From the Other to the Double: Continental Philosophy between Over-Metaphysics and Under-Metaphysics

In this article we propose viewing continental philosophy in the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first as moving between two opposing poles which we will call over-metaphysics and under-metaphysics. Over-metaphysics seeks an ideal of infinity and fullness, but distances itself from the here and now in favor of any kind of radical otherness. Under-metaphysics, on the other hand, denies the need for the radical Other as the sought-after and desired ideal and sees the immanent here and now as the sole horizon of thought. We argue that both of these poles derive from the gap between human perception and the world, a gap that philosophy tends to ascribe to a transcendent factor (over-metaphysics) or an immanent one (under-metaphysics), without taking into account the necessary relationship between the two poles. To that end we propose at the end of the article to place in the center of philosophy a literary and existential figure that embodies the tension between the external and the internal, that is, the double: a creature who is me and not me, me and the other. The double by definition preserves the gap, for it cannot be assimilated in the me, but it also prevents escape to an absolute exterior. Confronting the double may therefore refill the depleted batteries of continental philosophy and enable it to return with renewed vigor to the old questions of identity and otherness.