half a world apart brings us closer … Button 2 April 2023 Button 'and everything is green and submarine', 2022; Image credit: received ‘half a world apart brings us closer …’ is an attempt to respond-to Dancing Without Touching , a multi-media installation by Sarah Choo Jing which was shown at Yeo Gallery as part of SEA Focus 2023, by performing a reading-of and a writing-alongside the work(s). The piece stages — in the precise sense of theoria — my encounter with her work: in that sense, it is both deeply-personal yet, at the same time, hopes to create a space in which readers will be able read-themselves, write-themselves, into. It will not be an explication of Dancing Without Touching, even less so an academic treatise on it, but rather a slow-dance in which the work unfurls itself to us in glimpses as we move-with, dance-alongside, it. In many ways, ‘half a world closer apart …’ is an attempt to be thinking-with-senses, an attempt at sensual-thinking, which is precisely what Sarah Choo Jing is bringing forth through her work. ACT I Unfettered spaces scare me. I’m not used to scenes that aren’t in the frame … It’s probably from all the TV. ~ Izumi Suzuki (1) to dance, perchance to dream … Keeping in mind that dreams come to one, envelop one, quite possibly take over one take one over overtake one — and not only does one never quite have control over a dream, it might well write itself into one in ways that will always remain beyond one’s knowledge. A dream writing; an unreadable writing; perhaps an invisible writing; or maybe a writing that is awaiting reading. And where the effects of said writing are precisely its traces unveiling itself — waiting to be read. Where perhaps to dance is to risk being in the realm of the unknown — in the oikos of the idiotes . Stumbling around in the dark. And in that darkness, what is perhaps being dreamt of is space; a « space » that, as Jean-Luc Nancy continues to teach us, « is first needed for touch ». (2) To touch to think to thank: ein Denken, das immer auch ein Danken ist . (3) With thanks to Martin Heidegger for the reminder that to-think ( denken ) is to-thank ( sich bedanken ), perhaps especially when said « thinking touches on a sphere ». (4) Or a disco ball. After all, being thankful as we think should at least could hopefully would even ideally bring on a smile. Ah, to think with a smile : that might even bring us a touch of joy, even as, as John Lennon might well continue to say « happiness is a warm gun » (5) : hopefully whilst dancing on a bed with Yoko Ono. Mmm Fluxus. .Tout est art ~ Ben Vautier (6) Act I scene ii Dance is the only art of which we ourselves are the stuff of which it is made. Dancing is like dreaming with your feet! ~ Constanze Mozart (7) Dancing is silent poetry. ~ Simonides (8) What is dance? Act I scene iii There is a whole art in unfurling a body of thought in such a way that one ends up passing it by without seeing it. This is the opposite of discourse, which lays out its findings and arguments and sentences itself to house arrest within the precincts of its own conclusions ... ~ Jean Baudrillard (9) A drawing is simply a line going for a walk ~ Paul Klee (10) To walk, to wander, perchance to wonder … ah, to drift, to dream. Dériver : but from — to — what? Et, où et quand arrivons-nous ; where and when do we arrive? Can we even know if we arrive, if arriving ever happens, even comes, if it is only to-come? For, to drift implies a certain direction one is headed from heading to headed for; without these indicators indications markers points in-relation-with each other one would just be moving. But, can one know — intend — one’s drift? One who drives who thinks themselves a driver imagines they are a driven-person even as to be driven always also implies being moved-around (hello Ms Daisy) would almost certainly say so. But even as (s)he is starting her slide, all (s)he can know is that she is setting the car, herself, the car with herself in it, in motion … after which, the drift itself takes over. And, all (s)he can do is: attend to it. Peut-être l’attente l’oubli . Where, at the point of the drift, both (s)he and the car are drifting — and here, one might not even be able to separate the movement from the ones involved in it, with it, within it. Where, without either, there would be no drift; for, there is no drifting without the drifter. Where, both the drifter and the drifting are in relation — in which, all they can know is that there is a relation. Where, the drift itself is relation . A non-essence . But, it is not as if we cannot speak of it — after all, we are or at least I am trying to. Perhaps though: we can only speak as if we can speak of it. Where, it is always an imaginary gesture; where what is being imagined is the relation between the drift and the one(s) drifting. Where, what is imagined is nothing other than the drift itself, la dérive elle-même. Perhaps then, what are we drifting from, drifting to? , is a moot question. As is, what is drifting? Perhaps then, all we can say is … — la dérive — Where, to speak of drift is to attempt to speak of the unspeakable. Language is essentially discreet: what it expresses can always also be an instrument of encryption, a means of dissembling, disfiguring, or lying. Since, however, it constitutes all oppositions in the first place, it can belong to none of them, neither to concealment nor disclosure, neither publicity nor privacy and its idiosyncrasies. ~ Werner Hamacher (11) Not that what is speakable and what is unspeakable are antonyms: if that were so, speaking the unspeakable would make no sense, be a contradiction. But, that in every act of speaking, something unspeakable is potentially spoken: something that opens, ruptures, wounds even. And not just that — at the point where it punctures, speaking itself moves out of the way for the unspeakable; speaking itself disappears. Perhaps then, as Jean Baudrillard might say, « the whole art is to know how to disappear before dying, and instead of dying ». (12) You have to lose your way to find yourself in the right place ~ Gilles Massot (13) And where right place cannot quite be known until one is there — where, at best, one can sense, we might even call it feel , that (s)he is right where she belongs , if only for a moment. Even if there , wherever said place may be, were exactly where she were only a moment before — even if this feeling disappears even if (s)he no longer senses the appearance of this feeling only a moment after. Where right place might well be what Alain Badiou calls « an opening of a new world in an old world », (14) that is an event . Where what is « new » might well be one’s own self, a self that « you » could well first have to « lose » ; where the finding might well be à la recherche du temps perdu. To lose: une ligne de fuite that might lead one somewhere, might open possibilities for one might open us up to possibilities in one might well also leak away escape from one slip beneath fly above you. to lose — to find to come — to go Bearing in mind that a dash links — brings both together, allows both to touch, whilst —always keeping them apart. And where to be dashed is always also to run the risk of being broken into parts. Dériver / Arrivée : not so much from where or to where . For, both are not quite any thing, nor have any point, without each other. Where one might even say each one only exists due to the slash between them dividing and connecting them connection only in division — le trait oblique . Where, to drift away and to arrive are not only in relation to each other, in a relationship with each other, nor merely dependent on the other, but which bear oblique traces of each other within. Slanty. Perhaps even shadowy. Where perhaps all I have been attempting to read all I have been trying to write on speak about — all of my attempts to remarks on, make marks about — Dancing Without Touching, (15) all my alleged-thoughts touchings on the beautiful work brought forth by my dear friend, Sarah Choo Jing, are the illicit markings ghostly remarks spectral marks of what has to remain in the shadows be unseen perhaps unread or read in shadows ... where, shadow reading might well be an echo of Socrates and Phaedrus reading in the shadow of trees, relying on it not only for shade but being shady themselves ... Attempting to speak of trying to speak on what cannot be spoken of, of what can only be uttered in-between speech in the silent speech in a speech , as Michel Foucault might say , in a speech which only begins after death — inter-diction; interdiction . Where, to read is to attempt to touch to feel. Perhaps even each other. Where, to attempt to think — particularly under a shady tree — is to always also open oneself to not only being in the shadows to be accused of hiding sheltering oneself from the law but always also to the possibility of drifting off. Dériver — perchance to dream. And where one can never quite tell if said thought that comes to one came from one had arrived onto one or if one might have merely drifted to it into it. Where the very notion of having a thought itself might well only be thought teasing one . And where teasing out a thought always already opens one self to being teased. But perhaps we are always only — can only ever be — dancing. ACT II And what costume shall the poor girl wearTo all tomorrow's parties?For Thursday's child is Sunday's clownFor whom none will go mourningA blackened shroud, a hand-me-down gownOf rags and silks, a costumeFit for one who sits and criesFor all tomorrow's parties ~ The Velvet Underground (16) I keep dancing on my own, 2022; Image credit: received Just wanna dance all nightAnd I'm all messed up, I'm so out of line,Stilettos and broken bottlesI'm spinning around in circlesAnd I'm in the corner, watching you kiss her, ohAnd I'm right over here, why can't you see me? OhAnd I'm giving it my allBut I'm not the guy you're taking home, oohI keep dancing on my own ~ Robyn (17) Act II scene ii Espadas Me dijo: “vos sos una chica que transforma la naturaleza”, y se cortó la comunicación. Y tuve miedo, yendo por el medio de la calle, esquivando a los autos que venían hacía mí. Pero como me sentía pura, seguía caminando, porque esa era mi prueba de valor. Las chicas que caminan solas por la noche son valientes. Ellas luchan por transformar su miedo en espadas. ~ Micaela Piñero (18) Swords He said to me: « you are a girl who transforms nature », and communication was cut. And I was afraid, descending into the middle of the street, dodging cars that were coming towards me. But since I felt pure, continued to walk, because it was the test of my courage. The girls who walk alone at night they are valiant. They fight to transform their fear into spades. ~ Micaela Piñero, translated by Jeremy Fernando Every translation signifies the space-between, the gap, the historical chasm or the repression of history; translation is the most cautious form of communication since there is always the inherent admission of a certain departure and an uncertain arrival. ~ Hubertus von Amelunxen (19) Act II scene iii ACT III and everything is green and submarine, 2022 Que la luz del día ilumine mi corazón, como el día no lo hizo. Que la luz del día encienda mi corazón, como el día no lo hizo. ~ Micaela Piñero (20) Act III scene ii I love you. Where everything lies, as Roland Barthes remains to remind us, in that characteristically-beautiful way only he can, where « everything is in the speaking of it: it is a ‘formula’, but this formula corresponds to no ritual; the situations in which I say I-love-you cannot be classified: I-love-you is irrepressible and unforeseeable … too articulated to be no more than an impulse, too phatic to be a sentence … It is neither quite what is uttered (no message is congealed, sorted, mummified within it, ready for dissection) nor quite the uttering itself (the subject does not allow himself to be intimidated by the play of interlocutory sites). We might call it a proffering, which has no scientific place: I-love-you belongs neither in the realm of linguistics nor in that of semiology. Its occasion (the point of departure for speaking it) would be, rather, Music. In the manner of what happens in singing, in the proffering of I-love you, desire is neither repressed (as in what is uttered) nor recognised (where we did not expect it: as in the uttering itself) but simply: released, as an orgasm. Orgasm is not spoken, but it speaks and it says: I-love-you ». (21) a burst a musical burst a burst as music Or, music as burst — music to the point of bursting — music at the point of bursting. Or, perhaps even: music as the bursting point. Which also suggests that the point of love — as least in so far as one can hear its whispers — is also the point where Music bursts, is perhaps the point where it is no longer musical, is the point where it is quite possibly beyond the realm, the tone, of musicality … untz untz untz Act III scene ii mmm music, a musical thinking, thinking as music, a musicality of thought, a muse that leads us to thinking, thinking which amuses us, that might well leave us all bemused. smiling — thinking — dancing Nobody puts Baby in a corner ~ Johnny Castle (22) A certain timbre of thought, as it were. And here, it might be the moment (but who knows though, one can only hope so) to open our registers to the thought of Jean-Luc Nancy, in particular to his notes, his notable notations, his notations as notes (so perhaps always a reminder that they have to be played to be heard, to be heard as playful), to his reminder that « timbre is communication of the incommunicable: provided it is understood that the incommunicable is nothing other, in a perfectly logical way, than communication itself, that thing by which a subject makes an echo — of self, of the other, it’s all one — it’s all one in the plural ». (23) Moreover, as Jean-Luc continues, « communication is not transmission, but a sharing that becomes subject: sharing as subject of all ‘subjects’. An unfolding, a dance, a resonance. Sound in general is first of all communication in this sense. At first it communicates nothing — except itself. At its weakest and least articulated degree, one would call it a noise. (There is noise in the attack and extinction of a sound, and there is noise in sound itself.) But all noise also contains timbre. In a body that opens up and closes at the same time, that arranges itself and exposes itself with others, the noise of its sharing (with itself, with others) resounds: perhaps the cry in which the child is born, perhaps an even older resonance in the belly and from the belly of a mother ». (24) An original sound — perhaps an echo from, of even, an origin. Not that one can have access to this moment: or, even if one did, not that one would could know of it. For, even as one speaks attempts to speak of origins, of an auctor , one should try not to forget that one is always already quite possibly authoring altering it. Act III scene iii On ne voit rien. On n’entend rien. Et cependant quelque chose rayonne en silence … ~ Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (25) The work of art is not an instrument of communication. The work of art has nothing to do with communication. The work of art strictly does not contain the least bit of information. To the contrary, there is a fundamental affinity between the work of art and the act of resistance. There, yes. It has something to do with information and communication as acts of resistance. What is this mysterious relation between a work of art and an act of resistance when men who resist have neither the time nor sometimes the necessary culture to have the least relation to art? I don’t know . ~ Gilles Deleuze (26) But what if the work is housed, is enframed — behind glass, in between narrow and partly-open passageways along walls; dans une galerie , that is, within a gallery? For, the moment works are housed, encased, are placed within an oikos , they are also withdrawn from the polis , from the public; made private — all whilst trying not to forget that to be private is also to be made voiceless; to be excluded from citizenry; to be the one that cannot learn; to be an idiotes . Much like when the works are taken ( prendre ) by, taken into, one’s grasp — placed under one’s conception, one’s comprehension. And, it should weigh on one’s mind that the moment one attempts to attend to a work, to works, to address it write on them speak about it — even if one is attempting to open oneself to possibilities, to the works themselves, to the contours the steps the angles of the path the labyrinth that Sarah Choo Jing has laid out for us (where is the Minotaur; perhaps, as importantly, are there any threads for us to follow; are they merely red herrings; why does it always involve murder, at least a death; oh let me just fly a little too close to the sun) — one is not only tempted to know to understand to make sense of the works one has no choice but to, if only momentarily, bring it under one’s own conceptions framework; where, in attending to the video-works of Sarah Choo Jing to the maze which she has made, even as one is remains amazed one might well already be doing nothing but taming it turning them — the individual works themselves, the entire show named Dancing without Touching , thoughts on New World (can we ever think about the place the space without also remembering the devastation of the hotel hearing it crumble, a new world that is always already in the rubbles of our memories in our memory as a rubble a pile which came crashing onto me through sound through the sonic waves of a news broadcast whilst I was in the back of a car ostensibly heading for a holiday to a small break from the mad crush that is the school-system in Singapore a schooling that was is certainly seems to want to always be hell-bent on schooling us into schools swimming in the same direction certainly never against the current going anyway the wind blows in a car traveling north of the peninsula at half-past eleven the morning of the ides of March 1986 not quite five hours after driving past the building still enveloped by the darkness and dreams of the previous night now a ruin perhaps emblematic of what happens to dreams in Singapore that stray-away from a neo-liberal wet dream) into information (as I’ve clearly just done, have been doing, can only ever do, despite myself, perhaps all writing is always also to spite myself). And where, the very moment of response — any attempt at responding-with opening oneself-to another the very space of responsibility — might well be the instant when the potential « acts of resistance » in and of the work are muted. Where the works themselves are lulled into bed, put to sleep. And where, the very thing that one comes into a gallery for — to look at works, to see the work, perhaps even to expose oneself to the experience we call art — is precisely what carries the works, transports the pieces, away from the very possibility of art itself. After all, the road to hell is often paved with good intentions. All while trying also not to forget that every time one writes about something, one not only writes it into being, brings forth the said object, but also writes its context into existence — recontextualising it if one is feeling generous with oneself but really always also decontextualising it into and — with a new framing that has little maybe even nothing to do with it at all. Whilst also bearing in mind — even if this will always remain a burden on one — that to frame is always also to potentially accuse someone of something (s)he might not have done. to write — to writhe perchance in dreams Act III scene iv And, what is it to love across a screen? Which might well be the question that we are possibly facing, the quest that lies right in front of our eyes as we stand before the works (or the work, perhaps you might prefer to think of Dancing without Touching as a whole, even though it is impossible to see all of it in a single look; but when has impossibility ever stopped anyone from dreaming) — the question of: what does one do with the prophylactic between ? How to touch without touching as it were — bring forth a touchless touch. Which might well be the question of: how does one engender the space for the possibility of an immaculate conception . Which suggest that we might have to attempt to think of a stage, of what is being-staged before our eyes, beyond a frame. Doubly-tricky when said staging is taking-place through a screen: for, that would entail imagining a screen that is not just a frame even as it frames everything that we see. However, here we should bear in mind that the screen is also a mirror. And try not to forget, not that the screen will allow one to, that your face is screened right back at you, that as you are looking at the screen as you are watching the screens you are also watching yourself watch; and being in those small — tight — booths you might well also be hearing yourself hear hearing yourself mutter to yourself as you watch as you respond as you think, thinking yourself hear. Thinking is always an affair of the ear ~ François Noudelmann (27) Thinking might well be my affair of the year. mmm breathless conversation. To converse — to twirl-with to dance-alongside another Which means that even as we are attempting to turn-with each other ( versare ) even as we are trying to be with ( con- ) others maybe even whilst we are participating in a debate of sorts against ( versus ) another, this is a dance in which all bodies are separated — screened-off — from each other. Even if this other is our very self. And here, we should try not to forget that a screen both shows and hides away at exactly the same time. Which means that even as we scan the screen even as we might be attempting to pay careful attention enact the closest of readings what is screened is potentially being screened screened-off even as it is put on screen; and perhaps not even by us but by the screen itself in the very act of screening. That even as we are putting on exposing ourselves to the light of the screen it is already layering us with sunscreen. And even as we might be turning-with each other prancing-with alleged-thoughts with thoughts-that-allege which might well be allegations, dancing in screens through screens on-screen, we should try not to forget Heidegger’s reminder that technology only unveils itself, that we only manage to catch a glimpse of its essence alleged-essence of what he alleges is an essence one of his essential-allegations, in moments when it breaks down: thankfully, as Paul Virilio tries to never let us forget, each tekhnē brings with it its own, its singular, catastrophe, its own down ( kata ) turn ( strephein ), dip if you prefer. Which would suggest that all hope lies in the potential failures of the screen; in other words, in the potential of the screen itself — when the screen fails to screen, as it were; or even, when the screen screens itself as screen . Which is not to say that is this a situation that can be programatised, planned, instrumentalised: far from it. Which also means that all we can do is to await the possibility of such a moment, and attend to them as they happen, if they do: all whilst bearing in mind that waiting is not passive; far from it. But that it never knows cannot know what it is awaiting — otherwise futurial-possibilities are always already enframed, limited, by what is expected. Where, if waiting is about the possibility of an encounter, it is a state in which one waits: nothing more, and infinitely nothing less. To wait — to think; perchance to dream Perhaps even whilst we are touching screens, rubbing the screen with our digits. Opening the possibility that it is our fingers ( digits ) that are doing the feeling walking seeing opening — by touching caressing — the screen. A response which comes through the skin of our fingers; where one, like a surgeon examining bodies, is attempting to see through touch, by stroking-around; where one is performing a dance through seeing without seeing, as it were; by feel. And with one’s fingers with all of the fingers in the dance with dancing fingers perhaps making our languages, our skins, our screens, vibrate with an intensity that brings forth certain potentials lying within them. screens — veils … oh to scream sometimes at screens But like a veil ( un voile ) it sometimes in moments momentarily turns transforms trans-substantiates even into a sail ( une voile ) … flies away ( s’envoler ) like a thief ( un voleur ) in the night. And if this sounds like word-play, like merely playing with words, one might take comfort in the words of the great Australian philosophers — Barry, Maurice, and Robin, the brothers Gibb — that « it’s only words, and words are all I have/ to take your heart away ». (28) For, as Roland Barthes tries to never let us forget, « language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire ». (29) Ah, to rub … May the light of the screen illuminate my heart, like the day does not. May the light of the screen light my heart, like the day does not. … perchance to dream NOTES 1. Izumi Suzuki, ‘Terminal Boredom’ in Terminal Boredom: Stories , translated by Daniel Joseph, London: Verso, 2021, 191. 2. This line first came to me during Jean-Luc Nancy’s seminar, Art, Community, & Politics , at The European Graduate School in June 2006. 3. The echo of danke in danken was first brought to my ears in a conversation with Avital Ronell on the slopes of Saas Fee in August 2014. 4. Martin Heidegger, ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’ in Poetry, Language, Thought , translated by Albert Hofstadter, New York: Harper Perennial, 2001, 59. 5. John Lennon & Paul McCartney, ‘Happiness is a Warm Gun’ in The Beatles , London: Apple, 1968. 6. Ben Vautier, Tout est art , Oil and mixed technique on Canvas, 1970. 7. This is something she allegedly said, or at least has been attributed to her over time — so, apocryphal; like the best tales always are. 8. This thought is attributed to Simonides by Plutarch in his essay ‘De gloria Atheniensium’ (‘On the glory of the Athenians’), beyond which it is impossible to verify, even more delicious for being-so. 9. I first had the pleasure of encountering this thought as a line on a wall during the fête celebrating the life and works of Jean Baudrillard — in commemoration of a decade of his passing — which was organised by Marine Dupuis Baudrillard in Paris, June 2017. 10. It is of significance, at least to me, that this thought was first brought to me by an artist, my dear friend, Yanyun Chen, in response to my question, « what, to you, is drawing? » : both for the wonderful notion from Paul Klee but also for the fact that her notion of drawing had come to her, walked over to her as it were, from another, from her encounter with this thought, a thought that not only drew her towards it but has clearly also drawn itself into her, as it has now on me. To further explore Klee’s vision of drawing, please see Paul Klee, Pedagogical Sketchbook, translated and with an introduction by Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, New York: Praeger Publishers, 1960, in which the idea of « line going for a walk » is demonstrated, played-with. 11. Werner Hamacher, ‘“Disgregation of the Will”: Nietzsche on the Individual and Individuality’ in Premises: Essays on Philosophy & Literature from Kant to Celan , translated by Peter Fenves, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999, 173. 12. Jean Baudrillard, ‘The art of disappearing: an interview with Truls Lie’ in Eurozine (17 April 2007): https://www.eurozine.com/the-art-of-disappearing/ 13. Gilles Massot, You have to lose your way to find yourself in the right place , selected works shown at the NUS Museum, 14 June – 31 December 2019. 14. Alain Badiou described an event in these terms during his seminar, Philosophy, Ethics, Art , at The European Graduate School, in August 2004. 15. Sarah Choo Jing, Dancing Without Touching , solo show at Yeo Workshop, 7 January – 26 February 2023: https://www.yeoworkshop.com/exhibitions/43-sarah-choo-jing-dancing-without-touching/works/ 16. Lou Reed, ‘All Tomorrow’s Parties’ in The Velvet Underground & Nico . New York: Verve Records, 1967. 17. Robyn & Patrick Berger, ‘Dancing On My Own’ in Body Talk Pt.1 , Stockholm: Konichiwa Records, 2010. 18. Micaela Piñero, ‘Espadas’ en Universidad de la violencia . Buenos Aires: Mansalva, 2018, 23. 19. Hubertus von Amelunxen, ‘Afterword’ in Vilém Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography, translated by Anthony Matthews, London: Reaktion Books, 2000, 88. 20. Micaela Piñero, ‘Montañas’ en Universidad de la violencia . Buenos Aires: Mansalva, 2018, 54. 21. Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments , translated by Richard Howard. London: Vintage, 2002, 149. 22. Eleanor Bergstein, Dirty Dancing , directed by Emile Ardolino. Chicago: Vestron Pictures, 1987. 23. Jean-Luc Nancy, Listening, translated by Charlotte Mandell. New York: Fordham University Press, 2007, 41. 24. Ibid , 41. 25. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Le petit prince . Stutgart: Reclams Universal-Bibliothek, 2015, 95. 26. Gilles Deleuze, Having an Idea in Cinema [On the Cinema of Straub-Huillet], translated by Eleanor Kaufman, in Deleuze and Guattari: New Mappings in Politics, Philosophy and Culture , edited by Eleanor Kaufmann and Kevin Jon Heller. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1998, 18. 27. François Noudelmann, The Philosopher’s Touch: Sartre, Nietzsche, and Barthes at the Piano , translated by Brian Reilly. New York: Columbia University Press, 2012, 75. 28. Barry, Robin, & Maurice Gibb, ‘Words’, single. London: Polydor Records, 1968. 29. Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments , 73. Related Articles Related Article 1 Author Name Read Post Related Article 1 Related Article 1 Read Post

Excerpt of Elad Lapidot’s Jews Out of the Question. A Critique of Anti-Anti-Semitism, Albany: SUNY, 2020, 340 pages. Anti-“Jewish” ELAD LAPIDOT 25 January 2023 PHILOSOPHY POLITICS The Fall of the Angel , Marc Chagall, 1923-47; Image credit: Jewish Musuem, New York Excerpt of Elad Lapidot’s Jews Out of the Question. A Critique of Anti-Anti-Semitism, Albany: SUNY, 2020, 340 pages. Anti-“Jewish” Even if there is a historical basis for claiming that anti-Semitism, as a political movement, in fact has never explicitly campaigned against “the Semites,” all anti-anti-Semitism describes anti-Semitism, be it antisemitism, as a certain intentionality directed toward “Jews.” The currently most common institutional anti-anti-Semitic definition of “Antisemitism” states: “Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews.” (1) The attitude of “hate,” the negative axiology of anti-Semitism, its “anti,” expresses a more fundamental —to use here Husserlian epistemology— doxic relation to Jews: “perception.” Before being a negative attitude toward Jews, anti-Semitism is a certain way of perceiving Jews. Nonetheless, this definition hardly intends to contradict the basic anti-anti-Semitic position, whereby anti-Semitism is actually no real relation to real Jews, by insisting that it does consist in the cognitive act of “perceiving” Jews. “Perception of Jews” is meant in anti-anti-Semitic discourse as a purely subjective view, fantasy, imagination, or construction, which would stand in contradistinction to the objectively real Jews, to what may be called in terms of Kantian epistemology Jews an sich . Of course, thinking this through with Kant and Husserl, one could say that perception, Wahrnehmung , is nevertheless the closest we can ever get to anything (Kant) or even the very mode in which the thing itself is “given” to us as such, known by us (Husserl). A “certain perception of Jews” would accordingly mean a certain basic way of cognitively relating to Jews, of having Jews as an object of consciousness. Anti-Semitism, as “a certain perception of Jews,” would consist in a way of understanding, namely constructing the very sense of what “Jewish” is, of the idea or essence “Jewish,” as the basis for any perception of Jews, namely for any perception of something that may be called “Jewish.” Anti-Semitism may be said to be necessarily based on certain—problematic and partial as it may be, but nonetheless— knowledge of Jews. It is precisely this knowledge, with its specific mode of knowing, that would be expressed by the designation “Semites.” Anti-Semitism would perceive—and hate—Jews qua Semites. It is, however, a basic observation of this book that anti-anti-Semitism fundamentally rejects anti-Semitic knowledge of the Jewish, categorically rejects any knowledge of the Jewish: as mere perception, construction, projection, imagination, fantasy, and myth. This book will indicate how anti-anti-Semitism most fundamentally tends to criticize anti-Semitism not for thinking against Jews, but for thinking of Jews at all, namely for engaging Jews as an object of thought, as an epistemic entity. In other words, so the claim, anti-anti-Semitism has criticized anti-Semitism for introducing “the Jews” or “the Jewish” as entity of thought: as a category, idea, concept, or more commonly as a figure of thought, a figural Jew, a “Jew,” with scare quotes. To formulate it provocatively, the analyses below will show anti-anti-Semitism to be anti-”Jewish.” With respect to this anti-anti-Semitic rejection of “the Jewish,” i.e., rejection of the Jewish from the realm of thought, the following chapters make two basic claims: first, that at work in this rejection, and therefore in anti-anti-Semitism, is a specific radical type of negative political epistemology; second, that this rejection, and the negative political epistemology that underlies it, is what anti-anti-Semitism shares with anti-Semitism. It is this epistemo-political complicity that the present anti-anti-anti-Semitic critique wishes to bring to light. As for the first claim, on anti-anti-Semitism’s negative political epistemology, what I argue is that anti-anti-Semitic critique against the introduction of Jews into the realm of thought, the rejection of the “figural” Jew, as the supposed essence of anti-Semitism, is itself based on a certain figuration or “construction,” a certain perception of Jews. Quickly stated, the analyses to follow will show how this figuration consists in a fundamental dis-figuration , namely in a perception of the Jews as a historical human collective, whose existence, as a collective, lies outside the epistemic realm, outside the realm of knowledge, philosophy, and thought, and so, strictly speaking, outside of any perception or imagination, a non-figure or dis-figure. It would be for this reason illegitimate or rather invalid in principle , epistemically fallacious, to criticize, antagonize, or oppose this human collective, to be anti- Jewish, not because Jews are essentially “good,” i.e., not because the “anti” is wrong, but because “the Jewish” stands for, manifests, or “figures” no specific content, no specific idea. Strictly speaking, there is no “Jew.” In other words, the anti-anti-Semitic “Jews” are a radically de-epistemized collective, and in this sense a radically negative epistemo-political figure. Furthermore, this book argues that in and through anti-anti-Semitic discourse the epistemo-politically negative category of “the Jew” emerges as a paradigm of contemporary political epistemology, a contemporary paradigm for the figure of “the people.” As for the second claim, on the epistemo-political complicity of anti-anti-Semitism and anti-Semitism, what it argues is that the dis-figured, de-epistemized Jew, the anti-anti-Semitic real Jew an sich , a paradigm of contemporary negative political epistemology, is a realization, consummation, and perfection of the category of “the Semites.” It is in this sense that I subscribe to Gil Anidjar’s observation (see below) that anti-anti-Semitism as well as anti-Semitism are forms of Semitism, and therefore, in this perspective, “the Semitic perspective,” they tend to converge. Whereas Anidjar focuses on the Semite as concealing the Muslim, this book focuses on the Semite as dis-figuring the Jew, and the ways in which this dis-figuration becomes a gateway between anti-anti-Semitism and anti-Jewish anti-Semitism. As it will be shown, the (anti-anti-Semitic) critique against (anti-Semitic) attempts to inscribe the Jews as an epistemic entity within theoretical or philosophical discourse must lead to the realization that the attribution of epistemic value and meaning to Jewish being has been an exercise carried out, more often than by anti-Semites, by self-identifying Jews themselves, precisely as the performance of what they perceive to be their Jewishness. Accordingly, the critique of anti-Semitism for the very conceptualization, imagination, or construction of the Jewish—and my claim is that this is the center of contemporary anti-anti-Semitism —quickly veers into a critique of Jewishness itself, into anti-anti-Semitic anti-Judaism. NOTES 1. Formulated in 2005 by the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia, it has been adopted by European Parliament Working Group on Antisemitism, the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, and by its members states, including the US, the UK, and Germany. Related Articles « De l’éternel retour de l’antisémitisme »: Un dialogue entre Danielle Cohen-Levinas et Stéphane Habib DANIELLE COHEN-LEVINAS and STÉPHANE HABIB Read Article How to Kill People: A Problem of Design HITO STEYERL Read Article

Over one year has passed since the January 6 incident, the attack on the US Capitol. Over one year has passed since the January 6 incident, the attack on the US Capitol. This article argues that the coup on January 6, though replete with right wing pageantry, and a fair share of ineptitude, was no mere spectacle however, but indeed a substantial threat to the already fragile moorings of American democracy. Against the Political Stasis, or the Story of a Fall 16 March 2022 PHILOSOPHY POLITICS Article PDF Untitled, Zdzislaw Beksinski, Source: Wikiart Over one year has passed since the January 6 incident, the attack on the US Capitol. This article argues that the coup on January 6, though replete with right wing pageantry, and a fair share of ineptitude, was no mere spectacle however, but indeed a substantial threat to the already fragile moorings of American democracy. The text argues against reading of the January 6 uprising as a kind of ideological awakening and believes the attack on the US Capitol is a non-event that can only be caused by some kind of ideological and political predisposition. As writers assert, a democracy of the world will be the gathering of all the people of the world, without exception, in such a way that it comes over the present stasis. Authors KAMRAN BARADARAN and ANTHONY BALLAS Over one year has passed since the January 6 incident, the attack on the US Capitol. During this year, various interpretations of this attack have been presented. One could argue that the struggle to interpret that which led to this ‘incident’ can perhaps be considered the struggle to understand contemporary political reality of America. Despite all the various readings of this event so far, a number of important and fundamental questions remain: how are we to interpret this interruption? Can this event be seen as the opposition of a part of those who have no part? There’s an often blasé attitude percolating on what is called ‘the left’ about January 6, present in America at least, which alleges that the attempted coup was merely a failed insurrection, a sort of political comedy of errors, suggesting that the events themselves are proof that a fringe group of cultists under the Trump banner are indeed too incompetent to represent a real political danger — this perspective is sorely mistaken. It is possible that the theatrics of Trump and his supporters over the last half-decade have become so normalized as to appear as a natural part of political life in America, and therefore it is not preposterous anymore to claim that the events of January 6 mark less an interruption and more a continuation of the same. The coup on January 6, though replete with right wing pageantry, and a fair share of ineptitude, was no mere spectacle however, but indeed a substantial threat to the already fragile moorings of American democracy. The threat of right wing populist violence of this kind is still very real. The persistence of the threat Indeed, downplaying January 6 is a dangerous move. However, it is also a problem if we simply hyperbolize January 6 as a monolithic “interruption” of contemporary American politics, as though it were a momentary ripple in the fabric of an erstwhile smoothly functioning democracy. Even if Donald Trump is to be considered the catalyst for the rise of the right in America, the struggle, this apparent “ripple” itself, of course, precedes Trump by decades, and will undoubtedly exist long after he is gone as the representative of the Republican far-right. Another misstep is to claim January 6 represents an uprising that has bubbled up from the economically disenfranchised, the left-behind, impoverished and huddled American masses. Certain figures, such as the economist Richard Wolff, (1) seemed to buy into this narrative, at least initially, as though January 6 was the inevitable counter-reaction to the democratic party turning its back on the working class for the last 40 years, or as though the failure of the Democrats to galvanize voters around a socialist candidate like Bernie Sanders were the main causes of January 6 rather than, perhaps, a smaller tributaries of a larger problematic. It is uncertain if we can rely on this narrative for a variety of reasons. First of all, the statistics that eventually came out about the social composition of the January 6 insurrectionists demonstrated a bourgeois make-up composed of CEOs, business owners, members of the professional managerial class, doctors, lawyers, accountants — not to mention some celebrities, actors, musicians, etc. — and not some kind of “proletarian” or “lumpen” mass-mobilization of low or working-class interests against the federal government. We must be specific here: this coup was composed of a majority white, business-class demographic, and not some kind of poor or “laborist” sector of working class society. The racial composition of the insurrection Here, perhaps, one can use the film Winter Sleep , the irreplaceable masterpiece of the Turkish director, Nuri Bilge Ceylan. To summarize the plot, the film takes place in the mountainous region of Cappadocia in central Turkey, where Aydin (Haluk Bilginer), a former columnist and actor, runs a small hotel called Othello with his much younger wife, Nahal (Melissa Sözen), and his sister Najla. A poor tenant family who has recently been threatened with eviction also lives in Aydin's property. Aydin's Jeep more or less crashes after one of the tenants' little boys throws a stone at it, triggering a chain of events that have tragic consequences for both families. The story examines the significant divide between the rich and the poor as well as the powerful and the powerless in Turkey. Contrary to popular and liberal readings, the final message of the film is not about moral questions and the need for empathy in the current unequal world. The main point of Bilge Ceylan's masterpiece is that all the characters in this film are in a kind of constant slumber: from Aydin and the articles he writes for local magazines to Nahal, Aydin's young wife, who is involved in charitable activities, to the common people and their meaningless beliefs. All the characters in this film are involved in some kind of pseudo-activism, the urge to “be active”, to “participate”, to mask the Nothingness of what goes on. Therefore, the final message of this film is not that, despite all the problems, we are all ultimately seeking perfection, and the best thing to do is to accept the human condition as it is. As a matter of fact, Winter Sleep is a portrait of how all classes, from the poor to the rich, from the intellectuals to the common people, do whatever it takes to not think about the Object-Cause of their desires and keep dreaming in their drowse. As Freud points out, in his analysis of the paranoiac judge Daniel Paul Schreber, the paranoiac "system" is not madness, but a desperate attempt to escape madness – the disintegration of the symbolic universe – through an ersatz universe of meaning. (2) Nihal (Melisa Sözen) and Aydin (Haluk Bilginer) in a scene of Winter Sleep by Nuri Bilge Ceylan; Image Credit: dpa/hk As Gerald Horne observed, the January 6 coup was a tactic of the 1 percent whose Euro-American, i.e. white supremacist, “foot soldiers,” as he called them last year, marched en masse in Washington, D.C. and tried to seize the Capitol in order to derail the democratic transfer of power. (3) There really is no mystery as to the economic interests behind January 6. Therefore, any attempt to link the events of January 6 to the onslaught of the underprivileged who have not found a proper way to vent their discontent is essentially going nowhere. The main problem with the attackers on the Capitol building was that in the end they all worked hard to avoid waking up from their hibernation. As Slavoj Žižek elaborates, radical pessimism is perhaps “the first step towards really opening up the space to change something is to admit the extent to which there is no easy way out, nothing can be simply changed” (4) since, often, the worst way to become the prisoner of a system is to have a dream that things may turn better, there is always the possibility of change. In other words, it is precisely this secret dream that keeps you enslaved to the system. (5) Therefore, we should not be deceived by the usual readings in any way and see the January 6 uprising as a kind of ideological awakening. Of course, there is no doubt that there is a kind of awakening here, but what kind? The subject does not awake himself when the external irritation becomes too strong; the logic of this awakening is quite different. First we construct a dream, a story which enables us to prolong our sleep, to avoid awakening into reality. But the thing we encounter in the dream is more terrifying than so-called external reality itself, and that is why we awake: to escape the Real of our desire, which announces itself in the terrifying dream. (6) In his Conflict of the Faculties , (7) Kant conceded that actual history is confused and allows for no clear proof. For Kant, the important thing in the French Revolution was the enthusiasm that the events in France gave rise to in the hearts of sympathetic observers all around Europe and even across the world. In the case of the January 6 attacks, this logic must be reversed. Just the opposite of Kant's reading, the so-called uprising in the streets of Washington and the attack on the US Capitol is a non-event that can only be caused by some kind of ideological and political predisposition. Gerald Horne analyzes this phenomenon on these specific terms: a class-conscious whiteness organizing around the “great replacement” conspiracy theory, (8) an explicitly white supremacist narrative supported and perpetuated by Trump and his propaganda arm, Fox News, Alex Jones, etc. To be sure, this coup not only harbored the familiar “south shall rise again” “lost-cause” supporters — confederate flags, nooses, etc. demonstrate this — but as well a general white, libertarian “don’t tread on me” ethos suffusing the symbolism and rhetoric employed by the insurrectionists. Tracing this ideological front back through the white supremacist political lineage in this country, as Horne does, is absolutely necessary to understand January 6. The events of that day were a continuation of the white supremacist violence we witnessed in 2017 in Charlottesville, Virginia at the Unite the Right Rally, for instance. It was the continuation of pro-Trump neo-Nazi organizing, and white militia groups like the Boogaloo Bois, and the so-called Proud Boys, Three Percenters, and Oath Keepers. So, to be clear, the events of January 6 are indeed intimately entangled with the contemporary political struggle in America, which constantly faces white supremacist violence, from the state, from militia groups, etc., and which is directed against those who are already marginalized by economic and repressive violence. The real conundrum about events such as the attack on the US Capitol is the ideological nature of their claims of government manipulation. It is not a question of whether their claim is true or not. The true question is why in order to sustain their political view, they need this form of skepticism. The same logic applies to the ideological whole of vaccination opponents and Coronavirus skeptics. It is not a question of whether their argument against vaccination is correct. The main point is how the ideological nature of ideas such as the "state of exception" requires this kind of skepticism to survive. The misleading symptoms and the misdiagnosis One common reaction to the events of January 6 in the United States (or similar examples around the world) is to emphasize the importance of maintaining unity. The question remains, however: where did Trump and his followers come from? One can argue that his rise not signal a deep crack in that very unity. This “unity” (the password to today's apolitical world) can be seen as an attempt to ignore the importance of the emancipatory forces that can be an alternative to the false duality that politics is plagued with these days. Unity should always be translated as “unity for who?” In the American context, the democratic party, the typical political “unity front” in this country, absolutely abuses the term from the standpoint of disavowal: unity is a party-line term, designed to consolidate neoliberal economic policy, and to stabilize an overall failed multicultural, “melting-pot” ideology, through which class stratification is inevitably reproduced. Here we should take a lesson in the misleading notion of “unity” in thought. In The Muses , Jean-Luc Nancy uses a passage from Deleuze’s book on Francis Bacon to explain the relation between the plurality of sensations while taking a distance from Deleuze. The passage from Deleuze reads: “Between a color, a taste, a touch, a smell, a sound, a weight … there would be an existential communication that constitutes the ‘pathic’ (nonrepresentative) moment of sensation. … [T]he sensation of any particular domain ... is directly plugged into a vital power that exceeds all domains and traverses them.” (9) And Nancy adds: “it must only be noted that the ‘originary unity of the senses’ that is invoked here proves to be nothing but the singular unity of a ‘between’ of the various domains of sensation and that the existential communication happens only in the element of the ‘outside-of-itself’ [ hors-de-soi ], of an exposition of existence.” (10) Here Nancy emphasizes on the discretion of sensations, on the exteriority in which they stand with regards to one another and on the unbridgeable limit between them that is the place of their “communication.” Unity, then, is essentially nothing more than a charlatan to advance totalitarian policies, to implement the universal, the totalizing integral reality. The notion “democracy of the world”, conceptualized by Shaj Mohan shows something similar from the terrain of politics itself. First, Mohan distinguishes “world democracy” from “democracy of the world” because the former will be founded on the concept of “identity” or “unity” in the model of world government. As Mohan elaborated, “the political arrangement which makes a ‘hegemon’ possible is also liable to stasis ; stasis is when several groups in a political arrangement strive to be the ‘hegemons’ and as a result the very arrangement gets criticalised …” (11) Therefore we should understand that in any political conversation, if someone stresses “unity”, it is the identity and interest of a particular group that they seek to impose as the very meaning of the unity of the multiplicity. In other words, according to Mohan, in principle a democracy of the world will be the gathering of all the people of the world, without exception, in such a way that it comes over the present stasis . Aydin (Haluk Bilginer) in a scene of Winter Sleep by Nuri Bilge Ceylan; Image Credit: dpa/hk The alliances of the right Today, however, we are also witnessing a rather strange manifestation of another kind of oppositional unity. We already mentioned the Proud Boys, who, for instance, have recently forged a libertarian alliance with Black Hammer, a black anti-colonial organization. (12) We might expect such seemingly inexplicable unities to proliferate and even metastasize in the wake of the Trumpian moment, confused as the battle lines have now become in the chaos sown by the ideology of authoritarian populism. “Unity,” whether left or right, can also function as a “move to innocence,” as some scholars (13) have termed it; a kind of alibi for American whiteness which has its forgotten roots in settler colonialism. As Horne has already made clear, (14) settler colonialism is too often neglected or perhaps even foreclosed from the lexicon of the white left. We should absolutely take seriously the settler colonial legacy as one of the historical causes of the Trump phenomenon, but also the liberal wing of American politics. (15) We cannot overlook the white supremacist roots of settler colonialism and its contemporary political manifestations in state militia groups, as well as in militarized police forces, mass incarceration, the continued seizure and ecological devastation of indigenous lands, the fossil fuel industry, “fossil fascism” as Andreas Malm has described, and other phenomenon of modernity too numerous to count. (16) These and other features have not coincidentally become the most predominant factors of modern American capitalism, employed both domestically and internationally, but they also account for much of the white supremacist lineage out of which the policies and rhetorics employed and endorsed by Trump and his supporters came into being. The confluence of these currents, and others, can be thought of as the economic, social, and cultural substrate out of which the Trump phenomenon emerged, and this phenomenon has similar features echoing the rise of other right wing figureheads and movements globally. Indeed, it’s not a stretch to describe a global right wing authoritarian unity, connected from Trump to Bolsonaro, to Orban, and others. Trump’s fingerprints, as Agon Hamza wrote about last year, (17) can even be detected in Kosovo, and the coup to overthrow Albin Kurti’s Movement for Self-Determination in favor of a far-right party. This coup was a kind of Trojan horse on the part of Trump, insofar as he smuggled his own political prospects under the guise of a “peace deal” allegedly attempting to forge a less than cursory “unity” between Serbia and Kosovo (there was even a pitiful attempt to name a lake after Trump between territories). Such unified fronts are being forged on the right globally. By contrast, Trump’s domestic coup is more like a Trojan horse without the horse; his “stop the steal” campaign is rather ironic in this regard, as he and his Republican supporters are quite openly the ones executing the steal! And they aren’t finished just because January 6 has passed by. They are planning a long coup, with Republican members of Congress and House of Representatives providing ideological support, and right wing judges supplying the legal struts. As Jason Stanley recently observed, (18) America is in its fascist legal phase, which includes packing federal courts, voter suppression laws, the erosion of Roe v. Wade , etc. If we speak of unity, thus, we should be willing to speak of the unified almost proto-fascist legal and extra-legal forces that support Trump’s long coup: right wing populist militia groups and de facto vigilantes, sitting members of the House of Representatives like Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, Matt Gaetz out of Florida, and Lauren Boebert out of Colorado, who foment electoral conspiracy, fanaticism over the individual right to bear arms, border panic, and now medical and vaccine hysteria in the wake of pandemic, as well as climate denialism, and so on, and their business class of “foot soldiers” who mobilized in unison and lockstep on January 6. “Unity,” thus, is certainly a distracting and apolitical term unless we direct it toward the real unification campaigns that are emerging globally on the right. As Slavoj Žižek has elaborated, (19) the typical rhetorical trick to the question of the far-right is in two moves. First, you condemn the far-right — “no place in our developed democracy.” But then you add, “but they are addressing the real worries of the people.” We have to break this vicious circle and aim at the true essence of this phenomenon. Although perhaps there is no “true essence” of the far-right phenomenon, there may indeed be a strictly economic impetus that we can identify, rooted in imperialism, neoliberal policy, foreign investment and divestment strategies, the continued dispossession of the Global South, and so on. We should not only try and diagnose this phenomenon from within our current horizon, but we should also make sure that we don’t forget the lesson of Hegel’s Minerva: we may not know how exactly to diagnose this vicious cycle while we’re still bound up directly within it. In other words, we may only come to know what we’re witnessing after we’ve witnessed it come to an end. Nevertheless, as Rodolphe Gasché explicates, the rampage on Capitol Hill raises the specter of the West burning its relations to tradition in the name of populist fantasies; It is an effort “to spare the West the challenge of self-critically measuring itself up to the exigencies of a mode of speaking respectful of difference or otherness, and of a way of life that reserves a constitutive place for the other.” (20) The liberal error What the liberal position generally forgets, of course, is that American liberal democracy, and its own white nationalist and capitalist roots, is the historical progenitor of our current conjuncture, and therefore culpable in the manifestation of the right wing contingent here in America. We should not forget that although George Bush Jr.’s track record in the Middle East was abhorrent, Barack Obama’s drone campaign was far worse ; (21) and we are already seeing the (predictable) numbers comparing Trump and Biden’s border policies, (22) and it is looking like Biden’s numbers are rising and are comparable to Trump’s, and in fact Biden has adopted and is even expanding some of Trump’s border policy protocols. So yes, misdiagnosing or simply condemning the rise of the right rhetorically does entrap us in a vicious cycle of sorts, as it takes away from the common political and economic grounds between the left and the right. The liberal apologists and the conservative “make America great again” propagandists offer thus a twin nostalgia of American exceptionalism. Cracking through this nostalgia, this apology to capitalism and maintenance of liberal democracy, to me sounds most of all like the classical problem of class consciousness — we’re cycling, yes, between an easily identifiable monster, Trump, and his milquetoast counterpart Joe Biden, however neither front offers a true, viable working class program; one might give the populist appearance of doing so (Trump), while the other (Biden) appeals to a platitudinous, vague sense of unity, normalcy, or democratic sanguinity. The Concert in the Egg, Hieronymus Bosch; Image Credit: Wikiart How do we achieve a class consciousness through which we can diagnose and ultimately break free of the vicious cycle that you describe? This seems to still be the central plight of the American left, plagued as it is with disorganization and identitarian fragmentation. We might need to ask a similar question that Yanis Varoufakis confronted several years ago with the Greek debt crisis: should we try and save, or salvage, the European Union and with it European capitalism (which is what Varoufakis ultimately endorsed), or should we try and opportunistically use the crisis to our advantage, let capitalism fall and build something out of its ashes? The American political struggle falls between similar parameters: there has recently been talk of an emergent American civil war — the possibility of which, retired American generals, Proud Boys, Boogaloo Bois and Canadian journalists all seem to agree upon. (23) If this is the case, and the crisis of democracy is truly reaching a head, then we must accept what the consequences of such a confrontation might look like without any illusions. The final question in our time, however, is what to do in the face of events such as the attack on the US Capitol on January 6? What should the left offer in the face of such a wave of far-right alliances? In most instances what we call the left suffers from what the Mohan called an idyllic a priori . That is, it thinks from the idylls of someone or some select people and then sets up this idyll as the impossible teleology. We must, each and every one of us, at first experience the fact that we are the forsaken by any transcendent ends. As Divya Diwievi elaborated: “Instead, if there is to be a Left— those who are capable of collective imagination —they must also be capable of suffering a collective crisis. Such a left will be able to gather from the present stasis, with the shared experience of forsakenness, to be the community of the forsaken. This community of the forsaken will then be able to raise itself from the present stasis, which is properly anastasis . One is tempted to give outlines of how this could begin, but it must be the work of collective imagination.” (24) NOTES 1. See Richard Wolff, “Wolff Responds: DC Rage: More Coming Unless Basic Economic Changes Made,” Jan 7, 2021: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kvzgRCjN2NQ 2. See Sigmund Freud, ‘Psychoanalytic notes upon an autobiographical account of a case of paranoia,’ in Three Case Histories , New York: Touchstone, 1996. 3. See Gerald Horne and Paul Jay, “The Global Consequences of Jan. 6 and the Mass Base of Fascism,” theAnalysis.news , February 7, 2021: https://theanalysis.news/the-global-consequences-of-jan-6-and-the-mass-base-of-fascism-gerald-horne/ and Gerald Horne and Paul Jay, “Racism and a Failed Coup,” theAnalysis.news , January 10, 2021: https://theanalysis.news/racism-and-a-failed-coup-gerald-horne/ 4. See Slavoj Žižek, “An Interview with Slavoj Žižek” The Believer Magazine , July 1st, 2004: https://believermag.com/an-interview-with-slavoj-zizek/ 5. See: Slavoj Žižek, Violence: Six Sideways Reflections , London: Picador, 2008. 6. Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology , London: Verso, 1989, p. 45. 7. Immanuel Kant, ‘The Conflict of Faculties,’ in Kant: Political Writings , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991, p. 177. 8. See Gerald Horne and Paul Jay, “The Global Consequences of Jan. 6 and the Mass Base of Fascism,” theAnalysis.news , February 7, 2021: https://theanalysis.news/the-global-consequences-of-jan-6-and-the-mass-base-of-fascism-gerald-horne/ and Gerald Horne and Paul Jay, “Racism and a Failed Coup,” theAnalysis.news , January 10, 2021: https://theanalysis.news/racism-and-a-failed-coup-gerald-horne/ 9. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Muses , trans. Peggy Kamuf, Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1993, p.23. 10. Nancy, The Muses , p. 23. 11. See Shaj Mohan, “The Winter of Absolute Zero: Interview with Shaj Mohan”, Critical Legal Thinking (CLT) , June 18, 2020: https://criticallegalthinking.com/2020/06/18/the-winter-of-absolute-zero-interview-with-shaj-mohan/ 12. See Cheem Hammer, “Black Hammer Forms Coalition with the Proud Boys: All Your Questions Answered”, blackhammer.org , December 14, 2021: https://blackhammer.org/2021/12/14/black-hammer-forms-coalition-with-the-proud-boys-all-your-questions-answered/ 13. See Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization is not a metaphor”, Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society vol. 1, no. 1, 2012, pp. 1-40 14. See Gerald Horne, “Gerald Horne: Against Left-Wing White Nationalism (Organizing Upgrade), Monthly Review , May 17, 2021: https://monthlyreview.org/press/gerald-horne-against-left-wing-white-nationalism-organizing-upgrade/ 15. Here, it is important to maintain a caution that not all colonialisms are the same and not all post-colonial situations are the same. As Divya Dwivedi and Shaj Mohan illustrated perfectly, cutting the bonds between post-colonial theory and (post)colonial spaces makes the critical status of this theory questionable; finally, it is post-colonial theory itself that becomes colonialist and oppressive: “postcolonial theories which phantasize about the idols of nativism to remould the matter of societies criticalized by colonialism are repeating fascisms”. See Shaj Mohan and Divya Dwivedi, Gandhi and Philosophy: On Theological Anti-politics , London: Bloomsbury, 2019, p.217. 16. See Andreas Malm and Wes Stephenson, “What’s Worse Than Climate Catastrophe? Climate Catastrophe Plus Fascism: A conversation with Andreas Malm about his new book, White Skin, Black Fuel: On the Danger of Fossil Fascism”, The Nation , May 25, 2021: https://www.thenation.com/article/environment/andreas-malm-interview/ 17. Agon Hamza, “Kosovo is slowly recovering from Trump’s coup: The left-wing party Trump helped remove from power in Kosovo in 2020 may win the February 14 elections“, Al Jazeera , February 14, 2021: https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2021/2/12/kosovo-is-slowly-recovering-from-trumps-coup 18. See Jason Stanley, "America is now in fascism’s legal phase", Guardian , December 22, 2021: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/dec/22/america-fascism-legal-phase 19. See Slavoj Žižek, “Far Right and Anti-Immigrant Politicians on the Rise in Europe”, Democracy Now! , October 18, 2010: https://www.democracynow.org/2010/10/18/slavoj_zizek_far_right_and_anti 20. Rodolphe Gasché, Plato and The Stranger: Another Possibility of Democracy , Philosophy-World-Democracy , February 5, 2021: https://www.philosophy-world-democracy.org/articles-1/plato-and-the-stranger 21. See Glenn Greenwald, “Chomsky on Obama: Bush disappeared and tortured those the US disliked, while the Obama administration simply ‘murders them’,” Salon , May 14, 2012: https://www.salon.com/2012/05/14/chomsky_on_obama/ ; Noam Chomsky and Steven Garbas, “Noam Chomsky on the Era of the Drone,” chomsky.info , September 2013, https://chomsky.info/201309__/ ; and “Obama’s covert drone war in numbers: ten times more strikes than Bush,” thebureauinvestigates.com , January 17, 2017: https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2017-01-17/obamas-covert-drone-war-in-numbers-ten-times-more-strikes-than-bush 22. See Priscilla Alvarez, “Biden administration results in more of the same immigration policies,”, CNN , December 30, 2021: https://www.cnn.com/2021/12/30/politics/biden-harris-immigration/index.html ; David Agren, “Remain in Mexico: migrants face deadly peril as Biden restores Trump policy,” Guardian, December 3, 2021: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/dec/03/remain-in-mexico-migrants-face-deadly-peril-as-biden-restores-trump-policy ; and Oliver Milman, “Biden administration reinstates Trump-era ‘Remain in Mexico’ policy,” Guardian , December 2, 2021: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/dec/02/remain-in-mexico-biden-administration-immigration 23. See Paul D. Eaton, Antonio M. Taguba and Steven M. Anderson , “Opinion: 3 retired generals: The military must prepare now for a 2024 insurrection,” Washington Post , December 17, 2021: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/12/17/eaton-taguba-anderson-generals-military/ , and Stephen Marche, “The Next Civil War,” CBC , January 2, 2022: https://www.cbc.ca/books/the-next-civil-war-1.6302066 24. See Divya Dwivedi, “The proletariat are all those who are denied the collective faculty of imagination: an interview with Divya Dwivedi”, Positions Politics , May 5, 2020: https://positionspolitics.org/the-proletariat-are-all-those-who-are-denied-the-collective-faculty-of-imagination-an-interview-with-divya-dwivedi/ Related Articles The Return of History ROBERTO ESPOSITO Read Article Plato and The Stranger: Another Possibility of Democracy RODOLPHE GASCHÉ Read Article

Fukushima is Not Alone Button 26 March 2020 Button There are certain proper names of places — Fukushima, Hiroshima, Auschwitz, Timbuktu, Chernobyl, Marichjhapi, Hong Kong, Tulsa, Palmyra, Gujarat, Kilvenmani, others — which lift off from the land to hover over other words while resisting to be just another word; they haunt other places to remind them to never become them. They ask us to remain alert to the call of another place without locus, which has no name yet for it. The question being asked ten years after Fukushima in this special issue of March 2021 through the unusual writings gathered here—certainly unusual for philosophical discourse which speaks often without restraint— is the meaning of what it means to say “Fukushima is not alone”. There are certain dates which detach from the binding of time and move across the tenses—1917, 1921, 1776, 347 BCE, 19 March 2003, May 1968, 1st November. These dates without places could mean many things across the regions of the world, as we continue to mistake the world for them — regions! In the same way, the places—Hiroshima, Auschwitz, Timbuktu, Chernobyl, Marichjhapi, Hong Kong, Tulsa, Nagasaki, Palmyra, Fukushima, Gujarat, Kilvenmani, others. Certain proper names of places lift off from the land to hover over other words while resisting to be just another word; they haunt other places to remind them to never become them. There is still no end to the spectres and ghosts of our own making, as if there is still room here for more. As if, in the words of Jacques Derrida, “the dissociation between the place where competence is exercised and the place where the stakes are located” has not “seemed more rigorous, more dangerous, more catastrophic.” (1) These places shatter our gravely false sense of the regional confinement of man. Fukushima is not alone, and this is the quiet terror which is animating this month, March 2021. Today three places hover over Japan and together they haunt everywhere else, beginning in 6th August 1945. Through the name Fukushima, through the discipline of the act of mourning, two other names are recalled without being called out loudly. It is in the cold of this quiet terror witnessing the quiver of the pen that these texts of this month should be read. As Jean-Luc Nancy remarked, Fukushima is also the twin experience of limits—of the limits set by nature and the limits of our technical mastery—a natural nuclear disaster. (2) Fukushima is with us, haunting without seeking to make a home anywhere, asking us only to think. To think in order to make an interval to think; it asks of “we” who have fallen in the desert of time. To ask, as Osamu Nishitani did in 2011, where is our future? (3) This is all that it wants which is however not the easiest task to achieve compared to the ease with which we still lurch for new wars which were anticipated by Hannah Arendt when she observed that with nuclear technology “the Kantian statement that nothing should happen in a war to make a later peace impossible has likewise been set on its head, so that we live in a peace in which nothing may be left undone to make a future war still possible.” (4) The question being asked ten years after Fukushima in this special issue of March 2021 through the unusual writings gathered here—certainly unusual for philosophical discourse which speaks often without restraint— is the meaning of what it means to say “Fukushima is not alone”. Is it not-alone in the sense of Fukushima speaking to Chernobyl and the sites of nuclear tests, sites of barren time? Or is it that the people of Fukushima, offering in that name the other two names—Hiroshima and Nagasaki—to think with, are asking all of us to come over our terror to join in their decades long mourning? These filamental places which can no longer host a sparrow nor a song are powerless to comprehend our world, either to save us from the calamities we nurture by closing our eyes to evil, or to comprehend us towards the end, the eschaton. They ask us to remain alert to the call of another place without locus, which has no name yet for it. We have to be near it when it calls our name; it will have to call us in order that we may be raised again. What will it call us? DIVYA DWIVEDI Editor NOTES 1. Jacques Derrida, “No Apocalypse, Not Now (Full Speed Ahead, Seven Missiles, Seven Missives)”, trans. Catherine Porter and Philip Lewis, Diacritics 14.2, 1984: 20-31. 2. Jean-Luc Nancy, After Fukushima: The Equivalence of Catastrophes, trans. Charlotte Mandell, New York: Fordham University Press, 2015. 3. Osamu Nishitani, “Où est notre avenir ?”, Ebisu, 47, printemps-été 2012, https://doi.org/10.4000/ebisu.256 . 4. Hannah Arendt, The Promise of Politics, New York: Shocken Books, 2005. Related Articles Related Article 1 Author Name Read Post Related Article 1 Related Article 1 Read Post

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Demosophia Button 21 November 2020 Button The Tennis Court Oath by Auguste Couder, 1848, Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons Democracy and philosophy are only two sides of the answer to the same perplexity: that of a human gathering that no longer has a sacred (or natural, but in fact the two merge) bond to join together. It would not be abusive to couple them to form demosophia: the art or science of discerning the people, their nature, their good. Democracy and philosophy are one and the same thing in that both essentially relate to a lack of foundation. Democracy is the state in which there is a group without a leader and law. Philosophy is the state of thinking devoid of principle and rule. In both cases it is a question of inventing, and in both cases, there is no question of arriving at a definitive result (which would suppress any deliberation of decisions and any elaboration of meanings). This is the reason why democracy and philosophy appear together in Western history, at the moment when this history is separating from social and symbolic forms shaken by profound transformations. It is an age of loss and of need to invent. It is the Greek, Jewish and Roman age, soon also the age of Islam. Beyond this history it is always about something else: forms of government and forms of thought draw their resources from deposits of forms and forces that bear fruit from remarkable inventions that always relate to an immemorial fund (myths, wisdoms, symbolic regimes). These are arts of governing and arts of thinking, not the urgent need to trick with precariousness and bewilderment. There are traditional cults or meditations and recitations, as well as kings, priests, shamans. An order is assured, a regularity, a rhythm - under the condition of an unimpeachable hierarchy. On the contrary, in democracy and philosophy there is a haste, an agitation, an avidity of the destitute people, whereas in empires or tribes there is an assurance, a majesty that traverses even the miseries and tyrannies — without preventing wars or conquests. In the same way, in the West a logic of production and progress is awakening rather than a wisdom of reproduction and conservation. It could be said that the West has been pushed towards growth/progress? (with an organic and innovative model) while elsewhere it has stuck to increase (with a cumulative and transmitting model). But the agitation conquered the world when it became technological in the sense that implies going beyond the use of the given and forcing the elements. But the agitation conquered the world when it became technological in the sense that implies going beyond the use of the given and forcing the elements. The example and symbol of this is navigation: with the single rudder, known in ancient China but little used and on the other hand developed and perfected in 13th-14th century Europe, ships can much better and faster chart their course across the oceans. The use of gunpowder in firearms has a similar history. In just a few centuries the technological complex, which became industrial, managerial and entrepreneurial, extended its network to the whole planet. Democracy and philosophy, in their intimate connection, have been part of this extension. One could say that democracy and philosophy form a double technology of forcing the symbolic element. Where there is no sacred or natural principle or order, it is necessary to invent the law itself, that is to say, the functioning of the social assemblage as well as the foundations and/or the finality of this functioning. No democracy without a questioning of the very possibility of law, no philosophy without a practice of discussing principles and ends. Thus, we will not keep the term "demosophia": it should only be used to point out the promise that has remained fallow. Plato might seem to contradict this statement, since he is opposed to democracy. But he does so only in the name of what he thinks is the truth of the people gathered in the city. One can even say that Plato confirms the symbiosis of democracy and philosophy as the reality of a single process: that of giving meaning and consistency to the existence that is devoid of it. Existence is common — and it is for this reason that all cultures have always been provided with provisions for the maintenance and prosperity of the community. The Concourse of the Birds, folio 11r of a Mantiq al-tair (Language of the Birds) of Farīd ud-Dīn painted by Habiballah of Sav ca 1600, Photo credit: Metmuseum.org Democracy and philosophy are only two sides of the answer to the same perplexity: that of a human gathering that no longer has a sacred (or natural, but in fact the two merge) bond to join together. It would not be abusive to couple them to form demosophia: the art or science of discerning the people, their nature, their good. 2 Demosophia will have formed the political, legal and speculative aspect of the technological enterprise engaged in the pre-European Mediterranean. The Roman world will have been its first production, followed by Europe. There is no doubt that the technological extension was also an enterprise of domination. The question today is no longer to reveal the domination, but rather to note that the dominant force has lost the confidence that it attributed to itself and that up to a certain point everyone had recognized this. Technical power has nothing to do with an ability to make sense of existence. This is why today democracy and philosophy, considered as technologies for living together, project a poor image. Yet, demosophia was the true promise of progress and its domination: one had to achieve a renewed and fulfilled humanity, just, peaceful and capable of something other than enduring and suffering. However, we only notice this weakness within the so-called developed societies. For others, the whole relative Western well-being (food, health, leisure, domestic comfort, mobility, etc.) constitutes a model and spurs the desire. But precisely, desire is beginning to abandon developed nations. They are becoming aware of the vanity and even emptiness of a life subjected to an enormous techno-economic machine that only works for a few, which it enriches exponentially, while the others are less and less able to grasp what the machine is leading them towards. It is no longer hierarchy, it is the privilege of power that commands. However, the vast majority of humanity of our time does nothing but suffer. Some because they are visibly and cruelly deprived of the comfort of others, others because they find no strength, no breath of life in the gigantic and incomprehensible machinery that poisons their existence as much as it claims to emancipate them. 3 The promise was wrong - unless we old demosophers or demosophists have understood nothing, and a whole other humanity is being prepared, becoming part of the great machinery. And we are incapable of imagining this. It is true that there are a great number of human beings on earth to whom various forms of religion, beliefs, ritual observances furnish the necessary standards, the strengths and the breaths without which we do not exist. May the gods and spirits of each community watch over it. However, it is not easy to understand nor especially to manage the co-presence and interference of such divergent or even contradictory forms of existential resources. In fact, on the one hand the demos seems to have lost all that could give it form and consistency. On the other hand, the sophia seems to have been transferred to a general computation of algorithms. On both sides the vigour of desire – which always turns to the incalculable – gives way to the rigour of calculation. And yet, no one knows what it would be a question of calculating, if not the computational capacities themselves. Thus, we will not keep the term "demosophia": it should only be used to point out the promise that has remained fallow. The modern history of mankind, at the moment when it closes in on the history of a world both intra-connected and deprived of representation of itself, presents us with two empty forms: "people" and "thought". That is, existence and meaning. We know only one thing: the two sets are either close to disappearing into another reality –made up of populations and calculations – or to appearing in a wholy new light of which we still suspect nothing. This is why "democracy" and "philosophy" are once again the double, perhaps anachronistic, name for what can no longer be a promise but becomes an emergency. POST-SCRIPTUM It is all the less necessary to keep "demosophia" as it is essential to consider what remains after this lexico-surgery. There remains this other compound: philocracy. That is, the love of power. Now a demosophia which would be a true thought of the people, by them and for them, should above all hold in respect this philocratia which is one of the most powerful factors of human conduct. This doesn’t mean that no power is needed, but that the love of power must be controlled, channeled, instructed according to another love, that of life and speech. This is what democracy & philosophy must consider together. Yet, demosophia was the true promise of progress and its domination: one had to achieve a renewed and fulfilled humanity, just, peaceful and capable of something other than enduring and suffering. Translated by SOPHIE GALABRU Related Articles Related Article 1 Author Name Read Post Related Article 1 Related Article 1 Read Post

El problema del fin de la filosofía domina la filosofía europea desde (a partir de) Kant: Kant designa su enfoque crítico como un prolegómeno a una futura filosofía (metafísica)... Los dos finales de la filosofía SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK 17 January 2023 PHILOSOPHY Martin Heidegger; Image credit: Medium.com El problema del fin de la filosofía domina la filosofía europea desde (a partir de) Kant: Kant designa su enfoque crítico como un prolegómeno a una futura filosofía (metafísica); Fichte habla sobre una “doctrina de la ciencia” (Wissenschaftslehre) en vez de filosofía: Hegel vio su sistema no únicamente como filosofía (amor por el conocimiento) sino conocimiento en sí mismo; Marx opuso la filosofía al estudio de la vida real. Vivimos hoy día no solamente en una época en que se proclama el fin de la filosofía; vivimos en la época del doble fin de la filosofía. La posibilidad de un “cerebro conectado” es una especie de punto final a la naturalización del pensamiento humano: cuando nuestros distintos procesos del pensamiento interactúan directamente con una máquina digital, se vuelve efectivamente un objeto en la realidad. Deja de ser “nuestro” pensamiento como opuesto a una realidad externa. El fin de la filosofía en la ciencia El problema del fin de la filosofía domina la filosofía europea desde (a partir de) Kant: Kant designa su enfoque crítico como un prolegómeno a una futura filosofía (metafísica); Fichte habla sobre una “doctrina de la ciencia” (Wissenschaftslehre) en vez de filosofía: Hegel vio su sistema no únicamente como filo-sofía (amor por el conocimiento) sino conocimiento en sí mismo; Marx opuso la filosofía al estudio de la vida real; todas estas ideas hasta llegar a Heidegger cuyo lema fue “el fin de la filosofía y la tarea del pensar”. Mi primera tesis es que hay una profunda paradoja en todo esto. Es sólo con la revolución de Kant, con su idea sobre lo trascendental, que la filosofía vuelve sobre sí misma. ¿No será que a fin de cuentas la filosofía como tal empieza con Kant, con su giro trascendental? ¿No será que toda la filosofía puede ser entendida adecuadamente -no como la simple descripción de “todo el universo”, de la totalidad de los seres, sino como la descripción del horizonte dentro del cual las entidades se revelan ellas mismas hacia un ser humano finito- y sólo de manera anacrónica, a partir del punto de partida abierto por Kant? ¿No será que fue Kant quien abrió también el terreno dentro del cual Heidegger fue capaz de formular la noción de Dasein como el lugar en el que los seres aparecen dentro de un horizonte de significado históricamente determinado/destinado? (Soy consciente de que Heidegger nunca habría aceptado usar el término “trascendental” para su enfoque, en tanto que “trascendental” está para él marcado irreductiblemente por la noción de la subjetividad moderna. A pesar de esto mantengo este término porque creo que sigue siendo el más apropiado para señalar la idea de un horizonte en el que las entidades se nos presentan a nosotros). Hay por supuesto numerosas reacciones a la afirmación de que la filosofía ha muerto: en las últimas décadas encontramos esfuerzos por resucitar una ontología metafísica anterior a la de Kant. La posición del pensamiento de Deleuze es todavía ambigua: mientras Derrida es el último historicista del deconstruccionismo, ¿no despliega Deleuze en sus grandes obras (desde Diferencia y repetición ) una especie de visión global de la realidad? Y, ¿no es la “lógica de los mundos” de Badiou una especie de a priori de todas las posibles realidades? En una conversación conmigo, él caracterizó su “lógica de los mundos” como su dialéctica de la naturaleza. Después aparece Quentin Meillassoux y la “ontología orientada a los objetos” con su nueva “teoría del todo” (Graham Harman) que concibe a los humanos como uno igual entre los objetos. Si bien, en mi opinión, Harman simplemente despliega otra visión trascendental de la realidad, esta no es ciertamente su intención. En contra de estos retornos a la ontología, creo que después de Heidegger tal pensamiento ya no es posible. La distancia entre la realidad y su horizonte trascendental hace referencia a la estructura universal de cómo la realidad aparece ante nosotros: ¿qué condiciones deben cumplirse para que algo sea percibido por nosotros como realmente existente? En este sentido podemos dejar de lado la idea de que la filosofía es una visión ilegítima del universo que no tiene ningún fundamento científico; el pensamiento trascendental no especula acerca de todos los aspectos de la realidad, acerca de cómo la realidad es en sí misma; se preocupa únicamente en sí misma por cómo en la vida cotidiana aceptamos algo como realmente existente. “Trascendental” es el término técnico de los filósofos para el marco que define las coordenadas de la realidad; por ejemplo, el acercamiento trascendental nos hace estar conscientes de que, para un científico naturalista, dentro de un marco espacio-temporal, los fenómenos materiales regulados por leyes naturales existen realmente, mientras que para un premoderno tradicional, los espíritus y significados hacen parte también de la realidad y no sólo nuestras proyecciones. Un acercamiento óntico, por otro lado, está preocupado por la realidad en sí misma, por su origen y desarrollo: ¿Cómo llegó a ser el universo? ¿Tiene un inicio y un final? ¿Cuál es nuestro lugar en él? Antes del quiebre trascendental kantiano, la filosofía era una visión/noción de la totalidad de los seres: ¿cómo está estructurada toda la realidad, hay un ser supremo y cuál es el lugar de los humanos en él? Tales es usualmente nombrado el primer filósofo y su respuesta fue: el agua es la sustancia de todo -nótese que él habla de agua y no de tierra, ¡la usual réplica del mito! Como Hegel ya lo había percibido, el agua como la sustancia última no es el agua de la experiencia que vemos y sentimos -un mínimo de idealismo ya está presente aquí; el agua de Tales es una entidad “ideal”. Este corto circuito significa el gesto inaugural de la filosofía: un elemento particular representa a todos los demás. decir que “Hegel es materialista dialéctico” debe ser leído como una nueva versión de la afirmación especulativa de que “el espíritu es un hueso”: interpretada directamente, esta afirmación no tiene ningún sentido porque hay una brecha infinita entre el pensamiento de Hegel y el materialismo dialéctico. Sin embargo, el pensamiento de Hegel es precisamente pensar esta brecha. El reproche moderno que usualmente se hace a este corto circuito es que realiza un salto ilegítimo hacia la universalidad: en sus especulaciones meta-físicas, la filosofía propone una universalización sin un adecuado estudio y justificación empíricos. Solamente hoy día, con las “teorías del todo” en física, estamos acercándonos gradualmente a una respuesta científica a las “grandes” preguntas, lo cual significa el fin de la filosofía. En las últimas décadas, el progreso tecnológico en la física experimental ha abierto un nuevo terreno, impensable en el universo científico clásico, el de la “metafísica experimental”: “preguntas que anteriormente eran pensadas únicamente para el debate filosófico han sido traídas dentro de la órbita de la investigación empírica” (1) . Lo que hasta ahora era un tema de “experimentos mentales” se está volviendo paulatinamente el tema de experimentación actual en los laboratorios -el ejemplo más claro aquí es el famoso experimento de la doble rendija de Einstein-Rosen-Podolsky, en primera instancia imaginado, pero luego realizado por Alain Aspect. Las proposiciones metafísicas que han sido adecuadamente probadas son el estatus ontológico de la contingencia, la condición de localidad de la causalidad, el estatus de la realidad independiente de nuestra observación, etc. De acuerdo con esto es que, al inicio de El gran diseño , Stephen Hawking anuncia triunfantemente que “la filosofía ha muerto” (2) . Con los últimos avances en física cuántica y cosmología, la llamada metafísica experimental ha alcanzado su apogeo: las preguntas metafísicas sobre el origen del universo y otras similares, que hasta ahora eran especulaciones filosóficas, pueden ser respondidas a través de la ciencia experimental y ser probadas empíricamente. Por supuesto descubrimos que, bajo una mirada más cercana, no estamos todavía en ese punto -casi, pero todavía no. Además, sería fácil rechazar estos argumentos y demostrar la continua pertinencia de la filosofía para el mismo Hawking (sin mencionar el hecho que su propio libro no es para nada ciencia, sino más bien un problema popular vuelto generalización): Hawking se basa en una serie de presuposiciones metodológicas y ontológicas que da por sentadas. Apenas unas páginas después de la afirmación de que la filosofía ha muerto, describe su enfoque como un “realismo dependiente del modelo” basado “en la idea de que nuestros cerebros interpretan los datos de los órganos sensoriales elaborando un modelo del mundo. Cuando el modelo explica satisfactoriamente los acontecimientos tendemos a atribuirle, a él y a los elementos y conceptos que lo integran, la calidad de realidad”; sin embargo “si dos de esas teorías o modelos predicen con exactitud los mismos acontecimientos, no podemos decir que uno sea más real que el otro, y somos libres para utilizar el modelo que nos resulte más conveniente” (3) . Si hubo una posición filosófica (epistemológica), esta es una de ellas, pero en un lugar bastante vulgar. Sin mencionar el hecho consiguiente de que este “realismo dependiente del modelo” es sencillamente muy débil como para poder hacer el trabajo asignado a él por Hawking, a saber, el de establecer el marco epistemológico a partir del cual se puedan interpretar las muy conocidas paradojas de la física cuántica, la incompatibilidad de estas paradojas con la ontología de nuestro sentido común. Sin embargo, a pesar de todas estas características problemáticas, debe admitirse que la física cuántica y la cosmología tienen implicaciones filosóficas, y que ellas le hacen frente a la filosofía con un reto. Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) mit Studenten, Lithograph, Franz Kugler; Image credit: WikiMedia Commons. En este punto hay que ser absolutamente claros: estas consideraciones son, a pesar de sus imperfecciones, ciertas en un sentido simple y verdaderas; es por esto por lo que uno debería abandonar toda referencia oscurantista o espiritualista a cualquier dimensión misteriosa que eluda a la ciencia. ¿Deberíamos entonces apoyar esta consideración y abandonar la filosofía? En filosofía, la forma de resistencia predominante a la científica auto-objectivización de la humanidad que de todas maneras admite los logros de la ciencia, es la filosofía trascendental neo-kantiana (cuyo caso ejemplar hoy día es Habermas): nuestra percepción de nosotros mismos como agentes libres y responsables no es solamente una ilusión, sino más bien el a priori trascendental de todo conocimiento científico. Para Habermas, “el intento de estudiar la experiencia subjetiva de la primera persona desde el punto de vista objetivante de la tercera persona, compromete al teórico en una contradicción performativa, en tanto que la objetivación presupone la participación en un sistema de prácticas lingüísticas instaurado intersubjetivamente y cuya validez normativa condiciona la actividad cognitiva del científico”. (4) Habermas caracteriza a este terreno intersubjetivo de la validez racional como la dimensión de la “mente objetiva” que no puede ser entendido en términos de los perfiles fenomenológicos de la comunidad de las conciencias que la conforman: es el estado intrínsecamente intersubjetivo del terreno normativo el que excluye cualquier intento por responder a su operación o génesis en términos de las entidades o procesos más simples que el mismo sistema. (El término usado por Lacan para esta “mente objetiva” que es irreductible a lo Real de la pura realidad como también a lo imaginario de la experiencia de nuestro yo es, por supuesto, el gran Otro). Ni el perfilamiento fenomenológico (imaginario) ni neurobiológico (real) de los participantes pueden ser tomados como una condición constitutiva para esta social “mente objetiva”. El final de la filosofía en la historicidad trascendental Si bien Habermas y Heidegger son grandes enemigos filosóficos, ellos comparten el básico enfoque trascendental que le pone límites al naturalismo científico. Puede decirse que Heidegger lleva a la filosofía a su final al radicalizar el enfoque trascendental: él distingue de manera estricta entre realidad (entidades) y el horizonte en el que la realidad aparece -a esta distancia la llama “diferencia ontológica”. Por ejemplo, la realidad aparece ante nosotros, los modernos, diferente a los premodernos para quienes la realidad estaba llena de agentes espirituales y profundos significados -en la ciencia moderna no hay lugar para esta dimensión; “real” es únicamente lo que la ciencia puede medir y cuantificar. Recuerdo que cuando era joven se usaba en las escuelas un viejo y dogmático libro de texto marxista en filosofía en el que se caracterizaba a Heidegger como un “fenomenólogo agnóstico” -estúpido pero cierto. Heidegger es un “fenomenólogo” en el sentido en que su horizonte definitivo es el modo trascendental en que las entidades se presentan a la apariencia, y es un “agnóstico” en el sentido en que ignora el estado de las entidades antes o por fuera de su apariencia dentro de una específica y trascendental forma en que el ser se presenta. Para ponerlo de manera brutalmente simplificada, el verdadero problema en Heidegger no es el Ser, pero sí el estado de lo óntico por fuera del horizonte del Ser. (Esta es la razón por la cual algunos partidarios de la ontología orientada a objetos tienen razón al reemplazar “ontología” por “onticología”). Esto es así en tanto que al hablar de dios, Heidegger se limita a sí mismo en la forma como la divinidad aparece ante nosotros, los humanos, en las diferentes revelaciones temporales del Ser. Es en este sentido que obviamente Heidegger deplora el surgimiento del “dios de la filosofía”, la noción abstracta de causa sui: “Así suena el nombre adecuado para el Dios en la filosofía. A este Dios el hombre no puede ni orarle ni ofrecerle sacrificios. Ante la Causa sui el hombre no puede caer de rodillas por temor, ni puede ante este Dios tocar instrumentos musicales y danzar" (5) si el hombre es la única catástrofe, ¿significa que antes de la llegada de la humanidad no había catástrofe alguna, que la naturaleza estaba en un orden equilibrado que al final fue descarrilado por la hubris humana? (Por catástrofe no me refiero a desastres ónticos como asteroides chocando contra la tierra, sino más bien un trastorno mucho más radical de todas las formas de vida). De nuevo, el problema no es cuál figura de dios es más verdadera, sino más bien acerca de las diferentes apariencias en que dios se presenta en el tiempo. De manera parecida, y a pesar de su reciente respeto hacia la religión, Habermas, el gran opositor de Heidegger, insiste en que debemos adoptar una actitud agnóstica hacia las creencias religiosas -agnóstica en el sentido de dejar la pregunta abierta, es decir, no excluir la existencia de dios. (6) Vivimos hoy día no solamente en una época en que se proclama el fin de la filosofía; vivimos en la época del doble fin de la filosofía. La posibilidad de un “cerebro conectado” es una especie de punto final a la naturalización del pensamiento humano: cuando nuestros distintos procesos del pensamiento interactúan directamente con una máquina digital, se vuelve efectivamente un objeto en la realidad. Deja de ser “nuestro” pensamiento como opuesto a una realidad externa. Por otro lado, con el historicismo trascendental de hoy día, las preguntas “ingenuas” sobre la realidad son aceptadas justamente como “ingenuas”, lo cual significa que ya no pueden ofrecer un marco cognitivo general de nuestro conocimiento. Por ejemplo la noción de verdad en Foucault puede resumirse en el hecho de que la verdad/falsedad no es una propiedad directa de nuestras afirmaciones sino que, en diferentes condiciones históricas, cada discurso produce su propio efecto verdadero, es decir, implica unos criterios específicos de lo que se entiende como “verdadero”: “el problema no está en dividir entre lo que en un discurso responde a la cientificidad y a la verdad, y lo que responde a otra cosa, sino en ver históricamente cómo se producen efectos de verdad en el interior de discursos que no son en sí mismos ni verdaderos ni falsos”. (7) La ciencia define lo que es verdadero en sus propios términos: la verdad de una proposición (que debería ser formulada en términos claros, explícitos y preferiblemente formalizados) se establece a través de procedimientos experimentales que pueden ser repetidos por cualquiera. El discurso religioso actúa de manera diferente: su “verdad” es establecida a través de una serie de complejos argumentos retóricos que generan la experiencia de habitar un mundo de significados y controlado benévolamente por un poder más poderoso. Así pues, si se le fuera a preguntar a Michel Foucault una gran pregunta metafísica del tipo: ¿tenemos libre albedrío?, su respuesta habría sido algo como: esta pregunta sólo tiene significado si es puesta dentro de cierta episteme, campo del conocimiento o poder que determine bajo qué condiciones es verdadero o falso; y lo único que podemos hacer en últimas es describir esta episteme. Para Foucault esta episteme es lo que en alemán es llamado Unhintergehbares , algo detrás de lo cual no podemos alcanzar algo distinto. Un científico podría responder bruscamente: está bien, pero ¿no podría una antropología histórica describir cómo, en el curso de la evolución, diferentes formas de epistemes surgen de la tradición y circunstancias sociales concretas? ¿No ofrece el marxismo una muy convincente explicación de cómo las nuevas ideologías y ciencias surgen de una compleja totalidad social? Habermas está en lo cierto en este punto al insistir en que no podemos salir del círculo hermenéutico: una explicación evolucionista de las facultades cognitivas del ser humano presupone de antemano un determinado acercamiento epistémico frente a la realidad. El resultado es un irreducible paralelo: en un obvio e “ingenuo” punto de vista realista es claro que los humanos evolucionaron a partir de un extenso campo de la realidad; sin embargo, este círculo en el que nos incluimos en una realidad no puede cerrarse del todo en tanto que toda explicación de nuestro lugar en ella implica también cierto horizonte de significados -¿qué hacemos en este punto? Al enfoque trascendental le dio Heidegger un giro existencial: como una ontología trascendental y fenomenológica, la filosofía no se pregunta por la naturaleza de la realidad sino que analiza como ella se nos aparece en una específica constelación histórica. En la actual época de la tecno-ciencia consideramos como “realmente existente” únicamente lo que puede ser un objeto del estudio científico -todas las demás entidades son reducidas a experiencias ilusorias y subjetivas, lo que se imagina, etc. El punto de Heidegger no está en que tal punto de vista es más o menos “verdadero” que el de la premodernidad sino que, con el descubrimiento del ser que caracteriza a la modernidad, el criterio para decir que es “verdadero” o “falso” ha cambiado. No es difícil entender la paradoja de tal enfoque: mientras Heidegger es percibido como un pensador enfocado únicamente en el problema del Ser, deja fuera de toda consideración lo que entendemos por este problema desde nuestra “ingenua” y pre-trascendental posición: ¿cómo existen las cosas independiente de la manera como nos relacionamos con ellas, independiente de cómo ellas aparecen ante nosotros? Jacques Lacan; Image credit: Literary Hub ¿Es esto suficiente? Si la dimensión trascendental es el marco u horizonte irreductible a través del cual nosotros percibimos (y, en un estricto y kantiano sentido que no tiene nada que ver con una creación óntica, lo que constituye la realidad), ¿cómo podemos movernos más allá o a través de la realidad y su horizonte trascendental? ¿Hay un punto en común en que estas dos dimensiones se superpongan? La búsqueda por este punto es el gran tema del idealismo alemán: Fichte lo encontró en la auto postura del Yo absoluto, el Yo trascendental, mientras que Schelling lo encontró en la intuición intelectual en la que sujeto y objeto, actividad y pasividad, intelecto e intuición coinciden inmediatamente. Al tener en cuenta el fallo de estos intentos, nuestro punto de partida debería ser buscar tal punto en común entre realidad y su horizonte trascendental no en una especie de síntesis entre los dos sino más bien en la ruptura entre los dos. En tanto que el realismo científico es la visión hegemónica hoy día, la pregunta es: ¿puede ser entendida la dimensión trascendental en estos términos? ¿Cómo puede la dimensión trascendental surgir o explotar en lo real? La respuesta no es una reducción realista directa sino otra pregunta: ¿qué es lo que debe constitutivamente excluirse (primordialmente reprimido) de nuestra idea de realidad? En últimas, ¿qué pasaría si la dimensión trascendental es un “regreso de lo reprimido” de nuestra noción de la realidad? El hombre como catástrofe Este es, pues, nuestro callejón sin salida: tenemos dos finales de la filosofía; uno en la ciencia positiva que ocupa el campo de las viejas especulaciones metafísicas, y el otro con Heidegger quien llevó el enfoque trascendental a su conclusión radical al reducir la filosofía a la descripción de “eventos” históricos, a las formas en que el Ser se revela. Ninguno de estos dos complementa al otro, de hecho se excluyen mutuamente; sin embargo la insuficiencia inmanente de cada uno abre el espacio para el otro: la ciencia no puede cerrar el círculo y establecer en su objeto el enfoque que usa para analizarlo, pues únicamente la filosofía trascendental puede hacerlo. Por otro lado la filosofía trascendental, que se limita a sí misma al describir las distintas formas en que el Ser se revela, ignora la pregunta óntica (¿cómo son las entidades por fuera del horizonte de su apariencia?), de modo que la ciencia llena este vacío con su pretensión de entender la naturaleza de las cosas. ¿Es este paralelo la última posición de nuestro pensamiento, o puede ir más allá (incluso a través) de esto? Si bien Heidegger es el último filósofo trascendental, hay algunos pasajes misteriosos en donde se aventura en este terreno pre-trascendental. En la formulación de la noción de algo falso/ lethe / más viejo que la propia dimensión de lo verdadero, Heidegger enfatiza en cómo, cuando el hombre entra en el descubrimiento de la verdad, es “una transformación del ser-del-hombre en sentido de un desplazamiento [ Ver-rückung /volverse loco] de su posición en el ente” (8) . El desplazamiento al que se refiere Heidegger no es por supuesto ninguna categoría psicológica o clínica de la locura: hace referencia a una inversión/aberración ontológica mucho más radical, que se presenta cuando el universo mismo está “fuera de sus goznes”, descarrilado. Es importante tener en cuenta que Heidegger escribió estas líneas en los años en que se encontraba en una lectura intensa del Tratado sobre la esencia de la libertad humana de Schelling, un texto que se preocupa por el origen de la Maldad justamente como una especie de locura ontológica. En el “desplazamiento” de la posición del hombre entre los seres (su autocentramiento) como un paso intermedio (“mediador que se desvanece”) de la “naturaleza prehumana” a nuestro universo simbólico: “el hombre, en su misma esencia, es una catástrofe -un revés que lo aleja de su esencia genuina. En medio de los seres, el hombre es la única catástrofe” (9) Si bien Habermas y Heidegger son grandes enemigos filosóficos, ellos comparten el básico enfoque trascendental que le pone límites al naturalismo científico. Puede decirse que Heidegger lleva a la filosofía a su final al radicalizar el enfoque trascendental: él distingue de manera estricta entre realidad (entidades) y el horizonte en el que la realidad aparece -a esta distancia la llama “diferencia ontológica”. En este punto en el que en cierto sentido todo ha sido decidido, hay que dar sin embargo un paso más adelante en relación con la formulación de Heidegger –“un desplazamiento de su posición en el ente”-; un paso ya indicado por el mismo Heidegger en otras formulaciones. Puede aparecer claro lo que Heidegger quiere con la formulación citada: el hombre (uso el término en masculino pues es la forma como es usada en Heidegger) como Da-Sein (el “ser-ahí” del Ser, el lugar en que se desenvuelve el Ser) es una entidad fundamentada sobre todo en su cuerpo. Con un poco de exageración retórica, puede decirse que la idea de Heidegger de que no hay “Ser sin un Ser-ahí como el lugar de su desenvolvimiento” es su versión de la idea de Hegel de que “debe entenderse el Absoluto no sólo como substancia sino también como sujeto”. Sin embargo, si el desenvolvimiento de todo un terreno de entidades está enraizado en una única entidad, entonces es porque algo “desquiciado” está sucediendo: una entidad particular es el sitio exclusivo bajo el cual todas las entidades aparecen, adquieren su Ser -entonces, para ponerlo en términos crudos, si tú matas a alguien, al mismo tiempo estás “matando al Ser”. Este corto circuito entre el “claro del Ser” y una entidad particular introduce un desenvolvimiento catastrófico dentro del orden de los seres: esto es así porque el hombre, al estar fundamentado en su cuerpo y al no poder mirar a las entidades desde afuera, hace que cada desenvolvimiento del Ser, cada claridad, deba estar basado en lo falso (ocultamiento/encubrimiento). La causa última para la distorsión que le pertenece al Da-Sein está en el hecho de que el dasein, por definición, se encarna en algo. Hacia el final de su vida Heidegger aceptó que el problema más difícil para la filosofía es el fenómeno del cuerpo: lo corporal en el hombre no es algo animal. “Las formas de comprensión que tienen que ver con ello son algo que la metafísica no ha tocado hasta ahora”. (10) Puede uno arriesgarse en la hipótesis de que es precisamente la teoría psicoanalítica la primera en abordar esta pregunta tan importante: ¿no es el cuerpo erotizado de Freud, basado en la libido y organizado alrededor de zonas erógenas precisamente un cuerpo sin características animales, fuera de lo biológico? ¿No es ESTE (y no el animal) cuerpo el objeto propio del psicoanálisis? En este punto Heidegger se equivoca cuando en sus Seminarios de Zollikon desestima a Freud como un determinista causal: “Él postula también para los fenómenos humanos conscientes la integridad en la explicabilidad, esto es, la continuidad de nexos causales. Ya que «en la conciencia» no hay tal, tiene que inventar «lo inconsciente», donde tiene que haber la integridad de nexos causales”. (11) Esta interpretación parece ser correcta: ¿no será que Freud intenta descubrir un orden causal en lo que a nuestra consciencia se nos aparece como una serie confusa y contingente de hechos mentales (lapsus del lenguaje, los sueños, los síntomas clínicos) y en este sentido, cerrar el círculo de los enlaces causales que gobiernan nuestra psique? Sin embargo Heidegger no comprende cómo el “inconsciente” en Freud se fundamenta en el encuentro traumático con el Otro, cuya intrusión, precisamente, quiebra, interrumpe, la continuidad del nexo causal. Lo que está en el “inconsciente” no es un enlace causal completo, ininterrumpido, sino más bien las repercusiones, las consecuencias de las interrupciones traumáticas. Lo que Freud llama “síntomas” son las formas de lidiar con una herida traumática; mientras que la fantasía es la formación destinada a cubrir esta herida. Esta es la razón por la que para Heidegger, a priori, un ser humano finito no puede alcanzar la paz interior y la calma de la ilustración budista (nirvana). El mundo se nos revela en contra del fondo de una catástrofe ontológica: “el hombre es la única catástrofe entre los seres”. En este punto debemos arriesgar a dar un paso más adelante: si el hombre es la única catástrofe, ¿significa que antes de la llegada de la humanidad no había catástrofe alguna, que la naturaleza estaba en un orden equilibrado que al final fue descarrilado por la hubris humana? (Por catástrofe no me refiero a desastres ónticos como asteroides chocando contra la tierra, sino más bien un trastorno mucho más radical de todas las formas de vida). El problema es que si el hombre es la única catástrofe entre los seres, y si estos seres se revelan únicamente ante nosotros los seres humanos, entonces el espacio para los seres sin ninguna catástrofe que rodean a los humanos es algo ontológicamente fundamentado en el surgimiento del hombre como catástrofe. Más allá del trascendental Nos enfrentamos a la siguiente pregunta: ¿es una excepción que el ser humano sea una catástrofe entre los seres, a tal punto que si asumimos la imposible posición de ver al universo desde una distancia segura veríamos una universal textura de seres que no está trastornada por ninguna catástrofe (todo esto en tanto que el ser humano es una catástrofe únicamente desde su posición, como la excepción que permite el acceso a los demás seres)? En este sentido volvemos a Kant: la realidad “en sí misma”, por fuera del Claro en el que aparece ante nosotros, no puede ser conocida, y sólo podemos especular sobre ella en la misma forma que lo hace Heidegger cuando juega con la idea de que existe una especie de dolor ontológico en la naturaleza. ¿O debemos tomarnos esta especulación de Heidegger seriamente, de modo que la catástrofe no se encuentra únicamente en el hombre sino también en la naturaleza en sí misma, de modo que al concebir al hombre como el ser del habla, la catástrofe que fundamenta la realidad en sí misma se vuelve palabra? (La física cuántica ofrece su propia versión de la catástrofe que fundamenta la realidad: la ruptura de la simetría, la perturbación de las oscilaciones cuánticas vacías; las especulaciones teosóficas nos dan otra versión: la auto-división o Caída de la Divinidad por sí misma que da nacimiento a nuestro mundo). La distancia entre la realidad y su horizonte trascendental hace referencia a la estructura universal de cómo la realidad aparece ante nosotros: ¿qué condiciones deben cumplirse para que algo sea percibido por nosotros como realmente existente? En un debate con un estudiante de teología, Richard Dawkins (12) dijo que se toma muy en serio lo que los departamentos de teología hacen cuando investigan los orígenes históricos de una religión y su desarrollo -encontrando aquí un sólido estudio antropológico-; sin embargo no lo hace cuando, por ejemplo, los teólogos debaten acerca de la naturaleza exacta de la transubstanciación en un ritual cristiano (el milagroso cambio en el que, según el dogma de los católicos romanos y la ortodoxia oriental, los elementos de la eucaristía en el momento de su consagración se vuelven cuerpo y sangre de Cristo al mantener la apariencia del pan y el vino). Pienso que por el contrario tales debates deben ser tomados muy en serio y no reducirse a meras metáforas. Ellos permiten comprender no sólo las premisas ontológicas básicas de la teología, sino que también pueden ser usadas para arrojar luz sobre algunas nociones marxistas. Fredric Jameson estaba en lo cierto cuando proclamó a la predestinación como el concepto teológico más interesante para el marxismo: la predestinación muestra la causalidad retroactiva que caracteriza propiamente a un proceso histórico dialéctico. De modo análogo, no debemos ser temerosos de buscar las pistas del enfoque meta-trascendental (materialismo dialéctico) en las especulaciones teosóficas de Meister Eckhart, Jacob Boehme o de F.W.J Schelling. Si adherimos a esta opción, habría que indicar la única conclusión que se muestra como consecuente: cada imagen o construcción de la “realidad objetiva”, del modo en que ella es en sí misma, “independientemente de nosotros”, es una de las tantas formas en que el ser es revelado ante nosotros. Es ya de cierta manera una aparición “antropocéntrica”, fundamentada en -y al mismo tiempo tergiversando- la catástrofe que nos constituye. Quienes se presentan como los candidatos más importantes para decir con mayor certeza cómo es la realidad “en sí misma” son las fórmulas de la teoría de la relatividad y la física cuántica, que son el resultado de un complejo trabajo experimental e intelectual para el cual nada corresponde en nuestra directa experiencia de la realidad… El único “contacto” que tenemos con lo Real “independiente de nosotros” es nuestra separación con él, la locura radical, aquello que Heidegger llama catástrofe. La paradoja es que lo que une con lo Real “en sí mismo” es la brecha que experimentamos al estar separados de él. (Lo mismo aplica para el cristianismo en donde la única forma de tener una experiencia de unidad con Dios es la identificación que se tiene con el sufrimiento de Cristo en la cruz, es decir, el momento en el que dios es separado de sí mismo). Este movimiento en que se experimenta la brecha misma como el momento de unidad es el aspecto básico de la dialéctica en Hegel -esta es la razón por la cual el espacio que le asignamos al espacio que supera al pensamiento de Heidegger, que hemos denominado como el espacio más allá de lo trascendental, le pertenece al pensamiento de Hegel- Este es también el lugar del pensamiento que no puede ser reducido a la ciencia. Esta es la ambigua formulación de Heidegger acerca de este oscuro punto: “A menudo me pregunto, inclusive se ha vuelto para mí una gran pregunta, qué sería la naturaleza sin el hombre: ¿acaso no hace falta que se una a sus meandros a fin de desembocar en su potencia propia reconquistada?” (13) Este pasaje fue escrito inmediatamente después de las lecturas de Heidegger sobre Los conceptos fundamentales de la metafísica de 1929-1930. En ellas es formulada una hipótesis schellingiana según la cual los animales están quizás, de una manera hasta ahora desconocida, al tanto de su falta o “pobreza” de su relación con el mundo -quizás hay un infinito dolor que permea toda la naturaleza viviente: “si el carecer en ciertas variaciones es un sufrimiento, entonces, si la carencia de mundo y el ser pobre forman parte del ser del animal, un sufrimiento y un dolor tendrían que recorrer todo el reino animal y el reino de la vida en general”. (14) Así pues, cuando Heidegger especula sobre el dolor en la naturaleza que ha sido alejada de nosotros de manera independiente, ¿cómo es posible leer esta idea sin comprometernos con una forma de pensamiento antropocéntrica y teleológica? Fue nada más ni menos que Marx quien dio, en la introducción a los Gründrisse , una respuesta al decir que: “La sociedad burguesa es la más compleja y desarrollada organización histórica de la producción. Las categorías que expresan sus condiciones y la comprensión de su organización permiten al mismo tiempo comprender la organización y las relaciones de producción de todas las formas de sociedad pasadas, sobre cuyas ruinas y elementos ella fue edificada y cuyos vestigios, aún no superados, continúa arrastrando, a la vez que meros indicios previos han desarrollado en ella su significación plena, etc. La anatomía del hombre es una clave para la anatomía del mono. Por el contrario, los indicios de las formas superiores en las especies animales inferiores pueden ser comprendidos sólo cuando se conoce la forma superior”. (15) Al parafrasear a Pierre Bayard (16) , lo que Marx está queriendo decir es que la anatomía del mono, si bien fue formada en el tiempo antes que la del hombre, sin embargo, en cierto sentido, es un plagio por anticipado de la anatomía del hombre. No hay ninguna teleología en este punto; su efecto es estrictamente retroactivo: una vez el capitalismo está aquí (al haber surgido de manera contingente), establece una forma universal para las demás formaciones. La teleología reside precisamente en el progresismo evolucionista en el que la clave para la anatomía del hombre es la del mono. Alenka Zupančič muestra que lo mismo puede decirse de la idea de Lacan de que il n´y a pas de rapport sexual: esto no quiere decir que en la naturaleza, entre monos y otros animales hubiera una relación sexual armoniosa regulada por instinto, mientras que con la llegada del hombre la disarmonía haya explotado. No hay en efecto ninguna relación sexual entre monos y entre otros animales; sus complejos rituales de apareamiento lo demuestran. Es un simple hecho, quizás experimentado como doloroso, que la disarmonía permanece “en sí misma”, mientras que con los humanos el error es presentado como tal, “para sí mismo”. Es en este sentido que el dolor en la naturaleza apunta hace el orden simbólico que lo registra. (17) A lo largo de estas líneas puede entenderse por qué Kant pensaba que, en cierto sentido, el mundo ha sido creado de tal modo que nuestras batallas morales puedan ser peleadas en él: cuando estamos inmersos en una intensa batalla que significa todo para nosotros, experimentamos que el mundo colapsaría al fallar en la batalla; lo mismo ocurre con el temor que existe en fallar en un intenso amor. No hay ninguna teleología; el encuentro amoroso es el resultado de un encuentro contingente, es decir que pudo no haber sucedido -pero cuando sucede, decide cómo experimentamos toda la realidad. Cuando Benjamin escribió que una gran batalla revolucionaria no decide únicamente el destino del presente sino también el de todas las batallas pérdidas, hace poner en movimiento el mismo mecanismo retroactivo que alcanza su climax en la afirmación religiosa de que, en una batalla crucial, no es solamente el destino de nosotros el que se decide, sino también el de dios mismo. Es únicamente Hegel quien nos permite pensar esta paradoja. “Hegel es un materialista dialéctico” La dialéctica de Hegel no es ni una dimensión trascendental dinamizada (lo que Barndom y Pippin afirman como la sucesión de todas las formas posibles en que la realidad aparece ante nosotros) ni tampoco el proceso dialéctico “objetivo” de la realidad misma (que es tanto lo que los marxistas del “materialismo dialéctico” como los idealistas objetivos afirman). Su recurso oculto es la experiencia de una brecha irreductible que precede a las dos. En este punto es que podemos de algún modo dar claridad sobre la diferencia entre el materialismo naturalista (“mecánico”), el idealismo y el materialismo dialéctico: el materialismo “mecánico” cubre un extenso campo que va desde los materialistas antes de Platón hasta el naturalismo científico y la ontología orientada al objeto -aun así se caracterice a sí misma como “inmaterialista”). Todos ellos entienden la realidad como algo ya dado, ignorando así su constitución trascendental; el idealismo es caracterizado por el predominio del enfoque trascendental; el materialismo dialéctico aparece cuando nos movemos hacia el oscuro dominio que está más allá de lo trascendental, tal cual fue elaborado por el giro pos-kantiano de Schelling y Hegel, por algunas especulaciones teosóficas (incluyendo las de Walter Benjamin), por algunas formulaciones tentativas de Lacan, como también por lecturas especulativas de la física cuántica (18) . Para un kantiano por supuesto tales especulaciones no son más que vacías Schwärmerei, una entusiasta habladera acerca de nada, mientras que para nosotros es únicamente aquí en donde podemos tocar lo Real. ¿Por qué llamo a la posición hacia la cual todos estos distintos enfoques tienden como “materialismo dialéctico”, un término difícil de disociar de la tradición del estalinismo, un término que promueve la ideología filosófica en su forma más estúpida, una filosofía que no tiene ningún valor cognitivo sino el de justificar decisiones políticas? Esto es así puesto que lo que tengo en mente es innombrable, no hay un nombre “propio” para ello, así que la única solución es usar un concepto que muestre de la manera más clara posible su propia insuficiencia. En otras palabras, decir que “Hegel es materialista dialéctico” debe ser leído como una nueva versión de la afirmación especulativa de que “el espíritu es un hueso”: interpretada directamente, esta afirmación no tiene ningún sentido porque hay una brecha infinita entre el pensamiento de Hegel y el materialismo dialéctico. Sin embargo, el pensamiento de Hegel es precisamente pensar esta brecha. TRANSLATED BY Mauricio García NOTES 1. Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway. Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning , Durham: Duke University Press 2007, p. 25. (traducción propia). 2. Stephen Hawking. El gran diseño . España: Crítica, 2010, p. 5 3. Ibid . 4. Jürgen Habermas, “The Language Game of Responsible Agency and the Problem of Free Will: How Can Epistemic Dualism be Reconciled with Ontological Monism?,” Philosophical Explorations 10, no. 1 (March 2007), p. 31. 5. Martin Heidegger. Identidad y Diferencia, Barcelona, Anthropos, 1990 6. Jürgen Habermas. Entre naturalismo y religión . Barcelona: Paidós, 2006. 7. Michel Foucault. “Verdad y poder”. En: Un diálogo sobre el poder y otras conversaciones . España, Alianza editorial, 2000, p. 136. 8. Martin Heidegger. Contribuciones a la filosofía (Del acontecimiento) . Traducción de Breno Onetto Muñoz. Chile: RIL editores, 2002, p. 233. 9. Martin Heidegger, “Hoelderlin’s Hymne‚ Der Ister”, Gesamtausgabe 53 , Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann 1984, p.94. (traducción propia). 10. Martin Heidegger. Heráclito. Seminario del semestre de invierno 1966-1967 . Traducción de Raúl Torres Martínez. Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2017, pp. 193-194. 11. Martin Heidegger. Seminarios de Zollikon . Traducción de Ángel Xolocotzi Yáñez. Herder, 2013, p. 303. 12. Ver: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHoK6ohqNo4 . 13. Martin Heidegger, Correspondance avec Elisabeth Blochmann , Gallimard, Paris, 1966. Traducción publicada en Imago Agenda. 14. Martin Heidegger. Los conceptos fundamentales de la metafísica . Traducción de Alberto Ciria. España: Alianza editorial, 2007, p. 326. 15. Karl Marx. Grundrisse . Traducción de Pedro Scaron. España, Siglo XXI editores, 2007, p. 26. 16. Para esto ver: Pierre Bayard, Le plagiat par anticipation , Paris: Editions de Minuit 2009. 17. Alenka Zupančič. ¿Qué es el sexo? España: Paradiso ediciones, 2021. 18. La posición de Fichte sobre este respecto es ambigua: incluso cuando habla del Yo absoluto al formular el No-Yo, no está queriendo decir que el Yo absoluto crea objetos como su causa directa. Lo único que es creado por el sujeto es el “misterioso” impulso que lo lleva a “poner” la realidad; este impulso es la versión de lo que Lacan llama objet a. Related Articles The Two Ends of Philosophy SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK Read Article Nancy’s Wager DIVYA DWIVEDI Read Article

Amitiés à Jean-Luc Nancy Button 11 September 2021 Button Une photo de Vers Nancy par Claire Denis. In memoriam Jean-Luc Nancy J’ai peu connu Jean-Luc Nancy personnellement, néanmoins il fait partie de mon environnement intellectuel et culturel depuis bien longtemps. Et je crois que cette phrase ne pourra jamais s’écrire au passé, malgré sa disparition. Ce en quoi sa pensée œuvre et fait œuvre. Nous nous étions croisés quelquefois, et avions des amis communs, des liens : Claire Denis, Jean-Christophe Bailly, Bernard Stiegler. Mais aussi Divya Dwivedi et Shaj Mohan. La dernière fois que j’ai entendu sa voix, vive et douce à la fois, c’était à l’occasion du colloque « Memory for the future » ( 1 ) dédié à Bernard Stiegler. Et avant cela au téléphone pour préparer le livre collectif qu’il avait coordonné et auquel j’ai eu la chance de contribuer, « Amitiés de Bernard Stiegler ». Il y avait d’ailleurs souligné l’importance de ce lien « par accident », mais qui était existant par la relation même de Bernard à chacun de nous et réciproquement. Une autre façon d’interroger la communauté, ce qui occupa et fut aussi l’expérience de Jean-Luc Nancy. Pensée et expérience vécue, philosophie et vie, cette articulation, ou sa tentative, est bien ce qui caractérise ces deux philosophes, et qui fait sens dans leur existence autant, bien entendu, que dans leur œuvre. Jean-Luc Nancy évoquait à propos de Bernard Stiegler « cette vie risquée qui s’empare des concepts », et qu’il « vivra jusqu’au bout » ( 2 ) . Elle pourrait aussi identifier la sienne, par ses expériences propres, ses accidents, sa proximité avec la mort, la capacité à en faire une expérience de pensée. « Tout sera donc venu avec le sentiment de la mort » ( 3 ) . Nancy cite Stiegler. Un tel sentiment est propre à l’homme, et porteur de mélancolie. Nancy souligne que Stiegler écrit sentiment et non conscience de la mort. « Le sentiment : sensibilité, affection, passion, notion, intuition, sens. » ( 4 ) Sentiment funeste, et expérience jamais vécue. Stiegler écrivait que « la mort n’est pas un événement de l’existence parce qu’elle en est la possibilité même » ( 5 ) . Nancy avait-il lui-même ce sentiment présent lorsqu’il écrivait à propos de son ami ? « Une fois mort je ne sentirai plus rien. Je ne serai plus là. Je ne me diffèrerai plus ou bien ma différance, d’un coup, sera infinie et ne sera donc plus mienne » ( 6 ) commentait Jean-Luc Nancy. Et encore que « commencement et fin nous sont également dérobés : ils forment notre incomplétude » ( 7 ) . Selon Stiegler, la mort, « la possibilité la plus extrême » de la vie, « constitue la temporalité originaire de l’existence » ( 8 ) et les événements de la vie s’inscrivent dans cette indétermination. Mais toujours avec ce sentiment, qui affecte ces événements, et les rend si exceptionnels. Je voulais dire à Jean-Luc Nancy à quel point je trouvais que son commentaire était juste, à quel point il ouvrait la pensée amie. J’aurais voulu dire à Bernard Stiegler à quel point sa pensée me mettait en mouvement. Je n’en ai pas pris le temps et le regrette infiniment. Amitiés post-mortem chers, Colette Tron 6 September 20 NOTES 1. Colloque « Memory for the future : thinking with Bernard Stiegler, 3 et 4 décembre 2020 : https://www.universiteitleiden.nl/en/events/2020/12/lccp-symposium-memory-for-the-future-thinking-with-bernard-stiegler 2. Amitiés de Bernard Stiegler, douze contributions réunies par Jean-Luc Nancy, Galilée, Paris, 2021 3. La technique et le temps I, La faute d’Epiméthée, Bernard Stiegler, Galilée, Paris, 1994 4. Amitiés de Bernard Stiegler, Jean-Luc Nancy, op. cit. 5. Introduction à La technique et le temps, I, II, III, Bernard Stiegler, Fayard, Paris, réédition 2018 6. Amitiés de Bernard Stiegler, Jean-Luc Nancy, op. cit. 7. Ibid. 8. Introduction à La technique et le temps, I, II, III, Bernard Stiegler, op. cit. Related Articles Related Article 1 Author Name Read Post Related Article 1 Related Article 1 Read Post

RYOSUKE KAKINAMI Ryosuke Kakinami is a philosopher based in Japan. After having studied at the University of Tokyo and the University of Paris X, he is Associate Professor at the University of Yamagata, Japan, where he teaches Philosophy, Cultural Studies and French. He has contributed in Lorna Collins and Elizabeth Rush (eds.), Making Sense: For an Effective Aesthetics (Peter Lang, 2011). Recently, he co-edited a special issue of the review Tayôtai (Manifold: for the aesthetics of whatever beings, Getsuyosha, Tokyo, vol. 2, October 2020) Kakinami is currently translating Lacoue-Labarthe & Nancy’s L’absolu Littéraire (forthcoming).

Une résonance sans fin – l’éternelle jeunesse de la voix de Jean-Luc Nancy Button 20 September 2021 Button Image credit: recieved In memoriam Jean-Luc Nancy. La conviction de l’immortalité d’une œuvre peut se déplacer vers celle de l’immortalité de son auteur. C’est rare, mais ça arrive. Quelque part en moi, il y avait une croyance en l’impossibilité de la mort de quelqu’un comme Jean-Luc Nancy. Comme elle provient de mon admiration pour la nature impérissable de sa pensée, elle ne disparaît pas avec la triste nouvelle, bien au contraire. Elle ne contredit pas non plus le sentiment lancinant d’une imprévisible et incommensurable grandeur du vide qui vient de s’ouvrir. Le monde a subi une perte irréparable. Et pourtant rien n’est fini. De son vivant, Jean-Luc Nancy a tout fait pour nous apprendre à penser cet étrange événement. Dans un passage de Noli me tangere , en commentant une parole de Jésus, il écrit : « Se fier à lui [Jésus], être, donc, dans la foi, ce n’est pas croire qu’il peut y avoir régénération du cadavre : c’est se tenir avec fermeté dans l’assurance d’une tenue devant la mort. Cette « tenue » fait proprement l’ anastasis , la « résurrection », c’est-à-dire le relèvement ou le soulèvement (« insurrection » est aussi un sens possible du terme grec).(…) Elle [la levée] y fait lever la vérité d’une vie, de toute vie en tant qu’elle est mortelle et de chaque vie en tant qu’elle est singulière. » (1) Jean-Luc Nancy savait transmettre le mouvement de sa « foi » à ses lecteurs en leur témoignant de cette « assurance d’une tenue devant la mort », surtout après sa greffe du cœur. Cette « fermeté »-là est proprement contagieuse. En cela, il avait quelque chose d’un saint. Mais il va sans dire que sa « foi » était moins religieuse que philosophique. Elle peut donner lieu à un rire à cœur ouvert. Dans le lit de l’Hôpital de Keiô à Tokyo, où il a dû passer des semaines en 2017, Jean-Luc Nancy nous a rapporté une scène entre lui et son père. Celui-ci avait demandé à son fils devenu philosophe si les philosophes ont pu prouver l’existence de Dieu. Alors Jean-Luc a dû lui transmettre une nouvelle gênante : « Mais papa, on a prouvé qu’il est impossible de prouver l’existence de Dieu. » La réponse paternelle fut sans appel : « Vous ne servez à rien !» « Papa a raison », ainsi conclut le fils devant ses amis japonais. Jean-Luc Nancy est un grand penseur du rire. « Le rire, la présence » est une lecture saisissante d’un poème en prose de Baudelaire, « Le désir de peindre ». Toujours dans la chambre d’hôpital de Tokyo, au cours d’une conversation sur sa formation littéraire et philosophique, j’ai évoqué cet article de 1988. Interrompant ma remarque admirative, le philosophe confie que quand il était adolescent, le poète des Fleurs du mal n’était pas son auteur préféré parce qu’il n’avait pas compris pourquoi la femme est dangereuse. Ce texte décrit, on le sait, le portrait d’un artiste « heureux » d’être « déchiré » par le « désir », et de « mourir lentement » sous le « regard » d’une femme, comparable au « soleil noir ». « (A)u bas de (son) visage inquiétant », « éclate » « le rire d’une grande bouche, rouge et blanche ». La confession de Jean-Luc Nancy nous invite à lire autrement ce grand traité du rire dans ses rapports avec l’art. En détectant et suivant les traces d’un effort philosophique pour s’approcher d’un poète avec qui on n’a pas forcément d’affinités électives, nous pourrions mieux comprendre comment Nancy a entendu et pratiqué un partage , ce que ce mot, en acte, signifiait pour lui. Mais il est également possible d’y discerner des points d’articulation entre l’acheminement vers un texte rebelle et l’insistance d’un motif propre à l’auteur. Il soutient, dans le même article, que « le rire est le son d’une voix qui n’est pas une voix, qui n’est pas la voix qu’elle est. C’est la matière et le timbre de la voix, et ce n’est pas la voix. » Ou encore : « Le rire éclate sur la limite multiple des sens et du langage, incertain du sens auquel il est offert – à la vue de la couleur, au toucher de la bouche, à l’ouïe de l’éclat, et au sens sans signification de sa propre voix. Le rire est la joie des sens et du sens sur leur limite. Dans cette joie, les sens se touchent entre eux, et ils touchent au langage, à la langue dans la bouche. Mais ce toucher lui-même les espace. Ils ne se pénètrent pas, il n’y a pas « l’art », il y a encore moins un art « total ». Mais il n’y a pas non plus « le rire », comme une vérité sublime en retrait de l’art lui-même. Il n’y a que des éclats de rire. » (2) Après la disparition de Jean-Luc Nancy, j’ai voulu, sans savoir pourquoi, relire quelques-unes de ses méditations sur la voix en laissant résonner en moi la sienne, ses voix plus précisément, qu’un jour, j’ai eu la chance d’entendre. Le Partage des voix, par exemple, tente de repenser le cercle herméneutique entre l ’Être et le temps et D’un entretien de la parole de Heidegger. Comme ce dernier texte se présente comme l’extrait d’un entretien qui aurait eu lieu entre « un Japonais » et « Quelqu’un qui demande », ce livre a peut-être fourni la première occasion d’entrevoir une silhouette japonaise traverser l’œuvre de Nancy. Le partage passe ici aussi bien entre le divin et l’humain qu’entre les deux interlocuteurs qui sont étrangers l’un à l’autre, et le partage originaire du logos y est pensé par rapport à la voix : « Le logos n’est pas une phonè sémantiké , il n’est pas une voix douée de signification, il n’est pas un sens, et ne saurait être « interprété ». Il fait en revanche l’articulation d’avant les voix, dans laquelle pourtant les voix s’articulent déjà, et se partagent. Il fait la structure à la fois « anticipatrice » et partagée de la voix en général.» (3) Une note en bas de page précise que cette « structure » n’est autre que celle d’« écriture » «s elon le concept derridien du mot». La pensée de la voix chez Nancy peut être considérée, non seulement, mais aussi comme une série de provocations amicales adressées à l’auteur de La voix et le phénomène . Nancy prétend montrer la même structure à partir de la voix, et tente en même temps de dégager une possibilité de pensée qui restait virtuelle chez Derrida. L’enjeu était de taille, car il ne s’agit de rien moins que l’(im)possibilité d’une éthique de la déconstruction. C’était toute la question soulevée par Nancy, lors d’un colloque consacré aux travaux de Derrida, qu’il a co-présidé avec Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe en 1980 à Cerisy-la-Salle, dans son intervention intitulée « La voix libre de l’homme ». (4) Mais en toute logique, l’espace de ce colloque, de ce partage des voix ne cesse de s’élargir. Quelques années plus tard vient un texte en forme de dialogue, ou plutôt de pièce de théâtre, « Vox clamans in deserto ». On y entend des voix parlant de la voix, aussi variées que celles de Saussure, de Valéry, de Barthes, de Rousseau, de Kristeva, de Hegel (en compagnie de Schelling et de Hölderlin), d’Agamben, de Derrida, de Deleuze et de Montaigne… Significativement, le discours de Nancy lui-même y est confié à la voix d’un enfant. Et tout cela pour démontrer que toute voix crie dans le désert puisqu’elle vient avant la parole. Et cela n’empêche qu’elle appelle : « - L’autre que l’âme appelle, c’est encore l’âme ? - En effet, c’est ainsi qu’elle fraye la voix au sujet, mais elle ne l’installe pas encore. Elle l’évite, au contraire. Elle n’appelle pas l’âme à s’entendre, ni à entendre aucun discours. Elle l’appelle, cela veut dire seulement qu’elle la fait trembler, qu’elle l’émeut. C’est l’âme qui émeut l’autre dans l’âme. C’est cela, une voix. » (5) C’est la fin de ce texte rédigé en anglais et en français entre 1986-1990. C’est encore des années plus tard que Derrida fera un grand cas de l’ascendance aristotélicienne de la pensée du toucher, de la voix et de l’âme chez Nancy dans un grand livre qu’il lui dédie, Le Toucher . (6) Et Nancy y répondra avec un petit livre, mais d’une profondeur vertigineuse, Noli me tangere . Nous sommes de nouveau au chevet du philosophe. Emmanuel Macron venait d’être élu. Malgré tout ce qui m’oppose au nouveau président de la France, j’ai été au moins impressionné par son âge. Le contraste était cruel avec la gérontocratie qui règne sans faille au Japon. Si c’est le signe de l’émergence d’une nouvelle génération politique dans le monde… Mais pour Jean-Luc Nancy, ce n’est pas un problème. D’ailleurs, il ne se donne pas à lui-même un âge selon la chronométrie. Pour lui, il y a toujours eu un grand décalage, affirme-t-il, entre l’âge physique et celui d’une vie intérieure. Il était absolument étranger au sentiment d’avoir vieilli. Il est vrai qu’il vivait, à cause de la greffe, deux âges dans un seul corps. Mais il me semble qu’il s’agissait cet après-midi-là d’une autre conviction philosophique qu’il s’était déjà formée avant la greffe, et à laquelle, peut-être, est étroitement liée sa pensée de l’âme comme voix. Il y a un désert dans notre corps, où résonne la voix, toujours déjà plurielle, entre le son et la parole. Jean-Luc Nancy nous témoigne par sa voix d’une jeunesse éternelle de la voix, qui se tient dans une solitude absolue, et généreusement partagée. NOTES 1. Jean-Luc Nancy, Noli me tangere , Bayard, 2003, p.33-34. 2. Jean-Luc Nancy, « Le rire, la présence », in Critique , n°488-489, janvier-février 1988, p.59. Cet article est repris in Jean-Luc Nancy, Une pensée finie , Galilée 1990. 3. Jean-Luc Nancy, Le partage des voix , Galilée, 1982, p.82. 4. Jean-Luc Nancy, « La voix libre de l’homme », in Les fins de l’homme – à partir du travail de Jacques Derrida , Galilée, 1981. Repris in Jean-Luc Nancy, L’impératif catégorique , Flammarion, 1983. 5. Jean-Luc Nancy, « Vox clamans in deserto », in Le poids d’une pensée , Le Griffon d’argile, 1991, p.32. 6. Jacques Derrida, Le Toucher – Jean-Luc Nancy , Galilée, 2000. Related Articles Related Article 1 Author Name Read Post Related Article 1 Related Article 1 Read Post

This dialogue loosens "with a metaphorical hammer blow" what Jean-Luc Nancy calls "foundation", the origin of our civilization. He extracts it from the alloy that made Christian Europe, Jewish monotheism, Greek logos and Latin technique. On the eternal return of anti-Semitism: A dialogue between Danielle Cohen-Levinas and Stéphane Habib DANIELLE COHEN-LEVINAS and STÉPHANE HABIB 5 February 2023 PHILOSOPHY POLITICS Danielle Cohen-Levinas ; crédite d’image : République des savoirs This dialogue unlocks "with a metaphorical hammer" what Jean-Luc Nancy calls "foundation", the origin of the “western” civilization. He extracts it from the alloy of Christian Europe, Jewish monotheism, Greek logos and Latin technique. In the movement of the Heideggerian gesture he enacts, by the work of his thought, the deconstruction of Christianity. Daniele Cohen Levinas underlines the contours of this gesture in Jean Luc Nancy when he questions the phenomenon of anti-Semitism beyond its movement of displacement, in its institutionalization. She explains the necessity that philosophy think through and against anti-semitism. Stéphane Habib : While reading The Hatred of the Jews , and while I was thinking about our interview, I had a discussion one morning with Rabbi Delphine Horvilleur which I would like to mention very quickly so that you might follow upon or connect with them. Horvilleur was talking about the incipit of Romain Gary's Promise of the Dawn. In fact, this incipit – I would like to comment on it taking pages – is composed of three very simple-looking words: "It's over". So the beginning – supposedly? – of Gary's novel is a "it's over." It occurred to me, and this opened up a number of questions between us, that the incipit of Louis-Ferdinand Céline's very famous Journey to the End of the Night is certainly more than a beginning, the beginning of the beginning: "It began like this.” Is there not in the folds of these two incipits, in their abysmal difference, all the vertigo of the history of antisemitism? Questions of origin, of desiring origin to the point of death, to the necessary death of those who would testify to the impossibility of any original affirmation that is not fantastical or delusional? I quote at some length from the end of the decisive interview: Anti-Judaism and Anti-Semitism", but how could I not? Christian Europe is far from designating a particular and provisional quality of Europe and its Western expansion: Christianity is its soil, even its vital substance. An entire culture carries within it a need to denounce an internal threat or defilement – precisely because it knows itself to be deprived of purity: its origin remains obscure, being represented as the coming of the infinite into the finite. A figure is invented for the 'bad' infinite: the wandering Jew, the cursed face of humanist and capitalist blessing. One more step and the wanderer is exterminated. Then one also eliminates that which was alive in Christianity: the non-foundation, the non-membership in the world, the opening into the world of the infinite in act. Nazi anti-Semitism is at the same time anti-Christian: it knows only good conscience, or, which amounts to the same thing, pure fantasy. But this anti-Christianity had incubated within Christianity. Isn't your book in two voices – La Haine des juifs with Jean-Luc Nancy – made up of four variations on this same theme of the relationship to the origin? Doesn't all antisemitism have to do with a question revolving around the origin and the impossible origin? Danielle Cohen-Levinas : "It's over", "it began like this": the two expressions with which you begin the interview open up an abyss. On the one hand, the vertigo of a beginning that is ultimately a restart, and on the other, the attention paid to the barely perceptible neuralgic moment when this beginning starts again. At what point do we know, or sense, that the spectre of antisemitism is lurking again; that it is somewhere lurking in perfidious symptoms that we are afraid to name? These symptoms are not always identifiable at the precise moment they manifest themselves. But if the expression "It's over", which Romain Gary placed in the opening of The Promise of the Dawn , resonates across and within the problematic that we are dealing with, there is something in anti-Semitism that distances us considerably from this announced Promise. With the hatred of the Jews, we are rather in the nightmare of a dawn that will bring with it the haunting of what is coming back, of what has never ceased to be there, in one form or another. In other words, and to continue your reasoning, it starts again because it will never have stopped starting. This is also the theme of your beautiful book, Il y a l'antisémitisme , in which you give voice to the language of anti-Semitism, in other words, the political dimension that weaves the phenomena of remanence. I find it very interesting to link "promise" and "haunting", two occurrences that basically hold hands. Every promise carries a risk: that of not being kept, of failing in its task, or in its desire, or in the sense of history which would like us to move towards the peace of nations and the sovereignty of peoples every day, every dawn. A lesson learned, as you know, from Jacques Derrida. The promise is always untimely. It is an insurrection against which we must rise. We always promise too much, or not enough. The promise is therefore based on the structure of the "already-not-yet", because there is no promise without the risk of it being fulfilled too soon or too late. And then, what to do, what response to formulate today, what political and ethical action to initiate if one day, one fine morning, as in the story of Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis where Gregor Samsa wakes up in the skin of a cockroach, we were to wake up with the haunting feeling in our stomachs that we are not finished with antisemitism? This haunting, even obsessive scene is no longer a hypothesis. It is now our daily life. What to do with antisemitism, as Delphine Horvilleur shows very well in Réflexions sur la question antisémite , by shifting the cursor, not on the Jews, but on the antisemites themselves? La Haine des Juif s (The hatred of Jews) is one more stone to be added to this inconstructible edifice because it has already been built at the very heart of the origin, with the ambition to hold the course of philosophical reflection. Nietzsche would have said that anti-Semitism must be ended with a hammer, not with reasoning. But the metaphorical hammer we hold in our hands has led us not to yield to the temptation of speculative or ideological invective. You are right, The Hatred of Jews is a book written in the form of variations: Theme and variations (what is specific antisemitism aimed at?). Of course, it is written in two voices, but there are also, as you have perfectly well heard, mute voices: that of the origin of our civilisation, of course, but also that which speaks of the obscure background of this origin – what Jean-Luc Nancy calls foundation. This obscure background can be said to be "unthinkable", "historic", the negation of radical otherness, self-hatred, and absolute dislike, all of which recur like incantations. The idea was not to question what is unfortunately an obvious fact that some people are doing their best to trivialise. These interviews with Jean-Luc Nancy sought to elucidate, not the phenomenon of antisemitism, but its relentless repetition, as well as what Jean-François Lyotard called in 1988, in his book entitled Heidegger and the Jews , the "foreclosure” (forclusion). This is a completely different approach, for it was not a question of capturing or describing the symptoms that have not failed to reappear in recent years. Rather, it was to question the way in which antisemitism moves on the chessboard of history, taking on different profiles and masks each time, while still holding on to what you call the origin, the foundation. There are root causes of antisemitism, which are rooted in a past that Levinas would say is immemorial. We have tried to explore the crests and thresholds of this immemorial past. It is enough to make you dizzy! What seems to me to be exemplary in Nancy's approach is the way in which he tirelessly digs into the same motif, the same theme, by varying his answers or rather his questioning. On the one hand, the tireless repetition, the obsessive scene of the eternal return of antisemitism, in the quasi-Nietzschean sense of the term; on the other hand, the forclusion, the idea that the phenomenon of remanence rests on an exclusive logic of exclusion: to put an end, not to the antisemitic question, but to the Jewish question. Stéphane Habib : To you, who has regularly and extensively written with and about Jean-Luc Nancy, I would like to ask how you conceive this insistence, in recent years, on anti-Semitism. I say in recent years, but in truth, I have the idea that one could find in him the motive, or even the disturbance in thought caused by this unremovable thing, in the background, for a very long time. On reading it, one might have the impression of a philosophical decision taken by the author of Exclu le juif en nous (Excluded the Jew in Us) to open up something like an uncompromising struggle, without any possible compromise, up to and including language, against the murderous hatred of the Jews that he insists on naming, whatever its variations: anti-Semitism. Did you get this same impression, or is it something else in the general economy of Jean-Luc Nancy's philosophical work? Two other questions come to mind here: a) In this "deconstruction of Christianity" (can you, for those readers who are not familiar with Jean-Luc Nancy's work, say what it is about?) that he was engaged in, was the attack anti-Semitism inevitable? So that one might think that there is no deconstruction of Christianity possible that does not involve the analysis of anti-Semitism? b) As a philosopher who, moreover, has just published an entire book on anti-Semitism with the powerful title L'impardonnable (The Unforgivable), I want to ask you a question: why is philosophy interested in anti-Semitism? Why can or should it be interested in it? What does it mean for philosophy to take on anti-Semitism? And philosophy – but what is it anyway and in this sense? – what does philosophy bring to the table (if you think it does bring anything) not only in the analysis, in the study, but also in the fight against antisemitism? As I ask you these questions, I am reminded that J.-L. Nancy is one of the thinkers who argued that thinking is already acting. In support of this last sentence, which is a little too quick, I would have to quote hundreds of passages from his texts on the subject of politics... I have in mind this one in Que faire ?: What to do? It seems to me that there are, without hesitation, two answers that are necessary and that complement each other. The first is that we must change the question. The second: we are already doing it. Yes, doing it, right here. In writing. Not the writing of a speech, but the practice of a work of thought that is action (I emphasise), that is even the action that we most urgently need – and which, moreover, is already being done in several places, in several writings or several voices. Stéphane Habib ; crédite d’image : Mediapart.fr Danielle Cohen-Levinas : Your questions touch the heart of the matter. I will try to answer them as precisely as possible, starting with what seems to me to be an eloquent starting point as to the fact that Jean-Luc Nancy has given an undeniable philosophical voice to denounce the deep and unacknowledged causes of antisemitism. He has, in a way, summoned the history of philosophy by giving birth to a monster that it had carefully and methodically excluded from its constellations for reasons that remained unthought because they were precisely too rooted in their foundation. If there is a civilisational Leviathan, it is called anti-Semitism . This Leviathan is probably not acting, as in the biblical and Talmudic tradition, in revolt against the creator, but it is acting against creatures, except that, unlike God, we have not yet found the remedy, the pharmakon, that will rid us of this evil. Nancy has shown – and this is an essential point in The Hatred of the Jews – that this monster is always active, insidious, barbaric, ready to pounce on the prey of which anti-Semites would like to remain the eternal victim and scapegoat. Why such an insistence on the work in Nancy's thinking and writing, you ask? I think it would be up to Nancy to answer, although her writings, as you point out very well, bear witness to this insistence, this obstinacy to put the question back on the table, to grapple with it, to not let it have the last word. But I can nevertheless provide an element of response that is not negligible. Jean-Luc Nancy was convinced, in the philosophical sense of the term, that the West is heading for disaster; that if we refuse to face up to its origins, to assume full responsibility for them, to stop relying on magic formulas or irrational forces, or to wait for a salvation that will not come, we will end up excluding ourselves from the very idea of civilisation. The monster will be us! Our becoming Leviathan is in some way underway. But that's not all. Nancy has pushed his analysis very far, and the least we can say is, I really think, that he was right: tragically right. Nancy understood that what was going to destroy the West was anti-Semitism. It's unheard of that a philosopher who was well versed in Augustine, Hegel, Kant, Heidegger, that a Christian philosopher, of a Christianity that is certainly heterodox, even atheistic, with all that this means in terms of its complexity in relation to Judaism, whose first love was theology, was able to formulate such an assertion. It was not his intention, as you will have understood, to activate the fibre of a supposedly repressed guilt – although one can legitimately wonder whether our civilisation is not sick of what it has made itself guilty of without making reparation, on the contrary, by accusing the debt and the malaise. It's a bit like Tartuffe's line to Dorine in Molière's play, if you'll allow me to paraphrase it: "Cover up this anti-Semitism that I can't see, souls are wounded by such things. Our civilisation is full of beautiful souls who would feel offended to be denounced or to be filtered by the philosophical radicalism of Jean-Luc Nancy. Danielle Cohen-Levinas et Jean-Luc Nancy , Athens 2015 ; crédite d’image : https://jeanlucnancy.frenchphilosophy.gr This brings us to the threshold of this origin, of this unthought that must be nailed down before it can even open its mouth. A diversion through Deconstruction of Christianity is necessary. The insistence you speak of was, in my opinion, triggered by the three books that Nancy wrote between 2005 and 2010, namely Deconstruction of Christianity , La Déclosion and L'Adoration . The deconstruction in question is simply the very movement of a Christianity that has generated its own atheism, namely its own reversal. But deconstruction does not mean demolition. Christianity is a monotheism. Here we are at the heart of a performative contradiction that did not escape Nancy's notice, for monotheism is a kind of aleph (as far as I am concerned, I prefer to say beth , as in berechit ), from which the history of our civilisation is illuminated, including therefore the history of anti-Semitism. From there, we enter into the depths of the question. You know the rest. By virtue of a systematic hermeneutic, once the nerve of Christianity and Judeo-Christianity had been touched, it was necessary to go back to its source. The advent of Christianity immediately laid the foundations for what would later unfold in forms that some call anti-Judaism and others anti-Semitism. What are these foundations? First of all, the idea, which is very tenacious, that there is a distinctive Jewish trait, compared to other forms of proven hostility. The Jew would have the ability to overcome and integrate obstacles that would resist his survival and technical mastery. This is an old anti-Semitic cliché, which makes the Jew the prototype of an omnipotence, structural to the project of our civilisation, and this, from the beginning. Now, according to Nancy, the West is caught in the ellipse of an alloy between different characteristics, inherited from other civilisations: Greek logos and Latin technique, to which is added of course Jewish monotheism. According to Nancy, this combination became Christianity on the one hand and imperialism on the other. So, to sum up, you can see how Judaism is an active agent, according to Nancy, through Christianity, in the emergence and constitution of what we call the West, and this, at the very moment when the Greco-Roman world is losing momentum. Stéphane Habib : To conclude, at least very provisionally, I would like to stress that in your book, a questioning runs through the different interviews more or less explicitly, that of the relationship between anti-Judaism and antisemitism. And it seemed to me that there was perhaps a disagreement between you and JLN. Disagreement is too strong a word, no doubt, but JLN's position is firm: there is no anti-Judaism that is not antisemitism. He doesn't put it that way, and perhaps I'm putting it another way, but you can correct me if necessary. This formula has the advantage of making clear JLN's refusal of the theological, historical and philosophical necessity of a difference between these two words. So much so that the word "antisemitism" alone is sufficient for him, including the idea that the West was founded on the exclusion of the Jews. What is very interesting and what inspires me by this refusal is that, at the same time, the Universal must be re-interrogated, what the history of Western thought will have put forward in the name of the Universal on the one hand, and how this Universal will have been constructed by – to put it mildly – exclusion. This is where I see the urgency of articulating the questions that the history of anti-Semitism, postcolonial studies and gender studies are constantly asking, because there is no reflection on these "questions" that is not at the same time a perfectly concrete political struggle. Can you tell us how you, DCL, are approaching this formidable and enormous mass of work, the extent of which we have not finished measuring? Exodus, Marc Chagall, 1952- 1966 ; crédite d’image : Artists Rights Society, New York / ADAGP, Paris Danielle Cohen-Levinas : Let me take my response to your basic questions a little further, and forgive me for the short cuts. From a philosophical point of view, there is no doubt that there are links between Jewish monotheism and Greek logos. Let's remember Emmanuel Levinas' sentence: "We must translate into Greek principles that Greece did not know." Both, Greek logos and even more so Jewish monotheism, do away with gods and the notion of the sacred, in favour of a kind of transcendent unity, of a single, unique and immeasurable God. But whereas Greek logos tends to favour the emancipation of the subject through knowledge, Jewish monotheism responds to a call and asserts itself as heteronomy. Then came Christianity, which sought to synthesise the Greek and the Jewish, by putting God in man and promising man divine life – a return to the "promise", which is no longer quite the one that the biblical God made to Abraham. In fact, Christianity tries to conciliate ( concilier ), perhaps even to reconcile ( reconcilier ), the radical exteriority of the call and the interiority of the emancipatory dynamics of the Greek logos. The stumbling block is there, at this precise point where Christianity stumbles, at each stage of its spiritual and institutional evolution, on this inalienable principle of heteronomy which is the absolute singularity of the Jews. The Jewish exception became not only a problem, but a target that had to be excluded in one way or another. Hence the fact that the philosophical tradition has excluded the Jew in us. It has excluded him from a common belonging without which it would have no legitimacy. The Jew has become the figure of a belonging that does not belong. You can easily imagine the theological-political and geo-political consequences of this supposed non-membership. I believe that it is the movement of the fundamental insecurity raised by the question of belonging and non-belonging, at the very heart of a West that was searching for its full identity, that fascinated Nancy, what he calls "an exclusion included in what thus constitutes itself". This archaeology of Jew-hatred is placed under the sign of the West's internal incompatibility, as much as of its complementarity. Nancy found it necessary to further emphasise the incompatibilities. This is how the Jew ended up taking on all the crimes. This is the huge mass of which you speak, the experience of a world that forcloses identities, peoples, races, religions, the exclusionary thrusts of singularities and minorities, the political and ethical disjunctions. But I must tell you that I am a bit wary of thoughts that make the Jew a figure of non-membership. I think it is urgent to get out of this scheme. Not only is the Jew an integral part of history, but he is a fertile and decisive actor in it. Related Articles "Mais, il n'y a rien en dehors de la philosophie" : Un entretien avec Shaj Mohan SHAJ MOHAN with RACHEL ADAMS Read Article Une autre capacité d'écoute : entretien avec Jean-Luc Nancy JEAN-LUC NANCY with KAMRAN BARADARAN Read Article

Orientalism, Anti-Semitism and the Western “Narcissistic injury” Button 14 January 2023 Button Edward Said Mural; Image credit: palestineposterproject.org Edward Said's Orientalism is one of the classic works of postcolonial studies. In this text we would like to analyse one of the lesser known dimensions of this book. The research of European orientalists produced what Sartre called a "counter-finality": the more Europeans wanted to know the Orient, the more the originality of Western culture was relativised by these discoveries, to the point of producing a "narcissistic injury" of the Western ""ideal ego". It is in this "narcissistic wound" that we should find one of the causes of anti-Semitism and of the anti-democratic policies of the French and German extreme right. How many books are there in a book? How many fundamental theses can one detect within a great work? This is the risk of the magnum opus for an author: to produce a work so complex and dense that its “latent content” can be hidden through a “manifest content”, as Freud and psychoanalysis have proved. This situation, which can be found among some first-rate intellectuals, was also that of Edward W. Said (1935-2003), in our opinion. Indeed, this great American-Palestinian literary theorist is known worldwide as the author of Orientalism , (1) which is a book with an international reputation for more than four decades. An intellectual event at the time of its release in 1978, which was immediately widely read and commented. Nevertheless, some of the essential ideas of this book are still partially unknown nowadays. There are essential truths and analyses within this essay that can help us to think the human history, and these have not yet been fully deciphered. One of the most important truths that Edward W. Said shows in this book, and one that has not been visibly the most commented upon, is his analysis of the ambiguous participation of nineteenth-century Orientalist philology in the relativization of the centrality of the West. Why do we immediately say that this relativization is ambiguous? It is indeed ambiguous in its relation to Western knowledge as power . (2) Orientalist philology, of which Ernest Renan is one of the main actors in France, is obviously a science that owes its birth to European colonialism, like anthropology of that time. On this point there is no doubt for the author. And Said very precisely shows how the study of the different oriental languages participated in the creation of the “oriental” subject (3) by European science. More importantly, the theorist demonstrates how the epistemological creation of this subject of study is the political condition of possibility for the subjugation, and thus, the serfdom of Eastern peoples by European colonialism. As Edward Said notes, the Orient is not simply a matter of geography. On the contrary: “the Orient is an idea that has a history, and a tradition of thought, imagery and vocabulary that have given it reality and presence in and for the West”. (4) In this sense, we can say with the author that Orientalist philology in the 19th century is indeed a science of domination. This is how the Europeans used it, and this is its political purpose. In spite of that, we can observe to what extent the discovery and study of Oriental languages are very problematic for Westerners in view of what this science reveals . The object discovered by Orientalism is certainly disappointing to a European colonialist thought. It is probable that the study of the languages of the East had no other purpose than its colonization by Europe, but what these sciences discovered is a typical case of “counter-finality”, (5) as Sartre theorised. As an ideological production, orientalist philology is certainly a colonial science, but as a scientific production (i.e., as a discovery of truths), this same philology brings to light historical facts that are more than destabilizing for European thought, and for its aspiration to world hegemony. It is in this sense that we can speak of an ambiguous relativization of the West. Orientalist philology manages to realize this paradox that a European imperialist discourse is based on the discoveries of a science, despite the fact that its discoveries refute the primordial aspect, and therefore superior, of European culture on the Eastern world. And if it is only a question of anteriority of cultural, artistic and intellectual development, philology proves exactly the opposite. We can thus say that Orientalist philology must be considered as one of those “narcissistic injury” that the West has suffered, like the discoveries of Copernicus, Darwin and Freud, as the latter explains in the Introduction to Psychoanalysis . (6) Since the publication of Friedrich Schlegel's On the Language and Wisdom of the India in 1808 and Jean-François Champollion's Précis du système hiéroglyphique des anciens Egyptiens in 1824, Europeans discovered the relativity of their Judeo-Christian and Greco-Roman antiquity. This Hebrew and Greek antiquity, which was for the Europeans of the 19th century the source of the sources, the double source of their culture, appears suddenly as quite modern and recent compared to the antiquity of the Egyptian and Indian cultures, and the degree of cultural richness that they have reached. And it is precisely in these two cultures, Egyptian and Indian, that we find the deep origins of the West. In other words, philology discovers that there is in Egypt and India a much more ancient antiquity than the Hebrew and Greek antiquity. Moreover, this science even finds out that the Hebrew and Greek antiquity are only the late descendants of the Egyptian and Indian cultures. Hebrew is indeed a child of Egypt, since monotheism was first invented by Akhenaten, and is much earlier than Judaism. (7) Greece, for its part, is the descendant of an Indo-European cultural constellation, which experienced its first great flowering with the Indian culture, and with Sanskrit as its language. Europe sees its ancient foundation story disappearing, both in time and space. It loses its filiation. Its foundation is actually more archaic than Europe believed, and it is not where Europe imagined it to be from. It is neither in Athens nor in Jerusalem, but on the banks of the Nile and the Ganges, in Africa and Asia. Colonialist Europe, which “by the end of the World War I had colonized 85% of the earth”, (8) discovers that it is certainly not an autonomous cultural power (both Judeo-Christian and Greco-Roman), but on the contrary that it is only a late offspring of Asia and Africa which are being colonized by it. If the discoveries of Orientalist philology demonstrate that Europe was not the only daughter of Athens and Jerusalem, should we not see in this revelation the origin of the burning fascist desire to destroy what these two civilisations were able to bring to the Old Continent: namely, the idea of the universal and democracy? The discovery of Sanskrit, for example, totally refutes the primordial aspect of the Hebrew language. In a society marked by almost 2000 years of Christianity, it is not surprising that this is a shock. (9) Hebrew and Greek are, after all, the two languages of the Old and New Testaments : the two languages in which God expressed himself, according to the European imagination. And these two languages (along with Latin, of course) are the ones on which Renaissance Humanism was built. Not only does Hebrew no longer appear as the origin of Europe as a language (Hebrew can no longer be perceived as the mother tongue, the language of languages, or even the Edenic language), but it also no longer appears as the primary source of theology, since the Indian Veda is at least as rich and complex as the Torah , and it is much older. Similarly, the Upanishads (10) are a great philosophical thought, just as speculative as the works of the pre-Socratics, Plato and Aristotle. Moreover, the Arabic and Semitic philology of the nineteenth century strongly relativizes the exceptionality of ancient Hebrew, and places it in a long history of Semitic languages, which begins long before it in Mesopotamia with Akkadian and Babylonian, and continues well beyond in modern Arabic. The same applies to the Indo-European sources of ancient Greek. It is thus a radical shift that is taking place, in space and time, and it is turning eastwards. Although China is also a very ancient civilisation (contemporary with the Egyptian civilisation), it nevertheless has a cultural continuity up to the present day, at least in its ideograms. (11) Conversely, with Orientalist philology, Europe discovered that what it had taken to be its roots were not, that its roots had a much more distant and much older origin. These new discovered roots are so distant and ancient that it shared them in part with other civilisations which, until then, had seemed absolutely foreign to it: the Arab-Muslim world, the Indian subcontinent, and even South-East Asia, which was itself a child to a large extent of Buddhist India and Islam. With the birth of philology, Europe was forced to change its ancestry. The origin of Europe is no longer in Europe at all, but in two continents that have been colonized by it. It has to relativize the myth of its Greco-Hebrew foundation, on which it had been structured for nearly 2000 years, and discover that its real parentage is to be found among completely different, and previously poorly known, peoples, notably India. This is where we can speak of a “counter-finality” in Sartre's sense. We can agree with Said that European orientalists wanted to prove the superiority of Western culture by studying Eastern languages. It remains to be analysed to what extent this objective was a conscious or unconscious project for each author. However, the scientific truth that this Orientalist philology has discovered not only refutes this alleged Western superiority, but it also refutes the very idea of Western cultural autonomy. Europe is not a self-founding civilisation, but a daughter of the East, or rather its youngest child. (12) Qur'an manucripts in Kufic script, Iran, late 11th century CE; Image credit: Wikimedia We can understand why Edward Said sees Orientalism as one of the intellectual sources of European antisemitism. Since European culture does not have its principal origin in Hebrew, but in Sanskrit, Jewish culture is then perceived by a part of the reactionary European intelligentsia as an allogenous Middle Eastern culture. It was this reactionary theory, particularly in Germany, that produced racial anti-Semitism, its cult of the Aryan – a strange time when German nationalists thought of themselves as ancient Iranians – and precisely that led to Nazism. The Nazi cult of the swastika, a Hindu symbol, is emblematic of this fact. The history of this Germanic anti-Semitism is sadly well known, and no one is unaware of its tragic consequences, such as the outbreak of the Second World War and the extermination of the European Jews by the Nazi Third Reich. (13) But we must also think of the more specifically French double antisemitism analysed by Said, which is found in a paradigmatic way in Renan, (14) and which is often forgotten. It is a hostility displayed towards these two Semitic peoples who are equally despised by French Orientalists, namely antisemitism against the foreigner from within, the Jew, and antisemitism against the foreigner from without, the Arab, and in particular the Algerian who was colonized by France since 1830. We can speak of a double antisemitism because it is indeed the Semitic aspect of the language that is invoked, both in the contempt for both Jewish and Arab cultures. Thus, in France antisemitism is twofold, and this is its specificity. It justifies the anti-Jewish hatred of Drumont and anti-Dreyfusism as much as the massacres of Marshal Bugeaud in Algeria. It leads in one direction to Marshal Pétain's collaboration with Nazism and the Vel' d'Hiv' round-up of Jews, and in the other direction to the massacres of Sétif and the Algerian War. The hatred of peoples considered Oriental (European Jews and North African Arab-Berbers) was justified by the same devaluation of Semitic-speaking peoples, opposed to European culture, which was then set in motion by the very discoveries of this discipline. This is one of the essential truths that Said's Orientalism allows us to understand, but which still seems barely perceptible to many of our contemporaries. This double logic justified what Sartre called colonial “overexploitation” (15) of the Maghrebi Arabs, and led to Vichy's participation in the extermination of the European Jews. This orientalization of these two peoples, by which collective stereotypes are attributed to the populations according to their languages and the linguistic families to which these languages belong, is all the more an ideological deception since the European Jews did not use Hebrew as a language of communication at the time. Ancient Hebrew was a sacred language, and secular life was lived in secular languages. Thus, most of the life of the European Jews was expressed either in the national languages of the European peoples where they lived as a minority, or in the languages of the Europeans Jews, which are all Indo-European languages. Yiddish is a Germanic language, Judesmo (Judeo-Spanish, also called Tetuani or Haketiya) is a Latin language, as are Bagitto (language of the Jews of Tuscany) and Shuadit (language of the Jews of Occitania). Yevanic (language of the Greek Jews) is related to the other Hellenic languages. Similarly, if Maghrebi Arabic is indeed a Semitic language, one cannot deny the presence of Tamazight (Berber) languages in this cultural space, and the influence of these languages on Maghrebi dialectal Arabic; dialectal Arabic is the one in which people live, unlike classical Arabic, the sacred language of the Koran . Orientalist philology must be considered as one of those “narcissistic injury” that the West has suffered, like the discoveries of Copernicus, Darwin and Freud The terrible consequences of this hatred of Semitic languages, and by extension of the peoples who bear them, become clear to us. If we try to grasp what the German and French extreme right have in common, between an ideological movement that produced Nazism on the one hand and Petainism on the other, should we not reanalyse the trauma in the narcissistic construction of Europe that was discovered by Orientalist philology? Is there not in this Orientalist ideology an acknowledgement, as well as a terrible denial, of the relativity of European culture? Is it not in this Western “narcissistic injury”, questioning its identity by questioning its genealogy, that we must find both the source of European anti-Semitism and its hatred for Greek rationality, (16) the hatred of logos , and its modern incarnation in the philosophy of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution? Are not Nazism and Petainism the product of hatred of the Jewish religion and Greek rationality considered then as a devalued ancestry, a filiation that must be erased, cultures, that if they are not at the origin of all that is Europe, then deserve to be reduced to nothing? If the discoveries of Orientalist philology demonstrate that Europe was not the only daughter of Athens and Jerusalem, should we not see in this revelation the origin of the burning fascist desire to destroy what these two civilisations were able to bring to the Old Continent: namely, the idea of the universal and democracy? The complexity of the origins of European fascism is, of course, too extensive to be reduced to this mere civilisational and linguistic fact, but it is certain that the discoveries of Orientalist philology have had their part to play. Thanks to Said's Orientalism , we can understand one of the determining, and so far relatively unsuspected, cultural causes of European fascism and antisemitism. The Western “narcissistic injury” produced by the discovery of the languages and cultures of Eastern antiquity is one of the causes of the “mass” (17) psychosis of Fascism, especially its German and French versions. The relativisation of Western identity by its own science was not bearable for the “ego ideal” (18) that Europe had been forging for centuries. Moreover, we can see to what extent the identity of traditional Europe, turned upside down by its encounter with the East, is an effect of languages of which it was itself the initiator. The discovery of ancient Egyptian, Mesopotamian languages, and even more so of Sanskrit, was the source of a cultural trauma from which the West has not recovered without pain. But this can hardly surprise us: no one emerges unscathed from his encounter with the Other, the other language, the other culture. And as Jean Baudrillard reminds us, it is “in the very light of all that has been undertaken to exterminate it”, to deny its real or symbolic existence, that “the indestructibility of the Other, and therefore the indestructible fatality of Otherness, becomes clear.” (19) NOTES 1. Edward Said, Orientalism . New-York : Pantheon books, 1978. 2. Said, Orientalism , p. 12. 3. Said, Orientalism , p. 12. 4. Said, Orientalism , p. 5. 5. “Counter-finality” is a concept from the Critique of Dialectical Reason ( Critique de la raison dialectique ), which is developed in the famous passage on “Chinese deforestation”. Through this concept, Sartre describes a situation where a conscious collective project, with a clear and precise purpose, produces consequences that are strictly opposed to the initial objectives of its actors. Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique de la Raison dialectique , T.1, Théorie des ensembles pratiques . Paris : Editions Gallimard, 1985, p. 334 6. Sigmund Freud, Introduction à la psychanalyse . Paris : Payot, 2001, p. 343-344. 7. We are of course thinking of Sigmund Freud's last great book, Moses and Monotheism , and its main thesis: the Jewish people are children of Egypt. If this thesis is debatable from a literal point of view, because the time of monotheistic Egypt and the time of the writing of the Torah are several centuries apart, it is no less true if we think of it in terms of the history of ideas over the long term. And it is precisely on this time scale that Orientalist discoveries are issued. Sigmund Freud, L’homme Moïse et la religion monothéiste . Paris : Payot, 2014. 8. Said, Orientalism , p. 123. 9. Thus, using Nietzsche's famous expression, we can say that the discovery of Eastern Antiquity, and the relativisation of Judeo-Christian religion that it induces, contributes to the “death of God” in the West. 10. We know, of course, that the Upanishads are themselves part of the Vedas . More precisely, they are the last element of this theological-philosophical canon. Nevertheless, the Upanishads are traditionally considered as a qualitative leap in Hindu religious thought. They conclude the Vedas and, at the same time, they develop a real theoretical conceptualization, which has fascinated Western philosophy for a long time, especially that of Arthur Schopenhauer. 11. On the multisecular roots of Chinese civilisation, I refer to Chine trois fois muette ( China three times mute ) by Jean-François Billeter, and more particularly to the second chapter of this work. Jean-François Billeter. Chine trois fois muette . Paris : Editions Allia, 2010. 12. It would be wrong to separate the East from the West from a merely cultural point of view. Not only do we know from Said how much the West is a child of the East, but we also know from Christian Jambet (Christian Jambet, Qu’est-ce que la philosophie islamique ? . Paris : Editions Gallimard, 2011, p. 98-99) how culturally Greek the Muslim East is, as Greek as Europe in fact. We also know that Arab-Persian philosophy and science were constantly discussed throughout the European Middle Ages, and that this knowledge from the Muslim world often dominated European thought. We can think for example of Avicenna's medicine, which was the model for medicine in Europe for centuries. We also know that there have always been Muslims in Europe (Arab Andalusia, Ottoman Empire of Europe) and Christians in the Near East (Copts of Egypt, Levantines, etc.). Once all these facts are established, we understand that what radically separates the West from the Arab-Muslim East is not a culture, which is in any case partly common (with Greek thought and Abrahamic monotheism), nor is it a set of social representations. What radically differentiates the West from the East is the birth of modern society during the Renaissance, that is to say, the emergence of industry and capitalism. There is a West that is separate from the East because Europe has been considerably torn off from the Mediterranean world from which it originated, through the colonisation of America and the emergence of industrial capitalism. In other words, there is a West and an East, because Europe has partially separated itself from the Mediterranean space it shared with Muslim countries in order to conquer and develop its transatlantic space, a sine qua non condition for the domination of the rest of the world. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels had already stated, in the first pages of The Communist Manifesto , that the colonisation of America is one of the necessary conditions for the emergence of Western industrial capitalism (Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Manifeste du Parti communiste . Paris : EJL, 1998, p. 26). 13. On the origin of European anti-Semitism, from the Middle Ages to the end of the 19th century, we refer to our study: “Friedrich Engels and his Critique of Anti-Semitism”, published in the journal Gruppen n° 3 (Pierre-Ulysse Barranque, “Friedrich Engels et sa critique de l’antisémitisme”. Gruppen , n°3, 2011). On the origin of Nazism more specifically, we refer to our article on Wilhelm Reich's The Mass Psychology of Fascism : “Wilhelm Reich and the Missing Revolution. Thinking the interwar period with Marx and Freud”, published in the journal Contretemps , (Pierre-Ulysse Barranque, “Wilhelm Reich et la Révolution absente. Penser l’entre-deux-guerres avec Marx et Freud”. Contretemps . 2017 https://www.contretemps.eu/reich-revolution-absente/ ). 14. Said, Orientalism , p. 123-148. 15. Jean-Paul Sartre, Situations , X. Paris : Editions Gallimard, 1976, p. 9-10 16. We are familiar with the theses of Johan Chapoutot, who correctly proved in Le National-socialisme et l'Antiquité ( National-Socialism and Antiquity ) that the Third Reich imagined itself to be a child of ancient Greece, itself reinterpreted as one of the stages of a thousand-year-old history of mythical Aryans. But this fact does not oppose our thesis, but rather reinforces it. For what ancient Greece did Nazism claim to be? Certainly not the Athenian democracy and the equality of speech that it confers on all citizens (the famous isegoria ). Athenian egalitarianism is perceived by Hitlerism as an “Asian” decadence, which in future centuries will give rise to Enlightenment thinking, and then to the French Revolution. Pétainism and Nazism shared the same obsession with erasing 1789, even to the point of abandoning the term “ République ” (“Republic”), replaced by the term “ Etat français ” (“French State”) under Pétain, and the symbolic abandonment of the French revolutionary motto: “ Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité ” (“Liberty, Equality, Fraternity”), transformed into “ Travail, Famille, Patrie ” (“Work, Family, Homeland”). Despite the well-known historical limits of the Athenian democracy where the majority of the population were not citizens (but women, slaves, or metics), its claimed political egalitarianism is already too much for European fascisms. Similarly, the universal equality of the human condition in the face of a single God, which is at the heart of Judeo-Christianity, is unacceptable to Nazism. It should be noted that this Nazi hatred of Greek logos reaches the level of unintentional farce when an ideologue like Alfred Rosenberg defines Socrates as the “internationalist social democrat of his time” and Stoicism as a philosophy “of Semitic origin” (Johan Chapoutot, Le National-socialisme et l’Antiquité . Paris : PUF, 2008, p. 306-307). 17. With this expression, we are obviously referring to The Mass Psychology of Fascism by psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich. We refer once again to our article dedicated to this fundamental author: Pierre-Ulysse Barranque, “Wilhelm Reich et la Révolution absente. Penser l’entre-deux-guerres avec Marx et Freud”. 18. We can also note that Freud was fully aware of this collective dimension of the psychological “ego ideal”. Indeed, he wrote in 1914, in On Narcissism : “the ego ideal opens up an important avenue for the understanding of group psychology. In addition to its individual side, this ideal has a social side, it is also the common ideal of a family, a class or a nation” (Sigmund Freud, On Metapsychology : The Theory of Psychoanalysis , Volume 11. London : The Pelican Freud Library, p. 96), and we would add: of a civilisation such as Western civilisation. We can notice that in the German original version, it is not the expression of “group psychology” that is used by Freud, but the concept of “ Massenpsychologie ” (Sigmund Freud, Zur Einführung des Narzsissmus . Leipzig/Wien/Zürich : Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag,1924, p. 54). We know this concept will be central for his disciple Wilhelm Reich. 19. Jean Baudrillard, La Transparence du Mal, Essai sur les phénomènes extrêmes . Paris : Editions Gallilée, 1990, p. 151. Translated by the author. Related Articles Related Article 1 Author Name Read Post Related Article 1 Related Article 1 Read Post