Complementarity: Anti-Epistemology after Bohr and Derrida

336 Pages·1994·22.88 MB·English

by  Arkady Plotnitsky

Complementarity

Anti
Epistemology
after
Bohr and
Derrida
COMPLEMENTARITY
Arkady Plotnltsky
Duke University Press Durham and London 1994
© 1994 Duke University Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper 00
Typeset in Ehrhardt by Tseng Information Systems
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
appear on the last printed page of this book.
That this insecure and contradiaory founda-
tion was sufficient to enable a man ofB ohr's
unique instinct and taa to discover the major
laws of the spearallines and of the elearon
shells of the atom together with their sig-
nificance for chemistry appeared to me like
a miracle-and appears to me as a miracle
even today. This is the highest musicality in
the sphere ofthought.-Albert Einstein

CONTENTS
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 1
Part I. From General to
Complementary Economy 15
1 General Economy I: Bataille 17
2 General Economy 2: Derrida 37
3 From the Quantum Postulate to
Anti-Epistemology to
Complementarity 65
Part II. Quantum Anti-Epistemology 89
4 The Age of Quantum Mechanical
Reproduction 91
5 Complementarities,
Correspondences, Asyntheses 121
6 Locality and Causality 149
Part III. Complementarity and
Deconstruction 191
7 Undecidability and
Complementarity 193
8 Closures 225
9 Transformations of Closure 261
Notes 271
Bibliography 297
Index 309

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to thank many of my friends,
students, and colleagues for their help
and support during my work on the
book. I am especially grateful to Barbara
Herrnstein Smith. My thanks to Brian
Rotman and Gregory Ulmer, who read
the manuscript and helped to improve
it. My thanks also to Claudia Brodsky,
Stuart Curran, Vicki Mahaffey, Gerald
Prince, Andrew Pickering, Jean Michel
Rabate, Frank Trommler, Gwen Wells,
and Silke Weineck. I am grateful to Ken
Wissoker for his help and advice, and to
the Duke University Press for its support
of the project. My thanks also to Cheryl
Resetarits for her thoughtful copyedit
ing, and to Jean Brady, Mary Mendell,
and Marc Brodsky and others at the press
who worked on the book. Paula Geyh,
Jeanne Gurley, Patrick Hartigan, Sharon
Anne Jaeger, Walda Metcalf, and Carola
Sautter helped at various stages of my
work on the project. Finally, my thanks
to Nina and Marsha.