Remainder and Reserve: An Initial Exposition
The legacy of Western Thought has been its concepts. One way to understand postmodern interventions is their attempts to articulate how these concepts have simultaneously been a ruse or trap.
We might make the leap to suggest that the variations of postmodern discourse itself are the result of modernity’s inherent critique turned back on itself, i.e. modernity’s critical project to unite knowledge and truth turned on its own categories. Outside of this definition, any truly “post-” modernity seems at best a hopeful gesture. It remains a question whether the “post” of postmodernity signs the subsequent possibility or impossibility of truth in Western thought, or whether it is possible at all to transcend or release our thought from its Western traps.
All sorts of critical terms have been deployed to indicate what is left of the Western project. Attention has been turned to what is suppressed, submerged, and relegated by the hegemony of Western thought: subjugated knowledge, the subaltern, abject, remainder, the Other. Of course, not all of these terms speak to the same thing. Certainly, to think so would be to perpetuate the Western mistake, i.e. to tidy up things by declaring identity over the intervals of difference that make “things” what we think they really are.
But, we cannot assume that in this turn of attention to the perforations and promulgation of discourses on difference that the same Western conceptuality – its covering capacity, its ability to gather in and separate, to organize and intervene, and stake critical claims or put forth totalizing critiques of representation - is not at play. The contradictions that haunt all claims to truth in conceptuality remain implicit in the very function of discourse: writing, translation, and speech.
Nevertheles, the topic or thrust of Western discourse has invariably shifted. This turn has been from totality to infinity, from universality to particularity, and identity to difference. In theology and philosophy, there is a simultaneous search for the conceptual “beyond” and certain limits. In queer theories, the dialectics constituting the method of critique are also being suspended. The structure of difference, itself, is no longer confined to binary oppositions, but are seen as in ways necessarily indiscernable in moments of simultaneity, disruption, and transgression in the lived experiences inbetween categories.
What I am trying to zero in on is some general sense of this transition. As stated, its indications are set forth in the (already passe?) modern/postmodern discussion. The subject, if there remains such a thing, has shifted. The quest for truth set forth by Western epistemology and its philosophical concepts, remains amidst the play of representations. However, the project concerns what remains, the remainder.
The remainder concerns what modernity has both created and subjugated in its hegemony and systemization. The remainder is essential to the deconstructive and disruptive tone of postmodernity. The remainder, if it can be identified, carries with it productive capacities in that it holds the truth of what truth holds within itself in reserve. Conceptually, truth is difference.
Perhaps, it is difference unfolding.
Remainder and reserve are now our discursively productive concepts in postmodernity. The remainder is a helpful heuristic for deconstructive and critical thinking. It is what is left as non-identical in identity-thinking, identity being that which unites concept and object in the representations that make thinking, speaking, and writing possible. In this way, the remainder is perpetually productive. It is what is held in reserve of an object once its concept(s) has been exhausted.
What remains is the reserve truth holds within itself in thought. It is that which will always be outside: the light which illuminates thought is always that which remains.
