What would happen if structures, forms, and other stand-alone entities thought to comprise our intellectual toolkit—words, meanings, signs—were jettisoned? How would a work written in a purportedly dead language, like The Iliad, or penned in a foreign tongue be approached if deemed legible without structures such as meaning-bearing signs or grammatical rules? A New Philosophy of Discourse charts a novel course in response to these questions, coining an original concept of discourse, or talk!, that Joshua Kates presents as more fundamental than language. In Kates’ conception of discourse, writing and speech take shape entirely as events, situated within histories, contexts, and traditions themselves always in the making. Combining literary theory, literary criticism, and philosophy, to reveal a new perspective on discourse, Kates focuses on literary criticism, literary texts by Charles Bernstein and Stanley Elkin, and the philosophical writings of Stanley Cavell, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Donald Davidson and Martin Heidegger. This ground-breaking study bridges the analytical/continental divide, by working through concrete problems using novel and extended interpretations with wide-ranging implications for the humanities.

How are we to interpret Jacques Derrida's writings now, after so much commentary has been devoted to his thought and his own astonishing productivity has come to an end? In this groundbreaking book, Joshua Kates extends his earlier contextualizing of Derrida's work in relation to Husserl by arguing that we must begin from a frame different from that provided by Derrida himself. His work must be inserted into already existing fields, thus "fielding Derrida." By placing Derrida's texts in the context of broader fields (such as interpretations of modernity and analytic philosophy of language), Kates captures Derrida's stances with a new concreteness and an unprecedented scope, forging links to vital debates across the humanities today.

What would happen if structures, forms, and other stand-alone entities thought to comprise our intellectual toolkit-words, meanings, signs-were jettisoned? How would a work written in a purportedly dead language, like The Iliad, or penned in a foreign tongue be approached if deemed legible without structures such as meaning-bearing signs or grammatical rules? A New Philosophy of Discourse charts a novel course in response to these questions, coining an original concept of discourse, or talk!, that Joshua Kates presents as more fundamental than language. In Kates' conception of discourse, writing and speech take shape entirely as events, situated within histories, contexts, and traditions themselves always in the making. Combining literary theory, literary criticism, and philosophy, to reveal a new perspective on discourse, Kates focuses on literary criticism, literary texts by Charles Bernstein and Stanley Elkin, and the philosophical writings of Stanley Cavell, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Donald Davidson and Martin Heidegger. This ground-breaking study bridges the analytical/continental divide, by working through concrete problems using novel and extended interpretations with wide-ranging implications for the humanities.

How are we to interpret Jacques Derrida's writings now, after so much commentary has been devoted to his thought and his own astonishing productivity has come to an end? In this groundbreaking book, Joshua Kates extends his earlier contextualizing of Derrida's work in relation to Husserl by arguing that we must begin from a frame different from that provided by Derrida himself. His work must be inserted into already existing fields, thus "fielding Derrida." By placing Derrida's texts in the context of broader fields (such as interpretations of modernity and analytic philosophy of language), Kates captures Derrida's stances with a new concreteness and an unprecedented scope, forging links to vital debates across the humanities today.