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On the Bastard Family of Deconstruction

19 December 2021

On the Bastard Family of Deconstruction
PHILOSOPHY

Untitled, Elodie Guignard, 2010; Image Credit: ©Elodie Guignard

In July 2021, Jean-Luc Nancy, Divya Dwivedi and Shaj Mohan published three texts on the future of philosophy. These texts were concerned with the themes of “end of philosophy”, “the other beginning of philosophy”, and anastasis of philosophy. On 23 November 2021, Divya Dwivedi, Shaj Mohan and Maël Montëvil held a public seminar in École Normale Supérieure, followed by a series of seminars held in private. This is the complete text of the seminar of the 23rd November where notes, references and bibliographical details have been added for publication. The text examines critique and deconstruction from various formalities and problematics such as of presence, closure, and identity. Deconstruction was not a mere interlude in history of philosophy but a gestation for a radical other beginning. The Text reveals that beneath deconstruction the bastard reason had been at work preparing the anastasis of philosophy.

For Hélène Nancy


A good afternoon to everyone here. I dedicate this moment, this lecture, to Hélène Nancy.


We begin here the opening of a project or the setting in place of the early refrains of a song. This project titled “the anastasis of philosophy” appeared as necessary and essential to many of us for a long while. For these early hours we can call this project the preparation to receive that which was awaiting in deconstruction to take its stage; or, that which was awaited by the peculiar family of deconstruction. The family of deconstruction was born with the deconstruction of family, which also means the deconstruction of all communities that are inherited, including racial, ethnic, linguistic, national, and other biologised groupings of people. That is, what took place as deconstruction — all the many deconstructions — was not the end of philosophy, instead it was the creation of conditions of or for a politics and a philosophy which was not to be a mere inherited community but a community that was bastardised. Deconstruction was not the closure of philosophy, it was not even the suspension of the thought of a closure of philosophy. Instead, deconstruction was a kind of stretching of deliberation, the stretching of a bow which opened the critical hour. And anastasis, the coming over of stasis, found Kairos in that critical hour. In all this, there is a special significance to this amphitheatre named after Galois. (1) Maël Montévil is the appropriate person to discuss it.


Three years ago, Jean-Luc Nancy, Bernard Stiegler, Divya Dwivedi, and I had planned a conference to investigate the meaning of “evil”. It was to take place in College de France last year. Of course, the pandemic caused the first interruption, as if evil did not want such a confrontation, and the conference had to be postponed, but an event was held online, the proceedings of which are already appearing in the form of a book Virality of Evil. (2) In the texts that many of us wrote during the pandemic, in the middle of unnecessary controversies, we insisted on the necessity of this project. (3) In a certain sense, in a peculiar sense of the determination of thinking, before we, the animal that philosophises, began to think, the project had already commenced. The advanced anticipation is not the setting of a machine in motion, rather it is the constitution of an anticipatory system without a plan which pronounces the philosophical utterance. (4) It is still a rational order in the sense in which Aquinas would say that a world which is eternal could follow from the essence of god without any contradiction. In another sense this birth of the anastasis of philosophy amidst the family of deconstruction was set in place by many a proper name, and on a minimum they are: Husserl, Wittgenstein, Gödel, Heidegger, Derrida, and Nancy.


In the concretion of its enactment it was, and is, meant to clear the air of what has been called driving school philosophy by Jean-Luc Nancy and kindergarten philosophy by Bernard Stiegler. There were the other malaises of philosophy we had identified, and one evening Bernard [Stiegler] had declared “we have to go to war, there is no other way”. (5) The eruption of gigantomachia is necessary for philosophy to clarify itself like metal. However, the war Bernard [Stiegler] thought of had to be fought against an insipid and impoverished culture of thinking which protects the vapid erections of senseless propositions through mere force. This philosophical culture is assured of its inventiveness through the forgetting of philosophical texts and problems, among other causes; that is, if one forgets Kant it is possible to enjoy the antinomies of reason as novelties again. In other words, a war has to be fought against a philosophical culture which is without any philosophy and which is imitative of the little fascisms we find everywhere today.


But then, we lost Bernard [Stiegler] last August [2020]. Soon, Jean-Luc [Nancy] took charge and produced an intimate bouquet of memorial essays for Bernard Stiegler written by friends. (6) This August [2021] Jean-Luc [Nancy] left us. Otherwise, on this kind of a stage there would have been, at least, two more figures. But as you know the philosophical embrace never stops arriving, and they are here, amidst us. But we, the bastard family of deconstruction, are at war for that bastard reason which has been generating all the philosophies known to us all this while. At the ‘origin’ of all systems of thought is bastard reason, as we will find.


If deconstruction is the deconstruction of presence then it is primarily the deconstruction of identity. In all those questions which we today recognise as deconstructive — including of the self, subject, the identity between subject and object, truth and so on — the fundamental question is of identity. Rather, deconstruction set identities in question

On July 14 this year, Jean-Luc Nancy published a text which would become his final text, in the journal Philosophy World Democracy, which he founded with many of us after assessing the critical state of philosophy. The text was a suspension of Heidegger’s essay “End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking”. In it Nancy posed a challenge “why not, get it over with, since we have provided the proof (that nobody asked for) of a superb, majestic and abundant inanity?”. (7) Divya Dwivedi and I published our respective texts the next day. (8) A series was opened, with an allusion to and a reinterpretation of the Heideggerian phrase “the other beginning of philosophy”. (9) Soon, others followed, and will follow, in this series of publications and openings. Today, we will repeat some of the themes and, let us say, with the precautions, the revelations from those texts. But they are available for everyone now to read online. Therefore, we will also be discussing the themes and the conceptualities which began with, and which preceded, those publications as well. This we, the legion, might be confusing, and therefore, a few names shall be mentioned for this moment, but not all—Kamran Baradaran from Iran, Ivana Perica from Croatia, Benedetta Todaro from Italy-France, Laurence Joseph from France, Reghu Janardhanan from India, Robert Bernasconi from America, Zeynep Direk for Turkey, François Warin from France, Sergio Benvenuto from Italy, Mael Montevil from France, Rachel Adams from South Africa, Jérôme Lèbre from France, Daniel J. Smith from America, Osamu Nishitani from Japan, Emily Apter from America.


What Heidegger meant by this phrase, “the other beginning of philosophy”, is complicated by the way his posthumous publications appeared and by the contents found in them. For now, we can mark out the implications of this phrase following the distinction made by Dwivedi between “origin” and “beginning”. (10)


Origin is a set of conditions which were (functionally) isolated from what can be called the ‘pre-original’. Therefore an act, or a series of acts, through which the polynomia of the pre-origin and its homological powers were restricted through functional isolations and were then converted into the regularities we identify as the phenomenon of metaphysics, and its politics could also be given an end. By end we should understand not the temporal cessation of an activity (which in this case can continue as an inanity for as long as it remains liveable), but the securing of the essential as a range. For now, we should also define essence: Essence is the ratio between the possibilities and impossibilities of a particular articulation of a group of things. (11) The origin of metaphysics determined its essence. Then, the essence of metaphysics became visible from, at least, Kant onwards, and hence we can also say that metaphysics had been in stasis for a long time before Heidegger revealed this stasis. Beginning and origin are distinct, not only etymologically, but in the spans they show us. Beginning is the setting of a stage which is inseparable from all that takes place in it; the stage of commencement spans with the events of the stage. In another technical sense, it is the appearance of new laws which comprehend and raise up the elements of the stasis while leaving behind the shadows of the older comprehending laws for the archeologists.



Phaedra in agony, by Alexandre Cabanel, 1880; Image credit: Wikimedia Commons

What has come to be philosophy


Let us begin by taking into account what happened to philosophy in these recent decades. We can proceed by way of a list and it will be easy to recognise from the brief sketches.


  1. Philosophy entered a crisis of its own making when it set aside problems and objects which were its creation, such as space, time, nature, matter, faculties, health, evil, world. The withdrawal of philosophy created a species of sciences which continued either in a kind of ignorance of their origins in philosophy or without a care for their implications. Such ignorance in the sciences is exemplified by Stephen Hawking’s declaration of the ‘end of philosophy’ because these ends were ‘achieved’ by physics, and without any further interruptions from the philosophers physics became capable of securing the meaning of the remaining ends. That is, from the point of view of the sciences, the end of philosophy came to be when the ends of philosophy were accomplished by the sciences. These sciences include the so called human sciences as well; or, when we lost the lesson held in the ancient distinction between phusikoi and phusiologoi.

  2. Philosophy began an ethnic determination of itself through a complicated process which is certainly linked with colonialism and slave trade. This legacy began to isolate most of philosophical practice into a species of national or cultural theories, starting with the identification of “occident” and “western” philosophy. As a result, all criticisms of colonialisms and even crimes against humanity began to find in philosophy the culprit. Today, the very peculiar national, linguistic and ethno- isolations are deployed in order to mask the absence of philosophising in the prominent philosophical currents. Without addressing the continuance of the tendencies of the colonial and racial epochs of philosophy in much of what we find as contemporary national philosophies the risk for philosophy itself will gain speed. This process risks philosophy being confined at best to a museum of thought under what Divya Dwivedi warned us as the category of “white theory”.

  3. In the last few decades, what is called analytical philosophy and its associates began a growing bureaucratic reign over philosophy. This reign is convenient for many interests, because it takes away that which makes philosophy properly philosophy – politics as a philosophical act which creates freedoms. Philosophy creates freedoms and these freedoms have a sense only in the freedoms for which we fight in politics. Freedom is between us, and this is the responsibility of freedom.

  4. The growing dominance of technological determination of all activities takes away the room for politics understood as the fight for freedoms, and this in turn is already making corporations the lords of thought; and thinking less and less is the very goal of the automation of all domains.

  5. The crisis of education which we now call the “neoliberal universities” has affected philosophy the most. (12) When the emphasis is on employability and skill, the philosopher is the most useless thing in the world.


There is more to say in these regards, as you know very well. But we should now attend to what we began with, that which awaited its arrival within deconstruction.


The meaning of deconstruction


There are many deconstructions, including the kind we find in culinary discourses and tailoring. But what was it in philosophy? What was deconstruction the deconstruction of? The usual answer, which is not wrong, is presence. Deconstruction was the deconstruction of presence. Presence is the assertion of something as that thing. Rather, a thing is what it is by being identical to itself under a concept, and thus it presents itself. All the categories of a thing revolve around this notion presence. That is, presence implies that something which appears to us is only that particular thing, belonging to that species, and then to nothing else; the thing which is said to be present is in a fundamental sense free of kinesis or change, or speed. There might be something confusing about what we just found, owing to the very recent loss of the distinction between the particular and the specific in English, where by specific often whatis meant is the particular. That is, when we say this is a book we speak of the object book which is of the species books.


The law of identity is not enough to generate a field of metaphysics. In another register, if the classical laws of thought would form a system then this system will not be sufficiently complex to derive undecidability. Therefore, in deconstruction one finds the search for additional rules, presuppositions, suppressions, diversions, and semantic games through which everything is made to return to identity.

If deconstruction is the deconstruction of presence then it is primarily the deconstruction of identity. In all those questions which we today recognise as deconstructive — including of the self, subject, the identity between subject and object, truth and so on — the fundamental question is of identity. Rather, deconstruction set identities in question.


The questioning of identity took many forms and many different understandings, which in turn produced theoretical and political effects. It was also popularly known as “anti-essentialism”. (13) Anti-essentialism meant that the ethnic, gender, linguistic and other typologies of people and cultures were found to be relying on Identity, which was revealed by deconstruction to be unstable. The most minimal of these forms is what was understood as the deconstruction of binaries or the so called binary opposites. In this case deconstruction recovered something which was the insistence of a relation in that which presented itself as self-identical or as partial to itself and erased its veins with other functions and “things”. For example, the usual opposites of dark and light relie on a kind of reciprocal contamination for both these terms to make sense; more precisely, the functional isolations obtained under these terms define their sense. The deconstruction of gender, racial typologies, jurisprudential superstitions including of “the migrant”, constitutional superstitions about the identity of nations, and more, soon followed. That is, identity is contaminated by its others, which are suppressed and contained using forces which lie outside the logic of identity.


In another form deconstruction revealed “the other”. The other is understood here as that which holds on to a system as its outside. The other is that which, by giving systems of identity their very form, is considered the contamination to be expelled by these systems of identity. In that sense, the other still remains a general concept under the thought of analogy alone, without sufficient faculties to determine the homological powers of each and every “other”. The other is, in the system of justice, justice itself joining this system as the outside, which may seem perplexing, but not too difficult. To deliver justice one must take a side, or become partial each time a judgement has to be granted, while striving to justify the case for such a partiality. However, justice itself cannot be deconstructed, for it implies impartiality, which in a Derridean idiom, “watches over” the system of justice.


At another level, deconstruction was not merely questioning identities, but also the very systems which determined identities. Identities rely on the coherent closure of a system within which these identities have a meaning. In this regard, deconstruction functioned as the deconstruction of closure. The concept of closure (14) can explained through the algebraic notion of field laws, though not exactly, as we will see with philosophy. A field is that which obeys the field laws such as the closure, associative, commutative, identity, inverse and distributive laws for algebra. To obey involves two things: First, all the relations or actions are to be identified by the laws, including the elements; and second, the transformations and actions result in objects which are not foreign to this field. That is, a field is that in which all the elements fall after the formal operations following the field laws and this state of falling into the field is closure. That which originates in itself to return to itself through all the mutations and variations is the field, which is self-enclosed. Deconstruction on the other hand reveals the Other, that which is always outside the given field.



Untitled, Elodie Guignard, 2006; Image Credit: ©Elodie Guignard

But deconstruction does all this by assuming as suspended the central concern of what it identifies as the field law of metaphysics, which is presence, or more precisely identity. The law of identity is not enough to generate a field of metaphysics. In another register, if the classical laws of thought would form a system then this system will not be sufficiently complex to derive undecidability. Therefore, in deconstruction one finds the search for additional rules, presuppositions, suppressions, diversions, and semantic games through which everything is made to return to identity. For that reason, one cannot find an engagement with “logic” as it is understood by most of what goes by the name analytic philosophy within what took place as deconstruction. The other laws of logic, of non-contradiction and the excluded middle, were shown to rely on and were found to be serving the law of identity amongst the deployments of ruses, elusive definitions, marginalisation of problems, and outright assertions. If we follow the very workings of deconstruction it calls for a new order of faculties which are not reducible to the classical laws of thought.


Deconstruction was also the deconstruction of origins. We found that origin is that which makes a distinction between the pre-original and the original through a series of acts which suspend the polynomia and homological powers of the pre-original through functional isolations. The origin is also a force which attempts to enclose within itself a field which cuts off the pre-original. But deconstructions of the origins found that the pre-original was still insisting within the original. The origin, indeed, has its engine (which generated metaphysics and its histories) only in retaining a relation with the pre-original. The pre-original in deconstruction emerged as the other, the stranger, the bastard, bastard reason, paradoxes, margins, the bricoleur, the frame, the unconscious of the unconscious, and so on. That is, in each case deconstruction found that systems which constructed identity, under the imperative of identity, held themselves together through a reason which is older than identity; rather, identity is something which is obtained each time through functional isolations.


To recount in the context of metaphysics, origin,: the persisting condition under which the law of identity was obtained. In each deconstructive act the pre-origin emerged as a power which holds the resources for another beginning of another world, as opposed to the common place understanding of deconstruction which saw in it a mere stasis of the received metaphysics. Now we know deconstruction’s imperative to be this: The urgent creation of new faculties, or the powers of construction, which are adequate to what was revealed as bastard reason such that there is a beginning.


Jean-Luc Nancy opened the domain of homologies without which deconstruction risked being a procedure of analogies, which is how its popular versions represented themselves. In Nancy’s conception of the relation between sense, thinking and existence we can find a general principle of the homology of thought,


“Here, thinking burrows back to its source. It knows this source, its very being, as what is, in itself, neither thought, unthought, or unthinkable, but the finite sense of existing. Thinking burrows back to its source and so, as thought, opens it and drains once again as it both gathers and scatters it.” (15)


That is, “sense” for Nancy is that which persists as the domain of homological power — lets say, existence itself — which is never given as a whole to any domain, even philosophy. Sense is the homological power which is functionally isolable into the exercises of the making of fields of thought which, as long as they do not entertain the dreams of closure, will be able to access this sense. Nancy’s texts also caution us about the dreams of a domain of pure polynomia where no regularities are obtained, which are entertained in the works of Clastres, Deleuze, and Foucault. These anarchic dreams — a dream which seeks to be identical with the arche—is impossible, for each perception is enacted through functional isolations. In short, deconstruction was never about the guarantee to render thee at one with the pre-origin.


The revelation of deconstruction


The way philosophy, or most of philosophy, revolved around the law of identity was discussed in the previously published texts. There may have been other ways within philosophy to conduct itself without serving identity and we could allow those ways and modes to rise again provided we know the question to ask. This question of non-identity has to be older that identity in order of priorities. It is, in fact, a certain experience, one should say a very common experience which is suppressed through the primacy of identity.


If identity is obtained as a product of the suppression of a fundamental experience of the unanticipatable end or sustenance of the world, it is not the law of philosophy. Further, there are no field laws for philosophy, nor does philosophy enjoy closure.

I had called that experience or the question “the obscure experience” in a text published with Jean-Luc Nancy, titled “Our Mysterious Being”, (16) and in other publications as well. Recently, Reghu Janardhanan (17) and Jerome Lèbre (18) produced their interpretations of the question or experience of which identity appeared as the solution. In a certain interpretation of ancient thought, all thinking was understood to be concerned with the question of that which gives identity to each thing. That is, the concept through which everything has their identity was thought to be the central question of metaphysics, and metaphysics as a discipline provided the answer through a reference to a special identity. This special grounding identity is a position which took the various forms of god, subject, matter and so on. In the language of Derrida, it is a substitutable position which can never be occupied by a constant. For Heidegger, this is the history of the determination of being as a being. As we can see, the emphasis is on a being, or identity. That is, the critique of metaphysics, be it Derridean or Heideggerian, presupposes the whole of metaphysics as a field which operates under the law of identity. The presupposition of identity set in suspension the critique or the questioning of metaphysics at the limit of identity. That is, the anastasis of philosophy arising with bastard reasoning was still held in suspension.


Instead, we found that the oldest of questions—and even the newest questions—may not be the question of identity at all. In most cases, identity appears by way of answering another question, which is of the stability of the world. It is not why the world has stability, but rather whether it has any at all. For example, in Aristotle, identity answers the question of the duration of the world, its permanence, or a guarantee of its continuance; it closes off the obscure experience of the un-anticipatable end of the world. For this reason, god is posited as that which is self-necessitating and therefore without desire for speed. The domain of god which forms the outermost region of the world encloses the world in such a way that the world assures us of a stability as that which is held within eternity. However, unlike the eternity of god, the things in the world undergo speed or changes. The speed of the things of the world enjoy for a duration identity, which is an imitation of eternity.


The first mover, then, of necessity exists; and in so far as it is necessary, it is good, and in this sense a first principle [...] On such a principle, then, depend the heavens and the world of nature. And its life is such as the best which we enjoy, and enjoy for a short time. (19)


If identity is obtained as a product of the suppression of a fundamental experience of the unanticipatable end or sustenance of the world, it is not the law of philosophy. Further, there are no field laws for philosophy, nor does philosophy enjoy closure. The many senses of these experiences of the non-closure of philosophy were the central themes which emerged from the deconstructions of Derrida and Nancy, in particular. They both, while differing with one another, showed that the deconstruction of closure opens philosophy to the possibility of a thinking which lies beyond closure. We cannot dwell on these already discussed themes for too long. Instead, we have to come to the matter of that which has been in gestation in deconstruction.


The bastard family


In some moments, such as in the books Sense of the World and A Finite Thinking by Jean-Luc Nancy, we experience the outside of deconstruction as a certain ‘ground’ which prevents the stasis of closure from holding forth. For example, when it comes to the oldest experiences of philosophy such as existence, sense, and time, the deconstruction of closure does nothing to them, for they are outside what has been thought through the law of identity, or they stir beyond the fictive metaphysical field. Derrida would suggest the raising of a rare moment in ancient thought in his text on the Khora of Plato. He wrote,


One cannot even say of it that it is neither this nor that or that it is both this and that. It is not enough to recall that khora names neither this nor that, or, that khora says this or that. (20)


That is, deconstruction finds beneath it a logic which is not classical, although the operations of deconstruction often relied on classical logic to show paradoxes in systems which were constituted classically. The logic lying beneath was called “bastard logics” by Derrida following Plato. Plato could never develop this term, “bastard reasoning” (λογισμῷ τινι νόθῳ), in a fundamental way because the very concern of that discourse was the removal of all things bastard!



Untitled, Elodie Guignard, 2010; Image Credit: ©Elodie Guignard

But what really is “bastard”? It is the breaking of closure. Or bastard is that which threatens closures and enclosures derived from identities. For this reason, Euripides says in the play Hippolytus, “the bastard is always regarded as an enemy to the true-born”. (21) There are several texts from the ancient world that we can approach to find the early senses of “the bastard”. We know of them from several cultures as the folk tales of the “orphan child”, which often meant the bastard child. In myths we find the gods beginning their lives as the orphaned, abandoned bastard children, facing extraordinary dangers. That is, everything begins with the bastard who is then judged by the criteria of the derivative “true born”. All the species of families known – for there is no Platonic Idea of the family which is relations – have bastardisations at their origins.


For convenience let us continue with Hippolytus, the bastard who resembles gods themselves. Hippolytus is the bastard child of the king Theseus, born of the Amazon Hippolyta. The name says something of his fate. Hippolytus could mean, either the “unleasher of horses” following from the so called “proto-Indo-European” root *Lewh, which could have the sense of “let loose”; or to be “the one destroyed by horses” following the later Greek sense of “lysis”. Horses as we know in the ancient world (particularly for the tribes who descended with horses from the Eurasian steppe) meant freedom, passions, and the senses.


In the play the bastard Hippolytus refuses to partake in the sexual economy of the family by devoting himself to Artemis who is the eternal virgin. A curse leads his step mother to desire him to the point of her suicide, but not before accusing him of entertaining impermissible desire for her. That is, the bastard, the one born outside the logic of the family, is cursed through the desire in his stepmother for him, which he refuses to recognise due to his obedience of the very logic of the family. Later, Hippolytus met his death when he was crushed by his horses, through the curse of his father. This element of the tale too, of the father seeking the destruction of his bastard child, is common in the ancient world; Kronos and Zeus for example. The lesson is not too difficult to interpret: the bastard, even when he volunteers to abstain from the logic of closure of the family, he is cursed to a horrific death. At the same time, the origins of cults, religions, and cities commence from the bastards, who are ceremonially recalled and thus suppressed in the mundane level.


The political sense of this term for the ancient world and even our time is not difficult to see. Dwivedi had discussed earlier some of these questions through the examination of a peculiar difference in philosophy, that between the orient and the occident.


In philosophy bastard logic means to think from an intuition older than identity, or from out of a bastard family of philosophy. In other words, philosophy has the responsibility to create a new set of faculties which operate without identity as the fundamental law of thought. In terms of deconstruction, the task is to think of families and politics where contamination is not in the margins, eliminating the older dictum of the “true born”. A conduct in philosophy which relieves the politics of love deriving from the logic of the true born is lust. Sergio Benvenuto recently discussed the relation between such philosophical lust and psychoanalysis. This text, which is part of the “Other beginning” is available online. We touched on all these faculties on earlier occasions. To elaborate on them, especially on a new conception of powers, takes too long, which we do not have today.


In philosophy bastard logic means to think from an intuition older than identity, or from out of a bastard family of philosophy. In other words, philosophy has the responsibility to create a new set of faculties which operate without identity as the fundamental law of thought. In terms of deconstruction, the task is to think of families and politics where contamination is not in the margins, eliminating the older dictum of the “true born”.

The philosophical practice of bastard reasonings or the acts of bastard philosophical families will be necessary today to begin to address the crises of our world. Without it, the world of identities, including the world of identity politics, risks an early criticalisation.


 

NOTES


1. Évariste Galois, the French mathematician who deployed a reason, which retained the essential thoughts of both Leibniz and Kant, to give conditions for the solubility of polynomials, and in that act he founded Group Theory.


2. Virality of Evil: Philosophy in the Time of a Pandemic, edited by Divya Dwivedi, Rowman & Littlefield: London, 2022.


3. Coronavirus, Psychoanalysis, and Philosophy, edited by F. Castrillón, T. Marchevsky, London: Routledge, 2021.


4. See S. Mohan, “The Noise of All Things”, Philosophy World Democracy 2.6 (June 2021), https://www.philosophy-world-democracy.org/the-noise-of-all-things


5. See Amitiés de Bernard Stiegler, réunies par Jean-Luc Nancy, Editions Galilée, 2021


6. Ibid.


7. See Jean-Luc Nancy, “End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking”, Philosophy World Democracy 2.7 (July 2021), https://www.philosophy-world-democracy.org/other-beginning/the-end-of-philosophy


8. See Divya Dwivedi, “Nancy’s Wager,” Philosophy World Democracy 2.7 (July 2021), https://www.philosophy-world-democracy.org/other-beginning/nancys-wager and Shaj Mohan, “And the Beginning of Philosophy”, Philosophy World Democracy 2.7 (July 2021), https://www.philosophy-world-democracy.org/other-beginning/and-the-beginning-of-philosophy


9. See the Series “The Other Beginning of Philosophy,” Philosophy World Democracy 2.7, (July 2021), https://www.philosophy-world-democracy.org/other-beginning


10. Dwivedi, “Nancy’s Wager,” Philosophy World Democracy 2.7 (July 2021), https://www.philosophy-world-democracy.org/other-beginning/nancys-wager


11. The modern meaning of “essence” from which “essentialist” as a pejorative derives points to a tendency in thought whereby the polynomia of things are forgotten. Thus what one obtains is “industrial essence” as some minimum of characteristics which allow us to identify an object or give it an industrial identity. We have dealt with this notion elsewhere. See Gandhi and Philosophy: On Theological Anti-Politics, Bloomsbury Academic, UK, 2018.


12. See “The Endogenous Ends of Education: For Aaron Swartz”, S. Mohan and D. Dwivedi, European Journal of Psychoanalysis, 25 May 2020. https://www.journal-psychoanalysis.eu/the-endogenous-ends-of-education-for-aaron-swartz/


13. See note 11 above.


14. The concept of closure was not borrowed from mathematics by philosophy, rather closure originated in a series of philosophical acts which were guided by philosophical necessities.


15. Jean-Luc Nancy, A Finite Thinking, Edited by Simon Sparks, Stanford University Press, California, 2003, p. 30.


16. Jean-Luc Nancy and Shaj Mohan, “Our Mysterious Being”, Philosophical Salon, April 2020, https://thephilosophicalsalon.com/our-mysterious-being/


17. Reghu Janardhanan, “Deconstructive Materialism: Einsteinian Revolution in Philosophy”, Philosophy World Democracy 2.7 (November 2021), https://www.philosophy-world-democracy.org/other-beginning/deconstructive-materialism. Janardhanan had called the atmosphere of anastasis and “the other beginning of philosophy” by the name “deconstructive materialism” much earlier. Jean-Luc Nancy was open to this name which revealed the relation between a hitherto unknown materialism and deconstruction. However, Montévil for logical reasons has been deploying the name “bastard materialism”.


18. Jérôme Lèbre, “Pourquoi pas”, Philosophy World Democracy 2.7 (August 2021), https://www.philosophy-world-democracy.org/other-beginning/pourquoi-pas


19. Aristotle, Metaphysics 1072b.


20. Jacques Derrida, On the Name, edited byThomas Dutotit, translated by David Wood, John P. Leavy Jr. and Ian Mcleod, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995, p. 89.


21. Euripides, Hippolytus, 965.

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