and bequeathed to us contemporaries by their failures--are Kearney's target. His aim is to overcome them through the notion of figuration. This term--as well as the book's title--suggests an aesthetic orientation, but it is quite deliberately conceived as no mere substitute for the term 'imagination'. While Kearney does argue that the distinction between the imaginary and the real is a distinction ultimately of greater significance than the distinction between being and nonbeing, he also shows that the imaginary, classically conceived, has always taken second place to the real, and thus has always reproduced rather than overcome the insupportable difficulties of classical metaphysics. Figuration, by contrast, is not to be conceived in opposition to the real, but as a "comprehensive creativity," determining all fields of signification, such as the aesthetic, practical, ontological and ethical. It must be understood functionally, as the activity of an "always new ludic metamorphosis," the reciprocal play of new and old. Thus, like Merleau-Ponty's notion of "the flesh," it has great plasticity and at the same time yields specific insights.