Atonal philosophy

Derrida parodies Kant’s “On a Newly Arisen Superior Tone in Philosophy” with his late essay, “On a Newly Arisen Apocalyptic Tone in Philosophy’ (published, with Kant’s essay, in Raising the Tone of Philosophy .

Kant’s essay criticizes the mystagogues who have taken over philosophy, those who appeal to some sort of secret revelation, some intuition of the truth, some access beyond the veil. This lends a tone of superiority that is out of place in philosophy. The superior tone is the “death of philosophy.”

Derrida considers this a rare philosophical discourse on tone, but wonders what Kant means by “tone”: “By what is a tone marked: a change or a rupture of tone? And how do you recognize a tonal difference within the same discourse?” (122).

Behind Kant’s complaint about a particular tone, Derrida discerns a philosophical worry about tone as such: Philosophy aims to suppress tonality, to make “tonal difference inaudible,” to discourse with tonal “neutrality” or with “atonal” and prosaic rationality: “Isn’t the dream or the ideal of philosophical discourse, of philosophical address, and of the writing supposed to represent that address, isn’t it to make tonal difference inaudible, and with it the whole desire, affect, or scene that works (over) the concept in contraband?” (123).

Derrida hears something else in Kant: “the first time a philosopher comes to speak of the tone of other self-styled philosophers, when he comes to inaugurate this theme and names it in his very title, it is in order to be frightened or indignant faced with the death of philosophy” (124). Ironically enough, Kant reacts to the superior tone of philosophy with an excitedly apocalyptic essay on the death of philosophy. In defending the atonality of philosophy, Kant violates it.