The Play-Acting of Thought : ALTARITY<i> by Mark C. Taylor (University of Chicago Press: $42.50, cloth; $15.95, paper; 371 pp.) </i>

This is a book about thought--or rather about thinking. Or rather, it is a book in which thinking is what the text is trying to do, or trying to persuade you that it is doing. Blake said that “Thought Is Act,” and that thought (or act) might well stand as the motto for a great deal of modernist writing. It is an idea, a “truth,” held by this book to be self-evident.

Mark C. Taylor’s nominal subjects are a series of serious thinkers: in this order, G. W. F. Hegel, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jacques Lacan, George Bataille, Julia Kristeva, Emanuel Levinas, Maurice Blanchot, Jacques Derrida, and Soren Kierkegaard. But you do not come to this book to be given a series of essays, more or less connected, which will tell you what these thinkers thought (or are still thinking). Taylor’s book assumes that you are familiar with his subjects, and has no interest in giving you nutshell versions, critical or otherwise, of the thought of these people. To attempt such a task would be to violate the conviction that drives Taylor’s book--that Thought Is Act. Readers of this book are not meant to be passive receivers of given thoughts.

The primary heroes of Taylor’s text are two of the thinkers he discusses, Kierkegaard and Derrida. Their special importance for Taylor lies in the style through which their thinking is executed. Both are serious ironists, thinkers to whose work playfulness is essential. Of the two, it is Derrida who is more closely followed in Taylor’s text. On the other hand, Kierkegaard seems a more essential figure for Taylor because the thinking of both Taylor and Kierkegaard takes place in a distinctively religious space: When either of them uses the term God , the word still plunges into abysses which are not simply the abysses of language. Derrida does not take God seriously in the way that Taylor and Kierkegaard do. But Derrida is closer to Taylor’s heart. Derrida is the lover for whom Taylor left his Kierkegaardian family, the lover whom he married and then brought home, his Significant Other. It was a mixed marriage, however, and while the Kierkegaards have grown to love Derrida, Derrida will never be “family.”

I play with this metaphor because Taylor’s book licenses one to such acts. Derridean language play is the dominant stylistic convention of Taylor’s book, as one readily sees in the title itself. Altarity is a word, a sign, which intends to respond explicitly to Derrida’s call for “unheard-of thoughts . . . required . . . across the memory of old signs.” It is a word meant to carry Taylor (and us) into that territory of thinking that takes place “beyond absolute knowledge” where meaning is undecidable. But altarity is a word that has no existence, or at least that had none until Taylor decided to invent it and even write a long book “about” it, “on” it. Those two prepositions are to be understood here, you understand, as calling out to their embedded spatial dimensions. Altarity is a joke, a play on various words (principally altar and alter ), and Taylor introduces us to the word with an extended meditation on what it suggests to him. This exercise is set out in Taylor’s introduction, which is here called, jokingly and allusively, “Encore.”

In this sort of writing, style is not merely the dress of thought, as the ancients used to say, it is an active sign of the thinking that is taking place in the act of writing itself. As a consequence, the “subjects” treated in Taylor’s book--the other authors and their works--begin to emerge as allegories, or tropes, of Taylor’s personal concerns. “Altarity” is a book about Mark Taylor more than anything else--a “solipsistic” book, as the detractors of such writing never tire of pointing out, a narcissistic text feeding on itself.

“Altarity” supplies any number of examples of that self-involved process by which an object turns into a subject. In the Kierkegaard chapter, for example, Taylor weaves together an intricate discussion of the writing of Kierkegaard’s “Fear and Trembling.” In the course of this discussion, he quotes the epigram that Kierkegaard used as the epigraph for that book: “What Tarquinius Superbus said in the garden by means of the poppies, the son understood but the messenger did not.” The epigram, certainly (and deliberately) cryptic, is taken from the 18th-Century philosopher J. G. Hamann. Taylor tells us that the epigram is to be found in one of Kierkegaard’s scrapbooks, where an important other part of the Hamann text is also recorded to the effect that a “layman and unbeliever can explain my manner of writing in no other way than as nonsense, since I express myself in tongues and speak the language of sophists, of wordplays,” and so forth. At that point the reader of Taylor’s book feels the text to be turning back on itself, imaging its own writing in an allegorical reflex of the topics being considered. It is as if the Hamann text (and those of Kierkegaard, and of Heidegger, etc.) were mere figures of Taylor’s own act of writing, temporary pre-figurings of what he is doing in this book.

This impression is underscored when Taylor turns to comment upon the Hamann/Kierkegaard texts he has been quoting.

“This supplement to (the) epigram, which is itself a supplement to his work, compounds difficulties and generates further confusion. The reader is cast in the role of a layman or unbeliever for whom writing is “nonsense”. . . . The remainder of the epigram refuses every consolation that would provide an easy way into or out of the text that follows. It is not clear (and it never becomes clear) whether or not the belief that seems to hold a promise of lucid insight and comprehensive certainty is even possible. The reader is left with the unsettling suspicion that the text’s curious indirection might finally render it indecipherable.”

This text of Taylor’s can, indeed must, be taken as a gloss on his own book, an image of its reading as well as its writing. Taylor, a supremely self-conscious writer/reader, knows this very well, and means us to know it too.

But such writing runs the constant danger of a kind of inverted bathos. The travesty that threatens is not one that follows a descending curve from solemnity to some unforeseen abyss of absurdity (such an event is forestalled by this text). It is a travesty that follows an ascending curve, a curve that rises from its own textual play, its own apparently unsolemn nonsense, into entire and naive seriousness. The text too often brutalizes its readers with nonsense made pretentious, leading them, as a consequence, to react as we do to bathos; that is, to laugh at rather than with the writing.

I have no intention, or desire, to embarrass this book by quoting passages--they are, like our sins and our demons, legion--where this unfunny comical effect is generated. I would point out in general that the book fails to the degree that it has not included itself in its own critical imagination, that it has not been able to discover how merely (and therefore ludicrously) sensible so much of what it elevates to “nonsense” seems to be, and even seems at times to be taken to be by the book itself.

Philosophers do not make very good comic writers, generally speaking, and least of all comic writers who work the seams of nonsense. For such things we go to people like Lawrence Sterne, Oscar Wilde, and Lord Byron. The latter two are especially instructive because they are both writers for whom thinking, and ideas, are prominent and crucial features of their work. Taylor’s book would have benefitted, I think, had it included a chapter or two on writers like Wilde and Byron, poet-philosophers who understood what it means to work a deconstructive line of thinking.

Because “Altarity” is an academic book, its style will not recommend it to people situated outside the academy, or without a taste for serious academic talk. Within that world the book is unlikely to make much of a difference. Taylor is a learned and brilliant man, but “Altarity” does not carry deconstruction in any new directions. This failure is probably due less to Taylor’s own critical deficiencies, however, than to the waning energies of the deconstructive project itself.