FRÉDÉRIC NEYRAT Frédéric Neyrat is a philosopher, who has been exploring the territory of what he calls "radical existentialism through writing and images. He is an associate professor in the Department of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he also holds a chair in "planetary humanities. Neyrat hosts the electronic platform Alienocene and has recently published L’Ange Noir de l’Histoire : Cosmos et technique de l’Afrofuturisme (MF Editions, 2021), Literature and Materialisms (Routledge, 2020), Échapper à l’horreur: Traité des interruptions merveilleuses (Lignes, 2017), and La Part inconstructible de la Terre : Critique du géo-constructivisme (Seuil, 2016).

GABRIEL GOLDER Gabriel Golder was born in Buenos Aires in 1971. An artist, professor, researcher, and independent curator, she is also director of CONTINENTE, a research centre in audiovisual art at the Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero, and of the Bienal de la Imagen en Movimiento (BIM). She is curator of the video & experimental film program at the Buenos Aires Museo de Arte Moderno. Her videos, films, and installations — for which she has won several awards and grants — have been presented at numerous exhibition venues and festivals around the world. Golder’s work, a scrupulous witness to political, social, and economic developments in contemporary Argentina, explores metaphorically the concepts of collective memory, identity, and rights. Some of her works can be found at www.gabrielagolder.com and www.bim.com.ar

The question of the end of philosophy is essentially the question of its self-narration and construction as “western” or “continental”, and in that it is a political question which resonates with other such movements in the academia. Philosophy is Dead – Long Live Philosophy! DANIEL J. SMITH 7 October 2022 PHILOSOPHY Aérophone Bambara, Institut d'ethnologie de Strasbourg; Image credit: Wikimedia Commons. The question of the end of philosophy is essentially the question of its self-narration and construction as “western” or “continental”, and in that it is a political question which resonates with other such movements in the academia. The discussions following the publication of the texts by Jean-Luc Nancy, Divya Dwivedi and Shaj Mohan show that without an enquiry into the ways in which such histories were constituted in the recent past a way out of the crisis of philosophy will not appear. The “geopolitics” which has seized and made use of this recent occidentalized history of philosophy can be opposed by politically aware de-canonization, practicing philosophy without tradition, and raising alternative thought forms including “Bambara thought”. 1 Continental philosophy is in crisis. With the last few decades spent mainly on a “great figures” approach, this tradition is having to come to terms with the fact that most of its luminaries have now passed away. Derrida’s death in 2004 sent shockwaves through the community and seems to have functioned as marker for the generation before my own (I was not yet an undergraduate when it happened). For the rest of us, 2021 will have been a huge year as it marked the loss of Jean-Luc Nancy, one of the few remaining giants of this tradition who was engaged in the task of thinking to the very end. A friend of mine recently ran a seminar with the title “contemporary continental philosophy” in which every single author on the reading list was dead. A strange understanding of “contemporary”! The course was well-received and I have no doubt the students learned a lot, but it illustrates the scale of the problem we face. At some point, the great sequence that began in France in the 1960s will have to be thought of as another period in the history of philosophy, but our tradition does not seem ready to make that transition just yet. For this to happen, philosophy may first have to take another step, or make another beginning. But it is not only the literal death of its protagonists that indicates trouble ahead. There is another sense in which this tradition risks metaphorically dying in the contemporary intellectual climate, and this sense is already indicated by the moniker “continental philosophy”. It is assumed to be so obvious which continent is being referred to that it need not even be named; everyone is supposed to know that it could only be Europe. I cannot see how it will be possible for this tradition to open itself up to the tasks of thinking today – which involve, increasingly, global problems – while retaining a name that practically declares a European superiority. Students have no time for this, even here in the West; enrolment in these courses is down in proportion to others, but I am convinced this has to do with the title more than the content, which seems to resonate with young people as well as ever. I have always preferred the name “European philosophy” because it at least says what it means, rather than smugly assuming that the reader shares its view of Europe as the continent that need not be named; but it still obviously remains a limitation for those of us who would like this line of thinking to become less parochially European. To keep this tradition alive, to stop it from becoming history prematurely, we urgently need a new name (the usual, too-easy trick of referring to a “post-continental” philosophy obviously won’t do). The idea of “the West”, Dwivedi reminds us, “is a very recently invented fact”, and even the idea of philosophy as having a Greek birthplace is only a couple of hundred years old, virtually unknown before the late eighteenth century. Some of this, to be sure, results from the way in which continental philosophy has inherited a very particular story about philosophy from the great German traditions in the history of philosophy that came before it. In their contributions to this discussion, Nancy, Dwivedi, and Mohan have all emphasized Heidegger’s importance in setting up a certain account of philosophy’s past that has proven surprisingly durable within post-Heideggerian continental philosophy. Elements of this conception are clearly linked to geo-political considerations that seem to have persisted in spite of our strong critiques of Heidegger’s politics, such as the supposed special connection between Germany and ancient Greece, or the construction of a conception of “Western European thinking” that risks becoming a monolith, not doing justice to all the dissenting or minor traditions it holds within itself, never mind those that come from other parts of the world it does not consider. The idea of “the West”, Dwivedi reminds us, “is a very recently invented fact”, and even the idea of philosophy as having a Greek birthplace is only a couple of hundred years old, virtually unknown before the late eighteenth century. (1) It was certainly foreign to the Greeks themselves, who tended to emphasise their own continuity with previous thinkers, even “barbarian” ones about whom they could be quite disparaging. (2) We should not assume, then, that overcoming this influence will be an easy task. Just as continental philosophy has been declaring its own end ever since Hegel, as Nancy reminds us (3) , it has also been declaring, just as insistently, a break with Heidegger. This has taken many forms: the transformation of Destruktion into deconstruction (Derrida), a felt need to escape the “climate” of his thinking (Levinas), the necessity that Being and Time be rewritten from the standpoint of our being-with one another (Nancy). These were all attempts to twist free of Heidegger’s influence, but in the spirit of what is best in continental philosophy they did so by being engaging and creative works of philosophy in their own right. If continental philosophy has been “held hostage” by Heidegger’s corpus, as our editorial suggests, then the task is not merely to criticise it – after all, it has received its fair share of criticism by now! – but instead to make the attempt to begin again, under our new and very different conditions. 2 But it is not only Heidegger. Other philosophers, especially German ones, have played an important part in this construction of an unduly limited version of what we understand philosophy to be. Though Hegel has been an antagonist to so many in this tradition, his developmental tale of the history of philosophy – a kind of Bildungsroman of thinking that culminates in philosophy’s end or completion in the distinctive sense in which he understands it – has also played a significant role in shaping both the illustrious names that populate our conception of the history of philosophy and its rather limited geography. Though their accounts have a very different valence, to the point where they are often described as mirror images of one another (the sunny optimism of Hegelian progress compared with gloomy Heideggerian visions of abandonment and decline) the stories they tell are not as dissimilar as one might expect given the vast differences in theory. The geography is virtually unchanged, the list of mighty names almost the same. And in fact, if one looks over to our friends in analytic philosophy – a tradition born out of a reaction against Hegel, and in which Heidegger’s history of philosophy has had close to zero influence – we see a surprisingly similar list of main characters. Peter Park’s Africa, Asia, and the History of Philosophy illustrates this through a wonderfully jarring juxtaposition. Pointing to one of Heidegger’s more notorious pronouncements about the alleged tautology of the phrase “Western European Philosophy” and its supposed birth in pre-Socratic Greece, he notes that if one opens Bertrand Russell’s History of Philosophy – perhaps the most influential, certainly the most famous work of this genre from the analytic tradition – one will read there, too, that “philosophy begins with Thales”. (4) It would be hard to overstate the chasm that separates the two philosophers, Heidegger and Russell, and how they understand the task of a history of philosophy. And yet the geography, and even some of the founding myths are the same. As Mohan points out, the laden notion of “Greek” is already an imposition bound up in some way with the worst of German politics (“the Greeks never knew themselves as Greeks”, he writes), and it is anyway a nation-statist fiction to refer to the pre-Socratics this way, since they hailed from all across the eastern Mediterranean. (5) From the “Anastasis of Philosophy” seminar series held at École Normale Supérieure, Paris, Paul-Antoine Miquel Philosopher, Maël Montévil, Shaj Mohan, and Michel Bitbol; Image credit: Philosophy World Democracy. If Nietzsche’s madman were to be reborn today, and ran out into one of the major North American conferences in search of philosophy, his cry would be: “philosophy is dead, and we have killed it, you and I. All of us here are its murderers.” As philosophically seductive as these constructions of the history of philosophy have been for post-Hegelian, post-Nietzschean, and post-Heideggerian continental philosophy, they must be allowed to die so philosophy may live. Here is Mohan: “if the concept of history and the history of philosophy constructed under it are contaminated by geo-politics, then that philosophy must be allowed to end”; Dwivedi: “This construction of ‘philosophy’s beginning’ formed the durable condition, not for philosophy, but for a recent, approximately three hundred year old auto-bio-graphy for philosophy established in certain philosophers’ texts. It is one that has also, as it should have much earlier, arrived at its end”; and Janardhanan: “philosophy under the influence of geopolitics should be allowed to have its own ‘euthanasia’.” (6) This is not a call to “cancel” Plato, say, or Leibniz, whatever that might be imagined to mean, but to abandon an over-simplifying narrative about philosophy and “the West” that has been allowed to persist long past its expiration date. To speak in Deleuze’s idiom, it is the call for a deterritorialisation of philosophy. 3 Do these looming problems portend the imminent demise of philosophy as such? Not at all! Philosophy is not going anywhere – of that we can be sure. It may face threats, even severe ones, to its current form of existence in the university setting: budgets may be cut, departments may close, but this hardly constitutes a death sentence for it. Much of what truly merits the venerable name of “philosophy” today – involving, as Heidegger puts it in the essay whose re-reading sparked this debate, a “transformation of thinking” rather than a mere “propositional statement about a matter at stake” (7) – already takes place outside of the officially sanctioned, appropriately credentialised spaces we call departments of philosophy. These places are as much subject to the technical imperatives that increasingly rule over the whole world than any other workplace. Much of what comes out of them, as Dwivedi points out, already takes on an “industrial essence”; the production of articles as an assembly line in which each worker is supposed to consider just one tiny part of the whole. (8) While students retain some freedom to be carried along the meandering paths of thinking, their teachers, for the most part, must follow the paths laid out for them by the competitive neoliberal university. Everyone knows that the major institutions of the current system – extractive for-profit publishers, tenure, anonymous peer review, the exploitation of a disempowered and increasingly disillusioned teaching workforce – are not fit for purpose. Those who take “philosopher” as their job title are not always those best placed to carry out original thinking today. As philosophically seductive as these constructions of the history of philosophy have been for post-Hegelian, post-Nietzschean, and post-Heideggerian continental philosophy, they must be allowed to die so philosophy may live. Here is Mohan: “if the concept of history and the history of philosophy constructed under it are contaminated by geo-politics, then that philosophy must be allowed to end”. But in spite of these many little deaths, philosophy lives on. The question, for those of us who still see themselves as part of this tradition in some sense, is what we should do with ourselves in this funereal period of transition in which the older vision is being laid to rest. Nancy’s text expresses a frustration, even a flash of anger at the current state of philosophy, and he does not spare even apparently well-meaning attempts that have been made to take a different direction. At their worst, recent attempts to revitalise philosophy have been mere repetitions of banalities that everybody already knows: “good words are given out about an ideal – a better, more rational humanity, more open to all and to everyone”; “violence and injustice are condemned, egoism is condemned, and the common good or being-in-common must be rethought”. (9) Who could disagree with any of that? But if attempts to resurrect philosophy rest on nice-sounding but commonplace principles that everyone agrees with when enunciated at this maximal level of abstraction, then they are not the transformative thinking they think themselves to be but a mere moralizing, the “lukewarm waters of common sense.” We’ve all seen it; today, everybody claims to be revolutionizing philosophy, and yet more often than not the revolutionary programme involves nothing more than restating ideas that we all agree with and have heard a hundred times before. This is in part a result of the technical imperatives just mentioned: the easiest way to crank out peer-reviewed articles is to follow the crowd, and right now the crowd likes the language and aesthetics of revolutionary self-criticism. At their best, though, some of the trends in recent philosophy that Nancy alludes to seem to me more interesting and worthwhile than this. Though I quite agree that what goes under names like “philosophy of management” can be the worst kind of ideology masquerading as philosophy, I am not as confident that there is no such thing as “Bambara philosophy”; or at least, I would not put these tendencies together. (10) Whether or not one uses terms like “philosophy”, “metaphysics”, or “religion” to describe this thinking – and there are serious questions about the appropriateness or inappropriateness of each of these words in which their very sense is at stake – it raises real questions about the cosmos and our place in it, the nature of creation (unfinished, according to this tradition), the presence of the dead in the world of the living, the threefold division of all beings into “mute inanimates”, “immobile inanimates”, and “mobile animates”, and so on. We know that Modern European philosophy is overwhelmingly born out of the experience of European monotheisms (including atheism); the coming deterritorialization of philosophy will inevitably destabilise some of its inherited concepts, distinctions, and schema. For example, Bambara philosophy or Bambara thinking – an oral tradition that has preferred to remain one – involves a sustained meditation on the relationship between speech and writing, but in a completely different sense than it has had within Western metaphysics, even that version of it which has passed through deconstruction. (11) Whether or not one calls this “philosophy” does not seem to me the most pressing issue; this thinking raises questions that are of abiding interest to the philosopher, and the same cannot be said of the so-called philosophy of management, business ethics or whatever else it may be, which degrade the name of philosophy whenever they call it in to dignify the latest dressed up justifications of capitalist exploitation. So: change is in the air, and yet it has proven much easier to noisily declare oneself in favor of it than it has been to actually bring it about. It is nothing to philosophy to critique itself, even strongly: that has been a central part of its self-definition since Kant if not earlier. But to bring about a genuinely transformative rupture in thinking – well, that is not so easy! Whatever comes next must be up to the task, equal in its speculative daring to the Heideggerian, Hegelian, even Derridean accounts it is trying to move past. These are the stakes of formulations like “another beginning” or “anastasis of philosophy”; one should never predict what the results will be, but the ambition is there, the problem well-posed. 4 What characteristics may we expect, then, from this philosophy of the future? Coming out of a period like the one we have just been through, my sense is that we will see a tremendous eclecticism, in which we will hear about many more “minor” figures than was typical of the previous sequence. At its worst, this will involve a continuation of all the bad characteristics of the mediatized “reign of opinion” criticized by Nancy. We are already seeing, for example, the rehabilitation of high Tory, monarchist early modern women philosophers in the name of inclusivity; this is the mirror of a media culture in which the late queen Elizabeth II can be celebrated as an “example and expectation to generations of women and girls, helping us move to a world where opportunity opens for many more”. (12) That’s right: the hereditary monarchy is a symbol of opportunity! But at its best, this mass project that philosophy is currently undertaking will unearth more of the countless hidden treasures that lie buried within the archives, and which have indeed been unjustly ignored for all the reasons we are familiar with. Some will turn out to be fool’s gold and not worth the trouble, but that is an inevitable part of any process of decanonisation and recanonisation. It is not a bad problem to have, so long as we are willing to put in the work and be patient with one another. As this process continues to unfold, young philosophers will feel less and less need to legitimate their interest in non-canonical works by comparing them to established classics. We have come out on the other side of a period where one had to justify an interest in Fanon, say, by comparing him to a Sartre or a Merleau-Ponty; today, students are as likely to say that they are interested in Sartre and Merleau-Ponty because they are trying to understand Fanon. Instead of emphasizing the similarities between the less known and the more known philosopher, one tends to hear more today about their differences, which seems to me to mark a step in the right direction. It is not especially philosophically interesting to hear that some non-canonical figure writing in the Mediaeval period says some things that are similar to Aristotle, for example. If they are just saying the same things as The Philosopher – someone whose central place in any future canon is unassailable – then why the need to read their work at all? Much more philosophically interesting are the differences; that way, one gets to what is genuinely unique and new about the ideas of the unfamiliar name. Just as continental philosophy has been declaring its own end ever since Hegel, as Nancy reminds us, it has also been declaring, just as insistently, a break with Heidegger. One of the worst aspects of the old, dying standard story is the way it tried to corral all philosophers into a series of set positions – empiricist or rationalist, materialist or idealist, realist or anti-realist – that were fully laid out in advance. This classificatory endeavor, more reminiscent of Linnaean taxonomy than philosophy, actually prevents readers from having a philosophical encounter with the texts, since it determines in advance not only all the questions they might pose, but also all the answers that may legitimately be given. Like Borges’s Library of Babel, all possible thoughts must already exist somewhere, hidden in the unthinking grid itself, waiting to be discovered; the model of philosophical progress is filling out the empty squares in logical space. A particularly maddening example of this tendency is a series of surveys carried out by the social media platform PhilPeople, in which they asked a long list of questions about longstanding philosophical issues, listed the standard answers to them, and then reported how professional philosophers employed by Anglophone philosophy departments answered by percentage. (13) We learn, for example, that 46% of philosophers think the principle of sufficient reason is false, that 63% believe that ought implies can, and that 61% prefer analytic/rational reconstruction to contextual/historicist approaches in the history of philosophy. Obviously, philosophy is destroyed in an enterprise like this! The possibility that one might, for example, have a position that is not described by a pre-existing label is ruled out in advance, captured only by the awkward option of “other” (I was especially surprised to see that “other” did not generally score highly). The choice of survey respondents also raises obvious questions: why only Anglophone professionals? If this is what we mean by philosophy today, then it is truly dead – and it deserves its sorry fate. But in reality, there have always been many more problems, characters, positions, tendencies, and even movements within philosophy than is recognized in standard histories and the reductive, over-simplifying classifications they so often use. We would do well to let a thousand flowers bloom, and I believe they will in the coming years. 5 If this eclectic philosophy of the future is to preserve some relationship to what was called continental philosophy, then there are some places within that tradition it could take some inspiration, which may help avoid the worst of these tendencies. One prodigiously inventive example of this – and the philosopher I have personally found most useful in thinking through these issues in recent years – is Foucault. Though he is now as canonical a philosopher as they come, cited and re-cited more than anybody else in the humanities, it is striking that his general approach to the history of philosophy seems to have had so little impact on our own philosophical practice. Foucault, more than any other philosopher I know, found a way to philosophise without the canon. The hoary old story about the history of philosophy, “from Thales to Heidegger”, is quite simply absent from his thinking; it plays no role whatsoever. He goes out of his way to avoid its familiar names; when approved canonical figures do appear in Foucault’s archaeologies and genealogies – Descartes, Hobbes, Kant – it is to explain either why they were not part of the transformation he is talking about, or to emphasise a minor passage or text that can form part of his own account only because it goes against “official” interpretations of their thinking. The major historical ruptures, in his varying accounts of them, involve figures like Cuvier, Quesnay, and Migne. The first great theoretician of biopolitics, according to Foucault, is not Rousseau, Smith, or even Aristotle, but the virtually unknown French proto-demographer Jean-Baptiste Moheau, the first one to have developed techniques for modelling the size of the population through birth rates and death rates. (14) Divya Dwivedi giving homage to Jean-Luc Nancy in Les Rencontres Philosophiques de Monaco on 9 June 2022; Image credit; PhiloMonaco https://philomonaco.com Even though “biopolitics” has proven an extraordinarily successful concept that is often discussed, philosophy does not seem to have followed Foucault’s lead in de-emphasising the already famous figures he seems to be encouraging us to ignore in our understanding of this concept, or in reading the less known figures he seems to be attempting to nudge our attention towards. A search for Moheau and biopolitics turns up just one article written in Bulgarian, where one can find scores of studies in countless languages that relate it to Plato, Marx, or virtually any other well-known theorist. Even as Foucault himself has become about as canonized as it is possible to be, this aspect of his thinking has had almost no impact, even on those who write on him or see themselves as continuing in the kind of work he did. We have found it easier to abandon universals than we have to think without the guard-rails of the familiar canon. If our goal is to open up philosophy and the history of philosophy to other people and places, then we simply must become more comfortable working on “lesser” figures, and on questions or problems that are not immediately familiar, without having to immediately relate them to a standard story whose centrality is thereby strengthened even further. Foucault gives us as good a model as I know of how to do this; his texts are an excellent training ground. We have come out on the other side of a period where one had to justify an interest in Fanon, say, by comparing him to a Sartre or a Merleau-Ponty; today, students are as likely to say that they are interested in Sartre and Merleau-Ponty because they are trying to understand Fanon. To be sure, there is a common enough version of “Foucauldianism” that is part of the sorry state of affairs Nancy criticises; he refers to the ways in which concepts like “genealogy” or “subjectivation” can be used as a way to repeat the same old same old, only this time “spiced up with some more modern spices”. (15) We probably do not need to hear any more chatter about the panopticon, for example. Foucault’s genealogies were born of a different time and under different conditions, and belong to that moment that I am suggesting will soon become fossilized history; they certainly suffer from the same problems. Said famously charged that Foucault’s Eurocentrism was “near total”, maybe even worse than the other greats of his generation. (16) That is a fair point, though it should also be said that his thought has travelled unusually well in spite of this; it has been an essential point of reference for many of the contemporary philosophers who have been most successful in pushing the continental tradition outside of its European comfort zone. In his contribution to this debate, Esposito speaks of multiple paths being open to contemporary philosophy. (17) Other participants in this discussion have mentioned the deconstructive or post-deconstructive path; this seems to me another promising one, especially for those whose concerns centre on the history of philosophy. 6 Where does this leave us? Though there is much to lament in the present state of things, as there often is in the passing of one phase and the beginning, however inchoate, of a new one, and all the disorder this entails, there is much to give us hope about the future of philosophy. In any case, laments never change anything; they are the discourse of those who have given up the fight. The old world must go – and it will go, whether we want it to or not. I am convinced that there is a historical necessity at work here that is higher than the will of any individual philosopher who may decide to either welcome or resist what is going to happen anyway. Heidegger’s text puts this well: “each epoch of philosophy has its own necessity. We simply have to acknowledge the fact that a philosophy is the way it is. It is not our business to prefer one to the other” (18) The thesis of this discussion, if I may put it like this, is that philosophy as we have known it is dead or dying (we have killed it, you and I…), and that a new epoch and hence a new necessity has begun, different from the Heideggerian one though perhaps still ancestrally related to it. Our task – our business – is to grasp this rebirth as best we can and to acknowledge it in the way that it is. Long live philosophy! NOTES 1. Divya Dwivedi, “Nancy’s Wager”, Philosophy World Democracy 2.7, July 2021: https://www.philosophy-world-democracy.org/other-beginning/nancys-wager . 2. See, e.g. Critias’s speech in Timaeus 21a7-26e1. But the idea of a Greek origin of philosophy was not widespread even in the early modern period; an arch-conservative like Hobbes counts India, Persia, Chaldea and Egypt as having “the most ancient philosophers”; see Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan in The English Works of Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury vol. III ed. Sir William Molesworth, London: John Bohn, 1839, p. 666. 3. Jean-Luc Nancy, “‘The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking’”, Philosophy World Democracy , 30 July 2021, https://www.philosophy-world-democracy.org/other-beginning/the-end-of-philosophy . 4. Peter Park, Africa, Asia, and the History of Philosophy: Racism in the Formation of the Philosophical Canon, 1780-1830 , New York: SUNY Press, p. 4. For a history of the idea that Thales was the first philosopher, see Lea Cantor, “Thales – ‘The First Philosopher’? A Troubled Chapter in the Historiography of Philosophy”, British Journal for the History of Philosophy 30(5), pp. 727-750. 5. Shaj Mohan, “And the Beginning of Philosophy”, Philosophy World Democracy 2.7, July 2021: https://www.philosophy-world-democracy.org/other-beginning/and-the-beginning-of-philosophy . 6. Shaj Mohan, “And the Beginning of Philosophy”; Divya Dwivedi, “Nancy’s Wager”; Reghu Janardhanan, “Deconstructive Materialism: Einsteinian Revolution in Philosophy”, Philosophy World Democracy , 13 November 2021, https://www.philosophy-world-democracy.org/other-beginning/deconstructive-materialism . 7. Martin Heidegger, “ ‘The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking’ ”, in On Time and Being trans. Joan Stambaugh, New York: Harper & Row, 1972, p. 55. 8. Divya Dwivedi, “Nancy’s Wager”. 9. Jean-Luc Nancy, “‘The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking’”. 10. Jean-Luc Nancy, “ ‘The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking’ ”. 11. On Bambara thought, especially the question of speech and writing, see Amadou Hampaté Bâ, “The Living Tradition” in General History of Africa vol. 1: Methodology and African Prehistory , ed. J. Ki-Zerbo, Paris, UNESCO, 1980, 166-205. 12. This is Tory MP Sir John Redwood: https://twitter.com/johnredwood/status/1568093144595533825 13. https://survey2020.philpeople.org/survey/results/all 14. Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France 1977-1978 , trans. Graham Burchell, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, p. 22. 15. Jean-Luc Nancy, “ ‘The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking’ ”. 16. Edward W. Said, Reflections on Exile and Other Essays , Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000, 196. I stressed that Foucault practices philosophy without “the” canon – by this I mean to refer only to the standard philosophical canon; I am certainly not trying to suggest that he proceeds without any canon at all. He often relies on tropes and narratives that are well-worn in other disciplines or areas of study, but philosophy is often so insular in what it reads that even this can seem like a novel surprise to many of his readers. 17. Roberto Esposito, “What is Philosophy? – Tribute to Jean-Luc Nancy”, 14 September, https://www.philosophy-world-democracy.org/other-beginning/what-is-philosophy 18. Heidegger, “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking”, 56. Related Articles Be held in the gaze of the stone SHAJ MOHAN Read Article Deconstructive Materialism: Einsteinian Revolution in Philosophy REGHU JANARDHANAN Read Article

Jean-Luc Nancy: in memoriam. First published as “Même l’ouvert se referme – sur la disparition” de Jean-Luc Nancy in AOC on 30 August 2021, Even the open closes: on the disappearance of Jean-Luc Nancy JEAN-CHRISTOPHE BAILLY 2 September 2021 PHILOSOPHY JEAN-LUC NANCY At Librairie Quai des Brumes in Strasbourg, 2013 Jean-Luc Nancy: in memoriam. First published as “Même l’ouvert se referme – sur la disparition” de Jean-Luc Nancy in AOC on 30 August 2021, https://aoc.media/critique/2021/08/29/meme-louvert-se-referme-sur-la-disparition-de-jean-luc-nancy/ . Jean-Luc Nancy was one of those for whom philosophy must be shared, continually turned towards a sensitive attention to the present. With the death of the philosopher on 23 August, it is the last page of a work that responds to the world and responds to the world that is being written, and for which the immanence of meaning to itself was endlessly renewed. "He who writes responds. "Whoever writes resonates and, in resonating, responds. These two formulations by Jean-Luc Nancy, so clear-cut, so representative of his tone, I cannot read or hear them without telling myself that the one who wrote them, this time, after so many alerts, will no longer respond. And beyond the devastation of mourning, the primary meaning is that of this silence or extinction. Among the many expressions by which, as if in a slow and necessarily clumsy gesture, we try to ward off the brute fact of death, there is the one that says of a being that it has become extinct. Now it is appropriate for Jean-Luc Nancy, who can be said to have died, first of all in the strictest sense, like a life force - a heart, a breath - that gradually ceased to function, but also because even from a distance, even intermittently and discreetly, his presence acted like a continuous watch. Sometimes hyperactive, sometimes limited to a few filaments perhaps, fragile but not blinking, and above all strangely faithful. And that was enough to tell us that the world we see slipping away before our eyes or our steps, going in directions we neither wished nor planned, was being watched, listened to, probed, and that a consciousness, close to it, maintained that there was still something of a space in it that could be crossed and was worthy of consideration. No matter how far-reaching his awareness of a collapse of the reasons for hope was, Jean-Luc Nancy never gave in to nostalgia or engaged in a catastrophic discourse. Nor, conversely, did he ever take refuge in the escape of a utopian vision that was oblivious to the reality of the historical moment he was living through. What he continually sought to bring about had little to do with the glimmering of a consumed past or with that of a dawn distended by an exuberant promise; it can be said that it was above all in the closest proximity to the present, in the low light of what the days delivered to him, that he intervened. The very impressive number of his interventions in the press or in the form of small books is the most obvious sign of this constantly maintained attention and curiosity, but this relationship to the present, through which he fully assumed his responsibility as a philosopher in the city, came from afar, supported by a work of thought whose considerable scope remains to be explored. Certainly, as the abundance of reactions from all corners of the planet to the announcement of his death shows, Jean-Luc Nancy's thought, often translated, has circulated a great deal, infusing many minds over several generations, and to the point that the second community that could be gathered around his name, which resembles anything but a cenacle of initiates, would be immense. But immense is above all the work of thought that sustains it and that, beyond media exposure, functions as a reserve that is a real joy to explore and fathom, and first of all because it is, precisely, the space of an infinite resonance: a thought that responds to the world and responds of the world, and for which the immanence of meaning to itself is endlessly renewed - nothing, for it, should or can lead to the installation in an instituted form. But whereas Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, with whom he formed a rather exceptional tandem in the history of thought, was always reluctant to accept being called a philosopher, Jean-Luc Nancy fully embraced this appellation, and it was this full adherence to what is neither a profession nor a vocation but above all a way of standing in the world that he continually strove to illustrate, It must be said that he was on the verge of a form of heroism when faced with the numerous operations he had to undergo, starting with his heart transplant in 1991 – a particularly dramatic moment that he avoided by reflection, by coming back later on to this event of which his body had been the theatre, and by humour. Against what background of happiness, in spite of everything, this stands out, it would be necessary to say by evoking first of all some memories. Firstly, that of his unfeigned good humour, while still on a drip, just after the transplant, we discussed in the corridors of the hospital the finalisation of The Compearance , which was about to be published. Or the period, now distant, of the formation of his thought, when emulation and friendship had taken the form of a house shared with Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, in this street of Strasbourg where he continued to live afterwards, this time as a couple, with his wife Hélène - a house where the experimentation of a form of community life, devoid of any exhibition, surprised all visitors by its brightness. It is to all those who lived there, including the animals, that The Inoperative Community is dedicated, a seminal book in which the reasons for being, the forms and the chances of living together are examined through the sieve of an exceptional intelligence regarding the stakes, in contrast to everything that today transforms being together into a softened slogan. What is envisaged with the often-repeated schema of community (including in titles where it is successively disengaged, confronted, and disavowed, not without having been in passing unavowable for Blanchot, whose book responded to Nancy), is of course the with , but insofar as it is not a project. The with is there as the "there is" that founds it and it is with it, in it, that we are born. This common exposure to the common is the condition, and this is precisely what we tried to describe in The Appearance, a book that tried to oppose the fall of real communism with the possibility of a future politics, the very one that Jean-Luc would later call "the politics of the infinite link". To appear, in this sense, was not to go before a court but simply to appear within the generalized exhibition. This was a reminder of the founding tension that Jean-Luc later formalised by insisting on the non-separable or inseparable character (from himself as well as from others) of the subject, defined as being above all "a power of relation". This power is an opening and, as such, it produces networks, but these are in turn threatened by closure, and it is the quality of individuation that acts here as a guarantee: "each One as such subverts the closure of the network", it is explicitly stated, which means that it is thanks to the singularity, not only of any subject, but of any point of existence, that the dis-enclosure, which is like a new hatching, can take place. Dis-enclosure is therefore nothing other than that which liberates existence by allowing the "in-finite shining of the finite" to blossom in it, in an endless game. The other name of this shining is sense, which is, even below terms as recurrent as coming or spawning, the most active word in the philosophical lexicon of Jean-Luc Nancy, who dared to title one of his most collected books The Sense of the World , thus taking the lovers of asserted truths (who still run the streets and the corridors of universities) against their will, reminding them that meaning is nothing other than the narrative that the world makes of itself, that the declension of an unfinishable "there is" that no ideology of presence supports. It is precisely this narrative that must be listened to, and at this price is resonance. It is easy to see how Nancy's ontology, deliberately emancipated from its guardianship, joins the attention that is that of the poem, and how it also founds and authorises that "politics of the infinite relation" that he set out to define, and in which coming also becomes a form of dwelling in time, the time to which he devoted a strangely soothed reflection in one of his last books, entitled, and this is quite a programme, The Fragile Skin of the World . But at no time did he think of these relationships as the lineaments of a system, or accompany the appearance of meaning with a procession of limits by associating it with privileged areas of emergence. The question he poses is, on the contrary, that of a free coming always to come: "Can we," he wrote in The Sense of the World , "think of a triviality of meaning - an everydayness, a banality, not as the dull opposite of brilliance, but as the greatness of the simplicity in which meaning exceeds itself." And what is truly extraordinary is the calmness with which Jean-Luc Nancy made right of this excess, going to collect it in the most diverse domains in an almost untiring quest. I am aware, in any case, of how derisory and, even more so, how partial and insufficient such a rapid assembly of certain elements of his thought can be. One would like to take the time, for example, to follow his highly sensitive reflection on the way in which, as it moves forward, the line of the drawing always touches on the unknown - this was in the context of an exhibition organised by the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Lyon, The resulting book is entitled Le plaisir au dessin (Pleasure in Drawing). We would also like to return to the moment of definition he shared with Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, when together they translated the texts of the Athenaeum, the journal of the Jena Romantics, and ask him again what they both understood by the notion of the "literary Absolute" and what became of it in their own paths. And so on. But it just so happens that this work that we can do with Jean-Luc Nancy's considerable work we must now do without his help, and what must be said here is how available he was, how wonderful it was to hear him, to hear in his voice the pleasure of exercising the relationship, including with children, as was the case with the "little lectures" that he agreed to joyfully several times at the Centre dramatique national de Montreuil. In one of them, entitled Partir - Le départ , he spoke at length with the children about death, in another, entitled Vous désirez? he spoke to them about desire and this is what he said: "To desire is quite simply something that does not refer to having something. To desire is a state, I don't like this word very much, it's a disposition that is always in motion, an impulse, a tension, not to have something but simply to be someone. That's why we only live by the desire to live. This simplicity of speech he seemed to achieve effortlessly, and no more than there was demagogy in his movement towards children, there was no showiness when in colloquia and seminars he discriminated the slightest deviations, the slightest tremors of the concept. In its popular meaning, perhaps a little neglected today, the word philosopher designates above all a way of being, a form of wisdom, even an ability not to get carried away. There was indeed something of this in Jean-Luc Nancy's attitude, characterised by a constant refusal of pathos, but what I perhaps remember first, as he leaves us, is the extraordinary astonished mischief of his gaze, the same gaze that we see in So lebte er hin , a little film in which, facing a character played by Rodolphe Burger (who is at the origin of the film), he plays the part of an aged Lenz, who would have survived his Vosges wreck. On several occasions Jean-Luc Nancy had been in front of the camera and he had also been on stage, accepting out of friendship and curiosity to play small roles in shows from the great era of the Théâtre National de Strasbourg, Sophocles' Antigone in the version translated and reinvented by Hölderlin and Euripides' The Phoenician Women , both directed by Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Michel Deutsch. But in this costume film where he wears a wig, it is really that he enters with his exhausted face into the character he is supposed to play and that he plays with a staggering strength and precision. So that beyond this grumpy, smiling Lenz, it is he that we see. At the end of this little film, he suddenly leaves, closing the door behind him, and that is unfortunately what has just happened to us. "One lives only by the desire to live". This desire was, by Jean-Luc, held to the end of the possible, where the open, against all expectations, closes. From now on, a long, very long mourning process begins. Related Articles Jean-Luc Nancy’s Insurrectionary Insistence: to Start from Nothing Didier Cahen Read Article Jean-Luc Nancy: in whose wild heart immortality sleeps homeless. Divya Dwivedi Read Article

VIJAY TANKHA Vijay Tankha was the head of the department of philosophy in St. Stephen’s College where he founded the school of languages and directed it for 11 years After completing his doctoral degree from McGill University in the early works of Plato Tankha concentrated his research on pre-Socratic and Hellenistic thought. He is the author of Greek Philosophy: Thales to Gorgias .

Etienne Balibar est le philosophe marxiste le plus important de nos jours, et c’est précisément pour cette raison qu’il continue de présenter des critiques sensibles des modèles marxistes. Balibar a remis en question de nombreux mythes endurcis de notre époque, y compris celui de l’État-nation. Des Insurrections Ambivalentes : entretien avec Etienne Balibar IVICA MLADENOVIĆ et ZONA ZARIĆ avec ETIENNE BALIBAR 14 January 2021 PHILOSOPHY POLITICS Etienne Balibar; Image crédit: FRANCE 24, http://cas.uniri.hr et Verso Books Etienne Balibar est le philosophe marxiste le plus important de nos jours, et c’est précisément pour cette raison qu’il continue de présenter des critiques sensibles des modèles marxistes. Balibar a remis en question de nombreux mythes endurcis de notre époque, y compris celui de l’État-nation. Dans cet entretien, il aborde de grands problèmes contemporains : le sens de l’engagement politique des intellectuels dans une période de transformation des puissances mondiales, les limites du projet d’Althusser, la politique insurrectionnelle, la xénophobie et les notions d’identités nationales, la « guerre contre la migration ». Cet entretien avec Balibar pour Philosophy World Democracy a été réalisé par Ivica Mladenović et Zona Zarić. Tout d’abord, (1) nous commencerons par la question que vous allez aborder dans cette conférence, à savoir la question de l’engagement. Plusieurs chercheurs ont mentionné le fait que ce terme a des significations différentes dans différentes langues. Vous parlez vous-même d’engagement au sens pascalien et sartrien. Qu’est-ce qui inspire cette idée d'engagement dans vos propres expériences et vos propres références philosophiques? ÉTIENNE BALIBAR : C’est Sartre qui a réutilisé le vocabulaire de Pascal dans le texte considéré comme « fondateur » de sa théorie de l’engagement (la « Présentation des Temps Modernes » de 1945), en citant la fameuse formule : « vous êtes embarqués ». (2) Ainsi se trouve initiée une dialectique des contraires : il faut choisir (« il faut parier ») (3) mais dans une situation qu’on ne choisit pas. Je pense que la référence pascalienne est fondamentale, parce qu’elle montre que dans l’engagement il ne s’agit pas d’une simple décision d’un mode de vie ou de travail plutôt que d’un autre mais de ce qui détermine toute la vie et toute la pensée. Il s’agit donc de transformer une contingence en nécessité. Mais la référence pascalienne suggère que ce qui est en jeu est une rédemption ou une damnation dans une vie future (un « au-delà »), alors qu’il s’agit du sens de la vie présente, ou de ce que Marx appelait « l’ici-bas » ( Diesseitigkeit ). Dès lors se pose la question des conséquences de l’engagement, qui est à mes yeux la question fondamentale. Qu’est-ce qu’on fait des erreurs qu’implique inévitablement l’engagement. D’un point de vue sartrien, celui d’une liberté toujours « transcendante », on peut se « dégager » et parfois c’est ce qu’il faut faire. Je pense que la forme supérieure de l’engagement consiste à « s’obstiner » (comme disent Negt et Kluge dans History and Obstinacy ), ce qui ne veut pas dire défendre aveuglement les mêmes erreurs, mais chercher les moyens de les comprendre et de les rectifier pour soi et surtout pour le « nous » auquel un engagement vous lie. Car s’engager c’est sortir de soi. C’est ce que j’ai essayé de faire dans mes rapports avec l’engagement communiste – sans être certain d’y avoir réussi, bien sûr. L'idée de la fin, ou du moins du déclin des intellectuels, est défendue dans un nombre important de textes théoriques publiés au cours des trente dernières années. Êtes-vous d'accord avec cette thèse et quel est, à votre avis, le rôle et la place de l’engagement des intellectuels dans les sociétés contemporaines et dans les luttes sociales ? EB : Cette question n’a aucun sens si on ne la subordonne pas à une enquête et un effort de définition de ce que signifie « intellectuels ». Deux idées me semblent importantes à cet égard dans la tradition à laquelle j’appartiens. D’une part, celle de Marx qui inscrit la « division du travail manuel et intellectuel » parmi les grandes structures de domination traversant toute l’histoire, même si ses modalités ne cessent de se transformer. D’autre part, celle de Gramsci qui fait des « intellectuels » (ou du moins de certains d’entre eux, ayant une capacité d’intervention « organique » sur les luttes sociales) les constructeurs de l’hégémonie, des rapports de pouvoir et de subordination (ou de contre-pouvoirs défiant l’ordre établi), mais qui affirme aussi l’existence d’une « fonction intellectuelle » débordant l’intellectualité institutionnelle dominante, et pouvant être assumée par des individus de toutes les classes sociales, en particulier à travers leurs activités militantes. La société capitaliste « mondialisée » d’aujourd’hui (que j’appelle avec d’autres une société de « capitalisme absolu ») est en train de complètement transformer les données de ce problème, en utilisant les ressources des nouvelles technologies et de la communication en déplaçant les lieux de pouvoir réel dans la société. En fait elle n’a plus besoin d’intellectuels au sens « bourgeois » du terme (dont font partie les universitaires, les artistes « indépendants », voire les savants qui se consacrent à la recherche « pure », etc.). C’est une société capitaliste non-bourgeoise ou post-bourgeoise . D’où une situation paradoxale et périlleuse à la fois : les intellectuels qui se veulent « critiques » (les « traîtres » à l’ordre existant, comme disait Marx) doivent aussi et peut-être d’abord défendre leur droit à l’existence et les institutions qui leur permettent de travailler. Mais ils n’ont aucune chance d’y parvenir s’ils campent sur une définition passéiste de l’intellectuel (même « engagé ») et sur une position défensive. L’articulation avec des luttes sociales (ce qui ne veut pas dire seulement la lutte des classes, mais l’écologie, le féminisme, l’antiracisme et le décolonialisme, etc.) est donc à la fois un choix éthico-politique et une façon de faire vivre la « fonction intellectuelle » dans la société. Les insurrections sont le moteur des changements politiques dans le monde d’aujourd’hui, mais l’ambivalence est leur caractéristique fondamentale, donc le problème politique qu’elles doivent affronter. Votre maître et la personne qui a fondamentalement influencé votre pensée, Louis Althusser, a publié en juin 1970 dans la revue La Pensée un de ces textes magistraux, intitulé "Idéologie et appareil idéologique de l'État". Dans ce texte, le philosophe distingue deux appareils d'État : l'appareil répressif et l'appareil idéologique de l'État. Ce dernier est moins visible et est constitué de toutes les institutions qui permettent la transmission de leur idéologie par les classes qui dirigent l'État à l'ensemble de la société. Quelle est la différence entre l'appareil idéologique de l'État dont Althusser parlait dans les années 1970 et l'appareil idéologique de l'État d'aujourd'hui ? EB : Ce serait une très longue discussion… J’ai énormément appris d’Althusser, à la fois au travers de ses textes et sous la forme d’une longue amitié et collaboration personnelle. Je suis très heureux de voir que certains de ses textes, souvent incomplets et aporétiques, car ils ont été élaborés dans des conditions de très grande tension personnelle et collective, continuent de faire penser ou même agir aujourd’hui. L’opposition entre « appareils répressifs » et « appareils idéologiques », qui a été souvent critiquée (notamment par Foucault) ne doit pas être entendue de façon typologique (même si Althusser se laisse aller à des classifications des grandes institutions dans l’une ou l’autre catégorie) mais plutôt de façon dynamique ou stratégique, comme signe du fait que les rapports de pouvoir oscillent entre deux pôles et les combinent dans des proportions inégales. Mais le problème le plus délicat, et potentiellement le plus fécond, concerne la référence qui est faite ici à l’État . Il s’agit évidemment d’une descendance par rapport à la notion de postestas indirecta , qui appartient à la tradition de la théologie politique (Bellarmin, Hobbes) et qui débouche au XIXe siècle sur le concept du « pouvoir spirituel » chez Auguste Comte. En la combinant avec l’idée marxiste de « l’idéologie dominante comme idéologie de la classe dominante », Althusser se donne les moyens de reprendre le programme gramscien d’un « élargissement du concept d’État » qui installe celui-ci de façon occulte dans l’infrastructure inconsciente de la subjectivité individuelle elle-même. Louis Althusser dans son bureau, Paris, April 26 1978, Photo crédit : Alain Mingam/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images Mais on peut se poser la question de savoir si cette construction structurale est toujours adéquate (du moins sans variation) à la façon dont sont formatées les subjectivités dans le capitalisme actuel (qui de ce point de vue est bien caractérisé comme un « néo-libéralisme »). Une jeune philosophe grecque, Maria Kakogianni, a proposé le concept d’ « appareils idéologiques de marché » pour enregistrer la nouveauté des mécanismes d’interpellation des individus en « sujets » dans une société où la domination idéologique ne passe pas tant par l’imaginaire de la souveraineté que par celui de la concurrence et de la rentabilité auxquelles il faut « s’adapter » (Barbara Stiegler). Je suis tenté de penser que nous avons là un autre indice de l’émergence d’un capitalisme sans bourgeoisie au sens classique. On voit bien dans la crise actuelle, engendrée par la pandémie du Covid-19, et dont les dimensions morales sont aussi fondamentales que les dimensions économiques, que le désarroi et même le désespoir collectifs résultent autant, voire davantage du sentiment de la faillite du marché que du sentiment de la faillite de l’État… Ou plutôt celui-ci en fait partie, car les États aujourd’hui sont instrumentalisés par le marché à un degré qui est sans précédent. A l'époque où le mouvement des Gilets jaunes était à son zénith, vous avez dit qu'à travers ce mouvement - qui présente de nombreuses contradictions - on remarque le processus où « les exclus s’incluent ». Comment voyez-vous ce mouvement dans le contexte des nouvelles luttes de classes en France ? EB : en tant que « mouvement » non pas organisé mais individualisé, les Gilets Jaunes ont probablement terminé leur trajectoire. Mais la révolte contre les effets d’exclusion (privation de citoyenneté active en même temps que de reconnaissance et de protection sociale) dont il était l’expression ne va pas disparaître. On peut penser au contraire que les conditions extraordinairement inégalitaires et autoritaires dans lesquelles s’organise (ou se désorganise) l’effort de la société pour maîtriser la pandémie (qui elle-même affecte les individus et les groupes sociaux de façon extraordinairement inégale, en creusant ce que j’ai appelé les « différences anthropologiques », c’est-à-dire les différences qui fracturent l’espèce humaine comme telle), sont grosses de nouveaux phénomènes insurrectionnels. Mais la question de savoir quelle orientation politique ils vont prendre va se poser de façon aiguë. Dans le mouvement des Gilets Jaunes, où beaucoup avaient cru pouvoir lire une forme française de « populisme » tel qu’il se développait ailleurs au même moment (pensons à Trump, à Bolsonaro, etc.), il est remarquable que les tendances xénophobes et autoritaires aient été marginalisées et finalement surmontées par les participants eux-mêmes. Rien ne garantit qu’il en aille toujours ainsi. Les insurrections sont le moteur des changements politiques dans le monde d’aujourd’hui, mais l’ambivalence est leur caractéristique fondamentale, donc le problème politique qu’elles doivent affronter. Mais ils n’ont aucune chance d’y parvenir s’ils campent sur une définition passéiste de l’intellectuel (même « engagé ») et sur une position défensive. L’articulation avec des luttes sociales (ce qui ne veut pas dire seulement la lutte des classes, mais l’écologie, le féminisme, l’antiracisme et le décolonialisme, etc.) est donc à la fois un choix éthico-politique et une façon de faire vivre la « fonction intellectuelle » dans la société. Dans votre dernier livre, Histoire interminable : d'un siècle l'autre, (écrit I) , le dernier chapitre est un plaidoyer stratégique pour un projet socialiste pour le 21ème siècle. Nous avons une question suivante : si les socialismes précédents – ceux qui se sont concrétisés dans l'État national-social selon votre expression – pensaient la politique en termes de purs rapports de force, quel est le cadre interprétatif de la politique que vous proposez pour le socialisme du 21ème ? EB : Dans ce chapitre final de mon livre, je prends soin de souligner le caractère hypothètique des descriptions et des propositions que j’avance. Tout cela est matière à discussion et donc objet de réflexion. J’ai pris le risque d’utiliser un concept “large”, et même extrêmement large (on me l’a reproché) de “socialisme”, dans lequel, retournant contre elle-même la thèse de Friedrich von Hayek qui opposait au libéralisme en tant que dérégulation absolue du marché toutes les formes d’intervention étatique dans l’économie, j’ai inclu aussi bien les modèles de planification autoritaires et de parti unique du “socialisme réel” que les formations social-démocrates de l’Ouest européen et américain (donc le New Deal ) et les politiques de “développement” du tiers monde. Il s’agissait en particulier d’inscrire toutes ces politiques et les innovations institutionnelles correpondantes dans l’histoire des luttes de classes, de souligner (après Keynes et Negri) la fonction décisive de la Révolution russe de 1917 qui inspire au capitalisme le sentiment de l’urgence des politiques sociales (qu’il a perdu aujourd’hui...), et de comprendre que le capitalisme dans lequel nous vivons aujourd’hui n’est pas, suivant la formule classique, une “antichambre du socialisme”, mais un régime postsocialiste , qui s’est construit en déconstruisant le socialisme sous ses différentes formes. Lenin à Paris Affiche soviétique ; Image crédit : Wikimédia Commons J’ai aussi souligné, comme vous le rappelez, que ces expériences socialistes (très hétérogènes entre elles) ont ceci de commun d’avoir traité la question sociale dans un cadre national , ce qui est aussi un ressort de leur étatisme et explique la difficulté de repenser la question de la transformation sociale de façon transnationale, en mobilisant les forces correspondantes à cette échelle. C’est pourtant ce qu’imposent aussi bien les effets plus ou moins réversibles de la “mondialisation” que ceux, décidément irréversibles, de la catastrophe écologique. Un “socialisme” du 21ème siècle (j’ai mis le terme entre guillemets, pour marquer que ce n’est pas nécessairement le meilleur terme, ou le terme définitif) devrait combiner, de façon ouverte, des objectifs et des modalités d’action politique très hétérogènes entre eux et d’échelle très différente: j’ai dit hypothétiquement des régulations internationales (du travail, de la finance, des normes environnementales, des armements...), des utopies (c’est-à-dire des expérimentations à petite petite ou grande échelle de nouveaux modes de vie en commun, donc de consommation, de propriété, etc.), et finalement des insurrections (au sens le plus large, de préférence non-violentes étant donné). En juin dernier, vous avez co-signé un appel alertant l'espace public sur le fait qu'Emmanuel Macron ne lutte pas contre le racisme, mais contre l'antiracisme en France. Comment voyez-vous la présidence d'Emmanuel Macron dans son ensemble ? Y a-t-il quelque chose de fondamentalement nouveau qu'il a apporté à la vie politique française par rapport à ses prédécesseurs ? Et comment vous sentez-vous en sachant que le président français a indiqué qu'il était "très inspiré" par votre travail et qu'il voulait même faire sa thèse avec vous ? EB : Je pense que ces déclarations du candidat Emmanuel Macron faisaient partie d’une campagne de communication, de même que ses références encore plus insistantes à la collaboration avec Paul Ricœur. Mais après-tout je n’ai aucune raison et aucun moyen de déterminer son degré de sincérité. Je n’ai donc rien de plus à en dire. Quant à la combinaison dans le discours et l’action d’un dirigeant politique français de la rhétorique modernisatrice et réformatrice, comportant le cas échéant un volet social, avec une instrumentalisation du thème xénophobe et, dans les faits, racisant, de « l’identité française », elle n’a strictement rien de nouveau. Ce qui est très inquiétant, c’est que le Président opère ce virage à droite, et même vers l’extrême droite (il n’est pas le seul dans la classe politique française, mais il exerce le pouvoir) dans un moment où toute une série de facteurs (dont le terrorisme) peuvent pousser l’opinion publique vers une forme « active » de racisme institutionnel. C’est le phénomène que j’avais appelé il y a quelques années « l’impuissance du tout-puissant », une des matrices du fascisme dans l’histoire européenne. L’accueil des errants dans des conditions « humaines » c’est-à-dire conformes au droit international, peut poser des problèmes de police comme n’importe quel mouvement de population dans des situations d’exception, mais il ne constitue pas un danger pour la « sécurité » des pays européens ou de leur communauté. L’amalgame avec la question de la « terreur » est purement et simplement raciste (en particulier à travers la composante islamophobe). Il y a trois ans, dans un article paru dans Le Monde, vous souligniez que l'Union européenne, menacée par l'autoritarisme technocratique et la montée du néofascisme, risquait d'exploser. Dans cet article, vous appeliez à une refondation historique de l'Europe axée sur un nouveau type de fédération. Entre-temps, la situation ne fait que de se dégrader visiblement. À votre avis, quelle est la solution la plus probable pour l'UE dans la conjoncture actuelle : la dissolution ou la refondation ? Et, peut-on dire que la destruction de l'ex-Yougoslavie peut être considérée comme un indicateur de l'incapacité de l'Europe à faire face à son propre destin ? EB : Ma réponse – pardonnez la dérobade – est que je n’en sais rien. La destruction de la Yougoslavie (je n’emploie jamais l’expression « ex-Yougoslavie »…) est bien sûr, entre autres (car il y a quand même aussi des causes internes, mais nous sommes ici par définition dans une topologie où l’interne et l’externe échangent constamment leurs places) une marque de cette incapacité de l’Europe que vous évoquez. Mais il y en a beaucoup d’autres. Le Brexit en est une autre, évidemment, et par-dessus tout la gestion criminelle de la question des migrants et des réfugiés en Méditerranée, avant, pendant et après l’initiative de Merkel en 2015 (dont le sabotage a été assuré conjointement par la Hongrie et par la France). Réfugié syrien montrant une affiche d’Angela Merkel; Image credit: Deutsche Welle Certains commentateurs ont, sur le moment, salué le programme de « relance » de la Commission européenne (comportant un volet très limité de mutualisation des dettes) en face de la crise actuelle comme un « moment hamiltonien » - donc fédéraliste – pour l’Europe. Admettons la comparaison, bien qu’elle recouvre toute sorte de difficultés quant à la nature de la construction étatique en Amérique au 18ème siècle et en Europe au 21ème siècle… En fait rien n’est joué parce que, d’un côté, la question maintenant posée, est de savoir ce qu’est une monnaie dans le monde de l’endettement généralisé (ou dans quel régime monétaire l’Europe devra s’engager compte tenu des rapports de forces internationaux) ; et, de l’autre, la possibilité de gérer un budget commun sans une légitimité démocratique renforcée pour les institutions européennes est plus douteuse que jamais (or cette légitimité est presque inexistante). On en reste donc à la situation que je décrivais : aucune politique pour les peuples européens n’existera si le fédéralisme européen ne s’invente pas (pensons à ce que nous disions plus haut des régulations), mais les adversaires de ce fédéralisme (pour des raisons souvent opposées entre elles, mais dont la négativité se conjugue) ont en main tous les moyens de blocage. Je n’ai pas les moyens de dire autre chose. Comme d’autres, je pense aux « Somnambules » (au sens de Hermann Broch, repris depuis). Dans une conférence que vous avez donnée le 22 octobre 2018 à Montréal, vous affirmiez qu'après la "guerre contre la terreur", on parle maintenant de la "guerre contre les migrations". Nous pouvons voir que cette question des migrations approfondit le clivage non seulement entre la gauche et la droite, mais aussi au sein même de la gauche, entre les courants qui plaident pour une solution dite sécuritaire et ceux qui prônent la position humanitaire. Vous soutenez vous-même la thèse selon laquelle le droit à la circulation et à l'hospitalité sont des droits fondamentaux. Comment devrait-on, selon vous, comprendre la question des migrations dans le contexte du capitalisme contemporain et quelle est la stratégie appropriée pour une gauche progressiste sur cette question ? le capitalisme dans lequel nous vivons aujourd’hui n’est pas, suivant la formule classique, une “antichambre du socialisme”, mais un régime postsocialiste, qui s’est construit en déconstruisant le socialisme sous ses différentes formes. EB : Comme je ne peux pas, en quelques mots, reprendre tout mon argumentaire, qui d’ailleurs ne cesse d’évoluer, sauf sur le point central qui est la reconnaissance de la centralité politique et morale de cette question, je me contenterai de trois notations. Premièrement il faut cesser de s’enfermer dans cette dichotomie du « sécuritaire » et de « l’humanitaire », qui est elle-même un élément de la rhétorique de guerre contre les migrations, ou plutôt contre les migrants et les réfugiés – que pris ensemble j’appelle les « errants ». L’accueil des errants dans des conditions « humaines » c’est-à-dire conformes au droit international, peut poser des problèmes de police comme n’importe quel mouvement de population dans des situations d’exception, mais il ne constitue pas un danger pour la « sécurité » des pays européens ou de leur communauté. L’amalgame avec la question de la « terreur » est purement et simplement raciste (en particulier à travers la composante islamophobe). Deuxièmement l’analyse des migrations internationales dans le monde d’aujourd’hui, avec toute la complexité des déterminations concrètes qui l’accompagne (orientation des migrations du Sud au Sud, du Sud au Nord, combinaison des formes légales et illégales, corrélation ou non avec la transformation de la division internationale du travail, etc.) relève d’une transformation de ce que Marx appelait la « loi de population » du capitalisme et que Rosa Luxemburg (puis ses successeurs, analysant le « système-monde » du capitalisme historique) ont repensé comme une articulation entre les « centres » capitalistes et leurs « périphéries ». Aujourd’hui les centres sont en Europe ou en Amérique, mais aussi en Chine, en Asie du Sud-Est, dans le Golfe persique… et les « périphéries » d’om provient la surpopulation prolétarisée. Enfin troisièmement, la régulation des mouvements de population et surtout la reconnaissance du « droit aux droits » (Arendt) pour toutes les catégories d’êtres humains à la surface de la terre, territorialisés et déterritorialisés, nationalisés et dénationalisés, est le cœur d’un nouveau droit cosmopolitique et d’un nouvel ordre international, auquel s’opposent toutes les forces conservatrices (y compris celles qui se classent « à gauche » ici ou là dans le monde), mais que l’entrée de l’humanité dans l’âge des bouleversements climatiques et démographiques (auxquels on voit maintenant que vont s’ajouter les bouleversements sanitaires) met inéluctablement à l’ordre du jour. Je ne sais pas combien de temps il faudra pour que la majorité de nos peuples en prenne conscience, ni quelles violences en seront la condition (je ne crois pas, malheureusement, qu’il faille exclure des pratiques génocidaires). Ni, a fortiori, [combien de temps il faudra] pour que des gouvernements et des institutions internationales prenne le problème en charge. Mais je ne vois pas comment on pourrait en faire l’économie. NOTES 1. Cet entretien a été réalisé le 11 décembre 2020 à l'occasion d'Etienne Balibar recevant le prix annuel «Miladin Životić» à l'Institut de philosophie et de théorie sociale de l'Université de Belgrade. 2. BlaisePascal, Les Pensées , Paris, E. Mignot, 1913, p. 123. 3. Pascal, ibid. Related Articles Démosophia JEAN-LUC NANCY Read Article L’ « -ismos » du multiple SHAJ MOHAN Read Article

JÉRÔME LÈBRE Jérôme Lèbre is programme director at the Collège international de philosophie, and associate researcher at the Centre de recherches en philosophie allemande et contemporaine of the University of Strasbourg and at the Equipe de recherche sur les rationalités philosophiques et les savoirs of the University of Toulouse Jean Jaurès. He is also member of the scientific committee of the contemporary philosophy journal Phasis. Lèbre’s work is concerned with the aftermath of deconstruction, and his recent writings are on mobility, speed, and the geographical, ethical and political resistances to them. His recent publications include Eloge de l'immobilité and Scandales et démocratie , Desclée de Brouwer (2018 and 2019), and hisbook Les Travers du monde - méditations sur l'obstacle is forthcoming with Diaphanes, collection Anarchies . Revolutionising India: The Philosophy of Divya Dwivedi and Shaj Mohan 5 May 2025 Read Article Responsabilité d’Israël et au-delà 6 November 2023 Read Article Provocations, populisme et démocratie 18 September 2023 Read Article

MARC CRÉPON Marc Crépon is a philosopher and academic who writes on the subject of languages and communities in French and German philosophy and in contemporary political and moral philosophy. He has translated works by philosophers including Nietzsche, Franz Rosenzweig and Leibniz. Crépon has lectured at American universities, including University of California, Irvine, Rice University, and Northwestern University in Chicago. He is currently Professor of Philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. His books in English include The Thought of Death and the Memory of War (University of Minnesota Press, 2013), The Vocation of Writing: Literature, Philosophy and the Test of Violence (SUNY, 2018) and Murderous Consent: On the Accommodation of Violent Death (Fordham University Press, 2019). Resistance De La Traduction 27 July 2022 Read Article

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This is the text of the lecture delivered on the 10th of June at the children’s hospital in St. Denis, a suburb of Paris, where Bernard Stiegler had initiated a project of contributory research which involves philosophers, psychologists, scientists, nurses, and social workers. Be held in the gaze of the stone SHAJ MOHAN 13 June 2022 PHILOSOPHY Stone Knife, Early Neolithic period, Manchurian Culture; Image credit: Wikimedia Commons. This is the text of the lecture delivered on the 10th of June at the children’s hospital in St. Denis, a suburb of Paris, where Bernard Stiegler had initiated a project of contributory research which involves philosophers, psychologists, scientists, nurses, and social workers. The lecture considers the concept of “negation” from the point of view of Anastasis. Negation and ‘the nothing’ in metaphysics relies on the law of identity, which renders the world as ahoratos or the unseen. The way to release things and the world from negation and nihilism is to thinking with new faculties which reveal the world as a non-totalisable effervescence. Thus philosophy begins again without metaphysics. Each language has a distinct way of saying that something is not the case. In French “ne pas” says that something is not. (1) In English “not” does it, as in “this book is not red”. Then, there are other special kinds of negations. In Greek “Alpha” as a prefix would negate a term under consideration and this convention is called “alpha privative”. For example, the ancient Greek term “aletheia”, which usually means “truth”, is derived through the alpha privative; it is derived through the negation of the term “lethe”, which in this context meant “hidden”. By adding the “a” the term “Lethe” is negated. Then, the negation of the hidden will yield the un-hidden , which we translate and also understand very differently as truth today. The alpha privative was perhaps a short nasal “a” sound, which is present in many languages even now, including the English “un-” and the French “in-”. The meaning of being hidden that is derived from Lethe is still present in the English term “latent”. However, “lethe” has other homological powers, or the powers to give different meanings through its etymologies. We should look at one more word from Ancient Greek to get an intimate sense of this kind of negation. The word Ahoratos (ἀόρατος) is derived through the operation of the alpha privative on horatos , which means “the seen”. Therefore Ahoratos would mean the un-seen . In this case, the homological powers of the term horao (ὁράω) are perhaps more significant for philosophy than the term “Lethe”. Horao comes from the speculative root *wer-, which could have meant “to watch over”, among the other meanings which come from this root. This meaning of Ahoratos is present in the experience of children who feel that they are the un-seen , some times of their parent, and at other times of their teachers. It indicates the experience of abjection. It shows what was once experienced as being the un-seen of the gods. The terms which derive from this root reveal a family which show us a relation to the world. The English “Will” comes from it, so does the Sanskrit “Vara”, meaning wish or desire . The term “ward”, as in “hospital ward” where the patients are watched over too comes from it. But it also gave rise to the meaning of “to cover” in Pali, and in this sense it relates to “Lethe”. There is another path according to which *wer- gives the meaning of “to raise up” or “to increase”. When we do pay attention to things and to people they are raised up , or they rise above the cloud of inattention. They come alive. Such coming alive through the raising of care is also the experience of love. Then, the un-raised are most things. As we looked at the negations of these meanings something interesting appeared, a different relation to the world and to ourselves. If one is not alert to, or if one does not watch over something, it does not appear in vision. (2) That is, the un-watched or the un-cared-for are the most things around us. To be able to attend with care through which alone things, animals, and people are understood intimately. Then, the un-desired or the un-cared-for are most things. When we do pay attention to things and to people they are raised up , or they rise above the cloud of inattention. They come alive. Such coming alive through the raising of care is also the experience of love. Then, the un-raised are most things. There is something important which we should keep in mind from these examples before we move into the generality of absences or privations. The privation of a meaning can still be another meaning; or, by not being some particular X, a thing is still some other X. This sense is found in our common experience of arithmetic. The absence of the number 10 in the number 18 is still another number. Or, when someone says “it is non-sense” it signifies something distinct, that such a matter should be not be of anyone’s concern. The Venus of Monruz, 9000BC, Baden-Württemberg, Germany; Image credit: Wikimedia Commons. When we speak of “absence” we think of someone or something not being here, where we would expect it to be present, or where we would wish for it to be present. When we say that “the speaker is absent on the stage”, the meaning is clear. It is in a related sense that we often speak of the absence of someone close to us. We experience absence in the most intimate sense when we miss someone we love. The family of experiences which includes absence, missing, lack, denial, negation, privation, abjection, contrary and so on is not limitable to a special sign, such as the negative ( “—“ ) or the alpha privative ( “α” ). All these terms say different things; the “denial” of someone is different from the “missing” of someone. Yet, these words form a family. We can call the root concept of all the cases of this family by the term privation . It is a term which exists in French and English, indicating that something which should have been present is absent. Aristotle’s conception of this term meant something similar: That which should have belonged to some X is now absent. The Greek term for such absence of that which should have been present was “steresis”. A certain strand of thinking “the negative” in logic in the history of philosophy comes from the concept of privation. As it is the case with him (with important exceptions), Aristotle gives the many meanings of privation in The Metaphysics. At the beginning of his consideration of privation, he defines it as, “When something does not have one of the things that it is natural for things to have, even if it would not be natural for the something in question to have it. Example: a plant is said to be deprived of eyes.” (3) While appearing to be clear, the problem of privation exposed by Aristotle is complex. It can mean, as it should mean, that the stone suffers the privation of vision , that the stone is blind . Although, the blindness of the stone is not “logical” for our common sense. We will soon find that the very persistence of “our kind” may rely on the vision which can hold the blindness of the stone. Usually we do not speak of newborn kittens as blind, although they do not see yet. It is still possible to say that they are deprived of vision. When an adult man cannot see we recognise the total privation of a sense which should have been naturally given to him. But with the stone it appears different. It is not in the nature of, or the concept of, the stone to have anything to do with vision. But we have to watch the stone in a deeper sense, we have to become aware of it in another sense from the functions into which we have been isolating it. For example, the identity of the stone sometimes derives from the function of being the paper weight into which we isolate it. From the point of view of a palaeontologist certain stones are functionally isolated into the identity of a fossil. From the point of view of the children who are playing the stone is functionally isolated into a projectile. Each functional isolation grants the stone a particular identity while depriving it of the other identities. Each time what we take to be the stone is holding out into distinct relations. The stone is already many things. But what about the proposition The stone is blind ? In order to begin to bring our awareness or care into that proposition, we have to merely remember that the stone is prior to all those things which have vision. Without the being of the stone there would not be any vision. It is prior to vision and it is necessitated by vision in two different senses. Temporally the stone precedes vision, or the animals with vision, and in the materiality of the stone the homological powers of the beings with vision resides. For example, the constituents which make up vision in the living includes the protein “opsin”, which in turn is constituted by the elements of the stone. The stone is blind in this sense; the stone, is the necessary prior to the being of vision. Without the stone awaiting for it there would not have been any vision in the world. The blindness of the stone is Ahoratos to us; we are blind to the blindness of the stone . We can come back to the homological powers of the stone soon. It is only the functional isolation which lasts the duration of the function which gives a transitory experience of identity. From out of this experience we have derived a principle of identity, which makes the un-seen of all the other powers, or the effervescence that is all things, of all the people, and of the world. The principle of identity delivers a condemned world, of Ahorato s. In logical terms, privation (steresis) is expressed as the negation of an identity. In the operation of subtraction in arithmetic the negation takes away from (or causes steresis in) a number to give another number. In statements it takes the form of “it is not the case that” or “it is not true that”. Symbolically it can be written as “~P”, where “P” stands as a variable for any statement of identity whatsoever and the “~” is the negation. The meaning of negation in logic is given by the statement of identity: A thing is what it is, and nothing else. Symbolically, we write the first part, “a thing is what it is”, as “P = P”. Now, a problem is already evident. There are two Ps here. Positionally, we know that the two Ps are in a relation of to the left/right of, of one another. In other words, identity is as ideal as the line in geometry. That is, any line we draw will have thickness which will make of it, under a lot of care, a rectangle. Further, to express a relation it takes at least two terms, even the relation of identity. Just as there is no ideal line in the world, there is no such thing as identity . Reclining mouflon in marble, 2600–1900 BC, Pakistan; Image credit: Wikimedia Commons We found it already with the example of the stone. There is never a moment where it is the case that the stone = the stone . The statement “the stone is never the stone” is not to be understood in the way in which the ancient philosopher Heraclitus is often interpreted, which is that everything is changing as time flows; or that, with time things receive passions which make them unequal to themselves in different moments of time. We mean something else; already, here and now, the stone is much more than the stone. The stone is a projectile in a direction, in another direction a fossil, sometimes a paperweight, at other times an ornament, and on occasion they make gardens. It is only the functional isolation which lasts the duration of the function which gives a transitory experience of identity. From out of this experience we have derived a principle of identity, which makes the un-seen of all the other powers, or the effervescence that is all things, of all the people, and of the world. The principle of identity delivers a condemned world, of Ahorato s. The ancients who formulated what we have received as the classical laws of thought knew better. For this reason, Aristotle would say, “It is not the case that everyone is either good or bad, either just or unjust, but that there is, rather, an intermediate state”. (4) That is, the law of identity is the rare occasion of a judgment of things according to the occasion of a functional isolation. Further, according to the ranges of powers and relations everything is present as a plenitude of intermedia . Here, a thing is understood as the between of many other possible things— a thing means intermedium of things . There is another culture of thinking “intermedium” differently, which came to philosophy through several religious strands. It considers the world and worldly existence as the imperfect but necessary intermedium which will be exited upon death. The Greek term of intermedium was Metaxu , which was used by Simone Weil to theorise her version of nihilism according to which the value of this world is nothing, beyond which, through death man will gain pure grace—“The world is the closed door. It is a barrier. And at the same time it is the way through.” (5) We will soon find that things as intermedia are intermedia to other things. A thing is intermedium according to different powers or faculties. Let us take the stone again as our example. When we think of carving the stone to make for ourselves a knife, we perceive the homological power of the stone. The stone can also be used to grind spices. However, the knife made of stone has now entered into the family of all the things we use in order to cut. There is a regularity to the instruments of cuttings which is different from the regularity of things which are used for grinding. The power in things to be home for different regularities can be called polynomia. Things gain new regularities through analogies as well. One can use the analogy, or the functional logic, of a cup to twist a large leaf into something which can hold water. This analogical power is carried in the phrase “cupping the palm”. In each of these changes of regularities, or the incarnations of functions, things assert something essential. Nothing is ever what it is . This assertion is opposed to the principle of conatus of Spinoza. Spinoza said that all things conserve in their own being. In this term, “own being”, we can see the reflection of the law of identity, for which the philosopher provided a drive. If there is a tendency in things it is that they are already tending to be something else, as inter-media . The law of identity is the principle of Ahoratos. That is, in the sense of “a thing is ahoratos if it could be naturally seen but [is] unseen.” (6) It, the law of identity, makes us invisible to the world and the world to us. Burmalindenia in a cabochon of Burmese amber; Image credit: Wikimedia Commons Now we can think of negation differently. When a patient is in the caring attention of a nurse, for that moment, the sense of this nurse as a marathon runner, a priest, a gardener, a lover, a reader is suspended. This kind of suspension is logically a negation. In the same way when a stone is in the care of a sculptor, she keeps in suspension all the other regularities possible for this stone. That is, the logical image of a functional isolation can be called negation. The philosopher who explored the meaning of privation to the limit of his own thought, under the term “nothing”, was Martin Heidegger. He found that “the nothing” was essential for understanding man as the animal destined to think Being, “Without the original revelation of the nothing, no selfhood and no freedom.” (7) We should look at the un-seen error in Heidegger to understand the meaning of the attentive raising of all things. Heidegger would enter this error by thinking that the law of thought to be rejected was the law of non-contradiction, while admitting the law of identity. Heidegger entertained the logical possibility of the totality of the world as a thought, while he admitted that such a thought cannot constitute a real experience for finite beings such as we are. Heidegger involved the logical nothing into his thought of Being, “The nothing is the complete negation of the totality of beings.” (8) In its place he found the analogue of the big nothing in the unhomely experience of angst, “In anxiety, we say, ‘one feels unhomely’.” (9) The unhomely experience of anxiety makes things around us, and soon everything, lose their significance. Angst causes a relation of reciprocal repulsion between us and the world for him. We are repelled by things which fall out of functional isolation; things, as they lose functional isolation, and their identity, push us away from them. This experience is analogous to the big nothing , which stands against the totality of the world. Further, Heidegger would go on to say, “the nothing pervades the whole of metaphysics since at the same time it forces us to face the problem of the origin of negation, that is, ultimately, to face up to the decision concerning the legitimacy of the rule of “logic” in metaphysics.” (10) That is, he admits ‘The Nothing’ into philosophy, without questioning its origins or arkhe. The world admits of no such nothing. Then there is no such thing as nihilism, which is really the theology of the nothing. Or, nihilism is the little fantasy born out of the law of identity. But we are now wondering what this special nothing, or this ‘big nothing’ is. When a philosopher or a theologian speaks of “the nothing” it is another error which derives from the law of identity, such as with Heidegger. If we accept the law of identity we can think of two different kinds of identity—identity of a thing and the identity of a totality. First, it is the identity of each thing, which is founded on a misunderstanding of things. Now, if we accept that each thing is identical to itself it allows us to think the totality of all such identical things. This totality will also have a distinct logical identity. For example, the totality of all the people and things in this room is identical to itself. Whereas, the totality of all the things and people in the church close by will have its own identity. These two totalities are different from each other. Now, the world is neither the church nor this room. It is everything that there is. Then the totality of the world, provided we accept the law of identity and the identity of each thing, will be identical only to itself. The opposite of this great identity of the totality of the world is called “The Nothing”. It is in relation to this big nothing that the thought of nihilism takes its stand. Nihilism mistakenly assumes the totality of all things, and for this totality it assigns the value of nothing. Now, we are of course entering the dangerous terrains of God because the divine order of partition is God, Nothing, World . But is there such a nothing as the theologian and the nihilist believe? But before we get to this big nothing we should think of the common uses of the word “nothing”. We ask someone, “what is troubling you” and they say “nothing”. Of course they do not mean that they are pondering the matter of creation, but that what is occupying their mind is not something very significant. We tell someone “the book is on the table”. They come back and say, “there is nothing on the table”. In this case, “nothing” means the object of our concern, a certain book, is not to be found on the table. We can see in both cases the previous example of the attentiveness of a functional isolation which makes distant the other possibilities of things, and other things in our world. Apart from this experience of these occasions of “the nothing” no other experience of nothing, or negation, is possible. Then, we find something more than Heidegger’s “selfhood” given through “the nothing” in the world which rejects its totalisation and the big nothing. It is the power and responsibility to bring things, or to let everything arise, from the state of Ahoratos. That is, if things of this world, the words with which we speak of those things, and we ourselves are more than what they are, and if things are effervescent with polynomia, then no totality of the world is conceivable, because totalities presuppose the identity of things. That is, logically and really there is no such thing as the totality of the world. If there is no such totality of the world then there is no such thing as “The Nothing” which is opposed to the totality of the world. The world admits of no such nothing. Then there is no such thing as nihilism, which is really the theology of the nothing. Or, nihilism is the little fantasy born out of the law of identity. Then, once we find that nihilism is founded on an old error what should philosophy do in this world infected by the virulence of ‘the nothing’? Today this virulent ‘nothing’ appears through the impoverished repetitions of metaphysics, the nullity of social media culture, techno-synthesis of all values as data, the perception of ecological disaster as inevitability, a feeling in politics that it is without a point. Philosophy today is the caring activity of letting things coming over from the state of Ahoratos , by bringing everything into caring attention; or philosophy is the raising of those which are dead in their identities. Above all, in this moment of the crisis of the earth, to be a philosopher is to be the one who is held in the gaze of the stone. NOTES 1. The text of the lecture given at the children’s hospital in St. Denis. References have been added for publication. 2. This meaning and the meaning of seeing something for real in the eye of the mind are present in the Greek text of John, “Jesus said to him, ‘You have seen (horao) him, and it is he who speaks to you.’” (John 9: 35-37) 3. 1023a Aristotle, The Metaphysics. 4. 1023a, Aristotle, The Metaphysics . 5. Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace , Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1952, p. 132. 6. Alexander of Aphrodisias, On Aristotle: Metaphysics 5 , Translated by William E. Dooley, Duckworth, London, 1993, p. 105. 7. P 103 Martin Heidegger, “What Is Metaphysics?”, Basic Writings , Edited by David Farrell Krell, Harper San Francisco, 1993. 8. Heidegger, “What Is Metaphysics?”, p. 98. 9. Heidegger, “What Is Metaphysics?”, p. 101. 10. Heidegger, “What Is Metaphysics?”, p. 108. Related Articles Nancy’s Wager DIVYA DWIVEDI Read Article ‘The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking’ JEAN-LUC NANCY Read Article

Compte rendu du livre De langue à lange par Souleymane Bachir Diagne, Éditions Albin Michel, 2022. L’hospitalité est sa réversibilité : de langue à langue CHRISTELLE DUCASSE 6 September 2022 PHILOSOPHY POLITICS Souleymane Bachir Diagne ; Crédite d’image : Vincent Muller / Éditions Albin Michel Compte rendu du livre De langue à lange par Souleymane Bachir Diagne, Éditions Albin Michel, 2022. Il est encore temps d’interroger la place de la traduction dans la polyphonie des langues ? Quelles en sont les ordonnées, là où la traduction apparait comme gagée par ceux qui parlent sur les scènes internationales en outil de pouvoir. Peut il en être autrement ? La parution chez Albin Michel de De langue à langue, L’hospitalité de la traduction nous permet de l’imaginer. Souleymane Bachir Diagne, philosophe sénégalais, est spécialiste de l'histoire des sciences et de la philosophie islamique. C'est l'une des voix africaines contemporaines les plus respectées. A partir de l’histoire et la géographie de la traduction il déploie l’une des racines de ses intentions, la restitution. Développant une archéologie de la traduction, Souleymane Bachir Diagne jalonne les terrains coloniaux et post-coloniaux. Il ouvre l’épreuve de l’étranger par la pluralité de ses motions et de ses résistances. La partition jungle, et langue dominante est ici éclatée en convoquant les motifs de linguiste, ethnologue, historien, béhavioriste, théologien, écrivain, poète, artiste avec qui il converse pour accéder à l’intention première de la traduction, comprendre Ré-interrogeant l’énigmatique traduttore traditore et ses interprétations, il pose en repère sur la cartographie de la traduction, ceux qui en sont les plus lumineux. Ainsi à la sienne, il prête voix à ceux qui ont oeuvré à porter la sensibilité d’une langue à l’autre, à porter l’oeuvre de la traduction, comme hospitalité d’une langue à l’autre. Aussi à propos de restitution, Souleymane Bachir Diagne applique à lui même le principe d’enrichissement par la parole de l’autre. Il met en correspondance ses réflexions sur la réalité du métissage auquel donne lieu l’enjeu de la restitution des objets d’art africains à leurs pays d’origine. Jouant alors leur rôle d’intercesseur il questionne cet autre passage d’une langue à l’autre. « La ressocialisation demandera une retraduction. Les sculptures de l'art africain classique revenu « dans leur propre demeure » parlerons une langue faite d'hybridations multiples, qui demandera à être traduit. La translation du retour n'annule pas celle du départ, elle s'y ajoute. Comme Derain visite dans les galeries ethnographique du British Museum, les artistes africains qui veulent converser avec les œuvres d'art du passé devront apprendre à les traduire, à faire courir eux aussi le crayon et la main pour apprendre à les incorporer, peut-être, dont des créations nouvelles. » Le saisissement ne peut avoir lieu que dans l’après coup d’un mouvement décentré de traduction et de re-traduction. Ce qu’a à offrir un texte en langue étrangère c’est l’intraduisible. L’hospitalité comme l’indique le mot hôte en français est sa réversibilité. Si itur ad astra. Related Articles Resistance De La Traduction MARC CRÉPON Read Article Breathless… SOULEYMANE BACHIR DIAGNE Read Article

HÉCTOR G. CASTAÑO Héctor G. Castaño is an assistant professor at the Institute of Philosophy, National Sun Yat-sen University (Taiwan) and a program director at the Collège international de philosophie (2019-2025). His teaching and publications are mostly in the areas of deconstruction, phenomenology, aesthetics and transcultural philosophy. Castaño’s current research interrogates the relationship between philosophical institutions and nationalism.