[ Ugo Vlaisavljevic, Ontology and Its Legacy, Medjunarodni centar za mir, Sarajevo, 1995. ]

It is rare for a critic to admit that s/he is talking or writing about a friend's book. However, there is always an exception. The exception in my case is with regard to my friend Ugo (before the last war, Jugoslav) Vlaisavljevic, definitively one of the most talented younger philosophers in the former Yugoslavia. There are several reasons for this exception.

The book Ontology and Its Legacy was written in Sarajevo, during the war. Ugo Vlaisavljevic could have left his home city, but chose not to. In the book, there is a strong sense of belonging to Sarajevo, emphasized through acknowledgements to Professor Abdulah Sarcevic, the main organizer of the "Philosophy Colloquium" (where young philosophers from all around Yugoslavia met before the war, and where I met Ugo), and to Mr. Ibrahim Spahic. At the time where organizers of many philosophical meetings ignored us, Prof. Sarcevic has made Sarajevo the focal point of young Yugoslav philosophers. Unfortunately, Prof. Sarcevic was among the people who were forced to leave Sarajevo.

The articles from this book were originally presented at the "Philosophy Colloquium". This colloquium was also the meeting place of an intellectual community that opposed the war that destroyed the identity of this community.

The main issue that Ontology and Its Legacy deals with can be described as an attempt to reevaluate the metaphysical legacy (or the methaphysical tradition). This is done from a perspective which the author describes as "the most contemporary in contemporary thinking", or a legacy left by "the two basic, still surprisingly complementary, sets of attitudes towards metaphysics". Vlaisavljevic takes into account both lines of reasoning involved in this legacy. On the one hand, there are Husserl, Gabriel Marcel, Merleau-Ponty, Weizsäcker, Tugendhat, and Davidson; and on the other, Derrida, Rorty, Lyotard, and Fayerabend. Thus, Ontology and Its Legacy is primarily an attempt to reconstruct the current philosophical scene, or to look for a meeting point of the continental and the Anglo-Saxon (overseas) philosophy. Taking into account the precision of Vlaisavljevic's comments, as well as the general scope of this work, the book represents an excellent textbook for the study of contemporary philosophy - something that has been unavailable in the South Slavic languages so far. The majority of previous works dealt with analytical philosophy, as opposed to the so-called postmetaphysical thinking of the Western (that is to say, European) philosophy. Presentation of the postmetaphysical character of both main strands of the contemporary philosophy (or "lines of inheritance", as Vlaisavljevic calls them), gives this book a special value.

Martin Heidegger appears on both sides, or - as it is said - "at the meeting point of both lines of reasoning". However, Vlaisavljevic is well aware that this "last great ontology" owes its current importance primarily to Derrida - in particular to his deconstruction of Husserl's philosophy of language. Everything was initiated through the radicalization of phenomenology (as Descombes would say), which therefore forms the basis of the movement towards postmodernism. Therefore, the most important theoretical value of this book lies the presentation of this groundbreaking turn towards language, the turn which stands in the very center of the postmetaphysical research that at the same time signifies the destabilizing of the traditional metaphysical world order. Thus, at the end of this road, there are both Derrida's negation of the perception, and Davidson's doubt that language exists.

The radicalization of phenomenology thus clearly shows the hollowness of the ideological critique of postmodernism as a project which is philosophically unfounded. The limits of phenomenology are the limits of metaphysics. The linguistic turn is philosophically grounded on both sides in this radicalization of Husserl's philosophy of language, which thus formed the main philosophical subject of this book. This radicalization showed that the ideal constitution represents the capability of a language itself (which is by itself deprived of truth). This is a phenomenology without phenomena. That is the paradox of language that we have inherited from ontology. This paradox, this frightening phenomenology without phenomena, stands at the very center of the postmetaphysical turn that this book is all about.

According to Vlaisavljevic, this groundbreaking process can be reconstructed as a process of the dissolution of ontology in formal semantics, or, as a deconstruction of the ontological frame in language. This line of reasoning, from Husserl to Derrida and Davidson, has shown that philosophy is not a metadiscourse that can secure an ontological frame. The process began in late Husserl's "Essay on the Origins of Geometry" (where Husserl discovered this paradox of language, for it turned out that the constitution of ideal objects is only possible in a language which is by itself deprived of truth). This process has led to the spectral phenomenology without phenomena which forms the basis of the whole process. This phenomenology has led Derrida to postulate that perception does not exist, and on the other hand, it has led Davidson to conclude that, as a matter of fact, the language itself does not exist. "I therefore conclude", said Davidson in his 1989 essay on language, "that something like language does not exist, at least if by language we mean anything understood as such by many philosophers and linguists. Therefore, there is no such thing Sas languageC that can be learned, mastered, or that one can be born with".

Davidson reached this surprising conclusion through the so-called case of "Mrs. Error". "Mrs. Error" said: "What a nice derangement of epitaphs", when she actually wanted to say of "What a nice arrangement of epithets". In order to explain our capability to note errors, Davidson not only denied the existence of language as a conventionally understood statement about a certain reality (as an example, one can take Tarski's T propositions. For example "Snow is white" is true only if the snow is white), but at the same time assumed that we have both a fixed part of a dispositional mental apparatus (which corresponds to a literal language), and a special addition to this mental structure. This addition is a flexible part that enables us to note the changing meaning of words and phrases that constitute speech errors.

On the other hand, Derrida wrote that there is nothing sensibly given or an object of perception which is not already covered by a trope-initiated figure of speech. This is the basis of Derrida's deconstruction of Husserl's philosophy of language, which marks the postmodern turn to language. How is this deconstruction done? "The whole project of phenomenological philosophy", according to Vlaisavljevic, "is based on the establishment and the preservation of the transcendental difference. Husserl had to insist on it from the very beginning, as one can see in the Speech and Phenomena. Phenomenology had always been, and by its meaning had to be, a transcendental philosophy. However, at the end of the road, based on the telos fulfilled by his philosophy in an endless work of addition, it turned out that a phenomenology of writing is the place where the destiny of phenomenology is to be decided. The pure transcendental difference was finally appropriated by language, even though it only touched the pure possibility of language in general, achieved with writing. By writing this fundamental difference into language, the limits of language have been erased. This very same difference has become the difference of the pure possibility of language that produces every conceivable meaning, that is to say, an overall sphere of meaning that was supposed to be non-linguistic. From now on, the writing has to be thought of as the universal horizon of constitution, as the new transcendental. It includes the very possibility of a subject. It comes before both subject and object, taking the place of an Urregion between them. Thus, in its radical demand for the absolute and universal validity, Husserl's philosophy became a transcendentally-constitutive theory of writing".

This is how Derrida showed writing to have a transcendental prehistory. Of course, the phenomenological reduction can be seen as a method of writing an irreducible difference into the very body of language. However, as Derrida has shown, this method is doomed to failure. Therefore, thinking in phenomenology came to the very boundary of metaphysics. It thus showed that philosophy is not a metadiscourse that provides its own ontological frame, since it cannot step out of reality in order to reach this frame.

It is clear that this transcendental prehistory of writing, pictured as a philosophical origin of the postmodern turn, is not a loss of the world (Weltlosigkeit), as some traditionalists panicking about the postmodernist nihilism claim. In effect, it represents a radical return to reality, the same "living reality" that Husserl was trying to reach. It is impossible to step out of the reality in order to reach this lost metaphysical framework, because there is no framework. It is quite another thing that a metaphysical order extending from Plato to Husserl has been radically questioned by this discovery of language as a frightening phenomenology without phenomena. Derrida thus hit on the transcendental difference, the heart of phenomenology, the difference between the source, as a genuine intuition of the present, and the mark, the sign of language, as pointing, coming only afterwards, as the required ontological time frame, without endangering the metaphysics of presence. Vlaisavljevic says that: "Derrida will here refer to Husserl's well-known method of reverse inquiry, in order to read the transcendental prehistory from the perspective of writing. I wonder if Husserl allows for this, since the expressive level of writing is the last of the eidetic components. Starting from this level, it is possible to talk about the absolute truth. This would mean that one can read sense of a language from its writing, and sense of a world from its language. What would then this pure form of transcendentally-genetic constitution, which expresses itself as a structure of repetition, reveal? Just the fact that the whole experience can be put into writing. Thus Derrida concludes like the saying connected with Lacan - that every experience is structured as writing. This because the source is always missing - instead of expressing itself in the pure presence. Even in the first additions we find its traces... by which it demands that we record it".

Therefore, the paradox of language is that this structure of change is actually not a structure, since it only simulates its own ontological frame, producing this phenomenology without phenomena. Can one live without this parergon that belongs to the language, not image? Can this problem be solved by thinking about language from a position of a being that does not produce language or words, but images? Perhaps a theory of image is our next step into the unknown.

To conclude with Ugo's postscript: "The most contemporary of contemporary thinking (...) is that which mostly belongs to a tradition, while at the same time tradition fails to accept it fully. This is what has been for quite a some time revealing itself as 'inheritance' that can only be accepted as 'the logic of addition' always demanded: through a perpetual renewal of tradition. Therefore, a 'postmetaphysical thinking' (if it should exist), cannot count on its own abode, its own logic, categories, vocabulary, etc. The 'linguistic turn' has put itself as, if not the most convenient, then definitively the most acceptable name for this awkward movement of reinterpretation. Little by little, it allows this reinterpretation (which tradition does not leave for posterity, except in still undeciphered writings) to be seen".

Elsewhere, Ugo writes that Derrida's deconstruction is an ironic strategy. Well, who knows? Even more important, Vlaisavljevic's investigation has shown that the philosophical legitimacy of postmodernism is grounded in this transformation. In the linguistic turn, the postmodernism does not make a kind of a coup from ontology to rhetoric. This clearly demonstrates all the hollowness of ideological critiques of postmodernism as mere rhetoric. As Mrs. Error would say, postmodernism is not "a nice arrangement of epithets".

In the end, I have to stress that I am not in favor of a "continuity thesis", just as I think that this thesis would not be in favor of me. There is indeed an Abschied from the Cartesian legacy. Postmodernism is not a new phenomenology, and its language is not a new transcendental. This "phenomenology without phenomena" has yet to be explained. This explanation should involve linguistics, semiotics, epistemology, psychology, psychoanalysis, ethnology, art criticism, rhetoric, as well as literature - which I would add to this Ugo's list.

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