Philosophy of Thought : Dialectics and Polylectics
Contents: Acknowledgements. Preface. Introduction: phases in the philosophy of thought. 1. Dialectics as method. 2. Thought/reality as dialectics, and dialectical logic. 3. Laws of dialectical logic. 4. Dialectics in Kant. 5. Hegel's dialectics. 6. Transition of dialectics from Kant to Hegel: Fichte and Schelling. 7. Issues in dialectics. 8. Dialectics from Kant to Marx: a critical view. 9. Polylectics: logic of postmodern dialectics. Conclusion. Bibliography. Index.
"In the book, Philosophy of Thought : Dialectics and Polylectics, the author, Dr. Ratnamuthu Sugathan discusses how Nietzsche's objections to reason (logocentrism) and reality took him to the perspectivism and metaphorics in Nietzsche (aided by a reading of Eric Blondel). This, combined with Derrida's Theory of Meaning (deferral as well as difference in multiple signification), Foucault's decentering of thought, emergence of multiple perspectives in the context of Barthes' notion on 'the death of author', Derrida's finding of the rupture of thought and the loss of locus in it, his dependence on the ruse, namely differance, which is a conflated version of Hegel's concept of difference, the dialectics involved in Derrida's use of deconstruction and Nietzsche's antithetics, which is 'the play or fire of words', Derrida's observation that metaphysics became discourse with the decentering of thought, and the 'logical' disintegration of logic (Peter Dews) one witnesses in postmodern thinkers led the author (aided by the Derridean reading of Nietzsche) to think of the emergence of a new level of logic, a sort of postmodern dialectics.
The linkage to dialectics is because of the developments within Marxist dialectics: Althusser's concept of overdetermination and Mao's innovative clarifications in the area of dialectics regarding 'contradiction' major contradictions, principal contradiction, and principal aspect of contradiction. Read with Derrida's critique of binary contradictions, Sugathan takes on the issue of multipolarity of contradiction, not multiple contradictions, but about multipolarity in a contradiction. This leads to the multipolar dialectics, which Sugathan named polylectics (or multilectics), a third stage in the development of logic.
Polylectics happened to be the logic of post modernism, because postmetaphysics or postmodernism is the post-Nietzschean pattern of thought. Dialectics critiqued metaphysics. But the logic of postmodernism critiqued both metaphysics and dialectics. Though all these phases are linked, they are simultaneously paradigm ruptures also: metaphysics, dialectics and discourse." (jacket)
