Deconstructing the Western Colonial Dichotomy through Paralogy

『직면』(No Telephone to Heaven)의 해체론 독법- 배리(Paralogy)를 통한 식민주의의 이원론 관점 해체

Plato's philosophical importance in western thinking history cannot be understated. Especially his dichotomy system became common to the European traditions of philosophical and scientific discourses by assigning principal value to the presence that is opposed to the absence. Since the ancient Greeks, the concept of presence has been expressed itself in number of ways such as God, Truth, Logos, and center. Derrida called this European thinking "the metaphysics of presence." In order to analyze logocentrism also called the metaphysics of presence in No Telephone to Heaven, I used the term, paralogy that Aristotle did not accept as rules of argumentation but that Lyotard revived it positively as the principle of reason. Lyotard's incredulity towards rationalist theory of modernism is that knowledge can never be certain. Without any ultimate validity, certainty is impossible. Nevertheless, as Fanon said, the colonial world is dominated with a traditional Manichaean world. As a result what remains to the colonized to establish their identities is that of an armed struggle towards the colonizer even though they know it results in the vicious circle of hatred endlessly. Cliff attempted to show this message in her text through the tragic heroine, Clare Savage. Cliff's another critique of modernism's rationalism is shown through the ambiguous sexuality of Harry/Harriot. In this novel, gender plays also a central role by questioning the traditional binary system of sexuality. In this paper, I deconstructed this traditional gender system in terms of Bulter's concept of performitivity. This study will give the text another layer of deconstructive interpretation echoing with the proverb, one tree cannot make a forest.