Contemporary French Philosophy (Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements)

Contemporary French Philosophy ROYAL INSTITUTE OF PHILOSOPHY LECTURE SERIES: 21 SUPPLEMENT TO PHILOSOPHY 1987 EDITED BY

A. Phillips Griffiths

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Contemporary French philosophy: supplement to philosophy, 1987.—(Royal Institute of Philosophy lecture series; 21). 1. French philosophy I. Griffiths, A. Phillips) (Allen Phillips), 1927- II. Philosophy III. Series 194 ISBN-0-521-35735-7 (pbk.) Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data Contemporary French philosophy/edited by A. Phillips Griffiths, p. cm.—(Royal Institute of Philosophy lecture series: 21) "Supplement to Philosophy 1987." Includes index. ISBN 0-521-35735-7 (pbk.) 1. Philosophy. French—20th century. I. Griffiths, A. Phillips. II. Philosophy (London, England) III. Series: Royal Institute of Philosophy lectures: 21. B2421.C65 1987 88-20254 194—dc 19 CIP

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Contents

Preface

v

Continental Insularity: Contemporary French Analytical Philosophy

1

PASCAL ENGEL

The Misprision of Pragmatics: Conceptions of Language in Contemporary French Philosophy

21

J. J. LECERCLE

Ants and Women, or Philosophy without Borders

41

MICHELE LE DCEUFF

Motifs towards a Poetics

55

MICHEL DEGUY

The Relevance of Cartesianism

69

VINCENT CARRAUD

The Enlightenment without the Critique: A Word on Michel Serres' Philosophy

83

BRUNO LATOUR

The Teleological and Deontological Structures of Action: Aristotle and/or Kant?

99

PAUL RICOEUR

The Crisis of the Post-modern Image

113

RICHARD KEARNEY

Merleau-Ponty and the Phenomenology of Perception

123

CYRIL BARRETT

Epistemological History: The Legacy of Bachelard and Canguilhem

141

MARY TILES

History as Genealogy: An Exploration of Foucault's Approach to History

157

ELIE GEORGES NOUJAIN

Beyond Deconstruction?

175

DAVID WOOD

Further Adventures of the Dialectic: Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, Althusser 195 GREGORY ELLIOTT

111

Contents

Paradoxes of the Pineal: From Descartes to Georges Bataille

215

DAVID FARRELL KRELL

Notes on Contributors

229

Index

231

Preface

These lectures delivered at the Royal Institute of Philosophy cannot, even in the case of the first seven by French philosophers, be regarded as representative of French philosophy. That is however necessarily so, since nothing can be representative of contemporary French philosophy except contemporary French philosophy itself. They do, however, reflect one of the characteristics of French philosophy which underlies this: its great diversity. The essays by Pascal Engel, Michele Le Doeuff, and Bruno Latour suggest explanations. We are very deeply indebted to philosophers on both sides of the Channel for advice on possible contributors to this volume. Above all, from the beginning we were immensely helped and guided by Rev. Professor Marcel Regnier, SJ, editor of Archives de Philosophic. He was to have opened the series, but to our great regret this was prevented by his failing health. We are also deeply grateful to Mr Alan Montefiore, of Balliol College, for his advice and for his chairing many of the lectures. These philosophers are not, however, responsible for the final composition of the volume. Many were chosen, but few would be called; and of these, a few had to cancel their acceptance at short notice. This was not an unallayed misfortune. Dr Kearney, Dr Elliott, and Dr Krell gave us their splendid papers in their stead, and we are most grateful to them.

Continental Insularity: Contemporary French Analytical Philosophy PASCAL ENGEL

1. Sociological-Cultural Remarks People outside France have always wondered why analytical philosophy has had so little influence in this country, while it has gained currency in many other European countries, such as Germany and Italy, not to speak of Northern Europe, where the analytical tradition is strongly established. This can be explained only by a particular conjunction of historical, cultural, sociological and maybe economical factors, which it would be too long to detail here. If there are natural characters of nations, there is no reason to believe that there are no philosophical characters of nations. As Hume said, the characters of nations can have physical as well as moral causes.1 As for the physical causes, everybody in Britain knows how insular the Continent can be. So if there is such a thing as French analytical philosophy, nobody will be surprised to learn that it is very insular. Before presenting some of the work done by French philosophers related to the analytical tradition, let me try to give what I take to be some of the moral causes of their insularity. Among the more familiar reasons of the separation between the Anglo-American analytical tradition and the French tradition in philosophy, are some historical features of these traditions. One of them is the fact that logic has always been in France a minor and neglected discipline. Descartes is largely responsible for that, in spite of the influence of Port Royal. At the time when Boole in England was writing his Laws of Thought, the Ideologues and their spiritualist followers were explaining that logic is sterile and scholastical. Poincare's attacks against Russell and Couturat, at the turn of the century, have been largely responsible for the lack of interest of mathematicians and philosophers in logic. Even the most rationalistically inclined philosophers, such as Brunschvicg, were always tempted to identify the use of reason with mathematics, and to divorce the use of reason from the use of logic. This feeling is largely shared today by the mathemati1

Hume, 'The National Characters of Nations', in Essays, Moral, Political and Literary (London, 1875). 1

Pascal Engel

cians of the Bourbaki school and their followers. And the tsiew mathematicians and philosophers who worked in logic during the first half of the twentieth century, such as Couturat, Nicod, Cavailles and Herbrand, died so young that they could not change the fate of the discipline. The result has been that there was no echo in France of the so-called 'revolution in philosophy' which has changed the landscape of philosophy in England. Another deep intellectual factor has been the general contempt for empiricism. Analytical philosophy has been associated (and rightly so) with empiricism and with the logical positivist movement. One of the very first things that a young student learns in France during his philosophy classes is that empiricism is the anti-philosophical doctrine par excellence, because it dissolves our concepts into experience, and amounts to the apology of common sense (experience is tolerated only if it is of a higher and more praiseworthy kind: 'inner' experience, which is richer than the poor empiricist 'impVessions'). About positivism, French philosophers have always thought that their own kind of positivism, namely the positivism of Auguste Comte, was better than any other brand of positivism, even if it had to be criticized. So if you combine empiricism, logic and positivism, you can only get one of the most absurd doctrines that one can ever find. Last but not least, analytical philosophy has been associated with a particular method, the method of linguistic analysis, be it formal or informal. Here matters are more complex, because the dominant trend of French philosophy in the twentieth century, phenomenology and existentialism, has been in some sense associated with a criticism of language. But this aspect of the Husserlian tradition, the Husserl of the Logische Untersuchungen, has never been dominant, and French philosophers have always paid less attention to it than to the phenomenological descriptions of 'pure, inner, transcendental experience'. Later, the structuralist movement could satisfy what might be called a Mallarmean feeling of the linguistic nature of reality. But there has never been in France anything like a 'linguistic turn' in philosophy. But beside these well-known historical reasons, it seems to me that the divorce between the two philosophical traditions can be explained only in part by the rejection of certain doctrines and methods, and by the adherence to other doctrines and methods. There are also institutional reasons. Analytical philosophy, as it is seen by many of its practitioners, is neither a doctrine nor a method. It is a tradition and an attitude. A tradition consists in a certain set of beliefs, and beliefs are dispositions to act. Analytical philosophy can be (in part, but in an important part) characterized by the following beliefs:

Contemporary French Analytical Philosophy

(1) Philosophy, like science, is a common enterprise. What philosophers say has to be discussed, criticized, argued about, and no philosopher can expect to produce good arguments or good theories without the help and sanction of other researchers. (2) There can be progress in philosophy (although not in the sense of scientific progress), provided everyone tries to be clear and argumentative. 'Truth emerges more readily out of error than from confusion'. 'Do not write so that you can be understood, but so that you cannot be misunderstood' (Quintillian). (3) Not everybody is a genius, but as Peirce said, 'in order to be deep it is sometimes necessary to be dull'. Philosophers can be co-workers without being engaged in the construction of large philosophical systems, and without encompassing the whole range of philosophical problems and of the history of their discipline. There can be good professional, specialized, and therefore technical, philosophy. The success of analytical philosophy and its vitality are mostly due to the fact that many people can share these beliefs without agreeing on any philosophical opinion or theory. They can even be co-workers while sustaining philosophically antagonist doctrines, provided that they share this general attitude. This attitude is just the scientific attitude, even though philosophy is not one of the sciences, or, better, it is the rationalistic attitude. This is not to say that every philosopher in the analytic community adopts this attitude, but, by and large, it serves as a regulative ideal. It is also, by and large, an institutional attitude, the academic attitude, and it is better carried out through the channels of the academic institutions than through any other institution. Now if one considers the present situation of French philosophy, the attitude which many French philosophers have towards their discipline is most likely the very reverse of the analytical attitude as I have just defined it. Some widely held beliefs are the following: (1') Philosophy is, by definition, a solitary enterprise; criticism of one's philosophical views is due to malevolence or to oblique (maybe unconscious) intentions or motives; there is no other form of approval than celebration. (2') There can be no progress in philosophy, because there is no truth or agreement to be reached; truth and objectivity are suspect values; philosophy is more like literature than like science, and the use of argument is more a matter of rhetoric and eloquence than a matter of logic and truth. (3') There can only be geniuses in philosophy, giants of thought; contrary to what Descartes thought, it is better to have a great number of confused ideas than to have a small number of clear

Pascal Engel

ideas; the philosopher is neither a professional nor a specialist; he is more like an artist. It might be thought that I have myself indulged in some sort of malevolent caricature. Of course the expression of those beliefs is far more subtle and sophisticated than that. As a matter of fact, many prominent French philosophers have held such beliefs quite literally, and far from being ashamed of them, they are quite proud of these opinions, which are for them the expression of their passionate fight against what they take to be the tyranny of reason itself. In any case the question is: how far are they ready to renounce those beliefs? I shall not try to examine whether they are sincere or just naive. As Peirce said: let us not pretend to doubt in philosophy what we cannot doubt in our hearts. Needless to say, this intellectual climate has not been very favourable to the development of analytical philosophy in France, and is largely responsible for the present crisis of the academic institution in philosophy. It has been most ably described and diagnosed by Jacques Bouveresse in two recent books, Laphilosophie chez les autophages and Rationalite et cynisme.1 In these books Bouveresse explains the tragicomedy of the perpetual divorce and remarriage of French philosophers with philosophy, and the self-defeating and self-deceptive attitudes to which it leads. They contain also some profound reflections on the present status of rationality, to which I shall come later.

2. Contemporary French Analytical Philosophy: a Preliminary Map I have given some of the reasons for despair. Now for some of the reasons for hope. For some years there has been in France an increasing interest in analytical philosophy, due in part to a reaction against the excesses of post-structuralist philosophy. The French reader has now at his disposal the main writings of Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein, Quine, Strawson, Ryle, Kripke, Goodman, Putnam, Searle and Popper, although there are still large lacunae in the politics of translation. There are good historical expositions and discussions.3 We have come a long way since the time when, in 1962, some French and Anglo2

Minuit, 1984 and 1985. For instance, Jacques Bouveresse's books and papers (see below); Pierre Jacob, L'empirisme logique (Minuit, 1980). Joelle Proust has recently published an important book about the history of the notion of analyticity from Hume to Carnap, which is also a study of the origins of analytical philosophy 3

(Questions de forme (Fayard, 1986)).

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American philosophers met in Royaumont, and showed their inability to understand each other.4 These changes, however, came in a disorderly way. The French philosophical community being but a collection of tribes, there are no institutions, journals, or associations devoted to analytical philosophy, and not even a particular tribe of analytical philosophers (in spite of the allegations of those who are always ready to discern the signs of a so-called invasion). In many cases, the analytical tradition has been met by those philosophers of a more classical bend, who could not persuade themselves that such traditional ideas as the certainty of the cogito, the importance of the notions of truth, of argument, or of the rationality of science, had to be readily replaced by the Freudian unconscious, relativism and rhetoric, and the irrational succession of epistemai, or at least who believed that these notions had to be criticized on better grounds. Some people have met certain problems in analytical philosophy from the inside of other traditions, and have found that these problems had similarities with those from which they started. Some important agents in this respect have been the linguists, who in many cases have attracted the attention of the philosophers to the ideas of analytical philosophy of language.5 Are there positive, substantial, French contributions to analytical philosophy? It depends on what is meant by a 'positive' contribution. If it means work which has been discussed outside French by AngloAmerican philosophers, the answer is: very few (in this respect the post-structuralists have been much more successful). If by 'positive contributions' one means work which could (I do not say should) be discussed by analytical philosophers (given their usual criteria), the answer is: not many. But my purpose here is not to give a judgment but to give the elements to judge. In many ways the work of analytically orientated French philosophers reflects the present tensions existing within the analytical tradition itself, which might be briefly described in the following way. First, there is the thesis, which Michael Dummett has called 'the basic tenet of analytical philosophy', according to which the philosophy of language is the primary part of philosophy, upon which other parts are dependent, and which occupies the place which was traditionally reserved to ontology or to the theory of knowledge. Second, there is the 4

La philosophie analytique (Minuit, 1962). Benveniste was the first. See 'La philosophie analytique et le langage', in Problemes de linguistique generate (Gallimard, 1966). See also 0 . Ducrot, Dire et ne pas dire (Herman, 1972), where the notion of presupposition is discussed. Chomskyan linguistic too attracted the interest of philosophers to the debates in analytical philosophy of language. 5

Pascal Engel

growing propensity of many (mostly American) philosophers to think that philosophy is a sort of subpart of science, either because they conceive philosophy as 'naturalized epistemology' in Quine's sense, or because they see it as a part of cognitive science. There is a tension between the 'basic tenet' and this second trend because according to the latter the philosophy of language becomes dependent upon the philosophy of mind, and maybe the science of mind. Third, there is the thesis, quite opposed to the second tendency, but not incompatible with the basic tenet, according to which the central question of philosophy is the Kantian critical question of the possibility of our knowledge and of our experience, and about the place of the 'transcendental'. It seems to me that many of the current debates about, for example, the status of rationality or the truth of scientific or metaphysical realism, rest upon one or the other of these three assumptions, or a combination of them. In general, the Continental tradition has been favourable to the third, post-Kantian, thesis. It has shown recently (in particular in Germany) some interest in the first thesis, the basic tenet of analytical philosophy, but with a proviso: the philosophy of language is the primary part of philosophy, provided that language can be considered as 'transcendental' in one way or another. The main idea is that analytical philosophy of language could be adapted to the post-Kantian tradition, and relieved of its ungracious empiricist and scientistic tendencies. (Of course I am not claiming that this line of thought is exclusively Continental; everything rests on the way this programme is achieved.) All the French philosophers whom I am going to talk about have accepted the basic tenet of analytical philosophy, but they do not agree on its proper interpretation. A last reservation. I shall not count among the 'analytics' those philosophers who, although they have done much to introduce it to the French readers, are very critical of it, and when they discuss it, do so from a different standpoint. Jules Vuillemin and Gilles Granger are among them. Vuillemin's impressive work is about the philosophy of knowledge and the history of philosophy. He has commented upon Russell, Carnap, Goodman. 6 In his most recent book, Necessite ou contingence, an analysis of Diodorus' Master Argument, he uses widely the tools of modal and temporal logic, as well as in his previous books.7 In a sense Vuillemin's methods have affinities with the analytical school 6

J. Vuillemin, Leqons sur la premiere philosophic de Russell (A. Colin, 1968); La logique et le monde sensible (Flammarion, 1970). 7 Necessite ou contingence; I'aporie de Diodore et les systemes philosophiques (Minuit, 1984). What is a Philosophical System? (Cambridge University Press, 1986) is an English adaptation of part II of this book.

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in the history of philosophy, which considers, in Hide Ishiguro's happy phrase, that the history of philosophy is the 'jurisprudence' and not the court of appeal for philosophizing.8 But Vuillemin's work is unique, and cannot fall squarely within one category or another. The same can be said about Granger, a philosopher of science, who has shown much interest in Wittgenstein (whom he was the first in France to write about) and in the philosophy of language.9 Vuillemin and Granger are, if they let me use this phrase, the godfathers of French analytical philosophy. But a godfather need not approve of his godson's opinions and deeds. For similar reasons, I shall leave out of this survey the work of Paul Ricoeur, which has been for some years an attempt to bring about a fruitful dialogue between hermeneutics and analytical philosophy.

3. Francis Jacques' Philosophy of Dialogue Francis Jacques is one of the few French philosophers who became acquainted quite early with the analytical tradition, especially the Oxfordian philosophy of the fifties. For more than fifteen years he has been developing a comprehensive philosophy of dialogue.10 Two stages can be discerned in his work. The first stage is a study, within the field of the philosophy of language, of the pragmatic conditions of dialogue and communication. His main thesis is that the semantic, but also the pragmatic aspects of meaning have been analysed inadequately by the contemporary philosophy of language and linguistics. Not only the traditional semantical theory of meaning of the logicians, according to which meaning is determined by truth conditions, but also the pragmatic theory, according to which meaning is dependent upon the contextual features of utterances, are radically defective, because they ignore what Jacques calls the 'dialogicaP conditions of communication. His reason for this claim seems to be that, on most pragmatic models of communication and discourse analysis, the meaning of an utterance is taken to be 8

Hide Ishiguro, 'La philosophic analytique et l'histoire de la philosophic', in Critique 399-400 (1980), 743-750. 9 G. Granger, Pensee formelle et sciences de I'homme (Aubier, 1962) (English trans., Formal Thought and the Sciences ofMan Reidel, 1981); Essai d'une philosophie du style? (2nd ed. 0 . Jacob, 1987); La theorie aristotelicienne de la science (Aubier, 1976); Languages et epistetnologue (Klinckskieck, 1980); Wittgenstein (Seghers, 1968). 10 Dialogiques (Presses Universitaires de France, 1979); Difference et subjectivite (Aubier, 1983); L'espace logique de I'interlocution (PUF, 1985).

Pascal Engel

relative to the subjectivity of the speaker who utters a certain sentence, and to the subjectivity of the hearer who interprets this utterance. But in locating this subjective element of meaning either in the speaker or in the hearer's communicative intentions and expectations, these models ignore the fact that it is mostly in the exchange between the two that the communication resides. The primary situation in which meaning has to be deciphered is dialogue. Jacques has applied this principle to an analysis of reference. Singular terms such as definite descriptions and proper names refer to certain individuals only within a context in which they 'co-refer' to other possible individuals involved in the dialogic communication, or 'retro-refer' to objects in previous uses." Reference is fixed only in the ongoing dialogue which involves the further beliefs of the interlocutors. The same analysis is extended to other speech acts, such as questions.12 The second stage of Jacques' inquiry is an attempt to relocate this dialogic account of communication within a general philosophy of dialogue. He takes up the Kantian question: how is our experience and our knowledge of an objective world possible? This question, according to him, cannot be posed, as it was in Kant's and in Husserl's philosophy, as the question of the nature of a fixed 'transcendental subject' whose acts are immutable and within a fixed concept of what our experience is. On the contrary transcendental subjectivity is constrained by transcendental intersubjectivity, and the realm of our experience is not fixed, but evolves as a dialogue within a community.13 Instead of being true of an objective world, our theories (including) our scientific theories are ways by which we refer to a world, in a perpetual dialogue with it. Jacques intends thus to escape what he takes to be the false debate between objectivism and relativism.14 This transcendental philosophy of dialogue has some affinities with the transcendental philosophy of communication of German philosophers like Apel and Habermas. One might expect also that Jacques' pragmatic analysis of communication could issue in the 'logic of dialogue' which has been set forth by German logicians such as Paul Lorenzen and Kuno Lorenz. He disclaims, however, any commitment to an ideal community of communication which would fix the norms of objectivity, and he rejects as inadequate the analyses which would capture the essence of dialogue within a logical formalism. Jacques' views are ultimately ethical. Being a participant in a dialogue implies being a person, and the very concept of a person depends upon the 11 12

See Dialogiques.

L'espace logique de Vinterlocution, 267-322. 13 Ibid., 497-539. 14 See especially ibid., 461-496.

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interpersonal conditions of communication. Ego is alter ego, and ego communicans .1S I shall not comment upon the 'transcendental turn' which Jacques imposes, among others, on the basic tenet of analytical philosophy, although I shall say something about it towards the end of this paper. I shall only raise a few questions about his analysis of reference. According to Jacques, the semantical analysis of a sentence like: (i) Certain musical qualities are required for the principal actor of this comedy is defective if one only considers the truth conditions of (i), because the referential expressions contained in it are ambiguous.16 A semantic theory which, like for instance Davidson's adaptation of Tarski's theory of truth for natural languages, would be unable to give us the truth and reference conditions of (i), as uttered in a particular context. Only a process of 'inter-reference' (by which I suppose, Jacques means a series of questions and answers exchanged between two people in order to identify the proper referents of the expressions in (i)), can 'fix the referents'. An agreement on these referents is necessary, according to Jacques, to give the proper truth conditions of (i), before a truth value is given to this sentence. This situation, says Jacques, is not exceptional, but canonical in the process of communication.17 But I cannot see how it is an objection to Davidson's procedure. According to Davidson, an allocation of a truth-value to (i) is an hypothesis which we set in the process of interpreting the talk of someone else. By a maxim of charity, we decide not to count more beliefs that others hold true than are true by our lights. If this interpretative process fails, we then try another hypothesis, until we reach the best fit.18 Jacques objects that the process of maximizing agreement is not described. But being a postulate of interpretation, it need not be described. He objects further that Davidson rejects in the 'meta-theory' of a theory of meaning the pragmatic conditions which should appear in the theory itself. I cannot see why this is an objection. The strategy used by Davidson in his theory of meaning is to try not to incorporate too much explanatory hypotheses about meaning, in order to minimize the rules which we have to invoke when interpreting the speech of others. As Davidson puts it, his theory explains more 'in the obvious sense of bringing more data under fewer rules'.19 Incorporating more and more principles of 15

Par ex. ibid., 562. Ibid., 248. 17 Ibid. 18 See D. Davidson, Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation, essays 9-11 (Oxford, 1984). 19 Davidson, Essays on Actions and Events (Oxford, 1980), 141. 16

Pascal Engel

communication within the theory does not necessarily increase its explanatory power. Jacques is not satisfied either with Grice's analysis of meaning, although it is more pragmatic than the purely semantic theory. According to Grice (roughly), meaning is a matter of speakers' intentions over sentences uttered, and of various 'conversational maxims' which conventionally regulate these intentions. As well known, Grice's theory implies that in uttering/) with the intention of meaning that/), I also intend that my hearer recognizes my intention to mean that/), and that I recognize his own intention. Whatever the way to escape the regress, this process is clearly communicational and dialogic. But this does not satisfy Jacques, who says that the very process of recognition of the other's intentions is presupposed by Grice's analysis, and therefore begs the question against an analysis which, like his, implies that the intentions are identified in the dialogical situation.20 If he means that one of the difficulties of Grice's analysis is that linguistic meaning is explained in terms of intentions of communication, and intentions of communication in terms of linguistic meaning, and is therefore circular, I think it is a serious objection (although it maybe disposed of). But if he means that there is no such thing as a literal meaning of a sentence/) in an utterance of it, because the meaning oip is fixed by a dialogue about the meaning of />, I think he is wrong, because one of the conditions of the 'interaction' between speaker and hearer about communicative intentions is that there be such a literal meaning oip. 4. Pragmatics and Cognition As I remarked above, one of the interesting features of recent work on analytical philosophy of language in France is the co-operation between linguists and philosophers, a co-operation which existed a few years ago in England or in America but which has not proved as fruitful as it was expected to be. In France, where the communities of researchers are smaller, this has been possible to some extent. Chomskyan linguistics and pragmatics have been important points of contact. One of the main centres of interest has been speech acts theory, in the style of Austin and Searle. Francois Recanati has written a comprehensive presentation of these theories. In his book, Les enonces perfortnatifs, he studies explicit performatives (such as 'I promise to come'). Although Recanati introduces some new points, he follows mainly the lines of the theory of communication based on Grice's theory of meaning and conversational implicatures, according to which interpreting a 20

10

L'espace logique de I'interlocution, 72, 135, 249.

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certain performative utterance is a matter of making a certain inference calculated from the literal meaning of the statement concerned. He therefore rejects the kind of conventionalism which has been associated with speech-act theory, for Strawson's analysis.21 Among Grice's maxims of conversation is what he calls the maxim of pertinence: in conversation, always try to say something relevant to your audience. Dan Sperber, a French anthropologist, and Deirdre Wilson, a British linguist, have explored the implications of a pragmatic theory which reduces the Gricean maxims of conversation to only this one, which they call the 'principle of relevance'.22 An interesting feature of this theory is that it is not incompatible with truth-conditional semantics, since, as in Grice's theory, the various inferences drawn by the hearer of a speech act are calculated from the truth conditions of the sentence uttered. It might be asked: what is the philosophical upshot of these studies? They are, for sure, less far-fetched than those which are drawn by transcendental pragmatics. The upshot is mainly psychological: the principles of conversation are principles of reasoning, and reasoning is, under reasonable assumptions, a matter of cognitive processes. An important question, therefore, is whether the principles of pragmatic reasoning which are explored by linguists have a psychological counterpart and can be backed up by precise cognitive processes. Another linguist, Gilles Fauconnier, has proposed a pragmatic theory orientated along these lines, where the linguist constructions are taken as the counterpart of mental constructions, which he calls 'mental spaces'.23 But he does not study precisely the psychological underpinnings of these constructions, and pretends to leave out the philosophical interpretations of his theory. In my opinion, however, these studies have some philosophical significance. They raise important questions about the nature of logic and reasoning, and about the general form of a theory of meaning for natural language. But I think that we should not be too hasty and over-ambitious in drawing philosophical conclusions in this field.24 21

F. Recanati, Les enonces performatifs (Minuit, 1981). Meaning and

Force, Cambridge University Press, 1988. 22 D. Sperber and Deirdre Wilson, Relevance, Communication and Cognition (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986). 23 C. Fauconnier, Les espaces mentaux (Minuit, 1983); English trans., Mental Spaces (MIT, 1985). 24 Although speech act theory and pragmatics have attracted the interest of many linguists, some work has been done on semantics from a logical standpoint. See especially Frederic Nef, Semantique de la reference temporelle (Lang, 1986), a study of temporal reference within the framework of intensional logic. 11

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5. Denis Zaslawsky on Being Another interesting way in which linguistic and logical analyses can be combined with philosophical claims has been explored by Denis Zaslawsky. In a book called Analyse de I'etre and subtitled 'an essay in analytical philosophy', he attempts to give an account of the structure of 'atomic propositions' and explores the consequences which this account might have for a theory of the meaning of the verb 'to be'.25 Zaslawsky starts from the traditional question: what is the ground of the difference between propositions which assert the existence of a certain individual and propositions which predicate something of a given individual? He takes up the problem, both in its traditional formulation in Plato and Aristotle and in its modern and contemporary formulation in Kant, Frege, Russell and Strawson. One first difference between predication and existence is that existence is not a property in the usual sense, as it can be seen from an analysis of the famous paradoxes, such as Plato's paradox of the being of not being. Another difference is that predication is relative to certain categories within which properties are ranked. Being, unlike predication, is a crosscategorial notion, too general to be applied to an object in the manner of the attribution of a property to an object. It is, in the medieval sense, a 'transcendental'. Kant, Frege and Russell have drawn similar conclusions, although with different arguments: existence is not a predicate. So far, Zaslawsky's does not pretend to give a new analysis, but only to aim at a generalization of these views. The more original part of his account comes with his analysis of atomic propositions, of the basic subject/predicate form. Here he takes up Aristotle's, Russell's, and Strawson's views, and points out that they all recognize what Strawson has called the 'asymmetry' of subject and predicate. But Zaslawsky has a new, different interpretation of this asymmetry. According to him the basic structure of atomic propositions is not really the subject/predicate form, nor the function/argument form of modern post-Fregean logic, but the thematic structure in the linguist's sense. For instance in a sentence such as 'John is not polite', 'John' (which is the grammatical subject) is the theme, and 'polite' is the focus (the grammatical predicate). But theme and focus can be reversed, as in 'It is not John who is polite', where 'John' is not the theme, but the focus. According to Zaslawsky, the asymmetry of theme and focus is more basic than the asymmetry of subject and predicate, and Russell's and Strawson's analyses can be reinterpreted as special cases of this structure. Existential propositions reveal the same thematic structure as predicative propositions, and therefore both depend on this fundamental thematic 25

12

D. Zaslawsky, Analyse de I'etre (Minuit, 1983).

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structure. Both show an asymmetry with respect to negation. For instance, the negative existential propositions which Russell was interested in, such as: (ii) The best French analytical philosopher does not exist do not have the description 'the best French analytical philosopher' as their subject (as Russell recognized in his theory of descriptions), but there is a hidden theme in the proposition which can be paraphrased as: (iii) France does not have a best analytical philosopher. The same thing is true of negative predicative statements: (iv) The best French analytical philosopher is not modest can be paraphrased as: (v) France does not have a modest best analytical philosopher. It turns out, therefore, that existential and predicative propositions share the same asymmetrical thematic structure, although this asymmetry is distributed differently in each case. Existence is not a predicate, but there is something common to both, namely thematization.26 I would not quarrel with Zaslawsky's conclusion, which I find interesting, but with his method. As he himself points out, this conclusion is not incompatible with Russell's account. But he believes that his account is more general, and that the opposition theme/focus is a true linguistic universal (although a pragmatic one). I do not share his 'intuitions' regarding (ii)-(v), which seem to me strained. Zaslawsky has not shown conclusively that similar results could not be obtained within a more traditional, Fregean, treatment of predication and existence, and therefore that his informal 'comparative' method succeeds against this traditional account.27

6. Jacques Bouveresse on Wittgenstein and Rationality Jacques Bouveresse has long been the most active defender of analytical philosophy in France, but it begins to emerge that analytical philosophy can be defended and practised from different points of view, in France as elsewhere. Bouveresse's standpoint can be readily characterized as Wittgensteinian. Most of his work up to now has consisted in commentaries on Wittgenstein's philosophy, which he was one of the 26 27

Ibid., 177. 1 have reviewed this book in Revue Philosophique, 108, 3 (1983), pp. 317—

22. 13

Pascal Engel

first to expose and discuss. But Bouveresse's books and papers are not mere Wittgenstein scholarship: each of them is an attempt to put Wittgensteinian problems in contemporary perspective, and to put contemporary philosophical problems in a Wittgensteinian perspective. His first book, La parole malheureuse, is a series of exercises in conceptual analyses, on current topics in the philosophy of language, philosophy of mind and ontology. Although this books shows some influence of the 'therapeutic' style of analysis of Oxfordian philosophy, Bouveresse sees no real incompatibility between ordinary language philosophy and the formal methods of Carnap, for instance.28 In both cases, philosophy is a form of conceptual analysis, aiming at a clarification of philosophical problems. But Carnap was concerned by foundational problems.29 Wittgenstein, on the contrary, dismissed all foundational questions in philosophy (especially in the theory of knowledge and in the philosophy of mathematics) .30 Philosophy was for him a kind of anti-mythology, a 'Form der Betrachtung' of contemporary culture and of philosophy in particular. In his book Wittgenstein, la rime et la raison,31 Bouveresse shows the dual attitude which Wittgenstein had about the myths: on the one hand, he was a typical Aujkldrer, willing to denounce the illusions of mankind and every form of mythology and of religion, and on the other hand he was deeply convinced that mythologies are inevitable. He was, says Bouveresse, a militant rationalist with an acute consciousness of the limits of rationality.32 This formula can be applied to Bouveresse himself, who, when he defends analytical philosophy, does not defend certain theses and doctrines, but a certain style of thought, which he finds generally absent in contemporary French philosophy. For instance, Bouveresse's master work, Le tnythe de I'interiorite, which is a commentary and exegesis of Wittgenstein's thoughts on subjectivity and private experience, can also be read as the demonstration of what can be done in philosophy when one leaves the realm of 'pure subjectivity' and of 'the phenomenological ego' which has been the centre of the phenomenological tradition. As Bouveresse points out, many current themes in present day thinking (for instance many leitmotifs of the poststructuralist philosophers) were anticipated by Wittgenstein. But Bouveresse suggests that these ideas lose most of their strength when they are not the product of a certain style of thought, with a sense of 28

La parole malheureuse (Minuit, 1971), 12. See Joelle Proust, Questions de forme, op. cit. sec. IV. 30 Cf. Jacques Bouveresse, 'La philosophic et les fondements', Archives de philosophie 43, No. 1 (1980), 1-32. 31 Minuit, 1973. 32 Ibid., 228 seq. 29

14

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what Wittgenstein called 'real philosophical problems'. But what are 'real philosophical problems'? This is the kind of phrase which has been considered with much irony and sarcasm by the dominant trend of contemporary philosophy. Bouveresse's last two books (see above §1) are precisely devoted to an elucidation of the reasons and the causes of this particular situation. I shall not detail here the particular arguments of these books, which' do not deal with analytical philosophy as such, although they certainly deal, interestingly enough, with certain antitheses of analytical philosophy, as I have indicated above. Bouveresse's main purpose, in these books, is to discuss some contemporary philosophical varieties of irrationalism, relativism and scepticism, and to defend against them the rights of a rationalistic attitude. An interesting feature of Bouveresse's discussion is that he does not deal only with French versions of these doctrines, but also, so to say, with their Anglo-American counterparts. For instance, Bouveresse compares certain themes in Lyotard's thought with certain themes of Feyerabend; he points out similarities between Derrida and Rorty, etc. Relativism and irrationalism are not the apanage of the French. Richard Rorty has recently claimed that analytical philosophy, which he sees—rightly, in my opinion—as an heir of classical philosophy, has itself come to its end, and has to be replaced by a 'postanalytical philosophy'. The prefix 'post', which Rorty uses with many writers today (for instance Lyotard speaks about a 'post-modern' thought) means that Philosophy (with a capital P), conceived as an inquiry about the nature of Truth, Reality, Knowledge, or Goodness, is a declining, and maybe dead enterprise. It has been already replaced, and at least should be replaced, by a more modest kind of inquiry, which leaves out these traditional platonic questions. For Rorty, there is no such thing as Truth or Rationality. 'True' and 'rational' are just the names which we give to the doctrines which we happen to approve, and express the norms of our inquiry at a certain moment. This 'pragmatist' attitude, according to Rorty, is already present in the work of some leading analytical philosophers, such as Quine, Davidson, and Sellars. And Rorty is not afraid of coupling those names with those of Foucault Derrida, to enrol them all under his banner.33 The question whether Rorty is right in bringing together those names can be left to the reader as an exercise. But it is certainly true that Rorty's reasoning about the coming of a new age, in which Philosophical questions will be withdrawn and replaced by philosophical (with a 33

See in particular R. Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism (Brighton: Harvester, 1982), and Bouveresse's discussion in La philosophie chez les autophages, conclusion. 15

Pascal Engel

small p) questions, where notions such as truth and rationality will have a different meaning, looks very much like the reasoning of philosophers like Derrida, who always speak about the coming of a new era, when classical philosophical questions will be left over, an era which has in some sense already begun. As Bouveresse rightly points out, it is one of the favourite arguments of the irrationalists, that the meaning of 'rationality' is not fixed, and that there is no real criterion of what rationality is, apart from the criterion which we accept at a certain moment or age. But from the fact that there are various criteria of rationality, it does not follow that there is no rationality or that this word is devoid of any meaning. As Bouveresse remarks, quoting Wittgenstein, the fact that certain conceptions of rationality are untenable does not show that rationality itself is untenable. It leaves everything just as it is.34 According to Rorty, truth amounts just to 'rational acceptability' for a given community, and there is no independent point of view from which we could assess the truth of our theories of the world, or their correspondence to an independent reality. Rorty rejects not only the traditional realist conception of truth, but also the conception which has been put forward by Peirce and taken up by Popper, according to which truth is rational acceptability at the ideal limit of scientific inquiry. Rorty claims that he has no idea what the 'end of scientific inquiry' would be like, and that nobody has any idea of it either.35 But, as Bouveresse remarks, why should we have any precise idea of a situation which is a regulative ideal, or a necessary presupposition of our inquiry? This seems to involve a confusion between rationality as a fact and rationality as a norm. 36 Does Bouveresse himself hold the realist conception of truth? It is sometimes difficult, in his writings, to discern exactly what kind of conception he defends, on this topic and on others. This is due to the fact that he very often defends a certain style of thinking, more than particular theses. As a Wittgensteinian, he has a natural suspicion of philosophical theories. But we may get some hints from a paper which he wrote on Dummett and Frege.37 According to the realist, there is an independent reality, which 'makes true' our statements about the world. But it would be a mistake to think that this reality could be 34

Raionalite et cynisme, 120-124. See for instance his 'Pragmatism, Davidson and Truth', in E. Le Pore (ed.), Truth and Interpretation, Perspectives on the Philosophy of Donald Davidson (Blackwell, 1986). 36 Rationalite et cynisme, 140. 37 'Frege, Dummett et la "nouvelle querelle du realisme"', Critique (Oct. 1980), 881-896. 35

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determined independently of our language and thought, for this reality is the projection of our 'grammar'. But to conclude that it is nothing but a mere reflection of our grammar would be a mistake. We still need the notion of an independent reality. But this reality is nothing which we could assess. It is a transcendental presupposition of our linguistic practice and of our knowledge. Wittgenstein, in this sense, is a 'transcedental anti-realist'.38

7. Does Analytical Philosophy Need a Transcendental Turn? It seems, then, that, for Bouveresse, we can avail ourselves of some sort of transcendental philosophy. There are, of course, various interpretations of what a transcendental philosophy is or can be. We have seen for instance how Francis Jacques interpreted the critical question within his philosophy of dialogue. Wittgenstein's transcendental anti-realism (if Bouveresse is right in his interpretation) is certainly very different.39 The fact that many writers about analytical philosophy in France find it necessary to interpret their own position in the light of transcendental arguments is not at ail surprising, given the strong influence of German idealism in that country. It is, of course, even truer of contemporary German philosophy. We are reaching here a fundamental question: is analytical philosophy at bottom a variety of transcendental philosophy? However, I cannot examine this question here.40 But I want to emphasize two points. First, there has been no discussion among French analytical 38

Op. cit., 896. Bouveresse follows here J. McDowell, 'Antirealism and the Epistemology of Understanding', in H. Parret and J. Bouveresse (eds), Meaning and Understanding (Berlin; De Gruyter, 1981). 39 The question whether Wittgenstein's philosophy can be interpreted as a transcendental philosophy has been much debated. For a recent account, see J. Lear, 'Leaving the World Alone', Journal of Philosophy, LXXIX, No. 7, (July 1982), 382-403. 40 Vincent Descombes has given an interpretation of Wittgenstein notion of 'grammar' according to which the transcendental question in philosophy amounts to the study of the transcendental (in the medieval sense) or transcategorial notions, such as being, truth, or goodness. His analysis has many affinities with Zaslawsky's. See his book, Grammaire d'objets en tous genres (Minuit, 1983), translated as Objects of all Sorts (Blackwell, 1986). I have not commented on Descombes' book because it is more a critique of contemporary French philosophy from the point of view of certain (reinterpreted) insights borrowed from analytical philosophy than a contribution to analytical philosophy. See my review of this book, 'Des nuages de philosophic dans des gouttes de grammaire', Critique, 451 (Dec. 1984), 954-983. 17

Pascal Engel

philosophers about the precise nature and validity of transcendental arguments, that is, about arguments which proceed from the fact that a given proposition p is known to be true, to the fact that there is a universal, necessary, condition for our knowing £ to be true. On the other hand, transcendental arguments have been much questioned among Anglo-American analytical philosophers. Second, there is a dominant trend in analytical philosophy, of which Quine is the most famous representative, according to which there is no 'first philosophy', no point of view from which we could formulate, outside our experience, any a priori or necessary condition for this experience. On this view there are no transcendental questions, and philosophy has no specific subject matter which could be distinguished from the subject matter of scientific inquiries. A striking fact about most of the philosophers I have talked about is that they are all very reluctant to accept this position. I do not mean to imply that they are wrong, but that there is a different way to defend realism and rationalism than from a critical and transcendental perspective. It is to accept a version of scientific realism, a position which, despite its shortcomings, seems to me to make perfectly good sense. This position has been defended recently by Pierre Jacob, a French philosopher who has made interesting contributions to analytical philosophy.41 Pierre Jacob wants to defend the traditional distinction between the truth of a statement and our reasons for holding this statement true: a statement can be false even when we have the best reasons to hold it true. Like Bouveresse, Jacob criticizes Rorty's identification of truth and rational acceptability. He points out that Rorty's mistake is to infer, from the fact that there can be many correspondence relations between a language and the world, that there is no correspondence at all, and therefore nothing for a language to be true of. Jacob remarks also that the version of realism according to which our theories of the world can be true (or false) at the ideal limit of human scientific inquiry, encounters the same difficulty as the crude version of realism, according to which our scientific theories are just true or false: in both cases we encounter the idea of an unconceptualized reality independent of the human mind. If one, therefore, wants to deny the existence of such an independent reality then he will have to admit that truth collapses into rational acceptability. But, as Jacob remarks, the idea of 41

See his book mentioned in note 3 above. See also P. Jacob (ed.), De

Vienne a Cambridge, Vheritage du positivisme logtque (Gallimard, 1981) (a translation and edition on positivist and post-positivist philosophy of science). See also his papers 'Realisme et verite', Fundamenta Scientiae, 3/4, (1983); 'Le rationalisme peutil etre deductif ?', Le temps de la reflexion, 5 (1984), and especially 'Is there a path halfway between realism and verificationism?', to be published in Synthese. Pierre Jacob has also written on the philosophy of mind and psychology. 18

Contemporary French Analytical Philosophy

an independent reality makes sense. For instance according to the essentialist doctrine as it has been revived by some analytical philosophers, there can be essential properties of things, independent of our knowledge of them, and which science can investigate.42 These arguments, of course, should be examined with much more scrutiny than I can attempt here. But if they are correct, the 'transcendental turn' which many Continental philosophers are willing to take is by no means imposed on us. 8. A Modest Proposal I have tried to show that, despite the fact that there is much interesting work done by analytically minded French philosophers, there is at present nothing which can really be called 'French analytical philosophy'. Writing about analytical philosophy is one thing, practising it is another thing. The French context lacks the cohesion, the sense of a community of problems and of techniques which analytical philosophy has in other countries. It would be preposterous, however to expect that analytical philosophy could have in France the same diversity and the same institutional strength as in England or in America. I do not know whether it even possible or desirable, if it amounts to the suggestion that a certain tradition can be 'imported' from the outside into another tradition. It may well be that the best way to promote analytical philosophy in France is not to try to practise according to the canons and methods of the analytical tradition in other countries, but to try to revive those parts of the French tradition in philosophy which can best harmonize with it. For instance I have often heard analytical philosophers express the opinion that Descartes, Malebranche, or Arnauld were just analytical philosophers, by their own standards. We might then express the hope that, if French philosophy happened to renew, not the doctrines, but the style of its rationalist tradition, we could say, as Hilary Putnam, that there is no analytical philosophy, but just good philosophy.

42

e.g. Kripke. 19

The Misprision of Pragmatics: Conceptions of Language in Contemporary French Philosophy J. J. LECERCLE

I come to praise contemporary French philosophy not to bury it. My aim is not to hail the appearance in France of a native brand of analytic philosophy—in itself an important event in the last decade—but to describe the indirect and selective importation of certain Anglo-Saxon concepts by French philosophers whose practice is far from analytic; and also to describe the resultant misunderstanding. In this paper I shall analyse the use of pragmatic concepts—and of the concept 'pragmatics'—in the recent work by Deleuze and Guattari, Mille Plateaux,x and I shall try to show that these concepts are the object of a creative misunderstanding, of a misprision. Pragmatics: For historical reasons, the first analytic concepts were imported into France by linguists, in the early seventies.2 This is why the borrowing is selective: the texts made available to the French public were those which were of immediate interest to linguists. Performative utterances, illocutionary force, and, later, conversational implicature: Austin and the so-called Austinians rather than Davidson or the disciples of Wittgenstein.3 And this is also why it is indirect: the concepts were reappropriated by philosophers like Deleuze when they borrowed them back from linguistics. We can easily imagine that in such a situation the occasions for misunderstanding and betrayal would be multiplied. The reasons for this alliance, on the common ground of pragmatics, between Anglo-Saxon philosophy of language and poststructuralist philosophers, can be found in the history of linguistics in France in the last decade. It is the story of the domination of 'scientific' linguistics not only over other social sciences (Levi-Strauss's enthusiastic praise of the Copernican revolution of phonology is well known), but also over French philosophy, where it compensated for the absence 1

G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, Mille Plateaux (Paris: Minuit, 1980). Cf. J. L. Austin, Quanddire c'estfaire (Paris: Seuil, 1970); J. R. Searle, Les actes de langage (Paris: Seuil, 1972). 3 No book by Davidson has so far been translated into French. Wittgenstein's main works have been available for a number of years, but have attracted comparatively little attention and discussion. 2

21

J. J. Lecercle

of a native philosophy of language.4 It is also the story of the reaction against this domination, both against the structural linguistics of Saussure5 and against the all powerful generative grammar of Chomsky. Within linguistics, there have been two attempts to supersede Chomskian grammar: the French tradition of 'enunciation' linguistics,6 and pragmatics. Over Chomskian grammar, pragmatics seems to have two advantages. It is concrete where generative grammar is abstract—it describes the actual workings of language in a concrete situation, for instance a conversation, whereas Chomskian grammar, especially in its latest, post-Pisan stages, deals with levels of abstraction quite beyond the ordinary speaker's experience of his own language. And it can be seen as material, if not materialist, where generative grammar is based on idealist conceptions—performative utterances have force, they do things, and they are part of institutions and apparatuses which have material existence, whereas Chomsky's innatism is difficult to accept for French philosophers trained in the traditions of Marx and Freud. 7 Misprision: The term 'alliance' is a misnomer, for it supposes that people are aware of what they are doing when they enter an alliance. This is certainly not the case on the Anglo-Saxon side {Mille Plateaux has only recently been translated yet, and the previous Anti-Oedipus never appeared as a congenial piece of goods to analytic philosophers). Neither is it on the French side: Deleuze and Guattari treat the borrowed concepts with their usual flippancy. They do mention Austin and Searle, but in a context where analytic philosophers would find it difficult to recognize their concepts. So the term 'misprision' is more accurate than 'misunderstanding'. I have borrowed it—there is the beginning of an abyme here, the hint of a possible misprision on my part—from the American critic Harold Bloom. He uses it to describe the relation of influence or discipleship between two poets, renamed 'the predecessor' and 'the ephebe'. 8 The concept is meant to replace the 4

B. Parain's Recherches sur la nature et les fonctions du langage (Paris: Gallimard, 1942), is a notable exception. 5 Cf. J. Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. G. C. Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977). 6 Cf. E. Benveniste, Problems in General Linguistics (University of Miami Press, 1971), and A. Culioli, 'La formalisation en linguistique', in Cahiers pour I'Analyse, 9 (Paris: 1968). 7 This is a simplification. Pragmatics is not necessarily hostile to Chomsky (in a 'modular' grammar, a module can be reserved for pragmatics). But the Deleuze-Guattari version of pragmatics certainly is. Conversely, not all Chomskyan linguists believe in innate ideas: cf. the position of the French linguist J. C. Milner. 8 H. Bloom, A Map of Misreading (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975). 22

The Misprision of Pragmatics

notions of 'influence', 'source', 'imitation' or 'tradition'. The main point is that the relation of influence is painful and violent. There is no borrowing which is not also a dismissal and a betrayal. What Bloom calls 'the scene of instruction', the primitive scene of influence and discipleship necessarily announces another Freudian scene, the murder of the poetic or philosophical father. 'Misprision' seems to me an apt description of the process of importation of concepts (from other fields or other traditions) into philosophy—a process of reappropriation, betrayal and creative misunderstanding. In order, however, to show the relevance of the concept to my corpus, I must distinguish it from a mere critique—as when Hegel is put right way up again—for instance Derrida's critique of Austin.9 What Derrida shows is a certain inadequacy of Austin's concept of 'performative utterance', its reliance on a theory of the subject as presence and centre of consciousness, its disregard for the workings of 'e'criture' (as appears in his critique of the infelicity of a performative utterance when spoken by an actor), and therefore its dependence on the formal framework of logocentric metaphysics. No such thing in Deleuze and Guattari: they import the concept 'pragmatics' wholesale, they praise Austin, they do not criticize him. Yet, as I shall show, the whole system of pragmatic concepts, although used literally, is displaced (Deleuze and Guattari have a negative theory of metaphor: they reject it). It is made to work in an entirely different context, that is, 'misprised'. My aim is to describe this displacement and assess its effects. My next step ought to be a reading and critical discussion of Deleuze and Guattari's text, especially plateau no. 4, 'The four postulates of linguistics', where this theory of pragmatics is expounded. I have, however, chosen a different path. The comparison between Continental and Anglo-Saxon theories of language will be a comparison in act: I shall propose several readings of a short sketch by Harold Pinter, Request Stop.10 This is in itself a typically Continental gesture: as we all know, the role played by literary texts in contemporary French philosophy is crucial,11 and there is no equivalent to this in Anglo-Saxon 9

Cf. 'Signature, evenement, contexte', in Marges de laPhilosophie (Paris: Minuit, 1972). 10 In H. Pinter, A Slight Ache and other plays (London: Methuen, 1961). 11 Cf. Derrida's readings of Jabes in Writing and Difference (London: Routledge, 1978) and Celan (Schibboleth (Paris: Galilee, 1986). Deleuze and Guattari have produced a reading of Kafka (Kafka (Paris: Minuit, 1975)) and Mille Plateaux contains uplateau devoted to short stories by Henry James and Scott Fitzgerald (plateau no. 8). 23

J. J. Lecercle

philosophy.12 I shall therefore indulge in the philosophical art of pastiche and propose readings of the text according to Grice, Lacan, and Deleuze and Guattari. But first, perhaps we could agree on a literal, naive reading of the text.13 There is, of course, nothing naive in a 'literal' reading of any text, except the name I have just given it. In fact, even on the most superficial level, if I try to answer simply the question 'what is happening on the stage?', the reading divides into two. In the first reading, up to the very last words of the text, the situation seems to be clear: the small man has made an improper suggestion to the woman. In plain words, he has made a pass at her, and she quite rightly tells him where to get off, which creates a certain embarrassment in the onlookers. But even then, something is missing, the 'pass' itself, which we guess to have occurred before the curtain was raised (and this has two consequences: (a) our guess may be wrong, the result of a false interpretation of the clues, and (b) the 'pass' has no existence whatsoever, since this is a play, and there is no such thing as 'before the text': a situation reminiscent of Hamlet). We are indeed proved wrong when we come to the woman's last words and the stage directions which go with them, that is to the climax or rather—for the French critical vocabulary has a much apter word for this—to the chute, the 'fall' of the text. We are induced to change our deductions, to think that in the non-existent moment before the text, she made a pass at him. The words 'shyly, hesitantly' seem to indicate that the primitive question, to which she alludes in the opening of the text, was not so much a request as an instance of Freudian demand. We also realize that this demand, as is always the case, is destined not to be satisfied, that the woman's strategy is self-defeating, because she talks too much. And we understand the small man's silence as dictated not by guilt but by the same embarrassment that makes the other lady hail a taxi. Lastly, we understand, or guess, that the woman is not quite in her right mind, and that the accusations she makes are only projections: if anyone is sexually frustrated it appears to be herself. We have all experienced similar situations, when in an overcrowded underground carriage someone starts voicing his or her anxieties aloud: and we have all taken cover behind our copy of The Times. These two readings are literal only in so far as we can safely assert that they are imposed on us by Pinter himself. He it is who tricks us into making false deductions; he it is who forces us to abandon them and replace them with others—this may be said to be the point of the sketch. 12

The 1981-82 series of lectures at the Royal Institute of Philosophy (Royal Institute of Philosophy Lecture Series, Vol. 16, Philosophy and Literature, ed. Griffiths, Cambridge University Press, 1983) remains an exception. 13 The text can be found in the appendix. 24

The Misprision of Pragmatics

But the readings are not naive. They require our acceptance of an implicit theory of language (contained in the critical phrase 'Pinter's conception of dialogue'), and I have also used psychoanalytical terms like 'projection' or 'demand' in order to formulate the second reading. More importantly—this is what I mean by 'Pinter's dialogue'—we are led to make deductions (the second reading is also based on deductions, which might, after all, be wrong, since the first were) and to postulate the existence of various subjects, each characterized by a different strategy: the author (his strategy is to deceive us, temporarily and for our greater pleasure, perhaps also to make us reflect on the nature of language); the reader, whose strategy is to understand, i.e. not to fall into the author's traps, although he or she necessarily does just that; the small man—his strategy is one of escape or refusal to be involved; the woman—hers is a strategy of demand. In other words, each of these subjects is endowed with certain intentions of meaning: their meanings reside in their intentions; one of their tasks is to interpret the other subject's meaning, through pragmatic calculus (the woman says this, but on my second reading I realize she means that1*). The role of one of these subjects, the reader, is determined by this task—he or she must recover all the other subject's meanings. But the author does not escape it either: his task is to anticipate and guide the reader's reactions, i.e. his or her meanings (he is going to think that, if I say this). In other words, my pseudo-naive reading has opened up the possibility of two readings: one Anglo-Saxon, a pragmatic reading in the manner of Searle, a conversational reading in the manner of Grice; the other Continental, a (broadly speaking) psychoanalytical reading in the manner of Lacan. My pseudo-naive reading was already a pragmatic reading: for 'deduction' read the various stages of Searle's calculus in the essays in Expression and Meaning. But since the whole sketch is a sort of conversation, perhaps we could risk a reading in terms of co-operation and implicature. That the play is a conversation is indicated by the usual structure, for instance by stage directions like 'woman, to small man'. Yet it is immediately apparent that the sketch is also not a conversation: there is no inverse stage direction 'small man, to woman'. In other words, a Grician reading seems to collapse from the very start, as one of the parties refuses to abide by the co-operative principle. The small man refuses to play the game. But we must also note that this does not stop the woman from conversing, even if it ultimately excludes her from the game, when the crowd departs and leaves her alone with the newcomer (even this is debatable, for after all she is the one who remains on the 14

We recognize Searle's analysis of indirect speech-acts. 25

J. J. Lecercle

stage and opens a second innings). In other words, the point of the text is an exploration of what happens when the co-operative principle is not accepted by all parties. The unexpected result is that it does not prevent some form of conversation from developing, even if it appears to be only a monologue. A Grician reading is hard to kill: what happens in the text is perhaps that the co-operative principle, and not merely the maxims of conversation, is exploited. By whom and for what purpose will appear later. Normally, if the co-operative principle does not apply, there should be no room for an application of the maxims of conversation. Yet, as we have seen, only one of the parties refuses to co-operate—and in his case there is no conforming to or exploiting the maxims, he cannot even be brief since he does not utter a word. But the other party does hold a conversation—not a monologue: most of the sentence types resorted to in the text belong to a situation of communication, where the presence of an addressee is necessary: questions, imperative for insults, etc. So in the case of the woman we can rightly wonder whether she abides by the four maxims or not. The answer is that she does not. Take quantity first (do not say more than is necessary, do not say too little either). It is obvious that the woman talks far too much, which is the reason for her eventual defeat. Quality (do not state what you know to be untrue; do not assert what you have no proof of) is no better. Not only have we deduced (rightly?) that she unjustly accuses the small man, but the very essence of her insults (of all insults?) is that she states what she knows to be untrue or has no certainty about. 'Anyone can tell you're a foreigner': we do not know the small man's nationality, and since he has spoken to her before the text—but has he? perhaps he just nodded, or even only made a gesture—we might think that she knows better than we do. But she does not: there is no 'before the text', and her statement is contradictory with the next one, 'anyone can tell you're just up from the country for a bit of a lark'—methinks the lady doth insult too much (but my two objections are not on the same level—I must come back to the problem). The woman does not conform to the maxim of relation either: she is not relevant. If my pragmatic reading is correct, neither her initial nor her final question are relevant—her requests are not requests, but instances of demand. But here, we have a problem with the Grician analysis, for this situation is normal in the case of indirect speech acts: the question is an order, the statement a question, the literal meaning is different from the intended meaning. As instances of demand, the woman's questions are relevant, as are relevant her digressions and repetitions, which seem to breach the fourth maxim, of modality (a ragbag of requests: be brief, be perspicuous, avoid ambiguity, be methodical). To be sure, she is no more methodical than she is brief, but there is nothing unclear or ambiguous about her 26

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speech. Working back to the other maxims, we could say the same: perhaps she does not tell the truth only because telling the truth would be irrelevant for her purpose. Her conversational tactics are in fact well adapted to her strategy. The situation seems to be that the first maxim is clearly breached (she does talk too much), but the others are so only tactically. This, of course, is not at all contradictory with Grice's theory, for conversation according to the maxims is purely an ideal, and in real life, the maxims are meant to be exploited (one recognizes their force by breaching them). This is the solution to the problem of indirect speech-acts: in order to to understand them, we need to establish their implicatures. So the answer to my problem seems to lie in the concept of exploitation. The woman exploits the maxims in order to develop her strategy, which is one of demand. But she fails to get where she wants: the important lesson to be drawn from the text is that such a strategy fails, and not for contingent reasons. She cannot win by playing the game that way, her strategy is bound to fail, for it is not so much the object of a rational choice as imposed on her by her passions. The only instance of exploitation in the sense of Grice takes place before the text, when she successfully turns what we have guessed to be a plain answer to a plain question into an insult, which in turn enables her to insult her opponent. But again, this happens before the text. I keep coming back to this inexistent and mythic origin of the text. We must take this, I think, if we want to save our Grician reading, as a symptom. The exploitation is not so much in the text (I was wrong in saying that the small man exploited the co-operative principle: you can only reject it, you cannot exploit it) as by the text. Someone has a coherent strategy of exploitation : the author (whose opponent on this new conversational level is the reader). He wants to describe the other side of conversation, when one party is resolutely silent and the other bent on conversing (which is of course an abyme of the customary relation between author and reader). In order to do this, he exploits the rules of conversation and therefore recognizes them. But the fact that we have changed level has important consequences. This new conversation, between author and reader, (a) is a mirror image of the first, and therefore liable to the same difficulties—the author as bavard, as compulsive talker, who always ends up embarrassing his reader, and (b) is implicit and abstract, and therefore takes on general value—there is a theory of conversation implicit in this, which is anti-Grician: an agonistic view of dialogue, not the irenic view we find in Grice. Struggle, and not co-operation. Here, I can propose my second, Lacanian, reading. For the sake of brevity I will limit myself to the 27

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mention of five celebrated maxims of the master15—as a counterpart to Grice's maxims. From them I shall derive an agonistic logic of conversation. First maxim: 'No speech remains without an answer, even if it is only met with silence, provided there is a listener'. This points to an important aspect of our text, which is ignored by the Grician reading: this is a true conversation. Even if the small man refuses to play the game, he is drawn into the conversation, for silence is an answer (and Pinter duly indicates a 'pause'—the most frequent word in the text—after each of the woman's speeches). Silence is part of communication, it plays the same part as the zero sign in structural linguistics—it is in fact a sign. Which of course shows that meaning cannot be reduced to intention: whether he means to or not, the small man cannot help communicating. His meaning escapes him, or rather meaning can only be ascribed to the overall situation of conversation, not to the individual parties. Second maxim: 'Man's desire finds its meaning in the desire of the other, not so much because the other has the key to the desired object, as because his main object is to be recognized by the other'. This maxim is based on the ambiguity of the genitive, which is both subjective and objective. 'The desire of the other' points to both 'man desires the other' and 'man desires what the other desires', a kind of mimetic desire. Going back to our text, if we collapse the two, we have: 'the woman's desire is to be the object of the small man's desire', in other words, the meaning of her desire is that she wants to be recognized by the small man as a subject, and as a seductive subject. This of course gives us the key to her strategy: she struggles to be recognized by the small man; she wants to master him, and of course ends up being his slave; her demand (for recognition) is—structurally—meant not to be satisfied. Third maxim: 'If I address (or call) the person to whom I speak by whatever name I give him, I impose upon him a subject position, from which he will have to answer me, even if he rejects it'. In this maxim, conversation receives an object: the point of it is not to co-operate, but to gain linguistic ground, to occupy a place—to be recognized by the opponent as occupying this place. This is, by the way, typical of Pinter's conception of dialogue. Also, conversely, the object of conversation is to assign a place to the other—in the case of our text, the place of a scapegoat. The woman's insults all have one thing in common (they are in no way digressive)—they all refer to members of the series of dominated positions in modern society: madmen, criminals, perverts, foreigners, country bumpkins. Add only trade unionists and women, 15 My translation. Cf. J. Lacan, Ecrits (Paris: Seuil, 1966); also Ecrits, a selection, trans. A. Sheridan (London, 1977), especially 'The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis'.

28

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and you have the complete list of victims of comedians' jokes. This is why the small man must on no account answer, why his strategy of obstinate silence is successful in the end. The victim of an insult, or of an accusation of this sort, even if (s)he denies the charge, always answers, if only for a moment, from the position named by the accuser. It takes a whole system of judicial rights, and a long tradition of fair trial, to convince one that the accused is presumed innocent until proven guilty. The law of ordinary conversation is a lynching law, where there is no smoke without fire, and where the accused answers from a position of presumed guilt. One last point about this maxim. If conversation is an unfair trial, or a battle where the stronger party, not the innocent one, wins the day, the question of alliances is decisive— one must isolate one's enemies. The woman fails because, although she attempts to find allies, she cannot obtain them. The sentence 'I was the first in this queue', which isolates her, announces her defeat. Fourth maxim: 'In speech, the function of language is not to inform, but to evoke. What I seek when I speak is the other's answer. My question makes me a subject.' We understand why our deduction was right. The archaic question, and the final one, do not seek, as they ought to, to elicit information. They are indirect speech-acts, but of a special kind: they are not highly conventional (no general semantic rule, valid for English, allows me to understand 'please seduce me' from 'do you know if I can get a bus from here . . . to Shepherd's Bush', unless I interpret the hesitation marked by the three dots as a conventional sign indicating that the speaker is being coy), and they are not even necessarily meant as such (not only is the responsibility of the speaker withdrawn, as is usually the case with implicit meaning, but there is a sense in which the woman is impelled to ask the question, without consciously meaning to be seduced). Asking the question is therefore a way of occupying a subject position, of requesting the other party to recognize this subject position (the question requires an answer, it also seeks it). This is a well-known situation in thrillers, when the detective asserts his position in front of the suspect by saying 'I'm asking the questions here!' From this point of view also, the small man is right not to answer. This is the only way efficiently to refuse the woman the subject position she demands, that of the seduced, and therefore seductive lady. And there lies the source of the text: the woman must keep talking in order to force an answer out of him. As long as he keeps silent, he refuses to recognize her as a subject, and she must try to make him do so. Of course, the more she talks, the more she exposes herself, and the more certain her ultimate defeat is. Which brings me to my fifth, and last, maxim, the most mysterious one: 'The speaker receives his own message from the hearer, in an inverted form'. In order to understand this, we must remember that in 29

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most analyses of meaning, the meaning of my messages involves the hearer. Thus, for instance, in Grice's 'meaning NN', it is not sufficient that I should have an intention of meaning, I must also intend my hearer to recognize my intention. The important point, of course, is that this intention, this meaning, remain my intention and my meaning—we might call this the immediacy of his meaning for the subject. The formulation of the immediacy of meaning in a maxim might be: the speaker receives his own meaning from the hearer in the same form. B ut alas, here language plays a trick on us: it does not respect this immediacy, or at least it makes it problematic and fragile. This is due to the workings of what linguists know as 'shifters', i.e. first and second person pronouns. The sad fact about shifters is that they shift, and that if you do not shift the shifter, you shift the meaning. Thus, if my message is 'I want you to do this', in order to come back from my hearer with the same meaning, it will have to come back in an inverted form: 'you want me to do this'. Mere echo, i.e. the same form, inverts the meaning. This play on echo and inversion, which is allowed by the structure of language, enables the subject to evade his or her responsibility (using other personal pronouns than T is a well-known way for the speaker to do this). If for some reason my own message is unacceptable to me, I can still utter it in an inverted form as coming from my hearer: this is the linguistic basis of the operation of projection. This is what Freud describes in the case of Schreber's delirium (the unacceptable message, 'I, a man, love him, a man', reappears in the paranoiac's symptoms, transformed through operations of negation and projection). In the case of our text, the woman projects on to the small man her own desire to be seduced. We might represent this in the form of a short dramatic dialogue: —A: I wish to seduce you. —B: You wish to seduce me? —A: You wish to seduce me! Because what she is actually trying to do is to seduce the small man, she claims that he has tried to seduce her (he need not, of course, have said anything—it is her own message she receives from him in an inverted form). Because she is herself an outcast (as an eccentric, and also, in the world of obscene jokes, as a woman—the excluded third party of the joke according to Freud's analysis), she tries to place him in the position of the scapegoat. What I have illustrated is a weak version of the fifth maxim, which denies the immediacy of meaning: my meaning emerges through a circuitous route, but it is still my meaning. A strong version would deny the origin of meaning in the subject: 'my' meaning originates in the other or Other. I shall envisage something similar when, in my third reading of the text, I defend the thesis that 'all speech is indirect speech'. 30

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I think the five maxims provide a coherent interpretation of the text. They also evoke a theory of conversation, the maxims of which, in a parody of Grice, I shall now attempt to formulate. Quantity first: he who talks most, loses. The cause of the small man's success (he does succeed in not getting more involved) lies in his resolute silence, whereas the woman's logorrhea exposes her as at least an eccentric. But although this maxim works quite well for this text, it is not general enough. Because we have read other texts by Pinter, we know that the opposite situation also occurs, that speechless rage or terror often lead to the physical or mental destruction of the victim of verbal deluge (Mick in The Caretaker or Goldberg in The Birthday Party are embodiments of this 'talkative power'). What is common in the two situations is dissymmetry: in both cases the situation is one of excess (of words or of silence) and of unequal exchange, as opposed to the symmetry and informational exchange of Grician co-operation. Quality: you can state anything, provided it hurts, that is, provided it gains you a status, a place in this verbal battlefield, which you can force your opponent to recognize. Lying or stating without proof are therefore perfectly legitimate techniques. Indeed, they often prove to be the only adequate ones. There is no question of morality here: if stating the truth produces better results, you must speak truly; but it is only another weapon (cf. the old Jewish joke: 'You liar! I know you're actually going to Lemberg. So why do you tell me you're going to Lemberg in order to make me believe you're going to Cracow!'). The only relevance of your speech is its efficacy as a verbal weapon. This is the new maxim of relation: every speech-act is dependent on the constraints of your strategy. Lastly, modality: again, you may be brief or digressive according to the context; but it is always better to be ambiguous (if, at poker, you let your opponent be aware of your strategy, you are certain to lose). And, of course, the five maxims all depend on a principle which governs them, the principle of struggle. Any instance of verbal co-operation (as is the case when, in a bus queue, I successfully manage to inquire from my neighbour whether the next bus is going to Marble Arch) will be attributed to an exploitation of the maxims, the meaning of which will be pragmatically computed. This principle of struggle—do not expose your position; adapt your verbal weapons to your strategy and to the context (tactics is also important), never forget that your goal is to achieve recognition, to place yourself—is as commonsensical as its opposite. Indeed, one could argue that it is closer to the natural wisdom contained in language itself. The recurrent metaphor, as Lakoff and Johnson show at length,16 is not 'argument is co-operation' but 'argument is war'. 16

Cf. G. Lakoff and M. Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (University of Chicago Press, 1980). 31

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But in fact what I have shown in stating my principle of (verbal) struggle is the solidarity of the two readings: co-operation is the mirror image of struggle. The two readings share two essential elements. The first is strategy, and therefore pragmatic calculus, maxims and exploitation. In both cases, the technique of interpretation is the same. The second element, which is the source of the first, is the concept of an individual subject. The strategy is always attributed to an individual. It may be adequate or not (at some level, it is always adequate: the woman's strategy does not allow her to win, but the author's strategy is entirely successful—the woman's delirium is an instance of the author's stylistic talent) but there is always a subject to carry it, if not to carry it out. Of course, the conception of the subject is very different in the two readings. Grice's subject is a centre of consciousness, of intentional meaning, whereas the Lacanian subject is decentred, dependent on the symbolic law of language, determined by his relation with the other, with or without capital O, and certainly not always conscious of his meaning (the woman's responsibility might be said by a court to be 'diminished'). But even in the case of our text we have a subject, i.e. an individual construct—a personal history, his or her own fantasy, etc. What Deleuze and Guattari reject—this engages my third reading—is precisely this concept of 'individual subject'. We are going into deeper and murkier waters, away from the clarity of our fairly uncontentious first readings, away from the dictates of commonsense. Even if we carefully distinguish between 'sujet de l'enonciation' (the uttering subject) and 'sujet de l'enonce' (the grammatical subject), Deleuze and Guattari will still treat them as superficial effects. At a deeper level, there is no individual subject—and therefore no individual strategy— only what they call an 'agencement collectif d'enonciation' (collective arrangement of utterance). Let us go back to the text. The first thing to note is that neither the woman nor the small man have names. In fact, the only proper names mentioned in the text are 'Marble Arch' and 'Shepherd's Bush'. If the possession of a proper name is the defining characteristic of an individual, the only individual present in the text is London. Instead of two individuals, therefore, we have a map of London. Not even an organized one, where bus routes establish a fixed network of identities, by always going to and from the same places. Obviously the destination of the bus is of no importance: the name is only a point of cathexis for the woman's desire, for her delirium. In the terms of Deleuze and Guattari, what we have is not a hierarchic structure, organizing a totality and distributing subject positions or places, a tree (the best embodiment of this is Chomsky's 'syntagmatic marker') but a rhizome, a structureless root, branching out in all directions, according to lines of flight and desiring cathexes, without beginning or end, without direc32

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tion. The woman's speech, urgent but digressive, following her train of thought, is a good image of this. Not only are there no names: there is no subjectivity either. The small man, as we know, says nothing at all. And we cannot even know whether he has actually said anything at all (for reasons of principle this question is meaningless: there is nothing before the text17). There is something ludicrous in my first two readings: I have been attributing a complex, and successful, strategy to the small man, a strategy deduced from the single word 'pause', that is from a strategy computed from the zero sign (from which, potentially, any strategy can be computed without risk of being falsified). Does this mean that the small man's strategy is nowhere except in my head? Yes and no. Yes, because I calculated it from a multiply ambiguous sign. No, because my interpretation is not private: I hope to convince you that it is justified, to share it with you. In fact, my interpretation of the small man's strategy is not based exclusively on the word 'pause', but on its interaction with the woman's speech—remember the maxim of dissymmetry: the more she talks, the more he must keep silent. Yet, the question of the small man's subjectivity remains open. He could well be, if not absent, at least, as in the well-known passage in Descartes, a hat and a coat (what if the audience were to discover, when its owner takes it with him into the bus, that the woman has been addressing a tailor's dummy?). The case of the woman, however, seems to be different. At least, she provides material for my own interpretation delirium. But in her case too subjectivity is questionable. For what can assure me that I am facing a subject, and not a parrot or a talking automaton? There is no difficulty here for pragmatics, which postulates the existence of subjects (all meaning, being intentional, must be attributed to a subject—a simple process of checking will confirm that this is no woman, but a parrot). Or is there? For, after all, there are cases where the intention, and therefore the subjectivity it entails, is dubious. The first instance is possession: these are not my words, the spirit impels me, I speak in tongues. The second is constraints on speech, whether material, ideological or linguistic: these words are not my words, they are imposed on me, they do not express my meaning but, at best, a compromise. A good instance of this is Nelson's famous pronounce17

This non-existent existence of a moment 'before the text', to which I have been drawn time and again, (a) is an essential structure in all dramatic texts—in Hamlet, the murder of Hamlet's father, which has no reality because it has (not) occurred before the curtain rises, is unceasingly repeated in the text (in the dumb show, in the abyme play, etc.), (b) is the general structure of origins: the mythical arche which nevertheless is the truth of the patient's history—it is in fact the core of the psychoanalytic theory of truth. 33

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ment. As we know, what he intended to say was: 'Nelson is confident that every man will do his duty'. One of his lieutenants suggested that he replace 'Nelson' with 'England', and 'expect' was chosen because there was a word for it in the flag language, and it did not have to be spelt out. The result, as the Bellman in The Hunting of the Snark says— and he does not even bother to quote it in full, being content with 'for England expects . . .', that is, precisely what Nelson did not intend to say—is 'a maxim tremendous but trite'. The third case, with which I am very much concerned here, is reported speech: quotation, reports, speeches uttered by a character in a novel or a play. And indeed the woman's subjectivity appears questionable: a mere character in a play, she only speaks in cliches. She does not speak language, she is spoken by it. 'Ask a man a civil question, and he treats you like a threepenny bit': everything is conventional here, from the set phrases to the rhetorical-syntactic form of the sentence, down to the phonetic corruption of 'threepenny' (a particularly apt confirmation of the metaphor of used-up words as worn away coins so dear to Mallarme). The question 'who speaks?' is therefore raised. For even if I respond to it by the customary displacement, and answer that there is a subject speaking, the author, I am faced with a paradox. For this text is in fact characteristic of the highest type of subjectivity in language, a style, Pinter's style (and Pinter has a style: it is easily recognizable, it can be parodied, etc.). But at the same time his style is characterized by the overwhelming presence of non-subjective language, of cliches. In my opinion, the answer to this paradox can be found in Deleuze and Guattari's version of pragmatics: they undermine for good the strict pragmatic interpretation in terms of subject and strategy. The question 'who speaks in the text?', they answer by the two following theses: (1) all speech is indirect speech, and (2) all speech has its origin in a collective arrangement of utterance. All speech is indirect speech. The surface subject, the utterer of the speech (the woman in the text, Pinter/or the text) is not the origin of it, only the mouthpiece. He or she is spoken by language; his or her speech is always an instance of indirect speech, uttered by an absent—and here collective and impersonal—arrangement. We can see this in the use of cliches and endless repetition which is so characteristic of Pinter's style. And we can also see what this owes to a form of pragmatics: it is a generalization of what is known as the 'performative hypothesis', which postulates a performative clause, erased on the surface, in the deep structure of every sentence, thus turning all sentences into instances of indirect speech: 'this ball is red' comes from 'I state that this ball is red'. This is the best way of accounting for what linguists call pragmatic adverbs: otherwise, the sentence 'Frankly, what you just said was a lie' 34

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would be a contradiction. But the difference with the performative hypothesis is that the grammatical subject of the postulated introductory clause is not a subject, but an arrangement, impersonal and collective. It is social forces that speak, and they speak in mots d'ordre, passwords, slogans and injunctions. They do not communicate a message, they transmit an impulse, a force.18 Perhaps I should go back to the earth, i.e. to Pinter's text. The most recurrent sentence type in the woman's speech is 'I + verb + complement', where the complement is often a clause. In other words, it has the structure of an introductory clause in indirect speech ('I say that + clause'). Instances of this are 'All I asked you was if I could get a bus . . . " or 'Anyone can tell you're a foreigner'. The sentences beginning with'I know. . .' (perhaps the most numerous) are to be taken as quasiperformatives, i.e. they are used for their illocutionary force, not for their locutionary, or phrastic content (cf. 'Don't worry, I know all about people like you', where the 'I know' quite naturally follows an imperative sentence). The woman speaks in slogans, that is, in cliches which are used for their illocutionary force (again, we have a strong echo of pragmatics proper). But they do not originate in her. One of the most striking features of the text is the variety of personal pronouns she uses to refer to herself (language does offer the speaker the possibility of avoiding responsibility by using a personal pronoun other than I): 'nobody asked you', 'we can all tell. . .' 'they're putting your sort. . .', 'meet you in a dark alley . . .', 'ask a man a civil question, he treats you like a threepenny bit', 'anyone can tell . . .'. The frequency of these pronouns increases as the speech develops. When her attempt at finding allies fails, she goes back to the T which now isolates her (7 was the first in this queue'), cannot assume subjectivity any more ('born and bred . . .') except through identification with her adversary ('you ask a straightforward question . . .'). She is no longer speaking in her own voice—she begins afresh, though, with the new man: 'Do you know if/ can get a bus . . .' But in fact, she has no voice which is 'her own'. The combination of cliche, slogan and uncertain shifters indicates that it is the collective arrangement of utterance which is speaking through her mouth. No wonder that, as Alice, who had a similar experience, would say: 'Words come out very queer indeed'. Hers is a case of possession. Perhaps, in a parody of Lacan's treatment of Descartes's cogito, we should re-title the piece: 'Request: stop!' (this is only a way of pointing out that the title is meaningful, and that the text is made up of mots d'ordre). 18

In 'Signature . . .', op. cit., Derrida puns on several senses of 'communication' (a message, but also an impulse can be 'communicated'). 35

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In order to catch a glimpse of the social forces that are speaking through the woman, we must remember the contents of her delirium: in them we saw the tracing of a map of exclusion (madmen, etc.). Following the lines of her desire (delire/desir), she visits all the places where society encloses its scapegoats, by assigning the name attached to each of them to the small man—a characteristic instance, as we saw, of projection. In her slogans, she speaks the language of domination and exclusion; in her projections, she occupies the place of the dominated and the outcast. This contradiction is characteristic of language, according to Deleuze and Guattari. A language cannot be restricted to its standard variety (often camouflaged under the name of 'ordinary language'), what they call its 'major' form: it is always attacked from within by a variety of regional or social dialects, technical jargons, poetic, humorous or delirious coinages, all of which they capture under the concept of 'minor dialects'. If we want to understand the woman's delire,19 we must take it seriously: we must refrain from interpreting it as a strategy (as in our first reading), or reduce it to a symptom (a reduction implicit in a psychoanalytic reading—my second reading was an attempt at this). We must listen to it, to the delire of history within it ('la langue delire l'histoire' as, Anti-Oedipus says). Exactly as we must remember the twenty thousand Alsatian virgins which appear in Judge Schreber's delirium and inscribe a historical conjuncture within it. Earlier, I mentioned the paradox, for this reading, of Pinter's style. How can I say in the same breath that the collective voice of history speaks throughout the text, and that the piece is highly characteristic of Pinter's individual style? Deleuze and Guattari do not avoid the contradiction. The object of their version of pragmatics is the study of style. One of the main criticisms they level at linguistics is the fact that it is separated from stylistics. But for them style is not individual: it is the expression of a collective arrangement of utterance. Pinter's individual voice is not the voice of an individual, but the voice of such an arrangement, which we will call Harold Pinter for short. This is not a joke: it points to the fact that if Pinter's style is so recognizable and so important, it is because it captures the essence of a discursive conjuncture (as Kafka was the voice of another20 ). We can even attempt a description of such a collective arrangement of utterance: a conception of language as unstable and violent, with force overshadowing communicative content; the overwhelming use of cliches and ready-made 19

1 keep the French word for precise reasons: its range of meaning is not captured by any English word. Cf. the introduction to my Philosophy Through the Looking-Glass: Language, Nonsense, Desire (London: Hutchinson, 1985). 20 Cf. Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, op. cit. 36

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sentences, with the consequent depersonalization of expression; a use of rhetoric which is the opposite of classical eloquence—where rhetoric is no longer the result of choice and the expression of subjectivity; the reduction of linguistic activity to the model provided by the patter of comedians, of radio-announcers, of disc-jockeys—which implies new relations between language, the public sphere and the private sphere. We are not very far here from some analyses of the language of advertising and the concept of publicity in the Frankfurt school.21 This explains why the woman's delire is, in the last analysis, trite, why she is no Schreber: the expression of her desire in her delirious speech is constrained (Deleuze and Guattari would say 'triangulated', a geographical metaphor which is an obvious allusion to the Oedipal triangle) by the collective arrangement of utterance that speaks through her. This brief sketch of the Pinter arrangement of utterance seems to me to free us from the recurrent problem of the two levels (Who speaks? The woman, or Pinter?). The text speaks, or rather the collective forces which produce it. My third reading does not contradict the first two, it gives them a grounding, it shows their social and historical source. In so doing of course, it contradicts the individual and ahistorical theories of pragmatics and psychoanalysis. I can now conclude. My third reading, a pastiche of a Deleuzian analysis, shows that indeed such an analysis involves a 'misprision of pragmatics'. With the stress on either part of this phrase. A misprision it is. The third reading certainly does not look like Anglo-Saxon pragmatics. There is no individual subject, and therefore no calculus possible. Meaning cannot be reduced to intention of meaning. Its social and historical character cannot be adequately dealt with within pragmatics. But it is a misprision of pragmatics. I have noted several echoes, notably the insistence on the notion of force as the most important component of meaning, and the conventional aspect of that force (which enables Deleuze and Guattari to insist on the social aspect of meaning). These two elements combine in Deleuze and Guattari's conception of syntax as power ('syntactic markers are markers of power'22). Yet, it is not enough to show that in Mille Plateaux there is a misprision of pragmatics. We must also understand its function, the purpose of this unholy combination. The answer is simple. For Deleuze and Guattari pragmatics is an instrument against Chomsky, i.e. against the imperalism of linguistics, against the relations it 21 Cf. J. Habermas, Strukturwandel der Offentlichkeit (Luchterhand, 1962). 22 Cf. Deleuze and Guattari, Mille Plateaux, op. cit., 96.

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establishes between syntax and semantics (relations which AngloSaxon pragmatics also contest). The main object of 'plateau no. 4' is to criticize what Deleuze and Guattari call the four postulates of linguistics: that language has an informative and communicative function; that there is an abstract structure of language (Saussure's concept of langue); that there are such things as linguistic universals, and that language is homogeneous; lastly, that what the linguist must study is the standard dialect of a natural language. The contents of their pragmatics can be derived from the denial of these four postulates. To sum up. My third reading has produced a conception of language—associated with what I called the 'Pinter arrangement of utterance'—based on the notion of violence. Literally, utterances are potentially violent because they Iiave force. They are used for insult, for attack, for hurting one's opponent. The principle of struggle shows that language is not a friendly and innocuous co-operative activity. Language is not cricket. And even the system (langue) is unstable, subject to synchronic contradictions (the major versus the minor, for instance) and diachronic corruption—synchrony is the fifth postulate of linguistics, which Deleuze and Guattari forget, and it must be attacked like the other four. This is the structural violence of language, imposed on the subject (who is triangulated by it) and against which he or she struggles—the paranoid violence of the structure as opposed to the schizophrenic violence of the subject's attempts at liberation and expression of his or her desire. This is essentially what Pinter's sketch is about. Although I came to praise Continental philosophy I would not like the passage from the first to the third reading to be viewed as a trajectory from error (on this side of the Channel) to truth (en deed des Pyrenees). All I think I have achieved is to remind you of the existence of the Channel: 'meaning' on one coast and 'sens' on the other are rather different concepts. Perhaps there is a Whorfian reason for this: the grammar of the word 'meaning', as a former gerund for the verb 'to mean', points towards meaning as volition or intention (in French 'vouloirdire'); whereas 'sens', a true noun, is more easily conceived as an entity, as that which indicates a direction (Deleuze's conception of 'sens', a typically French one, is largely based on this). Still, in spite of these pessimistic Whorfian considerations, I hope that I have shown a common ground—there is a passage from the first to the third reading. Being an incurable optimist, I firmly believe that one day the Channel tunnel will be opened.

Appendix REQUEST STOP A queue at a Request Bus Stop. A WOMAN at the head, with a SMALL MAN in a raincoat next to her, two other WOMEN and a MAN. 38

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WOMAN

[to SMALL MAN] : I beg your pardon, what did you say?

Pause. All I asked you was if I could get a bus from here to Shepherd's Bush. Pause. Nobody asked you to start making insinuations. Pause. Who do you think you are? Pause. Huh. I know your sort, I know your type. Don't worry, I know all about people like you. Pause. We can tell where you come from. They're putting your sort inside every day of the week. Pause. All I've got to do, is report you, and you'd be standing in the dock in next to no time. One of my best friends is a plain clothes detective. Pause. I know all about it. Standing there as if butter wouldn't melt in your mouth. Meet you in a dark alley it'd be . . . another story. [To the others, who stare into space.] You heard what this man said to me. All I asked him was if I could get a bus from here to Shepherd's Bush. [To him.] I've got witnesses, don't you worry about that. Pause.

Impertinence. Pause. 39

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Ask a man a civil question he treats you like a threepenny bit. [To him.] I've got better things to do, my lad, I can assure you. I'm not going to stand here and be insulted on a public highway. Anyone can tell you're a foreigner. I was born just around the corner. Anyone can tell you're just up from the country for a bit of a lark. I know your sort. Pause. She goes to a LADY. Excuse me lady. I'm thinking of taking this man up to the magistrate's court, you heard him make that crack, would you like to be a witness? The LADY steps into the road. LADY:

Taxi . . .

She disappears. We know what sort she is. [Back to position.] I was the first in this queue.

WOMAN:

Pause. Born just round the corner. Born and bred. These people from the country haven't the faintest idea of how to behave. Peruvians. You're bloody lucky I don't put you on a charge. You ask a straightforward question— The others suddenly thrust out their arms at a passing bus. They run off left after it. The WOMAN, alone, clicks her teeth and mutters. A man walks from the right to the stop, and waits. She looks at him out of the corner of her eye. At length she speaks shyly, hesitantly, with a slight smile. E x c u s e m e . D o y o u k n o w if I c a n g e t a b u s f r o m h e r e . . . t o M a r b l e Arch?

40

Ants and Women, or Philosophy without Borders MICHELE LE DCEUFF

Some months ago, when giving a paper about Sir Francis Bacon's philosophy, I mentioned that, according to him, Nature was a woman; true knowledge treats her like his legitimate wife, while false knowledge deals with her as if she were a barren prostitute. In the same paper, I also mentioned that according again to Bacon, there are three kinds of intellectual attitudes, or three kinds of philosophers, namely the pure rationalists, who are like spiders, the empiricists who are like ants, for they gather materials but do not work on them, and a third category— good philosophers who are like bees, for they gather and work on the material gathered. Now, during the discussion a gentleman strongly objected to Bacon's use of ants as a metaphor. He explained t^hat there are many different species of ants, and some of them do not merely gather, some have gardens for instance, where they grow mushrooms. The gentleman concluded that philosophers do not know what they are talking about when they use metaphors. This is true enough, but I felt sorry indeed that nobody observed that it is not true that a woman is either a wife or a prostitute; nobody asked whether 'nature as her' implied that the scientist is, as a matter of course, male; nobody said that the simple fact of using 'woman' as a metaphor is questionable in itself. So, when speaking of feminism in contemporary French philosophy, one has to keep in mind that, on the Parisian stage, the honour, dignity, diversity and reality of insects are better defended than the honour, dignity, diversity and reality of women. For we must start on a rather gloomy note. Most philosophers, from Plato onwards, have felt free to say everything and anything about 'women', or what they call 'Woman' or sometimes 'the feminine'. Everyone certainly remembers how spiteful Rousseau's theory on womanhood is: since things are not radically different in French philosophy nowadays, there is, in the arrogance of philosophy towards women, a basis for feminist involvement in philosophy. For feminism does not create its object itself. Sexism comes first, and feminist reasoning sets itself up as a critical point of view which brings forth some questions about sexist statements and sexist attitudes. And there is a masculinism in French philosophy which is at least twofold: our male colleagues are still writing debatable things, which should be 41

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analysed and criticized; discriminatory and excluding attitudes still exist in the every-day life of our institutions, and we ought to be able to provide at least a theory of the link between attitudes and discourses. This could be said of many subjects or fields, especially of all human sciences.' Claire Michard and Claudine Ribery wrote a book some years ago about the sexism of the most famous French sociologists and anthropologists.2 On the front page they placed a quotation from Claude L6vi-Strauss about the fate of some explorers saying: 'The next day, all the villagers sailed away aboard some thirty canoes, leaving us behind, alone with the women and children in the abandoned houses'. The women did not go away, nor did the children, but Levi-Strauss thinks that the entire community ('le village entier') had left, because in his opinion when there is no adult man there is automatically nothing but a wilderness. Not that he really wanted to argue that women do not exist. His statement is more or less & faux pas or a Freudian slip. The first goal of feminists writing in the field of the Humanities over the last ten years has been to make male colleagues at least aware of their own prejudices or a prioris. A feminist critique of major works has been undertaken in every field of the Arts or Humanities. Women historians steadily call their male colleagues back to the paths of scientific duty whenever a sexist a priori makes them wander from those paths—for instance if any among them were to write a book on the nineteenth-century working class without mentioning that women were there, and quite often exploited or oppressed in a specific way. The same can be said of women anthropologists and women psychoanalysts. Should we add: and of women philosophers? or is there anything special in this case? It would be quite difficult for me to answer such a question today. For I am writing a book on women and philosophy at the moment. How could one produce a reflection on one's own work before it is completed? And anyway this is what I do not want to do. In a sense, this has often been the curse of French philosophers in the sixties: they outlined the programme of what was to be done (or not to be done), they could tell and emphasize what made their project specific or different from say tradition, ideology, or any other field, and in the end the whole work dissolved itself into its project or meta-discourse about itself. Now today we can look at the question from a different point of view: when a woman anthropologist shows that a blunder in Godelier, Bour1

Les sciences homaines: Foucault considers that those sciences include psychology (and psychoanalysis), sociology (and anthropology, etc.), the analysis of literatures and myths, and history. The category is broader than 'social sciences', I suppose. See Les Mots et les Choses, Paris, 1966, chap. x. 2 Claire Michard-Marchal, Marchal et Claudine Ribery, Sexisme et Sciences Humains (Presses Universitaires de Lille, 1982). 42

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dieu, Clastre or Levi-Strauss is due to a sexist a priori, what is she doing exactly? Is it still anthropology, or is it also philosophy? I would like to argue that, thanks to feminism, philosophy is more widely practised, and philosophical reasoning is expressed in more diversified forms than it would if it were limited to departments of philosophy or professional philosophers. The kind of analysis I am referring to could be described as epistemological. On the one hand, I would not consider it as a piece of anthropology, since it is not a study on a society in some suburban town or in South America, but a critical study of the present state of a science which studies various societies here and there. And the writer, instead of submitting herself completely to the rules and habits of her own field is submitting rules, habits and field to free examination. If epistemology is a branch of philosophy, or philosophy can be described as a free and critical inquiry concerning areas of knowledge, this is philosophy indeed. But, on the other hand, the authors of this kind of analysis do consider it as a part of their subject, calling it either 'sociology of knowledge' or reflective methodology. And, assuredly, this could be said also of Luce Irigaray's first book Speculum. When she provided a critique of Freud's lack of understanding of women, she wrote an epistemological, i.e. philosophical, study of a human science. At the same time, her work is also a contribution to psychoanalysis as such. There is a question here that I shall try to tackle later, a question about the borders of philosophy. However, even though we think that this kind of work is a part of philosophy, is it contemporary French philosophy? This is slightly more difficult to argue. Critical epistemology may be viewed as the main tradition of philosophy. Here are discourses which call themselves 'knowledges', and claim an authority. The traditional philosopher is someone who wants to put this authority to the test of our reflection and survey: let us endeavour to sort out what might be a valid rule, and what is a mere intellectual habit or an opinion in these discourses; let us bring out what their major principles are, let us screen their methodology. Such an attitude could be traced back to the Greeks, and is also a feature of modern philosophy, by which I mean seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosophical work. Now this kind of project applied to exact sciences is vanishing in contemporary French philosophy, or in philosophy which describes itself as 'contemporary' in France. First because fewer and fewer philosophers are able to discuss the theoretical choices present in physics, biology, or chemistry. Critical epistemology of those sciences must be done by people who have been trained thoroughly in that field, and are outstanding scholars in it. Let us mention Jean-Marc Levi-Leblond and Franchise Balibar. It is more difficult nowadays to do what George Canguilhem did, namely to study philosophy first, and then medicine, in order to 43

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become a specialist of the epistemology of biology. And those who are experts on those questions often think that only a team of people, trained in various subjects, are able to study certain difficult epistemological problems, say in recent physics. As to exact sciences, most philosophers are nowadays as it were lay-persons, unable to grasp the finer points of recent research. Since inability swiftly turns into contempt, this incapacity to produce the epistemology of exact sciences induces an effect. A fox could not reach some grapes he lusted, because they were growing on too high a stake. In the end, he left, saying: 'They are too green indeed, and suitable to feed churls'. In the like manner, contemporary French philosophy goes with the phenomenological stream, and concludes that, as Husserl made it clear in hisKrisis, there is no reason to bother any longer with sciences. Yet, it is still possible for any cultivated person to grasp, with some effort, the results of human sciences. It is still possible for the philosopher to understand the methods of those sciences which are thus still open to his or her critical research or epistemological work. It so happens however that professional philosophers have neglected this object, despising the whole stock of human sciences. An exception must be made of course in the case of Foucault. Other philosophers follow the doctrine of l'lnspection Generale de Philosophic (a corps supervising the teaching of our subject in high schools and chairing the top-level competitions through which teachers are hired). And this doctrine is that philosophy has nothing to do with the human sciences, moreover that philosophy is in the knowing of itself as completely different from those mock discourses on Man. Obviously enough, they are seen as dangerous rivals that must be discredited—not as serious theoretical endeavours which should be an object for reflective analysis. Just as experimental scientists work themselves on the epistemology of their own subject, sociologists and psychologists could have proposed this reflective analysis themselves. But the male leading figures in those fields seem too busy defending the validity and dignity of the subject they are concerned with to provide a critical theory of it. Since Tristes Tropiques by Levi-Strauss (Paris, 1955, editions Plon), there is moreover an aim in the French school of human sciences: to lay down the pre-eminence of their subject, on philosophy especially, or to argue that, for instance, sociology can provide a theory to explain what is happening in the field of philosophy—conflicts between philosophers being seen as social conflicts. The same applies to psychoanalysis, and so forth. Just as philosophers, male specialists of human sciences are so absorbed in questions of rank and hierarchy that the idea of a critical reflection on extant works—particular works and methodologies— would hardly exist if some feminists had not been there to dig away at it. 44

Ants and Women, or Philosophy without Borders

And it is an appropriate approach indeed, since all human sciences deal with a sexualized reality. When Pierre Bourdieu writes a study on a village in North Africa, his book must of course contain a chapter on the relations between sexes there. The problem is that this aspect of the book is by no means as good as the others. In the chapter concerning the calendar of this community, the conceptions of time people have and the highly complicated organization of time, he shows an acute sense of the otherness of that society, he is extremely careful not to project his own categories on to the reality he is studying, nor to allow the reader to forget how different it is from ours: the reader is requested not to identify what he reads in the terms or structures of an occidental idea of time. Now, when the same Bourdieu treats of the difference between 'the masculine' and 'the feminine' according to the villagers' system, you may have the feeling that it was not necessary to fly to North Africa to discover such material. It consists in a mixture of ideas borrowed from Greek philosophy and of typical Parisian sexual stereotypes—in short, what Bourdieu himself is likely to think about the difference between himself and women. Since you cannot find in his travel account a single element you did not know already just by being an inhabitant of the Latin Quarter, you may conclude that Bourdieu only proved his own inability to conceive that his own gender categories might not be relevant to describe the idea of genders in a North African peasant community. Perhaps any traditional person is someone who cannot imagine that there may exist different ways of thinking about differences. Perhaps P. Bourdieu was convinced his own system was the universal one. Perhaps . . . shall I venture to suggest he went to North Africa to seek out a priceless confirmation of this belief— elsewhere, things are definitely different, except for the difference between genders? Whatever the reason may be, Bourdieu's discourse certainly does not match the demands of his subject, or the standards he laid down himself when dealing with the question of time. His description of the gender system could be compared with the sudden appearance of a piece of alchemy in a chemistry book. If it is a philosophical task to sort out what is certainly not scientific in a scientific enterprise, then the work of feminist epistemologists (a work to which my remarks on Bourdieu will be a humble contribution) must be seen as philosophical. Not after the manner of the French demi-gods of the sixties, of course, but in a style partly inherited from Bachelard. And such a work is also typical of the French tradition, in the sense that this tradition is, or used to be, interdisciplinary. A mutual and fruitful understanding is possible between women who have been trained in anthropology, and in linguistics, or in philosophy strictly speaking, and so forth. The arguments and ways of reasoning of each prove to be helpful to the other's work. Claire Michard and Catherine 45

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Ribery provide a critical analysis of another methodological error in Bourdieu. Their analysis is based on a linguistic approach, but owes a lot to some sociological essays by Christine Delphy and Colette Guillaumin (Christine Delphy, 'Les femmes dans les etudes de stratification', inFemmes, Sexisme et Societe (Paris, 1977), ed. Andree Michel; Colette Guillaumin, 'Pratique du pouvoir d'idee de nature', in Questions Feministes (Paris, 1978), nos. 2 and 3, and 'Questions de difference' (Paris, 1979), no. 6 (editions Tierce), especially this idea: in a sociological study, it is common indeed to consider 'women' as a professional group and you will read then how 'factory workers, executive managers, farmers, students and women' react to some question or issue. It is common indeed, but wrong. They forget that a woman is not just any woman, she may be running a shop, typing your next book, sweeping the streets, teaching at a university—she may be a right-wing MP, and all that does make a difference. You cannot assume that women react in the same way, whether they are factory workers, executive women, housewives, farmers and so forth. And if they did, this should be first diligently and scrupulously proved. Whenever a male sociologist uses a set of categories including 'women' as a professional group, his ideological prejudice shows, and this falls short of the demands of any good methodology. In the same way as Michard and Ribery, if one day I succeed in arguing that every theoretician falls short of his own standards whenever he speaks of women, I shall be glad to be able to borrow arguments from friends in other disciplines. There is philosophical work, in a broader sense, which is being developed in the feminist critique of available areas of knowledge. If you accept this point, you will also perceive that, even though I am insisting on the similarity of that kind of critique with seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosophy, it is nevertheless the beginning of something new under the philosophizing heavens, because, traditionally, philosophy is fundamentally concerned with the question of its frontiers, borders, or limits, its difference with everything else, or its specificity. There is then, in feminist epistemology something more than mere interdisciplinarity—a promise or foretaste of a philosophy unconcerned any longer with the question of its frontiers and hierarchy of subjects. It is true that, in the sixties, some male philosophers said they were creating a 'wandering philosophy' (une philosophic nomade), free from the idea of a 'proper place', and seeking the Other. But who among them acknowledged the equality of the various theoretical discourses existing, and for example the idea that linguistics, or sociology, could provide a relevant critique of philosophical discourse? See, for instance Marges de la Philosophic, by Derrida (Marges de la Philosophic (Paris: editions de Mimier, 1972), 272): the main concepts of linguistics, 46

Ants and Women, or Philosophy without Borders

especially 'metaphor', are byproducts of metaphysics, and that is why you cannot dream of a linguistic theory of images in the philosophical text: 'II est impossible de dotniner la metaphorique philosophique, comme telle, de I'exterieur'. And the question of domination structures the whole essay. If, on the contrary, you acknowledge the equality—in dignity—of all the disciplines, you can also seek for a mutual critique and reciprocal enlightenment. The philosophical work being developed by feminists has other features: the women involved in it take the (virtual or potential at least) scientific basis of their subject seriously. They are critical of the presence of ideological a prioris in works which should be more rigorous, and, in a sense, they are doing what Bacon recommended in the Sylva Sylvarum, namely 'to inquire with all sobriety and severity' and separate superstitious and magical observations from learning which deserves to be furthered. This is just the opposite of positivism. They can tell what is wrong from what might be proved relevant later, when sufficiently laboured, while the positivist view focuses on what is peremptorily 'true', so true that you can ground recipes on it—to avoid crisis in slummy suburbs, or to bring up your kids. They are inside their fields or subjects and outside. For they acknowledge the demands of the discipline, and the idea that any subject has demands, but they are able to reject some of the habits of their field, because feminism gives them an outside point of view, a standpoint from which it is possible to see that the present state of the subject is mixture of scientific inquiry and mere opinions which come also from the outside of science strictly speaking, namely the prejudices of the many men who have founded and furthered the field without ever being challenged. This feminist work is guided by values. The women involved know what they are at, they have a goal, since they are fighting a sexist ideology existing in a tricky form, disguised, because it calls itself 'science'. For our time believes in science, which implies that scientific discourse is the place where beliefs are nowadays. Many researches claiming to be 'scientific' (and supported by public finances) have proved to be enormous frauds—from the N-rays to the scandal of 'les avions renifleurs'? Many discourses claiming to be scientific, and supporting sexist ideology are ejusdem farinae, as we say, of the same poor blend, and they provide excuses for sexual discriminations. Some years ago, a collective book, called The Feminist Fact, written mainly 3

Planes which were equipped with a machine supposed to sniff out underground oil deposits. Quite a lot of money was given by the French government to the 'inventors' of this ingenious device during the seventies. The discovery of this fraud created an enormous political scandal. 47

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by biologists, and edited by Evelyne Sullerot was published. The central focus of the book was the following: the existence of a yet unknown chromosome was alleged, a chromosome supposed to 'explain' the 'fact' of women's inferiority in various activities, mainly an inability to know where they are as soon as they have gone a few yards away from their dwellings. It is safer for them to stay at home. An 'unknown' chromosome and 'fact' (what a mixture of positivism and mystery!) and all that was presented as the 'results' of 'experiments'— experiments which were not described of course. The theory was guaranteed only by the academic titles of the contributors—the good old principle of authority. Now this book was taken seriously enough by colleagues to make me inquire (with, I hope, all sobriety and severity) into the stratagem by which experts go beyond the limits of their own expertise. The task of carrying out a critical epistemology is among philosophy's duties, and has an ethical end. On those groundless theories, the contributors were 'grounding' a regression. They argued that girls should not be given the regular education they have been receiving since the last century, but should be trained to be housewives. It is true that severity and seriousness are not exactly valued in French contemporary philosophy, nor is the idea of an ethical end. The conception of philosophizing as a quest or search for freedom and humanity is supposed to be old-fashioned—and reactionary—in the Parisian atmosphere, in so far as French contemporary philosophy is called 'post-modern' by many. For they call 'modern' the idea that sciences, technologies, arts and politics have one and the same end, namely the emancipation of humankind. 'Post-modernity' is, according to Jean-FranQois Lyotard, the acknowledgement that such an idea is falling away. When feminists think that Simone de Beauvoir's work mattered for the emancipation of at least a part of humankind, and that we must carry on, most of our up-to-date male colleagues at best smile, find us serious-minded, lacking a sense of playfulness, in short adopting an attitude which is neither up-to-date nor feminine. But we think we have to hold our heads above a stream of oppressive nonsense. Perhaps this is an eighteenth-century conception of philosophy—but he or she who will not live at all in the eighteenth century will never know what happiness is, as the saying goes. Nothing will give a clearer idea of how French colleages welcome feminism than this statement by Derrida: 'Feminism is the process by which woman wishes to resemble man, the dogmatic philosopher, seeking truth, science, objectivity, that is—along with the whole virile illusion—seeking the castration effect which is linked to it. Feminism is castration, and of woman too' (Eperons (Paris, editions Flammarion, 1978), 50). Incidentally, it is not that usual to read such a straightforward statement by Derrida, whose style is often overcautious, full of 48

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preliminaries, always calling for previous questions, sometimes even vanishing into great numbers of caveats and prolegomena. And it is extremely rare to see him borrow a concept from psychoanalysis— castration—with no qualification. As I said before, when a male philosopher speaks of women, the mode of his discourse deviates from his own standards. The pleasure derived from speaking ill of feminists, and indeed from vilifying us, is so great that a Derrida does not mind bluntness and abruptness for once. A second parenthesis: we do not think that feminism is an operation by which 'woman' wants to be like 'man', we insist on the fact that there are women, quite different from each other, and there are men also. 'Woman' is a mythical figure, a smoke-screen which prevents people from seeing the actual situations of real women. It is also the product of an oppressive situation. Every time a social group is oppressed, the dominant ideology creates a mythical figure or type, and all the individuals among the oppressed group are supposed to be like that. This is a well-known feature of anti-semitism, which has created a purely mythical figure, and an insulting one, first because the characteristics assigned to it are full of contempt, secondly because it is always an insult to be told: you are such a one or such another, for thus I choose you to be; I can decide, according to my own fantasy, what you are and should be. If some men find that it is their right to declare what 'woman' is, the practice of philosophy by women is useful indeed. For philosophy is quite apt to destroy poorly thought out ideas, and helps to hold one's own against dominant representations. And let me add finally that if there is a drastic distinction between on the one hand 'man' or a masculine subject, characterized by his desire to know, his claim to truth, science and objectivity, and, on the other hand, 'woman' or a feminine subject with just the opposite characteristics (lies?, ignorance?, affectivity?) then there apparently remains no one, unless angels exist, to make use of finer and more discriminative concepts which posit multiple forms of processes of verification, think out the pluralization of scientific fields, or the problems and difficulties of objectivation. 'Truth' in the singular, 'science' in the singular, and such a gross concept as 'objectivity' constitute a language which would sound crude to any scientist, male or female, and to any philosopher slightly aware of what is going on in twentieth-century scientific debates.4 A drastic distinction between a 'masculine subject' and a 'feminine subject' is also meaningless if you consider that areas of knowledge, when they reach a mature and advanced stage, are no longer produced by individuals, but by a scientific community or communities. It is true 4

Some scientists seem to resent the fact that philosophers have given up all dialogue with them. This is made clear by a special issue of Esprit (July 1987). 49

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that should a scientific community remain totally composed of male fellows, some distortions may remain and do remain invisible, blunders caused by sexist a prioris. A scientific community must be an open society, not a brotherhood defined by its exclusions of entire groups of people. That is also why it is so important there there be Black scientists, and scientists from every corner of the world. If some bizarre lab were to start a programme of racist biology, there would be people around to protest and say that they cannot sell ideas like this as 'scientific' hypotheses or results. Now when male philosophers speak of women,—sorry, 'woman'!—they seem to be addressing an old boys' club, as if they were certain that no woman would be around to disagree. Since this programme of lectures is devoted to contemporary French philosophy, I have put the stress on what is supposed to be 'contemporary' in French philosophy, although everything published recently is, by that very fact, contemporary. The Sorbonne still exists. It would be misleading to suggest a definite contrast between the philosophers who claimed to usher in a new epoch and the 'establishment', or a traditional teaching of philosophy and of the history of philosophy. And assuredly such a contrast would be irrelevant to our topic. In the most established institutions, there is an equal suspicion as regards feminist enquiries about philosophy, and at best we are seen as anarchists of a sort. Male philosophers who established themselves as 'contemporary' by opposing the establishment, and the existing establishment itself agree on denying women the right to speak about those who speak of 'woman', or to scrutinize the scrutinizer. For all of them keep speaking of 'the feminine' or 'woman', and are still allotting a special place and destiny to 'woman'. A crucial example: Vladimir Jankelevitch—the sweetest man who ever taught at the Sorbonne, and the fairest toward women students—wrote a chapter in Le Traite des Vertus on 'masculine and feminine' {Le Traite des Vertus (Paris, novelle edition entierement remaniee, 1970) tome III, chap. VIII, p. 6). What moral virtue is specifically feminine?—it is fidelity, of course, while courage is the virtue of the forceful and 'the role of virility'. Again, this kind of theory did not prevent Jankelevitch from showing regard for women colleagues or students nor from appreciating their independence of thought (quite an uncommon attitude among professors). Was it philosophy itself, and not the person, that was uttering a sexist theory of morality? If the task of feminist philosophers was to challenge and moreover to analyse such statements, it would appear to be a mere variety of feminist work that has to be paralleled with the work done in other fields. But I think there is something more here, and this will be my last point. 50

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If you look at the history of philosophy you can find a pattern: on the one hand it would be all too easy to compile a big book based on the dreadful things voiced by philosophers on the subject of 'woman'. But those things could be summarized very briefly: she is said to be 'the Other'. When Rousseau says that the search for abstract and speculative truths is beyond her grasp, he is of course reminding the reader that philosophy is or should be a search for those truths and, indirectly, he is providing a definition of what philosophy is or should be. And when philosophers insist on the idea that myth or fables are 'old wives' tales', nanny lore, at best the inspired voice of a Diotima, they are also emphasizing the fact that there is a big difference between philosophy and myth. Even John Stuart Mill, who thought of himself as a feminist and wrote that women should be given the opportunity to undertake any sort of employment, said that no woman is cut out for philosophy. The main result of such an argument is that philosophy is totally different from any other sort of activity. This is one half of the pattern. Here is the second one: since the very beginning of philosophy, male philosophers have enjoyed having women listeners and admirers, and some women have been admitted into philosophy as women-in-love, admirers and lovers of a mentor who could see himself as a demi-god in her eyes. Ten years ago, when I started writing on those themes, I endeavoured to show these different aspects are linked together, and are linked with philosophy's problematic status. For the existence of philosophy cannot be taken for granted, nor can its scope. Philosophy has always claimed to be different from any other form of knowledge or activity, and to be superior to all. But the fragility of this position, the incapacity of philosophical speculation, the lack that torments every metaphysical system are not things that the philosopher is unacquainted with. The reference to women as 'unfit' for philosophy allows this powerlessness to be overlooked; the idea that there is someone incapable of philosophizing is comforting because it seems to grant that philosophy is capable of something. And if the philosopher is tormented by the incapacity for definite proof which inhabits philosophy, if he experiences the bitterness of never being able to produce any knowledge that comes up to his own standards of validation, then the philosophical devotion of a woman is the welcome distorting mirror which transforms bitterness into satisfaction: through her, he is viewed as a fullness and an achievement. Now philosophy can also see itself as the greatest achievement by excluding women from its field. When Condorcet explains that women could be statesmen, but not philosophers, he is drawing a line, putting a great distance between the nature of philosophy and the nature of ordinary politics, and suggesting a superiority of philosophy, philoso51

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phy being for gentlemen only, when politics may be male or female. Moreover, this superiority is supposed to provide grounds for a control of politics by philosophy, and Condorcet maintains that politicians can err if they are not guided by the superior light and real providence of advisers who are the philosophers. All this could be described as hegemony, in so far as hegemony is the absolute right of a power to formulate its own difference in comparison with its various others, its own relationship with the same others, its own superiority to them, without being challenged. And of course to be in the position of having the right and power to decide what are precisely the essence, substance, fate, limits and duties of those others. Now, in philosophical discourse, 'woman' stands as a metaphor for difference in general. No wonder then if, when a philosopher speaks of 'woman' he evokes just a mythical figure which has nothing to do with real women. What he is asserting here is his absolute right to decide what is different from his realm and what is the content of this difference. This is probably the reason why feminists are so unpopular among all kinds of philosophers. Because the position of hegemony excludes two challenging elements, the idea that there might be different ways of looking at difference (a difference in difference, then), and secondly any project of reciprocity—for if it is always possible to scrutinize any scrutinizer what is left of the hegemonic standpoint with which philosophy identifies itself? Taceat mulier de muliere, may not woman speak of woman. This famous injunction by Nietzsche is meaningful, and probably not out of date, even though it may seem that women nowadays are allowed to write on women—but on women only, on a womanhood whose concept has been previously determined and framed. In that sense Nietzsche's phrase still expresses what our male colleagues think: 'may no woman analyse the discourse of those who speak of woman', and above all let her not question their idea of the sexual difference, hint that this difference may be thought of in many different ways, let her not think of it in any different way. This could be a further interpretation of Condorcet's essay on the rights of women: he is ready to defend certain rights for them (civil rights mainly) so long as he, as a male-philosopher, is the one who determines the principle and the frontier between activities women have access to and activities they do not have access to. And women are not to be given access to the standpoint from which (in Condorcet's opinion) differences are moulded and posited, or from which they are ruled. This could be the delight of a woman philosopher: first to gain access to this forbidden place, and then to discover that philosophy ruling over the differences between subjects or between sexes is imaginary. The delight, indeed. For I certainly do not wish to conclude this paper with the idea that we are unpopular, and why. I had better sketch 52

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briefly the main ideas a double involvement in professional philosophy and feminism can give, and what positive suggestions may be drawn from this. It is very important to stress the fact that today areas of knowledge or various learnings are produced in communities. We should get rid of the old question on 'who is producing the theory?', which is oldfashioned anyway, irrelevant as to the understanding of theoretical achievements. But we should pose a newer question seriously: 'In which community does such or such a work take place?'—is it an old boys' club, or a place where women and men can equally feel at home, and where they can work together? Where they can be equally unsatisfied? For intellectual life is made of the perception of deficiencies and inadequacies as well as of achievements. It is also important to acknowledge that philosophical work takes place in many more areas than that of mere professional philosophy. And we do not really know at what point a reasoning begins to deserve the name of 'philosophy'. If all philosophers were to stop asking what is the great difference between philosophy and other sorts of research, our male colleagues might stop answering that philosophy is more male than any other, and that is why women will never be good for it. But if we are challenging the mythical superiority of our field, it is not to accept the superiority on the part of another. Must the state of knowledge be now understood as a democracy, where each limb has a limited relevancy? Perhaps, but—if we are to give credit to such metaphors, we shall induce the idea that tackling the wholeness is all the question. And is it the question really when each part tends anyway to overflow and to trade some of its hypotheses or results to fill various gaps in our culture, for instance the gap left by the decay of religious or poetical myth? We no longer believe in the 'Fiat' of the Bible, but the 'Big Bang' works just as well, as a myth about the origin. It has the same linguistic conciseness, which can appeal to the imagination in so far as it appropriately describes, in a picturesque manner, an instant-long transformation of a nothingness into the whole universe. There is many a place for myth in our relationship to learning, and there is many a place for learned imagination in our present culture. It is quite possible that women are particularly ready to open or to initiate the question of how mythical interests and rational enterprises are intermingled. First because their namesake 'Woman' is a figure of that intermixture. And might not the sweetest of our traditional attributes (namely unpretentiousness!) prepare us to be serious about the field we are involved in without championizing it? For the project to championize, to defend and illustrate a subject (or anything else), swiftly leads to create self-praising myths, and probably makes anyone blind to the 53

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whole stock of appearances of the imaginary in theories as well as in everyday ideas. But if feminist criticisms have any methodological relevance (concerning the Humanities mainly, but from there perhaps as concerns the broader question of the mythical use of any science), then their results should be taken up again, furthered, specified and so forth, by any expert, male or female. I really enjoyed reading Georges Duby's The Knight, the Lady, and the Priest. Not the least because the author is careful to note that 'the Lady' here does not refer to real women of the Middle Ages, but to an image, or the object of two different projects, the Knight's and the Priest's. What real ladies thought about their lives, and about these contradictory male projects, nobody knows, for they left no documents. Unless people speak for themselves, you cannot guess how they feel or think. All this may seem a matter of course methodological caveat; but a look at Michelet's works will show that obvious principles are not so easy to acquire. These are some directions one may draw from a twofold involvement both in philosophy and feminism. I am perfectly aware, however, that other feminist thinkers are working on other lines. Women are not all alike, and feminists are not either. Perhaps, having been asked to speak about feminism in French philosophy, should I have surveyed the various strands of feminist philosophy and proposed a discussion of them. But this would have started a sort of internal debate, a debate supposedly taking place in a determinate field—and certainly creating the closure of that field. My aim is just the opposite, since I search that double involvement in order to seek questions (and experiences) that can enter eventually into common philosophy—regular and commonto-all philosophy. And it is pointless to ask whether those questions will be destructive (or subversive even) or constructive, since no one ever came across a single philosophical question or idea which was not, at the same time, a construction and a destruction. I also object to internal debates because they are alway an attempt to impose a view as an orthodoxy, an orthodoxy for the small intellectual field of 'women's studies', or for the Women's Movement itself—an attitude which could reinforce the traditional role of philosophy as the lawgiver knowing what can be thought, said, or even done. In England, Janet Radcliffe Richards provided a full-length sample of that, a sample which left me quite sceptical as to the philosophical and feminist value of such a line of thought. But let us give up the traditional struggle for expertise, the contest about whose voice is the authentic and authorized one, whose view may became the orthodox one. Polemical rivalry is the poorest face of philosophy, while freedom of thought is still to be conquered, and moving towards it is such a pleasure. 54

Motifs Towards a Poetics MICHEL DEGUY

Overture Contemporary poetry—true to the changes brought about by the poetics of modernity at the turn of the century—far from glorifying the 'lyrical illusion' and from favouring 'romantic' identifications with heroes standing 'alone against all', that madness of a subject believing himself to be the only exception to the law, had in fact to tone down its song, had to pull down its hopes, had to interiorize its failures in order to turn them into paradoxes . . . What failures? The failures of the poets who thought they were failing. Contemporary poetry has therefore to meditate the different figures of paradoxical failure (the failure that is in no way a simple failure); namely, to distinguish the failures of Baudelaire from that of Rimbaud, from that of Mallarme' . . . Poetics, or art thinking about itself, agrees with the Kantian spirit of critique; it makes use of its limitations, turns weakness into strength, uses its reservations as a resource; and it does this on several levels. First, in the as if thought which 'reduces' hope to the hope of inhabiting this world; of finding the way out (the exit) 'inside'; second, by bringing into play configuration, and, in the case of the poem, by making it use of the rhetorical and rhythmic apparatus of the rapprochement, the bringing together, which configures the appearance (the summons, the appearing together), which emphasizes the difference between the letter and the spirit, between realist naivete and the 'promise of happiness', between time lost and past recaptured: the relationship of the world and its poetic inhabitability, to use Holderlin's words, that is, the relationship of the world with its figure. It moderates the violence of identification; in truth it interdicts it through the

like /as. Poetry does not claim a special jurisdiction or status, nor even an exceptional lifting of immunity when the time comes to suspect it, to criticize it, to question it, even to settle old scores. It would be interesting—though this is not the right place—to analyse the accusations a Kundera levels against poetry in the name of the 'novelistic', or the mock-trial the novelist 'Sollers', among others, laughingly puts poetry on, accusing it of incompetence, infatuation, silliness and obsolescence. 55

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I, however, want to take up poetry where it integrates the critique of its limits into the reflection that constitutes it. In this enlarged, generalized sense, 'poetics' is nothing less than the naive inheritor of its blue blood. 'Poetry' (in the declaration of its mortality which made the Jeune Parque say 'my death a secret child already well formed') 'poetry', I said, none the less continues to speak in a distinct manner. And that distinction (which French sociology has made suffer the fate we know) provides me here with several motifs I'll expose as briefly as possible, displaying them here in juxtaposition, not in a deductive way.

First Motif: Of Justness and the Enigma The poem—no matter the justness of its local 'images' (and the need to be that, if T owe you the truth in poetry)—is proportionate only in relation to the insoluble, remains on alert only by envisaging the enigma of its appearances, what is, in Kafka's story (Prometheus) given as the inexplicable. Poetry is the experience of a questioning. There is not on the one hand a more or less trivial life, a 'simple life filled with boring and easy labour', a human dailiness full of traps and aporias 'until death cometh', and, on the other hand a restless disposition that transforms these assurances into parables, or the perceptions into enigmatic figures, or vainly tosses up these questions again and again. Poetry opens existence to its being-in-question(s)—without providing any answers. What does it mean to be here, to be here 'truly'? The passion and the figurative power of poetry help to bring into the light questions of loving, suffering, making (po'ie'iri), desiring, giving, losing . . . It creates relationships among things and among the arts. Our existence is a being-like inasmuch as it represents itself to be in the work and art of that human making names in the Greek verb poiein. The works of art which imagine and show what it resembles, or the order of the representation. The place becomes a place in the world only by being named, only by acquiring a place-name through a work which 'brings together the beauty of the earth' (Holderlin). This 'bringing together' is brought about by a work of art which puts us into place—and remains a dwelling-place for us. The responsibility Heidegger's thought demands us to take— through which it obliges us and exercises a compelling attraction on our thoughts—is the responsibility in regard to being, of which our language maintain the understanding and the expectation—and maybe they maintain themselves only through this contentless extension. By dint of hearing 'being', being re-observed, re-examined, plumbed, mentioned, capitalized, put between quotation marks, we become 56

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responsible (able to respond), we have to respond, that is, to say how it sounds in our understanding, 'how we hear it'. Experience consists in the understanding—gracious in that it could have left it ununderstood—of being accorded to its given, its 'there-is'. Having become recipients of the given, donnees, we respond by interrogating the giving. Language speaks to itself about being; it speaks of being by speaking of itself, and vice versa, the antedosis, the original chiasma, i.e. before all beginning. Each one, being and language, has been changed into the other; can exchange with the other. 'The exchange of a reciprocity of proofs': this beautiful Mallarmean formula expresses the given's way of being as a general relation: and could, for example, translate the mimeitai which according to Aristotle is the word describing the relation of reciprocity between phusis and techne.

Second Motif: Of the Image Do not think that when one looks for 'resemblance' it is a matter of mimetic exactness, of 'fidelity', but a matter of image. If I paint a dog, it is not for the pleasure of recognizing Mrs X's dog, it is to bring out the dog-aspect. A dog is like that. Now, what-a-dog-is-like appears only by means o/that relationship (that difference) between a dog one calls real, perceived (who barks, bites, or licks me, etc.) and the painted, photographed dog. (It is worthwhile to re-read Giacometti in James Lord's book which shows the Penelopian labour of the painter losing and recalling the semblance of his model). Although we speak most often of the copy (of reproduction, of representation) without ever knowing the original, we speak however inside this copy-model relationship. For example, I have never known or seen Goya's Marquesa; but a woman appears. The revelation of what she is nee*ds the work of art which (re)presents her in the equivocation of semblance. The obsession with the 'micro-macro' difference leads us back to the same question. The image is the small, in analogical proportion to the large. Being small characterizes the artefact. What escapes both sight and the senses, the ungraspable, the apeiric, what is without contour, is the macrocosm. It has therefore to give itself first as a diminutive; using something disproportionate, some thing very large, but which can be 'envisaged'—for example, the ocean for Baudelaire—representing the infinite; and thus in small, in a detail, a microcosm that metaphorically is the macrocosm.

Third Motif: The Threshold, or of the Rhythms Where are we when—thrown backwards and forwards (rhythm of 'terror' and of 'pity')—we consider: from; at the edge of; there from 57

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where. What opens up and operates then is the 'gaze', thinking-looking, the pensive-ecstatic vision, which constitutes itself with being like the ocular vision or 'sensation'. The imperceptible gap of perception in perception, the widening gap 'inside' is the gap of 'like'; of a distance towards what is, which the 'like' immediately links through its mediation, immediately bridges. If we follow the image of the scales, of equilibrium: two things are disjoined and weighed in relation to each other on the beam; in French, lefleau (from L. flagellum), a whip beating, pairing of a rhythm, of language in rhythm, on the tip of the knife, on the pivot of the 'like'. Just watch what happens when that apparatus is lacking, be it that the blow of identification, the violence of 'is', suppresses one thing to the advantage of another ('the hive is the goulag'); be it that the separation cannot see through what/how the things can be brought together, and fails to catch the same in the other and the other in the same. Then violence reigns everywhere, instead of what Heidegger calls 'rigorous serenity' (Gelassenheit). The threshold: not an object, but a thing: a 'real' thing as the spoken language would have it, that our bodies have to transgress. A thoughtthing, the experience of the threshold, and the poem of the threshold (its composition, painting, sculpting) grow together, 'concretely'. It is not a notion 'induced' by shared aspects taken from scattered thresholdobjects, nor is it a 'nominalist' naming/labelling of an empirical abstraction, but it is as word and thing that that which is there appears to thought. Place and speech proceed really from that Utopia of the threshold. Now, there is no threshold without artefact, without human construction, without work: the building of a step; and in its function, in its 'usefulness', the threshold-being of the step must be co-perceived. The beauty of a threshold forces one to admire and thus to experience 'the meaning of the doorstep'. Let us recapitulate the elements of the difficulty here. Starting from the threshold, the shares are shared out. No threshold, that is not made without artefact; no threshold without language and vice-versa: the threshold is characterized by the beat, the rhythm of language. And a work of art, for example Hans Arp's 'Thresholds', raises a showing of the threshold to the power of reflection; in it, liminarity is at work although separated (one cannot 'use it'; 'Do not touch' says the museum; abstracted, it isolates a threshold from its function in its beauty) with the risk of rendering idle the 'beautiful' work of art which withdraws itself from among the artful workings of labouring man.

Fourth Motif: Figure/Ge-lich That which limits, distinguishing in a relative way an inside from an outside, let us callframe. There cannot be an 'interface'; and separation 58

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as such has come to signify abstractly the minimum condition required for there to be an art object (different in that from work of art; though this is a difference that would need to be re-examined). 'Anything at all' can become art—on condition that it isolate itself from the 'rest', and the lowest level of metaphor or metamorphosis is here the 'transport' of the ordinary, the ready-made, into an area of seclusion removed from ordinary use; the museum, for example, or a private collection. Let there be, thus, this inexistent and uncrossable wall, the beam of the balance of the difference favouring an exoteric-esoteric equilibrium, as the formula which the work of art re-invents every time. Comparison could well be in general, in matters of poetry, the instrument of that distinction which at the same time transports into the 'frame' (language, the poem) many differences, 'brought together', and maintains, through the articulation of the like /as (explicit or not), the relation between the saying and that which is other than the saying; between thought, completely laid bare to itself through spatial relationships, and this outside where it slakes its thirst but whose absolute otherness remains unidentifiable even in the very operation of analogy, remaining incomparable in any comparison. The affinity of things brought together, composed: an image which puts into play a difference between here (what is inside the frame) and there (what is all around). A threshold that differentiates, yet a threshold: in the tight (concentrated, verdichtet) place of the bringing together, of the rapprocchement in that density, the meeting takes place (on the 'dissecting table'), the figure detaches itself inside; summoned, it appears. Just as the face is recognized by a specificprosopognosis, so is the face of that which has none and is therefore 'like a face', recognized not through a neuro-physiological chemistry explained by science, but through a poetic discernment of which the poetics of discernment talk reflexively in the 'mother' tongue. Let us call figure that which our existence resembles, that which lends its sense by being compared to it. It was given many names over the centuries; it is perhaps that which Hopkins wanted as the correlative of insight; or 'that' which the 'rapprochement' wants to assemble, to bring together. The enigma of existence becomes clear (i.e. becomes enigma) for being comparable-to. Take, for example, the river: the river, in its flowing, is figure. Every boat on it is Charon's boat; every bridge, well constructed, is passage to the other shore; crossing it I 'die'—and as I do not die, I make as if I died, 'thanks' to the bridge. And the river is the 'Spirit of the Centaur', spirit of Chiron (Holderlin), aspect of the flow=rate of language, which traces its course carrying with it the words from the source, its loss up-river, to its 59

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mouth, or 'infinitization' (Baudelaire); and which regulates its course, thwarts the law and laws of its banks, of its bends. All that is a lot for one river? But that is the price you pay for the seeing-like of poetic phenomenology. And I will go further: thus our river now is Holderlin's river, like our moon is Sappho's moon or Leopardi's. Or else art will have been of no use and we will not have 'dwelt on this earth'. What our life resembles, thus making a figure (so as not 'to lose face'!) by being comparable to it and compared through works of Art: let us call that a 'configuration', and translate thus Heidegger's strange term of 'Ge-lich'. Even if the whole remains incomparable, its 'diminutive' (Baudelaire) can symbolize it, and that is what is 'divine', as Hyperion's motto tells: non coerceri maximo, contineri minimo, divinum est. Heidegger: Wird denn hier uberhapt eines mit dent anderen nur verglichen? Vermutlich spricht das Gedicht nicht in einem Gleichnic. Gleich heisst Gelich—versammelt ins selbe 'Lich', in dieselbe Gestalt. An assembling and a bringing together into the same lich; if lich is understood as the flexional ending of the qualities (and of course in German alliterationally as licht, light), which in French would be rendered by the suffix -ite, and the ge as a prefix translatable as cum, com, thus risking here a neologic translation for the untranslatable Ge-lich: 'com-ite', comite, (which I would also like to spell) comme-ite: the 'comme-ite' of things! That which is what we are (the order of the Wesen) and that which is like what it is that we live (the order of the Ge-lich, oiDichtung), being-as-such (thus caught in a name or concept) and the what-it-resembles (the a/s-structure and the order of Wie) are brought together by art. 'Dichtung des WesensV Our existence is beinglike how it figures itself in the work of Art. Works of art 'imagine' and show what it looks like, what it resembles.

Fifth Motif: Rigour and Tropology For the thinking poet who tries to make poetry and poetics interpenetrate, and to sanction that poetic thought as a mode of thinking not unequal to philosophical thought, the insurmountable difficulty of the situation he confronts can be described as follows: (a) The traditional division (inherited, in fact, from the classification of the Aristotelian corpus) separates the categorical and logical organon of the works of rhetoric and poetics, the rigorous thought about rigour and the secondary reflection on the turns of language, or 'tropology'. (b) Modern poetics—called theoretics or litteraturlogic in general— suspect its grandparent 'philosophy' of theoretical deficiencies, or even 60

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of pre-theoretical senility. Symmetrically, 'for us', literary theory is not thoughtful enough, does not meditate poetic experience in its ontological roots nor in its spiritual history. (c) On the other hand, philosophy, in its contemporary Heideggerian version, tries to discredit the central metaphorical process of poetry or thought by comparison, 'analogical', congenitally 'metaphysical' thought, while extolling a few rare great poetic works of modernity supposedly liberated from the medium of the 'image'. Besides logic, and after it, in relative subordination, rhetoric, the art of persuading a public assembly (a tribunal, for example) by verisimilitudes, ends up by being associated with poetics in the taxonomies ('Dictionary of poetics and rhetoric'), via decisive relays such as the treatise attributed to a 'Pseudo-Longinus', and the long tradition of the problematics of the sublime arising from it, where Plato finds himself being treated as a writer and questioned from a perspective that will become Aesthetics. On one hand the question of Truth, of the essence of truth, logically developing into an elaboration of analysis and synthesis (of the principle of Identity, and of the a priori synthesis); on the other hand, the question of mimesis, of beauty, of the art of fiction and verisimilitude, of pathos, of ethos, of the artificial and the natural, of embellishment and decoration: accretions to the work that may well add to 'the splendour of the truth' (Plotinus) but do not partake in knowledge; the questions of Aesthetics are not implicated in the fundamental question of the gnoseological synthesis (what today's epistemologists of so-called artificial intelligence call 'cognition'). Thus the value of judgments in 'to be like' would not be considered a truth-value. Question: under what condition can 'to be like', methodologically worked into multiform comparisons, be elevated to ontological dignity? Does episynthesis, to go back to one of Longinus' terms, which has become the banal 'epithet' of our grammars for not being an a priori synthesis or an analytical tautology, does it not hide, under the trivial apposition of two a posteriori terms a comparative process on the level of phenomenological revelation, bearing witness to a 'to be like' of things in their constellated appearance? Analogy, homology, homothesis ask to be rethought in terms of knowledge achieved though a poetics. There is no lack of reasons for poetics, or, if you prefer, for reasons to worry. My gesture—to use a term currently in favour—and which would also require to be put between quotation marks in order to be further investigated; my 'gesture', then: to reserve and re-serve comparison on another scale, which I call a scale of 'generalization', than that of its local use, by overcoming the reprobation—a reprobation already old as it dates back to the polemic with G. Genette concerning 61

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'limited rhetoric', and on the other hand, to the discussion with the Heideggerians concerning the unavoidably metaphysical character of metaphysics—that reprobation then that befalls the raising of a term from rhetoric to the power of its omnivalence; or, in other words the raising of the relative use of 'to be like' to the power of an ontological level. To narrow the gap between logic and rhetoric, the gap which often leads to considering poetry as something decorative, to overcome that barrier, is an effort that has to be continuously renewed, repeated: by raising (i.e. by argument, by poetic proofs) the 'to be like/as', a rhetorical formula, to the level of 'to be', the ontological copula, the 'judgment'. In order to elucidate this tension deep within the logical force of the verb to be, we must expose an 'is not' itself implied in the impossibility of the literal interpretation, yet present as a filigree in the metaphorical 'is'. Thus, the tension would prevail between an 'is'-and an 'is not'. . . 'To be like/as' must be treated as a metaphorical modality of the copula itself; the 'like/as' is not just the comparative term among all the terms, but is included in the verb to be, whose force it alters . . . In this way, we would remain faithful to the tradition of Aristotle, which was not followed by later rhetoric. As we recall, for Aristotle, metaphor is not an abbreviated simile, but simile is a weakened metaphor. Our primary focus, therefore, must truly be on the 'is' of equivalence . . . I will point out the inadequacy of an interpretation that gives in to ontological naivete in the evaluation of metaphorical truth because it ignores the implicit 'is not'. The adjunct and the post posed 'like' of the 'to be like/as' syntagm, is not an optional addition. It turns back upon 'to be' to weaken it, to make it more fragile, to desubstantiate it, to differentiate it from 'beingin-process', to disidentify it (if I may say so) from the sign of mathematized identity. Not 'to be PLUS like' but 'to be like', the being's way of being, and if the like does turn back, it can as well be prepositioned, pre-posed; it wraps it up: like-to be. Judgments in to-belike (modality of the poetic proposition) could well apply to the expression of the Gelassenheit ('serenity' in Heidegger's last texts) spreading its 'rigorous serenity'—of that Gelassenheit which 'says yes and says no' simultaneously, and which is thus one of the names of the paradoxical in general.

Sixth Motif: Of the Sublime If the sublime has been since antiquity the generic term—giving its name to such-and-such a treatise of poetics and rhetoric, apt to sub62

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sume the profuse tropological taxonomy, answering in its name as in advance to the question of the unity of the turns, of the like/as of the figures in the speech of a poet who tries to transport the others, us, into our logical nature through pathetic emotion then the question of the sublime taken up (metapoetically) at the level of that modern generalization, could gather (bring together) an Aesthetics which looks for the reasons for the diversity and the universality of the arts somewhere else than in a sociological description or in a cultural economy. The sublime puts two questions to us, plus the question of how they connect. 1. How does artifice (techne) come to (dis)simulate (itself in) the natural (physis, natura) for the being whose 'nature' is defined by its logical essence {logon echon). Is there still anything natural? A Nature? 2. How does the sublime which is essentially testamentary—the work of the dying who bequeaths to his inheritors the final word at the threshold of the promised land—reveal it to them in an ambiguous prophecy: it is less a question for the descendants to take a Utopian programme literally than to hear the paradox of the peak (mountain top) from where one sees, and to enter into relation with the 'promise of happiness' on this earth.

Seventh Motif: The Motif of the Ark I am thinking of the last page of Baudelaire's The World will End. One poetic task consists of figuring (for oneself) how the world will end . . . in one's own time. What is the flood for that task, and for us today, and what ark (means of transport) can we imagine? The representation of the flood (it seems to me) happens through a staging of the cultural, today, like a certain apocalypse of technology. The courage to make an ark comes from a belief in a liberation through art, a paradoxical way out through art, paradoxical because it is a no-exit-exit, like the mountain peak, and through art, because it is the 'mise en abime' of the life in the work which, reflected, offers a means of a liberating relation to life. Obstacles, means, perspectives, are to be investigated in view of a critical and not negative relation to the cultural, or: a relation of transformation (trans-figuration) of the cultural itself. Yes! what is less certain than the worst, the '(un)imaginable', has however to be envisaged! The Mosaic cradle pulled along by the waters of the flood, floats by, can be cherished. The little saint of the legend, 63

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when he is told of the end of the world, wants only one thing: to go on playing. Our duty is to speak of what we love, according to our experience, to want it and to propose it again and again . . . I should therefore rather speak of the border, edge, skirt of the world as cherished by Satjajit Ray (Distant Thunder) or of the 'little sleepwalker' in Papa est en voyage d'affaires, who shows the principle of artistic transformation at work . . . How to cherish the works, how to save them from drowning in the 'cultural' current? By not giving in to that repulsive Anglo-Saxon dating method—malgre the millenary ambiance—of slicing time into 'late sixties, early seventies, eighties, etc. . . . ' i n the exclusive interest of poison-pen criticism which preempts the past in favour of the prizes (literary, etc.) it claims to have a right to bestow; but rather in following the growth in time of the works, the lines of maturation where, growing up, the work perdures, completes itself, the century . . .

Eighth Motif: Of Complexity It is against the fanaticism of simplicity that I want to make a stand, to draw a figure—searching for figures that would doubtless also be political. If one of the formulations of devastating Utopia is summed up in the slogan of a 'realization that suppresses and a suppression that realizes', then I believe that the spirit of poetry opposes this slogan with the conservation of differences, the respect of paradoxical diversity, the protection of the non-functional duplicity, polymetic ruse, which is what we are. To sum up one of our errors: the one that holds that a thing is in no way what it says it is, but that it is other and divisible by two: (a) a semblance working as a mirror and alibi; (b) a 'reality' that is entirely other and contrary to its pretension as being 'for itself. Now: there is nothing better than a distinction and the arrangements that separate what has been distinguished. The human institutions and constitutions, distinguished, in action, separated, are, have existence, according to men's inventions—both poetical and practical. Truth needs to be established. The so-called formal institutions, the human rights, create a solid, real (not hypostatized) bulwark against human injustice, against the Hobbesian horrors of the psyches, the usurpations of power, the unceasing endeavour by men to ruin each other. What needs to be respected: justice, right, the separation of power, the distinction of duties and rights and the bringing into play of all that in an arspoetica which safeguards tolerance by sheltering, nourishing and giving proof of the spirit of difference. 64

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Ninth Motif: Of Paradox Asked about his most ardent desire, Vale>y answered: 'to be awake'. What is this wakefulness he speaks of, this lucidity which finds its comparative, its measure, in that moment when 'dawn dissolves the monsters'? A way of saying that poetry thinks, is a thought in which is played out the possibility for a subjectivity to be not unequal to the paradoxical relationship of truth and the subject-who-speaks: that subject, defined by self-consciousness, self-awareness, is the one who is able not to reflect upon the paradox, the paradox which an assembly of philosophers may for example attempt to reflect on. That not-noticing-it, that Greek auxiliary (lanthanesthai) that permitted Plato to define us as 'dying without noticing it', that lethe, or that lethargy, characteristic of our mortal life, that principle of latency, makes possible that syncope by means of which happen those sudden and incessant veerings of the subject from the position where T claim the law for everyone to that position where I do not recognize that law for myself, while pretending to found it. The same is 'the principle of blindspot' (lethargy) {divertissement) and the ruse (the means) used by the work to lead us through a certain reverie (detachment, blindness), 'put to sleep' by fiction, towards the lucidity of that wakefulness that leaves the book, the work, in order to devote itself to its outside (i.e. life) while remembering the works, while knowing 'what it's all about'.

Conclusion: Poetry and Disenchantment What do we expect from our languages, and from the possibility of a subject to speak one of them, i.e. to 'make it speak' (to put it into question, to question it, to bring it out by testing it against our 'experiences') ; what do we still expect from our languages, from each of our vernaculars, and from our know-how-to-talk-it, between (a) The archaism of our fables (and the fable of its genesis), of its voices (myths, religions, 'pre-socratic' thought . . .) where philosophy re-immerses itself (cf. Benveniste or Vernant, or . . .) for the pleasure of a 'reconstitution', a 'restoration' of the arche and the 'etymologies' that still speak through 'us', 'speakers' and which always ventriloquate us; (b) And, on the other hand, the scientific languages, the innumerable algorithms that link up with each other, that leave the mother tongue to make up the semiotics of the future (in view of the cybernetics of the large human numbers), in short 'the-science-and-technology* I do not speak (that maybe nobody speaks) and that governs us? 65

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. . . I keep calling poetry the uncertain, disenchanted, threatened, environment of our 'dwelling', to wit of the relationship between a world and its figuration. At the end of history which romanticism, symbolism and, later surrealism, will have one last time re-steeped in the belief in analogy, the muse and the special evocative powers of images in words; end of an era, thus, whose mythic, then mythological, the poetic becoming could be retraced in these three arbitrary divisions: (1) mythic thought; 'X is a peacock'; (2) metamorphic thought: 'X was changed into a peacock'; (3) 'X is (by being) like a peacock'; will we who are more sceptical and desperate in those matters than were these matters of transition: Paulhan, Caillois, Queneau . . ., we who give in under the blows of a Gombroviz, or a Thomas Berhard, or a Kundera, will we, as if humanity today was now disrobing the old man, that is, the 'primitive' superstitious, will we put poetry in the trust of those destinies that await it: poetry as the folkloric-festivalian supplement on the cultural menu of the mass societies, and, very generally, as countable and visible wealth in the conservatory of national 'heritages', or as the language of the ideology of universal brotherhood in 'international encounters'; or poetry as a specific learning phase in the pedagogical set-up; or the textual, matricial and generalizable process in the production of wordprocessing machinery (literary technique being turned into the literature of the technique that ends it); or poetry as the more or less methodical exploration and exploitation of a sector of the 'materiality of the signified in its spatialist, objectist, phonetic, lettrist garb? Or will we try one more time, at the level of a 'critique of poetic reason', to define the conditions under which a knowledge of our poetic experience is possible and valid . . . ? (Though the great philosophers cultivate a desire for a fundament, a foundation, and though the element of worry, of anxiety, this desire contains is also present in a modern 'abandoned' poetics, poetry today no longer worries about a truth outside of itself, close to a Hegelian aesthetic (no matter if at the highest level).) The thought of relationship, and of the relationship to philosophy, has changed. Poetic thought no longer expects its reflection from a dialecticized mediation, at some sequential moment of 'Aufhebung'. But—it has learned this from the care taken by Heidegger in reading Holderlin or Trakl—from the experience of a relationship of enigmatic proximity in terms of 'closeness on the most separated mountain peaks' (Holderlin), seen from its side. How does it see, with what vision it is capable of, that closeness in, or of, separation? Neighbours are close via an abyss. What kind of vicinity can those confines be in that are the confines of separation, of the one-side-and-the-other of an abyss, so that there is no passage, no translation without transformation of the 66

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one into the other? Together they are; brought together, by an abyss. How to step beyond an abyss? I can communicate the abyss, which I will not cross, only by taking it inside me. It is my relationship to the abyss that will characterize me. It is therefore the taking of the abyss inside me that is important. And what abyss does poetry have to welcome in itself to be able to enter into a relationship with its neighbour, with thought} Let us not forget however that on both sides of the abyss it is sameness that sets itself up under the diversity of names: 'philosopher', 'poet'; it is one and the same Being, and the same 'being-there' (being gives the there)—just as the difference between the muses in Greek mythology did not prevent the same femininity to configure itself in their distinction. Philosophy and poetry, as modes of thought, think themselves reciprocally (in) their difference. That which is what we are and that what is like what we live have grown together, it is the concreteness of our History: to the question, concerning the Wesen der Dictung, poetry answers—or responds— with the Dichtung des Wesens. If 'man dwells poetically', we will have to ask ourselves ceaselessly how art makes the world and the earth inhabitable. To inhabit means to create an inside with an outside so that the inside and the outside be in their difference like one another, in 'comme-unication'. The outside is in a certain way put inside itself, folded in, 'invaginated'. And if that happens 'poetically' (Dichterisch), then it is a work, a figural work, that may be a language work, but in any case it speaks. The inhabitability of the world comes about through a relationship with its figure, a configured staging of the reciprocity of the outside and the inside, which, as coin of this absolute, increases in semblance, the like what of its resemblance.

67

The Relevance of Cartesianism VINCENT CARRAUD

A philosophy need not be afraid of being out-of-date. Any true philosophy, untimely as soon as it is published, necessarily remains so, thus necessarily remains relevant. This is the case of Descartes' philosophy. But in the case of Cartesianism, there is more to it: Descartes' philosophy goes in quest of the decisive, the principle, the very first Beginning. And the philosophy in quest of the Beginning is, indeed, a radical and original philosophy: what keeps its interest to Descartes' project and, even nowadays, its relevance is the fact that it may be mistaken with the very project of philosophy. In this way what is new in the Beginning, which we think is the shape of the breaking-up, is the old, the oldest. Although Descartes claims for his novelty ('je serai oblig6 d'ecrire ici en meme facjon que si je traitais d'une matiere que jamais personne avant moi n'eust touchee',' 'I shall have to write here as if I were dealing with a subject which nobody before me had ever handled'), he keeps coming back 'to the very prime moment of the Beginning',2 to the initial, original Beginning, that of the being: 'Mit dem cogito sum beansprucht Descartes, Heidegger says at the beginning of Sein und Zeit, der Philosophic einen neuen und sicheren Boden beizustellen'.3 Now, nothing is more untimely than the inaugural, nothing is more decisive than the foundation: if the relevance of Cartesianism does exist, it is the true one, the original one. So, even nowadays, we cannot philosophize without Descartes (even though some people would like to philosophize against Descartes). But unfortunately, there is one widespread way to respect philosophies, which is neither respectful nor relevant. Indeed, in order to neutralize them, to reduce them to a list of opinions, to classify them in chronological order, like stars, but stars extinct for more or less long. The star of such or such a philosopher has shone, but does not any more. This danger precisely affects the hagiographers of the history of philosophy, as in the case, as far as Descartes is concerned, of Francisque Bouillier, author of a Histoire de la Philosophie Cartesienne (the information of which is remarkable in other respects), more than a century ago. I am going to quote his first lines: 'The better we know 1

Passions de I'dme, I, 1 (AT XI, 328, 3-5). Michel Henry, Genealogie de lapsychanalyse (Paris: PUF, 1985), 18. 3 Sein und Zeit, 24. 2

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about what came before Descartes, the more we can admire the greatness of his genius and the more we can appreciate the services he rendered to the human mind. It is surprising to see that from the midst of the confusion and darkness prevailing in the sixteenth-century philosophy, such a dashing and pure light as theDiscours de laMethode should have suddenly shone.' 4 Then the history of philosophy incurs the risk of being no more than a museum for sterilized philosophies, because of a barren respect, a respect disrespectful of their relevance. Thus, it is necessary, before recognizing the original conceptual relevance of Descartes' philosophy metaphysically and showing its founding role in the constitution of capital contemporary philosophies, to measure the vitality of Cartesian studies. On the three hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the publication of the Discours de la Methode, I shall try to measure this relevance and vitality of Cartesianism. I shall first deal with bibliography, which is, I think, the right thing to do for the secretary of the Bulletin cartesien. The Bulletin cartesien, which is published at the Archives de Philosophie every year, aims at drawing up a list of all the books and articles on Descartes published every year and offering a more or less detailed recension according to the importance of the recorded text. Our work claims to be exhaustive, even though an exhaustive study is, in fact, very difficult, and, above all, very long to make. Thus, with a gap of two years between the recorded work and its recension we are still fairly far from the almost perfect work achieved by Gregor Sebba, Bibliographia Cartesiana. A Critical Guide to Descartes Literature, 1800-1960.,5 However, the long lists of such a Bulletin are a living proof of the contemporary interest yielded to Descartes. So, if the relevance of Cartesianism could first be measured through the number of writings on Descartes, every year, my task would be easy: undoubtedly, more is written on Descartes all over the world than on any other philosopher (Plato included), namely over sixty articles a year (articles only) for about a decade. If, secondly, the relevance of Cartesianism could be measured through universality—I mean, through the world-wide renown of the Cartesian studies—here again, my task would be easy. Perhaps—and this may be a surprise to you—this world-wide renown of Cartesianism dates back to the seventeenth century itself and more precisely to 1655 on. As a matter of fact, it seems most likely that Mesland, a missionary, Descartes' Jesuit correspondent, and a great admirer of Descartes, left 4

Histoire de la philosophie cartesienne, 3e edition (Paris, 1868), I, 1. La Haye, Nijhoff, 1964. A second bibliography, by J.-R. Armogathe and Vincent Carraud, drawing elements from the Bulletin cartesien, is being prepared for the 1960-85 years. 5

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France for Canada in 1646 and after a journey in Central America came back in about 1655 to teach the Cartesian philosophy in Quebec. At least, this is what Professor Leslie Armore, University of Ottawa, tries to demonstrate in detail in a recent article.6 So, via Mesland, Descartes' first disciples might be Canadian; and above all the first North American philosophy might be Cartesianism! Ten years ago it was a 'must' to stress the European dimension of the interest in Descartes and the revival of Cartesian studies, and this thanks more especially to the research carried on on young Descartes7 (and the Regulae in particular): with Detleff Mahnke, DerAufbau des philosophischen Wissens nach Rene Descartes (1967), a debate on the relationship between the Regulae and the rest of Descartes' metaphysical thought started in Germany. It was a French debate, indeed (Costabel, Rodis-Lewis, Weber, and Marion with Sur I'ontologie grise de Descartes), a German one (Mahnke, Springmeyer and then Gabe and Rod) but also an Italian one (Crapulli, Gregory and Perini with // problema della fondazione nelle 'Regulae' di Descartes&). The interest in the Regulae and the genesis of Cartesian thought, a textual and conceptual interest.9 outstanding in the seventies, is surely one of the best examples, but only an example among others, of the revival of Cartesian work and its European dimensions. But today we must speak of a world-wide dimension. Thanks to first-rate, often excellent translations, Descartes can be read throughout the world and not in the form of extracts chosen in an arbitrary and mean way. If a choice should be made, a living proof of it are the many translations in English (quite recently the excellent translation in two volumes of Philosophical Writings, translated by John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff and Donald Murdoch, Cambridge University Press) and also the translations in Spanish, German or Italian (a good example of this being Ettore Lojacono's excellent translation with footnotes, Descartes, Opere scientifiche, Torino, 1983); not forgetting the three volumes of the edition Alquie of Oeuvres philosophiques which have become a standard work in Japan. And precisely, it is Japan which reveals best this world-wide renown of the Cartesian studies. For ten years, the articles on Descartes have been innumerable; so I shall just mention the Japanese review Cartesiana (University of Osaka), and I shall refer you 6

Liminaire du Bulletin cartesien XVI, Archives de Philosophie, 51, 1, pp.

1-2. 7

See J.-L. Marion, 'Les chemins de la recherche sur le jeune Descartes: notes bibliographiques sur quelques ouvrages r6cents (1966-1977)', in Travaux recents sur le XVIIe siecle, C.M.R. 17 (1979), 173-179. 8 Rimini, 1983,291p. 9 The origin of which may be found in Heidegger's judgment in Die Frage nach dent Ding. 71

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to the 'Etat des etudes cartesiennes au Japon' published by Takefumi Tokoro in the second Bulletin cartesien. Another example is the Polish bibliography of Cartesian studies which is almost as good as the Japanese one. It is true that a long-lived Cartesian tradition has been part of the intellectual history of Poland, if not since Descartes' visit in Pomerania (according to Lipstorp and from the project of Descartes himself10) and in Gdansk, where he could have met Piotr Kriiger, Ticho Brahe and Kepler's disciple, at least from 1642, the year when Descartes met Komensky and nearly met Knoffel, Ladislas the fourth's famous physician.11 Anyway, the Polish studies on Descartes are of a most remarkable vitality, from Augustyn {Podstawy wiedzy u Descartes 'a i Malebranche' a [Foundations of Knowledge in Descartes and Malebranche], Warsaw, 1973) to Pomian (Csbwiek posrod rzeczy [Man Among Things], Warsaw, 1973) and Morawiec (Przedmiot a metoda w filozofii Kartezjusza [Objects and Method in Descartes' Philosophy]) not forgetting Kolakowski's articles.12 Japan; Poland; for my third example (again among others) I mention only the United States where, thanks to Descartes, Harry Frankfurt (to quote only the most famous) has for twenty years managed to give the history of philosophy its 'lettres de noblesse' and philosophical dignity and show in a convincing way on the other side of the Atlantic that the history of philosophy in philosophical history. In short, you just have to read through the contents of all the recent Collectanea on Descartes to be fully convinced of the contemporary universality of Cartesian philosophy. But is it more than just a sign? Can the relevance of Cartesianism be judged only through its universality? We must go further in detail into what constitutes the philosophical interest of this unquestionable revival. It is important at this stage not to make any mistake of expectation. Like all the others, Cartesian studies make progress through cycles and stages. According to the different aspects of Descartes' thought which will be considered, those cycles do not follow the same rhythm and do not reach the same extent. In France, mainly, a new great cycle, devoted to Descartes' metaphysics, started with Etienne Gilson's doctorate, published in 1913, La liberte chez Descartes et la theologie. We all bear in mind the three main works which constitute the first moment of this great metaphysical cycle, an essentially French one: after Gil10

AT X, 158-159 and 162-163. See K. Targosz, 'Autour du "philosophe latent". Les premieres traces des connaissances de Descartes et de sa pensee en Pologne', Bulletin cartesien XI, 11

34-36, Archives de Philosophic 45, 4 (1982). 12 See the Bulletin cartesien XII, 18-20, Archives de Philosophie 46, 3 (1983). 72

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son,13 Henri Gouhier whose La pensee religieuse de Descartes (1924) started a long series of Cartesian works, and Alexandre Koyr6 (Essai surl'idee deDieu et lespreuves de son existence chez Descartes, 1922). In the 1950s the second moment in this great metaphysical cycle brought into light basic works: Henri Gouhier's sequel of his works, the doctorates of Ferdinand Alquie {La decouverte tnetaphysique de I'homme chez Descartes, 1950) and Genevieve Rodis-Lewis (L'individualite selon Descartes, 195014), and Martial Gueroult'sDescartes selon I'ordre des raisons (1953). The cycle ended, in its third moment, with Jean-Marie Beyssade's work, La philosophie premiere de Descartes (1979), who, quoting one passage from La decouverte metaphysique de I'homme chez Descartes, admits having seen there a vast programme, the realization of which this work is the result (p. 201): 'For Descartes philosophy is always what allows after following the movement which reminds the spirit, to turn towards things, to take on an exact attitude in the temporal action'. There are also Genevieve Rodis-Lewis' master work, L'oeuvre de Descartes (1971), and Jean-Luc Marion's trilogy, we shall come back to later. L'oeuvre de Descartes, two compact and dense volumes, full of information, discussions, programmes of research, precisely takes stock of the intense Cartesian activity of this great cycle. In keeping with the historic-genetic method of Ferdinand Alquie', Genevieve Rodis-Lewis forbids herself to follow Descartes in his 'recherche de la verite': so, fifteen years ago, this book was meant to become a master book on new research, a statement of the scientific attainments which would bring into light the living fields of research and new problematics of Cartesianism. A more recent book, Descartes: Textes et debats (1984), is L'oeuvre de Descartes' sequel and its complement. Mrs Rodis-Lewis improves, goes deeper and more thoroughly into her own interpretations and re-organizes the whole presentation of Cartesianism in seven main parts, giving around the debates a full account of all Descartes' annotators' work: the commentators from Germany, Italy, the United States, Japan and Great Britain, whom we have rapidly mentioned, have been at last heard and listened to. But all this information is never developed for itself and for the sake of scholarship: it is used in a clarificatory aim and a quite discerning critical judgment. The aim is always to have the debates go further by taking stock, aiming at a still better understanding of Cartesianism. Of the same year as L'oeuvre de Descartes, dates Wolfgang Rod's remarkable work, Descartes' Erste Philosophie, which is also one part of this great cycle of Cartesian studies. The reading of Rod assigns a place to the Regulae and the Meditationes as the two poles—respectively 13 14

The Index scolastico-cartesien (1913). And Le probleme de I'inconscient et le cartesianisme (1950). 73

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epistemological and metaphysical—of only one instauration which points to Aristotle and Kant. To Aristotle, because the ideal of knowledge remains inspired from the apprehension of principles and the mutual subordination of sciences, so of the Analytics. But Descartes is also read as pre-Kantian, which allows the author a strict interpretation of the Cartesian thought as a 'theory made up of the principles of experience1, meaning a determination of conditions of possibility that 'iiberhaupt objects may be experienced that is to say, known'. Thus, Wolfgang Rod is then led to wonder how the method can include the conditions of the method in general and so strengthen itself as far as to constitute itself and to surpass itself in philosophia pritna. But how can their main directions be characterized in front of such a rich revival of Cartesian studies (and I took here the liberty not to mention the works which are familiar to you such as Curley,15 Kenny,16 Ree,17 Wilson18 or Williams19) ? I did not mean to draw up an impossible price list here, but show, through this summary bibliography, the new orientations of Cartesian studies. The loci communes of Cartesianism have taken on a new form; Descartes is no longer the one who meets the expectations of a society looking forward to his appearance, he is a man of his time (in science—we know it better thanks to Father Costabel's unexhaustible work—as in metaphysics—in the debate which opposes him to Suarez in particular—or in theology, as Jean-Robert Armogathe showed it in Theologia cartesiana (1977)). Predecessors and contemporaries are no longer studied for themselves in philosophy, neither from pure scholarship nor from the sole interest of their relationship to Descartes, but because Descartes' thought is like a tapestry woven on a weft. It is this whole we must know, this background which it is important to reconstitute. 20 It is known that philosophy is part of its time, that is to say, that philosophy itself is no abstract speculation, completely independent from the historical situation in which it was formulated, which does not mean at all that the constitution of philosophical problematics should be dealt with only through the taking into account of extrinsic elements imported to philosophy. The decisive research being carried on on young Descartes, theRegulae and the possibility (which remains to be proved) of a 1629 metaphysics, 15

Descartes against the skeptics (1978). Descartes: a study of his philosophy (1968). "Descartes (1974). 18 Descartes (1978). 19 Descartes. The project of pure enquiry (1978). 20 SeeJ.-R. Armogathe, 'Versunautre Descartes', in Travaux recentssurle XVIIesiecle, C.M.R. 17 (1979), 189-198. 16

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stems from the same spirit. So, the old school, influential concepts and so on have changed, and sometimes radically, to the benefit of a philosophical history of philosophy. Cartesianism was not born one night in November 1619 out of three founding dreams. Like all the ism-ending words, it is real only from a pedagogical or polemical point of view. As a matter of fact, we must understand the whole movement of the ideas circulating in this complex half of the European seventeenth century. Relevance of Cartesianism? I do not know. Perhaps Descartes' philosophy is more interesting through the breakings-up, the contradictions, the aporias it originated in Cartesians' Cartesianism. But is Descartes' philosophy relevant as the first-rate place for such philosophical work? Without any doubt. But Cartesian studies would not know such vitality if their aim were still not today philosophical, and if Descartes' philosophy did not remain the privileged ground, perhaps inevitable for philosophical questioning. For, if a philosophy is alive, it is through the relevance of its questions which survive the answers to which they have led. Thus, if Cartesianism is relevant, it is because of the principal and radical character (according to Heidegger's word) of Descartes' metaphysical questioning. And this relevance is dealt with in terms of phenomenology. So, the Meditationes and more precisely the first three Meditationes become the crucial place, the nexus of the metaphysical interrogation. Thus, the concept of the infinite constitutes the paradoxical nexus round which Emmanuel Levinas' reflection is organized: human finite thought could not possibly give birth to the concept of the infinite by itself: 'Nam quamvis substantiae quidem idea in me sit ex hoc ipso quod sim substantia, non tamen idcirco esset idea substantiae infinitae, cum simfinitus, nisi ab aliqua substantia, quae revera esset infinita, procederet'.21 The idea of the infinite is a (unique) exception to the correlation and noetical-noematical parallelism through which the thought (cogitatio) always equals what is thought (cogitatum) and which perfectly meets its demands. In the case of the infinite, which I know but do not understand, I think more than I think: the idea of the infinite exceeds, goes beyond the cogitatio itself. The infinite goes beyond the thought which thinks it.22 So, according to Descartes, God ('Deinomine intelligo substantiam quandam infinitam'2-3) is reached, in the first proof of his existence, as cause of this idea in me. The idea of God, that is to say the idea of the infinite, may be mistaken for my very consciousness. But what Levinas is interested in here is not that God should be proved: it is rather the fact that the idea of the infinite cannot 21

Meditatio III, AT VII, 45, 19-22. Totalite et infini, esp. 33. 23 AT VII, 45, 11-12. 22

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start from myself; that in it, the movement should start from what is thought and not from the thinker, from the cogitatum and not from the res cogitans. Descartes goes on: 'j'ay en quelque fac,on premierement en moi la notion de l'infini, que du fini', 'priorem quodammodo in me esse perceptionem infinitiquamfiniti',24 'I have in some way first in me more the notion of the infinite than of the finite'. In this way, the idea of infinite reveals itself; in the idea of infinite takes place the affection of the finite through the infinite, an affection which is thinkable neither as appearing, nor as content, nor as conception, nor as understanding. The infinite is no object, it cannot be themacized. Now, it is this transcendence of the infinite in relation to myself which thinks it which measures (through an unmeasurable measure) its very infinitude. The distance which separates ideatum and idea constitutes the content of the very ideatum. Of thinking the infinite, Levinas says, 'it is doing more or better than thinking'. So, this is the task Levinas assigns to himself: against ontology as the philosophy of totality, totality which is the fundamental one of the self equals self, of the identity of the self, of its ipseitas, as the systematic reduction of the Other to the Same, thinking from the idea of the infinite first in me the breaking-up of this totality, the metaphysical exteriority; thinking the relationship—the distance which is metaphysical desire—between myself and the infinite. This task gave birth to Totalite et infini,25 then to Autrement qu'etre ou au-dela de I'essence.26 Now, this task requires a reading of Descartes in one of his most decisive moments, the one where the transcendental primacy of the infinite appears to qualify God. It requires us to think/row Descartes. Michel Henry's project sets out to be still more radical. Let us come back to Heidegger's short quotation I read at the beginning. Heidegger goes on thus: 'Was (Descartes) aber bei diesem "radikalen" Anfang unbestimmt lasst, ist die Seinsart der res cogitans, genauer den Seinssinn des "sum"'. Now the way of being of the res cogitans, the meaning of the being of the ego has constituted the theme of Michel Henry's research in L'essence de la manifestation (1963). When Michel Henry goes on with his research questioning himself about the genesis of the conceptual couple conscious/unconscious in his recent work Genealogie de la psychanalyse (1985), he returns to the Meditationes, and especially the Meditatio II, as the place where the concept of consciousness has started from, in the meaning it has for us today (not as a moral conscience): 'With Descartes', Michel Henry says, 'the concept of consciousness receives the radical ontological meaning 24

AT VII, 45, 29-29. 1961, translation into English 1969. 26 1974, translation into English 1981. 25

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according to which it refers to the appearing considered for himself, not as something but as the principle of any thing, the original manifestation in which anything likely to exist reaches the condition of phenomenon and thus of being for us'.27 So, the cogito is only reached through the epoche of the world, excluding anything that is and even of the phenomenality of the world as such. The appearing as such is what Descartes calls thought. That requisite to the position of the sum is nothing else but the appearing, the thought. And the determination of this requisite is the very content of the cogito: cogito ergo sum. 'Nous sommes par cela seul que nous pensons.'28 Michel Henry says: 'Therefore in "I think therefore I am" is a phenomenological definition of the being through the effectivity of this revelation of the appearing in itself'.29 It is because the appearing defines the being that its laying bare in the reduction of the cogito is one with the position of the sum. Descartes here was the first to think what Michel Henry was to call a material phenomenology .30 The question of the essence of the appearing, which is the leading thread of phenomenology, is, thus, at the heart of Cartesianism. Now, the cogito finds its repetition and perhaps its 'very last formulation' in the proposal videre videor. In theMeditatio II is raised the question: who am I, I who am? Descartes has doubted everything, anything he saw, the world {epoche), and this doubt is still effective right after the cogito. It remains that he sees all that (the fire, his room, the world), even though appearances are false and he is asleep, even if nothing at all exists. Descartes concludes: 'Qu'il soit ainsi; toutefois, a tout le moins, il est tres certain qu'il me semble que je vois, que j'ouis et que je m'echauffe'.31 'At certe videre videor, audire, calescere.'32 'It seems to me I see.' Videor means appearing, revealing itself; videor refers to the primitive semblance, the original capacity to appear. 'From then on is raised before us, inevitable, inescapable, the crucial question which Cartesianism and perhaps any possible philosophy bear within themselves, as soon as it is able to bring light about itself: the semblance which prevails in the videor and makes it possible as the original appearing (. . .), is this primitive semblance identical to the one where the seeing {videre) reaches its object and exactly constitutes itself as seeing?'33 No, Michel Henry answers, this is no duplication of the videre at all. This seeing has been discredited as suspect, 27

Genealogie de lapsychanalyse, 6. Principia, I, 8; AT IX-2, 28, 9-10. 29 Genealogie de la psychanalyse, 19. 30 Ibid. 21. 31 AT IX-1, 23, 8-9. 32 AT VII, 29, 14-15. 33 Genealogie de lapsychanalyse, 27. w

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destroyed by the epoche: videor is not homogeneous to videre, the videre is not the cogitatum the videor of which would be the cogito; videre videor does not mean 'I think I see'. So, what is this videor} It is a feeling. 'At certe videre videor (. . .).' Descartes goes on: 'Hocfalsutn esse nonpotest; hoc estproprie quod in me sentire appellatur'?* It is in the feeling that Descartes defines the original essence of the appearing expressed in the videor and explained as the very last foundations. 'Videor, in videre videor, means this immanent feeling to the seeing and which makes it a true seeing, a seeing which feels it as seeing.'35 So, the thought leaves out all exteriority, 'it becomes an essence as a radical interiority': 'Cogitationis nomine, intelligo ilia omnia, quae nobis consciis in nobis fiunt, quatenus eorum in nobis conscientia est'.3b How can this feeling be thought? as apassion, thePassions de I'ame answer (art. 26). 'Passion, according to Descartes, develops its being in a sphere of radical immanence; it ignores the seeing (. . .); it is suggested as a pure interiority.'37 In this manner Michel Henry brings into light the capital importance of the structural phenomenological dissociation between the videor and the videre: what is the thought, in its most original essence, is the first appearing of the videor, the self-affection in its radical immanence. Now it is not gratuitous, indeed, that this phenomenological return to the first appearing and to the beginning should have been done in and through the cogito. I must now stop the phenomenological analysis where, for Michel Henry, the task of our thought starts: making a firm and crucial distinction between the videor and the videre (a distinction made by Descartes himself at the foundation but not sustained), which only a material phenomenology can do. Saying what such a phenomenology must be like is not my task. At least, I have tried to make the twofold interest of such a work significant in the knowledge of Descartes and in the task of thinking in a new way, that is to say, in a more radical one, the foundation of all thought: the relevance of Cartesianism and the relevance of the philosophical questioning/row Descartes. It is a twofold benefit of the same kind which can be drawn from Jean-Luc Marion's work on Descartes—whose study of Descartes has been the richest and most important in France for the last decade. I have already mentioned his works and I shall end by giving a general outline of his project. In order to understand the constitution of Cartesian metaphysics (if we can speak of metaphysics about the Cartesian philosophia prima), Marion takes Heidegger's model as his own, that is 34

AT VII, 29, 15-16. Genealogie de la psychanalyse, 29. 36 Principle, I, 9; AT VIII-1, 7, 20-22. 37 Genealogie de la psychanalyse, 38. 35

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to say, the model of an onto-theological constitution of metaphysics. Today, this model appears to be not only the richest but one of the only ones available from which the history of metaphysics can be thought. The benefit of it is, in fact, twofold. It is not a matter of imposing this model on Descartes, but thanks to this model, of testing in which way Descartes defines himself as a figure of onto-theology. Conversely, as far as Descartes is concerned, the onto-theological model might go through a new test of validity and, as the case may be, be altered: be understood, checked and possibly falsified. In this way, Marion ends a trilogy in his last book, Sur le prisme metaphysique de Descartes (1986), which started with the study Sur I'ontologie grise de Descartes (1975). Under the appearance (and reality) of the anti-Aristotelian epistemology of the Regulae, this first investigation was trying to bring out the counter-ontology which is the only one to allow the mind to disqualify the otioia of the beings to reduce them to the rank of objects; a 'grey' ontology hidden under the cover of a certain and evident doctrine of science, can, thus, clearly be seen in the Rules. The second part of Marion's work, Sur la theologie blanche de Descartes (1981), aimed at identifying the place of the first principle and the ambiguity of the primordial being, including the 1630 doctrine of the creation of the eternal truths as a new raising of the question of the analogia entis and as a transition towards the problematics of the foundation, and therefore, towards the principle of reason {causa sive ratio). In the third part, Sur le prisme metaphysique, Marion tried to articulate grey ontology and white theology with a view to conceiving the ontological figure of the Cartesian thought in its whole: such an articulation can only be achieved round the concept of metaphysics. To do so, Marion selects two privileged beings: the ego and God. In the order of the cogitatio (Meditatio II), the ego comes first; with the cogito, the cogitatio is first cogitatio sui. The ego is not added to the cogitatio; it gives the proper name of the cogitatio by revealing its reflexive and appropriable essence. 'Le premier principe', Descartes says, 'est que notre ame existe',38 or even '(. . .) haec cognitio, ego cogito, ergo sum'.39 So, the ego does exist first and 'par excellence' before all the beings because they exist only as cogitata, objects of a cogitatio whereas the ego exists as res cogitans. 'The existence of the ego supports (begriindet) the way of being of the cogitata; and the way of being which is revealed in the cogitata, by revealing them as being, is the foundation (griindet) of the ego in its privileged existence.'40 Such a foundation does meet the demands of what Heidegger calls onto38

To Clerselier, June-July 1646; AT IV, 444, 23-25. Principia, I, 7. 40 Sur le prisme metaphysique de Descartes, 103. 39

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theological constitution. The logical is here started as cogitatio; ontology includes the beings as cogitata, and the theology brings out the being 'par excellence' in the cogitans: the ego. But although 'the first word concerning being is cogitatio' ,*x 'the second word on the being's being (Sein des Seindes) is causa'.*2 As a matter of fact, being lets itself be thought starting from causality, more fundamentally and with no exception (according to the Primae Responsiones, but from the Meditatio III): 'Dictat autem profecto lumen naturae nullam rem existere, de qua non liceat petere cur existat, sive in ejus causam efficientem inquirere (. . .)'. 43 Now, in the order of the causality, supreme being is no longer the ego, which becomes ens ut causatum, but God, causa. Descartes himself built up the passage from one to the other: 'The highest cogitatio, which renders the idea of God, cannot surrender to the existence of God, except for the fact that it can let itself be reappropriated by the efficient and total causa, ut causatum'.** From then on, by building up this passage, it is Descartes himself who unbuilds the 'cogito, sum' (deconstruction announced by Heidegger in Sein und ZeitK): the cogitatio, as the main attribute of an ego cogitans, can be drawn from an ontology of the ens ut cogitatum (cogitatio sui) to an ontology of the ens ut causatum.,46 Let us sum up: the onto-theology of the causa deals with and surpasses the onto-theology of the cogitatio; so, the being 'par excellence' goes from the ego to God, 'or more exactly from the cogitative foundation of the ens ut cogitatum to the causal foundation of the ens ut causatum, so from the ego (cogito) to a God which first causes himself as the ego first thinks itself, causa sui after and like the cogitatio sui'." So, in order to confirm the metaphysical dignity of Cartesian thought, we first went in quest of its onto-theological structure. Here we are facing two onto-theological constitutions, that of the cogitatio and that of the causa: that is to say, a twofold onto-theology.48 Heidegger's model is, indeed, reinforced and even twice achieved; this duality betrays no incoherence, but reveals the decisive revival of the cogitatio through the causa—which does not exclude that from here on many problems are raised, the first one being the relationship between these two onto-theologies. Here again, I have left Marion's work half-way. Undoubtedly, the whole metaphysical task of post-Cartesian thought 41

Ibid. Ibid. 111. 43 AT VII, 108, 18-21. 44 Sur le pristne . . . , 120. 45 Sein und Zeit, 85. 46 Sur le pristne . . . , 121. 47 Ibid. 123. 48 Ibid. 126. 42

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will be to choose among these two onto-theologies, as Spinoza or Malebranche did, or fill in the gap to the point of making them coincide, as Leibniz's attempt shows it (causa sive ratio). Descartes was a genius in that he first distinguished them and then refused to confuse one for the other. And the most relevant task may be to keep that gap open.

The Enlightenment Without the Critique: A Word on Michel Serres' Philosophy BRUNO LATOUR

// n'est de pur my the que I'idee d'une science pure de tout my the La Traduction, p. 259 The French, it is well known, love revolutions, political, scientific or philosophical. There is nothing they like more than a radical upheaval of the past, an upheaval so complete that a new tabula rasa is levelled, on which a new history can be built. None of our Prime Ministers starts his mandate without promising to write on a new blank page or to furnish a complete change in values and even, for some, in life. Each researcher would think of him or herself as a failure, if he or she did not make such a complete change in the discipline that nothing will hereafter be the same. As to the philosophers they feed, from Descartes up to Foucault's days, on radical cuts, on 'coupure 6pistemologique', on complete subversion of everything which has been thought in the past by everybody. No French thinker, indeed no student of philosophy, would seriously contemplate doing anything short of a complete revolution in theories. To hesitate, to respect the past, would be to compromise, to be a funk, or worse, to be eclectic like a vulgar AngloSaxon! The revolutions were to be so deep and so complete that they left nothing intact of what they had subverted. In the new order of things, and only there, there was everything needed to think—until, that is, a new upheaval relinquished this order to the same obscurity. Needless to say, this state of affairs made life in Paris rather difficult. Everyone could outwit every other. No matter how radical you were, no matter how absolutely critical you might have been, someone could be still more critical, still more radical, still more revolutionary than yourself: someone who would have forced you to confess this capital sin: naivete, gullibility. Michel Serres is naive and gullible beyond description. Every time a revolution or a 'coupure epist6mologique' or an intellectual pronunciamiento, has definitely reversed the order of things, he still believes in what has been reversed; worse, he does not know how to choose between the past and the present, the losers and the winners. Not only 83

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is he unable to choose camps but he goes on digging in the leftovers, as if the world was beginning, as if no revolution had happened, as if all the past were still present, as if the losers were equal to the winners. For instance, it is beyond doubt that there has been a Copernican revolution that started the Enlightenment and established science as a sure and definitive access to truth, away from religion and mythology. Science has outgrown its past, and irreversibly passed over the Dark Ages of belief, opinion and story-telling. How can you doubt that? How can a French person hesitate on this evidence, after Descartes, after Comte, after Bachelard? Well, Serres is not too sure. He wavers. He fiddles. He sees the irreversibility as reversible. It may be that Lucrecius is not so ^rescientific. It may be that a novelist like Zola is not so ^scientific. It may be that a fabulist like La Fontaine has things to say about logic as well. It may be that the Holy Scripture's story of the Last Supper is not so awf/scientific. Well, one could say, then Serres is one of these conservatives who always scream against science, one of these spiritualists who claim that there exist other ways than science to gain access to ultimate truth, one of these irrational cranks, or may be one of these Nietzschean philosophers who appeal to the unbounded forces of life against the cold and narrow certainties of science? Not so. I said he is naive, so naive that he does not even believe what revolutionaries say of themselves; he does not see science as cold, and narrow. His hesitation to choose between scientific and pre-scientific discourse is perfectly symmetrical. Maybe Carnot, the thermodynamician, is as lively and interesting as Jules Vernes, the novelist, or Turner, the painter. Maybe set theorists, the mathematicians, are as exact as Livius, the recollector of Rome's foundation myths. Maybe that Brillouin, the information physicist, is more of a philosopher than JeanPaul Sartre. Maybe that a chemist like Prigogine is as interesting a cosmologist as Hesiode. Hold on! Hold on! One has to choose between these adjectives. This is a serious matter. You cannot put the wrong labels on the packages of documents that are securely safeguarded in religion, science, literature and mythology. One might be allowed to say that Livius is 'touching' or 'charming', but not that he is 'rigorous'; or one may say that Carnot is a revolutionary in physics but not that he is so in literature; or that La Fontaine is 'amusing' but not that he is a 'structuralist'; that Prigogine is a good chemist, but not that he is a philosopher. See? You are sure. You distribute adjectives like 'outmoded', 'charming', 'poetic', 'rigorous', 'scientific', 'fictional', 'mythical' with great mastery. But Serres is devoid of this mastery. He has never acquired this know-how. Faced with a novel by Balzac he really does not know for 84

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sure if it is part of the discipline of thermodynamics, of history of religion, or of literary criticism. See how naive he is? Worse. Faced with a Tintin comic strip, he cannot tell for sure if this is not the best theory of modern communication that has ever been written. Who is a better analyst, Herg6 or Habermas? You know. He does not.

1. Critique—an Acritical Philosophy His ignorance introduces us to what I see as one of the first important feature of Michel Serres' philosophy. He is not part of the 'Critique' philosophical movement. He does not see philosophy as the discipline in charge of founding knowledge, debunking beliefs, adjucating territories, ruling opinions. Philosophy is not a crepuscular bird similar to Minerva's owl. If anything it is a light and bright morning bird. Not sad and wise, but naive and brisk. A 'critique' philosopher sees his task as that of establishing a distinction between beliefs on the one hand and knowledge on the other, or between ideologies and science, or between democracy and terror—just to take three avatars of the 'Critique'. To be taken in, that is the main worry of a 'critique' philosopher. Since Descartes, we are looking for the minimum that could be said to be safe and certain. We, the knights of the Critique, do not ask much. We are ascetic and thrifty. Provided we can hold to one thing, even minuscule, to the cogito, to the transcendental, to the class struggle, to language analysis, to discourse, one tiny thing that allows us to see through the rest, we feel happy and safe. The Critique work is that of a reduction of the world into two packs, a little one that is sure and certain, the immense rest which is simply believed and in dire need of being criticized, founded, re-educated, straightened up . . . Out on rough water, the Critique always looks for a lifeboat. Well, Serres is by training a sailor and no doubt this trait will appeal to Englishmen. Like St John Perse, one of our greatest poets, Serres is one of the very few French for whom the oceans are the onlyymwa terra. Thus, out on rough water he is not looking for a lifeboat like seasick passengers, but stays at the stern like a weathered helmsman. Do we really need a Critique to survive? Is the Critique the only vocation of philosophy? His answer is no. There exist many other ways, many less sterile vocations for philosophers. To understand in what sense Serres is not a Critique philosopher, we have to take the word critique in the mundane sense of literary criticism. I have two reasons for starting from this point. First, for a large part of his career Serres published books which appear to pertain to that genre, and it is inside language departments that he is still best known abroad. But also, it is my conviction that every science, including the 85

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hard ones, is defined by a certain way of practising a peculiar kind of exegesis. Tell me how you comment on a scripture or an inscription, and I will tell you what sort of epistemology you hold on to. Understanding Serres's conception of the commentary is thus also a way of understanding his conception of the sciences. The literary critic comments upon a text (see Figure 1). He or she has a vocabulary; so has the text or the work under scrutiny. First, there is a question or direction. Which one is doing the interpretation? The critic of course. He or she is the one who provides the metalanguage that makes sense of the infra-language of the text. Second, there is a question of size. The critic's vocabulary is enormously shorter than the text's repertoire. This is why the metalanguage may be said to explain something. With one word in the critic's repertoire, for instance 'Oedipus' complex', you can explain four dozen novels and five hundred plays. Third, there is a question of precedence or of mastery. Who dominates the other? Answer: the commentator. Critics are much stronger than the text they dominate and explain, establish and analyse. The mastery is so complete, Serres argues, that the texts, the novels, the plays, the myths, slowly disappear, buried beneath stronger and more powerful commentaries.

Commentary Vocabulary 1

Vocabulary 2 Text to be commented

Figure 1

Serres is first of all a reader, a marvellous reader. As much as any other commentator, he uses all the tricks and instruments that exegesis may have invented over the centuries. But he does it with a difference. It is not that he appeals to the pure beauty of the untouched texts beyond the boring scholarship of the critique, although there is some of that ploy in his writings—he hates for instance the lovely Anglo-Saxon art of footnoting. What he does is to reshuffle the cards on the commentator's table (see Figure 2). First, there is no metalanguage. Second, it is impossible to distinguish who is providing the explanation; is it the commented text or the commentary? Third, and consequently, there is no precedence and no mastery either. 86

A Word on Michel Serres' Philosophy

Text 1

Text 2

Vocabulary I

Vocabulary 2

Figure 2

For instance, take Lucrecius' De Natura Rerum and place in the two systems of interpretation I just sketched. It is a poem in verse. So, the critics say, you cannot take it too seriously, can you? It is an amusing and outmoded way of exposing the naive physics of those ages. Lucrecius was wrong on every point of physics. Just think of his clinamen. Poor thing! Let us explain why Lucrecius wrote it, and do not forget the footnotes on the way. Better read the commentary than the text. It will be much faster. In comes Michel Serres. Remember that there is no metalanguage. So our definition of physics may not be the best judge of what the poem says. Remember also that there is no order of precedence. So why could the poem not teach us something on our physics ? What ? This non-sense of the clinamen could be the judge of our own commentary? Sure, Serres argues, provided you read the text. What is it about? Clouds, flows, fluxes, meteors, fluctuations, turbulences, chaos, the world and its emergence. If by physics you mean the tiny repertoire of solid and falling bodies started by Galilean physics, yes indeed, Lucrecius is rather out of the way. If by physics you mean fluid state physics, how old is Lucrecius' passionate description of it? It is still tomorrow's physics. People, I remember, laughed when Serres offered this answer a few years ago. Today, even the Scientific American carries articles on the physics of chaos. This turbulent object is slowly being reintroduced in the mainstream, so to speak, of physics. Serres argues that Lucrecius, all along his poem, offers a longer, richer and more accurate vocabulary to understand fluctuations than the confined repertoire of concepts used to comment on the Epicurian poem. We thought of this philosophy as of an outdated remnant of the pre-scientific era; but here it is, anew, resurrected, helping us to grasp what the best laboratories try to measure up to: non-laminar flows and turbulences. I know I have not convinced you. How can a mere poem carry weight 87

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in physics? We all know too well that poetry has no objective meaning, it has survived to these days only by keeping safely away from objectivity and science. To be sure a poem may have other qualities, like beauty and depth, but it cannot compete with Physics Review or with the Proceedings of the Royal Society. This objection is strong if you believe that the literary genre of science has definitely overcome and outdated every other genre—at least as far as access to the objective world is concerned. But again, Serres does not believe in this overcoming and outdating. To call the De Natura Rerum a poem, for Serres, does not mean that, on his desk, this morning, it is not as fresh as the weekly issue of Nature—not that it is a nice way of relaxing after reading science, but because it might be technically accurate. Still, I feel I have not convinced you. You believe (even on the other side of the Channel) that there have been revolutions in science. The past has been abolished by the present state of knowledge. To be sure it may survive as an object for antiquarians, or as a footnote in the textbooks, but it is fundamentally disactivated when handed out to historians. The past of science, for Serres, is still active. No revolution in physics has covered up the Epicurian approach of fluctuations, no more than the invention of the genre of scientific writing has disactivated mythology, cosmogony, foundation stories or fables. He does not only say that you should be fair to the losers of the history of science; he claims that they are not losers at all, that they are still tackling the same problems at hand as the modern sciences do. 'There is only one myth: that of a science purified from all myths.' You might now guess the main source of pleasure and strength of Michel Serres's writings. He visits our past like the Charming Prince visits Sleeping Beauty's palace. Lucrecius had been put safely asleep far away in the pre-scientific era; a kiss; and here it is, yawning, stretching, breathing again, as young as when it was written. Livius's foundation myths had been mothballed for centuries. They are standing alive today, and it is today that the Vestals are stoned by the turba, the mob, revealing in front of our very eyes the foundation of Rome and the creation of the ob-jects, ob-jicere, that is, what lies, stoned by the mob, buried under a tumulus of stones. So many commentators give venerable texts the kiss of death, that, to all those who have heard Serres talk, this resurrection echos what was said to Lazarus: 'Take off the grave clothes and let him go' (Jn. 11: 43). After this brief encounter with Serres's exegetic principles, we can now see how little he is a 'Critique' philosopher. Since Kant we define the Critique has a Copernican revolution that makes, at last, the things turn around the mind (or around whatever has since Kant been defined as the focus and master that occupies the Centre: the Unconscious, the 88

A Word on Michel Serres' Philosophy

Society, the Economy, the Language, the Episteme and so on). How could Serres accept that a Copernican revolution has ever taken place? Consider again his principle: the text under scrutiny is always more rigorous, more lively, more modern, than the commentator and always provides a richer repertoire. Who turns around them? The commentator. Who overmasters him? The humble and outdated texts. Still, one could say, this is a philosophy of texts, a typically French overemphasis on discourse. Not so. What Serres does on the relation of commentary to texts, he also does it on the relation of language to things. The things? How can one talk about the things? How can a Frenchman talk about them after hundred years of idealism? Serres does, and unabashedly at that. Again, things are not reduced to our knowledge of it; they, too, are richer, more accurate, more precise than our commentary on them. In his latest book, Les Cinq Sens ('The Body's Five Senses'), Serres provides a pre-Copernican version of things, things seen before the commentary of the sciences. To my knowledge, this is a rare attempt, in philosophy, to see things from the point of view of the known, not of the knowing. A French person who would also be an empiricist—even though a queer sort—who could imagine that? That is the difficulty of Serres, so French in his language and culture, and so totally un-French, that is to say un-German, in his philosophical tradition. What Serres does on the relation of the commentary to the texts, and of the texts to the things, he also does it on the relations of the sciences to the world. I said that there always exists a link between the practice of exegesis and the definition of what is a science. In Serres, this link is still clearer. Scientific knowledge does not reduce or abolish the world, nor does it reveal its essence. Nothing is more foreign to Serres than the problematic of hiding and revealing things, the problematic of Light and Darkness, of the Enlightenment. Scientific knowledge is added to the world; it is inside it; is part of its beauty, mystery and monsters, part, in brief of its myths, of its culture. Serres is one of the very few French philosophers since Bergson who reads science, who has been well educated in it, and who does not despise or worship it. It is part of his naivet6, as I said, to take the sciences to be as interesting as Livius or Jules Verne, as mythical as Homer. I insist on this essential point: Serres does not say that there is beyond, or above, or below, or beside the sciences, other ways of thinking and believing than science, who would deny that? He says that there is one huge reservoir of attempts none of them having been overcome, outmoded, outwitted, aufheben, by the present state of science. They are ready at hand, irreducible, all offering the measure of each other. Instead of the image of the Copernican revolution, that pictures a definitive and irreversible reversal of the force relations between centre 89

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and periphery he offers another geographical metaphor, a much less radical one, that of the North-West Passage, this chaos of islands and lands and ice and packs disseminated in North Canada. No direction; no obvious mastery; no clear-cut divide between the firm lands of science and the soft resources of the humanities. If one wanted an image for the Two Culture debate that so much obsesses the humanists, here it is: the two cultures do not exist, except as the infinitely far horizons of Canada on the one hand and the North Pole on the other. What exists is this chaos of passages and dead ends. Where is 'the sure path of the science' so dear to Kant's heart in this Daedalian labyrinth? Lost. No! It is there, but local, only local and transitory when the wind is good and the fog has cleared . . . Before closing this first part, we can see again the relations between two conceptions of science, two ways of practising commentaries and also two ways of disciplining disciples and defining the seriousness of a study. 'Critique' philosophers firmly install their metalanguage in the centre and slowly substitute their arguments to every single object of the periphery; organizing the Critique is a tantamount to a careful, obstinate and deliberate empire-building. A powerful critique being one that ties, like a bicycle wheel, every point of a periphery to one term of the centre through the intermediary of a proxy. At the end, holding the centre is tantamount to holding the world. A scholarly work is recognizable to the continuity, homogeneity and coherence of the metalanguage used all along to subsume the periphery. Serres' pre-critical philosophy lives under rather different assumptions. There is no centre and no substitution of one metalanguage that would overmaster the others. The result of his commentary is a crossover, in the genetic sense, whereby characters of one language are Language 1

Periphery

1.2 1.3 Centre Intermediary

Cross-over from one repertoire to another

Substitution of the metalanguage to the infralanguages of the periphery

Figure 3 90

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crossed with attributes of another origin. To take a less humble metaphor, his aim is to produce a local Pentecost, each reader listening to the same argument in his own mother tongue. Needless to say, such an aim prevents the creation of students, of deputies, of thesards extending the concepts of the centre to still another domain. Who does not want to take over a centre, does not need to train a retinue of followers. 'Be as inventive as the text, be as inventive as I am when inventing the text anew', is not a mot d'ordre to overpower positions and chairs. (As to the tell-tales that allow one to decide whether a study is serious or not I will tackle this question at the end of my presentation.) To sum up, I would say that, for Michel Serres, the Critique has been a long parenthesis that is now put to a close. The task and the duties of the 'Critique' philosopher is to reverse the pecking order, to reverse the force relations between masters. The 'Critique' philosopher wants to bring religion to an end and make all disciplines, including philosophy, enter 'on the sure path of a science'. The political overtone of this reversal of power relations was to at last emancipate the people and the mind from the tyranny of the senses, of beliefs, of the things, of the world. What does the task of philosophy look like when you do not believe in metalanguage, do not consider that history has been divided up by revolutions, when you do not take the new focus of mastery as having definitively overmastered the world? What sort of Enlightenment do you get when you put the Critique to rest? What emancipation is there in store, if any? Serres' philosophy is an attempt to explore these questions without being too influenced by what philosophy has done during the Critique parenthesis, let us say since the mid-eighteenth century. I am struggling for a word that would best describe Michel Serres' philosophy. 'Positive' would come to mind if Comte had not given this word a dubious posterity—let us not forget however that Serres knows his Comte very well. All the words like depassement, aufltebung, overcoming, outwitting, overmastering, are foreign to his vocabulary. Nothing overshadows, nothing buries anything else. Serres never overcomes anything. Serres' philosophy is free from negation. We all believe that negation and thus dialectics are the great masters of history, the midwives of our societies. Nothing is achieved, we all admit too quickly, without struggle, and dispute, and wars, and destruction. Serres' philosophy is first of all a reflection on violence, on what violence may or may not achieve, and this he does in all spheres of life, in politics, in economies, in scholarship, in physics. The world is innocent as well as positive and new. There is no divide, no camps, no 91

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limes, no boundaries that are worth a crime. It is not that, like in Nietzsche, the man of resentment becomes, after endless crisis, the man of affirmation, the later-day adept of agaya scienza. No, Serres is born endowed with thisgaya scienza. We can say of him what P6guy said of Victor Hugo: he was born into a world as fresh as it was when leaving the Creator's hands. 2. Crisis—an Anthropology of Science What has been lost with the Critique parenthesis? A certain belief in the sciences, a certain confidence in their abilities to reconcile humans together. Serres did his thesis on Leibniz, the reconciliator par excellence. But then he slowly realized that the sciences were not a way to limit violence but to fuel it. He decided to hear and to feel this terrible earth shaking tremor travelling from Hiroshima, the only date in history that he takes as a real turning-point; the earth has been shaking ever since. His rupture with epistemology, with Bachelard, with Canguilhem, with the Critique project, comes from this realization: all these eminent gentlemen are deaf to the noise made by the atomic bomb; they go on as if physics was business as usual; as if the emergence of thanatocraty—his word for the black triad made by scientists, politicians and industrialists—had not reshuffled for ever the relations between society and the sciences. The Enlightenment of the eighteenth century was defined by a confidence in the abilities of science to dissipate away the darkness of religion; a certitude that objectivity could replace the endless struggles of subjectivity; and a firm belief that a democratic process could replace the power of one by that of many. Two centuries later we are in a completely different situation. The same atomic holocaust fuses together total illumination and total darkness; it is through a growth of objectivity that political struggles grow; finally, the one leader can kill us all, reversing the old relation between the people and their single victim. If we may dare use again the word 'Enlightenment', a completely new understanding of violence, of the collective, of the object and of the sciences, is necessary. Such is the crisis this 'positive' philosophy is living up to. How can objectivity and terror be related to one another? A first possible solution is offered by the French philosopher and theologian Ren6 Girard exiled in the United States and a very intimate friend of Serres. The mob in a state of crisis cannot agree on anything but on a victim, a scapegoat, a sacrifice. Beneath any boundary is buried a sacrificial victim. Marking the boundary of Rome is the same as killing one of the two mythical twins. The object of agreement is stoned to 92

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death. Of course, Rene Girard deals only with people, with social relations inside the collective. Objects are very much absent in his religious anthropology. Literally, they do not count, since they are never worth a fight, since struggles are 'without object', without reason or justification. The only role for objects in Girard's account is to give the illusion that something is really at stake. Serres, on the other hand, takes objects much more seriously than Girard. They are not illusions unfairly accused, by Girard, of being worthless. They are substitutions of one type of non-human victim for a human one. Objective knowledge is not different in kind from subjective politics, it is a latecomer in a long series of substitutions of one victim for another. The objective knowledge of atomic physics is not different in kind from the stoning of a primitive hero; it is different in scale; it allows a bigger collective thus to be defined. Instead of taking apart the collective and the objects, Serres tries to measure how they both grow. Violence is not mopped up by science but fantastically increased. Instead of believing in divides, divisions, and classifications, Serres studies how any divide is drawn, including the one between past and present, between culture and science, between concepts and data, between subject and object, between religion and science, between order and disorder and also of course, divides and partitions between scholarly disciplines. Instead of choosing camps and reinforcing one side of the divide, of the crisis, of the critique—all these words are one and the same—Serres sits on the fence. Instead of dealing with a set, he always takes as the only object worth the effort the extraction of the set from its complement. If Serres were choosing the inside of the set, he would be a rationalist; were it to take the side of the complement, he would be called an irrationalist. How would you call someone who chooses the extraction of the set from its complement? Hyper- or infrarationalist? I call him provisionally an anthropologist of science. We are in the habit of thinking that anthropology's goal is to make sense of whatever non-scientific, pre-scientific, or anti-scientific beliefs and cultures there are left. How do Trobrianders or Jamaicans or lower class Britons live, that is part of anthropology. But how Thales, or Carnot, or Prigogine thinks, this, we gather, does not pertain to anthropology. Studying how all of them divide and order, studying what is to pertain to something, this is the purview of an anthropology of science, the new task before us now that the Critique parenthesis has been closed. The mixing up of objectivity and violence is best visible in the ways in which scientific professions organize their trade. In the Critique tradition, we love concepts and disciplines. We sit firmly inside the set and take as our main source of pride the extension of concepts and the 93

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defence of the propriety of the words we use against any metaphorical contamination. In a position akin to that of Mary Hesse, Serres is not a 'literalist' believing that there is a strong distinction to be made between literal and metaphoric meaning. Like Hesse, he is not for a 'police of metaphors' that would forbid certain uses and turn others into precise, literal ones. Instead he describes in many pages the works, deeds and rites of purification. How clerics, ancient priests and scientists alike wash out the world, forbid double meanings and extenuate analogies. How they establish properties and proprieties, allocate classes and camps. How they polish and police metaphors so as to discipline them into proper names. The work of classifying and conceptualizing, the work of clarifying and measuring, is not what make our sciences different in the end from religion, from beliefs, from our bloody and confusing past; it is what plunges us deeper into it. Serres, in this respect, marks the antipodes of Bachelard, and it is no doubt the French tradition of epistemology that provides him with his best specimens (in no country is the love of purity and the hatred of colleagues pushed to such extremities). His passion for the extraction of a set from its complement has led Serres to a very different ontology that, in many ways, anticipates the most advanced ideas of physics and cosmology. This is a better known aspect of his work, a reversal of foreground and background, a Gestalt switch. In many previous philosophies disorder is what should be ignored, kept at bay, repressed, eliminated, mopped up; order is what counts; in between there exist strong divides that have to be enforced. Order is the rule; disorder the exception.

Figure 4a

Serres reverses this image: disorder, fluctuations, noise, randomness, chaos is what counts; they are the rules, order is the exception, it has the shape of pockets, of islands of stability, of fragile and tiny archipelegos. Thus what becomes most interesting are the transitions and bifurcations, the long fringes, edges, verges, rims, brims, auras, 94

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crenellates, confines . . . all the shores that leads from one to another, from the sea of disorder to the coral reefs of order. I would say that a third of Serres' sixteen books is devoted to a systematic exploration of all the metaphors, myths and data, from the birth of Venus out of the sea to the bifurcations in Besnard's cells, that allow him to understand those fringes, what he calls a miracle, that is order from noise.

Figure 4b

This Gestalt switch reshuffles entirely the pack of arguments around rationalism and irrationalism. Serres does not defend the margins against the totalitarian empire of the sciences, or the rights of obscure thinking against the tyranny of clarity and rigour. On the contrary, his main source of inspiration, especially in his earlier books, is no doubt the mathematics that he practised for many years. He is all for clarity and rigour, all for the sciences, provided they are to be seen as local. The sciences are not to be worshipped, and not to be despised, they are local achievements extracted from the world. They do not replace it, and cannot be substituted for it, no more than any other metalanguage. It is true that Serres might be seen, after a cursory reading, as ambivalent about the sciences. Sometimes they seem to add lumen to the world, sometimes, especially since his book, The North-West Passage, they appear to add more numen. But it is not that Serres is ambivalent about the sciences, it is the sciences themselves that are a new mixture of lumen and numen, of light and terror, a new anthropological puzzle. To understand this mixture, one should remember that there is no path that leads 'naturally' from the local to the global. No way of mopping up the varieties of the world. Thus, the extension of a science, the substitution of one metalanguage to a language, has to be payed and paved by violence. Again, his main question is to understand how come that the sciences do not end the violence, but add to it. One aspect of Serres's originality is never to offer us a discourse for or 95

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against the sciences taken as a whole—and of course not a discourse beyond or above or below them. He offers us a principle to sort and select them in their finest details. When the sciences add variety to the world, they are to be used. When they substract variety they are to be rejected. He often compares the relation of the sciences to the rest of the world with the relation of plant geneticists to a primitive forest. Plant breeders extract a very few varieties and breed them into an endless number of pure lines, infinitely more productive, but, one should add, infinitely more fragile. The philosopher, on the contrary, thrives on the varieties of the forest; to be sure he never cultivates highly productive breeds, or even reproducible results, but he prepares the ground and the selection of new more robust possibilities. This is why Serres does not define philosophy as arriving after the sciences, like Minerva's owl, or as being subservient to them, or as surviving in the few clearings left by the universal extension of rationality. On the contrary, philosophy is beyond the research front, gambling far in the primitive forest, into the world, cultivating unexpected hybrids. Philosophy does contribute to the sciences either because it anticipates their results, or because it plunges them in their anthropological matrix they too quickly forget— and also because maybe philosophy frees the sciences from part of their violence. Conclusion I would be pleased if I had convinced someone to read Michel Serres carefully. However, before ending this presentation, it would be unfair not to warn the English reader that his writings make at first a difficult reading. It is not that they are obscure, or convoluted, or technical, or written in one of these many stilted tongues of our modern Babel. It is simply that his style is part and parcel of his very philosophical argument. This is a difficulty in general with the French. They never believe, like so many English philosophers do, that language is simply a means of communication. For writers as different as Diderot, Bergson, Peguy, or Lacan, language is the very material on which to experiment for any argument to gain some meaning. The deepest content of what they have to say is first of all a style, a form, a particular way of saying it. Hence the accusation, often levelled at them by English-speaking writers, of being superficial: 'Why can't they all say in plain language what they have to say?' Because, what they have to say is that the plain language is to be transformed for something to be said. But the difficulty of reading Serres comes from a transformation of the 'plain' language of scholars; paradoxically, it is too plain; it is clarity without a scholarly domain. We are so used to thinking inside one of the 96

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feuds defined by the Conflicts of the Faculties that we can barely understand someone who writes without pertaining to any one of them. Serres writes as he thinks, unbounded by the delineation of territories. He does not use one metalanguage, but many, and he does not substitute his commentary for what he is commenting on. Instead of mobilizing the referent inside the text as scholarly works do—by footnotes, descriptions, pictures, diagrams, instrumentation, allusions— Serres inserts his texts as a legend for us to read our world. Hence the difficulty. When you read his commentary of La Fontaine's Fables, you always wonder where are the fables he is talking about. When you read his description of Auvergne's landscapes or of the North-West Passage, you are never presented with a textual substitute for them. When Carnot's thermodynamics is put to use in order to understand Zola, neither of them is first explained to you. The referents in Serres's texts are neither absent nor made present in the text. They remain there, in front of your eyes, provided you know your La Fontaine by heart, provided you have been to Auvergne and yourself crossed the NorthWest Passage, provided you are well versed in Carnot and in Zola. Serres's texts are more difficult than most because they require us to know directly and by ourselves what they are about, but they are easier to read than most, because we do not need to abandon the world we know in order to read them. Serres does not worship the text, does not believe they are a useful—or dangerous—substitute for the world. As everything else they have to be added to the world. What appears allusive, impressionistic and poetic when his text alone is taken, appears technical, precise and accurate, when the text is read together with the world it is pointing at. Serres just provides the soundtrack of this movie: the world. It is in that modest sense that he offers 'the Enlightenment, without the Critique'. 1

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I thank Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent and Isabelle Stengers for helpful comments on this paper. 97

The Teleological and Deontological Structures of Action: Aristotle and/or Kant? PAUL RICOEUR

It is usually assumed in moral philosophy that a teleological approach, as exemplified by Aristotle's ethics of virtue, and a deontological approach, as heralded by Kant's ethics of duty, are incompatible; either the good or the right, to designate these two major traditions by their emblematic predicates. My purpose in this paper is to show that a theory of action, broadly understood, may provide the appropriate framework of thought within which justice can be done to both the Aristotelian and Kantian, the teleological and deontological moments of morality. Instead of action, I will use the term praxis, not only out of reverence for Aristotle, but in order to acknowledge human action's complexity and scope, which tend to be overlooked in the so-called 'analytic philosophy of action'. A broad account of praxis allows one, to my mind, to assign the two moments of morality to two different stages on the trajectory of praxis, and to establish in this way their complimentarity.

I. Praxis and the Teleological Moment of Morality We will proceed in the following way: by considering a series of levels on the scale of praxis and seeing how far we can go with a quasiAristotelian concept of arete, understood as excellence—in such a way that we will be able to identify the point where a quasi-Kantian model of obligation has to prevail. To anticipate our further discussion, I suggest that it is the consideration of violence that imposes such a conversion in the ethical account of praxis. 1. Practices I will consider four levels on the scale of praxis. I call the first one 'practices'. Let us call 'practices' complex actions ruled by precepts of all kinds, whether technical, aesthetical, ethical or political. The most familiar examples are jobs, skills, arts, games. If precepts, or rather the 99

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applicability of precepts, is an appropriate criterion for practice, in contradistinction with 'basic actions' to use Arthur Danto's terminology, we should not give too quickly a moral sense to the term 'precepts'. Not all precepts are imperative. They can provide advice, instruction, without imposing obligation. Nevertheless, they are on the way towards the moral imperative to the extent that they teach how to do well what one practises. An evaluative component is implied here which brings the ethical analysis close to the threshold of moral obligation, but without yet crossing it. What traits of practices call for evaluative assessment? The first one is the instrumental relationship expressed by the connection, 'in order to'. Arthur Danto, in his Analytical Philosophy of Action, uses this criterion in the reverse order for the sake of isolating the structure of 'basic actions', namely actions that we can do without having to do something else, 'in order to do' what we intend to do. The 'in order to do' relation is more or less equivalent to the first model of deliberation in Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, Book III, that is deliberation on means and not on ends, or on things related to an end. And to a certain extent it corresponds to poiesis rather than to praxis. This teleological structure of action in the instrumental sense of the term offers itself a double kind of connectedness, co-ordination and subordination. Co-ordination between causal and intentional segments in the linear concatenation of complex actions, as we have in H. G. von Wright's quasi-causal mode in Explanation and Understanding, part 4, which connects systemic segments and intentional segments (which may be put under practical syllogisms). In this way the result, the effect—let us say—of a systemic chain may provide a new starting point for deliberation and practical syllogisms, which create, in turn, indended results, which then themselves become the starting points of causal chains that also have teleological development. So it is this blending of causal and teleological connectedness which constitutes the logical structure of 'in order to'. Besides this co-ordination, we have a relation of subordination of parts to wholes. This latter mode of connectedness is reflected in the lexicon of our practical repertoire. The farmer's job entails subordinate actions, such as ploughing, sowing, reaping, and so on. Ploughing in turn includes riding the machine, and so on down to the 'basic actions'. In the same way, to move one's pawn on the chess board is not a practice, but to play chess is a practice. Among practices we count also laboratory research, musical composition, painting, maintaining a house (oikos, the origin of the term 'economy') or holding a political office are equally practices. Therefore, whereas the theory of action takes into account the descending order of these hierarchies of action, 100

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the theory of practice is interested rather in the ascending order implied by this 'embedding' of actions in one another. A third trait of practice sets in motion the transition towards a moral consideration about action. It concerns the role of the so-called 'constitutive' rules in the structuring of complex actions, namely its inner relations of both co-ordination and subordination. This notion of constitutive rules is borrowed from the theory of games, which are practices among others as we just said. By constitutive rules we mean rules such that the gesture of moving one's pawn 'counts as' a move in a chess game only in virtue of the rules which govern the use of all the pieces of the game. No such moves would exist as such, that is with such and such meaning and effect, without the rules which govern it. The rule is constitutive in the sense that it is not super-added as an external regulation to movements which would already have their own organization, such as the street signals which regulate the traffic and therefore the movement of people who have their own goals. In the case of the game, the rule only provides a gesture with its meaning: moving one's pawn. The notion of constitutive rules has been extended by J. Searle to the field of 'speech acts', for the sake of discriminating between the different illocutionary acts (promising, warning, stating, and so on). But if it may be now extended to the field of practices, it is to the extent that speech acts are themselves actions, as games are, and, more appropriately, practices or parts of practices. Of course, constitutive rules are not moral rules. Even with the constitutive rule of promise, according to which someone puts himself or herself under the obligation of doing what he or she now says he or she will do, the constitutive rule defines only the illocutionary force of the promise, but does not imply the moral rule which says that one must keep one's word, i.e. be faithful to one's promise. Nevertheless, with the concept of constitutive rule, a specific use of the concept of meaning equivalent to that of 'counting as', comes to the forefront. This meaningful dimension can become in turn a matter of evaluative and normative assessments, whether technical, aesthetical, ethical or political. We take a step towards an ethical characterization of action, in the broad sense of ethical which covers evaluative and normative codes or precepts, by noticing that practices, as distinct from mere gestures, consist in co-operative activities whose constitutive rules are socially established. One may indeed play alone, do gardening alone, and still more do research alone in laboratories, libraries, or private rooms. But the constitutive rules come from far beyond the solitary doer. The practice of a skill, a job, a game, or an art is learned from someone else, and the training relies on a tradition. Furthermore, success and 101

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excellence require recognition by other practitioners. In this sense, even when alone one takes part in a practice. Even without organized competition every practice lends itself to comparison in terms of what we will call later 'standards of excellence' (I borrow this expression from Maclntyre's After Virtue). In this sense, competition is itself an aspect of co-operation. There would be no fight, no conflict, without a minimal agreement about the rules which define, among other things, the levels of success, and the degrees of excellence. A new transition from the theory of action to moral theory—and it is the genuine breakthrough—is secured by what we just called 'standards of excellence', which govern the transmission of, and the comparison between, practices. It remains true, of course, that a certain lack of distinction remains between that which Kant called rules of skill and counsels of prudence, on the one hand, and a moral maxim in the categorical sense, on the other hand. But this very lack of distinction is interesting, because it allows for the introduction (still following Maclntyre) of the notion of immanent goods, of goods immanent to the practice itself, which will provide later a basis for moral theory, a ground of application for its imperatives. (It is at this point that I shall definitely depart from Maclntyre.) These immanent goods constitute the inner teleology of action, in the same way as the notions of interest and satisfaction express it at the phenomenological level This notion of inner teleology was already applied by Aristotle to support the distinction between poiesis, the fabrication of things exterior to the creative activity, and praxis, the very activity which has its terminus ad quern within itself, as in the entertaining of ethical and political practices. Such are my remarks about the first level of praxis. 2. Plans of Life We come closer to the domain where the theory of action and the theory of morality intersect by supplying a further extension to the notion of practice beyond the still limited examples of skills, arts, and games. Thus we speak readily of 'plans of life' in order to designate global projects which include, for example, vocational life, family life, life of leisure, and so on. (We find this term 'plans of life' in Rawls, for example, and, of course, in Maclntyre.) This notion allows us to come back to a distinction introduced by various Aristotle scholars concerning the two levels of deliberation in theNicomachean Ethics, Books III and VI. According to the means-ends model of Book III, the physician is already a physician, the architect an architect; he or she does not wonder whether he or she is right to embrace this vocational way of life. According to thephronesis model of Book VI, deliberation is about the ends themselves; its job is to specify, to make more determinate, the 102

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cloudy horizon of ends and ideals that point towards what we call the 'good life'. We deliberate according to a movement back and forth between our life ideals, whatever they may be, and the constitutive rules of such and such practices. Let us stay for a while with this notion of plans of life, because of the use of the term 'life'. Life is not taken here in a merely biological sense, but in an ethical-cultural sense, the use of which was well known among the Greeks when they compared the specific merits of the bioi offered to the most radical of choices, that of the anthropos as a whole: life of pleasure, active or political life, contemplative life, and so on. In this context, Aristotle asked whether there was an ergon, a function, a task, for the whole man, as there is one for the musician, the physician, and the architect. Held as a singular term, the word 'life' is intended to underline the indivisible character of an individual life. 3. The Narrative Unity of a Life It is at this stage that we meet a still more decisive mediation between theory of action and moral theory; namely, that which Maclntyre, rediscovering in his own way Dilthey's consideration of 'the connection of one's life' (the famous Zusammenhang eines Lebens), calls 'narrative unity of a life'. This will be my third stage: after practices and plans of life, comes the narrative unity of a life. I myself have been interested, in Time and Narrative, III, in the notion of narrative identity, which connects the notion of selfhood with that of the history of a life, as it is 'refigured' jointly by historiography and fiction. My purpose is to locate this analysis at the juncture between the theory of action and the theory of morality. I think that this can be done with the help of two connected notions, which I share with Charles Taylor in his Philosophical Papers. If, on the one hand, we are able to apply to our own lives the plots and characters which we owe to our acquaintance with biographies and literary fictions belonging to the repertoire of our culture, it is to the extent that the practical field itself maybe compared with a text offered to our reading (cf. my article 'Action Considered as a Text'). Anticipating his future readers, Marcel Proust writes in Time Regained: But to return to my own case. I thought more modestly of my book and it would be inaccurate to even say I thought of those who would read it as 'my' readers. For it seemed to me that they would not be merely 'my' readers but readers of their own selves. My book being merely a sort of magnifying glass like those that the optician at Combray used to offer his customers. It would be my book, but with its help I would furnish them with the means of reading what lay inside themselves (Pleiade III 1033; E.T. 1089). 103

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'The means of reading what lay within themselves.' It is the very inclusion of language within the framework of action, by the means of its constitutive rules of which we spoke above, which paves the way for the treatment of these large units of action which we call practices and plans of life as quasi-texts demanding to be read. The analogy works here at the level of the composition, of the configuration of texts and quasi-texts. As a quasi-text, action draws its readability from the rules of connection, thanks to which we may say that by raising one hand we are voting, by walking out of a room we are breaking a negotiation, by running in the street we are taking part in a riot, etc. The second related notion, beside that of quasi-text, is that of interpretation as self-interpretation. There are several reasons for introducing this term at this moment in the analysis. First, the quasi-text of action, as any other text, gives way to a kind of hermeneutical circle to the extent that one interprets wholes in terms of parts and vice versa. But this is still trivial. Second, we must taken into account that there is meaning only for someone who interprets himself or herself while intepreting the text of action. The concept of agent correlative to that of action is enriched in the same measure. The agent is the author of his or her action to the extent that he or she interprets himself or herself in the terms of the skills, the arts, the games, in which one is engaged in accordance with the competence, and the degrees of excellence which their regulative rules determine. Charles Taylor speaks in this way of man as a self-interpretative animal. The third function of the concept of interpretation in the field of practices is to underscore the role of contestation and rivalry in the exercise of judgments of excellence. As soon as we have to do with meaning, or better, with significance (that is, meaning for someone) there is room for controversy. The epistemological consequence is obvious. Interpreting ourselves, interpreting a practical whole, does not allow the kind of verificationist procedures that may be expected from a science based on observation. The adequation of an interpretation relies on an exercise of judgment which may at the very best claim only to be plausible. 4. The Good Life The fourth and last level of praxis is that of the 'good life'. I should like to conclude this progression in the direction of strictly moral consideration by introducing a last practical concept, that of 'good life', which translates the Greek euzoia, euzen. Aristotle does not forget to make a strong distinction between Plato's Idea of the good and the good for man, i.e. the cloudy horizons of ideals and dreams of achievement, in terms of which a life is held as more or less fulfilled. This is the good 104

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life. With this concept, the evaluative point of view prevails over the merely descriptive approach in the field of action. The good life, la vraie vie as Proust would say, supplies an horizon to the progressive series constituted by the terms constitutive rules, standards of excellence, plans of life, narrative unity of a life. Instead oihorizon, we could speak of limiting idea, in order to characterize the relation between the notion of good life and the teleologically ordered series of intermediary notions capable of connecting the theory of action and the moral theory. A last word at the end of this part of my paper. I just characterized by the term evaluative the kind of judgment that has been grafted on a mere description of action. This term deserves some attention. It is important to preserve the special status of evaluative predicates against a hasty reduction to that of regulative norms. We will say in a moment where the threshold of the normative should be located. I see two main reasons for preserving this epistemological status of evaluative expressions. First, the 'grammar' of evaluative predicates is that of the optative mode, whereas that of normative predicates is that of the imperative: 'act so that . . .' What I am now saying is of course more Aristotelian than Kantian. The optative mode is the mode of wish, of the Boule, which, according to the Nicomachean Ethics, rules the determination of the ends, if it is true that deliberation rules only the means. Actually, the optative mood is already anticipated in the notion of proairesis, which is usually translated as 'choice' (preference could be a better translation). To prefer something rather than something else implies that a something is more valuable than something else. The hierarchical structure of evaluation is thus implicitly entailed by any usual practice. Now, this optative evaluative mode pertains to that of the whole series of concepts which secure the transition from action theory, in the narrow sense, to moral theory. The second reason for not reducing evaluative expressions to normative expressions is the need to preserve, in front of the unitary concept of obligation, a certain multiplicity and diversity of evaluative predicates: good-bad, but also right-wrong, fair-unfair, noble-mean, admirable-despicable, and so on. To decide that the only appreciation that action deserves is the one that the purely moral criterion of obligation provides is to deprive oneself of the resources of the qualitative contrasts which contribute to the interpretation of practices, and to the self-interpretation of human agents in conjunction with the moral rule. In this regard, the plurality of virtues according to the Aristotelian and medieval tradition should not be dismissed merely for the sake of the respect of rule in the Kantian perspective. It is worthwhile to let flourish what Charles Taylor calls 'the real diversity of ends' (Phil. 105

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Papers, 230-247). This diversity is essential to the evaluative level in the analysis of practice.

II. Praxis and the Principle of Morality Now, why cross the threshold of morality? Why move from teleology to deontology? And where? I suggest a basic and massive answer: there is morality, in the sense of moral obligation, because there is violence. Morality has to be prescriptive and not merely evaluative, because our moral judgment about violence implies more than saying that it is not desirable, less preferable, less advisable; because violence is evil, and evil is what is and what ought not to be. Furthermore, because there is violence, the other is projected to the forefront of ethical consideration either as victim, as executioner, as witness, or as judge. Such reference to the other does not have the same urgency in merely evaluative assessments of praxis, ruled by the immanent aiming at the 'good life'. In a sense, the concept of 'good life' could assume a solipsistic overtone, as may be seen with the Stoic ataraxia, this haughty egotism preserved from the disasters that care for the other entails. There is morality because there is violence. But what do we mean by 'there is'? As concerns violence, 'there is' points towards what Jaspers called limit-situations, and raises the enigma of the problem of the presence of evil among us. I shall say nothing about this here. But as concerns morality, the use of the phrase 'there is' calls for an unavoidable justification. It means to my mind that the task of the philosopher is not to invent morality, to draw it from nothingness. We were born in a society where there were already norms and laws, imperatives, and prohibitions. We may change them, but we are not in the position of starting from scratch. The task of the philosopher, it seems to me, is to start from some paradigmatic norms recognized and assumed by most people, and from them to proceed backwards to the source of obligation, that is to say, to the highest maxim: the principle, in the Kantian sense of Grundsatz. I share with Alan Donagan in The Theory of Morality this epistemological premise that we may isolate the problem of the principle from that of the foundation {Grundlegung) for the sake of philosophical reflection. In which terms shall we formulate the principle of morality? Again, I follow Donagan, but for a reason that is absent from Donagan's argument—that is, the correlation and (I dare say) the contemporaneity between morality and violence. Here, I will take as a leading thread the Golden Rule as we find it in Hillel and in the Sermon on the Mount. I read in Hillel 'do not do to your fellow what you hate to have done to you'. 'This is', Hillel adds, 'the whole law, entire, and the rest is 106

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commentary.' We read a similar formula in Matthew, in the Sermon on the Mount (7:12), 'So whatever you wish that men would do to you, do so to them.' Donagan rightly comments: 'Although one of these obligations is negative and the other positive, they are in fact equivalent. For to forbid an action of a certain kind, and to commend one of the contrary kind are equivalent.' But what is specific to this principle of morality by comparison to merely the evaluative assessment of action and practice? I shall not insist on the most obvious feature, the imperative mood, as distinct from the indicative and even the optative mood. 'You shall not kill!' Such is the specific feature of the principle of morality. The imperative is the mood of obligation. I do not dispute that at all, even if I suggest later a qualification of the Kantian imperative which makes it compatible with the main theme of Aristotle's ethics. I shall rather focus on some traits which will play a decisive role in our attempt to reconnect the two spheres of evaluative and prescriptive discourse at the end of this paper. Let us, first of all, underline the intersubjective dimension of the Golden Rule. This point deserves some attention. The theory of action, we should say, is spontaneously solipsistic. The theory of 'basic actions' in particular does not take into account the relation to other agents; whereas in the imperative, at least in the formulation of the Golden Rule, this relation is not extrinsiic to the field of action, but supplies the first moral structuring of interaction. But this is not all. For one can say that nothing prevents the theory of action from developing a theory of interaction. This extension is implicit in the notion of practice whose character of co-operation and competition has been underlined above. (Max Weber and Alfred Schutz also have developed this theory of reciprocal interaction.) But the principle of morality says more, to the extent that it lays the stress not only on the conflictual side of interaction but on the asymmetry between what someone does and what is done to someone else. In this sense, the formula of obligation does not bring side by side two agents, but an agent and a patient of action (a recipient, as Gewirth states in Reason and Morality) that is the one to whom something is done. You have seen that it is in the passive voice that the Golden Rule is put: 'Don't do to your fellow what you have to have done to you'. In order to dramatize this initial asymmetry and inequality, we could say that the other is potentially the victim of my action as much as its competitor or its adversary. This is a good reason for admiring Hillel's formulation: 'what you hate to have done to you'. This point is overlooked in the philosophic tradition of the natural law where the other appears first as someone who may interfere with my rights. This other is potentially an aggressor rather than a victim. Thus in Hobbes, as Leo Strauss under107

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lines it strongly, the fear of violent death is held as the ultimate passion which motivates the yielding of my innate rights for the sake of the absolute monarch. In other classical theories of natural law, the initial appearance of the other is less dramatic. Nevertheless, the threat of interference in my private sphere of interests depicts the other as an equal adversary not as an unequal victim. In this regard the Golden Rule is more perspicacious. It sees the first agent, the one to whom it is addressed, as someone who claims to have power over another one who accordingly is ready to treat him as subservient to his own power. For this very reason the principle of morality is not basically distinct from the rule of justice as corrective rather than distributive, or as corrective in order to be distributive, as Rawls says it. It anticipates the abuse in the use of power. It says, according to an appropriate formula of Alan Gewirth in Reason and Morality, 'the receiver of your action is also an agent'. This initial asymmetry between the sender and the receiver of action is perhaps the most important presupposition of the principle of morality at the anthropological level, a presupposition generated by the principle itself and projected on to the field of practice. There is justice, as J. R. Lucas says in On Justice, because people are 'put down' by the initiative of other agents. Justice is the rule which equalizes agent and patient in the process of interaction. This presupposition is expressed in the formulation of John Rawls's second principle of justice, if it is only implicit in the formulation of his first principle. Now, what about the relationship of this analysis with that of Kant's imperative? In a sense, we are close to Kant. But, the Golden Rule suggests that we start from the second rather than the first formula of the categorical imperative: 'act so that you treat the humanity in your own person, and in the person of the other, as an end and not merely as a means'. The equality and reciprocity that the moral rule establishes redresses the presumed inequality and asymmetry implied in the treatment of the other as a means, that is in the use of power, the abuse of which the moral rule forbids, whether this means physical violence, psychological persuasion, intimidation, blackmail, exploitation, manipulation. But this reversal in the order of the formulations of the categorical imperative is less important than the feature of the Golden Rule that will generate the following reordering of the teleological and the deontological moments of praxis.

III. The Resumption of Evaluative Judgment by and within Normative Judgments Allow me, finally, to offer a suggestion for discussion concerning the possibility, and maybe the necessity, of reasserting and resuming 108

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evaluative judgments within the framework of normative judgments. I suggest linking this problem to the classical dispute started by Hegel concerning the alleged emptiness of the formal principle of morality. Donagan rejects this objection with the help of what he calls 'specifying premises', which say, for example, that only a free man has political rights, or contrarily, that a human being cannot be sold. Donagan sees these 'specifying premises' at work in the classical traditions of casuistics, in the procedures of jurisprudence in Anglo-American common law, with its logic of the precedent, and finally in Kant himself when he argues for his famous and controversial 'examples' about telling the truth to an intruder who threatens the life of one's own friends and so on. I shall not enter into the epistemological dispute concerning the status of these 'specifying premises', in spite of the opportunity that this discussion offers to compare the analytical non-formal role of reasoning with the hermeneutic recourse to phronetic confrontation and adjustment between rule and situation, as we have it in Gadamer. To my mind, at the root of any derivation of secondary principles from the principle of morality, there is the reassumption of evaluative judgments, belonging to the teleological component of ethics, within the framework of its purely deontological structure. To support this tentative interpretation, I suggest that we return to the Golden Rule, 'Do not do to your fellow what you hate to have done to you', and underscore an aspect of it which has been dropped in the apparently equivalent formulation by Kant: 'Act so that you treat the humanity in your own person, and in the person of the other, as an end and not merely as a means'. I underlined earlier the intersubjective side of the principle. I should like now to underscore its emotional side, expressed by the term, 'to hate' or 'to love': what you hate having done to your or what you love being done to you. The reference to so such strong feelings—hate or love—allows the Golden Rule to remain formal—because we do not know what is hated and what is loved—without being empty or void. I insist: the Golden Rule is as formal as its Kantian reformulation. It does not say what we may hate to undergo. And yet it refers to goods which we would love being done to us, and to evils which we would hate being done to us. In order to keep this love-hate relationship within the formal scope of the moral rule, the reference of goods and evils should be addressed to what some authors (Alan Gewirth, Alan Donagan, and John Rawls, among others) have called 'fundamental human goods' (i.e. 'generic human goods' or 'fundamental social goods'). These goods are fundamental in the sense that they are not the object of idiosyncratic wishes according to the Kantian description of desire as 'pathological'. They are, rather, the contingent goods without which the exercise of free choice and the development of a life governed by reasoned inten109

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tions or 'considered convictions' (to speak like Rawls) would be impossible. As regards this point, the Golden Rule is more benevolent, if I dare say so, than its Kantian counterpart. It leaves open the option between an ethics of good and an ethics of obligations. Or rather, and this is my own reading, it demands the incorporation of the former, the ethics of the good, into the latter, the ethics of the right. What would prevent us from doing this? It would be the wrong assessment of love (and hatred) by Kant. By bringing love into line with 'pathological' desire, Kant has arbitrarily severed his ethics of the categorical imperative from any legitimate search for satisfaction, accomplishment—in a word, for 'the good life'. Indeed, Kant rightly holds love, in the commandment to love one's neighbour, as practical, to the extent that love is not merely a feeling, a Gefiihl, but a deed, that is, a way of treating the other according to the duty of respect. But respect itself is not merely addressed to the other's relation to the law, therefore to the other as an exemplar of humanity or mankind, but also to the other as having interests, as pursuing the good life, which is contingent upon goods which can escape his or her grasp. To respect someone is to wish him or her well. In this way, I agree with Donagan's formulation of the Golden Rule, 'act so that the fundamental human goods, whether in your own person or in that of the other, are promoted as may be possible and under no circumstances violated'. In this sense the notion of fundamental human goods is substituted at the same place as the concept of humanity in the Kantian reformulation of the Golden Rule. At the same place and with the same function: that is, as providing the reference to an invariant, transhistorical entity. That morality is contingent on some fundamental human goods is always the case, even if these goods are defined differently in different cultures. But the difference with Kant goes further. These human goods, in spite of being fundamental, are contingent on fortune. In this sense, they are external goods. They may be reached or missed. The Other may be an instrument, or an obstacle, to reaching them. This contingency defines the fragility of the human praxis of goodness—'the fragility of goodness'—to use the wonderful title of Martha Nussbaum's book, The Fragility of Goodness. This fragility, contingent on fortune, is added to the vulnerability resulting from the basic fact that each agent is at the same time the patient and potentially the victim of the action of the other. The rule of justice does not ignore this double contingency affecting actions, linking fragility to fortune and vulnerability to aggression. Now, to conclude, this notion of fundamental human goods, as implied by the Golden Rule, is the connecting link which secures the intersection between the theory of action and the theory of morality, and, within the theory of morality, between its evaluative level and its 110

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deontological level, i.e. its prescriptive level. On the side of action, or rather of practice, it corresponds to the notion of goods immanent to a given practice. We assigned this level to the level of appreciative or evaluative judgments. Now, thanks to its coincidence with the notion of fundamental human goods (implied in the very functioning of human willing), it assumes, furthermore, a normative function. The Golden Rule thus becomes the yardstick with which we measure the conformity of the goods immanent to a given practice with the general human goods on which a large consensus of the common morality obtains. I would like to suggest the following formula: 'Act so that the optative goods to which your practice aims conform with the normative goods entailed by the Golden Rule'. This coincidence between the evaluative judgment immanent to praxis and the normative judgment implicit in the Golden Rule concerning human goods secures the intersection we are looking for between the theory of action and the theory of morality, and, within the theory morality, between its evaluative and its normative levels. It is presumptuous to aim at a kind of conciliation between Aristotle and Kant, namely between an ethics of virtues linked to the qualitative plurality of the goods themselves, and an ethics of moral obligation which reduces the good to the right and the right to the dutiful because of violence? But, if this presumption should be given up, how could we avoid becoming schizophrenic with one Aristotelian half-brain and another Kantian half-brain?

Ill

The Crisis of the Post-modern Image RICHARD KEARNEY

We now inhabit what cultural critics are increasingly calling the 'postmodern' age. I propose to explore here some of the implications of the advent of post-modernism for our understanding of the status of images and imaging. Indeed, this question is of added relevance when one considers that post-modern culture is frequently referred to as a 'civilization of the image' (a phrase first used by Roland Barthes). The role of the image in post-modern culture is essentially one of parody. By this is meant that the image no longer refers primarily to some 'original', situated outside of itself in the 'real' world or inside of human consciousness. Devoid of any fixed reference to an origin, the image appears to refer only to other images. The post-modern image circulates in a seemingly endless play of imitation. Each image becomes a parody of another which precedes it . . . and so on. The idea of an 'authentic' image is thus subverted—as is evident in the practices of parody and pastiche which predominate in contemporary forms of representation. Hence we note that the pre-modern model of the image as mirror (as in Book X of Plato's Republic for example) and the modern model as lamp (as in German Idealist and romantic notions of Einbildungskraft or the creative imagination) give way to the post-modern model of a circle of looking glasses—each one reproducing the surface images of the other in a play of infinite multiplication. This interplay of selfmultiplying mirror images without depth or interiority is a recurring preoccupation of not only post-modern thinkers like Derrida and Barthes, but also in a wide variety of contemporary writers, artists and film makers. I The post-modern paradigm of parody subverts the modern view of the image as an original invention of a unique human subject. The term 'post-modern' first gained common currency in architecture in the midseventies: it designated a shift away from the late modernist international style of Corbusier and Mies Van der Rohe, with its emphasis on utopianism and novelty, towards a 'radical eclecticism' of pseudo113

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historical forms.1 But the term was quickly taken up by the philosophers. Here it became synonymous with those structuralist and more 1

While the term 'post-modern' had been used in an occasional way—e.g. by the historian Arnold Toynbee in 1938 and by the literary critic Ihab Hassan in 1971—it was in architectural theories of the mid-seventies that it first achieved international recognition as a critical term. Charles Jencks was perhaps the most influential commentator of post-modern architecture. His first major study on the subject, The Language of Postmodern Architecture (London: Academy Editions) was published in 1977, and this was followed by a more comprehensive comparative study, Current Architecture (London: Academy Editions), in 1982. Here Jencks offered a useful definition of the term and a brief account of its genesis, p. I l l : Post-modern is a portmanteau concept covering several approaches to architecture which have evolved from Modernism. As this hybrid term suggests, its architects are still influenced by Modernism—in part because of their training and in part because of the impossibility of ignoring Modern methods of construction—and yet they have added other languages to it. A Post-Modern building is doubly coded—part Modern and part something else: vernacular, revivalist, local, commercial, metaphorical, or contextual. In several important instances it is also doubly coded in the sense that it seeks to speak on two levels at once: to a concerned minority of architects, an elite who recognize the subtle distinctions of a fast-changing language, and to the inhabitants, users, or passersby, who want only to understand and enjoy it. Thus one of the strong motivations of Post-Modernists is to break down the elitism inherent in Modern architecture and the architectural profession. Sometimes Post-Modernism is confused with LateModernism. Some architects practise both approaches, and there are also, inevitably, buildings which are transitional . . . The term Post-Modern has a complex genesis. It was used in a nonarchitectural context as early as 1938 by the English historian Arnold Toynbee, and applied to architecture by Joseph Hudnut in 1949, but its first use in the currently accepted sense was in my own articles of 1975. A year later, and quite independently, the architect Robert Stern (apparently influenced by Peter Eisenman) and the critic Paul Goldberger were using the term in the United States. By 1977 the usage had become popular (for example, Douglas Davis was asked by his editor to put it in the title of his book Artculture: Essays in the Post-Modern, although, characteristically, the term is not defined, nor even used). The same may be said of C. Ray Smith's book Supermannerism: New Attitudes in Post-Modern Architecture (1977) in which the term appeared in the subtitle only because it had become fashionable. Because of this loose usage I attempted in 1978 a definition to distinguish Post-Modern from Late-Modern architecture and to focus on the positive notion of double coding instead of historicist imagery alone (which was the major American definition). The two usages, European and American, were somewhat different although both schools of thought focused on the important work and theories of Robert Venturi and 114

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particularly post-structuralist currents of thought which disputed the modern belief in the primacy of the humanist imagination as a creative source of meaning. The idealist and existentialist arguments for the centrality of the autonomous imagination have, since the sixties, repeatedly run the gauntlet of critical deconstruction. Indeed, so vehement has this dismantling process been, that one sometimes wonders if it is still possible to speak legitimately of a post-modern imagination at all. Several contemporary critics dismiss the very notion of the 'imaginary' as an ideological ruse of Western bourgeois humanism; as little more than an 'illusion' or 'effect' of the impersonal play of language, a ludic mirage of signs. This threat to abolish imagination coincides with the growing talk of the 'demise of man' as a subject of identity. Disseminated into the absolute immanence of sign-play, the imagination ceases to function as a creative centre of meaning. It becomes instead a floating signifer without reference or reason—or to borrow Derrida's idiom, a massproduced postcard addressed 'to whom it may concern' and wandering aimlessly through a communications network, devoid of 'destiny' or 'destination'. In his recent work, entitled The Postcard (1980), Derrida playfully explores our mass-communications culture, quoting at one point a passage from Joyce's Finnegans Wake which suggests that the (modern) penman, Shaun, has become inseparable from his brother, the (post-modern)postman, Shem. And this contemporary 'confusion' of Shem and Shaun—which Derrida identifies as the legacy of 'Babel', as a decree of 'dechimination'—implies that all modes of expression are now irreparably contaminated by the erosion of 'original meaning'. This confusion coincides with the expansion of the communications media. A message is now no longer a unique expression sent from an author to a reader. It is invariably bound up in a mass circuit of reduplication. Meaning has become a matter of 'whatever you like . . .' Derrida's quotations from Joyce are aptly chosen. Beginning his commentary with the enigmatic phrase, 'no my love that's my wake', he punctuates his reading with the telling conundrum, 'Advantages of the Penny Post, When is a Pun not a Pun'. Meanings multiply themselves Charles Moore. They differed, and still do, over the emphasis placed on urbanism, participation, ornament, and image: Americans stress the latter two aspects, Europeans the former two. But as the term is an umbrella covering a variety of schools, this division should not be overstressed. There was a wide enough general agreement for a large exhibition on the subject, the 1980 Venice Biennale organized by Paolo Portoghesi. There, seventy architects from around the world, who have sharp differences among themselves, were loosely grouped under the banner Post-Modern. Both the heterogeneity and commonality of current Post-Modern work should be kept in mind. 115

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indefinitely. There is no identifiable origin or end to the Postal network of communications: 'In the beginning was the Post'.2 The 'post' of postmodernity would thus seem to suggest that the human imagination has now become a post-man disseminating images and signs which he himself has not created and over which he has no real control. II The imminent demise of imagination is also an obsession of postmodern artists. In the nouveaux rotnans of Robbe-Grillet and Sarraute or the anti-novels of Pynchon and Beckett, in the anti-cinema of Godard or the late Fellini, the anti-music of Cage or the anti-art of Duchamps, Vautier and Warhol, we witness an overriding obsession with the end of the humanist subject. Such works repeatedly undermine the modernist belief in the image as an expression of individual consciousness. The typically post-modern image is one which displays its own artificiality, its own pseudo-status, its own representational depthlessness. Hence the significance of Andy Warhol's brazen boast that if Picasso, the modernist master par excellence, could produce four thousand works in a lifetime, he could produce as many in a day. Warhol, the pope of pop art, rejects the accredited idea of the art work as an original creation in a unique time and space. He proclaims the post-modern message that the image has now become a mechanically reproducible commodity—part of the new 'total communications package' where globally conceived and retransmitted styles can be picked up in every place at the same moment and beamed back and forth from continent to continent.3 Contemporary art is acutely aware of the revolutionary mutations in consciousness brought about by the graphic revolution: the discoveries of dry-plate photography, electronic printing, the roll film, the telephone and the phonograph in the second half of the nineteenth century; the first public transmission of both radio voices and motion picture images around 1900; and the rapid expansion of television in America and Western Europe since the forties: a cultural phenomenon so pervasive that by the time satellite multichannel TV had come into usage in the eighties one finds a situation where almost half a billion people from all over the globe could tune into the 1986 World Cup—including the most isolated Indians from the jungles of Brazil! The introduction of the technological image signalled a momentous shift from an age of production to one of reproduction. In post-modern 2 3

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J. Derrida, La Carte Postale (Paris: Flammarion, 1980), 154-155. H. Rosenberg, Artworks andPackages (New York: Horizon Press, 1969).

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culture, the relations of industrial production have been subordinated to those of post-industrial communications. Equipped with video recorders, computer screens and print-outs, post-modern man is becoming daily more removed from the whole humanist cult of the unique and irreplaceable 'aura', in Benjamin's phrase, of the 'authentic art work'. The individual subject is no longer considered the maker or communicator of his own images. There is a growing conviction that the images we possess are reproduced copies of images already there before us. Like every commodity of our new mass communications society, the post-modern image has itself become an interchangeable consumer item, a pseudo-imitation which cheekily celebrates its pseudonymity, exposes its own superficiality and groundlessness. In many post-modern works the very distinction between artisticimage and commodity-image has virtually faded. The cult of parody and pastiche, while it frequently intends to subvert the commodified imaginaire of contemporary 'late capitalist' society, more often than not ends up by being co-opted or assimilated. Even the most dissident imaginations appear to be swallowed into the 'ideology of the simulacrum' which prevails in our consumer age. Indeed the very erosion of subjective inwardness, referential depth, historical time and meaningful human expression—four losses listed by Frederic Jameson as symptomatic of post-modernism—are now becoming de rigeuer (in deconstructionist circles at least).4 The post-modern artist does not claim to express anything because he does not claim to have anything to express. 'When I look into a mirror', says Warhol of his role as artist, 'I see nothing. People call me a mirror, and if a mirror looks into a mirror what does it see?'5 This metaphor of an incessant play between self-reflecting mirrors is, as mentioned, paradigmatic of post-modern culture. And the effects of its logic are by no means confined to the experimental tableau or text. They reverberate throughout the strata of both 'high art' and popular culture generally. Indeed, most post-modernist trends challenge the validity of this very opposition, so central to the whole modernist aesthetic: 'random music, concrete poetry, computer verse, electronic dance, guerrilla theatre, deliquescent sculpture, autodestructive media, packaged nature, psychedelic spectacles, blank canvases, and plain happenings; Pop, Op, Funk, Concept, Topographic, and 4

F. Jameson, 'Postmodernism and Consumer Society', in Postmodern Culture, H. Foster (ed.) (Pluto Press, 1985), 111-126; and 'Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism', in New Left Review, No. 145 (1984), 53-91. 5 A. Warhol, From A to B and Back Again (London: Cassell, 1975), quoted by M. Gibson in Les Horizons du Possible, du Felin (ed.) (Paris, 1984), 75. 117

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Environmental art proliferate, interpenetrate, even as new kinds of anti-art generate newer styles'.6 These movements share a basic impulse to demystify the pretensions of high modernism, with its established notions of controlling author, narrative order and metaphysical profundity. They explode the sacramental status of the humanist imagination and jubilantly proclaim the 'end of art'. The post-modernist dances on the grave of modern idealism. He is as far removed from the Sartrean cult of the self-creating consciousness (pour sot) as from the Kantian cult of the transcendental Einbildungskraft. Post-modern culture jibes at all talk of original creations. It exclaims the omnipresence of self-destructing images which mime each other in a labyrinth of interreflecting mirrors. Mimesis has returned. But with a vengeance. No more is it a question of images representing some transcendent reality. The very notion of such a reality is now unmasked as an illusionist effect of mirror-play. The wheel has turned full circle. But the mirror of the post-modern paradigm reflects neither the outer world of nature nor the inner world of subjectivity; it reflects only itself—a mirror within a mirror . . . like Lady V's fetishized lovemaking by looking glass in Pynchon's novel; like the Becketian narrator being swallowed up by his endlessly selfmultiplying narrators; like Godard's camera filming a camera filming a camera; or like Fellini's TV Dance Spectacular in Ginger and Fred doubly reproduced on the mirror-floor of the recording studio and on the electronically transmitted screen images of millions of television viewers.

m A central feature of this contemporary debate is the post-modern conviction that the very concept of a creative human imagination is a passing illusion of Western humanist culture. The deconstruction of imagination in post-structuralist theory is of a piece with the general announcement of the contemporary Disappearance of Man. Foucault's denunciation of the 'sovereignty of the subject and the twin figures of anthropology and humanism' in the Archaeology of Knowledge, was directed primarily against the anthropocentric philosophies which came to the fore in the nineteenth century and promoted the view that 'human consciousness is the original subject of all historical development and all action'7. While Lyotard promotes a post-modern culture 6

1 . Hassan, The Dismemberment of Orpheus: Towards a Postmodern Literature (Oxford University Press, 1971), 254. 7 Quoted by K. Soper, Humanism and Anti-Humanism (Hutchinson, 1986), 10. I am much indebted to Soper's lucid and wide-ranging analysis for my own discussion of this subject. 118

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which enables people to look at things 'within a context where they don't begin by positing what the human sciences or liberal arts always begin by positing, which is to say the Human Being'} Most other postmodern thinkers, from Lacan and Levi-Strauss to Barthes, Althusser and Derrida, tend to agree with the characterization of humanism as an expression of a modern ideology which places man at the centre of history and makes him the privileged creator of meaning.9 In short, they all dispute the claim, which held sway from the late Renaissance and Enlightenment to the modern movements of romantic idealism and extistentialism, that man makes his own history. Derrida, of course, extends the parameters of this critique when he argues that the philosophical tendency to construe 'man' and 'creation' in terms of origins, begins much earlier than the eighteenth and nineteenth penturies. In fact he traces its genesis back to the beginnings of Western metaphysics, which he equates, in Heideggerean fashion, with the qnto-theological tradition. In other words, the notion of Man is the inevitable counterpart of the Western metaphysical concept of the highest Being as a divine or self-sufficient presence. The death of man is thus for Derrida inseparable from the death of God understood as absolute 'origin' of truth. For man and God together make up that dialectical We which Hegel and German Idealism established as the goal or telos of history. What is necessary but difficult for us today, says Derrida, is to think 'an end of man which would not be organized by a dialectics of truth and negativity, an end of man which would not be a teleology in the first person plural. The We . . . assures the proximity to itself of the fixed and central being for which this circular reappropriation is produced. The We is the unity of absolute knowledge and anthropology, of God and man, of onto-theo-teleology and humanism'.10 This deconstructionist account of the rapport between the premodern and modern epochs of Western metaphysics sheds subtantial light on the genealogy of imagination. The creative power of imagination which Biblical culture identified with Adamic man, and Greek culture with Promethean or demiurgic man, reaches its ultimate huma8

J.-F. Lyotard, 'A Conversation', in Flash Art, op. cit., 33. See in particular LeVi-Strauss's concluding chapter 'History and Dialectics', in The Savage Mind (Chicago University Press, 1966); Foucault's Foreword to the English edition oiLes Mots et les Choses (Paris: Gallimard, 1966), translated into English as The Order of Things (New York: Vintage, 1973); Althusser's 'Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses', in Lenin and Philosophy and other Essays (NLB, 1971); Barthes, 'The Death of the Author', in Image-Music-Text (Fontana, 1977); Derrida, 'The Ends of Man', in Margins of Philosophy (University of Chicago Press, 1983). 10 J. Derrida, 'The Ends of Man', op. cit. 9

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nist conclusion with existentialist man. And the logical implication would seem to be that the human imagination will disappear as man himself disappears. The concept of imagination cannot apparently, survive the post-modern age of deconstruction. It is slowly being erased, to borrow Foucault's vivid phrase, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea. But there is a danger that all the talk about the demise of human imagination may in fact foment an apocalyptic pessimism which accelerates the end of humanity itself. And this danger is, arguably, heightened by the marked ahistoricism of the post-modern aesthetic: its rejection of the notion of historical progression or teleology, its tendency to construe culture as a sort of timeless and depthless space, a jumble of diverse historical styles which eclectically congregate and disintegrate. By collapsing the historical dimensions of time—recollection of time past and projection of time future—into an empty play of euphoric instants, post-modernism runs the risk of eclipsing the potential of human experience for liberation. It risks cultivating the ecstasy of self-annihilation by precluding the possibility of self-expression. And it risks abandoning the emancipatory practice of imagining alternative horizons of existence (remembered or anticipated) by renouncing the legitimacy of narrative coherence or identity. Finally, and perhaps most specifically, the post-modern cult of a timeless, depthless space jeopardizes the vocation of philosophy itself as a critical investigation of hidden dimensions within or behind the one-dimensional surface of things. IV The apocalyptic inflection of much post-modern art and theory is not adventitious. The dangers are real enough. Hence the recurring image of our contemporary condition as a labyrinth of interreflecting mirrors from which there is no escape. There is not even a Minotaur lurking within to be slayed or subdued; the mythic monster is itself but a mirror reflection which refers to no 'original' reality. The danger stalking the post-modern labyrinth is nothingness. The empty tomb. The paralysing fear that there is nothing after post-modernism. And perhaps this is why a painter like Rothko—whose work sought to protest against the 'anaesthetization of contemporary culture' but ended up a symptom of its own 'negative space'—chose extinction.11 Contemporary thinkers have not remained unaware of this predicament. Thus Lyotard proposes to interpret post-modernism in a posi11

See Peter Fuller, Aesthetics after Modernism (Writers and Readers Press, 1983), 28. 120

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tive relation to modernism, serving as the latter's avant-coureur and avant-garde. To the vexed questions 'what is the post-modern?' and 'what place does it occupy in the vertiginous questions hurled at the rules of image and narration', Lyotard offers this reply: 'It is undoubtedly a part of the modern. All that has been received, if only yesterday (modo, modo, Petronius used to say), must be suspected. What space does Cezanne challenge? The Impressionists'. What object do Picasso and Braque attack? Cezanne's. What presupposition does Duchamp break with in 1912? That which says one must make a painting, be it cubist. And Buren questions that other presupposition which he believes had survived untouched by the work of Duchamp: the place of presentation of the work. In an amazing acceleration, the generations precipitate themselves. A work can become modern only if it is first post-modern. Post-modernism thus understood is not modernism at its end but in the nascent state, and this state is constant' (La Condition Postmoderne, 1978). Despite Lyotard's supposedly reassuring claim that post-modernism does not represent some epistemological coupure, some schismatic rupture with modernist culture, he cannot so easily dispose of the problem of post-modern nihilism. Indeed his invocation of the 'inhumanity' of sublime allusions, which dismantle the productive pretensions of imagination and defy its narrative function, would seem to inflate rather than deflate the apocalyptic climate of postmodernism. One must have serious doubts as to whether the sublime excesses of rule-breaking paralogisms—recommended by Lyotard— are appropriate weapons against the post-modern paralysis. In his Preface to Postmodern Culture (1985) Hal Foster, also seeks to remedy the dilemma of paralysis by advocating a post-modernism of 'resistance': this, he suggests, might serve as a counter-practice to both the official culture of modernism and to what he calls 'the false normativity of reactionary post-modernism'.12 Such a resistant postmodernism, responding to the crisis of modernity of the fifties and sixties, would be concerned with (1) a 'critical deconstruction of tradition' as opposed to an 'instrumental pastiche of pop- or pseudo-historical forms'; (2) a 'critique of origins rather than a return to them'; and (3) a questioning rather than an exploiting of cultural codes and political ideologies. But however commendable such a discriminating postmodernism may be, we are still left with the question of whether it is feasible. In a technologized culture where the human subject is said to be reduced to 'a pure screen for all the networks of influence' (Baudrillard), to a shadow play or simulating machine of commercialized images, one is compelled to wonder if the very idea of resistance is not absurd. Do not the very post-modern efforts to contest the 12

H. Foster, Preface to Postmodern Culture (Pluto Press, 1985), xii-xiii. 121

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dominance of a commodified system of representation themselves fall victim to the system? Do they not confirm, despite themselves, the parodic network they intend to transgress?

Without resorting to the nostalgic option for a return to the paradigms of traditional onto-theology or modern humanism, is it not possible to conceive of a post-modern imagination capable of preserving, through re-interpretation, the functions of narrative identity and creativity—or what we call a poetics of the possible!1* Such a post-modern imagination would move beyond humanism understood as anthropocentristn while remaining faithful to its humanitarian convictions. It would take proper cognizance of the lessons to be learned from the excesses of its preceding paradigms: (1) the pre-modern tendency to repress human creativity in the name of some immutable Being jealously guarding the copyright of 'original' meaning; and (2) the modern tendency to overemphasize the sovereign role of the autonomous subject as sole source of meaning. Such a post-modern imagination aims to avoid the extremes of both traditional quietism and modern voluntarism. Entering into the labyrinth of parody and play, it dispossesses itself of inherited certainties. At the very heart of the labyrinth, it struggles to explore possibilities of an other kind of poiesis—alternative modes of inventing alternative modes of existence.

13

R. Kearney, Poetique du Possible (Paris: Beauchesne, 1984). This project of a critical post-modern imagination is outlined in our forthcoming book, The Wake of Imagination (London: Century Hutchinson, 1988). 122

Merleau-Ponty and the Phenomenology of Perception CYRIL BARRETT

It is over forty years since Merleau-Ponty published his first major work, Le structure de comportement ('The Structure of Behaviour') (1942) and a quarter of a century since he died. He belongs, therefore, with Sartre and Marcel, to the first post-War generation of French philosophers. Like his friend Sartre's, his philosophy may be regarded as dated, passe, of no interest or relevance to truly contemporary thought. In philosophical terms forty years are nothing; in terms of trends, fashions and novelties they are an eternity. But perhaps the work of Merleau-Ponty has not dated because it was never in vogue. He did not write plays and novels, or take part in political demonstrations, though he was involved in politics, or win a Nobel prize and refuse to receive it. He was very much a philosopher's philosopher, eminent in his field, well known in academic circles in France but hardly a household name. In this country he is hardly known even in philosophical circles, except by name. More is the pity, since his philosophical approach and manner of philosophizing have much in common with certain modes of British philosophizing, as I hope to show. Merleau-Ponty was born at Rochefort-sur-Mer in 1908. He studied with Sartre at the Ecole Normale. Having taught in a Iyc6e for five years, he joined the Ecole Normale as agrege repetiteur in 1930. He joined the army in 1939. During the occupation he worked for the resistance and was in touch with Sartre. In 1940 he published his first philosophical work, The Structure of Behaviour, and worked on his major book, Phenomenology of Perception, published in 1947. In 1945 he joined the University of Lyon, and with Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir founded Les Temps Modernes, a left-wing intellectual periodical. In 1950 he moved to the Sorbonne; and in 1952 was elected to the chair at the College de France, one formerly held by Bergson and taught there till his death in 1961. In 1952 he broke with Sartre over the policy of Les Temps Modernes but the rift was gradually healed, and shortly after his death Sartre published a tribute to him, 'MerleauPonty vivant' in the same journal. There are three main strands in Merleau-Ponty's philosophy: the phenomenological, the Existentialist and the Marxist. Of these, by far the most important and persistent was the phenomenological. 123

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Merleau-Ponty drew on Husserl, but did not slavishly adopt all his ideas. Husserlian reduction and Husserlian essences are not central to his phenomenology. Indeed, they play hardly any role, Husserlian phenomenology tends to separate consciousness or awareness from its objects and concentrate on consciousness alone with a view to discovering its essence or essences. Merleau-Ponty, on the other hand, stressed the close relationships between consciousness and its objects or the intentionality of consciousness, its reaching out towards its objects; and, conversely, the penetration of consciousness by its objects. It is not surprising, therefore, that he should have concentrated most of his attention on perception and behaviour. We are in contact with the world around us by perceiving it and acting in it. The phenomenology of perception forms by far the largest part of his philosophical writings and his main contribution to philosophy. It must, therefore, occupy the major part of my attention in this paper. But, first, a word must be said about the two other aspects of his philosophy, Existentionalism and Marxism. At the time when he and Sartre were editing Les Tempes Modernes, Merleau-Ponty was under Sartre's spell. He did not contribute much to Existentialist thought, but it occupied his thoughts a great deal. This shows through his writings. But he was mostly critical of it. It was fundamentally incompatible with his own thought. Eventually, he openly took issue with Sartre's ideas in Les aventures de la dialectique, an unpolemical, restrained criticism in which Sartre was not mentioned by name. The basis of their disagreement was Sartre's—to MerleauPonty's mind—rigid distinction between the object or thing (the en soi) and consciousness (the pour soi) and also Sartre's Cartesian disregard for the body in L'Imaginaire. Merleau-Ponty rejected this clear-cut distinction between consciousness and object, mind and body. As we have seen, for him, the intentional nature of consciousness displayed in perception and behaviour breaks down this distinction. And, as we shall see, the role played in perception by the body makes a Cartesian account of imagination as pure consciousness (internal perception) untenable. Merleau-Ponty also disagreed with Sartre on the notion of freedom. For Sartre freedom means radical indeterminism and pure spontaneity. Consciousness is not related to anything. Nothing has meaning unless it is bestowed on it by consciousness: a mountain is climbable only if I propose to climb it; a waiter's role is sustained only by waiting at table. For Merleau-Ponty freedom is conditioned, not absolute. It is conditioned by a pre-conscious engagement with the world and by one's personal history. This last is a Marxist element in Merleau-Ponty's thought. These views, together with his change of attitude towards Marxism, led to his estrangement from Sartre. 124

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Merleau-Ponty came to Marxism from Catholicism. His earliest writings were published in the Catholic periodical La vie intellectuelle. Even then he was interested in Marxism as a potential philosophy of history and as forming part of his own philosophy of history which consisted of an 'inventory of his time'. In the 1930s Marxism and the 'Russian experiment' were very much a feature of the time. There was even a Socialist government in France under Le"on Blum in 1936, and a Labour Prime Minister in Britain from 1929 till 1931. Merleau-Ponty broke with Catholicism when he discovered that even an intelligent and enlightened priest was not prepared to condemn Dollfuss's suppression of the Socialists in Austria in 1934. Throughout the 1940s he wrote articles on Marxism in Les Temps Modernes. He was interested in what he called the 'Marxist expectation' {I'attentisme Marxiste). What was expected from Marxism was a workable philosophy of history and, in politics, an awakening of the proletariat by Russian Communism. But, by the end of the decade Merleau-Ponty was becoming increasingly disillusioned, and more and more convinced that neither expectation would be fulfilled. Indeed, what with the Stalinist purges, he began to realize that, far from awakening the proletariat, the Russian system was having the opposite effect, and enslaving it. By the early 1950s his disillusionment was complete. In 1952 he broke with Sartre over the attitude of Les Temps Moderne towards Communism. The rift, however, was not made public until 1955 when Les aventures de la dialectique was published. It contained his criticisms of Marxism as a philosophy of history and denounced Communism as oppressive. For his pains Merleau-Ponty was abused and ridiculed by his erstwhile colleagues. Simone de Beauvoir attacked him in Les Temps Modernes (no. 114—15, 1955) in an article entitled 'Merleau-Ponty et le pseudo-sartrisme' and he was also attacked in a collection of essays by former Communist colleagues, Misadventures de I'anti-marxisme, Les malheurs de M. Merleau-Ponty (Paris, 1956) ('Misadventures of anti-Marxism, The Misfortunes of Mr Merleau-Ponty'). He replied to neither, but to the end he continued to write on political and social philosophy, as well as the philosophy of history.

To return to his phenomenology of perception and behaviour. A word must first be said about his attitude towards and use of science, particularly psychology, both experimental and clinical. Merleau-Ponty drew freely on experimental psychology, particularly Gestalt psychology, and case histories from psychopathology. From Gestalt psychology he drew more than experimental evidence. He adapted to his own purposes elements of the theory itself. In particular the notion that the basic unit of perception is a whole, a form {gestalt), 125

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not a conglomeration of parts, and the figure-ground distinction. Unlike the reductionist psychologists of the nineteenth century who held that a perceptual unit was the ultimate element to which a perception could be broken down—a single note of music, the simplest colour or shape that can be distinguished from all others. These elements were the first to be perceived, and out of them more complex units were built up by association. The Gestalt psychologists set out to demonstrate that this is not so. That wholes, totalities, forms, shapes are perceived as such before they can be analysed. We see, for instance, three dots arranged thus . '. as three tiny circles in the shape of a triangle before we perceive them as disparate dots. The figure-ground relationship is nothing more than the perceptual phenomenon whereby we isolate and focus on a particular object (figure) and the rest of our visual field becomes background in relation to it. Merleau-Ponty extended this theory to other instances of attention and shifting of attention, bringing ground into figure and allowing figure to lapse into background. But, though he adopted and adapted certain Gestalt ideas, Merleau-Ponty was critical of its underlying theory that traced forms to the neural structures of the brain. He was also critical of Freud, though he acknowledged the importance he attached to sexuality. The prime target for his criticism was Behaviorism as propounded by Pavlov and above all by J. B. Watson. But, on the whole, Merleau-Ponty was not so much critical of science—by which he meant the human sciences—or of specific scientific theories. On the other hand he wanted to distance himself as far as possible from the preoccupations, fields of research and methods of scientists. In the preface to The Phenomenology ofPerception he writes: The whole universe of science is built upon the world as directly experienced and if we want to subject science itself to rigorous scrutiny and arrive at a precise assessment of its meaning and scope, we must begin by reawakening the basic experience of the world of which science is the second-order expression. Science deals with objects and treats everything, even consciousness itself, as an object for investigation. It assumes a world already set up and in its place, a world that includes consciousness, a world in which the elements are causally interconnected. It ignores, or pretends to ignore, the fact that this world which it sets out to investigate has been in part constituted by and exists only through consciousness. This world the scientist purports to investigate is my world and the world of each conscious being with ability to reflect. I am its absolute source. My consciousness is fundamental to its existence. If there were no consciousness, there would be no world to investigate. It is in consciousness that we encounter the world because it is there that we are aware, 126

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immediately and at first hand, of what we have ourselves helped to constitute. Science, on the other hand, gives us an abstract and secondhand account of that world. Without the primary and direct experience of the world science would be meaningless. Merleau-Ponty concludes: Scientific points of view, according to which my existence is a moment of the world's, are always both naive and at the same time dishonest, because they take for granted, without explicitly mentioning it, the other point of view, namely that of consciousness, through which from the outset a world forms itself round me and begins to exist for me.1 Merleau-Ponty sees his task, therefore, as more basic than that of the sciences and, in a sense, prior to them. It is not a substitute for science. Phenomenology investigates a field that science does not, and, given its methods, cannot be explored. It is complementary to science. His critics would say that Merleau-Ponty's brand of phenomenology— which he calls 'genetic phenomenology' because it attempts to describe the genesis of our perceptions, our perception of the world and the things in it, of space and time, of other persons and of ourselves—is indistinguishable from psychology. He is, therefore, at pains to show that however much use he makes of psychological evidence and however much what he is doing may resemble psychology the fields and methods of investigation are poles apart. Merleau-Ponty admits that without the aid of psychology he could not carry through his investigations, but these investigations are not in themselves psychological. As he says: 'we could begin neither without psychology nor with psychology alone'.2 Here I should mention en passant that in many respects MerleauPonty's ideas resemble those of Wittgenstein. This has been the subject of a recent doctoral thesis.3 In the course of the paper I shall draw attention to some of these resemblances. So far we have come across the common notion of the world as my world and a common insistence that however much their methods may resemble those of psychology they are quite distinct from psychology in any form. One way in which Merleau-Ponty distinguishes his kind of investigation from that of science is by saying that it is concerned with subjectivity and intersubjectivity whereas science purports to be objective. What he means by these notoriously slippery terms will, I hope, emerge in the paper. One last general point, which is related to objectivity. Merleau-Ponty identifies two types of 'objective thinking' (pensee objective) to which 1 2 3

Phenomenology ofPerception, ix. Ibid.,63. E. P. Emerson, Perception, Language and Context (Purdue, 1985). 127

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his phenomenology is opposed: empiricism and intellectualism. Both exemplify what he calls a 'natural tendency' (tendence naturelle). This natural tendency is to make a strict and rigid distinction between nature or things and consciousness, the physical and the mental, and to look for causal relationships between them. In other respects empiricism and intellectualism are opposed to one another. Empiricism is an attempt to explain phenomena, both external objects and internal states of consciousness or mental acts, in terms of sensory qualities or sensory experiences and causal relationships between them. Intellectualism, represented by such contemporaries as L. Brunschvigg and J. Lachelier, is Kantian in approach. It relates perception to a priori forms and categories. Throughout his major works Merleau-Ponty carries on a dialogue with these two extremes of objective thinking and the natural attitude. Merleau-Ponty's first major work was primarily directed against the empiricist account of behaviour as exemplified in the writing of Watson and Pavlov. The Structure of Behaviour thus clears the way for his subsequent use of the notion of behaviour in describing perception. He rejects the Behaviorist account of simple and conditioned reflexes. Simple reflex behaviour as he understands it is an 'action of a defined physical or chemical agent on a locally defined receptor which evokes a defined response by means of a definite pathway'. If this were truly what a reflex is, then one would expect the response to be located at the point of contact and the stimulus and response to be distinct. But, as Gestalt psychology and the researches of K. Goldstein have shown, this is not so.4 It is not apart of an organism that responds but the whole organism acted on at a point. A response, such as pain, can also be a stimulus, otherwise it would be pointless to use a crop or spurs on a horse. When an organism is injured, it reorganizes itself so as to respond as a whole, even if only to a diminished extent. A half-blind person (hemianopsia) will see the whole visual field dimly. Response to a stimulus is a form of behaviour. Conditioned reflexes fair no better. Pavlov introduced this notion in order to account for complex responses, such as salivating by a dog, not in response to the sight of food, but to the sound of a bell. For Pavlov this is a matter of learning by repetition—food has been forthcoming so often that when the bell rings the dog learns to expect it. This occurs, according to Pavlov because a particular part of the brain is affected. But the findings of Goldstein, Pieron, Fischel and others, and the experiments of Koehler, Koffka and other Gestalt psychologists show that this is not so. Learning according to them is not achieved by repetition but by apprehending analogies. A cat that has drawn food to 4

128

Der Aufbau der Organismus (The Hague, 1934).

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itself by pulling a string may next time draw it with its teeth. Learning is not localized in any particular part of the brain. It is a general aptitude which may be exercised in a certain part of the brain, as is shown in brain damage, but it affects behaviour as a whole because it interferes with the organization of behaviour, the differentiation and articulation of perception and activity. Having dealt with reflexes, Merleau-Ponty proceeds to consider the orders and structures of behaviour—physical or syncretic, vital or adaptable (amovtble), and human or symbolic. This eventually leads him to the problem of the human body and its relationship with the soul and with perceptual consciousness which is the subject of his next major work, indeed his principal work, the culmination of what had gone before and the point of departure for all that was to follow, the Phenomenology of Perception.

Phenomenology is rather an outline of a vast programme of research than a completed work. In a prospectus of his work, submitted in support of his candidacy for a chair at the College de France, MerleauPonty speaks of a book on language, L'Origine de la verite, on which he was engaged at the time (1952). The book was never finished, but he continued to produce smaller works which complement the Phenomenology. However, even these fall far short of completing his project. The project was 'to discover the object at the very centre of our experience', to show that in every form of consciousness, from sensation to pure thought, including self-consciousness, social consciousness, and consciousness of value, perception is fundamental. So fundamental and all-pervasive is it that he entitled an address he gave to the Socie"te francaise de philosophic shortly after the publication of Phenomenology: 'The Primacy of Perception'.5 And not only did he regard perception as fundamental to every form of consciousness but he regarded as fundamental to perception the activity of the body. 'The perceiving mind is an incarnated mind', he says in A Prospectus. 'I have tried', he says: to re-establish the roots of the mind in its body and in its world, going against doctrines which treat perception as a simple result of the action of external things on our body as well as against those which insist on the autonomy of consciousness. These philosophies commonly forget—in favour of a pure exteriority or a pure interiority— 5

Delivered on 23 November 1946; published in December 1947 in the

Bulletin de la societe francaise de philosophie, 49, 114-153. 129

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the insertion of the mind in corporeality, the ambiguous relation which we entertain with our body and, correlatively, with perceived things. 6 This emphasis on the active role of the body in perception is not only central to this thinking, but is his major contribution to philosophy, and to French philosophy in particular. One might say that he was belatedly making amends for the rashness of Descartes's radical distinction between mind and body, and his almost contemptuous treatment of the body. Many attempts have been made to come to terms with or overcome the Cartesian dichotomy. Occasionalism, Spinozan pantheism, Leibnizian monadology, Berkeleian and other forms of idealism, materialism and physicalism, either reject the dichotomy or try to explain away one or other member of it or, in the case of the Occasionalists and, possibly, Leibniz, rig up a supernatural apparatus no less wondrous than the epicycles of Ptolemy. Merleau-Ponty's contribution is to nibble at both ends or, rather, allow an intrusion from mind into the physical world and from the physical world into consciousness. The mediating factor or catalyst is the body which, so to speak, has a foot in both worlds. Descartes thought of this, and, no doubt, countless others have seen it since. He realized that the 'confused ideas' of hunger and fear, as well as the emotions, were deeply and intimately embedded in the body; and that the relationship of mind to body was not that of a pilot to a ship—the pilot does not suffer pain when the hull is breached. But Descartes did not follow up this insight, presumably because to do so would have meant blunting his finely honed distinction between mind and body, and with it would have gone his criterion of substance and, possibly, his criterion of truth (clear and distinct ideas) as well. It should be stressed, however, that Merleau-Ponty did not propose the primacy of perception and its intimate relationship with bodily activity primarily as a solution to Descartes's mind-body dichotomy. He is primarily interested in a phenomenological account of consciousness which reveals the roles of perception and bodily behaviour. That his findings may help towards solving or dissolving the Cartesian problem is incidental. The fascination of Phenomenology lies in Merleau-Ponty's ability to demonstrate the presence of bodily behaviour in areas of consciousness which at first one would have thought it had no place. In the time remaining to me I can do little more than pick out what I consider the more impressive results of his investigations. As in The Structure ofBehaviour Merleau-Ponty draws freely on the reports of clinical and experimental psychology, to such an extent that 6

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The Primacy of Perception, James Edie (ed.) (Evanston, 1964), 3—4.

Merleau-Ponty and the Phenomenology of Perception

at times it looks as though phenomenology is itself a therapy, an alternative to alternative medicines. Phenomenology takes over from where The Structure left off, that is, with the activity of the body and mind as active at the level of reflexes, which might seem to be nothing more than physiological, chemical, or electrical reactions. After some introductory considerations MerleauPonty devotes the first part of his book to certain aspects of the body itself. First, he is at pains to contrast his view of the body with what he calls 'mechanistic physiology'. The mechanistic physiologists regard the body as an object among other objects; Merleau-Ponty regards it as a partial subject, as integrated with consciousness through its intentionality. This he believes, is shown by the phenomenon of the so-called phantom limb (anosognosia). This phenomenon has been variously explained, physiologically, as either a function or a functional failure of the nervous system, or, psychologically, as either a memory of the limb or forgetfulness of its loss. It cannot be memory, since the 'limb' is currently active, nor forgetfulness since the patient seldom attempts to offer a phantom hand but offers the good one instead.7 According to Merleau-Ponty the phenomenon is an abnormal manifestation of the operaton of the 'habitual body' which, by means of the so-called 'body image', enables the body to transcend the here and now, the incidental occurrence. This enables the human being as a whole to function effectively. Be that as it may, there are important differences between our bodies and other objects. As Merleau-Ponty puts it: 'Objects are before me; the body is with we'. It is accessible to exploration as other objects are not. My body is permanent in my experience; other objects are not. The presence of my body is a condition for other objects presenting themselves; absence of my body from a perceptual field—turning away, being asleep, not being in the vicinity—would make perception of certain objects impossible. Finally, the Cartesian point, certain internal sensations such as kinesthetic sensations or pain are not causally connected with the body; the body as object of these sensations is not a represented object but an affected object. From all this Merleau-Ponty draws the far-reaching conclusion that the body is the source of objects in consciousness or, stated somewhat misleadingly, if forcefully, 'that by which there are objects'. Classical psychology, he says, ignores this by objectifying internal sensations in an effort to be scientific. But, it will be objected, is the body, my body, not an object in space, located in space like any other material object? That is true. As such it is not a subject. Though it can affect other objects as they can affect each 7

L'Hermitte: L'image de notre corps (Paris, 1939). 131

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other and it, it cannot deploy them as a subject can. On the other hand, viewed phenomenologically it is not in space in quite the same way as other objects are located in space. Strictly speaking it itself is not located in space: it is situated in space. It is the centre in relation to every location: it is the 'first co-ordinate'. All other co-ordinates in which objects are located are external to it. Hence it is situated in the centre rather than located there as on a co-ordinate.8 Merleau-Ponty refers to this aspect of the body as the 'phenomenal body', as opposed to the body as physical object. It is by means of this phenomenal body that we make contact with the world and other objects, and with the parts of our own body. When we move our body, it is the phenomenal, not the physical body, the body as object, that we move. This can be illustrated by the sad case of the good soldier Schneider who had been wounded in the brain by a splinter of shell during World War I. He was capable of performing actions that involved direct contact with his own body—blowing his nose or scratching his elbow—and with objects in direct contact with his body—he would swat a mosquito. But he had no abstract idea of the parts of his body. He could not describe them or point to them if they were touched. Empiricists would explain this by saying that Schneider's sense of sight was defective, though his sense of touch was intact. But a normal person can locate parts of his body in the dark or with his eyes shut. So either both his sight and sense of touch were defective or neither were. The intellectualists would say that his symbolic consciousness was defective. To this Merleau-Ponty replies that a splinter could not have hit the source of symbolic consciousness. Moreover, consciousness is unitary. Schneider's whole imaginative bodily world had been affected. Merleau-Ponty compares the body to a work of art. It requires direct contact with sounds, colours, shapes, etc., and yet its meaning is not affected by their temporal and spatial location.9 Through the body not only are objects related to consciousness, but so also are other incarnated subjects, other persons. This comes about obviously in sexual relations where body is linked to body by desire. But it is not so much the bodily relationship that interests MerleauPonty as the perceptual aspect of sex. As he sees it, sexual desire comes about as a result of perception being given an erotic structure. The wretched Schneider had no sex life. He was indifferent to sexual stimulation and took no sexual initiatives, since for him persons were as abstract as any other objects. On the other hand, the body can offer a refuge for people deprived of sex, as in the case of the girl who lost her voice when kept apart from her lover. The body refused the exercise of 8 9

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Phenomenology of Perception, 100. Ibid., 103-109.

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that other form of communication, speech, as a protest against the forceful refusal of an opportunity to exercise its sexual powers. Just as he minimizes the role of the body in sexual intercommunication or intersubjectivity, so Merleau-Ponty stresses it in his treatment of speech, that form of communication that some regard as almost emancipated from the body, the self-effacing vehicle of thought. He does this by drawing attention, as Wittgenstein also does, to the role of gesture and bodily behaviour in speech. Indeed, he regards bodily gesture as the model of language. Speech and gesture have three important things in common: (1) they both transcend a substructure, whether the positions of the limbs or the accumulated cultural deposit of past utterances; (2) both verbal expression and bodily gesture are activities; and (3) they are both grasped immediately, without the mediation of representation, if they are grasped at all. But, it may be objected, there is an essential difference between them: gesture is natural and spontaneous—a smile or a scowl; speech is conventional. Merleau-Ponty agrees that there is an conventional element in language. Whether we use 'nuit' or 'night' is arbitrary, an historical accident. But that we distinguish night from day is neither conventional nor arbitrary. On the other hand, gestures may have different meaning in different cultures; the Japanese smile when they are angry (though it is hardly a beatific smile). However, Merleau-Ponty makes a concession to the common view of language by admitting that its world is privileged. It can be re-used with new meanings; it can be used in selfreflection; and it makes new forms of behaviour possible.

So much for the body and the perceptual world with which it is in immediate contact—itself and objects, other people as sexually desirable and as interlocutors. The perceptual world is wider than what can be apprehended by direct bodily contact. There is a world furnished with objects and peopled by other persons with which we are not in direct bodily contact. Whether this world is real and not illusory, and whether it is as it appears to be, with the attributes it appears to have— colours, shapes, tactile and auditory features, relationships of distance and direction, motion and rest, and, in some cases, thought, volition, emotion and self-consciousness—can surely not be established by means of the body, much less be impossible to establish without the aid of the body. Surprising though it may seem, Merleau-Ponty maintains that it is precisely by means of the body that the world around us, the world in which we live is established. 'My body is the fabric into which all objects are woven'. At this stage I can do no more than indicate some of the main steps in the argument. The basic argument is that we do not grasp the world of 133

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things and objects through apprehending isolated sensory qualities and synthesizing them either by association or by applying a priori forms and categories to them. This ignores the thrust of the subject towards the world and its objects, which is manifested in bodily behaviour. According to Merleau-Ponty this manifestation takes place even in our reaction to colour. We tend to withdraw from colours at the red/orange end of the spectrum and move towards those at the blue/green end. (Artists see blue/green as receding and red/orange as advancing, which is the obverse of the phenomenon.) More daringly, he challenges the Kantian a priori which constitutes the perceptual world. For MerleauPonty there is a more basic a priori, the subject's first engagement with the world, 'the primordial layer at which both ideas and things come into being'.10 He does not seem to be on sure ground here, particularly as he seems to suggest that the Kantian application of the categories is a deliberate, and hence, presumably, a conscious choice. In dealing with direction he does not, as might be expected, refer orientation to the position of the head or the semicurcular canals, because that does not account for Stratton's experiments with inverted vision due to inverting spectacles. Merleau-Ponty sees the rectification of orientation that takes place during the experiment as due to efforts to act in the world—touch one's toes, etc. Like Berkeley, he does not allow that perception of distance is a matter of vision alone; he holds that relating objects in depth is due to an effort of the body to take the best possible hold on the world. But how can the body account for the independence, self-consistency and constancy of objects, and, at the same time for the phenomenon of hallucination? It would hardly be an exaggeration to say that for Merleau-Ponty there can be no constancy among things except that provided by the body. There is no 'real' colour, size, shape, weight or texture.11 Colour is affected by lighting, size and shape by perspective, sound by distance, and so on. It is only by taking a certain light or perspective or distance as a touchstone that we can speak of the colour, size, shape or sound of a thing. This implies a certain kind of behaviour in relation to the thing. Such normative behaviour is obvious where the phenomeon is tactile, and it is obviously bodily behaviour. We check the texture of an object by running our hand over it and its temperature relative to our bodily heat. But even size, shape and colour are checked by bodily movement—by walking around an object, changing our perspective, moving our eyes, altering the lighting. One might say that all this could be done by instruments, apart from the fact that ultimately the use of instruments involves some bodily movement, the 10

Special Harmony ofSight and Touch, (New York, 1899).

11

Phenomenology of Perception, 303.

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readings of these instruments have to be translated into sensory terms. Thus constancy is 'constancy-for-my-body', an invariant of its total behaviour. It is only where a straight stick in water does not look bent, water in a basin feels cold to a chilly hand, what appears to be an iron bar feels very light that we suspect that these things are not what they appear to be. But what of the self-consistency and independence of things? Surely this also cannot be apprehended through our body? Surely MerleauPonty cannot have it both ways. But he does. The thing even in its independence can be understood as an 'in-itself-for-me' in terms of my behaviour. 12 But this behaviour is rather curious. It involves deliberately adopting a detached and indifferent attitude towards the object, making it 'hold itself from us and remain self-sufficient'—an attitude of self-forgetfulness: 'We lose ourselves in the thing, and this is precisely what makes it a thing'. As such it never becomes completely accessible to us. A total appearance of it would lie at the end of an infinite exploration. It is what Merleau-Ponty calls a 'perfect fullness'.13 This account would be acceptable to anyone who assigned priority to our apprehension of other things as first being endowed with personality to be followed by a sorting out process by which things were distinguished from persons. 14 But whatever way one takes it, the role of the body in this attitude of detachment and self-forgetfulness is not active. The mind, yes. But the body? Can it do more than refrain from acting? But what of hallucinations, seeing objects as present that are not? The body certainly has something to do with their production, so how can it be relied on as the fabric into which all objects are woven? Merleau-Ponty's reply is that hallucination is only a momentary occurrence. Someone suffering from hallucinations can, after the event, distinguish them from ordinary perceptions of his own and particularly from the perceptions of others who do not hear his voices or see his daggers. All perception is presumptive. That is what makes hallucination possible. In hallucination the normal person's basic function of indexing the perceived object to what is regarded as reality is temporarily in abeyance. Granted that the body has a role in the intersubjectivity of sexual relationships and communication, can it also establish the independent existence of other subjects, other 'Is' or rather 'Thous'? Yes, but only indirectly. We infer from the behaviour of others their intentionality and, hence, their personal existence, because we behave in a similar 12

Ibid., 324. Ibid., 326. 14 Ibid., 330. 13

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way. The other deploys consciousness in a system of actions with which we are familiar. But, it will be objected, I can apprehend another's behaviour only in my world of which it is a part. I cannot penetrate to his self and see the world from his point of view. Ultimately, MerleauPonty's account of perception leads to solipsism. On the contrary, he replies. It is precisely because we experience the existence of other subjects, even though we apprehend them from our own point of view, that the problem of solipsism arises. If the other person was to us an object among other objects the question of solipsism would not arise. I am not sure of this. Consciousness of non-personal objects can lead to self-consciousness and thence to the question, if not the problem, whether I am the only subject that exists. Finally, there is the world in which we find ourselves, the 'horizon of horizons', as Merleau-Ponty calls it, that whichgives an unwilled unity that 'underlies all the disruptions of my personal and historical life'.l5 It gives unity because it is 'one being, and one only, a vast individual from which my own experiences are taken'. It is both an incomplete individual that can admit other individuals (things) and is complete at any one time. It is the counterpart of the body in its pre-personal sensory functions, and of consciousness, which is complete in the effective present, habitually present in consciousness of the past and intentionally (potentionally?) present in the future. We must, alas, leave what Merleau-Ponty has to say about the role of the body in self-consciousness, in human freedom and social consciousness, and in our consciousness of time and in historical consciousness, fascinating though his treatment of them is. But I hope that sufficient indication of how he approaches these phenomena has been given. Phenomenology was at first received in respectful silence. Reviewers contented themselves with giving an exposition of his ideas. The first criticisms came at a discussion in the Societe franchise de philosophic in November 1946, where his notion of the primacy of perception was attacked. Other objections were that what he was doing was psychology and not philosophy. To these could be added a query about his notion of perception which seems altogether too broad. It is also pertinent to ask whether he had solved the mind/body problem, or, better still, made it disappear. I shall deal briefly with these four points. The opposition to the notion of the primacy of perception was put forcibly by Emil Brehier: M. Merleau-Ponty changes and inverts the ordinary meaning of what we call philosophy. 15

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Philosophy was born of the difficulties encountered in ordinary perception. It was . . . by getting away from it that men began to philosophize. The first philosophers and Plato . . . Far from wanting to return to an immediate perception, to a lived perception, he took his point of departure from within the insufficiencies of this lived perception . . . You take up this Platonic idealism and follow a specifically reverse direction.16 If philosophers had been phenomenologists from antiquity, would our science exist now? Brehier asks. Merleau-Ponty replies that this hypothesis is impossible. Phenomenology could not have come on the philosophical scene until rationalist philosophy and science had established themselves. But they had done so at a price. In getting away from the insufficiencies and the difficulties for the rational mind that of that lived, immediate present perception, they had left something out. It is to make good this omission that Phenomenologists follow a specifically reverse direction and return to an immediate, lived perception. But does this not, as Brehier says, invert the ordinary meaning of what we call philosophy? And is it not, one might add, a form of psychology and not philosophy at all? Without entering the sterile debate about what is the ordinary meaning of philosophy, it can be answered that Merleau-Ponty certainly inverts a traditional form of philosophy, rationalism, though where he inverts another philosophical tradition, empiricism, is not so clear. What can also be said with certainty is that however much he drew on experimental and clinical psychology, what he himself did, whatever it was, was not psychology. He did not use experimental or clinical evidence to prove theories about the nature of consciousness and perception, but merely to illustrate his own descriptions of various aspects of perception. If what he was doing was not philosophy, then quite a number of French thinkers, to say nothing of Husserl and Heidegger, thinkers such as Bergson, LeRoy and Marcel, were not philosophers either. But even if what Merleau-Ponty was doing was indeed philosophy, and a return to immediate, lived perception is a legitimate philosophical pursuit, surely it will be said, he went too far when he spoke of the primacy of perception? I do not think he went too far so much as expressed himself too dramatically and rhetorically, and laid himself open to misunderstanding. As Salzi pointed out during the discussion at the Socie'te' franchise de philosophic, there are at least three meanings of 'primacy of perception'. The first is psychological. The second is that perception is the exclusive source of truth. The third is that, whatever 16

The Primacy of Perception, 28. 137

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the triumphs of science, it must be supported by contact with perceptual experience. Merleau-Ponty confesses to meaning none of these. He does not mean that perception has the monopoly of truth. What he means is that (1) at every level of consciousness we have access to the object through perception; (2) the more complex forms of knowledge make this basic perceptual experience more determinate and explicit; (3) science does not give us a total explanation of the human being. Thus the investigation of perceptual consciousness helps us to understand the scope and limitations of science. But this, though a legitimate intellectual persuit, whether philosophical or not, gives no support to the notion of a primacy of perception. Moreover, the use of this expression obscures Merleau-Ponty's real and original contribution. It is not the primacy of perception that he was talking about but its fundamental and all-pervasive role in consciousness, penetrating as it does into areas where one would least expect to find it, even into the recesses of 'pure thought* and self-consciousness, whither, alas, we have been unable on this occasion to pursue it. But in following through his project does Merleau-Ponty not stretch the notion of perception too far at both ends? By this I mean that he speaks of, on the one hand, the 'primordial layer at which both ideas and things come into being' prior to full consciousness; and, on the other hand, 'the whole experience that gives the thing itself, and includes them both under the concept of perception. Now, it is one thing to say that perception, and even the body, have a role to play in every form of consciousness, including self-consciousness and 'pure thought', not excluding mathematics; that 'all consciousness is to some extent perceptual consciousness'. It is quite a different matter to call the whole experience 'perception'. One can speak of perceiving that the sum of the angles of a triangle are equal to two right angles or that E=mc2 or of perceiving that one is being stared at from behind, but this is an extended, if not a metaphorical, use of 'perceive'. And it is a far cry from sense perception even of the most abstract and attenuated kind, such as the perception of distance or a sense of direction. As for the 'primordial layer', this can hardly be called perception since by definition it is imperceptible and prior to awareness. It can be postulated as an engagement of the body and even of its sensory organs with the objects that it contacts, but to call this 'perception' is a misuse of that term, and can only blur Merleau-Ponty's thesis. To claim that perception and even bodily behaviour of some kind enters into every form of consciousness is an adventurous assertion. But if every form of consciousness, and even pre-consciousness, is perception, then the thesis loses its bite and becomes evacuated of meaning. Finally, there is Merleau-Ponty's claim, implicit at least, that his approach to consciousness helps to bridge the gap between mind or 138

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thought and body so painstakingly breached by Descartes. Has he succeeded in doing so? He has undoubtedly brought mind and body closer and shown that consciousness and bodily behaviour are interdependent to a degree that we may not have hitherto suspected. But even Descartes was aware of this interdependence. The trouble for Descartes was that, empirically sound though this observation was as evidence of a union between mind and body more intimate than that between pilot and ship, rider and horse, painter and brush, flautist and flute, it did not solve the metaphysical problem that he had created for himself. And however way one describes Merleau-Ponty's approach it is not metaphysical; so it cannot solve the problem either. Metaphysical problems are solved, if at all, by metaphysics, not by empirical observation or phenomenological description. This in no way diminishes Merleau-Ponty's achievement. But it is important to get it into perspective, and not ascribe to it virtues it does not possess. What MerleauPonty has done in his field, from The Structure of Behaviour to his last volume published in his lifetime, the collection of essays that goes under the title Signes (Signs) (1960) is a tour de force. No useful purpose is served by saying that it did or did not achieve what it did not set out to do.

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Epistemological History: the Legacy of Bachelard and Canguilhem MARY TILES

Introduction Fifteen to twenty years ago one might have been forgiven for thinking that both the philosophy and history of science constituted specialized academic backwaters, far removed from debates in the forefront of either philosophic or public attention. But times have changed; science and technology have in many ways and in many guises become central foci of public debate, whether through concern over nuclear safety, the massive price to be paid for continued research in areas such as high energy physics, the cost of high technology medicine, the spectre of genetic engineering, or the wonders of information processing and the computer revolution. At the same time that there is public questioning of the authority of expert scientific pronouncements and debate about the wisdom of courses of action proposed in the name of technology and progress, there is political pressure to direct eduction in an increasingly scientific and technological direction. But even so, in this country, the history and philosophy of science remain peripheral disciplines, not only in relation to the total academic scene but even in relation to philosophy, which is itself being academically marginalized. The situation is not quite the same in France, where the history and philosophy of science has been better entrenched institutionally and, more significantly, has been caught up in central philosophic debates. This position owes much to the work of Bachelard and Canguilhem, who between them occupied the chair of history and philosophy of science at the Sorbonne for almost forty years. They not only exerted a major influence in virtue of their institutional position, which has ensured that almost all those receiving their education in philosophy departments in France have at least encountered their works, but they recast the disciplines of epistemology, history and philosophy of science. Even so it must be confessed that work within this recast discipline has not hit the philosophical headlines either in France or in England, except in so far as it provides the background to the work of Foucault. In France it has been castigated by post-modernists for remaining faithful to some strands of the elightenment tradition and to the methods of critical philosophy. 141

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It remains the case, however, that much French work in the history and philosophy of the sciences bears the distinctive mark of Bachelard and Canguilhem. For example, two works which appeared in 1984 advertise in their titles their intention to write history of science in a manner advocated by them: Jean-Louis Gardies, Pascalentre Eudoxe et Cantor,1 and Franchise Balibar, Galilee, Newton lus par Einstein.2 The explicitly announced intention to read and evaulate the work of a given historical figure in terms of the framework provided by another, revered for having made the innovatory moves which make contemporary theorizing possible, is one which might well cause raised eyebrows amongst traditional historians. They would be even more unsettled by the claim that such projects are philosophical in character. But Bachelard and Canguilhem were quite self-consciously arguing against traditional demarcations, insisting that the reality of contemporary science requires that the interrelations between epistemology, philosophy of science, history of science and the sciences themselves need rethinking. This restructuring of the disciplinary matrix has implications beyond the seemingly limited area of science/history of science, and for this reason philosophers who do not accept these implications, dispute the legitimacy of the emergent discipline itself. Foucault, whose own early work shows clearly the influence of Canguilhem, has said:3 . . . take away Canguilhem and you will no longer understand much about Althusser, Althusserism and a whole series of discussions which have taken place among French Marxists; . . . you will miss an entire aspect of the theoretical work done by psychoanalysts, particularly the followers of Lacan. Foucault sees French philosophy since 1930 as having been divided into two streams: a philosophy of experience, of sense and of subject, flowing from Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, and a philosophy of knowledge, of rationality and of concept, flowing from Cavailles, Bachelard and Canguilhem. The question of the subject has remained central within the first stream. Whether the theorists are working within the framework of Marxism, of psychoanalysis or linguistics, the Cartesian cogito, which poses the problem of the relation between truth (or knowledge) and the subject, remains the point of departure. Here 1

Jean-Louis Gardies, PascalentreEudoxeet Cantor (Paris: J. Vrin, 1984). Franchise Balibar, Galilee, Newton lus par Einstein: espace et relativite (Paris: Presses Universitaire de France, 1984). 3 Introduction to Georges Canguilhem, On the Normal and the Pathological, R. S. Cohen (ed.), trans. Carolyn R. Fawcett, (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1978), ix. 2

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thought about the subject (or his absence) leads to conclusions about knowledge. Bachelard and Canguilhem invert the order of philosophical precedence; by focusing initially on knowledge, its various formations and deformations, they are led to conclusions about the subject.4 It is in this way that the history and philosophy of science becomes itself a participant in the central debates about the possible nature, method and role of philosophy. It is in the work of Canguilhem that we find this new conception of the nature and role of the history of science most thoroughly worked out, defended and illustrated in his own studies in the history of biology and medicine. But as he builds on Bachelard's epistemology, an epistemology which breaks with philosophical tradition, it is here, with a reading of Bachelard through Canguilhem, that we must start in seeking a justification for thinking that to read Galileo and Newton in the light of Einstein's theory of relativity is a legitimate philosophical project.

Bachelard's Epistemology The contemporary significance of Bachelard's work is that he mounts an attack not only on positivism, but also on the positivist conception of science (which is, in the very broad sense in which this term is used, that retained by both scientific realists and more explicitly anti-positivist philosophers). Moreover, the attack is launched from an examination of the character of twentieth-century science itself. But it is significant in the French context that Bachelard equally rejects existentialism and phenomenology. (Like Derrida he calls into question the philosophy of identity, of Being, querying traditional Cartesian assumptions about the subject, but he seeks to replace it not by a play of difference, but by a non-Bergsonian philosophy of Becoming, a Becoming which is discontinuous not continuous, by a dynamic rather than a static subject, by a reason which is open and creative as opposed to one which is closed and determined.) To have lived through the first half of this century is to have witnessed traumatic changes in the character of physics. Relativity theory and quantum mechanics were not just new theories to be added 4

Canguilhem's work in particular concerns the life sciences and cannot but introduce the reflection that any knowledge gained in these sciences is gained by a living being; the quest for knowledge of whatever kind is specifically a life function. This puts the subject and object of knowledge in a peculiarly complex interactive relation which displaces traditional subject/object oppositions. 143

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to the existing stock, or to replace parts of that stock. Their acceptance entailed the disruption of the whole framework of classical physics; its concepts of space, time causality and substance, concepts definitive not only of the thought-space of physics but also, according to Kant, constitutive of our conception of the objective, physical world and thus vital to the way in which the distinction is drawn between inner and outer, subject and object. A world in which space and time were absolute, independent of each other and Euclidean has been replaced by a non-Euclidean, space-time universe. A world in which causal laws were deterministic has been replaced by one in which the fundamental laws are, at the level of individual events, indeterministic. Whereas Laplace could suppose that in principle at least it would be possible to have a complete, absolutely objective state-description of the universe at a given instant, one from which all past and future states could in principle be predicted, his twentieth-century counterpart cannot. Simultaneity depends on the reference frame of the observer/describer and the states of 'particles' (or are they waves?) are determinate only within the limits set by Heisenberg's indeterminacy principle. The physicist has been obliged three or four times in the last twenty years to reconstruct his reason and intellectually speaking to remake his life.5 Bachelard's epistemology is the result of taking on board the radical implications of this fact of the history of twentieth-century science. The fact that physics has reworked the very categories which Kant took to be a priori and grounded in the nature of the subject, invalidates any philosophy which starts either from the subject as a given or from the presumption of a fixed rational framework, whether found in formal logic or in the structures of language or discourse. . . . the philosophy of science is perhaps the only philosophy which applies itself to determining how its own principles may be superseded. In short it is the only open philosophy. Every other philosophy presents its principles as untouchable, its first truths as total and attained. Every other philosophy glories in its closured But the rejection of foundational philosophy does not, for Bachelard, spell the end of philosophy, for science has already shown us how to think without foundations, in a rational framework which is open and 5

Gaston Bachelard, Le Nouvel Esprit Scientifique, (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1934), 715. 6 Gaston Bachelard, La Philosophic du Non, (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1940), 7. 144

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which contains within itself the dynamic potential for its own modification. Traditional philosophy has not so much to be rejected as surpassed. The model here is provided by the transition from Euclidean to non-Euclidean geometry. Prior to the discovery of non-Euclidean geometry, it was presumed that there was only possible geometry, one science of continuous magnitudes. Philosophical questions then centred round the status of its postulates. How could they be known for the certain truths which they seemed to be and which they must be if they are to provide the foundation of all geometric knowledge? Whereas the first four of Euclid's postulates could lay some claim to self-evidence, the fifth, the parallel postulate (which says that parallel lines—ones which make the same angle with a given straight line—never meet) could not. There is a long history of attempts to prove this postulate from the remaining four and then of attempts to show that its negation entails a contradiction. But in spite of some claims to success in this project, no contradiction does in fact follow, as was shown by Riemann, when he interpreted straight line to mean 'great circle on the surface of a sphere'. Here parallel lines (e.g. two lines both going due north from the equator) do meet at the north and south poles. There followed a systematic investigation and classification of other non-Euclidean geometries. This break with Euclid does not involve acceptance of some other uniquely correct geometry to occupy the place of Euclid's. Rather, there is a new, more general study of geometry in which the relations of a plurality of geometries, each characterized by a set of axioms, are studied. The ground of the absolute and unique truth of these axioms is no longer, mathematically, an issue, for they are each treated as coherent systems, legitimate objects of mathematical study and knowledge. This forces a realignment of the relation between physics and mathematics—mathematical geometric knowledge can no longer be confused with knowledge of physical space—the contours of the field of knowledge in relation to space and geometry are radically altered and it now becomes clear that there can be no purely mathematical demonstration of the properties of physical space. The epistemological value of Euclid's proofs is thus changed by this realignment, which, in opening up new fields of knowledge, also forces a re-evaluation of what was previously taken for knowledge and indeed as a paradigm of knowledge. This is perhaps the simplest example of the kind of move which Bachelard sees as characteristic of the way in which science progresses. It is quite crucial here that he takes the rational framework of science to be provided by mathematics, not logic, and that he does not think that mathematics reduces to logic.7 7

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It is in mathematics that we find the clearest examples of what Bachelard calls dialectical reasoning (a sense of 'dialectical' which is very much his own and not to be confused either with Hegelian or Marxist dialectic). A dialectical move does not take one from one theory to another which contradicts it (and which in being able to contradict must be on the same logical level—be working in the same logical space). It takes one from a limited system, a framework which is closed in a certain respect (e.g. by not admitting the possibility of parallel lines which meet), to one which is more general by being open in this respect, and which thus allows for the possibility of several theories operating at the old level each of which is a special, or limit, case of the new more general theory which provides a framework for characterizing these special cases and the relations between them. It is by means of such moves that epistemological ruptures, or breaks, occur, taking us for example from Newtonian to non-Newtonian physics, from Lavoissian to non-Lavoissian chemistry, from Aristotelian to non-Aristotelian logic, and indeed from Cartesian to non-Cartesian epistemology. Bachelard was thus led from the experience of rupture in twentiethcentury physics, via a characterization of the form of reasoning by which it occurs to a new epistemology. For if this dialectical process is one by means of which scientific advances are made (and the judgment internal to twentieth-century science in its endorsement of non-classical physics is that this is the case) then there must be consequences for epistemology. It is no longer possible to make Kant's identification of space and time as forms of intuition, of inner and outer sense, respectively, with the space and time which form the framework within which twentieth-century physics thinks. More generally science requires us to break with what is given in intuition, in the world of common sense. The empirical base of modern science, its world of experience, is not that of natural phenomena, but that of the products of phenomenotechnique, of theoretically guided and technologically mediated experimental set-ups. The science of electricity would have made little proinsisting that mathematics does, in its own right, have a congitive content and thus that it makes sense to talk of progress in mathematics. In characterizing this progress Cavailles says: . . . it is not an addition to the volume produced by juxtaposition, where the old exists alongside the new, but a perpetual revision of content which both deepens and erases. Afterwards there is more than there was before, not because the later contains or even extends the earlier, but because it necessarily takes the earlier as its point of departure and bears in its content the mark, which will be different each time, of its superiority over it (Jean Cavailles, Surla Logique de la Science, (Paris: J. Vrin, 1947), 70. 146

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gress if it had been restricted to the study of naturally occurring phenomena—lightning flashes and static attraction. There is thus neither a permanent a priori rational foundation, as required by the rationalist, nor a fixed empirical foundation, as required by the empiricist. The acquisition of scientific knowledge cannot be considered to take place within a single rational framework, one which might be provided by formal logic, in which all statements and concepts would stand in well-defined logical relations. The conception of a discontinuous, dialectical development of scientific knowledge, which Bachelard takes from twentieth-century science, brings in its wake a series of new, specifically epistemological notions: epistemological rupture (break), epistemological value, epistemological obstacle, recurrent history and the distinction between lapsed and sanctioned knowledge. A dialectical development constitutes an epistemological rupture because it introduces cognitive discontinuities, forcing far-reaching conceptual innovations on the one hand and reorganizations, restructurings and re-evaluations of cognitive fields on the other. To take the case of geometry: the terms 'straight line' and 'space' continue to be used but the concepts with which their use is associated stand in no simple logical relation to their Euclidean/Newtonian predecessors. Although a straight line may still be the shortest distance between two points the characteristics of lines with this property are now systematically related to the character of the space in which they occur (and the metric imposed on it). A space may be Euclidean or otherwise. It is now customary in mathematics to talk of a space, not simply of space, and in this way the physical dimension of the older concept has also been excised from its modern mathematical counterpart. A clear distinction is now enforced between physical and mathematical space where previously there had been what, with hindsight, we judge to have been a complex but unclarified relation which was none the less presumed to be unproblematic because taken for granted. In this sense the concept of space has been rectified, or corrected, and changed in such a way that there can be no return to the prior situation. But the discontinuity is not purely a disruption of logical relations. The change requires a re-evaluation both of what was in the past taken to be geometrical knowledge, and of the relation between physics and mathematics. The epistemological value attached to past proofs is altered and there has to be a re-assessment of what it is that they prove. The deductions are not discarded but Euclid's theorems can no longer be treated as demonstrations of the properties of space and of geometrical figures within it. They are demonstrations of the properties of a Euclidean space which reveal the consequences/power of particular assumptions by being set in the wider context of parallel demonstra147

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tions in spaces where those assumptions are systematically varied. Nor are these proofs demonstrations of the properties of physical space (and hence of the behaviour of light rays—rays which in a given medium always take the shortest distance between two points—as was assumed in geometrical optics). Before there can be any such demonstrations there must first be an answer to the question of what sort of space physical space is, is there a set of axioms which correctly characterize it, or is this a matter of convention? This is not a question which mathematics can answer. So once rational frameworks can be seen to change, the question of what a proof proves is no longer a trivial one (if it ever was). It follows, then, that a discontinuous, dialectically advancing science will require a continual re-assessment of the epistemological value to be attached to past science (knowledge), or to what was in the past thought to constitute science (knowledge). There is thus a need for what Bachelard calls a recurrent history of science, a re-evaluation from the standpoint not of contemporary theory, but of the contemporary conception of scientific knowledge, its acquisition and standards of objectivity. Epistemological obstacles are those factors which have contributed to the conviction that something (such as Euclid's fifth postulate) is a necessary truth, something whose negation is impossible or at least inconceivable and which is thus not open to question. The isolation of epistemological obstacles and their characterization as such can, of course, only be effected with hindsight after a break has been made and accepted as constituting a progressive move. The factors which made the move difficult, which contributed to the closure or limitation of thought in a specific dimension then appear as factors which had to be overcome if progress was to be made. These factors are necessarily hidden to conscious, scientific knowledge whilst they are operative because they result in the perception of something as self-evident, necessarily true, beyond question. This would not be the case if it were recognized as being conditional upon, or to be the product of, some further condition. Epistemological obstacles thus have to be sought and uncovered not in the conceptual, cognitive foundations of a discipline, but in the many and various factors which may play a role in shaping thought without our being aware of their operation. Thus, in the case of the parallel postulate, one would not look to spatial intuition, or to any direct, unmediated experience of space, but to those factors which condition our perception of spatial relationships and our theorizing about them. High on this list would come the ways in which we move ourselves and other objects around in space and our representational practices. The presumption that a rigid body can be moved through space without changing its shape, that we can make scale drawings, that we can make projections to give us ground plans and elevations all 148

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combine to restrict us to Euclidean space in the sense that the assumptions implicit in such practices hold only in such a space. Epistemology as concerned with the acquisition of knowledge and with the processes by which it is acquired thus also has to concern itself with the bringing to consciousness of factors which condition and limit thought, which shape it but which operate on a non-conscious, noncognitive level. Epistemology cannot, therefore, restrict itself to considering only conceptual/logical relations. Knowledge is acquired by overcoming epistemological obstacles and the process of this overcoming is one which takes place on the borders of the conscious and the unconscious, between reflective theory and unreflective practice, and it involves a continual redrawing of the line between them. 8 From all this it follows that the rational subject, constituted by the principles of rational, scientific thought, must be recognized to have a history because there is historical development within the rational structures and standards of science itself. But this is not a Hegelian history of reason, for the changes are not required by pure reason and do not occur purely as a result of the operation of rational principles. They are developments resulting from a confrontation with the object of knowledge of the empirical sciences. Thus epistemology can neither be ahistorical nor a priori. A theory of knowledge, its nature, organization and acquisition, given once and for all, a touchstone by reference to which the cognitive claims of any discipline, period or culture are to be judged is impossible. So a theory of knowledge given without reference to epistemology would be vacuous. And if there is to be epistemology it must be a discipline with a historical dimension, one which must learn from the history of each science the specific characteristics of knowledge within it, if it is not to be irrelevant to science. Moreover, this will be in the nature of an ongoing project and will not be something which can be written once and for all, for there is no finally attained knowledge (and hence no basis for a non-a priori theory of it) all contemporary sciences are, by the very fact of their existence, in the process of developing beyond their present state. 8

It is here that Bachelard subverts the distinction between internalist and externalist epistemologies and histories of science. Internalists restrict their epistemology and history of science to the purely conceptual/cognitive level. Externalists seek to treat science by the methods of empirical sociology (the strong programme in the sociology of knowledge, as advocated by Latour or Bloor) as just another cultural phenomenon to be explained by reference to social conditions. The character of science, it is argued, is determined by the conditions of its production. Bachelard allows for the operation of social, nonconceptual factors in the formation of thought, but does not treat these as the only factors. 149

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Canguilhem and the History of Science It was Canguilhem who spelt out in more precise and rigorous detail the consequences of this discontinuous, non-positivist epistemology for the history of science as a discipline which is to form an essential part of an historical epistemology. Just as Bachelard was critical of the philosophy of science which starts from an a priori philosophical account, whether metaphysics, the philosophy of the subject, or the theory of language, Canguilhem is critical of ways of doing the history of science which start either from a presumption that there is no question about what does or does.not constitute science, or from a purely philosophic account of what constitutes science. He asks, and forces us to take seriously the question 'Of what is the history of science a history?' The easy answer to this question is that the history of science is a history of those forms of culture that are sciences. To see why this is not an adequate answer, take a sample from the sort of history of science with which most people are familiar. Whether or not Descartes by 1628 was in full possession of his analytic geometry is not clear, but the effective date for the invention of Cartesian geometry cannot have been much later than that. At this time Descartes left France for Holland, where he spent the next twenty years. Three or four years after settling down there, his attention was called by another Dutch friend, a classicist, to the three-and-four-line problem of Pappus. Under the mistaken impression that the ancients had been unable to solve the problem, Descartes applied his new methods to it and succeeded without difficulty. This made him aware of the power and generality of his point of view, and he consequently wrote the well-known work, La Geometrie, which made analytic geometry known to his contemporaries.9 This kind of history takes the form either of a biography of famous scientists, or of a chronology of theoretical pronouncements, classic experiments and inventions, or, as above, some admixture of the two. The point is that the above quoted passage on Descartes gives us about as much understanding of Descartes' mathematics and its historical significance as a medieval bestiary gives in the way of biological information on the rhinoceros. It teaches us nothing of the nature of analytic geometry and even less of the thinking which led to its introduction. Moreover it tempts one to think that this innovation sprang fully formed from the mind of Descartes, without giving any warning that what is now known as analytic geometry is far removed from anything 9

150

Carl B. Boyer, A History of Mathematics (New York: Wiley, 1968), 370.

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that is to be found in Descartes' La Geometric Reading La Geometrie, one might well be prompted to ask why it is that Descartes is credited with the 'invention' of analytic geometry. With what right is his work, geometry done in the past, assigned to the past of today's science of analytic geometry? One might think that to answer such questions one should turn to the historian of ideas, for he seeks to describe the network of ideas current at any given period, their interconnections and their subsequent transformations. But such an account will still leave unanswered the question of how much of this history belongs to, for example, the history of mathematics, or the history of physics. Since Descartes does not call what he is doing analytic geometry does this mean that it does not belong to the history of analytic geometry? The historian of ideas cannot, in view of his terms of reference, treat scientific ideas differently from religious, political or other ideas and would merely point out to us that the very classification of ideas as scientific, as opposed to philosophical, or theological, is a modern one.10 We need to know whether in writing a history of mathematics we are to write a history of what is now called mathematics, or of everything that was done in the past under that name. If the former then we must start from some clear view of the nature of contemporary mathematics in order to make a selection within that which previously claimed the title. If the latter, then histories would need to include much more than is customary; they should include all the mathematical mystics from Pythagoras via Plotinus to Dee, Fludd, Cusanus, Dante and so on. The exclusion of such figures indicates that some standard of selection is already implicitly in operation; there is a certain tradition of writing histories which gets perpetuated, but the standards needs to be made explicit. If the nature of mathematics has changed dramatically in this century then the perpetuation of a tradition of writing its history will produce anomalies because these will neither be histories of present mathematics, nor complete histories of what was once called mathematics. In so far as such histories yield an image of mathematics it will be one which is false in relation to contemporary mathematics. Similarly with other sciences. Thus the writing of history of science which does not take account of the specific character of contemporary science and 10

Thus Bachelard says:

The historian of the sciences must take ideas as facts. The epistemologist must take facts as ideas, and insert them into a system of thought. A fact which is badly interpreted in one epoque remains a fact for the historian. It is, courtesy of the epistemologist, an obstacle it is a counter-thought {La Formation de I'esprit scientifique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1934: 14th edn, 1978), 17. 151

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the way in which this differs from past science will be a source of false consciousness. In this sense it can be argued that to continue to write positivist history of science is to write as if we were still in the nineteenth century. The thought that one could write a purely factual history of science, a natural history, supposes that the notion of what constitutes a science is given. But, as we have seen, even traditional writings of the history of science operate a principle of selection according to which some things are excluded because not really science. What has to be recognized is that to claim to be doing science is to claim a privileged intellectual status for one's work and not all such claims are accepted as genuine or justified even at the time at which they are made. Thus one must ask 'What are the criteria by which a discourse or set of practices, in any historical period, can be judged to merit its self-imposed title of science?' And in recognizing the need to answer this question in order to determine how to write the history of science, one is (a) recognizing that such history must always contain a normative, or evaluative component, and (b) that it cannot proceed without reference to epistemology because the question is essentially an epistemological question. This is an epistemological problem, not an historical one. The positivist can agree that the distinction between science and nonscience can be made only by reference to epistemology. He derives his criteria from an a priori theory of knowledge. An epistemological theory, an account of the means of acquisition and manner of growth of scientific knowledge, may then either, in the manner of Popper, be a normative theory, integral to the account of what constitutes science (only that which grows in the approved manner is science—the epistemology, or methodology, is an account of how science should proceed), or by analogy with an empirical scientific theory, one which is to be tested against the history of science. In this spirit Dijksterhuis (author of the impressive work The Mechanization of the World Picture) claimed that the history of science is not only the memory of science but also the laboratory of epistemology. Here the history of science is viewed as a record of the cumulative growth of knowledge. The record is arrived at by selecting from the material provided by the historian, using the criteria provided by a philosophical theory of knowledge, those statements which embody scientific knowledge together with a description of the historical route to their first pronouncements and general acceptance. It is against this record that epistemological theory is to be checked. In either case the quest is for an epistemological theory, a 'logic of scientific discovery', or a 'methodology of science' which will serve as a universal touchstone, applicable to any discipline at any period of history. 152

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Canguilhem argues at length against these conceptions of the relation between the history and the philosophy of science. His charges are basically (although this oversimplifies) that any such approach has to presume that science and philosophy have now attained their maturity and are thus in a position to supply a definitive, atemporally objective, logic of scientific discovery which will remain in the future as it is now. It is thus dependent on the assumption of a closed rational framework, one which does not recognize the possibility of future development. In this sense it is history written from the standpoint of the rational standards of nineteenth-century science, not twentieth-century science. The assumption of a fixed and closed rational framework, Canguilhem argues, produces a total blindness to history; an atemporal logical space is substituted for the temporality of history. The development of science is considered to be essentially a matter of logic which is only contingently extended over time and only contingently interfered with by the material, historical conditions in which scientists work. If this were the case there would be no real history of science. But if the criteria for evaulating claims to scientific status are not to be derived from an a priori epistemology, how is the history of science to proceed? This is where Bachelard's epistemology has to be brought into play. It has to be acknowledged that it is only in the light of the present that a history of science can be written. It is only present science which can yield a conception of that of which the history is to be written and in doing so it means that the history will inevitably be an evaluative history, one which results from the imposition of present values in the course of representing the past. But that idea that history of science should be explicitly written as an evaluative history needs treating with extreme caution. The soundness underlying the normal hostility of history to the intrusion of value judgments is revealed by parodies such as, 1066 and All That. Simon de Montefort's Good Idea Simon de Montefort's Idea was to make Parliament more representative by inviting one or two vergers, or vergesses, to come from every parish, thus causing the only Good Parliament in history. Simon de Montefort, though only a Frenchman, was thus a Good Thing, and is very notable as being the only good baron in history. The other Barons were, of course, all wicked Barons.11 A history written from the standpoint of the present can all too easily be a projection of present partisan prejudices on to the past. But if the 11

C. Sellar and R. J. Yeatman 7066 and All That, (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1960), 37. 153

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history of science is to be written with the aim of yielding an understanding of that of which it is the history, it must take account of the specific character of its object—science. The sciences themselves enforce a distinction between true and false, between knowledge and erroneous beliefs. However much one may suspect the notion of historical progress in general, the idea of progress is internal to and definitive of the sciences. The life of a science is carried on at the shifting border between the known and the unknown and consists precisely in an effort to resolve problems posed by the resolution or dissolution of old ones. A science is presently constituted by taking its current state as representing progress over past states and by a problematic which, in setting goals, determines what will be counted as further progress. It must, by its very nature see the present stage as transitory. The history of a science cannot, therefore, be written without making some evaluation of past claims to knowledge and the only standpoint from which this evaluation can be made is that of present science. The historian of the sciences, in order to judge the past, must know the present; he must do his best to learn the science of which he proposes to write the history.12 But in addition, it has to be remembered that it is part of the present of science to recognize its own transitory nature. The historian of science must therefore also recognize that his history is not final and definitive, but will need rewriting as science itself changes. The epistemological historian starts from an analysis of contemporary science and works toward its beginnings, re-evaluating past claims. This is not so much a matter of re-valuating them as true or false in the light of present theory, for it is not primarily present truth which sets the standard of evaluation, but present standards in relation to methods of justification and objectification. The historian of the sciences has to be alert to the ways in which conceptions of science, conceptions of the form of knowledge that would constitute a scientific understanding and of appropriate means of attaining it, have changed. Many views held in the past are not so much false scientific claims as claims which either can no longer be regarded as scientific, or whose scientific content is other than that which it was taken to be at the time at which they were made. The history of a science thus has to be written on two levels, separating the history of ratified science—past science which is still active in the present—from the history of lapsed science—that which was once part of (or regarded as) science but which is so no longer. But 12

Gaston Bachelard, 'L'actualtte de I'histoire des sciences', in Dominique Lecourt (ed.),Bachelardepistemologie: textes choisis, (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1971; 3rd edn, 1980), 201. 154

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the two also have to be interwoven for the story of how and why parts of past science came to lapse, the story of the overcoming of epistemological obstacles and of the displacement of scientific ideologies, is an essential part of the history of present science, one in which is standards and values are revealed. The task is to show why it was that, for example, Black's work on heat had a future where Priestley's did not, even though at the time, and by the standards of the time, both had an equally good claim to scientific status and could both claim successes.13 Whereas both Black and Priestley viewed heat as a substance and hence were both working within a framework which has been superseded, Priestley's phlogiston theory has sunk without scientific trace, whereas Black's caloric theory, within the framework of which he performed his calorimetry experiments and developed the concept of latent heat, has left its mark. These experiments are still treated as classics, to be repeated by the student, and the concept of latent heat still has scientific currency. But even here one cannot say that it is Black's concept of latent heat which still has currency for the surrounding conceptualization of heat has radically altered. Black's experiments can be re-evaluated and successfully integrated into the new framework within which the concept of latent heat persists in a rectified form, whereas that of caloric is wholly absent.14 In epistemological history the history of lapsed sciences and the history of ratified sciences needs to be both distinguished and interwoven. The ratification of the truth or objectivity of genuine science entails a condemnation of the lapsed. The separation is needed to prevent us placing in a continuous sequence things which involved a change in standards. But the interweaving is necessary to prevent us reducing the history of science to a platitudinous chronology.

An Illegitimate Humanism? The image which historical epistemology yields is an image of science as a human project. With any such project our view of it changes as we 13

This story is brilliantly told by Henry Guerlac in his 'Chemistry as a Branch of Physics: Laplace's Collaboration with Lavoisier', in Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences Vol. 7, R McCormmach, (ed.) (Princeton University Press, 1976). 14 In case it should seem that this example of a lapsed science is possible only because it belongs to the archaic pre-scientific period of chemistry/theory of heat, one can point to more recent examples in the area of logic. Both Hilbert's epsilon calculus and Lesniewski's protothetic, mereology and ontology—both logical systems at variance with and competing with that of Frege and Russell, now have the status of lapsed sciences. They form no part of and have left no trace of contemporary studies in formal logic. 155

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proceed to execute it and have to confront the realities and obstacles in the way of completing it. Work on scientific projects also changes us, as we are forced to think in new ways and to alter our conception of ourselves in relation to the world. Science is a human project. (And it is for this remnant of humanism, seen as entailing a form of idealism, that it has been criticized by Dominique Lecourt, Michel Serres and others.) Recognition of science as a human project may serve to remind us that we have a certain responsibility for the science we produce—the scientist is not being dictated to by the world, merely recording its pronouncements, he is engaged in dialogue with it. Far from being an illegitimate humanism, this strikes me as being a very necessary one. On the occasion of this Institute's receipt of its Royal title, the cosmologist A. E. Milne quoted Emerson: 'Something is wanting to science until it has been humanized'. He then went on to add: . . . something is wanting to the humanities until they understand the purpose of science. That is what is required of philosophy—the formulation, to the humanities, of the purpose of science and to men of science, the humanizing of science.15 The positivist image of science, with its conception of factual objectivity, a standard set by a non-human world, presents science as containing no place for either human values or for creative thought. It explicitly sets up an opposition between the scientific and the human as a projection of the opposition between subject and object. If that opposition can no longer take its traditional form, then neither can the oppositon between the scientific and the human and it seems to me that philosophy, if it is not to prove irrelevant to the scientific culture of the late twentieth century, must participate in the remaking of the relation between the scientific and the human. The value of epistemological history is that it breaks ever more effectively the hold of the positivist image of science. It is the obligation to throw light on the historical nature of science by reference to the modernity of science which makes the history of science a perpetually youthful discipline, one of the most lively and most educationally valuable scientific disciplines.16

15

E. A. Milne, Address delivered at a meeting held at the Royal Society, 27 November 1947, to mark the occasion of the conferment on the Institute of the title 'Royal'. 16 Gaston Bachelard, op. cit., note 12, p. 203. 156

History as Genealogy: An Exploration of Foucault's Approach to History ELIE GEORGES NOUJAIN

Anyone familiar with contemporary French culture could not fail to notice that, in the field of ideas, history and the philosophy of history occupy in France a more central place than in England or North America. The work and concerns—including the methodological concerns—of historians like Marc Bloch, Fernand Braudel and the Annalistes, Georges Lefebvre, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Michel de Certeau, Jacques Le Goff and Francois Furet, are known, discussed and taken on board by most French intellectuals and academics. One reason for this, I think, is the strong trace left on French thought by Hegelian philosophy and its major progeny, Marxism,1 two philosophies that stem from a sustained reflection on history. In contrast, in the English-speaking world, where Empiricism and its variants have held sway for so long, historical reflection has tended to be at best an afterthought, no doubt because the starting point of Empiricism is the biological individual rather than the social individual. Undoubtedly, however, the clearest and most interesting example of this French concern with history is the work of Michel Foucault. Whatever else it may appear to be, Foucault's work is primarily a recurrent dialogue with history, and hardly any 'philosophy' Foucault has put forward—on the nature of power, discourse, truth or sexuality—has been produced independently of detailed historical considerations. Yet, as many will know, Foucault's declared approach to writing history is anything but Hegelian or Marxist. On the contrary, Foucault sought to escape from Hegel; and he tried to make his escape good by following an escape route mapped out for him by the Nietzschean concept of genealogy. Indeed, with the exception of one book—Les mots et les choses2—it could be argued that Foucault's philosophy is ipso facto genealogy, since in essence his philosophy consists in showing 1

Recall that not too long ago, Sartre felt justified in claiming that Marxism is 'la philosophic inde"passable de notre temps'. (Marxism is 'the philosophy of our times, beyond which one could not go.') 2 Les mots et les choses: Une archeologie des sciences humaines (Paris: Gallimard, 1966); trans. A. Sheridan, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London: Tavistock, 1970). 157

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how some aspects of our society descend from past practices or institutions which today appear objectionable—a tack made possible by genealogy. Thus the main thrust of Surveiller etpunir3 is to show how some social agencies which play a pervasive role in shaping our lives today—like the university, factory, workshop, hospital or asylum, the jail with its 'reformatory' pretensions, the school and the ubiquitous counselling services—issue from forms and techniques of discipline that emerged and took root during most of the modern period. Surveiller et punir shows this fact reflected in the architecture of such institutions, their internal rules and timetables, the 'sciences' that inform them, etc. As to Foucault's 'epistemology', its main aim after I'Archeologie du savoir* became the removal of any major obstacle to accomplishing this kind of historically based critique. But how does genealogy make such a critique possible, and precisely what is genealogy? These are the questions I wish to address here. Before doing so, however, let me briefly sketch the main lines of this paper. To begin with, I shall try to explain what it means to say that history possesses a genealogical character. My explanation will in part use terms and concepts borrowed from elementary set theory: terms and concepts which are foreign to Foucault, Nietzsche, and the so-called Continental tradition in general. Consequently, I shall have to argue that my explanation does constitute a faithful rendition of Foucault's idea of genealogy. Finally, I shall contrast genealogy as I understand it to the serialism of Fernand Braudel, Pierre Chaunu and the Annalistes' school, and in this respect my conclusion will be that both genealogy and serialism involve the use of series but are different in ways which, I feel, demonstrate the superiority of genealogy. Thus, besides an attempt at understanding some important aspects of contemporary French thought, I hope to offer in this paper a modicum of support to Foucault's genealogical approach.

To say that history possesses a genealogical character is to say that the historical past appears as a (usually large) number of intersecting, discrete linear orderings; or—to use the older though more suggestive terminologies of Russell and Dedekind—it is to say that the historical past appears as a (usually large) number of intersecting, discontinuous 3

Surveiller et punir: Naissance delaprison (Paris: Gallimard, 1975); trans. A. Sheridan, Discipline and Punish: Birth of the Prison (London: Allen Lane, 1977). 4 L'Archeologie du savoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1969); trans. A. Sheridan, The Archaeology of Knowledge (London: Tavistock, 1972). 158

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series ofelements. (The appended diagram may be of help for the rest of this discussion.) A linear ordering (or series) is discrete (or discontinuous) if every one of its elements has one and only one immediate predecessor or successor. A familiar example of a discrete linear ordering is the series of natural numbers: as a member of the natural numbers, 7 for example has but one successor, 8, and only one predecessor, 6. In contrast, in a so-called dense series, every element has an infinite number of immediate predecessors or successors; thus 'between' any two elements of a dense series lies an infinite number of other elements. A familiar example of a dense series is the series of rational numbers expressed as fractions: for any two rational numbers a and b there exists some number c lying between a and b such that c = (a + b) X 1/2. Speaking figuratively, one might therefore say that in a dense series there are no gaps between any two elements of the series, whereas in a discontinuous series, between every element and its successor lies a gap, or hiatus. It may clarify matters if I stressed at this point that such series as I am talking about—dense or discontinuous—are all mathematical in character, and so may be contrasted to what I would call Bergsonian continua: unlike the mathematical series which is divisible in the sense of consisting of distinct elements that remain self-identical when isolated from the series, the Bergsonian continuum is indivisible in the sense of not consisting of such individually identifiable portions. A Bergsonian continuum may thus be metaphorically described as forming an indivisible stretch, whereas the mathematical series (including the so-called Cantorian continuum) remains divisible, however dense it may be. What I am therefore saying is that the series of genealogical history is certainly not Bergsonian: it consists in distinct elements; and, furthermore, that the series of genealogy is not even dense: it is a discontinuous series of elements. An individual element is any identifiable entity, and should be thought of as any entity normally used by practising historians. An element may thus be a war, an institution, an 'event', or even a person or an idea. Moreover, in a genealogical understanding of history, each distinct element in a series appears as a meaningful concatenation of components. A particular element, say E, may thus be deemed to succeed another particular element D when one or more components of D are found in E. s D in this case is the predecessor of E. Moreover, if E belongs to more than one series, as is usually the case, E will have an immediate predecessor in every series to which it belongs. So, if we 5

There are other conditions that must be satisfied before a particular element can be said to be succeeded by another, notably the requirement that the element should last in time at least until the emergence of its successor. 159

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agree to call E's predecessor elements in different series the antecedents of E, we may say that a particular element succeeds its antecedent elements by 'inheriting' from each one of them some component(s). Thus if A, B, E form a series of elements and C, D, E also form another series, then E has inherited components from both B and D, B and D are the antecedents of E, and the two series A, B, E and C, D, E could be described as intersecting at E. Thus an element may be said to occur, or to emerge, when a certain number of components separate out from antecedent elements and combine to form it. Furthermore, as a parent may outlive an offspring, an antecedent element may continue to exist simultaneously with its successor, and may even outlive its successor, although of course, an antecedent must always emerge before its successor. (In the example I discuss below, the institution of the hospital is one antecedent of the nineteenth-century asylum, but the hosptial continues to exist after the emergence of the asylum, and may be thought to outlive it.) But here I should stress that the relation between element E and its antecendent elements, or the components of these antecedent elements that have combined to form E, is not a causal relation. The relation between E and its antecedents is a relation of succession, and it is a relation given to the historian directly by the relevant documents more or less contemporaneous with the particular elements in question, i.e. by documents which are taken to originate from the same period as the elements described. Thus the task of the genealogist is to describe the succession, that is, to establish what elements were the antecedents of E, or—which amounts to the same thing—what components went into the making of the emerging E. In other words, the genealogist, qua genealogist, narrates how the components of certain elements broke up and recombined to form some new element, but does not, with the help of universal laws, explain why such a phenomenon occurred—which is what is involved in establishing causal relations. Of course, the genealogist may, having established the relations of succession, go on to investigate and establish causal relations, but in doing so the genealogist becomes engaged in what I would call meta-genealogy. When this happens however, the genealogist turns into a social scientist of sorts and altogether ceases to be a historian. I say 'ceases to be a historian' because I take it that the genealogical character of history I have described is not a matter of choice. History is genealogy. Given some of the necessary conditions under which we get to know the past, I believe that history necessarily turns out to possess a genealogical character. Demonstrating this proposition, however, though rendered easier by adopting the terms and concepts I have chosen, is a complex and lengthy affair, and I won't attempt it here, though I would mention that the main conditions I have in mind are: 160

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(i) The inescapable fact that the past is revealed to the historian in the language of some document(s) which are necessarily limited in number (by 'document' I understand anything surviving in the present and bearing some system of signs taken to describe the past), and (ii) The equally inescapable fact that the historian's account must be couched in a significant piece of language. But let me now try to provide an example of genealogical analysis, the genealogical analysis of the practice of psychoanalysis, as it may be extracted from three books by Foucault: Histoire de la folie a I'age classique6 (primarily), Naissance de la clinique,1 and La Volonte de savoir.* As you will see, the genealogy of psychoanalysis involves the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century institution of internment, the emergence of which, in Foucault's view, is of crucial importance to modernity. Simplified and schematized enormously, the genealogy of psychoanalysis looks like this:

This genealogical sketch of psychoanalysis shows it as an element having components inherited from the practice of confession, the nas6

Originally the book appeared under the title Folie et deraison: histoire de la folie a I'age classique (Paris: Plon, 1961). The second edition was retitled Histoire de la folie a I'age classique (Paris: Gallimard, 1972). The edition I have used is Histoire de la folie a I'age classique (Paris: Gallimard, Collection Tel, 1972). 1

Naissance de la clinique: Une archeologie du regard medical (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1963); trans. A. Sheridan, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception (London: Tavistock, 1973). 8 Histoire de la Sexualite, I: La volonte desavoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1976); trans. R. Hurley, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction (New York: Pantheon, 1978). 161

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cent nineteenth-century science of psychology, and from the nineteenth-century asylum which itself combines components inherited from the institution of the hospital, the seventeenth-century practice of cures and, most importantly, the classical institution of internment. In what follows, however, I shall not be discussing nineteenth-century psychology or the hosptial.9 Consider internment first. From about the middle of the seventeenth century (but earlier in England) to the end of the eighteenth century, the majority of the mad in Europe can be found locked up in internment houses, such as the Hopital General, the Salpetriere, Bicetre, the workhouses, or the Zuchthauser. These houses are primarily stone buildings, divided into cells or wards, and designed or adapted to restrict the inmates' freedom of movement; in them the inmates are subjected to various regimes of discipline and labour. However, particularly in France, only a very small proportion of the mad found in internment houses are interned qua mad. (Foucault's thesis concerning this only applies to France.) Those who might be receiving treatment for insanity at hospitals, or who are considered mad by their relatives or neighbours, enter the internment houses under a gamut of labels attached to other internees. Thus among those locked up in internment houses we find criminals, dimwits, imbeciles, idiots, alchemists, vagabonds, seniles, paupers, idlers, unemployed persons, venereal patients, sodomites, libertines, adulterous husbands, adulterous wives, apostate priests, illuminati, blasphemers, epileptics, prodigal sons, irresponsible fathers, wife beaters, persons of depraved habits, suicidals, etc. And when the mad enter the internment houses, they enter as condemned persons, for penal purposes only, to be confined and punished, not treated or cured; save for the application once a year of medical cures of a very general character, equally extended to all internees, there is no medical presence in the internment houses. Moreover, punishing the mad in this way conforms to the prevalent ethical view according to which any error, and so the erroneous ways of the madman, is condemned as resulting from a rational choice in favour of error, or unreason. The madman is thus viewed as being just as responsible for erring from the truth as the libertine or the criminal. Unlike the criminal or the libertine, however, and despite not being listed as mad upon entering the internment house, the mad are singled out for special treatment once they become inmates. (Foucault is not clear on how this re-identification takes place.) The mad are thought to have, like animals, a high tolerance to pain, and the corrective measures 9

This description of internment, confession, the asylum and cures as elements is compiled here from many of Foucault's books, and could not be referenced individually. 162

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inflicted upon them include prolonged exposure to cold and hunger, as well as various forms of beating. Not infrequently, and mostly on public holidays, the mad inmates are exhibited in cages in the manner of wild animals, while being subjected to dressage-like treatment. ('Les Insenses', the title of Foucault's chapter on this topic in Histoire de la folie, means both 'the insane' and 'the insensitive'.) Internment in France (paralleled by the Zuchthauser in Germany and the workhouses in England) is thus typically an institutional establishment for the confinement and sequestration from society of an assortment of persons, persons having little in common except their having fallen foul of the morality and conventions of order and reason emerging in the middle of the seventeenth century. Internment itself is, moreover, a solution consistent with that morality, for, as I said, internees include beggars, unemployed persons, blasphemers, criminals of sorts, and of course the insane. Furthermore, internment appears to have had three (self-proclaimed) broad purposes: first, to cleanse society and protect it from (also hide from it) manifestations of disorder and immorality, which are taken to include sins against reason; second, to re-establish a general moral balance by exacting retribution against the guilty; and third, to rebuild the shattered moral dimension of the individual internee through certain forms of discipline, in particular through a strenuous regimen of labour. These purposes extend equally to all internees, including the mad, who, as I said, do not receive any special medical attention or treatment within the walls of the internment house. Thus although internment does not (unlike its successors) aim to rehabilitate the individual as a functionally fit social unit, as someone able to rejoin the established ranks of society, it nevertheless has the morally regenerative aim of restoring and maintaining the threatened moral order of society. In short, internment may be said to have a morally normalizing role. Next, consider the early nineteenth-century asylum. On the whole, the early nineteenth-century asylum as exemplified by Tuke's Retreat and the Salpetriere and Bicetre under Pinel, is a place designed exclusively for the confinement and treatment of the mad. The medical practitioner has a predominant role in the asylum, though less as a man of science than as a man of wisdom—a kind of father figure in a position of authority (a point emphasized by both Tuke and Pinel). Thus the treatment of madness consists mainly in a system of punishment, systematic surveillance, moral pressure and constant judgment. Strict discipline and a regimen of labour are also believed to have beneficial effects. Through the establishment of the paternal authority of the doctor, regular work and the attempt to replicate inside the asylum the ideals of familial relations, the asylum seeks to recreate within its walls the bourgeois moral order existing outside. Moreover, madness in the 163

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asylum emerges as a silent object—what the mad have to say is of no value to those in charge of treatment—to be manipulated into recovery through a variety of disciplinary techniques, almost always non-medical in character. Hence the fundamentally thaumaturgic dimension to the persona of the doctor in the asylum. As to the practice of confession, it goes back a long way, to the beginning of the thirteenth century.10 Until the general council of Latran (1215), confession and penitence in the Church were optional public performances similar to those practised by the early Church and specifically prescribed by Pope Leo I. At Latran, Innocent III in Omnis Utriusque Sexus Fidelis makes confession obligatory for all (at least once a year) under threat of excommunication, and the Council of Trent sets out the process of what was to become the official practice of confession in the Church: a private session between a representative of the institutional order (the priest) and a penitent, in which the confessor probes the penitent with pre-set questions in order to unveil and assess the penitent's allegedly most intimate motives for engaging in certain acts, particularly those motives which are of a sexual nature. The benefit derived from this is the lifting of the threat of excommunication and the re-integration of the penitent among the rank of the faithful. As to the so-called cures, they are applied by a therapist, or man of practice (as opposed to a medical theoretician) to the uninterned mad, thus bringing together medicine and madness despite internment. (Like the hospital, the practice of cures predates internment but continues to exist alongside it.) These cures include strengthening cures, like the administration of foul smells or the taking of iron shavings (prescribed in this case by the theoretician Sydenham); purification cures, like the transfusion of calf's blood; immersion cures and showers (Tissot, a self-avowed disciple of J. J. Rousseau, recommends clear, cold water as the all-natural cure, in the form of baths and violent showers—showers were to become frequently used in the asylum— while a therapist named Pomme has a patient immersed in water for several consecutive weeks). Cures also involve attempts at regulating the patient's movements. But whereas in the classical period what is sought by this regulation of movement is the restoration of the mad to the natural order of things, later, with such devices as Mason Cox's rotating machine (1804), what is aimed at is either a mechanical psychological reaction or the inflicting of punishments. In any case, in general, during the classical period such cures are not psychological; they only aim to produce physiological effects, that is, the alteration of, 10

Some of the details regarding confession have been supplied by me. They are not mentioned in Foucault's books. 164

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for example, the qualities of fibres and humours. (Even 'talking' cures have a physiological aim in the classical period.) I hope that what I have said so far is enough to show in what sense psychoanalysis may be said to descend from the elements I have mentioned. To put it sketchily and selectively, one component psychoanalysis inherits from the asylum and, before it from internment, is the mad considered as an object of moral normalization, whereas from the practice of cures (and the nascent science of psychology) psychoanalysis inherits the mad as an object of positive analysis and a target of manipulative techniques of normalization. From the asylum psychoanalysis also inherits the father-figure authority of the doctor, as well as the thaumaturgic dimension of the doctor figure. From confession, however, psychoanalysis inherits—according to Foucault—a subject over whom power is exercised, but who does speak (in contrast to the asylum, where the voice of the mad is disregarded), thus enabling the listener to supposedly probe the deep origins of the subject's motives. (Recall that in psychoanalysis, as the patient speaks, the analyst is supposed to be able to track down, with the patient, and by the token of free word associations, the 'true origin' of the patient's 'mental problem'.) Now the choice of a practice like psychoanalysis or an institution like internment to illustrate how an element of history is made up of components is entirely incidental; it merely reflects the concerns of Histoire de la folie and the incidental fact that institutions play a prominent role in the history of madness as written by Foucault. However, it can be argued that other entities used in the course of writing even the most conventional of histories may be understood as elements. Events, be they political, economic or military, objects such as a sculpture, a weapon or a machine, persons, associations like a political party or a trade union, social or scientific theories, novels or philosophical treatises, etc., must all be construed, when they fall under the historian's gaze, as elements analysable in terms of components, and thus as elements which give rise to intersecting series.

But to return to Foucault: not only did Foucault actually practise the craft of genealogy, he attempted to describe what is involved in doing a genealogy. This he did in a 1977 article entitled 'Nietzsche, l'histoire, la genealogie',11 and what I want to do now is show that what Foucault 11

'Nietzsche, l'histoire, la genealogie', Hommage a Jean Hyppolite (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, Collection Epimethee, 1971); trans. D. F. Bouchard and S. Simon, 'Nietzsche, Genealogy, History', Language, Counter-Memory, Practice (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977). 165

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says there suggests that my description of genealogy—in what might be called analytic terms—does precisely capture what Foucault has in mind. But be warned that my attempt will involve, as it were, a good deal of translation from one philosophic language to another, a procedure some might find objectionable. To those who feel this way, I can only suggest that they engage in the exercise in the spirit of a game. In 'Nietzsche, l'histoire, la gen6alogie', Foucault, merging his voice with Nietzsche's, presents genealogical analysis as being primarily opposed to the search for origins. (Nietzsche's word for 'origin' is the non-specialized term 'Ursprung'.) 'Origin' means 'the exact essence of something, its purest possibility, its carefully preserved self-identity, its fixed form, pre-existing what is accidental, successive, and external to itself'.12 To search for such an origin is to engage in a rationalist quest, a quest to find the metaphysical essence of an object, its source or genesis, the point at which it springs into existence. But genealogy does not recognize the existence of such fountainheads; instead, it attempts to establish an object's lineage, the various threads that have intersected to make it what it is. This lineage Foucault designates as the object's 'provenance'. (The term Nietzsche uses in this case is the specialized 'Herkunft'.) Thus the object of genealogy 'has no essence, or rather, its essence is that it has been constructed piece by piece on the basis of forms foreign to itself'.13 To establish the provenance of such an object is thus to trace those foreign forms that have combined to make it, 'to discover all the subtle, particular and sub-individual marks which are intertwined within [the object] in a network difficult to unravel, . . . to find under the unified appearance of a concept, or a character, the multiplicity of events through which (by which or against which) it was formed'.14 As to what signals the 'emergence' (Entstehung) of the genealogist's object, i.e. what marks the moment when the object becomes itself, it is 'the entry of various forces onto the stage', 'the point at which they clash', although this clash must not be understood as 'a conflict in a closed field', but as 'a pure distance between opposites (adversaires) that do not belong to the same space'.15 The identity of the genealogist's object is consequently built with 'forces foreign to each other', and the search for its provenance 'must fragment what was thought to be unified and reveal the heterogeneous character of what was thought to be self-identical'. Thus 'history . . . can only offer . . . a system of complex elements, each of them multiple and distinct, incapable of 12

'Nietzsche, l'histoire, la g^ngalogie', op. cit., 148. Ibid. 14 Ibid., 151-152. 15 Ibid., 156. 13

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being ruled by any power of synthesis'.16 In contrast to this properly historical viewpoint, however, 'the supra-historical viewpoint aims to draw within a totality well closed upon itself a history at last devoid of diversity . . . capable of endowing all the shifts of the past with a semblance of reconciliation'.17 Accordingly, 'genealogy does not pretend to go back in time to establish some great continuity stretching over dispersion and loss of accuracy; its task is not to show that the past is still living in the present, as if the present was secretly avoiding the past'.18 Thus we have two main aims in a genealogical analysis of history: the tracing of an object's provenance (Herkunft), and the marking of its emergence (Entstehung). In so far as the tracing of an object's Herkunft and the marking of its Entstehung represent the two main aspects of genealogical analysis, genealogy becomes a 'Wirkliche Historie', a 'real history' which, unlike the traditional histories of the theological and rational schools, is characterized by the real 'spirit' or 'sense' of history.19 As to the implications of genealogy for any social theory of the present, they are mainly as follows: since discontinuity is the inescapable feature of any provenance, cultural heritage (Erbschaft) 'is never, as might be imagined, an accumulated acquisition, a possession becoming more solid with time, but a collection of fissures and ruptures, of heterogeneous layers'.20 Similarly, our identity is but a 'parody', being 'inhabited by a plurality of conflicting souls, a criss-cross of systems that dominate each other'.21 I do not think that much argument is needed to show how close my rendition of genealogy is to the theses advanced by Foucault. When, in my less colourful language, I state for example that an element is made up of components belonging to antecedent elements, I think I am expressing the idea that the object of genealogy is 'constructed piece by piece on the basis of forms foreign to itself. For, as we saw, the antecedent elements of a particular element belong necessarily to different series, series which may be said metaphorically to be foreign to each other. And to say that an element comes into existence as an individually identifiable element as a result of inheriting components from elements belonging to distinctly different series is not very different from saying that what signals the Entstehung of the genea16

Ibid. Ibid. 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid. 20 Ibid. 21 Ibid. 17

153. 159. 152. 161. 152. 168. 167

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logist's object is the point at which forces separated by 'pure distance', 'belonging to different spaces', actually come together in a clash. It also seems clear to me that an attempt to trace the various components that have combined to make up a new element is an attempt to trace its Herkunft, that is, it is an attempt 'to discover all the . . . sub-individual marks which are intertwined within the object'. Thus if one is seeking to establish the provenance of an object, one must fragment 'what was thought to be unified'; and the resulting break-up, combination and recombination of a myriad of components does indeed constitute a 'network difficult to unravel'. Moreover, this means that no object is ever a pure Ursprung, a pure beginning, that every object will be an element necessarily descended from other elements. For, at whatever point in time we choose to consider a given element we should be able to find some further elements from which it descends. To claim for instance that Christian morality springs from God, from Reason or from man's sense of good, or to claim that internment springs from man's innate sense of order, is to make essentially metaphysical or rationalist claims, for such claims attribute to a certain object—morality, internment—a pure origin, a pure beginning: God or Reason, man's sense of order. To the genealogist, however, there are no such pure, original objects, and every object, be it man's sense of order, Reason, or God himself is an object which necessarily has antecedents; for, to put it in my terms, it is an essential feature of any element to be made up of components that had previously belonged to antecedent elements. This Foucault/Nietzsche theory about the absence of origins may be accurately described as a commitment to the thesis that the historical outlook is the only outlook, that there is no understanding of a social phenomenon without tracing the social phenomenon's provenance. But perhaps this is too strong a thesis, and instead I would be content to claim that no object that becomes of concern to the historian could be analysed as a pure origin. In any case, the thesis, as espoused by Foucault, should tell us something about the importance of history in the overall fabric of his thought. Furthermore, an element can become entirely succeeded, and may thus be described as a 'past' that is no longer 'living in the present'.22 (Though an element may be said to be living in the present in the sense that some of its components may now be part of present-day elements.) As to the dreams of fitting all or some contemporaneous elements of a given period into one model (the structuralist dream) or exhibiting one or all series of history as a patterned development of some sort (the 22

It is possible however that an element may become totally extinguished, in that none of its components go on to form part of other elements. 168

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commitment to the existence of 'laws of historical development'), these I characterize as varieties of tneta-historical engagements, just as Foucault characterizes as 'supra-historical' the viewpoint which 'aims to draw within a totality well closed upon itself a history at last devoid of diversity, . . . capable of endowing all the shifts of the past with a semblance of reconciliation'. But here it may be of interest to ponder an important opportunity which genealogy affords the historian. The opportunity I have in mind is one of which Foucault availed himself, as Nietzsche had done before him: by enabling one to trace the provenance of a particular social entity—such as an institution, a social class, a rebellion, a mentality, or even an idea—genealogy makes it possible to show that what might be today passed off as acceptable and good might, equally by today's standards, turn out to possess an objectionable 'ancestry'. This kind of analysis constitutes, I would argue, one of Foucault's overall fundamental strategies since the completion of Les mots et les choses. Thus Foucault's criticism of an institution like psychoanalysis, or of modern forms of state welfare, consists mainly in showing that such entities in part descend from the institution of internment. This last point leads me to think that internment could be considered the pivotal discovery in Foucault's intellectual career. Having stumbled upon internment in the course of researching, under Georges Canguilhem's tutorship, what he thought was a purely medical history of madness, Foucault must have rapidly realized that the broken-up components of internment had drifted far and wide, down two centuries of Western history, combining and recombining to form institutions, forms and techniques of discipline of central importance to our era. Formed in this way were the modern prison, the modern hospital, the asylum, the modern school, psychoanalysis, and all the forms of discipline that flourished inside and outside such institutions: the cellular division of space, the imposition of timetables, the subjection of bodies to graduated exercises, as well as the functional manipulation of large masses of people in the pursuit of efficiency. Similarly, what went on in the internment house by way of techniques for the moral regeneration of the individual also became a crucial component in the implementation of the forms of discipline I have just listed: the technique of constant surveillance as embodied in the Panopticon, the technique of micro-penalities—small punishments for small departures from norms—the technique of normalization through constant judgment and assessment of everyone by everyone, the provision of standards by which to measure behaviour, the keeping of case studies files—all of these techniques of discipline could be traced to internment and its immediate successors. In merging genealogy and social criticism, Foucault was of course following in Nietzsche's footsteps. For 169

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Nietzsche's strategy (notably in The Genealogy of Morals and Beyond Good and Evil) was precisely to show that what we now take to be the greatest manifestation of goodness—Christian morality—is but the progeny of the ignoble mentality of supine but resentful slaves. Yet I can imagine one being tempted to say about such a method 'So what? Why should the ignoble ancestry of an institution or social practice tell us anything about its value today?' In the cold light of a strict separation of fact from value, this objection appears sound. Yet it may be argued that in describing what is thought to be good as descending from an ignoble ancestry, as having a pudenda origo, the descriptive language of genealogy enables itself to level criticism and sound warnings without having to step back from the business of writing history in order to issue moral condemnation or praise. Thus the descriptive language of genealogy is, on occasion, intrinsically critical, for to state the shameful ancestry of a present-day institution or practice is ipso facto to tarnish its gloss and warn against it, no matter what philosophers committed to the distinction between fact and value might say. For social thought—including history—is to some extent an art, primarily an art of persuasion which, in its critical dimension, aims to change some of the prevalent conditions of the thinker's day. Such social change can be wrought, as Foucault used to put it, by pointing out the dangers inherent in a given present-day practice—something genealogy can persuasively do, yet without having to supply any set of normative principles. Before I turn to contrast genealogy to serialism, I would like to mention that the terms and concepts I have used allow us to give precise content to Foucault's claim that of social theory and criticism must come to terms with discontinuity and the occurrence of micro-revolutions. In the light of my understanding of genealogy, it is easy to see that historical change occurs at the level of the single isolated element, where the totally new suddenly appears from the old. And I must insist on saying 'suddenly', for if we agree that the genealogical series is discontinuous, that there is not an infinitely large number of intervening elements lying in the gap separating one element from its successor, we have no option but to speak of the coming into being of the new as sudden, as a revolution rather than an evolution. Moreover, because genealogy conceives of overall change as resulting from the emergence of one individual element at a time (that is, genealogy is not methodologically committed to showing that change must occur as a result of most or all elements of a period being replaced at once), it makes perfect sense to claim that a social criticism generated by genealogy is interested in /racro-revolutions rather than revolution. 170

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The method I will call 'pure serialism'—to distinguish it from genealogy which also involves series—is not a method proferred only by philosophers; among those who practice it are some important twentieth-century historians, like F. Braudel23 and P. Chaunu,24 and most contributors to the influential Annales—not to mention an increasing number of social and cultural historians on this side of the Channel who practise the method of serialism but often call it by different names.25 In essence—to put it in my own terms—the method of pure serialism is one which restricts the writing of history to the mere setting out of multiple series of elements. By this I mean that the pure serialist is content to pile up, so to speak, a large number of series, without showing how (or whether) these series intersect, that is, without attempting to show how an element emerges by inheriting the components of antecedent elements. Thus, with pure serialism, all the historian essentially does is set out the elements in succession, name them, and describe them. For example, in Civilisation materielle et Capitalisme26 Braudel accumulates series after series, each series stretching over centuries. We are thus given a series of wheat prices, of weapons, of methods of agriculture, of crop yields, of inflationary peaks, of droughts, of demographic curves, etc. Sure enough, in presenting what I call an 'element', Braudel and Chaunu are forced to describe it in the way their documents give it to them, that is, as a concatenation of components. But rarely, if ever, are we told the 'story' of what components from other elements combined to form the element musket, or this or that method of agriculture, or this or that particular economic organization or market. However, in fairness to Braudel—and to some extent Chaunu—I am bound to add that their work involves considerably more than the mere setting out of series. In the massive and magisterial Civilisation materielle et Capitalisme Braudel subjects his series to many forms of

23

F. Braudel's main book is Civilisation materielle et Capitalisme, (XV'— XVIIP siecle), 3 vols. (Paris: Armand Colin, 1979); trans. S. Reynolds, Civilization and Capitalism, 1400-1800 (New York: Harper & Row, 1981— 84). See also his Ecrits sur I'histoire (Paris: Flammarion, 1969), in particular the essay entitled 'Pour une histoire serielle: Seville et l'Atlantique', reprinted from Annales E.S.C., no. 3 (May-June 1963). 24 In particular, see his Histoire quantitative, histoire serielle (Paris: Armand Collin, 1978), Ch 10. See also 'Dynamique conjoncturelle et histoire serielle', Industrie, 6 June (1960). 25 I have in mind mainly 'economic' or 'quantitative' histories, as well as some instances of so-called 'cliometric' histories. 26 Op. cit. 171

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fine yet wide-ranging analysis. If I were to describe his main concerns, I would say that he compares contemporaneous elements occurring over what he calls 'la longue duree', or long-lasting period (this is the structuralist side of his work), and that he persistently tries to establish causal relations between the various elements he mentions by pointing out the 'factors' that caused this or that element to occur. But such concerns are, to my mind, meta-historical concerns, and they can arise only after the series supplied by the documents have been set out. Thus in so far as Braudel is concerned with causes and structural relations, he is engaged in meta-history, but in so far as he never shows the descent of any particular element, he remains stuck at the level of proto-history. But to show such descent is precisely to engage in what I call a genealogic narrative, and one of the dangers of not engaging in genealogic narrative is a resulting tendency to create series on the basis of categories of our own day, categories which could be totally foreign to the period under study—which is exactly what Braudel, Chaunu and the Annalistes invariably do. Indeed, in attempting a genealogic narrative, it is the tracing of the descent of the various elements involved that determines the particular series the historian ends up with. But since, as I stated earlier, the element as well as its descent are directly given to the historian by the document(s) contemporaneous with the element and its antecedent elements, the resulting series of genealogy are not ones which are determined by the categories of the historian's day, but by the concepts and categories of the past period itself. Without this attempt at genealogic narrative, however, historians, I fear, would be more inclined to group the various elements given to them into categories of their own invention or of their own culture. An example of this is when the 'history' of a period like classical Greece is written as, say, a succession of (i) rates of variations in the velocity of money, (ii) slumps in aggregate demand, (iii) depressions in the labour market, etc. Braudel's method in this respect is slightly better than, though fundamentally not different from such so-called scientific histories— found mostly among economic histories—where the historian thinks the job of writing history is done when a large number of successive curves, facts and figures have been set out for the reader. But, supposing that the danger of using categories of our own day in setting out the series of the past could be avoided, why should the historian be required to go beyond piling up series one atop the other, so as to provide a full genealogy? One way to answer this question is to retort 'Well, that much is immediately given to the historian by documents, so why waste it?' As I have stated, I think it can be shown—though I cannot do so here—that a careful reading of the relevant documents would normally furnish the 172

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historian with the wherewithal to show how a particular element did emerge, i.e. to show the descent of that element. However, a more compelling answer to the question may be that anything short of a full genealogy is not likely to be a significant enough account. But let me specify here what I mean by 'significant'. I certainly do not mean 'meaningful' just in the sense that a grammatical sentence may be said to be 'meaningful'. Nor do I mean 'of practical relevance', as when we say, for instance, 'it is significant that the UK is a monarchy'. Still less do I mean 'useful', or 'important'. Rather, what I have in mind is an aesthetic notion of significance, the opposite of 'boring', 'ugly', and their like. Can such a notion of significance be exhaustively analysed? The prospect of achieving such exhaustive analysis seems unlikely to me, though through the use of examples one could come to quite a clear, albeit intuitive idea of what I mean by significance. For example, were I to set out for you, in a chronological series, every weapon ever manufactured and describe each one in detail, would my account be as significant as showing you, where possible, how each of these weapons came about? Finally, it should be clear that pure serialism deprives itself of the possibility of engaging in the kind of social critique that uncovers the pudenda origo of an institution, a policy, a practice, etc., for the pure serialist is unable to trace the lineage of a particular element back to its ignoble ancestry (if it has one), and is thus critically impotent. Of course, nothing stops the pure serialist from engaging in the timehallowed practice of pausing in mid-history to pass moral judgment on this or that event, person, demographic curve or market. In the case of genealogy, however, value judgments could be directly embedded in the genealogic narrative. For this reason, it would be best to say that pure serialism is critically impotent, in the sense of being intrinsically devoid of any critical dimension.

But I cannot leave my topic without raising (though not answering) the question whether the genealogical past is real, or whether it is a mere artificial construct, an appearance quite distinct from the past-in-itself. I tend to think that a case could be made for the reality of the genealogical past. If so, and in so far as our social and individual identities are shaped by history, fragmentation becomes the inescapable feature of our social experience. To have a history, that is, to be more than a society that knows itself merely as the product of some original founding myth, means precisely to live in this state of fragmentation. Any system—practical or theoretical—that projects unity, complete harmony, or final synthesis in the political affairs of human beings is thus a fraud, perhaps a dangerous fraud. And to the extent that the future will 173

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resemble futures now past, it would seem that the future too is likely to be a constellation of fragments—fragments which philosophers, in their longing for unity, have often fantasized to be a cogent whole. The truth be told, Clio's arms are forever flailing, though they may appear closed when the owl of Minerva is allowed to cloak her in its wings.

Appendix The following diagram may be taken to represent the structure of a typical genealogy.

An element is represented by a circle and the artery or arteries branching from it, and the lower case letters inside the circles represent components. The following series of elements are shown: H, I A, B , E , I A, B, E, F, N C, D, M C, N D, M

C, D, E, I

C, D, E, F, N

The distance along the horizontal axis separating two elements is meant to indicate how long an element lasted before being succeeded by the next element in the series. The distance separating two elements on the vertical axis is an arbitrary schematic convenience, and has no significance. The series A, B, E, I A, B, E, F, N C, D, E, I C, D, E, F, N intersect at E, and it is easy to see that two or more series can intersect more than once. C represents an element that has outlived its successor, namely D.M represents an element that I describe as 'extinguished' (cf. note 22).

174

Beyond Deconstruction? DAVID WOOD

There are many people who think that deconstruction has run its course, has had its day, and that it is now time to return to the important business of philosophy, or perhaps to serious ethical, social and political questions. Derrida's work, it is said, leads nowhere but a sterile philosophy of difference that in its de-politicized, de-historicized abstractness is a form of conservatism little better than the kinds of identity thinking to which it seems to be so radically opposed. In short, we must go 'beyond* deconstruction. But 'beyond deconstruction', is a bit like 'Hegel aufgehoben'. Deconstruction was born from and sustains itself in a meditation on the limits of philosophy. Derrida has made a speciality of diagnosing metaphysical residues in the thought of those who sought passionately to eliminate them, and pronounced this inevitable even for his own (and our own) thought. Deconstruction represents the most sophisticated attempt to deal with the question successively posed by Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Husserl and Heidegger—that of the end of metaphysics. I shall argue is that there is no royal road through or round Derrida or deconstruction, and that a serious confrontation with it makes the value of going 'beyond' it problematic. Ten years ago the situation was different. Heraclitus put it well when he said that dogs bark at what they do not recognize. Now the dogs have stopped barking, sniffed cautiously, and turned tail. Where they have paused to offer reasons, however, those reasons hardly survive scrutiny. It has been too tempting to confront deconstruction at second hand, superficially, and without, dare I say it, real seriousness. And if I were to hold on, strategically, to one undeconstructed concept, at this point it would be seriousness. In this paper I address some of the common criticisms of Derridean deconstruction, and argue that the idea of going beyond deconstruction is one that needs a lot more thought. 1 It usually means going round deconstruction, as one might 1

Two authors who evidence this further thought, in very different directions, are Peter Dews, Logics of Disintegration (London: Verso, 1987), esp. Ch. 1, where he tries to show how deconstruction is prefigured, and some of its perplexities resolved in the work of Fichte and Schelling; and Rodolph Gasch6, The Tain of the Mirror (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard, 1986), whose aim seems to be to treat deconstruction as a deepening of the transcendental project, a Husserlian graft. 175

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take a detour round a traffic accident. I argue that hostility to deconstruction is often based on the misconception that it must rule out or threaten some other favoured discourse, when precisely the opposite is often the case. I argue that for all the difficulties deconstruction poses for philosophy, it is based on a move which can be constructed within philosophical discourse, and that once this has happened, there is no going back. A recent exchange on the subject of race is discussed in this context. The main criticisms can be grouped, not without a certain violence, into three categories. 1. 2. 3.

That deconstruction is nihilism. That deconstruction simply reverses the usual dominance of identity over difference. The accusation of textual idealism (especially drawn from Derrida's remark that 'il n'y a pas d'hors texte').

I shall attempt to respond to each of these misunderstandings in turn. 1. That deconstruction is nihilism. This claim takes a number of forms: (a) All interpretations are as good as one other. The claim might be developed as follows: Derrida's deconstruction has as its first premise that the fundamental theme of philosophy is that of logocentrism, the structuring of thought around a fixed point with which it is possible to have immediate contact. If there is no such fixed point outside of some attempt at its textual production, then it follows that there is no fixed and final 'meaning' to a text. If there is no ultimate meaning, then any interpretation is as good as any other. This is a curious conclusion in that it clearly contradicts the premise from which it starts, which gives a privilege to a very particular interpretation of philosophical (and other theoretical) texts, namely one that exposes their commitment to sustaining logocentrism, to producing what he has called a transcendental signified, a fixed point of reference that would not be subject to the play of language. Such a privilege may be thought to bring with it its own problems but that is another matter to which I return. More importantly it just does not follow that the absence of a particular kind of absolute standard of interpretation licenses just any reading. Nor does the inability to produce advance criteria of relative adequacy mean that it is not possible to compare readings, and for some to be judged more productive, more interesting, more effective, more original, more pleasurable . . . than others. This still however misrepresents what Derrida is about, which is no kind of responsible pluralism, but a very deliberate and definable practice, 176

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which should give pause to those who think that 'after deconstruction' concepts like intention, context, relevance have no place at all. The simplest response is that there is no time or place 'after deconstruction', that deconstruction is not some global event that transforms philosophy at a stroke, but a textual operation, a way of reading particular texts. And strictly speaking, concepts do not get deconstructed, but only the functions they serve, the uses to which they are put in particular texts. If it seems otherwise (as when Derrida claims, for instance, that there has never been any perception) the point is that there are some terms that are only ever used for certain epistemological purposes. Even then, however, deconstruction could not anticipate the details of the functioning of the concept of perception in any particular text. (Naive realism and sense-data theory share the attribution of value to direct perception.) Derrida's position here could be summarized in the following way: in response to those who say that in the absence of an absolute standard it makes no difference how one interprets a text, he would say that of course it makes a difference, perhaps all the difference in the world. In an essay on Rousseau 2 Derrida offers a justification for a quite conservative respect for what he calls 'the instruments of traditional criticism'. And he goes on to give a rather Heideggerean account of the kind of readings of texts he is engaged in, without at this point using the word deconstruction. He says that his reading aims at drawing out 'a certain relationship, unperceived by the writer, between what he commands and what he does not command of the patterns of language that he uses'. This reading requires, however, some grasp of what the writer is controlling, that is, some respect for classical scholarship. Otherwise, he says 'critical production would risk developing in any direction at all and authorize itself to say almost anything. But this indispensable handrail has always only protected, it has never opened a reading.' One could generalize from this example the kind of problem there is in going beyond deconstruction. For deconstruction takes itself to be thematizing the very idea of going beyond, without wanting or being able to dispense with, the best of what already went before. (b) Oppositions like good/bad, right/wrong, duty/pleasure, in short the fundamentals of ethics are simply deconstructable, and therefore there is no basis for ethics. The response to this charge must be somewhat equivocal. For while there is some truth in it, the possibilities for ethical thinking that deconstruction opens up are quite as worth commenting on. One of 2

'. . . That Dangerous Supplement . . .', in Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri C. Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 158. 177

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Derrida's responses to the charge that deconstruction lacked an ethics used to be a defiant affirmation of the joy of being relieved of the burden. I still understand this on roughly Nietzschean lines, in which a link is presupposed between ethics and ressentiment, and ressentiment is deemed analysable, at least in part, as a reduction, or an attempt at reduction of difference. It is interesting, for example, that in the Geneaology of Morals Nietzsche develops his distinction between a noble and a slave morality by a distinction between two ways in which the concept 'good' enters into constitutive oppositions, two economies of 'goodness' (good v. bad, and good v. evil). What is fundamental to Nietzsche is the difference between the two differences. But the fact that Nietzsche can be said to be a proto-deconstructor, and that he gave a radical jolt to ethical thinking, does not mean that we can attribute his views to Derrida. Derrida's most sustained treatment of Nietzsche (in Spurs)3 offers very little direct clue to an alternative ethics. The most obvious application of deconstruction to ethical issues is surely in the deconstruction of those textual strategies by which certain categories of persons, living beings, or indeed ways of being, are given a secondary or less privileged position in some scale of values. The exploitation and subjugation of women, of non-whites, of children, of those who work with their hands, of the mad, of non-human animals, or religious and cultural minorities can in each case be adequately understood only through an historical investigation of the wider institutions and practices by which these examples of oppression have arisen. Foucault has demonstrated the interweaving of the texts and institutions of exclusion, and he indeed is one of the sources of a still fashionable impatience with Derrida's supposed textualism. This, I believe, is a mistake. The formal description Derrida gave in the early 70s4 of the general strategy of deconstruction: reading, that is, rewriting, or writing (on) a text in such a way as to invert and displace its constitutive oppositions, is based on the assumption that theoretical texts are structured around the project of sustaining and developing a loaded or weighted conceptual opposition. Philosophers are well used to this. We work within distinctions like the real and the apparent, the immediate and the mediated, the true and the false, the natural and the cultural, and so on. Nietzsche's brilliant account of 'How the Real World at Last Became a Myth', 5 which traces the rise and fall of a 3

Jacques Derrida, Spurs: Nietzsche's Styles (Eperons: Les Styles de Nietzsche), trans. Barbara Harlow (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979). 4 In Jacques Derrida, Positions, trans. Alan Bass (London: Athlone, 1972), 59. s In Twilight of the Idols, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), 40-41. 178

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Platonism for which the Real World becomes increasingly detached from our sensory experience, and ends with the restoration of 'appearances', and the consequent unsettling of the very idea of 'appearance' is, again, a classic case of a deconstructive manoeuvre. But the same can be done for those texts that legitimate what is so unsatisfactorily called discrimination. For what these texts do is to elevate particular differences, of which there are very many, to the status of privileged differences (intelligence, rationality, responsibility, etc.), and to develop an account of what is proper to each class. This reference to the proper could be pursued by an investigation of the topology of proper and improper places. Children, dogs, slaves, workers, subordinates, women need to be told or shown their place. A woman's place, we know, is in the home, blacks have their tribal homelands, servants had their quarters, and American Indians their reservations. Now it could be said that we no longer need deconstruction (if ever we did). The same conclusions can be reached by liberal analytic philosophy. And if we want a topology of proper and improper places, we could do no better than extend Foucault's work on incarceration and exclusion.6 In my view, there is no a priori reason why analytic philosophers should not make moves with some of the same theoretical and practical consequences as deconstruction. Rorty has shown how far such an alignment can be taken.7 The example of Quine's treatment of the analytic/synthetic distinction is actually a substantive case of this.8 So is Goodman's 'Ways of World Making'.9 And it might well be possible to rewrite Peter Singer's Animal Liberation10 in a deconstructive way. But there are, I think, differences between these approaches which it is worth spelling out even at the risk of misleadingly treating analytic philosophy as one thing, ignoring its own 'differences'. On this fiction, I would say that analytic philosophy takes concepts as its tools, and believes in the possibility of defining them. Deconstruction would take the very idea of a concept as the expression of a desire to restrict a term, a sign, to a particular way of operating in a text, one which, together with other concepts, will give to that text a coherent and grounded meaning. Deconstruction, it might be said, must also use concepts. How else could it itself mean anything? If what this means is 6

For instance, Madness and Civilization, trans. R. Howard (London: Tavistock, 1965) and Discipline and Punish, trans. A. Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1979). 7 Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror ofNature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979). 8 W. V. 0. Quine, 'Two Dogmas of Empiricism', in From a Logical Point of View (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1953). 9 Nelson Goodman, WaysofWorldmaking (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1978). 10 Peter Singer, Animal Liberation. 179

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that not every semantic expectation can be disappointed at the same time, that is true. But the whole emphasis on style, strategy, and textual economy in Derrida's work means that no term, however central, has any permanent immunity from a deconstructive treatment. To summarize what I was saying about deconstruction and ethics, it is that deconstruction is effective in displaying the workings of texts that legitimate political oppression. My short answer to the objection that Foucault does it better is that while 'logic' is a strange word to use here, Derrida supplies what Foucault does not, which is the logic of such theoretical textuality.11 The importance of this is not merely to please those who read but never act. It engenders a capacity for more vigilant reading, by teaching the subtle forms of textuality involved. And Derrida will argue that deconstruction possesses a capacity for intervention that the mere analysis of discourse does not.12 If displacement of oppositions can be accepted as a deconstructive manoeuvre, it plays a vital role in the practical sophistication of the movements of liberation attached to the various oppressed groups I mentioned earlier. Women may have begun wanting the right to choose, or equality with men, but it did not take long for the question of the origin of the menu to become an issue, what it might still mean to be a woman given the formal right to be just like a man, legally and economically, and how to avoid merely becoming a male woman, leaving the categories, and their oppressive implications essentially untouched. Derrida's own most serious confrontation with the question of ethics can be found in his long and brilliant discussion of the French Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, in his essay 'Violence and Metaphysics'. n For Levinas ethics is no mere branch or sub-division of philosophy, but its root, from which all else springs. He opposes his position particularly to that of Heidegger whose interrogation of Being he charges with being neutral and impersonal. Levinas calls the fundamental ethical relation that of the face-to-face, which he describes as a relation to the infinitely other, by which he means (at least) an assymetrical relation, in which the other can never be reduced to an object, can never be totalized, can never be wholly captured etc. What is distinctive about Levinas' position is, I think, that he does not, as is more common, base the ethical on sympathy, or a grasp of what I and the other have in common, but upon the difference, the otherness of the other. Ethics presupposes only that the other is/has a face, a face which put into words means the prohibi11

Such a logic, of 'infrastructures', is outlined by Gasch6 in The Tain of the Mirror (see note 1). 12 1 discuss this further in the section on 'Textual Idealism' below. 13

'Violence and Metaphysics', in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (University of Chicago, 1978). 180

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tion of murder. Derrida's dialogue with Levinas, for that is essentially what it is, takes place, as Derrida puts it, within the framework of Levinas's own questions (and interestingly defines the only possible philosophical community today as the community of the question)14 and basically draws out some of the difficulties that arise from Levinas' residual commitments to phenomenological method. Those who would argue for the absence of an ethics of deconstruction might well start here with an ethics of difference. That notion is not without its difficulties, but the claim that the basis of ethics is not the alter ego, the other like me, but the other as he or she resists my attempts at egological projection surely opens up new avenues in ethics. While there is little doubting the successes of liberal political reform in the last two centuries it may be that the overcoming of discrimination by reference to the underlying sameness of the two groups in question is a fragile success, and allows for the subsequent emergence of differences that would justify further exclusions. An ethics of difference, however, would be premised on a non-assimilative respect for differences. (c) For Derrida, all meaning is just an illusion so the world is essentially meaningless. It is hard not to be reminded, at this point, of similar charges raised against existentialism. One day I suspect, the deeper connections between Derrida and Sartre will become apparent.15 I shall try to respond to this objection succinctly. Assuming by the 'world' what phenomenology and hermeneutics would mean—namely the meaningful human world in which we live, move and have our being—we have to decide whether, if Derrida treats all meaning as an illusion, all our projects, frames of reference, common ways of understanding things, are not equally illusions. These formulations are, I fear, somewhat loose, but they are often made and they need answering. Derrida thinks of meaning as a textual production, as produced by the organization and articulation of signs. That does not make 'it' an illusion; indeed it makes it very concrete. It is not a thing in the world, but an effect (and in that sense a 'real' effect) of textual articulation. In a very broad way we could say that for Derrida meaning is syntactic. (d) Deconstruction supplies no basis for political action, because it denies the (human) Subject, and hence the basis of all agency. Common though this claim is, it is in my view doubly flawed. Derrida does not 'deny the subject', to begin with. But more impor14 15

Ibid., 79. Christina Howells has made an excellent start with her 'Sartre and Der-

rida : Qui Perd Gagne', Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 13, No. 1 (1982), 26-34. 181

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tantly, this objection forgets that some sort of interrogation, to say the least, of the nature and status of the individual subject not only forms the basis of the whole political tradition from Hegel and Marx onwards, but it continues to be essential today. And it would surely be a form of theoretical bravado to suppose that psychoanalysis had never had anything valuable yet disquieting to say about the human subject. How then has this misconception arisen? Some will find this a further reason to find Derrida irrelevant, but it is important to remember that Derrida (again like Sartre) began his theoretical production with a detailed scholarly analysis of Husserl,16 of the foundations of phenomenology. In Speech and Phenomena he undertook a careful deconstruction of Husserl's commitment to self-presence—that is to a private language, inner communication with oneself unsullied by any relation to public discourse or another person, to the idea of intuition, to the immediate temporal present, and to the idea of what Husserl called 'the sphere of ownness'. Derrida is doing a number of things here. He is accomplishing in his own way something of the same thing as Wittgenstein achieved when he argued against the possibility of a logically private language, but he is also following Sartre in undermining the idea of a transcendental self, a self that would be the constituting ground of all meaning (and hence of language), without itself being caught up in it. So, the simplest response to those who accuse him of 'denying the subject' is to say that what he casts doubt on is a particular concept of the subject, namely one that precedes language, precedes particular experiences, and one for which the experience of immediate selfknowledge is a founding phenomenon. Is this a threat to political agency? Certainly a transcendental subject is in some sense an agent. Nietzsche would, quite rightly I think, treat it as modelled on that absolute agency we call God. I cannot suppose that those who think Derrida to have repudiated the concept of the subject were lamenting the passing of the transcendental subject. But that is possible. If one supposes that moral or political agency requires a notion of human autonomy, and a Kantian solution to that problem—a self that prescribes rules for itself, and hence escapes deterministic insertion in the world of mere causes—then Derrida's critique of the transcendental self would indeed be a critique of moral and political agency. But that is a big if. I will, however, begin analytically. For the way Kant sets up the problem of autonomy is itself questionable. And there are many who would treat free-will and causal determinism as quite compatible, which would make it unnecessary to set up some separate realm of self16

Speech and Phenomena, trans. David Allison (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973). 182

Beyond Deconstruct ion?

legislation. If one does think that some such operation is required, then the point of productive deconstructive intervention might be the ideas of self-legislation and conscience that the theory requires. In each case, one could show that the self-relatedness in question was not simple and immediate but a struggle, a conflict, any resolution of which would itself be unstable. And spelling out the participants of that struggle might lead one not further into the transcendental recesses of the self, but out into the world of socially constituted imperatives, not only in respect of the content of such imperatives, but equally the very form. What is a transcendental self doing wielding such an institutional device as an order? And when one thinks of conscience, it is perhaps not relevant to be reminded of Eichmann's references to conscience and duty, and indeed to Kant. That is not an objection to the form of appeals to conscience. But to the extent that any expression of the insights of conscience takes a linguistic form, and one accepts the intrinsically social nature of language, it is hard to see how conscience can be a purely personal matter. Moreover, if one takes conscience as an immediate experience legitimating action, it is not difficult to show that the instantaneity of the experience is undermined by the ineliminable importance of consequences. And whether anticipated, imagined, or simply waited for, those consequences will corrupt the basis of conscience in immediacy, and indeed reliance on conscience as a conclusive form of legimation at all. I have offered here only a description of an argument, rather than the argument itself. And I have not presented it in deconstructive garb. That has meant a distinct loss of force, and perhaps a blurring of the particularity of deconstructive manoeuvres. Recast more rigorously in deconstructive mode what one would expect to find is the exposure and picking apart of an attempt in a text to constitute a realm of moral purity, of separation from the world, of ownness, as Husserl put it. If Kant's version of this rests on the distinction between moral rules and natural laws, deconstruction might attempt to probe the basis of this distinction in texts whose workings are not entirely subject to rules. 2. That deconstruction is an empty reversal of the domination of identity over difference. It has been argued (indeed I have been tempted by this line of thought myself) that Derrida's philosophy of difference is no real advance on a philosophy of identity.17 On this view, it is not really coherent to suppose that identities could be the products of difference, and even if it were, Derrida is merely supplying his own preferred name 17

Peter Dews' fascinating version of this thesis (see his Logics of Disintegration) (note 1, above), deserves more subtle treatment than I offer here. 183

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for the fundamental ground, the origin, etc., which he is so careful to expose in other texts. Derrida makes a fetish of differences in the abstract, and Hegel's dialectical understanding of identity and difference long ago demonstrated the inadequacies of this position. Those familiar with Derrida's work will know that one of his early essays was entitled 'Diff6rance', spelled, just to signal a difference, with an 'a'.18 In that essay he tried to draw together in some sort of web (he calls it an 'assemblage'), various uses of the term (not the concept!) difference, including Freud, Saussure, Hegel, Levinas, and Heidegger. The effect of this essay is to suggest something of a tradition of treating identity (be it of concepts, people or things) not as something given, something simple, but rather as a product of a complex, double operation of differentiation and deferral, both senses being locked into the term 'diff£rance'. Identity, in other words, is being given a relational understanding, and the relations in question could broadly speaking be said to be synchronic and diachronic, or diacritical and substitutive. Is Derrida guilty of an empty reversal? The idea of an empty reversal can be found in Heidegger, who argues that Nietzsche does not entirely escape Platonism by reversing it. But Nietzsche himself had grasped the same point. Assuming one can think of a philosophical system as, or as dependent on, a set of interrelated conceptual oppositions, then the mere inversion of the priority attached to one term of an opposition will not change the framework of thinking, any more than a new king need affect the institution of monarchy. Well, is that not what Derrida is doing? And is it not empty both in the sense of being unsuccessful and also in the sense of being purely formal, with no real impact on the real world, etc. Each of these views is mistaken, and reflect a failure to grasp the specificity (and hence limitations) of what Derrida is doing. Deconstruction has been the object of a fantastic desire, that something that explicitly marks out its distance (however problematically) from philosophy should none the less fulfil the traditional philosophical role of providing a reassuring foundation for life, meaning, action, and so on. We cannot reduce deconstruction's positive claims to the claim that there is no truth, or no one truth, but its capacity to disappoint is based on the thought that it can summed up in some such way. It suggests to me an extension of what Caputo19 has 18

'Diffeiance', in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (University of Chicago Press, 1982). 19 John Caputo's most original work is best represented by his Radical Hermeneutics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987). For'cold hermeneutics', see Ch. 7. 184

Beyond Deconstraction?

called Derrida's 'cold hermeneutics' to describe a whole tradition, which could have as its motto Hegel's warning that 'philosophy should beware of the wish to be edifying'. If deconstruction is an absolutely unavoidable move in philosophy today, it is, however, neither a substitute for nor necessarily a threat to all other philosophical activity. What it is a threat to, is a certain kind of naivety and innocence. There is no one more aware than Derrida of the dangers of merely repeating metaphysical motifs—presence is his favourite term. This does not mean that his work is immune to such tendencies. Far from it. But we ought to hesitate about reading such an explicit text as 'Diffe'rance' too simplistically. It is quite true that Derrida does talk about differences producing identities as textual effects. Is not the language of cause and effect here too obviously deconstructable? His answer is the development of an explicit strategy of writing 'under erasure'. The point of this strategy is to signal that such terms are not being used with the metaphysical (read foundational) sense that one might normally assume in a philosophical text. In other words, nothing ultimately hangs on or rests on such words. Or at least that is the claim. To understand what Derrida is doing here we have to understand that what he is attempting to deconstruct is the metaphysical function we could call transcendental causation, by which the way empirical things appear is accounted for by reference to fundamental acts of synthesis, or to acts of intuition, or a grasp of some ultimate grounding principle. His essay is an intervention into that sort of discourse, and very much at its own level, or at least giving that appearance. Derrida is, if you like, turning the language of transcendental causation against itself, rather than just standing outside and turning his back on it. It is not the only thing one could do, but what it does do, if successful, is make it more difficult for such discourse merely to return when we are not looking, because its very mechanisms have been interfered with. Should he not have taken Hegel's solution more seriously? We do not have time to pursue that possibility as far as we could,20 but his basic doubt is indeed an old one: that Hegel's method is tied to a teleology by which all difference would ultimately be reconciled in the Absolute. And that, for Derrida, means that on Hegel's story, the victory of identity over difference is only deferred to be more securely assured. If it is said that there is another Hegel, for whom difference and differentiation have a significance not exhausted by their reconciliation in the Absolute, it would seem to me that it is Derrida to whom one would first turn for assistance in drawing out that other Hegel. 20

Someone who does is Gillian Rose in her Dialectic of Nihilism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984). Her Ch. 8, on Derrida, deserves separate treatment. 185

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Finally: the claim that this inversion is empty because it is merely formal and makes no impact elsewhere. This is surely even more mistaken, if that is possible. Because even if one has doubts about Derrida's strategy of writing under erasure, and one is not sure whether he can have done what he is trying to do, the lesson one carries away from reading that paper alone is that we would do well to think of theoretical texts not merely as deploying concepts that already have a meaning in themselves but as repeating the traditional strategies for giving these concepts such meanings, such as deploying them in heirarchical oppositions. You can read 'Differance' and then go and use it. But a certain caution is called for against a common impatience. There are those who weary of a philosophy that reflects overmuch on its own limits, that questions too long its own methods and tools, and who demand that philosophy get out there and produce results. Derrida may be enormously productive, but why doesn't he get on and do real philosophy? Why does he concern himself with the margins of philosophy, with peripheral questions, with footnotes, irrelevant minutiae, scraps of paper and so on? Let me, as a preliminary answer suggest that the ultimate justification for philosophy may be that it makes familiar things strange. And Derrida has without doubt found a particularly effective way of doing this. There is one last claim made against Derrida, which is worth mentioning at this point, namely that his grandiose claim that the history of philosophy is the history of the metaphysics of presence makes his readings of texts predictable, even boring, and apart from these psychological difficulties, it means, strangely enough that he reduces the history of philosophy to the history of the Same. Derrida also has the apparently tiresome habit of using phrases, borrowed perhaps from Nietzsche and Heidegger, like 'Western metaphysics', 'logocentrism'—in other words, big, all-inclusive words—and surely, one can make the point again, these are ways of totalizing a history which in fact is not only itself infinitely complex, but has an ongoing interdependence with the history of real events which such names hide. Ricoeur made just such a claim in his book The Rule of Metaphor.n Someone once said that all poets really only have one poem that they repeat. Isn't that true of Derrida? I will leave aside the question of whether his readings are predictable or boring. I find Derrida constantly challenging and surprising. Whoever it was that said poets only ever have one poem did not, as I recall, mean that the variations were boring. But what about the 21

Paul Ricoeur, The Rule ofMetaphor, trans. Kathleen McLoughlin (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), 311. 186

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objection to the totalizing words?22 The point is not merely that we may find it annoying to have all the subtle differences between philosophers absorbed into such an umbrella word, but that Derrida of all people should resist this. But this objection is not convincing. First, one has to ask whether Derrida actually does blind us to the differences in his actual practice, and no one who had experienced the subtlety of his readings could credit this viewpoint; his Saussure is not the same as his Rousseau, though the similarities are remarkable. Secondly, while it is tiring to hear those who know nothing about the history of philosophy making Derrida and deconstruction into a hurdy-gurdy song, there is surely something valuable and challenging about the suggestion that the various strategies philosophers have employed might have something in common. A term such as logocentrism functions in Derrida as a regulative notion, a guiding hypothesis that directs his readings, not a dogmatic assertion, and we ought to judge it as such. A careful scrutiny of his writing would show that these general expressions have an organizational or regulative role, rather than an explanatory one. But having said that, one of the things that makes Derrida so interesting to read is precisely the combination of this overarching view and the details of his attention to particular texts. The claim that these grand words hide the connections between the history of philosophy and real historical events and circumstances has perhaps some force to it. To some extent any way of naming the history of philosophy can have this objection made to it. I would fall back on Derrida's response to a question asked him in Positions about the connection between the deconstruction of logocentrism and the critique of idealism.23 For the charge of historical disconnectedness is essentially the charge of idealism. His response was that his own project—the deconstruction of logocentrism—was wider than and included the critique of idealism. It is wider than it because in principle it would not be able to take for granted the very distinction between materialism and idealism. For Derrida, philosophical texts have no insulation from the forces of history, for history itself is textual. Deconstruction far from closing off the texts it reads, actually opens them up to what they themselves attempt to exclude. This takes us to the general objection to Derrida's alleged textual idealism. 3. That Derrida is committed to a textual version of idealism. This was one of the earliest objections and it remains most widespread.24 Fortunately it can be cured by reading Derrida. (Derrida 22

For example, in Of Grammatology, op. cit., 4, 60. In Positions, op. cit., 62. 24 Ibid., 66. Here he insists on materialism precisely to avoid 'a new selfinteriority, a new "idealism", if you will, of the text'. 23

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himself has suggested that about an hour will do.) The objection comes in some remarkably naive forms, which can be put to one side once the distinction is made between books and texts. Let us take a couple of plausible objections: (a) That Derrida believes that meaning is essentially mediated through language, (b) That Derrida denies there is such a thing as experience, or reality, or truth, or understanding, or reference. There is only a play of signifiers. In a chapter of Of Grammatology, entitled '. . . That Dangerous Supplement . . .', in which Derrida draws together Rousseau's discussions of masturbation (versus normal sexuality) and writing (versus speech), Derrida deposited a short sentence which has followed him around ever since, and sometimes walked in front of him with a red flag: 'II n'y a pas de hors-texte'—there is nothing outside the text. This has had the same fate as Heidegger's 'Das Nicht nichtet im selbst', namely to have been cited and even criticized (the latter by Ayer and Carnap) completely out of context. And if contexts never completely determine meaning, they can make certain interpretations thoroughly implausible. To get some sort of bite on to what Derrida is getting at, and why it does not license at least the most naive interpretations, we have to note the word text, not book. There is nothing outside the text. But what is a text? Or the text? There are two different answers to this question even in Derrida and corresponding to these different answers there are two different claims being made when he says there is nothing outside the text. In the first sense of text, we are talking about something that might be containably called Rousseau's text, or Derrida's text. The individuation of a text in this sense is not, as it usually is for a book, simply an empirical matter. What is at stake is the unity of a certain signifying structure, and depending on how one drew the lines its domain might be altered. Perhaps it would help if I quoted again at slightly greater length a short section from the chapter in question, which also reminds us what it is that a deconstructive reading is getting at: the writer writes in a language and in a logic whose proper system, laws and life by definition his discourse cannot dominate absolutely. He uses them only by letting himself, after a fashion and up to a point, be governed by the system. And the [deconstructive] reading must always aim at a certain relationship, unperceived by the writer, between what he commands and what he does not command of the language he uses. This relationship is not a certain quantitative distribution of shadow and light of weakness or of force, but a signifying structure that critical reading should PRODUCE.25 25

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Of Grammatology, op. cit., Pt II, Ch. 2, 158.

Beyond Deconstruction?

As I understand it, the boundaries of a text may in some sense coincide with a book or books, or a collection of parts of books, etc., but the text is understood in terms of signifying structures not in terms of objects in the world. Assuming for a moment that we can indeed individuate texts in this way, by reference to the boundaries of a writer's discourse, to a containable signifying structure, then the claim that there is nothing outside the text means that texts themselves have the capacity to anticipate, to articulate, the very relation between what lies inside and outside them. Derrida's way of explaining this is via the logic of supplementarity, by which, in this essay on Rousseau, he shows a parallel, and perhaps convergent chain of substitutive connections which, in Rousseau's texts link speech to writing, and sex to masturbation. In each case there is a contradictory or paradoxical (unthinkable to reason) relation which he calls supplementarity by which something which is defined as being complete is none the less brought to completion by what exceeds and even threatens it. Writing gives to Rousseau the chance to impress socially that his faltering speech and poor public persona do not allow him. Masturbation is in a sense a pure form of sexuality in the way it frees one from dependence on the other. In each case, nature, which is posited as preceding culture is in fact completed by it. For Derrida this is a truth about writing, textuality, signifying structures in general. And in the immediate context of our original quotation, he writes: in what one calls the real life of these existences of flesh and bone [he is talking about Rousseau himself, and Therese and Mamma], beyond and behind what one believes can be circumscribed as Rousseau's text there has never been anything but writing; there have never been anything but supplements, substitutive significations which could only come forth in a chain of differential references, the 'real' supervening, and being added only while taking on meaning from a trace and from an invocation of the supplement, etc.26 And thus to infinity, for we have read in the text, that the absolute present, Nature, that which words like 'real mother' name, have always already escaped, have never existed; that what opens meaning and language is writing as the disappearance of natural presence.27 As I understand it, Derrida is claiming that all the words and concepts we have for what lies outside the text are ways of construing or constructing a meaning or origin that is meant to be outside or prior to writing, but the theoretical function of which is dependent on thinking 26 27

Ibid. Ibid., 159. 189

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of writing as a loss or a lack. Writing generates a nostalgia for a sense of the natural which is actually dependent on writing as its transgression. Does not this account support the charge of textual idealism? Is it not comparable to Husserl's claim that the meaning of words like 'real', 'outside', 'world' were constituted by a meaning-bestowing consciousness? It is again curious that such a parallel would be with a transcendental idealism which, as Kant pointed out, is quite compatible with empirical realism. But that is not the best way of defending Derrida's account of a text here. For it is not that he is advocating a text's anticipation of its own outside, it is rather that he is diagnosing a certain sort of textual strategy that does just this, of which philosophical texts are the finest examples. But as I said there are two different claims being made under the rubric that there is nothing outside the text. The second sense involves the generalization of the concept of text beyond those problematic forms of textual individuation that we could call Rousseau's text, etc. In angry response to a recent critic, he writes: for strategic reasons . . . I found it necessary to recast the concept of text by generalizing it almost without limit. That is why there is nothing 'beyond' the text . . .28 The idea of the general text is one that extends as far as writing extends, understanding writing, again in his extended sense as the articulation of signs without reference to any sort of originating guarantees of meaning of the sort traditionally provided by the idea of speech. Writing, for Derrida, would include speech and every other form of signification, and mark the possibility of conceiving signification not primarily as a problematic translation of an inner intentional life (as Husserl would have it), but as an activity quite as much 'out there' as 'in here'. Derrida is here making use of that extension of the realm of language for which we have to thank structuralism. But in a way he goes further. If we understand writing as the articulation of differences, then it would not be opposed to consciousness or experience, but would claim that these themselves would display its primitive structures—differentiation, deferral. In other words, Derrida is not so much rejecting or denying consciousness, subjectivity, the real world, etc., as suggesting that in so far as they are significant they come within the domain of writing and textuality. This is not so implausible. If philosophical texts have links to what lies outside them what is usually being urged is that we take seriously their connection to history. But history, made up as it is of real hard events, has still to be given sense, to be articulated, before it can relate to anything. Derrida's increasing contempt for those who insist that 'deconstructionists' should 'go beyond the text', a remark often 28

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quite misguidedly made by those influenced by Foucault, becomes obvious. For Derrida discursive formations and the institutional practices with which they are interwoven are precisely what is included in the general text. And that is very far from saying that the analysis of discursive practices in their historical specificity is unimportant. Quite the opposite. But critics of deconstruction here, as so often, construe Derrida in ways that are quite perverse. Finally, however, it might be pressed, is not Derrida, for all this fancy footwork still a rather literary intellectual cut off from the real world of political action. But some might think it time we dropped experience of hand-to-hand fighting as a qualification for being taken seriously. If there is a lesson to learn from Derrida here it is not that engagement in social and political affairs is not important or possible, but that the rhetoric of directness, of immediacy, of 'action' can be as cruelly misleading in political intervention as it is in philosophy. Clearly, what I am arguing for is a kind of compatibilism between the Derridean project and many of those that would see themselves as 'going beyond' him. In this regard we could not do better than look briefly at a recent exchange of papers on the subject of racism and apartheid, published in Critical Inquiry. In autumn 1985 it reprinted a short paper that Derrida had written as part of an introduction to a 1983 Paris exhibition entitled 'Art against Apartheid'. Derrida's contribution was entitled 'Racism's Last Word' ('Le Dernier Mot du racisme'), and it is focused on the word apartheid. He suggests that the evil of the system is reflected in the way the word itself represents apartness as some sort of natural law, and I think it is fair to say that his strategy is to treat this word as condensing a whole range of the evils of the South African regime,29 and he compares it, appropriately enough for an art exhibition, with the symbolic meaning we now attribute to the word Guernica, after Picasso. There is much else in these few short pages, but it is not, and never pretended to be, an historical account of the development of the discourse of political legitimation that the South African regime has been generating since its inception. However, that lack occasioned a vigorous response a year later in the pages of the same journal by a couple of Columbia doctoral students, Anne McClintock and Rob Nixon, who use the absence of such an analysis (despite Derrida's affirming its importance) as the lever for exposing the general inadequacies of deconstruction. Derrida discusses the word apartheid in 'quarantine from historical process' they say, in a nice turn of phrase. His analysis, compared with an approach 'which integrates discursive, political, economic, and historical analyses' is of limited strategic worth. 29

Critical Inquiry, Autumn (1985), 292. 191

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Derrida's response in the same issue is one of controlled vitriol. He quite properly accuses them of totally ignoring the stated and obvious limitations imposed both by the length (eight pages) and the context of an art exhibition. They repeat the charge that Derrida should go beyond the text, which occasions a testy request that the authors might actually read what he has said about texts and textuality. And they accuse him of not realizing that the South African regime has now dropped the word apartheid, in favour of 'separate development', etc., so it is not the last word . . . Derrida's quite proper response is that we should not be misled by a discursive strategy. We should stick to the word apartheid, however the regime tries to massage our perception of it. The real tragedy of this exchange is not merely that these interlocutors are in large measure on the same side, but that the possibility of compatibility of their different approaches is not explored, and that each attempts to outflank the other in terms of political relevance. Thus Derrida: Deconstructive readings are . . . not simply analyses of discourse such as . . . the one you propose. They are also effective or active interventions that transform contexts without limiting themselves to theoretical . . . utterances, even though they must produce such utterances.30 But these remarks would allow one to argue for profitable co-operation between the analysis of discourse and such deconstructive interventions. And that seems to me worth pursuing. One final remark I would make about this paper, which is something of a revelation to anyone who has read through the debate between Searle and Derrida is that Derrida has come to take very seriously the distinctions developed within speech act theory, such as between performative and constative, and has become ultrasensitive to context. This is consistent with the general thrust of much of what I have been saying, that the absence of absolute standards is no reason to abandon discrimination, and indeed makes it all the more important. It may be that the insistence on the element of convention in speech acts was eventually enough to persuade Derrida that speech act theory was not committed to the privileging of intentions, or the purity of the voice. If so, it would be a fascinating development. I would like to end with something of a change of tone, making some more positive remarks about where we are and where we might think of going from here. I do not argue for them fully but I hope they will none the less be worth making. First, as I said in my introductory remarks, Derrida has been influenced by a tradition of thinkers, which would include Kant, 30

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Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Husserl and Heidegger (sorry, it's not very French) for whom the theme of the end of metaphysics has been a central concern. This has meant a number of different things, and sometimes philosophy has been identified with and sometimes distinguished from metaphysics. Kant saw himself as having ended metaphysics by solving all of its problems, Hegel saw philosophy as a teleological process completed in the Absolute, Nietzsche saw metaphysics as coming to an end with his own overturning of Platonism, Heidegger too discusses the end of metaphysics, but for the first time perhaps, is careful to make a number of distinctions between the different senses of 'end'. Metaphysics, he claims, is at an end, though its ending may last longer than the previous history of philosophy. He does not mean its demise or elimination, nor its teleological completion but its being gathered into its most extreme possibility, as he puts it. (Nietzsche's philosophy of power is a form of subjectivism which with technology is actually becoming real . . .) Derrida is heir to this tradition, and it is important to realize that for him deconstruction is no arbitrary move, but one in which philosophy turns to consider, in the most serious way we know today, its own conditions of possibility. And while deconstruction is not a form of scepticism, there is a sense in which deconstruction is subjecting philosophy itself to the kinds of questions it usually reserves for outer application. Heidegger was not alone in describing the history of philosophy as the history of the forgetting of a question. The uncovering of relations, principles, concepts, etc., that we ordinarily take for granted is a classic philosophical activity, and it is not much of an exaggeration to say that the routines of everyday life almost necessarily lead to the loss of questions. (The very title of the paper began its life with a question mark, and was advertised without one, in symbolic testimony to this historical process.) I am not sure that Derrida's questioning of philosophy is a recovery of anything once known and only later covered up, but I am convinced it is, as they say, indepassable, unavoidable. The call for us to go 'beyond deconstruction' has to be questioned as to its own theoretical commitments. Are we still supposed to be on the road to Truth, and being needlessly delayed? What account of historical time is being deployed here? If it is not teleological what is it? Have we actually caught up with where we are now?31 It is enormously 31

I am alluding here to a remark by Heidegger in 'Language', in his Poetry Language, Thought, trans. A Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row), in which he says (a propos of understanding language) that he is not trying to go anywhere, but for once to get to where we are already. 193

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tempting to see the desire to go 'beyond deconstruction' as the metaphysical Desire par excellence—for some as yet undiscovered truth, the logic of which deconstruction has so well described. If so, we ought perhaps to be a little more sanguine when preparing to break out of the prison-house of deconstruction.

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Further Adventures of the Dialectic: Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, Althusser GREGORY ELLIOTT

notre epoque exigeait de tous les hommes de lettres qu'ils fissent une dissertation de politique francaise . . . Jean-Paul Sartre, Situations IV (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), 217 This essay is not about contemporary French philosophy, strictly speaking, but something which concerns it—an important episode in its modern history. Its intention is to deal, in very schematic terms, with the nature and evolution of French Marxism from the mid-1950s to the end of the 70s, focusing on two of its best-known and most influential representatives, Jean-Paul Sartre and Louis Althusser, and relating the internal history of their ambitious reconstructions of Marxism to the wider, non-theoretical history of which they were a part— and for whose comprehension they sought to supply the conceptual instruments. Maurice Merleau-Ponty's balance-sheet of a century of Marxism, Adventures of the Dialectic, published in 1955, provides my starting point and explains my title. By what token is Marxism relevant to this series? After all, as early as 1979 Vincent Descombes was writing of its 'disappearance' from the French scene.1 Therein precisely lies my justification. Since 1975 the whole intellectual landscape in France has undergone alteration. Under the impact of its own undoubted theoretical weaknesses, an inclement political history, strong philosophical challenges and a concerted ideological campaign, a paradigm which had enjoyed great prestige for thirty years since the Liberation, has been reduced to marginal status. The crisis of Gallic Marxism has been profound and enduring—only the latest, certainly the gravest. In describing a very little of the fate of Marxism in France, then, my aim is to give you an idea of why there is no lecture in this series on contemporary French Marxism—something which would have been inconceivable not so long ago. There is not much point in trying Bolshevism all over again at the moment when its revolutionary failure becomes apparent. But neither is there much sense in trying Marx all over again if his 1

Modern French Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 1981), 129. 195

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philosophy is involved in this failure, or in acting as if this philosophy came out of this affair intact.2 With these words, Merleau-Ponty announced his renunciation of Marxism. Adventures of the Dialectic was provoked by some articles Sartre had written between 1952 and 1954. Entitled The Communists and Peace, they signalled his 'radical conversion', amounting to an extraordinary attempt to theorize the political practice of the French Communist Party from outside its ranks, and ushering in a new phase in their author's career: the four years he spent as a compagnon de route. Roughly speaking, prior to this, Sartre, together with Merleau-Ponty, had sought a third way: politically, between Soviet communism and American capitalism, an independent, European socialism; theoretically, between Stalinist 'metaphysical materialism' and idealist philosophy, a revolutionary, humanist Marxism. Like so many others, the founders of Les Temps Modernes had been rallied to socialism by the experience of Occupation and Resistance. Now, the war-time roles of the USSR and the PCF had ensured that they at least emerged from the defeat of the Axis powers with enormous prestige. Boasting a membership of half a million in 1945 and commanding the loyalty of a quarter of the electorate, the PCF was, as Sartre later recalled, 'our only pole'3— the locus of effective action on the Left. Yet it was characterized by a Stalinism of organization, doctrine and practice which dictated 'comprehension without adherence'4—in a word, 'anti-anti-communism'. Its transformation was a precondition for the realization of the hopes aroused by the Resistance. But the task of elaborating a sui generis Marxist philosophy, via some synthesis of Marxism and existentialism or phenomenology, could only be conducted outside its bureaucratized structures, albeit in 'fraternal dialogue' with it. This programme fared badly. The PCF's leaders, unconditionally loyal to the USSR, rejected the very possibility of a third way. And in any event, post-war political history delivered it its quietus. Amidst the deepening Cold War, the stark choices which had earlier been refused in the name of a principled neutralism, became increasingly difficult to avoid. Abstention being impossible, Cold War abroad and class struggle at home yielded a critical and conditional orientation to the Communist camp. The onset of the Korean conflict in 1950 produced a parting of the ways. For Merleau-Ponty it proved the imperialist nature of the Soviet 2

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Adventures of the Dialectic (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 91. 3 'Merleau-Ponty' (1961), in Situations IV (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), 228. 4 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Humanism and Terror (1947: Beacon Press: Boston, 1969), 148. 196

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Union. For Sartre it was the 'end of idealism', the beginning of 'realism'. Thus it was that when PCF leader Jacques Duclos was arrested in May 1952 and protest strikes failed, Sartre, persuaded that 'un anticommuniste est un chien', dedicated himself to the defence of an embattled Communist Party. 5 Declaring his solidarity with it on 'certain precise and limited subjects', he argued that in the current conjuncture a defeat of Stalinism would, in reality, be a defeat for the working class. For without the unifying instance of the Party, the proletariat was atomized, bereft of 'class-being' until endowed with consciousness and unity by its Party. Hence were the workers to abandon the PCF, 'the universe will be bourgeois': Sartre's dystopia. 6 To Merleau-Ponty's mind this constituted 'Ultrabolshevism'. 7 Sartre had failed to synthesize existentialism and Marxism, simply superimposing his own concepts on the latter, therewith transfiguring the Leninist Party into the sole repository of truth and action—a transcendental subject entitled to manipulate the passive masses beneath it and to engage in violence at whim. The Party, in short, had been legitimized as the pure revolutionary will which would effect Revolution and institute Communism. Such an advocacy was a radical form of voluntarism, injurious to the dialectic of party and class, foreign to the dialectic of history. Merleau-Ponty had earlier distinguished, famously, between 'Western Marxism', represented most notably by Lukacs, and Soviet Marxism, the lingua franca of the international Communist movement: that is, between a minoritarian dialectical philosophy of history and a dominant naturalist science of history. 8 Comintern condemnation of Lukacs's History and Class Consciousness and canonization of Lenin's Materialism and Empirio-Criticism were no accident. The 'discordancy' between 'dialectical inspiration' and 'naive realism' symbolized by them was inscribed in Marx's own oeuvre: in the discontinuity between the Young Marx, a philosopher of revolutionary humanism, and the older Marx, a natural scientist of society; between the Early Works, wherein Marx had 'realized' Hegel by secularizing the dialectic and making man the subject of history, and Capital, wherein Marx had 'annex[ed] Hegel's logic to the economy', rendering man the object of history—a theoretical debacle consummated by Engels's construction of a dialectic of nature whose 'laws' likewise held good for society. The anathematization of Lukacsian heterodoxy by Leninist 5

See 'Les Communistes et la Paix' (1952-4), in Situations VI (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), 80-384. 6 Ibid.,252. 7 See Adventures of the Dialectic, Ch. 5, 95-201, 'Sartre and Ultrabolshevism'. 8 See ibid., 30-73. 197

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orthodoxy was thus licensed by Marx's liquidation of his own 'philosophical period'. 9 And what if the philosophical Marxism which Lukacs had sought to resurrect was based on a myth—namely, that the proletariat was not merely the 'universal class' of capitalist society, but the subject-object of history which would liberate itself and redeem humanity?10 If so, retrieving it from its Engelsian and Leninist distortions—trying Marx all over again—was pointless. In any case, Marxism had not emerged intact from the Soviet experience. Following Korsch, Merleau-Ponty related phases in the history of Marxist theory to historical conjunctures: the misadventures of dialectical theory tracked the adventures of the historical dialectic. Bolshevism, that 'mixture of extreme objectivism and subjectivism (the one constantly supporting the other)', 11 which Sartre had not so much traduced as accentuated, registered the aberration of socialism in one, backward country—i.e. the advent, then isolation, of the October Revolution in defiance of Marx's schemas, issuing in Leninist voluntarism and Stalinist terror. Yet whereas once, confronted by history's detours—the discrepancy between Russian reality and Marxist theory—Merleau-Ponty had given the latter the benefit of the doubt, he now rescinded attentisme: theory had proposed, history disposed. And symptomatic of Marxism's intrinsic inadequacy was that it was incapable of explaining Soviet society which, contrary to Lenin's celebrated dictum, boasted much electrification but no Soviet power. Marxism's Utopian myth of an 'end of history' must be abandoned now that events had confuted the kind of rationality it projected on to the historical process. The Marxist enterprise must be eschewed, a 'new liberalism' embraced.12 The PCF was sufficiently concerned by Merleau-Ponty's reflections to organize a symposium on them.13 Its verdict? The philosopher's theoretical a-communism was designed to legitimate practical anticommunism. By contrast, Sartre did not respond to a work which challenged not only actually existing Marxist theory and politics, but any project of their renewal as well. He would, albeit implicitly, reply later. Meanwhile, the complacency of the Communist response was shaken by what one of its authors has since described as 'an earth9

Ibid.,62-64. See ibid., 54-55. 11 Ibid., 86. 12 See ibid., 203-233. 13 R. Garaudy, G. Cogniot, M. Caveing, J.-T. Desanti, J. Kanapa, V. Leduc and H. Lefebvre, Mesaventures de VAnti-Marxisme—Les Malheurs de M. Merleau-Ponty (Paris: editions Sociales, 1956). The volume concludes with a letter from Lukacs disavowing History and Class Consciousness and repudiating Merleau-Ponty's construction of it (pp. 158-159). 10

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quake':14 Khrushchev's Secret Speech of February 1956 to the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party denouncing Stalin. In Sartre's own case, the Stalinism-without-Stalin evident shortly thereafter, in the Soviet invasion of Hungary, proved decisive in his evolution. Whilst the PCF unambiguously supported it, in The Spectre of Stalin (1956-57) he just as unequivocally condemned it, nevertheless combining this stance with considerable optimism as to the future course of Soviet history—a perspective encapsulated in the prediction that 'de-Stalinization will de-Stalinize the de-Stalinizers'. 15 The de-Stalinization, political and theoretical, of the PCF requisite for a popular front between it and other left-wing forces was the crucial task to which Sartre now aimed to contribute. Much of the urgency of Sartre's intervention derived from the darkening political situation: the embroilment of France, a mere six months after its discomfiture at Viet-Minh hands, in another colonial war—this time in North Africa. It was against the backdrop of sanguinary counter-insurgency in Algeria and the ascendancy of the Right at home that Sartre was to pursue his project. The collapse of the Fourth Republic; the installation of the Fifth following the triumphant return of de Gaulle (of whom Sartre remarked that he would rather vote for God, the deity being more modest); the threat of fascism; the PCF's paralysis—these created the political emergency (and personal isolation) in which Sartre laboured, frenetically, on his monumental Critique ofDialectical Reason, published in 1960. It was, he later observed, a 'settling of accounts' both with his own previous thought and with that of the Communists, who, he then believed, falsified'true Marxism'.16 It was an attempt to de-Stalinize Marxist theory, to produce a 'living Marxism'17—one that would be capable of explaining contemporary reality, capitalist and communist alike. In short, Sartre tried Marxism all over again. A product of the history it sought to render intelligible, Marxism, according to Sartre, was the 'untranscendable philosophy of our time', dialectical reason 'the ideology of the rising class'.18 Yet it had 'come to a stop'. Under Stalinism, theory and practice had been divorced, the 14

Jean-Toussaint Desanti, in Dominique Desanti, Les Staliniens (Paris: Marabout, 1985), 510. 15 The Spectre of Stalin (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1969), 77 (translation modified). 16 'Autoportrait a Soixante-Dix Ans' (1975), in Situations X (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), 149-150. 17 'Le Reformisme et les Fetiches' (1956), in Situations VII (Paris: Gallimard, 1965), 117-118. 18 Critique of Dialectical Reason (London: New Left Books, 1976), 822, 825. 199

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latter degenerating into pragmatism, the former into dogmatism.19 Thus there was a link between the fate of the Russian Revolution, the impasse of the Western Communist Parties, and the sclerosis of Marxist theory. Theoretical Stalinism was indicted on two main (related) counts: for its economic- and technological-determinist account of the historical process, which negated the specificity of human history, suppressing its 'digressive complexity' and the role of creative human agency therein; for its conception of historical materialism as an analytical natural science, which betrayed the dialectical peculiarity of Marxism, severing theory from lived experience. If Stalin had carried this to the point of paroxysm, Engels's dialectic of nature was the theoretical root of the evil, bequeathing Marxists a naturalism—elision of history and nature—and scientism—quasi-physical 'iron laws' of history. In appearance a mechanical materialism, in reality this doctrine was an idealism which reduced history to nature, revolution to evolution. Hence it was not simply a matter of clearing away the Stalinist detritus in order to recover pure Marxism. Since there was ample warrant for such constructions, Marxism had to be reconstructed as a theory of human self-emancipation in which its 'first truth'—that 'men make history'—was restored to it.20 Via a synthesis of Marxism and existentialism, in which Kierkegaard would counterbalance Hegel, Sartre's ambition was to 'reconquer man within Marxism'.21 What form, briefly, did the Critique take? Its first volume, 'The Theory of Practical Ensembles', aimed to provide a philosophical foundation for historical materialism through an analysis of the 'elementary formal structures' of any possible history—the mechanisms underlying the formation and transformation of human groups. Accordingly, its categories are trans-historical, referring to invariant features of the historical process which exist at a deeper level than modes of production and do not change in tandem with them. What are these deep structures of history? According to Sartre, the historical field comprises subjects and objects, human actions and material things, between which a dialectic obtains. The freedom of human subjects is limited in two significant respects: by needs, which human activity seeks to negate; and by a pervasive scarcity, the condition and 'passive motor' of history—the struggle against which engenders class struggle. Constrained by their practical relations to nature, human beings are none the less capable of modifying it, thereby humanizing it, and thus transforming their objective situation. Sartre's term for such 19

Search for a Method (New York: Vintage Books, 1968), 21-22. Critique de la Raison Dialectique II (Paris: Gallimard, 1985), 316. 21 Search for a Method, 83. 20

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intentional activity, individual or collective, is 'praxis'. All praxes, however mundane, express a 'project'—an elected way of being— involve 'totalization'—the conjoint process of understanding and making history—and imply 'transcendence'—of present conditions in a future which simultaneously negates and subsumes them. Although essentially passive, worked or transformed nature retroacts on human beings. In a milieu of scarcity, matter impinges upon them, transmuting the human into the non-human, the subject into object; human actors themselves become like things. Once inscribed in matter, praxis is converted into an inert reality, an alien power thwarting its agent's intentions and producing what Sartre terms 'counter-finality'. Such worked-matter, in which past, free praxis is absorbed and reified, is called by Sartre the 'practico-inert'. The practico-inert, the alienation it represents, and the anti-dialectic it unleashes, are phenomena which have marked all recorded history, not just capitalist society. Moving from 'constituent dialectic'—the dialectic of individual practice—to 'constituted dialectic'—the dialectic of group praxis—Sartre suggests that scarcity gives rise to a ubiquitous form of social relations which he designates 'serial'. These are characterized by 'alterity' (separation and isolation). In the 'series' people regard themselves and others as 'objects', and their individual intentions are alienated in the resultant of their actions. At the opposite pole to the series is the 'group'. Constituted within and against series, the group evinces the bonds of reciprocity which surmount seriality. Basically, it can take three forms. The 'fused group' is opposed to all institutions which embody and impose alienation; its project is freedom (Sartre gives the example of the crowd storming the Bastille in July 1789). Here social actors recognize shared goals and achieve mutual recognition, engaging in communal action. But in an environment of scarcity the fused group cannot maintain its fusion indefinitely. The moment of apocalypse over, it is confronted by the enemy without and within. In response, it undergoes a process of internal mutation, becoming an 'organized group' in which rights and duties are allocated and enforced by a 'pledge'. The relation of individuals to such a group is characterized by Sartre as one of 'fraternity-terror'. Despite the division of labour, a collective purpose is still recognized; 'organized group practice' is not inherently retrogressive. Yet with the advent of organizational inertia and internal conflict, ossification sets in: common practice recedes from individuals and community is supplanted by a centralized, manipulative sovereignty. In this, the 'institutional group', authority guarantees unity, conformity is compelled, seriality returns. According to Sartre, any society comprises an unstable compound of these ensembles—series, organizations, institutions and, more rarely, fused groups. Any State is the ultimate embodiment of an institutional 201

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sovereignty, its structure authoritarian, its modus operandi bureaucracy and terror. Any class is a complex combination of interconvertible groups and series, never constituting a fused group. Any party threatens to degenerate from an organization into an institution. Class conflict—the battle of contending, complex ensembles—is part of the larger context pitting humanity against nature—the secular struggle which has generated oppression and exploitation. Class is not simply a matter of objective location in the relations of production. It also—and inseparably—involves class consciousness, something not formed solely in the production process, individuals being syntheses of many determinations ('mediations'). For its part, the working class is not unified, but serialized, by the capitalist mode of production. Hence its adoption of the revolutionary cause in order to affirm its humanity is not an inevitability. The proletariat is capable of winning the class struggle and triumphing over scarcity; it can perform the role of the negation of the negation. But socialism is only a possibility of history, which has no pre-given direction and in which regressions and reversals—'infernal circularities'22—are not exceptional. It is a project of liberation which must be consciously chosen by social agents, not a natural necessity to be executed by them. And the overthrow of capitalism is a necessary, but insufficient, condition of it, for socialism signifies a genuine community in which the natural and the social are finally humanized by the collective reappropriation of alienated praxes. Despite its 800-odd pages, at the end of Volume One of the Critique much remains to be done. Sartre was aware of this. History itself—in his language, the 'totalization of all practical multiplicities and of all their struggles'23—was to be the object of a second in which he would endeavour to demonstrate the existence of 'one human history, with one truth and one intelligibility'.24 The categories requisite for a dialectical understanding of any history were to be employed to trace the movement of history, in an ascent from the abstract to the concrete. Sartre eventually abandoned the second volume, 'The Intelligibility of History', unfinished (it was only published posthumously). He had encountered great difficulty in negotiating the intricate relations between subjects and structures when seeking to show that particular struggles between individuals and groups were 'moments of one totalization'—in other words, a synthetic unity of the totalizations inherent in myriad projects and praxes. The theoretical reasons are perhaps not far to seek. For the central problem posed by his starting point— individual praxis as the basis of all history—was how the historical 22

Critique of Dialectical Reason, 76. Ibid., 817. 24 Ibid., 69. 23

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process could be rendered intelligible if it was a compound of countless colliding projects. Rejecting the postulate of some meta-subject of history, Sartre hoped to demonstrate its character as a 'totalization without a totalizer'.25 The episode selected for analysis in the second volume was Soviet history.26 Yet Sartre was unable to explain how the multiple conflicts rending Soviet society ultimately wrought any structural unity, except by recourse to an illegitimate device. For his solution subverted the very complexity he had initially posited, resorting to a totalization with a totalizer: the sovereign Stalin. Since he had commenced by conceding that bourgeois democracies were analytically that much more intractable than dictatorships, the blockage is clear. Questioned a decade later as to why, within his framework, history should not be 'an arbitrary chaos of inter-blocking projects' containing no ordered social structures, Sartre referred his interviewers to power: a new, marxisant Leviathan.27 The incompletion of the Critique possibly had extra- as well as intratheoretical reasons. We shall return to them. Whatever the explanation, it has led critics to argue that despite the historicization of the categories of Being and Nothingness essayed by him, Sartre remained imprisoned in an ontology of mind and matter, self and other, whereby alienation is identified with objectification, Marxism subsumed into existentialism. So notwithstanding his achievement in breaking with a dogmatic dialectic of history; founding the openendedness of the historical process, therewith the possibility of regressions; and providing a fertile set of categories for analysing State, class and party, hence the history made in Marxism's name; despite this—a riposte to the Merleau-Pontyan challenge—the Critique, it has been said, is a fundamentally pessimistic work. For if the inexorable logic of scarcity helps explain the advent of bureaucracy (and worse) after every socialist revolution this century, does it not by the same token render communism inconceivable for the foreseeable future? Are we not left only with 'infernal circularities'? Retrospectively, this may be so. At the time, with the promise of a second volume to follow, this reconstruction of Marxism by France's most renowned living philosopher might have expected a warm reception. After all, it arrived just as the effects of the Twentieth Congress were making themselves felt with maximum impact domestically: 25

See ibid., 8O5ff. See Critique de la Raison Dialectique II, 109ff. 27 See 'The Itinerary of a Thought' (1969), in Between Existentialism and Marxism (London: New Left Books, 1974), 53-56. My discussion here is greatly indebted to Perry Anderson, Arguments Within English Marxism (London: Verso, 1980), 51-53. 26

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politically, as Khrushchev's 'Everything for Man' became the official slogan of the PCF, now wedded to 'peaceful coexistence' and 'peaceful transition'—a gradualist strategy favouring dialogue with Christians and alliance with socialists; theoretically, as a return to the Young Marx swept the Marxist universe, Communist and non-Communist equally, yielding a renaissance of Marxist humanism in which Lukacs and Korsch were rediscovered, the 1844 Manuscripts extolled. Yet within the wider philosophical culture the sun of humanism was setting. At the very moment when Marxists were rediscovering the Early Works and readmitting Hegel, a major mutation in French philosophy was underway: the irresistible rise to paramountcy of structuralism. The challenge to humanist constructions of Marxism implicit in the new paradigm became explicit with Claude Levi-Strauss's The Savage Mind, dedicated to Merleau-Ponty and published in 1962. It concluded with an attack on Sartre. Sartre had remained a Cartesian, commencing with, and ensnared by, the actor's conscious project. He had eluded cultural and historical relativism only by illicitly interpreting past forms from the standpoint of the Western present, thus erasing real historical discontinuity in a spurious continuity. Sartre's anthropocentric history and subjective epistemology were both ideological—the former a modern myth, the latter a perennial illusion. Ethnocentric dialectical reason and contingent historical diachrony were inimical to scientificity—a status the 'human sciences' could only attain if they modelled themselves on their natural confreres. Sartre, by contrast, had discovered in 'historicity the last refuge of a transcendental humanism'.28 Sartre offered no considered response to the ascendent paradigm.29 The result was his eclipse—a circumstance whose major beneficiary was, paradoxically, to be another Marxist theoretician to whom a mere five lines of a footnote had been given over in Adventures of the Dialectic. Louis Althusser too had been radicalized by the war. Unlike Sartre, however, he had been led by turbulent post-war history to join the PCF. For him it was the party of the French working class, the only real contestant of the capitalist order; membership of it was therefore a precondition of any kind of link with the class struggle. The price to be paid was of course high: assent—or silence—on political issues. Althusser's adherence coincided with the zenith of Zhdanovism—the Cold War in theory—for whose duration Communist intellectuals were restricted to performing variations on 'Diamat' as defined by 'the 28 29

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The Savage Mind (London: Wiedenfeld & Nicholson, 1966), 262. See, e.g., 'Jean-Paul Sartre Repond', L'Arc 30 (1966).

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greatest scientist ofour time', Comrade Stalin.30 Unlike Henri Lefebvre or Jean-Toussaint Desanti (whose oppositional activity occasioned their expulsion), Althusser remained in the PCF after Hungary—on which he made no public comment. With only a scattering of brief articles to his name by then, his first work of substance was a study of Montesquieu in 1959, his next publication—in 1960—an edition of Feuerbach's writings. His own 'philosophical manifestoes' began to appear in 1961 and were collected in For Marx four years later, rapidly followed by Reading Capital. What was Althusser's project? It is important to appreciate that he intervened in the midst of a new crisis in the Communist movement. The clamorous Sino-Soviet dispute conducted from 1960 onwards, during which the Chinese inveighed against Soviet (and French) revisionism, formed the background to his work. By the early 1960s, the CPs had appropriated much of the humanist critique directed against them after Hungary as the basis for their own programmes. Thus the co-ordinates of debate and division were fundamentally restructured. For Althusser de-Stalinization had not de-Stalinized the de-Stalinizers. Implicit in his essays is that Khrushchev's Secret Speech, far from initiating a genuine rectification, had been a right-wing critique which hastened a rightwards evolution in the Communist world. The Stalin era he considered to be an abandonment of the revolutionary legacy of Marx and Lenin. The Khrushchev intendancy looked less like being a new dawn, than a twilight, of Marxism—a period which could witness the 'social-democratization' of Communism. China, on the other hand, proclaiming fidelity to Leninism and exhorting internationalism, appeared to offer the inspiration for the revolutionary enterprise that was the raison d'etre of the CPS. Althusser's endeavour was the renovation of the political practice of the PCF by a renewal of Marxist theory: a return to Marx which betokened a turn to Peking. Now was a time for the 'detour of theory'—a reconstruction of Marxism which would, as he put it in 1975, found a 'left-wing critique of Stalinism' and 'above all help put some substance back into the revolutionary project here in the West'.31 Now, in some respects Althusser's diagnosis of the major problem afflicting Marxism was similar to Sartre's. But the treatment he proposed was radically different. Although the target of his criticisms was likewise theoretical Stalinism, Althusser, in a veritable contemporary scandal, regarded humanism as the mirror image of economism, the 30

The words of PCF intellectual, Frances Cohen, championing Lysenko's biology in 1950 (quoted in Michael Lowy, 'Stalinist Ideology and Science', in T. Ali (ed.), The Stalinist Legacy (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984), 177. 31 Quoted in Radical Philosophy 12 (1975), 44. 205

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cure as bad as—if not worse than—the illness. Each was a species of Hegelianism, derivative of the ideology with which Marx had broken in order to produce historical materialism. Both erased the 'epistemological break' which separated Marxism from bourgeois ideology, the science of history from any philosophy of history, Marx from his youth. For they were alike historicist, positing a process with a subject and an end. In the case of economism, this took the form of an epic of the productive forces from primitive communism via class society to communism; in that of humanism, an odyssey of humanity from original unity via alienation to reappropriation of the human essence. Neither schema provided a viable basis for the investigation and explanation of the complexities of real history—a theoretical demerit with practical, political implications. Althusser's programme, accordingly, was twofold: to construct an authentically Marxist philosophy which would provide an epistemological foundation and guarantee for Marx's theory of history; and to reconstruct historical materialism in a-historicist, noneconomistic and non-humanist form. It might be said that he sought to render Marxism immune from Merleau-Ponty's criticisms by a theoretical de-Stalinization which did not surrender the critical instrument which could guide political de-Stalinization—namely, historical materialism—to its Stalinist parody. To execute it, he conducted an audacious reversal of intellectual alliances. Perceiving some convergence between the theoretical anti-humanism of the structuralists and his own positions in Marxism, Althusser echoed their slogans, insisting that the comprehension and transformation of the world necessitated the destruction of the 'myth of man'.32 The upshot was quite distinctive versions of 'dialectical and historical materialism'. The philosophy was a sophisticated anti-empiricist epistemology—the 'theory of theoretical practice'—which foregrounded abrupt discontinuity between science and ideology and within the history of science. The science featured: a new version of the dialectic which, unlike any simple 'inversion' of Hegel's, stripped it of abstraction and fatalism via the category of 'overdetermination'; a reconceptualization of the structure of social formations which respected their constitutive complexity through the assignment of 'relative autonomy' to irreducible political and ideological regions, the totality being governed by a 'structural causality' wherein 'determination in the last instance', but not 'dominance', was the preserve of the economic; a non-teleological theory of modes of production as articulated combinations of forces and relations of production, whose account of historical transition proscribed evolutionism; and a novel 32

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See For Mao; (London: Allen Lane, 1969), 229-230.

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conception of ideology as representations of people's 'imaginary relation to their real conditions of existence' which, denying any end of it under communism, impugned historical messianism. Althusser's differences with Sartre were considerable. We have already seen that the latter's critics fixed on his philosophy of the cogito, Merleau-Ponty in particular arguing that it was what separated his former colleague from Marxism. It would appear that this was the burden of Althusser's contribution to a debate with Sartre staged at the Ecole Normale Superieure shortly after the publication of the Critique.23 Sartre, reportedly finding the reproach incomprehensible, failed to counter it. His consternation possibly decided the allegiances of a generation of young French intellectuals. At any rate, Althusser now pursued this line of attack, contending that Sartre's epistemological starting point in individual human agency led only to a regression to infinity which left him quite unable to explain history and society.34 Men were not the constitutive subjects of history, but constituted subjects in history—agents determined, and allotted their places/functions, by economic, political and ideological social relations anterior and exterior to them.35 Contrary to Sartre, history was a 'process without a subject'36 which only a science disjunct from the consciousness and illusions of human subjects could illuminate, thereby aiding its transformation and their liberation. For Althusser, Sartre was of the devil's party without knowing it.37 It could be said that Althusser escaped the German ideology only to succumb to the French. For if he simultaneously combated phenomenological anti-naturalism and vindicated, contra Levi-Straussian structuralism, the project of a science of history, he engaged in rather more than a 'flirtation' with structuralism.38 An enterprise of great power and originality, his re-theorization of Marxism was seriously vitiated: by a theoreticism that toppled over into idealism; by an astringent theoretical anti-humanism which occluded human agency in its prioritization of structural necessity; by an ultimately anti-historical anti-historicism, productive of its own fair share of difficulties in conceptualizing historical change given its stress on social reproduction, and resulting in an a-historical structurality or, alternatively, 33

See Regis Debray, Les Rendez-Vous Manques (Paris: Seuil, 1975), 83; Annie Cohen-Solal, Sartre (Paris: Gallimard, 1985), 576. 34 See For Mao:, 117-127. 35 See Louis Althusser and Etienne Balibar, Reading Capital (London: New Left Books, 1970), 119-144, 174-175, 270-271. 36 See, e.g., Essays in Self-Criticism (London, 1976), 94-99. 37 See 'Teoria e Metodo' and 'Gli Strumenti del Marxismo', Rinascita 4-5 (1964). 38 Cf. his own account in Essays in Self-Criticism, 126-131. 207

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an unstructured history. Nevertheless, because of its brilliant recasting of classical Marxism—and Leninism—in contemporary terms, Althusserianism rapidly acquired enormous influence, despatching the heroes of yester-year to the outer limits of the Latin Quarter. Althusser's prudence on political issues did not save him from the suspicions of his Party. If one possible deduction from the autonomy of theory he effectively invoked was, in the words of pupil Regis Debray, that 'all we had to do to become good theoreticians was to be lazy bastards',39 the Althusserians did not draw it. Althusser's constructions pointed in a contrary political direction to the PCF's evolution—and were seen to, by both friend and foe alike, from whom he immediately came under considerable, conflicting pressure. His students believed his theses logically to imply a critique of the moderatism of the PCF—a Maoist one—to which they proceeded, hoping eventually to detach their philosopher-general. The Party's leadership resented his implicit declaration of independence and feared his influence on the young. Trapped, so to speak, between the hammer and the anvil, Althusser retained his party card whilst effecting a radicalization of his theoretical positions, all the while studiously avoiding an open breach. With the launching of a Cultural Revolution in China in 1966, Althusser's hopes for a democratic communism were to be invested in the People's Republic. Previous comments on the USSR had subjected official Soviet pronouncements to sotto voce criticism. The 'critique of the cult of personality' (a concept 'unclassifiable in Marxist theory')40 furnished an ethical indictment of the Stalin period which circumvented a materialist explanation (and genuine rectification?) of what, despite proclamations of socialist humanism, 'has not yet been completely superseded . . . terror, repression and dogmatism'.41 Now, in an article published anonymously in a Maoist journal, Althusser welcomed the Cultural Revolution as an exemplary corrective to the bureaucratic and technocratic tendencies threatening any socialist society on the morrow of revolution—an initiative which could prevent any regression from socialism to capitalism and facilitate the transition to communism.42 China thus afforded the first example of a socialist revolution criticizing and rectifying itself—something Merleau-Ponty had adjudged impossible. Althusser's redescription of the base-superstructure topography had already provided a theoretical framework for the interpretation of Stalinism, since the installation of a new economic 39

Prison Writings (London: Allen Lane, 1973), 187. For Marx, 240. 41 Ibid., 237. 42 See 'Sur la Revolution Culturelle', Cahiers Marxistes-Leninistes 14 (1966), 5-16. 40

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mode of production did not automatically institute socialist superstructures. Its emphasis on the ideological now apparently received practical vindication in the East. In the event, it was in the West that Althusser's, Sartre's, and French Marxism in general, were to be put to the test as De Gaulle's efforts to 'marry France to her century' prompted a rather different 'month of youth' from that planned for May 1968 by the trade-union movement, detonating student insurgency and a general strike which were perceived by many to herald a return of the repressed: revolution. It might be thought that both Sartre and Althusser would be well placed to theorize 'the events' and to benefit from them to resolve the problems of their respective systems. But it was not to be. The political outcome of May had disappointed the hopes of its protagonists. The Marxist intellectual harvest was to be similarly dispiriting. In Sartre's case, May 1968 led to a definitive rupture with the PCF. In an interview later the same year he insisted that its role had not even been reformist, let alone revolutionary. Quite the reverse, it was guilty of an 'objective complicity' with the Gaullist regime in the restoration of order. At the same time, May had witnessed the emergence of a 'social left' utterly distinct from the discredited 'political left' (Communist and Socialist) in the radicalism of its objectives and the militancy of its methods. Therewith the dilemma of 'renegacy' or attentisme was at an end. The constitution of a genuine 'revolutionary movement' was now a real possibility and it was on this that Sartre pinned his hopes.43 While supposed Communist sabotage of the Paris Spring provoked Sartre's breach with the PCF, Soviet suppression of the Prague Spring in August 1968 had an equally dramatic impact on his international loyalties. In an impassioned essay, he excoriated the Soviet 'counterrevolution' and renounced what he now described as 'reformist illusions about this type of regime'.44 It has been suggested that the termination of Khrushchevite reformism in the USSR, and the repression of 'socialism with a human face' in Czechoslovakia, weighed heavily on Sartre's prospects for completing a Critique ofDialectical Reason in significant respects mortgaged to the expectation of a radical de-Stalinization in the Soviet bloc.45 Whatever, Sartre abandoned the Critique, pursuing, instead, the more modest project of rendering one man intelligible, the novelist Flaubert—a reversion to biography perceived by Henri 43

See 'Les Communister ont Peur de la Revolution' (1968), in Situations VIII (Paris: Gallimard, 1972), 208-225. 44 See 'Czechoslovakia: The Socialism that Came in from the Cold', in Between Existentialism and Marxism, 84-117. 45 See Perry Anderson, In the Tracks of Historical Materialism (London: New Left Books, 1983), 70-72. 209

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Lefebvre as 'fundamentally an expression of despair, an admission of defeat'.46 Sartre had concluded his essay on Czechoslovakia by suggesting that the revolutionary forces in the West must face 'the fundamental question of our time': how to effect a genuine, non-Stalinist socialism.47 For his own part he sought an answer by allying himself—at first cautiously, then recklessly—with the major Maoist grouping to emerge from May, the Gauche Proletarienne. The details of the political activism of Sartre's last years have been chronicled in Simone de Beauvoir's poignant open Adieu; they cannot detain us here. I simply want to note that Sartre graduated from attentisme to suivisme, from waiting on the PCF to tailing the GP—a movement based on ultraleftist political perspectives. What were these? Roughly, that May represented a revolutionary situation; that the immediate horizon postMay was revolution or counter-revolution; that reaction took the form of a 'new fascism from-on-high' buttressed by a social fascism beneath (i.e. the PCF); that the revolutionary movement must organize a 'new popular resistance' against it, initiating exemplary actions which would stimulate the masses to rebellion, thence to a people's war.48 A number of leading GP members or sympathizers were ex-students of Althusser's for whom his philosophy had died 'the night of the barricades'. Failed by their former mentor, the enrages now succeeded in seducing the engage. Sartre counter-signed their 'violence, spontaneity and morality', detecting in the Maoists' hostility to the Soviet Union and the PCF, in their rejection of Leninism and affirmation of populism and spontaneism, the basis for an anti-hierarchical and libertarian revolution which would vouchsafe 'freedom without alienation'.49 French Maoism soon foundered on its own fantasies and suffered a sea-change, not into something rich and strange, but poor and familiar. Belatedly alerted to the existence of Stalinism by Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago (1974), its partisans bid adieu to failed gods, bonjour to new ones, recycling Cold War ideology as the Nouvelle Philosophie. Capitalism had once equalled fascism; now it was socialism's turn. Sartre did not go anything like as far as his juniors. But he too proceeded to the renunciation of Marxism, in favour of a neo-anarch46

Quoted in Martin Jay, Marxism and Totality (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1984), 359. 47 Between Existentialism and Marxism, 117. 48 See, e.g., Les Temps Modernes 310 bis (1972), 'Nouveau Fascisme, Nouvelle Democratic'—especially the contributions of Andre Glucksmann, class, turned Cold, warrior. 49 See, e.g., 'Les Maos en France' (1972), in SituationsX, 38-47, and Ph. Gavi, J.-P. Sartre and P. Victor, On a Raison de se Revolter (Paris: Gallimard, 1974). 210

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ism—a transition signalled in the 'Self-Portrait at Seventy' of 1975. The 'untranscendable philosophy of our time' was now declared to be a 'philosophy of power' lodged 'at the heart of the Soviet system'. A 'new kind of thought' was required for a 'genuine socialism'.50 Sartre, blind and ailing, did not furnish it, a promised inquiry into Power and Freedom never materializing. What of Althusser? In essence, he too lost his way after May. His analysis of what he described as 'the most significant event in Western history since the Resistance and the victory over Nazism' was disappointing, scarcely living up to its subject and partially exonerating the PCF, for all that it defended the students.51 At a more abstract level, he did attempt to integrate its lessons in the major contribution to Marxism from his pen after 1968—the famous essay on 'Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses' (1969-70).52 That text is, however, marked by an unresolved tension between functionalism—an automaticity of social reproduction via State apparatuses—and voluntarism—a contingency of social transformation via the deus ex machina of class struggle. Significantly, the much larger work from which it was extracted—a projected ambitious new synthesis whose confident Foreword announced that 'the Revolution is henceforth the order of the day'S2—was abandoned, never to be published. In its place, in an effort to appease his critics, Althusser issued a series of short texts in which he continued a process he had begun in 1967: a leftist adjustment of his original positions, redefining philosophy as, in the last instance, the class struggle in theory, proclaiming that the masses made history, and foregrounding the thesis that the class struggle was its motor.54 Not surprisingly, this misconceived autocritique and rectification failed to propitiate detractors—a consensus summed up by one of them when dismissing theReply to John Lewis as a 'little pink book'.55 Alas, though, Althusser's attempt to repay the imaginary debt he had contracted by not being gauchiste went far enough to constitute a considerable 50

Situations X, 192-193. See his letter of 15 March 1969 to Maria-Antonietta Macciocchi, in idem., Letters from inside the Italian Communist Party to Louis Althusser (London: New Left Books, 1973), 301-320. 52 In Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (London: New Left Books, 1971), 121-173. 53 De la Superstructure (Droit-Etat-Ideologie), unpublished manuscript (1969), 2.1 am grateful to Louis Althusser for permission to consult this text. 54 See, e.g., 'Lenin and Philosophy' (1968), in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, 27-68; 'Reply to John Lewis' and 'Elements of Self-Criticism' (1972), in Essays in Self-Criticism, 33-99, 101-161. 55 The verdict of Phillipe Sollers, editor of Tel Quel, in his Sur le Materialisme (Paris: Seuil, 1974), 140-141n. 51

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impoverishment of his thought, substituting a schematic MarxismLeninism for the novel theoretical system of Reading Capital. The contradiction between Althusser's positions and those of his party became ever starker. For the overriding political influence on his work post-May continued to be Maoist China, into which he persisted in reading a Leninist 'letter from afar' (one always marked 'return to sender' by the PCF). The deleterious effects of his election of China as a cynosure of communism are nowhere more apparent than in the sketch of a purportedly 'left-wing critique'—in reality, an evasive account—of Stalinism drafted in 1972.56 The shattering of illusions about the People's Republic in the mid1970s with the termination of the Cultural Revolution did not, in Althusser's case, issue in renegacy. But it did infect his thinking with a pessimism that left him ill-paced to counter the insurgent New Philosophers. Politically, he made a transition from Maoism to a form of centrism or left-Eurocommunism, facilitating a far more forthright indictment of Stalinism, domestic and foreign, but producing no strategic alternative to Gallocommunist horizons other than a nuanced defence of the dictatorship of the proletariat.57 Theoretically, he became increasingly sceptical about the merits of historical materialism, in November 1977 himself announcing a 'crisis of Marxism' which could not be resolved by any return to Marx, since there was 'no original "purity" of Marxism that only has to be rediscovered'.58 Renewal could only spring from popular practice: the masses who made history could also redeem theory. In a contemporaneous text, he took this relinquishment of Althusserianism further, querying Marx's own achievement and despairing of that of his successors, asserting that they had 'blindly plunged into the darkness of night: night on the State, night on ideology, night on the party, night on politics'.59 In short, the philosopher of the epistemological break erased it: flawed from the outset, undeveloped since Marx, deformed under Stalin, compromised by a tragic history, historical materialism was now a very different creature from the omnipotent because true doctrine of Reading Capital. As a distinct current, Althusserianism thus came to a melancholy close. Soon afterwards, the vicissitudes of Eurocommunism in its local form—the defeat of the Union of the Left—provoked Althusser to the 56

'Note on "The Critique of the Personality Cult'", in Essays in Self-

Criticism, 78-93. 57 See 'On the Twenty-Second Congress of the French Communist Party', New Left Review 104 (1977), 3-22. 58 'The Crisis of Marxism', in // Manifesto (ed.), Power and Opposition in Post-Revolutionary Societies (London: Ink Links, 1979), 231. 59 'II Marxismo Oggi', in Louis Althusser, Quel Che Deve Cambiare nel Partito Communista (Milan: Garzanti, 1978), 121. 212

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frontal assault on his Party with which his career effectively ended. In contrast to Sartre he had missed the moments of 1956 and 1968; he did not miss the moment of 1978. Yet for all that his intervention amounted to a mordant critique of the PCF's tactics, organization and ideology, 'What Must Change in the Party'60 ultimately registered little advance over Sartre's Spectre of Stalin, its predecessor by more than twenty years. The 'delay of 1956' was not only the PCF's. The PCF failed to change as so many wished. As in the past, its leadership weathered the storm, ushering in, instead, what has been called the 'French political winter',61 which put paid to any remaining hopes of the previous decade and which neither Sartre nor Althusser survived—the one dying in April 1980, the other succumbing to a severe manic-depressive illness later the same year. The anti-Marxist intellectual consensus that had already crystallized by then was henceforth consolidated, while French Communism experienced the most serious crisis in its history, entering the second half of the 1980s fighting for its political life. From the 'vantage point' of 1987, the adventures of the dialectic could appear so many misadventures. I would like to end with a few general observations on the episodes in the history of post-war French Marxism I have attempted to sketch. First, then, in some ways Sartrean and Althusserian Marxism were too powerful for their own good, resulting in an intellectual exclusivity which had negative consequences for their development. Symptomatic of this were a disinclination to make the thorough acquaintance of other post-classical Marxist currents; a refusal to engage in extended debate or dialogue with interlocutors (witness Althusser and Sartre's treatment of each other); a tone of authority with, or sheer indifference to, critics. Electing to pursue their projects in splendid isolation, it was they who ended up being marginalized. Secondly, both were characterized by a theoretical absolutism: a fundamental immodesty about, an overweening confidence in, the explanatory powers of Marxism that contained its own nemesis. Perhaps this helps to account for their complacency about the rise of nonMarxist (e.g. post-structuralist) paradigms, which both thinkers either basically ignored or cursorily dismissed. At any rate, Sartre's sometime marxisme, faute de mieuxbl is a more salutary perspective than the 60

New Left Review 109, (1978), 19-45. In a related interview given to Les Nouvelles Litteraires (15 June 1978), Althusser made what (to my knowledge) is the only direct reference to Merleau-Ponty's Adventures of the Dialectic, endorsing its criticism of Sartre for confusing the CP and the working class. 61 By Michel Pecheux in the Postscript to his Language, Semantics and Ideology (London: Macmillan, 1982), 211-220. 62 Situations IV, 200-201. 213

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omnipotence of historical materialism or the untranscendability of dialectical reason. Thirdly, although Raymond Aron's reproach that Parisian Marxism was Marxism for agreges is quite unjust,63 it is the case that neither Sartre, nor Althusser, nor their respective followers, furnished the 'concrete analysis' of the French situation their reconstructions were supposed to facilitate and for which they had called. The implications of this for the political project—and reputation—of their Marxism need no underlining. Fourthly—and finally—it can be said that whilst Sartre and Althusser, in their very different ways, made enormous contributions to the de-Stalinization of French Marxism, each then proceeded, after his own fashion, to 'Maoize' it. Their most serious 'flirtations' were not with Cartesianism or existentialism, Spinozism or structuralism, but with Maoism—an involution which was theoretically retrogressive and politically perilous, the illusion of the Parisian epoch rapidly giving way to a disillusionment from which French Marxism has never recovered. If it is to recover, if the dialectic is to have further adventures, it will have to avoid these or cognate errors—one of which, however, would be totally to renounce its past. For whatever the shortcomings of Sartre's, Althusser's, and modern French Marxism generally, it was never, as is currently fashionable to believe in Paris, a useless passion.64

63

D'une Saint Famille a I'Autre—Essais sur les Marxismes Imaginaires (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), 73, 78-79. 64 This lecture, draws on a book devoted to Louis Althusser, Althusser—The Detour of Theory (London: Verso, 1987). I would like to thank Sarah Baxter for all her help. 214

Paradoxes of the Pineal: From Descartes to Georges Bataille DAVID FARRELL KRELL

Illustrious Gentlemen of the Academy! You do me the honour of requesting that I submit to the academy a report on my earlier life as an ape [mein affisches Vorleben]. Franz Kafka, Ein Bericht fur eine Akademie Behind the third ventricle of the human brain a miniscule pedunculate bud, close to the optic thalamus, that is, to the two beds of optic nerves, a gland soft in substance yet containing gritty particles. Function: unknown. Because of its pine-cone shape it is called the conarium or pineal body, even though the recent photographs of it by Nilsson and Lindberg show it to be morphologically reminiscent of nothing so much as the plucked tail of a gamebird, which Simon Dedalus refers to as 'the pope's nose'.1 Today it is presumed to be an endocrine gland of some sort, even though there is no doubt that morphogenetically in all vertebrates it is a vestigial unpaired eye. As fossil evidence indicates— and we still find it almost fully developed in some extant amphibians— ancestral vertebrates possessed in addition to the paired bilateral eyes a solitary dorsal eye opening at the top of the skull to the sky. This singular evagination of the brain—something betwixt a visual organ and a gland—seems to hold a special fascination for philosophers. Here we shall consider two of them: Rene Descartes (1596-1650), the father, as we say, of modern philosophy; and Georges Bataille (1897-1962), the father, as many say, of post-modern philosophy. Three hundred years separate them. Devotion to the pineal body conjoins them. Descartes knew nothing of the pineal eye. It was apparently only by the mid-nineteenth century that the morphogenesis of the conarium became established. Yet vision prompted Descartes' choice of the gland as seat of the soul, siege de I'ame. In letters to Meyssonnier (29 January 1

See Lennart Nilsson and Jan Lindberg, Behold Man (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1974), 170. 'The pope's nose' appears of course at that famous Christmas dinner at the outset of Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1960), 33. Contemporary endocrinology appears to be making considerable advances in research on the functions of the pineal gland, but I shall not try to do justice to them here, where it is a question of paradox and obsession rather than physiology. 215

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1640) and Mersenne (1 April 1640), as well as in the Treatise on the Passions of the Soul (1645—46), Descartes recounted the principal attraction of the pineal body for him: it is the only part of the bicameral brain that is not duplex but singular, and its singularity, along with its contiguity with the two beds of optic nerves, suggest its function— which is, as Descartes believes, to serve as what we today call the chiasm of the optic nerves, that which integrates the two images our eyes receive into the one image we see. Descartes was quick to locate in the pineal body thesensus communis, then the imagination, and finally, though considerably less confidently, the rational soul itself. However, five additional traits of la petite glande reinforce Descartes' choice. Allow me to enumerate them, go on to discuss the gland's functions, and then finally state a number of paradoxes and difficulties secreted, as it were, by the conarium itself. First, the singular gland occupies 'the most appropriate position' in the middle of the brain—au milieu, says the Treatise on the Passions of the Soul, 'between all the concavities'.2 Yet it is important to note Descartes' slight shift in point of view, or the slight shift of the gland itself: in the earlier, unpublished Treatise on Man (written in French about 1633-34, published posthumously by Clerselier in 1664) Descartes locates the gland at 'about' (environ) the middle of the brain, specifying that it is 'a bit removed from the centre'. 3 Its position slightly off-centre will prove to be significant in terms of the gland's differential structure and function, which I shall discuss in a moment. Second, the little gland is served by the carotid arteries, which supply the heart's blood and the rarified animal spirits to the brain. The gland itself is the 'well-spring' of the animal spirits and is lightly supported by these arteries. Thus its base is highly elastic, allowing the gland to incline in all directions, in order to eject les esprits animaux to all the requisite locales. Elastic, agile, adroit, the little gland is constantly in a state of agitation and vital vibration. Third, the gland is exceedingly soft and delicate in substance. (Descartes never mentions the grainy or sandy particles within, the grit that as Socrates complains in Theaetetus often makes the wax slab of memory unfit for impressions.) Although the surface of the gland must, as we shall see, be capable of sustaining certain convolutions, 2

See articles XXXI and XXXIV of the Treatise. I shall cite Descartes' Oeuvres et Lettres, Andre Bridoux (ed.) (Paris: Gallimard, Pleiade, 1953), simply by page number in parentheses in the body of my text. I shall occasionally refer to the Adam-Tannery edition, cited it as AT, with volume and page numbers. 3 In the Pleiade edition, p. 855; cf. AT, XI, p. 180. It is important to refer to AT for the Treatise on Man and its integument, The World, along with the editors' 'Avertissement', in volume XI of that edition. 216

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folds or traces, so that the soul can read these marks and thus come to know, these incisions of the surface dare not be excessive, lest the virginal gland become corrugated, rutted, ruined. The gland is soft in all human beings, explains Descartes to Meyssonnier, and not only in 'lethargies', as has been thought since Plato. It is so corruptible—or, one is tempted to say, entirely in the spirit of Descartes, so volatile in substance—that it vanishes soon after death. Descartes urges Meyssonnier, who suspects that the gland to which Descartes is so devoted is mythological, not to wait three or four days before setting out in search of it. Only the freshest cadavers will yield the pineal to the dissector's observation. Fourth, Descartes notes that the conarium is the only part of the brain that is smaller in human beings than in animals, so that it is meet and just that it should be the seat of intellection. Yet there is something particularly paradoxical about this fourth characteristic; let us pause a moment to consider it. It is of course usually the magnitude of the human brain that is celebrated as a mark of distinction. When Thomas Aquinas asks whether the body of man is suitably disposed (Summa theologiae, Iq91a3) he can justify the body's lack of thick fur, sturdy carapace and natural protections of all kinds, as well as its relatively dull senses and sluggish locomotion, only by appealing to its adroit hand and massive brain. Utilitas manuum and maximum cerebrum together constitute the human organ organorum or 'tool of tools'. How strange then that for Descartes the seat of intellection and agency should be marked in fact by a kind of devolution. For while the hominid brain expands in size, and while the olfactory sense claims less and less cerebral space, surrendering to that 'proper end' which in man is intellection, the citadel of the Cartesian rational soul, shrinking rather than expanding, follows the way of all flesh. Descartes thus exposes himself to Jack Shandy's barb: the great philosopher chose 'thepineal gland of the brain; which, as he philosophized, formed a cushion for her [i.e. the soul] about the size of a marrow pea'.4 To this paradox one might adduce others. What is one to make of the gland's central off-centre position? Of its service as the 'well-spring' of the spirits, which none the less spring from the heart? And what is one to make of a source that can stretch and incline? What about that soft substance, like warm wax, incapable of retaining impressions even though that is its principal function? What about a surface both virginal and visited? Does not this warm soft wax sacrifice all its secondary properties, and its primary one as well? What are we to make of that part 4

Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967 [first published 1759-67]), 162. 217

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of the cadaver that volatilizes so soon after death, as though it were not the mere cushion of the soul, the cushion of the seat of the sedentary soul, but the fugitive soul itself? Let us set aside these initial paradoxes of the pineal, in order to recall the principal functions of the petite glande as Descartes recounts them in the Traite de I'Homme. Many details of that treatise conform to what we know from the 1637 Discourse on Method and the later Passions. Perhaps its most interesting feature is the attempt to leave the 'rational soul' altogether out of account. Here Descartes sets his machine de terre agoing, allowing it to run through all its paces without the encumbrance of mind. Not only Malebranche but also hosts of future neurophysiologists will be fascinated and utterly convinced by this automaton. Every rational soul of the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries will be happy to let the torso of Descartes' Treatise end where it in fact ends—without the contrivance, the scholastic baggage, of I'ame raisonnable. A second feature of this prototypical and paradigmatic text, we know, is that it is part of a larger project on light, entitled The World, a treatise and a world, its author assures us, that are altogether fictitious. Chapter six of The World begins: 'Permit your thought, then, to exit from the world awhile, in order to come to see another altogether novel world, which I shall bring to birth in its presence within imaginary spaces' (AT, XI, 31). We shall have occasion to remember these imaginary spaces in which I'homme machine and the entire modern science of physiology are brought to birth when we turn to Georges Bataille's mythological anthropology. For the moment, let it suffice to note that Descartes' own text is a kind of automaton, a simulacrum, mime or hypomnetic of the world—perhaps of the world of ecclesiastical and court authority, itself a fabric of fictions, so that only a fiction could raise a claim to what is called 'truth'. Let us turn now to Descartes' fiction-science. The Treatise on Man tells us that the most vibrant, forceful and subtle parts of the blood circulate among the concavities of the brain, there yielding 'a certain quite subtle wind or, rather, a very lively and very pure flame, to which the name animal spirits have been given'.5 These 'gather about' but also enter into and issue from a tiny gland almost in the centre of the brain. A vast network of tubes allows the spirits (N.B.: the short form is always spirits, never animals) to flow to all the regions of the brain, all the sense organs and all the limbs of the 5

For this and the following, see the Traite de I'Homme, Pleiade, pp. 812— 815, 841-846 and 850-863; corresponding to AT, XI, pp. 127-131, 165-171 and 174—189. The page references in parentheses in my text from now on refer first to the P16iade edition, and then, after the solidus, to AT, XI. 218

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body. Itself shaped like a flame, the gland harbours and dispatches the tinier flames of the spirits in perpetual pentecost. The pores of the brain into which the ejaculate spirits flow are like intervals among the threads of a tapestry. The spirits tumble into them, 'always looking back at' or 'facing' (regardans) the gland. Strange that they can 'look'; curious that the gland whose gaze follows them needs either the spirits or the cerebral tapestry. Nevertheless, these intervals or breaches in the tapestry are extremely important for Descartes' account of perception and memory. Let us imitate the animal spirits, however, and look solely to the gland. Corresponding to its differentiating function, the pineal gland in Descartes' physiological system possesses a differentiated structure. It is composed of 'very soft material', material that is not embedded firmly in the substance of the brain but attached to it by delicate, pliable arteries. The force of the blood that is propelled through these arteries holds the gland in approximate equilibrium, like a flame dancing on its candlewick. The elastic arteries allow the gland to spill the spirits in the particular direction they are to pursue towards this or that region of the brain. We might ask what actually causes the gland to tip in different directions. Descartes cites two causes in addition to the altogether mysterious and here unexplained and undiscussed influence of the rational soul. The second is an exterior, though not extrinsic, cause; to wit, the action of objects imprinted on the senses. The first is an intrinsic cause, that is, one that operates entirely within the circuitry of blood and brain, tube and pore; namely, the 'difference' in force exerted by the sundry parties of animal spirits as they burst from the gland. The animal spirits, Descartes emphasizes, are 'almost always different in some respect' (854-855/180). Difference—and I am tempted to write the word as differance, with a pineal a, as it were— dominates the system. Dominates it dynamically (in the hydraulic standing or leaning of the gland), topographically (in the gland's slightly off-centre position, as well as in the intervals among the threads in the tapistry) and energetically (in the gradients of force possessed by the emitted animal spirits). And yet, at the end of the day, the exterior objects of sense perception win the upper hand in Descartes' account, for (paradoxically) inherent reasons. What 'ordinarily' causes the gland to move is 'the force of the object itself exerted on a sense organ. The sense organ in turn acts on the apertures of the appropriate tubes leading to the brain. If these tubes may be compared to the porte-vent of church organs, writes Descartes, then sensible objects in the external world are 'like the organist's fingers' (841/165). The little man on the inside, the homunculus who normally serves as the embodiment of the immanent rational principle, is now catapulted outside the body and the mind into the 219

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world where we live. Vision may serve as an example—a privileged example for both sense perception and memory. Objects strike (frappent) the eye. More specifically, rays of light press against selected points of the eyeball; they then 'trace at the rear of the eye a figure that corresponds to the figure of the object'. Sundry threads of optic nerve tissue transmit this figure to the brain tubes upon which they open, and are thus 'also able to trace the figure in the interior surface of the brain'. At this juncture the animal spirits sally forth from those points of the gland that are inclined toward the tubes in question, that is to say, the points that 'face' or 'look at' the tubes towards which the gland is now leaning. Precisely when or how, by whom or by what, the gland is inclined remains unclear: at times Descartes describes the gland as inclining in a particular direction in order to cast the animal spirits in the proper direction (854/179); at other times he describes the spirits' egress from the gland as a gratuitous 'heading towards' the requisite tubes, this spontaneous departure 'attracting' the gland in such a way that the animal spirits draw it along in their Jetstream (863/188). Whatever the case, sense perception remains multiple typography (the various impressions, traces, coinages) and iconography (the retracing of the identical figure, the icon of the object). In the wake of sense perception, memory too is a typographic and iconographic system. Descartes encourages us in the Treatise on Man thus (852/177-178): Think of it in the following way. After the spirits emerge from gland H (Figure 29), having received there the impression of some idea, they pass thence by the tubes 2, 4, 6, and tubes similar to them, into the pores or intervals among the tiny threads that compose this part B of the brain. The spirits have the power to enlarge these intervals somewhat and to bend and variously deploy the tiny threads they encounter on their paths, according to the diverse ways they move and the diverse apertures of the tubes along which they pass. The result is that the animal spirits trace there too the figures that correspond to those of the objects. They do not always do so here as easily or as perfectly at the first stroke as they do on the gland//, but little by little they get better and better, as long as their action is robust and long-lasting or is reiterated several times. This prevents these figures from being readily erased, and conserves them there in such a way that by virtue of them the ideas that were formerly on the gland are able to take shape there once again long afterwards, without requiring the presence of the corresponding objects. And in this memory consists. Not only the sense organs, the tubes and the gland receive impressions, but so also do the animal spirits themselves. Whether they are stamped passively or somehow actively see and scan the figure on the 220

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gland, to which they are always looking back, as if awaiting a sign; whether, in other words, the animal spirits are more spectating spirit than branded animal; whether the spirits need the gland at all in order to see or to be impressed, inasmuch as they themselves have transported the figures there; whether the gland needs them, since it clearly has possession of the impressed figures; these are all arresting questions. The spirits' power to enlarge the intervals and to weave the threads into a picturesque tapestry is hardly surprising; what seems odd is that they should require threads to work on, and that their weaving and tracing should not always succeed at the first stroke. Since they have already transmitted the figure from the sense organ to the gland they are surely capable of remembering it well enough without the warp and woof of the threads, or at least well enough to weave them expertly. (Capable of remembering it? What am I saying?) In any case, the animal spirits should prefer the gland as their medium and stick with it, as it were. For the images are easier to apply there and more perfect in the execution. Why the spirits should peregrinate to region B (not how they do so, since clearly they remember the way), and why they should toil away at their own artistic education—these things too remain enigmatic. That the gland's future recollections depend on the images woven by animal spirits in the Ghobelin of memory is indisputable. Yet why the animal spirits should have to depend on the apparatus at all, and why the gland should have to rely on the journeyman weavers, we cannot ascertain. Descartes therefore illustrates. With an image. Not to be forgotten. He writes (853/178) that the animal spirits have the power 'to form certain passages' in the brain tissue 'which remain open' after sensation has ceased. Even if these passages should close they leave 'a certain disposition in the slender threads of the brain by which the route can be traced and reopened'. Descartes appeals to the image of a punch and the action of puncture or perforation (Figure 30), a particularly violent but strikingly efficient form of typography. Even after the punch is removed, the tiny holes in the stretched canvas drumhead perdure; or, if they should seal up again, the canvas still bears stigmas of the holes and a 'disposition' to reopen them. There is something odd about this image, both its canvas and its punch. Canvas is normally used for painted portraits, such as Franz Hals's likeness of the haughty philosopher. Yet here a punctuated pattern appears, not exactly a paintby-numbers canvas that guarantees a standardized and infinitely reiterable image, but a sort of child's sewing card. Or do the holes indicate that this model for memory is a kind of sieve, to be used, as Socrates would say, for milking billy-goats? Rather than continue with Descartes' account of the pineal gland in sensation and memory, let me summarize with the following three points: 221

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1. It is clear that the gland, the animal spirits and every other item of the apparatus is subject to the logic of supplementarity: all are essential to and yet utterly superfluous for Descartes' account. 2. That account presupposes everywhere what it most needs to explain, namely, why it should be necessary to call upon either a soul or a machine to read representations engraved on a gland: the account merely postpones all the essential problems, pushing them—as Schelling said in another context—'one step farther down the line'. 3. Descartes' protracted fiction is itself a mimetic effect of memory, rather than an explanation of it, and that effect is unlimited; it is not merely memory function and its various machine parts that prove to be superfluous but the soul itself, the soul 'as such'. Neither the petite glande nor the animal spirits nor the invisible soul knows what it is doing: the gland teeters and tips (miraculously) in the right direction, even though neither it nor the soul knows what is to be rememberd; the frantic tumblings of the animal spirits in the grand flea circus of the mind cause an image to form on the gland, the same gland that has only now spilled them; and the soul, the little man, dragged back in to render an account of himself, scans the illegible and illiterate gland and pronounces upon what neither of them will ever know. In so far as the soul needs the animal spirits—those ultimate oxymorons—and in so far as it needs the gland, it is just another piece of superfluous machinery. Lifeless. Death itself. Georges Bataille does not attribute his fixation on the pineal eye to Descartes' fictional physiology and philosophy. Seldom mentioning the name of his predecessor, Bataille freely admits that during the years 1927 to 1930 it obsessed him, first as a traumatic representation whose affective charge could not be abreacted, and then as the deliberately chosen central figure of a mythological anthropology. Yet another fiction. The power of that fiction may be felt in such texts as 'The Solar Anus' (1927), The Story of the Eye (1928), 'Thtjesuve' (1930) and 'The Pineal Eye' (circa 1930). I shall leave the first two texts to your private delectation, and comment here only on some portions of 'The Jesuve' and 'The Pineal Eye'.6 Bataille remains unabashed by the notion of an anthropology that uses science against science and that surrenders at various points in its complex textual economy to a 'series of images'. Images of what? Of 6

See Georges Bataille, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939, Allan Stoekl (ed.) (Manchester University Press, 1985), 74-90. In Bataille's Oeuvres completes, presented by Michel Foucault, 10 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1970 ff.), see II, 13-35. In my text I will cite the French pagination, then the English: See also the selections published in October 36 (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, Spring 1986). 222

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nothing less than the origins of the human species. However unjustified such surrender to images may seem, argues Bataille (22/80), the introduction of a lawless intellectual series into the world of legitimate thought defines itself at the outset as the most arduous and audacious operation. And it is evident that if it were not practised without equivocation, with a resolution and a rigour rarely attained in other cases, it would be the most vain operation. Images of the greatest intensity, an intensity measured against the revulsion the images arouse. And yet introduced by an explicit appeal to philosophy of both the epistemological ('rigour') and moral ('resolution', 'without equivocation') kinds. Bataille is obsessed with 'imperative prescriptions' (after the manner of Kant), developed in nothing less than 'a clear and distinct way' (in the wake of Descartes and his

esprits animaux). Bataille's images have relatively stable valences, and form relatively stable molecules, however caustic their action may seem. A note contemporary with 'The Pineal Eye' (260) expresses their collective aim: the images are to arouse in oneself a sense of 'what miserably miscarried at the beginning of the constitution of the human body'. That such miscarriage is the proper name for the birth of humankind Bataille does not doubt. Is unable to doubt. For all the force of the cogito and dubito is gathered in this distended pineal eye. Like Sandor Ferenczi's Z?.ssa;y on a Theory of Genitality (1924), with its pervasive catastrophism and its 'thalassal regressive tendency',7 Bataille's mythological anthropology is an account of phylogenetic tragedy, precarious survival, anguished adaptation, freakish permutation and ignominious selfrecognition. Its guiding image: an unpaired eye at the summit of the skull, the eye and its peduncle erect with blood from the heart and ramming the bone, groping for the aperture that was once there, erupting then like a volcano and exposing itself to a sun that will blind it utterly. That pressure on the skull and the eruption—Bataille knows it full well—are eminently anal, and the eye's anomalous urge to expose itself to the blue of noon purely autodestructive. And yet they follow a certain logic, perhaps the only logic there ever was, ascensional and architectonic. The pineal eye does not invent that logic, but suffers it. I have already mentioned Aquinas' article on the suitable disposition of the human body. The bulk of that article has to do with the erect posture of humankind, the vertical axis along which the species develops and in which it invests all its hopes. Humans apparently share 7

Sandor Ferenczi, Schriften zur Psychoanalyse, 2 vols, (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1972), II, 317-400. English translation, Thalassa.A Theory of Genitality, by Henry Alden Bunker (New York: Norton, 1968). 223

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that axis with plants, while animals move on the horizontal. Yet only apparently. The doctrine to be defended is Ecclesiastes 7:30, Deusfecit hominem rectum. (It is rectal, erectile man that obsesses Bataille and others both before and after him—one thinks of Lacan's 'Kant avec Sade' and its 'rectification of the position of ethics'.8) Anticipating Freud's famous notes at the beginning and end of chapter four of Civilization and Its Discontents? Aquinas recounts the necessary regression of man's olfactory sense before the upsurgent, groping intellect. The very face of man is itself erect, and like Descartes' mobile pineal it is able to turn freely, in order to scan the things 'both of heaven and of earth'. The brain is not oppressed under folds of flesh but is super omnes partes corporis elevatum. Thomas conjures the nightmare vision of a prone humanity, sacrificing its hands to the earth as forepaws, seizing food with its jaws which now jut forward, stretching the entire skull into a sickening oblong shape; in unstoppable devolution the lips and tongue toughen and grow hard, their mucous tissue now leathery and gross, lest these organs wound themselves on the jagged earth on which they scavenge. And how would this horned tongue wrap itself about speech, 'which is the proper work of reason'? No. Thomas knows, as after him Freud and Bataille will know it, that the human trajectory is upward. When therefore Bataille dreams excessively 'of leaving, in one way or another, the limits of our human experience' (15/74), those dreams are continuous with the dreams of all metaphysics and morals, resisting the same nightmare. Bataille, trained as a medievalist, would not object to the following extended quotation from the conclusion to article 3 of question 91, which begins with an astonishing paradox: And in so far as man has erect posture he is most remote from plants. For man has what is superior in him—namely, his head—turned towards what is superior in the world; and what is inferior in him is turned to the inferior part of the world. Thus matters are optimally disposed with a view to the whole. By way of contrast, plants turn what is superior in them to the nether world (for their roots are analogous to the mouth); and what is inferior they turn to the upper world. And the brute animals assume the middle position: for the superior part of animals is the part that takes in nourishment, whereas the lower part is that qua emittit superfluum. 8

See Jacques Lacan, 'Kant avec Sade', in Ecrits (Paris: du Seuil, 1966), 765. See also p. 779, 'Oeuvre ennuyeuse . . .'. 9 Sigmund Freud, Das Unbehagen in der Kultur (1930), in the Freud Studienausgabe, 12 vols (Frankfurt am Main; Fischer, 1982), IX, 229-230 and 235-236. See also letters 55 and 75 to Fliess, in Freud, Aus den Anfdngen der Psychoanalyse, Ernst Kris, (ed.) (New York: Imago, 1950), 198-199, 246-248. 224

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With the angelic doctor's image firmly in place, the image of the tree obscenely turning its nether parts to the sky, it will perhaps not be excessive to remark that the paradoxes of the pineal—even when the gland and eye remain unmentioned—extend far back in our history, from Hegel's philosophy of nature as developed in the Encyclopedia and in the 1805-06 lectures at Jena on Realphilosophie, back through Kant's Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View and Descartes' Treatise on Man, to Thomas, Thomas' Aristotle, Aristotle's Plato, and Plato's Timaeus. For it is the doctrine of Timaeus of Locri, the Pythagorean doctrine as recorded in Plato's Timaeus, that we recall when Bataille designates 'the summit of the head' as the 'focal point of the new equilibrium'. Corresponding to this focal point is the diminution of everything in the bone structure that 'goes against the vertical impulse of the human being', such diminution necessitating above all else 'the reduction of the projection of the anal orifice' (18/76). The energies of evolution (or of devolution, since these are undecidable where birth is miscarriage) tend rather towards the buccal orifice, towards the hypertrophy of the larynx, brain and eyes. Including, presumably, the pineal eye. Which is—for now we can see it, clearly and distinctly—the ultimate paradox: if for Descartes the diminution and volatility of the gland testify to the distance between humanity and bestiality, then that blind vestigial eye, that sordid gland exuding tears and worse than tears, has erected itself as a monument or memorial to the absurdly frustrated ascent of man. Bataille allows his fantasy to feed on 'discharges of energy at the top of the head', confessing—in an autobiographical vein reminiscent of Descartes' Discourse and Meditations—the following (19/77): . . . this eye that I wanted to have at the top of my skull (since I had read that its embryo existed, like the seed of a tree, in the interior of the skull) did not appear to me as anything other than a sexual organ of unheard-of sensitivity, which would have vibrated, causing me to emit atrocious screams, the screams of a magnificent but stinking ejaculation. You have seen and perhaps even heard those screams in the paintings of Francis Bacon, who read Bataille as Malebranche read Descartes;10 and you have felt that ejaculation, Descartes himself would insist, every time you have ever succeeded in remembering something or had what the Germans call an 'Aha-Erlebnis'. 10

I am thinking of a whole series of portraits from the mid-1940s to the mid1950s, e.g. 'Head I' (1948), 'Head II' (1949), 'Study for Portrait' (1949), 'Pope II'(1951) and'Chimpanzee'(1955). See also the analysis by Dawn Ades,'Web of Images', in Francis Bacon (London: The Tate Gallery, 1985), esp. pp. 12-15. 225

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Many paradoxes of the pineal eye remain to be explored. Yet I am short of time, and you perhaps of patience. No doubt I have allowed a sheer contingency to guide my reflections—the fact that two 'French philosophers' take up the pineal, the first as 'seat of the soul', the second as the symbol of the human malaise. You might well demand something more—an intrinsic connection, an historical thread, a necessity, a deduction—more than these paradoxes. All I can do is raise the question that seems to emerge in both cases: Why, where it is apparently the most hard-nosed of matters, namely, the rather shocking intervention of a coarse materialism into the discourse of rational psychology, why the upsurgence in both cases of fiction? Even if we feel confident that the fictions are quite different, that the circumstances in which they arise are quite diverse, are we satisfied that the paradox of hard science and soft fiction dissolves? Rather than insist on the question, however, I prefer to hand over the reins to Bataille. Who is, I know, himself the most wanton of steeds." Allow me to invoke a series of problems and paradoxes arising from the extraordinary text, 'The Pineal Eye', invoke them with very little commentary. Bataille distinguishes between the horizontal axis of everyday vision, which 'fetters' the human being 'tightly to vulgar things', and the pineal eye, which breaks through to 'a sky as beautiful as death' (26/83). It is as though Bataille were reiterating Heidegger's basic complaint: man, dazzled by beings, has no eye for Being. (I mention 11

I am grateful to A. Phillips Griffiths for provoking these thoughts on the limits of my undertaking here. Nor can I do justice to his suggestion that I take up the question of soul and body in Kant's paralogisms of pure reason (KrV, B 399ff.), especially the second paralogism, concerning the simplicity and incorruptibility of the soul—a simplicity and incorruptibility that are surely reminiscent of the petite glande in Descartes' system. Kant calls the doctrine of incorruptibility 'the Achilles of all dialectical deductions' (A 351), 'the cardinal principle of the doctrine of the rational soul' (A 356) and the 'mainstay' (A 361: Hauptstiitze) of rational psychology. Yet this central pillar is fissured, the cardinal or hinge is jammed, and Achilles has his heel. I shall refrain from comment on either the highly reduced and 'logicized' version in B, or the more expansive discussion in A, both of them much discussed in the literature, and shall merely pose two questions concerning Kant's introductory remarks to the paralogisms, remarks common to both A and B. First, if the 'I think' is 'the sole text', der alleinige Text (B 401), of rational psychology, do not body (Korper) and matter {Materie) come to intervene in The Critique of Pure Reason as a kind of fiction—a radically undecipherable text? Second, is it because matter is 'no thing-in-itself but only a representation in us' (A 360) that Kant envisages the monstrous possibility of an empirical psychology that would be 'a kind of physiology of the inner sense' (B 405)? Perhaps the text of rational psychology begins to suffer change already in Descartes' fiction? Perhaps what Bataille is attempting can be described as a physiology of the inner sense? 226

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Heidegger because, as coincidence would have it, 1930 is the year in which that thinker offered his one and only lecture course involving theoretical biology. It is also the year when Alfred North Whitehead was putting the finishing touches on Process and Reality. No pineal gland or pineal eye graces either account. Yet the central problem discussed in Heidegger's lectures, namely, the 'abyss of essence' that separates human beings from animals but also sets the two in relation to one another by virtue of the body, has much to do with vision and thus bears some relation to Bataille.12) Yet why an eye for 'Being'? Should not Bataille rather desire to have an eye out, as it were, for 'Being'? As though the acolyte of 'Being' has one eye too many perhaps? And why this complaint about the horizontal axis of vision, which 'fetters' us to the mundane? For is it not the pineal eye itself that embodies the ultimate vulgarity? The pineal eye, and not the highly differentiated eyes scanning the horizon, that expresses 'a misery all the more oppressive in that it is apparently confused with serenity' (27/83)? For the pineal gland, which remains 'in a virtual state' in the brain, can 'attain its meaning only . . . with the help of mythical confusion', the confusion that condemns nature and nature's humankind 'to a special existence'. Such confusion, we have said, originates at least as far back as Timaeus, for whom 'the universe of astronomy' is man's 'highest achievement', son terme (32/87); it is surely co-extensive with what Nietzsche identifies as the history of nihilism. Thus the 'vertigo-tree' envisaged by Bataille (27/84) would be the Porphyrian tree, the tree of metaphysics as portrayed by Descartes in a letter to Picot;13 and the pineal eye is the triangulated eye of Providence, with the triangle merely inverted and the eye, enucleated, only more wretched: Thus the pineal eye, detaching itself from the horizontal system of normal ocular vision, appears in a kind of nimbus of tears, like the eye of a tree, or rather like a human tree. At the same time, this ocular tree is only a giant (ignoble) pink penis, drunk with the sun and suggesting or soliciting a malaise: nausea, the sickening despair of vertigo. In this transfiguration of nature, during which vision itself, attracted by nausea, is torn out and torn apart by the sunbursts into which it sfares, the erection ceases to be a painful upheaval on the 12

More precisely, it is the second half of Heidegger's 1929-30 lecture course, 'The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World—Finitude—Solitude', that is relevant here. See volume 29/30 of the Martin Heidegger Gesatntausgabe (Frankfurt am Main: V. Klostermann, 1983), 273ff. See also the remarks on this course by Jacques Derrida and D. F. Krell in 'Reading Heidegger', Research in Phenomenology, XVII, 1987, passim. 13 Heidegger cites the letter (in AT, IX, 14) in his Wegmarken (Frankfurt am Main: V. Klostermann, 1967), 195. 227

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surface of the earth and, in a vomiting of flavourless blood, it transforms itself into a vertiginous fall in celestial space, accompanied by a horrifying cry (27/84). These images of a mutilation exceeding castration, irreducible to the Oedipal triangle, are very much continuous with images that are central to German Idealism, especially to Hamann and Schelling.14 They bring us to our most ingenuous formulation of the pineal paradox: Could it be that the 'mythical confusion' of the vertical axis itself is the source of all the pejoration and misery lavished here—the tears, ignominy, malaise, vertigo, nausea, the bloodletting and the fall—so that a more gentle return to the vestigial organ in dreamless sleep, superfluous but without ambitions, locked forever beneath the skull and pursuing its modest, altruistic endocrine function, would be something like the earthly salvation of the species? Perhaps that vertiginous fall and more gentle return is what that horrific section of 'The Pineal Eye' which Bataille calls 'The Sacrifice of the Gibbon' is really all about. It is not the ape alone that is inverted and that hideously erupts but—as though it were Kafka's urbane ape that is spinning the entire tale, as though it were precisely 'A Report for an Academy' (1919)—not the ape alone but also that spectral creature possessed of the pineal eye, possessed by it, obsessed with the essential mark of human devolution. If Bataille greets the eye with 'the unintelligible discharge of a burst of laughter' (32/87), such laughter is hardly triumphant, and not even malicious. The final lines of Bataille's mythological anthropology read as follows: . . . surrounded by a halo of death, a creature who is too pale and too large stands up, a creature who, under a sick sun, is nothing other than the celestial eye it lacks (35/90). If the superfluous pineal apparatus of Descartes' Treatise of Man in fact makes the rational soul superfluous, the pineal eye threatens to reduce the species man to Aquinas' superfluum. And yet during the past three hundred years Descartes' fiction has become the remarkably tenacious physiological science of our schools of medicine and village surgeries. Should we not, then, ladies and gentlemen of the academy, ape the history of modernity? Should we not agree here and now to return three hundred years hence, in order perhaps to fipd the obsessions of Georges Bataille—obsessions that evoke in us nothing so much as a burst of derisive laughter—to find those obsessions thoroughly pervading what by then we will no longer have the temerity to call the sciences of man? 14

1 am thinking of Schelling—and Schelling's use of Hamann—in the treatise On the Essence of Human Freedom (1809). See D. F. Krell, 'The Crisis of Reason in the Nineteenth Century', in Collegium Phaenomenologicum: The First Ten Years, Giuseppina Moneta, John Sallis and Jacques Taminiaux (eds) (forthcoming in 1989). 228

Notes on Contributors

Pascal Engel is Maitre de Conferences de Philosophic at the Universite des Sciences Sociales, Grenoble. He published Identite et reference (Presses de l'Ecole Normale Supe"rieure, Paris) in 1985, and bis Philosophic de la logique (Fayard, Paris) is forthcoming. J. J. Lecercle is Professor at the University of Nanterre. His Philosophy through the Looking Glass (Hutchinson) was published in 1985, and his Frankenstein: mythe et philosophic (Presses Universitaires de France, Paris) is forthcoming. Michele Le Doeuff is at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris. An English translation of her L'Imaginaire Philosophique (Editions Payot, Paris, 1980) is about to be published by the Athlone Press. Michel Deguy has published many volumes of poems and other works since 1959. His Donnant Donnant (1981) was published in English in 1984 {Giving Giving, UC Press). His latest book is Lapoesie n'est pas seule (editions du Seuil, Paris, 1987). Vincent Carraud is at the University of Paris XII. He is Secretaire of the Bulletin Cartesienne (Archives de Philosophie). Bruno Latour is Professor at the Ecole des Mines, Paris. His works include Laboratory Life (Princeton, 1986), Science in Action (Harvard, 1987) and The Pasteurisation of France (Harvard, 1988). Paul Ricoeur is Professor Emeritus of the University of Paris X. His many works include Freud and Philosophy (Yale UP), The Conflict of Interpretations (Northwestern UP), The Rule of Metaphor (Toronto UP), Time and Narrative (3 vols.: Chicago UP) and Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences (Cambridge UP). Richard Kearney, University Lecturer in Philosophy at University College, Dublin, is the author of many works on Irish culture and European philosophy, including Dialogues with Contemporary Continental Thinkers (1984), Modern Movements in European Philosophy (1986) (both Manchester UP) and The Wake of Imagination (Hutchinson, 1988). D. C. Barrett is Reader in Philosophy at the University of Warwick. Elie Georges Noujain is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Carleton College, Minnesota. 229

Notes on Contributors

Mary Tiles is retiring as Secretary of the Royal Institute, to take up a Visiting Professorship at Swarthmore College, Pennsylvania. Her Bachelard: Science and Objectivity (Cambridge UP) was published in 1984. Her article, 'A Science of Mars or Venus' appeared in Philosophy in 1987. David Wood, Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Warwick published The Deconstruction of Time (Humanities) in 1988. His article 'Derrida and the Problem of Strategy' is in Derrida and Differance (ed. Wood and Bernasconi, Northwestern UP, 1988). Gregory Elliott is the author oiAlthusser: The Detour of Theory (Verso, 1988). David Farrell Krell is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Essex. His Intimations of Mortality: Time, Truth and Finitude in Heidegger's Thinking of Being (Pennsylvania State UP) and Postponements: Woman, Sensuality and Death in Nietzsche (Indiana UP) were published in 1986, and On the Verge: Of Memory, Reminiscence and Writing will be published by Humanities Press International in 1989.

230

Index action, theory of, 99ff Althusser, L., 142, 195, 204ff Annalistes, 158, 171ff Aquinas, St. T., 224 Archives de Philosophic, 70 Aristotle, 99ff Aron, R., 214

empiricism, 2, 157 Engels, F., 200 epistemology, 43ff, 142ff, 157 ethics, 99ff deconstruction and, 177ff Nichomachean Ethics, 102, 105 existentialism, 124ff, 142, 181, 200ff

Bachelard, G., 141ff Balibar, F., 142 Bataille, G., 215, 222ff Beauvoir, S. de, 48, 123 behaviourism, 126 Bergson, H., 123 Bloch, M., 157 Bouveresse, J., 4, 13-17 Braudel, F., 157, 171 Brehier, E., 136 Brunschvigg, L., 128 Bulletin cartesien, 70

Fauconnier, G., 11 feminism, 42ff Ferenczi, S., 223 Foster, H., 121 Foucault, M., 118, 142, 157, 179 Frankfurt, H., 72 Furet, F., 157

Canguilhem, G., 141ff, 169 Caputo, J., 184 Cavailles, J., 142 Certeau, M. de, 157 Chaunu, P., 158, 171 Chomsky, N., 22 Comte, A., 2 Danto, A., 100 Davidson, D., 9 Deleuze, G., 21ff Derrida, J., 23, 46, 48, 115, 119, 143, 175ff Desanti, J.-T., 105 Descartes, R., 130, 140, 150-151, 215ff Descombes, V., 195 Dews, P., 175n, 183n differance, 184 Dilthey, W., 103 Donagan, A., 106, 109

Gardies, J.-L., 142 Gasche, R., 175 'genealogy', 157ff Gewirth, A., 107 Gilson, E., 72 Girard, R., 92 Goldstein, K., 128 Goodman, N., 179 Gouhier, H., 73 Granger, G., 7 Grice, H., 10, 24ff Griffiths, A., 226 Guattari, F., 21ff Hegel, G., 109, 157, 185 Heidegger, M., 60, 76, 79-81, 180, 184, 226 Henry, M., 76-78 Hume, D., 1 Husserl, E., 182, 190 Jacob, P., 4n, 18 Jacques, F., 7-10, 17 Jameson, F., 117 Jankelevitch, V., 50

231

Index

Jaspers, K., 106 Jencks, C , 114n Kant, I., 99ff, 144, 146, 182 Koyre", A., 73 Lacan, J., 27ff, 119, 224 Lachelier, J., 128 Ladurie, E., 157 LeGoff, J., 157 Lecourt, D., 156 Lefebvre, G., 157 Lefebvre, H., 205, 209 Les Temps Modernes, 125 Levi-Strauss, C , 204 Levinas, E., 180 Lucas, J., 108 Lyotard, J.-F., 48, 118-121 Maclntyre, A., 102, 103 Marion, J.-L., 73,78-81 Marxism, 124ff, 157, 195ff Merleau-Ponty, M., 123ff, 195ff Milne, A.E., 156 mind—body distinction, 130ff

Popper, K., 152 positivism, 2 post-modernism, 48, 113, 141, 215 genesis of 'post-modern', 114n praxis, 99ff, 201 Proust, J., 4n Proust, M., 103 Quine, W., 179 Rawls, J., 102, 108 Recanati, F., 10-11 Ricoeur, P., 186 Rod, W., 73 Rodis-Lewis, G., 73 Rorty, R., 15-16, 179 Sartre, J.-P., 123ff, 181, 182, 195ff science, history and philosophy of, 141ff Searle, J., 101, 192 Sebba, G., 70 Serres, M., 83ff, 156 Singer, P., 179 Taylor, C , 103

Nietzsche, F., 158, 169, 178 Pavlov, I., 128 phenomenology, 143 Pinter, H., 24ff

232

Watson, J., 126 Wittgenstein, L., 14-17, 127, 133 Wright, H. von, 100