ABSTRACT
Rodolphe Gasche has construed Derrida's pathbreaking thought for the people postmodern era as a critique of "the philosophy of reflection". Derrida critiques the self-reflective type of philosophizing that has been pursued by Descartes, Kant, Hegel, and Husserl as representatives of the mainstream of modern Western philosophers. Through his persistent engagements with discourses of religion, and particularly with negative theology in his later work, he eschewed closure of deconstruction as a stable, defined intellectual paradigm that could simply be applied. Frank Kermode pointed out that Derrida needs to make theology his bogey in order for differance to appear different from everything else and hence to have a point. The major innovations of modern thinking eventually rendered remote and even unintelligible apophatic modes of thought revolving around no definable object. The modern innovations enacted a shift from analogical to univocal thinking in the age of Duns Scotus—exactly contemporary with Dante—and from realism to nominalism in its direct aftermath, with William of Ockham.
