Philosophy of Thought: Dialectics and Polylectics

In the book, Philosophy of Thought: Dialectics and Polylectics, the author, Dr. Ratnamuthu Sugathan discusses how Nietzsche’s objections to reason (logocentrism) and reality took him to the perspectivism and Metaphorics in Nietzsche (aided by a reading of Eric Blondel). This, combined with Derrida’s theory of meaning (deferral as well as difference in multiple signification), Foucault’s multiple perspectives in the context of Barthes’ notion on ‘the death of author’, Derrida’s findings of the rupture of thught and the loss of locus in it, his dependence on the ruse, namely difference, which is a conflated version of hegel’s concept of difference, the dialectics involved in derrida’s use of deconstruction and Nietzsche’s antithetics, which is ‘the play or fire of words’, Derrida’s observation that metaphysics became discourse with the decentering of thought, and the ‘logical’ disintegration of logic (Peter dews) one witnesses in postmodern thinkers led the author (aided by the derridean reading of Nietzshe) to think of the emergence of a new level of logic, a sort of postmodern dialectics. The lonkage to dialectics is because of the developments within Marxist dialectics: Althusser’s concept of over determination and Mao’s innovative clarifications in the area if duialectuics regarding ‘contradiction’ major contradictions, principal contradiction. Read with Derrida’s critique of binary contradictions, Sugathan takes on the issue of multipolarity of contradiction, not multiple contradictions, but about multiplarity in a contradiction. This leads to the multipolar dialectics, which Sugathan named polylectics (or multilectics), a third stage in the development of logic. Polylectice happened to be the logic of postmodernism, because postmetaphysics or postmodernism is the post-Nietzschean pattern of thought. Dialectics critiqued metaphysics. But the logic of postmodernism critiqued both metaphysics and dialectics. Though all theses phases are linked, they are simultaneously paradigm ruptures also: metaphysics, dialectics and discourse.