Res Oralis: Mouths of Philosophy

Abstract

This dissertation returns to Jacques Derrida’s 1975 essay, “Economimesis,” to rethink the place of the mouth in modern philosophy. In contrast to existing scholarship, which links the mouth to the corporeal challenge of the body (either as a symbol for the feminine or the vessel for the voice), my research proposes that the mouth is fundamental to the legacy of humanism in continental thought. Retrieving Derrida’s early interest in the mouth, my project argues that “Economimesis” situates the mouth as absolutely unique, which is to say, the revelation of Kantian aesthetics is that the mouth occupies a fundamentally different place in Western metaphysics, a place that is not subject to the logic of either anatomy or metaphoric substitution. In retrieving this insight, my dissertation argues that “Economimesis” delivers a rather devastating diagnosis—that the mouth is the accomplice of a humanist philosophy born of the logocentrism bolstered by Kant’s aesthetics, a legacy I trace from Kant to Marx to Freud to stake a claim for its extraordinary longevity. In tracking this trajectory, I argue that the mouth operates as the primary figure through which modern philosophy makes a claim about the ontology of the human, a being rendered distinct from the animal on the grounds of its capacity to take its own life as the object of its productive (i.e., aesthetic) work. Rather than concluding, however, that the mouth is irretrievable, I pursue the thread of ‘other’ mouths—mouths not subject to this logic— in the work of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Jean-Luc Nancy and Luce Irigaray in order to begin challenging the humanist oralities of Western metaphysics.