The return of dialectics

The 'linguistic turn' in twentieth-century scholarship has been marked by a shift in critical attention from thought and consciousness to language and signification. Across the disciplines of philosophy, history, political science and literary studies alike, this turn away from dialectics and towards linguistics has been proclaimed. The critique of dialectics has been most trenchant in poststructuralist theory. The poststructuralist critique of dialectics generally relies on four theoretical assumptions: that dialectics finds its culmination in the philosophy of Hegel; that dialectics is culturally specific to 'Western' philosophy or metaphysics; that the critique of dialectics entails the end of philosophy or metaphysics; and that poststructuralist theory itself evades all dialectical philosophy. In this dissertation, I submit the poststructuralist critique of dialectics to an interrogation in four corresponding chapters. In the first chapter, I argue that dialectics is best defined not by the triadic structure of the dialectic that Hegel presents in the Phenomenology of Spirit, but rather by the dualist structure of language that Saussure presents in the Course in General Linguistics. In the second chapter, I attend to the dualist structure of dialectics in a survey of the South Asian and East Asian philosophies of Mahāyāna, Vedānta, Ch'an and Zen, appropriating the theoretical terminology of dualism and non-dualism specifically from Vedānta to describe the problem of dualism that informs all philosophy, whether 'Western' or not. In the third chapter, I employ the terminology of dualism and non-dualism in a close reading of some key texts in twentieth-century phenomenology, existentialism, structuralism and poststructuralism, demonstrating that the poststructuralist critique of dialectics is largely indebted not only to structural linguistics, but also to French dialectical philosophy itself. In the fourth and final chapter of my dissertation, I conclude that poststructuralism is a dialectics, whose radical propositions may certainly be traced back to the dualism of Saussure's theory of language, but whose subversive effects may only be apprehended in the non-dualism of Levinas's concept of diachrony and Derrida's concept of 'differance'. What I am calling the return of dialectics has thus already been staked out by the turn towards linguistics in twentieth-century scholarship.