Language Beyond Postmodernism: Saying and Thinking in Gendlin Philosophy

When it comes to the practice and theory of language, Eugene Gendlin offers a radically different approach—an approach that not only challenges other philosophies of language at a theoretical level, but demonstrates its own merit in a way of using words, a reflexive practice of extraordinary intricacy and subtlety, which enables us to attend very carefully to the events of language that are taking place at a micrological level and involve the body of felt experiencing.

Dancing on the ruins of representation, the remains of the modern philosophies of language that have held us under their spell since the beginning of the modern age, the advocates of postmodernism have been dreaming a language of excess and endlessly deconstructive reflexivity, a language that could never be held captive in any conceptual forms, a language released from the logic of identity and the grammar of the same. But, surprising as it may seem, this dream is not nearly radical enough. For this language of excess, of endless difference, is actually arrested and frozen, unable to move beyond the dilemma of a persistent structuralism, either caught inside finished conceptual structures or lost outside them in utter indeterminacy. Because he is able to carry meaning forward and show how this practice works, Gendlin goes beyond both alternatives. Thus, what he contributes to the current debates is indeed a language that "exceeds," a language that moves with great agility— beyond postmodernism.

This book is a collection of critical studies on the Gendlin work in the philosophy of language. Following each of the studies, there is a reply by Gendlin. In addition, Gendlin himself has contributed a chapter—a major new formulation of his practice and theory of language. All of the chapters were written especially for this collection and involved their authors in some fruitful collaboration or exchange of ideas with both Gendlin and the editor. The essays gathered together in this collection identify problems of general and timely significance and raise difficult critical questions. I do not doubt that they will provoke thoughtful debate.