Review of Christopher Norris, Derrida, Badiou and the Formal Imperative

Do “we” need, today, a rap-prochement between analytic and “continental” philosophy? If so, from what philosophical and critical imperatives does such a need arise, and to what kinds of actual problems, political and social as well as theoretical, should it respond? Might giving a critical response to contemporary social and political problems require remapping familiar division lines between the analytic and continental traditions, sometimes in ways that will initially appear surprising and unfamiliar to those convinced of the legitimacy of the old traditional boundaries? To what extent might this require a creative rethinking of the boundaries and structural implications of formalism and of the kind of formalizing project so char-acteristic of one strand of the analytic tradition? And who might be the “we” (mentioned in the first question) that could emerge from such a critical remapping of methodological and thematic territories, as inheritors of the legacy of both traditions in twentieth century philosophy and practitioners of a new kind of philosophy drawing on the best resources of both? These are some of the questions raised by Christopher Norris’s useful and potentially important book, Derrida, Badiou and the Formal Imperative. In particular, Norris makes the heterodox but ultimately convincing argument that the work of two of the most important contemporary and recent “continental” philosophers, Jacques Derrida and Alain Badiou, responds in both cases to a “formal” imperative by developing the implications of classical formal and logical structures to the “breaking point” of structurally inherent aporias and paradoxes. It is at this structural breaking point that the possibility of transformative structural and politi-cal change opens up, and its identification and location in strict and rigorous accordance with the canons of traditional bivalent logic and with an unflinchingly realist ontology is therefore a cardinal task for contemporary philosophy in a critical mode.