Tomorrow the Manifold: Essays on Foucault, Anarchy, and the Singularization to Come 3035800995, 9783035800999

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Reiner Schürmann Tomorrow the Manifold Essays on Foucault, Anarchy, and the Singularization to Come

Edited by Malte Fabian Rauch and Nicolas Schneider

DIAPHANES

Reiner Schürmann Selected Writings and Lecture Notes Edited by Francesco Guercio, Michael Heitz, Malte Fabian Rauch, and Nicolas Schneider

1st edition ISBN 978-3-0358-0099-9 © diaphanes, Zurich 2019 All rights reserved.

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Table of Contents

On Constituting Oneself an Anarchistic Subject 7 “What Must I Do?” at the End of Metaphysics: Ethical Norms and the Hypothesis of a Historical Closure 31 Modernity: The Last Epoch in a Closed History? 55 Legislation-Transgression: Strategies and Counter-Strategies in the Transcendental Justification of Norms 77 Ultimate Double Binds 121

Malte Fabian Rauch and Nicolas Schneider Of Peremption and Insurrection: Reiner Schürmann’s Encounter with Michel Foucault 151

Acknowledgments 183

On Constituting Oneself an Anarchistic Subject

It is not power, but the subject, which is the general theme of my research.1

There exists a common opinion about the place of the human subject in Foucault’s work, an opinion he himself has done much to enforce. So as to skirt both humanist and structuralist invariables, he proposes an archaeology-genealogy to trace shifting configurations of knowledge and power. To be sure, the human subject does appear in these configurations, but they are what assigns the subject its place: a variable in discursive regularities, a product of power strategies. According to this opinion, most definitely dislodged from inquiry is the practical subject: I constituting myself as an actor in the midst of other actors. Whatever variant of Foucault’s archaeology-genealogy one examines, the practical I does not fare well indeed. As “man” in the modern episteme, it is greeted with a “philosophical laugh”2 and compared to “a figure drawn in sand at the edge of the sea,” soon to be erased.3 As the originary maker of events, it is dethroned by the discovery of epistemic and power arrangements in history that undergo incessant mutations. It has been an obsession typical of

1 Michel Foucault, “Why Study Power: The Question of the Subject,” in Hubert F. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 209. 2 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, trans. Alan M. Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1973), p. 343. 3 Ibid., p. 387.

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the nineteenth century “to preserve, against all decenterings, the sovereignty of the subject.” There can be no meaningful—that is to say, linear—history without the subject as its enduring agent and its synthetic bestower of meaning. “Continuous history is the indispensable correlative of the founding function of the subject.” Hence some tears are bound to be shed when thresholds and breaks are discovered in the formation of our past: “What is being bewailed with such vehemence is not the disappearance of history, but the eclipse of that form of history that was secretly, but entirely related to the synthetic activity of the subject.”4 In his genealogies of institutions, Foucault attempts to show that the self-conscious subject has actually been produced by the conjunction of external powers such as solitary confinement, itself the result of economic conditions. In the first volume of his last project, the history of sexuality, the subject appears again as a product, this time of what Foucault calls bio-power. With tears and fears, then, the subject as reader discovers that this common opinion holds throughout all phases in Foucault’s writing; he laughs while we discover that our presumed sovereignty as conscious agents not only arises from policed discourse and the glare of the panopticum, but also that it may soon be swept away. Whatever the archaeological-genealogical perspective, the subject is fabricated from without. This excludes any constitution from within, or self-constitution, be it transcendental (as in Kant, via the act of apperception as the pole of spontaneity in object-constitution), or otherwise. There is a second common opinion which Foucault has also done much to enforce. It has to do with the very status of “man” as a figure hardly three centuries old and already on the verge of disappearing. In what sense can “man” be called “an invention of recent date?”5 Foucault is following here, with more fanfare and playfulness, a claim that has been made before him.6 It has to do

4 Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. Alan M. Sheridan (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), pp. 12, 14. 5 Foucault, The Order of Things, p. 387. 6 In a lecture course of 1943, Martin Heidegger said: “Modern man, who is barely three centuries old […].” Martin Heidegger, Heraklit, in Gesamtausgabe, vol. 55 (Frankfurt/M.: Klostermann, 1979), p. 132.

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with the epochalization of Western philosophy according to discursive effects in each of the languages in which it has spoken. Each language-age would be determined by one postulated center of signification to which phenomena have to be referred if they are to make sense. In the Greek context, this supreme postulate would be nature, in the Latin and Medieval epoch, God, and in the modern context it would be “man, that passing postulate.”7 Only as an imaginary, yet ultimate focal point for the very constitution of phenomenality can the figure of man rise and fall. That figure is an invention of recent date inasmuch as prior to the seventeenth century the intelligibility of things had not been sought and construed in relation to the subject asserting its central position by saying “I think.” This second common opinion holds that only for the cogito can the world become objective. Only as represented to the ego do things turn into objects and can nature turn into the ego’s other that is apt to be mastered. Individuals, too, fall under that general process of objectification and mastery. One has thus to distinguish between ‘man’ as the epochally organizing ultimate postulate, the ‘ego’ as effecting that centering and mastering, and the ‘individual’ as objectified and mastered (e.g. through the sciences of language, labor, and life, or through technologies of power such as those institutionalized in asylums, hospitals, and prisons). One has to distinguish, in other words, between the epochal, the transcendental, and the objectified subject. If Foucault’s genealogy consists in laying bare the modes of objectification and mastery, it seems that through the very logic of his argument, he commits yet another exclusion from the arrangement called modernity, namely, the exclusion of the ethical subject. The latter remains indeed outside the three notions of the subject just mentioned, none of which can generate statements concerning the way one constitutes oneself as the performer of activities or practices. Yet the self-constitution of the practical subject—in both its ethical and its political dimensions—takes on an increasing importance in Foucault’s thinking, even though more through hints

7 Michel Foucault, Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique, 2nd ed. (Paris: Gallimard, 1972), p. 582.

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and pronouncements than through methodic developments. Less than Foucault’s ipsissima verba, what calls for an examination is the status of the question, “What can I do?,” as well as the nature of the I that puts it to itself, and eventually answers it in acting. That question differs from Kant’s “What ought I to do?” on two decisive points. From the standpoint of Foucault’s light-footed positivism, the I does not designate in any way the autonomous moral agent, be it individual or collective (as when Lenin asks, “What is to be done?”). Rather the I appears always under the constraints that make up the apparatus (dispositif) of a period. The same positivism accounts furthermore for the impossibility to speak of an ‘ought.’ Policed as we are by discursive formations and extra-discursive power effects, one can at the most inquire into the very finite place left for the practical subject to occupy at any given moment. There is little that can be done in any historical juncture. What ‘ought’ I to do, then, is a question that presupposes too much autonomy in the subject, namely the autonomy of my giving to myself a universally obligatory moral law. Sheer structuralism, on the other hand, allows for too little autonomy in the subject; the early Foucault’s “philosophical laugh” disowns the very question of practical selfconstitution. With the recognition that his archaeology of epistemic orders remained steeped in the (structuralist) episteme of the day, there came a re-consideration of the many ways in which we say “I” and modify the I. It will be necessary first to inquire into the status of the question “What can I do?” within an archaeological-genealogical history. Then it will be useful to point out a few paradigmatic instances of self-constitution in the history Foucault has told. Lastly, it will have to be asked: What can I do in my/our own historical site?

“What can I do?” in an archaeological-genealogical history In the introduction to L’usage des plaisirs, Foucault opposes his archaeological-genealogical method to what he calls a “history of behaviors or of representations.” These latter narratives inquire into positivities: observable data in recounting what people have actually done, imaginary data in recounting what they phantasized they

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were doing. There are good reasons for surmising that this twofold rejection is aimed at Marx and Freud. Foucault’s own narrative is meant to trace the “problematizations through which being gives itself as capable of being thought and asking to be thought.” He wishes furthermore to trace “the reflected and voluntary practices by which people seek to transform themselves, to modify themselves in their singular being, and to make of their lives a work (œuvre).” Having reframed his earlier archaeology, he now assigns it as its subject-matter proper those problematizations, and having reframed genealogy, he retains as its chief issue those practices. The stratum of Foucault’s narrative remains that of a second-degree positivism: he tells the sequence, not of social or ideological givens themselves, but of the epochal webs within which they can appear at all. The archaeology is still meant to trace the discursive features of epochal apparatuses and the genealogy, their extra-discursive features. In his most recent project, Foucault’s claim about epochal configurations is however stronger. To be sure, following up on the Greek configuration as it gives way to the Hellenistic and Roman, and this in turn to the Patristic, still reveals how problematizations and practices have joined together to impose on people varying systems of constraint. But the inquiry into that sequence is now expected to yield more than insights into the birth of epistemic rules and strategic norms. Archaeology and genealogy bring to the fore “a history of truth.”8 There are also good reasons for surmising that the resemblances with Heidegger’s project of a history of being, traced through the epochal constellations of truth, is not fortuitous. “Heidegger has always been for me the essential philosopher,” he writes.9 The very term “problematization” recalls one of Heidegger’s technical terms in questioning transmitted positivities—in this case, the branches of “special metaphysics”—from a second-level vantage point, that is, in taking a step back from those received positivities. Even before

8 Michel Foucault, L’usage des plaisirs, in Histoire de la sexualité, vol. 2 (Paris: Gallimard, 1984), pp. 16–17. 9 Michel Foucault, “Le retour de la morale” (interview), Les Nouvelles (June 28, 1984), p. 40. [Dits et écrits, vol. 4, 1980–1988, eds. Daniel Defert and François Ewald (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), pp. 696–707; p. 703—Editors.]

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attempting to draft a “history of being,” Heidegger indicated such a step back in his book title Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics. To make metaphysics a problem, to problematize it, is to inquire into the conditions or grounds that make it possible. Likewise, for Foucault to step back from social and ideological givens to the level where they appear as problematic to their age, is to inquire into their constellational truth. He has no more than a rhetorical use, I believe, for the additional step back towards conditions in Heidegger, namely from truth as an epochal mesh in which things are given, to the “giving” itself. At least he does not follow up on his remark that through the received problematizations, “being gives itself.” But nor is the history he recounts the mere concatenation of material and representational facts. It is the history of the truth of facts, ‘truth’ understood as formed by intersecting strategies of discourse and power. Their effects declare themselves discursively in what one finds not to go without saying in one’s age; in what one finds problematic. Thus pleasurable acts become problematized in moral teachings. Effects of discourse and power also declare themselves practically in the way people use them to fashion their lives. Thus the same pleasurable acts enter the “arts of living” by which a man of the free class in antiquity conferred on his existence a certain style. The history of truth can be narrated to the extent that one discovers a sequence of problematizations and practices as well as displacements within that sequence. This reframing of the method brings the subject to the fore. Where constellational truth turns problematic and where that problematization translates into practice, it yields a “history of the subject.”10 As the bounds within which we stand inscribed become problematic and solicit a deliberate practice, the question, “What can I do?” is being answered. The status of that question in an archaeologicalgenealogical history is thereby made explicit: it is the question that deals directly with the limits imposed on an age by the prevailing apparatus of knowledge and power. The subject that says I here differs from ‘man,’ the ‘ego,’ and the ‘individual’ as defined earlier. It also differs from the illusory I as ‘author.’ The problematizing

10 Ibid., p. 37.

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and practical subject renders manifest the enclosure in which it is placed. Recognizing this, Foucault “has already called back into question the absolute character and founding role of the subject.” There is no deep originative self expressed in problematizations and practices. Probing the authoritative subject—both as auctor or originator and as holder of auctoritas, responsibility and prestige— loses its pertinence. What probings about the subject, then, are pertinent? Only those that thematize its insertion into an epochal order. One such inquiry has to do with the openings in which problematization and practice are at all possible: “What are the places in [discourse] where there is room for possible subjects?” This is the key question in any investigation into what could or can be done in a given age. The old topic of freedom, as well as the more recent topic of finitude are mere collaterals to the epochal topographies. ‘Freedom’ and ‘finitude’ paraphrase “the subject’s points of insertion” in an apparatus. Another pertinent question has to do with making instances of discourse and power one’s own: “Who can appropriate [discourse] for himself?” Or, in the Greek context of pleasurable acts: Who can ‘possess,’ penetrate, whom without making his life unaesthetic, ugly (as happens when a freeman “lies underneath” a slave)? In the modern context, not everyone can speak as physician, psychiatrist or judge, nor perform the corresponding acts. Yet another question has to do with the latitude of the space left open for self-constitution to the fullness of the given confines, since that space varies according to one’s own station in a dispositif: “Who can assume these various subject functions?”11 In an archaeological-genealogical history, the question, “What can I do?,” not only has the positivist status which implies that the answers given to it can be retrieved only through a (discontinuous) narrative. But furthermore the status of the question is heuristic. In the issues people raise about behavior that does not go without saying, the bounds of an age declare themselves. But its status is not an ontological one: no sooner made, Foucault’s allusion to being

11 All quotes from Michel Foucault, “What Is an Author?,” in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, 1984), pp. 118–120.

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is dropped. The bounds of an age are not determined by a “destiny of being” (Heidegger). Nor is its status transcendental, since that question inquires not about ‘ought’ but about ‘can.’ Yet it is a quasi-transcendental question inasmuch as it addresses the network of constraints that conditions an age, and investigates possible points of insertion. In asking, “What can I do?,” one then takes one’s cue neither from factual beings nor from “being as such,” but from the intermediary realm where orders of things revealed in problematized behavior follow one another. Although Foucault calls that diachrony of orders a “history of truth,” truth is nothing that endures. It is the mode of phenomenal connection that makes up an epochal net. But a subject can nevertheless constitute itself in agreement with its truth, synchronically opened. It can move into the space left for such self-constitution the way each epochal net allows for it. A subject can make current figures of discourse and effects of power its own or combat them; it can or cannot assume those subject functions. Through discursive intervention, it can also make its contemporaries feel the severe law of inclusion and exclusion. If the status of the question, “What can I do?,” is determined by the history of truth so understood, then one wishes to know whether or not—perhaps at certain turns in history—it would be possible not only to thematize, but to struggle against one’s quasitranscendental confinement to points of insertion in a succession of apparatuses. What are some past forms of self-constitution? Also, how can I constitute myself as a practical subject today? Could it be that today’s situation allows us to contest in practice that very premise of insertion into an apparatus?

Some past forms of possible self-constitution In his tightest commentary on a text—on those lines dealing with madness in Descartes’ Meditations—Foucault distinguishes between two textual “webs”: one demonstrative, the other ascetic. Without the demonstrative strategy, Descartes’ text could not form a system of propositions, just as without the ascetic strategy, it could not be called a meditation. According to the first way of

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reading, the subject is not implicated; to read, here, is to follow the sequence of discursive events, linked by formal rules, as they spell out an argument. According to the second, on the contrary, “the subject passes from darkness to light.” What subject? One that determines itself. “In meditation, the subject is ceaselessly altered by his own movement; his discourse provokes effects within which he is caught; it exposes him to risks, produces states in him, and confers on him a status or qualification which he did not hold at the initial moment. In short, meditation implies a mobile subject, modifiable through the effect of the discursive events that take place.12 The discursive events here are text-events, but the motility they entail, if they form a meditation, is located outside the text, in the meditating subject. The two strategies, analytical and ascetic, intersect in ‘me,’ as meditating. They are chiastic. The issue in Foucault’s discussion is that madness makes it impossible for the subject to effect a demonstrative meditation and, more specifically, to constitute itself as universally doubting. What is pertinent for the question of the practical subject, however, is that the truth asserted by the sequence of discursive events must affect the reader in a concrete exercise. Madness is excluded in the progress of Descartes’ meditation since, if he were mad, he would not qualify as a subject undergoing the trial of doubt. This does not entail that madness is also excluded from the demonstrative web. But there it appears as an object of knowledge, not as a threat paralyzing the meditator in his itinerary from opinion to doubt to intuition. The distinction between system and exercise introduces the practical subject at that very juncture of history at which both the archaeology of discourse and the genealogy of power seemed to have unmasked it: the archaeology, as a mere variable in shortlived epistemic arrangements, and the genealogy, as an effect of equally short-lived technologies of power. At the very beginnings of modernity, then, when “man” is supposed to move to the epistemic center and objectify everything around him, including himself as individual, the practical subject asserts itself concomitantly. It does

12 Michel Foucault, “My Body, This Paper, This Fire,” trans. Geoffrey Bennington, Oxford Literary Review 4:1 (1979), pp. 9–28; p. 19.

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so not by chance, nor accidentally. The point of Foucault’s reading of Descartes is precisely that the cogito, to be established in its supreme epochal role, requires a meditation. It requires a textual strategy that appeals to a mobile and modifiable reader, hence a subject constituting itself in an exercise (askesis) and in that sense as practical. What is the nature of the ascetic, practical I? Why is it necessary in establishing the supremacy of the ‘I think’? The nature of the practical I, just as the process of its self-constitution, plainly cannot fall under the Cartesian criterion for truth. It is in no way perceivable clearly and distinctly. It is not something given together with the intuition ‘I think—I am.’ In contra-distinction to the thinking I, the practical I is neither simple nor absolute, but “mobile,” which is to say that it cannot serve as a principle. The deductive method does not encounter it, be it as the starting point of an argument or as the conclusion. The practical subject is neither identical with nor derived from the primitive given—the cogito— nor is it ‘really distinct’ from it the way the body is. It does not fall under the alternative of a thinking versus an extended substance. This results from the contrast, which Descartes adopts from nonphilosophical usage, between dementia and insanitas. The first is a legal, the second a medical term. To be demented, i.e. to be without mind, disqualifies one from participating in a litigation. To be insane, without health, on the other hand, requires intervention on one’s body. Only the demented are deranged as persons, that is, in their unio compositionis of thinking and extended substances. What Descartes excludes in order to pursue his meditation is dementia: “But they are demented, and I would appear no less demented if I were to take their conduct as a model for myself.”13 Once established in its sovereignty, the cogito serves as the point of departure for all demonstrations. But it cannot in turn be demonstrated. It can only be established via a series of exclusions. Who is the agent

13 In the sentence that precedes, Descartes describes madness and its causes in medical terms: “[…] those insane people whose brains are so befogged by the black vapors of the bile that they continually insist they are kings […].” As he excludes madness, he employs, however, the legal vocabulary. René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy (AT VII, 19), trans. Donald A. Cress (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1980), p. 58 (translation modified).

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of such exclusions? Neither the I intuited with certainty nor the I composed of body and soul. The agent of exclusion can only be the meditating I. Its systematic necessity results from the way the cogito can at all be secured, namely through an intuition. Descartes trains himself toward that intuition. Hence the nature of the practical I: not anything given, but something self-given in the process of meditating—I as constituting myself as in my right mind. The practical I is not a substance, nor a union of substances, but entirely an act, a practice. As such, its self-alterations not only accompany the demonstrative discourse, they free the terrain for the intuition ‘I think—I am’ to occur. Foucault’s strategy in establishing the exteriority of madness (against Derrida)14 satisfies, among other needs, a heuristic requirement. It reveals that the status of the question, “What can I do?,” as well as the practical subject that answers it in doing what it does, is one of extraterritoriality. The “mobile and modifiable” subject occupies a territory other than syllogistic reasoning. But reasoning is its very way of acting upon itself. Through his demonstrative meditation, Descartes constitutes himself a rationalist subject. It had been Foucault’s project to analyze more recent ways of practical self-constitution. After his introductory volume to the History of Sexuality, he had planned to study in what ways what is today called ‘sex’ became endowed with both boundless manifest power and unfathomable deep meaning—in what way it became ‘sexuality.’ This happens during the nineteenth century (since the word ‘sexuality’ is itself a coinage of the early 19th century, the general title of the series was and remains as ambiguous as the earlier title History of Madness: Foucault’s point in either case was to show that madness and sexuality are precisely not enduring essences). For the archaeologist of discourse, sexuality in the nineteenth cen-

14 Foucault’s essay is a rejoinder to Jacques Derrida, “Cogito and the History of Madness,” in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1978), pp. 31–63. In this piece, Derrida criticized in turn three pages on Descartes in Michel Foucault, Folie et deraison: histoire de la folie à l’âge classique (Paris: Plon, 1961), pp. 54–57, not included in the translation of the abridged version, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Pantheon, 1965).

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tury was a golden topic since no one spoke more about it than the Victorian schoolteacher and the father confessor. For the genealogist of power, it was an equally revelatory issue since it allowed him to challenge the received ideas about last century’s repression and our century’s liberation. Indeed, the “technologies” of sex suggest that in modern societies power no longer operates according to the model of monarchy and its law, but as a productive agency, utilizing innumerable mechanisms, and through “a subtle network of discourses, special knowledges, pleasures, and powers.” The genealogist was to “conceive of sex without the law, and of power without the king.”15 As to the particular technologies by which we constitute ourselves subjects of sexuality, they were to be four: the hystericization of women, child onanism and the tactics for fighting it, the psychiatrization of perversions, and the socialization of procreative behavior.16 The three volumes, two of which have been published, look entirely different. In these Foucault analyzes what in a recurrent phrase he calls “the way one was to constitute oneself as a moral subject, [i.e.] to place oneself in the complex and mobile game of command and subordination.”17 The self-constitution of the moral or ethical subject is traced, in as many volumes, through the classical Greek, the Roman, and the early Christian contexts. Foucault thus not only makes up for his previous neglect of anything premodern, he also expands the archaeological-genealogical method. It is used now to “seek out the forms and modalities in which one relates to oneself, that is, in which the individual constitutes and recognizes himself as subject.”18 These three volumes, then, tell in detail how in antiquity, up to the Fathers of the Church, the self could shape itself through varying practices. They describe how the individual was able to situate itself within a discursive network and 15 Michel Foucault, An Introduction, in The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1980), pp. 72, 91. 16 Ibid., pp. 153ff. These four elements together constitute “a general theory of sex”—a phrase left out in the English translation, doubtless for its essentialist ring. 17 Michel Foucault, Le souci de soi, in Histoire de la sexualité, vol. 3 (Paris: ­Gallimard, 1984), p. 115. 18 Ibid., p. 84. [In fact, this quote is in Michel Foucault, L’usage des plaisirs, pp. 16–17—Editors.]

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a power grid. For each of the three historical moments examined, they answer with much detail the question, “What can I do?” What strikes one right away is indeed the inadequacy of the generic concept of “sexuality.” For the Greeks, the guiding representation for self-shaping was rather that of the usage of pleasures (chresis aphrodision, Plato and Aristotle); for the Romans, a more severe learning of joy (disce gaudere, Seneca); and for the early Christians, the flesh (sarx, Saint Paul). Foucault thus discards any unitary concept of sexuality. He seeks out changing relations between “the subject as a sexual agent and the other domains of life in which he exercises his activity.”19 For the Greeks, any answer to the question, “What can I do?,” remains inscribed among determinants such as the order of the household, the exigencies of dietetics, and the problematic choice of a sexual object—three domains of power relations in which the agent must impose his mastery. The shift to the Roman context does not add any decisive factors to these three areas of the free man’s supremacy, rather it “concerns the way the individual must constitute himself as a moral subject. […] The subject must assure himself of his domination, but the accent lies now more on the individual’s weakness, his fragility.”20 In the early forms of monasticism, those factors change again, as does the form of mastery. The one compelling struggle of the monastic subject seeking to constitute himself as moral, aims at perfect chastity. However, what strikes one furthermore in these volumes is Foucault’s very concept of the self-constituting subject, which ­ now turns into an invariable.21 There is the Greek, the Latin, the early Christian—and one may add, the early modern, Cartesian— mode of practical self-constitution. To be sure, the sexual determinant is not an enduring feature of the practical subject revealed 19 Ibid., p. 49. 20 Ibid., pp. 84ff. 21 Shortly before his death, Foucault stated: “What was missing from classical antiquity was rendering self-constitution as a subject problematical.” Foucault, “Le retour de la morale,” p. 41. [Dits et écrits, vol. 4, p. 706—Editors.] This leaves one perplexed since in L’usage des plaisirs he reiterates that just such self-constitution as a subject was at stake in Greek ethics. Foucault, L’usage des plaisirs, pp. 10–11, 33ff., 45, 50, 56, 73, 96, 100–103, 123, 154, 193.

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by the archaeological-genealogical method (which Foucault is far from repudiating in his volumes on sexuality), but ‘mastery’ certainly endures diachronically. From the Greek free citizen’s and the Roman magistrate’s dominion over their families and lovers, to the Church-Fathers’ command over the “spirit of fornication” (­Cassian), to Descartes’ exclusion of madness, a clear line can be drawn that exhibits violence as an abiding trait in Western self-constitution at least from antiquity to early modernity. In addition, that line substantiates what appears like an unstated premise in Foucault’s more recent writings, namely that the task as well as the possibility of shaping the self are constants. Despite the many instances of “displacement, reorientation, and varying accentuation”22 in the ways people have been able to act upon themselves, the subject as practical is not an epochal figure, one tied to a particular age in our history. Rather, it is always called upon to step into the narrow, shifting place left open by discursive constellations and power effects. Whether the violence of imposing mastery also characterizes what can be done in the age of closing modernity, namely our own, remains to be examined. At the risk of seeming overly systematic, in tracing the successive modes of practical self-constitution it is useful to speak of the “ethical” subject only in the Greek context. Originally ethos designates one’s dwelling place. The three aspects by which Foucault describes the Greek self-practice—dietetics, economics, and erotics—amount indeed to as many emplacements of the self. One’s diet of pleasures places one with regard to one’s body; moderation in one’s authority over family members and slaves places one within the household; and one’s respect for a courted ephebe—or, in the converse relation, the ephebe’s self-control in giving in to a suitor—determines the subject’s reputation and places him within the city. This bodily, domestic, and political stationing is the one originally ethical issue. The term “moral” signifies strictly the way in which a Roman fashions his self. To speak of mores (customs, usages, conduct) indicates a greater anxiety about the place of pleasures, with an insistence on restraints and austerity in the medical

22 Foucault, Le souci de soi, pp. 84–85.

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and philosophical literature that the Greek term in no way connoted. Self-constitution still means self-stationing, but the emphasis lies more on the sagacious cultivation of one’s natural dispositions: on one’s self-culture in the sense of colere, ‘tending’ and ‘attending to.’ Likewise, the “ascetic” subject is specifically the one that effectuates itself through the early Christian technologies of self-constitution. Lastly, if Descartes’ practice of a demonstrative meditation is at all to be read as paradigmatic for his age, then the “rational” subject is produced by a style of exercise proper to the beginnings of modernity. To be sure, this epochalization of the ethical, moral, ascetic, and rational figures of practice upon oneself must not be taken rigidly. On the other hand, and although Foucault does not set them apart, treating these terms as vaguely synonymous would result in blurring the very displacements in history all of his investigations were meant to dramatize. The term Foucault will reclaim for our own historical site is the most generic of the ones mentioned, namely, askesis, ‘exercise’ or ‘training.’ Augustine rendered it as exercitatio. In a society that tends towards global uniformity, asceticism will however designate something quite different from the mastery of appetites denoted by the Greek word; something quite different, too, from the cultivation of inwardness stressed by its Latin equivalent. Each of the phenomena designated by these ancient concepts entailed a specific anxiety. For the eromenos it was the anxiety of submitting sexually like women and slaves, while belonging to the class of free men; for the erastes it arose from the very fact of physical desire while teaching the soul. For an early Christian it originated, in Augustine’s terms, from the dialectics of rest: the heart would not feel restless if it had not already found what it seeks; yet, having found its peace, it remains restless still. In our contemporary configuration, askesis will again be accompanied by an anxiety. Locating it will help us specify generic asceticism. That specification will appear as one describes the struggles through which subjects can constitute themselves today.

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On Constituting Oneself an Anarchistic Subject

What can I do in an isomorphic society? “There exists not a single culture in the world in which it is allowed to do anything.”23 From selected moments in our history Foucault has analyzed the ever-shifting limits of the arena that has marked out in advance what we have been able to do. He has mapped the discursive and extra-discursive forces that have assigned subjects to a restricted residence where they could constitute themselves. Those heteronomous forces circumscribe narrowly the field of autonomous self-constitution. One cannot help inquiring about today’s constellation of heteronomy and possible autonomy: What do those forces allow us to do in our contemporary site? Foucault has not entirely neglected addressing this question, but he has done so in a rather programmatic tone. He states: “We have to promote new forms of subjectivity.”24 This implies a struggle that conjoins various strategies. In the subject, as Kant had already recognized, strategies of heteronomous and autonomous constitution intersect. The archaeologist-genealogist, however, no longer trusts that autonomous selflegislation can at all be universal. Therefore, he has to point out in the contemporary site possible modes of self-formation or subjectivation that are as positive as the modes of other-formation or subjection. The conjunction of constitutive strategies is more complex than transcendental criticism could descry since all forces of subjection are not imposed from outside the self, as are social domination and economic exploitation. To be sure, these have not disappeared from the Western world. But new forms of inner, although heteronomous modes of subjection have appeared as targets in today’s struggles. These are the heteronomous voices that tell us our identity. To learn from the soft sciences who and what we are, and to recognize ourselves in their dicta, is to interiorize power in the form of knowledge. Indeed, in saying—in acknowledging, confessing, “This is what I am,” the subject objectifies itself within itself. As

23 Foucault, Histoire de la folie, p. 578. 24 Foucault, “Why Study Power,” p. 216.

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On Constituting Oneself an Anarchistic Subject

cognitive objectification, interiorized heteronomy exemplifies the modern postulate of man’s central position in the epistemic fabric; as subjection under power, it exemplifies the modern version of the quest for mastery, the one diachronically abiding trait in our history until now. ‘Self-identity,’ endlessly invoked, thus results from interiorized, although heteronomous, subjection. Self-identity is selfobjectification accepted and enforced as self-subjection. A comparable chiasma characterizes the possible self-formation or subjectivation. Outer yet autonomous subjectivation—to Kant, a contradiction in terms—lies at the heart of what Foucault has to say about the struggle for a new subjectivity. The free citizen of the Greek polis, the cosmopolitan Roman, the member of the City of God in early Christianity, the protesting communities of the Reformation, Descartes as the spokesman for the early modern rationalist community (to which he proposes the exercise of meditation), Kant as the spokesman for the movement of Enlightenment,25 all constitute their subjectivities in the public sphere. Their autonomy is a possibility rendered concrete in institutions or networks: the bouleuterion, the comitium, the addressees of instructions or collations such as Cassian’s,26 the assemblies of reformed churches, Descartes’ audience of correspondents (Mersenne, Bérulle, Christina), Kant’s “reading public.” In none of these is the self-constituting subject a wordless one. It is not the decontextualized self of inwardness, but a self that becomes autonomous as it makes the possibilities that are held out in its narrow sphere of freedom, and epochally opened up, its own. As one discovers the sequence of foci in Foucault and follows him from the analysis of discursive

25 “When in 1784 Kant asked, Was heißt Aufklärung?, he meant, What’s going on just now? […] What are we? in a very precise moment of history.” Ibid., p. 216. One may object that Kant’s essay is more likely to raise the question of what is happening in Kant’s historical period, when read in French translation, Les Lumières (as well as the Italian Illuminismo), is a term that designates an age in modernity, while both the German Aufklärung and the English ‘enlightenment’ (at least when not capitalized) denote primarily an intellectual project, not a century—the eighteenth—in intellectual history. 26 See Foucault’s analysis of Cassian’s Institutions and Collations in Michel ­Foucault, “Le combat de la chasteté,” Communications 35 (1982), pp. 15–25. [Dits et écrits, vol. 4, pp. 295–308—Editors.]

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On Constituting Oneself an Anarchistic Subject

practices to that of the techniques of power and lastly to the modes of subjectivation or self-formation, one should therefore not suspect any topical withdrawal to the inner life. For one, Christian and post-Christian interiority prove to have been determined by heteronomous although interiorized, as well as by exterior although autonomous, factors. But more decisively, as Foucault analyzes the contemporary constellation of possible modes of self-constitution, the self is entirely inscribed in public struggles. New forms of subjectivity, he writes, can today be promoted in struggles against “power effects as such.” He gives a few examples and spells out some traits they have in common. Examples are the “opposition to the power of men over women, of parents over children, of psychiatry over the mentally ill, of medicine over the population, of administration over the ways people live.”27 Or, in a different enumeration of targets: “Family authority, the impact of the police on ordinary life, the organization and discipline imposed by [schools], the passive role encouraged by the press.”28 These lists describe particular and scattered forms of mastery. More decisive are the traits according to which subjectivity constitutes itself in these struggles. Here again it is necessary to go beyond Foucault’s scant remarks and examine them from the perspective of the quest for mastery. From the Greek to the modern forms of self-constitution, this quest had appeared as a constant. Gaining and preserving ascendency over the household, over the body, over madness had turned out to be the prime feature of the various techniques for shaping the self. Power effects do not come in the form of universals. Taken abstractly, authority and mastery do not figure among them. Rather, one has to ask: Could it be that today mastery constitutes a leading trait, no longer of the goals of self-constitution but, on the contrary, of its obstacles? This hypothesis can be verified along the two lines of subjection and subjectivation. The struggles listed are aimed at distinctively contemporary modes of collusion between power and knowledge. In that sense, they 27 Foucault, “Why Study Power,” p. 211. 28 Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, ed. Donald F. Bouchard, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), p. 218.

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On Constituting Oneself an Anarchistic Subject

exemplify a resistance, possible today, against subjection. What is being opposed are claims of cognitive ultimacy. The expert’s “That is what you are” thus stands paralleled with knowledge claims concerning the postulated standards, mentioned earlier, of which ‘man’ may be the last. The educator, the psychiatrist, the physician, just like the speculative metaphysician, postulate evidence that, as evidence, can only be coercive. A truth from the mouth of an expert speaker—“Remember that you are a teenager,” or “a woman,” or “a neurotic”—imposes itself. Proof of its power lies in the degree of assent and interiorization these truths generate. Such was the very regime of epochally ultimate referents. They gave the city its order and the subject its center. An argument a contrario to demonstrate that formal affinity between expert knowledge claims and metaphysical postulates can be made from the fate of the most obviously heteronomous agent of subjection, positive law. Its fate is probably not the same today on the European and American continents. In the New World, a sentence like “It’s the law” remains assured of a degree of interiorization and hence of fetishization that it has entirely lost in the Old. Few would disagree with Foucault that “only a fiction can make one believe that laws are made to be respected. […] Illegalism is an absolutely positive element of social functioning whose role the general strategy of society includes in advance.”29 Claims to ultimacy promote varying representations according to context. For the struggles in question, the elementary task consists, then, in detecting those fetishes artificially endowed with ultimacy, and to reveal how knowledge and power concur in them to subject the subject. What forms of subjectivation, i.e. self-constitution, are possible today? Foucault has been reluctant to name any, preferring to invoke “the right to be different” and to urge us “to imagine and to build up what we could be.”30 The general thrust of his reasoning is however not so difficult to point out. This can best be done by distinguishing between individualism and anarchism. 29 Michel Foucault, “Des supplices aux cellules” (interview), Le Monde (February 21, 1975), p. 16. [Dits et écrits, vol. 2, 1970–1975, eds. Daniel Defert and François Ewald (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), pp. 716–720; pp. 718f.—Editors.] 30 Foucault, “Why Study Power,” pp. 211, 216.

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On Constituting Oneself an Anarchistic Subject

The modern state, he writes, has placed its citizens in a “double bind.” “Never in the history of human societies has there been such a tricky combination in the same political structures of individualization techniques, and of totalization procedures.”31 Individualization designates not only the atomistic condition of life in modern societies, but more radically the immediate and intimate exposure of each to the state. The origin of the welfare state in the Christian cure of souls has been noted before Foucault. As the church was present to the conscience of each, so the state in liberal regimes is present to the life of each. With the institution of democracies, “power of a sacerdotal type […] suddenly spread out into the whole social body.” The double bind consists in the state’s charge to unify its members into a whole while organizing their every dimension of private existence. Under these conditions—that is, if the organizational-totalitarian bind accompanies necessarily the liberal-atomistic bind—self-constitution cannot mean enhanced individualism. This is already apparent on the cultural level: there is no safer formula for social isomorphism than to appeal to everyone’s particularity. In chiming one’s unique personality, feelings, tastes, lifestyle, and beliefs, one does exactly what everyone else does and so promotes uniformity in the very act of denying it. To individualism, then, Foucault opposes anarchism: “The political, ethical, social, philosophical problem of our days is not to liberate the individual from the State and its institutions, but to liberate ourselves from the State and the type of individualization linked to it.”32 Only on the condition of ceasing to dream about social megaunits will self-constitution be public and yet autonomous. “To imagine another system is to extend our participation in the present system. […] If you wish to replace an official institution by another institution that fulfills the same function—better and differently— then you are already being reabsorbed by the dominant structure.” Reformism pertains to the same cluster of phenomena as individualism, liberalism, totalitarianism. Remembering what has been said about ‘man,’ “that passing postulate,” one may have to add human-

31 Ibid., p. 213. 32 Ibid., pp. 215–216 (translation modified).

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On Constituting Oneself an Anarchistic Subject

ism to this cluster; and remembering the genesis of the modern state out of Christian techniques of controlling the soul, one may also add spiritualism. In all of these, self-constitution, although interiorized, remains heteronomous. What emerges as the gesture of a self-constitution that is possible today is the polymorphous fight against social totalities. “‘The whole of society’ is precisely that which should not be considered except as something to be destroyed.”33 The struggles mentioned “are anarchistic struggles.” What makes them such is not only the intended break-up of totalities, but more essentially still their polymorphous, sporadic, “transversal,” “immediate” nature.34 Foucault is equally explicit about the philosophical discourse possible today, as well as about the status of his own writings. Of philosophy, if it is alive, he says that it amounts to an “‘asceticism,’ an exercise of the self, in thinking.” In other words, quite as in the case of Descartes, philosophizing would be the very activity of the thinking subject constituting itself. But, given the loss of the ego capable of centering the totality of phenomena upon its act ‘I think,’ the subject that can shape itself today through an ascetic exercise will not be the rationalist subject. Nor will his thought-trains yield a meditation. They will rather yield an “essay.” This literary genus “has to be understood as a modifying trial upon oneself in the play of truth.” His own writings, Foucault adds, amount exactly to such an exercise. They have been a trial and have required asceticism inasmuch as they consisted in an attempt to “think differently.” He views, then, his entire body of studies, the ones on sexuality “just like others I have undertaken before,” as the ongoing “protocol of an exercise.” The philosophic-ascetic tradition so reclaimed is brought to bear on a new content, on one enduring issue: “It has been a philosophical exercise whose issue has been to ascertain the extent to which, in the labor of thinking one’s own history, one can enfranchise thinking from what it thinks silently.”35 At stake is the struggle against the very premise of unquestioned insertion in the discursive and power plays of the day. 33 Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, p. 233. 34 Foucault, “Why Study Power,” p. 211. 35 Foucault, L’usage des plaisirs, p. 15.

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On Constituting Oneself an Anarchistic Subject

What thinking has thought tacitly are the constellations of truth conjoined with the effects of power. We have been thinking all along what a given age has produced as its own heteronomous order; and we have been thinking that order silently, interiorizing it despite its heteronomy. If any autonomous philosophical exercise consists in “thinking differently,” then the required asceticism is a trial indeed—not only an attempt or essay, but also an ordeal. The locus of that attempt and that ordeal, the locus of any speech that “no culture can accept immediately” and which is therefore “transgressive,”36 is writing. Therein lies the kinship Foucault claims with Descartes, an affinity that his earlier remarks on the rise and fall of the modern postulate ‘man’ did not exactly foreshadow. Foucault’s trial, undergone in writing, has consisted in displacing the boundary-lines tacitly taken for granted, such as between the normal and the pathological or between innocence and guilt. In his archaeological and genealogical writings, he has exercised—both trained himself in, and carried out—the constitution of himself as a transgressive subject. If in addition to those writings one takes into account the sparse remarks on the contemporary site, one may surmise that constituting oneself a transgressive subject is or has been an epochal possibility available to cultures other than ours. Socrates and many others have stood accused of “thinking differently.” But what is novel about today’s order of truth and power is its trend toward worldwide homogeneity. The forms of struggle mentioned earlier pertain to that context alone. What can be done in such an isomorphic society, then, is to constitute oneself an anarchistic subject. Transgressions, Hegel said, are necessary essentially—not epochally—so that the law be possible. Anarchism, on the other hand, appears as a practical possibility only after the triumph of the modern state. The anarchistic subject shares, however, in the medium of struggle whereby both the rationalist and the transgressive subject have constituted themselves publicly: through “writing” or discursive intervention. Having studied the power effects of discourse, how

36 Foucault, Histoire de la folie, p. 578.

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could Foucault not have been deliberate about the displacements effected in the public sphere by his own utterances? The difference between transgressive and anarchistic struggles lies in their respective targets: for the transgressive subject, any law, for the anarchistic subject, the law of social totalization. That difference also points to the type of anxiety that accompanies the mode of practical self-constitution possible today. Our anxiety stems from the impossibility of postulating standards. In the concrete goals of his fights—penal institutions, the collaboration between the medical establishment and institutionalized ‘enforced interrogation’ (not only in South-American countries), etc.—Foucault stayed in agreement with ideological organizations and movements. However, he did not endorse the rationale for action of any of these. Why did he join their fights then? Certainly not out of some moral imperative that would be universally valid. “The search for a form of morality acceptable by everyone in the sense that everyone would have to submit to it, seems catastrophic to me.”37 One is reminded of Luther: “Here I stand, I can do no other.” As opposed to nineteenth century anarchism, the one that is possible today is poorer, more fragile. It has no linear narrative to justify itself, only the history of truth with its attendant history of the subject. But these are fractured by breaks. The transgressive subject still fetishizes the law in daring what is forbidden. The anarchistic subject echoes Nietzsche’s Zarathustra: “‘Such is my way; where is yours?’… For the way—that does not exist.”38 Anarchism through discursive intervention is a possibility today, but it is not an ought. To be sure, there lies a prima facie paradox in claiming that constituting oneself an anarchistic subject amounts to contesting one’s very insertion into a given arrangement of discourse and power: “The target of these struggles lies in power effects as such.” As such? Is it not contradictory to hold, on one hand, that there exists no Enemy Number One but only precise goals for skirmishes and, on the other, that the objective of contemporary struggles is to fight the principle of encroachment by which social totalities confine 37 Foucault, “Le retour de la morale,” p. 41. [Dits et écrits, vol. 4, p. 706—Editors.] 38 Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in The Portable Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Viking, 1968), p. 307.

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one’s life to a pre-set locus in their over-all apparatus? The impression of paradox diminishes if it is understood that contesting power effects “as such” amounts to the strategy of exposing them where and as they occur. Thus the medical establishment needs to be denounced “because it exercises uncontrolled power over people’s bodies, their health, and their life and death.”39 Aiming dispersed interventions at heterogeneous targets does not imply that any and all power effects could be excised, freedom fully appropriated, and everything enacted that “until now”40 had remained inhibited. To that liberation ideology Foucault opposes more modest tactics within reticular formations of knowledge and capillary strategies of power. Contesting power effects “as such” remains a piecemeal operation. It means intervening against ever new figures of mastery (which are not instances of any one Great Oppressor), starting over again and again, displacing coordinates of thinking as far as is strategically possible. The anarchistic subject constitutes itself in micro-interventions aimed at resurgent patterns of subjection and objectification. Does the project of drafting a history of the subject lend itself to the same essentialist misapprehension as the histories of madness and sexuality? Yes, if by ‘subject’ one understands the bearer of qualities such as consciousness and the agent behind such acts as reflection; no, if that history is read as an instance of the history of constellational truth, with its many diachronic deaths and new beginnings. For a culture obsessed with what is deep inside the self—hidden, unconscious, profoundly and unfathomably my own—anarchistic self-constitution means the dispersal of inwarddirected reflection into as many outward-directed reflexes as there are “systems of power to short-circuit, disqualify, and disrupt.”41

39 Foucault, “Why Study Power,” p. 211. 40 “Revolutionary undertaking is directed [...] against the rule of ‘until now.’” ­Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, p. 233. I take this ambiguous remark as a warning against utopianism, cf. ibid., p. 232. 41 Foucault, “Des supplices aux cellules,” p. 16. [Dits et écrits, vol. 2, p. 720—­Editors.]

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“What Must I Do?” at the End of Metaphysics: Ethical Norms and the Hypothesis of a Historical Closure

The nomos is not only the law but more originally the injunction contained in the dispensation of being. Only this injunction is capable of inserting man into being. Only such insertion is capable of supporting and carrying. Otherwise, all law remains merely the artifact of human reason. More essential than instituting laws is that man find the way into the truth of being so as to dwell there.1

These lines from Heidegger’s Letter on Humanism indicate how ­ethical norms fare in his general project of deconstructing metaphysics. They appear as conditioned by what he calls “dispensations,” Schickungen. This is clearly a transcendental move: Heidegger, in these lines, steps back from the fact of law to a set of conditions that make such a fact possible. What is the a priori condition of law in general and of ethical norms in particular? “The injunction (Zuweisung) contained in the dispensation of being.” Stated otherwise: the conditions are provided by the modality according to which, at any given time in history, phenomena enter into relation with one another. What makes a law presumably not only 1 Martin Heidegger, Wegmarken (Frankfurt/M.: Klostermann, 1967), p. 191 / Basic Writings, trans. and ed. David F. Krell (New York: HarperCollins, 1977), pp. 238–239; although for all quotes I refer in these notes to the published English translations, all translations are mine.

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positive, but also natural and divine law possible, is the constellation of phenomenal interconnectedness in which we “dwell” in a given age or into which we are “inserted.” It is “more essential,” then, to obey that epochal constellation of aletheia than to decree and enforce laws. Our primary obligation is, it seems, to the nomos as aletheiological; and our secondary obligation to the nomos as “rational.” The law as “artifact of human reason” reads like a barely veiled allusion to Kant and to the law that reason gives to itself. Are we to understand that the moral ought by which pure practical reason binds itself is as secondary as positive law? What is sure is that the lines quoted curiously turn Kant against himself. The distinction between nomos as a binding epochal order and nomos as an act of reason historically locates Kant’s quest for universality and necessity in morality. With Kant we had become confident that what is right and wrong can be discovered by any rational being; but now we hear that such trust in reason is indicative of but one way of finding oneself “inserted” into the history of being, but one way of responding to the “injunction contained in the dispensation of being.” If this is an acceptable account of Heidegger’s strategy in the epigraph above, one understands that the question, “When are you going to write an ethics?,” posed to him shortly after 1927,2 arose from a misunderstanding about the radical character of his undertaking. It is radical indeed because it amounts to uprooting a certain rational rootage of morality. And before lamenting a defeat of reason and a return of the irrational, it would be wise to see how such a subversion can legitimate itself. A first legitimation for historically locating norms and normative ethics can be found in the very content of Heidegger’s “turning,” Kehre, around 1930. What he discovered then was that being-inthe-world has a history; that the existential structures spelled out in Being and Time are not as timeless as they seemed there. The “history of being” affects all areas of life, the ones traditionally called theoretical as well as the ones traditionally called practical. The rule of norms has its history and so does the very quest for universal and necessary principles for action. 2

See below, n. 43.

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A second, and more decisive, justification stems from the subject matter that provides the starting point for the phenomenology of the later Heidegger: no longer our daily activities in a world made of things ready-to-hand, but technology. And technology as one era in Western history. Just as for Kant the point of departure is the fact of experience and the question of a priori conditions, so for the later Heidegger the point of departure is the fact of technology and the question of “being.” These two foci allow him to speak of technology as the end of metaphysics. And if it should turn out that this end may be described by a withering away of norms, in a sense to be specified, then the two foci compel us in turn to ask: What happens to the question, “What must I do?” at the end of metaphysics? And furthermore: What must I do at the end of metaphysics?

Epochal Principles and the Hypothesis of Closure It used to be the awesome task of philosophers to secure an organizing first principle to which theoreticians of ethics, politics, law, and so forth could look so as rationally to anchor their own discourse. These points of ultimate moorage provide legitimacy to the principia, the propositions held to be self-evident in the order of intelligibility. They also provide legitimacy to the princeps, the ruler or the institution retaining ultimate power in the order of authority. They lay out the paths that the course of exploitations and the discourse of explications follow, and they are observed without question in a given epoch. When questions are raised about them, the network of exchange that they have opened becomes confused, and the order that they have founded declines. A principle like the sensible substance for Aristotle, the Christian God for the Medievals, the cogito for the moderns has its ascent, its period of reign, and its ruin. We can trace the rise, the sway, and the decline of a mode of presence so instituted by a First, that is, we can trace the arche, the origin as the founding act of an era. We can also unearth the theoretical and practical foundations on which that era rested, its origin in the sense of both principium and princeps. But the question is whether we can speak of an origin from which has issued that very lineage of representations held to be authoritative, measure giving. Can we speak

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of a beginning and an end of the various guises that the awesome task of construing a “first philosophy” or “general metaphysics” has assumed? Is the disintegration felt in the human and social sciences an indicator that these principles have a pedigree, their genealogy and necrology? I should like to suggest that we may have more to gain from hastening the withering away of what I will call epochal principles than from attempts at their resuscitation. The first to draw a genealogy of those figures esteemed highest for an age was Nietzsche. In one single page he spelled out what has become the model for today’s deconstructionists and archaeologists of knowledge. In that one page, entitled “How the ‘True World’ Finally Became a Fable,”3 Nietzsche enumerates six stages of the metaphysical First. In each state the First served to regulate and sanction all things knowable and doable for a time, and through these stages it progressively exhausts itself in that function. These stages are: Plato’s “virtuous man,” Christian salvation, Kantian duty, positivism, the “free spirit” of scepticism, and finally Nietzsche’s own joyful nihilism, at which stage the “true world” has become a fable. What Nietzsche sees fading away is not just any one representation of an ideal, but the sequence itself of ultimate standards for thinking and acting. His “gay science” consists in saluting the “high point of humanity” when the old quest for an unshakable and indubitable ground has come to an end and when “innocence is restored to becoming.” This genealogy of metaphysics in Nietzsche allows us to determine a little further the concept of epochal principles. They rest entirely on the representation of a relation that Aristotle called the pros hen (relation to the one). They are an entity to which knowing and doing, theory and practice are referred as to a yardstick. I may add that in Aristotle the pros hen relation properly obtains only in the context of fabrication, in which all steps of manufacturing are

3 Friedrich Nietzsche, Götzen-Dämmerung, in Werke in drei Bänden, vol. II, ed. Karl Schlechta (Munich: Hanser, 1955), p. 963 [Götzen-Dämmerung, in Kritische Gesamtausgabe Werke, vol. VI/3, eds. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1969), pp. 74–75 (subsequent references to this edition will be abbreviated as “KGW”)—Editors.] / Twilight of the Idols, in The Portable Nietzsche, trans. and ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Viking Press, 1968), pp. 485–486.

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oriented towards the object to be produced and in which the “idea” to be realized in wood or marble serves as the working measure. From the Physics to the Metaphysics occurs that metabasis eis allo genos, that undue transposition, by which the pros hen relationship becomes the heart of any first philosophy and this first philosophy, a doctrine of an ultimate ground. Nietzsche’s genealogy also allows us to introduce another technical term that will serve to designate the locus to which our ignorance concerning morality in the social sciences points. This term is “hypothesis of closure.” Nietzsche’s genealogy of the “ideal world” operates under the hypothesis that the centuries in which theory and practice could be measured by some one ideal yardstick have come to a close. Hence the subtitle given by him to that page: “History of an Error.” Epochal principles and the hypothesis of closure constitute the two coordinates of Heidegger’s “deconstruction of metaphysics.” As is well known, at the end of the Introduction to Being and Time, he announced a “phenomenological destruction of the history of ontology.”4 Later he spoke of the “deconstruction [Abbau] of representations that have become current and empty [so as] to win back metaphysics’s originative experiences of being.”5 On the general project, he does not deny his partial indebtedness to “Nietzsche, in whose light and shadow everyone today thinks and poetizes with his ‘for him’ or ‘against him.’”6 The indebtedness is patent when Heidegger enumerates the epochal principles that in his view have concretely ruled over Western history: “the ideas, God, the Moral Law, the authority of Reason, Progress, the Happiness of the greatest number, Culture, Civilization.” But his indebtedness is patent also when 4 Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Halle: Max Niemeyer, 1941), p. 39 / Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), p. 63. 5 Martin Heidegger, Zur Seinsfrage (Frankfurt/M.: Klostermann, 1959), p. 36 / The Question of Being, trans. Jean Wilde and William Kluback (New Haven: College and University Press, 1958), p. 93. Heidegger spoke of “Abbau” already in the lecture course of 1927, Die Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie, in Gesamtausgabe, vol. 24 (Frankfurt/M.: Klostermann, 1975), p. 31. 6 Heidegger, Zur Seinsfrage, p. 43 / The Question of Being, p. 107.

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he places this sequence under the hypothesis of closure. Metaphysics is that historical space, he writes, wherein it becomes our ­destiny that these figures “lose their constructive force and become nothing.”7 Thus, the deconstruction is the method of laying bare the sequence of epochal principles under the presupposition of the hypothesis of closure. On this hypothesis, Heidegger is very cautious. His thinking prefers to move “about” the line that encircles the closed field of metaphysics rather than “across” that line (“über die Linie” in the sense of “de linea” rather than of “trans lineam”).8 Elsewhere, however, he clearly states that to raise the question “What is Metaphysics?” already amounts, “in a certain way, to having left metaphysics behind.”9 What counts is that the method of deconstruction is a topological one: it assigns us our place, namely on the borderline where “special metaphysics” is uprooted from “general metaphysics,” the body of human and social sciences from “first philosophy,” or still more generally, cultural discourse from philosophical discourse. It should be noted that the deconstruction remains phenomenological. The principles are not construed speculatively, but described as epochal forms of the a priori. This phenomenology is thus transcendental not in that phenomena are examined according to their subjective conditions but in that the principles provide the synchronically universal and necessary conditions according to which all that appears can show itself. This phenomenological method can be transcendental and yet at the same time antihumanistic for the simple 7 Martin Heidegger, Holzwege (Frankfurt/M.: Klostermann, 1950), p. 204 / “The Word of Nietzsche: God is Dead,” in The Question Concerning Technology, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Garland, 1977), p. 65. See the very similar list in his Nietzsche, vol. II (Pfullingen: Neske, 1961), p. 273. Heidegger’s technical term for these configurations is Prägung (stamp). “There is being only in this or that particular historical stamp: Physis, Logos, Hen, Idea, Energeia, Substantiality, Objectivity, Subjectivity, the Will, the Will to Power, the Will to Will.” Martin Heidegger, Identität und Differenz (Pfullingen: Neske, 1957), p. 64 / Identity and Difference, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), p. 66. The point is that, with “the end of metaphysics,” these epochal “stamps” disappear altogether: “The event of appropriation is not a new historical stamp of being.” (Zur Sache des Denkens [Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1969], p. 44 / On Time and Being, trans. Joan Stambaugh [New York: Harper & Row, 1972], pp. 40–41.) 8 Heidegger, Zur Seinsfrage, pp. 7–8 / The Question of Being, pp. 35–36. 9 Martin Heidegger, Was ist Metaphysik? (Frankfurt/M.: Klostermann, 1960), p. 9.

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reason that its starting point consists in a move away from man as constitutive of presence. Its starting point is, as I said, the discovery that being-in-the-world (or the “life world”) has a history. The point of departure of this entire enterprise thus is nothing very innovative. It is the very traditional wonderment before the epochs and their slippages: How is it possible to account for the fact that in the heart of an epochal enclosure (those enclosures called “polis,” “Roman Empire,” “Middle Ages,” etc., or, according to a scarcely more discriminating division, “seventeenth,” “eighteenth,” “nineteenth” centuries), certain practices are possible and even necessary, which are not possible in others? How does it happen that a Revolution was impossible in the Middle Ages, just as an International was during the French Revolution, and a Cultural Revolution was at the moment of the First International? Or, according to a perspective that is less alien to the question of the “principles” than it may seem: How does it happen that a Duns Scotus, although surnamed Doctor subtilis, could no more write a critique of pure reason than Kant a genealogy of morals? How does it happen, in other words, that a domain of the possible and necessary is instituted, endures for a time, and then cedes under the effect of a mutation? “How does it happen?”: a descriptive question asking for conditions of possibility and not to be confounded with the etiological question: “Why is it that …?” The causal solutions brought to bear on these phenomena of mutation, be they “speculative,” “economist,” or whatever, leave us unsatisfied for the very reason of the causal presupposition that they cannot situate, for this presupposition is only an epochal incidence of the pros hen schema. With the “turning” in Heidegger’s thinking, what comes to be first in the order of phenomenal constitution is no longer man’s “project,” but the modalities of presence, the ever new aletheiological constellations, that is, the “history of being.” Within the closed field of metaphysics, these constellations are governed by the representation of a most real ground. “The principia are such as stand in the first place, in the most advanced rank. The principia refer to rank and order. […] We follow them without meditation.”10 10 Martin Heidegger, Der Satz vom Grund (Pfullingen: Neske, 1957), pp. 40, 42. [The Principle of Reason, trans. Reginald Lilly (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1992), pp. 19, 20—Editors.]

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This is not to say that they have any efficacy of their own—an idealist construction for which Karl Marx already derided Proudhon. Each principle has had its own century in which to manifest itself. The principles of authority, for example, had the eleventh century, just as the principle of individualism had the eighteenth century. Consequently, it was the century that belonged to the principle, and not the principle that belonged to the century. In other words, it was the principle that made the history.11

No hypostatization of this kind can occur in the deconstruction because it remains confined to describing modalities of presence. These modalities have nothing noumenal. Nor are they empirical facts: the deconstruction is not an historicist enterprise either. Between the Scylla of noumenal history and the Charybdis of mere historicism, it follows the middle road of the categorial. Basic categorial features of presence that remain the same throughout the “history of being” are, for instance, in Heidegger’s vocabulary, “concealedness and unconcealedness.” But a historical deduction of categories would reveal more “pervasive traits”12 than these two. The word deconstruction has been popularized more recently by ­ eidegger Jacques Derrida.13 Although he is more triumphant than H about the hypothesis of closure,14 and although he adds to

11 Karl Marx, Das Elend der Philosophie, in Frühe Schriften, vol. II, eds. Hans Joachim Lieber and Peter Furth (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1975), p. 750. [Das Elend der Philosophie, in Marx-Engels-Werke (MEW), vol. IV (Berlin: Dietz, 1959), p. 134—Editors.] / The Poverty of Philosophy (New York: International Publishers, 1963), p. 115. 12 Martin Heidegger, “Etwas Durchgängiges,” in Der Satz vom Grund, pp. 153–154 and Identität und Differenz, pp. 65–66 / Identity and Difference, pp. 67–68. 13 Jacques Derrida, De la grammatologie (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1967), particularly pp. 21, 55. / Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), pp. 10, 37. 14 “Perhaps patient meditation and painstaking investigation […] are the wanderings of a way of thinking that is faithful and attentive to the world that is ineluctably to come and that proclaims itself to the present, beyond the closure of knowing” (ibid., p. 14 / trans. p. 4).

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this method a few useful concepts—logocentrism, difference/differance, and so forth—I fail to see how, on the issue of deconstruction itself, Derrida goes beyond Heidegger as he claims he does.15 The hypothesis of closure rests entirely on a phenomenology of technology that, for Heidegger, is essentially ambiguous. In the global reach of technology, principal thinking comes to its fullest deployment. At the same time, this climax may signify its consummation. To Heidegger the ambiguity of technology is suggested by Hölderlin’s lines: “But where danger is, grows / The saving power also.”16 Technology is essentially Janus-faced, looking backwards with the most rigidly principial gaze ever and forwards with what can be described as anarchy.

The “Principle of Anarchy” We are now in a position to look anew at the question What must I do? and at the way it is tied to the fate of metaphysics. If it is true that the question of norms depends essentially on a first philosophy or a critique of practical reason, on a critique of pure reason and if on the other hand, technology “closes” the era of such derivations, then technology places us in a peculiar state of ignorance. With the withering of ultimate principles, be they substantive as for the medievals or formal as for Kant, it seems that there is only one answer left to the question, What must I do?, namely: I do not know. Let us examine this ignorance. Perhaps it is not accidental or due to the lack of some specific power of insight. In any case, it can be paralleled with a few “confessions” of ignorance in Heidegger’s writings that will place it in context: The greater the work of a thinker that is in no way measured by the extent and number of his writings all the richer is what remains

15 Ibid., pp. 21–39,142, 206 / trans. pp. 10–24, 93,143. 16 “Wo aber Gefahr ist, wächst / Das Rettende auch.” Quoted, for instance, in Martin Heidegger, Vorträge und Aufsätze (Pfullingen: Neske, 1954), p. 36 / The Question Concerning Technology, p. 28.

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unthought in that work, that is, what emerges for the first time thanks to it, as having not yet been thought.17 The fact that the real has been showing itself in the light of Ideas ever since Plato, is not a fact brought about by Plato. The thinker only responded to that which addressed itself to him.18 The pluralistic character of the essence of reality at the beginning of modern metaphysics is the sign of an authentic [epochal] transition.19 What Kant, beyond his express formulation, brought to light in the course of his laying the foundations […] Kant himself was no longer able to say anything about. Generally, whatever is to become decisive in any philosophical knowledge is not found in the propositions enunciated, but in that which, although unstated as such, is brought before our gaze through these propositions.20 Like the works of Plato, Descartes, and Kant, Being and Time itself is traversed by something unthought or unsaid that is not due to chance: “Do not our own efforts, if we dare compare them with those of our predecessors, ultimately evidence a hidden avoidance of something that we and certainly not by accident no longer see?”21

17 Heidegger, Der Satz vom Grund, pp. 123–124. [The Principle of Reason, p. 71— Editors.] 18 Heidegger, Vorträge und Aufsätze, p. 25 / The Question Concerning Technology, p. 18. 19 Heidegger, Nietzsche, vol. II, p. 428 / The End of Philosophy, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), p. 25. 20 Martin Heidegger, Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik (Frankfurt/M.: Klostermann, 1973), p. 195 / Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, trans. James S. Churchill (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1962), p. 206. 21 Ibid., pp. 237–238 / trans. p. 253. The most explicit “confession of ignorance” in Heidegger concerns the question of politics: “It is a decisive question for me today how a political system, and of what kind, can at all be coordinated with the technological age. I do not know the answer to this question. I am not convinced that it is democracy.” (“Nur noch ein Gott kann uns retten,” Der Spiegel [May 31, 1976], p. 206 / “‘Only a God Can Save Us Now’: An Interview with Martin Heidegger,” trans. David Schendler, Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal, 6:1 [1977], pp. 5–27; p. 16).

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A very distinct ignorance, then, seems to prevail at the moments of transition between epochs, at the “decisive” moments (decidere, in Latin, means to cut off, to set apart). What if the avowal of ignorance were integral to the constellation of presence in postmodernity? What if this ignorance were so necessary to the contemporary order of discourse that without such a confession today’s social sciences would no longer quite constitute a text, a fabric governed by internal laws? The deconstruction cannot dispense with the assumption that an epochal discourse constitutes an “autonomous entity of internal dependencies” (Hjelmslev’s definition of structure). Can it be said, then, that beyond the empirically observable “loss of standards” today’s discourse about man and his doings is structured according to rules that are few in number, one of which directly concerns this ignorance? That this ignorance is closely interwoven with the texture of today’s theorizing because on the level of discourse it echoes a break, a rupture, a Kehre (turning) in the way things, words, and actions enter into mutual exchange today? In Heidegger’s own itinerary, the turning in his thinking is merely experienced as the reverberation of a turning in the order of things. As is well known, he describes technology as the Gestell (enframing). Referring to Hölderlin he can say: “The essence of ‘enframing’ is the danger. […] In the essence of this danger there conceals itself the possibility of a turning such that […] with this turning, the truth of the coming to presence of being may expressly enter into whatever is.”22 As we shall see, “the truth of the coming to presence of being” designates nothing more and nothing less than the withering away of the epochal principles; a modality of presence such that the “fable” of the ideal world {of} Heidegger’s notion of epoche is no longer necessary to give it coherence and cohesion. The “truth,” aletheia, of being designates the utterly contingent flux of interchange among things, without the governance of a metaphysical First.

22 “Das Wesen des Gestells ist die Gefahr...” Martin Heidegger, Die Technik und die Kehre (Pfullingen: Neske, 1962), p. 40 / “The Turning,” in The Question Concerning Technology, p. 41.

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As the ground recedes on which to rest a theory of action, the postmodern turning in the way things are present to each other must appear as the moment of the greatest danger. Ever since Socrates philosophers have consistently repeated that “virtue is knowledge”; that practical reason receives its architecture from pure reason; and that theoria, because it is what is most noble within our reach, prescribes the routes to praxis. But the method of deconstruction no longer allows one to claim that agere sequitur esse (action follows being). Even worse, it not only disrupts the unity between the moral or “practical” and the scientific or “theoretical” discourse, but by depriving thinking and acting of their model or canon, it renders them both literally an-archic. The method of deconstruction thus not only dissociates “being and acting.” It leads to the pulverization of a speculative base upon which life is to find its steadiness, its legitimation, and its peace. Deconstructing metaphysics amounts to dismantling what Kant called the “doctrines” of first philosophy. The deconstruction interrupts, throws out of gear, the derivations between first philosophy and practical philosophy. It does more than disjoin the ancient unity between theory and practice. It is the method of raising the question of presence in such a way that questions of action and morality already find their solution, their dissolution, rather, because the ground is lost on which they can at all become a question. To ask What ought I to do? is to speak in the vacuum of the place deserted by the successive representations of an unshakable ground. The epochal constellations of presence have always prescribed already, not only the terms in which the question of morality can and must be raised (ousiological, theological, transcendental, linguistic terms), but also the ground from which it can and must be answered (substance, God, cogito, discursive community) as well as the types of answers that can and must be adduced (hierarchy of virtues; hierarchy of laws divine, natural, and human; hierarchy of imperatives; and hierarchy of discursive interests, that is, cognitive or emancipatory). The deconstruction of the historical constellations of presence thus shows that one can speak of the closed unity of the metaphysical epoch at least in one respect: the concern with deriving a practical or moral philosophy from a first philosophy. “Metaphysics” is then the title for that ensemble

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of speculative efforts with a view to an arche for both the theoretical and the practical discourse. In the light of the deconstruction, that ensemble appears as a closed field. The hypothesis of closure or, as we can now say, of transition towards anarchic presence functions doubly (even though the opposition between system and history needs to be revised): it is a systematic closure, inasmuch as the norms of action formally “proceed from” the corresponding first philosophies, and it is an historical closure, because the deconstructionist discourse can arise only from the boundary of the era over which it is exercised. The hypothesis of closure confers its ambiguity on much of contemporary philosophizing: still enclosed in the problematic of presence, but already outside the fief where presence functions as constant presence, as identity of self with self, as unshakable ground. The hypothesis of closure also confers its radicality on the deconstructionist move: action bereft of arche is thinkable only at the moment when the problematic of “being” inherited from the closed field of metaphysics but subjected on its threshold to a transmutation, to a pass over, emerges from ontologies and dismisses them. If in the epoch of postmodernity (in short, since Nietzsche), the question of presence no longer seems capable of articulating itself as a first philosophy and if the withering away of epochal principles annihilates the quest for a complete possession of self by self, then in the epochal constellation of the twentieth century, the possible discourse about society, as well as possible action in society, proves to be essentially an-archic. “Anarchy” is only the complement of the two premises I have advanced, namely, (1) traditional doctrines of praxis refer this concept to an unsurpassable first science from which proceed the schemata applicable to a rigorous reasoning about action, that is, to moral doctrine; (2) in the age of metaphysics’ closure, this procession from, or legitimation by, a first science proves to be epochal, regional, dated, finite, and finished in both senses of the word: complete as well as terminated. Correlatively, here anarchy means: (1) The prime schema that practical or moral philosophy has traditionally borrowed from first philosophy is the reference to an arche, the pros hen relation. This attributive-participative schema, when

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translated into the doctrines of praxis, results in the ordering of acts to one measure-giving focal point. None of the continual displacements or transferences through history of this focal point destroys the attributive, participative, and therefore normative, pattern itself. The arche always functions in relation to action as substance functions in relation to its accidents, imparting sense and telos to them. (2) In the epoch of closure, on the other hand, the regularity of the principles that have reigned over action can be laid over. The schema of reference to an arche then reveals itself to be the product of a certain type of thinking, of an ensemble of philosophic rules that have their genesis, their period of glory, and their decline. Anarchy in this sense does not become operative as a concept until the moment when the great sheet of constellations that fix presence in constant presence folds up, closes on itself. The body of social and human sciences appears without a common discourse and action, without principle in the age of the turning, when presence as ultimate identity turns into presence as irreducible difference (or reducible only categorially). If these are the contours of the program of deconstruction, the necessity of an avowal of ignorance begins to be glimpsed; the very question of a norm-giving standard for behavior pertains to principial constructions. The most adequate expression to cover the whole of these premises would be the principle of anarchy. The word anarchy, though, clearly lends itself to misunderstanding. The paradox of this expression is nonetheless instructive, dazzling. Is not the backbone of metaphysics, whatever the ulterior determinations by which this concept would have to be specified, the rule always to seek a First from which the world becomes intelligible and masterable, the rule of scire per causas, of establishing “principles” for thinking and doing? Anarchy, on the other hand, now designates the withering away of such a rule, the relaxing of its hold. This paradox is dazzling because in two words it points within and beyond the closure of metaphysics, thus exhibiting the boundary line of that closure itself. The paradox that the expression principle of anarchy articulates locates the deconstructionist enterprise, it indicates the place where it is situated: still implanted in the problematic of ti to on (What is being?), but already uprooting it from the schema of the pros hen that was connate to that problematic; retaining presence,

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but dislocating it from the attributive schema; still a principle, but a principle of anarchy. It is necessary to think this contradiction. The principal reference then appears to be counteracted, both in its history and in its essence, by a force of dislocation, of plurification. The referential logos becomes “archipelagic speech,” “pulverized poem” (“parole en archipel,” “poème pulvérisé”).23 The deconstruction is a discourse of transition. By putting the two words principle and anarchy side by side, what is intended is to prepare oneself for this epochal transition. The anarchy that is at issue here is the name of a history affecting the ground or foundation of action, a history where the bedrock yields and where it becomes obvious that the principle of cohesion, be it authoritarian or rational, is no longer anything more than a blank space deprived of legislative, normative power. Anarchy expresses a destiny of decline, the decay of the principles to which Westerners since Plato have related their acts and deeds in order to anchor them there and to withdraw them from change and doubt. Indeed, “in principle” all men do the same thing ... The avowal of ignorance concerning the moral criterion for action in the technological age now appears more coherent, better inscribed, at least, in the general unity of the epochal texture exhibited by the deconstructionist method. If the question of moral criteria can become an issue only within principial modalities of presence; and if, on the other hand, the lineage of epochal principles comes to an end in the age of closure, then weighing the different methods of gaining objective practical knowledge about how we should live is a rather untimely way of looking at our possibilities and limitations. From Heidegger’s writings the inevitability of ignorance can be shown in several ways. First, and this is the best-known factor, it can be shown by the opposition between thinking and knowing. In Heidegger no dialectic links thought and knowledge, no synthesis makes it possible to pass from one to the other: “Science does not think.” This opposition, inherited from Kant, establishes two territories, two continents, between which there is neither analogy nor even ­ resemblance.

23 René Char, La parole en archipel (Paris: Gallimard, 1962), the title and p. 73.

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“There is no bridge that leads from science to thought.”24 We “think being” and its epochs, but we “know beings” and their aspects. There is a generalized ignorance, then, that strikes thought in all its advances. Heidegger so ostensibly invokes this necessary poverty of philosophy only because it is the lieu-tenant of a necessity within the “history of presence” (Seinsgeschichte). Furthermore, for Heidegger the matter of thinking is, on the boundary line that encircles a long history, to “repeat” or retrieve presence itself, to “win back the originative experiences of metaphysics through a deconstruction of representations that have become current and empty.”25 If this long history actually reaches its end, then in the crisis, the structure of this field gets out of order; its principles of cohesion lose their efficacy; the nomos of our oikos, the economy that encloses us, produces fewer and fewer certainties. The moment when an epochal threshold is crossed is inescapably one of ignorance. Finally, the necessary ignorance concerning moral criteria and their respective merits results from the constellation of presence whose dawn is described to us: cessation of principles, dethroning of the very principle of epochal principles, and the beginning of an economy of passage, of anarchy. In the epoch of transition, then, words, things and actions would come to presence in such a way that their public interaction is irreducible to any systematicity. This said and understood, nonetheless it must be added that the avowal of ignorance on the part of the deconstructionist is of course a feint. And one that is more than strategic unless the word strategy is understood not in relation to human actions and the art of coordinating them but in relation to the economies of presence. Then we see that there are strong reasons for feigning. Indeed, after having outlined the withering away of principles, it is difficult to avoid questions of the following type: How, then, is one to evaluate action at all? What is your theory of the state? And of property? And of law in general? What will become of defense? And of our highways? Heidegger, to stay with him, makes himself scarce. After one 24 Heidegger, Vorträge und Aufsätze, pp. 133–134 / Basic Writings, p. 349. 25 See above, n. 5.

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of the most direct developments of what could be called ontological anarchy expressed at this juncture by the concept of “life without why,” borrowed from Meister Eckhart (via Angelus Silesius), Heidegger concludes: “In the most hidden ground of his being, man truly is only if in his way he is like the rose without why.” The “without why” points beyond the closure; therefore it cannot be pursued. The brusque halt of the development. “We cannot pursue this thought any further here”26 as well as the feigned ignorance, is inevitable when “another thought” is attempted. To strengthen this point a little further: a life “without why” certainly means a life without a goal, without telos; also it is said that “in the most hidden ground of his being” hence, totally man must be deprived of telos. For man to be “in his way like the rose” would be to abolish practical teleology. It is clear that the objections rebound: But without telos action would no longer be action ... Indeed. Whence the necessity of the feint.

Anarchic Presence as Measure for Thinking and Acting The phenomenology of the technological “turning,” as it reveals the cessation of modalities of presence governed by epochal principles, entails a few consequences concerning the question, What must I do at the end of metaphysics? It is yet another aspect of technology’s Janus-faced character that we still cannot but ask, What must I do? and that at the same time we find ourselves unable to point to any ultimate measure for action. Technology, I said, is still a principle, but already a principle of anarchy. 1. The consequence that is easiest to see and perhaps easiest to tolerate is a certain breakdown in the received divisions of the sciences of man. The reason for this breakdown is however not the one that is frequently invoked when scientists complain about the impermeability of partitions between disciplines, namely that man or human nature is one and that therefore the inherited division into 26 Heidegger, Der Satz vom Grund, pp. 72–73. [The Principle of Reason, p. 38—Editors.]

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fields of research is artificial. On the contrary, there is no unitary dream that moves the phenomenological deconstruction the way I have tried to outline it. The figure of “man” as one is precisely the chief epochal principle instituted with the Socratic turn, the turn due to which “the specific feature of all metaphysics consists in its being ‘humanistic.’”27 The properly principal role of man dates back still more recently, to the beginning of modernity: “modern man is barely three hundred years old.”28 With the turn out of the epochal, principial, metaphysical, and that is to say humanistic, history, man as one can no longer serve as the measure for discourse in the sciences called social and human. It is therefore not the unitary figure of man that leads to the observation that with the technological age, life is reified according to economical, sociological, anthropological, and other perspectives. The partitions are artificial not because this subject matter is ultimately simple but because, once the epoche is overcome, it appears on the contrary as irreducibly multiple. 2. A subject matter so irreducibly multiple requires multiple modes of discourse. “Only a manifold thinking will succeed in entering the discourse that corresponds to the ‘matter’ of that subject matter.”29 A “plurivocity in discourse” is required to respond to “the allplaying structure of never resting transmutation”30 in a modality of presencing no longer obfuscated by the “fiction” of an “ideal world,” that is, a presencing no longer “withholding” (epechein) itself. The ceaseless transmutation in the constellation of presence and therefore in discourse beyond the technological closure is what Heidegger opposes to the “reification” that he deplores in the social

27 Heidegger, Wegmarken, p. 153 / “Letter on Humanism,” trans. Frank Capuzzi and J. Glenn Gray, in Basic Writings, p. 202. 28 Martin Heidegger, Heraklit, in Gesamtausgabe, vol. 55 (Frankfurt/M.: Kloster­ mann, 1979), p. 132. This thesis has been popularized by Michel Foucault, Les mots et les choses (Paris: Gallimard, 1966), pp. 15, 319–323, 396–398 / The Order of Things (New York: Vintage, 1973), pp. xxiii, 308–311, 385–387. 29 Martin Heidegger, “Vorwort,” in William Richardson, Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1963), p. xxiii / trans. ibid., p. xxii. 30 Heidegger, Zur Seinsfrage, p. 42 / The Question of Being, p. 105.

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and human sciences. There exist not too many types of discourse about “man and his society” but rather too few. 3. The plurification in thinking and speaking as it results from the hypothesis of closure involves a subversion, an overturn (vertere) from the foundations (sub-) that does not stop with the mere wish for discursive proliferation. The domain most thoroughly and decisively structured by the pros hen relation is grammar. Metaphysical thinking has to be seen as the universalization of the relation by which a predicate is attributed to a subject. This primary attributive relation is what would have to be unlearned if the borderline of the metaphysical field were at all to be transgressed (that is to say, if metaphysics were to be “worked through” as one surmounts [verwindet] grief or pain).31 At the end of his last public lecture, Heidegger complained about the chief obstacle: “This lecture has spoken merely in propositional statements.”32 He suggests that all we can do is “to prepare somewhat the transmutation in our relation to language.”33 The difficulty lies in language. Our Western languages are, each in its own way, languages of metaphysical thinking. It must remain an open question whether the essence of Western languages is in itself marked with the exclusive stamp of metaphysics [...] or whether these languages offer other possibilities of utterance.34

4. The other domain, besides grammar, in which the pros hen relation has held sway without challenge is that of ethics. Aristotle enunciates the methodological teleocracy in the very first lines of the Nicomachean Ethics: “Every art and every inquiry, and similarly

31 The reference to the Freudian durcharbeiten seems to be implied when Heidegger writes that the surmounting (Verwinden) of metaphysics “is similar to what happens when, in the human realm, one gets over grief” (Die Technik und die Kehre, p. 38 / The Question Concerning Technology, p. 39). 32 Martin Heidegger, Zur Sache des Denkens, p. 25 / On Time and Being, p. 24. 33 Martin Heidegger, Unterwegs zur Sprache (Pfullingen: Neske, 1959), p. 267 / On the Way to Language, trans. Peter Hertz (New York: Harper & Row 1971), pp. 135–136. 34 Heidegger, Identität und Differenz, p. 78 / Identity and Difference, p. 73.

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every action and pursuit, is thought to aim at some good.”35 In all our undertakings, we aim at some telos. This reign of the end, couched in the question “What is the good for man?,” constitutes the guiding thread of all moral research and doctrine. Without the representation of a measure-giving end, no such doctrine can be conceived. But teleocracy cannot survive the transition towards an order of presence where “innocence is restored to becoming,” to the flux, to perpetual transformation. Heidegger proposes ever new concepts and metaphors to suggest this abolition of teleocracy in action. One of these is the metaphor wood paths, the tracks used for felling and cartage of timber. What is distinctive about such tracks is that they lead nowhere. “In the wood are paths that mostly wind along until they end quite suddenly in an impenetrable thicket. They are called ‘woodpaths.’”36 Like these cart tracks, doing as opposed to making when freed from the representations of arche and telos, would follow an itinerary that ends in the impenetrable. Another term in Heidegger to express the same idea is borrowed from Heraclitus. Human action, Heidegger writes in a commentary, would have to follow the sole movement of coming-to-presence, of phuein. Beyond the closure of metaphysics, the measure for all our enterprises can be neither a noumenal First nor the simple pressure of empirical facts. What provides the measure is the ceaselessly changing modality according to which things present emerge, appear, show themselves: “Human production espouses that which emerges by itself and addresses man. “His poiein takes the physis as its measure, it is kata phusin. […] Only he is knowledgeable who

35 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, I, 1, 1094 a 1, in The Basic Works of Aristotle, trans. Richard McKeon (New York: Random House, 1941), p. 935. 36 Martin Heidegger, Holzwege, p. 3 / Early Greek Thinking, trans. David F. Krell, (NewYork: Harper & Row, 1975), p. 3. Hannah Arendt, in “Martin Heidegger at Eighty,” The New York Review of Books (October 21, 1971), wrote of “thinking,” that according to Heidegger, “one cannot say that it has a goal. […] The metaphor of ‘wood-paths’ hits upon something essential” (p. 51). Elsewhere she developed more in detail the idea that “all questions concerning the aim or purpose of thinking are as unanswerable as questions about the aim or purpose of life” (The Life of the Mind, vol. I [New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977], p. 197). In formulations like this, at least as far as Heidegger is concerned, “thinking” does not designate the activity of the mind but stands for what he earlier called Dasein.

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‘produces’ in keeping with what comes forth by itself, that is, with what discloses itself.”37 Human action kata phusin, following the way things enter into mutual relations, would be irreducible to the representation of an “end for man” that sanctions the morality of his ventures. In yet another attempt at conceptualizing the overcoming of teleocracy, Heidegger quotes from Nietzsche a declaration of faith that directly contradicts the Aristotelian declaration of faith in teleology: “‘The absence of an end in itself’ is our principle of faith.”38 In all of these attempts at subverting teleocracy, what is at stake is to confine the rule of end to the domain where it initially and genuinely obtains, namely to fabrication. Aristotle’s Physics, ­Heidegger charges, is the “foundational book of Western philosophy”39 precisely because of the rule of end established in it is the rule of end that Aristotle translates into his key concepts of entelecheia and energeia. 5. To answer the question “What ought I to do?” thinking understood as pure response to phuein, to “coming-to-presence,” “presencing,” “appearing” has nowhere else to turn than to itself. Indeed, after Parmenides and to a certain extent against the modern opposition between subject and object, Heidegger holds that the basic traits of thinking and those of presencing are the same. As H ­ annah Arendt puts it: “If there is anything in thinking that can prevent men from doing evil, it must be some property inherent in the activity itself.” Moral evil does not stem from the election of some 37 Heidegger, Heraklit, in Gesamtausgabe, vol. 55, p. 367. 38 Friedrich Nietzsche, Der Wille zur Macht, in Werke, vol. III, ed. Karl Schlechta (Munich: Hanser, 1960), § 25; p. 530 [Nachgelassene Fragmente Herbst 1885 bis März 1887, in KGW, vol. VIII/2, fragm. 9 [123]; p. 70—Editors.] / The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1968), p. 18. Quoted in Heidegger, Nietzsche, vol. II, p. 283. On the absence of end (Ziellosigkeit) in Nietzsche, cf. M ­ enschliches, Allzumenschliches, I, §§ 33, 638, in Werke, vol. I, pp. 472, 730. [Menschliches, Allzumenschliches: Erster Band, in KGW, vol. IV/2, pp. 46, 375 / Human, All Too Human, trans. Reginald Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 28–29, 203–204—Editors.] 39 Heidegger, Wegmarken, p. 312 / “On the Being and Conception of Physis in ­Aristotle’s Physics B, 1,” trans. Thomas Sheehan, Man and World 9:3 (1976), pp. 219–270; p. 224. Cf. Der Satz vom Grund, p. 111.

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wrong end or maxim or principle. Hannah Arendt speaks of the “interconnectedness of non-thought and evil.”40 The measure for good and evil that thinking finds in itself is physis, the emergence out of concealedness. A measure, to be sure, that has nothing permanent. But a demanding measure nevertheless: “Thoughtlessness is an uncanny visitor who comes and goes everywhere in today’s world.”41 The contrary of “thinking,” then, is not feeling or willing. Nor is it the body or the animal. The contrary of thinking is hubris or adikia, “extracting oneself from the transitory while” and “striking the insurrectionary prose of persistence”42 which is precisely the chief characteristic of all epochal principles. What must I do at the end of metaphysics? Combat all remnants of authoritative Firsts. In Nietzsche’s terms: after the “true world” has turned out to be a fable, after “God is dead,” the task is to dethrone the many idols with which we still adorn public and private life. Or in the terms of the epigraph above: unlearn the nomos as an artifact of reason and follow the sole nomos as the “injunction” contained in the ever new “dispensation of being.” The closure of principal thinking can actually be seen as implicit already in Kant and as becoming more and more explicit with Nietzsche and Heidegger. Indeed, because the Kantian moral law is constituted or “declared” by the transcendental subject, its transgression lies ready as a possibility in its very legislation; even more, inasmuch as the subject is the “master” of what it enacts, the act of transgression is identical with the act of legislation. In Nietzsche the moral law appears as one of the obstacles that the will to power sets up for its own preservation and enhancement. The establishment of the 40 Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind, vol. I, pp. 179–180. Arendt describes the absence of any striking characteristic in the personality of Adolf Eichmann, whose trial in Jerusalem she attended, except one: “It was not stupidity but thoughtlessness” (ibid., p. 4). 41 Martin Heidegger, Gelassenheit (Pfullingen: Neske, 1959), p. 13 / Discourse on Thinking, trans. John Anderson and E. Hans Freund (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), p. 45. 42 Heidegger, Holzwege, p. 328 / Early Greek Thinking, p. 42. In the “fourfold,” on the contrary, “None of the four insists on its own separate particularity” (Vorträge und Aufsätze, p. 181 / Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter [New York: Harper & Row, 1971], p. 177). See also Hannah Arendt, Life of the Mind, vol. II, pp. 193–194.

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law is thus quite expressly already its transgression. In Heidegger, finally, the moral law has as its condition of domination the rise of principial thinking in classical Greece. As an immobilization of the flux of phuein, the formation of the moral law constitutes, here most evidently, its own transgression: a transgression towards that full sense of physis that Aristotle discarded for the sake of a “first philosophy” entirely guided by the representation of ends; a transgression, in other words, towards a mode of acting purely “according to anarchic presence,” kata phusin.43 The French poet, René Char, may have sensed this same withering away of any measure-giving First at the end of the epochal economies structured by pros hen relations, when he wrote: “Amont éclate” (“upstream bursts”).44 And he may have felt the same urgency of hastening the fall of what remains of them so as to set free a more originary multiplicity: “Cette part jamais fixée, en nous sommeillant, d’où jaillira DEMAIN LE MULTIPLE” (“That part never fixed, asleep in us, from which will surge TOMORROW THE MANIFOLD”).45

43 It has been clear from the start that the question “When are you going to write an ethics?” (Wegmarken, p. 183 / Basic Writings, p. 231), posed to Heidegger after the publication of his major work, arose from a misunderstanding. But it is only in his last writings that the issue of action finds its adequate context: the genealogy of a finite line of epochal principles and the “retrieval” of presencing as “an-archic” as well as of action according to presence so understood. 44 René Char, Le nu perdu (Paris: Gallimard, 1962), p. 48. 45 René Char, Commune présence (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), p. 255.

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Modernity: The Last Epoch in a Closed History? On n’est dans le vrai qu’en obéissant aux règles d’une ‘police’ discursive. One is ‘in the true’ only if one obeys the rules of some discursive ‘police.’ (OD 37/AK 224)1

In some of the liveliest circles in philosophy today it seems to go without saying that we are about to enter, or have in fact entered, the “post-modern epoch.” The classical humanist tradition is treated as a field of discourse coming to completion. As to the task 1 In the references to Michel Foucault’s works the following abbreviations will be used: For the works in French: Cr “Préface à la transgression,” Critique 195/196 (1963), pp. 751–769. [Dits et écrits, vol. 1, 1954–1969, eds. Daniel Defert and François Ewald (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), pp. 233–250—Editors.] LMC Les mots et les choses (Paris: Gallimard, 1966). AS L’archéologie du savoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1969). OD L’ordre du discours (Paris: Gallimard, 1971). HF Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique, 2nd ed. (Paris: Gallimard, 1972). VS La volonté de savoir, in Histoire de la sexualité, vol. I (Paris: Gallimard, 1976). For the works in English (I do not always follow these translations): AK The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. Alan M. Sheridan (New York: Pantheon, 1972). MC Madness and Civilization, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Vintage, 1973). OT The Order of Things, trans. Alan M. Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1973). LCP Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. and trans. Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977). HS1 The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1978).

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left to philosophers today, it is said to be limited to “deconstructing metaphysics,” that is, to describing—as if from without—the internal rules that have regulated philosophical discourse since the time of the Greeks. Modernity, then, would only be the name for the last epoch in what is alleged to be a closed history. The purpose of this paper is not to challenge this deconstructionist position. It is rather to show those conditions under which we could responsibly treat metaphysics as a whole, as a field. One of these conditions is that the deconstruction of metaphysics afford us an historical deduction of the categories which determine that field. And one of the consequences of such a deconstruction would have to be that it would allow us to speak of our own future in a way neither positivism nor Marxism can (to say nothing of linguistic analysis). As my starting point I take the epigraph cited above, from Michel Foucault. It is a radically anti-philosophical statement. Philosophical knowledge claims are said to obey the “rules of some discursive ‘police.’” It seems to me that such rules can be situated within what Heidegger called “the ‘destruction,’ which knows of no other purpose than to win back the originative experience of metaphysics through a deconstruction (Abbau) of representations that have become current and empty.”2 By taking this route, Foucault should emerge in a more philosophical guise, and, in turn, this deconstruction may reveal some of the rules that have policed metaphysics.

I. Identity and Difference in Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge In the context of the archaeology of knowledge, the necessity of the concept of “police” is easily recognizable by the way Michel Foucault defines what he calls his working hypothesis: “I am supposing that in every society the production of discourse is at once 2 Martin Heidegger, Zur Seinsfrage (Frankfurt/M.: Klostermann, 1959), p. 36 / The Question of Being, trans. Jean Wilde and William Kluback (New Haven: College and University Press, 1958), p. 93. Although I follow the pagination of Heidegger’s published translations, I have provided my own translations throughout.

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controlled, selected, organized, and redistributed according to a certain number of procedures” (OD 10/AK 216). These discursive procedures “rarify” discourse by excluding things from being said or subjects from speaking. There are, at any given moment, a great many agents whose conjunction produces the “discursive police.” What used to be considered the philosophers’ most shining phoenix, “truth,” is now placed within “a system of exclusion: a system that is historical, modifiable, and institutionally constraining” (OD 16/AK 218). The screening agents which exclude objects from discourse may be external to it, operating as a taboo, or internal. The internal agents, too, classify, order, and distribute all that can be said. The agents excluding subjects from speaking, select individuals according to competence and expertise. Truth now is the very functioning of this network of discursive procedures, the functioning of epistemic fields. There are many such fields, both following one another diachronically and intersecting synchronically. Speaking within one such network is to “be in the true,” être dans le vrai. Therefore: “One is ‘in the true’ only if one obeys the rules of some discursive ‘police.’”

1. Empirical Difference and Categorial Identity There is one question that must be raised in the de-sedimentation of these epistemic fields. In all his books Foucault insists on the breaks, the ruptures, the diffractions, the discontinuities between such fields. “The problem is to know,” he writes, “how they are distributed in history. Is it necessity that links them together, makes them inevitable, calls them to their right places one after another, and makes of them successive solutions to one and the same problem?” (AS 85/AK 64). To idealist constructions of necessity in history, Foucault opposes “the finitude upon the basis of which we are, and think, and know” (LMC 387/OT 375), a finitude in which there is no necessity other than that of the positive order of discourse which polices whatever can be said at a given time. To the idea of a necessary unity in history he responds with “a philosophical laugh” (LMC 354/OT 343). He adds: “It may be possible, however, to find (among these epistemic fields) a regularity, and

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to define the common system of their formation” (AS 86/AK 64). This does not mean that epistemic fields can be traced back to some kind of “origins”—and the concept of “archaeology” must not be translated as “discourse on arche,” on origin. Foucault likens his work to that of the archaeologist because his own deconstruction consists in taking away layer after layer of epistemic sedimentation. The one question that one cannot help raising is that of the One and the Many in this de-sedimentation; the question of identity and difference among the epistemic fields. We have learned from the Greeks that the manifold, as such, is unthinkable. A dispersion pure and simple of discursive positivities could never be gathered up, even in a genealogy. In Kantian language: of what is merely empirical, there is no knowledge. On the other hand, one would certainly let the positivity of discursive formations slip if one were to articulate their dissemination according to “the theme of a Contradiction uniformly lost and retrieved […] in the undifferentiated element of the Logos” (AS 204/AK 156). In Kantian language: of what is noumenal, there is no knowledge either. Between the Scylla of noumenal history and the Charybdis of historical positivism, the archaeologist traces the line of categorial “series.” Such series of categorial rules help to concretize Foucault’s notion of episteme: this notion defines neither a form of knowledge nor anything upon the knowing subject, rather it defines a system of categories that are historically, epochally, operative. The episteme, we are told, “is, for a given epoch, the totality of relations that can be discovered between the sciences, when one analyzes them at the level of the discursive regularities” (AS 250/AK 191). Thus we possess a first answer to the question that I am raising, the question of identity and difference in the de-sedimentation of epistemic fields. The differences among fields are positively irreducible, but not categorially so. I speak of “categories” here, neither in the sense of the metaphysics of the sensible substance nor in the sense of the critique of the transcendental subject. Rather I use that concept in the sense Foucault calls chance, for instance, one such “category in the production of (epistemic) events” (OD 61/AK 231). Holding fast to the categorial as the sole realm of identity in history, we understand that

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the fundamental notions now imposed upon us are no longer those of consciousness and continuity (with their correlative problems of freedom and causality), nor are they those of sign and structure. They are notions, rather, of event and series, with the group of notions linked to these, namely regularity, chance, discontinuity, dependence, and transformation. (OD 58/AK 230)

Once it is understood that the term “category” here is dissociated from its metaphysical appropriations, once it is “deconstructed,” there is no reason not to have recourse to such a venerable concept. One might also speak, in this context, of “fundamental traits” or of “guiding traits,” as Heidegger does in his own program of “deconstruction.” Much is gained once the realm of the categorial is discovered as the site upon which is located what remains the same throughout history: nothing remains the same, yet the dispersion of epistemic events can be described through formal traits, or rules. There are four such classes of categories in Foucault’s archaeology of knowledge, dealing respectively with the formation of objects, the formation of the subjective positions, the formation of concepts, and the formation of what he calls strategic choices. These four classes of categories “correspond to the four domains in which the enunciative function operates” (AS 152/AK 116); that is to say, they articulate, they cut into, the vast mass of what has been said over the centuries, so as to uncover “objects, statements, concepts and choices” (AS 95/ AK 72). These classes of categories remain the same, whether one traces the shift from “the analysis of wealth” to “political economy,” or the “birth of the clinic,” or whether one shows that “sexuality is originarily, historically, bourgeois” (VS 168).

2. The History of Philosophy as a Discursive “Series” Discourse, thus, is not a new version of a self-same Subject of history; what remains identical throughout the ages are merely “traits” or categories. Once this is recognized, the question of the One and the Many rebounds, however. For the second step, it is necessary to distinguish between two types of description within the general

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program of archaeology, viz. critical description and genealogical description. Critical description traces the forms of exclusion, of rarefaction of discourse; it traces the ways in which statements, over the ages, have obeyed the “discursive ‘police.’” Genealogical description, on the other hand, shows how discursive formations affirmed themselves, how one could be “in the true,” in spite of, or even with the aid of, these systems of constraint. By critical description the archaeologist of knowledge “recognizes the negative play of excision and rarefaction of discourse” (OD 54/AK 229). It is in this line that Foucault can operate as the historian of a number of phenomena neglected by the so-called human and social sciences, such as madness, disease, criminality and sexuality. By genealogical description, the archaeologist traces “the spontaneous emergence of discourse which immediately […] finds itself submitted to selection and control” (OD 68/AK 233). Genealogical description treats the transmitted positivities of discourse as discontinuous practices, as violent impositions of an order upon things, as series of chance events. To complement the genealogical description with the critical description is to show, once again, that one can only be “in the true” by obeying the rules of a great many authorities; that discourse can only affirm itself as already muzzled. For this second approach to the play of identity and difference I should like to single out one domain of positivities which Foucault has actually said very little about, that is, the history of philosophy. The question now is the following: if the statements made in this particular series of fields and folds also were “in the true” insofar as they obeyed some “discursive ‘police,’” how do critique and genealogy apply in this domain? Which would be the categories that would allow us to deconstruct that particular history archaeologically? The question of categories arises inevitably, as I have tried to show, if one is to keep the middle road between idealism and historicism. On the other hand, the four categories mentioned above—objects, subjective positions, concepts, and strategies—are too general since they apply by definition to all and any discursive series. Quite as Foucault describes, for instance, the classical theory of language as analyzing discourse according to proposition, articulation, designation, and derivation, one would have to ask: is

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it possible to isolate traits that apply to that particular formation of discourse which is the history of philosophy? A first answer easily comes to mind: philosophy enters, at every epoch, into the prevailing system of discourse. Thus “Descartes’ itinerary of doubt,” we are told, “is the great exorcism of m ­ adness. Descartes closes his eyes and plugs up his ears to better see the true brightness of essential daylight; thus he is secured against the dazzlement of the madman” (HF 262/MC 108). Such exorcism of madness is but one facet of the rising age of man, which is—at least according to Foucault’s early books—the age of reason, of consciousness, of dialectics. The Cartesian exorcism of madness thus would only be the counter-part to the incipient age of reason. Similarly, Marxism arises within a new disposition of knowledge: “it found its place without difficulty […] within an epistemological arrangement that welcomed it gladly, since it was this arrangement that was in fact making room for it. […] Marxism exists in nineteenth century thought like a fish in water” (LMC 274/OT 261f.). One could generalize and draw the conclusion—which is not exactly unheard-of prior to Foucault—that the philosophical discourse obeys, in any given epoch, the same order of objects, of enunciative modalities, of concepts, and of strategies as any other discursive formation made possible by an epochal episteme. At least from the point of view of later writings, however, this is an inaccurate conclusion since in the Archaeology of Knowledge, discursive practices constitute series, not epochs, and since the archaeological de-sedimentation exhibits several such discursive series as co-existing, intermingling. To speak of an “age, e.g. the ‘classical age,’” then, is to speak of “a tangle of continuities and discontinuities,” but “the ‘epoch’ is neither the basic unity (of archaeology), nor its horizon, nor its object” (AS 230/AK 176). A synchronic cut into the episteme resembles an archaeological drill: laying bare a multiplicity of discursive series, which may be of different length. For instance, the discursive series called psychoanalysis is, diachronically, shorter than the discursive series that stretches from Socrates to Nietzsche and which is the one I want to disentangle according to its inner rules. We have seen that the archaeologist of knowledge who undertakes a de-sedimentation of the history of philosophy cannot be

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content with the simple conclusion that philosophy enters, at any given epoch, into the general system of discourse. Additionally, the description of “epochal thresholds” (“Epochenschwellen,” Hans Blumenberg) misses the inner “tangle” of continuities and discontinuities within what historians call a period. It then follows that the positive knowledge produced under the heading of “philosophy” will have to be treated as a series co-existing with other series, mingling with them, opposing them, and for many centuries outliving most of them. What the archaeologist cannot claim is that, for instance, Kant and the Marquis de Sade represent two options within the same epistemic order quite as, in another domain and half a century later, biological fixism and evolutionism are two possible—although opposing—answers to the problem of “life,” falling both within “biology.” Sade transgresses the discursive series called philosophy and by so doing produces, perhaps for the first time, its closure.3 To see Kant and Sade merely as two figures within the same epoch, swimming in it like two fish in the same water, would lead one to disregard the contemporaneous breaks between series, that is, the topological dispersion that discourse undergoes at any given moment. These remarks allow us to locate, at least, the question of identity and difference within the general project of an archaeology of knowledge: identity and difference, as categorial determinations, do not apply to epochs and the discursive multiplicity within them. The discovery of discursive multiplicities precisely disrupts the selfidentity of epochs, whether this be understood as an empirical, a categorial or a noumenal identity. The One and the Many cannot be treated, then, as designating, respectively, an epoch and its inner heteromorphism. Rather, it is within a discursive series such as Natural History and, subsequent to it, Biology that one has to look for a

3 It is true that in “La pensée du dehors,” Critique 229 (1966), pp. 525–546, ­Foucault traces the “thought of exteriority,” which is also a thinking outside of philosophy, to “that mystical thinking which, ever since Pseudo-Denis, has been prowling about the margins of Christianity” (ibid. p. 526). [Dits et écrits, vol. 1, p. 521—Editors.] But it is less adventuresome, he adds, to ascribe the beginning of that thinking to the Marquis de Sade and to see its resurgences in Friedrich Hölderlin, Friedrich Nietzsche, Antonin Artaud, Georges Bataille, Pierre Klossowski, and Maurice Blanchot.

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categorial solution to the old problem of identity and difference. Or: Treating the history of philosophy as a discursive series, it is within that series that one has to look for a categorial One and a categorial Many. Before Foucault’s ‘archaeology’ I thus feel compelled to say, like Luther before the imperial Diet at Worms: “Here I stand, I can do no other”—no other than asking philosophical questions which Foucault however treats rather offhandedly. The question now to be raised concerns the unity of that one discursive series, the one “movement which has sustained the wisdom of the West, probably ever since Socrates,” the series marked by the prominence of “the speaking subject of philosophy—one whose obvious and garrulous identity has remained unexamined from Plato to Nietzsche” (Cr 761–762/LCP 42–43).

II. Historical Deduction of Categories Here is how Foucault describes the rupture that inaugurates the discursive series called the history of Western philosophy: “I will place myself at the age of the Sophistic and of its beginning with Socrates, or at least with Platonic philosophy, so as to see how effective, ritual discourse, charged with power and peril, gradually arranged itself into a disjunction between true and false discourse” (OD 64/AK 232). The discursive series that comes to an end with the Platonic break is that of the Greek poets: With the Greek poets of the sixth century, true discourse […] meted out justice and attributed to each his rightful share. […] And yet, a century later, the highest truth no longer resided in what discourse was, nor what it did: it lay in what was said. […] A division emerged between Hesiod and Plato, separating true discourse from false (OD 17L/AK 218).

The Socratic turn towards consciousness institutes a definite discursive series, governed by the disjunction between truth and falsity. The “great Platonic divide” inaugurates a certain type of discursive practice that is regulated by inner rules or categories, quite as Newtonian physics at the beginning of the 17th century and the “positivist ideology” of the early 19th century initiate comparable

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series of discourse (OD 64–65/AK 232). To the series dominated by the disjunction between truth and falsity, one can perhaps also assign its end—Nietzsche’s discovery that “there are many kinds of ‘truths,’ and (that) consequently there is no truth.”4 If we are thus entitled to treat metaphysics as a closed system of rarified discourse, the task is to work out the categories of that system. Furthermore, if the deconstruction consists in “winning back the originative experiences of metaphysics,” we also possess the starting point for a historical deduction of the categories that determine metaphysics. The starting point will be gained if it is possible to ascertain what kind of experience started off the disjunction of truth and falsity. This point of departure is not a simple one. Its description will have to take into account the discursive practice preceding the Platonic divide, since Presocratic discourse “was” and “did” something that the closed metaphysical system subsequently excluded. The description will also have to take into account the principle of such exclusion, which comes to the fore only at the end of the discursive series in question. Thus we have to look with a cross-eyed gaze at the discursive series called metaphysics: it will yield its inner regulation only to a reading that is both prospective, running forward from its inception to its exhaustion, and retrospective, running backward from the contemporary constellation to the Platonic divide. Finally, a third set of rules will be required to understand the inception and the withering-away as such of this series. From the positivity of metaphysical rarefaction one can, thus, gather three classes of categories: prospective categories, retrospective categories, and categories of transition. Needless to add, Michel Foucault has not subjected the philosophical tradition to such an “applied” archaeology as he has the formations of discourse about speaking, classifying and exchanging or about madness, disease, criminality and sexuality.

4 Friedrich Nietzsche, Der Wille zur Macht, § 540 / The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1968), p. 291. [Nachgelassene Fragmente Herbst 1884—Herbst 1885, in Kritische Gesamtausgabe Werke, vol. VII/3, eds. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1974), fragm. 34 [230]; p. 218—Editors.]

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1. The Prospective Categories Foucault is straightforward in naming that category from which Western thinking—and perhaps Western civilization—has arisen: it is “the Logos that constitutes the birth place, so to speak, of Western rationality” (Critique 229 [1966], 525). One probably has to add that “the originative experience of metaphysics” resides not in just any logos; rather—although the term “ontology” appears only at the beginning of the 18th century—the originative logos is a logos tou ontos, a self-ordering of being. I translate here logos by “self-ordering” since prior to the Socratic turn it hardly means “discourse, doctrine, word.” It is actually not human, since, as was said above, “with the Greek poets of the sixth century, true discourse […] meted out justice and attributed to each his rightful share.” The pre-Socratic logos can be called “discourse” only metaphorically; it designates the way things arrange themselves according to their order of presence and absence.5 If the relatively recent neologism “ontology” reflects best the early experience of thinking, then the guiding category of logos must be understood as a self-display, as the relation or proportion among things which ascribes to each its rightful share. The verb legein, the chief prospective category, thus is not limited to phenomena of language. The logos is a category, an enduring trait throughout metaphysics, not primarily in the sense of a science—the first philosophy that, in Aristotle, is “sought for”—but in the sense that whatever may become science or knowledge, must first expose itself to the metaphysician. From the categorial point of view, such self-exposition is the condition that makes any particular configuration of knowledge possible. In the Epic tradition, legein signifies that one turns toward something, gives attention to it and thus isolates it from the rest of things that do not deserve attention. What is remarkable about this discrimination performed by the logos—and what makes it a

5 A late and “humanized” version of this notion of logos is Wilhelm Dilthey’s principle “Das Leben legt sich selber aus,” life interprets itself, quoted by Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Continuum, 1975), p. 199. The translation of “auslegen” by “interpreting” misses the kinship between “legein,” “legere” and “legen.”

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“fundamental trait” of the history of Western philosophy—is that the demarcation drawn between things present and things absent is viewed neither from the side of man, as gathering them, nor from that of the things so gathered together. The ordering accomplished by the pre-Socratic logos can be reduced neither to some “objective” principle that would organize the world, nor to some “subjective” law that would regulate discourse, instruction, or thinking.6 The legein designates the movement by which an economy of things present and absent produces itself, lays itself out. The pre-Socratic discourse, as transmitted in the fragments and epics, is regulated in such a way that an understanding of logos as a nondiscursive display of things is central to its functioning. With the “great Platonic divide,” it is not the centrality of logos that recedes, but its encompassing sense. The comprehension and extension of logos progressively narrow down. Beginning with Plato and Aristotle, logos comes to mean “proposition,” “cosmic order,” “order of reasoning,” the “concept,” and finally, at least in Heidegger’s deconstruction, “cybernetics” and “logistics.”7 Here we have a first instantiation of categorial identity and difference: the “trait” of logos remains throughout Western rationality, but from rupture to rupture it undergoes transmutations. The retrospective category that corresponds to it will allow us to further articulate these epochal ruptures. At this point, the history of philosophy appears as a discursive series because logos is its central feature. The second chief prospective category is on (or the archaic eon). The pre-metaphysical unity of “onto-logy” results from these two “guiding words.” Eon designates that of which the logos is the selfdisplay. The present participle—in Greek as well as in English— indicates of itself a difference. To say, for instance, that a surface is “shining” is to say first of all that it is neither dull nor dark, but that it “shines.” The form “shining” thus participates in the verbal form.

6 This character of logos—neither objective nor subjective—has first been established by Karl Reinhardt, Parmenides und die Geschichte der griechischen Philosophie (Bonn: Friedrich Cohen, 1916), pp. 217ff. 7 Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, vol. II (Pfullingen: Neske, 1961), p. 487; Zur Sache des Denkens (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1969), pp. 63–65, 79 / On Time and Being, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), pp. 57–58, 72.

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At the same time, it also designates the surface—sea or metal— that is shining, and in this sense it participates in the nominal form. “Shining” means: something that shines, and something that shines. Likewise, “being” means: something that is and something that is; “to be” and “a being.” When Parmenides has the participle preceded by an article (t’eon, fragm. VI), he not only effectuates the transition from epic to philosophical language but also articulates the duplicity contained in this grammatical form. The full phrase “the being-to-be” (t’eon emmenai) only makes explicit this difference between verb and noun in the participle. The logos, then, is the proportion, the ordering, of the difference between verbal and nominal “being,” it indicates the ways according to which things enter into the arena of presence and withdraw from it. The premetaphysical unity of on and legein designates the instauration of an order of things, the endurance of their epochal arrangement, and their retreat from the scene of discourse. But neither is logos itself this discourse, nor does discourse in any way render things present. Logos designates the way einai differs, at each moment in history, from ta onta. From this point of view one can render more explicit than Foucault actually does, the link between the logos and what he calls the “three cuts into the morphology of our will to know.” To take simply the last of these three cuts, i.e. the beginning of the nineteenth century, whatever enters into discourse there renders itself present in an unheard-of way: what is new is the einai, the way of being, of the onta that come to the fore with “the great founding acts of modem science, as well as the formation of industrial society and the accompanying positivist ideology” (OD 64–65/ AK 232). This novel way that things have to render themselves present at a turn in history, is what is most consistent with the preclassical meaning of legein. At every threshold in history, the difference between things present and their way of coming to presence articulates itself anew. Such epochal self-articulation is the ever new legein of what Heidegger calls the “ontological difference.”8

8 As a consequence of the legein so tied to the epechein (i.e. the “epochs,” the “turns,” Kehren, or “reversals,” Wenden, in history), “the history of Being is, as such, Being itself.” Heidegger, Nietzsche, vol. II, p. 486.

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T’eon (being) together with logos is a category of the discursive series that dominates “Western rationality.” It is a prospective category on a first level of evidence inasmuch as Parmenides’ discovery of the double—nominal and verbal—signification in the present participle prefigures and makes possible the later versions of that duality or difference: ousia and on, ens and entitas, das Seiende and Seiendheit. On a second level of evidence, however—not historical, but phenomenological, that is, when viewed from the vantage point of the deconstruction of discursive formations—the difference contained in eon operates prospectively because the whole of Western metaphysics appears as one discursive series articulated diachronically according to reversals in the self-display of things present. The archaeological de-sedimentation of discourse thus appears as dependent upon (actually one instantiation of) the phenomenological deconstruction of epochal modes of presence.9

2. The Retrospective Categories The regularity of a field of knowledge can be analyzed, according to Foucault, only once that field has come to completion. A history of disease or madness becomes possible only when there exists a discourse about them; likewise the description of the field “natural history” becomes possible only after it has given way to “biology.” The de-sedimentation of the philosophical tradition, too, operates under the hypothesis of closure. The site from which Foucault speaks is one of “fulfillment and of end”; a site that “makes us believe that something new is about to begin”; a site where “the whole of this configuration is now about to topple” (LMC 396–397/OT 384, 386). Gathering the categories that apply to this moment of fulfillment and the end of the metaphysical series in which—following the hypothesis of closure—we live today, is not an easy task. If we assume that the contemporary constellation is best described by the title “technology,” the task will be to work out 9 Such is, at least, the way I should like to understand Heidegger’s remark that “man’s relation to language could transform itself analogously to the change of the relation to Being.” Zur Sache des Denkens, p. 55 / On Time and Being, p. 51.

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the basic traits of this particular order of things. But “technology” is not a discursive formation. It seems to me that Heidegger’s interpretation of Nietzsche provides some elementary categories for the treatment of technology as a discursive formation. Furthermore, in Heidegger’s usage—or misusage—of Nietzsche, the transmutations that logos and eon undergo are made explicit: they become “eternal recurrence of the same” and “will to power.” Let it be agreed, then, that these retrospective categories are formally taken from Nietzsche, but that they materially speak of technology; and that what is in question here is neither the thinking of Friedrich Nietzsche nor the role it plays in Foucault’s archaeology, but simply a set of convenient traits applying to “the end of metaphysics.” Let it be agreed, in other words, that these traits are made convenient for our purpose through the arm-twisting that Heidegger inflicts on Nietzsche. Indeed, Heidegger makes two types of statements about the locus where metaphysics comes to completion. On the one hand, “in these days of ours,” where we possess “tanks, airplanes, and telecommunication appliances,” “metaphysics has become unconditional”;10 but on the other hand, Nietzsche is said to be “the last thinker of metaphysics.”11 One may criticize the commutation—which is topological in nature—by which Nietzsche is forced into the role of spokesman for technology. I would agree with such criticism. However, such is not my purpose here. I rather want to suggest how, retrospectively, the notion of “eternal recurrence” sheds a different light on logos, and the notion of “will to power,” on eon; how the “eternal recurrence” achieves what the logos in Western rationality has always attempted to achieve, namely to “stabilize the unstable into the greatest stability,” and how the “will to power” becomes “the being of beings,” eon, at the age of closure.12 If this retroactive agency of the two Nietzschean concepts which now stand for “onto-logy” can be shown, we shall possess a second pair of determinations that apply to the whole of philosophy since the “Platonic divide.” 10 Heidegger, Nietzsche, vol. II, p. 165. 11 Martin Heidegger, Holzwege (Frankfurt/M.: Klostermann, 1950), p. 94 / The Question Concerning Technology, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Garland, 1977), p. 142. 12 Heidegger, Nietzsche, vol. II, pp. 287, 403; 264, 232.

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The “eternal recurrence” understood as a characteristic of technology, designates the ultimate fixation of all that is present, into a circle. This circle is one that man traces around himself by placing everything within his reach. To say, as Foucault does, that logos “constitutes the birth place of Western rationality” is to say that in logos something quite different from the simple self-articulation of things present has been at work; that a force, or an interest, has been operative in logos which comes to full deployment only at the end of Western rationality. To be sure, phenomenologically legein designates for every epoch the self-display of the order of things present. However, the discourse in which logos has been operative, aimed at mastership over nature, has “framed” whatever enters into man’s horizon so as to assure him control. Western rationality then appears as just that project: imposing man’s order on all that is available to him; turning into available stock all that there is. The eternal recurrence, read in this light, stabilizes becoming into the geometrical permanence of the circle. To think the eternal recurrence “is to hold oneself essentially in the true as in that which has been fixated and stabilized; thus the thought of the eternal recurrence stabilizes the eternal flux.”13 The self-display of things is obfuscated by man’s grasp on them, whose efficacy runs counter to the original function of legein. But what counts is that this grasp, when read through the constellation of technology, appears incipient within the Platonic transmutation of logos into “reason,” that is to say, with the very rise of Western rationality. Man has placed himself in the position of being the hub of things ever since he understood himself as zoon logon echon, as that living being that is endowed with reason and speech. Rationality, speech and mastership are interchangeable epithets for Western man, for the metaphysical animal. These remarks indicate in what sense technology fully brings to light the attempt at total domination, according to the deconstruction and under the hypothesis of closure. This attempt appears as pertaining to the very project of the metaphysics of reason. The equation between reason, speech and domination proves to be as

13 Ibid., vol. I, p. 407.

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old as the shift from the pre-Socratic legein, which is not anthropocentric, to legein as something that man is capable of. The ultimate figure of legein conceived as a human faculty, is the technological reach as symbolized by the circle of recurrence. The Cartesian cogito, for example, when seen as a descendant of Greek “logic” signifies an act of the mind; but when seen as an antecedent of technology, of the stabilized and stabilizing circle of recurrence, it signifies “co-agitatio,” a forcing together of all things. Or again, the Hegelian Begriff, concept, when seen as of Platonic descent, also signifies an act of thinking; but when seen as an ascendant of technology, it signifies an act of aggression, Angriff. Just as the human subject was absent from the first prospective category, logos, and settles in the center of the first retrospective category, “eternal recurrence,” so it is absent from eon, the second prospective category, but fills the scene with the second retrospective category, the “will to power.” As a trait of technology, the “will to power” indicates the ultimate form of man’s self-positing. In this Heideggerian reading, will to power designates the triumph of subjectivity. The subject not only prevails and is in command of all things by turning them into objects, but—so we are told—it also bestows on them their being. This being of objects as imposed by the subject is the will to power, called therefore “the fundamental character of beings,” “the reality of the real,” “the being of beings.”14 The difference contained in eon now turns into sheer reduplication: “will to power” is nothing but the will towards more will, it is “will to will.” Thus the category that appears at the other extreme of eon on the discursive series called metaphysics, not only points to man alone, but it also collapses the ontological difference into simple redoubling. Triumph of totalitarian “humanism” over the self-manifestation of presence; triumph of goal-directedness— towards the self—over aimless self-display of things present in an epochal order; triumph of the repetition of the identical noun over the difference between noun and verb: such are the chief elements of the “meaning of being” as it appears at the moment of metaphysical closure. To understand the deconstructionist concept of

14 Ibid., vol. I, p. 26; Holzwege, p. 223 / The Question Concerning Technology, p. 86.

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will to power is to see in this threefold technological triumph—of subject, goal, and reduplication—the conclusion of the orientation that philosophy has taken ever since “the birth of Western rationality.” Ever since the Platonic divide, man has been the “unsufferable spoiled child which has been occupying the philosophical scene far too long and has hindered all serious work by its demands for exclusive attention.”15 Retrospectively, the humanistic essence of metaphysics comes to the fore in the technological “will to will.” The triumph of this peculiar humanism is possible insofar as the will posits its own conditions, called values. The will needs to constantly renew its values so as to constantly overcome itself. The necessity, at the core of all forces, to always go beyond themselves is not a mere consequence of the will to power substituting itself for eon, it is the very essence of that substitution. The philosophical texts in-between Greek metaphysics and contemporary technology, such as Descartes’ and Hegel’s, can and must be related both to the birth of rationality upstream and to its closure downstream. But Plato himself must be so read both prospectively and retrospectively: “Understood out of the will to power, the Ideas must be thought of as values”; when read prospectively, however, “Plato’s Ideas are not values.”16 Likewise for Aristotle: when viewed retrospectively, the hypokeimenon is a position that anticipates the selfpositing of the subiectum in the sense of the subject willing itself; but when viewed prospectively, it designates “something lying before from out of itself,”17 and not an early version of the ego. Out of this symmetric correspondence between logos and eternal recurrence, as well as between eon and will to power, a strategy manifests itself at work in Western culture, which runs backwards to its very dawn: the strategy of transforming the totality of beings into objects for the subject seeking preservation and enhancement. Such is the unity in the discursive series called metaphysics, which the retrospective categories lay bare. The last class of categories, now, must exhibit the otherness, the principle of plurification which brings to a close this identical trait in Western history. 15 Claude Lévi-Strauss, L’homme nu (Paris: Plon, 1971), pp. 614–615. 16 Heidegger, Nietzsche, vol. II, p. 273. 17 Ibid., pp. 141, 435; Holzwege, p. 98 / The Question Concerning Technology, p. 148.

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3. The Categories of Transition The prospective categories were worked out from the pre-Socratic strategy of discourse, and the retrospective categories, from the Nietzschean discourse forced, rather artificially, to speak for the technological strategy. In order to understand the closure of the discursive series called metaphysics, the possibility of a cessation of that series as well as of the beginning of another series has to be accounted for. The categories of transition are therefore necessarily double, just as any threshold is doublefaced. The problem of identity and difference in the discursive field of philosophy, the end of which has been announced for a century and a half, comes down to the phenomenon of break or rupture itself. Of the confines between fields one can only speak in double language, approaching the border line first from within the closed domain of metaphysics, then—if possible—from outside that domain. In the later Heidegger, technology appears as essentially Janus-faced, looking both backwards and forwards. The guiding formal idea in the working out of these traits of transition remains that of “ontology,” but the category that now corresponds to logos and “eternal recurrence” will have to be twofold: “epoch/clearing.” Likewise, the category of transition that corresponds to eon and “will to power” will be twofold: “ontological difference/world and thing.” In either case, the slash mark stands for the line that closes the domain of metaphysics.18 A few indications must suffice to exhibit this double strategy of the categories of transition. If to deconstruct metaphysics is to understand its history explicitly as a sequence of configurations in the way things come to presence, and if the description of such configurations is phenomenological rather than metaphysical, then the very project of deconstruction becomes possible only at the end to the “epochs.” The concept of epoche is borrowed here, not from Husserl but from the Stoics, where it means “retention,” “suspension,” “stoppage.” The order of presencing “retains” itself, refuses itself to thought,

18 The metaphor of the line was adopted by Heidegger from the novelist Ernst Jünger, cf. Heidegger, Zur Seinsfrage, pp. 7–8 / The Question of Being, pp. 35ff.

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all along the metaphysical discursive series. This epechein is what Heidegger calls, somewhat loftily, the “forgetfulness of Being.” Technology is double-faced because it contains both the danger of ultimate stultification in its organized grip, and the possibility of a new way of thinking. But, and this is crucial, “the danger is the epoch of Being.”19 The danger contained in technology results from the very power of its achievements, the transformation of “things” into “stock.” The danger is that the overabundance of stock obfuscates the order of things as order, thus making the sheer question of their legein, their mode of presencing, meaningless. Since the project of deconstruction is nothing other than that of recovering past constellations of presence, the laying bare of the successive economies, by itself, puts an end to the “epochs.” The deconstruction is the transgression of Western rationality. As such transgression, the deconstruction proposes a double ordering of things, or two gathering places: one where the gathering or ordering as such remains hidden, and the other in which such gathering and ordering are explicitly retained. The former topos stretches from Plato to the “danger” in technology, and the latter is seen as incipient with what is “salutary” in technology. Both of these discursive fields, set apart by the closure, are arrangements of things present; they differ from one another in the modality of presence: constant availability within the field of metaphysics, event of presencing outside that field. To indicate this event character, Heidegger opposes to the notion of epoche, that of “clearing,” Lichtung. “Philosophy knows nothing of the clearing.”20 Rather than repeating old light metaphors, “clearing” here expresses the process of self-display. It speaks, not of an order, but of the ordering. The crisis in which the “epochs” give way to the “clearing” is the moment when the deconstruction becomes possible. The first category of transition thus shows the formal ordering of things as the factor that remains beyond the breaks and rup-

19 Martin Heidegger, Die Technik und die Kehre (Pfullingen: Neske, 1962), p. 42 / The Question Concerning Technology, p. 43, emphasis added. On the Janus-faced character of technology Heidegger quotes this verse from Hölderlin (ibid.): “But where there is the danger, grows / That which saves, too.” 20 Heidegger, Zur Sache des Denkens, p. 73 / On Time and Being, p. 66.

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tures in the history of presence. It is the modalities of such ordering which introduce difference into the economical identity. The second category of transition enforces this solution given to the problem of identity and difference in history. Within the metaphysical field, the epochs are irruptions of a new constellation of eon among things present, a new manner in which “Being” differs from beings. With every epoch things render themselves present in a novel order. But if outside the metaphysical field, presence means the event of self-ordering rather than the permanence of concrete orders, then, Heidegger writes, from the perspective of this event, it becomes necessary to free thinking from the ontological difference. From the perspective of the event, this relation now shows itself rather as the relation of world and thing, a relation which could in a way still be understood as the relation of Being and beings; but then its peculiarity would be lost.21

What makes the transition from the “ontological difference” to the difference between “world and thing” a radical one, is that the latter abolishes transcendence. “Being,” as differing from beings, “is the transcendens pure and simple.”22 But “the world” is not seen as transcending “the thing.” It structures the thing from within, not as its horizon. Such a transmutation of the ontological difference enables us to do what no metaphysician can do, that is, think the individual thing as individual, think the utter dispersion of things. If Western rationality is so transformed into a thinking that espouses the manifold and the contingent, its closure is indeed complete, and its borderline transgressed. Things, man and the world then appear such that they require a new attitude in order to be thought of: Heidegger writes that the thing then only becomes the thing, whereas previously, “its essence has never yet been able to appear”; furthermore, “rational living beings must first become mortals”; and

21 Ibid., pp. 40–41 / trans. p. 37. 22 Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Halle: Max Niemeyer, 1941), p. 38 / Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), p. 62.

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the world “all of a sudden (jäh) gathers itself together as world.”23 It seems that these three sudden transmutations indicate the break between the discursive series called metaphysics and “some event of which we can at the moment do no more than sense the possibility—without knowing either what its form will be or what it promises” (LMC 398/OT 387). To show the possibility of a new discursive series, breaking with philosophy as it has shaped modernity and the whole of Western rationality, it was necessary to work out categories that cincture the history of philosophy as one discursive formation. The epistemic field of which we can only “sense the possibility” as lying beyond the closure of modernity, may then be a period of dispersion, of justice done to the manifold—a possibility which the French poet René Char calls “that part never fixed, asleep in us, from which will surge TOMORROW THE MANIFOLD.”24

23 Martin Heidegger, Vorträge und Aufsätze (Pfullingen: Neske, 1954) pp. 169, 177, 180 / Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), pp. 171, 179, 182. 24 “Cette part jamais fixée, en nous sommeillante, d’où jaillira DEMAIN LE ­MULTIPLE.” René Char, Commune présence (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), p. 255.

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Legislation-Transgression: Strategies and Counter-Strategies in the Transcendental Justification of Norms

What if there were, lodged within the heart of law itself, a law of impurity or a principle of contamination? What if the condition for the possibility of law were the a priori of a counter-law, an axiom of impossibility, maddening its sense, order and reason? Jacques Derrida1

With these rhetorical questions Jacques Derrida casts general suspicion on what is primarily constitutive of the transcendental tradition: the authority of the “I think” as the source of laws for both knowing and acting. In this paper I wish to show some presuppositions under which the legislative ego can appear as traversed by “the a priori of a counter-law,” by a condition of “impossibility”; how an element of transgression can be seen to “contaminate” transcendental legislation at its very heart. I will then point out some consequences of the formal identity between legislation and transgression for the status of the social and human sciences today. A first set of such presuppositions can be stated briefly, as just so many hints that the reading I propose of that tradition is not disinterested. 1 Jacques Derrida, “La loi du genre / The Law of Genre,” trans. Avital Ronell, Glyph 7 (1980), pp. 176–232; p. 204 (translation modified); see the French original, ibid., p. 178.

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Reading modern philosophy backwards. What is the text in which transcendental legislation may eventually appear as formally identical with transgression? It is not any one text by Kant, Nietzsche or Heidegger taken in isolation, but rather a discursive network within which each of their books is inscribed, a network that undergoes incessant shifts. Thus to the question, What are we reading?, I answer: a diachronical concatenation of texts, in which elements of continuity and discontinuity have to be isolated. This cannot be done from some fictitious, neutral vantage point. The inherited issues appear in their historical transmutations when unfolded from the fold in which we live. To situate any given text is to appropriate it, whether explicitly or implicitly, from our own site in that history, a site that I will describe as closing modernity. To read the transcendental tradition backward, with the explicit interest in elucidating our own locus, it is not enough to trace mere developments of concepts (Begriffsgeschichte) nor the progressive enrichment of a text by generations of its readers (Wirkungsgeschichte). When a text from another moment in history is placed into our own context so as to enlighten it, that text’s topics will necessarily be de-naturalized, deprived of their original citizenship within the datable discursive network from which they were born, and thereby de-natured, altered in their nature. Topical Strategies. The subject matter for a retrospective reading of the tradition consists not so much in philosophical topics as in their strategies. The topos of transcendental legislation will be “varied” along the line—the lineage—of modern, late modern and closing modern contexts. A topical strategy is the itinerary that an issue goes through as it appears and reappears, without a master strategist, in transient horizons. To speak of diachronical strategies also implies that the successive crises in modernity cannot be understood as utter ruptures or breaks (contrary to what Michel Foucault seems to hold): to account for the possibility of novelty in history means to sort out what endures from what undergoes change. Novelty results from a play of identity and difference in topical strategies. The hypothesis of closure. The interest in casting general suspicion upon the transcendental tradition is, as I have said, to better understand our own site. There could be no retrospective reading and no search for topical strategies, to say nothing of the “a priori

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of a counter-law,” without the hypothesis that in the twentieth century a certain history is drawing to a close. That history has been characterized by such misleading phrases as “onto-theology” and “logo-centrism.” They are misleading in that they seem to perpetuate the eschatological, apocalyptic tone introduced into philosophy in the early nineteenth century, a tone that indeed turns the claim of closure into yet another ideality. The thrust of that hypothesis is, however, more modest. It aims at the transmitted representations of ground and shows that they never accomplished what they were expected to accomplish; that the legislative edifices secured through reflection never stood on anything more solid than a fundamentum concussum. The history of that illusion can be said to draw to a close insofar as the hairline fracture in the justificatory bedrock has widened continually since the late nineteenth century. To say that ultimate referents have lost their credibility is no longer a philosophical topic but has become a popular commonplace. The fissure in the constructs of a legitimating First has turned into a rent open for public inspection. Such is the evidence that allows Derrida to suggest a formal identity of legislation and transgression. It is evidence that has its point in time: the moment when the long line of ultimate representations—the Good, the Christian God, the Cogito, the Mind ...—has exhausted its resources and when an age has come to understand itself as without a beyond. The effacement of any legitimating First did not occur all at once. Retrospectively it can be discerned as announcing itself in the focus on transcendental legislation and as realizing itself through the subsequent mutations of that focus. The ontological difference. The guiding question that may lead one to suspect a formal transgression at the very heart of transcendental legislation can only be what Heidegger has called the question of being. This is so since each construct of normative validity appears retrospectively as having depended on one thetical referent construed as fully present to itself. In a first approximation, transgression is the effect of a power of dissolution counteracting that formative, law-bestowing force at its core. Formal transgression cannot become phenomenal, only empirical transgressions do. The formal here functions as a pull toward indeterminacy within every act of determination. Philosophers have held that what they

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retained as determinative agency manifests itself in every act of knowing or doing, be it as a “trace” of the Good in us, as “the subsisting Truth, closer to my mind than I am to myself,” or as a “fact of reason.” Not so the power of indeterminacy. It has to be wrested from the topical strategies. Such wresting requires a pre-understanding of being as not simple, not self-identical. The guiding thread for tracing displacements in the transcendental justification of norms is then that the verb “to be” differs from “being” as a noun, and historically, epochally, so. The indeterminate power of transgression will likewise appear as differing epochally—within each discursive network in another way—from the determinate force of legislation. I will speak, then, of the nomothetical difference between transgression and legislation.

Three nomotheses The subject subjected To legislate is to impose an order2 by prescribing what is to be. Any juridic law decrees what is to be done. It drafts patterns to which practice is to conform and which, whether or not they are

2 In Descartes, at the origin of rational subjectivism, the threat that haunts philosophy seems to be madness under the guise of the evil genius. Strictly speaking, the counter-strategy of transgression is “maddening” (Derrida, above [“La loi du genre / The Law of Genre,” trans. Avital Ronell, Critical Inquiry 7:1 (1980), pp. 55–81; p. 57—Editors]) only in the context of the Meditations. In Kant, when subjectivism includes ordering forms not only in reason but also in sensibility, the threat would be for reason to get carried away by sensibility into “chaos and night.” Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A XI. As the “a priori of a counter-law” (Derrida, above [“La loi du genre / The Law of Genre,” p. 57—Editors]), transgression in Kant strikes one as the threat of public disorder, “anarchy,” rather than private madness. This sense of a threat is a leitmotiv that intrudes like a phobia at the major steps of his transcendentalism, cf. particularly Critique of Pure Reason, B XXXVII, A 100–101, 111–112, 121; Perpetual Peace A 12, 19 n., 62, 72 n.; On History, ed. Lewis White Beck (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1963), pp. 89, 92 n., 113, 120 n.; The Strife of the Faculties, A 18 and 41 n. This last text in particular shows that for Kant “anarchy” arises from judgment given over to inclinations. (In the citations from Kant’s works “A” refers to the original edition of a work and “B,” to the second edition.)

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recognized as such, bind everyone’s action. A law obligates even a dissenter, makes him a dissenter. Such prescription of patterns is transcendental if the source of laws is sought in the subject as bestowing the traits of objectivity on nature and the traits of personality on itself. Pure reason legislates inasmuch as it achieves a priori syntheses between thinking and intuiting. If it attempts furthermore to justify its own synthetic activity, reason is also critical. The self-examination of reason in its legislative function cannot stop short of the question: where do its laws, whether theoretical or practical, ultimately originate? The ambiguity of Kant’s answer to that question appears from his understanding of being, of the existing I, and of the subject as universal referent. 1. Kant is said to have substituted a merely formal act, apperception, for all ancient substantive referents held capable of ordering a cosmos because they were eminently present to it. Kant did not quite abandon the ancients’ quest for an ultimate mensura, however, he merely directed it away from the demiurge or Creator measuring his works to reason measuring its acts. He is therefore said to have replaced dogmatic metaphysics with critical metaphysics, the metaphysics of experience. For the tradition prior to Kant, the Platonic ideal of becoming kosmios—as beautifully measured by the Good as the cosmos itself3—indeed provided key concepts not only for politics and ethics, but more fundamentally for speculation about the very source of metron and taxis, measure and order: the Good posits them as it posits itself. For the city or for the soul to become beautifully ordered would amount to their resembling the Good as such. Kant remains indebted to that tradition not primarily in his doctrine of ideas but more radically in that he, too, seeks an originary thesis, positing, that could function as nomothesis, positing of norms. To be sure, his transcendental ego-thesis cannot be “ontological” in the sense of establishing a highest degree of being. The ultimate self-positing of thinking sought by Kant has to satisfy only the

3 Plato, Gorgias (506 e) and Republic (430 d ff. and 500 b-d).

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requirement of a highest condition for experience. As such, it is nothing entitative—no-thing, not a subsistent referent of which one could predicate, for instance, simplicity or eternality. And yet it has to be “originary,” “an act of spontaneity.”4 It is “the highest point to which all employment of the understanding must be attached.”5 The question is: Can the act “I think,” to which Kant assigns the task of simultaneous egothesis and nomothesis, provide what he expects of it? Can the norms that it yields bind without being contaminated by the a priori of a counter-law? The viability of Kant’s transcendental justification of norms can be tested only by putting to him the question of being, a question he consistently shuns while answering it equally consistently. Ti to on; What is being? Kant gives two answers, one too many, it seems. Being, we are told, is a category, Dasein. As such it is one fundamental mode of synthesizing data into the unity of objective experience. Being as a “dynamic” category is not only a law for all actual experience, but also inseparably a form of all objects actually experienced. As every other category, Dasein has objective validity only when it is gathered with the pure forms of intuition, time and space, and thereby constitutes whatever can become a phenomenon for us. That is Kant’s doctrinal answer to the question of being. It is “doctrinal,” since for him anything that can be proved without recourse to appearances, anything that can be demonstrated or deduced a priori, is part of a doctrine. Running parallel to that doctrinal concept of being there is however a second one which precedes the critical revolution in Kant’s way of thinking and remains operative at each major step in his critical system. It may be called Kant’s “subversive”6 concept of 4 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B 132. 5 Ibid., B 134. 6 I borrow this term from John Sallis, The Gathering of Reason (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1980), pp. 13, 167. Sallis’ “subversive” interpretation of the Critique of Pure Reason amounts to suggesting that the faculty of imagination dispossesses the self of itself: “The encroachment of imagination upon reason, the installation of radical non-self-presence within the very upsurge of reason, deprives reason, beyond appeal, of its title to serve unquestioningly as its own tribunal.” (p. 166) While I agree with Sallis’ conclusion, viz. reason’s dispossession of itself qua tribunal, and while I wish to extend that dispossession into reason qua legislator, I cannot follow Sallis on

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being. It will prove to subvert the sought-for identity of egothesis and nomothesis. “Being is not a predicate, nor a determination of any thing,” Kant wrote in On the Sole Proof Basis for a Demonstration of God’s Existence.7 It is usually held that this early text is incompatible not only with Kant’s later criticism of the ontological argument, but more generally with his transcendental method as such. That is assuredly the case, except in one respect related to the understanding of being operative in the treatise. Being cannot be conceived as a predicate since it adds no thought content to whatever we do conceive. Kant’s starting point is reminiscent of Leibnizian idealities—propositions in logic, mathematics, and pure geometry—among which universal and necessary connections obtain. He reasons, not from “real things,” as the Scholastics did, nor from “being” as a necessary thought content, as Descartes did, but from the universal “possibilities,” the formal presuppositions for anything real. His argument in this pre-critical text is a priori, based neither on observation nor on a trusted correspondence between concepts and things,8 but on connections of concepts. Absolute existence is attainable from that rationalist starting point—the system of rules for thinking—insofar as that system of rules is given. If there are any rules whatsoever for connecting concepts, be it only the opposition between “true” and “false,” material existence, too, is assured. “If all existence is can-

the way that leads him there. Any muddling of faculties not only lacks reliable basis in either Kant’s text or spirit, it also dodges the issue of the subject’s dispossession as ontological. Failing to trace the many “forms of disunity” in the subject (pp. 26–27) to Kant’s understanding of being, Sallis can only conclude: “The moment one takes up the dismantling of subjectivity, he thereby abandons the Kantian edifice.” (p. 175) I wish to exhibit the fundamentum concussum in Kant’s transcendental ontology itself. 7 Kant, Der einzig mögliche Beweisgrund zu einer Demonstration des Daseins Gottes (1763). For what follows see particularly A 1–16. 8 Descartes stresses that trust in an explicit reference to his ontological proof. At the beginning of his Second Replies, under the title “Thoughts About the Proof of God’s Existence and the Soul’s Distinctness from the Body, Ordered in Geometrical Fashion,” he writes: “When we say that something is contained in the nature or in the concept of a thing, that is just the same as when we say this is true of the thing or can be asserted of it.” Def. 9; René Descartes, Œuvres, vol. VII, Meditationes de prima philosophia, eds. Charles Adam and Paul Tannery (Paris: Léopold Cerf, 1904), p. 162. As a consequence, the Kant of 1763 comes out as more rationalist than Descartes.

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celled, then nothing whatsoever is posited, nothing at all is given: no matter for anything thinkable, and any possibility vanishes entirely.” The point is that the real and the possible can very well be negated together without any ensuing contradiction. It is however contradictory to hold that the real exists without the possible, or the possible, without the real. Not what is being thought leads then, as in Descartes, to apodeicticity, but that there are thought contents ruled by necessary connections. There would be no thinking at all if this particular kind of givens—possibles—were lacking: “That there is anything possible and yet nothing real is a contradiction since, if nothing existed, nothing thinkable would be given.”9 Being as the position of anything follows from the givenness of ideal entities. To avoid confusion with any type of thesis, being as givenness will be called “positedness” here, not “position.” Kant’s argument for the existence of God in that same treatise is complete only once the apodictic principle—being as positedness— is developed in two directions. From any thing’s givenness he has to step to absolute givenness and from existence, to essence. These two moments of the ontological proof, which oppose Kant further to both Anselm and Descartes, need not be pursued here. What is relevant for his understanding of being is the anticipation of the transcendental method in the early treatise: without givenness as its starting point all knowledge would remain impossible. To be sure, after the critical turn givenness is no longer that of a system of idealities. Therefore, being is then no longer understood as absolute, but only as relative positedness: relative to our experience. As a first feature of the other concept of being in Kant, other than the category, we retain that being is givenness as such. That concept cannot be analyzed any further, it can only be determined negatively. Each major section of the Critique of Pure Reason contributes to such a negative determination whereby givenness will appear as pre-cognitive, pre-categorial and pre-predicative. The most revelatory issue is that of the existing I, of how the I is given.

9 Kant, Der einzig mögliche Beweisgrund zu einer Demonstration des Daseins Gottes, A 19.

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2. The Transcendental Aesthetic, Kant claims, “establishes already of itself the objective reality of noumena”10 insofar as in experiencing something is necessarily experienced. On the level of simple encounter, what is so experienced yields no knowledge yet. We cannot say what it is that we come upon. It yields however its own certitude of objective reality, namely that something is there whereby we are affected. Contrary to some ambiguous formulations in and after Kant, this affectedness—or facticity—cannot be construed as “posited” by consciousness. It precedes all thetical acts of the mind. Such is the very starting point of the Aesthetic: the pre-eminence of intuiting over thinking is due to the immediacy of the sense data.11 As is well known, that starting point of the Critique made Friedrich Jacobi complain: “Without that presupposition [of the noumenon] I cannot enter the Critique, while with that presupposition I cannot remain in it.”12 Sense affection provides obviously no knowledge of the noumenon qua noumenon; as a mere sensation it is “blind.” Nor has the being concept implied in sense affection anything to do yet with the formal constitution of objects. It is merely the concept of a datum as such, the critical descendant of the “data of possibility” in the earlier treatise. In the Transcendental Aesthetic ontological givenness is determined negatively as pre-cognitive. In the Transcendental Analytic, the same concept of being is specified with regard to the I: “The ‘I think’ expresses the act of determining my existence.”13 Affection and givenness are here selfaffection and self-givenness in inner sense. “My existence” cannot be given either to intellectual intuition or to formal consciousness since it is to be determined by the “I think.” The existing I cannot be either the noumenal or the transcendental I. But neither can it be the empirical I as observed in our mental life. For such observation—for self-experience—the intuition through inner sense would have to be joined to a pure concept of the understanding. But, Kant

10 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A 249. 11 Ibid., A 19. 12 Friedrich Jacobi, David Hume über den Glauben oder Idealismus und Realismus (Breslau: Loewe, 1787), pp. 222–223. 13 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B 158 n.

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adds, “existence here is not yet a category.”14 As a mere sensation, existence precedes, he says, any experience and therefore any synthesis. In this context, then, the “I think” is turned into a proposition of existence independently of any recourse to categories. This is not, in Kant, a momentary lapse into Cartesian metaphysics. He explicitly justifies that step by describing the existing I as “indeterminately given,”15 impossible to reify into a thinking thing. Is the determinacy of the “I think” such that by its mere selfpositing it can prescribe what is to be? Its determinacy obviously cannot result from the pure concepts of the understanding: as the source of all determinations the logical subject of thinking cannot in turn be determined categorically. Determinacy is its very nature; it is utter spontaneity. In that regard, as the origin of law and order, it reigns supreme. And yet, if it “determines my existence,” it has to be equiprimordial with givenness. The existing ego designates the yet indistinct presence of an indeterminate sensation to thought. As their proto-synthesis, it lacks conceptual articulation. Does this selfpresence guarantee normative validity by grounding the subject’s full self-possession? Such would indeed be the requirement if the transcendental I were to succeed in “binding”16 nature and eventually practice, in conformity with the ontology of the subject. Kant does justify the step from transcendental logic to transcendental ontology—“existence here is not yet a category”—but he does not in any way thematize the precategorical sensation of existence with which, however, in his own words, experience sets out. Prior to any act of experience and any synthesis there occurs the givenness of the indeterminate “something real” which is “desig-

14 Ibid., B 422. Gerhard Krüger, Philosophie und Moral in der kantischen Kritik (Tübingen: Mohr, 1931), pp. 38–39, contrasts this precategorial existence with Heidegger’s notion of facticity and concludes that precategorial existence in Kant “must be understood as being created by God”—as the noumenal self, in other words. This contradicts flatly Kant’s equation between existence and “an indeterminate perception” (Critique of Pure Reason, B 423 n), but it is in keeping with Krüger’s insistence on Kant’s generally Scholastic design. I wish to point out an indeterminacy of being in Kant that such an either-or between facticity and creation can only obstruct. 15 Ibid., B 423 n. 16 On “bound” versus “free” nature, see Friedrich Kaulbach, Der philosophische Begriff der Bewegung (Cologne: Böhlau, 1965), pp. 23ff.

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nated as such in the proposition ‘I think.’”17 Could it be that the “unknown root”18 of our faculties is existence as sheer presence of ourselves to ourselves? If so, that it is a fragile root appears from closer scrutiny of the way this primitive self-presence comes to be determined. For the existing subject to possess itself fully, to be fully present to itself and thereby nomothetical, it would have to be thoroughly determined. Such is however not the case. Indeterminate presence proves to be a distinct moment that precedes not only knowing, but also thinking and apperception. Otherwise the “I think” could not determine my existence. The originary nomothetical act, the act of legislation from which derive both theoretical rules and practical norms, is the imposing of the I as a law unto myself: We have to “presuppose ourselves, entirely a priori, as legislating with regard to our own being and also as determining this existence ourselves.”19 Self-presence is indeterminate since in it my existence is not yet articulated. Presence precedes consciousness (apperception) as well as introspection (experience). Being as indeterminate presence precedes being as schematized category. The subject thus shows itself to be broken. On the one hand, there is the determinative “I think” that posits itself and unfolds into twelve categories, and on the other, “my existence” which stands in need of determination. Kant’s second being-concept disrupts critical ontology inasmuch as indeterminate existence, given to inner sensation, opposes a counter-point of ignorance to apperception as the highest point of consciousness. It opposes a counter-law of indistinctness to the originary law, which consists in saying “I.” As I give to myself, “entirely a priori,” the “I think” as the origin of all possible laws, the subject subjects itself to itself. Without this double strategy—the determinate “I think” arising from indeterminate presence and in turn determining it—there would be no legislation, no law. By the same token, however, determination or self-possession does not result from what Kant describes as 17 Kant, B 423 n. This understanding of being as simple presence is taken up later by Kant in his critique of the ontological argument for the existence of God (B 626). 18 Ibid., B 29. 19 Ibid., B 430.

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­ ntologically first, “my existence.” As a consequence, the law as o such is traversed by its contrary. This counter-law, the indeterminacy of being qua presence, is a necessary condition if any law is to be possible. It co-constitutes any law, rule or norm. Indeed, from where does the legislative I derive its legislative power. From “me,” the subject subjected to it. This analysis of the existing I shows that indeterminacy and selfdetermination are two equally indispensable moments of its being. The subject turns out to be ruptured and Kant’s doctrine of being as a category. The doctrine of being as concept (from con-capere, holding together, quite as Begriff stems from greifen, grasping)—as the act of uniting the pure sensible manifold—is subverted by his need for being as givenness, as indeterminate, and as precategorical. Primitive self-presence is a starting point of experience that throws the subject’s quest for full self-possession out of gear. Its “ground” and “essence”20 puts full presence forever out of reach. An egothesis so bound to indeterminacy can only yield a nomothesis equally traversed by transgression. In the Transcendental Dialectic, Kant gives the best known formulation of his other being-concept, a formulation reminiscent of his pre-critical writings: “‘Being’ [Sein] is obviously not a real predicate.”21 “Real” does not refer here any more to the first category of quality than “being” to the second category of modality. We know empirically what something is when we know its “real” predicates or properties. In the case of the supreme being, these properties would have to be known a priori. If such were the case, his properties—what the medievals called “perfections”—would allow for a “thorough determination” of that supreme being. Its concept would then be rendered concrete as the “set concept [Inbegriff] of all reality.”22 But Sein is obviously not a real predicate once 20 Ibid. In this section, “General Note on the Transition from Rational Psychology to Cosmology,” Kant designates the originary moment of indeterminate self-presence with some vagueness as “the ground of thinking” (der Grund des Denkens) and as “the essence itself” (das Wesen selbst). Phrases like these are meant, it seems, to preserve the existing ego—the indistinct “I think-I am”—not only from hypostatization as a noumenon, but also from reduction to a phenomenon. 21 Ibid., B 626. 22 Ibid., B 605.

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being is understood as the sensible givenness of a physical fact, to the exclusion of intellectual affection. As to the category of Dasein, although it is thinkable a priori and although it is a predicate, it does “not in the least enlarge the concept to which it [is] attached,”23 it is not a real predicate either. It gives us nothing to think. Sein differs from Dasein (or Existenz) in that it is not thinkable a priori in any way: neither formally as all categories are, nor materially as the supposed divine perfections would have to be. To refute all attempts at an ontological proof of the existence of God, Kant then repeats his pre-critical equation between being and positedness.24 Translated into the critical context, that equation now amounts to enunciating the difference between being as category and as precognitive, pre-categorial, pre-predicative givenness. One may see in that break a displacement of the old metaphysical difference between einai and on, or esse and ens, and one may speak consequently of a transcendental difference in Kant. All forms of the ontological difference, whether metaphysical, transcendental, or phenomenological, spell out an ambiguity that lies in the present participle: the English participle “being” can mean both the noun “a being” and the verb “to be.” Due to the Copernican Revolution in Kant, the transcendental difference exhibits the peculiar consequence that the inherited terms of the difference are inverted: in Kant it is not the verb—“Dasein” as a categorial act, as conceiving—that stands for indeterminacy, but the noun, the unknown 23 Heinz Heimsoeth, “Christian Wolffs Ontologie und die Prinzipienforschung I. Kants,” Kant-Studien: Ergänzungsheft 71 (1956), pp. 1–91, quotes from Kant’s lecture course on Metaphysics, edited by K. H. L. Politz, to assert that the categories of modality “are not predicates” (p. 27). This contradicts Kant’s own affirmation in the Critique: “The categories of modality have the peculiarity that, in determining an object, they do not in the least enlarge the concept to which they are attached as predicates.” Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B 266 (emphasis added). This makes it impossible to hold, as many commentators do, that in B 626 (“‘Being’ is not a predicate”) on one hand and in the table of categories and B 266 (“The categories of modality ... [are] predicates”) on the other, Kant is working with one and the same understanding of being. 24 “‘Being’ [...] is merely the positing of a thing” (ibid., B 626). ‘Positing’ does not mean here the self-instituting of a supreme ground but the fact that in ­experience something is being experienced. Positedness means facticity. It enters language through the copula.

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something encountered in a sensation. In the transcendental difference, determination is a human doing, the act of categorizing, of subsuming under predicates. Both in Aristotle and in Heidegger, on the contrary, the verb stands for indeterminacy and the noun, for determination: an entity determines—“forms” (Aristotle), “stops” (from epechein, Heidegger)—the neutral being-process. Kant’s inverting the poles of determinacy and indeterminacy is the consequence for ontology of what is described today as the modern triumph of subjectivity. Determination is a subjective doing: categorizing. But the inversion is ineffectual, the subject’s pretending universal determination remains shot through with indeterminacy. Hence Kant’s broken ontology, broken between verbal kategorein and nominal fact. 3. To speak of legislation-transgression in the Kantian nomothesis is not to claim that there is somehow first a law and then its eventual empirical transgression,25 nor that there is first Dionysian chaos subsequently more or less successfully mastered by Apollonian order. Nothing would be more un-Kantian than to view the existing I as “chaotic and anarchic” in the inception of experience and thereafter placed under the light of reason. Rather, legislation and transgression are simultaneous moments of the same thesis, position: the “I think.” The obscurity in which Kant leaves the ontological status of the I veils the fact that as theoretical and moral legislator the I both arises from and legislates for “our own being.” As arising out of indeterminate self-presence it does not legislate. Quite the contrary. There would be no law if it were not for the indeterminate “I am” from the determinate “I think.” The prestige of the determinate subject “I think” would be vain were the inde25 As Kant himself describes the problematic of legislation-transgression, it hinges on the distinction between the universal moral law and an individual maxim or action, cf. Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Herbert J. Paton (New York: Harper & Row, 1964), B 57–59, 113 / pp. 91–92 n., 123. Transgression is thus material. The same conception surfaces in his tentative reconstruction of evolution: “Before reason awoke [...] there was no transgression.” Kant, “Conjectural Beginning of Human History,” A 13 / On History, p. 60. The closest he comes to recognizing formal transgression is in his description of the will as both above and under the law it gives to itself. Kant, Groundwork, B 72 / p. 99.

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terminate “I am” not both its ground and its vassal, subjected. The “I am” thus appears as the moment of transgression without which there could be no legislative “I think.” If what Kant calls his Copernican Revolution were merely, as he claims, an attempt to better account for experience, if it did not also address the older question “What is being?” categories and imperatives could not be laws. They could not function as measures for what is to be. The Copernican revolution is ontological because the “I think” provides the ultimate measure for both knowing and acting. Quite as natural law once secured a divine referent for pre-modernity, so legislative reason secures the modern subjective referent. Modernity is that age in which the subject occupies the measure-giving center of all that can be ‘accused’ (kategorein) as being, the center which “is” before all else, which is one (the “I,” in English, of transcendental apperception can also be read as the Roman numeral “I”!) and for which all else is the transcendental other. The interest in rational legislation is thus only a consequence of a more radical interest, the strategy of placing all that is within the subject’s dominion. As the modern ontological referent, the thinking subject is then more than what Kant calls it, legislator and judge. It “makes” everything be by imposing on it the traits of objectivity. The lapse that I have tried to trace in the supposed source of norms for modernity is that between the “I think” and the “I am,” the latter understood as the indistinct sensation of presence. The “I think,” then, is indeed measure-giving, normative; but its supposed ground, the pre-categorial “I am,” is rather an abyss since it stands in need of determination. It cannot provide what it would have to provide if by its normative agency the I were to impose itself as the measure on all things, namely full self-presence. Fully determinate presence would require that the unity of the “I think-I am” function as the one primordial position, thesis. But what is thetical, we heard, is the “I think.” In its very self-positing as the epochal referent, the subject is thus broken from the start. The obvious difference between a pre-modern and a modern nomothetical referent seems to be that for the ancients and medievals it had to be substantive, whereas with the discovery of the cogito it became merely formal. The rise of modernity would then be accompanied by a progressive turn from ontology to e­ pistemology,

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from speculation about entities and their ranking to the more humble investigation into experience and its conditions. But if the supreme condition of all experience, the “I think,” emerges as the act of determining my existence, that seemingly obvious replacement of ontologies by theories of experience proves to be more equivocal. The Copernican Revolution proves to be unable to guarantee the new sun it sets out to identify. A precategorial existence that calls for determination is no new sun worth leaving a cave for, nor is an “I think” whose ordering agency is subsequent to indeterminate presence. The true modern referent may actually be neither the existing nor the thinking, but the noumenal I: “the will as intelligence, that is, our genuine self.”26 In that case, however, the revolution miscarries. The legislative First then remains “the old sun, but seen through mist and skepticism. The idea has become elusive, pale, Nordic, Königsbergian.”27 The Kantian nomothesis cannot disown a certain understanding of being. Self-determination as the original nomothetical act cannot entirely shed the pre-modern problematic of ontological mensuration from which it is born. Now one may doubt that the understanding of being involved in that theory is temporal, that “Kant recoiled from [transcendental imagination as] the unknown root,” understood as “the originary ground: time.”28 Such an adumbration of time in transcendental criticism would have required that Kant link the verb connotation of “being” with givenness in sensibility, rather than with the understanding. That, however, would have restored spontaneity to intuition and thereby ruined the very project of the subjectivist turn. Precategorial existence becomes systematically necessary if the normative ground is to obligate in virtue of its full presence; if the validity of norms is to depend on being as simply given, shining in 26 Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, A 123 / p. 129. 27 Friedrich Nietzsche, Götzen-Dämmerung oder Wie man mit dem Hammer philo­ sophiert, in KGW, vol. VI/3, p. 74 (the references to Nietzsche’s works refer to the Kritische Gesamtausgabe Werke, eds. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1967ff.) / Twilight of the Idols, in The Portable Nietzsche, trans. W. Kaufmann (New York: Viking, 1968), p. 485. 28 Martin Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, trans. James S. Churchill (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1962), pp. 167, 207 (translation modified).

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the raw evidence of its actuality. But as Kant tries to avoid recourse to the noumenal self as nomothetical for theory and practice, the subject reveals itself to be a broken measure. It is broken between indeterminate being which provides ontological moorage but cannot legislate, and determinate thinking which legislates but is not constitutive ontologically. Self-presence as simple positum is sought for and remains sought. It is clearly a transitional age that articulates itself in Kant, who still looks for a fully present referent to justify the validity of norms, but who is no longer satisfied with the ontotheological construct of such a referent. The epochal site for which he speaks is intermediate between the pre-modern understanding of being as supreme guarantor and guardian of laws and the understanding of “being as time”29 at the end of modernity. What occurs, then, in the Kantian topos of transcendental legislation is not a displacement of the ultimate norm-providing referent— from God to Man, as it was put in the nineteenth century—but an incipient loss of any such referent; the loss of the origin as unbroken self-possession. Merely for the sake of illustration (as well as for the pleasure of it) I add a consideration concerning Kant’s text: the book entitled Critique of Pure Reason presents itself as “the sole path of guarding against all those errors that have hitherto set reason at variance with itself. […] I have specified these questions exhaustively, according to principles; and […] I have solved them to its complete satisfaction.”30 As a law for writing, Kant sets himself the goal of complete systematicity. His very act of writing, however, transgresses that law: there is no major text in the history of philosophy so consistently fraught with incomplete sentences. Kant’s notoriously involved periods frequently lack their matching verbs. One may cite external reasons for this phenomenon of script violating its declared principle: e.g. the omission of certain verbs as a ­literary device (in German quite as in Greek and Latin), or the circum29 “Thinking the most difficult thought of philosophy means thinking being as time.” Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche: The Will to Power as Art, trans. David F. Krell (New York: Harper & Row, 1979), p. 20. 30 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A XII.

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stances by which the book was composed “in some four or five months, on the wing, as it were.”31 From the viewpoint of writing, the paradox remains: the text cancels consistently the major law, systematicity, it enunciates. In Nietzsche and Heidegger, the withering of normative referents becomes an explicit strategy which eventually brings about, or leads to recognition, the closure of modernity as an epoch.

(Anti-)subjectivism The dualisms in Kantian criticism—subject-object, is-ought, thinking-knowing, spontaneity-receptivity, etc.—arise from the basic­ otherness between the acts of consciousness and the givenness of precategorial existence, between thinking and being. What makes the topic of transgression a counter-strategy is that this radical otherness is not one more figure of the critical dualisms by which Kant hoped to lead metaphysics onto the highway of science. Kant’s nomothesis is cleft as thinking is severed from being (needless to add, this does not imply any return to some precritical ontology since, as I have said, ‘being’ designates here a proto-synthesis, the indistinct presence of an indeterminate sensation to thought). Kant could still repair the breach by constant recourse, whether implicit or explicit, to the noumenal self. That trust or rational belief may indeed place him “not at the beginning of ‘modern’ thinking, but at the end of the old theistic metaphysics: Kantian criticism is the last attempt to save it.”32 In that case, however, the broken unity of “I think-I am” makes him a strange delayed Scholastic.

31 Quoted in Ernst Cassirer, Kant’s Life and Thought, trans. James Haden (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), p. 136. 32 Krüger, Philosophie und Moral in der kantischen Kritik, p. 227. The topic of human reason’s resemblance to God, Gottähnlichkeit (ibid., p. 179), has been taken up in the English language Kant literature most recently by Sallis, The Gathering of Reason, pp. 28, 31, 151. While Krüger treats that topic as proof of his thesis that Kant has to be read as a late Scholastic, Sallis views it in terms of the Greek anagoge, ascent, and of the relation paradigma-eikon (Urbild-Abbild, model-copy). Both readings miss what I try to retain as the distinctive Kantian moment in ontology, namely, the incipient

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No such recourse is available to Nietzsche, the spokesman for late modernity. The breach between thinking and being is consummate. Following the strategy of legislation-transgression, its new locus is that of a break between thinking as making (poiesis or facere, “poetizing”or “fictionizing”) and being as becoming (genesis or fluere, “generation” or “flux”). When displaced into the struggle (again, not the dualism, and still less the dialectic) between fiction and flux, the topos of legislation turns into an ou-topos, a utopia in the literal sense: a nowhere of ultimate referents, which for Nietzsche is also the gay or blissful place, eu-topos, of innocence regained. “Chaos and anarchy” are no longer to be covered up by a noumenal “fact of reason” but to be withstood. Such withstanding is the primordial nomothetical activity. It consists in imposing “complex forms of relative life-duration [on] the flux of becoming.” Nietzsche calls the outcome of such formative imposition a “configuration of domination,” Herrschaftsgebilde.33 To understand the implications of this topos for the issue of ­legislation-transgression, it is necessary to examine how it responds to the guiding question, What is being?, and more specifically how it emerges from Kant’s implicit answer to that question, the transcendental difference. The metaphysical difference between ens and esse can be described as any entity’s appropriating what is not its own: “a being is understood in terms of the act of to-be” (Aquinas).34 Every being makes the “pure act of to-be” its property or perfection, it appropriates that pure act by participating in it through deficient similarity. (This formal construct reappears in the guise of the “totality of reality” in Kant’s doctrine of the transcendental ideal—a doctrine, one evidence that the metaphysics of full presence is cleft in its very positing of whatever happens to function as measure-giving First, the Good, God, or the subject. 33 Nietzsche, Nachgelassene Fragmente Anfang 1888–Anfang Januar 1889, in KGW, vol. VIII/2, p. 278 / The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann (Vintage: New York, 1968), p. 380 (§ 715). 34 “[…] ens sumitur ab actu essendi […].” Thomas Aquinas, Quaestiones Disputatae de Veritate, Q. I, Art. 1, corpus / Truth, trans. Robert W. Schmidt, 3 vols. (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1954), vol. I, p. 6 (translation modified). On the appropriation of the actus essendi, see my Meister Eckhart: Mystic and Philosopher (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), pp. 177, 184–185.

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c­ ommentator writes, “that belongs in fact to a pre-critical conceptual context: it […] has failed, as it were, to join in the critical turn.”)35 The transcendental difference that I have sketched appeared as determination of the indeterminate. Nietzsche’s answer, now, to the being-question retains that subjectivist element of determining, but expands it to forces in general. What he describes as the formation of the formless may therefore be called the (anti-)subjectivist difference. Lastly, the phenomenological difference will prove to consist in the manifestation of the non-manifest. As opposed to the metaphysical difference, all three modern answers to the beingquestion deny that it can be couched in terms of an unshakable ground, that is, one necessary being. Nietzsche’s locus in that progressive disclosure of the fundamentum concussum is the moment where the long hidden crack bursts open. The subject appears not only as manifold, as in Kant, but as non-systematically, irreducibly so. Nietzsche’s locus is (anti-)subjectivist inasmuch as his discovery of forces in conflict originates in “my hypotheses: the subject as multiplicity.”36 He hypothesizes both with and against the subject, turning the polymorphous subject against any one fictitious thinking thing or one transcendental apperception. No longer denoting any subject as numerically one, the I ceases to be capable of instructing us about the legitimacy or illegitimacy of norms. If the thesis, positing, of prescription is the posture of standing and mastering ever shifting forces, primordial legislation mutates into a formative act. Referents whereby norms are considered valid within a configuration of forces take birth from an act of domination. Such an understanding of primordial legislation as an imposition is however not as far removed from Kantian transcendentalism as it might seem. To be sure, the indeterminacy of the “flux of becoming” is not equatable with the indeterminacy of precategorial existence, nor does determination by the “I think” amount to domination

35 Anneliese Maier, “Kants Qualitätskategorien,” in Kant-Studien: Ergänzungsheft 65 (1930), pp. 45–46. 36 Nietzsche, Nachgelassene Fragmente Anfang 1888–Anfang Januar 1889, in KGW vol. VII/3, p. 382 / The Will to Power, p. 270 (§490). “Man is a multiplicity of forces […]. ” Ibid., p. 181.

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by anything akin to the “favorability or unfavorability of circumstances (nourishment—).”37 But is the self-assertion of the force, e.g. nourishment, that shapes phenomena into a Herrschaftsgebilde not the universalized consequence of the transcendental subject’s self-assertion in the so-called Copernican Revolution? Nietzsche can indeed view the body, the subject, a chemical compound, protoplasm, an emotion, a social group, a religion as formations of domination because in each and every gestalt of whatever scale he sees one force imposing its law on the whole. The universalization by which the transcendental subject appears as one among an infinite number of possible I-saying forces constitutes a radicalization of transcendental criticism that Kant would have found difficult to follow. It is a genuine displacement. In either site, however—the ordering of a synthesis between reason and sensibility, and the ordering of a formation of domination—the topos of legislation is the act of saying “I.” Moreover, according to phenomenal content if not to literal phrasing, either is the work of the will. The retrospective reading of the transcendentalist tradition, from Nietzsche back to Kant (and eventually to Descartes) shows the will at work not only in moral self-determination, but more sweepingly in the thetical act of the “I think” determining my existence. To such a reading, the subject’s very move into the panoptic center of the phenomenal scene, its constitution of that scene as objective, is the originative doing of the will. Here, then, is one instance of philosophical topics displaced: when projected backwards onto the cogito, the Nietzschean topos of will to power reveals the epochal site for which the philosophy of subjectivity speaks. This site is constituted by the subject’s willfully declaring itself the ordering principle of all that there is and can be; by its legitimizing all rules and norms out of the attempted ontological self-determination “cogito-sum.” From its birth in Descartes’ Meditations onwards, the philosophy of subjectivity is an ontology of the will. It is an ontology because the cogito, transcendental apperception, and the strengthening of one force are acts of declaring what is and can be,

37 Nietzsche, KGW, vol. VIII/2, p. 278 / Will to Power, p. 380 (§715).

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and it is an ontology of the will because what is and can be is not merely encountered, read, received, but imposed, posited. Kant’s turn towards subjective justification of norms was undertaken in the name of enlightenment. To a retrospective reading, this topical strategy, too, becomes more sweeping in Nietzsche. “Man’s release from his self-incurred tutelage”—Kant’s definition of enlightenment38—culminates in Nietzsche’s critique of all normative agents as figments of the will. The reign of referents that measure all our doing and knowing by their full presence is a reign bestowed by reason; that bestowal now appears as the tutelage most blatantly self-incurred. The Kantian striving for enlightenment thus stops halfway. As a critic of reason’s illusions, prefiguring Nietzsche, he uncovers in thinking a disposition towards poetizing, “making,” the making of illusions. But the Kant who stops halfway in his endeavor, Kant the would-be savior of theistic metaphysics, demands subjection under yet another measurement endowed with ultimacy, and this time willed as reason’s self-subjection. Can it be the same Kant who calls for release from self-incurred tutelage and for submission under a principle expressly recognized as reason’s own creation? Kant’s tribunal of reason is still bound, only partially enlightened, still in need of further release from self-incurred tutelage. This is not so because, as has been charged ever since Leonhart Creuzer,39 in his moral philosophy Kant takes back the effort towards emancipation he so forcefully advanced in his criticism of knowledge. Rather, as pure reason legislates for itself out of a broken origin, its Aufklärung keeps procrastinating, and inevitably so. As supreme legislator Kantian reason is asked to metaphysicize while as supreme judge it is asked to pass sentence on metaphysics. This cumulation of contradictory charges is lifted only once cognitive categorization and moral normalization appear as “introduced by us (from perspectival

38 Kant, “What is Enlightenment?,” in On History, p. 3. 39 Leonhart Creuzer, “Skeptische Betrachtungen über die Freiheit des Willens” (1793), in Rüdiger Bittner and Konrad Cramer (eds.), Materialien zu Kants Kritik der praktischen Vernunft (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1975). Creuzer charged that noumenal freedom could only “be thought of against the laws of pure reason” (p. 284).

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grounds of practicality and utility).”40 Until full presence has been called by its name, a fiction of the will in the interest of domination, reason will not have released itself from its self-incurred tutelage. These premises suffice to show the formal identity of legislation and transgression in Nietzsche’s displacement—better: dislocation—of transcendentalism. It is quite apparent in his best known piece of criticism, the genealogy of moral values. That identity appears there in two complementary ways: (a) as willful imposition of laws by one nomothetical type, and (b) as the shaping of power into force in a formation of domination. They are complementary inasmuch as only the first has to do with the subject. The birth of “transcendentalism without a subject”41 can be traced quite precisely to this displacement of legislation from type to power, in Nietzsche. Furthermore, the topics of type and power will confirm a certain interest at work in the subjectivist transcendental revolution, the interest in mastering everything by objectifying it. A merely prospective reading of that history (for instance as a “history of concepts” or a “history of efficacy”) would hardly enable one to uncover that strategy running from Kant to Nietzsche. a. The unity of legislation-transgression appears in a rather obvious way from the conflict of wills in Nietzsche’s “moral” writings. The major key in which the first essay in The Genealogy of M ­ orals is written makes the calm self-assurance of “the good,” “the noble, powerful, high stationed and high-minded” ring forth. There is no “calculating prudence, no calculus of utility” in them, only the delight in how good they are, how beautiful they are. Out of their distance from “the low, the low-minded,” they “seized the right to create values and to coin names for values.” The major key in this account of how values became norms stresses, then, the purposelessness in “the seething overflow of rank-defining value

40 Nietzsche, Nachgelassene Fragmente Herbst 1887–März 1888, in KGW, vol. VIII/2, p. 278 / The Will to Power, p. 380 (§715). 41 The phrase is Paul Ricœur’s, The Conflict of Interpretations, ed. Don Ihde, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1974), p. 53.

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judgments.”42 No conflict of wills, here, only the equation “good = noble = powerful = beautiful = happy = beloved of God.”43 Yet there is a minor key that rings through these descriptions of goalless name-coining and value-creating. The “master morality” would be sterile without such delight in the thoroughbreds’ beauty, goodness, power. However, this delight chinks the ruling group’s self-sufficiency. Its “consciousness of its difference from the ruled group was accompanied by a feeling of well-being.” Far from shining for his own sake in enviable autonomy, the master actually lies in wait of being admired, like a spider in its web. Dichotomies such as ruler-ruled, delight-contempt, master-slave, enviable-envious, etc. show that names and values are established for a receiving group. They show that the master’s will is strong enough to “separate from himself those in whom the opposite of [his] exalted, proud states finds expression.”44 The “pathos of distance” is not thinkable without one type of will fixing that distance and another type keeping it. Thus names and values emanate from the master type for the slave type so that the slave submits to them as worthy of esteem, of obedience. In such imposition the formal identity of legislation-transgression is obvious since the master declares norms for the slave to follow while remaining above his own decrees. The Machiavellian prince thus binds others but remains unbound himself. Should he commit himself to his prescripts, he would no longer be master. For a type of will to be strong, it must legislate for others, for the “herd,” but not for itself. Inasmuch as the nomothetical type remains above its laws, they are transgressed by that type as they are laid down. The simultaneous formal transgression of the imperatives by the imperator is even the condition for the validity of norms, for their being values. If he does not exceed his creations his will ceases to be normative. Here, legislation-transgression is not yet a mark of the will as such. It marks one type, which values, and becomes operative in the presence of another type, for which values are norms. It is

42 Nietzsche, Zur Genealogie der Moral, in KGW, vol. VI/2, p. 273 / Genealogy of Morals, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: 1966), pp. 461–462 (I, 2). 43 Ibid., p. 281 / trans. p. 470. 44 Ibid., p. 209 / trans. p. 394 (emphases added).

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therefore an identity in need not only of otherness, but also of the other, of intersubjectivity. The typology of wills in conflict does not yield, then, an understanding of identity and difference in the will qua will. The subject remains twofold, subjecting and subjected— not as in Kant, within one agent, but in two. Not two in one, but two in two. This is the very point of the typology: for values to be norms, the subjecting subject must not also subject itself to them. Only a dialectic of consciousness, of recognition, might uncover the unicity of the will in the master-slave relationship, but then the master’s thetical agency would be lost. The slave would be equally thetical. Reciprocal recognition45 is not what is at stake in the imposition of norms on the weaker type. As a mere typology, the genealogy of morals does not allow one to grasp the counter-strategy in a normative will without recourse to a normalized will. Legislationtransgression appears as the specific features of one kind of will to which other kinds may be juxtaposed—not only the will to serve, but also, for instance, the will not to will (Nietzsche’s “last man”). Legislation-transgression appears as pertaining to the will qua will from the perspective of power alone. The “stronger will” of the nomothetical type is not to be confused with the “will to power.” The stronger will is opposable to the weaker will, but the will to power is opposable to no type. It is not a type. b. The distinction between power and force accounts for the “formations of domination.” To speak of “the will to power in every combination of forces”46 is to say that in a Herrschaftsgebilde the stronger force (resentment in the formation called Christianity; consciousness in the formation called animal rationale) as well as the weaker ones (sentiments other than resentment, e.g. pleasure, in Christianity; faculties other than reason, e.g. instincts, in the rational animal) determine power, each in its way. It is now power, not one type’s force, that is seen as sheer overflow, aimless.

45 “If you whip me that will be proof that you do not reject me. Whip me! By your blows you are taking possession of me,” the servile Lebedev says to Rogozhin in Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Idiot. 46 Nietzsche, Nachgelassene Fragmente Herbst 1884–Herbst 1885, in KGW, vol. VII/3, p. 284 / The Will to Power, p. 346 (§655).

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Macht comes from mögen, vermögen, poorly rendered as “being capable of something” (in German this teleological “something” is not implied). A force, on the other hand, whether weak or strong, points at some telos: another force. Legislation appears thus as a play of forces. The stronger directs itself at the weaker to subject it, and the weaker at the stronger to value it. The Kantian moral subject, the “personality,” is an example of such a formation based on contest: duty subjects inclinations and fears, but inclinations and fears are forces, too, forces to be mastered. Formation means that power forms itself into a configuration, and domination means that the constituents of such a configuration are forces. A formation of domination is the ordering of power. In that ordering—of which, once again, the moral subject is only an instance—all laws originate. Power formed into forces is the original legislation. From the viewpoint of power it is not one type that is nomothetical but the coming together, the gathering, of forces in a determinate formation of domination. Power does not occur unless translated into forces. In Nietzsche, this originative translation functions as normative determination. Wherever there are forces, power determines itself in one way or another; for instance, actively in the master and reactively in the slave. Norms are born from power through one force and for another force. This originary thesis is what Nietzsche calls willing. The will to power is the shapeless shaping origin of all types. In the translation of indeterminate power into determinate force, the will is no longer two, but one; it is however not simple, since it sets up forces so as to reach determination. It is the originary poiein, machen, the origin as poietic, Macht. As determinative, it legislates; but as simultaneously indeterminate, it transgresses the bounds that it posits, as it posits them.47 Laws are

47 This determinacy-indeterminacy of the will may be seen as a displacement of a Kantian topic, cf. the text from the Groundwork, B 72 referred to above (note 25). The will as both binding and unbound reveals its ontological status only as will to power, that is, when severed from moral and subjectivist strategies.

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the obstacles that the will to power erects for itself: “The obstacle is the stimulus of this will to power.”48 Beneath the struggle of wills described in the genealogy of moral values there proceeds then another struggle which alone is truly formative, the struggle of power for determination. This struggle is the locus of formal legislation-transgression. There would be no legislation if power did not essentially follow the strategy towards constellations of forces, of obstacles. But there would also be no legislation if power did not constitute an indeterminate moment in every formation, a counter-strategy of transgression, a stimulus of dissolution, making each normative configuration potentially other. Just as, in Kant, precategorial existence remains as an indeterminate moment of the “I think” that determines it, so in Nietzsche, power remains an indeterminate moment of the will that determines it. Here again Kant seems aware of the counter-strategy in his own justification of norms, and if he recoils from some abyss it may well be from that of indeterminacy as power. Nietzsche draws the consequences from the transcendentalist discovery of the shapelessness behind shape.49 One consequence is that the subject, too, is a formation of domination: “The sphere of the subject constantly growing, the center constantly shifting.”50 Another con-

48 Nietzsche, Nachgelassene Fragmente Anfang 1888–Anfang Januar 1889, in KGW, vol. VIII/3, p. 153 / Will to Power, p. 373 (§702). 49 The difference between power and force is a displacement, within Nietzsche himself, of the earlier difference between the two formative principles in art, Dionysian and Apollonian: without force as principle of individuation no formation of domination would be possible. Likewise in the young Nietzsche: “The Greek knew and felt the terrors and horrors of existence: in order simply to live he had to place before them the radiant dream-birth of the Olympians.” Nietzsche, Die Geburt der Tragödie, in KGW, vol. III/1, p. 31 / The Birth of Tragedy, in Basic Writings, p. 42. The pull towards formlessness, transgression, generates both horror and pleasure: “If we add to this horror the blissful rapture that wells from the innermost depth of man, indeed of nature, at this collapse of the principium individuationis, we cast a glimpse into the nature of the Dionysian.” Ibid., p. 24 / trans. p. 36 (translations modified). 50 Nietzsche, Nachgelassene Fragmente Herbst 1887–März 1888, in KGW, vol. VIII/2, p. 55 / Will to Power, p. 270 (§488). The shiftings of the center are due to the transient predominance among forces: “Man is a multiplicity of forces which stand in a ranked order, so that there are commanding ones.” Nietzsche, Nachgelassene Fragmente Herbst 1884–Herbst 1885, in KGW, vol. VII/3, p. 181.

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sequence is the loss of all titles by which a thought referent, including Kant’s transcendental apperception, has been endowed with ultimacy: simplicity, numerical oneness, originariness, etc. Kant’s broken ontology—precategorial being in need of determination by categorial being—is not speculatively mended as in the Idealists. It is affirmed as broken.51 The two topics of type and power reveal what happens in the modern “way of thinking,” Denkungsart, wherein the subject sets out to position itself as the normative referent. What happens is an essentially awkward move. Modernity appears as that formation of domination in which the I steps forth to shape power. But to the retrospective reading of the transcendentalist tradition, it has been out of step with referential thinking from Kant’s critical turn onwards. The topic of subjective legislation inaugurates the reach toward global domination. This reach is boundless since the essence of the will to power, as indeterminate, is: more!52 The subject’s self-positing thus dissolves in the will to power which is no one’s will, nor a type of will. The counter-strategy revealed by the boundless drive for mastery over the earth marks the loss of the subject as referent. With the shift from type to power, transcendentalism has abandoned its native soil, consciousness, by drawing the consequences of its native deed, uttering the nomothetical “I” in the Copernican Revolution.

51 Corresponding to the difference between precategorial existence and the positing “I think,” in Kant, is the difference in Nietzsche between being as wesen and as Setzung. Wesen is a verb: “Processes as essentializing,” “Die Prozesse als ‘Wesen,’” Nachgelassene Fragmente Herbst 1884–Herbst 1885, in KGW, vol. VII/3, p. 284 / Will to Power, p. 346 (§655) (translation modified). “If the innermost essentializing of being is will to power […].” Nachgelassene Fragmente Anfang 1888–Anfang Januar 1889, in KGW, vol. VIII/3, p. 52 / Will to Power, p. 369 (§693). Setzungen are “an arranging of a world,” for instance through logic. Nachgelassene Fragmente Herbst 1887–März 1888, in KGW, vol. VIII/2, p. 53 / Will to Power, p. 279 (§516). 52 “an increase of power,” “ein Plus von Macht.” Nietzsche, Nachgelassene Fragmente Herbst 1884–Herbst 1885, in KGW, vol. VII/3, p. 3 / Will to Power, p. 373 (§702).

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The subject de-centered As a spokesman for the end of modernity, Heidegger draws terminal consequences from the spokesmen for high and late modernity, Kant and Nietzsche. Regarding the transcendental strategy of legislation and the counter-strategy of transgression, these consequences arise from the new legislative locus. From Kant to Nietzsche legislation finds itself displaced away from the subject. But this displacement is only incipient, and Nietzsche’s site remains essentially ambiguous. His ambiguous position as an (anti-)subjectivist, (anti-) psychologist, (anti-)moralist may have undone the man; retrospectively it indicates the ruin of the cogito that has made modernity. Heidegger’s place in transcendentalism is terminal insofar as he completes the move away from the subject. Phenomena are no longer in any way objects for the subject. It has ceased uttering the nomothetical “I” and claiming to position itself, be it ambiguously, at the center of the phenomenal field. It is de-centered. The new legislative locus is reached by radicalizing Nietzsche’s anti-subjectivist strategy, by following to the end his denaturing of the cogito. This is the locus that Nietzsche adumbrates in some fragments on Western history, as when he speaks of “punctuations”53 of the will. What is punctuated in that history? The text of the will to power, he says; the texture of ever-shifting formations of domination. And what are those textural punctuations? In one of his bestknown pieces, already quoted, Nietzsche describes them as a series of halting points through which “the true world finally becomes a fable.” The progressive collapse of normative referents from Plato and Christianity through Kant and Positivism, to the “free spirits” and the discovery of the eternal recurrence reveals our past to be “the history of an error.”54 These ultimate representations, which

53 Nietzsche, Nachgelassene Fragmente Herbst 1887–März 1888, in KGW, vol. VIII/2, p. 278 / Will to Power, p. 380 (§715). That Nietzsche’s phrase “Willens-Punktationen” in this fragment refers to epochal punctuations results for instance from his description of the concept “God” “as an epoch—a point in the evolution of the will to power.” Friedrich Nietzsche, Nachgelassene Fragmente Herbst 1885–Herbst 1887, in KGW, vol. VIII/1, p. 250 / Will to Power, p. 340 (§ 639) (emphasis added). 54 See above, note 27.

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have made the West, are fictions of philosophers, to be sure, but as “punctuations of the will” they are first of all fictions of the will to power as the indeterminate factor (from facere, “to make,” quite as “fiction”) of determination. Nietzsche’s description of the breakdown of normative foci has its parallel in Heidegger: “Metaphysics is that historical space wherein it becomes our destiny that the suprasensory World, the Ideas, God, the moral Law, the authority of Reason, Progress, the Happiness of the greatest number, Culture, Civilization lose their constructive force and become nothing.”55 For Heidegger, too, the indeterminate factor of determination is to be understood as a process of gathering phenomena into precarious constellations. To emphasize structuring over structure in such constellations he speaks of “presencing” and “event.” For him, too, this factor remains indeterminate while it determines: “unconcealment” preserves in it the element of concealment. For him, too, finally, this factor accounts for halting points in our history, “epochs.” The Good, the moral law, God, etc., are referents endowed with force, each of which has had its age, each of which has made an epoch. In Heidegger’s use, epechein (“to halt” or “stop”; in the Stoics: to “reserve” one’s assent) addresses both the self-reservation or concealment in presencing and its historical orderings or stampings (Prägungen). Far from dismissing the project of enlightenment56 Heidegger’s dislocating of history—his segregating its loci—puts the ultimate edge on that project as it places it on the edge of the closed field of metaphysics. He does so by making explicit the unity of leg55 Martin Heidegger, Holzwege (Frankfurt/M.: Klostermann, 1950), p. 204 / The Question Concerning Technology, trans. William Lovitt (Harper & Row: New York, 1977), p. 65 (emphasis added). 56 Jürgen Habermas likes to oppose enlightenment to the “new right,” a distinction which for him is synonymous with that between modernism and postmodernism. This typology becomes cruder still when rationality and communication are described by him as modern enlightened ideas, whereas today’s “young conservatives” (­Nietzschean, Heideggerian, French), “old conservatives” (Aristotelian, Straussian) and “neo-conservatives” (early Wittgenstein, late Gottfried Benn) stand accused of identifying modernism and nihilism, state intervention and totalitarianism, anti-militarism and ‘fellow-traveling’ with terrorists....In writing he has formulated some of these criticisms in a summary treatment of the late Adorno and Heidegger. See, for instance, Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns, 2 vols. (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1981), vol. I, pp. 516ff.

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islation-transgression without concentrating, centering on the last referent still unquestioned by Kant and only partially questioned by Nietzsche, the normative subject. Resolute enlightenment uncovers the formal identity of legislation and transgression in several ways, all without recourse to the subject. 1. Man’s tutelage (Kant) results from his endowing ultimate representations with legislative force, an error (Nietzsche) that has entailed an age-old errancy (Heidegger); 2. Man’s release (Kant) from that self-incurred tutelage requires that nomothetical fictions (Nietzsche) “become nothing” (Heidegger) and that norms be traced to mere modalities in presencing; 3. The counter-strategy of transgression (Kant), when severed from subjective acts (Nietzsche), comes to be located in epochs (Heidegger). Errancy (Irre), presencing (Anwesen), and epochs (Epochen) are the key concepts—but are they concepts?—in the later Heidegger’s phenomenology of history. 1. “Errancy,” in Heidegger’s phenomenology, refers to the (structural, not psychological) interests responsible for the succession of eras and crises. It suggests that the interests at work in occidental culture have made it stray from an immediacy acknowledged initially, the immediacy of thinking and being. One such interest, born in a (hypothetical) turning point in the Greek understanding of being and identifiable ex post facto from an (equally hypothetical) contemporary turning point, has to do with the constitution of objectivity. Underneath the posture of theoria, of raising one’s gaze in contemplating eternal truths, this phenomenology reveals a pose quite different from that of examining universals: the positing of some supreme entity capable of warranting all-too-human undertakings. That previous interest declares itself straightforwardly in Descartes’ Meditations, which open with the “I think” and close with the “command of the will” over things extended.57

57 René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, trans. Donald A. Cress (Hackett: Indianapolis, 1980), p. 97 (René Descartes, Œuvres, vol. VII, p. 84).

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The ­all-too-human undertaking that ultimate sponsors have been expected to back is the constitution of objects at the disposal of the subject. Incipient modernity confirms the suspicion that ultimacy may never have been where metaphysicians have kept locating it— in representations beyond the human world of change—but that its genuine locus may always have been the I as interested in effecting change. The philosophical heritage appears thus as a text or fabric of speculative displacements crosscut by the not-so-speculative interest in domination. This interest accounts for the constitution of the not-I which is then submitted to the I. Heidegger’s title for that text, read diachronically, is “errancy.” In this phenomenology the Kantian “subject subjected” finds itself inscribed in yet another topography. The suspicion that Western history has been a long errancy again displaces his topic of rational self-legislation. Its new topos is that of an epochal stamp in the “history of being,” or history of “presencing.” According to that stamp, only what is represented is actually present. If in Descartes the cogito declares what it is, consciousness, in Kant it declares what it does. What does the “I think” do essentially? Against the counter-strategy of indeterminate being, its essence is to submit itself and everything else under its legislation. Such submission for the sake of full possession requires constituting the other to be subjected (including the other within ourselves, our sensible character). The process of that constitution of otherness is called representation. With Kant, Heidegger holds that onto-theological justification of norms is born of an illusion. With Nietzsche and against Kant, he holds that submission under the legislative subject still amounts to tutelage. Against both Nietzsche and Kant, he views legislation as a late displacement of the initial Greek immediacy, a displacement from thinking as “one” with coming-to-presence to thinking as representing, producing phenomena as “other” before the tribunal of reason. The nomothetical subject finds itself denaturalized a first time as a citizen of the noumenal republic and re-naturalized as a citizen of formations of domination; it is re-naturalized a second time as an epoch stamp in the history of being, cast on the road of errancy since the Greeks.

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2. Heidegger’s attempt to retrieve thinking and being as one process, as event, could not have been carried out without “Nietzsche, in whose light and shadow everyone today thinks and poetizes with his ‘for him’ or ‘against him.’”58 To understand being out of the “complex forms of relative life-duration within the flux of becoming” is indeed to put an end to the constructs of being as full of self-possession through representation—a construct on which transcendental criticism rests, but nevertheless a broken construction from the start. With the discovery of Herrschaftsgebilde, the issue of time is retrieved in ontology. A formation of domination is temporal not primarily in that it lasts a few seconds (a sensation), decades (a life), or centuries (a culture), but in that its constituents enter into it at every moment, gather themselves into it. When Heidegger speaks of historical constellations of truth, it is toward such entering into a phenomenal network of mutual relations that he displaces the topic of Herrschaftsgebilde. Under the guiding question of temporality, das Ereignis is the most appropriate name for being qua being. It addresses primordial time, the indeterminate-determinative condition of historical temporality. Time as event stands to historical-epochal temporality as will to power stands to formations of domination; as power to force; as precategorial existence to the “I think.” The illusory face-to-face of subject and object in representation is sundered as being is understood as mere presencing, but this is not to say that being is conceived as simple. As the event of presencing, it is neither monistic nor dualistic but irreducibly manifold. Such a thoroughly temporalized and plurified origin of norms yields no justificatory ground. With the attempt to retrieve the event-like polymorphous oneness of phuein and noein, Kant’s transcendental as well as Nietzsche’s (anti-)transcendental strategies cease to function as nomothetical. Explicit de-legitimization of normative referents becomes possible at a certain moment in history: when their self-emptying, their kenosis, has already turned into a commonplace, when in the 58 Martin Heidegger, Wegmarken (Frankfurt/M.: Klostermann, 1967), p. 252 / The Question of Being, trans. Jean T. Wilde and William Kluback (New Haven: College and University Press, 1958), p. 107 (translation modified).

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s­ ystem of epochal references, they have “become nothing.” From the viewpoint of the history of being, that commonplace is our site today. Man’s release from the tutelage he has incurred by endowing thought entities with full presence appears, then, as already accomplished. Hence the chance for phenomenology to bring before its gaze referents in their essence: in their Wesen, their historical unfolding as it has marked our history since the Greeks with epochal stamps. There is an indubitably positivist element in the later Heidegger as he traces norms to mere modalities in the history of presence. His inquiry into what makes norms possible ceases however to be positivist as he links their conditions to those that make historical modalities of presence possible. These conditions cannot be drawn from the cogito. For Heidegger to take as guide the question, In what way is being temporal?, is to undercut the very possibility of normative representations because it is to leave the terrain where representations are formed to begin with, namely consciousness. Investigating the temporality of being from the standpoint of an enduring subject and its conscious acts would amount to a relapse into the philosophers’ oldest habits: seeking the conditions for what is transient in what is immutable. Rather, if being is to be understood as time,59 these conditions are best described by the (ontological) difference between time as event and time as history; between coming to presence, phuein, on one hand, and on the other, the coming about of an age, the incipiency of an era, epechein. 3. The nomothetical in the history of presence is each novel juncture of that difference. For Heidegger the opening moments of an era contain the fullness of possible phenomena by which that era will live. Thus the pre-classical philosophers remain beyond—“unfold beyond and ahead of”60—all that has been thought thereafter, quite as Marx remains beyond Marxism, Freud beyond Freudian-

59 See above, note 29. 60 Martin Heidegger, Heraklit, in Gesamtausgabe, vol. 55 (Frankfurt/M.: Kloster­ mann, 1979), p. 43; see also his Nietzsche, vol. II (Pfullingen: Neske, 1961), p. 481 / The End of Philosophy, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), p. 75.

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ism, etc. “Every genuine inception […] sets a standard” insofar as every epochal beginning institutes a mode in which things appear for a while.61 The difference between such a mode (beingness, die Seiendheit, or presence, die Anwesenheit) and being (das Sein, or presencing, das Anwesen) constitutes the ontological difference as temporalized. Since “ontology,” the discourse about being, too readily suggests “being” as some subject matter next to (or above, or below) other subject matters, it is wise to avoid that eighteenth century coinage and to speak simply of the temporal difference. This temporal difference is now to be understood as nomothetical. The functioning of the Heideggerian nomothesis is not formally dissimilar from its Kantian and Nietzschean antecedents. At each moment of the modern trajectory an indeterminate factor (precategorial existence, will to power, presencing) of determination (by the “I think,” a force, an epoch) posits an order (the knowing and acting subject, a formation of domination, a constellation of the temporal difference). But the Heideggerian nomothesis is unique since with it the normative agency is fully disengaged from any “I”saying force. No longer decreeing laws, thinking now merely obeys the modalities of epochal presence—something it has always done anyway beneath its own metaphysical fallacies. It has turned into “thanking,”62 into recognizing the epochal arena in which we find ourselves inscribed. “The destiny of being clears a path for itself

61 Heidegger, Holzwege, p. 63 / Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), pp. 76–77. That mode is primordially enacted by a natural language. The great ruptures in Western history are the transitions from Greek to Latin to modern vernaculars. 62 “Thinking is thanking.” Martin Heidegger, Was heißt Denken? (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1954), pp. 91–92 / What is Called Thinking, trans. J. Glenn Grey and Fred D. Wieck (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), pp. 139–139. Much poetic, pious, or psychologist ado about this assonance in the more lyrical Heidegger literature could have been avoided if danken had been clearly understood as receiving and heeding modalities of presence. Thinking is thanking in as much as it cannot but respond and correspond to the way phenomena appear in a given order of unconcealment. Correspondence here does not mean homoiosis (adequatio, conformity), but poiein kata phusin, “to make according to presencing.” Heraclitus, fragm. 112; cf. Heidegger, Heraklit, in Gesamtausgabe, vol. 55, p. 367.

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in sudden epochs of truth.”63 Such ever shifting historical clearings draw the limits of our site, situate us. As they regulate the network of phenomena for an age, the sudden epochs of aletheia are what is originally legislative. The temporal difference between an order of presence and the event of presencing posits a transient system of exchanges. Heidegger speaks therefore of historical Grundstellungen, fundamental positions.64 Within a phenomenology of finitude, for which being is time, these positions are what justifies any rule and any norm. The event of presencing, or “being,” differs from every given order of presence; each fundamental position is therefore already transgressed, permeated with indeterminacy, as it establishes itself. Heidegger is most explicit about the potential toward other, new beginnings in every epochal beginning, when he describes contemporary technology as the Janus-faced border-line that limits the metaphysical field. On one hand, he claims to do no more than look back from that line without moving across it; on the other, he writes that “a thinking that attempts to think the truth of being itself […] has in a sense left metaphysics.”65 Just like precategorial existence in Kant and the will to power in Nietzsche, being in Heidegger does not deny the limits it posits; but to circle an arena also amounts to excluding what lies outside it, to addressing the absent as outside that arena. To posit a limit is also to posit its other. “Being” is the indeterminate condition (not a cause) of that ever shifting demarcation line between present and absent. There would be no history if presencing did not teleologically “stop at” ontic cultural orders; but there would be no epochal stopping places either if presencing as such—being qua being—were 63 Heidegger, Holzwege, p. 193 / The Question Concerning Technology, p. 54 (translation modified). 64 Ibid. pp. 96, 98, 193 / trans. pp. 145, 147, 53; Nietzsche, vol. I, pp. 455–472; vol. II, pp. 168, 174, 189, 421 / The End of Philosophy, p. 19. 65 Heidegger, Wegmarken, p. 197 / “The Way Back into the Ground of Metaphysics,” trans. Walter Kaufmann, in Existentialism from Dostoyevsky to Sartre (New York: Meridian, 1969), p. 208; see also, Heraklit, in Gesamtausgabe, vol. 55, p. 98. Compare these texts to Heidegger’s exchange with Ernst Jünger, in which he claims to ponder merely “de linea” and to leave it to the novelist to step “trans lineam.” Heidegger, Wegmarken, p. 214 / The Question of Being, p. 37.

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not a-teleological. Legislation is the positing of an order as an end or goal to be known, willed, observed. Transgression is the negation of any such finality, a negation operative in the very process of position and without which there would never be anything to be known, willed or observed. The terms of the temporal difference—epochs and the event of presencing—recall formally the Nietzschean difference between Setzung and wesen.66 The formal continuity from Kant to Nietzsche to Heidegger, despite the material de-centering of the subject, can best then be characterized by the nomothetical difference between legislation and transgression. Quite as in Kant, the identity and difference of legislation-transgression is also operative in Heidegger’s text. Kant’s syntax actually disrupts, I said, the very system his writing sets out to establish “exhaustively, according to principles, and […] to complete satisfaction.” The surface strategy pursues law and order, whereas the counter-strategy in his script “maddens its sense, order and reason” (J. Derrida, above).67 In Heidegger’s writing, the surface strategy aims against all forms of referents, and first and foremost among them, the grammatical subject to which all our Western languages refer a predicate. Transgression is his prima facie strategy, whereas legislation turns into the underground pull toward the age-old propositional logic. “The lecture has spoken merely in propositional statements.”68 In Kant, style is ahead of the project while in Heidegger, the project is ahead of style. Acknowledging the nomothetical difference entails at least one methodological consequence for phenomenology. If it is to be radical it cannot remain content with descriptions. Merely to describe the phenomenal network, the “life-world,” of an age is to miss the factor of transgression operative in it. In more sociological terms: the rationality of description amounts to rationalizing existing social formations, leaving their norms and common sense justifications untouched. To be sure, descriptions enable the phenomenologist

66 See above, note 51. 67 [Derrida, “La loi du genre / The Law of Genre,” p. 57. Schürmann has modified the translation—Editors.] 68 Martin Heidegger, Zur Sache des Denkens (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1969), p. 25 /On Time and Being, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), p. 24.

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to trace abstract concepts back to the life-world from which they originate. They do not enable him, however, to understand this lifeworld in turn as conditioned, namely by modes of presencing. But such is precisely the discovery from which radical phenomenology was born (in Heidegger’s so-called “turning”): being-in-the-world— the life-world de-subjectified—has a history. There is the Greek, the Roman, the Medieval, the early, middle and late modern being-inthe-world. Descriptive phenomenology is not equipped to situate social formations and beliefs by inscribing them in the concrete lineage of positions and negations in presencing. Such situation and inscription—not as an occasional digression into history but as “the issue itself”—is however the first step towards a critique of social theory and practice. Situating what is said, both in scientific and in ordinary language, in relation to the nomothetical difference makes phenomenology into something it could never be as long as it remained a discourse about consciousness and its acts: a tool for discursive intervention.

Unfinished enlightenment in the human sciences Instead of discursive intervention, it would be perfectly acceptable to speak of theoretical practice, had theoria not turned out to be so little a “theoretical,” contemplative activity. Discursive intervention is the critical act of pointing out the displacements in topical strategies that have led to the site where our age is alive, with the purpose of setting free the potential of transgression contained in the counter-strategies so discovered. If ours is, then, the cultural site where normative positings “have lost their constructive force and become nothing,” to expose the self-depletion of referents is obviously to hasten it. As such festination, the discourse of radical phenomenology amounts to intervention. Understood in light of the strategies that have produced it, our historical site may well be the one where discursive intervention is most pressing: once “the true world has finally become a fable” there still remain a good many idols to be identified and dislodged. Therefore, although the place held by supreme representations may already have been deserted for quite some time, there is unfinished business in the effort

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towards enlightenment. And what discursive intervention could be more enlightening than that which exhibits the counter-strategy of transgression in the transcendental constructs of ultimate normative justification? In the human sciences the unfinished business towards enlightenment is waiting in (1) research practice as well as (2) social practice.69 1. In view of the syncretistic state of the “soft” sciences, those for which quantification has not proved to be the highway of progress, pragmatists have come to agree that their disciplinary divisions— “psychology,” “sociology,” etc.—should be treated as little more than filing labels and their subject matters, “the psyche,” “society,” etc., as handy fictions. Such universals of nineteenth-century social science as Life, Spirit, Soul (all in W. Dilthey) have thus turned from objects of inquiry into variables for the formulation of hypotheses and in that sense into quasi-norms for research practice. They are quasi-norms, not norms, because as ordering hypotheses they are expressly held to be binding only as long as they prove useful. They are manufactured with built-in obsolescence. To some, such norm-like fictions remain useful because they allow one to understand paradigm revolutions; to others, because they help in edifying the infinite conversation of mankind which is history; to others still, because they produce a bête noire, consistency theory, to be expelled into the desert of experimentation where “anything goes.” One may question the very conditions or, in topological terms, the very site of these versions of pragmatist enlightenment: in what strategical constellation is such levity about norms for social science at all possible? Their relativization suggests a deeper structural transgression without which “normal science” could not be susceptible to such casual treatment. Once all the light has been focused that pragmatist enlightenment is capable of radiating, its energy source still remains in the dark. This power by which norms 69 Once the practical interest behind theoria has been noted, the Kantian distinction between rules for theory and norms for practice becomes untenable. The resorption of theory into one type of practice entails the parallel absorption of rules into norms.

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­ issolve into convenient fictions requires ways other than pragmad tist if it is to be identified. To radical phenomenology it instantiates the unity of legislation-transgression as an epochal mark. The moment of legislation in the organization of the human sciences can best be observed in their tendency toward disciplines. That discourse about the psyche, society, etc., which calls itself scientific, is one that follows rules for universal syntheses of empirical data. Special laws in these sciences require experience, but the “field” of a science is delineated by a priori laws just as the “field” of nature is in Kant. Such a priori laws that make the psyche or society into a phenomenon are constituted by a subject, called by Bachelard the “scientific city.” In that sense they can be considered transcendental: they make the discovery of empirical laws possible, which is to say that their validity lies in their application. The “psyche,” or “society,” is thus an Inbegriff, a set-concept. The scientific community as transcendental subject determines what can be known by agreeing on the forms according to which the given manifold of human phenomena is to be shaped. Just as the Kantian subject is itself constituted as it constitutes the domain of objectivity, so a human science establishes itself as it declares what can at all become an object for its investigations. The primary thesis, position, in a human science consists in so cutting out its field and imposing it. In Nietzschean terms, the primary nomothetical activity consists in shaping the formation of domination called “psychology,” “sociology.” Heidegger is most explicit about the interest behind the force that drives the human sciences toward disciplines: “The division of philosophy into ‘Physics,’ ‘Ethics,’ ‘Logic’ yields a compartmentalization. With that begins a process that comes to completion in the discipline’s prevailing over the subject matter dealt with in that discipline. What belongs to the ‘subject matter’ is decided by the perspectives and trends of inquiry which, for the sake of its own survival the discipline prescribes as the only possible ways of objectifying the subject matter.”70 The moment of transgression in the organization of the human sciences, the power of dissolution that militates against the force

70 Heidegger, Heraklit, in Gesamtausgabe, vol. 55, pp. 233–234.

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of self-preservation, surfaces most explicitly in the pragmatist “anything goes.” But it only surfaces there. The thoughtlessness of pragmatism lies in its inability to trace its own program to the indeterminate ontological moment in normative strategies. To do just that is the supplement of enlightenment radical phenomenology has to offer. Tracing topical strategies, it shows that, in Kant, it was the indeterminacy of precategorical existence which originated the “law of impurity,” the “principle of contamination,” the “axiom of impossibility” (J. Derrida, above)71 at the very heart of law. In Nietzsche, impurity, contamination and impossibility arose from the indeterminacy of the will at the heart of formations of domination; in Heidegger, from the indeterminacy of presencing at the heart of all epochal stampings. Before this ontological rooting (if that is the proper metaphor...) of today’s fragmented discourse about man pragmatism can only stay mute. Contemporary human sciences could not espouse the principle of bricolage if since the rise of modernity our being in the world had not found itself more and more manifestly deprived of fully present nomothetical agents. Transgression so turned into the (counter-) law of the age can hardly be an option or matter of opinion. The latest wrinkle in the literature is then less the effect of someone having an idea, or someone toying with nihilism, than it is a surface ripple from not-so-recently sprung currents and counter-currents in our cultural site. The supplement of enlightenment that the strategy of legislation-transgression may shed on the human sciences results directly from displacing a transcendental topic. In Kant’s new way of thinking something else occurs besides the subject willing itself as the nomothetical center for all that there is and can be: freedom is granted to experimentation. His revolution consists in saying: “Let us make a trial whether we may not have more success in the tasks of metaphysics if we suppose that objects must conform to our knowledge.”72 Reason makes an attempt with conditions it chooses for itself and with nature, which it observes under those 71 [Derrida, “La loi du genre / The Law of Genre,” p. 57—Editors.] 72 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B XVI (emphasis added). In this Preface to the second edition of the Critique the remarks abound in which Kant describes his undertaking as a Versuch, cf. B XI, XVII-XXIII, XXXVI-XXXVIII.

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conditions. Retrospectively one may see here an incipient recognition of the irreducible multiplicity of being, a recognition fullfledged in Nietzsche and Heidegger. If it is still shared only reluctantly in the social sciences, such reluctance stems from the forces of disciplinary division. These may then be the first victims of a genuine plurification of discourse. Discursive intervention in the theory of the human and social sciences, if resolutely enlightened, not only makes explicit the impurity, the contamination, the impossibility at the heart of norms for research practice; by pointing out the withering force of those norms it accelerates their withering. 2. Discursive intervention in social practice would accelerate a counter-strategy in public life: towards the plurification of power, the revolutionary process par excellence, begun in 1789. Michel Foucault has observed that the age of Kant is also the age where “mobile, polymorphous, circumstantial techniques of power” begin to replace techniques confined to the hands of the sovereign alone. The “threshold of our modernity” would thus be marked by an incipient move away from power as “imposed on subjects” to “a power bent on generating forces, making them grow, ordering them, rather than one dedicated to impeding them.”73 This decentering of power (now in the political, not the ontological sense mentioned earlier) is not a novel occurrence. It has suffered the gravest setbacks in our own century. But it is not equivalent to representative democracy either. In conclusion, I will sketch the counter-strategy of transgression in constructs of power-delegation as well as one incidence of enlightenment upon political practice. The legitimation of political power is that issue in Kant in which the unity of legislation-transgression seems to have haunted him most openly. The paradoxes of his position are well-known: “There is an original contract by means of which […] a completely lawful commonwealth can alone be established.” Against French and English social contract philosophers, he holds that such an original

73 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. I, An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon, 1978), pp. 106, 136, 148.

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agreement cannot be established “as a fact […] it is merely an idea of reason,” regulative of political practice. This idea provides the basis for fundamental human rights, “an infallible a priori standard.” And yet he adds: “It follows that all resistance against the supreme legislative power […] all defiance which breaks out into rebellion is the greatest and most punishable crime in a commonwealth, for it destroys its very foundation.”74 Rebellion and revolution are conceived as instances of relapse into the state of nature from which a commonwealth emerges only through the idea of an original contract. Kant’s rigorism, here as elsewhere, results from a rigid application of the principle of noncontradiction: one cannot will at the same time a commonwealth and its negation, the state of nature. What haunts Kant quite openly is the evidence that the people’s sovereignty remains built into the transcendental act of delegating it. He acknowledges this simultaneity of foundation and dissolution as a matter of observation, of {the} empirical: “the great artist, nature,”75 produces harmony among men even against their wills, namely through the conflict of their passions, their “private vices.” (B. Mandeville) Kant’s trust in progress toward a more moral world order thus rests on what is immoral, strife—the essence of the state of nature. In legal terms: Kant has to rely on actual transgressions of the law to enhance universal lawfulness. When read retrospectively, this dependence on conflict for the sake of perpetual peace is more than an article of empirical wisdom. It is an acknowledgment that the people’s right to take back the power it transfers upon the ruler corrodes social contract theory from within like a counter-strategy of disruption, of plurification. The bestowal of power upon the sovereign (or an elected 74 Immanuel Kant, “On the Common Saying: This May be True in Theory, but it is no Good for Practice,’” A 249–255 / Kant’s Political Writings, trans. Hans Reiss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), pp. 79–81. On the aporia between the “a priori standard” for human rights and the inherent immorality of revolution in Kant see the articles by Iring Fetscher, Jürgen Habermas, Dieter Henrich, Peter von Oertzen, and Manfred Riedel in Zwi Batscha (ed.), Materialien zu Kants Rechtsphilosophie (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1976) as well as the articles by Manfred Riedel and Thomas Seebohm in Social Research 48:3 (1981). 75 Kant, “Perpetual Peace,” A 47 / On History, p. 106.

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r­ epresentative) is one more foundational act in Kant crossed by its contrary, the pull toward “mobile, polymorphous, circumstantial techniques of power.” If radical enlightenment consists in uncovering the illusion of full presence, it is not so difficult to conceive its translation into political practice. Discursive intervention would have to denounce the arch-metaphysical concept of power as something one possesses and eventually delegates. Such a metaphysics of full presence sustains all contract theories with their corollaries, government contracts and the mechanisms of representative democracy. Enlightenment about agents fictitiously endowed with ultimate power in the community cannot stop short of one practical consequence: hastening the downfall of whatever remains of such agents. It cannot stop short of strengthening the counter-strategy towards ‘direct democracy’ within the strategies of representative democracy.

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“Entering into being-there, its instant and its place: how does this occur in Greek tragedy?” M. Heidegger1

Much has been written about “Heidegger and Politics.” Still, it remains one of the most difficult issues whether his radical questioning leaves any place at all for thinking the political. If it does, what will be the enabling conditions for rethinking the political sphere after Heidegger? To deal with any topic under a heading such as “Heidegger and X,” it is best to take one’s bearings from his single issue throughout his writings: his attempt to understand being as time. In the present case, where ‘X’ equals ‘the political,’ it is also advisable to aim at the key phenomenon that constitutes the political sphere, namely, the phenomenon of the law. No politics existed prior to the Greek invention of democracy, and the new factor that then came to determine relations between the one, the few, and the many—between a lawgiver, an assembly, and a people—was the law. Hence this more specific question: how does the temporality by which the later Heidegger seeks to comprehend being affect his understanding of the law?

1 Martin Heidegger, Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis), in Gesamtausgabe, vol. 65 (Frankfurt/M.: Klostermann, 1989), p. 374 / Contributions to Philosophy, trans. Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1999), p. 261. Henceforth, cited as GA65 / CP with page reference. [Since Schürmann’s own translations in general differ significantly from the published English edition, the references to CP are merely indicative—Editors.]

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The question can be answered tersely. In moving out of the transcendental subjectivism, whose shadows still lingered over Being and Time, Heidegger does not exactly move away from the quest for ultimacy that philosophers have pursued since Parmenides; being as time remains, in a way, the ultimate condition of phenomena. But he disrupts in that condition what has been essential to any figure of firstness: simplicity. Representations held to be ultimate impose on phenomena a single bind. If they did not, their multiplicity or complexity would have to be accounted for, which means that they would have to depend in turn on one more fundamental representation and thus could not be ultimate. Now if being is to be thought of as time, it will no longer satisfy that principial requirement. ‘Being’ cannot be listed, then, in the archive of names given to the First more originary than which nothing can be thought. In the later Heidegger, the retrieval of the issue of being has to be placed under an epigraph, not taken from Plato (as in Being and Time), but one invoking the tragics (see the epigraph beginning this piece). The heroes of Attic tragedy suffer indeed a condition that is originary without being simple. Inasmuch as it repeats that condition, being as time obliges one to think the political anew. It obliges one to think of the law as a normative double bind.2 *** The starting-point of any philosophy has been a perplexity before one precise phenomenon or region of phenomena. In Plato, it was axiomatic geometry; in Aristotle, substantial change brought about by human know-how. In Being and Time, the heuristic experience was everyday involvement with “stuff.” What struck the later

2 The phrase double bind was first coined in 1956 by Gregory Bateson, as far as I can tell. I am retaining the three formal traits by which Bateson characterizes this concept (Steps to an Ecology of Mind [London: Intertext books, 1972], pp. 206ff.): a primary injunction declaring the law; a secondary injunction declaring a counter-law, hence conflicting with the first; and lastly a tertiary injunction “prohibiting the victim from escaping from the field” constituted by the first two injunctions. Obviously, I am not retaining these features as they are used in social psychology.

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­ eidegger as problematic was the global reach of contemporary H technicity. He diagnosed it as the apogee of thetic subjectivity exhausting its normative resources. The diagnosis entails that our locus in Western history is bifrontal, as is a line of closure or the face of Janus. In the apogee of hegemonic subjectivity lies the possibility of its perigee; in the most brutally subsumptive single bind lies the opportunity of remembering a more ancient double bind. To learn how the later Heidegger understands being, one must therefore try to trace the step back by which he moves from that pathology of our historical site to the tragic essence of being qua event. His attempts at retrieving the being event are as diverse as they are unrelenting. They offer various avenues to trace this step backward. I choose to read a few sections from a text written during the years when the contemporary pathos forced itself upon Heidegger with blinding self-evidence (just what sort of blindness will soon become apparent), namely, from the Contributions to Philosophy.3 In starting from the disparate site that is our own, one can say that the Contributions succeed where Being and Time failed. A heuristic temporality that is only marginally subjectivist allows ­ Heidegger to step back toward the temporality of being itself: the one and only step for which he had been practicing, as it were, all along. In this temporality of withering subjecto-centrism, the edges of the era instituted by the cogito are fraying. The contemporary pathos signifies a non-thetic possible, announcing itself in an ultrathetical present. This essential discordance of times is what needs

3 The present article is fully understandable only in conjunction with three related papers. In particular, I shall not develop here what Heidegger means by “entering into being-there, its instant and its site.” From the lines quoted in the epigraph above, Iretain solely the claimed line of descent connecting his thought to Greek tragedy. The related papers are in Karsten Harries (ed.), Heidegger on Art, Politics, and Technology (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1994) [“A Brutal Awakening to the Tragic Condition of Being: On Heidegger’s Beiträge zur Philosophie,” pp. 89–105]; in Joseph Margolis and Tom Rockmore (eds.), The Heidegger Case: On Philosophy and Politics (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992) [“Riveted to A Monstrous Site: On Heidegger’s Beiträge zur Philosophie,” pp. 313–330]; and in Arthur Melzer, Jerry Weinberg and M. Richard Zinman (eds.), Technology in the Western Political Tradition (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993) [“Technicity, Topology, Tragedy: Heidegger on ‘That Which Saves’ in the Global Reach,” pp. 190–213—Editors.]

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most to be retained from the “closure of metaphysics”—at least, if one wishes to understand Heidegger’s suggestion that the end of epochal history may produce the liberation from self-incurred tutelage.4 The temporality of the possible exit from normative theticism is non-subjectivist in that, unlike the temporal ecstasies, it appears in an epochal constellation, not in some offshoot of the solipsistic ego, and it reveals originary temporality in that such constellations spell out a history of being, not of some collective subject. In the fading of subjectivity as the modern focus for constituting the phe-nomenality of phenomena, Heidegger reads the self-emptying—the kenosis—of all normative representations. The “loss of standards” that has been happening to the West over the last century and a half is instructive for the being-question as it indicates a hiatus that spatializes and temporalizes from within what philosophers have pursued as ultimate conditions. Indeed, in accordance with the hypothesis of a closure of metaphysics, our historical site is marked by a deferment separating the ‘not-there’ from the ‘there’5—a spatial gap which is not the issue here, but which translates the temporality split between the integrative violence of the technological present and the potential for disintegration that it displays. This economy, spaced and deferred from within, sums up the heuristic function of our age for answering the question, What is the temporality of being? The argument worth considering here is that discordant spacetimes can be granted only by a condition in itself discordant. Heidegger describes this condition as the event of appropriation-expropriation (thereby collapsing the problem of space into that of time). The fractured condition—the discordance of times (dissecutio temporum) which is being—will obviously not remain without repercussion upon beings. It is what makes us mortals. It places the beings that we are within the double bind of birth and death, i.e., within

4 “Enlightenment is man’s release from his self-incurred tutelage.” Immanuel Kant, “What is Enlightenment,” in On History: Immanuel Kant, ed. and trans. Lewis W. Beck (New Jersey: Macmillan, 1963), p. 3. On Heidegger’s view, Kant instituted but another tutelage, namely, under the legislative ego. Heidegger can thus claim to radicalize the Kantian project of enlightenment. 5 According to the Contributions, being-there (Da-sein) is not yet; see GA65, p. 90 / CP, p. 62, and elsewhere.

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differing pulls (rather than between distant facts). It places us within the double bind of being-through-birth and being-toward-death, or of natality and mortality.6 Heidegger’s entire effort, however, aims at thinking the discordant time of being in its singularity and without the detours, either via our de facto history (which fulfills the merely heuristic function inasmuch as late modernity knows itself to be bound by a paralyzing planetary grip apparently beyond solution and, at the same time, unbound from the idealities in the name of which, only yesterday, we killed and died), or via the beings that we are (who fulfill a verificatory function, since everyone knows being-toward-death which makes us finite and so binds us, as well as being-through-birth from which arise the maximizing impulses that unbind us). Originarily discordant time, then, appears as the law in disaccord with itself. To the old question of being qua being, the Heidegger who speaks after the fault of 1933–34 answers with this nomic monster: the originary, and in that sense ultimate, disparity of legislation-transgression. This is the tragic double bind. It determines the way Heidegger problematizes anew, and sets apart, the two spheres—the historical and the political—that philosophers have usually been tempted to treat as one. *** The Birth of the Law from Tragic Denial On a wall in Pompeii there is a fresco that represents Agamemnon sacrificing his daughter, Iphigenia. What is remarkable about the picture is that the head of the koricidal father is veiled. Agamemnon, Homer wrote, ruled over “many isles and all Argos” (Iliad 2. 108). He was the most powerful of the Greek princes. After Paris had carried off Helen, Menelaos’ wife, it fell to Agamemnon, Paris’ brother, to lead the punitive expedition against Troy. None other than Zeus ordered the operation. The flotilla was assembled in Aulis, in Boiotia, but Artemis caused adverse winds to blow. It 6 In speaking of natality and mortality as phenomenological traits, I am following Hannah Arendt in The Human Condition (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1958), pp. 9, 177, 247.

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was she who demanded the sacrifice. Agamemnon therefore found himself placed at the intersection of two divine commandments. Is this not enough to make one cover one’s head? He also found himself placed at the intersection of two laws. Whence his complaint: “Heavy doom will crush me if I disobey, and heavy doom as well if I slaughter my child, the glory of my house. How could I stain with virgin blood these father’s hands and slay my daughter by the altar’s side! Is there a choice that does not bring me woe?”7 The conflict of laws appears more clearly here than with other tragic heroes. For the first among leaders, what law could win out over the obligation to carry through a war ordered by the first among gods? Yet for a father, what law could be stronger than that of preserving his child’s life? “Is there a choice that does not bring me woe?” The question is obviously rhetorical. Disaster indeed is sure to fall on the father who, in the name of public responsibilities, denies his family ties; but disaster, too, will fall on the leader of the army who, in the name of his bloodline, denies his political duty. Faced with such a nomic conflict, how could one not cover one’s head? Lastly, Agamemnon finds himself placed at the intersection of two transgressions. His brother’s hubris in abducting Helen can only end up ruining the city (polis), just as his ancestor’s hubris— Atreus,’ who had killed his own son—can only end up ruining the household (oikos) and the family line. He himself had committed neither of these two faults: neither the one that is now plunging the cities into war nor the one that is about to destroy his home. They fall upon him. “Heavy doom will crush me if I disobey and heavy doom as well if I slaughter my child.” Whether he chooses to desert (liponaus, 1. 212) his commander’s post or to disrupt his lineage, there remains no way out of the situation without incurring guilt. Is it then these two destinies of retribution that intersect under the veil: two ancient kinds of blindness and their sudden differing as it strikes at Aulis? Now, speaking at Aulis, Agamemnon takes a strange turn. Without transition or pause, he changes tone. From one verse to the next, the conflict of obligations is carried off—as if by favorable

7 Aeschylus, Agamemnon, lines 205–211.

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winds, effective even before they blow. “It is right and holy that I should desire with exceedingly impassioned passion the sacrifice staying the winds, the maiden’s blood” (1. 214ff.). The either-or, which just an instant ago was so cruel in its two opposing laws, is now decided. What is more, the law embraced by Agamemnon is no longer an evil, it is themis: right, just, sacred.8 With a wave of the hand, one of the laws in conflict—the law of the family—has been erased. This is tragic denial. It amounts to new hubris, one that will bear its terrible fruit upon the return from Troy. At Aulis, Aeschylus shows this denial enflaming the passions of Agamemnon. Anguish gives way to audacity: “He dared to sacrifice his daughter” (1. 223–224). “He would not hear nor heed the girl’s voice plead: ‘pity me, father.’” The routine of ritual slaughter is applied to her. Her father places her on the altar, “as one hoists a goat for sacrifice” (1. 232). To silence her curses—and to avoid that these fall upon the house—she is gagged. Also as with an animal, a “bit” is placed in her mouth (1. 237). The expression is Agamemnon’s. Thus he completes the transformation of his daughter into an animal to be slaughtered. Thus, more noteworthy still, Agamemnon makes himself into a military leader, released from contrary allegiances. A tragic denial is necessary if a univocal law is to be born. The Pompeian fresco is then not so difficult to understand. What is it that Agamemnon no longer sees? It is what the chorus sees only too well. Of Iphigenia, the chorus says: “with one last piteous dart her glance struck the sacrificers […] .” (1. 239). To this human gaze, calling for another human gaze, Agamemnon blinds himself. The painter has depicted this very veil of denial. Tragedy traces out something like a path of sight. The hero sees the laws in conflict. Then—this is the moment of tragic denial—he blinds himself toward one of them, keeping his gaze fixed on the

8 The abrupt change in Agamemnon’s attitude has been underscored most recently by Martha Nussbaum in The Fragility of Goodness (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 32–38. For the expression orge periorgos epthumein, which Nussbaum translates as “desire with exceedingly impassioned passion,” see the parallel constructs and the commentary in Eduard Fraenkel, Aeschylus: Agamemnon, vol. 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1950), sub loco.

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other. Armies and cities have lived, and continue to live, within the shadow of this blindness. Then follows a catastrophe that opens his eyes: this is the moment of tragic truth. The vision of irreconcilable differing takes his sight away (even gouges his eyes out, as was the case for Oedipus and in another way for Tiresias), and it singularizes the hero to the point that the city has no room for him any longer. From denial to recognition, blindness is transmuted. His orbits empty, Oedipus sees a normative double bind, i.e. tragic differing. In the elation of the slaughter, the law of the city asserts itself wantonly against that of the family. Hence the legislative hubris which will cost Agamemnon dearly once back from his expedition. Now—such is the lesson of Heideggerian Ereignis as the differing of appropriation-expropriation—the law is always born from a repression of the transgressive other, just as life sustains itself by repressing death, the other that transgresses it. This conflictuality by which Heidegger understands being stands most in need of elucidation. In the sphere of history, it makes for innumerable constellations of epechein (suspension or withholding of originary strife), i.e. for innumerable epochs. In the sphere of the political, it breaks the univocity of the law. One has therefore to ask: What legislation and what transgression are at issue here? *** Legislation To the genealogist of normative representations, philosophical hubris declares itself in legislative, not transgressive, acts. The representations successively phantasized as ultimates to legitimate order in the West have forced themselves upon us through the very terror whose effect sent piteous darts from Iphigenia’s eyes. A wantonness comparable only to Agamemnon’s has promoted phantasms to the rank of ultimate standards for their epoch. To philosophers, acting in this as mankind’s functionaries,9 has fallen the task of Urstiftung 9 “We are the functionaries of mankind.” Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Philosophy, trans. David Carr (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970), p. 17.

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as understood by Heidegger: the task of instituting one focal sense of being. If one were to draw up a genealogy of these institutions, the law of laws would in every instance turn out to arise from this or that finite phenomenon phantasmically maximized into a standard. For this normative theticism alone, Heidegger lumps together as “humanist” all philosophies of order (a pleonastic phrase, anyway, since for the genealogy the very vocation of philosophy is to display things to man, according to an order). Legislative hubris is to be spoken of, then, in the comparative as well as in the superlative. In the comparative, for if all things manifest have been fixed by man around himself according to one order or another—if he has made himself their measure—this is because he has posited himself, and continues to do so, as worth more. The standardization of beings results from a comparison of valence and of value whereby man validates his hegemony in the constitution of phenomenality. But “humanist” wantonness reaches the superlative when man sets about to leap over his own shadow and attempts to establish himself on a post-hegemonic terrain; when he makes the post-subjectivist, post-thetic economy his affair within his means. Then, Heidegger asks, “does the hubris of the given standard (Anmaßung der Maßgabe) not turn out even greater than where [man] remains posited simply as the standard?” (GA65, 25 / CP, 19). Thus the denial of transgressive counter-laws curiously reaches its apex when the loss of norms becomes a common conviction, when there prevails a common resolve to shake ancient and modern fixations, and when it looks good—or even a little old-fashioned already—to hold forth on transgression. There is more impassioned elation still than Agamemnon’s. It intoxicates pronouncements stating with no more ado than the commander at Aulis that metaphysics is closed and that its play of normative theses is over.10 A rabid denial it is. The claim merely adds onto the

10 One of Jacques Derrida’s strategies has been “to decide to change terrain, in a discontinuous and irruptive fashion, by brutally placing oneself outside, and by affirming an absolute break.” Margins Of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 135. This might be read as a description of events in France at the time the essay was finished—“May 12, 1968” (ibid., p. 136)—were the proclamation of a future “which breaks absolutely” with the present not a leitmotif in Derrida

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thetic game. It locks itself up for good in the poses and positions struck: in the very theticism it declares out of date. Yet language itself commits us without escape to generalization and subsumption. We cannot speak “in singulars.” In every utterance, we obey the law of the common. If, however, in every law a transgressive strategy disrupts the legislative strategy, then this oldest observation about language is not well served by the vocabulary of universals. It is best described in that of phenomenalization, which thematizes singulars in contexts. Hence this lesson of legislative hubris: there is a phenomenalizing—regional—violence that cannot be unlearned; and there is a universalizing—transregional—violence that the West, while in its throes, has been trying to unlearn for more than a century. Phenomenalization means that things gather in a world. Legislation as Heidegger understands it is entirely regional, as the law of such contextualizing and ‘worlding’ remains in incessant flux. It is impossible to escape regional violence: the micro-violence through which a body organ asserts itself, the macro-violence through which a collectivity asserts itself—both ‘micro’ and ‘macro’ nourished by language. Indeed, one must not forget that Thebes becomes livable again through the nomotheses of Oedipus the tyrant. Life sustains itself through claiming territory after territory. So, too, do the concepts in our languages get serialized. This polymorphous integrative violence results from the phenomenological trait of natality.11 In other words, it is impossible to get away, without suffering factual singularization, from either the polis or the concept. Nevertheless, to go through life with one’s eyes open means to see tragic denial shape the entire morphological scope of the law. Crossing through our public spheres, in particular the national, with one’s eyes open is seeing that they maintain themselves at the cost of obliterating—if necessary, through extreme vio-

(see the Exergue to Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974], p. 5). 11 Legitimizing specific forms of these regional types of violence would require a doctrine of judgment. Given its subjectivist presupposition, such a doctrine would obviously be incompatible with Heideggerian phenomenology, just as it remains incompatible with other contemporary philosophical projects, for instance, Wittgenstein’s.

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lence—the counter-law that I shall call below the singularization to come. Another thing entirely is the violence of some trans-regional law, maximized out of one region of experience. Thus normative subjectivity is maximized out of the experience that “I think.” What late modernity may be striving to get away from is this very univocity. It is a harsh unlearning, marked by relapses of various scales. The Führer differs from the Greek turannos precisely through the nomothetic maximizing of a collective subject, posited as the phantasmic ultimate focus. I have suggested the analogy that likens epochal institutions, from which such hegemonic phantasms are born, to Agamemnon’s legislative coup at Aulis. Now in National Socialism, this analogy between a regional referent (such as Solon in the institution of the phenomenal region, democracy) and ultimate referent collapses into identity. From Aulis to Berlin, the political, regional code gets exalted into an ultimate, hegemonic nomothesis. The Heidegger of the Contributions, having just come back, as it were, from the properly modern hyperbolic self-assertion of normative subjectivity, now puts all his effort into bringing the counter-law to recollection through which the singular always subverts ultimate foci such as the one he had served. The lesson teaches the double bind. What would public life be like under the disparate versions of universalizing principles and of the singular subverting them—the version whose functional origin is the “event turned against itself”? Faced with the apparatus set into place by the univocal law, this tragic knowledge hardly ever has a chance. It may even lack legitimacy in the polity.12 One may be no more successful in attempting to slip away from underneath ultimate phantasms than in sneaking outside of the polis, let alone the concept. But here is what makes all the difference, setting Heidegger’s “other thinking” apart from “the one thinking” which has been that of mankind’s functionaries: in ultimate phantasms, subjectivity included, there is no denying the denial on which they feed, as Creon and Antigone deny that their respective law feeds on 12 It would be difficult to disagree with the well known line from William Butler Yeats: “Civilization is hooped together […] by manifold illusion.” William Butler Yeats, “Meru,” in The Poems, ed. Richard Finneran (New York: Macmillan, 1983), p. 289.

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the denial of its other. There is no denying the denial in ultimacy claims since the necrology of past epochs’ destitutions is just as recordable as the genealogy of their institutions. The knowledge of the double bind will, at the very most, act through sporadic, discursive interventions: through “the other thinking.” It recalls—both remembers and repeals—publicly the hubris of any univocal law, that is, of any collective single bind. *** Concerning the law, the other thinking no longer traces the genealogy of epochal nomotheses, but its origin in the event of appropriation-expropriation. From that other viewpoint, the law remains traversed by the nocturnal retraction denied to it by the attraction of diurnal order. As one seeks, not its epochal condition in one focal sense of being, but its originary condition in being as Ereignis, the law loses its ordering power. Here, then, is Heidegger at his most radical: in his step back, from the epochal institutions that have held and continue to hold normative power, to the origin of all normativity in the conflictual event. This step leads from a plainly subsumptive Yes to a conflict in which a No enters the Yes, shattering its power of subsumption. In epochal institutions, Heidegger writes, “the ordinary Yes gets immediately and heedlessly maximized into that Yes pure and simple that lends its standard to every No” (GA65, 246 / CP, 174). He distinguishes between two kinds of Yes. One is ordinary, uttered tacitly or vocally before something that is the case: “yes, she is beautiful”; “yes, at this moment I am thinking”; “yes, my country.” By such a constative Yes, we give our assent to whatever is. The correlative No, one might add, is its strict constative counterpart: “no, she is not ugly like her mother”; “no, I am not now singing”; “no, I am not American.” The other Yes, or the other kind of Yes, results from an operation more complex than reporting. First, there is but one of that kind: it is the Yes schlechthin, he says. Then, correlation to the No changes into determination, since this Yes does something “to every No.” The No, for its part, remains manifold, but this Yes passes into the position of ultimate standard for any

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constative Yes or No. Lastly, what the single Yes does to all No’s is to lend them its plain standard. Such normative institution is a complex operation inasmuch as oneness, ultimate determination, and standardization lack any phenomenal mooring. They are no longer wrested from what shows itself as being the case. The standard-setting Yes (one may call it the norm) results, and this is now the key word, from a maximization starting from an assent to something that does show itself. The standard setting Yes is aufgesteigert. For Heidegger, this operation marks the end of all faithfulness to phenomena and the start of speculation. To claim that one can deny—namely, particulars— only after having affirmed—namely, a universal—is to state the very mechanics of subsumption. This mechanics produces, as law, some Yes in relation to which alone every No is a No. With the No so rendered secondary, being is “forgotten.” It is noteworthy that for Heidegger legislative maximizations are never formal in the sense in which they would posit a neutral structure. They always elevate some content. From “yes, she is beautiful” the operation passes to the fullness of kalokagathia; from “yes, I am thinking” it passes to the thickness of the cogito; and from “yes, my country,” to the country Über alles ... It is just as noteworthy that in this critique of assertoric maximization the possibility of a Yes that would be phenomenolo­ gically prior to any negation never even arises. For Heidegger, it is precisely a matter of remaining faithful to phenomena; no longer to this or that one among them, nor to this or that region of experience, but to the phenomenon not to be outstripped which is the double bind between being-through-birth and being-towarddeath. A Yes that would be an originary word (Urwort)13 remains literally out of the question once the being-question takes its starting-point in this double bind, which the pathology of global technicity makes

13 According to Franz Rosenzweig, the Yes, in the sense of sic, of amen, of ‘it is good,’ is the “originary word” (das Urwort; see his The Star of Redemption, trans. William Hallo [New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971], pp. 27, 127). The translator renders Urwort indiscriminately as “archetypal word” and as “arch-word.” Both renderings carry connotations that are too Greek for the context.

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increasingly obvious and which alone is originary—and alone neutral—since it is the sole phenomenon truly familiar to everyone. Hence the phenomenological project more ancient than theticism and denial, a project that is neither speculative nor optional, namely, to rehabilitate the No and the Not as the singular other of being as singular. “From the singularity of being follows the singularity of the Not belonging to it, and consequently the singularity of the other. The one and the other are binding” (GA65, 267 / CP, 188–189). Rehabilitating a Yes-No of disparate singulars amounts to giving the last word to an originary differing that sets every law against itself (more about which, below). The origin of the law in the event of appropriation-expropriation disturbs the principles of order such as oneness, ultimate determination, and standardization. It makes them function against—in a non-dialectic “against”—the most efficient mechanics of order: oppositional negation. Heidegger restores to the Yes its correlation to the No, denied by the legislating coup that likens these principles to the law championed by Agamemnon at Aulis. However, such restitution forever ruins any tranquillitas ordinis. Before examining this normative double bind restored, one needs to look at the transgression it retains as co-originary. *** Transgression How is one to understand the expropriation in Ereignis (event of appropriation-expropiation)? In terms of the law: How is one to understand the transgression in the ultimate (legislative-transgressive) double bind? Two senses of transgression are to be excluded; a third will have to be retained. (a) Heidegger’s sarcasm concerning any extra-territoriality posited by mere fiat, the target of which was clear in the 1930s, has by no means lost its relevance. It could easily be redirected today. In self-proclaimed avant-garde circles, transgression is made the law. Yet this does not guarantee faithfulness to expropriation in the event. If in our day and age such faithfulness is best learned by inquiring into the distant origins of technicity and into the potential

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it yields, then transgression is not to be taken here in the sense, for instance, “preluded” to by Michel Foucault.14 Transgression does not denote here the passage beyond some closure, not some step across the line (trans lineam). (b) Another strategy of trans- is more complex. In the part of the Contributions entitled The Leap, one of the subsections is headed “Overmeasure in the Essence of Being” (GA65, 249 / CP, 176). By ‘overmeasure’ (Übermaß) is to be understood, Heidegger adds, not a quantitative surplus, but a measure that “refuses to be evaluated and to be measured.” The paradox—a standard of measurement beyond all measurement—is ancient. It recalls the step beyond being (epekeina tes ousias) as construed by the Alexandrians and their epigones. This paradox, however, pertains to the core of every doctrine of principles. A standard is a principle only if it is not in turn measured by some other standard. Whence the warning: “Overmeasure is not the beyond [that would define] some suprasensible realm.” In other words, it puts out of play any sequence of “before and after” among intelligibles. It does so as it puts out of play the representation of universals and their hierarchy. Thus overmeasure is “binding” (Erzwingung), indeed, but not simply so. It cannot therefore be modeled after a priori constraints as exerted, for instance, by the Greek agathon and en. Every principle, every norm and law, is a binding standard—on the condition, however, that it reign simply. Now simplicity is just what Heidegger challenges in ‘overmeasure.’ He undoes the a priori by dealing a blow to the prestige of simplicity. Of that blow, antisubjectivism is but a consequence. One may well fail to see that he tries to think of an ultimacy that would not entail simplicity, for the expressions used have an all too familiar ring: “nothingness alone is of a rank equal to being because it belongs to it.” If it is a matter of “rank” after all, is one not compelled to recall, for instance, the Dionysian uperon, itself a uper-metron? Such ancestry seems all the more obvious since nothingness is to be understood, he continues, “as the overmeasure of pure refusal” (GA65, 245 / CP, 173). In Dionysius, the 14 Michel Foucault, “Preface to Transgression,” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, ed. Donald F. Bouchard, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), pp. 29ff.

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prefix uper- compounds the distance marked by the more ancient epekeina. The prefix removes the term to which it is attached out of reach. It designates an ultimate focusing that refuses to yield to our thinking15—a refusal which, to the Neoplatonic mainstream, indicates an excess of simplicity. Now this precise and venerable lexicon gets diverted here on the very exaltation of simplicity. The overmeasure, Heidegger writes, “opens the strife and keeps open the space for every strife” (GA65, 249 / CP, 176). That, then, is how it binds beings. It commits them to discord. Not, to be sure, to the war of all singulars against all others, but to the polemos of life and death permeating every singular and singularizing it. The overmeasure stresses the polemical essence of the event. One is far from the doctrine of principles and from its most rigorous argument, where the ascent through negations produces an ultimate focus reachable in excess (uperoche). How could Heidegger’s “going-beyond,” “rank,” etc., lead to a single bind when the event itself is not simple? As he twists inherited thought models out of the mechanics of simple subsumption, they lead rather to a double bind, phrased here as that of being and nothingness. (c) By transgression one is to understand the co-normativity of the law’s disparate other under the very reign of the law. If being is to be characterized by discordant temporal pulls—an attraction and a retraction within manifestation—then all laws, whether theoretical or practical, natural or positive, are always deferred and spaced from within by their singularizing negation, just as an epochal hegemony is, from its establishment onward, deferred and spaced from within by its decline to come. The decline of an epochal standard occurs when the phantasm endowed with normativity suddenly appears as one commonplace representation among others (just as 15 The two main works by Pseudo-Dionysius Areopagite open with hymns in which the prefix ‘over-’ (uper-) and the adverb ‘above’ (epekeina) abound. God is “He who is beyond every being” (o panton epekeina), He is “over- unknowable” (uperagnoston), “over-most-evident” (uperpheanestaton), etc. (On Mystical Theology, 1.1); He is “the non-being cause of every being, beyond being” and “beyond thought” (The Divine Names, 1.1), from Pseudo-Dionysius Areopagite, The Divine Names and Mystical Theology, ed. and trans. John D. Jones (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1980), pp. 109, 211 (translations slightly modified).

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a psychoanalysis is said to be finished when the analyst, no longer phantasmically endowed with maximal knowledge, turns into one professional earning his living like others of his ilk). Such a decline or destitution was suffered by the natura of pre-modern “natural law” when the Scotists detected in it an essential contingency. With singularization, then, that is it for an ultimate standard’s referential and legislative prestige. In normative theticism, the transgressive pull consists in the possible singularization at the heart of any actually legislating universal. For this disparity of strategies sundering Ereignis, I find it difficult to endorse readings that would take Heidegger to vary, yet again, symmetrical contraries. To see the dissymmetry of the double bind, it is enough to recall how the transgressive strategy asserts itself in everydayness, namely, through the pull toward death. Now beingtoward-death, or “mortality,” temporalizes phenomena by the loss of their world: by a possible, singularizing loss, inscribed in beingin-the-world. Only if one stops one’s reading at the words and their symmetry, will the contextualizing-decontextualizing strategies oppose one another inside one genus and yield some dualism. Such a reading would amount to jumping over the decontextualizing factor itself: the possible which, in Heidegger, always arises from the future. The possible is therefore also the temporalizing factor. Nor can it be said that, as such, the possible reflects the actual as its antithesis; this now would amount to leaping over the possibilizing factor in the everyday, which is my death. For Hegel, death is what makes us all equals and thus properly constitutes the human genus. Mineness, on the other hand, disrupts generic equalization. In Heidegger, death as mine temporalizes phenomena because it is absolutely singular. But the singular cannot be treated as the determinate negation of the universal; the contrary opposite of the universal is the particular. It takes a neglect of the persistent tie between time and the singular, a tie signified to me by my death, to append these conflictual strategies to the list, long since Antiquity, of terms that are mutually exclusive within a genus and jointly exhaustive of it. Dissymmetrical otherness best describes tragic conflict, which remains paradigmatic for Heidegger. The law of the household and the law of the city can be construed as opposing one another and sublating each other, only once revised by the dialectic of

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the ­objective spirit and under the authority of the modern state. Aeschylus’ heroes, for their part, perish from that conflict, as they are left without recourse to any covering law. Antigone differs with Creon as her law, and his, lack a common genus. The same is true of the attraction-retraction that splits Ereignis. There is nothing new in philosophy about claiming that being is not a genus. Yet philosophy has made it its job to block the reasons for this most common claim, i.e. tragic differing. Transgression by singularization to come deposes (ent-setzen) hegemonic referents, takes their “may”—their might—away and hence provokes dismay (das Entsetzen). Once transgression is retrieved as pertaining to our condition, being-there can come to pass. “This deposing becomes an event only out of being itself; indeed, being is nothing other than that which de-poses and dis-mays” (GA65, 482, / CP, 339). It is nothing other than legislation-transgression. With ultimacy pertaining to nomic strife in the event, all univocally binding phantasms—whose reign has culminated in twentieth century totalitarianism and “giganticism”—appear as illusions. Their “illusory reign must some day be broken” (GA65, 336 / CP, 235). That breaking up is incumbent upon “the other thinking,” whose critical task consists, then, in laying bare the one enduring interest behind any focal sense of being: the interest in mastery. This interest has not only been served by logic; it has instituted logic, the know-how of subsumption, to begin with. Indeed, “‘logic’ itself is an illusion, though the most necessary illusion that the history of being has known up to now” (GA65, 461 / CP, 324–325). The enabling conditions for rethinking the political after Heidegger lie in the agon, in the agonistics and the agony of the being-event turned against itself. Such conditions are impossible to institutionalize. They settle institutions (and thereby unsettle them), however, on the same broken foundations that appear in everydayness as ‘natality’ and ‘mortality.’ Since I only seek to understand how the nomic strife within the event frees the public sphere from univocally binding phantasms, it remains to be seen in what way the legislative-transgressive double bind is originary. ***

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Legislation-transgression How, then, is this other (non-a priori) step back to be taken which un-denies the disparate and leads to being as it deposes and dismays—the step which retrieves, in other words, a differing more originary than which nothing can be encountered? The how-to is learned by doing. The step back seals the normative double bind in several ways. First, in tearing apart referential phantasms, it puts an end to the contents that have been endowed with ultimacy. Rehabilitating the No as co-originary with the Yes does not amount to declaring the ugly equal to the beautiful, or thoughtlessness equal to the ‘I think.’ In this sense, originary differing remains formal and neutral, as I have stated. It works upon everydayness the way a category works upon the empirical—except that everydayness can no more be treated as an empirical given than can the late modern pathology where differing becomes most acute. It would force the received lexicon to call originary differing the “condition of the possibility of phenomena”; it is indeed just as much the “condition of their impossibility.” Phenomenological phenomena proper do not yield to the same kind of description as this beautiful woman, that act of thinking, or this country; they have rather to be wrested from empirical givens. So it is with differing. If—and as—it works upon phenomena without preceding them as a condition that is formally one, then it can no longer determine and measure them materially (as does the eidos that makes beautiful things beautiful; or as does nature, making one’s acts natural; etc.). It works upon them in destroying from within the apriorism that posits some eidetic focus. By the same stroke, it destroys maximized contents. The conflict of natality and mortality in everydayness, along with the conflict of positing and letting-be in the epoch of extreme theticism, reveal the event turned back against itself:16 turned back as can only be, against a formal Yes, an equally formal No. 16 Here are some formulations of that (literally) crucial thought: “the event turning within itself” (das in sich kehrige Ereignis; GA65, p. 185 / CP, p. 130); “the event swinging against itself in itself’ (das in sich gegenschwingende Ereignis; GA65, p. 261 / CP, p. 184); “the turning-against” (die Wider-kehre; GA65, p. 407 / CP, p. 287); “the

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Next, and apparently in a blatant inconsistency, Heidegger declares the No greater than the Yes.17 Phrases to this effect abound. They do indicate that singularization always wins out over the phenomenalization making a world. But how is this to be understood? Received wisdom is one thing, which holds that death always ends by winning out over life. Quite another is the question of conditions: how can the expropriating retraction in the event be said to be “greater” than the appropriating attraction? One feature at least about the equi-originary, yet unequal, No and Yes is not hard to see. Their unequalness prevents their equi-originariness from recycling oppositional figures in which the principle of non-contradiction combines with the principle of the excluded middle to produce a binary division within some genus posited as supreme. But does Heidegger then undertake an inverse secondarization of normative theses, devising a primary No followed by a Yes that would feed upon it and, in turn, confirm it—Yes to No, hence twice No? Such a mephistophelization of being as originary catastrophe would not only be absurd,18 it would moreover disjoin once again the tragically equi-originary laws and counter-laws. To understand the No, greater than the Yes, one has to return to normative maximization. Is it not Heidegger’s best known teaching that being differs from beings, that the latter alone are something

countering” (die Ent-gegnung; GA65, p. 470 / CP, p. 331); “the turning-against” (das Gegenwendige; GA65, p. 247 / CP, p. 174). None of these phrases is to be understood in a dialectical fashion. 17 See GA65, pp. 246ff. / CP, pp. 173ff. The apparent inconsistency follows the model of ecstatic temporality in which the to-come is the “primary sense” of existentiality, while on the other hand having-been, being-present, and to-come are said to be all “equi-originary” (see Being and Time, § 65; trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson [New York: Harper & Row, 1962], pp. 370ff). 18 A catastrophe is, literally, an overturning. Now for something to be overturned, it must first be. Logically, therefore, a negation cannot be claimed to be originary. Operations such as negating and affirming require a prior Yes as their transitive object. In phenomenological terms, an originary No, making the Yes secondary, would annul the phainesthai itself and, hence, the world. As concerns Mephistopheles, Goethe shows himself to be a good theologian when he has this spirit, who always denies (“ich bin der Geist, der stets verneint”), state that from time to time he does like to see that old gentleman, God (“von Zeit zu Zeit seh’ ich den Alten gern”). Faust, Part One, lines 1338 and 350.

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and that being is, consequently, nothing? The word says it well: ‘nothing,’ non-ens, being is ‘not a being.’ Now, Heidegger observes, such “negative” determination of nothingness follows the very type of reifying predications whereby a particular thing is said to possess or not to possess a particular quality. The logic of predication has little to teach us about the origin of phenomena—about their manifestation, phainesthai, or their emergence, oriri—where the condition gets fractured. This logic indeed assumes that phenomena be describable as data, that the phenomenal signify the actual, and that being be understood as the actuality of data. Whence the task, he says, of “determining in a more originary manner how being and nothingness belong together.” The polemic against predicative logic therefore serves to make nothingness problematical, regardless of the ontological difference. The new problematizing is spelled out in a cascade of rhetorical questions19 pointing to the “event turned against itself”: “What if being itself were what withdraws itself and if refusal were its essential way to be? [...] And what if it were by the force of this nihilation of being itself that ‘nothingness’ is filled with the power out of which arises […] all ‘creation’ (by which a being takes on greater being)?” (GA65, 246 / CP, 174). Something else is at stake than the so-called ontological difference. The cascade falls on the other side of a dam sheltering the beingquestion from “vulgar,” describable, maximizable phenomena that are always rushing forth as the sole matters of interest. How is No greater than Yes? Maximizing remains excluded, as this always consists in a Yes endowing some given phenomenon or feature of phenomena (including ousia, entitas or ens commune, Seiendheit, ‘beingness’) with greater being. All actual phenomena are thus to be dammed up, suspended, bracketed. To grasp the originarily transgressive No in being, one must stop briefly to consider the traditional prestige of the actual over the possible and to detect the interest that speaks through this prestige. Just as normative phantasms become problematical for Heidegger through transcendentalism and hence through Kant, 19 In reading an author, it is useful to have detected the few literary devices by which he sums up his thinking. In Kant, this usually happens in the opening paragraph of a section, a chapter, or even a work; in Heidegger, in rhetorical questions.

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so too, No, Not, and nothingness become problematical through kineticism and hence through Aristotle. *** No, Not, and nothingness first became philosophical issues through the analysis of possible change, inscribed within actual data. Aristotelian kineticism reduces the possible beforehand to what can be rendered actual, just as it reduces being actual to what has been made such, to being fabricated. This twofold reduction of the possible to the makable and of the actual to the made is doubtless among its few pervading presuppositions. A lintel, a column, and a pile of sand are possible from a block of marble, provided that a contract, an architect, a workshop, mallets, chisels, and so on, intervene. If kineticism presupposes this twofold reduction, then it reduces moreover the logic of predication and assent to techno-logy. In Heidegger’s words, Yes to the actual denotes the “Yes of ‘making”’ (GA65, 246 / CP, 174). The phrase indicates both the interest pushing toward normative maximization and an assessment calling for a critique of such maximization. Maximizing a Yes of “making” is indeed not without interest. What can be done with things is always what is most interesting about them. A primordial Yes would be full of order, which means in this instance: full of an order to be realized, full of a technical organization to be actualized. This is the technological core of all classical paradigmatism. It implies already the elements for a critique, since when some Yes lays down a univocal law, things (via their representation) alone set the standard; assent (via subsumptive hubris) universalizes the actual; producibles (via a metabasis eis allo genos) pass for all beings—and the best made, namely, primordial, order for the best of beings; and finally nothingness (via predicative logic) signifies the negation of beings, a non-thing, the non-actual understood as a non-product. Aristotelian dunamis has dictated the proper usage of nothingness in philosophy and has forced out knowledge of a No greater than any Yes. The age-old variations on the actual and the possible have one trait in common: they treat the possible in the same way as, and following, the actual. The possible can only be equal to, less than,

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or better than the actual. In other words, it amounts either to the actual itself, which then figures among the possibles (for example, the best of all possible worlds), or to a bad actual because it is not (the unicorn), or, yet again, to a better actual, one that will be (a messianic society).20 How then is one to think of nothingness or No as ‘no other,’ not comparable to the equivalences and oppositions put into place by Aristotle’s physics? How is one to think of it as the “singularity of the Not,” of which Heidegger stated in the lines cited above that it was just as binding as the “singularity of being” (GA65, 267 / CP, 188)? The other way of thinking the No or the Not will place it neither vis-à-vis actual things as their technical negation nor above the Yes as its catastrophic annihilation. How is it to be placed? What has to be the place of No? Phenomenologically, it is always to come. Nothingness or No is immanent to the world as its possibility, that is, as imminent. The twist Heidegger inflicts on the proper usage of the actual and the possible responds to the de-phenomenalizing pull which always twists in advance any given phenomenal edifice or “dwelling.” For the sake of responding to the unsame phenomena our vocabularies force into coupling—for the sake of responsiveness and responsibility— one has to begin where their stirrings begin, namely, with the futurity of the possible. To claim that “the possible stands higher than the actual”21 amounts already to shattering this old pair. The locus of the possible shifts; it no longer borders in any way on the actual nor follows from it. Its place is rather the simple opening in which, as we say, anything is possible—not “any thing,” any entitative and representable content, but the gap between my inhabitable world 20 These various senses of the possible entail various relations to time. The break between entitative time and originary time appears when the possible connotes the future. Thus, when a society-to-come or a democracy-to- come are being announced, some content gets assigned to the possible. “Classless society” and “democracy” are descriptions of possible entities. They denote a factual to-come. Heidegger, on the other hand, holds that time originates in the to-come, regardless of contents. Here, the possible is no more describable than is our simple opening to the phenomenal world. It denotes an originary to-come. 21 Heidegger, Being and Time, §7; p. 63.

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and this same world as undoing itself. Weaned from the realm of entities, the possible no longer denotes this column or that lintel as latent in the block of marble, awaiting the passage, the choice and hand of the architect, Ichtynos; it no longer denotes possibles (in the plural) capable of being turned into actuals. Whence the new link of the possible to futurity, “higher” than actuality, since it is indifferent to things present and absent just as to things actual and eventually actual. Here then is the key point in the argument. So weaned from the actualizable and the feasible, the possible is not simple. The present opening, as opening to the future, breaks the rule of consecutio temporum. If ‘possible’ means ‘to come,’ then possibility consists in a formal discordance of times. This is not bipolar as are presence and absence, but disaccordant as the to-come itself. It distracts (literally) the everyday through the traits of natality and mortality, as it distracts the truth through unconcealment and concealment. The possible always pulls in two directions, as attraction (Bezug) of Yes and retraction (Entzug) of No (GA65, 183, 293 / CP, 128, 207). Does this double pull recycle symmetrical dualities? Only a retina with the most rigid sort of grid would read the strife of attraction-retraction prompted by the possible, yet again in accordance with the geometry of determinate negation. Rather, that strife undoes, once and for all, bipolar mechanics. Heidegger gives a few examples, all of which instantiate dissymmetry: birth is “toward death”; “the clearing, for concealment” (GA65, 351 / CP, 245); “the groundless is the ground’s originary way of being” (GA65, 379 / CP, 264); nothingness, “what is more originary in being” (GA65, 247 / CP, 175); the No, “of an even deeper essence than the Yes” (GA65, 178 / CP, 125); … Such prepositions and comparatives as ‘for,’ ‘more originary,’ ‘deeper,’ can hardly be said to pair off contraries. None of the bipolar models received from the tradition would survive were it to be arranged in the form of: “Yes, for No,” or: “No, deeper than Yes.” What sense would it make to say (to paraphrase a title by Lévi-Strauss) that microbiological fullness in honey is ‘for’ the biological No in ashes? Or that ashes are “deeper,” “more originary” than honey? Their symmetry would be done with—as indeed, with the discordance of time, the symmetry of Yes and No is done with. There remains the speculative baggage of compara-

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tives. One quite naturally would say: if No is not the determinate contrary facing Yes, and if No does not follow Yes as dependent on it, then No can only precede Yes in the manner of a condition. Thus No would end up rendering Yes secondary after all. But what is it that can be described according to locations such as above, equal to, beneath? As we have just seen, gradations of this or other orderings always serve to represent beings. As far as the traits traversing the to-come are concerned, the prepositions and comparatives in question can no longer posit any sort of scale. More originary does not mean, then, primordial—‘of prime order’—as a first cause is of prime order in relation to second causes. As the paradigm of binary opposites is put out of function, so is the great ladder of a maximal archetype, degraded through stages of ectypes. It is not thinkable that death, concealment, the groundless, nothingness, Not, and No could in any way occupy a primordial place. *** What is phenomenologically originary can only pertain to manifestation. There alone does it make sense to speak of a No that is more originary than the Yes. At first sight, this has been all too familiar ever since Heraclitus. A certain No has to determine manifestation, in that manifestation as such can never become manifest. Coming-into-presence likes to retreat, or to retract itself. A self-hiding of manifestation has been familiar to all persuasions of phenomenology as well. Since visibility must always have been “intended” prior to any visible content, there seems to be nothing more evident even than just the originary No. Visibility never becomes visible. That evidence is of the kind with which all phenomenology sets out. The attraction of Yes points to appearing. Yes, there is manifestation (a statement that holds a double tautology inasmuch as ‘yes,’ ‘there is,’ and ‘manifestation’ all denote the same phenomenalizing). The contrary statement would assert: No, there is no manifestation; appearing does not occur. No one, to my knowledge, has as yet drawn the curtain on the world in this way. Phenomenologists observe instead: No, there is no manifestation of manifestation. Heidegger subscribes to the evidence of this observation. However, if manifestation is constituted, not by enduring self-consciousness,

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but by precarious contextualizations and re-contextualizations, he has to add: There is a No that debilitates all manifestation. This statement, which neither denies manifestation nor tautologizes non-manifestation, moves elsewhere. To see where it goes, one must, according to the very project of phenomenology, look not only at how one speaks, but at what one is speaking of. Here the undertow of No is more familiar and more evident still. Its familiarity and its evidence lie in everydayness, neither in the history of philosophy nor in the method of phenomenology. This undertow is therefore the most decisive for the understanding of being. In what way does the No pull otherwise than the Yes? To ask about manifestation and the No, in everydayness, reveals an otherness (which indirectly accounts for both Heraclitus’ kruptesthai and Husserl’s intentionality) in which the tragic condition of being is at stake. Of what is Heidegger speaking when he speaks of phuein or manifesting? Always of singulars forming a constellation, that is to say, phenomenalizing themselves as they enter into an economy of presence. This entry into presence, this presencing, was to remain his single and persistent issue. It works upon singulars by regionalizing them. It inscribes them in a context—in a world—and thereby makes them into phenomena. Marcel Duchamp seems to have perfectly understood the strife of phenomenalizing and singularizing when he mounted a bicycle wheel on a stool and exhibited it in a museum. A bicycle wheel is made for turning around an axis, held in a metal fork, and serving the purpose of locomotion. Yes to that object of spikes and a rim as it composes a world, contextualized between the pavement and the traffic through which it allows you to thread your way. That is where it appears, phenomenalized according to what it is. But a No traverses its phenomenalization as the possibility of being dislodged. In this case, the dislodging exiles and singularizes it on a stool in an exhibition hall. The singularization that is always to-come in phenomena points to the No of their world (their “own” or “proper” world, yet one deprived of any appropriating subject and of full possession). To call a being “singular in its world,” or beings “singulars in their world,” would amount to counter-sense: a sense over-determined by nonsense. That over-determination is the tragic. It is strikingly

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accused in Rimbaud’s line: “We are not in the world.”22 A phenomenon in its world alone has meaning. Singularization is the loss of meaning, but a loss that is always imminent. Here then is how Heidegger remains faithful to the philosophers’ ancient quest for conditions while at the same time staying clear of the a priori, simplicity, universality, univocal standards, as well as all other corollaries of normative theticism: factual decontextualisation—as in Duchamp’s ‘ready-made’ or in my own terminal entropy—can happen only because the decontextualizing No is first of all a trait of being. Singularization, as possible, always disrupts from within any actual phenomenality bestowed by a world. Nothingness has to be more originary than being because it singularizes being into an event. Such singularization is the pathetic stakes of the Contributions to Philosophy. Each time that Heidegger speaks of the supreme danger, this is what he is speaking of. Singularization to come is indeed the other belonging to no genus, alienating being in its essential ways, in its Wesen. What parity, symmetry, determinate negation, contrariety, contradiction—or what hierarchy of particulars under a universal principle—could couple the singular with the phenomenon? One must not let oneself be duped by the lexical match when the double bind is described as appropriation-expropriation, unconcealment-concealment, beingnothingness, Yes-No, or, again, legislation-transgression. In each of these pairs that are not pairs at all, the first word designates the phenomenality that a being owes to its world and the second, its singularization to come. This singularization spells out a passibility in phenomena, namely that they can suffer expulsion from their world. As an originary trait, singularization to come means that dispossession is always imminent, that full possession never happens. From the viewpoint of the event that is being, such eviction is called ‘expropriation’; from the viewpoint of epochal hegemonies, some normative phantasm’s ‘destitution’; and from the viewpoint of everydayness, it is called ‘death.’

22 Arthur Rimbaud, “A Season in Hell: Delirium I,” in A Season in Hell and The Drunken Boat, trans. Louise Varèse (New York: New Directions, 1961), p. 37.

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These are but so many retractions instantiating the possible, hence, futurity. Whether Heidegger is speaking of the singular or of time, the same differing is at issue: the dissimilar laws in which nomic being always opens up a world, but in which the Not—more originarily nomic in that it singularizes phenomena toward their exit—strips this world, forever and from all time, of its reconciling, consoling, and consolidating foci. Heidegger’s world is therefore not an anomic world. It is doubly nomic. Recess binds and obligates us just as much as process; reclusion, just as much as inclusion. “What closes up on itself opens up as that which holds and binds [us]” (GA65, 260 / CP, 183–184). As for the world of the twentieth century, Heidegger doubtless lets himself get carried away a bit when he suggests that today singularization becomes pathological to the point that ours is hardly a world anymore. Things can no longer become phenomena in accordance with what they are. “Machinations are unbound” (Ungebundenheit der Machenschaften; GA65, 120 / CP, 84), he says. The phrase makes sense if it is meant to suggest an extenuation of deictic pertinence in contemporary language, as words get detached from everyday experience. Marked by technicity, life becomes impenetrable to experience to the point that a thick mutism covers the originary condition. If, however, it is meant to suggest that technicity today leaves things under the single bind of their singularization—if it implies an new worldlessness, this time due not to subjectivist solipsism, but to an enfeeblement of phenomenalization—then the formula cannot but prompt headaches. At least it bespeaks why, according to the Contributions, being-there is not yet. It will be, when an age will acknowledge itself in all clarity placed in a given phenomenal economy, without denying in it the singularization to come. This is what diasozein ta phainomena, preserving the phenomena, would be. *** “The one and the other are binding,” Heidegger said in a passage cited above. We have seen whence every univocal law is born: from the hubris that denies singularization as if it were not. Idealists of all times have been the model functionaries of order, declar-

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ing flatly that the singular has no being. Unlearning this hubris (Gelassenheit, as Heidegger would later call it) restores to the law its disparate other and hence the double bind. From beneath tragic denial, it restores tragic truth which always ends by singularizing the hero to the point of silence and ruin. Such occurs with Agamemnon. At Aulis, his blood-ties singularize him in the phenomenal region constituted by the armies under his command. Conversely, the constraints of arms singularize him in that other phenomenal region, constituted by Clytemnestra and the house of Atreus, at Mycenae. At Aulis, his nomic allegiance to the military economy effaces the singular No pleading with him through the eyes of Iphigenia, bound and gagged. A few years later, he will find himself singularized in quite the same manner, in the net of Aegisthus. Such occurs also in Michel Foucault: “Only a fiction can make us believe that laws are made to be respected. […] Illegalism constitutes an absolutely positive element in social functioning, whose role the general strategy of society includes in advance.”23 When Heidegger says that “the event alone is binding” (GA65, 416 / CP, 292), he is speaking of the tragic event in its disparate pull of appropriation-expropriation. In terms of the law: the originary, legislative-transgressive, double bind alone has the force of obligation.

23 Michel Foucault, “Des supplices aux cellules” (interview), Le Monde (February 21, 1975), p. 16. [Dits et écrits, vol. 2, 1970–1975, eds. Daniel Defert and François Ewald (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), pp. 716–720; p. 719—Editors.]

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Of Peremption and Insurrection: Reiner Schürmann’s Encounter with Michel Foucault

I. Anarchy as Principle “What we are attempting to understand is the caesura that marks the end of the metaphysical epoch.”1 The essays collected in this volume are oriented by this attempt; they are explorations of the site opened by a caesura. From his engagement with Foucault to his readings of Marx, Nietzsche, Kant, and Heidegger, Reiner Schürmann’s work operates under what he terms the “hypothesis of closure.” Thus, before considering his relation to Foucault in more detail, an outline of Schürmann’s project, which in its entirety is structured by this thesis, is in place. In literature, the Latin caesura—literally, ‘the cut’—denotes the suspension of a metric continuum; a “counter-rhythmic rupture.”2 It is in this sense that the hypothesis of closure refers to an ambiguous space at the boundary of the metaphysical field, a site where this field is displaced, where it “gets out of order” and “its principles of cohesion lose their

1 Reiner Schürmann, Heidegger on Being and Acting: From Principles to Anarchy, trans. Christine-Marie Gros (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1987), p. 30. It should be noted that the English title, conceived in collaboration with Schürmann, modifies the title of the French original: Le Principe d’anarchie: Heidegger et la question de l’agir (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1982; Biel and Paris: Diaphanes, 2013). In what follows, the book will be referred to as From Principles to Anarchy. 2 Walter Benjamin, “Goethe’s Elective Affinities,” trans. Stanley Corngold, in Selected Writings, vol. 1, ed. Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996), p. 340.

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efficacy.”3 And yet it is a site where no after or beyond has taken shape. The hypothesis of closure is not a claim about the history of philosophy, but a topology of the present that outlines its place. The present is a symptom, a transition in which “the bedrock yields,” where it becomes obvious that principles of cohesion can be no longer anything but “a blank space deprived of legislative, normative power.”4 As such, the closure is both systematic and historical: systematic, because it denotes the erosion of metaphysical foundations; historical, because it can only be posed in the breach established by the caesura. In this situation, the history of metaphysics reveals itself in its entirety, still defining the horizon of philosophy, yet not determining it. For Schürmann, its task therefore turns into the deconstruction of metaphysics, the “pulverization of a speculative base upon which life is to find its steadiness, its legitimation, and its peace.”5 Within the discourse in which Schürmann positions himself—the field of French philosophy marked by phenomenology and a critical reception of Heidegger—, claims about the end of metaphysics and the need to undo its history abound. Yet Schürmann distances his own project sharply from these alternatives, above all from that now most commonly associated with the concept of deconstruction,6 by insisting on the precise, even restricted meaning of his thesis. In From Principles to Anarchy, he unfolds the different dimensions

3 Schürmann, “What Must I Do at the End of Metaphysics?,” in this volume, p. 46. 4 Ibid. 5 Ibid., p. 42. 6 The history of metaphysics, Schürmann asserts, “has been characterized by such misleading phrases as ‘onto-theology’ and ‘logo-centrism.’ They are misleading in that they seem to perpetuate the eschatological, apocalyptic tone introduced into philosophy in the early nineteenth century, a tone that indeed turns the claim of closure into yet another ideality.” Schürmann, “Legislation-Transgression: Strategies and Counter-Strategies in the Transcendental Justification of Norms” in this volume, p. 79. Cf. “Perhaps patient meditation and painstaking investigation on and around what is still provisionally called writing […] are the wanderings of a way of thinking that is faithful and attentive to the ineluctable world of the future which proclaims itself at present, beyond the closure of knowledge. The future can only be anticipated in the form of an absolute danger.” Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), pp. 4–5.

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of the thesis most extensively. In the caesura of metaphysics that defines the present, the mechanism governing the metaphysical apparatus becomes legible for the first time as the pros hen structure, the relation to the One. Ever since Aristotle, metaphysics was constituted through this relationship, which thus “becomes the heart of any first philosophy and this first philosophy, a doctrine of an ultimate ground.”7 The relation to the One establishes an identical focal point—an arche—to which phenomena and acts are referred in order to endow them with meaning. A singular phenomenon is intelligible if and only if it can be subsumed under a general principle. This claim operates on a structural level, inasmuch as the focal point at the center of the pros hen apparatus can be specified differently while the mechanism itself remains in place. What remains the same throughout the metamorphoses of principles is the normative pattern itself, the operation of establishing a normative First on the basis of which the world becomes intelligible. Thus, instituting a normative First by means of the pros hen apparatus is tantamount to establishing a field of intelligibility determining the way in which phenomena can present themselves. The structure of the pros hen functions “in relation to action as substance functions in relation to its accidents, imparting sense and telos to them.”8 Intelligibility and authority are, Schürmann claims, structurally as well as genetically identical—whence the isomorphism of first philosophy and political philosophy: “From Plato’s philosopher-king to Machiavelli, this pros hen reference defines the relations of the many subjects to the one leader as it defines the relations of the many accidents to substance and, in general, of the secondary analogates to prime analogates.”9 The perspective that orients Schürmann’s project is political throughout, since the political is that realm in which the pros hen structure manifests itself most forcefully: as the instalment of a public and collective order. Accordingly, the most pertinent trait that unifies the history of metaphysics is defined as the attempt of “deriving a practical philosophy from a first philosophy,” that is, of grounding praxis in 7 Schürmann, “What Must I Do at the End of Metaphysics?,” p. 35. 8 Ibid., p. 44. 9 Schürmann, Heidegger on Being and Acting: From Principles to Anarchy, p. 40.

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theory.10 Schürmann’s most urgent concern is to deconstruct this relation and to map out the consequences for action and politics, the “the principle of anarchy” which marks the disintegration of the pros hen structure. “Ultimate reasons are unquestionable,” asserts Schürmann. But this is “only temporally so.” Principles have “their genealogy and their necrology. They are epochal.”11 During an epoch, ultimate normative principles are the conditions of possibility for thought and action, since they are the foundation that renders them intelligible and authoritative. An ultimate normative principle is “both the principium, the foundation that provides reasons, and the princeps, the authority that dispenses justice.”12 As such, principles are unquestionable, and even unknowable, during the epoch of their reign.13 Once the succession of ultimate referents becomes legible, however, the ideality of what appeared transcendental is contaminated by history: “The metamorphosis of the a priori introduces history into the transcendental conditions.”14 Deconstruction, for Schürmann, therefore, means tracing the genealogy and necrology of these principles, situating historically what were once considered unquestionable grounds. Following the emergence and decline of such principles amounts to “a phenomenology of the reversals of history”; since it is in historical crises, at the threshold of epochs, that the historicity of ultimate principles becomes legible.15 The two claims adumbrated thus far—first, that the ground recedes on which ultimate normative principles could be estab10 Ibid., p. 4. 11 Ibid., p. 25. 12 Ibid. 13 Methodologically, Schürmann thus historicizes a transcendental account of normativity. In this, his approach is closer to Foucault’s conception of a “historical a priori,” which is also unknowable during the epoch of its reign, than to Kantian transcendentalism, which is predicated upon the possibility of an ahistorical knowledge of the structure constitutive of intelligibility, an approach that introduces the whole problem of gaining access to the transcendental by means of the empirical. The by now classical analysis of the various afterlives of this aporia in post-Kantian philosophy is Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (London and New York: Routledge, 1970), chap. 9. This issue will be discussed in more detail below. 14 Schürmann, Heidegger on Being and Acting: From Principles to Anarchy, p. 79. 15 Ibid., p. 30.

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lished and, second, that the history of metaphysics reveals itself as a succession of such epochal principles—are but two aspects of the hypothesis of closure, with which “the principal reference as such, the pros hen, withers away.”16 Whither metaphysics? Towards anarchy. This notion of anarchy is not to be confused with the theories of 19th century Anarchism, which Schürmann deems rationalistic, hence metaphysical to the core.17 Rather, anarchy expresses, historically, “a destiny of decline, the decay of standards to which Westerners since Plato have related their acts and deeds in order to anchor them there and to withdraw them from change and doubt.”18 Systematically, it denotes the inoperativity of the pros hen apparatus, the disintegration of the normative pattern itself. Anarchy is the end of metaphysics both as completio, its fulfilment, and as finis, its incipient termination. The breadth of this thesis is exceptional. Schürmann argues that with the closure of the metaphysical field, intelligibility, normativity and authority, entangled as they are in the pros hen structure, disintegrate altogether. While these claims are topological in nature, thus excluding any voluntarism, Schürmann consistently outlines a sphere for action as he emphasizes the need to intensify the vector of disintegration, of “hastening the withering away of […] epochal principles.”19 The notion of action that emerges here departs from any previous understanding of praxis. When ultimate principles are displaced by their dispersion, action is deprived of a foundation; it becomes anarchic, groundless, without why or goal. But since this notion of anarchy emerges in the closure of metaphysics, the ambiguity of the interim affects the concept itself. Paradoxically, anarchy—the cessation of epochal principles with ultimate authority—itself has to be construed as a principle: “It is necessary to think this contradiction. The principal reference then appears to be counteracted,

16 Ibid., p. 38. 17 For the distinction between Schürmann’s “ontological anarchy” and this early modern anarchism, see ibid., pp. 6–7, 10. See also Miguel Abensour, “‘Savage democracy’ and ‘principle of anarchy,’” Philosophy and Social Criticism, 28:6 (2002), pp. 703–726. 18 Schürmann, Heidegger on Being and Acting: From Principles to Anarchy, p. 7. 19 Schürmann, “What Must I do at the End of Metaphysics?,” p. 34.

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both in its history and in its essence, by a force of dislocation, of plurification.”20 Thus, anarchy emerges as a transitional notion, as a principle at the degree zero of principial normativity. And to ask ‘What ought I to do?’ can then only mean “to speak in the vacuum of the place deserted by the successive representations of an unshakable ground.”21 As a deliberate paradox, Schürmann’s answer is an imperative—that most normative of concepts. Yet it is the ultimate imperative, as it is the imperative to dislocate the apparatus underwriting normativity itself: “What ought I to do? […] Combat all remnants of authoritative Firsts.”22 There are two self-positionings by Schürmann that are decisive for the essays assembled here, one explicit, the other mostly implicit. The first concerns the philosophical lineage in which Schürmann inscribes his project, a line of a deepening fissure leading to the disintegration of the metaphysical field: “Marx, Nietzsche, and Heidegger: three moments in a single epochal crisis (krinein, to separate) from late to closing modernity.”23 Common to all three is a displacement of modernity’s ultimate First—the subject. The rendering of man as the authoritative One by reference to which phenomena become intelligible is the explicit project of modernity. Yet, this reveals the implicit perspective that oriented the entire trajectory of metaphysics: “Man is the theoretical origin from which objects receive their status of objectivity.”24 The dislocation of the subject as ground is, therefore, the precondition for shattering the fixation of phenomena into objects: things available, knowable and manipulable. Schürmann considers the unlikely trio of Marx, Nietzsche and Heidegger as an event in which a reversal takes place—the announcement of the closure—that dislocates man as the center orienting the pros hen apparatus: “In whatever way it is articulated—by the transcendental materialism of the laboring individual, by the topology of the formations of domination, or by the phenomenology of the difference between presencing and modes

20 Ibid., p. 45. 21 Ibid., p. 42. 22 Ibid., p. 52. 23 Schürmann, Heidegger on Being and Acting: From Principles to Anarchy, p. 47. 24 Ibid., p. 51.

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of presence—the closure requires that man renounce the role of chief focal point in the genealogical depositions and dispositions.”25 As metaphysics culminates in modern philosophies of the subject, anti-humanism spells its death. Schürmann’s second self-positioning concerns the field of French philosophy in the heyday of what is now vaguely described as poststructuralism. Schürmann characterizes this field as being defined by different stances taken toward the Nietzschean revelation that the authoritative One is a fiction.26 As indicated above, the position from which Schürmann distances himself most sharply is that epitomized by Derrida, who in his view mourns the disintegration of the One as a loss, as violence and trauma.27 In opposition to this, Schürmann brings his project into proximity with Deleuze’s espousal of the disintegration of metaphysical foundations, borrowing the concept of the “rhizome” to describe the proliferation of the origin.28 Here, the shared intention is the frontal attack on the normative First in all its forms and the attempt to think multiplicity beyond the capture of the One.29 Of particular interest for the texts assembled here, however,

25 Ibid., p. 58. For a detailed account of Schürmann’s reading of Nietzsche and Marx, see the forthcoming volumes: Reiner Schürmann, The Philosophy of Nietzsche, eds. Francesco Guercio and Michael Heitz (Zurich and Berlin: Diaphanes, 2019); idem, Marx, eds. Malte Fabian Rauch and Nicolas Schneider (Zurich and Berlin: Diaphanes, forthcoming). 26 Ibid., pp. 321–322 n. 44. Cf. also the discussion by Dominique Janicaud—who was part of the committee for the oral defence of Schürmann’s dissertation, on which Heidegger on Being and Acting: From Principles to Anarchy is based—in which he contextualizes Schürmann’s work within the field of the French reception of Heidegger. See Dominique Janicaud, Heidegger in France, trans. François Raffoul and David ­Pettigrew (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2015), chap. 8. 27 Schürmann partly cites the following passage from Derrida in this context: ­“[­­S]uch is the gesture of the arche-writing: arche-violence, loss of the proper, of absolute proximity, of self-presence, in truth the loss of what has never taken place, of a self-presence which has never been given but only dreamed of and always already split, repeated, incapable of appearing to itself except in its own disappearance.” Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 112. 28 Schürmann, Heidegger on Being and Acting: From Principles to Anarchy, pp. 56, 321 n. 44. 29 “[I]t is only when the multiple is effectively treated as a substantive, ‘multiplicity,’ that it ceases to have any relation to the One as subject or object, natural or spiritual reality, image and world. Multiplicities are rhizomatic, and expose arborescent

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is Schürmann’s changing stance towards Foucault. For reasons that will be considered in more detail below, Schürmann characterizes Foucault, in From Principles to Anarchy, as a mere reinstatement of the anti-humanism of Marx, Nietzsche, and Heidegger.30 Yet, both with regard to Foucault’s discontinuous conception of history and his work on self-constitution, the essays collected in this volume demonstrate that throughout the 1980s, a certain necessity emerged for Schürmann to engage with Foucault’s work in detail. In the following pages, the extraordinarily inventive work this period provoked is discussed with a focus on the question of method (II) and the place of the subject in Schürmann’s and Foucault’s work (III). The fourth section sketches how the concepts developed in these texts prepared Schürmann’s final project, Broken Hegemonies.31

II. Methodology of Destitution, Destitution of Method 1. Radical Phenomenology The question of method pertains to the very core of Schürmann’s interpretation of the history of philosophy. The viability of Schürmann’s phenomenological method stands and falls with its c­ apacity to be more than a mere theoretical method: only a “radical phenomenology” offers the tools required for a “critique of social theory and practice.”32 This critique, however, presupposes the deconpseudo-multiplicities for what they are. […] The point is that a rhizome or multiplicity never allows itself to be overcoded, never has available a supplementary dimension over and above its number of lines, that is, over and above the multiplicity of numbers attached to those lines.” Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia II, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), pp. 8–9. Thus, Schürmann’s reading of Deleuze is directly opposed to that of Alain Badiou, Deleuze: The Clamor of Being, trans. Louise Burchill (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1999). 30 Schürmann, Heidegger on Being and Acting: From Principles to Anarchy, p. 47. 31 Reiner Schürmann, Broken Hegemonies, trans. Reginald Lilly (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indianapolis University Press, 2003). 32 Schürmann, “Legislation-Transgression,” p. 114 (emphasis added). Schürmann’s approach hinges on the adaptation of phenomenology to the level of insight attained in the work of ‘Heidegger,’ a name that, as Schürmann remarks in From Principles to

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struction of the separation between theory and praxis, which in turn supplies the impetus to Schürmann’s overall philosophical project. What this inquiry into the role of method throughout the history of philosophy brings to light is that it is method itself—as methodos, the pursuit of the path of knowledge—that articulates the separation between theory and praxis by relating practical to first philosophy in such a way that the former is reduced to pursuing the doxa generated by the latter. The dogmatic foundation thus laid is abstract and its claim universal, governing phenomenalization tout court. In Schürmann’s reading, this institution of method rests on a “metabasis eis allo genos,” a logically “undue transposition” that carries observations obtained in one specific phenomenal region over into another one.33 In the trajectory of philosophy since ancient Greece, Schürmann contends in From Principles to Anarchy, this transposition involves the transmutation of a “focal point” or “referent” observed in one specific region of phenomenalization into an ultimate referent or arche, determining the way all phenomena are bound to present themselves or, to put it in a Heideggerian lexicon, the way presencing (Anwesen) is fixed into economies of presence (Anwesenheit).34 This generalization and reification of a phenomenon establishes it as an ultimate referent or as what ­Schürmann would later call a “hegemonic fantasm.”35 Accordingly, if Schürmann’s aim is to deconstruct the hierarchical divide between theory and praxis and to explore an-archic constellations of presencing, the task is to develop a methodol­ ogy in critical delineation from those attempts that reproduce the archic scheme of reference. It is in this context that his engagement with Foucault’s method must be located. Apart from his reading Anarchy, denotes a “discursive regularity” much more than the philosopher (p. 3). Schürmann’s anarchic appropriation of this discursive event reads ‘Heidegger’ backward in order to consider praxis in relation to presencing as the crucial element of his philosophy. On this, see ibid., pp. 12–21. 33 Schürmann, “What Must I Do at the End of Metaphysics?,” p. 35. 34 See Martin Heidegger, Zeit und Sein and Protokoll zu einem Seminar über den Vortrag „Zeit und Sein“, in Gesamtausgabe, vol. 14, ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann (Frankfurt/M.: Klostermann, 2007) / On Time and Being, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), pp. 1–24 and pp. 25–54. 35 Schürmann, Broken Hegemonies, pp. 6–16.

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of ­ Heidegger, the methodological development of Schürmann’s approach—from the notion of radical phenomenology to the “topology of broken hegemonies” that structures Broken Hegemonies—is propelled by a sustained engagement with Foucault’s genealogyarchaeology. The texts assembled here give an account of Schürmann’s effort to skirt what he considers relapses into a mode of philosophizing that remains oblivious to the manifest disintegration of its metaphysical ground. In dialog with Foucault, Schürmann casts these relapses into two polar extremes, the noumenal and the historicist. Foucault, in The Order of Things, specifies these two extremes as fluctuations inherent to all analysis in the modern episteme: “either this true discourse finds its foundation and model in the empirical truth whose genesis in nature and in history it retraces, so that one has an analysis of the positivist type […]; or the true discourse anticipates the truth whose nature and history it defines.”36 For Foucault, as for Schürmann, these two poles correspond to the idealist and the positivist aporia which furnish the substratum to the modern archic economy and its ultimate referent, the selfconscious subject. These apparent opposites are linked through the figure of ‘man,’ leading any discourse relying upon them into complementary aporias: “a discourse attempting to be both empirical and critical cannot but be both positivist and eschatological; man appears within it as a truth both reduced and promised. Pre-critical naïveté holds undivided rule.”37 As a result, in as far as it articulates the tension between the fantasy of accomplished self-identity and the abyss of unspeakable dispersion, the interplay between idealism and positivism is both institutive and destitutive of the modern hegemony. Foucault, for his part, counters this problem with an archaeological analysis, the purpose of which is “to maintain discourse in all its many irregularities.”38 While Schürmann shares the analysis that leads Foucault to develop an archaeological approach, he is critical of the direction this “historical deduction

36 Foucault, The Order of Things, p. 349. 37 Ibid. 38 Michel Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. Alan M. Sheridan (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), p. 173. Cf. “Modernity: The Last Epoch in a Closed History?,” in this volume, pp. 55–76.

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of categories”39 takes in Foucault’s work. Elucidating Schürmann’s critical appreciation of Foucault highlights its essential contribution to the development of what might be called a methodology of destitution qua destitution of method.40

2. Destitution of Method: The Double Step Back contra Positivism Schürmann variously enunciates the requirements that this methodology has to fulfill. Two general points are already implied in what has been said above about the theory-praxis problem. First, a radical phenomenology goes beyond the mere description of lifeworlds, since otherwise it would be unable “to situate social formations and beliefs by inscribing them in the concrete lineage of positions and negations in presencing” and to become a “tool for discursive intervention” that deconstructs and critiques social formations and beliefs;41 second, it investigates the structure of “normative theticism,”42 that is, the internal organization of an economy of presence and the specific hierarchy it establishes between theory and praxis. Any such historicization of the transcendental runs the risk of either dissolving into a mere positivism that is unable to account for the normative force a principle had during an epoch; or of reinstating the transcendental on a more general level, as evinced by structuralism.43 To this aporia, Schürmann responds with a set of more complex methodological strategies, which can be drawn from his r­ eading of

39 Schürmann, “Modernity: The Last Epoch in a Closed History?,” p. 38. 40 The use of the term “destitution” here anticipates a terminology that Schürmann deploys only in Broken Hegemonies. Since most of the analyses conducted in the texts of this volume find their way, in modified form, into his final project, this seems justified both in understanding the genesis of that project and in retrospectively elucidating the vector of the texts assembled here. 41 Schürmann, “Legislation-Transgression,” in this volume, p. 114. 42 Schürmann, “Ultimate Double Binds,” in this volume, p. 124. 43 For an account of structuralism as transcendentalism, see Gilles Deleuze, “How Do We Recognize Structuralism?,” in Desert Islands and Other Texts, 1953–1974, ed. David Lapoujade, trans. Michael Taormina (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2004).

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Foucault. He adopts an “antihumanistic”44 standpoint, a perspective that chimes with Foucault’s general approach.45 Both reject the universal categories underlying positivism just as well as transcendentalism; for Schürmann, focusing on the phenomenological origin of universal categories, universals are grounded in an undue transposition from one phenomenal region to another, while Foucault, interested in their legitimating function, emphasizes the implication of universalism in consolidating systems of relations of power that in actual fact are “singular, fragile and contingent.”46 However, there appears to be an important difference in the respective understanding of the role of the subject. While for Foucault the subject becomes the point of flight of the analysis—in its complex relationship to systems of relations of power—Schürmann’s discourse by and large abandons the category as a relevant perspective for the benefit of the deconstruction of those changing categories that structure historical economies of presence. Thus, Schürmann develops a topological approach in which the notion of topos (place) figures as the central conceptual tool for analyzing how the relation between theory and praxis is regulated in philosophy. The essay “On Constituting Oneself an Anarchistic Subject” is a conspicuous exception to this rule; here, one of the most curious aspects of the theoretical relation between Schürmann’s and Foucault’s thought can be observed, as will be discussed in the next section. In general, however, for Schürmann the antihumanistic standpoint implies an anti-subjectivist perspective—a perspective the adoption of which is important in responding to the critique, typically brought against phenomenology, that it is premised on a specific subject-object scheme.

44 Schürmann, What Must I Do at the End of Metaphysics?,” p. 36. 45 Michel Foucault, On the Government of the Living: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1979–1980, ed. Arnold I. Davidson, trans. Graham Burchell (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), p. 80. In his lecture from 30th January 1980, Foucault outlines an analysis of power in contrast to the “humanist position” adopted by “ideological analyses,” an “anti-humanist position” that refuses the universals which the former implies. 46 Ibid.

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Schürmann summarizes his heterodox reading of Heidegger in the formula of the “double step back”47 from the ‘life-world’ of descriptive phenomenology which allows differentiating between manifest entities (das Anwesende), presence (Anwesenheit) and presencing (Anwesen). In other words, to the question ‘what is,’ two ‘how is it’ questions are added: the first inquires into the specific conditions of possibility of the modality of presence of what is, the second into the conditions of possibility of historical modalities of presence themselves: “There is an indubitably positivist element in the later Heidegger as he traces norms to mere modalities in the history of presence. His inquiry into what makes norms possible ceases however to be positivist as he links their conditions to those that make historical modalities of presence possible.”48

If it weren’t for the second step, Heidegger would remain entrapped in positivism. The sense of this aporia is, in Schürmann’s reading, not unequivocally dispelled in Foucault’s approach. According to this passage, the inquiry into conditions of possibility—signposted by the question “How…?”49—becomes the methodological breach that undermines any fixed presence. Presence then reveals itself as but “a historical mode of ‘presencing,’”50 allowing for a form of presencing that would no longer obey the pattern of presence, identity, and ground. This is what makes Foucault’s focus on the subject contentious, since in his approach the “very concept of the selfconstituting subject […] turns into an invariable.”51 Establishing an invariable, however, risks ending up in one of the above mentioned aporias, idealism or positivism. Schürmann, in contrast to this, seeks to develop an approach closer to the double step back of radical phenomenology. Against turning the self-constituting subject

47 Schürmann, Heidegger on Being and Acting: From Principles to Anarchy, p. 20. 48 Schürmann, “Legislation-Transgression,” p. 110. 49 Schürmann, “What Must I Do at the End of Metaphysics?,” p. 37. 50 Schürmann, Heidegger on Being and Acting: From Principles to Anarchy, p. 45. 51 Schürmann, “On Constituting Oneself an Anarchistic Subject,” in this volume, p. 19.

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into an invariable, he proposes that “the method of d ­ econstruction is a topological one: it assigns us our place.”52 This shift of focus is a result of the double step back in that it does not only deconstruct the self-constituting subject in light of the modalities that make it possible, but inquires into what makes these modalities possible in the first place. The topological method brings to light a first place that is constitutively broken and, in this sense, never “first,” neither temporally-chronologically nor spatially-territorially. Since the task, for Schürmann, consists in gauging the impact of the breaking through of this fissured origin on the contemporary site, the topological method crucially concerns our own ‘implacement’ or ‘situatedness.’

3. Destitution of Method: Situatedness contra Idealism The focus on situatedness is the cornerstone of the methodological perspective developed in Schürmann’s work. It finds expression in the discussion of a “historical deduction of the categories that determine that [metaphysical] field.”53 In laying out this method, Schürmann establishes categories that are neither idealist nor positivist but relational: in their respective setting, they are absolute, but this does not invest them with transcendental status. In “Modernity: The Last Epoch in a Closed History?,” Schürmann works through the prospective, retrospective and transitive historical categories as well as their destitution at the end of the modern economy of presence, the epoch of man. As the title of this essay suggests, the destitution that disintegrates the modern hegemonic fantasm from within is of a different scope than the preceding ones: it is not only a destitution of one arche, to be replaced by another one, but a “peremption,” a withering away of the very condition of possibility for the succession of ultimate referents.54

52 Schürmann, “What Must I Do at the End of Metaphysics?,” p. 36. 53 Schürmann, “Modernity: The Last Epoch in a Closed History?,” p. 38. 54 Reiner Schürmann, Broken Hegemonies, pp. 511–632 (trans. changed); Des Hégémonies brisées (Mauvezin: Trans-Europ-Repress, 1996; Zurich and Berlin: Diaphanes, 2017), pp. 639–787 / pp. 589–699. “Peremption,” Schürmann’s own English transla-

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The idealist aporia is explored in-depth in “Legislation-Transgression,” where Schürmann investigates how, in Kant’s philosophy, the constitution of the self-conscious subject relies, in the final analysis, on the reintroduction of a pre-cognitive, and hence pre-categorical facticity, givenness or self-presence.55 To a certain degree, this can be seen as a fully independent analog to Foucault’s analysis of the Kantian subject as an “empirico-transcendental doublet,” mentioned above.56 As Schürmann shows, the transcendental element of indeterminacy is the inevitable complement of the subject’s capacity of self-determination: while the subject’s self-determination is legislative, the indeterminate givenness on which it is preconditioned implies permanent transgression. Kant’s philosophy thus produces a “noumenal I” whose autonomy is broken from the outset. Along the twofold displacement of the double step, Foucault’s proximity to and distance from Schürmann’s method crystallizes. In “On Constituting Oneself an Anarchistic Subject,” Schürmann insists that Foucault “has no more than a rhetorical use […] for the additional step back towards conditions in Heidegger, namely from truth as an epochal mesh in which things are given, the ‘giving’ itself.”57 Accordingly, Foucault’s narrative “remains that of a second-degree positivism.”58 Foucault’s archaeology-genealogy then falls short of the full analytical scope offered by radical phenomenology. This distance can be further elucidated by way of the distinction between transgression and the notion of anarchism fleshed out by Schürmann. The “difference between transgressive and anarchistic tion of dessaisie, diverges from the choice of the translator of Broken Hegemonies (“diremption”). The latter choice is remarkable given that ‘diremption’ strongly resonates with a falling into two or a bifurcation, a conceptual specification that is not contained in the French ‘dessaisie’ and that invests this notion with a decidedly Hegelian ring, given that ‘diremption’ is the standard English translation for Hegel’s ‘Entzweiung.’ For Schürmann’s translation of “dessaisie,” see his typescript “Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (SPEP) conference, Boston: Response to remarks by Peg Birmingham and Rodolphe Gasché,” [undated] in Reiner Schürmann Papers, NA.0006.01, box 3, folder 40, p. 19, The New School Archives and Special Collections, The New School, New York. 55 Schürmann, “Legislation-Transgression,” pp. 85ff. 56 Foucault, The Order of Things, pp. 347–351. 57 Schürmann, “On Constituting Oneself an Anarchistic Subject,” p. 12. 58 Ibid., p. 11.

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struggles lies in their respective targets: for the transgressive subject, any law, for the anarchistic subject, the law of social totalization.”59 This distinction between laws articulates the crucial difference between specific perspectives or situations, divergent topoi or historical sites: while transgression contributes—despite itself—to the dialectical formation of a social totality, anarchism opposes totalization; as such, it is situated or ‘implaced’ on the boundary line of the movement of totalization. In Schürmann’s reading, the closure of metaphysics renders impossible any attempt to postulate standards, an attempt that merely “fetishizes the law.”60 The notion of the “anarchistic subject” connotes nothing more than “an instance of the history of constellational truth, with its many diachronic deaths and new beginnings.”61 Expressing the backward-looking side of the hypothesis of bifrontality on which Schürmann’s project is premised, ‘subject’ enters into a similarly paradoxical relation with ‘anarchy’ as the term ‘principle’ in his formula “principle of anarchy.” It denotes the “there” as opposed to the “not-there” of our historical site.62 As the result of a “kenosis,”63 a self-emptying of the capacity of the metaphysical scheme of reference to furnish normative representations, our “historical site”—the vanishing point of the topological method developed by Schürmann—is a paradoxical state best described by the principle of anarchy. Transgression, as the attempt to “step across the line (trans lineam),”64 ignores its impossibility for the benefit of its necessity. Thus risks obliterating the difficulty that must be implied by the attempt to leave a historical site that is not one but “bifrontal.”

59 Ibid, p. 29. 60 Ibid. 61 Ibid., p. 30. 62 Schürmann, “Ultimate Double Binds,” p. 124. 63 Schürmann, “Legislation-Transgression,” p. 109. 64 Schürmann, “Ultimate Double Binds,” p. 135.

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III. Self-Constitution in Schürmann and Foucault

1. The Place of the Subject in the Closure What does it mean to ask, as Schürmann does, “What must I do at the end of metaphysics?”—since at the end of metaphysics, in the hypothesis of closure, the very premise of the question, the philosophical status of the ‘I,’ has become problematic. Implied in Schürmann’s question is thus yet another one: what type of agent addresses that question to herself after the subject has disintegrated as the focal point of metaphysics? Decisive for both Schürmann’s own engagement with the question and his relation to Foucault is the essay “On Constituting Oneself an Anarchistic Subject.” Any exposition of this dense piece must proceed cautiously, since Schürmann constructs this essay in a way that is distinct from the other texts in this collection. While being anything but a commentary on Foucault’s work, Schürmann’s analysis maps out a zone of indeterminacy, of ambivalence as to where reconstruction begins and ends, where voices merge and where divergences are marked—a move that puts the bifrontal method to practice. Schürmann and Foucault share the conviction that any notion of the subject as philosophical ground has definitely come to an end: “It is no longer possible to think in our day other than in the void left by man’s disappearance.”65 For all those who still want to take man either as the point from which philosophy seeks to find the truth, as the condition for the possibility of knowledge or history, the early Foucault has nothing but “a philosophical laugh.”66 In his own genealogy, Schürmann analyzes the subject as an economy of presence the displacement of which is reflected in Marx, Nietzsche and Heidegger. Dwelling on the concept of a humanism that has come to ruins, Schürmann distinguishes, in From Principles to Anarchy, four understandings of the subject that withered away with it: cultural individuality, reflective subjectiv-

65 Foucault, The Order of Things, p. 373. 66 Ibid.

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ism, t­ranscendental subjectivity, and the notion of the practical subject.67 In “On Constituting Oneself an Anarchistic Subject,” Schürmann at first distinguishes three conceptions of the subject in Foucault’s writings in a way that maps roughly onto the previous classification. It is the fourth meaning of the term that introduces an important modification into the framework. First, there is “‘man’ as the epochally organizing ultimate postulate,” which denotes the “epochal” conception of the subject. Second, there is “the ‘ego’ as effecting that centering and mastering,” corresponding to the “transcendental” conception of the subject. Finally, there is “the ‘individual’ as objectified and mastered (e.g. through the sciences of language, labor, and life, or through technologies of power such as those institutionalized in asylums, hospitals, and prisons),” corresponding to the “objectified subject.”68 But, whatever “the archaeological-genealogical perspective, the subject is fabricated from without.”69 It could seem, Schürmann continues, that Foucault effects through this strategy the deconstruction of another understanding of the subject: that of the practical subject, now defined in distinction to the three aforementioned conceptions through the generation of “statements concerning the way one constitutes oneself as the performer of activities or practices.”70 Yet, in opposition to this view, Schürmann argues that the self-constitution of the practical subject is a vital category in Foucault’s work, in particular in his later writings. Schürmann here outlines a notion of the practical subject that diverges from that presented in From Principles to Anarchy. There, the practical subject is conceived as “history-making, as a person responsible for his acts, as the initiator of a new order of things,” a conception that is considered the primary target of the line of antihumanistic critique as whose heir Schürmann

67 Schürmann, Heidegger on Being and Acting: From Principles to Anarchy, pp. 46–47. Nietzsche thus forms the reference that unites these genealogies, as Foucault’s “laugh” is of course mimicking that of Zarathustra. 68 Schürmann, “On Constituting Oneself an Anarchistic Subject,” p. 9. 69 Ibid., p. 8. 70 Ibid., p. 9.

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presents his project.71 In From Principles to Anarchy, Schürmann explicitly includes Foucault in this genealogy, going as far as calling him the “epigone” of Marx, Nietzsche and Heidegger.72

2. Constituting Oneself in a dispositif The notion of the practical subject Schürmann outlines in “On Constituting Oneself an Anarchistic Subject” moves beyond the opposition between the constitutive subject—transcendental or otherwise—and a notion of the subject as something that is entirely constituted from without, an opposition that was implicit in the presentation of the traditional understanding of the concept in From Principles to Anarchy. But what does it mean, then, to constitute oneself in this way? How does it differ from an understanding of the subject as constitutive? Could it, in light of the preceding methodological discussion, be conceived as a destituent subject? The practical subject is neither something given in advance nor the mere

71 Schürmann, Heidegger on Being and Acting: From Principles to Anarchy, pp. 46–47. Indeed, Schürmann in this passage even quotes Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge as an example for a deconstruction of this understanding of the practical subject. 72 One possible reason for the change in Schürmann’s view may be located in the fact that in 1982, when the French original, Le Principe d’anarchie, was published, neither what would become the second and third volumes of the History of Sexuality had been published, nor are there any indications that Schürmann had access to the lectures Foucault was giving at the time at Collège de France. From his references and the breadth of the analysis, it is clear that by the time he wrote “On Constituting Oneself an Anarchistic Subject,” Schürmann was not only immersed in the entirety of Foucault’s published books, but also had a knowledge of the themes treated in Foucault’s lectures and unpublished texts from this period. This is evidenced by the references to Foucault’s “The Subject and Power,” in Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1982), a collection which also contains an important interview on Foucault’s work in progress. In addition, Schürmann quotes Foucault’s analysis of Cassian, which forms one of the most important texts relating to the unpublished parts of his project for The History of Sexuality. On the relation between this text and Foucault’s lectures and unpublished work, see Stuart Elden, Foucault’s Last Decade (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2016), pp. 113, 164–166, 171–172. The essay on Cassian now forms part of Michel Foucault, Les aveux de la chair, in Histoire de la sexualité, vol. 4, ed. Frédéric Gros (Paris: Gallimard, 2018), chap. 1, part 4 (“[L’art des arts]”).

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effect of historical forces. It exists only in and as a process, which Foucault came to describe in his late work as the “care of the self.”73 In a pointed analysis, Agamben describes this conception in terms similar to Schürmann’s. The practical subject, he writes, is “what is at stake in the care of the self, and the care is nothing but the process through which the subject constitutes itself.”74 Although the language of the “practical subject” and of “self-constitution” have a deliberately Kantian ring to them, the framework in which this conception is elaborated is, inasmuch as it fully operates under the proviso of Foucault’s threefold deconstruction of the subject, no longer transcendental or substantialist. “The practical I,” Schürmann asserts, “is not a substance, nor a union of substances, but entirely an act, a practice.”75 No bridge leads from selfconstitution back to transcendentalism and its doubles. And once the subject has lost its privileged status, once those forces and institutions that constitute the individual have been analyzed, the ‘I’ can only appear “under the constraints that make up the apparatus (dispositif) of a period.”76 The same rationale—Foucault’s farewell to the transcendental77—accounts for the shift from Schürmann’s general question “What must I do at the end of metaphysics” to the one he poses in this essay: “What can I do” in “our historical site.” For Foucault, Schürmann argues, any deontological remainder vanishes together with the transcendental subject. Since the subject can only constitute itself within the historical constellation determined by a dispositif, without appeal to principles outside of it

73 Michel Foucault, The Care of the Self, in The History of Sexuality, vol. 3, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1988). 74 Giorgio Agamben, The Use of Bodies: Homo Sacer 4,2, trans. Adam Kotsko (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016), p. 104. 75 Schürmann, “On Constituting Oneself an Anarchistic Subject,” p. 17. 76 Ibid., p. 10. 77 The most devastating critique of the Kantian transcendental and its various afterlives, occurs, famously, in The Order of Things, chap. 9, where Foucault tracks the aporias of man as an empirico-transcendental doublet, functioning both as the object of inquiry and the necessary condition for all knowledge. For a detailed account of the early Foucault’s engagement with this theme, see Béatrice Han, Foucault’s Critical Project: Between the Transcendental and the Historical, trans. Edward Pile (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), chap. 1.

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which could lay claim to having deontological status, the question as to what can be done concerns, precisely, the “limits imposed on an age by the prevailing apparatus of knowledge and power.”78 Schürmann singles out the notion of dispositif here as the central concept for understanding the link between subject and possibility of action in Foucault. This will meet with little surprise today, but it bears noting that at the time this attested to a rare sensibility for Foucault’s conceptual strategy.79 Yet, Schürmann does not comment on the term in any detail, taking it from Foucault without giving it an inflection of his own. In the latter’s work, dispositif is first introduced in The Will to Knowledge, to describe the dispositif of sexuality.80 In terms of the methodological architecture, the notion functions as an alternative to what Foucault, in The Order of Things, analyzes as “episteme.”81 In contradistinction to this notion, “dispositif” is supposed to account for historically changing conditions of intelligibility by connecting discursive with non-discursive elements. Accordingly, Foucault defines it as a network that links together “a resolutely heterogeneous ensemble, comprising discourses, institutions, architectural arrangements, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral and philanthropic propositions.”82

78 Schürmann, “On Constituting Oneself an Anarchistic Subject,” p. 12. ­Schürmann does not discuss how Foucault’s knowledge/power framework relates to the subject/ truth conceptualization in Foucault’s later works. 79 Thus, four years prior to the publication of Schürmann’s essay, Rabinow and Dreyfus, to name but one source Schürmann himself was familiar with, could still call the term “extremely vague.” Dreyfus and Rabinow, Michel Foucault, p. 120. 80 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon, 1978), chap. 4. In addition, Foucault developed important aspects of the term in the lectures immediately following the publication of this work. Cf. Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977– 1978, ed. Michel Senellart, trans. Graham Burchell (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979, ed. Michel Senellart, trans. Graham Burchell (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). 81 Cf. Foucault, The Order of Things, pp. xxiii-xvi. 82 Foucault, “The Confession of the Flesh,” in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon, trans. Colin Gordon et al. (New York: Vintage, 1980), p. 194. / Dits et écrits, vol. III, 1954–1988, eds. Daniel Defert and François Ewald (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), p. 299.

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A dispositif forms the basic matrix in which processes of self-constitution occur. Since the subject is no longer a given, it can only be understood as a relation or process that depends upon historically changing practices defined by interrelated dispositifs. Although the practical subject is thus conceived as always already captured in a dispositif, Foucault, Schürmann suggests, in particular in the History of Sexuality, turns it into an invariable. Offering an alternative to both a purely nominalist reading of Foucault and an interpretation that sees a return of the constitutive subject, he asserts that “the subject as practical is not an epochal figure, one tied to a particular age in our history. Rather, it is always called upon to step into the narrow, shifting place left open by discursive constellations and power effects.”83 It has been pointed out that the concept of the dispositif takes— despite Foucault’s general reluctance to engage with universal categories—“the place of the universals” in his strategy.84 Following Schürmann, both Foucault’s account of the subject and of the dispositif, can thus be seen as intertwined. They are turned into methodological invariables—they are what remains identical within historical difference—in order to take over the function usually held by universals. Yet, they are categories without fixed referents, categories that refrain from essentializing the object they examine. Their function is solely heuristic; it cannot be reverted into a transcendental one.

3. Anarchistic Subjects and the Contemporary Site Having framed Foucault’s project in these terms, Schürmann moves to a consideration of the possible modes of practical self-constitution in the present dispositif, which he distinguishes as individualism and anarchism. Individualism is pointedly defined as the link between the individual personality and social isomorphism, that 83 Schürmann, “On Constituting Oneself an Anarchistic Subject,” p. 20. 84 Giorgio Agamben, “What is an Apparatus?,” in What is an Apparatus and Other Essays, trans. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), p. 7.

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is, as the interiorization of power relations through self-identity: “Self-identity is self-objectification accepted and enforced as selfsubjection.”85 Directly opposed to this is the “polymorphous fight against social totalities,” fights which contest a dispositif through a mode of self-constitution that Schürmann names “anarchistic.”86 This notion is Schürmann’s conceptual inflection of Foucault, who himself dubs “anarchistic” only the struggles at issue here, not the mode of work on the self they imply.87 Rather than a form of interior self-constitution or inward reflection, anarchistic self-constitution operates through public acts. The aim of these acts is the loosening of the hold of one’s insertion into the contemporary dispositif. As such, anarchistic self-constitution is the antithesis to the search for identity; “the attempt to get free of oneself.”88 Such a form of resistance as subjectification [subjectivation] works from within the constraints of a dispositif, without recourse to transcendental normative principles and without totalizing strategies. Anarchistic self-constitution is necessarily a form of micropolitics, a politics whose strategies are dispersion, disruption and deactivation. In his study on Foucault, Deleuze rightly points out that just “as power-relations can be affirmed only by being carried out, so the relation to oneself, which bends these power relations, can be established only by being carried out.”89 Constituting oneself an anarchistic subject is the very process of this bending, a dispersed form of resistance: “The anarchistic subject constitutes itself in micro-interventions aimed at resurgent patterns of subjection and objectification.”90 Schürmann thus introduces a modification into Foucault’s framework that accentuates the possibilities of active resistance that are present in a bifrontal site. That is, while Foucault sketches the possible modes of resistance in an analysis that portrays them as the underside of power, Schürmann conceives 85 Schürmann, “On Constituting Oneself an Anarchistic Subject,” p. 23. 86 Ibid., p. 27. 87 See Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” p. 211. 88 Michel Foucault, The Use of Pleasures, in The History of Sexuality, vol. 2, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage: 1990), p. 8. 89 Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, trans. Seán Hand (Minnesota and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), p. 102. 90 Schürmann, “On Constituting Oneself an Anarchistic Subject,” p. 30.

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them as modes of resistance that actively challenge the nexus of power and knowledge defining a dispositif. It should, moreover, be noted that, from Schürmann’s perspective, any theorization of the contemporary dispositif needs to occur against the backdrop of his analysis of the contemporary site, which is not one epoch among others, not the transition from one ultimate referent to another, but the closure of the metaphysical field itself. Seen from the point of view of subjectification in the present dispositif, anarchistic self-constitution can then be understood as hastening the “peremption” of ultimate normative referents, the erosion of their very conditions of possibility. That Schürmann considers the role of the subject—a figure that has no constitutive function in his main works—in this context thus amounts to exploring the possibility for action in the bifrontal site that is our present. Loosening the hold of one’s insertion in a dispositif concerns the ‘active’ side of this Janus face: anarchistic self-constitution is the form kenosis can take in praxis. Whence its maxim: “Combat all remnants of authoritative Firsts.” Another way in which the concept of anarchistic self-constitution relates directly to the most urgent concerns of contemporary theory and politics is the modality it implies. As anarchistic, the subject cannot be identified—cannot identify itself—with a determinate, constituted state, as this would result in a reinsertion into a dispositif. In his analysis of Foucault in The Use of Bodies, Agamben criticizes Foucault’s conception as being caught up in a circular relation of constitution between self and subject. Agamben locates this circularity in Foucault’s theory of power relations, which, he claims, necessarily imply the concept of “a free subject.” In a next step, this entire problem is traced back to an ontological aporia of democracy: “The aporia of democracy and its governance—the identity of the governors and the governed, absolutely separated and yet to the same degree indissolubly united in an indivisible relation—is an ontological aporia.”91 Towards the end of the book, Agamben directly engages with Schürmann’s notion of anarchy, highlighting its importance while describing its limits in terms that

91 Agamben, The Use of Bodies, p. 106.

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directly relate to his critique of Foucault’s notion of the subject: “Anarchy can never be in the position of a principle: it can only be liberated as a contact, where both arche as origin and arche as command are exposed in their non-relation and neutralized.”92 It is up to contemporary thought and politics to determine the degree to which Schürmann’s notion of the “anarchistic subject” develops a modality of subjectivity that moves beyond such aporias, thus adumbrating a form of resistance that remains to be explored, a mode of existence that still remains to be “produced.”93 Here, anarchy would no longer figure as principle, but as a mode of life, immediately tied to life as it is lived. If the concept of the anarchistic subject could be said to dissolve the entanglement of constitutive and constituted power, it would have to be possible to think it as a destituent subject, a subject whose very form of life would be destitution, dispersion and deactivation: “What is found after the law is not a more proper and original use value that precedes the law, but a new use that is born only after it.”94

IV. The Topology of the dissecutio temporum

1. Temporalization and Displacement The previous section presented some crucial aspects of the relation between Schürmann’s philosophical trajectory and his reception of Foucault’s work, discussing both the affinities and points of

92 Ibid., p. 276. Cf. also the related discussion of Schürmann in Giorgio Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government (Homo Sacer II, 2), trans. Lorenzo Chiesa (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), pp. 64–65. 93 “Subjectification is the production of modes of existence […],” as Deleuze writes. Gilles Deleuze, Pourparlers: 1972–1990 (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1990), p. 156: “La subjectivation, c’est la production des mode d’existence […]” (emphasis added). This sentence, as well as the preceding two, is missing from the translation of the interview in Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations: 1972–1990, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), p. 115. 94 Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2005), p. 64.

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potential divergence between the topological approach that Schürmann derives from the work of the late Heidegger and Foucault’s archaeology-genealogy. Thus, section II outlined the development of a methodology of destitution that proceeds by applying the double step back performed by radical phenomenology on the analysis of modalities of presence to the destitution of economies of presence. The third section highlighted Schürmann’s appropriation of Foucault’s thoughts on the problem of praxis and his anarchistic inflection of the concept of the self-constituting subject. To gauge the specific analytical force of the conceptual displacement that Schürmann carries out vis-à-vis Foucault’s notion of the subject, the present section confronts the subject to the concept of place, exploring the limitations of the attempt “to promote new forms of subjectivity”95 beyond the “ontological aporia” looming in the circular relation between self-constitution and subjectivation [assujettissement] from without. In this sense, Agamben’s conclusion that Foucault fails to break out of the dialectical pattern unfolding between power, on the one hand, and the resistance of the “free subject,” on the other, thus leaving unexplored the form of life of “an Ungovernable that is situated beyond states of domination and power relations,”96 ultimately seems closer to Schürmann’s topological project than the “care of the self” proposed by Foucault. To elucidate this, the present section draws on Schürmann’s insistence on the destitution of method as the precondition for “the diagnosis […] that our locus in Western history is bifrontal”97 in light of the temporal and modal shifts effected by the topological account. On the temporal plane, Schürmann’s topology enacts a temporalization of the question “What can I do?” that goes beyond the abstract time envisioned by traditional conceptualizations of emancipation by re-inscribing the revolutionary question “What is to be done?” within the problem of the temporality of the anarchistic agent. Thus, it consists not merely of a historicization of “our

95 Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” p. 216. 96 Agamben, The Use of Bodies, p. 108. Agamben defines “form of life” as “only a manner of being and living, which does not in any way determine the living thing, just as it is in no way determined by it and is nonetheless inseparable from it.” Ibid., p. 224. 97 Schürmann, “Ultimate Double Binds,” p. 123.

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locus” but of an inquiry into the internal temporal conditions of the possibility of presencing. On the modal plane, it effects a displacement of the origin from the simple “proper place” that haunts Heidegger’s entire philosophy, to the manifold “possible place” as always already broken. This possible place offers a path towards the understanding of the contemporary condition, an alternative to Foucault’s attempt to rethink forms of subjectivity which affords Schürmann a distinct philosophical position among his contemporaries.98 Both the temporal and the modal dimension bear on Schürmann’s appropriation of the hypothesis of closure and feed into what Schürmann calls the “singularization to come.”99 The topological notion of place as both possible and broken gathers together the temporal and modal in the double notion of the always-already and the to-come, which maps out the zone of indeterminacy, of ambivalence in which any praxis is situated.

2. Of the Singularization to Come The tension between subject and place is captured by juxtaposing two short passages from the essays assembled in the present volume. In “What Must I Do at the End of Metaphysics?,” Schürmann claims that the topological method “assigns us our place.” In his most sustained engagement with Foucault, in “On Constituting Oneself an Anarchistic Subject,” he states that the subject is “a variable in discursive regularities, a product of power strategies,” regularities and strategies which establish a constellation that “assigns the subject its place.”100 A potential divergence between the topology and Foucault’s archaeology-genealogy of constellations concerns the aspect of praxis: “Whether the violence of imposing mastery

98 See section II. The topology stops short of a limit that Deleuze’s approach risks transgressing, namely that of speculatively declaring singulars by mere fiat. In contrast, the temporality that corresponds to the broken origin, in which the ‘to-come’ is interlocked with the ‘always-already,’ pertains to a place (the ‘there’) that is both possible and impossible and, in the last instance, undecidable for pure philosophy. 99 Schürmann, “Ultimate Double Binds,” pp. 147–149. 100 Schürmann, “On Constituting Oneself an Anarchistic Subject,” p. 7.

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also characterizes what can be done in the age of closing modernity, namely our own, remains to be examined.”101 While, as noted above, both the dispositif and the subject in Foucault’s work retain a merely heuristic as opposed to transcendental function, their dialectical relation within the constant presence of power relations does not exhaust the modal and temporal dimensions Schürmann devises to outline the notion of place: “Utopia is the very topia of things.”102 In other words, although neither dispositif nor subject assumes the status of transcendental “invariable,” their interplay within the field of power relations nonetheless confines the scope of the investigation to a specific dynamic: the attempt to impose mastery. In contradistinction to Foucault, then, Schürmann’s approach at least provisionally circumvents the assumption that presencing is necessarily entangled in power relations. Instead of focusing on the analysis of the competition for mastery that seems to necessarily follow from placing the concept of the subject at the center of attention, he explores temporal and modal potentialities of the notion of place. It is in the context of his work on the double bind between legislation and transgression that Schürmann most explicitly articulates the distance between the “violence of imposing mastery” and the topological account: “Indeed, in accordance with the hypothesis of a closure of metaphysics, our historical site is marked by a deferment separating the ‘notthere’ from the ‘there’—a spatial gap which is not the issue here, but which translates the temporality split between the integrative violence of the technological present and the potential for disintegration that it displays.”103

This insight calls for destituting any method that aims at integration or totalization and maps onto the distinction, referred to above, between isomorphism and polymorphous plurality. From this results the possibility to explore notions that accommodate both 101 Ibid., p. 20. 102 Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community, trans. Michael Hardt (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press,1993), p. 103. 103 Schürmann, “Ultimate Double Binds,” p. 124.

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the active and the passive aspects of the “narrow, shifting place” that provides the matrix of thinking and acting in the contemporary site—a matrix that, for Schürmann, is essentially temporal. Drawing on Hannah Arendt, Schürmann conceives place as “dissecutio temporum, […] the double bind of birth and death” and thus in a way that parallels the “event of appropriation-expropriation.”104 The topological discordance traversing this notion of place is distinct from the opposition that drives power relations precisely in that it is not primarily concerned with external political antagonisms but with the internal temporal “differend” that renders every unity impossible.105 This is why Schürmann rejects an understanding of transgression as “the passage beyond some closure, […] some step across the line,” a tendency that he asserts is present in Foucault’s Preface to Transgression.106 In contrast to this, Schürmann casts transgression as “the co-normativity of the law’s disparate other under the very reign of the law,” which opens a place that is “deferred and spaced from within” by the “possible singularization at the heart of any actually legislating universal.”107 This “singularization to come” is not the intention of any mastery-seeking subject but the essential double bind that defines our emplacement.

104 Schürmann, “Ultimate Double Binds,” p. 124. See Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1958). 105 The differend is a crucial element of the conceptual framework of Broken Hegemonies; see the “General Introduction,” esp. pp. 16–26; for its application in the context of the analysis of our contemporary site, see vol. 2, part II (“Its Diremption”), pp. 511–632. 106 Schürmann, “Ultimate Double Binds,” p. 135. Michel Foucault, “A Preface to Transgression,” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, ed. Donald F. Bouchard, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), pp. 29–52. / “Préface à la transgression (en hommage à Georges Bataille),” in Dits et écrits, vol. 1, pp. 233–250. In this 1963 text on the work of Georges Bataille, Foucault explores the relation between transgression and limit, arguing that “transgression incessantly crosses and recrosses a line which closes up behind it in a wave of extremely short duration” (p. 34). If Foucault here seems to affirm the possibility of discontinuity and “pure transgression” (p. 40), it should be noted that he would later come to distance himself from such fantasies. For this, see Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, p. 150. 107 Schürmann, “Ultimate Double Binds,” p. 137.

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It is the distinction between destitution and peremption that determines Schürmann’s topological account of the caesura that marks the end of the metaphysical epoch. Its conceptual necessity is implied in the difference between presencing (Anwesen) and economy of presence (Anwesenheit), in the context of which Schürmann describes the coming-into-presence of phenomena within “their ‘own’ or ‘proper’ world,”108 a theme that seems to suggest a continuity between any phenomenon’s origin and the place in which it phenomenalizes. For Schürmann, however, the singularization to come always already negates this proper place, interlocking every phenomenon’s discordant temporality with its modality, thus creating a manifold and discordant, “possible place.”109 In this reading, there is no simple identity between phenomena, their origin and their world, but rather an “over-determination” caused by the “loss of meaning […] that is always imminent”110 in every presencing. The distinction between destitution and peremption results from the hypothesis of closure. In as far as the loss of world concerns a phenomenon that has been instituted as ultimate referent, Schürmann refers to this process as “destitution,” which re-asserts the “possibility of phenomena” as their capacity to “suffer expulsion from their world.”111 Under the hypothesis of closure, however, the destitution of ultimate referents coincides with another destitution: “What comes to pass for us is not the destitution of one fantasm after another, but a peremption that deprives us henceforth of any fantasmic recourse.”112 Schürmann refers to this process as the peremption “of any representation functioning as uniformly and simply normative,” which entails the “annihilation of normative acts,” and hence “the loss of every hegemony.”113 Peremption is the destitution of the pattern of institution and destitution itself. In other words, that not of any specific modality of presence but of the conditions of possibility of historical modalities of presence

108 Ibid., p. 146. 109 Schürmann, Broken Hegemonies, p. 553. 110 Schürmann, “Ultimate Double Binds,” p. 147. 111 Ibid. 112 Schürmann, Broken Hegemonies, p. 514 (trans. changed). 113 Ibid., pp. 348, 514, 623.

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themselves. By instituting hegemonic fantasms as measures for all phenomenalization, these have determined the history of philosophy and politics, subjecting the manifold to the reign of ultimate principles. It is against this backdrop that Schürmann’s appropriation of the line from a poem by René Char—“Tomorrow the Manifold”114— must be read. If Schürmann turns the phrase “Tomorrow the Manifold” into the emblem of the principle of anarchy, this is not to suggest that there is another life, waiting in some outside or beyond, but to suggest that every “morning insurrection,”115 every phenomenalization, is always-already the to-come of a singularization. For Schürmann, it expresses both the poietic nature of every beginning and the absolute dispersion that the “age of transition”116 effects, thus referring to both the foundation of an arche and to the anarchistic turn that puts an end to the oscillation between institution and destitution. In breaking the simple modality of presence that founds itself “in illo tempore,”117 the dissecutio temporum becomes the yardstick for thinking resistance in our historical site. Destitution then defines itself as the necessity-impossibility of transgression and of the promotion of new modes of existence, as a new, ungovernable form of life: “If there is a task and a possibility of thinking today, it can only be that of letting normative consciousness collapse.”118

114 Original: “Demain le multiple.” René Char, La Paroi et la prairie (Paris: GLM, 1952), p. 17. The significance of Char’s poetry as one of the central elements catalyzing the development of Schürmann’s philosophy is also highlighted by a 1976 article: Reiner Schürmann, “Situating René Char. Hölderlin, Heidegger, Char and the ‘There is,’” boundary 2, 4:2 (1976), pp. 512–534. 115 Ibid., p. 517. 116 Schürmann, Heidegger on Being and Acting: From Principles to Anarchy, p. 303. 117 Schürmann, “Situating René Char,” p. 519. 118 Schürmann, Broken Hegemonies, p. 514.

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Acknowledgments

The essays assembled here were first published in the following journals and essay collection: 1) “On Constituting Oneself an Anarchistic Subject,” Praxis International 6 (1986), pp. 294–310. 2) “‘What Must I Do’ at the End of Metaphysics? Ethical Norms and the Hypothesis of a Historical Closure,” in William L. McBride and Calvin O. Schrag (eds.), Phenomenology in a Pluralistic Context (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1983), pp. 49–64. 3) “Modernity: The Last Epoch of a Closed History?,” Independent Journal of Philo­ sophy 4 (1983), pp. 51–59. 4) “Legislation/Transgression: Strategies and Counter-Strategies in the Transcendental Justification of Norms,” Man and World 17 (1984), pp. 361–398. 5) “Ultimate Double Binds,” Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 14:2–15:1 (1991), pp. 213–236. Editorial interventions have been restricted to a minimum. Only obvious errors and misspellings have been corrected; systems of referencing have been unified. If a missing word could be reconstructed with some certainty, it has been inserted with curly brackets. Where Schürmann quotes texts from editions that are not easily accessible, a reference to the text has been added if a reprint was available in a more accessible form.

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Reiner Schürmann Selected Writings and Lecture Notes Edited by Francesco Guercio, Michael Heitz, Malte Fabian Rauch and Nicolas Schneider

This edition aims to provide a broader perspective on the prolific, multifaceted, and still largely unrecognized body of work produced by Reiner Schürmann (1941–1993). It brings together a selection of Schürmann’s as yet unpublished lecture notes, ­written for the courses he delivered at the New School for Social Research in New York between 1975 and 1993, with previously uncollected essays. These works offer an additional avenue into the repertoire already available—including recent re-editions of his major philosophical works and of his only novel. The printed works will be complemented by a digital edition of Schürmann’s typescripts, along with transcriptions and an extensive critical apparatus. We hope that the Selected Writings and Lecture Notes will contribute to a renewed appreciation of the scope of Schürmann’s philosophical endeavor and help to establish him as one of those thinkers who are indispensable for the understanding of our present—or, rather, to show our present as the moment of legibility for Schürmann’s work. We are grateful to the Reiner Schürmann Estate for entrusting us with the responsibility of this work and for their full endorsement.