One and nothing: free variations (continued)

4. The distinction between Greek mathematics and modern mathematical analysis allegedly turns on certain discoveries of properties of infinite series. What this characterization obscures, however, is that we need not think of the problem of number as one of enumeration or, more generally, that the problem of multiplicity be confused with that of a series. The work from Bolzano to Cantor recognized the latter fact with the well-known consequence that there are perfectly good ways to speak of actual infinities. But the mortgage that set theory had to pay—and here the original problem returns—is, broadly speaking, an account of the structure of multiplicity, toward which we cannot remain indifferent and which has both logical and ontological consequences (the former, for example, being an effect of the reflexive problem exposed by Löwenheim-Skolem and the latter simply a consequence of the trivial fact that there is no reflection arrow for the empty set).

The turn toward intuitionism in mathematics, viewed in a certain light, is a return to the problem of Platonism not only in the ontological (Brouwer) but also the epistemological sense, which is the explicit difference in the treatment of number between, for example, Plotinus and Proclus (but which remains a difference in aspect only). The question of number takes place not at the level of unity and multiplicity (one and many) in the order of being(s) but, rather, in the passage from being to non-being where the latter is understood not as the negation of being already counted as one under the category of quantity but as a transcendence of being (i.e., the non-being of the One, for example, is already a double negation: a negation of the first negation of being as nothing). The typical theological mistake has been to conflate Platonic cosmogony/ology with ontology.*

*Here Heidegger’s account of onto-theology has severely limited our capacity to understand the terms of anti-Aristotelian metaphysics.

Proclus’ ideal (eidetikos) number or Plotinus’ substantial (ousiodes) number are principles of the intellect understood as the ontological expression of what is prior to being and nothing other than the activity (energeia) of being. Proclus in a sense ‘domesticates’ Plotinus’ account of substantial number in the intelligible by locating it as a sort of category in the soul; but this account nevertheless is supposed to explain how mathematical number is possible within the Platonic account of number as substance against the Aristotelians. The significance of the monad in Platonic metaphysics is that it is the principle not only of the unity but also the limit in being: the monad is not itself (counted-as-)one, which explains how the dyad participates in the monad in different ways (i.e., how the dyad is both clearly discrete and continuous). The persistent mistake of Aristotelianism has been to insist that the difference between number and monad be quantitative and to fails to understand that substantial number does not count substance.

5. The ambiguity of the substantial and the mathematical one is, however, necessary insofar as it expresses the duality of thought and being; or that thought and being are expressions of substance considered under different attributes à la Spinoza; or that thought is the reverse of being and vice versa. Modern mathematics has simply given rigorous formulation to the perennial Pythagorean proposition: not only that being is number but that being is number as structure. The absence of structure has been nominated variously as One (Plotinus), as zero (Peirce), or as void (Badiou). Everything turns, however, on how we interpret the nature of this absence and that we should not be misled neither by the nomination of the transcendental,** the confusion of number with enumeration, nor the conflation of the One with the “all” (as universe, the whole, the set of all sets, etc).

**Badiou is exemplary here: “I say ‘void’ rather than ‘nothing’, because the ‘nothing’ is the name of the void correlative to the global effect of structure. … The name I have chosen, the void, indicates precisely that nothing is presented [emphasis added], no term, and also that the designation of that nothing occurs ‘emptily’, it does not locate it structurally”.

6. The symbol of the monad is the circle since it “preserves the specific identity of any number with which it is conjoined” (Iamblichus), just as the void can be added to (and/or subtracted from) any set. For the Pythagoreans, the monad was also the intellect insofar as it was seminally (“potentially”) all beings; the circle has therefore long been the geometric expression or symbol of infinity.***

***See, for example, Augustine’s famous image of God or, more interestingly, Spinoza’s curious remark that “number is not applicable to the nature of the space between two non-concentric circles. Therefore if anyone sought to express all those inequalities by a definite number, he would also have to being it about that a circle should not be a circle”.

While the monad is often characterized as stability (monad is derived from “menein”, “to be stable”), stability is distinguished from nothingness as nascence (or, as before, harmony is only possible by forgetting a fundamental disharmony):

“[T]his incessant movement and progression which all things partake could never become sensible to us but by contrast to some principle of fixture or stability in the soul. Whilst the eternal generation of circles proceeds, the eternal generator abides. That central life is somewhat superior to creation … and contains all its circles. For ever it labors to create a life and thought as large and excellent as itself; but in vain; for that which is made instructs how to make a better.” (Emerson, emphasis added)

This is the real (ethical) meaning of transcendence or the “moral fact of the Universe”: that the given is never sufficient and that “every ultimate fact is only the first of a new series”. The very condition of possibility for thought is its inadequacy to being, which thus constitutes its fundamental imperative: to recognize this deficiency not in itself but in what is given to it. “Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet. Then all things are at risk.” The weakness of thought—its inadequacy—calls not for its mystical renunciation but a persistent refusal of that temptation toward cessation, whether in its annihilation or defeat by the overwhelming burden of totality or its pacification by the illusory satisfaction of identity—“I’m just me” or “I’m only human, after all”. The Pythagorean monad is the limit of being only as a self-limitation (which is the only way to account for the priority of the monad with respect to the dyad) and in a certain sense thought is nothing other than the (reflexive) expression of this “self”. This expression, however, betrays itself only through negation: just as the Pythagoreans called the One “Apollo” (from a-pollon, “not many”) and harmony requires the impossibility of complete unity, “the one thing which we seek with insatiable desire is to forget ourselves, to be surprised out of our propriety, to lose our sempiternal memory, and to do something without knowing how or why; in short, to draw a new circle” (emphasis added). Thought fulfills its destiny not only when it ventures into the unknown but takes the leap into what, in principle, it can never know.

[Cf. the previous post from March 2010 "Dialectics at a standstill".]

The unfinished system of knowledge

1a. When Schopenhauer declared that the in-itself of phenomena is Wille, the nihilist mistake is therefore to conclude that the appearance of good masks a fundamental blindness, forgetting that the third aspect of Schopenhauer’s account is dedicated to showing that the Platonic Idea is the “adequate objectification of the will”. For Schopenhauer music was the direct expression of Wille but if we take the Platonic moment seriously, what we should actually notice is that the idea of the good remains the real of thought. This is why, among the semantic and logical paradoxes, it is actually some version of Moore’s paradox that provides an interesting site for the convergence of metaphysics and ethics: the relevant propositions are not of the order “the world ought to be good” (nor even “the world is not good”) but, rather, in a sentence whose significantly paradoxical structure is masked by grammar: “the world is good but I believe it is not good”.

1b. Crossing the gap between the appearance and the real(ity) of the good is not simply a matter of “having more knowledge” (if we only knew which companies from which to buy, for example) or even being more “self-conscious” since fundamentally the problem is not that of making better choices if for no other reason than that, as we know, the kind of knowledge that would be required to do so is impossible.

2a. The positivist fetishism of facts has distorted our capacity to inquire into the conditions for how knowledge is possible.* If only we knew, for example, the facts behind Nike’s labor practices in Indonesia we could make “more informed choices” because our intentions are good.

*So too, for that matter, the insistence on the “sublimity” of the postmodern condition.

Yet having “good intentions” is more difficult than the subjectivists realize. Similarly, the phenomenological mistake is to mistake intentionality for an arrow when it is more like a field. To take seriously the material conditions for knowledge—which are not themselves objective but the convergence of the subjective and objective—what we require is not “pure reflection” (here Sartre has moved too quickly) but the possibility of what we might call a purifying intention.

2b. “The problem with philosophy is the passage from the knowledge of limited objects to the knowledge of the entirety of what is” (Bataille). This gap is the common source of philosophy, mathematics, and science, even if within each the beginning and destination are often reversed (in, e.g., romanticism, axiomatics, and unified theory).** We falter in the search for knowledge not by failing to bridge the gap but in misunderstanding the character of this putative totality. The insight of speculative philosophy consists not in the identity of thought and being but, more precisely, in the speculative unity of thought and being through the morphism from the system of objects to the system of knowledge.

**Equally interesting is that, contra Schopenhauer, Bataille’s observation is perhaps the one thing that can not be said of either art or religion.

Despite recent innovations in continental ontology, we should keep in mind that while every network is a system, not every system is a network. This is also a useful heuristic to distinguish information from knowledge: there are networks of information but it is the systematicity of knowledge that marks the difference between a database and consciousness. This is why, among the intellectual disciplines, philosophy (or logic for Husserl)—until the twentieth century—has been the science of science*** and why, despite the recent suspicion of totality inherited from Marx, Lévinas, and Derrida, we must learn that not only is it possible to think totality without violence but that it is imperative for us to do so. This is the tendency of recent work in Merrell's semiosis or, in different but perhaps more familiar terms, it is also the lesson of Rancière’s analysis of the homology between aesthetics and politics in le partage du sensible.

***This is also, incidentally, why the sciences require philosophy (although the converse is also true but for different reasons): the psychologist who can identify instances of fundamental attribution error does not thereby have knowledge of the problems of egoic identity or effective agency. To put it simply, empiricism always misses the transcendental (just as the transcendental always misses the empirical).

Rancière’s question here is for critical theory what Badiou’s project is for ontology: what are the structures of intelligibility that constitute the world of life that we must interrogate both because of but also despite them? What is the invisible truth of the real that demands expression (through what Badiou calls “torsion” or—I suspect equivalently—Henry calls the “Internal”)?

2c. The danger is that this truth may turn out to be nothing. But there are two kinds of nothing: there is the nothing of inconsequence—that nothing happens or that nothing will happen. But there is also the “pure zero” of which Peirce spoke: the “nothing of not having been born. There is [here] no individual thing, no compulsion, outward nor inward, no law. It is the germinal nothing, in which the whole universe is involved … As such, it is absolutely undefined and unlimited possibility—boundless possibility”. For Peirce, the mediation between this freedom to the determination of the individual is quality—the determination of this or that possibility. What is surprising here is that he further insists that “a quality is a consciousness. I do not say a waking consciousness—but still, something of the nature of consciousness [emphasis added]. … A possibility, then … is a particular tinge of consciousness”. Rather than a mystical pantheism, Peirce’s quale-consciousness denotes the material sympathy between mind and object as the ground for unity (“unity” in the sense of a category) but, more importantly, perhaps also how we might approach the possibility of a purifying intention—not as a mental act but precisely in the abstrusion of the mental (or the obstrusion of the cognitive in what Varela has called “enactive structures”). Intentions remain impure as long as we succumb to the fiction that the seat of cognition or identity is in the head, the individual, or the ego. But beyond the materialist fascination of the genesis of the individual from the pre-individual field (Deleuze, psychoanalysis) of metastable equilibria (Simondon, Stiegler)—which at the least does not seem to account for the dialectic between the activity and passivity of thought—the purification of intention consists, foremost, in laying thought bare against the conditions of its impossibility.

The betrayal of thought

1. Theory and practice. We have no intelligent model of the relation of theory and practice insofar as our currently available models are designed to foreclose any such relation. The problem is always to justify theory against practice: we must go “beyond the classroom” or have “street smarts”, “that may be true in theory …” – Yet what this expression overlooks is the fact that anything that may be “true in theory” but that does not reflect the existing state of affairs is a false theory. We lack an intelligent model for theory because our operative presumption is that theory is prior to practice: we learn “principles” and then seek their “application”, for example. But what every enemy of theory fails to notice is that theory is the result of practice. The relationship of theory to practice is understanding or, more precisely, understanding is nothing other than the unity of theory and practice. Theory without practice is not understood and conversely for practice without theory. The musician does not begin with an abstract “theoretical” knowledge of harmony and then proceed to compose; but the musician who attempts to compose without theory will either have to reinvent the scale with every tune or will simply be banal and poor in her work. There is, quite simply, a dialectic of theory and practice: each implies the other and the failure of this dialectic results either in extreme academism or extreme stupidity.

2. Blaming the victim. Yet despite the usual demand for practice we have seen a curious double criticism of OWS in that the movement offers neither theory nor practice. Occupiers, so the charge goes, neither understand what they are protesting nor offer any “real solutions”. Of course, this criticism is either itself guilty of the same fault—e.g., in itself doing nothing productive in offering the desired “solution”—or fails to understand the significance of the protest. On the one hand, the message is right on the surface: those who are tasked with finding solutions are themselves part of the problem and have effectively debarred other possibilities from entering the discussion. But, more fundamentally, the refusal to articulate a “party platform” has inverted the disastrous model of theory and practice that has currently paralyzed our federal government. The right’s ideological commitments (theory) unilaterally trump the necessities of action in the face of competing interests. OWS has given us the opposite: practice without theory for the purpose of asking us to think. OWS’ silence has forced upon us, through its refusal to think for us, the recognition that we have all failed to think—and that this failure has permitted the continuing devastation of livelihoods and households under the name of a supposedly free economy. OWS has asked us to wonder how it is possible and necessary for these protests to exist. The exhortation, then, for them to re-enter the economic system that ejected them in the first place misses the point in a particularly pernicious way, i.e., by refusing to recognize the manifest injustice of the status quo that has produced the victims who are now being asked to shoulder the blame.

3. The body of the soul. “Only philosophy can be an antidote for all the evil into which philosophical curiosity has plunged us,” Herder said. This idle curiosity is the decadent form of the theological “wonder” of the Theaetetus. The philosopher, Socrates says, is like the goddess who passes between heaven and earth and that philosophical questions are those that the soul considers “alone and through itself” (185e). Aristotle respects this call to philosophy when he too says that the knowledge of the wise is “most universal” which is “farthest from the senses” (Metaphysics 982a25) that aspires toward the starry heavens above. Such knowledge, Aristotle says, would make us free, yet the human condition is necessarily one of bondage. Our freedom consists, then, in understanding the necessity of that which compels us to wonder, such as the incommensurability of the diagonal, “for there is nothing which would surprise a geometer so much as if the diagonal turned out to be commensurable”.

It is precisely this complicity that criticism refuses. Philosophy shall complete its task precisely when there is no further need for it. “Happy if philosophy showed him the path on which he teaches the people to act without thinking, to be virtuous without knowing it, to be citizens without pondering about the fundamental principles of the state …” (Herder) or, as Adorno would say to Horkheimer, “true thought is thought that has no wish to insist on being in the right”. Philosophy ends not in the satisfaction of wonder but the rejection of necessity and in the truth of the given, not in understanding but disbelief, and not in happiness but in the suffering of a body rebelling against the ascent of the soul.

Appeals and incriminations

1. The primrose path. The split between philosophy and science has rendered philosophy vulnerable to two equivalent and damning accusations disguised as genuine questions: “what are the facts of the matter?” or “what is your ontology?” When, for example, cognitive and neuropsychology are busy re-creating the Kantian picture of cognition (including the opacity of the transcendental ego) or when sociology agrees with Aristotle’s insight into what we now call “crowdsourcing”, it seems that science has given philosophy empirical verification. Against the consequent threat of redundancy, philosophy (particularly in its idealist and crypto-idealist varieties) has generally responded with some doctrine of method: “philosophy provides an account of what a fact is in the first place”. Of course, we should be wary of any such tendency toward absolute idealism ever since witnessing the misfortunes of a system that attempts to deduce being from the idea. But an ethical idealism is equally problematic that insists on the role of philosophy in arbitrating between facts and values (which are, by definition, outside the domain of ontology): such a solution simply reduces philosophy to literature and makes it possible to speak of “my” and “your” philosophy since, after all, if values are not facts there is no other court of appeal than my “yes”.

1a. The discourse bubble. Values, of course, are discursive (as Nietzsche insisted against the metaphysicians). “We must reflect and discuss our values.” But to whom do we speak? Confronted with the towering black obelisk of technology, for example, philosophy quarantines itself in a mode of discourse that appeals to Aristotle and Heidegger instead of Lanier. The objection to such discursive naïveté (at best and bad faith at worst) is not that of simply lacking reference to a “real” world outside discourse but, rather, that a discourse that intends only itself is self-defeating.

2. Whither the moral world? Is it possible to be moral in an immoral world? We face here an inverted image of the doctrine of original sin. Bourgeois ideology refuses, for example, to decide between the “right” of a chemist to create a better non-smearing lipstick and the creation of HIV medication. The democratic paradox is that we must at once affirm the separation of ethical injunctions from political right while at the same time recognizing that it is this very distinction that creates the very immoral world from which we must impose on ourselves the choice to be moral.

2a. Discourse and praxis. Philosophy faces a similar paradox. Faced with the separation of philosophy and politics (which Marx famously wanted to overcome), philosophy both recognizes and refuses its task in the face of injustice. Philosophy has its responsibility and capacity to incite us to the recognition of injustice—including the fact that its current existence in academic institutions is predicated on unjust socioeconomic practices—but it will not be by researching what passages of Hobbes Leibniz was reading in what years (although, in fairness, such research is arguably not philosophy at all but its decadent imposter).

Words and reason

1. Perhaps the greatest embarrassment to Enlightenment philosophy is the persistence of the extremism of stupidity that we must suffer as one effect of the proliferation of social media. On the one hand, according to critical philosophy, the free individual is identical to the activity and substance of the World Spirit that has no other meaning except the existence of politics as historical existence (which distinguishes modern from the ancient state). On the other hand, Ronell has brilliantly demonstrated that stupidity remains equally embarrassing for empiricist philosophy: “as concerns its need to observe and experience the idiot, it crashed against the wall of the real” since any attempt to describe the non-discursive non-disclosivity of the idiot forces us to postulate the natural that, ostensibly, the idiot simply is. Free from the corrupting influences of culture, the serene idiot would never pass into civility and would remain forever dumb. Thus “nature, like idiocy, is an effect of the erasure of naturality, a figure of lost literality” (Ronell).

2. And as both Ronell and Nancy have shown, Kant duplicates this circularity of culture and idiocy within pure reason (both theoretical and practical). On the one hand, pure practical reason only appears, empirically, in the silent will of actually virtuous individuals who possess virtue “as a gift from the gods” (Plato, Meno), quite indifferent to any (philosophical) account of it. On the other hand, Kant’s own self-conscious failure as a writer leaves critical thought “scrambling, ever searching to write itself” as neither philosophy nor literature (Nancy); Kant could never arrogate to himself the name of the monstrous genius of the Third Critique that “gives the rule to nature” at the cost of being so intimately bound to it. Since Kant’s renunciation of literary finesse, “beautiful writing has been feminized and homosexualized, as so many attacks on theory reveal (or try to conceal). Kant, for his part, openly struggled with two heterogeneous entities: philosophy, on the one hand, style and elegance, on the other, feminine, one” (Ronell). Kant writes the limits of reason by a parody of the idiot. Hence Nietzsche: “I have some idea of my privileges as a writer; in a few cases I also know the extent to which familiarity with my writings ‘spoils’ your taste. You just cannot stand other books any more, philosophy books in particular” (Ecce Homo). What Nietzsche’s imitators failed to grasp is that style is not a disguise for thought but its very language. The idiot has no style; in response, the philosopher and the postmodernist make equivalent mistakes, i.e., either to renounce style or to substitute style for form. Style is, rather, the ability “to communicate a state, an inner tension of pathos, with signs, including the tempo of these signs” (Ecce Homo)—and is not this passion the origin of all philosophy? The inequality of thought and experience moves the philosopher from complicity to speech and any philosopher worthy of the name speaks to be heard for a single reason: that to remain silent would be an affront to those for whom experience has been neither just nor magnanimous.*

*This is also why, moreover, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra is a book “for all and for none”: how does one speak to the idiot? “Let us take the most extreme case, where a book talks only about events lying completely outside the possibility of common, or even uncommon, experience, — where it is the first language of a new range of experiences. In this case, absolutely nothing will be heard, with the associated acoustic illusion that if nothing is heard, nothing is there. At the end of the day, this has been my usual experience and, if you will, the originality of my experience” (Ecce Homo). But where sense passes into non-sense, Nietzsche no longer speaks as a philosopher but as an artist.

What a philosopher is not

Three brief encounters: 1) Concerning my work in philosophy, I was recently asked if I learned about “meditation and that kind of thing”. 2) If this confusion over what philosophy is to those outside the university should seem surprising, consider the fact that the column in the NY Times devoted to exposing the public to philosophy is called “The Stone”. 3) A seller on Amazon (GRACEANDPROVISIONS) advertises a used copy of a technical book on modality with the “warning” that the book “contains false doctrine and will come with a free truthful Bible tract” (in caps). Interestingly, on casual perusal, no other book in this seller’s catalogue (including The Cambridge Companion to Nietzsche and The Chinese Way in Religion) is accompanied by this comment.

While an explanation of the last of these oddities would be apposite (and much appreciated), the philosopher’s onus cannot be explanation if for no other reason than that explanation presupposes criteria of understanding that are either unavailable for those to whom it would apply or are those that in this case would require the very explanation of what is not understood. History has shown beyond redemption that the price for justification is the very existence of philosophy. The philosopher is not the defender of reason (since those for whom such defense is necessary are those from whom it is) nor its advocate (what would be gained from convincing the faithful that philosophy contains no “doctrine”)?

There are many ways to renounce the philosophical imperative. Among the most perilous—yet the most naïve—of these reproduces the activity of philosophy as a leisure (schole): a bourgeois endeavor for young people who have nothing better to do or for the disenchanted and socially awkward. The onus of the philosopher is not to explain what philosophy is but to advance what philosophy can do. The only philosophy to survive the present barbarism shall be that which refuses to believe that this—the melancholy, solicitude, and enjoyment of experience—is sufficient.

Some recapitulations

1. Life without being (… or nature): Without further clarification, the term “critical vitalism” stands under the threat of implosion. Its integrity is predicated, moreover, on its differentiation not only from the two halves of its contradictory namesake but also from prior attempts at such synthesis, which have tended toward the disaster of culture that we now call “modernism” (e.g., romanticism). The current eco-political crisis demands a philosophy of life (in the objective sense of the genitive) that refuses the supposed relevance of philosophy to life (under the ideology of “lived experience”), the naïve materialism of life as either substance or matter (the object of biochemistry), or the vulgar systematicity of taking as its guiding principle the unity of the “living organism”. We still suffer these errors on account of the tendency to read concepts like the élan vital as a metaphysical principle of (evolutionary) biology with the consequence that life becomes either the movement of differenciation without difference (in Deleuze’s terms) or the abstraction to which we appeal when insisting on what we all have “in common” when we are actually at our most mechanical (when we say, for example, that we all have the same rights because we eat, sleep, and defecate). A critical vitalism requires, like Deleuze and, most recently, Jane Bennett have argued, a conception of difference that is sensitive to the violence of the negative and to a joy that has no need of it. Beneath the vulgar materialism of an illusory “dynamism of force” that struggles for more existence is precisely what Freud had described as the secret will to destruction. What vitalism must reject is both the anti-dialectical posture of a “cycle of life”(predator/prey, life/death) and the militaristic dialectic of production and consumption whose condition and limit is death.

2. Why write? (not for politics): Both French and English criticism have been encumbered by the dogmatic insistence that writing consists in giving material to ideas in language, with the consequence that the writer’s task is literary. The writer whose activity consists of putting words to a page betrays a complicity with at least a certain form of bourgeois idealism that safely ensconces language in words and sentences. Rationality thus consists of discourse and commentary and the critic believes himself effective by the possession of a quick wit, verbal acuity, and the appropriate amount of self-aggrandizing righteousness of character. The writer simply needs to be “committed” to a political task. No such criticism can escape the production of false discourse and the subsequent tendency toward quietism despite any protestations of radical or revolutionary commitment.

(Addendum) 2a. In 1929/30, Benjamin complained that “criticism has to secure its own power by developing a more effective attitude toward the relations of production in the book market. It is well known that far too many books are published. What is worse, a consequence of this is that too few good books appear. And those that have appeared have made too little impact. … The aim here, of course, is not to attack the commercial aspect of publishing … but to appeal to the misguided idealist whose patronage supports dangerous products”. In the eighty years since these lines were written, what Benjamin could not have foreseen was not only the absolute monopolization of textual production by capital but the entirely distinct onto/logical field of digitization and hyper-textualization of new media. As Benjamin points out, what is at stake here is more than simply a critique of the economy of textual production nor even of the dissemination of signifiers that were at one time meaningful within a shared field of intentions. Beyond the degradation of criticism as a mere refinement in taste (subjective judgment) or as political commentary, criticism must fight against the very ideology of discourse that, at one time, it had itself created.

This may seem paradoxical insofar as criticism seems to be precisely that which is excluded from public discourse. Habermas, for example, explicitly exempts “aesthetic criticism” from the modes of discourse available to the rational speaker in the ideal speech situation. Yet this is, of course, merely another symptom of the general collapse of criticism into its current ruins in blogs, syndicated newspaper columns, scholarly commentary, and user comments.

2b. In the comments to an online news article reporting the latest results from experiments performed by the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, the majority of users aligned themselves with one of two positions: either the scientists involved in this project were guilty of an overwhelming “Anything But God” neurosis or of misplacing their priorities for the benefit of “merely theoretical” questions at the expense of pressing “practical” problems such as disease, hunger, and energy. What should be objectionable to the critic is not the defective logic or rationality of these comments but, rather, the philistinism that results from a posture of being “original” that masquerades as the supposed “right” to have and express an opinion (of course, what stands in need of finesse is not the right itself but its value). The very notion of “originality” has been irreversibly transformed into the anti-dialectical inversion of its authentic sense: we say that to be “original” is to be without precedent and to cast aside the bonds of tradition when being the one who has an origin means recognizing that we are not the first to arrive—that my opinion is our opinion. But this “we” is the abstract universality described by Hegel and Heidegger as the immature thought of thinking that does not yet know itself (or, more precisely, that does not yet know that it does not know, according to Socrates): this is the same adolescent reason (which is, incidentally, encouraged by certain sophistic practices of philosophy that promote so-called “general critical thinking skills”) that presumes to pronounce on any discourse with the “view from nowhere”.

"Dialectics at a standstill"

1. The formal and the transcendental: The distinction between the formal and the transcendental is beholden to a naïve opposition of subject and object. Both idealism and materialism attempt to introduce a third term into this opposition: the idealists say that not everything is a thing because there is negativity (which takes a number of ultimately equivalent formulations: things disappear, there is time and death, there is language), i.e., there are subjects; the materialists say that not everything is an idea because there is (something called) truth and discourse, i.e., there are objects. Between ideas and things, the dialectician erects the structure of subjectivity.

The dialectician asserts that the ‘I’ of any subject is neither an idea nor a thing, so there are at least three irreducible ontological terms. But perhaps we should acknowledge at least four:* that which appears (usually nominated as “fact” or “world”), that to which appearances appear or the “place” of such appearance (the “subject” or “thinker”), the appearance of that which appears (“cognitions”, “representations”, or “ideas”), and that to which appearances refer (“forms”). For the sake of simplicity, we might name these, respectively, object, subject, idea, thought. A series of relations among these four obtain.

i. {subject, idea} In cognition, we feel and experience. That of which we do so are objects {object, idea}.

ii. {subject, thought} Just as objects are that to which cognition is referred, there are multiple subjects because in thinking subjects must refer to thoughts (in Frege’s sense of the word “thought”). Both thought and object exceed cognition.

iii. {subject, object} A world. Experience and thinking are always local.

iv. {idea, thought} Truth.

The naïve subject/object distinction, then, can be recast in two different orientations: either as {subject, idea} and {object, thought} or as world {subject, object} and truth {idea, thought}.

*”At least” four insofar as these do not, it seems, quite account for time.

2. Mediation without dialectics: There is no immediate unity of thought in being—neither in the divine intellect nor in the phenomenon of an ‘I’: this much is taken for granted. But not all mediation is dialectical. The disjunctions between expression and the expressed, for example, are often not the condition but the failure of meaning; something new emerges from the “infinite abyss of meaning” when the laws of sense dissolve or from the gaps and ruins of history. These have otherwise been called the minimal things (Gaché), the most subtle touch (what Derrida calls the “barely touching touch”), the objet petit a (Lacan), the void (Badiou), or perhaps even Bataille’s “expenditure”. What is at stake here is more than the naïve infinity of a reflection that, since Fichte, has failed in the task it sets for itself. What emerges not only from the failure of such reflection but even from the destitution of a world that refuses to be destroyed? How can the necessity of thought (including the sense of its imperative) be understood as more than a resistance against its dissolution (e.g., the persistence or conatus of life) but also as the construction of new objects (even from, but not requiring, the destruction of worlds)?

The transcendental dialectic

1. The One and the Two: The hermetics taught that the Kosmos is God’s image. But God himself cannot be presented in images: “He is hidden from our sight. … [But] thought alone can see that which is hidden, inasmuch as thought itself is hidden from sight …” The ban on graven images and the prohibition of idolatry maintains a rigorous separation between the world known through images and that toward which thought is drawn outside of itself. The totality of images is only possible by the exclusion of that which cannot be presented in an image. But, we should stop to wonder why that which cannot be presented should be forbidden from such presentation. To foreclose what is impossible to thought is the monist gesture par excellence. But this too is the fundamental dialectical question; in short, the choice between monism and dialectics is not essentially metaphysical but concerns what is available to thought: specifically, the dialectical gambit is that the impossible really is impossible, while the monist, by declaring the impossible as such, makes all things possible and thinks that all we need to do so is declare the limit.

2. Explanation and criticism: Both metaphysics and hermeneutics after Kant have thought that the task of philosophy is to explain the thought that explains the world (thus Kant imports logic into epistemology). Yet we all know how ineffective genealogy, etiology, and natural history are to the one who must form a life against the receding horizon of self-knowledge. No amount of theoretical understanding, for example, makes injustice tolerable and no explanation can provide a sufficient account of a betrayal. Instead, criticism’s material is not the unity of what is presented to thought but the cracks and ruins, the traces of the noumenal in phenomena. Such a speculative thought surrenders the desire for the absolute for the systematic destruction of experience.

The desire for the absolute

In some religions, practitioners are advised not to look upon the dead and when confronted with an image of death to avert their gaze. In some cases, such an aversion or refusal to look is shameful or ascetic. Yet not all sacred practices are normative; some might be considered, instead, aesthetic. What is at stake in the prohibition against the viewing of death is the formation of a certain kind of body, which is to say the condensation of some habits over others, the formation of potentialities along some orientations over others, and the creation of certain tendencies of moving, acting, and doing that reproduce the conditions for life. But in every case, this diamagnetism is specific to the living material. In some sense, we might say with Aristotle that there is no such thing as pure matter—not because matter must be wedded to form but because the material is always multiple and always presents itself in composites (which has been a tenet of every materialism since Leucippus). Life itself is the complex of relations that comprise these composites.

This is the intuition to which the French spiritualists (after Bergson) attempted to give expression against the dialectic of the absolute while, ironically, surrendering to that very dialectic by taking it too seriously. Lavelle, for example, insists on a “pure experience” of existence or an “experience of real presence” that is made concrete in determinate consciousness, which itself creates an interval between the cognition and presentation of its objects. It is on the basis of this sympathy for existence that vitalism has always thought that the thinking of death was merely naïve and, consequently, that life should tend toward the fulfillment of eternal life (which, equivalently for Hegel or Lavelle, means achieving the original unity of thought and being).

We see this desire for the absolute disguised in various ways in philosophy. For example, the greatest pretension of philosophy is that thought should have an effect on the world (whereas the gambit of religion is the opposite—i.e., that thought is impotent against the destiny of a contingent world). Under the guise of a persistently naïve empiricism (to which Carnap, despite the genius of his Aufbau, must have recourse since for him there is only one domain of objects), analytic philosophy has simply renounced the task that philosophy has arrogated to itself and, without an account of its conditions, will continue to fiddle while the world (and itself) perishes. On the other hand, continental philosophy has yet to realize that philosophy must be about something other than itself. In both cases, however, we are caught within the temptation both to affirm and to deny the unity of thought and being, i.e., that there is no such unity (else the philosophers would rule the world) or that it is only on the basis of that unity that philosophy exists at all.

Yet between philosophy and religion—i.e., between a material or a spiritualist thinking—perhaps what we need to affirm is not only that “the gift of thinking to itself is betrayed by a thinking that insists only on thinking itself” (Desmond) but also that the very attempt for thinking to think itself is impossible. What is impossible, however, is not simply a negation of the possible, for the possible is itself the negation of the necessary. That thinking should find it impossible to think itself is not the condition but task of thinking. Every philosophy that fails in this task is unjust.

Signatures and styles (Characters II)

1. Traces: In unfinished sentences. In the one sentence that refuses to leave, “like a handprint on your heart”. In the voices of indirect language, nothing is left unsaid yet, for all that, mutual understanding is eminently unsatisfying. I know that you know, but that is not sufficient. When it comes to another who remains an other—who remains distant, untouchable, and who possibly may not even hear what we have to say—we can find no satiety. In the midst of the most perfect understanding available to our language—for example, in an unspoken agreement, a slight nod, the upturned corner of a lip, or even in a sigh of content—we can find ourselves under the most violent, nauseating reduction, i.e., within the unbearable solipsism of absolute immanence. In such immanence there can be no exterior, “nothing else than this”. I am alone and present with myself (a divided being); I am bound to myself, unable to escape myself: this is the burden of identity, i.e., the impossibility of not being myself, even if I am nothing more than a solitary dreamer who is deceived into believing that there are others who see and understand me.

But even if all we have is the faint recollection of those we cannot even really be sure existed for us, they always leave traces—in words and lacerations, in images and memories, and in the spaces we refuse to visit because we are only able to walk the same paths as they, following the footprints that have been left behind. We follow, simply to see them fly ahead, even if every freedom leaves a trace that cannot be forgotten.

“Out of incidents comes a “Mark!” that would not otherwise be thus; or a “Mark!” that already is, that takes little incidents as traces and examples. They point out a “less” or “more” that will have to be thought in the retelling, retold in the thinking; that isn’t right in these stories, because things aren’t right with us, or with anything.” (Bloch)

2. “The Prose of the World”: Against itself, identity is compelled to fortify its integrity against dissolution into the impersonal “it” of the simple “there is …” [il y a], i.e., to be drawn into what is unthinkable (which, we say, always remains available to us as “the last option”). But so long as there remains even the smallest trace to catch our attention and to make us pause, there will always be room for one more story, even if it should be told to no one but ourselves.

In the immediate urgency and intensity of pathetic self-presence, we are tethered to a constant battle against a fundamental contradiction contained in the bidirectionality of appearance. The infinity of (self-)expression is restrained by the exigencies of a world that appears to us as finite. We ourselves are not the source of finitude, even if we are its servants. We find our possibilities scattered amidst a world of bare objects to be consumed, shaped, and resisted; we cannot find the right words; we are obligated to work, health, sex, and religion. This is why the story, for example, is often taken to be inferior to music: the former gives expression to our all-too-human destiny while the latter offers a glimpse to what is otherwise banished from our earthly life.

We find the “meaning” of our lives, our “own” lives, dispersed among the tenuous fragments of the world that come within our reach—in the friends and strangers who cross our paths, the books that find their way into our hands, or the motility that forms in our bodies. It is from these fragments that we assemble the secrets that we take care to measure carefully in the extent to which we trust that others at least know that they exist even if they do not know what they are. These private thoughts, however, are precisely the most visible about us because if they really are “who” we are, they give us the very form and figure by which we are seen at all. We are seen as ambiguous, which is to say we can be misunderstood and misrepresented. This does not mean, however, that we might be more “accurately” represented if only we could be seen for who we “really” are, but, on the contrary, that our very visibility precludes the transparency of our appearance. It is for this reason our silence, even if it is unintentional, reveals who we are by our refusal “to remove all doubt”. I appear in my silence, not with this or that meaning or as this or that kind of person, but as this or that, i.e., “I” become an effect of this “or”, for only when that “or” is decided do “I” appear.

This is why my possibilities are not my possibilities: we find our possibilities in lessons and auditions, in characters and role models, in greetings and surprises, and, of course, in language and in the names (by which) we are called. We must search for possibilities, of course, but so too they must offer themselves to us. This is also true of our language insofar as our prose admits only two terms in the relation (poetry require at least three)—nature and word—in which we are caught in a dizzying circulation that manifests as science, history, and literature. We are able to read the world (and to read the character of others), but so too our characters are capable of being read by being in the world. By the “cunning” of reason, in our very attempts to sketch our “own” characters, we become characters within the prose of the world.

It is for this reason that even the anonymity of a forgettable character is preferable to us than the oblivion of one who has never existed. There can still be ecstasy in the crowd, however, which is not, strictly speaking, impersonal but supra- or hyper-personal. To be “lost” in the crowd is still a mode of existence (this is why, for example, fascism is the shadow of democracy), but there is no existence for the one who is only a statistic (which is why we always struggle to give each statistic a story).

To be “lost” in the crowd is not only a negative mode of existence, however: insofar as the crowd offers a community of meaning, it functions positively as a mode of affirmation: “Yes, I agree” or “Yes, I know what you mean” or “Yes, we can”. We know, of course, that to separate ourselves from the crowd is only an initial gesture, since if the point is to be recognized as different, we are still affirmed as such by the ones who are the same.

This is why so many of the characters available to us are not only clichés but perversions (which, if they remain clichés, are perverions but not subversions). It is one thing for us to recognize the reduction of the human to the biological in the Third Reich; what does it mean for Littell’s Aue (a former SS officer) to say “So I came to think [at Auschwitz]: wasn’t the camp itself, with all the rigidity of its organization, its absurd violence, its meticulous hierarchy, just a metaphor, a reductio ad absurdum of everyday life?” This is the same character that opens his story with the words “My human brothers, let me tell you how it came to pass”. Who are these “human brothers” that, by virtue of their humanity, must have been absent for the story to need telling? Under what conditions of inhumanity (viz., of our inhumanity) does this character exist for us? What does it mean for a character such as this to exist at all? – But better to be a monstrous character than a well-functioning desiring machine.

“The whole outward visible world with all its being is a signature, or figure of the inward spiritual world … Thus everything which is generated out of the internal has its signature; the superior form, which is chief in the spirit of the working in the power, does most especially sign the body, and the other forms hang to it …” (Böhme)

3. “The Most Improbable Signature”: Though we often mistake style for the signature, we always look, for example, for the signature of the painter or we hear the unmistakable signature of the composer. When a counterfeit deceives us, when it is so good to mimic the signature of the “real”, it is precisely there that the artist’s signature is most visible: the counterfeit doubles the original and repeats, in every instance, the gesture of the original signature, which becomes a transcendental (metaphysical and temporal) presence. This is why, for example, under the “hyper-reality” of free signifiers, the contemporary problem of “identity theft” becomes so problematic: divorced from the real our signatures are autonomous and effective without us. Yet the “I” of the signature is not only “peculiar and special” (Austin’s qualifications) in its use and function but in the very mode of its being (Derrida): “My brothers, here is the story I have to tell.” The “I” here does not precede its utterance but is the “I” that has and will always have said it. We can no longer say “I am not that person anymore” and, if we had never told our story, we would never have existed. By the very same act that we leave our mark, we are surpassed by those to whom it is addressed and, in this surpassing, they leave their traces on us.

“Others form man; I tell of him, and portray a particular one, very ill-formed, whom I should really make very different from what he is if I had to fashion him over again. But now it is done.” (Montaigne)

4. Under the imperative of self-knowledge, the reflective consciousness always looks elsewhere. Our understanding runs the risk of being the mask behind which hide ourselves. The paradox is not simply that, to understand ourselves, we must be understood by others (in language, in communication, in archetypes, etc), nor that self-understanding requires the non-coincidence of myself to myself. The question is not one of intelligibility (how I do or do not fit); rather we have an essentially ontological question: where there is a fragment of being, there is a style of being (Merleau-Ponty); or, according to the great Plotninian insight, being is an effect of expression and not its cause. In the distance between the determinate individual and the idea of that individual there lies the expression without which existence cannot pass. It is not only the “unity of a world” that I recognize as a style but without a style nothing appears at all (which is also why the appearance of nothing is itself a style). Appearance, however, does not require a “universal” style if every appearance is itself a style.

Being and phenomenon converge in style. As Jameson observes in his earliest encounter with Sartre, “consciousness is pure, impersonal; even the feeling of having a personality is external to it, a kind of mirage … Mathieu is a consciousness at odds with the problem of freedom: impersonal and absolute, what he perceives is an ultimate reality. There is no other truth of things behind his perception unless we make the leap into a second consciousness and its truth and world, the reality of his consciousness is limited only by that of others, and there is no privileged place where these worlds finally meet and correct each other and form a single objective real world. Mathieu is his situation, his reality is a constant present developing itself; but at the same time, above that present in places we find traces of older recurrent character problems that remind us of their existence before our attention to the present sweeps them away again …” But, as we have seen with someone like Littell’s Aue, it is not the case that “the reality of the novel does not exactly coincide … with the reality of the human beings which are its subject matter”. We say, for example, that the characters of a novel are always in their situations—in which they are the heroes, the victims, and the accomplices—but they lack the possibility of reflecting on their situations, which is the task of consciousness. Yet we know that our own reality never comes under the purview of consciousness, either (at best we retain such awareness as a possibility by analogy with the unity of God’s essence and existence).

In addition to a style of being, characters have a style of life. To resist the conflation of a style to a type or a category (which has especially befallen so-called “alternative” styles such as punk, the avant-garde, etc), style must be understood not only as the inflections of a language, but the creation of new languages. What matters is not the scene of thoughts—the fields and milieux in which they appear as concepts and systems—but their style. On the one hand, a style of life manifests in a certain power of doing and acting, of creation and generation, of drawing those famous “lines of flight” of which Deleuze spoke. We might, alternatively, call a style of life what Ravisson called “habit”, which is “the infinitesimal differential, or, the dynamic fluxion from Will to Nature. Nature is the limit of the regressive movement proper to habit. Consequently, habit can be considered as a method—as the only real method—for the estimation, by a convergent infinite series, of the relation, real in itself but incommensurable in the understanding, of Nature and Will”. We must, in other words, always “find our way about” even as we already know our way about. We are simply this self-transcending nature—that creates its own differences, variations, and fractals—but what we are only appears as an identity, i.e., in time as the point where being contracts into the singularity of a unique appearance.

“[S]tyle also uses its spur as a means of protection against the terrifying, blinding, mortal threat (of that) which presents itself, which obstinately thrusts itself into view. And style thereby protects the presence, the content, the thing itself, meaning, truth—on the condition at least that it should not already be that gaping chasm which has been deflowered in the unveiling of the difference. Already, such is the name for what has been effaced or subtracted beforehand, but which nevertheless left behind a mark, a signature which is retracted in that very thing from which it is withdrawn. Withdrawn from the here and now, the here and now which must be accounted for.” (Derrida)

5. If we have survived the destruction of experience at the hands of war, the viral proliferation of information, and the sublimations of enjoyment, in its continued destitution, what we require today is not only a style of life (such as some have called philosophy), which is manifest in our appearance, but new styles of thinking that are neither mine nor yours, subjective nor objective, mythic nor logical; not Greek but perhaps, as Rachel Blau DuPlessis says, Etruscan; whose matter and form are not only words but sounds and movements; whose task is not to think itself but "to sing its other" (Desmond); whose language is the regard in which we hold each other or the promise offered to a young child; whose vessel is the justice that continues to elude this world; that can construct a world from a single tear, a note, a sentence, a gust of wind or an afternoon storm, a one-way street, or a peal of laughter.

The many valences of thinking: Jameson (Notes on reading Valences of the Dialectic)

1. Philosophy has always been impressed by the strangeness of thought—that there should be such a thing in an otherwise thoughtless, irrational universe. Behind the usual invocation of the “strangeness of reality” in the usual self-characterizations of philosophy (especially in the banality “why is there something rather than nothing?” which is, more accurately, a theological and not a philosophical question), the real interest of philosophy in thought is in thought itself, whether idealist (what is thought thinking?) or materialist (how does thought think?), immanent or transcendent. In the case of the latter duality, the interest of philosophy has always been the abrogation of the unthinkable (for the transcendentalist, the unthinkable is thought “as” unthinkable). Insofar as the domain of thought is thought itself (despite the bifurcations of reflexivity), the only “strangeness of reality” to which thought is exposed occurs through the experience of alienation: that there is reality at all. For this reason, Jameson rightly charges that philosophy “is always haunted by … a set of interlocking concepts which are their own cause. This mirage is of course the afterimage of philosophy as an institution in the world, as a profession complicit with everything else in the status quo, in the fallen ontic realm of ‘what is’”.*

*It is for this reason, Jameson says, that the dialectic belongs to Theory rather than to philosophy. In an unusual slippage of terms, what Jameson really means is not Theory but, rather, praxis. As he says much earlier than the passage cited, “these unities of theory [small “t”] and practice are … distinct from the implied autonomy of the philosophical concept and cannot in any sense be completed by philosophy but only by praxis”. And in this he is surely correct.

2. What would be a thinking whose substance is the unthinkable? This question is not yet dialectical, for the unthought is in itself negative (the unthinkable is simply the unthought or the not-yet-thought) but does not, for all that, simply throw us back into thought (the thought that there is something unthought). But neither can we simply say that the unthought is the (transcendental) condition for thinking, for this returns us again to the absolutism of thought (i.e., the familiar lesson of negation as the figure of thought). The dialectic, therefore, is not another figure of thought; the dialectic is not a concept (it has no essence that can serve as the object of a definition); neither is it a method or a logic. The dialectic is in a sense a “pure signifier”.

Contradiction functions as the expression of the dialectic or, perhaps, we might say that the dialectic is expressed by the torsion of contradiction; whereas the task of conceptual purity is to deactivate contradiction and to protect the integrity of the subjective utterance against the shock of a real contradiction. Mediation, then, operates in both directions: although the result of mediations, in contradiction the subject finds itself in an essentially reactive position such that “self-knowledge is not really a knowledge of the self, but rather a consciousness of its situations, a way of gaining and keeping awareness of precisely that multiplicity of situations in which the self finds and invents itself”, i.e., amidst a complex of forms of appearance which are produced and re-produced as thought. The dialectic, then, accounts for the possibility that there is a form of thought that is not yet thought: “a speculative account of some thinking of the future which has not yet been realized … a way of grasping situations and events that does not yet exist as a collective habit because the concrete form of social life to which it corresponds has not yet come into being”.

Jameson’s name for such a thought is, as he had already said in Archaeologies, “Utopia”, for which he will give at least two equivalent formulations: temporally, Utopia designates the fact that the dialectic, if successful, will no longer exist but, for that reason, can never be successful (in a teleological sense); spatially, the name “Utopia” designates not a place or an ideal but “it expresses Utopian desire and invests it in a variety of unexpected and disguised, concealed, distorted ways” (hence in Archaeologies Jameson finds the figure of Utopia in science fiction, i.e., in allegories** of transformed worlds: “violent ruptures with what is breaks that destabilize our stereotypes of a future that is the same as our own present, interventions that interrupt the reproduction of the system in habit and in ideological consent and institute that fissure, however minimal and initially little more than a hairline fracture, through which another picture of the future and another system of temporality altogether might emerge”).

**This word should be understood as Benjamin would say it. Benjamin and Barthes are pervasive throughout Valences, but always by their traces.

3. Topoi: Insisting against a temporal thematization of subjectivity, Jameson argues for a spatial dialectic (the result of which must be some form of what he has called “cognitive mapping”) whose function is not to subsume the concept under the category (Aristotle, Kant), nor to preserve the consistency of relations in the absolute (Hegel), nor to reduce history to the battleground of an objective praxis (bad Marxism). The dialectic maintains the disjunction between the One and the Two through the excess of the One—not a becoming or abundance of the One but negatively as a void that maintains the gap between incommensurables: “this kind of dialectic is therefore not so much dualistic as it is revelatory of some ontological rift or gap in the world itself, or, in other words, of incommensurables in Being itself”. More than parallax (Zizek) or complementarity (Plotnitsky), what Jameson offers is the possibility of a new form of sensibility such that out of the many objective forms of appearance, new subjectivities become possible as appearances without ipso facto simply falling victim to false consciousness. For this reason, the question remains for Jameson what it had for Adorno: how is truth possible in a false world? Only if truth is that which cannot be thought. But the possibility of such an event is neither subjective—and, obviously, not a matter of will or intention—nor objective (since the real is precisely what is not true nor, strictly speaking, that which is inaccessible to thought—this is why, while the dialectic can be thought, in some sense, along the old lines of sub/object, it is best to consider “the dialectic” a pure signifier. Yet this too is not quite right, since the dialectic is not a logical principle, particularly in the legal sense that is necessarily beholden to the abstract universality of law (Jameson himself is explicit on this point). At bottom, the dialectic remains what it always has been for Jameson: an aesthetic principle—one that, if we follow his thought to its necessary conclusion, calls for the articulation of a new “transcendental aesthetic”, which, if philosophy is to have a future, must be one of its paramount tasks.

4. Why Althusser is worth fighting for: The dialectic, then, is not a principle of thought but calls for thinking: more precisely, it calls for what philosophy since Hegel (or, arguably, Plato) has always posited: the possibility of thinking something else. As Althusser famously said, “if … contradiction is to become ‘active’ in the strongest sense, to become a ruptural principle, there must be an accumulation of ‘circumstances’ and ‘currents’ …”. What we need to understand is the unfortunate word “accumulation”: not as a mere aggregation of contradictions but the topological relations of contradictions themselves (even as contradictions mark the limits of spaces), which results in the inexistence of the real—the fact that the real should appear to us as strange or perhaps even as erotically intolerable. In the face of the real, Badiou and Lacan have offered us a logic; phenomenology a method. In addition to these, what Jameson has indicated, even if he may not say this himself, is a correlative aesthetic; and for this, he remains, perhaps even more than Badiou, the greatest avatar of the dialectic today.

Vox populi: philosophy and politics

1. Those who would wonder about the political relevance of philosophy—for example, by insisting that there is such a thing as “political philosophy” or by puzzling over Marx’s eleventh thesis—decline to recognize that philosophy, properly speaking, has always been political. This necessity was not forced on it from the outside (e.g., by sophism) nor simply from the existence of doxa (philosophy is not the antidote to either of these). Rather, politics as a form of life issues a demand that philosophy ignores at its own peril on pain of its obsolescence—that its time should come to an end (without ruin and recovery, for such a task is precisely the work of the philosopher).

We find ourselves, however, in a form of life that requires a new philosophy. However we might wish to designate our form of life, what is at stake is not the claim of “the part that has no part” in the systematic exclusion from what is properly political from politics. Under the ideology of a sham liberalism (a sham because it does not exist), whose proponents have never been more vociferous in their affirmation of deliberative democracy, what we witness in politics today is not only the inexistence of certain political subjects but the unintelligibility of their demands. This inexistence, which is more damning than simple non-existence, binds them to existence only in the mode of being declared, by fiat, not to exist. What is at stake in the fight for justice includes the sense of that justice, for justice is self-compelling to the ones who have ears to hear and, as such, cannot be the end of politics. The ellipsis preceding the phrase “and justice for all” defers justice indefinitely, which can indeed come too late for the ones who never see it.

When a politics operates under a systematic principle of exclusion under the principle of universality (e.g., protecting the “basic building blocks of society”), what is required for the construction of the political (subject) is a new thought. Philosophy is not politics nor does philosophy give a sense to politics—that is the work of the political subject. Philosophy consists in the creation of new thoughts or, more precisely, in new possibilities for thinking. This is, for example, what Gödel would endorse in Husserl: “[phenomenology] is … a procedure or technique that should produce in us a new state of consciousness in which we describe in detail the basic concepts we use in our thought, or grasp other basic concepts hitherto unknown to us”. But, as we know, reflexivity in the phenomenological method does not merely “leave thought as it is” but, Gödel says, moves us toward a “higher” state of consciousness (ein höherer Bewußtseinszustand), just as we witness the development of a child. This is, of course, what he said in his famous incompleteness theorem: that thought will always have an exterior to its own (reflective) determinations. Whatever name we might give to this procedure (phenomenology, dialectics, etc), only when thought can come to recognize its own inexistence* can we begin to think what for us now is impossible. Such is the political task of philosophy.

*We might be tempted to say that thought should be “woken” (Kant, Lévinas, etc) except that we might wonder why thought should not be allowed to dream (Bergson, Bachelard).

2. Philosophy, therefore, does not begin from but moves toward the everyday and consists in the construction and subsequent deconstruction of the everyday. We know, of course, that there are levels of sense (for example, there is “common sense” but there is also eidetic intuition), but the topography of thought is not hierarchical. The word “sedimentation” is misleading if for no other reason than that thought does not consist of strata but of fields and their relations (which are given by transcendental logic). To give an account of “the everyday” is to give an account of conditions, i.e., the conditions for thought itself. Conditions, however, are causes, which is why thought operates under the hypothesis of universal determinism (which implies logical monism**). There is no “everyday” until it is identified under a matrix of conditions, just as we cannot be ignorant until we are aware of our ignorance. “Common sense” has no sense until it is constituted, just as thought is not thought until it is thought (this must be what Kant meant when he spoke of freedom from our “self-imposed immaturity and servitude”). The dialectical faith is that in moving toward consistency, thought will always encounter its impossibility. It remains to be seen how we will handle this limit; so far, our responses to these situations have not been encouraging.

**The either/or should not be understood as a binary operation (which is obviously true in the syntax of disjunction in logic) but as a categorical one: a sort of synecdoche for the category (not “either/or” but, rather, either/or/or/or/or …).

Conditions II

1. Why philosophy? What are the (material) needs for which thinking finds expression in philosophy? These may be political (e.g., Plato), religious, scientific/physical, etc. What is at stake is not simply the articulation of the philosophy of “our time” (as if thinking required stimulation by the environment). Even if such an account were possible (e.g., in a so-called “sociology of philosophy"), we are not asking “what” philosophy is but why philosophy? What is the wisdom we need, if ever there is wisdom that we seek?

2. Against the ideology of “eternal wisdom”—which in the name of a vague humanist subjectivity ultimately reifies thought into the most sterile objectivity—philosophy today is not merely an inflated commiseration on the injustices of the human condition. Modern philosophy exists as an account of conditions. The first step for the philosopher is not to ask “what is it?” but to notice that this object (thing, situation, circumstance, affect) is and has come to be. In science we would speak of causality and in mathematics we would speak of entailments: i.e., a physics of place, time, mode, and manner. But any account of how anything is is also an account of how it is not (in this time, in that place). A physics is therefore always a science of complexes. The philosopher asks “why this complex? why this combination? (gyms and rock music, suburbs and chain stores, fate and circumstance, guilt and punishment, science and technology)”. This account of conditions constitutes the theoretical component of philosophy; the practical, of course, is nothing other than the material performance of philosophy in the formation of the body or the corpus (which is not, of course, merely to speak of the biological body); finally, the logical component of philosophy is the construction of the thinking subject (i.e., thinking the conditions for thought). Broadly speaking, philosophy has three allies for these respective tasks: politics, aesthetics, and psychoanalysis.

Three (more) questions

1. Has any age ever known how to be timely? Have we ever been fit for our age or does our history always flee from its own consciousness? A “false historical consciousness” can take many forms; many of these result from either the confusion or conflation of natural and calendrical time—that the calendar is more or less a representation of natural time (the turning of the seasons, the revolution of the Earth, the phases of the moon, etc). Millennial thinking, as various historians have shown, is not the result of calendrical time but the reverse: the very notion of the calendar is grounded in millennialism.

Millennialism presupposes that we are never modern—we are never fit for our time because “the time is near”. But is not what has gone under the sign of modernity (which is often confused with post-modernity) in contemporary discourse, i.e., that claims that “our time has come” (the third age, the end of history, etc), not simply another (bad faith) iteration of this same schema? A secular redemption is still teleological. Or, alternatively, we are still not timely because there is no longer any time—we see this in the chronology of museum pieces, in the homogeneity of sense presupposed in scholarly citation and commentary, in the ideology of federal holidays, in globalization (where, incidentally, we can witness the extraordinary reduction of time to space), in the paroxysm of the avant-garde, in both the vulgar forms of relativism that masquerade as post-modernism as well as the post-modernism of pastiche (Jameson) and enjoyment (Zizek).

Nevertheless, to be timely does not mean a self-congratulatory imprisonment within certain “conceptual schemes” or necessarily any other variety of horizonal hermeneutics. To be timely, as Nietzsche understood better, perhaps, than any of his successors, means not to have a historical consciousness but a historical unconsciousness (Cioran demonstrates the malady of a historical consciousness unable to forget: the name he gives to his malady is “despair”). The task of a historical unconsciousness is not the constitution of sense but, rather, in the division of sense. In short, what Zupancic has called the figure of the Two in Nietzsche with respect to the psyche must be extended to history.

2. What is the task of criticism? At the risk of positing an “essence” of philosophy—which would give philosophy the unity of a discipline—at least since the time of Plato the task of philosophy has been critical.*

*This is not the best word, particularly since we cannot ignore its Kantian and Hegelian meaning; but neither can we say “political” since that word too is contaminated either by the Straussians (who claim that philosophy is inherently political) or by naïve conceptions of that in which “politics” consists.

We need not aver to the usual ethical readings of Platonic criticism to make the claim that philosophy is intrinsically critical (in Plato’s language, anything else is sophistry). Neither need we pay disingenuous homage to the usual banalities about Socratic irony or ignorance (Socrates is wisest on account of knowledge of his ignorance; the philosopher is the lover and not the possessor of wisdom, etc), which usually miss the point of the prefix phil- entirely (usually by confusing philia with eros and, additionally, confusing eros with lack). Neither, finally, need we appeal to the counter-ethical claim (for example, of Adorno or Mannheim) that the critical imperative is historical.

There are several ways we might express the critical imperative of (double genitive) philosophy. In metaphysics it is the non-identity of thought and being (what I have suggested might instead be called the ‘chiasm’ of thought and being); alternatively we might look to the material conditions of thought, the historical conditions of experience, or the topology of subjectification. (These are, incidentally, more perspicuous ways of talking about what in contemporary continental philosophy goes under the name of “difference”, which has the unfortunate tendency to succumb to questions about the “priority” of difference over identity and so on.) The task of philosophy is not to identify itself as criticism (under the name of “critical theory”, etc) but, rather, to perform this criticism. Critical philosophy cannot, without reneging its imperative, proclaim its intention to be critical (hence the question is no longer one of “praxis”) if for no other reason than that in doing so, i.e., in providing logoi of criticism, we presuppose the unity (correspondence, correlation) of thought and being.

Criticism is an imperative precisely because it cannot ground itself in an account of itself, i.e., a logos (which is not, however, to oppose language to a “feeling”). The critical imperative is not discursive nor, strictly speaking, practical (in the Kantian senses); the critical imperative is what might be called “affective”, which criticism has always been at the least. Even in common usage, what motivates the critic is a certain experience that by definition cannot merely be interior—judgment is always public (aesthetics has always recognized this since Baumgarten and Kant). For Hegel and Kierkegaard, criticism was thus not merely aesthetic but ethical. For the Marxists, criticism has, by extension, always been economic and/or political. These are, of course, external divisions of affectivity—i.e., the non-coincidence of self and other or of self to self, in short, the splitting of sense and non-sense. The fundamental question of criticism is how to handle this split—either to deny it tout court (first-order logic), to subordinate non-sense to sense, or to tarry at the limit of sense (what goes under the name of “experimentation”, the event, undecidability, etc).

3. What remains for phenomenology? From phenomenology to ontology: Phenomenology has never been what its Anglo- and psychological readers have thought it is—i.e., a first-person discourse. We should not be surprised, then, that the problem of appearances could not be settled without an account of the divisions within appearances not merely in their modes but in their logic (Husserl the mathematician was well aware of this problem from the 1920s on, quite independent of the encounter with Heidegger and well before the usual identification of the “turn” in the 1930s).

From ontology to …: To what? to history, to life, to science, to the unconscious, to givenness, and so on, whether through mathematics, structuralism, etc. In any case, the question remains: what is left for phenomenology as such, particularly insofar as it gets recalled amidst these other discourses as an appeal to “conscious experience” (has there been anything else that phenomenology has not been)? Of what value is phenomenology to us as a method if its concerns have thrown us outside of consciousness (and not just phenomenology but insofar as the technical world continues to encroach on the interiority of consciousness—even a discourse on consciousness can no longer rely on the reduction)? Without method, do we still have the right to use the name “phenomenology”? Is phenomenology the only available discourse on consciousness (even presupposing that such a discourse still carries purchase), or is phenomenology still guilty of wedding consciousness to a certain (viz., transcendental) conception of subjectivity?

Philosophy as performance

1. “Be no one’s disciple”—should we be surprised that Nietzsche, Marion, and Deleuze have all said this? But is this not an impossible imperative? Are we to respond to this imperative qua imperative? But, if so, do we not thereby violate it?

The impossibility of this statement, however, is not the reason we have failed to meet it, for then we would have had to understand what it would mean. If we had indeed understood it, we would not be faced as we are by the figure of the sycophant. The sycophant is to the disciple what the sophist has been to the philosopher: he is the one for whom the master has set the agenda. The task of the philosopher is to give the “Hegelian reading” of anyone or anything else, or to demonstrate that Althusser says it better than Foucault.

2. It has often been said that the discipline of philosophy is masturbatory—the ideology of philosophy according to which philosophy is itself the unconditioned (with which it competes with myth to seek) at best leaves the rest of the world alone and, at worst, banishes it from its domain (as body, as material, as phenomena, as science, etc). The philosopher needs no scientific knowledge to condemn science as techne, for example, since scientific knowledge qua science is “empirical”.

Yet this is not quite right. Philosophy is masturbatory insofar as it is narcissistic. Narcissus’ sexuality requires dislocation for him to be the object of his own desire. In philosophy this takes the form of the bibliography.

3. What, then, is the alternative? Are we faced with an impossible imperative? We do impossible things all the time, however: we love another, we move beyond the death of a parent, we make a promise, we overlook an offense to our pride. What does it take to do these things? It is precisely what is required to perform the image of thought.

Persistent mistakes

For those of us who are opposed to any of the “standard” or “traditional” readings of philosophy, the most important question to ask is not why these readings are deficient but whence they come and why they persist. They are reproduced, harmlessly we say, in every intro class where we speak of Plato, the Apology, and the Republic as one of two things: either as an encomium of the “life of the mind” or, alternately, as the politicization of philosophy. Both of these alternatives make the mistake of trying to demonstrate in a world of technology that philosophy is “relevant”.

We can make philosophy relevant to the world through “critical thinking”, through politics, by training scientists and doctors to be “ethical”, etc. Philosophy then becomes procedure, i.e., formal. Or, we make philosophy relevant to “the human” by reducing philosophy to content—to the “eternal questions”.

On the other hand, we can make philosophy irrelevant to the world—by confining the realm of philosophy to “thinking about thinking”—by attempting to make philosophy relevant to itself.

These are both the fundamental mistakes of the philosophical institution (by means of a mistaken reading of Plato), which results in the familiar inanity of philosophical writing and discourse.