Capital Times: Tales from the Conquest of Time (Theory Out of Bounds)

Capital Times

Sandra Buckley

Michael Hardt

Brian Massumi

THECB? OUT OF BOUNDS ...UNCONTAINED

BY

THE

DISCIPLINES, INSUBORDINATE

PRACTICES OF RESISTANCE ...Inventing, excessively, in the between... 6 Capital Times: Tales from the Conquest of Time 5

The Year of Passages

EricAlliez

PROCESSES

Reda Bensmai'a

4 Labor of Dionysus: A Critique of the State-Form Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri

OF

3 Bad Aboriginal Art: Tradition, Media, and Technological Horizons Eric Michaels 2 1

The Cinematic Body

The Coming Community

Steven Shaviro Giorgio Agamben

HYBRIDIZATION

Capital Times Tales from the Conquest of Time

Eric Alliez Foreword by Gilles Deleuze • Translated by Georges Van Den Abbeele

Theory out of Bounds

Volume 6

University of M i n n e s o t a Press

Minneapolis • London

The University of Minnesota gratefully acknowledges funding provided by the French Ministry of Culture for the translation of this book. Copyright 1996 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota Originally published as Les Temps Capitaux. Tome I, Re'cits de la conquete du temps. Copyright 1991 by Les Editions du Cerf. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Published by the University of Minnesota Press 111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290, Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper L I B R A R Y OF C O N G R E S S C A T A L O G I N G - I N - P U B L I C A T I O N DATA

Alliez, Eric [Recits de la conquete du temps. English] Capital times. Tales from the conquest of time / Eric Alliez ; foreword by Gilles Deleuze ; translated by Georges Van Den Abbeele. p. cm. — (Theory out of bounds ; v. 6) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8166-2259-0 (he). — ISBN 0-8166-2260-4 (pb) 1. Time. I. Title. II. Series. BD638.A3913 1996 115 —dc20 95-40926 The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer.

To the child from Chile

This page intentionally left blank

And then there is the matter of the highly improper manipulation of time. The shameful tricks, the penetration of time's mechanism from behind, the hazardous fingering of its wicked secrets! Sometimes one feels like banging the table and exclaiming, "Enough of this! Keep off time, time is untouchable, one must not provoke it! Isn't it enough for you to have space? Space is for human beings, you can swing about in space, turn somersaults, fall down, jump from star to star. But for goodness' sake, don't tamper with time!"

Bruno Schulz, Sanatorium under the Sign of the Hourglass

This page intentionally left blank

Contents

Foreword Cities Defence

xi

Introduction xv i ii

The Accident of Time: An Aristotelian Study The Time of Audacity: Plotinus 27

in

The Time of Novitasi Saint Augustine 11

iv

Fides Efficax ApOStil Notes

141

241 243

Bibliographical Indications Index

309

297

i

This page intentionally left blank

Foreword Gilles Deleuze

E R I C A L L I E Z is not out to expose conceptions of time or even to analyze temporal structures. He speaks about various conducts of time.1 It might be said that thought can grasp time only through a number of strides, which precisely compose a conduct, as if you were switching from one stride to another, according to determinable occurrences. Even more so, we will pass from one conduct to another, in different milieus and epochs, which relate the time of history with the thought of time. In short, multiple conducts of time, each of which reunites several strides. Within each conduct, certain strides become strange, aberrant, almost pathological. But it is possible that, in the ensuing conduct, they are normalized, or that they find a new rhythm they did not previously have. This introduction of deep rhythms within thought, in relation to things and societies, is perhaps what inspires Alliez's work— as we might see, for example, in the beautiful pages where he analyzes the historical and noetic difference between Cosmos and Mundus. Thus, a conduct of time as the number of the world's extensive movement. It is evident that strides change according to the moving body under consideration and the nature of the movement. There would be an encapsulation of times going from the originary to the derived, according to whether the moving body is more or less perfect, its matter more or less light in weight, its motion more or less reducible to cyclical compositions. But there would also be a decapsulation of time, according to whether its heavy matter faces contingency or linear accidents.

At the limit, an aberrant time undoes itself, becoming more and more linear, autonomous, abstracted from other strides, and sometimes falling and tripping. With meteorology, isn't such a time introduced into things? And with money, with "chrematistics," isn't such a time introduced into the community? Without a doubt, there is a world soul, and the soul is itself a world. Nonetheless, a mutation of thought is required for time to be defined as the cipher of the soul's intensive movement: this is a new conduct of time, with other strides. Originary time refers back to some synthesis carried out by the soul, which at every moment makes a distinction between present, past, and future. This differentiation of time implies a double movement of the soul that leans toward what comes after (procession) and turns back onto what is before (conversion). This conduct is less the motion of a sphere than the tension of a spiral. It could be said that time falls, a little the way light does, with an idealized fall (the intensive quantity or distance from the moment of zero) endlessly taken up in a return to the source. The closer one gets to zero, however, the more the stride changes, the more the fall becomes a real fall: a new aberrant time takes shape in which the spiral disappears in the froth, a time derived from distension that no longer lets itself be converted. Perhaps the order should be reversed, leaving from the derived in order to better aim at the originary, following yet another conduct, where the intensive becomes a kind of intentionality. The aberrant is reintegrated insofar as sin has founded a time of distension, of diversion, of diverting. The possibility of setting up an "intention" that gives back the originary depends on new strides that mobilize the faculties of the soul and inspire other rhythms in them—not only memory, but also perception, imagination, understanding. What new aberration will arise from this? The history of philosophy is a spiritual voyage; Alliez's originality is in marking the changes in conducts and strides at every stage. There is a provisional horizon to this voyage, and that is Kantian time: not as something foreseen, a goal, but as a line discovered at the end and of which a furtive segment here and there is at first only glimpsed. The pure line of time has become autonomous ... Time has shaken off its dependency on all extensive movement, which is no longer the determination of objects but the description of space, a space we must abstract for time to be discovered as the condition of action. Time also does not depend on the intensive movement of the soul—to the contrary, the intentional production of a degree of consciousness within the moment is what depends on time. With Kant, time ceases to be originary or derived, to become the pure form of inferiority, which hollows us out, which splits us, at the price of a vertigo, of an oscillation that

x i i, x i i i

constitutes time: the synthesis of time changes direction by constituting it as an insurmountable aberration. "Time gets unhinged": must one see here the rise of an urban linear time that no longer relates to anything but the given moment? Never does Alliez separate the processes of thought from those of things and of societies (rural communities, commercial towns, empires, cities, states). Or rather, things, societies, and thoughts are caught up in processes without which the conducts and strides would remain arbitrary. The force of Alliez's book is in discovering and analyzing such processes of extension, intensification, capitalization, subjectivation — processes that become something like the conditions for a history of time.

Foreword

This page intentionally left blank

Introduction

WHAT i present here is a history of the Conquest of Time, in the two senses of a genitive belonging both inside and outside the concept. Potential time and power time — the pure force of time shaking off its subordination to the world's movement, provoking aberrant movements of all kinds, and an abstract time, the instrument of all "machinations," the bearer, perhaps since the end of the Middle Ages, of the capture of being within representation. Let's take this up again, from the start. A start that would be a point of departure rather than of arrival, by putting the text back on stage in the chiasmus of research, between the beginning and the end, Marx and Aristotle. A kickoff: Read Marx reading Aristotle. At first glance, everything seems very simple. The author of Capital begins by saluting Aristotle as the genius of the great Greek Form, he who posited, formulated, if not founded, the postulate of exchange between equivalents. And Marx is not wrong, for this proposition in its anodyne demeanor is upheld not only by the whole of the Stagirite's political philosophy, but also by what is essential in his physics and metaphysics. What will be formalized as C-M-C (Commodity-Money-Commodity) is in effect par excellence a "natural movement" characterized by "need"—whose number is money— as "final cause." Whence a first aspect of time as the number of a natural movement

defined as a function of privileged moments (telos, akme): a "sublunary" time, near to itself in its political re-presentation, operating its declension of the community of needs in the mode of a reciprocity that makes the city subsist in a relation to otherness similar to the one that opens my own relation to myself. Let's say it is all in the same movement, political exchange regulated by commutative justice, real equalization according to that just measurement that corrects the aberrant movements that produce inequality; and self-presence, or "self-care" [souci de soi\\ subjectivation under the sign of an ethics that assigns to oneself (heautoi) the things that are noblest (kalos).1 Subjectivation and temporalization designate the intersecting of human action with time, where time is the occasion (kairos) for the just measurement (metrori). Marx's immediate critique follows in the wake of the classics and of modern metaphysics.2 Aristotle did not get to the foundation, to the essence of exchange that determines both its form and its content: labor, identified with the "common substance" of the two commodity objects — that labor without which one cannot penetrate into the economic sphere properly called (of exchange value), that abstract labor that underhandedly regulates the reality of exchange by definitively overcoming the qualitative plurality of different labors.3 From Aristotle to Marx, we have thereby passed from money, as a substitute for the social unit of need, to value, as the expression of the social unit of human labor. "It is only the commensurability of commodities as objectified labor time which converts gold into money."4 Labor time, the substance and measure of commodities, inscribes time as the matter and measure of equivalence. "Just as motion is measured by time, so is labor by labor time; it is the living quantitative reality (Dasein) of labor."5 What happens between Aristotle and Marx is the scientific revolution, which subordinates movement to time, now an independent variable; the industrial revolution happens, which no longer conceives the laborer as anything but labor time personified, as the quantitative determination of labor. Alienation or "aberration is now valid in itself and designates time as its direct cause."6 "Time is everything, man is nothing; he is, at the most, time's carcass. Quality no longer matters. Quantity alone decides everything: hour for hour, day for day."7 The very principle of a market economy, abstract labor is what creates exchange value, what imposes the law of equivalences without any other relation to use-values qualitatively defined and suited to needs. The most aberrant movement has become the everyday itself, the daily mastery of time. Here is found the old curse: money is time. "Remember that time is money," signs Benjamin Franklin. He is the founder of political economy.8

XVI ,XVI I

It is well known that this movement is not and could not be absent from the Aristotelian corpus. A subversion of the oikonomike founded on the teleological subordination of "exchange value" to "use-value," khrematistike is Aristotle's M-C-M. Money is torn from its political condition of mediating need to become the number of an artificial and convulsive movement. The infinite movement of accumulation is what empties the city of its self-presence by achieving the metamorphosis of goods into commodities; it is what scientifically converts time into the money form. Chrematistics is a poetic science, linked to "production," giving rise to an infinite and abstract product under the rubric of a wealth other than itself, apart from the oikos, where money replaces property, becoming an instrument of appropriating expropriation. Interest—what Aristotle calls tokos—would represent here the essence of all profit insofar as it incarnates the most aberrant movement, the one the most counter to nature (the inverted filiation, the monstrous filiation of money issuing from interest—"Tokos hie mali medium est" [Tokos is here the medium of evil], Ezra Pound repeats after the Scholastics), and insofar as it puts a price on time, which it serializes. Interest is the "homogeneration" of time, the register of an abstract, infinitely divisible time. The "sign" of a creative time, or rather the "producer" of simulacra that make use of kairos as an object,9 interest displays an empty form freed from this political presence and political finality that made beings coincide with self, and whose indefinite opening in the quantitative direction of chrematistics has a major effect on the Aristotelian text: the definition of chrematistic knowledge never comes to term. Is this because "those who maintain the infinite series destroy the very notion of the good," as Aristotle explains in The Metaphysics"? He specifies that such a practice signifies the ruin of all scientific cognition if nothing can be known before one arrives at the furthermost elements of the definition, which is cited to appear outside of time.10 The suspicion here is that Aristotelian science stumbles against what it indicates as being the first modern science by the speculation on time and infinity that it implies,11 precisely situating in this blind spot something like the final cause of the kineto-temporal unruliness of the sublunary world (economic and historical unruliness, but also physical and astronomical unruliness) where the status of time slips away as an indirect representation subordinated to motion and its conditions of "normality." In this way, the books of Aristotle's Physics— most especially book IV of the Physics, which contains the definition of time as the number of movement in relation to what is anterior and posterior—could constitute the Grundbuch of Western philosophy, as Heidegger says, by reason of

Introduction

the conjuring operation inaugurated by them upon the forehead (or the back) of time.12 Marx, on the other side of the great Kantian reversal, is a full partner in this history. His conception of a money commodity circulating within a world ruled by labor-value understood as substance-value (by the identification of Mehrarbeit with Mehrwert that the physiocratic idea of surplus implies), "a mirror outline of real unchanged events" (Bernard Schmitt) that consequently introduces no convexity, no convulsion in the economic field,13 reproduces alongside abstract time the conjuring away of that potential time, of that "creative" time, whose most tangible index is furnished by the existence of finance capital. Finance capital represents, says Marx, the form of capital empty of content; it is economic determination in its pure form, it signifies the reversal of the true order of things on the basis of which money as such is already potentially value becoming valued. Because it capitalizes the essential dissemblance of potential time, its empty form and its pure force, the critique of finance capital sums up the whole critique of capitalism. But does it not also crystallize, in the operative autonomy of its mechanical action, in the senseless efficacy of its nominalist structure, what Marx admired in capitalism? "The most intensive advance of historical development..." 14 Everything is reversed, for abstract, homogeneous time, the measure of the exploitation and subsumption of the socius under the regime of equivalence (time is this regime's very matter), is undoubtedly opposed to every idea of a creative duration, though it invokes creative duration as its natural complement (be it only for this: the subsumption of society has turned itself into the production of society}, just as a science calls on the metaphysics that founds it. This potential time appears in the Gmndrisse (which begins with a "Chapter on money," an exclusive form of value and not, as Capital will develop it, a special commodity), along with the conception of money as a process creative of wealth, a tautology of power, in which what has been previously presupposed posits itself and thus becomes the presupposition of what its condition was.15 The process so described can find its reason only in a theory of the subject/capital as logical apparatus of capture, in association with the isolating of a value relation that turns circulation, by reducing space to time, into the basis of production and reproduction.16 There, monetary exchange determines equivalence. Money presents itself, positively, as an "instrument of production," as "real metabolism," as "infinite continuity of process."17 Money—that is, the time productive of motion as quantity, along with the promotion of aberrant (alienating) motion, the ordinary perspective on time. "Time gets unhinged" because it has

xvi i i , x i x

overturned its subordination to the regulated movements it was measuring. It has become a pure order of time as the "purely formal distribution of the unequal in the function of a caesura" — of any kind.18 Aristotle had an inkling of this under the single name of khrematistike. By dint of zigzagging back and forth, while staying within a kind of circle (the threepoint circle Husserl describes at the beginning of the Krisis: the understanding of the beginnings, science as given in its present-day form, a development of meaning), everything has become clearer. A choice must be made between two great options. Either, by privileging the economic upsurge of potential time as abstract time, we are led to redeploy its genealogy from the point of view of its "pragmatics" (a modern theory of money) within the framework of a cartography of the existing (Marx is inevitably pivotal in this — but how can one manage its access without becoming an economist "for good"?), or else the problem of time must be posited as such, and the whole study must be reorganized as a function of its history, of that history that has unfolded within thought, within the world, according to times — need it be specified? — that are not necessarily the same. Engaging the "movement" through which being, in the West, has historically constituted itself as experience and as representation, as subject and as object, this study will urge genealogy, and along with genealogy the analysis of the practices of time, in the direction of an archaeology of potentiality. This archaeology would strive to account, within the very historicity of philosophy, for what commands the scene of modernity—and everything listed under that name— through a certain montage of calculated specularization between time and subject. (An entire economy is implied, from economic and political capture to the capture of being: always a de jure violence whereby this capture contributes to the creation of that over which it exerts itself, and time in the manifestation of its very strength as putting in crisis the notions of truth, of the real.) We must then dive in well ahead of our stated project, and clarify/or itself & third dimension, one of subjectivation, of the production of that subject without which mastery is inconceivable, insofar as dynamic, as pro-blematic, as pro-jection of the first two (temporalization and capitalization). Here, an inexhaustible dramatics is located: the subject as the drama of time having overturned its own foundation, time as the drama of the subject "carried away and dispersed by the shock of the multiplicity to which it gives birth."19 A subjectivity that is not ours but is time itself, taking both autonomy and subjectivity with regard to every anthropology in order to assure the hermeneutic place of its modernity.

Introduction

I will show that Aristotle discovered and covered over the irreversibly circular dimension of that process that draws humanity and the world into "the ultimate figure of the labyrinth, the labyrinth in a straight line," and that the "onto-cosmo-anthropological" structure of his thought (to use Remi Brague's expression) furnishes its most powerful indicator (chapter 1). His ontology is above all oriented by the cosmos, to pan kekesmetai: the Whole is organized! That is Aristotle's "cry" — by virtue of a movement rigorously contrary to the one described by Heidegger. If Aristotle's physics supposes acceding to the domination of the ontological paradigm of the said Vorhandenheit, it is to the extent that it resists it with all its force in the name of the cyclical perpetuation of the same in the presence of that which is most sovereignly present, of that which is cosmos.20 If, on the side of the subject, Neoplatonism truly marks the starting point for this interminable history by determining the action-image that triggered time altogether (chapter 2), that action-image is nonetheless Christian from end to end. For it would be nothing—a mere animation—without a dialectics of transcendence (chapter 3) capable of actualizing it in the world, which no longer retains its principle of organization within itself, and of interiorizing it within a consciousness: theo-logically, upon the paradox of distance, unwinding its thread at the first commandment. So it is: in a single, long, forever Augustinian sentence without caesura, the ex nihilo creation creates not only the Earth but also that world of the Commandment regulated in its exteriority by the creator's order. If we dared: the dynamics of transcendence would be the red thread of abstract time, already in the sense that there will no longer be any primary matter that is not determined by (the unitary mechanism of) the Idea (of God), that is not credited to that idea's foresight and "calculation." By dint of representing this idea in the direction of its completed advance, late medieval philosophy gives its most precious and decisive "coloration" to a critical age whose subterranean force and pulsations echo well into the scientific revolution of everyday time (chapter 4 and also to be discussed further in part II of the second volume of this work, still forthcoming), up until the transcendental elevation and normalization of this time, which attains with Kant the rigorous definition of a formal, empty order, representable in terms of set and series. This is the ordinary time of the most aberrant movement, the crushing ensemble of dailiness itself, the most pitilessly straight line that splits the ego, equalizing it to the unequal in itself, revealing it in its finitude by a burst that disperses and reassembles it, that summons it to the foundation of an order that authorizes itself by the transcendental truth of its power (volume 2)—that summons it to Power's transcendental foundation in Knowledge. Is neo-Kantianism the last word [le fin mot] of

xx,xxi

this story (and Hegelianism, the word of the end [le mot de la fin]: from the law to the state as possibilities of self-consciousness), making Platonism rhyme with socialism under Hermann Cohen's pen?21 What is secretly in question here, in a correspondence that is complex but analyzable point by point, is the abstract machine of capitalism, and the capitalist analytics of totality (the subsumption of the world) when totality is presupposed at every moment (the synthesis of being as method), while "the sensible real becomes existent \wird seiend] within the law."22 "The sovereign potential of thought over being, which no absolute force can oppose," comes down to the axiom "thinking is calculating." For "progress, method is everything":23 function. So it is that I have decided in favor of the second "archaeological" option. Not without having long pondered the difficulties of the task, of which the most immediate and at first glance nearly insurmountable one is the impossible delimitation of the field to be explored except by what institutes philosophy as history. Vertigo. For if reason and just good sense impose a limit to the risks of the enterprise by the attempt to restrict the amount of material at whatever cost, the conditions of the problem dictate their own necessity. With this first bit of self-evidence, it also became clear that only by following a "long temporality" is one capable of producing the progressive determination of the genetic and objective conditions for a proposition of the following type: between the subjectivation of time and the temporalization, constitution of the subject, a line of force passes that forms the intrinsic genesis of the Western experience even in its deviations. If there is a tautology in the way the problem is determined, it is in the very principle of our story with its complex theme of discontinuities functioning against the backdrop of a "differential" continuity that in its closing moments is able to "integrate" the hegemonic development of capitalism taking place only in the Christian West. On this basis, it seemed to me that farther reflection was required. This continuity was no longer separable from an ideal complementarity without which, I believe, the research would have rapidly come to a halt. On the one hand, the consciousness that only one "itinerary" could be traced out of the set of remarkable points that form the historico-critical24 conditions of the problem; on the other hand, evidence of a distribution of the singular and the regular over the initial corpus of the problem, but also and more fundamentally, particular evidence of time's abstract line, representative as such of the sole singularities selected by that line in order to determine them. Inside the field of singularities, then, the distinction is exerted between the ordinary (according to convergence) and the remarkable (according to their divergences).25 Now, oddly, what we find at the same time all but defined there is the ordinary practice of Christianity in its "axiomatic" func-

Introduction

tion of converging what essentially diverges, its aspect as nexus; along with the exemplary relation of Christianity to Neoplatonism, when Christian theology is given birth to by a capturing operation that makes operational in the world (and hence "ordinary") the ("remarkable") utterances of the extraworldly individual. If something was getting knotted together here, which would determine the economy of times to come (the dynamics of transcendence), the outline was, so to speak, all traced out, at least in terms of what would have to be confronted: Plotinus and Augustine, rupture, capture; the theological age, foundation; and at the end, all the way at the end, of the dynamics of transcendence, when the Copernican revolution was complete, was the Kantian critique, which leads to an epistemology that relates the two great axes of power and knowledge that were united by the scientific revolution back to the question, Was ist derMensch? What, finally, is the Subject outside of all intuitus originarius'? A purely logical function, the neoKantians would answer, with the autoaffection of the self as giving the definition of time in a way inseparable from the transcendental genesis of the object as something "given," and of Idea as a Method that rejects the sensible as a principle... the reverse in some way of the Augustinian "montage." Put this way, the question of time led me into an inquiry that could be "foundational" only by confronting an unfounding (effondement)— to use Deleuze's word—dimension, which to my mind would be inseparable from the critical labor of thought upon its own history. This critical labor takes place as soon as thought, in the construction of its objects, faces up to its essential relation with an Outside that nonetheless, insofar as it implies a becoming of forces, ought to be distinguished from just any state of things ("Es gibt keinen Tatbestand").26 In a text presented as a kind of philosophical last will and testament, Michel Foucault found the most exact words to speak of the "only kind of curiosity... which is worth acting upon with a degree of obstinacy: not the curiosity that seeks to assimilate what it is proper for one to know, but that which enables one to get free of oneself."27 By way of this "curiosity," I arrive at the third motif (after the self-evidence of the path to be taken, and its essentially limited aspect: in sum, a matter of evaluating the passage on its own grounds), which urged me to leap ahead and try out what follows. It comes down to a single word: apprenticeship. Learning to construct one's own problems, to discern the remarkable from the ordinary, to try out new ways of thinking our present, to recognize and cultivate the part of intuition that generates every philosophical assertion, to create for oneself an ethics that lets one get lost in the labyrinths of true/false and strong/weak games, to prepare the first drafts of a thought still to come (this thought determines the mobile

XX II , X X I I I

element of work at present), and tirelessly to work out the questions by relating them to the Idea that envelops them. It seems to me that there is, and ought to be, a little of all this in one's first philosophical essay, and this alone could make acceptable, if not necessary, the "gap between the work, the time spent in ascesis, and the result attained."28 When a problem is sufficiently insistent to keep reinstigating your research in new directions and to increase your "curiosity," what other choice is there but to pursue the agenda of its variations by attempting to forge, while on the road if necessary, the tools needed for the trip... and with advice, as much as possible, from the best guides? Gilles Deleuze, whose teaching and friendship have constantly stimulated my "studies," helped me and guided me throughout these years with unequaled availability and attentiveness. Isabelle Stengers gave me her remarks and criticisms after reading different versions of this work; the seminar we ran together, first at the College International de Philosophic, then at the Universite Europeenne de la Recherche, was the occasion for confrontation and renewal of this essay's every moment.29 After the thesis had been defended, Maurice de Gandillac was willing to reread the medieval chapter with extreme care; Barbara Cassin read the Greek chapters. Jean-Francois Courtine brought me the aid of his precious advice for the final drafting of the manuscript. Luiz Costa-Lima, Michel Feher, Barbara Glowczewski, and my trusty counselor Yves Lemoine helped bring the work to completion with their suggestions. When the book was ready, Heinz Wismann befriended me by welcoming this impossible history of philosophy into the prestigious series he edits. Finally (because I cannot mention everyone, in France and in Brazil, who was involved one way or another in this work), Felix Guattari, through his complicity, his encouragements, and his questions (in particular after the meetings of the seminar on schizoanalysis), accompanied the production of this book from beginning to end. Together, we finalized the chapter titles and headings. Capital Times refers to those capital sins whose root, Augustine would say, is Avaritia, radix omnium malorum, understanding by that a certain "avarice of the mind" that comes from the knowledge of temporal things, and that also takes the form of the science of time, that time precisely that does not belong to God, following the formula echoed against usurers throughout the Middle Ages, those "instigators of capitalism," "merchants of the future, sellers of time."30 "Et ita vendit tempora Dei... Sed tantum tempus quod Dei est..." Since Jacques Le GofPs magnificent study, we know what unrestrained use the usurer made of the concept of purgatory, in what is beyond, in God's time if it exists, a time endowed with some rather strange

Introduction

qualities: variable, linear, segmented, measurable, and above all "manipulable" by the thread of a fantastic accounting. Time becomes the element most explicitly susceptible of being measured,31 the object par excellence of the arithmetical logic presiding over the calculation of punishments. Thus, it is not only by allowing the usurer to be saved that purgatory contributed to the birth of capitalism, but also and above all by God's time becoming practically indiscernible from the usurer's time. In effect, if purgatory becomes an annex of earth and effaces every clear demarcation (a poet revealed the great action of usura in this regard),32 if it has only one outlet, then it opens out not onto paradise but onto the everyday itself. This is very logical, we can agree, as soon as the birth of purgatory is inscribed into the heart of that movement of salvation in the world that reaches its climax with ascetic Protestantism's "ethics of profession," as soon as its system appears on the horizon of the "ethics of conviction" and the promotion of intention (the "analysis of intentions") that must have brought about the great change of aural, individual, and private confessions, which opened up the "pioneer frontier" of introspection and personal responsibility ("these were the beginnings of psychological modernity").33 In the immanence here of a religious, social, and historical axiology whose effects can be pinpointed immediately, Capital Times can be seen to mean the nexus between temporalization, capitalization, and subjectivation. It belonged to the logic of things that the form of the expression tended to espouse the singularity of each of these "knots," the stride of each of the examined conducts of time. I did not think that the whole ought to be homogenized after the fact by a single system of writing and organization.

This page intentionally left blank

O

N

E

The Accident of Times An Aristotelian Study

Many the wonders, but nothing Beyond man, more strangely, gets up to go. . . . the oldest and most primitive

Sophocles, Antigone

personal relationship is that between buyer and seller, creditor and debtor: it was here that one person first encountered another person, first measured oneself against another.

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals F O R A moment, we stayed within a kind of circle... the circle of the understanding of beginnings and the development of sense that left no other choice: we had, in HusserPs terms, to "zigzag" backward and forward. Between Aristotle and Marx, Marx and Aristotle, from the greatest violence to the highest anxiety, our understanding of the beginnings gave shelter to a certain abstract figure of time, both anodine and excessive, mysterious and anonymous, a certain insubordination of capital time freed from the planetary rule that presided over the destinies of the world and over the destiny of the Greek polis.

Our task is already laid out before us if no circle closes upon itself without every completion representing the possibility of a deviation, without constituting a circuit bifurcating itself in the difference of its repetition. Our task is to be situated at the point of time's bifurcation in order to let it roll [pour que c,a se deroule]. In order that the circle (of time, of the search for lost time, too) face up to the question that triggered the departure: that the history of the conquest of time be brought out as a form of the most radical change, that the genealogy of capital/time be brought out as the archaeology of the metaphysical figure (eidos) of "capitalism" (it will have to be shown too, of course, that capitalism is a metaphysical figure) — a geology of modernity. In its beginnings, this movement is expressed in the irreversible mode of a provocation of what is unequal in and of itself. It is the convulsive movement of what does not come back to itself, the specter of what does not come back into itself, thereby breaking the natural motion of need that had bodied forth in the notion of reciprocity that led to exchange, and from exchange to the polis — thereby drawing the entire astrologies of the Same into an abyss of dissimilarity.1 M-M'. After money understood as the number of need, the mediator of an exchange that compensates for divergences from the equilibrium (C-M-C) insofar as the unit of measure is "in truth" the need that holds and maintains all things together (panta sunekhei);2 after a time subordinate to the circulation of commodities as to the circular motion of celestial bodies, the spare change of cosmic exchanges, always defined by the manner in which it incarnates privileged moments and positions (according to Henri Maldiney's expression, it opens no other horizon than that of a future foreclosed by the enclosure of time), there succeeds a time seized by a certain "something" forever new that grows in its heart (the briskly increasing number of capitalization) and throws the economy of the spheres off balance. A potential time that submerges and forces movement, which projects and dissipates it in the labyrinth of homogeneous and irreversible series. An abstract and creative time that, for having forsworn its supralunary content, for having overturned its model of eternity, and for having espoused the eis apeiron progression of chrematistics, no longer finds its rule in the motion of the world and imprints its own unruliness [dereglement] upon it. The situation develops to the point that movement itself is what becomes abstract, what relates to any given moment at least virtually, what is no longer—as Plotinus will assert after he had considered movement to be completely defined at every moment—"linear or circular except by accident." This is the time of dislocation. The earthly sphere is dislodged.

2,3

This is the time of the world crisis marked by a break in the harmony between soul and world. This is the time of the great uprising against the cosmic order that "held" the multiple anomalies of the sublunary world under the sway of the metaschematism of the Planetarium only by curving movement in such a way that local motion passed through set points and planes (the cosmo-theological framework of the Timaeus that underlies the Physics);3 the uprising against the "economic" order, too, which joins — and enjoins — the members of the koinonia by making them gravitate around the meson (the ontopolitical adjustment of the Nicomachean Ethics). From this disintegration on, Aristotelian thought could not avoid inscribing the principle of Order into the heart of the corpus.4 Whence, already, the enigma so often reiterated that the stated theorist of the polis surfaced at the moment of its dissolution. Yet Aristotle was also the first about whom it could legitimately be asserted that his ontology was wholly a politics of being. Under the name of ousiology, he mounted a general economics of value opposing the truth of things to the crisis initiated by chrematistics and relayed by the Sophists: words and coins no longer refer to themselves, within the determination of a generative economy of the sign opening onto the sole regimen of linguistics and economics. Chrematistics or Unequal Exchange

What about the system of this practice for the Aristotle of the Politics, for the Philosopher grappling with the "chrematistic" subversion of a mercantile economy that detaches wealth from property, wrenches money from its mediating condition, withdraws exchange from the law of equivalence to derive a profit from it—that substitutes interest for the social unit of need, the natural referent of the monetary sign?5 Here, on the surface of the Aristotelian narrative, arises the untimeliness of a hybrid science, without regards or moorings, distinguishing itself from the oikonomia ruled by use-value inasmuch as that circulation becomes the source of a limitless monetary wealth: "money is the beginning and the end of this kind of exchange" (emphasis added), the M-C-M cycle. A science of money whose bad infinity haunts the organicity of the body politic by unsettling the postulate of exchange between equivalents. Aristotle seems not to rest until he has accentuated the line of fracture between oikonomia and the art of acquisition that "being nearly connected [dia ten geitniasin} with the preceding is often identified with it [the confusion between these two forms is what has caused some to think that the acquisition and infinite accretion of money is the final goal of the economy]. In fact [as though he were

The Accident of Time: An A r i s t o t e l i a n Study

correcting himself]; although they are not very different, neither are they the same [esti d'oute he ante tei eiremenei oute porro ekeines]. The kind already described is given by nature; the other is not [esti d'he men phusei he d'ou phusei auton], but rather is gained by experience and art [tekhne]."6 Could this last clause, however, not justify in and of itself the radical alterity of chrematistics? Did the Stagirite, in a polemic against Solon, not take care to specify that the quest for and establishment of an unlimited wealth did not in any case signify the accumulation of a "true and natural" wealth obtained through excess, and diverted from its instrumental role (the role of action in the service of praxis, of good living) with a view to the satisfaction of needs in the happy life of the oikos'?7 Is the other nature of this wealth what implies the expulsion of chrematistics from domestic economy, removed from the natural place where all property comes to be inscribed? What sense can be given, then, to this impossible affinity, if it is indeed a break that cuts open the text? This break, this opening, already falls as an effect whose apparatus can be readily summarized. As opposed to domestic economy, which, as a practical knowledge tied to a praxis limited to the time of the act, has its own end in itself, chrematistics appears as a poietic or productive science, turned toward the production of a work external to the agent, with no inferiority at all. Whence the infinite character of the production of its end, that is, the product (wealth "scientifically" produced through an action becomes means of production, endowed with a time proper to it), if infinity is that which "taking it quantity by quantity, we can always take something outside."8 The man ofpoiesis being always as if outside himself is the reason why he must find in the order of knowledges the absolute end that will circumscribe his relative end within the organic unity of the nomos, of the isonomia, (by) assigning him his natural place.9 His very definition is at stake. Now, the quest for a definition of chrematistics undertaken in the Politics does not succeed: remaining shapeless, chrematistics will occupy no rank within the hierarchical order of knowledges and acts. Shapeless, because the form of a thing is what it has that can be bound or set upon within a definition (logos). How can the limits of something that has no limits be defined? (It can already be seen that chrematistics recuperates something of the indetermination and ungraspable potential [dunamis] of the primal hule, of the "Urhyle," casting into the logically ordered series of natural forms those monstrous productions by which the resistance of becoming manifests itself.) Is this because "those who maintain the infinite series destroy the good... Further, those who speak thus destroy knowledge" (nothing can be known before arriving at the furthermost and indivisible elements of a definition)?10 It is tempting to say that from the Aristotelian perspective this problem is posed for every art and every technique.

4,5

We are obliged to return to the letter of the text of the Politics if we wish to grasp the disjunctive function in action as it works out the triage between the no-place of chrematistics and the hearth of economics: [Exchange] arises at first from what is natural, from the circumstance that some have too little, others too much. Hence we may infer that retail trade /kapelike/ is not a natural part /kata phusin/ of the art of getting wealth; had it been so, men would have ceased to exchange /allage/ when they had enough... This sort of barter /metabletike/ is not part of the wealthgetting art and is not contrary to nature, but is needed to satisfy the natural /kata phusin/ wants of our self-sufficiency /autarkeia/. The other form of exchange grew logically /kata logon/ out of this one. When the inhabitants of one country became more dependent on those of another, and they imported what they needed /eisagesthai hon endeeis/, and exported what they had too much o//ekpempein hon epleonazon/, the use of money /he tou nomismatos khresis/ necessarily /ex anagkes/ came about. For the various necessities of life are not easily carried about, and hence men agreed to employ in their dealings with each other /pros sphas autous/ something, which being intrinsically useful / khresimon/, was to have the use [ khreian/ of easily changing hands /eumetakheiriston/ in order to get the necessaries of life, for example, iron, silver, and the like. Of this the value was at first /to men proton/ measured simply by size and weight, but in process of time /to de teleutaion/ they put a stamp upon it, to save the trouble of weighing and to serve as a sign /semeion/ of the amount of the metal. When the use of coin had once been discovered, out of the barter of necessary articles arose the other art of wealth-getting, namely, retail trade /kapelikon/; which was at first probably [isos] a simple matter, but took on a more professional air /tekhnikoteron/, as soon as men learned by experience whence and by what exchanges the greatest profit /kerdos/ might be made. Originating in the use of coin, the art of getting wealth is generally thought to be chiefly concerned with it, and to be the an which produces riches and wealth.^ Chrematistics properly called would thus issue from a retail trade (kapelike} initially limited to the sphere of needs able to be inscribed on the autarchical body of the koinonia, a small-time commerce that, if it is not originarily derived from a counternatural art of acquisition, probably (isos) never existed under a nonchrematistic monetary form. Let's pause here over the purely economic explanation of the origin of money. The invention of money as an accounting unit, as a means of circulation, metron and meson, would be determined by the growth of the city insofar as it makes distant trading a necessity in order to compensate for the impossibility of a collective autarchy, the sine qua non condition of political freedom and autonomy.

The Accident

of Time: An A r i s t o t e l i a n

Study

This traffic in foodstuff remains "natural" because it allows for the reestablishment of a self-sufficiency that is not at all self-sufficient, with the provisioning of "the various necessities of life." Thus Aristotle, like Marx, has money (nomisma) born of the exchange between communities.12 But, in distinction to Marx, far from having money crop up spontaneously from direct barter, Aristotle defines it in terms of a convention (nomos) between collectivities designed to facilitate their commercial relations. Expressed in the briefest possible way, this is the meaning of that development that assimilates monetary "constraint" to the delimitation of a general space of circulation and comparison spilling beyond the sovereign territory of the polis. "We grasp here," comments Edouard Will, "the contradiction between the introverted existence of the city (requiring autarchy) and the condition for this existence, a broadly extroverted economy (the negation of this autarchy)."13 Let's say the principle of a conflicted reality situated beyond the sphere of justice, for political autarchy is an ideal impossible to be realized given that "complete autarchy" exists only "as a manner of speaking."14 It remains to be known if the self-evidence of the model stifles all answers to the question of the passage of the kapelos in the chrematistic sphere of monetary accumulation, for everything takes place as if the "transpolitical" use of money contained its own mainspring, though a hidden one, veiled to some extent by the text's "evolutionary" dimension. The question is obvious: what about the sovereignty of money as a means of circulation? A second answer, perhaps just as secretly Aristotelian as Marxian: money turns value into a flow that tends to escape the juridical frame of political territoriality. In other words, money aims to trace out its proper space as a private space, split off from the political. (Just read Solon, Lysias, or Demosthenes, or consider Athenian legislation on the provisioning of wheat.) Would it be because the function of money as a mere medium of exchange (as an intermediate term: the opposite of an end) is essentially precarious from the moment the apparatus opens onto time, "as long as the sale is not followed by a subsequent purchase," because "no one directly needs to purchase because he has just sold"?15 As opposed to barter, monetary circulation splits the immediate identity of these two acts by introducing the antithesis of selling and buying, which appear as mutually indifferent, separate in space and time. The linkage C-M-C should really be written C-M/M-C. "And for future exchange [huper de tes mellouses allages]" writes Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics, "if we do not need a thing now [ei nun meden deitai], we shall have it if ever we do need it [ean deethei] —money is as it were our surety [egguetes]."16 Thus, under the cover of need, money as a means of reserve, as a temporal reserve, maintains the initiative for its holder in relation to the reverse

6 ,7

circulation of M-C/C-M, M-C-M in its condensed expression. Money mediated in relation to itself via the commodity appears in the final analysis as its own unit. The "dissociation" of exchange, along with the stocking of commodities and monetary accumulation, is precisely what allows for speculation and the quest of autonomous value for its own sake, reflected in the mirror of the commodity representing nothing more than money, which turns exchange into a rather odd affair whose essence is dual (a duel). It is a duality before being an equivalence, in which the reversal of the means/end relation creates the order of merchants by opening up the duration of the durable. Thus we can verify that "the buying power of money expresses the temporal dimension of circulation when it takes the C-M-C form... Consequently, the ambivalence of money is expressed by the irremediably conventional character of all measures of its buying power. What is essential is found in the reactions this measure is capable of triggering in private behaviors."17 In this use of money to speculate on a future result, "forever banking upon future profits" (Marc Bloch) rather than discharging the accounts of need, the emporos (the sea merchant, who is never mentioned here) has nothing to begrudge the kapelos. The emporia is kapelike: what differentiates the two forms of exchange is the scale of operations, not the mode of functioning, which inevitably works "to someone else's detriment" (ap'alleloi, negative reciprocity) in subverting and alienating the mediator.18 This is at the opposite pole from the model on which the development of the Nicomachean Ethics rests, grafted on justice, of which we are told that it has probably (isos) never been verified under a nonchrematistic monetary form. In following the convention of reserve, it is soon discovered that money, which appears as a sign only insofar as it itself is wealth, the market value of the metal, and the metal's affect (the sign of the amount of the metal that is "not always worth the same"19), is — probably—never a mere means of circulation, a practical guarantee of the circularity of exchanges and of the equivalent form of money as the measure of values, a pure homogenizing convention that makes goods commensurable in view of satisfying needs and harmoniously developing exchanges. Under ideal money is real money, money properly called, the infinite potential of money that "measures all things" because it is the measure of all things, just as man is for the Sophist Protagoras.20 "It is in the world market," writes Marx, "that money first functions to its full extent." It is in the exchange between city-states, Aristotle tells us, that the money form mediatedly arises. That social potential thus becomes the private potential of individuals under the cover of political affirmation.21

The A c c i d e n t of Time: An Aristotelian Study

On the one hand, the genesis of money proposed by Aristotle is commanded by this "needy," chreiatistic (from khreia: need) exteriority for which money is the conventional substitute. On the other hand, the money form, introduced with the appearance of "international commerce," does away with all considerations about the needs of others,22 the only guarantor of the virtue of exchange, of exchange as a social bond... all of which at one stroke comes down to explaining money through chrematistics and chrematistics through money. It is as if money had never been a mere means of exchange, as if its function as "common measure" was legitimating in advance, behind the formal equality of the terms made commensurable, the inscription of an infinite debt turning virtually every exchange into a means of monetary production and appropriation and all money into money "with interest," into time-money, and turning all wealth that escapes its natural place, the oikos, into "progressive value, money that is forever burgeoning and growing, and, as such, capital." From there, every "economic" exchange is turned into a "chrematistic" exchange. As exaggerated as it may seem at first glance, couldn't this deduction—in some way: pos—account for the progression that led Aristotle to "struggle against the common opinion according to which money is the common measure," "to stress that money passes for a middle term, which it really isn't," because in truth (tei aletheiat) need is the only common measure?23 This equivalence nonetheless remains insufficient, for it is capable of engendering the illusion of a first (?) dialectical representation of the money form. (Through Boisguillebert, we know of the slave of commerce who becomes its master, or rather its tyrant; and under Marx's pen, the valet acceding to the title of sovereign and God of commodities: chrematistics always appears as the perversion of the alienated mediator.) To resume my thoughts into one formulation: one hesitation may hide another. It is thereby to be understood that if Aristotle "hesitates," it is not before the problem of the commensurability of use-values (he elaborates a theory of need irreducible to every classical approach to the measure of value outside of exchange).2* If Aristotle himself tells us where "he falters," to use Marx's expression, it is not before the insufficiency of his concept of (exchange) value, but before the concept of use (value) as the foundation for a political-economic exchange (C-M-C) whose historicity becomes hypothetical in the course of attempting to define chrematistics.25 To the point that if "they are not very different," it is perhaps not so much because chrematistics appears as the threatening reverse side or the emancipated form of economics, but rather because the political science of exchange locates its principle only in the (de)figuration dictated by the critical imperative.26 It

8,9

must be noted here that by following out Aristotle's track, the entire Marxist analysis of Spaltung turns out to be affected at the very level of this immediate form of circulation; it is opened up to the efficaciousness of the Critique, for which "the inequality of exchanged values is but an accident."27 Riding Backward on the Beast of Time

At the point of concluding the chapter of the Politics dedicated to chrematistics, Aristotle introduces a new element into the analysis: The most hated sort of trade, and with the greatest reason, is usury, which makes a gain out of money itself, and not from, the purposes it was meant to serve. For money was intended to be used in exchange, but not to increase at interest. And this term interest, which means the birth of money from money /tokos: born, engendered] is applied to the breeding of money because the offspring /ta tiktomena/ resembles the parent. That is why of all modes of getting wealth this is the most unnatural.2*

Thus tokos, interest, whose root tek- evokes the son being called by the name of the father, cuts itself off from the order oiphusis and of natural reproduction to become the symbol of a monstrous filiation. If money does not engender interest but is engendered by it in some fashion, doesn't that invert the Just Relation of Generations? Isn't the child giving birth to the procreator? Money would not only be, as Shakespeare believed, an agent of divorce between son and father (a factor of dissolution) but more originarily a factor of filial inversion. Interest would thus appear to be the operator of this counternatural filiation that diverts money from its "economic" origin by establishing, under the pretext of differed exchange, a debt taking the form of a monetary creation — money engendering money. In this sense, interest would resume the chrematistic exchange to the extent that it forcibly (biaios} gives the initiative to money.29 Profit-creating capital would be but a derived form of interest-producing capital. In short, chrematistic techniques would obey what we call banking techniques. Arnaud Berthoud warns that this is a strange and difficult idea to grasp, for it immediately must be added that interest would no longer be discernible solely at the moment of borrowing: it would be intimately bound to every use of money detached from its normative function as intermediate term (meson} understood as the simple monetary expression of equivalence. Tokos would be the name given here to the device transforming exchange into an activity of "scientific" production whose effects the Politics has taught us to measure. Detaching money from its political condition of mediation, this activity mobilizes and expropriates wealth,

The Accident of Time: An A r i s t o t e l i a n Study

monetarizes and dissolves ancient property, completes the metamorphosis of goods into commodities, and finally converts reciprocity into mutual debt. Interest is no more than the number of the movement of (monetary) growth following the desire for money that binds individuals to each other in the radical injustice of a debt that nothing can acquit. As cipher of desire, interest imposes "that relationship to objects, which we call subjectively our desire and objectively their value."30 As number of the simulacrum, interest operates in a world of exigencies at once impersonal and interpersonal. Berthoud writes that "growth is just the effect of a game of desire with money," and interest "the product of measuring currency by the desire for money."31 Interest is the effect of a disproportion establishing inequality in terms of a caesura by which the permanence of money no longer coincides with the social presence of need, or with the immanence of an end with each act of exchange, but with the differance of a power (and not of a consuming) obliged to ignore the "concrete time" of presence in order to drain the surplus formed by each sequence of chrematistic exchange. By another pen we read: Whose Child do you harvest?... Who sets the Child backward upon the Beast of Time?... You have stolen Time... You have bent Time with the Tooth of Lust, torn the Hem of Righteousness, and the Wind may enter and the Cyclone follow!... Made of Society into an Unknown Quantity and this we are not built to bear... You counterfeit thereby changing a Known Sum into a Sum needing Recount. Have you not, therefore, made the whole of Society a Dupe?32 Chrematistics thus empties the city of its presence to itself by freeing the (monetary) sign of any relation to its natural referent. Need and its repetition marked the place of things within the limits of an identificatory present in which potential becoming actualizes only what is already there, what is authentic because it always is: organized like cosmic realities having to serve as a model for moral and political conduct.33 Need and its repetition condensed the community's collective memory, expressed the proper time of the polis. With a fundamentally Greek gesture, this proper finds its sense by reducing the amount of time in the Place of the City according to a topic presenting the con-gruency of the heteronomous figures of need, the com-parison of the singular terms of exchange as pure possibility of the One-same's difference from itself. The figure of chrematistics is henceforth prescribed, inscribed, within the alteration of the order of cobelonging, through the wild "temporalization" of the eventless reversibility of political space — a position of insubordination allowing the "scientific" modernity of its production, of its

10,1

dangerous infinity, to be foreseen. The sign becomes a producer of events (and in events there is something that is determined only "through the introduction of a fragment from the future event")34 as the instance that assures the advent of a new order in a single dimension, and the sign no longer appears except under the indexical form of a speculative becoming through which thought is as if it were thrown outside itself. Having the effect of breaking up the (supertemporal) reciprocity of transactions guaranteed by commutative justice, monetary "speculation" affects the (ethical) reflexivity of need and of righteous action as well as the (political) reflection "in which every present reflects itself as present at the same time representing the former,"35 closing back on itself. Speculation determines a break in the ontocosmological circle—where ontology was oriented in terms of the cosmos only to the extent that the cosmos's own regime was that of an ontological model — that was subordinating the economic to the political, the science that is "sovereign" (kuriotates) in the play of the same.36 The present of the polis, or the political present, had its root, as it were, in a perfect tense of the state; that is to say, in a telos confounding itself with the limit, perns, where the close of an action is carried out in the form of its occurred being (the satisfaction of need) on the basis of an arkhe (justice) subtracted from the sequence of events through its integration into a totality, koinonia, indissociable from the constitution of the whole of reality in the kosmos. This is finally the situation that, according to Henri Maldiney, defines the diathesis of the Greek perfect, where actuality and potentiality are indiscernible in a consciousness that "is above all presence... in a copresent world—in a dateless empeiria."37 And the act, in the coinciding of present and perfect ("at the same time one thinks, and one has thought," Metaphysics IX, 6, 1048 b34; translation modified), is what makes the potential pass "into action," a potential completely relative to the being in action, to the eidos to which it was predestined. In sum, because potential (dunamis) is the name of a beingappropriated-toward-an-end, change occurs in Aristotelianism only when effected in a telos that gives its name to the change;38 where time henceforth finds its true beginning because change can be grasped only in the perfect, "in the first moment [it] was carried to its term" (en hoi protoi epekteleste he metabole), in a form assimilated to the immobile destiny of the completed act, to the preestablished design that sub-tends it — to the past of something that has always already happened.39 The perfect tense is therefore referential time, time viewed retrospectively by placing oneself at a final point. The present, the present instant that divides earlier from later, the dialectical nun, originates in the sense of closure so defined by the Stagirite:

The Accident of Time: An A r i s t o t e l i a n Study

"It [the point of time that divides] always belongs to the later affection."40 If it is right to say that the dividing point is already the future to the extent that the telos, last in terms of its genesis, is first in nature with reference to the thing,41 it must be added that the beginning of the future, logically distinguished from the end of the past, is within that end only the payment due [echeance] on the past having come to term, from which the future comes forth \pro-vient]. This is so much the case that need in the Ethics, like change in the Physics, has "its final term [telos] in its first principle [arkhe] and its first principle in its final term."42 Playing within this structure, the intervaling present, stretched between two needs, neutralizes the tension between desire and value. It is nothing more than the nonincidental accomplishment, which forms the pour-soi of experience, of the em-peiria in its "political" version, the pour-soi of a certain interiorization of the limit where the transformation of the act into a state of the subject is effected—a subject whose future, and desire, has only to be foreclosed in the extinguished term of need. Whence by enfeebling the general sense of Aristotelian temporality, chrematistics substitutes a concrete time subordinate to the needs that scan it (a time that is aspectual and limited, alive and singular with a-genetic presence) with an im-perfect (ateles) time, without Anteriority and hence abstract, open (indefinitely) and serial (the series, already, of "propitious" moments), infinitely divisible, and whose access is furnished by a future that is banking on current value. The future is the magnetic pole of value. Note that in Greek, the future is, along with the subjunctive that expresses the category of will, the sole mood to have a strictly temporal sense where one is acting upon time as it arrives and that one anticipates and summons. That one makes happen. The future institutes a power, a doing, a creation (poiesis) that is irreducible to a past, which keeps casting me always into the direction of futurity.43 Every doing is endlessly to be recommenced. Not even the order of material repetition and reproduction re-presents (the) accumulated time (of the past); it is rather the very process of infinite accumulation in (the) time (to come). Aristotle didn't get it wrong. It is just that the future affirms the unraveling of a creative temporalization; it un-covers the unlimitedness of time and the ambiguous, "opportunistic," present of the kairos;44 it opens onto the time of premeditation and of foresight, of the intention and pre-tension of the ego anchored in the project that it has machinated in advance as a function of the kerdos it had banked on. The ego does not decide; it is itself determination and decision, it "slices," decides (decidere) the temporal flow and with this caesura makes a split capable of drawing off a difference from

12,3

repetition — of exploiting the repetition of need. Now. Now made equal to what is in itself unequal, the desire of the ego, the ego of desire cannot exhaust its potential within the sole horizon of acquired and actual perfection, complete its movement in the repose without incidence of the perfect, in the stable autarky of being regulated in its determination by the eternal return of the same and of time circling around the "now." Now, "you have twisted Time with the Hook of Concupiscence"... Everything becomes anticipation within the series of time, in relation to "that purely formal distribution of the unequal as a function of the caesura." If money bears within itself an ineffaceable debit, it is because time, converted into the money form, is discovered as an empty form, a pure order of time, quantitative and differential, measurable and coinable, which nothing can come to fill. The time without qualities of a future-oriented humanity that cuts time into segments of linear duration that are put to profit in order to realize investments and "accumulation." And so time itself is "invested": there is no advance but in time, no payment due that is not temporal. Capitalization or the futuristic conquest of time... a chronothesis. So it goes with chrematistics: it is for Aristotle literally a question of time, the business of a time that creates simulacra, the fiction of a "nonwealth" at a remove from the polis, far from the equilibrium of property. It designates finally that depoliticizing (de-realizing) anticipation that can derive profit from exchange because it is inscribed above and before the monetary equivalence it develops, on the tangent of the space of comparison and on the curve of appropriation that it keeps inextricably enveloped. I was going to make the case, in agreement with Berthoud, that the essence of all profit is only the effect of a game of desire with money. We now see that the chrematistic-monetary relation is never anything but a certain usage of time; that the exchange value of time,45 freed from a presence to itself that was fixing and measuring the movement of goods and bodies, freed from the real movements it was measuring, is deployed as valorization in the mercantile speculation that invested it. For Aristotle, it expresses the movement making out of a simulacrum-measurement the means of its own proliferation. The simulacrum of measure, the number of the simulacrum, because, Berthoud adds, "the desire for money produces its measurements for pursuing its object," capitalization; "the increasing series is only the increase of a measurement without being the increase of any particular object" (emphasis in the original). Money is not the measure of a preexisting substance (ousia), true wealth, the wealth of the oikos, without exteriority or ornamentation, declined according to units of need. It is nothing. Nothing but the all-powerfulness of exponentiality. Nothing but the invention of the "inexponential," abstract wealth

The Accident of Time: An A r i s t o t e l i a n Study

of the world of values: signifying that its total is really equivalent to nothing, or just about. Precisely. And in this nothing, in this instant that has come, ostentatiously, outside of all need, far from all presence, what turns out to be dissolved is the cardinal reality of time as subordinated to objective and actual motion (that accompanies an action), motion-time that constituted something like the lodgment andy/mtion of every being and every thing. That time dissolves to the profit of a time that is unhinged, no longer referring to anything but the tightly bound network of simulacra. The hinge, cardo, Deleuze recalls, "is what ensures the subordination of time to those properly cardinal points through which pass the periodic movements which it measures." Something of Aristotle's famous definition of time as the number of motion (arithmos ara tis ho khronos) will be recognized here, the definition that Marx, after Hegel, is not far from repeating—but in a sense that reveals, if not the triggering process, at least the repressed double: abstract time as perspective, the number of the motion of unequal exchange; or "demented time or time outside the curve that a god gave it, liberated from its overly simple circular figure... in short, time revealing itself as an empty and pure form... in order to assume a merciless and straight form."46 Understand: off its rocker [devergonde]. Along with Sophocles and Thucydides, Aristotle was obliged to discover the strange powers of this anomalous time that is no longer so much the object of the original discussion between kerdos and dike as the very subject of chrematistic secession. This secession is what brings to the surface "amid the rubble and broken bits of the city-state, consigned to being commodities, the idea of a new world, a new life, and a new political order—along a single dimension."47 Then comes the most worrisome of times (for apolis man, "with no city, no site"), the time of the soul's boldness and of being's dissonance, the time of the fear of God. The time of dissension, where "money stands alone before God" because "it amassed in itself everything that is most venomous in the temporal..." "Through whatever frightful adventure, through whatever mechanical aberration, through a gap, through a deregulating, through a monstrous folly of the mechanism, what was only supposed to serve exchange completely invaded the value to be exchanged. It need not just be said, then, that the scale of values has been overthrown in the modern world. It needs to be said that it has been annihilated, since the apparatus of measurement and exchange and appraisal has invaded the whole of the value it was supposed to measure, exchange, appraise. The instrument has become matter and object and world."48 This is the modern world according to Charles Peguy.

14,5

It appears that its "modernity" clings to nothing, perhaps, other than the globalization and schizoid universality of that originary reversal that commands the decentering, the deregulation, and the monstrous folly of the temporal mechanism. Let us dare to take a step farther, which would allow us to think the form and content of time as staged together. We could then say: taking on both the ancient and the Christian worlds with the same contestation, with a single disequilibrium that reduces them both to "a single and common disaster," the modern (world) is not what comes after a "first," a first false movement onto the stage of the world. Instead of the natural and reflected movement of physical representation, the forced and capitalizing movement of the Psukhe would lead the world, would knock it off its hinges — as the embryo of a modern and unhinged drama, whose true hero would be the one Heidegger calls "the individual tied to the mode of scientific thought."49 It would be rather as Peguy wants it, though in a very strange way, this first time in the history of the world. It's "from the beginning" that it is for the first time: the exact degree to which the very idea of a first time becomes enigmatic. First, because it exists "since the first time," in the way of a hollow mark that would haunt the social in its most constant operation: coding desire, facing up to the haunting effect of decoded flows.50 Then, since even before coming into existence, this modern world already acts as the exorcised limit that works progressively, like the anticipated potential that operates regressively and inverts time's shock wave by liberating the flows of desire. It all happens a little as though the chrematistic deregulation was what repeated in advance the capitalistic operation of decoding without in any case producing a capitalism properly called. Finally, it should be emphasized that this reversal bearing Clio's mark implies that retrospective categories produce effects on the same level of contingency as prospective categories.51 It all "begins" by the need to comprehend history retrospectively in the light of "capitalism." Aristotle's tragic modernity, those pages written on the verso of history, anticipating and repeating the end to represent it in order to conjure away the indispensable origin of a dislocated time, deviating from the curve given to it by some god, demiurge, or archon... this is the Aristotle whom Peguy honored as the only Modern among the Ancients. Of course, we should refrain from letting ourselves be abused by this "modernity" by giving it a philosophical import it doesn't have. Its signification is symptomatic. It is reduced to sheltering the dynamics of an impulse whose temporal apparatus will never be thematically explicated. As we have said, the definition of chrematistics doesn't come about; it gets lost in the series of simulacra, gets blocked in the strange menagerie of potentialities that surface one after the

The Accident of Time: An A r i s t o t e l i a n Study

other out of hubris and overwhelm the concept (horismos) by sweeping away its limit, the limited instant of the nun conceived as horos. Defined it can scarcely be, except by threatening the keystone of the Aristotelian institution, in which its historicometaphysical possibility and fragility are condensed. That keystone is astronomy, or rather astro-^gy as covering over the question of the sense of sublunary time that leads back to the representation of the circular movement of the heavens, which envelops all things in opposition to everything that happens (this is the excess of sense: sense in its excess and not in its lack as what measures the growth of entropy).52 Once again, an ontology of the most "natural"53 movement elides the problem of the supplement of origin, of the supplement of soul that brings to time only accidental discernment and measurement (this is the sense of the excess: excess through "internal sense" — or ipseity as the lodging of atopos, apolis man—and not through the violent nature of a movement that, despite the effort to tear bodies from their natural place, still continues to oppose the effective emancipation of place within infinite space).54 The Accident of Time

Couldn't we object to this final point, essential to Aristotle's demonstration? Isn't Aristotle himself the one who asks, on at least two occasions, "whether if soul did not exist time would exist or not"?55 Doesn't he answer, as one customarily summarizes this passage that is difficult to read and that has singularly divided its commentators, that if the soul is the only thing that can count, without a soul there cannot be any time as number of the movement between earlier and later? Even more, didn't he come to this definition after having shown that "we perceive [aisthanometha] movement and time together [hama]," specifying that, even in the dark, and with no affection (paskhomen) in the body, if any movement takes place in the soul (en tei psukhei), it seems (dokef) "at once" that some time has indeed elapsed?56 Taking a recent interpretation as an example, should we conclude that the Kantian break, just as the Heideggerian reprise of the Kantian gesture, was prepared by Aristotle's Physics IV—still the founding book, the Grundbuch of Western philosophy, in Heidegger's formulation previously cited—given that time is there (already) understood as the form of what can take place only en tei psukhei, as "the form of inner sense"?57 The stakes involved in the question justify a quick return to these two passages in their context, and first 219 a, about which Octave Hamelin wrote in self-congratulation: "It is indisputable that Aristotle, unconsciously and despite himself, takes a step here in the direction of idealism."58

16,7

This piece is introduced by the following consideration: "When we perceive [aisthometa] and distinguish [horisomen] a change we say time has elapsed; evidently time is not independent of movement and change."59 If sensation is in itself a movement,60 the question quickly becomes: can it be said that time is (already) the number of the soul's movement, or, to be more precise, is it identified with the anterior-posterior structure of the aisthesis, which marks the alterity of instants, unites time and movement without any objective movement being necessary? Grave confusion is possible, for at no moment does Aristotle imply any inference from the conditions of the perception of time and the experience of internal duration to some real dependence on the being of time. He merely says that perceiving time is to have the sensation of at least an internal change that reveals the existence of time to us. This is a "realist" preoccupation stated on the basis of the telos of physical science, of "the phenomena always and imperatively given to perception,"61 "since it seems that there is nothing outside and separate in existence from sensible spatial magnitudes."62 So, after the thesis that identified time with movement had been assailed under the cover of common sense, it was inevitable that the common experience of inner sense be consulted directly to show that time can in no case be conceived without movement, even if only "mental." In conclusion: "Time is either movement or something that belongs to movement. Since then it is not movement, it must be the other." Editors have the habit of stopping the text here and of opening a new paragraph centered on the relation between anterior and posterior (219 a 10-2 5), in which it will thereafter be a question of elucidating this "something that belongs to movement" that is time. One will nonetheless pick up on the fact that these lines give their true orientation, or determination, to what precedes. If Aristotle envisions nothing more than local motion, it is not because he is constrained by a Physics whose proper object it is, but because this motion is "the most general and fundamental."63 Moreover, Aristotle specifies (1) that "the distinction of before and after holds fundamentally [kurios], then, in place," and (2) that the anteriorposterior is, with regard to its substratum, movement itself, and with regard to its essence, something other than movement, later to be verified as nothing other than the numbered number of movement. The distinction is important, as indicated by Boethius's conclusion, related by Simplicius: "Nothing prevents the numerical from existing even without what is numbered, just as the sensible exists without what is sensed." 64

The Accident of Time: An Aristotelian Study

This numerical is what institutes the founding being of time, identified at the end of Aristotle's inquiry with the circular movement of the first heaven, the sole measurement, "the cause, within each movement, of eternal uniformity," and of its place in the economy of the universe.65 This numerical, independent in its profundity from the numbering soul, is what will never become an actual number or be numbered except "as an effect of the perception of time"—the "actualization within thought of the numerical existent in being," according to Father Festugiere's felicitous expression.66 To make the existence of time depend on the presence of the soul would be to fall into the sophistical fallacy that, by neglecting the substratum, assails the privilege of substance, in the style of the Sophist Antiphon's words, later taken up, it is said, by the Peripatetic philosopher Critolaos: "Time is a thought [noema] or a measurement [metron], not a substance [hupostasis]."67 This leads us to the second passage we wish to examine. But first, without further commentary, let us read the Stagirite's conclusion: "and it is only when we have perceived [aisthesis] before and after in motion that we say that time has elapsed." This same consideration a little later introduces the famous definition of time, where the reduction of the temporal to the local is carried out by the intervention of a circle (the sphere of fixed points) that verifies none of the properties of the sublunary movements whose last cause it is supposed to be. Already the cosmological closure presents itself as meta-physical. Now look at Aristotle's final answer to our problem, namely: is time but a construction of the "soul's intellect" (psukhes nous), a "noumenon" or form of what can only happen en tei psukhef? Whether if soul did not exist time -would exist or not, is a question /aporesein/ that may fairly be asked; for if there cannot be someone to count /arithmesontos/ there cannot be anything that can be counted /arithmeton/ either, so that evidently there cannot be number; for number is either what has been counted /erithmemenon/, or what can be counted /arithmeton/. But if nothing but soul, or in soul's reason /psukhes nous/, is qualified to count, it is impossible for there to be time unless there is soul. Unless time is what is found then to exist /all' e touto ho pote on estin ho khronos/, if, for example [hoion ei/, movement can exist without soul. The before and after are attributes of movement and time is these qua countable, they are time.68 Right up until the substratum is taken into account, the movement of the text is produced on the basis of an aporetic reasoning, an aporia whose formal deconstruction is operated, modeled, in an important passage from the Topica (V, 9, 138 b27-37). (Is there any need to recall that the argument developed is inscribed "in flagrant contradiction with Aristotle's constant teaching, which posits

18,9

the priority and the independence of the object of cognition in relation to cognition itself,"69 with the ontological priority of the cognizable over the cognizing?) Aristotle more or less says that nothing forbids apprehending a thing through its potential (air through the breathable, in this case time through the numerical), on the condition nonetheless of not passing then from potential to act in order to show that its nonactuality entails the nonexistence of the thing to be defined, and conclude what is proper about this thing from its nonbeing because essence and accident will have been confused, disregarding that "the accidental always implies predication about a subject."70 Here, we can recognize that paradox of predication that forms what is properly called Aristotelian ontology, its "pure thought," which presents itself as writing that investigates the real only with book I of the Physics, whose systematic chains of reasoning it articulates in their critical gesture. Thus, "if the subject is the predicate, the predicate is not the subject." So much so that it would no longer be the property of air to be breathed when air could easily exist in the absence of an animal actually in the process of breathing; similarly, time does not at all require as a condition of existence that it effectively be numbered by a numbering soul. Isn't it precisely the impropriety of the Sophists to limit their analysis to the domain of accidents, attributes, potentialities, and relations, forgetful that essence, "of which they have no correct idea," is primary?71 It is also known that the Aristotelian refutation of sophistry goes through the distinction between action and potential, between being by itself and being by accident, between essential predication and accidental predication. These are distinctions that cannot be understood except by supposing the fundamentally antepredicative being of the truth: the ontological truth, which must be anterior to perception so that a primacy of the thing can exert itself in sensation and govern the act of knowledge that has no other upshot than to identify the thing in itself in order to accomplish its proper function of homoiosis. These distinctions suffice to dismiss arguments that are solely apparent, having only the appearance of science (to make us believe that the "truth lay in the appearance"),72 while, as specified by the Sophistical Refutations, "one solves arguments that are properly deduced by demolishing them" on the basis of the signifying plan of a science of Being, of the being par excellence, which is the true and the false.13 Destruction has a foundational value for a logic of essence in which reference governs sense and things govern words.74 Far from representing an objection, it is not a matter of indifference for our problem that a certain duality of points of view appears in Aristotle with reference to that conception of truth that engages the whole analysis of time.

The Accident of Time: An Aristotelian Study

In effect, opposed to this ontological truth would be a logic of judgment, in the shape of a logical conception that sets judgment up as the locus of truth and establishes that "falsity and truth are not in things... but in thought."75 Pierre Aubenque was able to show that the very notion of judgment (kataphasis}, in the way that it traverses and works these passages from the Metaphysics, is what constrains us to overcome the alternative between, on the one hand, adequation founded on the truth of the thing and unveiling, and the truth of judgment on the other hand, in such a way that there would be a definitive priority of the relation between things over the logical relation in which it is unveiled. "In judgment, we do not say something about something, but we allow to be said within us a certain relation of things, which exists outside us," and which is unveiled in the truth of judgment, independently of the subject who states it.76 It's because you are white... This thesis, physical in destination (and thus "meta-physical" in an utterly essential sense), is wholly directed against Protagoras's doctrine of Man-themeasure (whose temporal avatar we cited earlier as formulated by Antiphon) and his subjective relativism hostile to the idea of every "by itself," to the idea of a being in itself whose cognition would be only a reflection of every objective nature external to the perceiving subject, of something cognizable prior to the act of cognition. But then, concludes Plato, if no single thing exists that is in and by itself, what we affirm to be whiteness is neither what projects itself nor what is projected, but something that is produced between the two.77 To the young Meno responsive to a variation of this definition "a la Gorgias," the ironical Socrates answers that there is something tragic about it.78 You can bet Aristotle took this something seriously, this something that is not even a thing, not even a true argument, but the mere appearance of an argument, harboring an affirmative exoteric potential where perception and cognition cease to be secondary in relation to phusis; where there is no privileged point except what comes from the subject itself; where there is no more being but the relativity of the real and the effects of speech; where things cease to give their measure as "subject" (hupokeimenori), to be subjugated to the representation that assures them, to the subject that measures and masters them (anthropos metron), uses them (read ta khremata, useful things, as opposed to ta pragmata, things in truth, in the full form of a pragma sense — on which we must agree in order not to play with words);79 where, finally, the question is no longer that of the representation of time but of time as representation: noema, phantasma, according to Democritus, undoubtedly influenced here by Protagoras. A representation produced by the activity of consciousness without going through Being properly called; a dynamic representation

20,1

that no longer has to make itself adequate to something given in order to be identified with something giving. A "psychedelic" or inadequate representation, which is another way of saying the eclipse of the cosmos and the sophistical appearance of an argument that no longer relates to the meaning of things (pragma, pragmata); an argument based in appearances, an unfounded argument with no foundation other than the representation I have of it, and which for this very reason evades being demolished. There begins the infinite labor of making distinctions, which perhaps attains its acme in Physics TV and surely finds its arche in the opposition between the point of view of reality (epi tou pragmatos) and the point of view of representation (epi tes noeseos), between phusikos and logikos.80 The "science" of discourse versus the science of "things," sophists versus physicists: such was the state of the loci drawn up by Plato after the passage of Gorgias. Criticizing the Platonic method of division as a bad syllogism condemned to disjunction for lack of a middle term, the Aristotelian science of being as being is included within the general system for the resolution of conflict and contradiction through the displacement of contradictories and the disguising of negation under mediation: a traversal of appearances governed by the distinction between actuality and potentiality, between essence and accident, oriented toward the mastery of the enigma of time. Paraphrasing Aubenque, who so rightly indicated the breadth of the polemic against the Sophists throughout the entire opus of the Stagirite, I would like to add that it is surely no exaggeration to assert that the principal objective of Aristotle's speculation on time was to reply to the Sophists.81 The point is to suggest that, provoked by the great prescription of the Timaeus ("to correct the revolutions relative to becoming which take place in our head and which have been troubled, learning about the harmony and revolutions of the universe should correct the courses of the head which were corrupted at our birth and should make the subject of intellection adequate to the object of intellection''*), Aristotle constructed his doctrine of time on the basis of the denunciative determination of the empire of signs that is common to sophistics and to chrematistics in their work to subvert the order of things.82 Whereby physics is metaphysics, and vice versa — inevitably.83 Having thus verified that the task of the philosopher in the Physics was indeed to examine "whether Socrates and Socrates seated are the same thing"84 in order to solve the sophistic aporia through the play of distinctions, it would be very surprising to see Aristotle take up on his own account a sophism of the same genre in the framework of his analysis of the "now" (nun}. At present, this

The Accident of Time: An A r i s t o t e l i a n Study

last difficulty must be examined so that the compartment left oddly empty by my commentary receives a content and at the same time organizes how that provision will be circulated. I have called the structure and function of the nun (which is not some part of a whole but a principle for the cognition of time) on a par with the role of the moving body vis-a-vis motion. It will have been noticed that the rise of sophistry, which is no longer indicated as such, to the surface of the text intervenes when the Stagirite proposes to give meaning to the aporia of identity and difference that opened the inquiry into time. In what sense is the "now" identical, in what sense is it other and forever new? Distinction oblige. The 'now' in one sense is the same, in another it is not the same. Insofar as it varies, it is different, which is just what its being now never ceases to be, but insofar as now turns out to be then, it is the same. For motion, as was said, goes with /akolouthei/ magnitude; and time, as we maintain, with motion. Similarly, a moving body, by which we are aware of the motion as well as of the before and after involved in it, can be compared [homoios] to the point. The moving body is the same with regards to the substratum (whether a point or a stone or something else of the kind); but it is different in definition /toi logoi de alloy, as the Sophists assume that Coriscus' being in the Lyceum is different from Coriscus' being in the market-place. The moving body differs insofar as it is at one time here and at another there. But the 'now' goes with /akoloutheiy the moving body as time goes with the motion. For it is by means of the moving body that we become aware of the before and after in the motion, and it is insofar as the 'before'1 and 'after' are countable that we get the 'now.' Hence, in these, the 'now' that turns out to be then is the same (for it is what is before and after in movement), but its being is different; for it is insofar as the before and the after are countable that we get the 'now.' This is what is most know able; for motion is known because of that which is moved, and transport because of that which is transported. For what is transported is an individual thing /tode tiy, the movement is not. Thus, the 'now' in one sense is always the same, in another it is not the same; and this is true also of what is transported.*5 This long passage had to be cited to show the very particular status of the nun, given that the work of making distinctions here depends on an analogical problematic, and so much so that we must ask, as does Simplicius, how it is possible to assimilate the instant to a body in motion, and what does not subsist to what subsists in the mode of tode ti.86 Nevertheless, despite the text's general movement and its concluding sentence, Aristotle never establishes a comparison between instant and body in motion (but rather between a point and a body in motion): the true relation is that of accompanying or "going with" (b23). Why? Because the identity of the "now," far from being substantial, is logical. That identity does not

22,3

exist outside the act of saying "now," of introducing (numerical) determination into a property of the body in motion, one that is expressed by its countable character. An accidental identity, if you like. But this is the accident of a pseudosubject having no consistence other than that of a predicate or an attribute. The signification of "now" is attributive insofar as discourse avers it,87 says that it is forever "what is": signified, and no longer shown in the sense of a letting-appear, according to a way the phenomenon belongs to speaking that leaves no place for the distinction between true and false. "The 'now,'" Remi Brague concludes, "is the only case where sophistry is right. Or rather, the phenomenon of the 'now' contains, if one may say so, such a natural sophistry that only sophistical discourse can do justice to it."88 In fact, as opposed to the body in motion or Coriscus's "permanence" in the lyceum and in the marketplace, between the lyceum and the marketplace, the "now" can only be ascertained by logos: it is constituted by whoever enunciates it. In this sense, the nun is indeed the Coriscus of the Sophists, which Aristotle does not bring in here without its threatening to alter the whole demonstration. From this point of view, the problem of the soul is but an avatar of the question of the "now" from the moment that question is able to bring about a mutation in the regime of truth — if it really is the case that "if there were no time, there would be no 'now,' and vice versa. "89 As opposed to the point, whose accidental function as limit to the line rests on an actual foundation in the static content that supports its reality, the "now," which insofar as it is a limit is not time but still an accident,90 is the only actuated element. "Now" is what founds temporal continuity by quantifying it, a continuum where one segment no longer is while the other is not yet. The whole system of distinctions is there to master that accident of time that is the "now," in order that it not be said that the accident of the "now" defines the essence of time—that it frees up a time of the accident foreign to the essence of the thing, a time of the subjugation of the "subject" (of the substratum, to hupokeimeinon: here, that of the body in motion) capable of reversing the primacy of the motion of bodies over the time of the soul, of designating a time of the subject rather than a subject for time. But the whole procedure of analogy is still needed in order to circumscribe the strange potential of number itself—strange to the thing that is counted — by carrying it over into the numerical function of the moving body in the "now," which would be like the unit of number (hoion monas arithmou), of that number of the movement whose mere effectuation belongs to the soul's action: to its discernment and to its logical articulation (arithmos) that turns the before-after of motion into time.91 You can guess what follows. If the "now" is that through which the subjectivizing process of time (dephysicalization) is threatened with being swal-

The A c c i d e n t of T i m e : An A r i s t o t e l i a n Study

lowed up, the "now" is that upon which the new operation of mastering time will have to be exerted. "Now" will be the operator of the synthesis exerted on any given instant (exaiphnes) on the basis of a privileged instant (nun) that tends to reconstitute a "field of presence,"92 a place of temporality through which time is in a sense ontological within the "now" of a presence. A maintenance of newness (maintenance) that has never coincided with one of the dimensions of time in order to be present to us as consciousness of the Whole, as affirmation by itself of what is, by the rotating motion of a sphere upon itself, the perpetual return to self. A Cosmos, or "Cosmodicy," prescribes human beings to "regularize" their movements so as to imitate Unity, defining humanity by its maximum conformity to the cosmos and to its being-in-the-world.93 One could find in this context a means of illustrating the movement of deterritorialization analyzed by Deleuze and Guattari. At first, it will be said that reterritorialization will by priority be exerted on the points susceptible of being "conductors" for an absolute deterritorialization, so much so that the line of flight will be barred and curved upon itself. At least in principle. This kind of attempt shows up only when it is too late (this is the "Aristotelian moment," for example, of the Greek city-state). Very quickly, it appears that what is the least deterritorialized will of itself refer back to the most deterritorialized as to the conditions of the real experience that subtends it. Indeed, it is because what is least deterritorialized has only to reterritorialize itself upon what is most deterritorialized that a very unusual movement is produced in which what is aberrant in one structure must be cathected in another.94 A second system of reterritorialization then surfaces, which can be grasped when the Aristotelian (anthropo-cosmological) articulation is succeeded by the Neoplatonic overcoding (noological or analogical: from and, marking the deep meaning of the Plotinian climb upward: "higher"), while the relative deterritorializations — the anomalies of (the) physical or "psychosomatic" movement (of the soul, of the city-state, of economic fluctuations) — are henceforth determined, on the basis of an absolute deterritorialization, as fall. The production process of time envelops and develops, but only on the "sublunary" side, the break in the harmony between soul and world. An outlaw subjectivation outside the law maneuvers the opening of a denaturalized time. The essential is already here. At the end of this trajectory that was allowed to follow out the "objective sense" of the Aristotelian theory of time, when at its narrowest tip the curve encounters the accident, the whole circle breaks in the sense of a coun-

24,5

tereffectuation. Some lines from Plotinus are sufficient to explain the reason for this reversal: Why should the mere presence of a number give us time—a number measuring or measured; for the same number may be either—if time is not given us by the fact of movement itself, with the before and after that very well belong to it? To make the number essential to time is like saying that magnitude has not its full quantity unless there were someone to estimate that quantity!... We may, therefore, very well think that [time] existed before the soul or mind that estimates it—if, indeed, it is not to be thought to take its origin from the Soul.95 If the circle is recognized at this point in the principle of its sophistical genesis by the mere doubling over of the pathway, it is because in carrying along with time a limitless potential of beginning, which, as such, corresponds to the question of the West, origin has come into play.

The Accident of Time: An Aristotelian

Study

T

W

O

The Time of Audacity: Plotinus

This whole construction thus debuts through the birth of the first accident, which ceases to be similar to itself; it debuts through a dissonance and cannot debut otherwise.

Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, Munich Lectures on the History of Modern Philosophy E L L I P T I C A L L Y , H I S T O R Y is altered only by coming back to the same. In the repetition of its difference, then, history begins anew. Thus—sophistry oblige—Plotinus will reproach Aristotle for misrecognizing the essence of time and defining it in accidental terms at best. "Time will not, of its own nature, be a measure of movement: primarily a kind to itself, it will accidentally exhibit the magnitudes of that movement."1 At best, for this measurement-time of movement is itself but an interval measured by movement. This "formula" is what Plotinus's confrontation with Aristotle must specify and develop at several levels. Taking part in an extrinsic and descriptive analysis that integrates a number of observations from the Physics on the measurement of time, in order to blind their effectiveness, this confrontation aims first to display the epistemological confusion and logical contradiction presiding over the destinies of an extent-time regulated by the mutual determination of time and move-

ment. But the critique is deployed only insofar as it serves to induce a new approach, a new form of movement, which is intensive and no longer extensive, ordinal and no longer cardinal: the movement of the soul who engenders time — and the possibility of a different narrative. It will first be discovered that "what performs the act of measuring is not time, but a particular quantity of time."2 But before knowing the quantity of time, isn't it necessary to tell us what this time is of which we are told its extent? In fact, the answer is implied: it can be nothing but an interval of movement within time because "the movement is commensurate with the area it passes through, and this area is its extent. But this gives us, still, space only, not time [ou khronos alia topos]."3 This area passed through is taken for real movement, in action, close in its impetus to real time. A second confusion, far from appearing incidentally, will be picked up a little later: "We might as well define movement—because it escapes definition — as the thing measured by space; the definition would be parallel since we can mark off a certain space which the movement has traversed and say the one is equivalent to the other."4 The Bergsonian resonance of these pages is not fortuitous. They are inscribed within the wake of a global critique of Aristotelian physics inasmuch as it is a teleocratic physics of natural movement. This critique is undertaken by Plotinus in a chapter of his tractate On the Kinds of Being (VI, 1, 16), which immediately precedes, according to the chronological order established by Porphyry, the tractate On Time and Eternity.5 Here are its concluding lines, with no other commentary: "Change, be it noted, is here distinguished from the result of change, the result being unnecessary to establish the change itself [ou gar tes en toi metabeblekenai edeito}" Reversing Aristotle's formula that turned movement into an imperfect act (ateles energeia, Metaphysics K, 9, 1966 a20-21), Plotinus posits that "it is entirely an act, but an act that recommences with every moment" (translation modified). Against Aristotle and the thesis that something that changes "cannot be changing in a now" (Physics VI, 237 a 14), Plotinus rediscovers the intuition of the Stoics — as lamblichus saw well—but especially Parmenides' third hypothesis where Plato describes that "strange thing" that is the instantaneous (to exaiphnes, 156 d). And while it changes, the One, first immobile and then moving a moment later, can be in no time. Opposing Aristotle to himself (who was not afraid to exclaim, "as if change never took place all at once," Physics I, 186 a 15-16), Plotinus concludes that if the act is produced in the timeless, nothing prohibits that "motion also should not primarily be timeless, time attaching to it duration only insofar as it happens to have such and such an extension," as completion comes with the result that the movement tended to produce.

28,9

The same goes for alterity, for the consequence of movement is to make other: alterity does not consist "merely in the sense that it arises and persists in a difference of conditions, but in the sense of being itself perpetual alterity."6 At every moment movement is, within the sensible, the image of the intelligible other that communicates ceaseless alterity to time.1 With regard to this essential character, and in conformity with this Platonic spirit, "locomotion appears in general to be a unique movement whose differences stem only from external circumstances."8 Thus Bergson, in those numerous developments dedicated to the sophisms of Zeno of Elea whence metaphysics would have been born, would mutatis mutandis do nothing more perhaps than explain what is asserted here. The originality of the Bergsonian position would consist in transgressing that natural metaphysics of human intelligence that inspires the Greek world by exploiting certain indications given in the Enneads. These would lead Plotinus to consider movement as completely defined at every moment, to consider it at any given time, at whatever moment of time without any longer erecting its final term (telos) into an essential moment. This itself is what formally defines modern science for Bergson in its opposition to ancient science, which was Aristotelian in principle. But one must take into account Maurice de Gandillac's warning against Emile Brehier's modernist ardor and against "those formulae that seem anticipatory to us today only by the light of a physics of which Plotinus had never the slightest idea."9 Without forcing Plotinus's intuition, one could follow a Bergsonian tempo in "articulating" the different critical elements set forth at this level concerning the confusion of movement with the space that has been traversed. It could be said, then, that the illusion comes from the fact that the movement, once it has been carried out, has left along its trajectory a line that can be divided at will, along which can be counted an indefinite number of virtual stations for the moving body. Whence it is concluded that this line, at once trajectory and concrete mount of the process, accompanies the movement in its course, effectuating itself, leaving at each moment a position with which it could coincide, propelling it toward its end point—without seeing that "walking is walking from the outset... quantity is present to motion only by way of accident... if it were a case of motion occupying a day or some other quantity of time..." Without seeing that "by walking we do not mean the feet," and that things in motion must not be taken for motion itself.10 At a third level, how does this line measure that with which it progresses? "Why should the one of the two be the measure rather than the other?"11 Or again: why does time measure movement rather than movement measure time if Aristotle himself aimed to integrate the ordinary experience of reciprocal measure-

The Time of A u d a c i t y : Plotinus

wewi- in the doctrine of measurement-time, by declaring the former rational (eulogos, Physics TV, 220 b24)? What happens to the priority of the measured over the measurement presented as an objection to the subjectivism of Protagoras? It will be remembered that if "knowledge also, and perception, we call [another common experience, that of language] the measure of things, for the same reason, because we know something by them—while as a matter of fact they are measured rather than measure other things. But it is with us as if someone else measured us and we came to know how big we are by seeing that he applied the cubit-measure a certain number of times to us."12 That the theory of relatives does not furnish us with concepts satisfactory to justify this reciprocal measurement means that from within Aristotelian doctrine we must understand Plotinus's "difficulty" in grasping the idea that the measurement is in the thing measured and carries with it a relation of reciprocity. In the final analysis, it is the being of time that escapes definition, as was said already of real movement, this time about which it is successively asserted that it is what measures and that it is what is measured, when all the evidence suggests that they are two mutually reversible propositions (enhellagmenos). Short of having followed the esoteric lessons of the School, Plotinus adds perfidiously.13 Victor Goldschmidt generously concludes that one can see in all this, rather than a weakness, "the sign of Aristotle's intuitive genius, whose concrete descriptions surpass the dogmatism of theory."14 Interpreting Aristotle, Plotinus had correctly remarked that only the first clause of the thesis (time determines motion) is equipped with its proof (because time is motion's number) while the corollary (and motion determines time, 220 b!4-16) remains at the level of mere assertion. Then, when Aristotle recalls the thesis of reciprocal determination, he gives this explanation: "This being so because by a motion determined by time the quantity both of the motion and of the time is measured."15 In the immediate continuation of this text, finally, it will be farther specified that time measures motion by determining the uniform, circular transit that will be the unit of measure "because the number of this is the best known." To define time in this way by solar revolutions, one would fall again into the illusion that was denounced earlier: "We are no nearer knowledge than if we said that the footrule measures magnitude while we left the concept magnitude undefined."16 As if— and this is the sense of Plotinus's first objection—this magnitude were not a uniform quantity of motion before there were a soul to know this privileged number. The problem concerns dissymmetry (time/movement) and intelligibility (measurement-time). Here again the dissymmetry of intelligibility disqualifies the sense required by Aristotelian speech: "We observe the tract between a sun-

30,1

rise and its return and, as the movement is uniform, we thus obtain a time-interval upon which to support ourselves, and we use this as a standard. We have thus a measure of time. Time itself is not a measure [metroi de tou khronou'1 ou gar ho khronos autos metron]."^7 Instead of time being the affection (pathos), measure, or number of motion, it is time that is measured by motion and motion that measures time: motion is the number of time, of a time become, if not an "independent variable," then at least independent to the extent that, as time, it is something utterly other than a quantity measured by motion.18 What has happened? By taking a single movement occurring within a determined time, thus choosing a movement as representative of time inasmuch as it is uniform by definition, "and by counting the movement a number of times, we will come to grasp how much time has elapsed; thus it is not at all out of place to assert that movement and the revolution of the sun in particular measure the magnitude of time; which lets us know by its own quantity the quantity of time elapsed, which cannot be grasped or understood otherwise."19 We thus arrive at a first critical sedimentation. To define time in terms of the number of the world's movement is to confuse the gnoseological plane with the ontological one, ratio cognoscendi with ratio essendi; it is to conclude from dependency in the order of cognition to subordination in the order of essences, even though it has nowhere been demonstrated that time was engendered by motion, or that it was something in relation to motion. It has only been ascertained that time was cognized through motion, that it primitively manifested itself to our thought thanks to that uniform, circular movement that allows measurement, that it was easier to grasp the duration of a movement than that of a state of rest. Measuring is not the same as producing, as Aristotle very well seems to induce despite himself. On the contrary, it is in the course of time that the state of things in motion and at rest is produced, the earlier and the later that are in the life and movement of the sky, and that the celestial sphere brings about its own movement.20 If the sphere stops, not only would time not be annihilated but its state of rest would be rightfully measurable inasmuch as the soul continues to act.2± To turn time into a dependency of locomotion, to explicate it on the outside as is implied by every realist and dogmatic ontology, is in the final analysis to assimilate the false evidence of the ordinary perception of time, its "representation," to what must be called the pure intuition of time linked to its "presentation." Under Plato's influence, the path taken by Plotinus consists in turning the problem around by reversing its principle in such a way that what was designated as "objective" can no longer be posited except within and through that life of the soul whence stems real-ontic time, and in such a way that the reversal of

The Time of Audacity: Plotinus

the physical time/locomotion relation is achieved by the overcoming of Aristotelian extrinsicism, which made the internal character of time depend on an external criterion (the movement of the world) instead of basing the extrinsic criterion in an internal character (the movement of the soul). No longer the inscription of time into space, "the translation of solar passion," but the soul's initiative toward the sensible that inscribes matter into the commotion of time, "the escapement of the primordial distension" outside the intelligible that chases the soul across the area it engenders, and whose successive horizons widening around it are like "circumferential reporters."22 We would therefore commit a great absurdity by granting anteriority and posteriority, and consequently time, to an inanimate /apsukhos/ movement, and by denying time to that movement in whose image ^kata mimesiny the inanimate movement nonetheless exists, to that movement whence primordially arise anteriority and posteriority; for that movement is spontaneous /autourgos7; each of its own acts is produced one after the other, and in producing their succession, it engenders the passage from one to the other. We explain the movement of the universe by saying that the universe is enveloped in the soul; we also say that this movement is within time... Thus the soul is the first to go all the way to time, which it engenders and possesses with its own acts.23 It really says something, then, to assert that time is the life of the soul consisting in the movement passing from one state of life to another,24 that the soul is at the origin of time, which is constituted along with the soul as soon as the latter arises out of intelligence "by adopting another movement, proceeding in the opposite direction,"25 that time blends with the soul's restless and action-seeking nature that directs it toward an ever new future,26 that finally or first of all, far from being merely an abstract order of succession linked to the divine regularity of the movement of fixed stars, time is identified with the movement of the soul (with that "stream of consciousness"?) that is ceaseless alterity (aei heterotes).27 Even before understanding what all this "means," is this really to advance something essentially new that, in the nonevidence of its fabric, draws us into an other universe of thought and action? Without claiming right off to measure Plotinus's originality with regard to the entire Hellenic tradition (here, especially Platonic in inspiration), the question aims to identify the great line of mutation that acts and is acted on to form the contour of a new system, a new metaphysical figure. I want to speak of that procession of the soul that temporalizes itself (and Plotinus is constrained to forge a new expression to say it: "heauten ekhronosen," Enneads III, 7, 11, 1.30), whose mode of presentation is a mode of production; and also of that

32,3

subjectivization process of time that becomes the primary process of production — production of time and production of subjectivity—thereby determining the effective field for the appearance of the metaphysical economy of time as the essential structure and formative system for a subjectivity that cannot be reduced to the constitutive elements of a moral subject. The emergence of this subjectivity in the descriptive plane of Neoplatonism coincides with the experience of the dissolution, external as well as internal, of the Greeks' civic relation to themselves. This externality is what Plotinus will be the first to dare to unpack metaphysically as time. And that inferiority is what he will attempt to fold back onto the exteriority coextensive with it by doubling the irreducible and irreversible temporal dimension of the fall with an ontological procession overcoming itself in the conversion (of being) to self. (Parakolouthesis: Remi Brague reminds us that only barely with this Plotinian word does a term translatable by "consciousness" appear in philosophy.) This is no longer the theme, common to Platonism and Stoicism, of the future as the place of passions, but that of the autoconstitution of time as temporal linking together of the subject who wants and desires. This is the project of a will "that seeks to break up the permanence of its intelligible exemplar,"28 but that also relocates and prolongs — at its own risk and peril, underscores Pierre Aubenque, because it recuses the imperative of simple-becoming (haplosis), of exit from self (ekstasis), and of self-abandonment (epidosis} — something of the free deployment of the One, whose essence is identical with its potentiality (dunamis) and its will.29 Let me risk a hypothesis: the genesis of time (of its reality and no longer just of its idea) becomes explicit from the perspective of the determination of the soul's essence, which was made problematic by the setting up of a new foundation for metaphysics in response to the historical overcoming of classical Greek ontology. As Bergson explains in his 1902 course, Plotinus only spoke of the two other hypostases in terms of an extension and purification of the soul: "Now just as these three realities [the One that transcends Being, the Principle that is at once Being and the Intellectual Principle, and third the nature of the Soul] are in the nature of things, so we must think that they are within us ... such are the parts of the human being that Plato calls the Inner Human [eiso anthropon]."30 Everything is in the soul, and the soul is in everything. Meditating on the secret angle of this "ideal intuition"—which in our sense is not "Plotinus's boldest assertion"31 but rather a speculative formulation that condenses the existential positioning constitutive of Plotinianism in a cry32 — one soon perceives

The Time of Audacity: Plotinus

that the centrality of the soul, leading to the apprehension of truth as a pure form of interiority, if "each of us is an intelligible world,"33 implies tearing humanity from the hierarchy of being from which it had itself withdrawn by dint of its own movement, detaching it from all natural links forged in the hierarchical system of hypostases. Within the system of a metaphysical doubling by which humans are, in themselves, outside themselves, they reflect the entire diversity of ontological totality, the absolute totality of ontological diversity folded back onto itself, in a context of conversion defined by the ascending of cognitive stages all the way up to the level of the One. There, knowing is being. The reason that a manner of being corresponds to every mode of knowledge is that cognitive activity is essentially ontological trans-formation, and thus the position of the soul is effectively "primary and in reality unique."34 Isn't conversion the immediate work of the soul, a solitary traveler toward the "within of the within"? This is a voyage in the time of Authentic Life that reconstitutes me as spirit, institutes me as subject in an inside deeper than any interior, reveals me as One in the ecstasy wherein the within of everything is discovered, the within of a without farther away than any exterior world.35 It would be saying too little of this philosophy that it is about the Soul and Time. Rather, this philosophy is born from them, and unheard of in the audacity of its thinking is the unthinkable fold of the without, which delivers the life of the within to the very extent of its operation (re-flection), from which derives humanity's relation to time in the extreme recoil of the origin (dis-cernment). So maybe one would not be doing the work of "a historian in shorts," as Michel Foucault would say, to advance the notion that Kant need not be awaited for there to be found (at last) in determinate form the historico-transcendental field wherein that force-idea takes on meaning in its two versions, original and doubled, that "the more subjective time is, the more original and extensive is the expansiveness of the subject."36 This is not to diminish Kant's glory by dredging the tortuous paths of the already-been-said in search of some pale echo. It is rather to situate that glory elsewhere, far beyond. The problem is not that of finding the text that assembles together (resembles) "in advance" the elements of a later statement in order to reconstruct hastily a spare genealogy having no other use than to fill the gap and establish at the lowest possible cost its own author's quota of originality. But here, for example, we need to describe Plotinianism's profound break with the classical model of Platonist philosophy—and this, through statements that never cease appealing to Plato's authority in the course of a discursive practice that can take up this or that figure of thought, or reproduce it by accelerating and accentu-

34,5

ating redistributions in progress (time, the mobile image of eternity). We need to examine what will be translated in the transition to the Latin world (the chain diastasis-distensio uniting Augustine to Plotinus), what will be transformed (the relation between originary and derived time, the synthetic function of the soul), what will be transfigured (the shift of henological qualities — freedom, will, infinity, potentiality— to the role of attributes of the Supreme Being), what will be lost (on a number of points, including the fall and the creation of time, Augustine is closer to Plato than to Plotinus), what will be rediscovered at the dawn of modern times (Cusa, Spinoza). Finally, we need to pinpoint the stakes and true content of the Kantian revolution in its abolition of the caesura between originary and derived time, along with its irreversible emancipation of an ordinary time made up of any instant at all, of an urban time having lost all dependency on the intensive motion of the soul as well as the extensive motion of the world. A general transformation of relations does not in fact exclude that essential regularity that carries with it the ideal genesis of modernity: the representation of the subject as mastery of time; the synthesis of time as active identity of the subject, equalized with the unequal in itself under the predominance of the future, that dimension of the will; the will effectuating itself in an exclusive avidity of self—which can be rendered by the German Eigensucht—as will to power (subjectivization, or the derivation of the subject).37 These features in Plotinus will be conserved and converted by Augustine, "that father of the church who is also the true father of Western consciousness."38 Returning to the question left in suspense about the Plotinian turn, I must briefly indicate that perhaps no other thought poses with as much acuity the question of its proper "consistency." This is the case whether one is judging that thought's historical situation within the history of thought, with the massive irruption in Alexandria of Oriental (Brehier)39 and Jewish (Ravaisson) thought, or Judeo-Christian thought: a "direct" Christian influence being seen through the intermediary of Plotinus's master, Ammonius Saccas, a former Christian who would supposedly have raised Plotinus in the Christian religion (though the man in charge of the situation remains Philo Judaeus); or whether one is judging the place and function of those traditional themes he took from his predecessors (the Pythagoreans, Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics); or judging the "deconstructivist" appreciation of his ontology insofar as it reunites and hierarchizes respectively Plato's One-Good, Aristotle's Pure Intellect, and the Stoics' Universal Soul (Moreau); or the real influence of Plotinus's writings on the Neoplatonists ("surprisingly limited," according to Richard Harder,

The Time of Audacity: Plotinus

and ambivalent at least with regard to the question of time and the soul) and of their "fidelity."40 This is not to forget the major problem of Plotinus's relation to Plato, knowing that the latter was first known within the framework of Plotinian thought—with Plotinus outside the frame. (It may only have been with Leibniz that a distinction was clearly established between Platonic and Neoplatonic elements.) It is as if the commentator were drawn into the indecidability (and duplicity) of a coded text, submerged by the metonymical body of the raw text of the Enneads, petrified by the audacity (tolma) of the self-constitutive movement of Plotinus the author (who [re]doubles the Parricide's "supreme audacity" in bringing nonbeing back to an infinitely expanding nature of the Other by turning alterity into the principle of procession).41 The commentator then seems condemned to the indefinite movement of regrasping its constitution, while complaining about the distance from its "grasp" henceforth dependent on the proximity of the (Platonic) origin. It is as if left to oneself, left by Plotinus himself to the textual production of the Platonic doubling, the commentator preferred to remain at the level of the organic stratification and formal articulations that make up that textual production. A patina of meaning that always lets the preceding meaning subsist, as Barthes would have said. Plotinus or the glory of ancient philosophy? It will be admitted that this is the surest way not to glorify Plotinus for having broken a new path. In that land where East and West were at grips with each other, he would nonetheless allow the first contours of the "European determinacy" (Hegel) of absolute essence as infinite subjectivity, as depth, as original break, to be conjectured. The audacity and anxiety of being. Self-consciousness. A threshold effect, for the main border between the movement of thought and an exterior and transcendent God, the Unmoved Mover, is abolished. The essence of God explicates itself in the thought of oneself, in the unity of thought and of what is thought conceived as an activity, as automotion. This philosophy, whatever Hegel says exactly, is perhaps no more neo-Aristotelian than Neoplatonic. Or rather, perhaps it is as much pseudo-Aristotelian as pseudo-Platonic. A false doubling and double cloak. Pierre Aubenque is right to recall that the circularity of thought thinking itself was never understood by Aristotle as automotion (Selbstbewegung), a notion he definitively refused when he rejected Plato's self-moving soul. In substituting "the perfect of the pure act by the aorist of an activity that would be the infinite movement of self-constitution," and by interpreting energeia as Tatigkeit because he confuses the first heaven with the Unmoved Mover, Hegel merely continues "the Neoplatonist interpretation that believed itself authorized to apply the passage from Plato's Sophist (248e) to Aristotle's

36,7

Prime Mover."42 Only after the entirety of Greek thought and what thinking means has been displaced and broken into (of which this problem, endowed with its critical character, is an important index), only after its reorientation, can the assertion according to which the Sophist—or Parmenides—offered its kairos to Neoplatonism take on meaning.43 A final observation, to justify the importance of these historiographical remarks. Alexandre Kojeve, in his Essai d'une histoire raisonnee de la philosophic pai'enne, undoubtedly has gone furthest in analyzing Neoplatonism as an eclecticism, for we could be said to be in the presence of a mere "addition" of the Platonic idea to the Aristotelian-Stoic form (all dogmatized).44 Plotinus would be the first to restate Aristotle by speaking as //he were restating Plato, just as he is able to restate Plato as //he were restating Aristotle. He says nothing, then, in its proper sense, because in speaking he contradicts himself. To give a picture, "it could be said that, for Plotinus, the System of Knowledge was a statue made up of two parts that were initially separate, namely a Platonic head and an Aristotelian-Stoic body, these parts having been glued together by Plotinus himself with the aid of a specifically Neoplatonic (or Plotinian, or better Porphyro-Plotinian) glue whose application moreover had to be as thin and invisible as possible" (3: 344). The conclusion falls like the blade of a guillotine: there is no room for Neoplatonism in the schema of a dialectical development of philosophy, "given that [Neoplatonism] is nothing other than a simple copresence of thetic and antithetic paratheses within a single and even socalled eclectic 'system,' which is in fact dogmatized, that is, paraphilosophical" (3: 341). Instead of a living contradiction, we have an eclectic addition, a dead, paraphilosophical coexistence — inasmuch as it is in some way "spatial" and not "temporal" (synthetic). In fact, and by definition, the eclectic addition excludes time just as much as the Platonic and Aristotelian paratheses. The explication would be grossly circular were it not that a further step was taken to found this hypothesis in reason (quaestio juris). It will be considered, then, that all of pagan philosophy refuses to relate the concept with time insofar as this relation is specifically Judeo-Christian. That is why, Kojeve concludes, neither Plotinus nor Plato was ever able to account for the Fall. I will show that Plotinus does "account for" the fall (real or material) of the human soul as a purely subjective activity, without fraudulently reintroducing Plotinus into the Judeo-Christian mold because what will be discovered in him is the idea of an idealized (ideal or intensive) fall of potentialities emanating from the One, an idea properly belonging to Neoplatonic speech. It will be verified too that a dual temporality responds to this double approach to the Fall, not that of linear time and cyclical time but an originary time and a derived time, something utterly different

The Time of A u d a c i t y : Plotinus

from the juxtaposed reproduction of Platonism and Aristotelianism. Yet I did not mention Kojeve to announce this, what is to come, but rather to underscore that behind every "eclectic" reading of the Enneads (depreciative or glorifying) is found this misprision of Neoplatonism insofar as it is the first great philosophy of the soul and time, along with the introduction of the subject in the intelligible and the Aion as life of the absolute, as life of the concept, to take up Kojeve's Hegelian terminology. The philosophical stakes of Neoplatonism crystallize in the problem of time. If it let itself be conceived only as a strategy to sidetrack, if there were no break without a deliberate intention, I would be tempted to define the Plotinian turn as a paradoxical "breaking-off strategy" with regard to the plane of Platonic consistency (a plane to which Aristotle is "still" tributary on a lot of points — and time would be inscribed under the dependency of the Great Form, of cosmological configuration).45 This "breaking-off strategy" would do something like reverse that regulated distribution of points and privileged positions by freeing depth (bathos) from its "geometrico-dialectical" subordination to the plane (length and width, the kata platos and kata mekos procedures of The Sophist); by unveiling a depth irreducible to every spatial dimension, a bottomlessness that the intensive movement of light expresses (the idealized fall of light is what tumbles into glory—even in its greatest glory the light of nature falls and does not cease to fall), and that affirms through this motion the procession of a series of potentialities (dunamis) of which the rigid lines of the sensible and locomotion would be but an extreme consequence (along with the real fall into particular beings). "Up above," writes Plotinus, "everything is transparent and there is neither obscurity nor resistance, each being and each thing is visible for all the others right into its very depths: light is transparent to light." Up above, every body is like an eye. Potentialities derived from light, the celestial souls see everything and see themselves in the others. And light is what creates forms, as so many luminous figures. Lines of light.46 For Plotinus, what is important is that the whole of intelligible nature is a light.47 What mattered to Plato, however, was the transcendence of the luminous source. Of course, for Plotinus, the emanating cause remains in itself—as the being that sends these luminous traits that the souls are remains in itself, and to each of these traits corresponds an animate being—inseparable from a system of a One that is beyond being; it is true that in this sense the first hypothesis ofParmenides dominates the whole of Neoplatonism. But "already at the level of the One, the metaphor of the sphere and of its radiance singularly corrects the strict theory of a hierarchy... Under Stoic influences, a cause that is veritably immanent joins in fact with the emanating

38,9

cause."48 "It may be compared to the ray of light attached upwards to the sun, but not grudging its light to beings that lie beneath it."49 Nonetheless, it can still be guessed that each of these potentialities and their deployment can be referred to a term from The Republic or from The Banquet, to a development in Phaedrus or in Timaeus, each of the hypostases to a hypothesis in Parmenides... Yes, but following Gilles Deleuze's expression, all the words have changed accent.50 (Notice that at almost the same moment the situation of the socalled Greek or Sophist novel is palpably the same: all the genres of ancient literature—love elegy, tragedy, the rhetorical, epic, and historical genres, the geographical novel—are reworked and recast to form the new novelistic entity of the particular human being, of the private person evolving in an abstract and alien world. How can one not cite Bakhtin? "The elements derived from various other genres assumed a new character and special functions in this completely new chronotope—'an alien world in adventure-time' — and ceased to be what they had been in other genres.")51 Hence, everything has changed meaning, beginning with that spontaneous movement of the soul from which one must depart in order to explicate bodily movement, given that it already is, according to Plato, the "first principle of motion for all other things that are moved."52 The essence of life, the arkhe of kinesis (an expression from the earliest Greek tradition), the world soul would animate every cosmic movement with a "psychical" movement embracing all of sensible reality within a single potentiality. Preceding Plotinus, doesn't Plato go to the point of turning the soul into the essence of phusis proper?53 Unless this proposition is to be inscribed in the wake of the xenocratic definition of the soul: a sequence of numbers that is deployed in the movement of the heavens and always closes back anew on itself—and that is also time. Properly speaking, there is no psychical movement in the Timaeus, but a numerical-kinesic structure. Listen to Gadamer: When the soul is described as being spread out everywhere and enveloping and permeating everything, ive have the graphic way of stating that behind the All as it presents itself to our senses there is an invisible, prevailing order—a sort of celestial mathematics and music upon 'which both the segmentation and the unity of the whole are based.54 This was the plane of Platonic consistency. In any case, Plotinus adds something whose implications make possible a definitive disentanglement from Platonism: the soul produces everything because it has a role as the principle of movement.55 The immanent soul, and not the demiurge, is what engenders, like a living organism, a kosmos through the sole force

The Time of Audacity: Plotinus

of its silent contemplation of the intelligible identified with that life of the intelligence from which it proceeds, and an image of which it strives to reproduce at its level. An image of that other contemplation that does not have its object in something different from itself: the unity-in-tension of primary life and intelligence. Isn't this because that image is nothing other than a first draft of the sensible world? A substitute for an imperfect contemplation that would be further weakened by lavishing its internal unity on the exterior, the soul frees itself from the demiurge's hold and can no longer be determined, constituted by it, because the soul henceforth assures its mediating role between the intelligible and the sensible — because the soul assumes its productive function that is called nature. "What does this tell us? That what we know as nature [phusis] is a soul." "Nature [being] no other than the order the universal soul has established"; "has no need to deliberate."56 The break between transcendence and the world was what made Plato's "deliberation" of a demiurge necessary. He was only there to fill the gap. Now, Plotinus's "panpsychism" and "panvitalism," his transformation of animism in the direction of a spiritualist physics that conceives only of purely "optical" forms, are the expression of his overcoming the Platonic break. "Nothing, however, is completely severed from its prior. Thus the higher soul appears to reach away as far down as to the vegetal order."57 One need not deliberate but understand and be quiet, Nature would assert if she agreed to speak. Understand what? That the engendered being is for me an object of mute contemplation, the natural object of my contemplation; I am myself born from such contemplation and I have a natural taste for contemplation; what in me contemplates produces an object to contemplate; thus do geometers draw their figures in contemplating. But I draw none of them; / contemplate and the lines of bodies realize themselves as if they fell from me.58 Everything is contemplation! Things and images, things insofar as they are figures of light, images insofar as they are acts of contemplation. Everything is contemplation, both nature and the self.59 On reading these lines, it should be admitted that there is little interest in knowing whether Plotinus—and the texts are, of course, contradictory— effectively ("literarily") situates the demiurge at the level of the soul ("Reflection is no function of the Intelligence but characteristic of the soul, whose actions belong to divisible nature"),60 or at the level of the intelligence ("above everything is the Demiurge-Intelligence," nous demiourgos), "which gives to the Soul the forms that come after it."61 What is important is that burst of action (horexis) from which derives

40,1

the motor function of the soul and, mediately, the creation of a time belonging entirely to it, because it manifests the life of the soul that "in dissociating itself [diastasis zoes] occupies time" (Enneads III, 7, 11; translation modified). "The soul," Plotmus explains, "contained an unquiet potential [dunamis oukh hesukhos], always desirous of translating elsewhere what it saw in the intelligible world, and it could not bear that the entirety of Intelligible being be present to it all at once."62 But is it the soul in its entirety that is thus characterized? Is it still a question of the world soul? If this is the movement through which the soul is temporalized, if this "unquiet" decides its temporalization (and it is hard to see how this "unquiet potential" could be confused with the world soul), then the soul, in its essential activity of contemplation and in its specific function of organization, must be already determined by its relation to what gives birth to time. And this is indeed what happens: "While the soul remains in repose and contemplates the intelligible world, the universe is constituted in organizing itself"63 under the royal authority (epistasia basilike) of the divine soul (theias psukhes), which sends the last of its potentialities into the universe without itself diving into bodies. This cosmos is the universe of celestial bodies, with a universal and ordered life. Hence the souls of stars: "There is no preoccupied concern, bringing about a veritable descent, as to withdraw it from its noblest and most blessed contemplation; the star-soul is always close to ideas, and through its potential it governs the universe without executing anything itself [apragmoni dunamei]."64 This strange potential, deprived of action, is what allows it "to remain unchanged."65 With no remembrance. "[The celestial souls] have seen God and they do not remember? Ah, no: it is that they see God still and always, and that as long as they see, they cannot tell themselves that they have had the vision." Nor do they remember their past, for "their living is eternal, and eternity is an unchanging unity [zosin aei"1 to de aei tauton hen]."66 Similarly, what is thought currently does not imply the memory of having thought.67 The contemplative act is the whole life of these souls who, while residing in the ever present, are ignorant of time. The soul is constituted as such by turning itself toward its source, the Intelligence, which it surrounds with its love in the manner of a circle in motion moving itself by virtue of an aspiration (ephesis). From this potential turning upon a center, the heavens are animated by a circular motion that is only incidentally a locomotion.68 "Just as the soul turns upon itself, so the sphere too turns upon itself." "That's a movement like that of the Intelligence; the Intelligence moves by staying still; for it turns upon itself." "Why do the heavens move with a circular movement?

The Time of Audacity: Plotinus

Because they are imitating the Intelligence," that internal motion of the intelligence that aspires in contemplating itself to find again the simple unity, the immobility from whence it comes —just as the soul desires the good that is beyond being. This spiritual act of conversion, this movement of desire (ephesis), is what defines the motion— even more than it is motion "par excellence"—which is "the life and act of essence and of being itself."69 Life, in which the soul takes part as a living, thinking, contemplating essence, is nothing other than the movement of desire that goes from thought to being, which effectuates the identity of being and thought by converting itself toward the One. From then on, far from forming through the successive regularity of its (local) motion an "image eternal but moving according to number... such that time came into being,"70 circular motion is but the image of that converted motion from which springs forth the life of the nous. And the substantial number (ousiodes arithmos) will be the one that eternally brings being back to intelligence,71 and not the arithmos in terms of which is regulated the locomotion of the celestial bodies, the number of the Great Year that synthesizes the numerical structure of the world soul. Here we come to the decisive point of rupture with the Platonic world and with Hellenic idealism in general, which conceived the essence of the sensible only on the basis of thinkable objects (ideas or forms). For without the identity of thinking with what is thought, without the identification of the intelligible with the intelligence that turns each idea, in the manner of the Leibnizian monad, into an individual spirit in which is expressed a point of view on the whole—which comes down to introducing the (point of view of the) subject in the intelligible world, and this is above all that "other point of departure" mentioned by Plotinus right when he is preparing to reformulate the problem of the genesis of being in terms of audacity, tolma, engaging the will and the "generating desire of its object" — thus without the identity of being and thought, the idea of a productive contemplation would remain wholly arbitrary.72 Circular motion figures, in the order of the visible, the circle of thought thinking itself, the coincidence of the contemplator and the contemplated that characterizes pure intellection. The celestial trace of the infinite movement of self-constitution, it is a motion not local but vital: "The movement of a single living being whose act is directed to itself, a being which to anything outside is at rest, but is in movement by dint of the inner life it possesses, the eternal life."73 This motion is the concept of the world soul. It is neither a (local) predicate, nor a (cosmic) state: a motion that comes back to itself, it is the motion of consciousness, of reflection, and of life.74 Illumination or image of the intelligence (eikon nou) thinking itself in turning toward itself. Gathering the light of the intelligence, "like the light of the sun which

42,3

goes beyond its spherical mass, issues from it and plays about it," the most divine part of the soul "displays properties identical to those of the Intelligence."75 We can now answer the question we raised. The unquiet potential that makes time by directing itself toward "an ever new future" can belong neither to the world soul nor to the celestial souls, Plotinus bringing these two together often to the extent that they are not affected by the bodies in motion they command.76 It is thus necessary to search farther in the procession for the surfacing of the temporal soul. The conclusion to be drawn is strict: even if we had to envision the intelligible world in a later phase sub specie temporis, and disengage another figure of time that could only be the life of the nous, we will have to stand by the assertion that in Plotinus there is no cosmic time endowed with an autonomous reality. Hence, no more cosmo-logical time as surrogate for divine immutability. Instead of the world soul's spontaneous harmony, the silent split in the soul whose intensive movement, caught between two limit audacities (of the Intelligence that strays from the One; of matter that drums up an "other intelligence"),77 is inseparable from a fall—in the double modality of a virtual fall that "measures the degree to which the intensive quantity rises,"78 and of the real fall of the soul, snatched up by the black hole of matter, in the extensive part. At the level of the stars, we are still essentially within that prehistory described by Plotinus: "Before having engendered anteriority and to have linked it with the posteriority the anterior demands, it [nonchronological time, before its birth as time] lay, though not yet as time, in being, keeping its complete immobility within being."79 What if one were to object that anterior and posterior are already within the "vital" motion of celestial bodies? The Alexandrian would answer that they are present there as within thoughts (noeseos): under the relation of order (taxis) and not of time just as with the universal soul there are parts separate in a sense other than local.80 He would also claim that the movement of the stars, having always the same life, is comparable to the movement of a chorus that would dance forever: at every instant its dance would be complete, and thus it would have no desire.8i Until then, this permanence has been conserved thanks to its intelligible exemplar; it is lost if, within the soul, everything is in a state of a becoming... the soul, in the part of itself that is dispersed in time, seeks to break up the permanence of its intelligible exemplar.82 There arises the throbbing declension of a series of (surface) effects that threaten to subvert and obscure (from below) the processual luminism of the Enneads. The emanating cause is no longer conjugated with the immanent or "expressive" cause of the dynamism of a single act; it is doubled by its "expres-

The Time of A u d a c i t y : P l o t i n u s

sionist" tendency. How is it that thoughts and ideas are not in us as they are in the universal soul? Why is there in our souls this succession in time and these errancies? How is it that souls have forgotten God their Father (patros theou) and, as bits detached from Him, they are ignorant of themselves and of Him? Why do our bodies not move like the heavens? The question of the soul and time seals the passage from the how (whose basic form since Plato is that of "How is multiplicity born of unity?") to the why. Why the Fall? A question: from which fall is time born?83 A hint: the circular motion of the universal soul is in opposition to the particular soul in the linear movement of "our impulses that carry us to endlessly different objects," "because what is in us of the spherical element is poorly rounded."84 The hypothesis building up here is opposed not only to what one could (adopt or) reject as the "traditional interpretation" of the genesis of time from out of the world soul in the philosophy of Plotinus; it also comes up against the discourse that it would make time hold forth "in person." In effect, according to Brehier's translation, the phusis, that potentiality derived from the universal soul, is what would engender time. Here is the text of Plotinus: Nature eager for action /phuseos polupragmonos/, which was set on governing itself and on being for itself ^kai arkhein hautes boulomenes kai einai hautes/, chose to aim at something better than its present state. So it stirred from its rest, and that state too stirred with it; they stirred themselves ^kinoumenoi/ toward a future that was ceaselessly new, a state not identical with the preceding one but different and ever changing. And after having traversed a portion of the outgoing path, they produced /eirgasmetha/ time, which is an image of eternity /aionos eikona/.85 Setting aside for the moment the problem of time as image of eternity (which would send us back to the analysis ofaion that takes up the first part of the tractate), it can be admitted that (1) the "action" described here seems poorly compatible with the life of the world soul, including its productive function (which is nothing other than the phusis) to which it is referred; and (2) Plotinus uses terms and expressions that elsewhere qualify the audacity of the particular soul when, "multiplying its activity [polupragmonei],"86 the particular soul separates from the universal soul and forsakes its union with the intelligence: terms that relate to the fall of the soul and "when its wing is broken." As if the fall into time was (at) the measure of the fall of the soul—"which tends towards sensible things... since time would disappear if the soul withdrew to unite with the intelligible."87 Now, it is necessary to admit with Monique Lassegue that it is difficult for those whom Brehier says stir themselves (se dirigent, kinoumenoi) toward

44,5

a future that is ceaselessly new to be "nature" in the sense that his translation lets it be understood, and which will become time.88 This translation is what constrains the translation of eirgasmetha (line 19) by "they produced." In the Henry-Schwyzer edition, a note on the term kinoumenoi indicates that it can only be a question of ourselves, human beings, the subject of eirgasmetha having to refer back to the beginning of the chapter, where genesomen should be read in the place of genesomenon (line 5), as does Brehier by indicating an emendation to the text. Which authorizes him to transcribe: "Time was not yet: or at least it did not exist for intelligible beings; that doesn't mean that time would be engendered by them, but that it is logically and by nature posterior [kaiphusei ton husteron] to them." Arthur Hilary Armstrong, who translates the main sentence by 'W.. .constructed time," also refers back to the first person of genesomen, which he sees as the correct reading: " We shall produce time by means of the form and nature of what comes after."89 And in some fashion this same "nature," marked by the will of what comes after, by the seal of the future, is what will become manifest in the intention and independence of human souls toward alterity, and which will set off the machine of time.90 If it is definitely we humans who constructed time, we need to try to circumscribe better "the differences that there are between the universal soul and ours." What does Plotinus tell us in fact? "But to treat the human soul as a fair presentment of the soul of the universe is like picking out potters and blacksmiths and making them warrant for discrediting an entire well-ordered city."91 There would also be a difference in kind, as well as in potential, between the world soul and our souls, which should logically prevent Plotinus from putting each soul at the level of this universal soul, in the very same movement that leads him to reject the notion that the souls are parts of the soul (to the poorly understood formulation of the Philebus, he opposes "the soul when its wing is broken," which Plato, he says, correctly distinguishes from the soul of the universe).92 My foreboding is that this will not at all be the case, the soul having first to reflect on the following: "that soul is the author of all living things, that it has breathed life into them all, those nourished by earth and sea, those in the air, the divine stars in the sky; it created the sun and the vastness of the heavens."93 Moreover, the urban metaphor is introduced and developed in one of the oldest tractates of the Enneads by analogy with the Intelligence, being at once one and multiple: In the same way, the soul must be both one and many, the single soul being the source of a

multitude of souls differing just as from one genus there rise various species... For over there, there is an Intelligence, which like some huge living being contains potentially all

The Time of A u d a c i t y : Plotinus

£#e o^^r beings- and there are other intelligences of which each contains in actuality what another contains potentially. It is as if a city had one soul even though it contained a multitude; the soul of the city would be more perfect and more potent than the souls of individuals; that does not prevent them from being all of the same nature.94 But that's just it: for the relation between individual souls and the universal soul to be conceived in the image of the relation between singular intelligences and the total intelligence indicates that it can only be a question of a formal relation that implies only intrinsic differences, in a world that ''''contains within itself no spatial distinction, and has none of the feebleness of division. "95 Internal and pronominal distinctions, a virtual multiplicity referring to the fact that an intensive quantity is not composed of parts (panes extra panes is the rule of composition for extensive quantities) but contains in a virtual manner all its present expressions, all its subsequent units (pars totalis}; each of the intelligibles expresses one aspect of the infinite reality of the intelligence while implying all the others virtually, and so much so that the undivided unity that reunites all life and all intelligence turns every part into a whole. "No part [is] standing in isolated existence estranged from the rest"; while different, no part is estranged and "nowhere is there any wronging of any other." In this way does the universal soul contain all souls: Each item is distinct, though not to the point of separation... Its unity consists in the sense not of an aggregate built up of all the souls, but of their having a single origin and of their residing still within their origin; or rather, they have no origin, since they have always been; there is, in fact, no becoming to this level any more than there is apportioning; the apportionment is in appearance only, from the perspective of the bodies in which the soul is received.96 Whatever the state, it is insofar as they have a single origin and reside there still that individual souls are of the same nature as the universal soul. Residing in its origin, each soul is the logos of an intellect, a reason more unfurled than it, which it expresses. Souls are "as the multiple coming out of the simple but remaining in contact with the simple, which is more indivisible than they are." Coming together completely in the most perfect potentiality, which is always close to the intelligibles, each soul suspended to an intellect, despite their tendency to divide themselves, they cannot go the extreme of division.Q1 Thus, at the higher level, the division is in appearance only, while the individuation of souls flows from an eternal essence, each soul expressing the universal organization from its point of view. Because it does not result from the dispersion of bodies, there is indeed an idea of each individ-

46,7

ual.98 (We can gauge the break here from the Aristotelian tendency that consists in seeing the principle of individuation in matter.) Having its foundation in the intelligible, "our soul is of the same nature as the soul of the gods; when it is considered apart and without what one adds to it, we find it of the same value as the world soul."99 All the more so, "if my soul and your soul come from the soul of the universe; all souls, once again, would be but a single soul."100 The world soul is thus nothing other than the state of ideal, hypostatized union in a single soul such that, as a virtual multiplicity, it is not composed but decomposes into all the other souls that it ontologically precedes. This sublational, spiritual, and ideal excellence results in the separation between individual souls being but a phenomenon: all entire in itself, the soul only multiplies and divides itself, and is only reflected in bodies from the view of the imagination.101 Conserving identity in difference, individual souls reside together and form only a single soul because they are not each the soul of a particular being.102 They meet, so to speak, fringe to fringe; they strike out here and there, but are held together at the source much as light is a divided thing upon earth, shining in this house and that, and yet remains uninterruptedly one identical substance. The all-soul would always remain above, since essentially it has, even in its lower phase, nothing to do with descent or with attending to this sensible sphere; our human souls similarly do not remain for ever above, because their lot is cast for this sphere, and because they give attention to a thing (the body) which requires their care.103 Because the further one descends in the series of potentialities, the more the ideal fall, inseparable from intensive motion in its relation to matter = 0, tends to become a real, material fall, the more the virtual multiplicity contained in the One tends to be actualized, the more the One loses its potential, the more length and width (that is to say, extension: the sensible, matter) tend to imprison depth, the more geometrical figures tend to predominate over figures of light. The more intrinsic differences turn into extrinsic distinctions, real divisions, local separations, and subjective oppositions.104 The scale of intensities slackens as do the links between the universal soul and these individual souls who, turning away from their activity and exiting the All, "leap in some way from universal being into a particular being,"105 become a particular soul, descend into the subjectivity of passions and affections. A strong distinction will, therefore, have to be introduced between "individual" soul (intensive individuation) and "particular" soul (extensive subjectivization). Individuality is the sign of the virtual multiplicity immanent in the universal, what exposes the

The Time of Audacity: Plotinus

conversion—that conversion that prevents the ideal fall of the procession of potentialities emanating out of the One from becoming a real fall of the soul, the source of the production of real objects in the exteriority of matter; the particular is the result and the coefficient of a procession that is nothing more than dispersion and separation because it does not come back to itself (a real fall). Yes, Plotinus certainly does define the human soul here as a purely subjective activity determining the reality of the fall of my soul into a body. Souls are not content in fact to produce through their radiance a reflection of themselves, namely, the body, which they would animate with a natural and necessary action "in agreement with the circular movement of the world"—in such a way that "their conditions, their lives, and their wills have their signs in the figures formed by the planets and are united in some way in a single melodic theme."106 If some remain motionless, others are irresistibly attracted by their own reflection on the surface of the things they illuminate. Thus, far from expressing their union with the order of the universe, which would be a proof that they do not act in isolation, souls change and they descend from the universe to its parts; each wants to be for itself; they 'weary of being with another and they withdraw into themselves. Having stayed a long time in this distance and separation from the All, its gaze is no longer directed toward the intelligible, the soul becomes a fragment, isolated, weakened, it multiplies its activity and envisions only fragments. Intent upon a single object, severed from the whole, it distances itself from all else... it departs from the whole and has no trouble governing its particular object... The soul becomes present to this object and at last penetrates far into it. With this comes what is known as the casting of the wings.i01 Hence, the fall of the soul "depends not upon a structure or a nature of the soul, even less upon a drawing of lots, as Plato thought in the Phaedrus, but upon an initiative in virtue of which the soul departs from its principles, and directly from its father, the intelligence. That is what is called the soul's audacity."108 Audacity (tolma) determines and ratifies this passage from the individual, as we have defined it, to the particular, from undivided multiplicity to extrinsic difference and real division, from spiritual tension to the soul's distension (diastasis), whose action divides into mutually external parts, into antagonistic subjectivities.109 From contemplating (and from) ideal fall to practical subjugation to (and) real fall. The audacity of the soul determines that fracture in the Aion whence surfaces Chronos when the procession is completed in a process of appropriation (or, more literally, of expropriation). Henceforth swept up by the linear movement of our inclinations that propel us toward endlessly different objects, the lower potentiality ceases to

48,9

tend toward the higher potentiality, ceases to turn itself toward that potentiality, ceases to turn itself around pros eauto when the soul withdraws from the conversion that produced a rotating movement in the bodies where the soul was inserted, turns itself away from that movement similar to that of the intelligence in motion, immobile (hesteke gar kai kineitai).±±0 Then the human soul "in practice" veers away from the (theoretical) movement of contemplation (theoria). In sum, the rectilinear movement of bodies incarnates the souls' line of perversion, represents the praxis of the soul bewitched and tending toward what it is not, pros 0//0.111 The einai antes of the soul following after the peri auton of the world soul breaks the circle of the Same,112 the dis-quiet of the moment (exaiphnes) that unrolls time and dissipates the ego in the straight-line labyrinth of time bent in accordance with the future. It remains to be understood that the ego is dispersed, or "distends" itself, at the very moment it appears in time as the existence of a phenomenal subject. For if the ego is born in the tremor of separation and of "partitionpartaking" (partage, partum: parturition and birthing: odis) — of partitioning (merismos)—through the refusal it makes of its undivided present (nun), its own identity is lacking in order to form the disparity and split interiority of being outside itself, to actualize (capitalize on) the denaturalized effect of an original depth. Being explicates itself outside itself, it has acquired for itself the audacity that procession was in itself,113 thus attaining the "particular" essence of subjectivity: there the passage of Being with itself in difference (conversion) to being outside itself in dispute (aversion) is carried out. The gap at the origin is transformed into a will to autonomy that "is exalted and nourished by opposition."114 A provisional conclusion can be reached in agreement with Brehier: "This in spite of the logic of the system of the procession, our own activity, our subjective spiritual attitude, if we may call it thus, tends in Plotinus to set itself off from this spiritual activity transformed into a thing, which is the hypostasis."115 Let's admit, then, that the human soul isolates itself from this eternal model (hupostasis) with regard to which it manifests its will to heteronomy (apostasis), but let's also recognize that, if the soul is what engenders time by its living of a temporal and "busy" life, we are scarcely in a position to grasp how time could be said to be, precisely, an "image of eternity"... even by letting it be understood that Plotinus is only recycling the famous Platonic definition in order to mask his iconoclastic audacity, and to mark himself off from "those, who in rejecting the methods of their ancestors... have nothing to pass on but their fantasies," as Alciatus states in his commentary on the emblem of Narcissus^ Would all this be better understood

The Time of Audacity: Plotinus

by making the whole analysis depend on a perilous postmortem conforming of "psychological" time to the cosmic time of the Timaeus, which by the same stroke turns the ensemble of the tractate On Time and Eternity over to the suspicion of being incoherent? (It is true that one could see this as the paradoxical sign of the "emotional disarray of a society, whose center no longer was the city [polis], that, while cosmopolitan, gave human beings over to what H.-Ch. Puech calls ineffable solitude .' ")117 Recall: "Eternity on one side, psychological time on the other, and nothing between the two." Nothing, that is indeed what the Platonic doubling is all about: although the Timaeus is cited often and with praise by Plotinus, we are decidedly no longer in the Platonic world.118 That's where we are, and that is obviously no longer sufficient for apprehending the Plotinian operation on time. For the problem is singularly "dramatized" if Plotinus is the one with whom the definition of time as mobile image of eternity is at once cleanly formulated, formally attributed to Plato, and the object of an attempted explication.119 In fact, Aristotle is not the only one who, at the beginning of his treatise on time, takes aim at Plato when he mentions the existence of those for whom time is "the movement of the whole" (ten ton holou kinesis, Physics IV, 218 a33ff.), alluding to another definition borrowed from the cosmological realm. Notice again that the ancient commentators (Simplicius, outdoing Alexander of Aphrodisius, also cites two students of Aristotle: Eudemus and Theophrastus) agree on the same addressee to the extent that, right with Plato's immediate successors, and then with the students of the Academy, one loses trace of the formulation of time as image of eternity. Suppositions are made, "as a well-known fact," about a definition of time as the movement or revolution of the sun, or rather, later and in its proper name with Histius, as the "transport of the stars in relation to each other." Let's quickly examine what there is of the Timaeus by adopting the backward approach proposed by Remi Brague. (1) Consciousness of time is determined by sight, by the visible motion of the heavens that forms a number through its combinations. Time is nothing other than the movement of the universe in its divine order, a motion ruled by number (47a-b; 39c-d). (2) Similitude to the aion is asserted about the universe and not about time; the image is "worldly" rather than temporal (39d-e). "It is, in fact, the model that exists from eternity; it, on the other hand, has been and will be from one end of the entirety of time to the other" (38c; emphasis added; translation modified). If we refuse to characterize time by itself, the subject of the latter clause can only be the heavens, which have been, are, and will be.120 The heavens are the image of the diaionia nature, that is to say, of the aion. We thereby come to the central passage (37 d5ff.). (3) The heavens are con-

50,1

stituted as an image to the extent that they are the object of the organizing work (diakosmeiri) of the demiurge who, the commentator emphasizes, never ceases deploying his effects in the cosmic harmony. That is why, if the demiurge made the sensible world in the image of the intelligible world, he makes (diakosmori) the heavens: image of the aim. The heavens are like a continuation of the demiurge. (4) Time is no longer the image of the aion, but that by means of which the heavens are its image. If time were the image of the aion, it would have no need of imitating it (mimeisthai 38 a7f.) by striving to produce that image. "What we call time" (37 d7) is the motion of the heavens as regulated by number. (5) This number is aidnios, of the nature of the world soul whose numerical structure has just been described (35a-36b). (6) Time is the organized movement of the heavens, which makes evident the number of the world soul. Here it is, then, that "the number of the great year, at the end of which the heavens will have returned to their initial position (cf. 39 d2-7), will realize that of the world soul, the aidnios number, the one that synthesizes all the particular numbers of particular movements by bringing them back to the same... What people commonly call 'time' bears the rigorous name of 'heaven'... The definition of time as the image of eternity, which everyone today attributes to Plato, rests upon a mistake in the assigning of the subject."121 From a cosmic image to a time-image. This movement begins with middle Platonism, and deprives time of its link with the supposedly quantifiable order (kosmos) of the universe based on a calculation of the Same that determines the circular form of real Identity (the heavens as continuous demiurge: turning and returning, distributing or sharing).122 This movement goes into operation with the appearance of a new sensitivity to the theme of the image, coinciding with its transposition from cosmology (out of which comes the soul of the Platonic world) to anthropology and psychology. Whence the stakes involved in the "misconstruction"123 of the passage from Timaeus, for time-image covers the experience of time that belongs to the human soul. Nor is it a matter of indifference that during the epoch of Philo and the Platonic fathers the "anthropological" mutation whose seat is the concept of image, intervenes. Did they not familiarize us with the idea of an image without resemblance, or rather, via the potential of the false and the essential negativity developed (enveloped) in sin, of an image with a wholly external resemblance, a shattered image built on a disparity, referring to itself as if to an illusion whenever it wants to be its own source of itself, the origin of vision and not a reflection of light from some single source? Fission of the other, and of the other of this other, but not fusion with the Same of God the One. Then can arise the new insanity of the

The Time of Audacity: Plotinus

narcissistic soul, Novitasque furoris,±24 which sets the departure from the starting line in two opposite directions (mythic-specular, mystic-speculative), to the process of subjectivization, which is wholly haunted by the double. As is the mirror of Dionysus, held between two opposing poles: the fraudulent mirror of the dispersion into the multiple, the initiatory mirror of coming together in the divine that requires that "one returns to Dionysus as sole source, [that] one loses oneself in him in order to find oneself again, instead of seeking oneself in one of the fragmentary images through which he is refracted."125 If the Neoplatonic formulation of the image-time of the aion has still not revealed all its secrets, we now at least know that the image side, of "the image reflected in the fraudulent mirror,"126 is where we will have to start scanning a surface that is folded on the two sides, in the form of a mirror: with the constitution of the ego and the effectuation of time. The mirror of Dionysus as the place of meaning, as the form of time. "The souls of men? Seeing their reflections [eidola] in the mirror of Dionysus as it were, they have become present in these reflections by leaping down into them."127 But this reflective movement is no more condemnable than the emission of the originary reflection by the world soul which "does not bend" ("for bending is obviously to forget the intelligibles")128 if, like the world soul, human souls remained impassible with regard to their own reflections. And even if they did bend, they would only be "illuminating an object below, and that constitutes no more of a fault than having a shadow. The fault is to be attributed not to the luminary but to the object illuminated; if the object were not there, the soul would have nothing to illuminate. Its descent and its bending signify that the object it illuminates lives by it and through it. It lets its reflection go, then,... not because it is a thing cut off from the soul, but because the soul is no longer there where the reflection is; and the soul is there no more, because it gives itself over completely to the contemplation of Intelligible Beings."129 "The Soul remains unmoved, and only gives forth reflections of itself, which are like the reflections of a face caught by many mirrors."130 We can grasp right away the danger of the Gnostic heresy in Plotinus's eyes, and the violence of his attack. Here and there, the sensible world is the product of a mirror reflection. But while for the Gnostics the "narcissistic" love of the archetypal man, who becomes enamored of his reflection and descends to rejoin it, is an integral part of the cosmological process (the real fall has absorbed the ideal fall, there only remains a cosmic fall),131 in Plotinus, the emergence of a narcissistic figure arises from a psychological process, whose very object configures

52,3

psychic space. It is representation itself, the phantasm, and its possible sublimation and hypostasis in a movement of speculative interiorization, that along with Narcissus "imposes itself as the motor of Western subjectivism."132 Psychic space begins at this level. Representation is structurally narcissistic to the extent that it appears with the movement toward autonomy or the will to power of the soul, which wants to be its own principle to itself, separating itself from the luminous potentialities of the All of which it was but a degree of intensity variable according to the quality of its conversion (universal soul, world soul, celestial souls, individual souls). The soul's punishment responds to the logic immanent in its fault: it is unaware that the body to which it has subjugated itself is only a reflection of the soul in the mirror of matter, because it wants to ignore the solar source of which it is just the effulgence, a refraction in the pure exteriority and infinite divisibility that serves as the substratum to every representation, because it has forgotten the ideal organization of which the realized organism is only the "imaged dispersion." The soul is at present "in the case of one who sees his own reflection [eidolon] but not realizing whence it comes goes in pursuit of it."133 In his tractate On Beauty, the first he ever put together, Plotinus writes: If someone were to leap down onto these visible images wishing to grasp them as if they were true, that person would be like he who, having wished to possess himself with the beautiful reflection floating in the water—just as, somewhere, it seems to me, a myth lets it be mysteriously understood—was dragged to the bottom and was lost from sight; in the same way, one who becomes attached to beautiful bodies and does not depart from them, it is not through the body, but through the soul that one goes down into the shadowy places, into shadowy depths hostile to the Intellect and there, becoming blind in Hades, one will live, as that person already does here, only amongst shadows.134 Behind the Platonic cliche and remake of the Banquet, what the Alexandrian introduces here can be seen: the idea that Narcissus is caught lacking in self-consciousness, a victim, Valery would say, of a love that exhausts itself in pretending to be, because he departs from the intelligible plane of self-knowledge at the level of interiority and universality under the rubric of the circle (and) of selfreference. Son of light, image, dream or lure, O Narcissus, O Myself, O Same who welcomes me in the mirror of Dionysus. But it is through material passions, not through Titans, that the soul lets itself be dispersed and torn.135 Dividing from itself according to the singular operation of a multiplicative division. If the mirror

The Time of Audacity: Plotinus

of Dionysus is the source of Narcissus, the split I, the narcissistic (ego's) division, is the "formula," the prototype of the division and of the real fall, the criterion for the surfacing of objects for a subject. If one rereads the first lines of the passage on Narcissus, this movement—whose tracing espouses the motion of the soul become temporal — could become confused with the event of the phantasm itself (substitution-assimilation of projection for perception; the body itself as original power of projection). As if it were self-evident that the root of the "drive" resided in the sole fact that the subject desires to see itself, that its activity (of the drive) is concentrated in a making itself [se-faire] seen where the subject would see itself as seen by the other. But what is important for us is this idea that the extrinsic difference, the real fall, goes through the narcissistic doubling of subject/ego (object) appearing in time (originary reflection/derived reflection). That the ideal omnipotence of narcissism signifies nothing more perhaps than the intentionality of the apperception wherein the object is manifested, and the empty form of potential time... (One would almost like to redo Freud's formula in the New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis [1932]: "ego libido is being constantly changed into object libido and object libido into ego libido.")136 This is when the intelligence that is made in the soul to see forms of light disappears and another intelligence, "an intelligence different from itself, not true intelligence because it is resolved to see what does not belong to it,"137 is inscribed in the soul. The dark vision of the eye without qualities. If the name eros is explained by the fact that it owes its existence to vision (horasis), perhaps Plotinus is proposing the genesis of narcissistic Eros in a unique passage.138 Penia, the "insatiable," always present and full of audacity (tolma) like an indigent solicitant, unites with Poros, "which is to say not that she unites with Being or with the plenitude of Being, but with a thing of cunning [pragmati eumekhanoi], that is, with a clever combination of appearances [touto de esti te sophia touphantasmatos]."*39 Penia sends us back to the synthesis of time as exerted in depth, within illusion (pseudos) and the audacity of matter "which tricks us and is but a phantasm, within another phantasm, like a mirror"140—going back in its "reality" to the one who exhibits oneself in it, subjugates oneself in it, accomplishes it.141 "Hence the measureless [ametron] is the primary evil; the secondary evil is to acquire the measureless, either by resemblance [homoiosei] or by participation, and to take it as an attribute."142 In the mode of a becoming that is unequal, infinite, and proper to the narcissistic libido that fragments intrinsic identifying, reversing and subverting the supreme measure: the identifying present of the immortal soul. In the instant, the split of an instant, the instant of a split, which perverts present being,

54,5

time loses its circular figure surrounding every present, appears out of itself, and is reflected in the excessive series of presents that are measureless and disconnected "like the time of profundity and of subversion." Valery put it well: Le Temps mene cesfous qui crurent que Von aime Redire a tes roseaux de plus profonds soupirs! (Paul Valery, "Fragments du Narcisse," in CEuvres) [Time leads those fools who believed in love Tell your reeds deeper sighs again!]

But what about Narcissus for whom desire equals death? What would be an ego that could only be said to be one through a figure of speech (simulacrum, imago, umbra) and that, according to Eros's vengeance, must see itself only to desire death for having loved itself to death?143 "Iste ego sum; sensi, nee me mea fallit imago" (I am he! I have felt it, and neither does my image deceive me).144 It is in the image of death, and not by the so-called death drive, that the form of empty time is reflected, the original interiorization of the real difference within the split I is betrayed by its simulacra. Narcissus is the partial subject and the form of empty time, the "fallacious source" (fons fallax) of the narcissistic soul — the sneer of his capital mistake, to use an expression dear to Kafka. And all that, which we have an inkling of without yet understanding it completely (Plotinus the somber precursor), only makes sense in the sneer of Dionysus referring us back to death as to that universal Other that is matter, as at the constant horizon of a shadow image, of an image that is no more than a shadow of itself: a reflection in terms of its extenuated potential (the human soul is only the image of the world soul), simulacrum in terms of its illusionary potential (the dignity of Being is succeeded by the alienated soul's fascination with owning). How laughable is Narcissus's cry: "Dear BODY, I give myself over to your sole power..." "What shall I do?... What I desire, I have; the very abundance of my riches beggars me. Oh, that I might be parted from my own body!" ("Quid faciam?... Quod cupio, mecum est; inopem me copia fecit / o utinam a nostro secedere corpore possem!" Metamorphoses 465-67). The dissociation will be realized with the definitive separation of a deliverance/death linked to the theme of vision,145 while in a strange resurrection the flower destined to perpetuate the name of Narcissus is born from death ("Nusquam corpus erat: croceum pro corpore florem" [His body was nowhere to be found. In place of his body they find a saffron flower], Metamorphoses 509)— from the death of him who prefers the vision of the eyes to

The Time of Audacity: Plotinus

that of the inner eye. "We, undisciplined in discernment of the inward, knowing nothing of it, run after the outer, never understanding that it is the inner which stirs; we are in the case of one who sees his own reflection but not realizing whence it comes goes in pursuit of it" (Enneads V, 8, 2). We can measure the gap opened up by the Neoplatonic reading of the myth by comparing it to Ovid's narrative: the switch from the position of Narcissus I to that of Narcissus II (to use Hubert Damisch's terminology) works in both cases in relation to the phenomenon of the awakening of consciousness. But while Ovid's Narcissus chooses to love his image to the point of becoming a shadow of himself, a shadow among shadows until the final extinction, Plotinus opens up the path of salvation for Narcissus in the form of the constitution of self-consciousness and speculative Anteriority that makes us see mind as our own ego.146 So, Narcissus changes his universe of reference, his "world," and we accompany him in this passage from the (sensible) world of the anamorphosis of the Other to the (intelligible) world of the metamorphosis of the Same, wherein the movement of the narcissistic operation is rehabilitated and distinguished from its thrust: the shadow image taken for an essential reality.147 "To any vision must be brought an eye adapted to what is to be seen, and having some likeness to it. Never did eye see the sun unless it had first become sunlike."148 With Plotinus, who "thereby sketches out an esthetics of grace,"149 Narcissus changes the world, that soon-to-be Byzantine world in which seeing means becoming light. Material narcissism having been condemned, a formal narcissism remains that postulates an identity between subject and object, mind and vision, seeing and being seen, the eye and the visible, allowing for an access to the universality of pure thought: to the eye of God. "The act and the faculty of seeing are no longer reason [logos]; they are better than reason, prior and superior to it, as well as their very object. If the being which sees saw itself at that moment, it would see itself as similar to its object." But it will be necessary to go still farther before the metamorphosis takes hold of the Same in the ek-stasis of seeing oneself as everything (se-voir-tout; blepe holon, Enneads V, 5, 10,1. 10) and before that other itself refers to another that is not itself. Perhaps one should not use the expression, it would see. The object which it sees (since one needs to say there are two things, a subject which sees and an object which is seen; to say that the two are only one would take a lot of audacity, tolmeros,), it does not see in the sense that it distinguishes the object from itself and that it represents a subject and an object for itself; it has become another, it is no longer itself.150

56,7

As Sami-Ali has seen, Narcissus is also the fountainhead that pulls him away from himself, that transmutes him into another that refers him back to a unity:151 when novitasque furoris andfuro divinus become indiscernible. Thus is enunciated the self-reflexive space of pure soul as the thought of everything, total inner vision. For in becoming a particular soul, when you become "someone, "you become not-all, you add your negation to "All. "And that lasts until that negation is suppressed. If you reject everything that is other than the All (that is, the nothingness of particular being), you increase. Cast it aside and the All will be present to you. Withdraw into yourself and look... Do you have a pure rapport with yourself, with

no obstacle to your unification, with nothing from without mixed inside with you? Are you wholly an unlimited light... when you see that you are in this state, you are now become very vision.152

This total interiorization of vision, which "exchanges one manner of seeing for another," and which is all at once the complete passing of the gaze into form (formal narcissism), reunification (love-fusion with the One under the aegis of the loving nous), moral purification (conversion), is fulfilled by the entrance of another mythic figure onto the stage of the Enneads: Ulysses "going toward the father."153 A Ulysses who closes his eyes to the spells of the sorceress Circe and of Calypso in order to get back to "his beloved fatherland," the place from whence he came, to discover, beyond the body and the steps that bear us from one land to another, the inner voyage of the human soul toward Intellect reflecting the primordial light of the "formless." The Odyssean soul is the great traveler in the land of metaphysics. But one could just as well say that it is the narcissistic soul, if it is indeed that soul that begins by seeing that it is itself the light and bodies its reflections, before recognizing that its own luminosity is only the diffraction of another light, which is itself. This light thus illuminates the soul with its rays — by which I mean that it makes the soul turn in on itself, that it prevents it from being dispersed in the outer and dark area, from being carried away on every side by the attraction of sensible objects, from leading a life intermingled with death.154 When "contemplation alone stands untouched by magic,"155 light diffuses the new conditions for an ethics of contemplation into the universe. Now, most points on this program of formal, mystical, and speculative narcissism, conferring a metaphysical dimension onto the image, animate Byzantine art as soon as it renounces the apparent harmony of the world (mimesis} in order to reveal the

The Time of A u d a c i t y : Plotinus

sense of the divine in the incorporeal light of the countenance (heuresis). The countenance is what appears in a work whose essence no longer depends upon the equilibrium of proportions (summetria) or of colors (eukhroia) but upon the union of idea with the expression of internal form (eidos) designating an "intellectual intuition," that is to say, a vision, marked by the predominance of the whole over the parts.156 The Countenance is the Face of the All (Le Visage est la Face du toui).±57 The art of light, that "art nouveau" that appears between the third and the sixth centuries, is dominated by the discovery of a new dimension: the inner infinity, suspended to the faculty of turning toward the depths of the soul, toward the infinite depth of the mind. Thus, "in order to bring out in the representation of man the profundity of his inner life, art no longer needed to resort to the harmonious proportions of the body; it would instead concentrate its attention upon the characteristic traits of the face and its expressivity, upon the gaze, the lips, the wrinkles of those faces of ascetics, whose dematerialized and stiff body remains suspended in space, as if it were not 'of this world.'"158 To sum up this passage from Greek to Byzantine art in a formula, it could be said that the ascetic supplants the sculptor who is no longer sufficiently sure of his plane—the tactile-optical space of what is called classical representation—to represent the perfect profiles of the nude body and "to bring down into this world the archetypes of an ideal beauty." The Byzantine painter aspires, on the contrary, "to exalt to the heavens the spirituality that springs from individual expression."159 Form becomes purely optical with the appearance of the countenance of the face, bearing with it a transformation, a trans-figuration (dilated eyes, emaciated faces) in which is manifested the activity of the luminous background and the sparkling of the immaterial light, the "disaggregation" of being climbing into the light, of being that has substituted inner vision for the external gaze (whence that indecisiveness of the limit between shadow and light, motif and background, that Henri Maldiney has discussed so well). It is in this sense only, but how contradictory to its author's intention, that Alberti's line can be considered a "citation" from Plotinus: Narcissus was the inventor ofpainting.±6° Perhaps some remarks of a dispersed kind may be permitted; to start with, the following, so as to justify what might appear to be a useless digression: the passage from Greek to Byzantine art translates the mutation that takes place between Platonism and the School of Alexandria, Plotinian philosophy showing itself to be no less essential an element to the one than to the other, even were it verified that "the ideas of Plotinus must not have exerted any influence at all upon the artists of his time and of the following period."161 On the historical level, it is nonetheless

58,9

important to note that a scholar like Ainalov, who anticipated Strzygowski's thesis (Orient oder Rome: Beitrage zur Geschichte der Spatantiken und Friihchristlichen Kunst [Leipzig:}. C. Hinrichs'sche Buchhandlung, 1901]) by a year, oriented his research into the Hellenistic origins of Byzantine art in the direction of Alexandria and Antioch.162 There would be nothing especially surprising, then, in Plotmus having been acquainted with the first rough sketches of the new aesthetics (which, drawing from Oriental art, prolonged a Hellenistic practice especially developed in Alexandria and Rome), or indeed—as Andre Grabar thinks—having foreseen and explicated its aspirations, insofar as they partake in a single anticlassical overturning of the Greek world.163 (Plotinus's "aesthetic" considerations, without speaking of the new status granted the work of art and the image, go in the direction of an expressive or expressionist dematerialization—transparency of vision—that can no longer be satisfied with the constraints of mimetic art, with Platonic-Aristotelian inspiration.) At the heart of this upheaval, one still finds the kosmopolites human—that political nonsense—now contemporaneous with the disappearance of the last traces of the old civic koinonia, which took place under the harsh rule of the great economic crisis of the third century. Financial wealth as a factor of political power (Alexandria, the frivolous city where "money alone is God"), fiscal exploitation, the spread of great domains and the piecing together of lands, the surrender of the first Roman emperor to have fallen into the hands of the enemy (Persian at that!), the irruption of the Barbarian capacity to make war...: everything contributed to the isolation and inner life of the individual. The emperor Gallienus, too busy conversing with the philosopher Plotinus to think about regulating affairs of state, does not fail to participate in this interiorizing movement. Gallienus, the most despicable of all princes, says Gibbon. For the ascetic would not have supplanted the athlete, and the painter the sculptor, if the individual had not already dethroned the citizen. Of Hellenistic origins... Second remark: The ascetic and the painter, and painting as the horizon of formal narcissism, are born from an abstract machine of faciality "when the body, head included, has been decoded and has to be overcoded by something we shall call the Face."164 No faceness without "individual" decoding (Hellenistic humanity) or deterritorialization of a nation (the destiny of the Jewish people)... But let's return to the decoding of the body. It suffices to think about the hieratic style of Byzantine mosaics, about the deformation of the body become obstacle to the soul's impetus, about all that expressionism of the loss of the body aiming to signify the tendency toward dematerialization, about the turning inward of the gaze detached from external form, inhabited only by the soul's inner force—the soul that expresses itself through the face alone.165 Isocephalic bodies, with no volume, reflect-

The Time of A u d a c i t y : P l o t i n u s

ing the atrophy of plasticity; a nonreferential image that may express the transcendant to the extent that the image does not represent the object; an autophane image juxtaposing a very abstract view of the whole, whose beat is measured out by the diffusion of luminous energy, with portrait figures whose "very existence is precisely a bottomlessness or infinity that can only be grasped on its own terms."166 The face is this head said to be based on a bust, or better yet, the deformed head that escapes from the body, sucked out by the frightful worry of the bottomless; this is the face of the Pantocrator Christ, viewed head-on as the figuration of formal narcissism (thus can we characterize the Byzantine "abstract machine of faceness"), with, to use yet again Deleuze and Guattari's terms, the black hole of the eyes set against a field of gold, all of its depth being projected to the front. Hence, the Dorian calm, the Ionian smile, would definitively depart from the Byzantine idols. "A frightful worry dwells in and around their fixed pupils; instead of broad daylight and limpid space, the darkness of the chapels accumulates these magical phosphorescences that linger over rubbish heaps and polluted waters."167 The Time of the Fear of God. The Hellenistic is the period when the deformation of the human face begins: it loses the beautiful proportions of classical harmony at the very moment when it is already preparing its uncontested rule in those churches that are the true image of the universe.168 Of course, it is not with Plotinus that the space of the Cosmos was transformed into the time of Glory (but light falls in glories...); the image contemplated with the inner eye is still only the luminous form of the nous and the ecstasy of matter; but it is around the third century that the ideal of individual expression, along with the art of portraiture, becomes the essential object of artistic research.169 A final remark: The passage from Greek to Byzantine art translates the leap from material narcissism to formal narcissism — from the inorganic expression of the beautiful to the spiritual expression of the sublime. From a staticrepresentational art (the "eyes of the body" in their measure and order) to a dynamicvisionary art (the ineffability of the inner eye), from an art of (objective) figuration to one of (subjective) transfiguration: the dynamics of potentiality, the sentiment of the misshapen. From an anthropocentric conception to the delineation of the notion of a suprapersonal Ego. Art is no longer the contemplation of the beauty of the cosmos (ordo) but the ecstatic impetus toward the inner infinite (rhuthmos) that is an abyss of consciousness, toward that sublime which Pseudo-Longinus, like Hegel, would apprehend in terms of light. Otto Demus is certainly right to insist that the Byzantine decorator never played with light as if it were coming from a distinct source, since those thousand continual sparklings that contrast black and white,

60,1

shadow and brightness, are what will make the matter of the edifice transparent to the point of seeming to be dematerialized.170 You might think that we have relocated the original background noise, what Riegl calls the Hintergrund, light as the ecstasy of matter, by setting into motion "the echo of an elevated thought that leads to ecstasy." This is said to be the first definition of the sublime. This was made in Plotinus's time, in the treatise Peri Hupsous by Pseudo-Longinus. Many objections can be raised, however, against the legitimacy of a Neoplatonic view of Byzantine art, an Oriental art, but also an imperial and a Christian one, "the most authentic in Christianity." Andre Grabar, moreover, at the end of his article titled "Plotin et les origines de 1'esthetique medievale," willingly agrees that "a particular style of sculpture in Gallienus's time, which had been believed to be inspired if not by the philosopher himself then at least by his entourage in the latter part of his life, is without the slightest relation to the doctrine that has occupied us here and to that New Art of late Antiquity." He also recalls that in fourthcentury Rome, the disciples of Plotinus presented themselves as champions of the classical tradition in art. For Michelis, the explanation is simple: the art of Plotinus's time ("classicist revival") is completely in tune with his ideas. Consequently, Plotinian philosophy is inevitably misinterpreted when applied to explain early Christian an instead of the an of its own age. Christian an, no matter the degree to which it may have been derived from Neo-Platonic aesthetics, is inspired, not by the Neo-Platonists' pagan mysticism which springs from the impersonal One, but by the divine revelation of the One and Only God. It is an an of the Sublime and not of the Beautiful.±7i May it suffice to point out what is remarkable about this statement: the pressing urgency of an "a priori" that is supposed to connect the feeling of the sublime with Christianity, and only Christianity. We find here again the "a priori" of Hegelian origin (cf. the "case of Kojeve," discussed earlier in this chapter) that induces a strange fluctuation in a demonstration at the very moment when it was a question of exposing the critical underpinnings. What kind of influence in fact would Neoplatonic aesthetics have on Christian art if it remained a prisoner of the plastic sense by the inclusion of the infinite within the finite as the appearance of idea within matter, which is constitutive of the wholly "classical" beauty of the work of art? If in spite of everything a certain aspiration to the sublime is conceded in Plotinus's philosophy, then it is not seen why a similar quality cannot be attributed — always a priori—to the Plato of The Republic. As for me, I find a precious observation in the fact that Neoplatonists, hostile to Christianity, certainly did not care to emphasize "the relation one

The Time of Audacity: Plotinus

is allowed to establish between the ideas of their master and the artistic work which served their enemies' cause."172 Nonetheless, this is the relation that must be specified if, as I am inclined to think, the absolute beginning of Byzantine art insofar as "that art is the first one to wish itself, in the full sense of the word, to be metaphysical" could only take the obligatory path of Neoplatonism.173 And of a Neoplatonism that considered "the wisdom of art" as a vector of metaphysical adventure. First of all, reconsider the reasons why the art of late Antiquity has long been taken for a decadent art. It is said to have lost the sense of perspective familiar to Greco-Roman art by bringing the image back to a single plane. Whence the multiplication of aberrant representations: the overlapping and interpenetration of figures that partially cover each other, the "suspension" effect of characters, the "reversed" or "negative" perspective that effects an enlarging of the object in proportion to the viewer's moving away. Reversed perspective, it is called, to indicate that there is only an optical reversal to explain the loss of influence of the anthropocentric perspective in the art of imitation. Now, what does Plotinus tell us, and in what form? On the one hand, a knowledge: "The attenuation that, for colors, is effacement, and for sizes, reduction... ": a classical perspective; and, on the other hand, an assertion: "the impression obviously takes place at the spot where the object is": a negative perspective. Thus, to follow Plotinus, the viewer will merge into the represented object in an immediate and total intellectual vision. As if the work were (in) the image of that science that directly attains beings when it no longer sees its object (of the gaze or through discursive linkages) but has it altogether in itself, is identical with it. For in intellectual vision, "the world becomes transparent to the object," we become the world to the point of the extinction of spatial extension, when the transparency of images is such that everything is a light source, and is a light source equal to the rest. Absorbed in an ungraspable Stimmung, the viewer forgets his or her own situation as soon as the phenomenon of sight is produced in the contemplated object and not in the contemplating subject, such that "there is no single point where one can determine one's own limits so as to be able to say: up to this point, that's me." That is why the true space will no longer be behind but before. "And this is ours. And it is then we who are the painting. The image, here, is no longer separated from the contemplator, or rather from the contemplated, by a fictive partition, as in classical art: the image is projected toward the contemplator, englobing and engulfing the latter in its own universe just as it would a piece of food."174 The Byzantine image is the pictorial expression of that state in which the soul is in no other thing except itself in the vision of God made Eye. (That is why the Byzan-

62,3

tine God, and the God of the Eastern church, is a potentiality, a divine potentiality, and not a person.) The answer to mystical asceticism, to the ascension toward transcendent Beauty, toward amorphoteron,±75 is the pictorial ascesis of Form as an image of the formless; and in response to the identity between contemplator and contemplated is the reversal of the relation between beholder and beheld. Leaving God who contemplates us from the depths of the gold, "we progress as an image to its model and come to the end of our journey." In a gaze that "is not a spectacle, but another form of vision, ecstasy"—beyond Beauty itself.176 In letting ourselves be borne along toward the end (telos) of the Byzantine journey in the sublime emergence of that beyond of Beauty through "a going forth from the self [ekstasis], a simplifying [haplosis], a renunciation [epidosis], [through] a reach toward contact and at the same time a repose [stasis]," we must encounter what is called by the name Ereignis. The event of the coming into presence of pure being, revelation, appearance, destination, das Ereignis (in its Heideggerian reading) makes reference to Old German er-augen, in which is found das Auge (the eye or the gaze)—unifying the soul here to the deity in a "simplification" that in Plotinus constituted the essential trait of man as well as of the One, and that was supposed to make the eye like the object seen as a way of applying itself to its contemplation. Co-propriation. Seen through the eyes of God upon us, upon us who are the painting, it is no longer essence that is appearing, but rather appearing that becomes essence and law. In this overcoming of essence by appearance, in this overcoming of the beautiful by the sublime, Byzantine art—like Plotinian henology177 — would manifest something much more tenuous than the divine governance of the world: the event of coming to presence in self-revelation, appearance as depth of the originary field, the profundity of an originary time that the divine gaze hollows out within us: Ereignis as temporal depth, dunamis "through which the whole becomes uni-verse," turned toward Him, re-turned into Him.178 The Byzantine gaze would then be like the pictorial horizon of that originary temporality (at on) — the very business of contemplation—which, as we will verify, is for Plotinus nothing other than God himself showing himself and showing himself as He is. In this ineffable experience where the fundamental structure of time is constituted, it appears that temporality is essentially implicated in the perception of Byzantine depth — in the conceptual elucidation of Neoplatonic depth. Thus, it is precisely because I think, along with Jean Paris, that "what Plotinus says about contemplation is apt for the Pantocrator's optics," that we need to distance ourselves from his conclusion, namely that "the Eastern God [the God become eye] thus asserts his sovereignty in the only order that defies

The Time of Audacity: Plotinus

time: the visual order."179 Paul Philippot seems to me to be more inspired in foregrounding the means whereby time plays a fundamental role at the level of the conditions of perception of this art, whose secret he is not far from grasping in the following brief paragraph: Having come in from the outside, the visitor feels blind at first in the semidarkness. Then, little by little, as the eye adjusts itself, figures appear. Solidary with the background through the reflective play of the tesserae in the very heart of the shadows, these figures seem to emerge from an indeterminate depth both in terms of the image and in terms of the architecture: their presence is in a perpetual state of appearing. A prestigious formal solution, which includes time within the most severe immobility, and, in this becoming of appearance, opens presence onto eternity. 18°

At this point, stopping the description in order to take the risk of writing, I would say that the Byzantine image reveals the inner self-generating movement of the figures of light within an originary time of appropriation (Ereignis) of self. The center of presence thus gives itself in an event of contemplation and a formation of order (theoria) that defies the derived time of expropriation (Enteignis) of self (praxis) at once as what reveals us to ourselves and what dazzles us through too much light.181 At the horizon of the distinction between formal and material narcissism lies the opposition between originary and derived temporality—and the disjunction between two types of images: the contemplation-image and the actionimage. In proposing this, I am initially only making the two poles of the image explicit on the basis of the radiating of the ineffable: resemblance and degradation are the two poles of emanation. On the one side, there is the assertion that there is always a resemblance between a being and its actions; on the other, the necessity that the image always be inferior to its model. Contemplation is the upper limit of this process, action its lower limit. It is not two "varieties" of the Image that are to be understood by contemplation-image and action-image, but rather two tendencies, two movements of opposite orientation that constitute the double regime of referral for images. A pure image, and a truthless image: a trace, a shadow, a reflection with no consistency and no longer a hypostasis, a centrifugal scattering that no longer knows any folding back toward "what is up ahead": the simulacrumimage. On the one hand, a contemplative desire expressing itself through an aspiration (the vertical homoidsis) that turns the life of the Intellect into an imitation of the life of the One (the circuitous spiritualis of the eternal folding back of being onto itself); on the other hand, a diverting of theoria into praxis, in the case of the soul, which, moving itself "with a different movement and in the opposite direction" in

64,5

order to engender itself, does not remain motionless in its production; in the case of those particular souls that, in temporalizing themselves, make use of the spontaneity of their motion to rush in the opposite direction from God. Even though, while watching corporeal beauties, one must not "run to them, but know that they are images, traces, and shadows." Even though one must "flee toward that beauty whose images they are. If one ran to them to grasp them as if they were real, one would be like the man who wanted to grasp his beautiful image borne upon the water." One would be among those souls that "belong to the subjects they animate to the point of being nothing more than images of soul."182 Material narcissism is expressed in action-image terms in the twin sense that the production of its image implies a movement while its reception engenders a passion that makes the soul leave itself (praxis), that makes it fall under the dependency of what is not the soul as pure Ego: this is the gap, the virtual action of the image that no longer signifies even a degraded resemblance. The soul is defined by the production of geometrical surfaces that become strata in a process of (over)determination of bodies. And it is because the human soul relies on action-images, derived, factitious, and factual images, that it temporalizes itself from the material aspect of its practical (praktikos] subjectivity. Whence the pregnant quality of the "pragmatic" vocabulary when it is an issue of defining the temporalizing movement of the soul rushing into this place of gaps, lines, and signs. As for formal narcissism, it is dependent upon a pure image that is none other than "the intensity of our consciousness... in inverse ratio to the extension of our being."183 Live contemplation becomes indistinguishable from the contemplator: pure intuition from the form of intuition. The contemplation-image arises, from the return back toward where it came from, with the unlimited activity of the contemplating soul who is nothing other than absolute rest. An originary and creative passivity, constitutive of a passive Ego open to the unification-of-being (sunthesis). A pure synthesis, the passive synthesis of "explicative contemplation"184 in the living present of a time that is retained, and does not flow away. Contemplation is that passive synthesis, as syn-opsis, synthesis of an originary time in which present, past, and future, far from reflecting themselves in representation and prevision (the derived time of action-images, active synthesis), are ekstatically contemporaneous with a world whose actuality is not of the passing moment but of the self-temporalization of the absolute within a twin horizon of pure past and future: conversion, procession, which we don't have to reunite through an intellectual act (intentionality of action), which is exerted in a "vitally flowing intentionality," "a total framework of all souls, which are united not externally but internally, namely," specifies

The Time of Audacity:

Plotinus

Husserl, "through the intentional interpenetration which is the communalization of their lives."185 This is what Heidegger calls transcendence, and what Husserl, in opposing the passive synthesis of pregivenness to the active synthesis of effective objectification (the thetic consciousness of an object), calls Logos of the aesthetic world. At the core of originary time—which is spelled out as aion by Plotinus, as Urzeit by Husserl, or as Ereignis by Heidegger — there is a Byzantine gaze. As "there is a beatitude associated with passive synthesis; and we are all Narcissus in virtue of the pleasure we experience in contemplating..." 186 And we will all be like Narcissus in becoming similar to the 187 Supreme One. "And to say it as it must, the very self is no longer: torn away from itself and and enraptured with enthusiasm, all the being is calmed and peaceful, never turning away from the being of the One, nor even turning about itself."188 This is no longer the active Ego turned toward objects in the mode of grasping — im Griff haben, Husserl would say—of maintaining its grasp upon an object (the reflective past of representation) by its seizure of the following one (the productive future of representation) which it was developing in the field of an intentional time based in the multiple syntheses of its specific activity.189 (In such a way that the active ego is not only delivered to a succession of activities, but also, more fundamentally, is "a unit of activity persisting through the successive," which it produces to the very degree that it gives itself up to stimulation by endlessly new objects—whose "chain" is formed by the relative displacement of its point of application.) As pure ego, it is no longer that concrete ego that determined the move from one object to the next, and the very unity of the object, in its active, practical movement of subjectivization. Its field of presence is subjective, but it is the subjectivity of a passive subject. In the manner of original time, which must be understood as this subject. Odyssean Narcissus, or the paradox of intimate meaning. He has become another, no longer himself; down below, nothing of himself contributes to the vision; given over to his object, he is one with it as if he had made his own center coincide with the center of the universe. Even here below, when these centers meet, they are but one, and are two only when they separate. This is why the vision baffles telling. How can we state that it is an object different from ourselves, when we do not see it as different, but as united to us when we contemplate it? (Enneads VI, 9, 10; translation modified) If Narcissism is the desire of the One, if what constitutes itself (what Proclus will call hauthupostatos] is being in a position to make its own center

66,7

coincide with the center of the universe, then, in a certain way, / will be another, right from the moment when the becoming conscious of the "ego" as receptive interiority coincides with the soul in its first purity, whose form is revealed as pure thought, as thought of the whole and the whole thinking itself. Noosphere. The inferiority of self-consciousness is given in the form of the universality of a "substantial conversion" toward oneself, thus reintegrated, scarcely sketched out, in the mystical loop of the One "wholely turned toward itself and internal to itself" that "is seen one on one" (hautoi monoi auto monon).±9° It is only at this level of absolute reflection and rapture that tips Platonism toward subjectivity,191 at this level of noetic Anteriority, that one should seek the point of subjectivation that kicks off the Neoplatonic lifeline oscillating between the following two assertions: (1) all life is thought; (2) all things are like a life that stretches forth as a straight line.192 The workings of the process could thus be presented as follows. The point of subjectivation is aseity (aition heautou, VI, 8, 14,1. 42) in all its forms, giving figure to the absolute subject—of a tolmeros logos. The One is the "cause of cause"; will of will ("it wants to be what it is and it is what it wants to be"); it refers back to the ideas of infinity and freedom as primary: the self-determining of the infinite as freedom; it is the self-seeing of light; "at once the beloved, love and self-love" (kai erasmion kai eros ho autos kai hautoi eros).±93 The one makes itself (auto hauto poiei) through "an inclination toward itself," self-constitution. From the point of subjectivation springs a subject of enunciation: a noetic activity, an illuminated inferiority (ideal fall), a form disengaged from matter, a pure (Odyssean) soul revealing itself as pure thought and internal difference (contemplation-image): which can only be conceived as following a line of deterritorialization represented by conversion (pure or intrinsic participation, ideal-syntagmatic figure of self-consciousness concerning form). From the subject of enunciation, ho theoretikos,194 springs in turn a subject of the statement (enonce), with "the recoiling of one into the other, of the subject of enunciation onto the subject of the statement,"195 of the passive, contemplative ego onto the active ego. It is the (narcissistic) soul discovering that it is itself the light whose reflections bodies are (the real fall); it is the human soul, the active ego, the particular and distinctly Audacious One (external difference) that aspires to disengage itself from the deceptive shimmerings of matter (action-image) and from the rush toward the nothingness of the evanescent (exaiphnes) via an upward "process" to be forever recommenced and represented by purification. Pure subject, the (divine) One; a subject taking itself as object, ideally identified with its object, (noetic) intelligence; a subject extracting itself from

The Time of Audacity: Plotinus

absolute difference through spiritual concentration, a subject conjuring away the effusio ad exteriora through an act of "folding back": this is the soul in its eternal essence, pure ego, passive (psychical) ego. In such a way that the line of subjectivation can be expressed only in the specular reduplication of subjects as subject of enunciation and subject of the statement, as passive ego and active ego, with this "folding back" referring to the internalization of the superior within the inferior as the inferiority of the inferior within the superior. Neoplatonic subjectivation is a regime of implication, of immanence, of (internalized) transcendence: whence that the point of subjectivation is the "strange invention" of a transcendence functioning from within, is already "the paradox of the legislator-subject."196 "Mind is the very reality of beings... it is like the primal legislator [nomothetes prdtos] or, rather, is itself the law of their existence [nomos antes ton einai]." "The soul discovers the One at the deepest point within itself as the pure subject who turns the soul into a substance, an autonomous and independent being."197 In a final paradox, Plotinus is not afraid to present that ectasy he is reputed to have attained only four times (Porphyry, On the Life of Plotinus, 23) as the normal state of the ego in the pure, constitutive now (nun) of an original time, the pure form of time.198 The Ego has assimilated the undivided perfection of the intellect's inner life, which reunites /sunthesis/ all potentialities into a unity, so as to endow their ensemble with a single life; [which] gathers together alterity, incessant action [motion], self-identity, a thought and a life which do not pass from one object to another — in a word, what remains the same forever without extension or interval; the ego sees all this. And at that point, it sees eternity /aiona/, a life persisting in its identity, always present to itself in its totality... Yes, what is within the limits of being has a life wholly present all at once, full and indivisible in every sense; that life is the eternity (aion) we seek.199 The act of synthesis (sunthesis) is what the Narcisissean soul carries out on its own intensive movement (theoria). It is the infinite life (zden apeiron) of the nun (the fundamental activity of the soul that reunites the set of potentialities insofar as it is forever: aei on: ONE present) as the act-point of internal distinction at the core of the aion (the pure form of time).200 And the process of subjectivation, as it is presented in passive synthesis, is what constitutes the discovery of the aion as originary time, what institutes the identity of aion and of pure subject: "as God made manifest, as God displaying what He is."201 Thus, not only is Kant not the one who discovers pure time as synthesis (his originality, to which I've already alluded, lies elsewhere),

68,9

but, one might say without fear of diverting Heidegger's interpretation to our profit: The whole of the Enneads is there for the synthesis.202 This (original) synthesis configures (originary) time. The originary place of unity and multiplicity finds its foundation in the essence of the now. In a word, to say that synthesis is related to time is in fact a tautology: the modes of synthesis (maintenance, procession, conversion, which correspond to the three moments of every development) are related to time not by accident but by essence. Exhibitio originaria temporis. In eternity, which is intelligible being (nous), all the potentialities are together insofar as they are united. That is even why the secondary principle "needs to think itself, for a being that needs itself is only satisfied by itself wholly entire and and only if it reunites everything that makes it up; hence it unites itself. The feeling of togetherness [a consciousness: sunaisthesis] is the feeling of a multiplicity, as the expression indicates."203 The nous is con-sciousness (sunaisthesis) of a virtual, intensive multiplicity. But if the ensemble of processions and conversions reunites all potentialities in the aion, the latter also distinguishes between them by an internal and pronominal distinction. And it is through synthesis (sunthesis} that the distinction makes itself pronominal — that there is a distinction between the nun of a purely past moment and that of purely future. The nun, pure now, is the matrix of originary time as the distinguishing-itself of time. It is the act through which a degree of potentiality is distinguished under a pronominal mode and individuates itself. Each nun, as a degree of potentiality, distinguishes itself from within, differentiates itself, is-in-the-process-ofdifferentiating-itself&t the summit of the highest unity (thus without contradistinguishing itself) in a double, simultaneous movement: procession, conversion. It throws itself forward in order to turn back toward the preceding potentialities. (What constitutes itself, Proclus would say, internalizes procession and conversion.) By that very movement, the nun engenders a time that is the measure of intensive quantity, a time of contemplation referring back to the primacy of the past (through conversion, that is to say, the movement of a returning toward) of the passive ego, who retains the leakage of the always in the real difference of the heterotes, or extensio, in the actual multiplicity of the partial soul, of the active ego.204 That is why Plotinus takes good care to distinguish eternity (the infinite of intensity, the infinite of potentiality) from perpetuity (the infinity of extension, the infinite of intention), aion and aidion. That is why the nun is divided into past and future in their pure state. Past and future are pure forms. The price for originary time is this: a past that has never been present, a future that will never be present. The whole ministry of an ontological pre-

The Time of Audacity: Plotinus

sent is what does not pass by, the invisible cause of those divisions that "subsist under a single form prior to the multiplied and indefinitely repeated divisions, that preexist immobile to sensible divisions."205 Originary time is the product of the disjunctive-inclusive synthesis effectuated by the nun, that is, of the self-differentiating of the soul that makes us conceive totality as infinite, because it will never be at the point of, in Damascius's words, having finished differentiating itself.206 This is the time of contemplation, the time of Parmenides' second hypothesis, which throws the nun out into the foreground of the philosophical scene—of the One who, both one and multiple, takes part in the eminent time of Life through exemplarity, takes part in the aidn. As pure self-affection, time is essentially implicated in the intrinsic structure of immanent transcendence, in the soul that is the "middle and center of all beings."207 Its manner of "presentation" is revealed in conversion, the true matrix of time. Pure, it forms the essence of every interiority, of every "self-solicitation": it determines the essential structure of the process of subjectivation, the deep essence of a transcendence that no longer rests on an ocean of immutability but espouses the movement and first life of Difference, where it both proceeds from and gathers itself into. The Time of maintenance: "This 'time' is the first nun, the original maintaining that, still enveloped within intelligible maintenance, without yet exiting the paternal abyss, already spreads itself out and lasts."208 The nun is the privileged instant of the passive synthesis (ontological maintenance). We know the rest. The original now must reflect itself in an instant of a wholly other nature, in one instant or another (exaiphnes) that characterizes the degradation potential of the active Ego's intensity and affection, in order to subjugate derived time to the order of originary time, to reintegrate the soul's audacity (extrinsic difference) into the audacity of being (intrinsic difference). Schelling expresses this perfectly when he writes that "true eternity is not that which excludes all time, but that which contains time (eternal time) subjected to itself."209 Thus the exaiphnes, the floating zero, the zero-flux of the original synthesis, is the privileged object of the nun. Or again: the exaiphnes is the mobile image of the nun just as the sensible universe is the image of the intelligible world, real difference the image of pronominal distinction, active synthesis (praxis) the image of passive synthesis (theoria): time (derived: khronos) the image of "eternity" (aidn). And the future, constitutive of derived time, is the image of the pure past as continuous presence for contemplation, the difference of the conversion of the soul within itself.210 As action is the shadow of vision and reason:211

70,1

Therefore, over against the life of the intellect, there must be another life, which belongs to that potential of the soul and which is called life by homonym; over against the movement of the intellectual soul, the movement of apart of the soul; over against identity, uniformity and permanence, change and ever-different activity; over against indivisibility and unity, an image of unity, the oneness that is in continuity; over against an infinity that is a whole, a ceaseless progress toward the infinite; over against what is at once wholly entire, a whole which must come part by pan and by stages never final. Thus, the sensible universe will imitate that compact and infinite whole of the intelligible world, by aspiring to endlessly new acquisitions in existence; its being will always be the image of intelligible being.212

Having to be to eternity as the sensible universe is to the intelligible world, "the movement through which the soul passes from one state of life to another state of life," the active synthesis of practical reason, is the image of the originary corn-position of a "life identical to itself and infinite." A reflection of eternity, the perpetual nonpresent is the actual image of the eternal present. And Chronos is the action-image of Aion. Action-image, since nothing resembles itself, since everything differs — and ex-plicates itself in a powerful tension that projects us, from the natural place of harmony between soul and world, into the time of fissure and the face-off between two antagonistic subjectivities. Into the time of fear, too, for new forces of unsuspected expression burst forth into the field of philosophy; new forces come from the outside that could no longer be pushed back to the edges, at a time when the Aristotelian cartography of the soul could not take over in any durable way from the Platonic geography of hubris. Theoria and Praxis, contemplative ego and desiring ego, ideal ego and concrete ego, passive ego and active ego, split by the empty force of time... So begins a crazy story. As for the question of knowing whether this interminable story indeed gets under way with Plotinus, there is no other answer than: perforce, since with him the audacity of the soul wanting to be itself the master of the principle, for the first time, launches the series of time, and this on the basis of the future mode of the will and of the appropriative relation to things. (Perfectly rendered by the Brehier translation in evoking those "endlessly new acquisitions.") A further word, to mark the major effect of this total shake-up on the reversal of temporal relations, of a time that no longer flows out of the past toward the present and the future because it is born of the relation between active ego and things, a relation represented by a pure movement of abstraction, signified within the moment, whose role is first of all to invest every present in the direction

The Time of Audacity: Plotinus

fature —> past, to relate it back to the artificial signs of the pro-ject, of a production that will never be reproduction in the form of presence — but provision. It is remarkable, in fact, that this plucking of the future from the crest of time presupposes what Aristotle sought in vain to dominate in the play of telos: that time supposes a grip, over time "itself." Whether one thinks it in derived terms changes nothing—the hold is over time, but time is altogether in the grip. That is why, far from being a temporal dimension, the future is the active synthesis of the ensemble of time, whose only dimensions are the present and the past, which issue from an a priori order, and from one caesura or another. That is also why it is necessary to reverse the Plotinian formulation in order to "reinstitute" the conspiratorial enterprise on which it depends to save the harmony of the soul, in the absence of (anthropo-cosmological) agreement with the world: Aion is the contemplation-image of Chronos; originary time is the sublime or sublimated image of derived time. A virtual image, or if you like, a theoretical activity. That is finally why, the taking grip [em-prise] of time is not only defined by an abstract time (in relation to the cosmos) adequate to this or that instant, but also by a potential time determining itself in an action-image whose audacity (tolma) heralds the overturning of its originary foundation, the independence of derived time. Disaster keeps a vigil: in the part of itself that is dispersed in the time engendered by its potential, the soul strives to make the permanence of its intelligible model disappear. In this movement of negation determined by the refusal it puts p up to its ontological present, in that moment of differ ance and of projection that identifies man with the insurrection of time, the human soul turns away from the symphonic experience of the primordial infinity felt as autarkeia in the process of interiorization—and the infinity of being is autarchical only because it is inferiority—in order to give itself over to pursuing an imaginary infinity that prolongs every number by multiplying it; to throw itself into pursuing a "slave laden with gold," says Plotinus. Here, rather than in the distinction between sensible and intelligible, is where the true break is manifested: at the level of the order of "production," between the essential number assuring the correct processual appearance, the autarchical or "unified" number defining the pronominal cohesion of every being, and the imaginary number, the number of the action-image, the number of the will that is never effectuated for itself, never finds its accomplishment in the act itself,

72,3

tends toward the Indefinite, in the irreversible series of potentialities of time as acosmic relation to self.2±3 Between Aristotle and Plotinus. From need's number as what exposes polites humanity's relation to otherness, constituting a self-presence in the world (the care of the self), to the will's cipher as what exposes a relation to self that commands the split between subjects who are mutual objects (the appropriating expropriation of the other): another Odysseus comes into view, the Odysseus of the adventures of the "divided self" in the dis-order of the world.214 Taking up again in part Michel Foucault's analysis of the Greek formation,215 we could, in order to reach some very general conclusions, stirn up the Plotinian "situation," the properly Neoplatonic "in-between," as follows. There would be: a)

b)

the Greek folding (pli) of the forces engaged in the relation to others that is constitutive of the relation to self (ethical subjectivation, aesthetics of the fi-ee man), and that does not exclude the temporal provocation of the Unequal in itself. The care of the self, political reflection, chrematistic deflection; the Greco-Roman unfolding (de'pli) of the relation to self in power relations (personalization, privatization, and moral universalization of man subjugated to status) that commands, through a counterstroke, the develop-

ment of a true "culture of self" that seems to break the subjugation to the chain of power. Mastery of the other, reconversion to self; a : b = c) the Neoplatonic refolding (repli) of the self within the Whole that puts it outside itself (the personal dissolution of contemplative man). The Affirmation of the self as active non-ego, as ecstasy; b X c = d) the Christian folding over (surpli) of truth-salvation as constitutive of a subject subjugated to itself insofar as it is invested by an absolute transcendence (religious closure, extraworldly subjectivation/objectivation of believing rnan). Representation of the ego as God's care, as faith.

A golden chain bound all beings together, from the formless to matter, via the continuity of a single life, of light spreading across the entire spectrum of the hierarchy of being. But the golden chain broke, leaving the movement of unimultiplicity suspended, as well as its "wandering course" in the "plain of truth," which taught us to "accept meekly the nature of all things" (praios sugkhoreteon tei

The Time of A u d a c i t y : Plotinus

panton phusei).2*-6 (Unless that movement was definitively brought to a halt.217) From the Beautiful, the potential of the Supreme God sought refuge in Faith. The tragic vision of the world triumphs at last. And so the world makes as if to bend (plier) to the old prophecy of Simon the Magician, and his terrible image: if mind does not turn itself into image, it will be annihilated at the same time as the world.

A French philosopher says that since the fall of man we have ceased to intuit things in themselves. If the dictum is to have any reasonable meaning, he must have been thinking of the fall of man in the Platonic sense, as stepping out of the absolute state. But in that case he should have put his dictum inversely; since we have ceased intuiting things in themselves we are fallen beings. For if the term thing in itself \s to have any sense, it can only signify something that is no longer an object for us, something that offers no resistance to our activity... Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, Philosophical Letters on Dogmatism and Criticism

T

H

R

E

E

The Time of Novitas: Saint Augustine

While in the process of revealing one thing, God does not always display the other.

Saint John of the Cross

I Dynamics of Transcendence ADMIT IT: our situation is difficult because it works too well, because it's going too fast. This paradox engages the critical essence, or ateleological sense, of genealogical and archaeological investigation. Do we need, under the name of Plotinus, to take up again the conditioned opening of the subjectivation of time within the structure of an apparatus, without method but not without return, to which he will have delivered us, marked, bearing the stamp of an excess that disconcerts the assurance of our own hermeneutical strategies? A veritable "mutant" thought is what was revealed to us beneath the characteristics of a philosophy of Soul and of Time that implies the first sighting of infinity1 as well as

the dislodgment of the notion of will at the level of the One2 and of the human soul (which thus acquires, according to the Kantian formula, the power to begin by itself a series of things or successive states). As anachronistic as it may appear, this rapprochement translates the strangely modern sentiment that has taken hold of more than one reader of the Enneads. Infinity, will: doesn't the fusion of these two concepts, by something unthought that it introduces within its strange rigor, presage the appearance of the (constituted, modern) subject and of what will henceforth be taken for the "most profound calling of Western ratio"? Isn't the carryover between the two, be it ever so abstract, in solidarity with what we have been able to call the "metaphysical figure of capitalism," well before the structural effect of its process makes itself known? For my part, more modestly, the exploration of the Neoplatonic continent is what allowed us to measure and clarify the articulations and tensions of the subjective economy of time conceived as the number of the soul's intensive motion, and what gave a first meaning and direction (sens) to the internal analysis of the conquest of time. The break between the time of things and the converted time of the soul coincides, in fact, with the elucidation of purely subjective activity as the hitherto totally unknown object of an onto-anthropology ofpsukhe—from the praxis of the human soul straining toward its "object," to the audacity of a soul itself wanting to be its own first principle and from which real-ontic time henceforth proceeds. When the procession, as we say, ends in a process of appropriation... Since that audacity, investigation can forever only go from the subject to the object, from the time of the ego to "objective" time. We are obliged to follow this path insofar as Plotinus was the first to free himself from the Platonic-Aristotelian philosopheme. And we have seen that the problem of time is where the reversal he operates determines itself as well as the audacity that carries him away;3 arising in this way from a fundamentally destabilizing enterprise. Noting this shake-up of the foundations upon which ancient thought reposed, Chestov even speaks of a cult of uprooting in Plotinus. But does this come down for all that to some kind of royal road whose trace would merely need to be prolonged to arrive at the buttresses of modern reason and enframing? At the level of ideal linkage where we are still situated, a positive answer does not obligatorily seem to be excluded a priori. Where some have seen in Saint Augustine the "father of Western consciousness" and "the first modern," we will have to insist upon his relation to Neoplatonism, along with the incredibile incendium lit in his soul tormented by those platonicorum libri, about which he is very close to saying that they are "consonances] Evangelio."4 If he effectively restricts

78,9

this expression to the Plotinian philosophy of Illumination,5 doesn't he still assert in the Confessions that the basic teachings of the Platonici are the same as those of the Gospel, with only the language being different? In them I read— not word for word, of course — though the sense was the same and supported by

many, complex reasons, I read that in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God; this was with God in the beginning; everything was made through this, and without this nothing would have been made; what has been made in this is life, and that life was the light of men; and the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not taken hold of it.6

In case the reader has any doubts about the identity of the mysterious author of these Platonic books—thinking that Porphyry at least (at the price of some effort...) tended to identify the One with Being—Augustine takes care to specify that Egypt is where these books came from: "et utique inde [ab Aegypto] erant illi libri."7 Allusion is thus expressly made to the Enneads of Plotinus, the Egyptian philosopher who came to settle in Rome, the heart of the Latin West. In Augustine's eyes, Christianity would thus be Plotinianism fulfilled. At the dusk of his life, besieged by Vandal hordes, the aged bishop of Hippo meditated again on the Egyptian's words: there is no greatness in him who finds justice in seeing wood and stone fall to dust but finds affliction at the death that strikes mortals... or in the fall of an empire and the seizure of its capital city.8 All in all, though, for Augustine to have read the lessons of the Gospel in Plotinus is one thing, but it is something else entirely to be able to assert that "morally as well as intellectually he was converted to Neoplatonism rather than the Gospel"!9 Without going so far, let us briefly take account of some doctrinal arguments or elements that, under one title or another, could accredit an analysis that tends to make Augustinianism a "Plotinianism brought into agreement with the requirements of Christian thought."10 What needs to be mentioned first, since Augustine directly alludes to it, is the analogy between the Neoplatonic doctrine of the three hypostases and the Christian dogma of the Trinity—wherein is also found, at a slight distance, the idea of a partition without division, "inseparabilis distinctio" in Augustinian terms, and the assertion of the identity between knowing and being. His theory of knowledge should also be mentioned, and more particularly his theory of self-knowledge, which allows him to present a proof of God "through the life of the spirit," as well as his doctrine of the spirit's illumination by God and steps in the ascension of the soul, which he gathered from, respectively, the tractate On the Three Hypostases and the tractate On the Beautiful. All this leads him to the

T h e T i m e o f No vitas: S a i n t A u g u s t i n e

dialectics of magis esse and minus esse (of "more being" and "less being"), a translation of the Plotinian expressions mallon einai, hetton einai, which would be but "a Christian variant of the Plotinian metaphysics of the proodos and the epistrophe."ii Finally, let us mention, as the logical end of this Augustinian ontology of created being, a conception of evil defined as a "perversion of the will that turns away from God, who is the Supreme Substance, and veers towards things of the lowest order,"12 of a bad will opposed to the beatitudinis voluntas and which, while in its expression tributary to the terms of the Gospel, seems once more broadly inspired by the first chapter of the tractate On the Three Hypostases and by the Plotinian description of the fall of the soul.13 The issue, of course, is that of developing what we shall limit ourselves to saying here in order to give a first contour to the thesis of a Neoplatonic intra-structure to Augustinianism. It would no longer be just the Confessions but the ensemble of the opus that would bear witness to a metaphysics of "conversion." It is more than evident in this framework that putting book XI of the Confessions in the perspective of the Plotinian tractate On Time and Eternity will produce inevitable confirmations. But what conclusions can be drawn, once the displacement and encounter of "categories" (schematically: diastasis and distentio, tbedria and intentio) has been staged, if not, as Emilie Zum Brunn nicely puts it, that "they attain a universal resonance"?14 Drawing back before the heuristic poverty of the procedure, should one opt for the principial inscription, the essential self-norming of the economy of thought and the possible within a teleology of history without hesitation or indeterminacy, without fault or hiatus? Without enigma in its cursory evolution. Or else, should we turn toward the unfolding of an enigma without history that commands the significant modalities of a Face of Being? A budding forth and a retreat, the understanding [entente] of the present (humanity as metrori) and the subjectivation of the present (subjectivity determining itself as voluntas) posited through an act of representation, in a world where the free Play of Time yields its place to the Determinant that beats the Measure... This triple impasse generates a vertiginous dwindling of intelligibility. Already insofar as it would not be impossible to demonstrate that on a good number of points—paradox oblige—Plotinus is "ahead" of Augustine's Christian Platonism. Insofar, for example, as the internal tension between originary temporality and derived temporality takes a more decisive turn in Plotinus, one imposed by the human production of time. The same goes for the synthetic function of the soul, under the double form of theoria and praxis, for within itself is where the soul

80,1

finds the light that enlightens it as well as the darkness that turns it away from its divine reign, while the Augustinian intellect is still only the receptive subject of divine illumination: "Non est pars Dei anima" (the soul is not a part of God). And then: does not the "emanentist" doctrine of Plotinus surpass the Platonist critique of the sensible, inherited by the church father, who nourishes the extraordinary hiatus between the assertion of the beauty of divine creation and the throes of the regio dissimilitudinis'?15 This expression is interesting because it is borrowed from Plot16 inus. Now, for the latter, it is a question of the soul turning away from the divine in order to yield to vice and the attraction of matter, of the human soul alienating its own ontological structure, its essential temporality (aion) which is nothing other than the very life of the intelligible. Linked to the procession that multiplies beings and removes them farther and farther from the first principle, the dissimilarity between the sensible man and the inner man is what conversion effaces. The conversion refers back to an assimilative existence that counters and reintegrates into the absolute those potentialities of dissimilarity whose ultimate identity with the operation of the Logos as the principle of cosmic order Plotinus had wanted to seal—in opposition to the Gnostics.17 The soul is indeed the center of all things, mese taxis, insofar as it dissolves the divine into a kind of hyperimmanence within a cosmos that is thoroughly ontologized. Augustine's world, on the contrary, is that of the greatest ontological difference between creature and creator: the divine emanation of the One is reversed into a religious duality in such a way that metaphysical distance, or the ontological split, is reaffirmed in the very movement of the created soul toward Absolute Being. So it goes with Gregory of Nyssa, taking up Plotinus's two tractates on the Beautiful and on the Good in chapters 10-12 of De virginitate. Where Plotinus wrote, "Ugliness being due to the addition of alien matter, it is a toil for man to become again what he was" (I, 6, 5), Gregory corrects: "It is not our task to remove what is alien and to become again what we are by nature" (372e).18 Fascinosum versus tremendum. "And I trembled with love and horror, and I discovered that I was far from You in the region of dissemblance." Now, this pathology of transcendence, this theopathy, is what will—historically—turn out to be decisive in its dynamic possibilities. For in the night of God's absence, while God has retired into Himself, while the divine has withdrawn from the world, while "the old has passed away, [while] the new has come" (2 Cor. 5:17)... the Christian receives his share of the inheritance. Theology of distance oblige, it bears upon the very regime of what one designates by transcendence.19

T h e T i m e o f Novitas: S a i n t A u g u s t i n e

I do not intend to examine for its own sake the irreducible gap between the doctrine of emanation and the dogma of creation, between immanent cause and transcendent cause, between the procession of the One and the promotion of the Utterly Other. Nor do I intend to take up again the quarrel over "Christian philosophy," with the question keenly disputed in the 1930s "an sit et quae sit philosophia christiana" (whether or what Christian philosophy might be). I don't think that such a study would allow us to get out of the difficulty in which we are floundering, except to extend it under the auspices of a history of thought, or worse of a "philosophical" history of the intuition of time across the ages, exposed to the worst failings of Weltanschauungsphilosophie. Let us specify rather its amplitude and its law, the reason for this paradox, which was announced at the beginning of this chapter, around which we keep turning without naming it, and whose only tangible manifestation is negative. We are not in the process of commenting book XI of the Confessions, the famous book of Augustinian time, of which many a passage seems nonetheless directly translated from Plotinus: from the assertion of a time of the soul disconnected from the time of the world to the definition of time as distentio animi. Proposition: The Neoplatonist formation of time only emerges on the stage of the world in its destabilizing effects, only disengages itself from its conservative insertion in the divine, with its carryover to that whose advent it so desperately tried to delay: a dynamics of transcendence and of religious debt. In itself, apart from its Christian recuperation — and from that retrospective optic that was ours—Neoplatonism does not belong to the West's dominant dynamics (one speaks of "Oriental influences"). What it will lead to is not the investigative subjectivation of self-certitude and the mastering objectivation of the Cartesian subject, but the via intellectualis of a Jakob Bohme or a Spinoza. Its principle is that of contemplation, not reason. For while one can always imagine possible translations, and watch the translations effectuated into statements ("medietas animi.. .in meditullio quodam rerum...") that seem to make vain the tracing of any border between the processual regime of theoria and the hierarchies of the consideratio rationis, never will that influence tend toward identity, or its translatability toward equivalence.20 Even more so, it is precisely because Christianity does not coincide with Greco-Roman culture that "the problem[s] of translation, transmission, and interpretation originate with Christianity."21 As for its "audacity," if it is deployed on the basis of the Hellenistic caesura between soul and world that it pushes to the metaphysical paradox of an extinction of the powers of the One that has completely the air of a categorical

82,3

turning away (with the other intelligence of the "caesured" human who will soon be called superbia, potestas, ambitio saeculi...), under Stoic influence, it also consecrates the ultimate effort of philosophical paganism in order to reestablish sub specie perfectionis the way of immanence and the reign of the divine man beyond the aspectual duality of being, the upper world and the lower world, with difference as the sublimation of the low. In counterpoint to the subjectivation of the divine, what is undoubtedly found in the Enneads is the first philosophical presentation of the human subject whose mode is the future, whose origin and destination is the will, whose essential dimension is anxiety. Hannah Arendt salutes Plotinus as Hegel's "strange precursor."22 But although with Hegel there is a shift from wanting to thinking by the will to an end that is that of the Good, the identification of a real will with mind, in Plotinus the conversion from praxis to theoria, from the human of Khronos to the human ofAion, is imperious. From the material narcissism of bad will to the formal narcissism of contemplation, where seeing is not wanting because every separation, every division between subject and object, is abolished with the illusion of the active ego. The Neoplatonic human is an alternative subject. That subject's shadow, cast over the history of philosophy, will always present itself as the hope for an alternative to the fundamental process of the new times: the very Christian logic of alterity. Hasn't it been sufficiently repeated, however, that "The claim [to a "fundamentum absolutum inconcussum veritatis"] originates in that emancipation of man in which he frees himself from obligation to Christian revelational truth and church doctrine to a legislating for himself that takes its stand upon itself"23 and no longer on a personal God acting as the supreme cause of the created order? Thus the Judeo-Christian development of absolute divinity would not represent a lesser shackle on the autonomy of human reason. Is this a sufficient, if not necessary, explanation for the integration of the Greek phylum into Christian speculation?24 The reader will have understood that I wish to uphold the opposite hypothesis, that of a dynamics of transcendence and of scission; namely, that the divine economy henceforth implies a principle of dissociation, a specific break between what is beyond and what is here below, which, far from fulfilling itself in a negative logic with regard to the terrestrial city, in the end favors the autonomy of the temporal. We should not be overly surprised to find in The City of God the first broad manifestation of a dialectics of this genre, of which Augustine, in at least one place, is not far from becoming conscious. I allude to the great reprise of the theme of the two cities, in book XIX, when the constraining categories are no longer those of "self-love to the point of scorning God," and of "the love of God to the point of scorning the self" ("Two

T h e T i m e o f Novitas: S a i n t A u g u s t i n e

loves built two cities") — caritas and cupiditas—but of peace and order, the common end of every society, of the just as of the wicked, of beasts as of brigands. From the start, two orders around which are organized two cities: one turned toward the potentiality and enjoyment of things here below (temporalia), the other toward the veritable goods (spiritualia) through charity and grace. But very quickly Augustine's temptation appears: that the absolute heterogeneity of the two domains, led to its ultimate consequences, will let only the City of God subsist, the only one worthy of the name city. To the extent that (1) "the peace of the unjust, compared to the peace of the just, is not worthy even of the name of peace in the eyes of him who has learned to prefer right to wrong and the ordered to disorder"; and (2) "therefore, where there is no true justice [through which the sole and sovereign God commands the city, which obeys Him by his grace], there can be no association of persons united in society by a common sense of a right and a community of interests. After that, there is certainly no people, since such is the veritable definition of a people. Therefore, there is no republic [res publica] either, since there is no thing of the people [res populi] there where there is not even a people."25 The righteous return of things: Cain, the ancestor of blacksmiths and musicians, founder of the first city, the inventor of weights and measures, which preludes the sordidness of accounting, Cain, "whose name means 'possession,'"26 killed Abel; Abel in turn eliminates Cain. At least that's how it ought to be if the two de jure mutually exclusive cities did not coexist de facto, if the City of the saints, communio sanctorum, did not beget "citizens here below and in their persons the City dwells as if abroad until the time of its kingdom comes."21 While waiting, if I dare say, Augustine has no other path to take but that of coming back to a definition whose fulcrum remains love: If, on the other hand, another definition than this is found for a "people, "for example, if one should say, "A people is the association of a multitude of rational beings united by a, common agreement on the objects of their love," then it follows that to observe the character of a particular people, we must examine the objects of its love... the better the objects of this agreement, the better the people; the worse the objects of this love, the worse the people.2*

As soon as he is constrained to abandon any idea of identifying social peace with Christian peace, with the sole criterion of obedience to God under eternal law—justitia being nothing less than God and the realization of the divine will, the created order participating in the unity of being with God29—Augustine de facto renounces the submission of the temporal order to the absolute order of eternal justice in the name of the higher ends of the celestial city; and he admits the separation between the political and the religious domains, between nature and

84,5

grace. He ratifies the independence of the justice of law from the justice of faith. The true significance of his doctrine of law would therefore be the juridical positivism implied by his conception of a dual citizenship of the Christian subject in strict conformity with the Pauline doctrine of the natural law of the state, of which I detect no "distortion" here, nor any preforming of Augustinian politics.30 Even if that were the case, let us assert along with Marcel Gauchet that the hierarchizing will of medieval Augustinians "liberates and literally gives rise to the expression of the antagonistic claim...: the will to subject everything to what is beyond unveils by its very action the irreducible independence of what is here below."31 (It is impossible not to note as an aside the presence of a similar erasure in Luther's opus, when he renounces his vision of a New Jerusalem in the face of the cataclysmic shock of 1525, when evangelical revolt frantically rhymed with social revolt. Let us briefly recall Luther's arguments: (1) true Christians are rare in this fallen world; (2) Christ did not hesitate to place our bodies and possessions under the control of the emperor and civil law; (3) since everyone cannot be equal in this world, the integrity of persons and the inequality of possessions must be respected to assure public peace. Conclusion: except for the pursuit of extreme ends, it is perfectly vain to ignore the divorce between Christian ethics and the worldy necessities of social organization. It will be noted with "interest" that the crisis is unleashed by the question of usury, as practiced by the Augustinians of the Marian Seminary in Eisenach. Far from teaching us that debtors were complicitous in sin by reimbursing their debts encumbered by the wages of usury, Luther stresses the point that Christ advised his disciples to offer their tunics and cloaks to the people's oppressors.32 Once private property has been established between people, it would be an act of theft not to pay the agreed-upon interests and to add a second sin to the first. Besides, wasn't this already the spirit of one of Alexander Ill's papal decrees?)33 Now, this independence, autonomy, and dehierarchization of the temporal is still what rules over the Augustinian solution to the problem of property rights. In proper doctrine, all riches, all material belongings, even gold, belong to God as creator of all things. Human beings properly possess nothing: everything has been made by God; everything belongs to Him. Thus is it written in Deuteronomy that no sale of land "in perpetuity" may be tolerated, for the land belongs to God, and the Israelites who have settled on the land are but God's outsiders and slaves. This is the meaning of the evangelical counsel of total renunciation ("if you wish to reach perfection, go and sell what you own") that led Saint Anthony to flee the world, and the meaning of early Christianity's "communism of

T h e T i m e o f Novitas: S a i n t A u g u s t i n e

love," which was violently hostile to private property since God had created everything for common use.34 Traces of this ideal are still found in the craftsman of Augustine's conversion: Ambrose, the great bishop of Milan, admired by the Pelagians and other partisans of a church sine macula et ruga (without blemish or wrinkle).35 "Natura ius commune generavit, usurpatio ius fecit privatum" (natural law begets commonality, the law of usurpation makes for the private). Conscious of the subversive consequences of such a teaching and of the necessity of adapting the discipline of the schola Christi in function of the empire's conversion to Christianity, Augustine prefers to develop the idea of a justa possessio: "male autem possedet, qui male utitur" (he possesses badly who enjoys material goods instead of using them). In passing, you will have recognized the famous distinction between frui (enjoyment) and uti (use). In God's eye (which can only be enjoyed through beatitude) the legitimacy of property depends on the good use of the acquired thing, the only one permitted being its use with a view toward God. That is why it is found in the Scriptures that the faithful possess the riches of the whole world while the infidel does not even have a farthing.36 Does that mean that such a program must be realized"? No, Augustine asserts, for that would be to go against the rules of civil law, which turns the real into an order by designating the individual's area of maximum pretension, by delimiting the sphere of "divine law" within which every pretension is illegitimate. To follow a more constraining formulation: the juridical order is instituted upon the taking into account of a casus, that is, of the "fall by occasion" as an effect of sin that the law alone makes known (Paul).37 To Caesar what belongs to Caesar, to God what belongs to 38 God: isn't this precept, whose fortune among the Pauline is well known, ultimately what Etienne Gilson seems to comment upon when he is led to write that transposing the rules that are valid for one City onto the plane of the Other is to confuse and overturn everything? We can recite his difficulty in concluding: "It would be tempting to believe that this radical heterogeneity between the two domains assures their complete independence in Saint Augustine's doctrine; that is not at all the case, and other considerations come to reestablish in practice what the theory seems to sunder."39 The practice in view is none other than the recourse to the secular arm and coercito against heretics and schismatics, Donatists and Pelagians, each of whom seeks to impose the Christian lex in all its rigor in a drastic reductio ad unum of the ensemble of the populus christianus. They seek to impose the point of view of God onto the earth, of a sole order in which the total hierarchization of being would reign

86,7

thanks to the preeminence in actu of the spiritual over the temporal. Forgetting that the church has its own soldiers and stewards ("to reason and teach like those men reason and teach, is not to fight but to revolt; it is not to plant the vine but to tear it out; not to bring the flock together to lead it to pasture but to separate out the ewes and to lose them"),40 all of these movements testify to the resistance of a unitary economy—even the Manichaeans are not exempt. To give Evil a consistency equal to that of the Good, is that not finally to inscribe each within a single universe?41 Manichaeism, Donatism, Pelagianism: three successive combats Augustine had to engage. If we set aside Manichaeism insofar as it is a "materialist" heresy that is not a heresy of Christianity even if it borrows from it its constitutive elements (on the Manichaean interpretation of the Trinity, see Adversus Faustum Manichaeum XX, 2), it should nonetheless be remarked that all these heralds of a Christianity of discontinuity turn out to be the ultimate defenders of an ontology of the One (in late Antiquity, that ontology was always an affair of the aristocratic and/or spiritual elites). That explains why Augustine was able to confuse them in the same counterargumentation that partakes, beneath the continuist appearances of a reduction of alterity, in an economy of separation that borrows characteristics of an assertion of divine exteriority such that its infinite distance empties the meaning from any pretension to applying here below the norms of what is beyond, to living a beata vita on this earth.42 That would be to wish to reconnect the human and the divine in this world — and to repeat, in content, the mystery of the Incarnation. To those in search of such a union, of the "Sancti estote, quoniam ego sanctus sum, Dominus Deus vester" (the Holy existence, since I am holy, God is your Lord), to the men of the sancta superbia (holy pride), Augustine gives a single answer: "God wanted time to be mixed,"43 even though He had at least two ways to state it, according to whether one is situated on the plane of grace or that of nature. In The City of God, he emphasizes the fact that the two cities will remain "interwoven and intermixed in this era, until the day when the Last Judgment separates them"; for "in the same way, while the City of God is on pilgrimage in this world, she has in her midst some who are united with her in their participation in the sacraments, but who will not join with her in the eternal destiny of the saints... concealed among our most outspoken enemies are some predestined souls."44 Of course, we have to wait for Luther before the practical consequences of Augustine's lesson are drawn (with what it requires in the way of a change in the material basis of being-in-the-world), yet there is no doubt that an essential dimension of Christianity is revealed here: the radical formulation of the

T h e T i m e o f N o v it as: S a i n t A u g u s t i n e

doctrine of predestination necessarily implies the individualist idea of an invisible church. The individual overtakes the church of Peter, dispossessed of the Kingdom of God that human beings have only in themselves. Between the potestas clavium, the Power of the Keys that seals the human-divine ecclesial continuity, and a conception of grace as gratia praeveniens (anticipatory favor), which Augustine was the first to formulate (along with the doctrine of original sin, whose expression as well as its content in a certain way he invents), there appears an abyss that is difficult to cross. At the bottom of this abyss, where the assertion of transcendence turns all humanity into a massa damnata, lies the profound mystery of redemption that the Pelagians refuse to meditate. Don't they think they can secretly acquire through their virtues and deprivations enough merits to replace the blood of Christ? Don't they make him out to be unjust and cruel, Him who would corrupt even the soul of the newly born to chastise the fault of the first man? Now, if we follow Augustine, the economy of separation is not limited to the domain ofjustitta: it climbs onto the plane of potentia, threatens to play between potentia ordinata and potentia absoluta. A phrase by Chestov marvelously sums it all up: "The thief on the cross was closer to true faith than the virtuous monk Pelagius."45 In that tenth book of the Confessions that so scandalized Pelagius, Augustine underscored that "no one should be confident during this life, which may be called a perpetual trial."46 No one, for neither conversion nor baptism ensures against the weight of habit (consuetude) and the goad of carnal will in an old man (vetus homo): against the temptations of an earthly man "which still assail me," writes Saint Augustine, "despite my sighs and my ardent desire to be cloaked in my little home from heaven."47 This tenth book of the Confessions, which in its developments on memory prepares the great book on time, marks the decisive break with missionary Christianity and the ancient conception of conversion—linked to catharsis— which supposes a continuum uniting the inner person, the new person, to God. This is because there remains only a faint glow of light in humans and because it is no longer time for contemplation but for walking: "Let them walk on, let them walk on, for fear that darkness may engulf them" ("ambulent, ambulent, ne tenebrae comprehendant").48 Always a profound continuity under the apparent discontinuity, the structural discontinuity in the lived continuity of man the sinner. So speaks Augustine: I scrutinized all these things and stood back in awe, for without you I could see none of them, and I found that none of them was you... For in my wounded heart, I saw your splendor and it dazzled me. I asked: who can come close to this?*9

88,9

We are no longer within the framework of a Christianity of the law that obliges according to the formula of "Dominus legem dat" (The Lord gives the law). The logic of superiority has been substituted by the wholly internal economy of a Christianity of faith no longer fearful of consummating the definitive duality. A line of fracture: the fracture in being. A fundamental buttress: the presence of God in the "awesome mystery" of memory, of his profound and infinite multiplicity, which is nothing other than myself: that "life that is ever varying, full of change and of immense power" that engenders "such a difference between me and myself" — "inter me ipsum et me ipsum" — that "I cannot myself grasp all that I am."50 Far from there being a social norm, there remains for the Christian only an internal difference, which is revealed in the temporal dialectics of intentio and distentio. In the heart of the subject, in one's innermost heart [son for interne}, is where there is the projected shadow of the ontological fracture and of transcendence, whose process of expression is merged with the history of the principle of individuality. The chain of being broken, the divinity abandons the world to creation in order to coil back into the great spaces and vast palaces of memory. The final figure in the paradox of exteriority, the radical separation of the Utterly Other with the gaping open of being-for-the-world must be affirmed so that there emerges from the depths of Christian consciousness the ideal of the Inner Master:51 For if you are not there to hear us, even in our deepest plight, what is to become of us? To whom shall we cry? Yours is the day, yours the night: upon a sign, at your wish, the moments fly away. Give me some wide space of this time for my meditations on the secrets of your law.52 In final preparation for the shift from the autonomy of the temporal to a possible and necessary autonomization/subjectivation of time, two points remain to be examined and worked out: 1. The first concerns Christianity as a religion of Interpretation. What is the meaning of these meditations on the secrets of the law? The law is that of the Word that creates, of an eternal will belonging to the very substance of God.53 This substantial will is the foundation of the world and the principle of its creation. The creation is the expression of an absolutely subjective and unlimited will. The principle is that of the omnipotence of the absolute subjectivity that holds all things to its commandment. The world is the product of the commandment. Feuerbach sums this up with a resounding formulation: "The culminating point of the principle of subjectivity is creation out of nothing." But this will is also the sole guarantor of the coherence of the world, of its ordo. "Omnis ordo a Deo" (All order comes from God), writes Augustine,

T h e T i m e o f Nov it as: S a i n t A u g u s t i n e

citing Paul from memory, with a characteristic lapsus.54 For without Deus ordinator, the Revelation would remain unintelligible, magical, obscure in its essence, requiring submission and not meditation. Now, meditation upon the secret of the law is what spiritualized the egoist obedience of Judaism (Jehovah, the I of Israel) by elevating it to universal subjectivity. (Judaism, Feuerbach says again, is worldly Christianity; Christianity, spiritual Judaism.)55 Creation, revelation: "Crede ut intelligas, intellige ut credas" (Believe so that you may understand, understand so that you may believe). God's designs are certainly impenetrable insofar as they surpass human understanding, but the organization of what is created is in and of itself a duty to know the world separate from Him,56 to know the Other of God, a duty to recognize His objectivity, which throws humanity, the end of creation, into the situation of being a rational subject sure of itself in the midst of things (medietas animi)?1 "Omnes mentes de se ipsis nosse certasque esse" (Every mind knows itself and is certain of itself).58 Since Saint Augustine, the first theologian, the first Christian philosopher, evey soul knows itself with certitude. For the cogito is not at "the end" of the religion of interpretation (Descartes); it is its center. That is why, beyond the troubling similarity of the formulas, one is fully grounded in speaking of an "Augustinian cogito." To the point that the Cartesian presentation of the cogito would appear as the tardy—because definitive—breakthrough of a constitutive dimension of Christianity that is strictly contemporaneous with its theological advent. Whence the importance of Gilson's remark, according to which what is most striking in the comparison between the two texts of Augustine and Descartes is that what is the most Augustinian in the one is also what is the most Cartesian in the other:59 from mind to things and not from things to concepts. There lies the essential difference between pagan eternity and Christian creation. "Pagans assign a real, objective eternity to the world, while Christians confer upon it only a non-objective eternity. Things were before existing, not as objects of the senses but as objects of the mind...That is why, for them, the matter posited by their subjectivity, represented subjective matter is also primary matter—much more important than real, sensible matter," which is soon reduced to the pure and simple state of material to be worked on \matiere d'ceuvre].60 Whereas faith increases in man, the world, given over to the profundities of an obscure God, declines to the profit of a "new lump" (1 Cor. 5:7), of the paradigm of a self-establishing subjectivity freed of its natural limits in which the absolute identity of the subjective and the objective, and of objecthood and will, is affirmed. God, prayer, mark the victory of the practical point of view, of the secularization of the world, over the aesthetic relation to the phusis. So it is that Augustine is, practically speaking, "the genius of the European mind."61

90,1

This is a crucial effect of the distance between creator and creation, which closes the path to self-divinization, to a Providence that tears man from his connection to the universe — of which the Doctor of Grace was the first theoretician. The existent is no longer what blossoms out of itself in the presence of a humanity living in cohabitation with the totality of nature, and on which thought depends according to the essence of the things concerned on each occasion, but it is "that which is collected [colligitur] nowhere else but in the mind, that is to say gathered together [cogitur], and now said in the proper sense to be thought [cogitart]."62 Represented, positioned in front, rightfully situated as an object, is the object that belongs to mind. This is still thinking in the sense of acting with God: co-agitatio: to act like God, who is distinguished from nature by his deploying his domination over being (let it suffice to think of Ambrose's commentary on the Six Days: seeking a reason for God's decision to rest, he proposes that He created "someone" in a position to pursue his opus). Unless this distinction has become God himself, so that thereby we "may have power to comprehend with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth" (Eph. 3:18). So that we may thereby have the force to grasp knowledge [ap-prendre] (that even in what is beyond, the subject-object relation remains in order to found itself there). Hegel is right. The Christian religion is a positive religion: what exists for consciousness is objecthood for it. Thought is the foundation of being. But wouldn't the absolute religion have a "spirituality," a plenitude (Erfullung), other than the objective will of commanding over being? We know what Heidegger thinks: "The will alone... forces the earth out of the circle of what is possible and hurls it into what is no longer possible and that is therefore impossible." Hegel, once more: "these words are addressed to men who have come to the end of the world and whose world has come to an end." What is determining for the development of Christianity is not so much the certitude of salvation (certitudo salutis) than the certitude of oneself as subject. Even before the latter certitude acquires the preponderance we know about it, this is where the operational point of view requires that the terms be reversed. Faith in Providence presupposes the exertion of the believer's will; the revealed certitude of salvation stems from the certitude of the subject, from which the image of God is constituted,63 just as the certitude of thought, from Augustine to Descartes, is what serves to found the proof of God's existence.64 Just as the belief in one's personal immortality is what makes possible the eternal life assimilated with God "in person." There is no Revelation that is not rhetorical in its expression, dialectical in its effects (both handled to perfection by Aurelius Augustinus, the ex-grammaticus. The assertion of maximum dependence goes in tandem with the reality of

T h e T i m e o f Novitas: S a i n t A u g u s t i n e

an emancipation toward a certitude in which humanity is assured of the true as its own knowledge, a sufficient reason for a world created "at one stroke" (simul}. The total dependence of being is made in the image of an inaccessible God: in its concision, this singular equation sums up the tension maintained between extraworldly radicalism and intraworldly conservatism. That tension runs through the entire history of Christianity. A dialectics of the similar and the dissimilar, of proximity and distance, of interiority and exteriority, of diversion and appropriation. No matter how much one clamors that "the world is always in all things contrary to Christ" (Luther), the obliqueness of God's manifestation will still put souls at odds with "the problem of how the extraordinary power of such a [perfect] God may be reconciled with the imperfection of the world that He has created and rules over,"65 at a time of hierarchical relativization.66 Co-agitatio, voluntas, con-scientia. This is the "little trinity" that will determine Augustinianism in its becoming, a subterranean becoming, long covered over by that medieval search for the mediation that will have the indisputable merit of engaging, to an unprecedented degree, the Christian individual in the world. That search would find its greatest representative in Saint Thomas — and its ultimate compromise (concordism as method). As for Augustinianism, it will complete the accomplishment of its mission of dis-integration within the framework of the Reformation. Augustine, Descartes, and Kant are the major poles and privileged moments of this religious movement of emancipation that attains its acme with the Augustinian Renaissance of the Reformers—where Max Weber thought he had come across the spirit of capitalism: in intraworldly, rational asceticism. Grasped in this semantic configuration, Descartes's Meditations on First Philosophy do not throw out the outline for the ontology of the subjectum on the basis of the subjectivity of the conscientia "from nothing"; they endow it with an "authentic metaphysical status" and they realize it in the likes of a mechanical physics that (by its principle) turns the existent into something that can be calculated and mastered. In this sense, Descartes's meditations continue the creation: from divine pre-meditation to human fore-sight within the pure thought of mathematics. In so doing, Descartes freed himself from the Romanticism of "Inquietum est cor nostrum" (Restless is our heart). But besides the fact that this "restlessness" still cuts a striking figure in such thinkers as Luther or Hegel, to see in Augustine "the first Romantic," as Peter Brown puts it, is at least to recognize his definitive break from the ancient ideal of self-perfection for the benefit of an individual-in-tension-withGod, "in hoc maligno saeculo" (in this evil century), split within himself by the religious division of monotheistic faith, separated from the divine by the economy of

92,3

transcendence.67 Let us repeat it one last time: for Augustine to have felt the influence of the said "Oriental" revelation of Plotinus until the end of his days changes nothing in all this. His topic is not that of a sage, but that of a saint, separated from the world because God separates him from it, because Unity is the subversion of Revelation. What it is exactly is an "abstract God who 'forbids' 'religion' in the etymological sense of a living link with God."68 2. It remains the case that Christianity is not just the religion of Interpretation (of Revelation, of Creation) but also, above all, the religion of the Incarnation. Moreover, is not the Incarnation the very heart of the Revelation, the center of Christian faith, the promise of a new world that is no longer the despotic one of the inaccessible Yahweh, irremediably cut off from men? Taking on human form, God is so close to us that He would have remained unknown without the help of the Revelation and of the Good News by which the Son of Man makes himself known. The Son of Man: can these words that return so frequently on Jesus' lips to designate himself signify anything other than the consciousness of Humankind's reconciliation with God? And in some way we would see this term, scarcely introduced and so laden with "dialectics," turn back against our hypothesis: Namely, that Christianity is a dialectical religion in its effects as in its essence (nothing revolutionary about this assertion: see Hegel's Theologische Jugendschriften: dialectics is Christian, even Augustinian, in essence, since the whole of De trinitate can be read as a long commentary on the "exinanire semetipsum" [the emptying out of himself]), but without mediation there is no dialectic, nor any reconciliation of opposite terms in a higher unity! This is precisely what makes Christianity an absolute religion: a religion of mediation and reconciliation, of the identity between divine and human once the deepest abyss of severance has been overcome by the greatest love. While the "economy of transcendence" and religious duality only correspond to the moment of immediate existence, to die logic of the (sinner's) understanding, to the Judaic figuration of the bad consciousness that has not attained the "experientia figurarum praesentialitatis" (experience of figures of the present time) — and to the wholly Hegelian Gegenivart. Besides, doesn't Augustine use, precisely in The City of God, some curious words to talk about an antithesis of which much should have been made? Here it is brought back down to the rank of a rhetorical opposition, of a contrasting syllogism, in short of an element of style, "for what one calls antithesis is one of the most gracious ornaments of discourse"; it is introduced though some considerations on the universal order where it appears that God would have created no man "in the foreknowledge of his future evil state, if He had not known how He would put such creatures to good use, and thus enrich

The

T i m e of N ov it a s : S a i n t A u g u s t i n e

the course of world history by the kind of antithesis which gives beauty to a poem."69 Not the least weakness of the argumentation presented is its having been constrained to silence the conclusion to book X of the Confessions: the need for a Mediator. For we have only had reported to us the question "Quis illuc potest?" (Who can attain your splendor when I have been hurled far from your gaze?) while omitting the answer contained in a second question: "Quern invenerim, qui me reconciliaret tibi?" (Who can be found to reconcile me with you?). Who, if not the verax mediator, the ChristMan Jesus, the mediator as human being, as Word equal to God a single God with God? "For my ills are many and great, many and great indeed; but your medicine is greater still. We might have thought that your Word was far distant from union with man, so we might have despaired of ourselves, if He had not been made flesh and come to dwell among us."70 In sum, it remains to be shown that the hypothesis was not constructed for the sole aim of extricating us from a "paradoxical situation" in which you yourself would have thrown us. Refusing to let ourselves understand the move from Plotinus to Saint Augustine on the basis of a change of plane (from the world soul to the human soul), we invent to suit a change of base (from a base-One system to a base-Two system) in preparation for the temporal development of the divine economy: just plain economics, caught right in the act of writing itself out with a double syntax. Allow that the true paradox consists in the two questions turning out to be irreconcilable if the divine economy had celebrated nothing but the dogma of circularity, the Mystery of Mediation that admirably comes apart under the tenaciousness of the negative — a rhetorical opposition under the circumstances. What I mean to say is: since the time God sent his son formed by a woman, since the year zero of the Incarnation that makes history pass into God. "Ordo quippe temporum in aeterna Dei Sapientia sine tempore est."71 Paul is the one with whom one must conclude, in those sentences Augustine does not fear to repeat twice, a few pages apart, in De trinitate: "What then shall we say to this? If God is for us, who is against us? He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, will He not also give us all things with him?" (Rom. 8:31-32).72 Clouded by the spirit of capitalism, which is but nihilism associated with power, you have let yourselves be taken by the essentially contradictory character of the Revelation. Now, as Jacques Ellul—an author that one profits by reading when one appreciates Chestov— has not ceased to write, the Revelation is antinihilist only if one holds together all the elements in an indissociable way. The transcendental God is He who is incarnated in our history. "Da quod jubes et jube quod vis." Supposing that the debate is indeed where our contradictor situates it, I find no better response than this short

94,5

sentence — it appears three times in book X alone73 — defining to my mind the origin, the stakes, and the object of the Confessions: "He gives what he exerts and exerts what he wants." Against Neoplatonic "emanentism" that credited the human soul, as potentiality derived from the One, with a possible reascent through the world up to its source of illumination, against Pelagian rationalism that denies the necessity of grace by asserting the omnipotence of free will, Augustine's little sentence marks the caesura that separates praesumptio from confessio, conversio from epistrophe (including its Christianized variants). No longer the illusion of knowing the similar through the similar, but the apprehension of the contrary by the contrary. A doctrine of sin and grace — "what have you that you did not receive?" (1 Cor. 4:7)—Augustinianism is Paulism fulfilled. It teaches us to exult while trembling ("ut... casto timore ... diligerem et dilectione casta timerem" [so... that I may love ... with pure fear and fear with pure love], Enarrationes in Psalmos 118:22). "So I seized eagerly upon the venerable writings inspired by your Holy Spirit, especially those of the Apostle Paul... For even if a man tastes the law of God after his inmost self, what will he do with the other law, which, in his members, is at war with the law of his mind, and makes him captive to the law of sin which dwells in his members'?" (Rom. 7:22f.).74 The contradiction between these two laws is irreducible — being not formal but very real: the in itself irreparable split between contraries — to the point that without the help of Jesus Christ's grace, without the most punctual incarnation of grace in a given man, without its most immediate and most singular manifestation, no path was or can be found between the one who reaches out and the goal reached out to. If it is difficult enough to speak of synthesis and conceptual mediation in relation to something arising not from the order of a structure but from an event—the Jesus event which manifests the immediate unity of genre and individuality, of universal and particular in a Countenance situated at the opposite pole from the Face of the despot (the traditional, great Reconciliator of the earth with the heavenly order), within the internal distance of the divine—what can be said about the Madness of the Cross Paul places at the very center of Christianity?75 Paul the Dysangelist: out of love he nailed Christ to his cross, Nietzsche would say. Far from expressing the refound unity of human nature with divine nature, the reconciliation takes place by the Son of Man's blood (Col. 1:20). If he had not been a man, Augustine writes mercilessly, he could not have been put to death. And a Christ absolved of all debt could not have redeemed us with his blood spilled gratuitously. Such, then, is the economy of the Redemption: the death of the Son of Man for the price of redemption. The reconciliation is not within us, for us, but "in God," that "greedy usurer."76 The expiatory sacrifice, the juridical

T h e T i m e o f Novitas: S a i n t A u g u s t i n e

logic of the unpaid debt, annulled by the second Adam who paid for us a debt that was not his by suffering "a temporal death that he did not merit in order to free men from an eternal death that they merited," all this nonetheless does not suffice to liberate us definitively from the paternal debt because the debt is infinite (the idea of eternal punishment: give us our daily debt...). Moreover, it is necessary that we die in the grace of Christ, destined before the foundation of the world (1 Peter 1:20). It is those predestined souls alone to whom that man, who never had and never would have any sin, would give rebirth in order to free them from sin, those who could not be born from sin. It is in Him and in Him alone, as virginity fecundated by the law, that God did not rule man but assumed him: "non regebat sed gerebat."77 It is about Him and about Him alone, as immortal in death, impassible in suffering, that it can be said that "every contradiction is reconciled here" (Luther). Here, in the monstrous union—singulars privilegium at the limit of a simulation that would ignore nothing of the pedagogical virtues of dissimulation: "Christ did not hide truths to deny their communication but to arouse desire through that very dissimulation" (Augustine, Sermones, 51,4, 5)—in the de facto union of man and the divine which de jure signifies their radical disjunction. In Christ, writes Hegel in the very last pages of The Spirit of Christianity and Its Fate, "the man and the divine seem inseparable. But the closer is the tie... the more harshly are we struck by the unnaturalness of a tie between the opposites."78 Isn't that the sanctifying "hindsight" (Hinterabsicht) Nietzsche talks about? Christ continued to call God that Other that He is not. But all that, which undoubtedly had to be taken up again, after so many others, and which makes us espouse the twist that we thought should be imprinted onto our discourse, that whole set of arguments that Augustine receives from Paul and that strictly obeys the omnipotence of identity (that of Roman law), is still just the "historical" Paulism determined by the simplicity of its internal principle: late Judaism making itself the master of early Christianity and its eschatological temptation.79 The Paulism "fulfilled" by Saint Augustine in a theological efficacity is not what is proper to it. In fact, and no matter what its will to remain within the framework of the theocratic intrication of Constantinism, Augustinian metaphysics, by developing the endlessly recommenced play of analogies and differences, tends to multiply tensions and dissolve simple contradictions; in a parallel way, the Christological economy is affirmed by drawing duality toward alterity, to the point of substituting the distance of interiority for the sentiment of superiority. As though by a miracle, the love announced by Jesus, in freeing man from the bond of society, appeased

96,7

God's anger—a "judiciary" sentiment, according to Tertullian. While the signs of the empire's fragility multiply, no longer is it only the Christianity of Faith that undermines the Christianity of the law, but also the dogma of Incarnation is what overdetermines the economy of redemption within the play of withdrawal. Without utterly silencing it, the inner voice [voix] covers over the way [vote] of blood that it shows and takes apart [demont(r)e].80 It is there no doubt, in that field of presence that is not a knowledge but a mystery with a face, that the Paulist doctrine of grace came to sunder the church from the City of God, the state from the Earthly City. A God so Other, taking the most secret and unforeseeable paths into hearts, that one must imagine the presence of the elect even among the persecutors, while in the church, the stated kingdom of God, many will not be numbered among the elect. A God so different that "the grace of God was shown to us in the man Christ, without any preceding merits, because even He himself did not obtain by any preceding merits that He should be joined in such great unity to the true God as to become the Son of God, one person with Him; but from that time when He began to be man, from that time He was also God. "81 Here we are led to the last form of inner consolation and the Pauline mode of the as //(Paul avoided the denomination Son of Man). If we ought to encounter God only there where He takes the initiative to reveal himself to us, obliquely, sub contraria specie, since every creature is a larva Dei (mask of God) and "there need to be appearances and masks: God passed them out and they are his creatures,"82 if we ought to live at once, simul, with God and with his masks—then the secrecy of the heart is no longer where the place humankind holds in God's creation can be tested, where the fact can be meditated that "human nature could be so united with God as to become one person out of two."83 A mystery and not a synthesis. Unless, like the young Hegel, you claim Christ's Gegenwart for earthly use and inscribe the Novitas in the theodialectical syllogism of Absolute Mind (but then it is Aufhebung that is a gift of grace, correlative to the miracle he wished to dismiss), there is nothing else to see than God's withdrawal at the peak of his proximity, and the indication of the earth's close in an unresolved difference that essentially deforms the representation of resemblance. "And that is why grace has been bestowed on us through the intervention of a mediator, so that when we had been polluted by the sinful flesh we might be purified by 'the likeness of sinful flesh'" ("ut polluti carne peccati carnis peccati similitudine mundaremur").84 Elevation itself has become obscure, on a par with a syntactical heterogeneity stashed in the heart of its general syllogistics. I would like

T h e T i m e o f Novitas: S a i n t A u g u s t i n e

to propose that all of Augustine's novelty lies in this obscurity. This novelty is not philosophical — or out of a "realist philosophy of night" (Przywara) — but strictly theological at least in its necessity, for the logic proper to the Christly founding is what requires the extraction of the mediator from his "classic" position (the divine man), and the interdiction for the new man of every space of compromise (the man of the Judaic law), in order to plunge him into the time of disjunction. As if Christianity were all ready to go, so to speak, in the head of a God who has renounced in advance the pleasures of the onto-theologies of appeasement. But this injunction is inclusive and no longer exclusive. It is a disjunction within the whole conjunction between the human and the divine (Gauchet). A discord that incessantly gives the lie to the vow of concordance (Ricoeur). In sum, Augustinian time at "the furthest tip of what is innermost" would be able to make what Hegel advances heard: modern thought.

98,9

II

Biblical Time First: the problem of time as it presents itself to Augustine. We have seen him repeat the words of the psalm (74:16): "Tuus est dies et tua est nox" (Thine is the day, thine also is the night). In sum, as a basic position: time belongs to God because, like every "thing," time was created by God, so that it is itself that creature whose existence begins with that of heaven and earth. As the artisan of heaven and earth ("caeli et terrae artificem"), God is the laborer of all times ("operator omnium temporum"). "How could those countless ages have elapsed when you, the author and creator of all the ages ["saeculorum auctor et conditor"] had not created them? What time could there have been that was not created by you?"85 The consequence: if, as all reality coming from God's hands, the time contemporaneous with the act through which the world was drawn from out of nothingness, ex nihilo, is good in and of itself,86 then it is not that time of rot ("foedum tempus") that flows under the sign of a race to the death ("cursus ad mortem"), about which the Apostle says: "Redeem time for the days are bad." The time of presentation is put outside itself in the representation of time. Original, essential time is not existential time, about which I don't know whether I should say "in this life which leads to death, or else this death which leads to life";87 the historical time of change is not the cosmic time of creation. "All derives from you except what has no being at all, so the movement of a will which leaves you who 'are' for that which 'is' less, such a movement is a fault and sin."88 That time is not God's but humanity's since the latter rejects God's time as the time of the world. That time is that of human beings, who, since the fall of the angel and the twin sins of Adam and Cain at the origins of the earthly city, put self-love in opposition to the love of God, "by turning [their will] away from immutable and universal good and towards [their] own particular good." "The will," adds Augustine in a passage that you would think was translated straight from the Enneads, "turns towards a good of its own whenever it wants to be its own master [ad proprium convertitur, cum suae potestatis vult esse]."89 Thus "by a certain morbid condition which was conceived in men from a suddenly injected and pestilential corruption, it was brought about that they lost that firmness in duration in which they were created, and, by reason of the mutations which they experienced in the stages of life, issued at last in death." 90 This "firmness in duration" rests on the doctrine of the aevum, an almost literal reproduction of the aion, along with the staging of an originary

The

T i m e of Nov it a s : S a i n t A u g u s t i n e

time that does not prevent existence from coinciding with Being, or from obeying the impulse of the eternal harmonies in which an eternal present is affirmed in the convergence of past and future, in the passage from the future toward an integrally conserved past. The internal measure of created spirits, this non-fallen time is what can be called the mobile image of eternity, triggered, according to the hypothesis of De immortalitate animae, by a motion without change, without caesura or loss of substance. As the number of an angelical movement, the aevum is shared eternity, eternal life communicated by God to his creatures insofar as the successiveness that affects the acts of their minds does not affect their nature: in this becoming, everything is contemporary. The aevum is of the order of beatific vision, of the Adamic condition sealed in the essential plenitude of time itself through the coinciding of cosmic rhythm with the time of consciousness. But with sin, time becomes the number of a "violent" motion, one that is forced and no longer natural, the movement of a will that moves away from God — and everything is as if carried away by the fleeting moment, and things flow like the rush of a torrent ("momentis transvolantibus cuncta rapiuntur, torrens rerum fluit").91 The irreversibility of time, which turns sin into the engine of history, dates from the fall. Time extends itself according to the im-moderation [de-mesure] of a soul that, fascinated by its own power, "slips from the universal common to all, to its own particular part."92 Time particularizes itself, individualizes itself, makes itself autonomous vis-a-vis its creator by opening onto series of temporalization; overturning its own foundation, it makes itself unequal to itself. It discovers itself as empty form by losing its spiritual plenitude, which is reduced "to an indefinite and empty function of unification, in relation to temporalizing movements, which appear only to disappear as quickly as they came."93 Forswearing its cosmic content, the ensemble of time is hurled into what makes it born to the multiple, it is cut off from that perfect Measure that "measured even the intervals of silence and whose rhythm precisely espoused the movement of every body."94 These are so many ways of saying that irreversibility, the order of time, is determined, in Deleuze's words, "in the image of a unique and tremendous event, an act which is adequate to time as a whole," which opens onto a total signification of time.95 It translates the reversal of humankind's relation to God, relating the absolute to the self instead of to him; it manifests the will to belong to oneself and to erect oneself as absolute within original sin, which is the very reversal of time, when humanity wants to assert itself as the master of time that God offered to humankind in its authentic structure—being god without God. Henceforth, the soul "takes delight in itself, by a kind of counterfeiting of God, imitandum Deum,

100,1

to the point of seeking its enjoyment in its own potency." There, concludes Augustine: "lies the sense of the words: pride [superbia] is the beginning of all sin; and the beginning of pride is man's apostasy from God (Ecclus. 10, 15, 14)."96 You would almost want to say that sin is the "pride" of that derived time, the caesura from which Being flows, from which time unravels itself, until death, with which God threatened the first human being. It is thus that the sense of evil corresponds with the sense of time, to the point of reversing the causal link that unites their destiny: "For it is in relation to time that we are subject to evil things, and we must abstain from them in order to come to those eternal goods."97 "For in the day that you eat of it, you shall die" (Gen. 2:17)—when the evil of meaning, the pride of knowledge appears, the sense of time also appears. A confirmation of this movement is found in the second term the Scriptures suggest to Augustine as a way of qualifying the whole process: avarice, the root of all evils, "radix omnium malorum" (1 Tim. 6:10): In fact, had the soul followed God as its guide in the universal creature, it could have been most excellently governed by His laws. But the desire to possess something more than the universal and the pretension to govern oneself by one's own laws thrust the soul into caring for a particular part, for the good reason that there is nothing beyond the whole; and so by desiring something more, the soul becomes less, and for this reason avarice is called the root of all evils.98 Avarice, that is to say, the disposition to want more than what is sufficient ("plus velle, quam sat est"), is the sign and cause of the will's unruliness. That is why it is an unruly will. "Haec autem avaritia cupiditas est; cupiditas porro improba voluntas est" (Such avarice is cupidity, and cupidity is thus a perverse will).99 This unruliness of the will is what induces Augustine to think that there exists an avarice of the mind: "For when he neglects the love of wisdom, which always remains in the same manner, and lusts after the knowledge which is derived from experience with changeable and temporal things, he is puffed up but not edified by that knowledge (1 Cor. 8:1)."100 This avarice of the mind is none other than a science that ceases to be mastered by the love of eternal realities and the exercise of contemplative reason. Avarice is the affection and the motivation for the so-called science of action — "scientia dicitur actionis" — that, in the process of trying out its power over temporal things, no longer desires to know them except in order to master them and exploit them to its profit. As an instrument of the soul that has preferred the part over the whole, science takes for its end what should

T h e T i m e o f Novitas: S a i n t A u g u s t i n e

only be a means, and at the same time links the negativity of desire to the appearance of the fearsome power of voluntas. If wisdom were the contemplation-image of eternity identified with the substance of God, the science that surpasses the necessary administration of the temporal ("cui temporalium rerum administratio delegata est") would be an action-image in the sense that the action is derived from a perversion, or deflection, of God's image ("defiexus ab imagine Dei," the image being preserved only "in relation to Him by whom it is impressed"),101 consecutive to the fornication of the imagination ("phantastica fornicatione") with the pride of the will. But action-image of what, if not avarice? Science is in fact like the operator and number of avarice, "whenever the attention of the soul ["intentione mentis"], which exerts its active function upon temporal and corporeal things with that quickness proper to reasoning, lets itself be attracted by that carnal and animal sense which induces it to enjoy itself, that is, to seek its own egoistic and particular good, and not that public and common good which is an unchangeable good; then the serpent, as it were, addresses the woman."102 In parenthesis, notice that in following these premises, science not only marks the insurrection of the individual against the genus—while the wisdom of good measure consists in conforming oneself to "what each nature requires for its preservation according to its genus"103—inasmuch as it allows for the position of God to be occupied by those powers without rule that Eunapius called "tricks that delude the senses, and work wonders by magical manipulation, through men who overreach themselves in dealing with the powers of this material world."104 The individual's insurrection against the genus is but the consequence of the individual's identification with the genus: out of the assimilation with God that grants power over time is triggered the negative productivity of time. If, as Augustine insistently demands, we refrain from thinking "that anything could possibly be truer than the saying that 'radicem omnium malorum esse avaritiam,'" a strange conclusion is imposed upon us: avarice is what disarranged time, which then ceases to rhyme with those "temporal harmonies... which belong to motion... preceded and regulated by the vital motion that obeys the Lord in all things, a motion having in its harmonies no temporal spans divided out, but with a potential that produces times." Avarice is what makes time "leap" outside the cosmic rut of eternal equality that was subordinating things of the earth to heavenly ones. From all this, "times are made and ordered and changed, imitating eternity as they do when the turn of the heavens comes back to the same state, and the heavenly bodies to the same place, and in days and months and years and centuries and

102,3

other revolutions of the stars obey the laws of equality, unity and order."105 Avarice is what liberates time from its subordination to (celestial) motion. With no play on words: ceasing to be cardinal, it is no longer that cosmo-biblical time whose signification is not cosmological but anthropo-theological.106 It arises no longer from God's intention for and attention to man, the center of the cosmos, but from the soul's distension in the world. You might believe that avarice was the onset of the subjectivation of time of which history is the witness as soon as the soul, "refusing to become similar to God through God," intends to attribute the goods of the earth to itself by acquiring cognition of temporal things — of time and within time. The time of History and the history of Time begin as soon as the soul "is no longer sufficient to itself, nor is anything at all sufficient to him who departs from Him who is alone sufficient."107 So it is, still and always, Saint Augustine's avarice. All of which, let me hasten to specify, and perhaps to reassure the reader, is not satisfactory given the excessive character of the propositions to which we have been led. What is the relation between form, and the deformation of time, and the "love of money" that translates as avaritia (philarguria)'? By what slant does the presence of money in avarice usher in a conquest of time by human beings, who want to be what God is by themselves? This question, which in all likelihood risks contradicting Augustine because bad will for him is not efficiency but deficiency (if it is a question of falling away from the sovereign being and going toward that which has "less being," then the cause of evil could only be a deficiency), ought nevertheless to be posed.108 (As if, by producing a cognition effect whose consequence is its very condition, Augustine constrained us to a change of regime in writing \ecriture\\ in schematic terms, from the scriptural to the theoretical by overstepping the theological.) In fact, there is one of two things. Either the deduction is possible only because avarice is no longer essentially spoken about in terms of money and currency, and is nothing more than an inspired metaphor; or, even though it does not bear only on money ("non in solo argento"), "avarice" is in its origin an apparatus whose essence and effects can be analyzed with reference to time, because in some mysterious way, time is its very web. Let Saint Augustine tell a story that happened at the theater. The location is far from being indifferent, so much is theater, in his eye, a diabolical gesticulation, the symbol of Rome's fall and perdition. On the one hand, there is the admirable wisdom of those ancient Romans who wanted to cast out of their tribe those who give themselves over to the arts of the spectacle; on the other hand, there are those Romans who, having just gotten off the boat in Carthage the day after the sack of Rome, rushed to the theaters, crazy about stage performers.109 Con-

T h e T i m e o f Novitas: S a i n t A u g u s t i n e

temporaneous with the advent of the empire, was not this fascination with actors always "a hysterical celebration over the loss of the civic body"?110 While theaters were being built, the rectangle finished planing down the circle of isonomia. How could someone like Juvenal not read "the progression of servitude in the rows of seats where the hierarchy of wealth is displayed and set out in tiers"? The theater: the place of expenditure and prodigality, the time of diversion, of which it represents perhaps the most dangerous form for Christian life.111 The story, then, takes place at the theater: [This is the story of] a facetious joke credited to a mime: be had promised that in another play he would tell all in the theater what they had in their minds and what they willed; and on the appointed day, crowds thicker than ever and spurred by great curiosity rushed to the theater. While all were in suspense and silent, the mime cried out: "Yozi wish to buy cheap and to sell dear." In the words of this clown, they all recognized what was in the bottom of their thoughts: he had revealed a truth obvious though unexpected before the eyes of all. And so they spared him no applause.112

It took a mime to unveil the speculative potential of ordinary will. A mime? An actor latching onto the postures of the average man, a freedman having renounced the tragic motion of the true man (the ancient hero) to slide into the daily chain of falsifiers. And his gest has no content other than the exposition of those potentialities of falsehood whose universal form and pure force is money. Who would be better placed to make the secret identity between speculator and actor burst upon the stage of the world than a wordless sophist whose gestures reflect, under a false appearance of presence, the uninterrupted fiction of his own presence?113 A stunning parable in which Augustine's moralism is revealed in its social dimension as the key to a reality dominated by those homines novi that make up the crowd of all kinds of speculators "who are all in the noise, in the diversion, and in the thought of the future," who prefer the hunt to the kill, never staying in the present, within its bounds, which must be kept for our salvation and our own repose. In his soul, every spectator is a speculator. White face and black face, prodigality and greedy cupidity: two expressions of a single affect never ceasing to exchange, mirrorlike, the two images that constitute it and the two uses that institute it. There are only two useful uses of money, Martial enjoys repeating: loaning on interest or consumption in pleasure. Yes, but Augustine lets it be understood that those are not different ways of relating to money. They are the two complementary and simultaneous requirements that make manifest the insatiable nature of cupidity, scoffs Ambrose as well in his saintly estimation: is free whoever holds

104,5

not the bonds of avarice, who serenely contemplates the present and is not devoured by the terrors of the future. Is free whoever has no need to turn away from it, to be diverted from it. That is why "Our Lord did not wish our foresight to extent beyond today."114 There is no point in proliferating quotations. The last one very explicitly indicates the initial disarrangement that took hold of the earthly city, when self-love took the place of the love of God, guarantor of the social bonds of true community.115 This is the operation, then: to let subsist only a society founded upon the inequality of exchanges, unequal exchange substituted for the disinterested gift. Babylon, the cradle of capitalism's first forms.116 Now, if avarice, a form of self-love through which domination and power appeared in the world, is indeed the generic formula for that apparatus of "vili vultis emere, et caro vendere" (you wish to buy cheap and to sell dear)—the time of the fall is the time of the merchant, who has since forever developed his activity on the basis of commercialization, segmentation and the anticipation of time itself. The merchant appropriates time by speculating on it. He is the one who projects the serialization of time, who produces its acceleration by endlessly re-creating it, disjoined from the world as God wished it. Between buying and stocking in the expectation of shortages, reselling at the right moments, the merchant is the man of occasio. While sin resides wholly in the will to acquire,117 the merchant's time is the endlessly renewed occasion for gain. By the merchant's grace, money is time. The traveling merchant, the "aberrant" movement of unequal exchange, becomes the ordinary perspective on time. In that financial Babel that was Rome, it would not be surprising if the merchant was able to incarnate for Augustine the most pure type of Latin, who, he says, "has always tried to speculate on time, to employ it to his advantage. He has certainly known how to utilize it (carpe diem)... he has 'maneuvered' and 'ruled' it according to his needs."118 Put to profit every day destiny grants you, the Roman precept advises: "Appone lucro quemcumque diem tibi fors dat." As for the usurer (so difficult to distinguish from the merchant that Roman jurists often used indifferently the expressions pretia varia and usurae:iiQ with reason, since the usurer is the one through whom monetary fortunes are made independently of landed property, through whom the capital reserves necessary for commercial needs are accumulated), one would like to assert that the usurer knows how to take the formula literally by selling "day and night," since, in accordance with the reasoning in fashion throughout the Middle Ages, one can only sell "the hope for money, that is, time." Before undertaking the study of Augustinian time, it must be recalled in what context tempus is one of the most frequently used words of the Latin language.

T h e T i m e o f Novitas: S a i n t A u g u s t i n e

Remember, too, that Latin discourse is essentially juridical. Dominated by the form ofjurisdictio, it speaks the law, and the inequity that founds it;120 it states the casus, and determines the effect of the fall that it appraises at the outcome of a knowledge with a value of division, as "constitution of the subject in the instance of its division," in the occasion that makes the subject, the potentiality that affects it. "The jus," writes Jean-Luc Nancy, "is thus articulated essentially of a subject: but of a subject worth less as substance than as potentiality... of action and pretension." Potential is what defines the subject; upon it is set up "the unheard-of metaphysical law of truth as certitude" — of the subject of enunciation.121 Now, this potential of law, this power of law, is the maker of duration:^22 not only in its function as the time of consciousness—situated in the horizon of the Mitsein, it gives itself as the social figure of memory—but also, more fundamentally perhaps, because under the imperium of the law time is segmented, taken apart and put back together, stretched or shortened according to its proper measure. The law—twice Roman, insists Pierre Legendre (imperial plus pontifical) — gives rights over time, which it shapes, models, or sculpts (fictum): which it assigns. The law is the formula of Roman time. When "the political organism dissolves into the atoms of private persons," the law is born of a right over time, and one must conform to its constitutive power over time. Then, to cite Hegel again, "just as in the putrefaction of the physical body, each point acquires its own life, which however is nothing more than the wretched life of a worm."123 With regard to "the same universal confusion" that took hold of the world after the fall (of man, of the Roman republic), the time of the law could only be the time of rot. Foedum tempus. Original time and time derived from the fall, time of the eternal verbum's alliteration and time of the alteration of the human vox, time of grace and time of sin, equal time and unequal time, the time of God and the time of human beings who, wanting to be what God is, appropriate time for themselves and hurl us toward death, the time of the eternal church rhythmed by religious services and the discontinuous time of the merchant, biblical time and lay time, the object of lucre... These are the two levels of temporality that present themselves to Augustine on the basis of the Genesis narrative. Out of this oncological inheritance of an essential time of divine dispensation preceding the accidental time of avarice—the root of all evils in Paul's expression — the pathway from De musica to De civitate Dei can be traced. It should be emphasized, however, that Saint Augustine formally dealt with this problem of the aevum only "with infinite precautions, almost excusing himself for taking it up,"124 and in a few rare texts, compared to the expansive-

106,7

ness of his meditations on eternity and time. It can certainly be foregrounded that language itself is defective for speaking about these things that are no longer of this world because we turned away from them, preceded in that act by Lucifer's secession, "his fall into the pit of the worst of all concupiscences: that which the mind is guilty of when it removes itself from charity."125 With Adam's fault and Abel's murder, that substitution of a diabolical time of avarice for the angelical time of charity became irreversible. That essential time, we have seen, is no longer that with which the world was created, that true time that in sum was nothing other than the spiritual rhythm, the divine number of its cyclical motion, when Abel still lived with a divine want of foresight.126 Only in this sense, one that is surpassed, as will be verified, is a rapprochement between Aristotle and Augustine thinkable.127 (But it is true that chrematistics did introduce a wholly other time, which was no longer the time of the Physics.} With the fall, time became that distentio of the soul dispersed into the multiple and into the cares of the saeculum dominated by money.128 Now, even if time is once again rendered capax aeternitas [the space of eternity] by the incarnation of the Word, allowing us to hope for a reascent to Being, that time of hope cannot be a return to the time of beatitude and of the ordo amoris [order of love]. To think that would be to give oneself over to the "diabolical vainglory" of a Pelagius. There, it seems to me, is the essential reason for Augustine's reservations: that stability in duration, that mobile image of eternity willed by divine wisdom has been lost forever. Our time is no longer that of transcendental mediation but of the opposition, which must be called phenomenological, between time and the eternity internal to time itself. Whence the dialectical, or rather aporetical, character of the Augustinian theory of time that wants to tear intentio from distentio, the extensio ad superiora orienting us toward the eternal from the expectatio futurorum that carries us toward the future. "In Augustine there is no pure phenomenology of time." Paul Ricoeur, whom I cite, has no doubt reason to add: "Perhaps there will never be one."129 Let's follow this idea out to the end. Between the recourse to these givens of Revelation—aevum, aeternitas, Adamic-angelic time—which Augustine only develops occasionally although they are at the horizon of his meditation on time understood as distentio animi,130 and book XI of the Confessions there is a gap of the same genre as the one previously registered between what I called historical Paulism and fulfilled Paulism, or the theological re-presentation of Paulism. From biblical time to theological time: so it is that the "transcendental" deduction of an original time, organized by the eternity around which it gravitates, is succeeded by the phenomenological induction of a renovated time, reaching out toward the eter-

T h e T i m e o f Novitas: S a i n t A u g u s t i n e

nity to which it aspires. If it is true that theological time is born from the desire to redeem the derived time of avarice, if it is possible to discern logically a horizontal and a vertical axis, a tension toward the future and an attention to the eternal, it must be remembered that it has become impossible to separate them ontologically. "There was but one way of attaining the supreme ecstasy: by separating, once and for all, these two axes of time, so as to leave only the totally pure; and that was by death."131 Just as the two cities live constantly blended together, the two currents of time—the vertical component of the inner human drawn toward eternity and the linear time of the merchant polarized with regard to the future — develop inextricably mixed together. Just as the good seed is to the tares, for we still live in the night ("adhuc in nocte sumus"). Until the supernatural intervention that will come to separate them at the end of time, similarly to that which originally separated light from dark, theological time — the theological re-presentation of the subjectivation of time — does not "belong" to God any more than it begins with Him. It reaches out toward Him. It is up to Him for the moments of our historical duration to be reestablished in the spiritual profundity of a true present, "with no other mystery than the one that puts our efforts to perfection there."132 What Augustine calls predestination is precisely that perpendicular action of God in which Khronos is transformed into Kairos.±33 Surpassing the simple contradiction of biblical time (coram mundo/coram Deo) in order to face himself (coram se) and discover in himself that transcendent subjectivity of the homo interior in a position to dominate time, Augustine ran the risk of seeing his categories inscribed upon a double register — or rather upon a single register: that of the conquest of time. Let us say right away that the Augustinians of the Middle Ages, promoters of a wholly urban theology and transcendence, were not the last to declare "frivolous" the argument by which time cannot be sold because it belongs to God.

108,9

III

Theological Time

Before plunging (finally!) into the labyrinth of book XI of the Confessions, we need to return to the central notion of distentio in order to understand better how it is imposed and intentionally put into play as Augustine weaves his writing about time. With the appearance of distentio as the "natural" movement of the soul after original sin, it is important to underscore the presence and occurrence of the term in the Latin versions of the Old and New Testaments: in Ecclesiastes and Paul's epistle to the Philippians. For the former, in the Vulgate and Jerome's Commentary on Ecclesiastes, the play of substitution between distentio, afflictio, and occupatio (in which a usage ofdistentus often attested in classical authors is reflected) should be retained.134 The domain of distentio is thus as moral as it is social (the concern of the saeculum), one being like the mirror image of the other. Within the Augustinian perspective, the same phenomenon occurs in which two terms, parallel to the two preceding ones, emerge in the wake of distentio: dissilio and multiplico. Dissilio (in tempora dissiluf) belongs to the vocabulary of dissolutio, the primary category Augustine disposes of to express the essence of time in the experience of universal evanescence.135 Nonetheless, dissilio retains something of the Greek verb diistemi in its intransitive form: "to turn away" [s'ecarter], as is seen in the passage of the Confessions that relates the episode of the "pear theft." "My soul was vicious and broke away [dissiliens] from your safekeeping to seek its own destruction, looking for no profit in disgrace but only for disgrace itself."136 Dissilio is identified with the deficient cause of afflictio. Similarly, multiplico appears at once as the "extensive" source and the effect of the occupatio that devours time and is devoured by it: "I wished no more for the manifold [multiplico] riches of this earth, things that devour time and are devoured by time [devorans tempora et devoratus temporibus], for in eternity, which is one alone [in aeterna simplicitate], I had other corn and wine and oil."137 And once again, it is toward the merchant's time, or at least what appears to me to be it, that points a third term present in this same chapter of the Confessions, one that could be placed "between" dissilio and multiplico: effundo. "For those who try to find joy outside themselves easily vanish into emptiness. They pour themselves out [ejfunduntur] onto visible and temporal things, the world of appearances which they lap up with a famished imagination [famelica cogitationes\.n

The T i m e of No v it as: S a i n t A u g u s t i n e

From the epistle to the Philippians (3:12-14), we need to retain the situating of distentio in relation to the terms intentio and extensio that exhaust its dialectic. Near the end of book XI, Augustine writes: Ridding myself of the old man's days, I gather myself together in following the One. Thus, forgetting what I have left behind, / turn not towards things that are future and transitory but toward those that are in front and in relation to which I am not distended but extended /non distentus sed extentus/ / pursue my path not in a distended way but with intention /non secundum distentionem. sed secundum intentionem/ to the prize, God's heavenly summons. Then I shall listen to the sound of your praises and gaze at your beauty ever present, never future, never past.138 From this passage inspired by Paul, and which Augustine qualifies moreover as extentus,±39 it comes out that a single spiritual connotation is attached to the words intentio and extensio: the soul reaching toward God, fixing its attention-intention on the eternal, is unified and extended beyond itself; it grows larger and makes itself greater. "Only the purpose [intentio] that proceeds from faith is the right 140 one"; only the gathering together of the inner man identified with intentio allows the soul torn to shreds by distentio to be reunited by bringing it back to God. If that is the utterly Pauline conclusion to book XI, the gap can be measured that is susceptible to being opened up between intentio in its psychological sense — the concept that is the engine of the Augustinian treatise, along with the thesis of praesens intentio, of the present intention that makes the future pass into the past and confers onto the present an enlarged sense (28, 38)141 — and intentio in its theological representation, which becomes indiscernible from the extensio ad superiora, the extention toward the eternal. Between the phenomenological expression of time and its theological designation. How can it not be noticed, in fact, that the argumentation about time, even though it is framed within a meditation on eternity and prepared by the thematics of the memoria Dei—a kind of psychotheological foundation for the extensio ad superiora — no longer refers to eternity? What was done "to more strongly emphasize the ontological deficiency characteristic of human time"142 could, then, indeed herald, in its threadwork, the other reign of the divinity—a "superfluous wheel in the machine of the world" as Naigeon says—the other face of divine transcendence: the earth's teleological independence with regard to heaven.143 But it is time to conclude our discussion of the great doctor's sources. First remark: the thesis of a scriptural nucleus to book XI of the Confessions does not seem to me

110,1

to contradict the idea of a Pauline Neoplatonic synthesis.144 The question is not that of knowing whether Augustine could only have "obtained" his distentio from the translation of Greek diastasis and from reading the Plotinian tractate, but, more modestly, of registering the effect of their resonance, of verifying that here and there those terms motivate and describe the existence of the human soul separating itself from the divine. For Augustine to give a moral connotation to distentio does not induce any profound alteration of Plotinian diastasis: by reason of the human soul's centrality, "the middle of all things," apostasis is from the beginning inscribed along the trans-descendent line of diastasis. Didn't Gregory of Nyssa, often presented as the natural intermediary between Plotinus and Saint Augustine, do as much in projecting the words of Ecclesiastes (Qo 8; Patrologia Graeca 44; 752A) onto the diastema?145 The second remark concerns precisely the question of "intermediaries" (Gregory of Nyssa, but also, to a lesser extent, Basil of Caesarea), since Gregory has been thought to be the true promoter of the "psychological" analysis of time. Three arguments have been advanced, each of which leads us a little closer to the term of Augustinian repayment: (1) the identification of creation itself with the diastema; (2) the transfer of time from the universal principle of the world soul to the human soul; and (3) the development of a psychological analysis of time that apprehends past and future as affection (pathe), on the basis of memory and expectation. The first point rests on the words of Ecclesiastes, taken up again by Gregory: "Diastema is nothing other than creation itself." John Francis Callahan, who was one of the first to develop this analysis in its full scope, has no difficulty admitting that the Gregorian conception of time is very close to the Stoic and Aristotelian definitions—which Augustine would combat with the help of Neoplatonic arguments. Time is an "extension" (diastema) that accompanies the motion of the universe and allows all its movements to be measured. This approach is recuperated, of course, within a Christian perspective that cannot accept the idea that time is endogenously produced by the world in motion. Diastema thus becomes the mark of creation and of the ontological break, with the abyss (kasma) that separates creator from creature. Without entering further into this doctrine, which would hold some surprises for us, it will be understood that Gregory prefers the Stoic term diastema to the wholly Plotinian diastasis.146 The second argument is the most (counter)determining from my point of view. "Gregory," writes Callahan, "has transferred time from the principle of soul to the soul of the man, but he conceives of time as a truly universal diastema that becomes self-conscious in man."147 Despite the terms employed, this position

T h e T i m e o f Nov it as: S a i n t A u g u s t i n e

is neo-Aristotelian in principle, and lets us glimpse the author's chief preoccupation and the key to his interest in Gregory of Nyssa: that of giving an objective foundation to Augustinian time in order to save it from the abysses of a "psychological" time freed from its subordination to movement. The position is all the harder to sustain since Augustine introduces the notion of distentio for the first time at the end of the argument dissociating the notion of "day" from any cosmological support (23, 30). That is why time is a distension of the soul and not of the world.**8 For my account, I would retain only a single element of the relation to Gregory: while the notion of diastema tends to become for him synonymous with the condition of being a creature, be it a spiritual one (perfection does not consist in escaping "distension" but in following a distension continuous with a higher order),149 in his commentary on the Song of Songs Gregory is led to assert that the diastema is a consequence of the fall of man.150 Without wishing to attenuate the contradiction, T. Paul Verghese is certainly not wrong in seeing there, under the influence of Scripture, an "unconscious lapse into Plotinian views about which Gregory was most of the time rather circumspect."151 This reflection has the value of leading us to the heart of the problem, namely to the question of the relation between Augustinian distentio and Plotinian diastasis. A single consideration to close this heading provisionally: there is no need to assert that Augustine did indeed read diastasis in Plotinus on the basis of the swerving (scattering) and separating movement of the human soul. Holy Scripture is sufficient to lead him to that vision, which, all things considered — and keeping the interpretation that brings the diastasis zoes back to the world soul — is less "forced" than the analogy momentarily sought by the great doctor between the doctrine of hypostases and the dogma of the Trinity. Remember, finally, that Augustine, unlike Gregory who was lording it over Greek philosophy, could not take the risk of understanding distentio as the mark of the creation as creation. Finally, the last argument, according to which Gregory of Nyssa's views on the past and the future anticipate the "psychological theory of time." Besides the fact that his method has nothing introspective about it (which is generally what one understands by "psychological theory") and that similar considerations on memory and expectation can easily be found in all the great Greek philosophers, historians, or poets—who were no more ignorant of "linear time" than of the unique capacity of humans to project themselves into past and future—it should be remembered that the metaphysical time of universal distension would become psychological only in the sense that humans would become conscious of it. (I don't exclude the possibility that an acceleration of the anthropocentric tendency of Greek Chris-

112,3

tianity could have occurred with Gregory of Nyssa: he surpasses his predecessors and contemporaries in perceiving that a theory of time must above all be adapted to humankind's central position in the universal scheme of things.)152 With Gregory thus situated in relation to the Augustinian leap, it is paradoxically no longer impossible to see in him "one of the fathers of the progressive dynamism so characteristic of our Western civilization." For—continued an authorized voice on the occasion of a colloquium on Christian time from the end of antiquity to the Middle Ages—that dynamism of Europe secularized since the Renaissance is religious in origin and nothing is more explosive than the secularization of a religious idea.153 To understand this more precisely, it need only be asked: how could the Augustinian meditation on time not be at the heart of that process if, as I think I have shown, the concept of time is the profound instance of the decision? Which is what it has always been, but which its "phenomenological" representation, necessarily having to assume itself as metaphysical, carries to the acme of the inner consciousness of time. In this context, theological time indicates and dissimulates at the same time the active labor of mastery as autoaffection. A time liberated from the "theoretical" hold ofphusis as originary relation to self (contemplation). A time directly engaged in the world because it no longer numbers anything except the movement of self-love (including, therefore, its transcendent repetition). Since Augustine, all the concepts of metaphysics — activity, will, subjectivity...—constitute the provisions for that movement of human mastery and seizure of the world that "machinates" (says the Citizen of the South) or "dissipates" (answers the Prince of the North) time by determining the future from which time comes as in itself Unequal. Blessed are the blind who see clearly: Saint Augustine did not usurp the title of antiquity's first great futurologist.154 "That father of the church who is also the true father of Western consciousness," Klossowski announced. We have already had occasion to mention the fact that the Augustinian investigation into the nature of time is preceded by a long reflection on the role of memory that concludes with the theme of the memoria Dei,155 with the localization of God himself—and not simply of the remembrance of the idea of God — in a metaphysical memory that would be in some way, as Gilson puts it, God's dwelling place. God is the metaphysical "heart" of a psychological memory that was already making a self-presence to self appear in everything temporal, conjointly manifesting its uncoupling and fundamental anchoring. All of which makes the memoria Dei into a formulation that is at once excessive ("Where else, then, did I find you, to learn of you,

T h e T i m e o f Novitas: S a i n t A u g u s t i n e

unless it was in yourself, above me?")156 and necessary, as recalled in the prayer at the beginning of book XI cited earlier: "For if you are not there to hear us even in our deepest plight, where shall we go? To whom shall we cry?" (2, 3). The attraction is measurable—we are on the threshold of a book that will find itself confronted by the problem of the synthetic nature of time—with regard to the possibility of deepening and sharpening the thesis of the inner Master and of identifying the human intellect with a subject receptive of divine illumination; but so is the risk: that of confiding God's immanence within things to a symbolic instance, when God's memory is but a particular case of divine omnipresence. It would be necessary, though, for that particular case to be "unique in that only here does a creature become intimately aware of the divine presence"—in the presence to self that memory essentially is.157 "Et hoc animus est, et hoc ego ipse sum" (And it is my mind, it is myself).158 In a primary sense, memory is the fund of the soul. There is stockpiled (reconditum) the treasure of countless images brought in by perception (retrospective function) and everything that our mind constructs from those images (creative function): there is found one's experience of the world in which "the sky, the earth, and the sea [are] ready at my summons, together with everything that I have ever perceived in them by my senses."159 But this experience in which the flow of what is lived is grasped as retained living depends on an inner gaze (acies animi), prior to images, "just as the body existed in space even before it was perceived in the production of vision." This inner gaze is what "in some way engenders the form produced by the imagination of the subject who thinks about it,"160 and unites the past with present to form what we call a remembrance. In this secondary sense, memory tends to be assimilated to the gaze of the soul, which Augustine qualifies as voluntas insofar as it is an intentional movement of the mind. The totalization of what is lived exists only on the basis of an intentional sighting; the totalizing function of memory depends on a perspective function, which allows the subject to presence all of its experience. In this latter sense, which determines the subject's selfapprehension, memory is identified with the subject by endowing the total flow of its life with a lived unity that incessantly unifies the present as well as the past to the future. "From the same abundant reserve, I can draw all kinds of different images based either upon my own experience or upon what I find credible because it tallies with my own experience. I can link them back into the web of the past; from them I can even spin actions and events and hopes for the future; and I can contemplate them all over again as if they were actually present."'161 There is hardly any need to specify that book XI is there in its entirety to answer the question of the status of this quasipraesentia, seeing that without memoria all perception is impossible.

114,5

"And so, even in hearing the shortest syllable," he writes in De musica, "unless memory help us have in the soul that motion made when the beginning sounded, at the very moment when no longer the beginning but the end of the syllable is sounding, then we cannot say we have heard anything."162 Deus creator omnium: Augustine returns, in the Confessions, in the very heart of the book on time, to the analysis of the Ambrosian hymn in order to show the central role of memory, "light of duration in time" — "ita memoria, quod quasi lumen est temporalium spatiorum"—which under the gaze of consciousness makes a succession of instants coexist that would disperse without it. Deus creator omnium. It is difficult not to hear here, in the recitation of that verse whose meditation will allow the measurement of time to be detached from that of internal motion (27, 35), what is at play in the deployment of a philosophy of the subject revealing itself in the revelation of the Word: the primacy of believing over seeing, ending in the renunciation of vision (of theory, a taking of the divine into one's sights, according to the classical etymology of the name of God among the Greeks — Theoro: video);163 the abandonment of things for words (hence faith, but also semiotics, born perhaps with Augustine in De doctrina christiana, in that quivering of thought that makes him assert one after the other: that the thing is part of the sign not as referent but as signifier; and that "things are learned by signs"164); the primacy of audire reflected in obaudire, unveiled in obeying (but while referring the words to the voice from above, theology interprets that voice that dictates and decrees by making the intensity of the sign constituting itself as sense in intention emerge under the name). That the Scriptures must be held for the Word of God before being a book is sufficiently indicated by the nature of the Word engaging above all its being heard [recoute]. There is question of nothing else in the memoria Dei and in memory itself. Metaphysical memory has value only as the recoil it ought to produce upon psychological memory, in such a way that it may be grasped not as an activity of the mind but as a receptacle of a spiritual order in which consciousness' field of presence, formulated as an instantial relation in the autonomy of distentio, transcends itself in its insistance toward the axiological present of an absolute Presence that would function from within. We would be given to witness the subjectivation of imperial representation, or, if one prefers, the spiritualization (or interiorization of the passions) of its fundamental operation. "The flattening of the graphy onto the voice," explain Deleuze and Guattari, "has made a transcendent object jump outside the chain — a mute voice on which the whole chain now seems to depend, and in relation to which it becomes linearized. [Thus] the subordination of graphism to the voice induces a fictive voice from on high which, inversely, no longer expresses

T h e T i m e o f Novitas: S a i n t A u g u s t i n e

itself except through the writing signs that it emits (revelation)."165 To hear the Voice of God as the interiorization of the book that interiorizes everything, that becomes the sole Book.166 A book in which the autobiographical writing of the Confessions turns out to be inserted, embedded. Memory is to time what God is to the heart: light.167 But this light is that of the Word that is the First Principle because it also speaks to us "quod et principium est, quia et loquitur nobis," 8, 10; cf. John 8:25): within (intus). "It is there that I hear [audio] your voice [vocem tuam], O Lord, telling me that only the one who really teaches us really speaks to us [loquitur nobis]; if he does not teach us, even though he may be speaking, it is not to us that he speaks" (emphasis added; "qui autem non docet nos, etiam si loquitur non nobis loquitur"). God is lumen inasmuch as He teaches through the inner Word and properly makes learning possible in the form of (linear) time just as light makes seeing possible in the form of space.168 God is nomen, in conformity with the linguistic genius of Latin that sees in this term, whose polysemy intersects that of auctoritas, the symbol of (juridical) recognition, of (financial) obligation, and of potency (nomen Romanum}: the potency of the sign become letter, become Being.169 And in the sense Augustine equally confers upon it, God is the name insofar as He makes known—within the element of an ideality that borrows no substance of expression foreign to its own spontaneity from outside itself, from out in the world — the word insofar as it teaches within the self, the voice that I hear beyond external verba, the signifier. "But who is our teacher except the Truth that never changes [stabilis veritas]'? Even when we receive a warning [cum admonemur] from created things, which are subject to change, we are led to the Truth that does not change [ad veritatem stabilem]. And there we truly learn, as we stand by and listen to him [cum stamus et audimus eum\ and rejoice at hearing the bridegroom's Voice [vocem sponsis], restoring ourselves to him who gave us our being" (8, 10). Cognition manifests the potential of the memoria Dei. It is the sign of the memoria sui to the extent that it is the mediation between the eternal Verbum and the human vox, the ascension—of "Thought obeying the Voice of Being" (Heidegger) — toward the higher values that "elevat[e] time, moving it in the direction of eternity."170 The mystery of hearing, thought as the original relation to language, is also what will last all the way through medieval civilization, within which nonetheless the written—as graphic memorization of speech—is not subordinated to voice without in the end subordinating voice by force of being dependent upon it.171 "That is why he is the First Principle; for unless he stayed [nisi maneret] when we wandered in error, there would be nowhere for us to return. But when we return from error, we return by knowing the Truth; and in order that we may know

116,7

the Truth, he teaches us, because he is the First Principle and he also speaks to us [quia principium est et loquitis nobis]" (8, 10). This stay that cannot be seen, this staying, the condition for the "return" of those who listen to the Word, is nothing other than the word of memory, the prelude to autobiographical writing, which will allow for the resolution—in the aftermath of the analysis of deus creator omnium (27, 35-36) — of the twin enigma of the being and measurement of that which has no extension. It is also the final word of the inner human's presence to self. "For what is it to hear what you tell them about themselves if not to recognize themselves for what they are [quid est enim a te audire de se nisi cognoscere se]?"172 Thus are we better equipped to understand that there is no pure phenomenology of time in Augustine, if it will be remembered that we include in the same movement Ricceur's "bold assertion,"173 namely, that there will perhaps never be such a phenomenology after him. For lack of being able to retrace here, on the same archaeological soil, the history of its impossible positivity, it will be observed that Jacques Derrida definitively oriented research in this direction when he wrote: "That the privilege of presence as consciousness can be established—that is, historically constituted and demonstrated—only by virtue of the excellence of the voice is a truism which has never occupied the forefront of the phenomenological stage."174 In preoccupying oneself with this issue, there is precisely a quick change of decor for, in the Confessions at least, the scene is inevitably one of writing. Banal as it may be, the proposition requires demonstration. It will be noticed (a) that the excellence of the voice implies that Augustine dispossesses himself of his own writing in the course of a constant citational play where "I" is able to write a book only in the Book where "He" has already written, ever since the beginning— to the point of getting caught "in the endless spiral that the 'You' whom T addresses is perhaps none other than the 'Me' that 'He' constitutes in the very words that T pronounces and that he writes by re-writing the Book" (voice presents itself as consciousness only at the price of this engagement in the strategies of difference); and (b) that autobiographical writing operates as a synthesis of subject and present, which gives itself as a transcendental constitution of personal time that "can effectuate itself only to the advantage of a machination of writing that manipulates the past time of history by the present time of narration and produces the subject of narrative utterance as the simulacrum of the apparatus of uttering."175 Finally, let us underscore that this thematics of voice and listening appears on a terrain marked by the failure of attempts at ecstasy related in book VII, which the episode of the "contemplation at Ostia" corroborates more than

T h e T i m e o f Novitas: S a i n t A u g u s t i n e

it invalidates. The contemplation—the term is absent from the narrative — arises from a play on words: For we were talking together /conloquebamur/ alone in serene and joyful contemplation. Forgetting what lies behind, straining forward to what lies ahead (Phil. 3:13)... we held the mouth of our heart /ore cordis/ wide open... And while we spoke /"loquimur/ and longed for Wisdom, there we barely /modice/ touched it with a rapid and total impulse of the heart. We sighed, and left the first fruits of the spirit (Rom. 8:23) bound to it; we returned to the sound of our lips /ad strepitum oris nostris/, in which each word has a beginning and an ending—far, far different from your Word, our Lord, who abides in himself for ever [in se permanenti/, yet never grows old, and gives new life to all things?176 So this passage, the culminating point of book IX, is the metaphysical narrative of the missed passage to vision. The "mouth of the heart" will never be the organ of contemplation. While climbing inside the self, the cogitatio remains loquacious: "et adhuc ascendebamus interius cogitando et loquendo." The narrative ends with the gap between eternity and the constraint of time, in the abyss between eternal verbum and temporal verba. Christian hope has definitively picked up the relay of the Neoplatonic conversion. And the axis of time has also reversed itself, although here and there, as we will verify, time comes from the future. While Plotinian conversion, it will be remembered, was dominated by the metaphysical primacy of the past, Christian conversion projects humanity into the future, the biblical time of hope. For ever since the real Fall alone subsists, the return can only be carried out by going forward. Knowing that with the elimination of the eschatalogical attempt to accelerate time there remains literally nothing of early Christianity, one measures the ambivalence that takes hold of the theological future, of the future reflected in theological time. The problematic character of this future, subject to the contrary forces of biblical time and lay time, is what is borne witness to by the (what is no more than a) logical opposition between expectatio futurorum and extensio ad superior a. Between the expectatio that is synonymous with distentio and the extensio that belongs to the symbolics of the memoria Dei, to the dynamics of the inner person's intentio gathering oneself together to follow the One—when the Two dominates. "Try as they may to savor the taste of eternity, their heart still twists and turns upon the ebb and flow of things • in past and future time" (11, 3). Augustine takes aim here at those Manichaean an Neoplatonic detractors of Scripture who grant God a new will at the moment of creation, while his will belongs to his very substance (10, 12). There is no doubt, moreover, that he also targets the pride of "divine man" in them. "But if only their

118,9

minds could be seized," he continues, "and held steady, they would be still for a while [ut paululum stet] and for that short moment, they would glimpse the splendor of eternity which is forever still [nunquam stantibus}. They would contrast it with time, which is never still, and see that it is not comparable." Far from reducing the difference, the comparison between time and eternity in the time of fallen humanity's "vain heart" aims to show only one thing: its impossible character. And yet are not every past and every future created and set in motion (excurrere) by what is always present (quod semper est praesens)"? Of course, but on the condition of situating ourselves from the cosmic point of view of the creation of time, that of the commentary on the first verse of Genesis. This is what Augustine reminded us of a little earlier (9, 11), citing the psalm "O Lord, how manifold are thy works! In wisdom hast thou made them all!" (Ps. 104:24). The confusion of levels comes from the fact that Augustine, on the threshold of the question "What, then, is time?" must simultaneously assert the greatest gap and the greatest dependency of every creature in relation to the Creator. Later on, when he will resolutely situate himself at the level of the all too human time of distentio, he will show us that time is constituted and measured on the basis of a wholly other present, extended to the dimensions of past and future, which will become the image of the eternal only with the bearing of intentio on extensio ad superior a alone. "If only men's minds could be seized and held still! They would see how eternity, in which there is neither past nor future, determines both past and future time" (11, 17). But is my hand strong enough (Gen. 31:29)? "Could the hand of my mouth [manus oris] have the power to achieve with words {per loquellas] so great a task?" (XI, 11, 20), Augustine wonders. So great a task: while the mouth of the heart will listen to the biblical Word, the hand of the mouth will trace out the spacing of theological time — thus preparing the return to self, toward the very being ofldipsum, of time outside itself. In the very first lines of On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time, Husserl writes: The analysis of time-consciousness is an ancient burden for descriptive psychology and epistemology. The first person 'who sensed profoundly the enormous difficulties inherent in this analysis, and who struggled with them almost to despair, was Augustine. Even today, anyone occupied with the problem of time must still study Chapters 14-28 of Book XI of the Confessions thoroughly. For in these matters our modern age, so proud of its knowledge, has failed to surpass or even to match the splendid achievement of this great thinker, who grappled so earnestly with the

T h e T i m e o f N o vitas: S a i n t A u g u s t i n e

difficult problem of time. We may still say today with Augustine: "si nemo a me quaeret, scio; si quaerenti explicate velim, nescio [If no one asks me about it, then I know "what it is; but if I am asked and try to explain, then I don't know what it is]. "17T Several elements can be deduced from this long quotation. It offers us a first perspective on the book about time in terms of the phenomenological dramatization of Augustinian writing. First of all, the legitimacy of a reading that isolates the analysis of time from the meditation on time that heralds it, and from the final reprise of the dialectics of distentio and intentio identified with the old man's wailing and the inner man's future delights. This is the very legitimacy of the "psychological thesis" that displaces the skeptical aporia of the Being/non-Being of time toward the introspective analysis of our knowledge of its phenomenal reality, without losing sight of the question: "quid est enim tempus?" (14, 17). Explaining the aenigma implicatissimum of time implies extracting the question of its being from realist and dogmatic ontology, which can only grasp it as something given. Only the phenomenological analysis of consciousness allows for the manifestation of the unity of a sense that constitutes or gives, on the basis of the daily resistance of language because it speaks of time as something having being. " 'Time' and 'times' are words forever on our lips. 'How long did he speak?' we ask. 'How long did he take to do that?' 'How long it is since I have seen it!' 'This syllable is twice the length of that.' We use these words and hear others using them. They understand what we mean and we understand them. No words could be plainer or more commonly used. Yet their true meaning is concealed from us. We have still to find it out [inventio}" (22, 28). Concealed, since if no one asks me about it, then I know; if someone asks and I want to explain what time is, then I no longer know, everything becomes complicated, and in all truth we cannot say what time is because it tends toward not being (14, 17). A true inventio is needed, then, in order to bring to light what happens in language and consciousness when I speak of time and its measure. This same inventio is what, after many approximations and rebeginnings, imposes the proper meaning (fortasse proprie dicitur) of the present as "something new," freed from past and future, in accordance with the three modes of memory, attention, and expectation (20, 26). Henri Dussort, in a note referring to Husserl's text, is certainly not completely wrong to suggest that we think of the necessity of the Augustinian inventio as the first trace of a "phenomenological reduction" in the history of Western philosophy. Is that not the best sign that this

120,1

great thinker "has struggled seriously with the difficulties," that no one has done much better, and that the modern era has produced perhaps nothing of such scope?...

Husserl would not have disavowed the opinion of Bertrand Russell: The best purely philosophical work in Saint Augustine's writings is the eleventh book of the Confessions... it is a great advance on anything to be found on the subject in Greek philosophy. It contains a better and clearer statement than Kant's of the subjective theory of time—a theory which, since Kant, has been widely accepted among philosophers.™ Do not forget, in fact, that Husserl departs from the Kantian critique insofar as that critique remains solely at the eidetic — that is to say, worldly— level.179 With that consequence whose effects continue to be measured on the brow of time: overcoming the duality between originary and derived temporality (there is nothing more than some time), Kant is caught in a movement that seeks to substitute the splitting of the ego with the fusion of transcendental subject and concrete ego; while the "phenomenological" enterprise from Augustine to Husserl aims to discover an authentic time below the ontic time of the concrete ego. With Husserl, we must "admit simultaneously that the ego in question is the concrete ego, since there is no difference of content between psychology and phenomenology, and that it is not the concrete ego, since it is disengaged from its being in the world" through the intentionality that makes epokhe itself possible.180 In Augustine, the analysis of time starts from a reflection on the being-in-the-world of the psychological ego that measures time by means of the dialectics of intentio-distentio, manifest in the noncoincidence of the modalities of the soul's actio, and finishes by authenticating the experience of intentio at the spiritual level of the inner man's disengagement from the cares of the saeculum. But then what about the phenomenological legitimacy of a reading that isolates the analysis of time from the Augustinian meditation on the relations between time and eternity—if eternity, far from being thought as a limit-idea, tends to become the horizon for the authentic experience of hope? Finally, to better grasp Husserl's statement about the lack of "scope" of modern philosophy with regard to the depth of Augustine's views, the name of Descartes ought to be mentioned. Is it not by virtue of the discovery of the subject that Saint Augustine was led to anticipate the Cartesian cogito, but in such a way that he would have had to reject the thesis of the ego res cogitans, which reifies the transcendental effort by folding the cogito back onto the psychological ego? Descartes is one for whom, at least at a first level, time is included in those things "which are

T h e T i m e o f Novitas: S a i n t A u g u s t i n e

veiy simple and are known naturally" such that when one wants to define time logically, one obscures it and becomes baffled, since a true duration of things exists independently of everything that happens.181 Returning to book XI, we find the Augustinian inventio full of the effort to sustain the assaults of skeptical argumentation. "So we must not say that the past was long, because we shall not be able to find anything in it that could be long, for the simple reason that once it becomes the past it ceases to be. Instead we must say that the time of which we are speaking was long when it was the present, because it could have been long only while it was the present. It had not yet become the past—which would have meant that it no longer existed—and therefore something existed which could be long. But as soon as it became the past it ceased to be long, because it ceased to be at all" (15, 18). An essential point is announced here: safety from the storm of skepticism must be found on the side of the present. A first attempt ends in failure. Can present time be long? No, for a hundred years, no more than a single year, a month, a day, or an hour are present at the same time. "Everything is continually passing in little parts: everything which has gone by is past, everything which remains is future" (15, 20). It seems impossible to conceive of an element of time that cannot be infinitely divided into parcels of instants; although it alone could be called the present, it "passes so rapidly from the future to the past that its duration is without extension \ut nutta morula extendatur}. For if duration were extended, it could be divided into past and future; but the present has no space [nam si extenditur dividitur in praeteritum et futurum: praesens autem nullum habit spatium}.'" Conclusion: "Present time exclaims that it cannot be long" (ibid.). The failure of this first attempt orients us, however, toward an indispensable element for the elaboration of the final solution: if the punctual present does not exist for me, ordinary language ought to overcome itself to the point of closing in on the possibility of an extended present, capable of being divided into future and past; a present that lets itself be apprehended in terms of spacing. This is confirmed by Augustine's new question: "Where, then, is there a time that we can call long?" (ibid.). "Quid est ergo tempus?" is henceforth said as: "Ubi est ergo ternpus?" In the course of this investigation, the stage of time will be seen to be scaffolded and animated, while already, through the calculated self-evidence of that ubi and the (as yet) negative linkage of dynamic terms whose stand can only be spatial (spatium}, the subjective determination of extensio gets ready to distribute the intensities of memory and expectation in accordance with the twin movement in analogy and opposition of distentio and intentio.

122,3

Along the way, it will have been noted that time, as in Plotinus, comes from the future rather than flowing, like a liquid substance, from the past toward the present and the future. Henceforth, to pick up again on Merleau-Ponty's demonstration, time is no longer a succession that I as spectator limit myself to registering. It is born out of my relation with things, in step with that future that is no longer prepared behind me on the basis of a founding past but that I pre-meditate in front of me. Time must be understood on the basis of a field of presence that is nothing other than the primary experience of intervals of duration (intervalla temporum): "as the times are passing... we measure them by our perception of them" (16, 21); this is the originary experience of a present that "emerges from some secret refuge [ex aliquo procedit occulto] when it passes from the future to the present, and goes back into hiding [in aliquod recedit occultum} when it moves from the present to the past" (17, 22). The thesis of punctual presents, which could be (impossibly) only successively, is replaced by the idea of a continuum differentiated into future, present, and past, under the sign of a present necessarily distended in the very passage of time. "O Lord, my Hope, allow me to explore further. Do not let my attention [intentio mea\ be disturbed! If the future and the past indeed are [suntfutura et praeterita], I want to know where [ubi\ they are. I may not yet be capable of such knowledge, but at least I know that wherever they are, they are not there as future or past, but as present [praesentia]" (18, 23). Notice that an objection advanced by Sextus to deny all existence to time is found here in reverse form: to uphold the being of past and future, they need to exist in a certain way in the present itself—a hypothesis that is subsequently rejected as absurd.182 But what is this present that can no longer participate in the discontinuist and substantial vision of the instant? It is henceforth a plural adjective (praesentia) aligned on the two other adjectives, praeterita andfutura, which appeared in the previous paragraph (17, 22), when the existence of past and future things was affirmed in spite of the skeptical argument. Doesn't one discern past things through the mind (si animo ilia non cerneret) as one foresees those that do not yet exist? "Although whenever true but past things are narrated, what is drawn from the memory is not the things themselves [non res ipsae], which are past, but words conceived from the images they have imprinted in our minds, like traces, in passing through our senses" (18, 23). Similarly, "by whatever means it may be that there is a mysterious 'pre-perception' of future things [praesentio futurorum], it is only possible to see something which is; and whatever is is not future but present. So when we speak [dicuntur} of foreseeing the future, we do not see the things themselves [non ipsa\, which are not yet in being, because they are in the future, but it

T h e T i m e o f Novitas: S a i n t A u g u s t i n e

may be that we see their causes or signs, which are already in being. In this way they are not future but present to the eye of the beholder, and by means of them the mind can form a concept of things which are still future and thus is able to predict them" (18, 24). Expectation, which Leibniz will call percepturitio, is thus the correspondent to memory—a memory supplied with a creative function that includes in its operation a certain orientation toward the future. In the aftermath, the famous formulation of the living present can emerge: From what we have said it is abundantly clear that neither things to come nor things past, are. Nor do we properly say /nee proprie dicitur/: there are three times, past, present, and future. But perhaps it might properly be said /sed fortasse proprie diceretur/: there are three times, the present of the past /praesens de praeterisy, the present of the present /praesens de praesentibus/, and the present of the future /praesens de futuris/. These three modes of time are indeed in the soul [in anima/, and I see them nowhere else /et alibi ea non video7: the present of the past is memory [memoria]; the present of the present is our sight /contuitus/,- the present of the future is expectation /expectatio/. (20, 26) And I see them nowhere else, these three modes of time. This is what needs to be demonstrated now, in defiance of any cosmological temptation that inscribes time as dependent on physical movement. The definition of time as distension of the soul cannot be produced before the problem of measurement has been resolved. In sum, the difficulty raised by the measurement of spaces of time — it being said that time is never measured except in a certain space (in aliquo spatio) (21, 27) — should allow it to be seen that the mental representation of time is not added onto its spatial presentation: that this "space" must be understood as the spacing of the triple present and of the soul itself. In that case, time would no longer be only in the soul, but o/the soul. As long as the notion of distentio animi has not been formed while invalidating the "physical" solution, it will remain impossible to capitalize on these first acquisitions of the inquiry by endowing the soul with an utterly different extension from the one refused to the punctual present. The impasse would then appear to be total: "How, then, do we measure present time, when it has no space? It must be measured while it is in process of passing. It cannot be measured after it has passed, because nothing then exists to be measured" (21, 27). Pause. Faced with so embroiled an enigma, Augustine once again abandons himself to prayer: "O Lord my God, good Father, I long to find an answer. Through Christ I beseech you, do not so keep these common but abstruse things [usitata et abdita] hidden away" (22, 2). It would be wrong to see in this a slightly formal confession

124,5

of faith, or a simply rhythmic procedure. For not only is affirmed the horizon of the Augustinian investigation into time, namely the Scriptures ("To whom am I to put my questions? To whom can I confess my ignorance more fruitfully than to you? For my burning desire to study your Scriptures is not displeasing to you" [22, 28]), but also, in a short sequence obtained through a skillful montage of psalms, its hidden element, its camera obscura, along with a recalling of the hiatus that commands the economy of biblical time. "For / kept my faith, even when I said (Ps. 116:10). This is my hope and for this I live, that I may behold the beauty of the Lord (Ps. 27:4). Behold, thou hast made my days a few handbreadths (Ps. 39:5), and they pass away [transeunt]; but how they pass, I know not" (ibid.). This passage, this transit, is what must also be read as a change of state, which manifests the rending of the existential present.183 The explication of the overimplicated enigma will presently be inscribed within that long history of time whose Augustinian tracing will necessarily be projected, or retrojected, onto those three "moments" effectuated by Plato ("I once heard a learned man say that time is nothing but the movement of the sun and the moon and the stars, but I did not agree" [23, 29]); Aristotle ("Seeing therefore the motion of a body is one thing, and that by which we measure the duration of its movement, another thing; who cannot judge which of the two is rather to be called time? [24, 31]); and Plotinus ("Could I measure the movement of a body, that is, measure how long the movement lasted and how long the body took to move between two points, unless I measured the time in which it moved? Therefore, I measure time itself" [26, 33]). Thus, the (cosmological) thesis of the identification of time with the movement of the heavens; the (physical) synthesis of the assimilation of time with the measurement of the movement on which it depends; the (metaphysical) antithesis of the reversal of the rapport between time and (physical) movement. To the first of these, Augustine objects that time could just as well be the motion of all bodies, which comes down to rejecting any astral privilege, or any dichotomy between supralunary and sublunary worlds — to bring the stars down from the divine rank where antiquity had placed them. The importance of this first argument cannot be overstated; it furnishes the theoretical framework of the following two arguments directly inspired from Scripture: that the stars "lit up in the sky are as signs [signis] that mark time" (23, 29); and that their movements may vary: speeding up, slowing down, even stopping completely in the manner of a potter's wheel — time made by a human hand (23, 29-30). The decisive rupture of the Aristotelian chain is what is announced here, in fact. For, recalls Pierre Duhem, who must be cited at length:

The

T i m e of N o v i t a s: S a i n t A u g u s t i n e

Modern science is born, one could say, the day one dares to proclaim this truth: the same Mechanics, the same laws rule celestial and sublunary motion, the circulation of the sun, the ebb and flow of the tides, and the fall of heavy bodies. For such a thought to be conceived, the stars had to be brought down from the divine level where antiquity had placed them. A theoretical revolution had to take place. This revolution was to be the work of Christian theology. Modern science was ignited by a spark thrown from the contact between the Theology of Hellenistic Paganism and the Theology of Christianity.184

Didn't Galileo directly participate in this scientific dynamics of transcendence when he wrote to Castelli that "astronomical truth is contained in the Bible"?185 It is in the aftermath of this first moment, in refutation of the cosmological solution, that the notion of distentio appears, with a lot of hesitation still: "Let no one therefore say to me that the motions of the celestial bodies are what constitutes time, because although at the prayer of a certain man [Joshua], the sun stood still, till he could achieve his victorious battle, the sun stood indeed, but the time went on: for in a certain space of time [spatium temporis] of his own (enough to serve his turn) that battle was struck and won. I see time, therefore, as a distension [distentionem] of some sort. But do I really see this or only seem to see it? You will make it clear to me, my Light and my Truth" (23, 30). If miracles must be taken seriously, what is the lesson of this one? Not only, as Ricceur emphatically remarks, does "the notion of distentio animi... serve, precisely, as a substitute for this cosmological basis for the span of time," but also that this figure appears for the first time in a context that should indeed be called that of mastery and domination over the motion of the world.186 Feuerbach's wonderful pages dedicated to miracles, that invention of the Christian soul, should definitely be read and reread in order to understand how the process of subjectivizing time, whose product "culminates in that pre-Galilean, prescientific, form of a continuum in the strict form of distentio," can emerge from the shadow of the greatest discontinuity.187 To the second hypothesis, the Aristotelian one, Augustine objects, without underestimating the progress it represents ("quid horum potius tempos dicendum est?" [which of them should rather be called time?] [24, 31])—the Plotinian inspiration is obvious here — that time is what we use to measure not only a body's motion, but also its standing still too ("sed etiam statum tempore metimur" [ibid.]). This explains the paragraph's conclusion, surprising at first: "Time is therefore not the motion of a body" ("non ergo tempus corporis motus" [ibid.]): for the "physical" solution again confuses time with what is only its sign. In which case, the force and nature of time (vim nattiramque temporis [23, 30]) will be misjudged,

126,7

that time that allows the motions of bodies to be measured because it is not an attribute of the cyclical movement of the stars, of which we must dare to think that they may vary in their movements, stand still, and so on. The Peripatetic solution is but a variant of the cosmological theme indispensable to its formulation. Encountering this problem for the last time, let us signal a halt in our commentary in order to answer a possible objection concerning the relation of Augustinian theory to Aristotle's cosmological conception. Although its subject is not unknown to us, let us recognize that the argument presented in the last volume of Ricoeur's Time and Narrative is more forceful than any of the others already examined. It is a matter of recognizing, of "admitting," to use Ricoeur's word, "that a psychological theory and a cosmological theory mutually occlude each other to the very extent they imply each other."188 This thesis goes well beyond the relation between Aristotle and Augustine, since the same perspective is then used for the succeeding analyses: "Husserl Confronts Kant" and "Heidegger and the 'Ordinary' Concept of Time." To respect the framework of the present inquiry, I will stay, however, in the realm of Augustine, but not without pointing out that Ricoeur's analysis of the Aristotelian definition of time often overlaps my own: to include a noetic determination in it "would be to threaten the dependence of time on movement, the single, ultimate principle of physics." Here's what follows: It is in this sense that we are able to say that there is no conceivable transition between an Augustinian conception and an Aristotelian one... Not only must we make a jump from one perspective on time to the other, hit it seems as though each is doomed to occlude the other. And yet the difficulties peculiar to each perspective demand that these two perspectives be reconciled. (3:21) Let's examine the difficulties referred to by Ricoeur. In Aristotle, what is involved is above all the absence of reflection on what distinguishes an instant from a point, with regard to the necessity of physical solidarity between size, movement, and time. Were the chain to snap, the primacy of what is counting over what is counted in movement would have to be recognized, drawing in its wake the reversal of the relation between time and motion. In plain logic, (the soul's) time would subordinate (the world's) motion to itself. In fact, and less clearly, the unleashing of time freed from the world's ideal motion would turn the multiplication of "aberrant" movements into the sole perspective on time. "Chrematistics" is nothing other than the economic representation of that aberration, by which the Sta-

T h e T i m e o f Novitas: S a i n t A u g u s t i n e

girite was able to measure the size of the split between (potentially) quantifyin motion and (in actuality) counting with time. This is what we have tried to show. For Ricoeur's part, Augustine has no other resource when it comes to the cosmological doctrines than to oppose to them the time of a mind that distends itself. This mind has to be that of an individual soul but by no means a world soul. Yet his meditation on the beginning of creation leads Augustine to confess that time itself had a beginning along with created things. This time must be that of every creature, therefore, in a sense that cannot be explicated within the framework of the doctrine in book XI of the Confessions, a cosmological time. (3:244) Thus, just as Aristotle is constrained to refer every sentence of his demonstration back to operations that can only be those of a soul, Augustine is inversely condemned to count on the regular movement of the world, which he reduces to a "purely pragmatic function" in order to strip that reference of any constitutive role. The two theories having shown that they are insufficient in themselves, it remains only to try to reconcile the double regime of necessity that rules them in their de facto complementarity within the utterly different field of narratology, and no longer that of philosophy (Kant's effort is no exception). Whence the hypothesis that "the effort of thinking that is at work in every narrative configuration is completed in a refiguration of temporal experience" (3:3). A poetic, nonspeculative solution to the aporias of temporality. Which is as much as to say that we have no intention of "criticizing" a project of that scope. We wish only to examine the difficulty that might be raised by the Augustinian aporia as set off by Ricceur. Now, we are compelled to note that the aporia vanishes as soon as the split between original-Adamic time and the derived time of the fall, between the time of creation and the time of "decay," is taken into account. Fallen humanity has been cut off from the sempiternal order of creation, divorced from that movement of the world that implied no loss of essence for past and future, and passed into a fleeting present, until the two coincided in the essential plenitude of time itself, of the cosmic time that espouses the astral curve. How will this time of the beginning of creation be picked up again in the doctrine of book XI, when Augustine finds himself confronted with the task of elaborating the first—and perhaps the only—theological conception of time, because the biblical times of the origin are no longer valid, and because the public time of the merchant, which made the world "leap" off its hinges, dominates? The acting intentionality will have to be doubled by a second intentionality, operating at an utterly

128,9

different level, in order to recover an interiority which can no longer be except as produced in a paradoxical unity wherein the split is carried to its blindest intensity. So yes, in that sense, it is true that only by a "leap" can one pass from one perspective on time to another, that each is condemned to hide the other. But that leap is a fall. So, Augustine had to renounce reconciling the two regimes. For this time, the fall was real indeed. We thus come to the admission of ignorance that concludes the examination of the Aristotelian thesis, with the terms (scio, nesdo) that launched the initial investigation. "I confess to you, Lord, that I still do not know what time is. Yet I confess to you, Lord, that I do know that I am saying this in (in) time,... How can I know [scio] this, when I do not know [nesdo] what time is?" (25, 32). Here, we are warned, once every path of cosmological interpretation has been definitively rejected, of the imminence of the final solution: "Or is it perhaps that I do not know how to put what I know into words? [An forte nesdo, quemadmodum dicam quod sdo?] (ibid.). The outcome in the form of the reversal will come from "thou [who] dost light my lamp; the Lord my God lightens my darkness" (Ps. 18:28). The outcome we know already following that formulation that can at first be only negative to the extent that it results from the impossibility of the preceding hypotheses. If it is true that the movement of a body does not assure a fixed measure of time (certa mensura temporis; 26, 3 3), "it can happen that the space of time be greater for the delivery of a verse pronounced more slowly" (ibid.) while we try to measure time in pronunciation at the moment the words pass by (transeunt), "and... not by the page—for that way we would measure places not times [emphasis added]... thereupon [inde\ it seems to me that time is nothing else than a distension; but of what, I know not [w«ri], and I wonder whether it is not of the mind itself [et mirum, si non ipsius animi]" (ibid.). Note that this conclusion is still made necessary only by the reversal of the time/motion relation: the setting in motion of the fraction bar has the effect of drawing a transfer of movement: from body to soul, from spaces (of place) to (spaces of) time. The definition of time as distentio animi will be really founded only with the grasping of the triple present as distension of the "life of my actions" (28, 38). "That," Ricoeur insists, "is the stroke of genius of book XI of Augustine's Confessions, in whose wake will follow Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty."189 This is not to forget that other characteristic, proper to Augustine, that strives to disjoin present intention, that moves the future into the past (27, 36) from action, from distentio, to reconnect it to the regathering of the new human. Proper to Augustine? Unless one finds the trace of another and similar transcendence among the cited Moderns. Originary presence, original time,

T h e T i m e o f Novitas: S a i n t A u g u s t i n e

undivided within the intersection of Being and consciousness: the triple avatar of a single faith (Glaube)? "Courage, my mind, and press on strongly" (27, 34). There follow the three famous examples of sound (which have had no small part in diverting research into weo-Bergsonian pathways190) whose function is to propel us from the ungraspable transit-image to the centrality of the imprint-image that no longer passes by (transire) but stays (manet). With the former, one speaks to the past (ibat enim et praeteribat) of a sound (vox) still resonating since "in fact, while passing [praeteriens], it was tending toward some kind of temporal space [tandebatur in aliquod spatium temporis] by which it might be measured" (ibid.), the present not itself having any space. If the aporia of measurement remains entire, we can anticipate its area of resolution: the present of the past, which will soon be unveiled as vestigium, the imprint or impression that things "leave" in passing. In the second example, the accent is on the paradox of the present relative to its passage ("let us now while it sounds measure it" [ibid]): "a sound which has not yet come to an end cannot be measured... But when it comes to an end it will no longer exist. How, then, shall we be able to measure it?" Joining the intuition of tension (1) with the paradox of extinction (2), we acquire the definitive certitude of a lag between future, past, and present times of things that pass and those times we measure (3). This is what is developed by the third example, that of the reciting of the verse from Ambrose's Deus creator omnium: this example reintroduces memory into the heart of the analysis by reason of the complexity of the linkage between short and long syllables. I don't measure those syllables that are no longer or not yet "but something in my memory, which remains fixed there [infixum manet]" (27, 35). There remains the problem of the passage, which attention alone (passive: vestigium affectio) can resolve only at the risk of referring us back to an external movement that the vox would have barely "covered" by interiorizing it. Unless attention, which provides a "place" for the impression by endowing expectation (praemeditando) and memory (memoriaeque conmendans) with the extension necessary to every continuous duration (28, 37), is the mark and reverse side of a present intention (praesens intentio) that conveys the future into the past (futurum in praeteritum traicif) (27, 36). (To the point of rendering them practically indiscernible; which explains how Augustine can assert in the following paragraph that it is through my attention [attentio mea], present at hand [praesens], "that what was future is conveyed over, that it may become past.") That is the fundamental equation of a time that comes from the future: (as affectio is the vestige-image of attentio) intentio is the sign-image of the voluntas that unlatches and unreels time. Does Jean Guitton say

130,1

anything else when he maintains that "time is thereby found internally linked to actio whose spiritual form it is"?191 There would be no future which shrinks, no past that grows, without the present intention, which makes the past grow by shrinking the future (27, 36), without a mind that does that action, without there being "in the mind that does this action" three acts (in animo, qui illud agit, tria sunt). "For it expects [expectat] and is attentive [adtendit] and remembers" (28, 37). To pass is to make pass, to direct (pergat) toward absence what will be present and will pass in a moment (in puncto). But to pass is also to make pass in a synthetic process that betrays a triple temporalizing intention, along with that contrast between three tensions that "makes the distentio arise out of the intentio that has burst asunder."192 This oscillation between passivity and activity, diathesis and synthesis, is what ends by precipitating the dialectics of expectation, memory, and attention — in which the mind accedes to the certitude of itself— into the discordance of distentio, of an intentio that becomes unequal to that action that "keeps going and going" (agitur et agitur}, and becomes distended to the degree to which it is tendered. The activity itself is what forbids the self-identity of the present, self-certitude in pure presence, and what projects self-knowledge into the anticipation of time. I am about to recite a song that I know. Before I begin, my expectation tends /expectatio mea tenditur/ towards the whole of the song; but once I have begun, while whatever bits removed from my expectation are taken into the past, my memory in turn tends towards them /tenditur et memoria mea/; and the life of this action of mine is distended /atque distenditur vita huius actionis meae7, towards memory because of what I have said, and towards expectation because of what I am going to say... What happens for the whole song also happens for each of its parts and each of its syllables; it happens for a longer action /in actione/ of which this song is perhaps but a small pan; it happens for a man's whole life [hoc in tota vita hominis/, of which the parts are all the actions of the man /omnes actiones hominis/: it happens for the whole of the centuries lived by the children of men, whose pans are all the lives of men /omnes vitae hominum/. (28, 38, end) From Plotinus to Augustine, between seeing and hearing, conversion and confession, while the essential identity of psychological time and historical time is being affirmed, the vocabulary of actio is definitively taken over by the diastasis zoes. The time of separated man derives from that action that allows him to "retain speech" while going forward, and going forward, without turning around anymore to contemplate, toward that from where he comes. "Ecce homo, ecce distentio. Ecce homo, ecce intentio." "Behold my life is a distension, and your right hand has taken hold of me in my Lord,... in

T h e T i m e o f Novitas: S a i n t A u g u s t i n e

order that through him I may grasp the prize—Phil. 3:12-14" (29, 39). The strongest prize or price [prix] is the one the spiritual memory must pay as the wages of sin; that memory that can no longer locate itself in the depth of pure remembrance, and be reborn in the past by recognizing it as the originary time of immersion in the original form and life of the ego. While man was producing and forming future in a tattered form — in a "unique and tremendous" action adequate "to time in its entirety" — the image of pure duration was getting blurry, the circle of the aion was breaking, the presence to self in the beatific vision of the aevum was clouding over forever. "Now [nunc] my years are but sighs, and you are my only solace, O Lord, you are my eternal father; but I, I am scattered in time" (29, 39). In tempora dissilui... Once the sanctuary of consciousness has been abandoned (deserto secretario conscientiae), I swelled with pride (superbia intumescere) to the point of seeing outside what is not, to the point of imprisoning my soul in the distended appearances of space where Being cannot be without perpetually differing from itself, without being condemned to being otherwise.iQ3 Thus, space in its physical distension is the region of lost identity only inasmuch as the time of fallen man governs the dissidence of Being with unity, the extended ipseity of spiritual being. Thus, forgetting the past /praeterita oblitus/, / turn not toward things that are future and transitory but toward those that are ahead and in relation to which I am not distended but extended. I pursue my path not in a distended way but with intention to the prize, God's heavenly summons /supernae vocationis/. Then I shall listen to the sound of your praises /audiam vocem laudis/ ...

We must distinguish the soul itself from its corporeal agents, whether vessels or organs or whatever else they may be called. The difference is evident from the fact that the soul is frequently concentrated [ intentio/ in thought and turns itself away from everything, so that it is ignorant of many things which are present before the eyes when they are wide open and able to see. (De Genesi ad Litteram VII, 20, 26)

... my thoughts are torn asunder /dilaniantur/ with tumultuous vicissitudes, even the inmost bowels of my soul; until the time when /donee/ / will flow into you, purified /purgatus/ and melted /liquidus/ by the fire of your love. Then shall I stand /stabo>7 and be set firm /solidabor/ in you, in my mold, your truth ... ... and how far from you have I been cast away by the consequences of my faults! (31, 41)

132,3

IV The Time of Novitas What happens to Augustine, in his form as concept? More and something else than his "saint" form; he becomes the operating function of conversion, border of exchanges, logical distributor of concepts, in the institution of the West, and the setting to work of its genealogies.

C. Morali, Combien d'amours...

In the beginning was the split. The Revelation is explained, developed, in a very particular story, "crazy" enough to invent heresy: the story of a split that does not exclude a paradoxical, nondialectical unity insofar as it conserves it integrally. At the end of the narrative, the originary is no longer God but within Christ. But it is from the beginning that creation implies a split operating at a double level since it cannot delve into emanation and hurl us into the order of the ontological break without undoing the immanence the emanation still needed. Unless it be reproduced by other needs, other modalities. And in fact the originary is no longer "given" but "aimed at." Neoplatonism is no longer valid. Of contemplation and ecstasy, which are equally impossible (theoria), there remains only the intention (intendere), the aim—from the basis of the derivative ontologically established in the constitution of the creature. How else can the recovering of the ideal fall by the real fall, the essential accident of the downfall, be understood? Henceforth, the originary is no longer valid as intensity but as intentum, intentionality. The derivative aims at the originary, and this reversal is possible, is thinkable, only within the split. (If the trace of an intentionality was already detectable in the Neoplatonic Weltanschauung, it was "operational" only to the extent that it was immanent to the self-temporalizing of the absolute: its intentionality is intimate, complicitous, as its consciousness is without subjectum: a vacancy of the ego.194) The split is the only thing that can introduce us into a world dominated by intentionality. Be it only because the split is never in play except

T h e T i m e o f Novitas: S a i n t A u g u s t i n e

between the intention and what it aims at, which cannot be grasped independently of the aim, which constitutes that new mode of paradoxical unity—that targeted ob-ject, Christ. Beyond Christ and the paradox of the mystery he incarnates, the tension toward God is no longer pure intensity but empty intention. The intentional relation falls to the subject in the sense that it is strictly contemporaneous with the latter's advent. "The subject is structured intentionally within itself. As subject it is directed toward..." 195 As soon as intentionality designates the relation between subject and object, the originaty has become the object of the derivative—a pure target. This comes down to saying that within intentionality, and within it alone, is where transcendence resides: "accidentally," it is the structure of directing-itself-onto any given object; "essentially," it is the re-presentation of the originary that can no longer be contemplated and cognized. So is it that theology succeeds theoria, comprehension succeeds contemplation. So is it that the Fall proceeds from the will to cognize and the act of cognition that it has itself determined. The interdict signifies the resistance of the originary toward what it knows to be its overturning; it manifests the fright of the originary discovering its reflection in the intentio, as a mode of being of what is aimed at within the intentum. How could it have been comprehended differently? Briefly, the originary is aimed at not only as what is finally deposed—in Christ—but as what is pro-posed in the circle, of course, of the derivative (intentio-intentum). This is the profound sense of the split: because it is no longer given, the originary can no longer be except as re-produced by the derivative (as much will soon be said of the object in its relation to representation). It is only a question of time from then on for intentionality to be re-cognized in its creative function, the created being taken for the creator, and for Being to be apprehended only on the basis of the intentional structure of producing; that is to say, effectuated in the sense of effectivity, with no return possible after the nominalist reduction of substance to operation.196 Thus, there would only be, after all accounts are reckoned, an ordinary time, the time of daily productivity having subordinated the soul's intentional movement toward God as well as that "lay movement" about which Georges de Lagarde has this to say: "Born from Christianity [it] follows it as a shadow. It sticks to Christianity at the very moment it thinks it is detaching itself from it. It insuperably recalls Christianity, even when it claims to suppress it."197 If the Confessions is where is reflected for the first time in all its potential the reversal carried out within the Christian consciousness of the world, book XI in and of itself marks the unique moment when the process of temporalization acquires the general ontological character of producing by projecting itself into

134,5

the impossible place, the insane refuge of a Memory that lets itself be thought as foundation of time only on the condition of being itself founded "in advance" — of determining itself as aim in the operation of intentio. By that "advancement," the exteriority within which we are becomes internal to time, to the time-consciousness of novitas. And it is certainly because novitas is the fundamental presupposition of "theological time" that we will never be acquitted of the advancement—and of the duality that keeps working right into the Augustinian reduction: I mean to speak of the division between objectivizing intentionality and immanent intentionality, the theological representation of intention. Augustine says that the only straight intention is the one proceeding from faith, the descent into the depths, and the extension to eternity, high intentionality. Whence the putting out of circuit of worldly intention, of the low intentionality distended ad extra: an intention turned toward possession and not toward intuition, attention. This opposition must be further nuanced inasmuch as the former is immediately the identical possession of the ego by itself. (The cogito is intentionality.) Only the morality of intentio guarantees its judiciary use, as indicated by that passage of De mendatio circulated by Augustine a little before finishing his Confessions: "It is according to the intention of one's heart and not according to the truth or falsehood of things in themselves that one ought to be judged as lying or not." Intentionality is not, any more than judgment, a specific act of the intelligence. Here again, we can verify the absence of any mediation between originary moral value and experience derived from sensory knowledge. The autonomy of moralism. "Whence the paradox of an enterprise [necessarily] based upon the very experience it subverts."198 That this statement can target Augustine as well as Husserl, to whom Ricoeur applies this reflection, suffices to show that this paradox can fearlessly be qualified as a phenomenologicalparadox. Allow us to add that, for our sense of it, the phenomenological positioning, in its most "dynamic" effects, must be considered the ultimate process of covering over the Christian conception of the world. It will be remarked that the phenomenon of "covering over," in its technical, Husserlian sense (Deckung), should give a satisfactory explanation of the linkage of time — at which it fails. As testimony is the need to pursue the constitution of time at a more profound level. What remains to be examined is the other slope of the phenomenological paradox, which will finish peeling the originary from the objectum by unveiling a horizon more

T h e T i m e o f Novitas: S a i n t A u g u s t i n e

profound than any intentionality, in which what is aimed at is disposed as possible aim in the overcoming of phenomenology by ontology, with the need for an "authentic, universal ontology" that will finally give access to the foundation of intentionality, will distinguish it from mere learning. It is Husserl's Horizonstruktur that evokes an "overcoming of intention within intention itself"; it is Heidegger's Fold of Being (Zweifalf), Merleau-Ponty's Chiasmus in whose heart a radical visibility is folded into a Self-seeing that allows the beholder to take sight of the visible. An originary vertical visibility twists itself into "an Inside that is deeper than any interior, and alone creates the possibility of the derived relation of the interior," the horizontal relation between a seeing and a seen."199 It would certainly be surprising not to find in Augustine a similar restoration of a new immanence, implied by creationism itself, that suspends the intentional relation to the object aimed insofar as it is aimed at a pure thought, at an objectless objective concept more profound than any subject: the figure of a God more internal than my own Anteriority, grasped by the metaphysical, nonpsychological, apprehension of self-consciousness in the memoria Dei. As the "intensities of emanation" were turned back into intention (memory "in advance"), contention definitively picks up the "intensities of immanence," in such a way that the centripetal motion of gathering founds and justifies the centrifugal aim. Bathing in God, I can take aim at something else. Thus, far from supposing the wholly Aristotelian extrinsic determination of knowing through the object—that something that must be allowed to appear without doing it violence because the criterion of truth resides within it—the intentionality of cognition is detached from the philosophical realism of the formal (and not absolute-real) identity between subject and object such as it is in itself, and depends no longer on anything other than the intuition of God within Me; that is to say, on the primacy of the will over the order of nature.200 The soul is no longer "in a certain way" all things (Aristotle), nor even the center of all things (Plotinus). Recognizing in God the efficient cause of its certitude in itself, the soul is at the foundation of all things. So, too, is the "classical" world of representation, founded on the metaphysics of the idea of the divine. "Noli foras ire," says Saint Augustine, "in te redi, in interior homine habitat veritas" (Do not wish to go out; go back into yourself. Truth dwells in the inner man). These are the lines widi which Husserl ends his Introduction to Phenomenology, or Cartesian Meditations. To conclude, let us record this fact and basis of transcendence: that it is in the nature of Christianity to be delivered up to this new immanence. To this bears witness, at the edge

136,7

of contrary interests, the entire urban theology of the Middle Ages; and its extreme consequences for morality and theology are explicated by William of Ockham when he disengages the "voluntarist" thesis of the autonomy of the subject in faith from the elements that threatened its dynamism. Via Luther, the most radical critical sense of the Ockhamian operation will determine the definitive interiorization of the a priori in the immanence of the transcendental /, in its activity limited to the esse objectivum or intentionale of the phenomenal world. I wanted Saint John of the Cross's testimony to serve as the signpost for this chapter on Augustine's novitas. It appears there that "in the process of revealing one thing, God does not always display the other." This is because I wished to show in time, in the genesis and theological synthesis of time, the authority of his critical competence. Knowing now what covers over such an organization—to which is posted Ernst Bloch's famous dictum, "Where deliverance grows, so grows peril" — but having barely drafted what is discovered at its pleasure, we now need to raise the question: what is its process in the world? "For if you annihilate the Cosmos but are not yourselves annihilated, you will dominate all of creation and everything that perishes" (Stromata IV, 13-89). To be continued, then: the concept of Augustine in the institution of the West and the putting to work of his "nihilist" genealogies, tactics, and strategies.

T h e T i m e o f Novitas: S a i n t A u g u s t i n e

This page intentionally left blank

... Now, it is indeed the sight of the objective world that extricates us from intellectual self-contemplation, from the state of bliss. In that respect, then, Condillac might have said: As soon as the world ceased to be a thing in itself for us, as soon as the ideal reality became objective, and as soon as the intellectual world became an object for us, it became clear that we had fallen from our state of bliss.

Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, Philosophical Letters on Dogmatism and Criticism

Fides Efficas

F

O

U

R

Fides Efficax

. . . ilia machina, id est mundus [that machine is the world]...

William of Conches, In Timaeum

I 1033: The Romance of the World " D E S C R I P T I O N S OF disturbing anomalies in fire, in water, in the heavens, and in the bowels of earth constituted the main topic of the chronicles written by the monks of that time."1 While the dreaded year 1033 draws near, the signs of a general disarray multiply. The order of the seasons and the elements, and the cosmic order, vacillate. Famine. Eclipse. Days of rage, the Wrath of God plunges the world into a lunar pallor. It is written: the millennium of the Passion, the anniversary of the death of God "when a thousand years shall have passed," will mark the end of the world, the end of man, the end of time. The Parousia of the Last Day.

The light dwindles. Chaos settles in. Judgment Day draws near. All by the book, right on schedule, with no way out. Several years, several moments earlier—the pain is extreme in wishing to count a time already breathing cataclysm, gone crazy from the funereal avatars that punctuate it—the last vestiges of the empire disappeared. Swept away in the course of the "fantastic" rides of warlike squads in the pay of the new sires. In their wake arises the promising cinder of that "penitence scourge" Rodulfus Glabcr tells us about in his Histories. It's that the imbecillitas regis has succeeded the sacred reign of the two-headed sovereign, divided between heaven and earth in order to apply down here the celestial model of the Lord's Peace, aiming in the sky at the final proposition of all social organization so that everyone remains, in Charlemagne's words, in one's life purpose and in order. Unanimiter.2 In other words, the hierarchical principle of the law of unity, incarnated in the body of the king as in the body of a world whose kosmos remains its unbroached figure. From which stems a condition and a postulate of the world empire: that to the one's divine intention responds the other's territorial extension—so much so that the extensio of the imperium is the form of Carolingian times, of the time over which the emperor asserts himself to be the supreme master. Caught in an immobile universe congealed in the routine rhythms of rural life and regulated by a wholly external principle of political order, the enterprise of conquest had no function other than integration, no potential other than inclusion. As long as it lasts, the permanent war directed toward an outside that had to be subdued animates on the surface only a virtually flat history "plugged into the weak circulation of reserves in equilibrium."3 The violent movements of conquest, the departures from the equilibrium brought about by pillaging, are so many circumstances. In the final analysis, they do not affect a purely static conception of order, in which the stability of things and human beings, qualitatively defined via the "exemplary" comprehension of the divine essence, assures the widespread repetition of the system. Earth and Bible are what every anomaly is fatally brought back to. Rex and pontifices, bellatores and oratores communicate in the glory of the King of Kings, the Christ, the God made man who founds the unity of the two hierarchies that divide up the body of the sovereign before spreading over the entire body of God's people, who are furthermore called upon to serve — as servi [slaves or serfs]. Georges Duby is right to recall that every game is played with three players. In

142,3

this schema, which can be called "Gelasian," dualist in its command structure, a tripartition is inscribed as soon as it is referred back to the common plane of the dominium.4 We have the impression of dwelling on what no longer is, in the vicinity of the year 1033, when a multiplying of aberrant movements is witnessed in the kosmos, and on earth, that strange violence of the elements invading it to its core.5 In these years, nonetheless, the famous tripartite theme of Bishops Adalberon and Gerard is formulated. Nothing paradoxical at all about this: it defines an enterprise of restoration right when "the laws are coming apart and [when] every bit of peace is already drifting away."6 Oratores, laboratores, bellatores: "From its origin, the human genus was divided into three groups, between those who pray, those who cultivate, and those who go to war."7 Between those who pray and those who go to war appear the men of the earth, agricolari, in the guise of little producers. These were alternatively taken aside and courted — but always dominated — by one or the other of the two parties, drawn to a face-off brought about by the crisis of royalty.8 "The manners of men have changed and the order has changed."9 So testify those assemblies of the Peace in God who divert the oath from its hierarchical usage (the vassal's oath of subordination) to promote the project of an egalitarian conjuratio (the mutual oadi, outlawed by Charlemagne), which spread the divine white tutelage over the maxima turba. It is up to that tutelage to offer protection against the forces of turbulence henceforth linked together in a single "military" body. The fear and resistances of our two Frankish bishops can be imagined: added to the danger of heresy entertained by these new, horizontal group solidarities with their aspirations to a general purification that would end by depriving the church of its auctoritas was die danger of the constitution of collective bodies susceptible of endowing the ongoing autonomization of social agents with a religious and spiritual basis. From this Peace in God would soon be inspired the communal institution. The commune, a new name, a hated name. An inorganic body, a foreign body, was die medieval city. According to Robert Fossier, it is "a scandal within the society of order, an anomaly within 'feudal' economics, a hotbed of perturbation within the divine opus."10 The commercial city, the autocephalic city, established upon the dissolution of the ritual, traditional forms of association (lineal, military, or tribal groupings) — to which the influence of Christianity contributed in no small way—showcases individuals who give economic shape to terrestrial autonomy. The homo economicus is an invention

Fides Efficax

of the medieval urban system;11 he is a malformation whose elements stalked by the devil, by money, are agitated with incessant motion. Strepitus urbis. When the "peace of the marketplace" is definitively substituted for the Peace of God — and the visio pads is succeeded by the theological pacification of sacred science—the translation of cosmos by mundus will have meaning and effect, the latter term signifying "everywhere in motion" (mundus dititur quasi undique motus) with the notion of a dynamic and no longer a static order, one endowed with its own efficacy. That is the efficacity of an organized collection of creatures (est mundus collectio creaturarum) and states (status) not able to find a "natural place" in the representation ad ordines of feudal society. Collectio, status—two terms called on to express the new universal of "conjoining" (of conjunction and framing). 1033: death of a Cosmos in which sublunary motion was conceived of only as transitory and ephemeral; birth of the World (mundus). All resurrections are of course possible, under the sign of medieval Augustinianism or Aristotelianism, but they necessarily take on the demeanor of synthesis in order to integrate into the march of history (saeculum) those elements disjoined from the imperial schema that make for what has fearlessly been called the eleventh century's "modernity." The limit from which the kosmos bends. The "cyclo-phoric" vision declines, withdraws before the "violence" of the motion that has become a state, before the letter. The state of the world, which obeys a general economy that develops in time (series temporum, to use an expression present in the writing of Rodulfus Glaber as well as Hugh of SaintVictor).12 On this depends the consciousness of an aetas modernas. Rhythmed by the hours of church services, cosmic time, stuffed for the present into the heart of the monasteries, does not cease for that matter to claim its rights on eternity. On the contrary. But would the outburst of monasticism have attained that scope if being-z'w-the-world had not seen a proliferation of accidents able to upset the circular rhythms of the celestial spheres and the just, stable hierarchies of the ordines^ In this celestial city proclaimed to be by the autarchical ideal—paradisus claustralis—cosmic time will find itself confronted in the keenest fashion by the shaking up of time that the new society raises. Cluny, Citeaux—each in its turn will have the bitter experience of being sent out to the most advanced outposts of the model of urban exploitation so reviled. How could it be otherwise? The monastery was in fact a new kind ofpolis: an association, or rather, a close brotherhood of likeminded people, not coming together just for occasional ceremonies, but for permanent

144,5

cohabitation... [Thus] it was in the monastery that the ideal purposes of the city were sorted out, kept alive, and eventually renewed. It was here, too, that the practical value of restraint, order, regularity, honesty, inner discipline was established, before these qualities were passed over to the medieval town and post-medieval capitalism, in the form of inventions and business practices: the clock, the account book, the ordered day.i3

Here is something to reflect on — before crassly opposing "an ecclesiastical division of time to a secular division" (Gustav Bilfinger, 142) work clock, town clock, and church clock—if the monastic milieu was indeed the great master in the use oi schedules.u Both black friars and white friars, coinciding in this moment with "the incipient development of actual capitalist instruments,"15 were accused of conducting themselves as usurers, as vendors of God's time... diabolical avatar of a conquering time whose progress is measured by ascendancy over the future and the intensive exploitation of space. If it is certain that human beings of the year 1000 felt extensively the tensions of material logic, "the contradiction between the pressure of the need for growth and the bad and inequitable enrichment it entailed,"16 it remained for them to discover the new reality of the mundus in the religious logic of terrestrial establishment: Adam as God's Laborer. The spiritual movement carried along by the notions of person and moral intention (the morals of intention, with the reemergence of the great Augustinian theme of intention as the "countenance of the soul") will offer a sufficiently efficacious vector, in fact, to place Saint Bernard—who qualified himself as the "chimera of his time" — next to Abelard.17 Along the same line, the mastery of nature "rhymes" with individualization, or the interiorization of faith.18 1033: birth of a world in motion,19 destined to be tamed by humankind in its pursuit of the work of creation, but also, significantly, the birth of him whom the Middle Ages would call by the name of Alter Augustinus and whom modern times hesitate to "situate" (the latter perhaps corroborating the former). A return to the purity of the Benedictine tradition, or a decisive step toward scholasticism whose first representative he would be?20 I mean to speak of Saint Anselm, author of the so-called ontological proof insofar as it seems to be based not on the essence of God but on the idea of God such as it is unveiled to our minds. Brehier is one to appreciate the "daring" of this procedure, "for it meant that one could meditate on God without benefit of the instruction given by the Church."21 It was in any case to take the risk of seeing—against its author's wishes22 — logical truth become the guarantor of

F i d e s Ef fi ca j

ontological truth. With the result of giving an utterly other meaning to the assertion in De libero arbitrio that the will ought to be considered in its very essence as a power. (It being said that all of Abelard's dialectical genius would be needed for the will in its dynamism, organized toward an end, disengaged from a morals of nature, to turn away from the natural goodness of human action and to posit the good inasmuch as it is presented by my reason; without taking into account the determination of Duns Scotus and William of Ockham to see moral action and voluntary action defined a priori.) At the risk of anachronism, the decoding that threatens the Proslogion's realist epistemology should be marked right from the onset on the metaphysical side, and, along with it, the hierarchical doctrine of truth exposited in De veritate, where it was shown that (a) every truth takes part in a single Truth, which is the primary cause of everything true, and which is God; (b) every truth is a "correctness" whose immediate cause is found in the object that measures and regulates the thought insofar as the (objective) truth that belongs to it is caused by God; and (c) caused by the preceding truths, the truth reflected in propositions and in thought in turn causes no other. To the point of making Anselm in his proof the major "exponent" of the reversal of the "realist" theology of cognition, following an obligatory and, as a consequence, immediately formalizable model as follows: (r) inverts (b), (b) diverts (a) (see part III, "1300: The Capture of Being"). For now, let's acknowledge that the shift, at the outset of the thirteenth century, from the question "cur Deus Homo?" to that of humanity's function in the universe — "cur homo?" — could have been wrought under the cover of the authority of Saint Anselm himself.23 Under the sign of year 1000, described in these terms by the Clunyist monk Rodulfus Glaber: "At the millennium of the Lord's Passion,... the happy face of the sky began to shine."24 This springtime of the world heralds the time of the exornatio mundi. There can be distinguished not only the adornment of the white mantle of churches that the world everywhere would don,25 but also, following Duby's proposed translation, an outfitting [appareillage]. Ornare is also to furnish [munir] (the mundus) with more efficient organs. After the time of audacity and "within" the time ofnovitas, comes the time of departure, the time of outfitting. Beginning in the twelfth century, esquiper means "to embark." And what if we admit that we are "embarked"? In this, we are the inheritors of a "conjoining," of a writing that already "tugs at its moorings, aspires to drift away, impugns the present of the voice, complexifies itself, proclaims its existence outside of us, outside of this place,"26 throws itself toward (an open future); like a continuous voyage, this opening of subjective play with time

146,7

that takes hold of the poetic ornatus, is the adventure ofromanz in its birth, of litteratura in its ever renewed course of travel (iterum)—that translater that makes the world come to pass in the troueiire of the mythic cosmos.27 This material set of tools, freed from the constraints of the imperial schema, is the dynamism of the social outfitting turned toward the intensive exploitation of what is within, but also the mental outfitting, whose modus essendi, while having encountered the material dynamics of the conquest of time and of the appropriation of space (the system of the fall-world), gets ready to "pilot" the new positivity of the modi operandi. Social dynamism, "transcendental" dynamism: here it is that the medieval equation of the Ordo novus clearly makes its resolution depend on the integration of these two factors. Influence, resonance, determination, or correspondence ... Gauchet is not wrong to judge the question undecidable a priori. Before plunging into that twelfth century, about which the classic term, since Charles H. Haskins, is the equivocal notion of "Renaissance," we ought to reconsider, then, on a less impressionistic level, a certain number of scattered indications, drawn from that tight ensemble of multiple relations that is the Middle Ages. Not so much, by the way, to decide between these two lines of interpretation as to disengage from that inextricable "empirico-transcendental" doublet the problem of the place and function, the field of presence, of the theological statement in its age of triumph. Have no fear about the final, unifying point of this discourse: it suffices to try out its analysis to find oneself led back, in obliquo, to the question of the conditions of internal possibilities, to the genesis of the theological age. There is a willing agreement to acknowledge that the great advances of the eleventh through thirteenth centuries are carried out under the ecclesiastical aegis: the church controlled daily time as well as historical time, the framing of space with that checkerboard of parishes destined to become the basic cell of the state structure, the educational system, and the direction of consciences; the church held in its hands the foundations of power, justice, and the accumulation of wealth — in short, "it would be quicker to inventory what the church did not control: in theory, nothing." If we went to the point of asserting that the church appears to be the principal driving force behind the feudal system, that it organized not only reproduction but also the very relations of production, that theological function is, remarkably, still considered by most historians as "an affair of much less import," a strange performance in whose arcana, if one chose to dive into them, one would at best find "a few occasions for diversion."28

Fides Effi cax

With historians of philosophy, on the other hand, social dynamics are either haughtily ignored (the reverse of the preceding situation) or there implicitly reigns what one could call a spontaneous philosophy of reflection. In the one case, they call it quits, so to say, with regard to time understood as a historical category (the historial in Heidegger undoubtedly represents its most subtle and obsessive elaboration); in the other case, they refer the time of concepts back to a theory of the historical subject secretly nourished by the most mechanistic of materialisms: one all the less dialectical, that is to say, speculative, since it remains unthought. If great authors by definition escape the average profile, this state of things must at least be mentioned in order to indicate the difficulty one has in extracting oneself in vivo, in concreto, from an "economistic" analysis whose unifying effect has long limited the field of history to the point of determining the foundation of every possible historicity. Is not its force finally that of common sense? Dare we deny that there must first be the development of the material base so that feudalism can then develop and finally formalize its own models of legitimation? We'll agree to play the game, and to face the problem of the feudal revolution and the new space-time of the exornatio mundi. Problem: historians are the ones who say right away that they are seeking an answer to the question of why this great outbreak, these local whirlwinds, these material turbulences, this shake-up of time took place. Why this awakening rather than the yawning and closed gape of history? Marc Bloch: Now the one essential prerequisite for colonisation is a ready supply of colonists; and land reclamation is impossible unless the exisiting labour force can be augmented—though in this context it would be more correct to say it was impossible in the absence of technological advance on a scale far beyond the grasp of eleventh and twelfth century societies. So it looks as though only a spontaneous and significant increase in population can account for the immense advances made at this period in the occupation of the soil. Admittedly this merely pushes the problem one stage further back, into a position where at present it must remain insoluble: has anyone yet offered a convincing explanation for demographic fluctuation?29

So, to get to the point: here, the legitimacy of research into a material and linear causality is asserted simultaneously with the delineation of a veritable limit to the evolutionary logic of history. Closer to my view is Robert Fossier: Why this change?... Until now, historians have not succeeded in finding a truly satisfying explanation... Technical progress is one of these... Demographic explosions [are another]...

148,9

Unfortunately, it will be remarked that overviews of these two potent and determining causes have not yielded an answer to the question, for developments in technology like those in population themselves in turn beg to be explained.30

This is what, to my mind, justifies Alain Guerreau's evocation of a veritable aporia of historical discourse. All the more so, since the pursuit of this inquiry makes it apparent that the aporia about the regimen of consistency with regard to the process of historical causality throws us into a second difficulty regarding the consistency of the feudal regime. This was a theme dear to the great historians of the nineteenth century, who were able to oppose feudal form, understood as a metastable equilibrium of available forces, with a thought of forces investing and overflowing the feudal unity. They soon came to the paradoxical idea that "feudalism" never existed. "We only glimpse its germs," writes Guizot, "and observe the work forming this system that was never formed; here and there on our soil, we encounter the materials for that edifice that was never really built."31 And for good reason, if its laws arise from a strange statics always in excess or at fault, if its global situation is a sum of anomalies that give a disarticulated, exploded appearance to lordship. To such a point that the allodium (become practically synonymous with the Roman notion of proprietas) might seem the rule, with fiefs being the exception. Everywhere, despite the downward reclassification of allodial freeholders to the benefit of land held in tenure, "feudalism" runs up against "allodialism," which reconstitutes itself in a hundred ways (sales and exchanges of lands, frauds, customs, land clearings...)— or even comes into play against the strengthening of monarchical power, as in the chansons of Giart de Vienne and Girart de Roussillon (recall in passing that fief problems form the obligatory story line of the chansons de geste). At the base as well as at the apex of the feudal pyramid — that is, everywhere — the logic of vassal integration and of "cellular confinement" comes up against the endlessly renascent dynamics of autonomization that makes it particularly difficult to trace the boundary between allodial freeholders and tenant holders. Would you like a blunt indication that escaped the contradictory analyses of historians?32 It is the commune and administrative monarchy, it is the emergence of the "market" that feudalism carried in its breast. Whence the intrinsic instability of feudal society and of a system that, while based on the uncasing of the socius, intends to calm that play by mastering its dissolving effects (in particular through the regime of tenure). Feudalism is in reality a crypto-verb33—whose main inflection is given by the rise of cities and commerce — that we have wished to reduce to a

Fides Efficax

noun, the fief. It is permissible to wonder whether such an importance was not attributed to it, as Jacques Flach suggests, in order to apprehend feudalism as an organic -whole, as a form of government that would have succeeded Carolingian monarchy and thus ruled France for long centuries. Historians have tried to describe the essential gearwheels of this government, then to show them in action. To do so, they have taken their documents from all sources, from all periods, from the ninth to the fifteenth centuries. Finally, they came up with a juridical system that is very complete and very well organized with just one fault: that of having never existed.3*

It could be made more evident that feudalism is neither a "state" nor a "stage" nor a "mode of production," in which the landholding lordship in and of itself formed the material base for the ensemble of social relations. As Marx recalls (it is too often forgotten), only with the modern world does the mode of production of material life dominate the development of social, political, and intellectual life. In the Middle Ages Catholicism reigned, in Athens and Rome politics did. Still, it remains to be understood "why in one case politics, in the other case Catholicism played the chief part."35 For Flach, the crumbling of the great domains is what brought the substitution of the religious bond for the domanial bond, that is, for the direct system of domination and servitude. This process is pursued in the ensuing centuries, until the model of the rural commune is fully realized. I would like to present in summary fashion the hypothesis of a triple reversal of perspective. For lack of being able to open the way to a global solution, this hypothesis might at least displace certain terms of the problem of European expansion, of the "takeoff" [de'collage] of the mundus (the world economy).36 What follows will successively tackle three relations that are tightly imbricated within each other: town/country, interior/exterior, dominant/dominated. With regard to the first two axes, remember that in his thesis on the Macon region, Duby painted a very different picture of what passes for the rule; the progress of commercial circulation, he proposed, is at the origin of the urban outbreak, which itself provoked various upheavals in the countryside.37 Dispensed from having to undo great certitudes of economic evolutionism and from having to overturn the established chronology, let's take this last proposition seriously. It will then be perceived that in the world of the very high Middle Ages — that is to say, very late antiquity—not only have towns just about disappeared, but also, in a certain fashion, the villages and peasants who would often have had to identify themselves with villae.38 Installed in the shadow of Frankish power, the system of the neo-slaveholding villa dominates the countryside with-

150,1

out, however, quantitatively prevailing there.39 With the crisis of the state, a tendency toward dismemberment is observed to the benefit of small production by peasant and village.40 Try to ignore for the moment the multiple causes of the demise of domanial yoke in order to better close in on the problem. Geographers know the difficulty here. As for medievalists, without a doubt they are today the most ill equipped to answer the question: where does a village end and a town begin? Physical (the existence of walls), juridical, and economic criteria have in fact become inapplicable one after the other. Numerous villages are fortified, a number of "communes" were little rural burgs where the villagers were called "burghers," villages are places for fairs and markets while the most important towns long maintain strong rural traditions— In the final analysis, there only remains the criterion of the extent of domination (and colonization) over the surrounding area, following a rule of greater complexity for the relation involved: field, village, town, city. Should we be surprised to find at the base of this pyramid of unequal exchange that the holders of power were inclined, and increasingly so, to favor the concentration of the peasant habitat in order to increase manorial revenues and to palliate the decline of state functions? Thus understood, through this agrarian revolution and renewal of the countryside, one finds the idea of an urban origin of agriculture, which presupposes plenitude — and not the opposite.41 But while (re-)creating the country and establishing a mercantile relation with it, the town not only supposes that earth and men are sufficiently "deterritorialized" and "individualized" to enter into its web. It also supposes the circulation that makes it exist and that, at the appointed time, unplugs the town's economic function from the "tributary" circuit linked to its political function. Here we are brought back to Duby's first proposition: to the problem of the origin of the "commercial revolution," of the perpetuum mobile. Now, at the beginning of the ninth century one witnesses the multiplication of edicts aimed at severely controlling commerce outside the Carolingian empire. In vain, however, since the collapse of imperial authority coincides with the prodigious development of commerce in the South, sustained by the continuous flourishing of the Muslim world for almost three centuries. It might be said that the empire, already internally undermined, through contact with Islam became a kind of backward area. The situation will be reversed when the Latin world's military expeditions give direct access to the wealth accumulated by Islam. According to this analysis, which — a bit unilaterally, without a doubt—makes the flourishing of the medieval West into the counterstroke for the formation of the Muslim world,

Fides Efficas

the eleventh century's "boom" would be tied to revenge on Islam. To the revenge of a nascent world economy upon a world empire in decline. It is to Maurice Lombard's credit to have demonstrated the radiating strength of the Muslim urban centers in opposition to the decomposition of what, according to Duby, would never have amounted to anything more than "a village district extended to the dimensions of the universe," governed by an economy of self-sufficiency and gift giving.42 "It tolerated commerce only when its purpose was to make good occasional shortages in domestic output," the golden rule being to see that "it should not be necessary to request or buy anything from outside," in Charlemagne's words. Charlemagne: the last man who thought he could definitively stabilize prices by fixing \h&justium pretium of provisions, in order "not to allow economic activities to disturb the order willed by God."43 An order, a cosmos, that was not created in the likeness of money—that ignored, or wanted to ignore, monetary liquidity and social mobility, and its political analogon: the abstraction of power in institutions — that conjured away the becoming mundanity \mondanisation], the becoming world [mondialisation] of the cosmos.44 Although partially explaining the transformation of the modes of inhabiting and utilizing the soil, "commercial logic" ought not to hide the importance of one factor whose measure it would have trouble giving by itself: the perishing of the imperial state. Whence the need for a global dynamics escaping the explanation of exchange by exchange in order to integrate the relation of dominium under the rubric of internal cause. To take up the spirit of Bloch's question: why and how does the slavery of the servi manuales come to an end, if serfdom no longer exists as the dominant relation when "feudalism" is affirmed at the level of the whole socius?45 Do we need to propose the hypothesis of the introduction of new technologies that made prior relations of production inadequate, to argue about the will of the lords to increase production in response to a demand whose origin we can only guess, given that "in an immobile atmosphere, the smallest breeze is important"?46 The most mechanical materialism would find itself justified, even to the point of making the master into the hidden motor of the movements of individual and collective moment of emancipation—that is to say, the social crisis of the ninth and tenth centuries!—as the "domiciling" of slaves has been explained through a calculation founded on the economic rationality of the great landowners.47 Do you want a more subtle analysis? Turn the conspiracies of villani and peasant revolts into the living reflection of the contradiction between the blockage exerted by the former, neoslaveholding relations of production and the high level attained by the forces of

152,3

production. But besides the fact that the latter is far from being demonstrated, and despite the existence of a "technological revolution" about which we agree today that it preceded to a certain extent the setting up of feudal structures, "economism always makes one smile" as Pierre Dockes exclaims. Wouldn't he have to assert in the same movement the regressive character of the great unit of production in which the chain gang of wage earners works? Let's examine, rather, on the lords' side, what is put in place as new forms of exploitation regrouped under the appellation of banal powers. An indirect exploitation founded upon "common" law, the ban puts into play rights linked to justice, the magnum emolumentum indissociable from the financial system, or economic rights connected to monopolies. To this account belong the set of user privileges (for mills, ovens, winepresses...) that henceforth constitute the essential profits of the new lordship. The latter responds to the social impossibility of the prior (direct) forms of landed domination based on taxes, serfdom, and corvees; based solely on rents collected in the form of work. With the appearance of natural rent, which already supposes that the peasant is no longer motivated by the whip but by the law (Marx), responsible for himself, and the appearance of pecuniary rent, which puts an important fraction of production under the hold of monetary wealth, the landed manor yielded to the political, juridical, and economic manor. The manor is no longer a piece of land but a "set of rights" (Lucien Febvre). Far from having been introduced to favor the productivity of work simply put, the banal mill of which such fuss has been made concretizes the manorial reaction to the autonomizing of social actors from whom profits are to be drawn by channeling their "dynamism." If the mill ended up bringing a certain increase to the total product, "it was above all a way of redistributing income, increasing the surplus that accrued to the masters,"48 a means of getting around the peasant conquests of rights over their tenancy. Generating a continuous web of constraints extended to all men; "banal" power is the response to "the breakup of property into various real rights, with individual or collective titularies" (Raymond Delatouche). A certain number of decisive facts can be understood from this. First in line is the following: a world in motion, governed by a hierarchy that is more horizontal than vertical—far from the equilibrium of the three orders sacralized in the form of obedientia—is indissociable from the new division of power and wealth to the extent that that world depends on that diagrammatic mutation of power relations that is actualized according to a deterritorialized schema of integration and exploitation: the process of subjectivation and social subjugation, subjective right and indirect tax. "Feudalism" is a "de jure" reaction to the autonomizing process

Fides Efficax

determining itself within the relations of force opened by the dismantling of the imperial structure at the moment its military enterprises put it in contact with the most intense zones of exchange. If the "exogenous" factor is insufficient to make us share in Charlemagne's oft-expressed fear of seeing the state's link with its soldier peasants broken, simply turn to the logic of the concentration of lands (shrinking of differences in status—freeborn and servile tenure—indebtedness, lowering of social rank, emergence of a real estate market...) to be convinced: this is the economic uncasing that was carried along by the "successes" of the imperial state, which undermined its own social base, rendering impossible in turn the prior public — direct, extensive — form of coercion. It has often been said that feudalization is indissociable from a privatization of power, from an invasion of the private affecting the whole of the political hierarchy.49 From the king, whose powers wore the increasingly glaring aspect of a private property, quickly imitated by princes henceforth holding the portion of the realm subject to their authority as an annex to their own home, all the way down to counts, who tended to treat the ensemble of the inhabitants in the territory subject to their ban as members of their familia. In the manner of those knights qualified as privati, they had to "confide" in themselves. Commendatio, the term is everywhere the same. The patrimonial character of political strength, the transactional formula of its rights: it is "custom" and also, precisely, what "in classical law distinguished the res privatae (which were in commercio, in patrimonio) from the respublicae."50 It can be seen to what point the private/public opposition becomes arbitrary (it was already weak under the Roman Empire) as soon as the private appropriates the sphere of the publicus, subject to the fragmentation of power and the autonomization of its subjects. There is nothing to choose: all is private and all is public in feudalized society. "Feudal" people had only this image of their potency. The private and the public are no longer an affair of place (the res publica, domestic space defined by enclosure: res privata, res familiar is), but an affair of power that is an affair of time. And in at least two senses. If the public emergence of the private constitutes the subjectivation mode of the new social outfitting, the private as a dimension of the public institutes a new figure of subjectivity that finishes breaking the circle of the cosmos by opening the totality of the world onto subjective time, by turning the ideal order over to the centrifugal forces that undermine it, over to the reality of individual interests that divide it. (Bringing them out into the light of day, the Cycle

154,5

of the Rebellious Barons actively reproduces such a setting-in-motion of the world and its subjective investment under the raw traits of a "metaphysics of the hero," mysteriously elected by God to realize his designs in a climate of gross savagery. God abandons the emperor, the representative of the divine order on earth, to clothe his hero in a Christian appearance; God is "himself torn between serene order and chaotic grandeur": through the chanson de geste, the mythical expression of the individualized time of conflict is what inscribes itself at the origin of medieval civilization, and underscores the difficulty of "establishing a Christian society in an anarchical and still barbarian world." Later, with the Mart Artu the Arthurian cycle in prose ascertains the impossibility of "establishing an evangelical Christian society in a feudal world policed in appearance only.")51 For the ensemble of time, already freed by Saint Augustine from the formal order of cosmic movement, to fragment and scatter itself in a world forever in motion, for it to reflect itself in the mobile image of the mundus—that is the condition for the shift from the time of novitas to the exomatio mundi, to the time of outfitting, to the outfitting of time toward the infinite becoming-unequal proper to the capitalistic universe (of subjectivity). (A necessary but not a sufficient condition, for only abstract time can ensure an effective function of "capitalization.") An affair of time, finally, in a more immediate sense: if being free is to participate no longer in the rights and duties fixed by law, power relations having literally sucked in the private sphere, there would be de jure less and less "free" time, and paradoxically "less and less private life because power in all its forms had become more and more private." More and more "indirect," too. With the representation of humanity wholly immersed in a divine privacy (which places that humanity within what Duby again calls "the interlocking networks of subordinate territories in God's private domain"), the importance of the religious field seals in its sanctifying manner the collapse of the two notions. As soon as constraint alone no longer allows for that continuum of domination to be assured, below which relations of force degenerate into violent oppositions that constantly feed the centrifugal desires of emancipation, and while the last expressions of the ancient notion of servitude were disappearing and the first wage forms of free and unfettered labor were appearing, a need was felt to reconquer an ideal space that would be able to reaffirm the individual's subjection to the frame that contains and maintains one imbricated in the webs of dependency answered for by "custom." Led along by a church tending to posit itself at the foundation of every jurisdiction, Romanesque art had to express as close as possible this

Fides Efficax

mission of enfeoffing heterogeneous elements with variable characters, defined by the ensemble to which they belong rather than by their own internal law.52 Romanesque sculpture, if it is indeed (strictly) "subordinated to the interpretation of space by architecture,"53 is the ideal measure of feudal space, whose principle it wishes to make absolute. Milieu-space (hierarchical and qualitative), and not limit-space, with which sculpture forms a block. Constricted to the order of Walls, "it is the wall itself." Mass art. Dominated by the expectation of a final return that would loop time up with itself, Romanesque art strives with all its forces to rejoin the cosmic order willed by God. God who made space into the measure of man, into the measure of a man who in turn was supposed to fix the hierarchical place belonging to things in a "qualitative cosmology." Feudalism is (a) Vision in the sense that \hzfeudal regime, reduced to a set of encapsulated patronages—say, the image all the princes of that time give themselves of their own power54 — exists only in representation, as staged by the Romanesque artist. "By his manner of willing his art... [he] offers us his way of willing the world."55 A world dominated by the person of the Lord God (the monumental perspective of Christ-the-judge watching the faithful file past under the tympanum of the Last Judgment), with the respect for traditio that is animated by a belief in the omni-potence of the past (a closed composition that distances itself from us, is constructed without us). By the way the edifice is put together with stones, Peter Damian will say, the church proposes the image of the immense City of God formed by all Christians. The church offers the ideal image of feudal society. Isn't the omnipotence of the Church Wall the fact that innumerable stones are set next to each other "so precisely that the joints do not appear and the whole mass seems as one rock" (John of Salisbury)? With the Carolingian technique, the stones are no longer drowned in mortar, their singularities are used in the construction process— at the risk of breaking the edifice's cohesion if their excessively strong "individuality" no longer permits them to be bound together by the thinnest joint. Whence also, in the work of Peter Damian, that theme of Christian universalism that is now indissociable from the call for reform. Reform alone allows for proposing to christianitas in its ensemble the model of a recovered religious perfection as the foundation for a collective privacy re-forming itself around the notion of the "common good." Were monks not seen rising up against the authority of their abbot? Communities renouncing the rules of austerity and abandoning the traditional practices of autarky? "Masters of artifice" (artifex doctor) asserting the supremacy of reason, denying the reality of transubstantiation, criticizing the doctrina orthodoxorum of the realism of universals under the pretext that indi-

156,7

viduals alone have a reality "in the literal sense," giving themselves over finally to the diabolical temptations of human science and lending themselves to the pride of the artist instead of cultivating "the terrain of the human heart"? In short, despite the allegorical moralizings of contemptus saeculi, stone continues to work until "the element emancipates itself from the determinisms to which Romanesque artists enjoyed subjugating it..., [and] the architectural or ornamental framework no longer exerts any tension on the figure it contains."56 But already, in accordance with what was happening in feudal society, this tension did not take place without inflecting those figures puffed out toward the light, buttressed as if striving to escape the architecture; without the principle of symmetry appearing to be a principle of doubling that gives a sense of monstrosity to the connection between movements, without its being doubled by a principle of dissymmetry that encourages the proliferation of alterity. Formosa deformitas of bodies that are too long with excessively tiny heads, bent by the violence of a mystical thrust; of squatty bodies with fat, hard heads and a peasant aspect, connoted as a "bestially human workforce, "57 some holding in their hand the miser's purse, beasts in a state of fusion whose rhythmic agitation, "in making multiple lives abound inside a single body, had crossed a dread threshold, destroyed the principle of the unique in order to recompose a complex unity."58 Giants, dwarfs, and beasts. An entire family of intermediary beings prey to the convulsive obsession of "mobility" inscribe on the pediment of Romanesque churches the fulgurating representation of the Last Day, the created being's monstrous and pathetic attempt to create something in turn. While the armature begins to bend under the weight of the figures, while monsters threaten to multiply in liberty, and while the earth shudders with pride, "an idea slowly made its way to the surface: the terrifying God.. .was none other than the Son, that is, man himself" discovering himself as a person engaged within the temporal.59 The heroic age of the Father's vision is succeeded by the organic age of the Son's reason, the Son whose grandeur is made manifest by the order of creation. The Romanesque spatium sought to identify de visu salvation and blind submission to the Lord of the Old Testament in the stretching or crushing of figures. But this was without counting on the disintegration of the firm and compact mass of doctrinaire Christianity shaken by the "springtide" that runs through "those rough figures, those barely quarried heads and bodies" (Elie Faure). Its bursting forth would promote theological science, the urbane theology of the God-Man, to the rank of epicenter for a civilization that had become alien to the system of traditional relations: Gothic civilization, centered around the cathedral-school.

Fides Effica;

The city—one might as well say money, that is, what is most deterritorializecl — is that on which takes place a general reterritorializing of flows passing under the domination of states in gestation. Urban art, royal art, Gothic art with "its immense systems of stone, rigorously conceived and reasoned,"60 celebrates the emergence of an administrative power exerted upon functional groups each of which has its place well defined within a coherent ensemble. This is the "logic of the skeleton," this is the great rule of "formal subordinations" that has the same forms repeat themselves at different "logical levels," according to a strictly hierarchized system of compartmentalization. Whence an iconographic fixity, a new metrics resulting from the analytical treatment and juxtaposition of forms that, for having acquired their own intrinsic value, as though "centered around an axis within [themselves]," no longer change.61 Function determines form. This academicism, this architectural conformism—the characterizations come from Focillon, evoking the "monotonous and perfect combinations, hard and brittle forms that have lost the impetus of discovery, the generosity of sap"—seal within stone the ideal project, the material ideal and social idealism of the Gothic city. The unity of absolute structure designed to channel (and no longer to compress) that potent and jumbled life that the Romanesque cortex was no longer able to contain. Is this to say that Gothic art merely carried on from, if not took the place of, Romanesque art? Recall instead Panofsky's trenchant assertion—that between scholastic thought and Gothic architecture, there exists a veritable relation of cause and effect that is the secret of their connection—and the debates that statement has occasioned, as summarized by Andre Scobeltzine: (1) the assertion merely pushes the essential problem back, since it does not explain the appearance and development of this scholastics that is supposed to have had such an influence; and (2) in any case, this genre of explication could not be applied to the Romanesque era.62 To this double objection, a single response can be presented, if the mutation consists precisely in the fact that discursive formations, or rather enunciative events, are from here on what carry out an overt capitalization within the modular complexity of different elements. From molar relations of power to molecular elements of existential manifestation. The monetary connection that marks "the way in which decoded and deterritorialized flows boost each other" is answered by the semiotic conjugation of these same flows, indicating something "like a point of accumulation that plugs or seals the lines of flight."63 This "conjugation" is inflected in the mode of the reign of linguistic signs over sensory and concrete signs. As the hand is to the body, logic is the instrument of all knowledge; it allows everything to be apprehended. It substitutes senseless foresight for the meek meditation on the Lord's will; it illegit-

158,9

imately dominates where his omni-potence legitimately reigned — so argues Peter Damian in his polemics against the Abbot Desire (!) by appealing to the growth of grain (ever that exclusivism based in the soil) and the resurrection of Lazarus. The theological age is above all the lexicographical age. So it goes, in the Victorines' activity of the preceding century, with the composition of a De nominibus ustensilium by Alexander Neckham, applying the new passion for division and distribution to the "mechanical arts" — adulterated arts if the old etymology of artes mechanicae from moechus, debauched, is to be believed; but, after all, casuistry oblige, the world of vice will not be the last to be concerned by the sovereign act of naming that leads to the principle of a universal taxonomy. The name appears as the point from which power becomes power to distribute (competans conjunctio), as the point toward which all the structures of theological language and science converge. Constructio petfecta, in this movement we can place the assertion by which theology is the first great technology of the Christian world.64 Its triumph is the "scientific" efficacy of theology turned into organized knowledge; it is the "juridical" efficacy of medieval logic, that of a generalized jurisprudence bringing conflict into the heart of speculation so as to undo its threads (subtilitas), to "conjugate" (conjure away) its forces; this triumph is that of a speculative grammar. There is no theological regulation without an extension of the territory of grammar raised to the rank of a major discipline, without the domination of grammaticus over the field of knowledge, without grammatical theology. Regula, Marie-Dominique Chenu remarks, is the vocabulary of grammarians transferred to theology. And certainly it is through contact with the impositio of a grammatical order that, caught within the need for a deduction from the rules of language, the (moral) thesis of intentio became logic. This (grammatical) dynamics of transcendence can be summed up, and the lesson from the proliferation of the treatises De modis significandi drawn, as follows: "Those who practiced the best grammatical critique were those who had the luck of being the best theologians."65 The theographical age, to follow the very title of Longuel de Clairvaux's work Theographia,66 would lead to the Grammatica speculativa of Thomas of Erfurt (long attributed to Duns Scotus) in which grammar, in its displacement of interest from etymology to syntax (ratio consignificandi, sermo congnms, constructibilia...), no longer has any value except through the abstract formulas of logic and ontotheology. For logic to begin already to replace what is rational and immediately operational in grammar (Hugh of Saint-Victor, for whom grammar is no more than a part of logic,67 Duns Scotus, and especially William of Ockham) overturns everything: the triumph of grammar in the Middle Ages is the triumph of logic; it overlaps in fact with

Fides Efficax

the eviction of grammar by dialectics, which ends by reducing language to the rank of a mere instrument of the intellect.68 In the meantime, already fortified by a textualization more horizontal than vertical by reason of which the subject turns out to be invested with sense (the sen of Erec et Enide that commands the entry into the Romanesque world of Chretien de Troyes), a wholly other romance [roman] appears: haunted by these problems of identity and of status that it had to overcome, resolutely installing itself in a personal sense of duration proper for the elimination of every transcendental stake with regard to man's destiny, in order to become realist or bourgeois, or "popular."69 The romance is no longer conceived in order to be seen, but rather written out to be read and not sung by some inspired poet, free to improvise the marvelous in verse. Puerilis disciplina poeticae, Alain of Lille would say, for whom only the expression of spiritual truth can still justify recourse to poetic fiction70; a little later, the purely logical analysis of nominalism will completely finish the devalorization of orality by rejecting it into the realm of the empirical: the realm of what is irregular and accidental. This romance, exemplified by Chretien de Troyes, reflects the new predominance of logic over rhetoric by making a juridical and normative, often parodic, use of dialectic, making the reader inclined to look behind the facts and circumstances for those universal reasons that authorize us to judge their consequences from the point of view of an ethics of relations.ll More profoundly, perhaps, it will be noticed that if language is no longer the instrument of the will (which it still was in the chanson de geste) but of reason, this reason necessarily takes a logical form as soon as the development of fiction strictly depends on it. Don't the propositions that make up this reason consignify independently of their referential value, in a formalized nothingness that is the very locus of logical necessity (Abelard's nil omnino)'? Thanks to which the work of narration very soon draws the text into becoming its own model: explicitly in the Prologue to Erec et Enide, and formally throughout the entire literature of the Grail: the Grail, or the reiteration of literality "under the ever renewed anamorphoses of narrative fiction" (Roger Dragonetti). At the same time, in what is accidental to it, it affirms the subjectivity of the narrator by a process of writing that invents itself, finds itself (se trouve; from trobar, troubadour) bringing the vulgar tongue to its barbaric essence, corrupting the Latinness it was supposedly "translating." Consequently, the Grail leads to the flowering of a poetic rationality that defeats any equivalence between language and truth, making its semantic consistency, its hypothetical necessity, spring forth into an intellection, a perception, an affection. And don't these avantures—of the knight, of the writing,

160,1

ofcbevalerie de letreiire — combine with each other in the manner of accidents whose interpretation is subordinate to the implied rhetorical equivocality of the conventional signs of allegory in the logical univocality of their linkages? Characteristic of medieval poetics, and in particular of Arthurian romance, this logical tension poses the whole problem of becoming in a "world of marvels," of changes in a substance relative to a sequence of events projected in a (in principle) measurable time where the linking of facts, from before to after, takes the place of meaning. "From this point of view, the itinerary of the knight is nothing other than this patient appropriation, this progressive mastery of time simultaneously revealed in its origin and in its becoming."72 At the end of the Quest, the final mystical writing on the motif of the Grail in medieval literature, when the return to the Orient has been accomplished, the adventure begins anew: under the sign of a narrative dynamics of transcendence. Off to conquer a real West—it's all the same. Begun right here. For the "adventure" integrates as an essential component—it must now be made explicit—a fundamental mutation on the level of religious education when the biblical lectio out loud, interspersed with commentaries in monastic schools, is replaced in urban schools by the disputatio and the dialectic of quaestiones seeking to establish, according to the "order of the discipline," the basic elements of discourse. Faith itself would arise from existimatio (Abelard) — from aestimatio73 — and imply probatio; "and the dogmatic formulation, come to specify the expression of revealed data, will be like all human utterances, laboriously obtained through multiple 'compositions and divisions,' through analyses incessantly recommenced, through long and patient approaches."74 Dominated by the juridical model of reasoning (the quaestio, the critical examination of the auctoritates, another term with a juridical resonance), carried along by a textual surface in a state of permanent reelaboration — the Summae are about to be built—theologia will finish by projecting onto Scripture its own architectural construction, fabrica spiritualis, its structural effect: Nam et ipsa, Scriptura structuram habet (Hugh of Saint-Victor, Didascalicon 6, 4). The Sacra structura is affirmed while, as an unforeseen consequence of that quarrel of Investitures that brought along the awakening of juridical activity, "custom" is codified in a written set of laws. This is the establishment of a judiciary system tending toward the progressive constitution of a juridical persona whose moral responsibility cannot be dissociated from the effacement of individual differences that serves the cause of monarchical centralization —just as for commodities, as value, all differences are effaced.

Fides Ef fleas

Monetary power coins itself here in the assumption of the law, which is exactly superimposed in the rigorous crease of the law of the written.75 The law gives maximum value to the logical possibilities of substitution and exchange to the detriment of the "natural" referent in the background unified "by the submission of particularity to a power that can only be a power outside the sphere in which these particular groups have their independence, that is, a monarchical power."76 It would still be necessary, though, for the teaching of writing—that broaching of the soul's interiority and of its living self-presence in the voice (vox) of the soliloquy with God — to become one of the principal tasks of the Universitas. Universitas: this word used to designate the corporation in general, and as a result, the sovereign city at the center of the universe. That was enough to raise the twelfth century to the rank of legal century, and to see the scriptorium oust the oratorium. John of Salisbury is a precious witness to this: the cohaerentia artium of eloquentia and sapientia is no longer understood in the Metalogicum in terms of the orator's formation but of the sapien's, in the framework of the civilis ratio of the scriptorium. Jean-Joseph Goux says it well: the ensemble branches out, forming a complex, pyramidal organization whose many-sided base would be constituted by the set of any given (sensory and concrete) signs of the world, and the summit only by linguistic signs and concepts. As for the middle of Gothic civilization, it is constituted by the exemplary information of matter on the basis of universal representations. (In these conditions, there is no longer any properly artistic Idea: "the passages in which we can recognize — or, rather, from which we can interpret—the aesthetic views of medieval Scholasticism are no more than auxiliary constructions for theological trains of thought" 77 —for theological rules, Tbeologicae regulae.) Paraphrasing Hegel in his Propaedeutic, we can thus express the reversal (and not only the "break") between the Romanesque and the Gothic. In Romanesque intuition, we have singular objects before us (that need to be framed, inserted, enfeoffed, etc.); Gothic thought refers them to each other, compares them. Through comparison, it brings out what they have in common and sets aside what distinguishes them from each other.78 In this way, it obtains, through abstraction, a generalized reality stripped of all its particularisms: the "generalized humanity" of the royal portal at Chartres. The space of intuition is succeeded by the time of abstraction, the time of the concept. Or again: the intuition of space is replaced by the concept of time. This reversal is not alien to Focillon's muffled complaint regretting that effervescence no longer aroused by the wind of the Apocalypse. We are not at the beginning of an evolution, we are at the end of an art, at the extremity of an era.

162,3

This is the Gothic break. Replacing the curve by one or more acute angles, the ogee decomposes movement into its elementary times, extracts a segmentary time from movement; just as in the architecture of books, by introducing into the letter angles that divide it up while putting it together, Gothic writing pushed textual division to the point of making evident the smallest unit logically conceivable.79 In discovering what must already be called an abstract time, the ogival mind vanquished the vertical weight that ivas crushing the "vessel" just as it blew away the compact column of the Romanesque manuscript unaware of the order of discourse. Gothic aesthetics is temporal architecture in the sense that this arbitrary time (it imposes its arbitration on movement) is at once the operator of the mechanical articulations of the structural building (in the form of a framework) and the potential of dematerialization, characteristic of the "northern transcendentalism" studied by Worringer. Let us note with a final word, then, since this first exploration of the medieval world must be brought to a close, that this earliest emergence of an abstract time turns out, while still sunken in stone, to be indissociable from its "commercialization," from its "monetarization": from its being put on the market. This is testified to by the utilization of a single argument applied to mercatores and to magistri liberi alike.80 Science is a gift of God and hence cannot be sold ("scientia est donum Dei, unde vendit non potest"); time is a gift of God and hence cannot be sold. It cannot be tolerated that the cosmic order of the calendar, the alternation between days and nights, be put to evil by the usury oxen (boves usurarii) who incarnate the diabolical labor of money. In this, master and merchant are jointly threatened by the twin figure of avaritia and ambitio, two terms that became practically synonymous in the twelfth century. Numerous satires that place Regina Pecunia in God's post show them next to each other, accountable for a single time, ad lucrandum pecuniam. Soon another satirist will spell the first art of the quadrivium, Arithmetica, as aerismetica: the art of money. Are they not both sciences insofar as they consist in divisions and multiplications? And is not this principle of divisibility (or multiplicability) the great postulate of Scholasticism, while the doctrine of the "divisive" "increasingly affected the entire edifice down to the smallest detail... so that the enormous variety in, for instance, the shape of canopies, the decoration of socles and archevaults, and, above all, the form of piers and capitals tended to be suppressed in favor of standard types"?81 Standard types. That's everything at stake in the quarrel of the Universals whose virulence in the Gothic age is poorly explained if the city wasn't populated by indi-

Fides Effiuax

viduals without order, gestators of a new world divided according to the series of a time relative to action, to human labor. What if the universal order had not become a problem, or essentially problematic; what if it was not to be perpetually reconquered in a logico-linguistic, or logistic, analysis so that the most complex "capital," the universal, would remain at the summit of a pyramidal system inscribed in the heart of discursive organization? This is the structure of the proposition stating to the subject what it is, reflecting the gradual hierarchy of the existent from singular to most general, to the essential reality from which all that is holds its very reality. But when the true protagonists of being can no longer appear as so many particular forces, when the multiplication of "technico-linguistic" manipulations has finished fogging over transparency—in the form of the simplicitas of a participation of essence that aimed to abolish every separation between the communitas and the dominium — more and more influential clerics will be found who will assert that the universal is only a representation (intentio animae) and time a concept (intellectio) whose objectivity is anchored in the "private" subject's will to represent, and who will say that the concept is nothing other than a sign. Logic... Who was the first professor of grammar, if not the Devil? Peter Damian hammered away in his De sancta simplicitate.82 In a momentous article, Paul Vignaux wrote that "nominalism can open up the wider horizon to a natural morality based on free will."83 More current, Jean Largeault, in his capacity as the tireless slayer of bureaucratic planning, posits nominalist theology at the root of liberalism. It allows the individual, he explains, to be posited as the center of personal interests. (It might be remembered that the Cluny monk Rodulius Glaber, around the year 1033, evoked with terror those prophecies indicating that "as the last days go by" religion would in its turn be corrupted "with the growth of avarice." He identified those days with the ones he was given to live, those days of feudal dislocation.84 With the advantage of distance, we moderns have been able to show that the new orders of the thirteenth century were the best instruments for the ideological justification of the merchant from the moment when every trade exercised in good conscience could lead to salvation; in short, that they behaved as true theologians of the market economy.)85 This proposition would admittedly be more interesting if its regime could include the regime of economic individualism, the "avarice of the mind," which abandons the final causes of the kosmos for the efficient causes of an objective world; that world oriented according to the guiding image of a functional complex ("ilia magna totus mundi fabrica et quaedam universalis officina", said Ger-

164.5

hoch of Reichersberg already in the middle of the twelfth century, by which he was targeting the creation of God as demiurge), which is authorized by the internal link uniting the theologia depotentia Dei absoluta (the new dynamic and "voluntarist" conception of God) to the anchoring of the existent in the subject's will to represent. "God then becomes," Ruprecht Paque maintains at the close of his study of Jean Buridan's thought, "for the scholar as well as the politician, the model for the free manipulation of hypotheses and possibilities that — just like the signs of language interpreted in a nominalist way—may be combined, invented, and rejected at will."86 Taking up the word that defined Buridan's attitude in the eyes of his contemporaries, the via moderna would be inseparable from astucia, from those technological manipulations linked to the identification of the universal with the act of cognition, and to God's arbitrary absolute. A "philosophy of avarice." In an analysis of this genre, it can certainly be seen that every a priori opposition is effaced between a "qualitative," "theological" time, assimilating cognition to a singular intuition and regulated by a liturgical model said to be of Augustinian origin, and the "quantitative," "scientific" time, identifying cognition with experimentation and regulated by the astronomical model. For lack of exposing right away its preliminary law, we will aim to get at least a first grapple hold on its systematization. It will be remembered, then, that in throwing a bridge over the abyss supposedly separating sublunary phenomena from celestial movements, the new time of mechanical clocks, installed everywhere in cities (on the belfry, but also on the cathedral steeple) in the course of the fourteenth century, designates Saint Augustine as a strange spiritual precursor, making his solid anteriority weigh as much on the side of the moderni as of the antiqui, to follow medieval terminology. To this analysis corresponds the effort to think a scientific dynamics of transcendence that from the twelfth century onward hoists the contested colors of a philosophia mundi?1 Precursor: this appellation dropped too quickly should not mean that it would have been sufficient to "follow the thread" (Saint John the Baptist as the precursor of Christ...) in order to cross the field separating the Augustinian novitas from the ordo novus and the philosophia mundi of the dwellers of Chartres, or subjective time for abstract time. This ever debatable notion harbors, at best, the structural effect of a theological accelerator that remained largely inoperative as long as it did not encounter that material dynamics scanned by the hazards of the historical time that commands the irruption of new forces, and of new values. Without that dynamics, minus the empirical content of its values, apprehension ("nihil in

Fides E ffi c ax

re, sed solum apprehensione," following the formulation of one of the Bishop of Paris's condemnations [200 (86)] in 1277, aiming perhaps at certain developments on the nature of time to which the Augustinian thesis would have given rise), the first intellection of abstract time would have strongly risked being in the image of a cogitatio natura believing its critical spirit proven by the eternal recognition of established values. I do not therefore contest that money is "the sole operator susceptible of converting the qualitative into the quantitative, of assigning every object and every duration with a number that is supposed to express its value, with a price."88 But money is not a new invention, and the expansion of a monetarized economy within an embryonic capitalism is not peculiar to the West. It thus became urgent to think through this opening from which, throughout the century of great flows and the outfitting of the world, a disposition of knowledge turned toward terrestrial completeness was able to constitute itself, and the insistent connivance between monetary economy and ontological economy, between scientific investigation and theological speculation, must have been reflected in the sovereign form of time. It's been a good while since the affair was settled: reducing the twelfth-century Renaissance "to the common denominator of humanism risks leading in the long run to a mere verbal expression deprived of concrete significance."89 One may nonetheless wonder why the medieval effort at assimilating and imitating the forms of classical antiquity accounts so little for the very purport of the "humanism" (as imprecise as the term may be, generic if there ever was one) of the ordo novus. Let's risk an answer: because the age of Man is announced as though breaking forth from the era of abstract time — before becoming that common discourse whose strict and oh so frail historicity Michel Foucault was able to recognize. Now, such an intrication cannot fail to be without a practice in which what is engaged is not the knowledge man has of himself, O Socrates, but man himself. Man engaged in that "inextricable protocapitalist mixture of feudalism and the erosion of feudalism" about which more than one historian has told us, man reserved in the silent articulation and elucidation of subjective time and abstract time.

166,7

II

1141: The Time of the World Three Approaches of Twelfth-Century Physiology "Extravagant phenomena are no longer what interests them, those mirabilia that seduced their elders and led them to a providence all the more real in their eyes for its being capricious; on the contrary, regular and determined sequences are what interests them."90 No longer the monsters emerging from the marvelous in bestiaries and lapidaries: "est mundus ordinata collectio creaturarum,"91 but the regula inundi of the school of Chartres realized in stone under Thierry's vigilant eye. 1141: Thierry, prince of philosophers for all Europe ("totius Europae philosophorum praecipuus"), is named chancellor of the episcopal school of Chartres. On this same date begins the erection of the cathedral's western face: the royal portal of Chartres. Here is the skill of the new time, of terrestrial construction engaging humankind within the whole of the universe ("tota universitatis structura"). Regula, structura; these now need to be shown at work in the nature of things, in the linking of bodies, in the genesis of the world. "Secundum physicam et ad litteram." According to physics, and according to the "historical" letter of the book of Creation, "ad sensum litterae historialem,"92 the Chartrians owe it to themselves to understand how the universe was constructed with a view to and in the service of humankind. Isn't humankind, after God, the final cause and demiurge of the physical world? Revealing itself in its quotidiana dispositio,^ the world will reveal humanity to itself. First Approach ("Formal")

Quotidiana dispositio. In allowing these terms to resonate,94 one could not find a better way to say at first glance the desacralization of nature, the mundus and its stakes, brought by that philosophia nova that the "moralists" (Saint Bernard and his friend William of Saint-Thierry) accuse, it was inevitable, of desacralizing the pagina sacra— and the divina dispositio. Intending to give reason for the genesis of all things by calling not only upon God's omni-potence but also upon the natural causality (causae secundae) of physical laws alone, aren't these bad masters reading the tale of Genesis

Fides Efficax

in the light of the Timaeus and of the superstitious sciences of the mathematici—of those errores mathematicorum denounced by Saint Augustine — going so far as to "follow the doctrine of stupid philosophers for whom there is nothing other than bodies and corporeal things, no other God in the world than the confluence of the elements [concursus elementorum] and the regulating principle of nature [temperatura naturae], for whom that is itself the soul in the body"?95 In subordinating theology to philosophy alongside mathematics—the domain of the quadrivium—and physics, all three sciences of res, they don't hesitate to apply probationes arithmeticae to the mystery of the Holy Trinity (Thierry of Chartres). Thus are drawn the two interpretations that still today divide up the commentary. The first interpretation, a critical one, is without appeal. It consists of a "pagan" position on what exists that uses and abuses Christian terminology to promote a reign that is not its own: that of philocosmia. "The schoolmasters of Chartres," writes Canon Clerval, "stand outside dogma in their philosophy, and they made Theology on the basis not of tradition but of their own principles, or else they viewed profane authors as an organ of Revelation almost on a par with sacred authors, and strove to make them agree. They call Plato the Theologian."96 Now, Plato, during this era, is known as the author of the Timaeus, of the dialogue that lets us penetrate into the very arcana of nature and truth: "Secundum Timeum Platonis, id est secundum ipsius veritatis et nature archanum."97 For his part, Eugenio Garin stresses Scotus Erigena's influence on Thierry:98 from him Thierry would receive the basis of his doctrine, a mystical rationalism, a naturalist mysticism with a pantheistic tendency—in short, a "full-blown Spinozism."99 It is not surprising, then, to see "theophany" take up the theme of the Anima mundi, at first identified purely and simply with the Holy Spirit,100 then, after a moment of hesitation,101 with Natura itself. Naturalis vigor.102 If one should observe that this world soul would henceforth be deprived of its metaphysical prerogatives of mediating between the sensible and the intelligible worlds, we would be given the answer that the stoical path conveyed by classical culture is profoundly corrected by Erigenian Neoplatonism. Humankind is that through which, condusio omnium, the return of the world to God (resolutio) is carried out, that through which all things attain their end, that divine goodness that is the final cause of the physical world.103 On this subject, a remark will be made straight off the better to circumscribe the Chartrian determination of the question of creation. For it is not certain, finally, that the stoical mortgage can be so easily discharged, so much does it inspire—via the second book of De natura deorum (Cicero), the sixth book of the Aeneid (Virgil), the commentary on Scipio's Dream

168,9

(Macrobius)104—the idea of nature as a force (vis) commanding the mechanistic tendencies necessary for the inventio of the first purely physical theory of the Creation ex nihilo (Thierry's rational explanation precedes his encountering the letter of the biblical text that comes to verify that explanation). Moreover, the Chartrian doctrine of the natura operans is constantly haunted by the theme of igneus vigor, ignis artificiosus inseminating the earth and propagating life. Calor vitalis. If we open Thierry's De sex dierum operibus, we read that at every stage of creation a single motor element prevails: fire, fire that envelops everything, and whose every completed revolution constitutes a day. Just as in its first revolution, fire illuminated the air, and the duration of that first revolution constituted the first day; so the second generation of that fire, through the intermediary of the air, heated the water and placed the firmament between water and water; the duration of this second revolution was called the second day. Raising a portion of the water in the form of steam, heat decreased the amount of the liquid element and revealed portions of land. Heating them in turn, those islands received the power to produce grasses and trees... And the duration of this third revolution was called the third day. On the fourth day, the vapors suspended above the air condensed in the firmament and formed the body of the stars. The stars having been created and having begun to move in the sky, the heat increased; it finally attained the degree of vital heat /vitalis calor/; in that form, it first came to brood over the water, since that element is above the earth; aquatic animals and birds were thereby created. The duration of this fifth revolution was called the fifth day. Helped by the humidity, this vital heat naturally came to earthly bodies, and terrestrial animals were thereby created; among them was found humankind, made in the image and likeness of God. And the duration of this sixth revolution was called the sixth day.105 Should we expect that, having come to the end point of the physical deduction, Thierry would finally speak to us about the creation of the soul? Nothing of the sort. The return to the "literal" exposition ("In principio creavit Deus caelum et terram") is, on the contrary, the occasion to examine what Moses calls "heaven and earth," and "how, following the rational teachings of physics, those two bodies were created at the same time": "et quomodo secundum rationem physicorum simul creata sunt, demonstrare conabar." There follows a veritable expose of "corpuscular physics," in which it appears that the hardness of the earth does not stem from the particular nature of the particles from which it is formed—"for the elements pass into each other" — but from the incessant motion of air and fire. Encircling the

F i d e s Ef fi cax

earth and the water on every side, that motion confers solidity and hardness on them. Let it be a kinetic explanation of the elements, formed of mobile particles in constant transformation, whose mechanical relations account for their respective localization as well as the progressive appearance of things: "The lightness of air and fire," summarizes Etienne Gilson, "is nothing but their motion, and that motion, at the same time that it causes the rigidity of earth and the weightiness of water, requires them in the way of a resting place."106 Along the way, the theory of impetus seems obvious to Thierry of Chartres: "Cum lapis ejecitur, ex projicientis innixu circa aliquid impetus contingit. Unde quanto firmius se infigit, tanto jactus projicientis est impetuosior."107 Genesis no longer displays the archaic constancy of earthly civilizations whose every element is endowed with fixed qualities, stable in themselves and situated in a proper place. The work of the Six Days of Creation is propagated in the fashion of a firestorm, with no direct intervention by God once the creation of matter is posited by the play of the material causality of the powers of fire (of light and heat, splendor et calor). A machine of particle flows—the stock of the four elements organized in concentric spheres is as if melted: enflamed, made molten by the incessant motion of air and fire; the "elementary" particles become interchangeable— the creation is the instance of a civilization of fire. The fulgurating foundation of a "culture in which the elements are brought down to the energy of fire, a culture succeeding forgotten cultures of the earth's invariances, without inflation or deflation." Without claiming right away to relate this foyer to the basis of an experimental use,108 the importance of work with fire in the utilization of these nonhuman energies must be recalled. This work is the principal glory of the Middle Ages, according to Lynn White Jr. (the takeoff of metallurgy in its agricultural as well as military applications, the rediscovery of steam's force of expansion and explosion applied to new domains, Greek fire...), a work without which the idea ofzsdentia experimentalis would be devoid of meaning. Now, "work with fire," Michel Serres again emphasizes, "belongs to science, technology, and history. It is urgent and dangerous. We are embarked on some very extreme fluctuations. The time of history is no longer anything but growth or descent along the greatest slopes." This inclined, stretched-out time that "embarks" us has taken the figure of a state of matter. "Materially: either fire or earth. Equilibrium or dynamics."109 Kosmos or mundus. Forsaking the allegorical reading of the Six Days to take us over to the encounter between the physical time ofcreatio and the historical time ofinventio, man springs into movement in a world "everywhere in motion," letting nothing

170,1

subsist of the ancient cyclical parallelism between the time of nature and the time of history. The paradigm has not disappeared, but it has in some way become "vectored." In the very time when homo artifex was preparing to take hold of the opus naturae by endowing it with an autonomous order of consistency, created nature became historical through and through: history woven on the backdrop of a horizon of mechanical technicity that imitates the technological time of the mechanicus:iw articulated continuity (series temporum, series causarum, series narrationis). Philocosmia? I prefer to take up the expression that served as the title for the major work of William of Conches, that other great Chartrian: Philosophia Mundi. A formulation so fearsome to handle that it was able to justify every variety of "accusation": paganism, thoroughgoing pantheism, Neoplatonism... The desacralizing of nature would only be the abstract effect of an inferiority that is that of naturalist idealism. The greatest slopes of the time of history? Growth and descent might well belong to that primordial time of the soul that in the twelfth century had still not ceased to haunt the conscience of the Latins—processus, descensus, and reabsorption (relabi) of inferior forms within the divine form — from the moment when the descent is finalized in the ascent, the "explicative" flow in the unifying reflow. A dynamics of transcendence? But why this covered-over potential of the Emanation that flows back over the world and enjoins us to think it as the expression of divine essence, the forma essendi of all things? The question can be rephrased more precisely, and urgently: if it sufficed, at the first moment of creation, for God to create matter in order for that matter, left to its own devices, to produce the world as it is, isn't that because "God in His entirety is essentially everywhere," as Thierry asserts in his treatise? "Unde Deus totus et essentialiter ubique esse vere perhibetur..." At the end of this first overview, one would be thus tempted to assert that everything happens as if the restoration of a regime of immanence reproduces on the side of the object what we were able to glimpse on the side of the intentionality of the Augustinian subject^ It would, of course, be easy to propose that the "philosophy of the world" of the Chartrian physicus could not determine such theoretical autonomy without its "theological accreditation" conjuring away its effects, under pressure from the vigilant bishop of Laon, Gautier of Mortagne. "According to what I have been told, you have the habit of saying that the essence of God is not everywhere present: something that I cannot believe of you."112 The information is worth retaining. The explanation is insufficient, however, if, as I am inclined to think, those pantheistic tendencies show in the most immediate way the subjective reserve of the world (rationes seminales or causales),ii3 making us glimpse the inevitable, sub-

Fides Ef ficax

jective foundation of the mechanism in the speculative identity of "objectivity" in its physical advent and of the absolute subjectivity ofDeus ordinator (i.e., the creation ex nihilo as "supreme pinnacle of the principle of subjectivity," according to the expression from Feuerbach). Thierry of Chartres's naturalist idealism would then indicate to what degree it is perhaps already a matter of sufficient indifference whether being is characterized as objective or subjective, objecthood or will. (Remember that Christianity discovers itself as a positive religion as soon as the matter posited by subjectivity, "subjective matter," reveals itself as primary matter; "quod factum est in ipso vita erat," Thierry loves to repeat with Saint Augustine's punctuation.) That's why, far from excluding it, the secularization of the world, the "scientific" vision of the world attributing autonomy to secondary causes, would in some way call forth the assertion by which the units from which numbers are composed (on this mathematical rejoinder depends the rational explanation as well as the sensible delectatio of the ornatiis mundt) and which subsist in a total participation of essence with the primary Unity—God—are not only the forms of things: they are their very existences ("creaturam existentiae sunt").114 Thus we are obliged to say that the whole and only being of every creature is the divinity present in each of them, and that matter itself exists by the presence alone of the divinity, without claiming nonetheless that the divinity takes its essence from matter or subsists in matter. When we say, then, that the unit is the essential form /forma essendi/ of all singular things, that ought to be understood in the same way. Similarly, when we say "God" simply, without any determinations, or if we use the word "God" in the plural, to signify "some God" or "some Gods," then that term refers to all those who partake of the divinity.iib A wild ontology, hence an avowed pantheism, or, as a second interpretation would have it that is more attentive to the denials of the Chartrians themselves — "Christianus sum, non Academicus," asserts William of Conches in his Dragmaticon — and to the spirit of their doctrine: the impassioned search for an agreement between profane sciences and sacred knowledge under the aegis of the ratio fidei, the fundamental correlation of religion and philosophy together recognizing that the reason for the existence of beings is their presence, as distinct units, in the heart of the primary Unity, without their being the being of God, since God is above Being, being the One? Let the question be raised in these terms, and the horizon as well as the limit of convergence of these two answers will appear insofar as they are agreed in disconnecting the "dynamic" aspect of the school of Chartres from its dependence on alterity (deificatio).

172,3

Taken within the Neoplatonist drift of the orientak lumen — in the words of William of Saint-Thierry, it brought "the fervor of Eygpt into the Gallic cold" — Chartrian ontotheology leaned toward (or wallowed in: the difference depends on one's point of view) the unitary and hierarchical vision of a continuitas inserted into the cosmic determinisms, restoring the full figure of the kosmos under the guise ofmundus. De processione mundi,ii& thephilosophia mundi would remain threatened by an ontology that is naturalist (which could just as well be called, thinking of Christian Wolff, natural ontology), "materialist" (if matter is the source of a movement whose fundamental dynamism is at the origin of the return, epistrophe — see De divisione naturae II, 547B), and "reductionist" (the return to unity is here called redactio) as long, finally, as Thomas Aquinas had not given concordism its definitive shape by supplying himself with the intruments needed for the task: the categories of Aristotle no longer univocally brought back to the Neoplatonic theme of unity; the distinction between essence and existence removed from the primacy of form. It would not be innocent, therefore, for these same terms of continuitas and of continuatio^ essentially linked to the Erigenian context, to be taken up by "scientists" "to express the continuity of the phenomena of nature within the universe; such as Adelardus of Bath, Quest[iones naturales] about the pressure of air on water."117 So, the semiotic conjugation of flows (the general semiology of the "Romance of the world") would be doubled by a natural conjunction of phenomena, under the rubric of a cosmobiology that definitively renders inconceivable any disjunction between a faith contemplative of its divine objects and an enterprise that rationalizes the mysteries of creation, in which everything that is dis-covered as truly existing is, in the final analysis, that which is hidden in God. Nor will it be forgotten that the Chartrian physicus, whose interest in the arts of the quadrivium we have been able to gauge, is above all a grammaticus constrained to draw on the subtleties of the trivium, the science of verbs., in order to accede to the understanding of a text like that of the Timaeus, where Plato spoke per integumentum: through "myth." By the same stroke, it will be noticed, this lets us grasp the limited and relative import of the thesis of virtus artifex operatrix, a moment assimilated indifferently to the world soul or the Holy Spirit. What must be known is that "if we take what the philosophers said of the world soul as an involucrum, it is easy to understand everything in a reasonable sense without straying from the faith."118 As a result, this notion of involucrum or integumentum, as applied to the Timaeus, was able to supply "the ideal framework within which [William of Conches] inserted his ideas on the causality of natural agents, nature being considered through-

Fides Efficax

out Chartrian thought as a principle of activity enjoying relative autonomy under the high rule of Providence."119 Let's risk a farther step, however: wouldn't there be something like a structural and objective desolidarization—the objectivity (become physical) of the world—implied by the very web of sympathies and correspondences through which everything is held together in the universe, as soon as they are regulated by the wholly scientific univocality of causal linkage, as soon as they are explained on the basis of rationes that can be said to be either seminal or causal, substance-atom or cause-atom? As a consequence (lectior difficilior, the more difficult reading: that of a reversal within the apparent identity), Thierry of Chartres's student, Clarenbaldus of Arras, soon identifies Divine Providence with the "Neccessitas absoluta in qua omnia complicantur."120 This would be nothing, in the final analysis, but the operator of complicatio-explicatio: "Absoluta Necessitas rerum omnium complicatio est in simplicitate. Necessitas complexionis earum rerum explicatio in eodem ordine, qui ordo a physicis 'factum' dicitur. Absoluta autem possibilitas est ejusdem universitatis rerum complicatio in possibilitate tantum, de qua veniunt ad actum" (Absolute Necessity is simply the folding together of all things. The necessity of this folding together of those things is unfolded in that same order that is the order said to be "made" by physics. The absolute possibility, however, of that same universe of things is the folding together with such possibility that they come to action from it).121 What is divinely possible, despite its being "complicated," is nonetheless rationally explainable because it explains itself really, totally, logically. Within this nature of things, it illuminates us on the means by which the universe is physiologically constructed. And if you are ever asked, Could God make a calf from a tree trunk? ask back: Did He ever do that?122 I return to the lectio dtfficillima, of desolidarization, for it might well be able to "explicate" a curious redistribution carried out by Thierry in his treatise. He began by relating the play of the three causes (efficient, formal, and final) to the Holy Trinity—respectively, to God the Father, the Son (Dei Sapientia), and the Holy Spirit (Benignitas),— thus denying an at least de jure efficiency to the material cause constituted by the four elements. "Si quis igitur subtiliter consideret mundi fabricam efficientem ipsius causam Deum cognoscet."123 But a few pages later, having come to the end of his exposition De causis et de ordine temporum, there he is strongly tempted (quasi) to displace the bimembris divisio in order to confer the efficient function upon one of the elements, fire, and material cause upon earth. "Nam ignis tantum agit. Terra vero tantum patitur... Ita igitur ignis est quasi

174,5

artifex er efficiens causa; terra vero subiecta quasi materialis causa" (For fire so acted and the earth so suffered... Fire, therefore, is almost an artisan and an efficient cause: the earth was truly subjected to a nearly material cause).124 Does he here (quasi) suspect the "explosive" alternative offered before him: abandoning God to the powers of fire means leaving the peace of the Cosmos for the violence of the World and its elements, the theology of symbol for a physics of causality, cosmic equilibrium for the dynamics of a world everywhere in motion that would bring matter down to a question offeree? This perception is undoubtedly amply anachronistic (Thierry does not "leave" God; the "literal" alternative plays between an instantaneous vision of divine creation and a progressive evolution, an organized sequence of physical phenomena). That doesn't change the fact that Chartrian atomism displays the reality, the actuality, and the moment of the switch from the world of exemplary forms (kosmos), of formal causality, to the world of form within matter, those efficient shapes of the mundus, effectively proceeding from a Form that is transcendent but that cannot and ought not materialize itself, or introduce itself, into matter, the principle of mutability and division. "Nunquam enim Forma immateriatur divina" (For divine Form is never materialized). This distinction between the two forms, which Thierry takes from his brother Bernard of Chartres, "might have the character of being too easy and done out of expediency";125 it nonetheless plays an essential role since it provisionally saves the transcendence and autonomy of created form. It allows for a point of equilibrium between God's transcendence and immanence to be approached — this limit-theory favored by the Boethian conception of the Word omnia complicans: "Omnia in quandam simplicitatem complicata" (everything folded together in such simplicity), following Thierry's formulation taken up by Clarenbaldus — by subordinating "expressionism" to creationism.126 One can understand how this distinction did not erase the uneasiness felt by the most nuanced commentators. How right they were in their inkling that Chartrian thought and analogous doctrines "make it difficult, just by their logic, for dependency to be placed in its full light." ±2J This God is so scarcely feudal that He is unafraid of coining his presence in an infinite number of substantial slices, which are not substances in the same sense as God is but do not, however, fail to merit the name of substance, indivisible bodies sharing with Him in simplicity. Atomism in another guise. With Adelardus of Bath, we mentioned a little while ago, we are led to the limits, material limits, of this first approach, the "formal" one. After Constantinus Africanus, Adelardus calls attention back to atomic theory. On the

Fides E ffi c ax

Orient's other face, that of those foolish philosophers who are cognizant only of bodies and corporeal things, there is no God in the world other than that of the concourse of the elements. Adalberon had starkly posited the alternative: "Naturae finem non ponunt arte periti: / Artificem quidam dicunt ignem sapientes, / Est aliis natura Dei praeclara voluntas" (The experts cannot place the limit of nature with skill: the wise speak of some kind of ingenious fire; to others nature is the bright will of God).128 For our part: either the epiphany of the divine or the action of fire, and the knowledge of its powers, on earth. But here it is that slipped in between the two sides is the gloss on the Timaeus and its decisive formulation — "nihil igitur sine causa" (there is nothing therefore without a cause) — destined to be worked through by the "physicist" or physicotranscendental tendencies of Chartrian Platonism. (Where Saint Augustine said "nihil igitur casu fit in mundo," [nothing in the world happens by chance], Duns Scotus will assert that everything that happens regularly by virtue of an "unfree" cause is the natural effect of that cause, thereby reserving the case of divine, libera action.129 The mechanicians of the School of Chartres passed by this spot, via Oxford.) Duhem emphasizes one final time: The work of the six days thus unfurled, without any direct intervention by God, through the natural play of the powers of fire; it was sufficient that God, in the first instant, created matter, for that matter, left to its own devices, to produce the world such as it is. Neither Descartes nor Laplace would surpass Thierry's bold rationalism; they would even claim, as a condition for the world to be organized, a given that the Chartrian Master... did not require; they would ask not only for matter but also for motion; Kant alone would reduce the Creator's role to the extent Thierry does.130 Second Approach ("Elementary") The Arabs were needed to lift this doubt. The Islam exalted in Adelardus of Bath's famous pages is "the whole Islamic technico-scientific repertory knocking on the door of the Latin world."131 The renewed interest in the arts of the quadrivium was nourished by translations from Arabic. It is through these translations that Greek and Oriental science was introduced into the West: Arabic and Greek medical treatises (Hippocrates, Galen) translated by Constantinus Africanus, mathematical works translated by the Englishman Adelardus of Bath (Euclid's Elements, Alchwarismi's Liber algorismi}, translations into Latin of numerous astronomical works by Hermann the Dalmatian, the presence in Toledo and in Palermo of a circle of Arabic and Jewish

176,7

literati... The work of Constantinus Africanus is what William of Conches cites as the directing principle of his research in its "elementary" exposition: "Elementum, ut ait Constantinus in Pantechni est simpla et minima pars alicuius res" (The element, as Constantinus said in Pantechni, is the simple and minimal part of something).132 Perhaps it will be asked why these references are given, when the principles of atomism could have been transmitted by completely other, more "classical" sources: by Chalcidius, whose translation is the only path of access to the Timaeus—a Latin Timaeus, then, and a partial one to boot, since it only included pages 17a-53c — by Isidor who was not unaware of Epicurus,133 by Lucretius himself perhaps, although we know that the latter's reception in the Middle Ages was more literary than philosophical (burdened as he was by accusations of materialism and atheism), by Virgil undoubtedly, in whom we already find William's attempt to reconcile the doctrine of Democritus and Epicurus with that of Empedocles?134 What I want to emphasize is that neiv sentiment of nature discussed by Brehier, nourished by the decisive contribution of Greco-Arabic sciences, themselves ripened by so many travels permitted by the riconquista (in Italy, Sicily, Greece, and the Near East for Adelardus; across Egypt and the Orient for the doctor Constantinus), that sentiment with which the influence of Platonism is reborn. All the more so because, if there is a "return" of atomism, the Timaeus is not where its primary source is to be found. Chalcidius's translation breaks off in fact at the precise spot in the dialogue where Plato is about to expose the geometrical structure of the four elements, along with their decomposition into the elementary triangles to which properly belongs the name of elements (53c-55b). At best, William could have been inspired by that passage (48c) where we read: "We speak of fire and the rest of them [the nature of water, air, and earth] as though we knew what they were, and maintain them to be first principles and letters or elements of the universe, when they cannot reasonably be compared, by anyone who reflects just a little on this, in a plausible comparison, even to syllables." The contribution is far from being negligible since William finds a confirmation there for the Democritian intuition comparing the letters from which words are made to the atoms from which things are constituted. But the commentary of a passage in which Plato alludes to there being only four elements (3 Ib) is the occasion for William to introduce Constantinus's definition. "Constantinus igitur in Pantegni sic diffinit elementum: Elementum est simpla et minima alicuius corporis particula, simpla ad qualitatem, minima ad quantitatem... Que elementa nunquam videntur sed ratione divisionis intelliguntur" (Constantinus therefore in his Pantechni thus defines element: the element is the simple and minimal particle of some body, simple as for

F i d e s E f f i c ax

quality, minimal as for quantity... That elements never appear but are understood by reason of division).135 In opposition to these first particles are the elementa mundi, or elementata. The term elementatum was to have a considerable echo (it is found in John of Spain and Dominicus Gundissalinus, mentioned by John of Salisbury, present in the De Mundi universitate of Bernard Silvestis, and in the Englishman Daniel of Morley), but its origin has been sought for until now more or less in vain.136 For my part, I am inclined to pay attention to what the author of the Dragmaticon says, demanding a clear explanation of the question of the elements, it being the case that "nee in aliquo authore diligenter de illis scriptum invenitur" (neither is it found written more diligently in some author).137 The same assertion is made of an original conception expressed in the Glosses on the Timaeus: if names are really needed, let's call particles "elementa," and the elements we see "elementata" ("Si ergo digna illis velimus imponere nomina, particulas illas dicamus elementa, ista vero que videntur, elementata").138 This is the conception we would like now to set forth in its broad outlines, before coming back to the final meaning of the return of atomistic intuitions. But one more word to note that it is completely possible to conceive, in the limited field of physics, a strong analogy with the distinction proposed by Bernard of Chartres (ideae/formae nativae: Ideas such as they exist in God's mind and forms, reflecting these Ideas, entering into composition with matter to produce forces). Where Bernard said men imagine that "what is" is what we see, whereas the philosopher knows that "what is" is the pure Idea, William would answer: similarly, men think that the elements are what we see around us — earth, water, air, fire—whereas thephysicus knows that an element is pure, "cuius non sunt contrariae qualitates" (whose qualities are not contrary), and that his "reason" is not empirical but analytic, logical, produced by ratione divisionis.i39 From theology's divine complication to the utterly logical, utterly ideal human explication of the world, here is undoubtedly where "the boldest of the Chartrians" (Jolivet) most clearly anticipates the future. Let me explain. What William is indebted to, more perhaps than the tradition of Platonist cosmogony, is Galen's physiological model (as reported by Constantinus): "Dividitur enim humanum corpus in organica scilicet in manus, etc., organica in omiomira, omiomira in humores, humores in elementa" (For the human body is divided into organs, that is to say, into hands, etc., the organs into glands, glands into humors, the humors into elements).140

178,9

The elementa corporis find their model in the human body. Is this a mere physiological application of the thesis of the human microcosm, a medical translation of Chalcidius's mundus brevis"? Or a "material" verification of the primacy of humankind, the final cause of the physical world after God? Following an indication given in the Philosophia Mundi, taken up again in the commentary on the Timaeus, one would be inclined to think that humanity is more than the mere image of the universe. Isn't it in fact the master from the beginning to the extent that it is the only living thing in which the four elementata form a harmonious mixture, because that equilibrium can only be realized one time?14± While it must be recalled that, already for Isidor of Seville, medicine was like a "second philosophy," the cry of indignation this conception provoked among the tenants of a strictly biblical theology cannot be forgotten. They make much of the opposition between the reasons of the body and the salvation of the soul (Saint Bernard); the close relations between doctors and the merchants of Babylon (Peter the Venerable); and the inevitable disjunction between the temporality of the body and the immortality of the soul (Peter Comestor). "Qui student valetudini non sunt in Schola Salvatoris, sed Hippocratis... Miror unde Jesu Christi: scholasticae Hippocratis Scholas redolent, unde merces Babylonicas Jerusalem filiae mercatae sint" (Who studies health is not in the School of the Savior but that of Hippocrates... I wonder whence scholarly daughters in Jesus Christ reek of the Hippocratic Schools, whence they buy Babylonian wares in Jerusalem).142 From the fact that this second philosophy consisted in examining every being in terms of its being simple or composed, and in the case that it is composed, of enumerating its parts, nothing more was needed for these critics to conclude that the liberale — or the modemorum theologorum—was never anything more than a mechanicum stepping forth masked (Peter the Deacon). What is revealed is the epistemological function of divisio for the analytical study of nature. "Cuius divisionis pars actu, pars sola cogitatione et ratione fieri potest quia, ut ait Boethius, 'vis est intellectus coiuncta disiungere et disiuncta coniugere'" (Whose division into an active part and a part solely thinking and reasoning is able to be done because, as Boethius said, "force is understanding how to disjoin what is conjoined and to join together what is disjoined"). Analysis and synthesis are complementary.143 Composition and decomposition—the mind needs no other powers to identify reality and rationality, to impose its rational objective of/on the real. Distancing itself from the experience of "those who, like peasants, are unaware of the existence of everything that cannot be grasped by the senses," the ratio divisionis opposes in(di)visible atoms to (di)vis-

Fi d e s E f f i c ax

ible elements, the mechanical conjunction ofparticulae to the aleatory transmutation of qualitates. William here contradicted those Platonists who, within the Chartrian milieu, brought up the sensible world's flux as a pretext to refer the elements in their pure state to the Ideas of the four elements (substanciae sincerae). For William as for Thierry, the world is a "machine"—"Ilia machina, id est mundus" (That machine is the world)144—which can be understood in itself without constant referral to the intelligible world. The elementa, or principia, are matter and not the "continuous" determination of some matter by an intelligible form. "In hoc vero quod dixerunt Epicurei mundum constare ex atomis, vere dixerunt" (In what the Epicureans truly said about the world being composed of atoms, they spoke truly).145 In return, he continues in the Dragmaticon, the Epicurean negation of the creation stems from fabula. "lecit Deus ignem et terram fundamenta id est principa mundani operis" (God cast fire and earth, that is the fundamental principle for the making of the world).146 What is denied is the primordial chaos. "Sed, queret aliquis, ubi sunt elementa? nos veros dicimus: in compositione corporum, non per se. Sunt igitur, in compositione corporum, quatuor genera predictarum particularum: quedam frigide et sicce que dicuntur terra, quedam frigide et humide que aqua, quedam calide et humide que aer, quaedam calide et sicce que ignis" (But, someone may ask, where are the elements? We say verily: in the composition of bodies, not for themselves. There are, therefore, in the composition of bodies, four kinds of predicted particles: those that are cold and dry are called earth; those that are cold and moist, water; those that are hot and moist, air; those that are hot and dry, fire).147 From the beginning, natural laws were instituted among the atoms. They are the stable webs of coiuncta, obtained through conjugation among noncontradictory qualities (cold-dry, cold-moist, hot-moist, hot-dry). Hence, a physics of quality, tending to bring phenomenal character back to the explicative element, "to reduce — the reverse of the ideal of modern scientific thought—the laws of phenomena to the properties of substances."148 Nevertheless, it cannot be said of this atomism, of this "inner realism," that it erects naivete into a system since it avoids accounting for a phenomenon by purely and simply attributing it like a quality to a substance: "Quandoquidem id quod videtur non est ignis quia proprietates illius mutantur, igitur putandum est ignem vere esse eum ignem qui semper idem est, scilicet ille simple et minime particule que nunquam variantur, quamvis compositum ex eis varietur, et cuius proprietas id est substantialis qualitas omnino manet" (Since indeed it appears that fire is not something because its properties change, therefore it must be thought that fire truly is that fire that is always

180,1

the same, namely, that it is a simple and minimal particle that never varies, however much it varies in composition, and whose property remains just like a quality to a substance).149 It is thus necessary to distinguish, as Michel Serres does very well for the text of Lucretius, between the theoretical science of atoms (pura elementa), in this case the cognition of primordial qualities (substantiates qualitates) in a stable liaison, from the experimental science of phenomena and the composition of elements (visibilia elementa) in continuous variation.150 This shifting of planes envelops the inevitable proclamation of an autonomous physics ever since the infrasensible substituted for the meta-physical, ever since relation penetrated the simplex itself to endow it with an internal structure. The coherence of physical explication becomes a function of the inherence of its elements, which are no longer given in the observation of phenomena. One no longer seeks to "save phenomena," but to reconstruct them. What is expressed is the text of the world formed by atoms-letters, the articulation of the world and language, the accord between thought and the real. "Unde littere, per simile, elementa dicuntur: sunt enim ita partes vocis quod nihil est illarum pars" (Whence the elements are said, by simile, to be letters: for they are parts of the voice of such a kind that nothing else is a part of them).151 The semiotic conjugation of letters repeats the natural conjunction of atoms. Atoms are the alphabet of bodies, the writing of the world, the texture of movement. But it is an obligated writing, directing as much as directional, since it is a question of qualified atoms in a homogeneous disorder (creatio mundi}, subject in all places to universal laws of composition, at all times — since the beginning of time — destined to produce the ornatus mundi as "ordinata collectio quatuor elementorum, ordinata collectio creaturarum. Et est ornatus mundi quicquid in singulis videtur elementis ut stelle in celo, aves in acre, pisces in acqua, homines in terra, etc." (an ordered collection of the four elements, an ordered collection of creatures. And the adornment of the world is whatever appears in single elements such as stars in the sky, birds in the air, fish in water, men in the earth, and so on).152 Everything that exists is but a composition of elements coded by the operation of nature in the form of law. This "collective" writing is what deciphers the ratio divisionis by attaining the geometrical cipher of coding—"secundum physicam et ad LITTERAM" (following physics and going in the direction of the LETTER). Vis, the same word expresses the efficacity of nature (natura operans, natura vis) composing things and the operation of the intellect decomposing the coiuncta into those "vera elementa quedam que per se non existunt, per se tamen

F i d e s Ef fi cax

intelliguntur" (true elements that do not exist for themselves, but are understood for themselves), "vis EST INTELLECTUS COIUNCTA DISIUNGERE" (Force is understanding how to disjoin what is conjoined).153 Otherwise put, particles are certainly not things in miniature. Their unity, like their simplicity, is logical before being material. Simple bodies, abstract bodies, they will always be those simplified bodies whose analysis Bachelard draws up, obtained at the end of a discursive technique in search of the integral unity of which things are made. In the final analysis, the atom is primitively a cause insofar as it is "nothing other than the body of postulates indispensable to the explanation."154 This is how the most realist atomism is always doubled by a nominalist atomism, complicating that ontological intuition that institutes a physics of circulation and exchange, an economy of nature shaped by the mechanical composition of forces, in which space ceases to play the physically determinant role. And that is also how its prehension of space leans on an apprehension, on a representation of time, scanned, and determined by the atomizing action of the mind. The theoretical model is fabricated from the experimentation of an "originary" time that surpasses the explanation of time linked to the sensory, letting physics be seen—and the genesis of the world—comprehensively in the decomposing movement of coiuncta, extensively in the web of related primordial elements, thus giving us the ratio of composition. Access to the theoretical is oriented by this implicit philosophy of time that produces and measures time according to the two epistemological directions of analysis and synthesis of phenomena. This time is no longer that of procession and conversion, of intentio and distentio, but of conjunction and disjunction assimilated to the highest power of the mind. Through this double process, the soul transforms the ruinous mutability of external time, explained by the succession of things, into a "contracted," explicative duration. This is so as not to ignore the currency conserved by the Augustinian commentaries on Genesis throughout the whole of the Middle Ages. Is it possible to go further in stating that there is no time outside consciousness because time is fundamentally assimilated to the way in which thought organizes and represents certain aspects of bodies resulting from the movement of atoms? By this step, we would like, not without paradox, to understand the following all at once: why Augustine's most revelatory works of his meditation on time were little read and cited in these milieus; why the Boethian notion of aevum was resorted to as the measurement of the life of the mind; why the absence of any echo among the Chartrians of this temporal atomism—falsely attributed to Epicurus by the Neoplatonists, who assimilated his position to the one criticized by Aris-

182,3

totle in Physics VI, 1 —rediscovered beginning in the ninth century by Mutazilite Islamic thought.155 Without forgetting that the purely "conceptual" approach to time would be pursued with the greatest vigor, in the fourteenth century, by the Franciscan milieus closest to atomism... The nominalist enterprise, according to this hypothesis, would be so decisive as to entail the immediate proof of an atomistic criticism — and virtually the abolition of the caesura between originary and derived time. Far from turning us away from human time, the aevum spiritualizes that "state of mind"—which is also a primary state of things. (After all, theological Platonism, which conceives Ideas as God's thoughts, is perfectly reconcilable— Brehier very rightly remarked—with simple nominalism.) In short, are we witnessing the return in force of the Epicurean repressed, or, in more measured terms, are we quite simply confronted with the retrospective lesson of Epicurus?156 But finally let's recognize that there is another lesson, closer to the Chartrians. This lesson has until now been willfully "ignored" because its importance, in our sense, stems more from a transposition than from what was previously designated under the name of "influence." (If we were allowed the use of a somewhat barbarous vocabulary, we would say transduction rather than traduction [translation].) It involves John Scotus Erigena and his Division of Nature, or Periphyseon, which he himself qualifies as "physiology." Division and analysis "are not simply abstract methods for the decomposition and composition of ideas, but the very law of beings." They impose themselves upon the intellectus as true, because they are inscribed in the law of the formation of things, where reason did nothing but discover them. "The explanation of the universe ought [therefore] to follow the paths of division and analysis."157 On a double level: (1) that of the categories, whose order is not "natural" but relative ad nos inasmuch as it effectively depends on scientific procedures of composition and decomposition — but which, considered in and of themselves, are simple, incorporeal, and immutable; and (2) that of the elements, which are intelligible and stable, "beyond all perception by mortal senses because of their subtlety and natural purity"—whose regulated concourse produces that mirabile that is the appearance of the sensible (of sensible elements) from the nonsensible.158 Now, Chartrian atomism prolongs this movement in bodies by a de facto dispersion of "the unity of supreme genuses" into "individuals" who no longer represent the final term of division—they are themselves composed of indivisibles — by reinscribing the unity coined in this way into the multiplicity of matter. Erigenian Neoplatonism turned nature into a universal dialectics; Chartrian atomism would turn it into & precise dialectical materialism^ The two moments of Erigena's method

Fides Efficax

are complementary ("a single movement of going and coming") as are Boethius's decomposition and composition, as are the realist and categorematic senses following "the parallel but reversed movements" of atomistic analysis and synthesis. In John Scotus, time espouses this double status: it is a "worldly" category first of all as an a priori condition of intelligibility for the plurality of created being; it is an onto-logical determination, a transcendental condition of being and of cognition before it is an ontic given, an idealized determination depending "directly on the mind that conceives, that is — and in the strict sense — on the mind that defines" — divides and analyzes.160 But also, as the fundamental limit for creatures in their "detemporalizing" effort to resolve multitude into unity, time is indissociably that through which creatures are never entirely present to themselves in the identity and simplicity of their being, in the immediate and absolute intuition of their object. That's why, in the fifth and final book of the Periphyseon, time (along with place) appears in the perspective of "return" as that limit of the world that separates, "brings forth a hindrance by its erecting the partial into an absolute,161 gives us capax irrationalis motu (an irrational ability to grasp through passion), refers to that free and dangerous alterity that had broken away from dependence by drawing the entire universe after it into the time of the fall, into the fall of time. That's why, as the operator of synthesis, time remains for William of Conches an imago aevi: the caesura between originary and derived time is never really abolished by dint of the gap between a world whose cognition reproduces its division from itself and from the divina sapientia: "Ea enim nee habuit principium existentiae nee vices temporis" (For it has neither the first principle of existence nor the vicissitudes of time).162 And, through the effect of a certain fold that marks something like the extreme edge of this story, we find in Nicholas of Cusa: "mens est imago aeternitatis, tempus vera explicatio; explicatio autem semper minor imagine complicationis aeternitatis" (the mind is the image of eternity, time its true unfolding; the unfolding, however, is always less than the image of eternity folded together).163 Third Approach ("Universal")

"In fact"—the Chartrian could pick up from Erigena— "the term 'creature' properly signifies engendered beings that divert themselves [divide themselves] into their own species, whether visible or invisible, by following, so to speak, the movement of time."±64 In this the world is an organized collection of creatures. But what is the criterion, if not (and here again is found a term used by Scotus Erigena to qualify what subsists by itself) its status. This is the great thesis of in-dijference formulated

184,5

by William of Champeaux, and taken up by Gautier of Mortagne. How can the universal be understood in such a way that it integrates the individual into a functional ensemble without menacing the individual's identity? A "Gothic" problem, par excellence, to which one ought to respond as follows: since two singular realities cannot be essentially identical, it remains for the universal to be the local collection of individuals whose common resemblance (absence of difference) can be gathered because they belong to the same "state," are of the same status, can be apprehended from the same point of view.165 Indifferenter, the universal becomes practically synonymous with collectio. "I call a species," we can read in a treatise De generibus et specibus falsely attributed to Abelard by Victor Cousin, "not that essence of man that is in Socrates alone or in any other individual, but the total group [sed totam illam collectionem] formed by the conjunction of other singular beings of this nature [ex singulis aliis hujus naturae cunjunctam]." Abelard, it is known, rejected this "conjunctive" way of conceiving the universal by pointing out that those realists, tempered though they be, continued to confuse "man," which is no more of a thing existing (essentia) in itself than in the individual, with "being-man," that something in which the inevitable foundation of the universal is expressed in things (man is not a stone), as soon as the collectio comes after the individuals who make it up (Josselin de Soissons, who inspired if not authored the cited text, would have had no great difficulty in accepting this). Abelard thus prevents himself from returning to the extreme position of a Roscelin, for whom the universal was but a flatus vocis, an emission of the voice. Neither dogmatic nor critical, his nominalism is so moderate that William of Ockham could take him for a realist (Ockham himself not being absolutely protected, as we will see, from a reading of this genre). Take as you will Victor Cousin's confusion in saluting Abelard as a "revolutionary genius." In fact: what is the foundation of the universal in Abelard when he intends to refute William of Champeaux's (second) thesis whereby individuals of a single species partake of a single status, and if this is the same decidedly uncircumscribable word that reappears under his pen in the second Glosses on Porphyry where he is not afraid to assimilate "being-man," esse hominum, to the "state of man," status hominis (and "admits"—concedimus—that "every genus or species exists in sensible things"—sensualibus inesse rebus)? This foundation rests on a "common reason" resulting from the perception of "an originary similarity between things" (similitudo nascentium}, which Boethius assimilates to nature.166 The propositions thus express a nature become synonymous with a state of things, that is, with "the way things behave with each other—namely, whether they agree or not."167 But how

F i d e s E f f i c ax

could one thing come to an agreement [convenire] with another, if each thing has the character of being personally separated (discreta) from another thing,168 which is just as indivisible (atomos) as it—if each thing behaves like a proper name?169 How can this be, then, without retroceding from the domain of things to that of eternal relations (habitudmes), without admitting the existence of idealized relations freed of all subjugation to the mode of being of things? We can agree on the following rather easily: the "conquest of the spirit of independence," in Victor Cousin's words — outdone by Charles de Remusat's "what one could call the liberal movement of the human mind"—leads Abelard back to an "utterly exact Platonism... freed from the realism of genuses and species."170 "Down to the terms themselves," Gilson concludes for his part, "his own position is scarcely distinguishable from the one William ends up holding," under fire from the Abelardian critique to stop thinking that individuals are distinguished from each other only by the diversity of what is accidental. "Plato and Socrates, Abelard himself says, have this in common, that each of them is in the condition or state of man. Between the similitude of status invoked by Abelard and the resemblance invoked by William, the distance is hardly perceptible."171 All the more so that on the theological plane, Abelard maintains the existence of Ideas within divine thought (for William of Ockham, one names Idea the very things God can produce outside of any "ideal relation"), which in the final analysis is what the universal is based on. The name signifies a form (forma), which is a conceptio Dei; it expresses the author's habit of the "generic and specific states of nature [generates vel speciales naturae status}" "God, to whom everything He created is manifest and who knows everything before it is, distinguishes between all the states [Deus... singulos status in se ipsit distinguit]."172 Status is being itself; "nature" is what founds being or the "constitution of things," defined on the basis of a status essentiae prior to that of the genuses and species below.173 To these two primary forms of the universal—collectio, status— which still manifest somewhat of a permeable membrane between "realism" and "nominalism" in this century of Renaissance, a third expression must be added, one employed by another chancellor of the school of Chartres: the conformitas of Gilbertus Porretanus. The context is that of a very strict exemplarism where abstraction takes the turn of a deductio conformativa by which the engendered forms "conform" to Eternal Ideas. From those Ideas, things of the same species derive the conformity constituting that collectio called nature, genus, universal. Indeed, it is because the conjunction, or collection, essentially conforms that the relation becomes inherent to substance as such. The Form is inherent and not accessory. Transposed into

186,7

the domain of physics—if pure substances are no longer ideal models for the four elements but, if you like, the atoms out of which the elements are composed — this "conformism" is just as valid for William of Conches, who attaches the transcendent principle of organization to the nature of the atom qualified, determined by its function. Here and there, God remains the sovereign guarantor of the order of creation, an order identified with the "collective" framework of a functional ensemble where every species, genus, status has its marked place, every individual its proper essence and motion, in conformity with the solidarity of the group (communitax), just as beings are in the city — and atoms in nature. But what is the price, if the social connotation of this word status, which ends up designating the universal itself, is but the index of a more profound displacement where time must no longer be just a given and is anticipated as an effect of analysis, a coefficient of division, a movement of dereification that affects the structure of the universe, the great machine of the world, constituting it as mundus, in that coherent whole that has secretly already been possessed in the name of a new harmony? Mixing Platonism and "materialism," the school of Chartres kicks off the Gothic order, the consistency of the "bourgeois" order. It is the first to elaborate and diffuse the autonomous vision of a world opening/limiting the field of possibility on/to a vast hierarchized and organized composition in motion, perfect "in every point and whose equilibrium cannot be lost" (Abelard) despite the contingency of natures (essentiae). A single confirmative functionalism links the system of Chartrian thought to Gothic architecture. To cite Scobeltzine again, in relation to the western face of the Chartres cathedral as supervised by Thierry: "Fxmctional movement is what is magnified, what expresses the fact of belonging to a determined state that has its place in the order of creation."174 The material decomposition of the world, the visual decomposition of the ensemble of the edifice into its constitutive elements, according to their function and not according to their placement—their natural places — is done in such a way that "all parts that are on the same 'logical level' came to be conceived of as members of one class... and there must be an unequivocal correlation between them. We must be able to tell which element belongs to which."175 Decomposed into their elementary times, what is purely rounded is entirely eliminated in the twin movement of dissection and recomposition to the benefit of structural elements. Resulting from a linear and serial form, the ogival spirit would signify nothing without that pure form of active time that is the very condition of its contemplation.

Fides Efficax

The art of stained glass—stained glass coming to substitute for the walls of an earlier time—lets the importance of the upheaval be measured: from an ideal milieu-space to the limit-time of an ideal milieu where the light of the world is refracted and reflected. An art of discontinuity, it expresses most closely the Utopia of an ensemble whose cohesion flows from the functional composition alone of its constitutive atoms. Regrouped into fields of homogeneous color, these atoms assign an at once privileged and obligatory place to the various parts of each sacred scene — or profane scene, with the different bodies of the trades (status} placed under the tutelage of the king, the bishop, and the burgher. Honorius of Autun would say that "the translucid windows that keep us from the storm and shed clarity upon us are the doctors." Doctors of the lux nova. As it ought to be, it is through the mediation of these same doctors that the storm, intemperateness, penetrates into the sanctified universe of the cathedral. Stained glass, very quickly—from the thirteenth century on: the urgency of the Thomist "synthesis"... —would bear the trace of intemperateness so often weathered. To the point of losing its luminous simplicity and that claritas evoked and insistently set in its declension by Abbot Suger: clarere, clarus, clarificare.i76 A single fragment will reveal a number of distinct hues, or else on the contrary, a great number of elements will be needed to constitute a single field of color. Compositions become more and more complex, the armature more and more arbitrary, the ornamental background more and more apparent to ensure "the visual cement of the ensemble,"177 the subjective intervention of the artist, the subject's intuitus of the ever more visible object. The immediate association between glass fragment and constitutive element is broken. As will soon be broken the old logical liaison between word and thing. Illumination slips away. In which every edifice becomes a sacred temple in the Lord. Is the time past when Suger could immediately draw Saint Paul's metaphor in the direction of a theurgical justification of architecture governed by the synthetic power of reason, guided by the anagogical path that authorizes the recognition of reason as a vehicle of faith? When Alain of Lille could still launch a vibrant "Deus tamquam mundi elegans architectus" (God is just as much the elegant architect of the world)... resting upon the Chartrian tripartition of the opus—of God, of nature, of humankind"? This is because the ars mechanica was shown too quickly to be "voluntarist" not to put into perspective the old shame: adulterine, "quia circa humana opera versatur" (because it turned around human exertion).178 "For the time is coming when people

188,9

will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own likings, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander ino myths" (2 Tim. 4:3-4). So it goes with the use of the notion of integumentum in medieval glosses in Timaeum. Should one conclude, with Malebranche, that nature is an anti-Christian idea par excellence, a worldly idea—mundana philosophic a remnant of pagan philosophy gathered up by imprudent theologians who find Christianity good only for soliciting philosophical perspectives? Philosophia mundi. Let's listen, one last time, in brief, to its bivalent economy. Put in a position of alterity with regard to natural data through Christian ideality, medieval man, led by the Chartrian schoolmaster, endows the world with an order of autonomous consistency by de-constructing it physically in order to re-produce it theologically as other than what it gives itself for (a mechanical conjunction of historical forces in becoming); in so doing, the world lets itself be discovered as (or by) a philosophy animated by a principle of dehierarchicization such that the mundus and its philosophia abolish theological completedness, such that— to take up again the two Greek orders—the transcendence of "Theology" proceeds really to the ontological deployment of "Economy."179 In the twelfth century, philosophy—of a Platonic inspiration, with what is called a bit hurriedly, since Koyre, the mathematical atomism of the Timaeus—is reborn from/within the investment of the world and its rational order. Time belongs to the inner law of this representation, it becomes one with the emergence of a mundus, it announces the scientific destruction of the cosmos dominated by the qualitative differentiation of a sensible space. But also, envisioned in depth within the movement of the mind by which it is repossessed, time in the burst of its "potency" [puissance} (vis) illuminates a possible definition of cognition by something a priori in which the determination of physics is played out in the logical categories susceptible of creating a liaison between rationality and the power of its concept, carrying off with it the destiny of mechanics in its classical sense (not the Chartrian one with its renovated "Platonism"). So the great syntheses of the thirteenth century will no longer designate anything but an essentially strategic regime of signs whose integrative capacity was, when all is said and done, inversely proportional to the precariousness of their resistance. Like the forced regime of an "axiomatic" will that has come too late or too early.

Fides E f fi c ax

Note on Theological Reason in the Thirteenth Century

As an aftereffect of the invasion of Aristotelian science, the thirteenth century is when the word theology was substituted for the obsolete term of sacra pagina. This differentiation, implied in a certain way in/since the Augustinian exercise (but "enveloped" by it also; for its "development," see the Didascalicon of Hugh of Saint-Victor), coincides above all with the diffusion of the Aristotelian theory of science insofar as that theory allows, through Abelard and Richard of Saint-Victor, for the Anselmian operation on the rationes necessariae to be formalized. Juxtaposed, in theology, to the credibile ut credibile (believe in order to believe) is the rational elaboration of faith. This elaboration takes the form of a credibile ut intelligibile (believe in order to understand) where the modus ratiocinativus reigns — that is, the logical armature of the episteme. Namely: (1) the "definitions, divisions, and reasonings" of Aristotelian knowledge (definitto, divisio, collectio linked together and leading to a conclusion); (2) the structural analogy in science between articuli fidei and principia (or suppositiones), starting evidences from which one can proceed to demonstrations. It will be up to Saint Thomas to give this equivalence its strongest expression by positing the parallelism lumen fidei—intellectus principiorum (light of faith—understanding of first principles): "Just as the intellectus principiorum locates its determining object in the external, sensible world, so does the inner light of faith locate its objects of belief in external obedience to an authorized predication" (Marie-Dominique Chenu, La Theologie comme science au XIIP siecle, 3d ed. [Paris: Vrin, 1969], 65); and (3) the theory of the subalterning of the sciences, subordinating themselves to each other, every level inserting itself in the next higher level by virtue of a subalternatio of objects and principles, reverberating within the difference between demonstrations quia and demonstrations propter quid. Subordinating and subordinated sciences, whose final justification is founded on what must indeed be called the unity (continuatio} of the natural and the supernatural worlds. This unity subjects the philosophical intelligibility of analogy to the regime of obediential potency. The relative autonomy of theological reason, subaltern to the subalterning science of God (subjective genitive) and of the blessed who see God, is still limited because there is subalternation only of principles and not of object. Quasi subalternation of a ratio fide illustrata whose resolutio depends on a single truth excluding a priori all hiatus between the truth of philosophy and the truth of revelation, of the intellectus Dei in which "that truth resolves itself, after having discovered its impulse in bringing back to itself everything it has embraced and elaborated" (ibid., 91-92). In God himself is where the idea of "scientificity" is realized and achieved in the sense of a vision of what is present: visio rei praesentis (cf. De veritate, q.14, a9; In Saint Thomas Aquinas,

190,1

Boethium de trinitate, q.II, a2 ad5 and q.V, al ad5; and Jean-Frangois Courtine's commentary, "Philosophic et theologie. Remarque sur la situation aristotelicienne de la determination thomiste de la 'theologia,'" Revue philosophique de Louvain 63 [August 1986], 327-78). Is what is true of theology and the revelabile with regard to the scientia Dei et beatorum also true of philosophy in relation to theology (Philosophia ancilla theologiae)? Brief as our answer may be, it must pass through the difficult question of the meaning of "what is believed in Aristotelianism" (Duhem), of the solidarity between Christianity and Aristotelianism in the thirteenth century. The problem is no longer that of a borrowed, transposed scientific treatment, but that of the integration of an autonomous philosophical corpus participating for long centuries "in the stability and immutability of dogma" (Etienne Gilson; Thomas Aquinas became Saint Thomas in 1323, and was proclaimed a "Common Doctor" of the Catholic church in 1879). It is impossible to limit the problem to the Thomist conception of the relations between reason and faith, the second dominating the first by declaring it incapable of demonstrating what would be contrary to it: philosophy as the servant of theology; one can always emphasize the contrast offered by its "theory of reality" inasmuch as the latter calls forth the development of an autonomous philosophy (Brehier). On this subject, there is perhaps no more important remark than the following: "We would like to imagine the Paris theologians worried by the philosophical progress of their colleagues in the Arts Faculty and running after them to grab their conquests. What happened is exactly the opposite" (Gilson, La Philosophic cm May en Age, 556). Otherwise put, what is called Latin Aristotelianism, which is still a Neoplatonizing Aristotelianism, would be created by theologians (even if soon afterward, with Siger of Brabant, a nontheological Aristotelianism found its privileged locus in psychology and ethics). By way of indication, two facts may be recalled. In a first letter dated July 7, 1228, and addressed to the professors of the Theology Faculty of Paris, Pope Gregory IX recalled with a sense of urgency that they pay attention not to let sovereign theology be put under the authority of its servant. The opposition between those who limited philosophy to the study of sacred Scripture and "theologians" using Aristotelian notions in the interpretation of the mysteries must already have been well alive. Three years later, in his letter of April 23, 1231, Gregory IX set up a commission charged with examining Aristotle's libri naturales. It is hard to see how we can avoid concluding, with Fernand Van Steenberghen, that from the first third of the century onward the ecclesiastical authorities were taken "with the idea that the study of Aristotle might be profitable to Christian

F i d e s E f f i c ax

science." This is a feeling that well reflects the point of view of the whole of the theologico-philosophical movement prior to 1250: that of a Neoplatonizing eclectic Aristotelianism fused "with the traditional doctrines of Latin theology, whose principal source is Saint Augustine." Bonaventure himself, following the example of his masters Alexander of Hales and Jean de La Rochelle — one and the other, as he would do in turn, had conceived of the intellect acting like a part of the soul—would take up a very great part of the Philosopher's heritage, completed and corrected by an Augustinian inspiration without which the project of a theological synthesis would be devoid of all foundation. It was only when faced with the danger of the propagation of a heterodox and heretical Aristotelianism presenting itself as a separate philosophy (although, if I am not mistaken, none of the Latin "Averroists" ever defended the thesis of the double truth) that the general of the Franciscan order modified his attitude, in order to denounce vigorously, in an eschatological and apocalyptic sense, every philosophy independent of revelation that would wish to snatch us from the hands of the royal fiancee of Christian wisdom (the "prostitute of reason"). In his Collationes in Hexaemeron, his anti-Aristotelianism is thereby presented under the guise of an antiphilosophism, which could be qualified, following G. Sohngren, as an apocalyptic anti-Aristotelianism. In this context, he can be considered the inspiration for neo-Augustinianism, a tardy machine of war launched against philosophical separatism, ending in the famous condemnations of 1277. As is known, those condemnations would not spare the memory of the Angelic Doctor, despite his jousts with Siger of Brabant and his supporters at the Arts Faculty. On all these points, see Fernand Van Steenberghen, La Philosophic au XIIF siecle (Louvain and Paris: Beatrice-Nauwelaerts, 1966), and his important bibliography, which merits completion, La Bibliotheque du philosophe medieviste (Louvain: Nauwelaerts, 1974)—which we rectify in the sense of Gilson's initial remark, cited earlier. I consider fundamental the continuity of neo-Aristotelianism, "the integrative element of theological speculation" (ibid., 464), from William of Auvergne and Alexander of Hales up to the doctrinal struggles of 1270-1277. See Martin Grabmann's important works. Far from opposing each other as two irreducible syntheses, an Augustinian and an Aristotelian one (this is Etienne Gilson's thesis in La Philosophic de saint Bonaventure [Paris: Vrin, 1924]), the systems of Bonaventure and Thomas appear as two successive phases of Christian thought in the thirteenth century. "Thomism thus appears as the putting into focus of Saint Bonaventure's Neoplatonizing Aristotelianism" (ibid., 542). (Note that the latter, in his Commentary on the Sentences, q.2, ad4, had formulated a first draft of the theory of

192,3

subalternation; it should also be recalled that the Franciscan master, as later the Dominican doctor, opted for Aristotle's cosmic time over against Augustine's anthropocentric time; see M. Ratzinger, "Der Mensch und die Zeit im Denken des Heiligen Bonaventura," in UHomme et son destin d'apres les penseurs du Moyen Age [Louvain: Nauwelaerts, 1960], 473-83.) More than a "purely philosophical decision" that would make Aquinas choose "once and for all, between the only two pure philosophies that could exist, that of Plato and that of Aristotle" — and therefore to be against Plato's doctrine, is to be for Aristotle's—if it is a question of understanding how and why "Thomism is right away what it will always be" (Etienne Gilson, "Pourquoi saint Thomas a critique saint Augustin," Archives d'histoire doctrinale et litteraire du Moyen Age [1926], in fine), I would prefer to start from the major problem inherited by Brother Thomas. This problem had grown throughout the twelfth century under the auspices of Platonism: that of the autonomous efficacity and consistency of the worldly order of "second causes." For the precedent set by Albertus Magnus, who had juxtaposed more than he had articulated Augustinian illumination with Aristotelian empiricism (and this was not for lack of having put his hand to the task more than once; cf. the problem of individuation, which remained philosophically unresolved), threatened to open the way for an integral Aristotelianism authorized by the inevitable distinction between philosophy and theology—between what is demonstrable and what is not—in order to promote the idea of two separate orders of conclusions. There was nothing else to do but go to the expense of renewing the attempt at synthesis. Now, Thomas's master stroke (or the stroke of master Thomas) is above all methodological when he dares to draw the extreme consequences of the disconnection, beginning with the existence of God, which must henceforth be demonstrated on the basis of the experience of the sensible world (the existence of God as problem). This implied as much a new theory of the soul and of cognition (on the basis of sensory cognition, the preeminent case of the problem of the efficacity of second causes: what is a natural operation?) as a new ontology prohibiting the reduction of existential being to essential being (the actus essendi having to found metaphysically the principle of causality put to work in the five proofs for the existence of God issuing forth in the formula "Deus est esse omnium, non essentiale, sed causale" [God is the essence of all, not essentially but causally], I Sentences dist. 8, q.l, art. 2, Solutio). Having drawn the map this way, Thomas Aquinas no longer had a choice. It was necessary to "metamorphose the Platonist notion of participation into an existential notion of causality" such that the God of the Christian religion becomes the

F i d e s E f fi cax

supreme principle of philosophical intelligibility (Etienne Gilson, Le Thomisme [Paris: Vrin, 1965], 6th ed., 87, 168). The technical notions of Aristotelian physics, reconcatenated around the theme of the Primum Mobile ordering a world composed of fixed essences, and regulated by the natural tendencies of bodies to move toward their place, their "end," were what would form its main instrument. The hierarchical subordination of effects and causes to the pure Act, omnipresent in the five "ways," allows a stricter affirmation than ever of the created being's essential dependence on God, by conferring to each existent the limits set for it by "divine justice" in the form of the All's protection granted to its proper activity. (Cf. Summa theologicae I, q.103, a6: God governs all things immediately, although He has his designs carried out through the actions of creatures upon each other; Contra Gentiles III, 21: "Unumquode tendens in suam perfectionem, tendit in divinam similitudinem," every nature is moved by a constant effort of assimilation to God, assimilatio, participatio—Neoplatonism here finds its rights restored.) "If there therefore exists a physics of bodies," Gilson superbly sums up, "it is because there first exists a mysticism of divine life" (Le Thomisme, 237). It is in this sense that the soul will be said, with no damage to Christian faith, to be the body's form; that Saint Thomas can recuperate Aristotelian noetics (the theory of abstraction, the transcendental relation between matter and form) and attribute to man an individual acting intellect, the sufficient reason for his intellectual operations. He can dispense with the Augustinian doctrine of divine illumination because man sees everything, according to his degree of being, in the eternal essences of things understood epistemologically by him as the first principles of cognition, and because at the ontological level God is posited as the existence itself (ipsum esse) of everything that exists, which only exists through the supreme Existing behaving as an act, even with regard to form (Contra Gentiles II, 54). "Unde oportet quod Deus sit in omnibus rebus, et intime" (Whence it is proper that God be in all things, and intimately so; Summa theologicae I, 8, 1 ad Resp.). Being is found at every level in a manner proportionate to its level (the analogy of being). As a consequence, organizing is what belongs to the wise. "To intimate the order, is [in fact] the task that comes back to the one who can call upon a higher cause [per altiorem causam} when it is a question of judging what is inferior" (Courtine, "Philosophic et theolgie," 329). By this the scientia Dei alone merits the title of wisdom—sapientia. To borrow yet again from Gilson, we can exclaim: a strange Aristotle it is through whom nothing can exist or be considered true without a gratuitous gift of the Holy Spirit! That does not prevent the genius of Thomas, the boldness of his initial "throw of the dice," from resting largely upon his intuiting the resources

194,5

of that finalist meta-physics in a crisis situation that was all the more dangerously threatening the unity of Christian thought for its being secretly borne along by the deployment of its transcendence. That Thomism's condemnation by the most conservative currents of the Theology Faculty may have led Christianity to the threshold of a science in which everything would be "considered through natural reason without the light of faith" (Rene Descartes, Principles of Philosophy, Preface) indicates through counterpoint the historical limits of Thomist intrinsicism. A counterexample: the pseudo-Thomism of Cajetan, a "Thomism" with no action of esse, was constrained to give up the semiological capture whose operator it intended to be. If conservatives sometimes overtake progressives who are waiting in place for the ensuing progress, what can one think of an "Augustinian" reaction that, while distancing itself from concordist "naturalism," would separately produce that "progress"? This is what happened with the complicity of the Oxford masters, the inheritors of Chartrian culture. It's as if the dynamics of the West were never anything but the blind history of the promotion of the modern via the will of tradition. Reformation, Counter-Reformation... With the Jansenist movement, we would hold "the case of the limit figure" (Marcel Gauchet, Le Desenchantement du monde. Une histoire politique de la religion [Paris: Gallimard, 1985], 230) — the extreme limit of the religious breakup of Being, which engages its definitive dissolution, and simultaneously bears within it its absolute domination (Kant). In truth, this adventure is so unforeign to Thomism that the retroactive effect of its enterprise could, with implacable logic, launch the dynamics of transcendence against the Heideggerian problematics of the ontotheological fold of metaphysics as such. ("Die Ontologie ist zugleich und notwendig Theologie" [Ontology is at the same time and necessarily Theology].) Let's take up the process that triggers the Thomist narrative, from article 1 of question 1 of the Summa theologicae. Here, we find verified that the first definition of theologia as scientia is elaborated from the dissociation between theology in the strict sense (theologia sacrae scripturae) and the theology of the philosophers, which must be subaltern to the former to the extent that the splitting of the two theologies shelters a potential conflict between the two points of view. Subalternation oblige, let us acknowledge with Jean-Francois Courtine that "what is treated by philosophical theology may thus be claimed as its own, and even more rightfully, by the theologia nostra, the one that treats sacra doctrina" in its extraphilosophical purity. But by the same stroke, in tending to make God exit philosophy so as to enunciate Him in another syntax, \he gesture of splitting is the bearer of a liberating

Fides E ffi c ax

effect with regard to metaphysics, for there is no theologizing of philosophical theology without an ontologizing of metaphyics: without a detheologizing of philosophy. God himself pays the costs for all this in the Thomist text. He will in effect be ontologized by that philosophical theology that can never latch onto res divinae as such, except as a function of its proper object, the ens inquantum ens. Following Suares's formulation, such a theology would end up making "God fall under the consideration of the ens inquantum ens" (Disputationes metaphysicae I, 1, 19; cited by Courtine, whose interpretation inspired me to make this "compliment"—though the entirety of this note is addressed to him). That the Scotist concept of being (of the existent: ens) univocal to God and creature carried this business to its final consequences sufficiently indicates that the aforesaid ontotheological constitution of "Western" metaphysics makes sense only on the basis of the major inflection to which it is subjected by the dynamics of transcendence. (Heidegger was not far from agreeing with this in this one remark: that Christian theology "must first be realized before a process of secularization can lay hold of it"; see Hegel's Concept of Experience [New York: Harper and Row, 1970], 147.)

196,7

III

1300:

The Capture of Being

Et renovabis faciem terrae... [And thou renewest the face of the ground... ]

Ps. 104:30 Dissociation, dissolution, or disintegration... "decline," "autumn," or "decadence" ... there is no lack of words of a privative character and "disjunctive passions" to qualify that critical age beginning—though one time does not make a habit—around the year 1300, with the great conflict between Boniface VIII and Philip the Fair. A prelude to the irremediable failure of the spiritual unity of christianitas, it coincides with the beginning of Duns Scotus's teaching at Oxford (via antiquaT) and the birth of Buridan, the broadcaster, if not the inventor,180 of the via modernorum—but also the future rector of the arts section at the University of Paris, and in this capacity at least involved with the elaboration of the "Statute of the Faculty of Liberal Arts in reprobation of certain erroneous Ockhamist doctrines." (The modern version of parricide? William of Ockham is the initiating "Father," the Venerabilis Inceptor of the via moderna.} 1300-1340: the century opens on the scene of the Jubilee celebrating the last days of glory of pontifical theocracy, then is split at its midpoint by a paradoxical and universal "etat d'ame" (passio animae) where the exemplary image of dehierarchicized Being and time is displayed — before the century discovers itself to be "modern" from beginning to end.181 The rough outlines to be sketched here are the historical background of the self-assertion of the state — contemporaneous, it should at least be mentioned, with the unprecedented transformation of merchant capital into finance capital; the metaphysical object of Duns Scotus's question; and the pragmatic frame of Buridan's enigma. That the definitive foundation of the world in (divine or human) subjectivity proceeds from a theology de potentia Dei absoluta (of Augustinian inspiration) in no way unaware of the "economic principle" of reasons, that this theology may introduce into the efficacy of the subject's will to represent in the affirmation of being and the true, in the identification of a nature in the process of becoming

F i d e s E f f i c ax

wholly objective through the play of signs substituting themselves for real things — all this indicates that the dynamics of transcendence no longer really has an object; except to consider as such the hypostasis of the phenomenon in being, of pure Ego in an Absolute that becoming "objectifies," if naturally, we withhold the case of Kant. A century of borders and breaks, the fourteenth is marked by every kind of discontinuity, within being as well as cognition. Faith and reason, theology and metaphysics, physics and metaphysics, but also, to take up again concepts that are far from having finished the course of their innovation with the end of the preceding century, matter and form, individual and universal, sensible and intelligible ... seem to obey just as many unleashed forces, just as many freed forms, full and sufficient realities "that undoubtedly pile up but without requiring each other."182 In this first year of the new century, when his theological teaching commences, Duns Scotus gives it its foundation, its color, and the summons whose bearer he is. "Colorare rationem in negotio fidei" (to give color to reason while in the business of faith), shall we say by way of a first pass. A poet writes: Around the year 1300, a great adventure happened. Scarcely had Duns Scotus gone beyond analogical signification and opened up infinity to the contemplating word than a sudden gleam of light displaced the dense fog hanging over our humble life here beloiv... This was the greatest step forward since Augustine. The jargon of crafts did not from this stroke come to translate the soliloquy of the soul. Still, unbeknownst to all, the two languages were already on the way to breathing the same air.183

Unbeknownst to all: the air of the time and the labor of the human being were going to determine each other in the metaphysical flash of Scotist meaning. It ought to be asked whether the suddenness of the gleam184 and the slow coming to the fore of the new self-evidence implies a historical and doctrinal break of such a kind that it would be perfectly vain to seek any antecedent, any preparation for it. If this were the case, the critical extraneousness of Duns Scotus would scarcely call up any references other than the condemnation of Greco-Arab necessitarianism and the neo-Augustinianism "destined to hold in check the Thomism" that had inspired it.185 For having confronted the problem of the formation of the Subtle Doctor's thought in all its amplitude, Etienne Gilson was able to show that this overly simple polemical view could not stand up to examination. His doctrine was less elabo-

198,9

rated through contact with Saint Thomas and Henry of Ghent—whom he had to oppose by reason of "the ineluctable necessity of keeping his distance with regard to a theologian whose fundamental philosophical options were extremely close to his"186—than with the contradictory dialogue between Averroes and Avicenna. We know the upshot: Tenetur ergo Avicenna: Avicenna is the one who is right, since the existence of God cannot be demonstrated by physics. Now, the proper object of metaphysics cannot be God considered as supreme substance, that is, as final cause of all other substances (Averroist metaphysics is an "ousiology"), without his existence being demonstrated by a preceding science, physics, that is, Averroist physicism (proof by the Primum Mobile). But how, Duns Scotus asks in his Quaestiones in Metaphysicam Aristotelis (L. VI, q.4), can the physicist prove that this Mover is primary, unless it is by being more of a metaphysician than a physicist in order to establish and demonstrate the existence of a God who is the Primum Mobile? Moreover, this would be, if not to include God in the world, at least to limit our cognition of God to his action upon the world, to a privative cognition of God. To admit, on the other hand, within the Avicennian perspective of the esse essentiae and of the intentio essendi, that the sole object of metaphysics is being inasmuch as being (ens inquantum ens), precisely because it is not a genus susceptible of corresponding to some existing real thing that would stem from Aristotelian categories, but something transcendental able in a sense to be affirmed by all beings, is to give oneself the possibility of demonstrating his existence on the basis of primacy in the order of being and of the Ipsum esse drawing infinity along with it (proof through causality in the order of the ens). "It is thus," Gilson concludes, "a question of the true primacy of metaphysics: Prima scientia, scibilis primi."187 For it to be applicable later to the most general genuses, being must be intelligible by something naturally anterior — "the quidditas that is in the substance" — instituting it as the primary object of the intellect. Being is unius rationis. In the name of an intelligible content, it affirms the sense unity of the existent. (The theological consequences of this thesis are precisely what Henry of Ghent claims to occult while conserving the Avicennian assertion of a single and simple concept of the existent present to our intellect. Whence the constant critique led by Duns Scotus against the "Henrician paradigm," for it is a matter of the weakest link in the chain of analogy. How can the first and simplest concept adequately grasp the creator/creature dissymmetry on which is based dependence of/in alterity, if not by appealing to the analogy of an essentially ambiguous concept? "And for this reason, there is an errancy [error] in this concept," admits Henry of Ghent.188)

Fides E ffi c ax

The strength of this analysis is so evident that there is hardly need to underscore what is at stake in it. It propels us straight away into the heart of the Scotist path since a certain189 doctrine of the univocity of Being is necessarily presupposed by the Avicennian solution, and since the existence of God apprehended as infinite being can be demonstrated by an argumentation rising up to him on the basis of his metaphysical effects, even though Revelation alone can deliver us the intuition of his object. In effect, once the primary mover of continuity (the AristoteloThomist principle of universal analogy) has been abandoned to the benefit of a univocal conception of being giving no means to creatures to distinguish themselves ontologically from God by analogically drawing near him, the distance between finite and infinite becomes infinite.190 Here is found again, transposed onto the metaphysical plane, the historical paradox of the Incarnation comprehending the Unequal in itself. Having proceeded to a "veritable metaphysical integration"191 by positing infinity as an intensity of being itself (acting within being, infmitas intensiva), and the infinity of numbers as actually realized ("si in entibus intelligamus aliquid infinitum in entitate in actu")192 in the order literally out of series of the simile in actu, of the intensive break with regard to the extensiveness-successiveness of the alterum post alterum (what is unequal within quantity itself), it is with every bit of rigor, every bit of "transcendental" logic, that Duns Scotus argues: "There is creation; there is an infinite distance between the extremes of creation... God is infinitely distant from creation... The infinite is that which precisely exceeds any given finite, not according to any finite measure but even beyond every assignable proportion [ultra omnem proportionem assignabilem]."193 Between our being and this God separated by the individuating modality of infinity, which can be the object of no concept other than that of being, even though the latter does not represent (positively, not privatively) infinity to itself, the abyss is infinite, the ontological contingency so absolute that it "forbids every deduction [claiming] to link the infinite world of beings to the absolute transcendence of Being."194 The univocity implicating God and creature excludes any resemblance between them (the same goes for Ockham).195 Thus, we ought not to recoil before this eminently problematic assertion: the thesis of the univocity of being does not only herald the positive formulation of the Christian logic of transcendence; the great Scotist ontological proposition expresses the definitive metaphysical exit out of the sphere of the ontotheological One, within which the theory of analogy evolves (that theory is only valid through/in a metaphysics of participation that reduces ontology to a theology: every existent in its finite measure partakes in the divine nature).

200,1

It's on this account, led by a reflection on the intensive and the intrinsic determination of essence, carried along by the very nature of the mathematical idealities that, by definition, can only be understood with one sense (univocity), that Duns Scotus can operate this fundamental revolution: to consider the ens qua ens as an object, "the first natural object of our understanding,"196 and to impress this final inflection managed by the dynamics of transcendence: the modern distinction between subject and object as prior to any theological consideration.197 Signifying being in its supreme degree of intensity, the infinitas intensiva is not the attribute but the modality of a concept. For the moment, note that far from reducing divine transcendence, the existence ante intellectum of a common nature ensuring the de-physicized metaphysics of its "scientific" identity (scientia scientiarum} implies, if not its definitive de-theologizing, at least its effective de-subalternation. If metaphysics to a certain extent brings us near the subject of theology (God as God, the most singular unit), it can never conceive him otherwise than as being, the most formal of all essences, independently of every determination and of every practical finality of salvation (the reserved domain of theology conceived as notitia practica, praxis: no science is possible in man's present situation—pro statu isto — on the basis of credibilia revelata). "That is why," one reads in the Prologue to the Ordinatio, "we assert that knowledge sought for the purpose of orgasmic pleasure [jouissance d'amour} is more noble than all speculative knowledge... Hence, the principles of theology are practical as are the conclusions derived from them." Gilson's proposed reading of the Quaestiones in Metaphysicam, one of the young master's first works, is important on two accounts. First, historically: in borrowing his definition of metaphysics from Avicenna, Duns Scotus finds himself attached to the Oxfordian tradition — in which the Avicennian current of the more geometrico dominated — and removed from an exclusively critical-reactive aim with regard to Thomism. Second, philosophically, and as excessive as this proposition may be: if "the doctrine of the univocity of being is [implied and] represented in Duns Scotus's eyes by Avicenna's philosophy,"198 ive must take the risk of searching even earlier for the mainspring and originality of his thought, the origin of that new mental universe Joe Bousquet told us about—the greatest step forward since Augustine. This is an assertion that seems as peremptory as gratuitous when we recall that Scotus's attribution of univocity to Avicenna did not allow (and for good reason; see note 189) for the expression ipsissimis verbis to be found in his writings: there is, then, at least "explication," "development," and, to say it all, the creation of a concept;199 when we recall that in his great work, the Opus oxoniense, Duns

Fides E ffi c ax

Scotus deduces his conception of being from Aristotle200 (the Avicennian Aristotle of Oxford) and when we recall that it is Duns Scotus who explicitly related the basis of all possible cognition to the univocal unity of the concept of the existent, giving to metaphysics by the same stroke the status of condition of possibility of the sciences as sciences on account of having identified the simplest concept with the primary object of metaphysics.201 But listen again a moment to Etienne Gilson: To confuse Duns Scotus's philosophy with that ofAvicenna would be an error worse than being unaware of their relations. It cannot be done, not only because Duns Scotus rejects everything Avicenna's doctrine contains that is not assimilable to Christian philosophy, but also 'cause his thought entails a personal, original, and, if it can be said, formal element in relation to Avicenna's metaphysics. Duns Scotus did not passively come under the influence of Avicenna's philosophy; he accepted it as a point of departure that suited him, because that philosophy, penetrated as it was by Platonism, allowed him to transpose the fundamental theses of Saint Augustine onto a new philosophical plane.202

If we understand this correctly, that "new philosophical plane" is a matter of formality. One can guess here at the enigmatic presence of that eminently Scotist notion, since it commands the overcoming ofAvicenna as well as the split with Henry of Ghent: the idea of a formal distinction a pane rei of which the doctrine of the univocity of being would be but a corollary vis-a-vis the structure of Duns Scotus's thought (and no longer the history of its formation) and of its incidence upon the history of medieval and modern philosophy. It is his "formalism" that Duns Scotus would already singularly escape from every via antiqua. The question must therefore be taken up in a more methodical manner. The notion of univocal being supposes that being is a something "real and common." The object of metaphysics depends on this reality for its own existence. If it were but a being of reason, metaphysics would be confused with logic, an impossible logic, for there is no concept whose definition is common to every being; but reciprocally, if this real and common was but the real being of the reality of singulars, metaphysics would only be a physics daring all the less to recognize itself as such, since there exists no being whose quidditas rei materialis belongs in common to all beings. The problem thus delimited, it appears that the unity of the object of metaphysics can no longer be formulated in logical or numerical terms. Another type of unity must intervene, intermediary (medium), real without being numerical, and thus minima a parte rei, in order to respect the status of metaphysics as "science

202,3

of the real." This is what Scotus calls quidditative unity or unity by nature. On it rests the doctrine of the communitas entis in quid, the real community of pure essence — prior "by nature" to the singularity that contracts it as well as to the thought that conceives it—whose metaphysical being is only the most universal. "Metaphysica quae est de quidditatibus," says Duns Scotus. His universe is that of essences, comments Gilson, and we understand even more willingly: that of the realism of essence, which the Subtle Doctor refers expressly to Avicenna's common nature203 to prop up that doctrine in which quiddity possesses, if not an actual existence entailing a distinction just as exclusively real, then at least a proper entity. "Such is natura, in effect; not a singular being endowed with a numerical unity, nor a universal with no other unity than that of its predicabiliry, but something between the two that does not blend into either one. Considered at the level of being, 'nature' is not a 'being' existing apart, like the singular, but neither is it a simple 'being of reason,' like universal logic; it is not a singular esse in the full sense, but an 'entity,' a 'reality,' or again, and there will be a place to remember it, a 'formality.' "204 We will remember it, but not without having first underscored the newness of the Scotist accentuation. Difference of intensity. Although for Avicenna, the esse is an accident of essence in the sense that it is "added," as existence is added to humanitas, to the essence of humankind, to constitute the real human, and that human is in some way external to it, Duns Scotus takes up the notion of essence by considerably modifying its spirit: every essence, such as it is, is according to the degree of proper existence "suiting" it. Every essence is its existence to itself, which is proportional to it. In other terms, essence is the intrinsic measure of existence conceived as its modality.205 Intensity is the form of essence as the cause of existence, of a pre-individual individuation. Essence only lets itself be distinguished from existence formally: a real non-distinction regulates their relation. Essence and existence are distinct formaliter a pane rei.206 Duns Scotus thus pretends not to know what exactly that (Thomist) fiction is that wants esse to be something coming as if from outside onto essentia.207 Virtual-ideal at midpoint between the effectuated real and the logically possible, essence is nothing other than existence in its "real-possible," in its "effectibility," in its objective "productibility."208 Anchored in the reality of the "real-possible," this singular essentialism has no equal except for the strangeness of the metaphysical naturalism on which it is based. Let us remark in passing that certain of the most common misunderstandings about Scotist philosophy could be avoided by keeping in mind that the notions of esse and essentia take on in this thought a bearing, a "col-

Fi d e s E f f i c ax

oration," Duns Scotus would say, that are utterly specific and whose genesis goes back to the intensive foundation of his thought. On this subject, the author of the Introduction to the French translation of De Primo Principle, Fran9ois-Xavier Putallaz, is not wrong to write that "the realism of essence with which one garbs Scotist philosophy is nothing more than a misfortunate label without much sense."209 There remains the question of knowing how to recognize the reality of this formal distinction, since it certainly is a distinctio realis, whose proper quality is not to hit the real unity all the while permitting the (internal: the "distinguishing-itself" [se-distinguer]) distinction between the modes of emanation of divine persons. In fact, it is to resolve this theological problem that the Scotist distinction is originally produced: the distinction between divine attributes predicating themselves univocally from divine essence requires that their formal reasons be distinctly present in that essence whose simplicity must necessarily be saved. The Subtle Doctor's answer takes one line. "Omni entitati formali correspondet adaequate aliquod ens" (For each notion considered formally, there adequately corresponds a certain being).210 Once this principle commanding the intelligibility of the distinctio formalis ex natura rei (formal distinction of the nature of the thing) has been formulated (the principle harmonizes the "real" order of extrinsic differences with the "conceptual" order of intrinsic differences thanks to the intensive differential element), the Quarrel of the Distinctions picks up from where the Quarrel of the Universals left off. Not that this latter quarrel disappears (William of Ockham will revive it in his polemic against Duns Scotus), but it will henceforth be dominated by those new interests and stakes that appeared within the perspective opened up by the Scotist tertium quid and its ideal of clarity and distinction, claimed by the project of an internally dynamic construction through which extrinsic differences are not any the less "internal."211 In Scotus's doctrine, in any case, everything is linked on very rapidly, as if we were finally in possession of the system's master articulation.212 1. In fact, if for every notion distinct in itself there necessarily responds in the thing an esseformale endowed with a real determination, it is clear— we must now restore the citation in its entirety—that one wants to know nothing about that fiction [requiring] that being /esse/ be something that is not composed coming unexpectedly upon essence /essentia/, if the essence is composed "Nescio enim istam fictionem, quod esse est quid superveniens essentiae non compositum, si essentia est composita..." (Opus oxoniense IV, d.ll, q.3, n. 46)]. Thus, the being of everything that is composed includes the being of all its parts, that is, it includes numerous partial beings /esse/ of numerous forms, as a whole formed of numerous forms includes these partial actualities.

204,5

In these conditions, all things result from the composition of superimposed formal degrees (formalitas or gradus metaphysici), considered as formally distinct within the existential unity of being. Although Duns Scotus can thus criticize physical atomism, it will not escape the reader that his doctrine of the plurality of forms composing all things (compositio metaphysica) takes up from a metaphysical point of view the epistemological problems left in suspense by the Chartrians' compositio physica. The Chartrian atom sparkled in the backfire [la part dufeu], referring back to a difference of level that was its sufficient reason de jure, insufficient de facto since the qualities of the visiblereal elements were still present in the elementum. Now, Scotist intensity will allow for giving things their due [la pan des choses] by raising the difference of level to the difference of intensity as the reason for the sensible in which the finite itself accedes to the status of the transcendental.213 It here finishes q/f (concludes and destroys) the "complicated" movement of "explication" begun back there in the orientale lumen: subordinate the real to the virtual, the extensive to the intensive (which alone can account for the individuations and variable degrees of existence), make the background rise to the surface... But precisely because it can only be a question of a metaphysics of quidditatibus, it is absurd to maintain that every reality is comprehended within it as an "assemblage" and a "mosaic."214 Conscious that "beings should not be multiplied unnecessarily," Duns Scotus never understood this plurality in the manner of distinct, actual existences in the heart of the composed (far from apprehending the seminal reason as an atom of life, he assimilates it to a form).215 And these "formalities," real respondents of distinct, objective concepts, are hierarchized by the completing role of the ultimate form — the completing form — from which concrete being takes its completion, est hoc ens. In this sense, I concede that total being /esse/ takes its completion /est completive/ from a [single] form, which gives to the whole what it is. But it does not follow from there that in the whole there is exclusively contained a [single] form, [that it is impossible] that in the whole are contained several forms [considered] not as specifically constituting that which is composed, but insofar as certain [elements] included within the potential [part] of that composed.216 The doctrine of the unifying capacity of multiple forms within the primary form supposes that the real unity of a substantial whole is a unity of hierarchical order, the essential unity of distinct forms a parte rei, and no more the fact of the transcendental relation of matter to form (natural order): "The connection between matter and form is not necessary."217 Whence, too, Duns Scotus must criticize atomism (metaphysical reversal).

Fides E ffi c ax

2. If matter may be conceived according to a distinct formal notion, it cannot, as Thomas Aquinas had claimed, be absolutely and immediately united to form. On the contrary, matter must be endowed with its own reality and existence, apart from form. Matter will be "subjective potential," "not only objective potential... that is, it [will be] an action (I don't care what they may say, adds Duns Scotus)."218 Having a certain essence, it will be posited as a quasi form, an entitative action and not a potential of form, a formal or informed action.219 A limitsituation: its at least possible separation from form requires its formalization. Augustine is the one who will be cited by way of a theological guarantor at the very moment Duns Scotus takes up the decisive question, namely, whether matter through some potential could be without form (q.2). To which the following answer is given: if "it is not contradictory for matter to be without any form at all, substantial or accidental"; it being admitted that "every absolute that God produces in creatures through the intermediary of the second cause, He can produce without that second cause, which is not a part of the essence of what is caused"; considering that "form is a second cause, which is not of the essence of matter, insofar as it is matter, and [that] through it God gives being [esse] to matter—[then] God can produce matter without form."220 Thus, formal distinction, appearing for the first time221 in order to explain that divine simplicity was in no way pluralized by the trinity of persons, emerges in a theological argument de potentia Dei absoluta. What is immediately creatable by God can exist absolutely and separately without any corresponding object existing for us, who since original sin cannot proceed in a mode other than abstractive. Note right off the Ockhamian lesson about such a teaching: the hypothesis of an act of cognition defined a priori, independently of its proper object, for God as primary cause can very well de potentia absoluta substitute himself in the exercise of that created second cause that is the object.222 But already Duns Scotus's argumention aiming to break formally-really the transcendental unity between matter and form tended to substitute the natural order of things and second causes, de potentia Dei ordinata, with the logical order of the a priori principle of noncontradiction alone, to which divine potential is strictly subjected in the very affirmation of its absoluteness.223 That is why, despite what Duns Scotus has to say, his analysis of the relation between matter and form comes down to interpreting it on the model of a predicamental relation grasped intuitively.224 As Andre de Muralt says, "The intuitive grasp tends therefore to replace Aristotelian abstractional induction, since it is henceforth sufficient to examine the order of reasons well to be assured of their

206,7

correspondence with an organized plurality of the real."225 Certainly, let us repeat it, Duns Scotus wants the formal object to precede the intellectual act (ante intellectum), the formal distinction having to be thought "praecedens omnem actum intellectus creati et increati" (he has sufficiently warned us against the danger of confusing logical order with metaphysical order). That doesn't change the fact that if metaphysical possibility is nothing other than that absence of contradiction226 on which rest—de potentia absoluta Dei—the "productibility" and the "productivity" of the being corresponding to absolute potentiality in the order of the concept,227 the real is no longer completely separable from the logically possible, from what is noncontradictorily conceivable.228 Through'the formal distinction, the thinkable is not only the horizon of the possibile logicum, it is also even unto God—where the formal distinction ended up imposing the priority of the transcendentals upon the procession of the trinity—the rule of the possibile reale.229 Not only is the notion of formal distinction what is "the least evident" (immanifesta)230 it is also the distinction between the real and the thinkable, the in-between, which tends to become "immanifest." In short, by thinking univocal being as neuter (neuter), indifferent to the infinite and the finite, to the singular and the universal, to the created and the uncreated, and by positing the univocal essence of metaphysics, Duns Scotus "only thought univocal being," he neutralized it in an abstract concept, whereas Spinoza would turn it, against Descartes, into an object of pure affirmation (the wild ontology of Deus sive Natura)23± Even if there is only a logical basis there, we are led to express the following hypothesis: far beyond the chronological bounds of this decisive vacillation, the substitution of the distinctio formalis a parte rei for Henry of Ghent's distinctio intentionis, according to which the plurality of concepts was only actual in intellectu concipiente, determines classical philosophy, in its general orientation, to open up the way to modern metaphysics. "My ability to understand one thing clearly and distinctly apart from another is enough to assure me that they are distinct, because God at least can separate them."232 Every reader of the Metaphysical Meditations knows what perspective is heralded in Descartes by this late translation of the omni entitati formali correspondet adaequate aliquod ens. But what about for Duns Scotus himself on the level of cognition? The very sense of the Scotist advance depends on the answer to this question. 3. We can understand right away why, as Gilson pointed out so well in his article, the problem of cognition is "the question that haunts the mind of Duns Scotus":233 because of the inevitable analogy between matter and form on the one side, subject and object on the other, the Aristotelian-Thomist path is

F i d e s E ffi c ax

blocked. The formal distinction a pane rei in fact implies the break with every idea of an intentional identity between subject and object, the thesis by which the adaequatio rei et intellectus is "intentional" insofar as it supposes (sub-poses) the information of the intelligence by the form of the object, disengaged from the sensory, actualized by the abstracting operation of the acting intellect. Responding to the Aristotelian notion of eidos, Saint Thomas's species intelligibilis or impressa is the real form of the thing as intellected in the act. The form itself of intelligence is the thing (as) cognized: "forma autem intellectus est res intellects."234 Through the object's formal causality, every cognition is cognition of the thing as real, existing outside of me. Every dissociation between subject and object in the act of cognition other than a logical one (in Aristotelianism, the distinction of rational reason whose basis remains a real, numerical, existential unity containing various aspects within itself) is contradictory.235 Here again, the Scotist formal nonidentity imposes its game of consequences governed by the "effectible," if not effective, real separation. Suppose, Duns Scotus explains, that God imprinted an intelligible likeness (species) on our intellect, or a sensible likeness on our eyes. The intellect would bear itself toward the corresponding object in the same manner, and its object would be exactly the same as if it had really existed. But the object of the intellect would not be God, even though He imprinted in us the likeness of the object. Haec ergo est vera: for every patient to suppose an agent does not imply that the agent setting a cognitive potential into motion is necessarily the object, such as it is, apprehended by that potentiality. Conclusion: what moves the intellect to cognize is not ipso facto the cognized object.236 We can see that the argument de potentia absoluta thus allows for the legal establishment of the possibility of an intellection absolutely independent of its object. The major misinterpretation would be the conclusion that the Subtle Doctor intends, in the manner of certain Augustinians, to grant to the intellect alone the total production of intellection. His preoccupation rather is to substitute an a priori order of cognition for its formal-sensible definition (in Thomism). An a priori definition that, far from denying all causality to the object represented by the species, intends to make it converge with the intellect in the capacity of efficient cause of intellection. "It is necessary," we read in the Ordinatio, "that the soul and the present object converge in the intelligible species... because otherwise [the object], besides the sensible and material object, is not present as intelligible in the act."237 The first, however, is more essential, by reason of the autonomy of the intelligible order: the latter remains (in) itself despite the actual imperfection of our faculty of cognition. If the intellect in fact could not have its own operation, indepen-

208,9

dent of the sensory part (Aristotelian-Thomist abstraction, induction), it would follow that the intellect could not be disjoined, like the eternal from the corruptible, from the body. Thus it is susceptible not only [of having] the object present to itself because it is present to the powers of the imagination (virtus phantastica), but [it can have it] according to a proper presence

/praesentialitate propria, distinguished from the praesentialitate sccundaria of the object as present to lower powers], that is to say, inasmuch as it shines (relucet)yor the intellect by something] that is in the intellect.,238

The notion of object comes out so profoundly transformed that it negotiates its modernity by overtaking its ancient sense in the reduction of being to the concept of being (the ens is prior to the distinction between essence and existence). That notion is no longer defined on the basis of things, according to the intellect's information from the thing in genere intelligibili, but on the basis of the concept, as representation. If the existent is an object, it is as esse repraesentatum in the intellect that apprehends it. The same goes for the divine intellect in the famous example of the stone239 where, as soon as that intellect has comprehended its proper essence under its definition as Absolute, "the divine understanding produces things by its action in an intelligible esse, and through its action it gives that object such or such an esse. Consequently, it provides such a definition of the object [talem rationem objecti]," without soliciting other essences to understand something other than it, because the divine representation is sufficient—as Jean-Luc Marion has very well seen—"to produce objects, or terms reduced to objectivity." In this context of metaphysical reprise and transformation of Augustinian theology (the Augustinian pretext), the ens as ens should be held to be the first natural object of our understanding (which is no longer determined on the basis of things themselves, but on the basis of concepts: according to representation).240 It becomes a veritable object to the extent that it is an object of cognition, to the extent that it is within cognition that the true constitutes itself. Within representation — and not "as a repetition of what 'is found in things,' as if the judicatory relation too existed with an ontological status."241 Augustinian doctrine undergoes a major inflection: in order for "the stone cognized by the intellect to be able to be called an idea" one must preliminarily have identified the divine idea, the reason for which the stone will be formed, with the cognized object (objectum cognitum), and this prior to the relation the divine intellect entertains with that object (this is the "third moment," preceding the cognition God has of that relation). No need that the cognition of the idea be that of the divine essence cognized as irnitable by the essence of the stone: divine cogni-

Fides Efticax

tion does not escape the schema of human cognition. "Ornne positum distinctum cognoscibile habet distinctam ideam" (Everything cognizable that is distinctly posited has a distinct idea).242 Now, everything that is the object of a distinct concept possesses a proper being that the reality of the divine being is not sufficient to account for in its talitas, in its being-that-idea. The idea of the stone, in its relative being, then, needs to be endowed in itself with only a minimum of formal entity and distinction to be "such an object." The result is that God, as first cause, moves our intellect to cognize through the ens objectivum of his ideas, according to their relative being. In the Scotist world, everything that is conceivable "apart" possesses an objective reality, and, in this respect, has in God a distinct idea oriented toward a possible production. "And as long as it has to do with ideas of things to make," Gilson concludes, "the science of God is finally, therefore, a practical science."243 Rather than taking us away from the operations of the finite intellect on its object—but we depart here again from the great medievalist's interpretation244—the study of the act by which the divine intellect cognizes something other than its own essence brings us back to the a priori foundation of all cognition, insofar as cognition no longer lets itself be apprehended in terms of mutual rapport or coexistence, because God founds all the possible systems of correspondence between intellect and object. What we are given to behold, in my view, is the birth of the object, in that unilateral relation of dependence with regard to intellect that "certainly comes down to turning the existent into a kind of universal, logical matter."245 From the preceding, two points stand out rather sharply in the noetic field opened up by the distinctio formalis a pane rei. On the one hand, there is established the scientific ideal of a cognition proceeding from the a priori analysis of "clear and distinct" concepts formed by the understanding (we are assured that there responds adequately, adaequatio, for every distinct notion a real determination in the thing). Although sensible experience is pro statu isto the occasion of the cognition, the whole truth is on the side of the intellect, suspended from the cognizing mind. The mind exerts itself on the basis of the logical determination of essences, independently of its relation to the concrete, existing object that caused the cognition. Such a model is none other than the one at work in the mathematizing of nature undertaken by the great Oxfordians of the thirteenth century.246 On the other hand, if the active role of the intellect, which knows no other causes than efficient ones (the prelude to physical mechanicism), arises from the criterion of the "consciousness of truth" (Gilson), that is, of certitude, while

210,1

representation ceases to be relative (to the thing) in order to become absolute (sive res sit, sive res non sit, it would soon be said), then the cognition of the self and of the esse objectiva borne by the self will be implicitly privileged. It is no longer any surprise, then, that the Ockhamians, and Nicholas of Autrecourt in particular, end up defining cognition by a subjective a priori, well before the Metaphysical Meditations.247 Because the Scotist doctrine of the plurality of distinct forms a parte rei applies indifferently to the domain of being and to that of the soul, those two aspects, objective and subjective, say the Same. In one case as in the other, the unitive capacity of multiple forms within the primary form determines a hierarchical order of forms superimposed a priori. (Every composite is a single being, even though it is composed of virtual-partial esse included within that form.) The a priori deduction of the possible forms of being flows from the unitive capacity of the transcendentals within being, just as the primacy of self-cognition imposes itself on the basis of the unitive capacity of the soul's powers within the mind. The esse objectivum is no longer the form itself of the subject (which is not something subjective in the sense of being unreal, as Michalski has shown in taking up again Herve de Nedellec's profound analyses) but its representation, its object in the modern sense, determining itself in the operation of the soul that concludes the reality of the distinction of forms as soon as one can be completely conceived without the other. This is where the Scotist enterprise masters the primary sense of the esse objectivum: that something presents itself as an object of cognition: which it represents in the sense of establishing a logic of the "instrumental sign."248 For all that, one doesn't take up cudgels for an "idealism" that calls the reality of the outside world into question by assimilating ens reale to ens rationis, existence and the "existible," by reducing the formal distinction to those real distinctions the philosopher of the plurality of forms refuses to introduce into substance: they would break the unity of being, would fragment it into so many beings. ("Whence," Gilson sums up, "his 'formalities,' which never entail real distinctions except between simply formal entities" [Jean Duns Scot, 305].) One simply underscores, deciphered in the direction of what heralds itself and supposes the buried sovereignty of Augustinianism, the index of the Scotist position. Once the primary intentionality from cognition to object (the Thomist intus tentio) has been elided, everything that does not imply contradiction is in a certain fashion res because every reality, even empirical, not only expresses a composition, but also depends on a constitution — on a point of view, on an a priori form. "Even 'data,'" Heidegger writes in the Treatise, "already represents a categorial determination."249 Someone, no doubt, will object that the principle of noncontradiction was never stated by Duns

Fides Efficax

Scotus as "an a priori subjective condition of the possibility of knowledge,"250 a necessity that falls rather to Ockhamism. This is true. But we must not be fooled: expressing itself in this form, the structure of Ockhamiam thought is more inscribed within the wake of Scotist dynamics than it departs from it. If comprehending composition as a metaphysical constitution is indeed the drift of the Scotist approach, we can imagine—in view of the first results we came to after our "Chartrian" study—that the consequences for the intensive comprehension of time will be almost infinite. We suspect that the a pane of the formal distinction might lead to its first objectively "modern" disposition. But there is another aspect of the distinctio formalis I would first like to evoke, for it is not without "coloring" the metaphysical base and in turn resounding on the problem of time: it concerns its repercussions on the conception of the will. The analogy is obvious between the structure of the act of cognition and that of volition interfering with intellect (it is necessary to want to comprehend independently of the solicitation of things). The Scotist solution is identical: it consists in denying the formal determination of the action from the res to the benefit of an "immanent" conception of the will. The (de facto) requirement of the cognition of the action's end is noted; it is asserted that the will remains (de jure) causa totalis of the volition. We relocate the causal synergy defining the act of cognition: two efficient causes conjugated together, one being partial-occasional, the other active-essential. To Saint Thomas taking up the Aristotelian doctrine by which the real end is the formal cause of volition, Duns Scotus objects that the voluntary, moved by something whose action is exerted from without, would no longer be either free or contingent. "Nothing other than the will can be the total cause of volition in the will, according as the will freely determines itself to cause the act of willing."251 After the manner of the act of the cognizing intelligence, the voluntary act ceases to be defined by its proper object (the good) to be grasped on the basis of its operation: "volitional intuition," or "action-intuition."252 Dissociated from its end and, in this sense at least, defmalized, the will is more apprehended in the move toward its "natural place," determined on the basis of the inner transcendence of the good, lived in thepondus of the voluntary act ("sentimental intuition"). The angels themselves did not all equally tend toward the good. More generally: From the fact that the will is perfectly free, it does not result that it throws itself with all its forces into its object; on the contrary, with whatever force it tends toward its object, it has still more for

212,3

the purpose of dominating itself, so that toward whatever object it may tend, it tends toward it freely, and by virtue of its absolute freedom, it could not tend in this way toward it.253

"Necessitas naturalis non stat cum libertate" (Necessity does not naturally stand with liberty). Apprehended through the intellect, the end is not necessarily desired by the will. To put it otherwise: moral goodness is no longer for Duns Scotus the efficient cause of the voluntary acts that result from it. "The Bonitas moralis is added to the substance of the voluntary act as beauty is added to the substance of the body."254 Being no longer that final principle in command of the voluntary moral act, the cognition of the good is only "ostensive," not "directional" or "effective," although Duns Scotus's constructive monism at no time crosses the decisive threshold of Cartesian voluntarism, which transposes the free action of the creator into man.255 In Scotus, the will remains that of created being and sinner, a double weakness. (Never creative, the human will is "receptive" at best, "operational" at worst: such is the will of sin.)256 A fortiori, then, there is no submission of the will in God either to a good conceived by his understanding (determinism of the lex aeterna). Of course, the God of Duns Scotus is not the God of Ockham and of the nominalist paradoxes, nor the Cartesian God of eternal ideas, products of an absolutely free creative will. There has quite rightly been an insurgency against such simplifications, which tend to privilege far too unilaterally the arbitrariness of the divine will when, infinite will and perfection being identical, the good is always what the divine will wants — but in an absolutely contingent way.257 It can nonetheless be asked whether the Subtle Doctor's ontological voluntarism did not clear the path from the one to the other by consecrating de potentia absoluta the breaking of the natural movement of the will's potential toward its good. At the end of the reflection on the content of the Decalogue, only the Commandments of the First Table, whose proper object is God, appear as necessary in themselves.258 The others, concerning duties toward contingent creatures, are valid only by their express notification and character of positive law defined a priori causa, by the prior case of God. How else can that teaching of Scripture be understood where God Himself was able to suspend the laws He had promulgated? If the Commandments were tied to the Sovereign Good by a necessary relation, if they were necessary by a natural necessity, the divine understanding would cognize them as such and its will could not dispense with them. It would be constrained to want them. The idea of an "accidental" (in casu) dispensation would be contradictory and incompossible with the order of essences.

Fides Effi c ax

Is this to say that Duns Scotus would disidentify himself, at the level of the Precepts of the Second Table, from the exigency of evangelical love and from the law of charity? To think it would be a gross doctrinal error. It would also be to bypass what is really determinative in this affair, and what leads the Ockhamists, precisely, to inflect the movement in the direction we know: freedom as an essentially infinite power constitutive of an absolutely definalized will, and thus its extrinsic limitation with regard to the created world. If "God had done otherwise, the order he might have chosen would have been just as just and wise by the sole fact that He wanted it, since his will is always just." Thus, de potentia Dei absoluta, is it not necessary to possess charity in order to be justified. But de potentia Dei ordinata, from the point of view of the order established by free divine decree, charity is necessary for justification. "God," Emile Brehier sums up correctly, "having wished charity to lead to beatitude, gives to the predestined soul for whom he wants eternal happiness the virtue of charity that, according to his decree, must lead there."259 My assumption was that this conception — anti-Thomist in its spirit of moral heteronomy (set by Gurvitch in opposition to Saint Thomas's theonomy) — of moral action and voluntary action defined a priori in the mode of exemplary determination (and no longer "from the inside," since their operations are no longer directed toward a transcendental good attracting the action to itself as an end of human perfection) would not fail to resound upon the economic determination of time. We can already foresee its major effect, that of alteration. So radically indifferent de jure to every determination, banking on the final transcendence of things, this will, in the very movement by which it accomplishes itself meta-physically right at the level of its existence, rids itself of its former "political" plenitude founded in Aristotelianism on the ethical reflexivity of need and the just act. Now, this will is what curved the time of becoming around a telos that ends up merging with the immanent limit of the eidos, to which every "potentiality" was predestined.260 As if thereby "legalized" and "obligated," the moral act tended to lose all ethical autonomy, all political radiance. There are too many intertwined and still unanswered hypotheses here for us not to seek some supplementary enlightenment by turning, if not toward "Scotist politics," at least toward the transposition onto the political plane of that "voluntarist" economy of potency—toward the action-intuition of the social group. First assertion: only the family is a society by natural right, the natural law de ratio recta, pro omni statu. Therefore, it appears in the Dialogue right after the Commandments of the First Table and before all other human rules. Doesn't it furnish the only precept that escapes the contingency of the order of

214,5

natural values and of the historical tivitas! Naturally—in the Thomist sense of a lex aeterna—man is not a "political animal" but a "conjugal and domestic" one.261 The rest, all of the rest, the whole of the social sector, no longer arises from natural law and the ends toward which human acts are naturally organized;262 it proceeds from positive law (positivw. that which is posited), permitted by the divine revocation of the precept of the community of goods in the state of innocence (divine, positive right). Rations peccati, concession ("concessa licentia appropriandi et distinguendi communia") precedes social constitution ("non fit de lege naturae sed positiva") and political convention ("ex communi consensu et electione").263 So the constitutional regime of efficient causes picks up from where the natural regime of final, that is, originary, determination leaves off. On the basis of this, it is not forbidden to remark that "many Scotist formulations are very close to those of Saint Thomas," and to observe that Duns Scotus tends to reestablish natural law by organizing the social pact around the common good, which, for want of legitimating the ulterior actions of the sovereign (whether monarchical or republican), "alone 'justifies' them" (Maurice de Gandillac). It is with difficulty, however, that one escapes the conclusion that the capital turn is being negotiated here, out of which the voluntarist conception of the law is definitively able to sweep away the ancient doctrine of natural law.264 No longer the intentional formation of the social by the final order of nature (natural necessity, sentimental intuition, adequation) but information constitutive of the political by the will of the legislator, de jure essentially free, de facto alienated (historical freedom, volitional intuition, alienation). Would the "liberal" conception of juridical positivism be the sole horizon for the dynamics of transcendence as soon as it gives itself its most finished form: a theology de potentia Dei absolute, an "activist" metaphysics of the primacy of the will over the understanding that is able to liberate emotive-religious intuition from its passive individualism (that of the innermost heart [for interieur], Saint Augustine)? God'spotestas absoluta is no more "ordered" by itself than an absolute ruler is subject to his own laws (princeps legibus solutus est). Led to its full political explicitation, the reversal of Thomism is contemporaneous with the transition from a feudal to a national king. The coming of temporal sovereignty coincides with the effacement of the natural community conceived as an initial source of power (supposing a primitive consent of wills to the actual exercise of authority) on which henceforth rests the very fact of the civil community—on the basis of which is progressively imposed the constitution of the collective into the nation.255 "In this metamorphosis of a king of justice into a political king" lies the establishment of the autonomy of the political

F i d e s E f f i c ax

community in a logistics of representation constituting civil society as subject to itself.266 "Not ceasing for that matter to be subject in the final analysis to the will of God. Arising simply from a special order of reality that allows him to place himself on the inside within the distinct plenitude that his separation from the divine order precisely confers upon him."267 The appearance of the political bond in the role of the exclusive and autonomous social bond, governing by the principle of subjective sufficiency of the civitas, makes the autonomy of the human sphere inseparable from a structure of/in representation between power and society. If representation is the new figure of separation and the face of its "secular spirituality" (Kantorowicz), the founding capture of the principle of sociality by national monarchies is not opposed, at bottom, to the dynamics of democratic sovereignty; rather, it leads to it in a historical dialectic deploying itself progressively on the basis of the absolute estrangement of the foundation's transcendent exteriority and the erosion of its radical superiority over the will of men. In this sense too summarily sketched, it can effectively be said that the doctrine of Duns Scotus "in several ways heralds modern, democratic theories."268 That the nation, the ultimate form, the completing form of political community, is nothing other in the historical register than the virtually indissociable complement of the capture of being in the form of the object, in the metaphysical register of the distinctio formalis a pane rei; that the philosophy of a priori ideas belonging to the theology de potentia absoluta Dei corresponds to the political philosophy of divine right in "absolutist" regimes; that the metaphysical decomposition, from which would arise the "attempt to subject the universe to a single concept capable of assuring the totality of its empire to the will,"269 implicates and explicates the atomistic dismembering and hierarchical-contractual re-composition of the body politic; that the real nondistinction between power and society ought to provide the backdrop to the a priori correlation between idea and ideal, to the formal representation of the order of existences within the order of essences; that the terrestrial transcendence of collective being, its accession to collective subjectivity, must pass through a certain "realism of essence" or "realist conceptualism" — all this is what I propose to call the Scotist moment: the entry into the Era of Representation, the earliest expression of the Reign of the Will. The decisive assigning of this new figure of the world to take place against the backdrop of the metaphysical relations form/matter and subject/ object, governed by the formal distinction, a pane rei and its theological transposition de potentia absoluta Dei, stems from the fact that, in the form of something that can be stated, "the metaphysical conception of the relations between matter and

216,7

form finds its analogon in the political conception of the relations between people and prince."270 In the constitutive slashing of its very object, the Scotist moment is at the origin of the oriented oscillation of modern philosophy: from "the a priori imposition of form onto matter, of idea and of law onto the potentiality of the subject, of the prince onto the social body," to "the absolute constitutive autonomy of matter, and of the people's subjective potentiality."271 It being said, of course, that Scotist thought was able to triumph over the Thomist school (Cajetan) and to spread its influence up through the end of the eighteenth century by collaborating in large part with the renewed Augustinianism of modern philosophy (the work of the Jesuit Suarez,272 widely distributed in Lutherian Germany, was its great relay in modern Europe) because, among other things, this determining form corresponded to changes that, independently of it, were in the process of producing themselves in the domain of collective forms. Metaphysical forms and collective forms, "forms of expression" and "forms of content," acted upon transversally by these new relations of force and by the new necessity issuing from their encounter, as different as they may be from a strictly Scotist point of view, and despite the absence of a totalizing, common form, they all have, at this outset of the fourteenth century, a single point of implication.273 It is from this point that they were able to reserve themselves in the genesis that has not ceased to produce them by inhabiting, by investing a common place within the inner dispositions of representation: a transformation of temporal architecture and of being-in-time. If the coadapting of forms depends on an a priori "in which is engulfed the informal diagram" of the new society, that a priori is itself historical.21* From out of this integration, we have the "elevation" of time that makes it as it is. At the level of social being, things are sufficiently clear. Synonymous with a terrestrial completedness substituting the economy of difference for the economy of dependence, the autonomy of the political bond takes the time of history away from the gaze of eternity as from the destructive flow of becoming. That bond is "representatively" incarnated in the person of the Sovereign and of the collective bodies emanating from him in the manner of an a posteriori subjectivization (economy of differance) of the primordial compact. No longer coming from without and no longer existing since forever, anchored in a consensual will that founds it forever from within, the fact of collectivity is rooted via its representatives in an indivisible perpetuity, endowed with a subjective, immanent, and nonetheless transcendent permanence. An inalterable identity, for which eviternity (aevum), situated between the eternity of the creator and the distended time of creatures, offers the obligatory model. "The enterprise [related by Marcel Gauchet to the Western

F i d e s E f f i c ax

subjectivation of collective being] is inscribed within the direct prolongation of the at once competitive and mimetic recomposition of the temporal powers in relation to the church. It constitutes a systematization of their long labor to seat a sacredness that is simultaneously proper to them and on a par with the one administered by the spiritual hierarchy. The supplement of sacralization, under these circumstances, will consist in elevating through perpetuity the institutions of the earth to the rank of heavenly entities — to transform terrestrial bodies into angelic persons.7'275 By the same stroke, though, it is seen that with men beginning to produce politically their own world in time, the tension of the whole of social practice turns out to be oriented toward the future, a future to be made in an anticipatory synthesis where takes effect "the very element of a recognition of the generative character of human activity and the axis of a permanent, identificatory regrasping of the collective in its very change."276 It is true that this tipping of time toward the future, following Krystov Pomian's expression, is complete only with the Age of the Ideologues and of Political Economy: when society will comprehend and organize itself through and through with a view to the future. It is nonetheless important to point out that its start coincides with the rise of merchants, bankers, and money changers who speculate on the future as much as they quantify time by assigning every object and every duration with a value, a price; with the generalized use of that extraordinary multiplier that was the bill of exchange. This was nothing more than a title, a draft drawn on time (and not a mere instrument of payment linked to a commercial operation requiring a different currency: the operation of exchange), associating credit with credence — confidence [confiance] with belief [croyance], the fiduciary withfideism, since de potentia ordinata/absoluta the letter is valid for the being it represents at term, independently of the presence of its "own object."277 Such is the general economy of representation in its earliest emergence. As if there were a "representative" bond, a process of temporalization common to pure political convention and monetary convention, to the social consensus identified with royal individuality and to the arbitrariness of the monetary sign (in opposition to the state and the natural sign), in the extreme form of a play of writing dominated by the intuitus personae. Let it be understood: politically, economically, from a public as well as a private point of view, representation has become absolute. It furnishes the pivot around which is carried out the tipping toward the future inasmuch as it is "the indispensable temporal axis of a subjective, social functioning."278 Would one make the argument that, although this bond is historically founded, it is not from a Scotist point of view? By way of proof, there is

218,9

the fact that Duns Scotus, besides his taking up, with regard to usury properly called, the traditional argumentation since William of Auxerre that the sale of time belongs only to God, did not cease to combat the usurious profit of the regrattiers, in French if you please, in that text from the Opus oxoniense in which it is specified that "commerce is unjust if it strikes a blow at the community or if it receives excessive gains from it, out of all proportion to the negotiator's labor, diligence, solicitude, and risks incurred."279 I could show, historically still, that under its anodine aspect, the consideration of risk (periculum sortis) makes manifest a singular aggiornamento of church doctrine on the matter, so decisive that the men of the sale of time would have immediately recognized in it an official justification for their practices.280 But a demonstration would have no other interest than that of verifying that the logicohistorical process is unaware of the (best) intentions of the protagonists, that it rarely offers itself to the consciousness of its promoters, and that, reciprocally, the "becoming conscious" of a theoretical possibility is not in itself a historical support if its intrinsic virtualities have not already engaged it in a new world. It should suffice to recall that while our Subtle Doctor may reaffirm in vigorous terms that the common good remains the sole authentic foundation of sociality based pro statu naturae lapsae (in the state of fallen nature) on individual propriety, it no longer coincides with the natural requirements of the voluntary act, with the inner transcendence of its finality. The operation of "definalized" will is in itself constitutive, pure power de jure, find founded de facto, thus secondary in the relation to its "good." Into this structural gap dashes, in the guise of essential lapsus, the line of time. (Etymologically, the lapsus, participle of labor, is in itself a time, that of the fall; it laterally—labor—states another, the time of work.) From social forms (imitates aggregationis), if we intend to climb back to more "natural" structures, we must encounter those obligatory forms of the universe that are the place, motion, and time of bodies. It would be quite surprising were we not to relocate here, in Oxford or in Paris, that universe "everywhere in motion," that definalized universe at least with regard to Aristotelian theory, whose incursion we were able to measure in milieus close to the school of Chartres. But as one can imagine, the natural laws of linkage between material causes are no longer what make up the de facto footing; the theology de potentia absoluta, along with the assertion of the infinite omni-potence of the primary cause, is what will offer its obligatory pretext in substituting the physical requirements of Aristotelian ontology by the logical imperative of noncontradiction alone.

Fides E ffi c ax

Among the most "hyperbolic" hypotheses authorized by the long series of propositions condemned in 1277, the following will be retained, negatively formulated in these terms: "Quod Deus non possit movere Caelum motu recto. Et ratio est quia tune relinqueret vacuum" (That God cannot move the Heavens with a straight movement. And the reason is because then He would leave a vacuum).281 It would be hard to go farther in the direction of anti-Aristotelianism. God could without contradiction move the heavens with a straight movement, even if a void remained behind—thus, the idea of a universal-violent-straight-line-movementinto-the-void! Nonsense from the point of view of a physics studying the concrete motion of real bodies. An absurdity in the eyes of an Aristotelian: outside of the world, there is neither void nor plenitude; there is nothing. Because all places are inside the world, the world itself is not in a place; thus the idea of such a movement is inconceivable — every movement supposes a place from which one departs (a quo) and a place to which one goes (ad quern}. We are hurled here into a purely logical space, which in all rigor must be called imaginary or geometrical. A space to constitute, not one that is given, a thought experiment reflecting at the mercy of the arbitrary association of these two propositions one of the most important stakes of these "new mental experiences" (Gilson) stimulated by the theological notion of an omni-potent God. The hypothesis of the Void by itself destroys the conception of a cosmic order founded on natural places; it implies a new theory of place. The hypothesis of a movement of the World, of a displacement of the Universe as a whole, wrecks the ontological foundation on which rested the whole physics of the School, namely, that all local movement, beginning with the rotating movement of the highest orbit, requires the actual existence of an invariable Term (the Earth, to meson, every immobile body in relation to which bodies are said to be in motion); it implies a new theory of movement. Duns Scotus inaugurates both one and the other. Without claiming to restore the complexity of the "batteries" of distinctions advanced by the Subtle Doctor, let us acknowledge that they all aim to distinguish (according to the principle of the distinctio formalis a pane ret) local movement from the acquisition ofubi, corresponding to the attribute of the contained body (locari, lodged being). That being the case, nothing is more normal than that sublunary bodies cease to be lodged in a certain manner to be lodged in another: they move themselves secundum locari; but the same cannot be the case for the supreme orb: in contrast to other bodies, it moves itself secundum locare for what changes is the way in which it lodges (locare) the contained body. This "dynamic" conception

220,1

is not without influence on the general theory of place. If it is no more than an attribute relative to ambient bodies, the idea of a place immutable in itself must be renounced. The matter surrounding a fixed body is always susceptible to local movement; in that case, the place of the fixed body changes; not that it is in turn animated by a similar movement, but at every instant the place of the body perishes, corrupts, and a new place is engendered. For each of these places there corresponds a rational place (ratio loci), distinct but equivalent from the point of view of local movement (numerically distinct but specifically identical). Thus, no more unique ratio loci for an immobile body plunged into a variable milieu, as Thomas maintained, but a succession of rationes loci equivalent with each other. After this brief overview giving us the most important stages of the demonstration, without further delay let us bring ourselves to Duns Scotus's conclusion. Its discursive landscape will be more familiar: Just as the heavenly sphere can rotate although it is not contained by any body, so can it rotate if it did not contain a body either, for instance, if it were a continuous spherical body. And then this fluid form /Torma fluens/ according to which rotary movement exists per se, could also exist per se without reference to either a container or content and thus would be an absolutely pure form

/et ita est forma mere absoluta/ To this, seek an answer [quaere responsionem/.282 To this: to the character so absolute of movement conceived as a form (could the work of the formal distinction produce anything else?) that it doesn't even save the immobility of place required by Aristotle and Averroes. While the Heavens accomplish their revolution, it will no longer be necessary that one be able to compare the changing positions of its "parts" to an immobile body endowed with an actual existence. This was to make thinkable the astronomical system of Ptolemy, widely in favor in Franciscan milieus.283 The answer: it suffices that one be able to conceive a fictive, fixed point of reference; it suffices to have an ideal body existing in the geometer's imagination by way of conceptual existence (esse cognitum)— it suffices to have a pure concept to give meaning to Duns Scotus's "equivalent place." On this subject, unanimity is almost total, from John of Bassols to Nicholas Bonet, from William of Ockham to John Buridan (who comes back to Scotus's analysis, by the way, by pleading the falsity of the nominalist identification of local movement with the place acquired at each moment by the body in motion). I consider this analysis of motion exemplary of Scotus's adroitness. And Nicholas Bonet, in positing that, in all circumstances, the point of refer-

Fi d e s E f f i c ax

ence to which the movement is related is a simple mathematical abstraction, does not fail to recall the unchanged principle of that ultimate deduction: "Movement is a certain entity or reality distinct from the ubi. This is proven by the fact that they can be separated from each other, that movement is encountered without any ubi [an attribute of the contained body] being acquired anew."284 In fact, if movement is conceived as an absolute form by reason of its real nonidentity with the ubi of the concrete body required by the possibility de potentia absoluta Dei of the void, and a body can still move itself with local movement and be perceived even when there exists no effective, immobile, fixed term, the referent of the movement will no longer be natural but ideal. It can in fact coincide with this or that existing body. It will still tip toward the interior of the understanding, in the esse cognitum, the esse objectivum of movement turning out to be determined within the suspension of the intentional adequation of intelligence and the real (sive res sit, sive res non sit...) and the abandonment of the thing's formal causality with regard to the subject. From the vantage point of this revolution, it matters less than is generally thought for motion to be grasped on the basis of an absolute forma fluens (realist conceptualism) or of a pure assemblage of concepts (logical conceptualism). In the one case as in the other, movement is no longer defined by a proper object (im-mobile, or final end) but a priori. By way of proof: the possibility of that "divine case" where an isolated solid body could be animated by a rotating movement. Be careful, however, not to want to go too fast by under-standing [sousentendant], for example, that these "divine cases" will soon become scientific cases.285 In clear language: does the fact of Alexandre Koyre's rather pointed critical remarks about Duhem mean we must renounce the hypothesis that certain fourteenth-century masters would have "prepared a theory of motion capable of agreement with Newton's dynamics"?286 I don't think so, if it is understood that what is involved is an essential, meta-physical and not immediately physical— that is to say, "scientific"—preparation, which makes possible (though certainly not necessary), or thinkable, the formation of the fundamental concepts of modern science organized around Newton's absolute space and time: defined without relation to external things. To paraphrase Andre de Muralt, it can almost be said, to use a convenient formulation, that everything takes place as if the distinctio formalis aparte rei, the key to Scotus's essentialism, furnished modern science with "its most potent analytic scalpel."287 Whatever the case, the formal apparatus Duns Scotus elaborated to take up the theory of movement with renewed effort would know an immediate extension in his analysis of time. The problem was singularly reactivated by another

222,3

proposition condemned by Bishop Etienne Tempier, formulated as follows: "If the heavens stood still, fire could no longer set flame to tow, for time itself would not exist."288 It should be noted right away that the Augustinian basis of this condemnation (we are reminded of the example of the miracle of Joshua, explicitly mentioned, moreover, by Duns Scotus)289 seems to influence Scotus's conception so strictly that its profound novelty could remain unnoticed, a prisoner of the labyrinth of the Confessions. For Duns Scotus begins by indulging in a "coloring" of the Augustinian argumentation, if one is willing to give that word (colorare), that discursive practice, its most elevated and precise sense. The most elevated: a shifting of field obtained by the addition of a supplement as if "reserved" in advance; the most precise: an argument is never better "colored" — see the Per illudpotest colorari ilia ratio Anselmi de summo cogitabili—than by establishing its ontological condition of possibility. What does Duns Scotus do? He starts from Augustine's effective point of arrival, the subordination of time to physical movement. Like Augustine, he can evoke the passage from the Book of Joshua that testifies to the combat that took place while the sun and the moon stood still. But in a certain fashion, he has no need of it except by way of exemplification to "give a good appearance" to an argument whose primeval corpus is no longer scriptural but metaphysical, miracles having been totally integrated into the logical formulation of omni-potence. Just as a measurable movement could exist in the absence of every effectively immobile term, as the movement of the supreme orb could be conceived independently of the Earth's immobility, reciprocally, time would continue to be and to measure the movement of bodies even if Heaven were in a state of rest. In the image of matter and form, time and motion are formally distinct; distinctly, really conceivable separately. Scotus's entire metaphysical structure is engaged here, mobilized to show that in the absence of all movement time would still exist and would measure the universal state of rest. A potential time distinctly cognized in the absence of any body's movement. An abstract time that, though not actual, is less "originary" than absolute insofar as it allows the duration of every movement and every state of rest to be measured. In fact, this time coincides with the actual and positive time marked by diurnal motion. De jure, it suffices that, in the case where this movement exists, its magnitude can be known by a distinct cognition of time, this time being, moreover, either actual or potential /vel actualis vel potentialis/ When I say, therefore, that the Heavens' first movement would not exist, every other movement could, nonetheless, be measured with the help of time according to that movement of the first heaven; that is to say, we could know which part of that celestial movement, if it existed, was

F i d e s E f f i c ax

the one during which the movement under consideration could be accomplished; at present, it is accomplished during a pan of the celestial state of rest equal to that pan in which such a pan of the celestial movement could exist.290

Thus, it would be false to say that the disjunctive couple originary time/derived time is replaced by the opposition between actual and potential time. The caesura (of the fall) is no longer what governs their relation but representation. De potentia ordinata, actual time re-presents a potential time that we know a priori, independently of the movement of the Heavens that allows us to measure arbitrarily, conventionally, other movements "in the way the ell measures a piece of cloth," Duns Scotus specifies. No longer strictly actuated by its objective, formal cause — the motion of the celestial sphere — the intellect may claim an independent intellection autonomous of ordinary time because it in some way contains that time within itself. The Heavens having come to a halt, Peter is able, after the Resurrection, to go for a walk; and this walk will be conceived as existing within that continuous time that is habitual to us and not in some other kind of time.

Motion is only the "relative" representative of time; it exerts on its account only an occasional, adjuvant causality without signifying it absolutely. The analogy is obvious with the status of sensible experience in the Scotist theory of cognition, which proceeds by an a priori deductive approach to the analysis of concepts formed by the understanding. Actual time is only the time relative to the perception of the visible movements of the celestial bodies. Its status is that of a de facto truth, not of a necessary proposition. At its limit, this "apparent" time is what must be qualified as "qualitative," insofar as it remains exclusively a tributary of the experience of the senses as long as it is not related to the potential time allowing humans to recognize the uniformity of the "Heavens' first movement"—whether the latter is or is not realized. For want of being effective, it is effectible from the point of view of its nonempirical conceptual foundation. To express this idea differently: metaphysically speaking, potential time is the condition of possibility—not only logical but real — (of the cognition) of actual time (in relation to all possible objects), just as what is real/possible is the condition of what is existing/real. Physical by destination, Scotist time is no more "psychological" than its existence is exclusively conceptual: time is quidditatively present in things. And for good reason, since it is "cognized distinctly" according to the model of a formal distinction for which the object is in esse rei such that

224,5

it is constituted in esse cogniti, in esse objecti. Situated halfway between an absolute time that would have no other existence than the conceptual one of mathematical being (the esse mathematicum that Nicholas Bonet would soon assert) and an a priori form of intuition to which the exclusive certitude of inner consciousness would not fail to arrive (allied to the phenomenism of a Nicholas of Autrecourt or of a John of Mirecourt), Duns Scotus escapes—on command?—from this last condemnation of the fearsome Bishop Etienne Tempier (Henry of Ghent having been one of the instigators): "Quod aevum et tempus nihil sunt in rei, sed solum apprehensione" (For age and time are nothing in things, they exist only in apprehension) (Error no. 200 [86]). From a prospective point of view, nonetheless, it is hard to see how not to credit a thought structure of the Scotist type with that "absolute, true, and mathematical time, [which] of itself and from its own nature, flows equably without relation to anything external... All motions may be accelerated and retarded, but the flowing of absolute time is not liable to any change,"291 as well as the transposition of this quantitative time into the a priori formalism of the Kantian transcendental consciousness made possible, if not necessary, by the extreme critical consequences of the distinctio formalis, relieved of the rationalist, metaphysical reprise of the divine idea and omni-potence on which Newtonian time still depends.292 Scotus's philosophy would thus be doubly implicated in Kant's critical revolution: insofar as it defines within a metaphysics of "forms" that principle of the economy of reasons that ends up delivering the transcendental a priori of a God already so inaccessible to reason that the revelation functions as an object (supplet vicem objecti), a pure object of faith, a "thing in itself" and not one for us. In his separatism, Kant extends and concludes the break with Aristotelianism, a true Copernican revolution on the scale of the history of Western thought. He marks the brilliant end of this revolution, its temporal accomplishment when the categorical diverting of the divine to which the dynamics of transcendence lent its voice is no longer anything but time, empty form, neither physical (Aristotle) nor psychological (Augustine), freed from its subordination to the extensive motion of the world (Augustine) as well as to the intensive motion of the soul (Duns Scotus), no longer existing "in itself" except within the relation between being and cognition, within the a priori foundation of the objecthood of prefigured being, and since the works of the great Oxfordians, by the possibility of a mathesis comprehended and determined as that which ought to orient humankind in relation to the normative project of a determination of things on the basis of their formal domains of orderly arrangement (deductive way), and not according to their real fields of presence (inductive way).293

Fides E ffi c ax

What can be seen to be constituted thereby is a thought whose moving edges end up leading to that scientific revolution destined to make an "epoch" of our modernity, with the development of a mathematical physics to which Galileo gave us full access in disclosing his protocol: namely, the uniformity of all bodies within a homogeneous space (every place is equal to every other; abstract space), within a time that is one of any given moment (every moment is equal to every other; abstract time);294 and the substitution of acceleration for movement; that is, the production of something new related in terms of growth to any given moment.295 In this perfectly mastered figure, the abstract time of calculation is valid as an independent variable (t) operating upon a world univocally governed by the law of numbers, subject to the precedence of linear over circular motion, in which the bodies inserted there can be nothing more than bodies, bodies subject to the order of time.296 An order with no Sunday, a dailiness with no eternity in which bodies have ceased to disclose their soul by rising to the meditation of the divine, which in some way marked the return of the circle upon itself. The order of daily banality is this uniform, homogeneous time, taking the form of an infinite straight line. No more recollection of the eternal in the privileged moment of the meditation from which time would bend, but production at every moment of the new. The transcendent ceases to qualify the state, the reality of a being, in order to denote the action of a subject insofar as it passes beyond itself or beyond what it is given. Truth is no longer adequation, adaptation (of the intellectus to the res that informs it), intention, or revelation; it is ordination, apprehension and projection, subjectivation and objectivation "for the essence of subjectivism is objectivism to the extent that, for the subject, everything becomes an object."297 Once it is assured of its objectivity in the common discourse of representation, the latter absolutely excludes every intimate and originary belonging of thought to being, such as it is still understood in Aristotle and makes perhaps its final claims under the Thomist restoration. The obligatory prelude to the constitutive universality of transcendental subjectivity, Scotus's discussion is dedicated to passing beyond the ens creatum, to the violence of the will in asserting the true, to a definitive change of perspective with regard to the determination of time. It is an urban perspective in its raw being, dissipating the last glows of a rural and monastic life, rhythmed by the seasons and by prayers. Then it's up to us to shout: "The time of Works and Days is over and done with. Gone is the time of the Confessions. For us, it is the time of the workday" — and the subordination of work to time: the time of wages, the capitalistic (in the strict sense) time of products, of time that is stocked up, moved forward,

226,7

negotiated in an abstract commerce that introduces the consideration of its capitalization under conditions of infinite duration. The problem is no longer that of knowing, as Jean Beaufret would like to believe in an utterly Heideggerian sense, whether the (two) former time(s) persist(s) in the latter, but whether the latter pierces through and takes hold in the former as soon as rural life and monastic life engender the enemy that they were determined to combat and that they had to bring down: the city, that is to say, money, the course of abstract accumulated time, the course of a day without respite in the wave of uniformity.298 Is it surprising that Aristotle's thought like that of Augustine bears its decisive mark? That "the uniquity of an interminable winter" is brought into the light of day within the folds of a metaphysical discontinuism on which the Reformation would impose its abrupt reasoning, inseparable from the representation of creatures as objects? This day is the shortest day indefinitely reproduced, and which now merges with what made it possible: the overexposure of any given moment to the icy nakedness of its urban essence. At the outset, I mentioned those few sentences of Bousquet alluding to certain "jargons of crafts" involved in the illuminating discovery of Scotism. As if there were no shorter path to reach the injunction this thought receives from and gives to itself, another poet whose fascination with the Subtle Doctor is well known, Gerard Manley Hopkins, turns toward Duns Scotus's Oxford: Towery city and branchy between towers; Cuckoo-echoing, bell-swarmed, lark-charmed, rook-racked, river-rounded; The dapple-eared lily below thee; that country and town did Once encounter in, here coped and poised powers; Thou hast a base and brickish skin there, sours That neighbour-nature thy great beauty is grounded Best in, graceless growth, thou hast confounded Rural rural keeping—folk, flocks, and flowers. Yet ah! this air I gather and I release He lived on... Of realty the rarest-veined unraveller299 Duns Scotus's Oxford. The city at the end of the Middle Ages, in the crisis of the Commune and under the domination of the urban patriciate, the proliferation of mechanical clocks in cities... That the fourteenth century is "the most important epoch in all the history of time from antiquity up to the beginnings of our own,"

Fides E ffi c ax

and that this state of time (as we say the "state of places") has something to do with the city, is self-evident.300 This blinding "banality" is nonetheless what I would like to come back to, with a view to specifying the relations between the City-Form and the a priori form of time. Is it not precisely in this critical century—to employ terms Duns Scotus would not have disavowed — that its quoddity (its being what [son e'tant-quoi]) assumes, or fully "inhabits," the regime of its quiddity: the state of relations securing it having been able to remain hidden to itself as long as the fiction of the Commune had lasted?301 The crisis of the Commune is in fact important on two levels. Historically, it reveals those "particular" forces, henceforth indissociable from a countable bourgeois form of the new time on the way to being homologized by the state (Charles V), manipulating its collective universality for a long while; ontologically, the city appears since then in the light of its sense: the crisis of habitat. This formulation imposes itself, if it is at all the case that the primary object of the city is not the Abode but the Circulation whose correlative it is, the dwelling no longer receiving its being from the earth "in its heavenly reception"—what could be called the sidereal upkeep of places—but from the distance between things measured according to a homogeneous expanse (extensio), abstracted from the qualitative heterogeneity of places. In the city, there are no more places, only emplacements relative to displacements, with no instance more "profound" than the speed of circulation within a space empty of any ultimate and original dimension, a space that annuls itself in explicating itself outside of itself: in analysis, in the decomposition of motion into units of distance and time. The city is a cinematic entity. Its being constitutive of functional relations destined to be regulated by a delocalized, quantitative, and abstract time has no other primary cause. It is as a theologian of cities that Roger Bacon expresses himself, when he writes in his Opus majus: "All the categories depend on a knowledge of quantity of which mathematics treats, and therefore the whole excellence of logic depends upon mathematics."302 As a consequence, the sovereignty of thinking is asserted as ratio—legislatio or legisratio — on being, insofar as being is, already, being represented mathematically. But which mathematics are we talking about? That mathematics of rest corresponding to the geophysics of natural place and the ideal polis of the Greeks? Or a mathematics of change and of movement governed by a theophysics of the void, the mathematics to which the fourteenth century invites us by allowing us to witness its first efforts?303 The answer is in the following few words: the city is not a place. A space without place, that is, a geometrical space, void, and a time without duration espousing the straight line of the distance separating the

228,9

human being from every place, measuring the linear movement of a transport whose speed is its sole parameter. In this sense, the crisis of habitat, taking the form at the end of the Middle Ages of congestion and mobility, with "that enormous place of violence in daily life" (B. Geremek), belongs to the secret necessity of the city with its "base and brickish skirt" that "sours / That neighbour-nature." When this necessity is disclosed in the reduction of building to constructing, then to producing, in the reduction of habitat to object, to the daily framed within a chronological network, a certain modern manner of being is what is born from this crisis of lodging, whose metaphysical marking is finally restored by the applications of a theology de potentia absoluta to the theory of place. Then may the city explode in an eternal dissonance, radiate from the terrible generating crystal of its ratio: the arranging of space is but a lure (Cluny, Citeaux...) or the twinkling of the last stars (Athens...); to cease managing the Earth and conversing with Heaven is to arrange time a priori, and a fortiori space; it is to be the man without qualities, the nameless one of anonymous societies, a plebeian whether enslaved or freed, the holder of the secret of the order of time. After the Aristotelian discovery of the abstract time of chrematistics and its cosmic conjuration—the most potent ever conceived from the perspective of its gestation all through the Christian Middle Ages — after the flashy Neoplatonic anticipation of the "collapse" of time and its transposition into a contemplative patho-logy (henopathy), after Saint Augustine's extraordinary attempt, having armed himself with a dialectic sharpened by the dynamics of transcendence, to save time as number of the fallen soul's intensive motion, all that could surprise us was the end of the World, or the extinction of a world, the apocalyptic conjunction of Earth and Heaven or their daily disjunction left abandoned to the vehicular potency of the city. This was the hope of the End or the end of Hope, the Kingdom of Christ or the Empire of Absolute Time, being subjected to a pure phenomenon of speed, strepitus urbis (the bustle of the city). "We know." For a long time, this was the physico-mathematical outfitting of the world and the techno-logical mastery of time in the determinist sense of its foreseeability. Each of these was prodded by a distinctio formalis ex natura rei whose "influence in Europe will spread until the end of the eighteenth century," in the manner of a "dominant structure of thought."304 Finally, the following three strong incidences hollowed out by the Scotist approach in the theological dimension of the absolute of potentiality will be recalled.

F i d e s Ef f i c ax

1. The hypothesis of the void detaches all motion from the exclusive influence of the milieu insofar as the determination of the milieu is added accidentally to its "essential speed," to the speed at which this movement would develop in the void.305 Thus, at the origin of the modern Dynamics, the pre-scription of an ideal movement, to which it is not impossible to relate Buridan's impetus: res naturae permanentis, he would de jure maintain the body in motion without change as long as it does not undergo the action of forces causing growth or diminution.306 2. The conception of "potential time," which Duns Scotus still calls "privative time" to underscore its being unbound from relative movements, imposes an a priori form on time. Its cognition preceding experience, potential time is normative-objective to the extent that the intellect apprehends it distinctly. If that time is inevitably led back to God, it is in a sense utterly different from Newtonian time: potential time will be realized with the end of the world, when the diurnal movement has completed its arched course. Thus, at the origin of Modern Times, the pre-scription of a time liberated from its realist or/and psychological sense. 3. Inspired by the analyis of Henry of Ghent and Richard of Middleton, the Scotist solution to the problem "of the intensification and attenuation of qualitative forms" (de intentione et remissione formarum) subjects qualitative "latitudes" to the quantitative operations proper to the category of quantity. Quality is reduced to a quantity of perfection in essence or to a quantity offeree in action (quantitas perfectionis et virtutis), brought near the quantity of mass (quantitas molts) that is, Duns Scotus's favorite pupil, John of Bassols, specifies, a "relation of extension" (extensionis).307 Quantity dominates the whole of the physical universe, integrally measurable. Intensio is no longer essentially indivisible (with)in the nature of the subject (inesse) participating more or less perfectly in the form, because, as Saint Thomas explained, "every form received by a certain subject receives a certain delimitation [terminatio], according to the capacity of the subject that receives it."308 Form is assimilated to extensio as soon as within itself, "by supposing against all possibility that every relation with the subject were suppressed," it is susceptible to being more or less, as soon as it possesses a latitude of degrees (latitudo graduum) explaining the increase in intensity by its intensive "parts."309 Parity is therefore total, with a continuous increase of magnitude by means of the addition of parts that are extensive in kind: each new degree is added onto the preceding degree — and is distinguished from it as the individuals of a single species are distinguished from er-'b other. Francois de Meyronnes concludes: "What the degree adds to

230,1

the specific nature is its haecceity, for the individual adds nothing to nature, unless it is its haecceity [to take Antonio d'Andres's example, the individual difference by which whiteness is this (haec) whiteness]; thus, just as haecceities differ from each other."310 Thus, very logically, at the end of this analysis in which Scotus's fundamental principles (the plurality of forms, the completing form, the formal distinction, the economy of means) turn out to be engaged in the establishment of a purely quantitative physics, the final reality of nature, the haeccitas, represents something like the quality proper to quantity (strength); there, individuality is led back to quantity, to number, to the ordination of the world in the uniformization of qualities, while sensible experience, sensation or "sensibility," is anticipatorily integrated by intensive magnitude into the domain of the a priori by receiving the faculty of objectivizing the quality it reveals.311 Thus, at the origin of the accountable scheme of being and of the mathematical realization of its represented being from which descends every measure of the physico-material existent, we find Scotus's "reform" of Aristotelian abstractive induction, which was at the beginning of the two really distinct categories of quantity and quality. Abstract space, a priori time, intensive magnitude — a triple start for the constitution of the physical object and for the constitution of the object-world within a metaphysics of the city whose whole critical sense (a metaphysics of finitude, an anthropology) will be given by Kant, who makes the genesis of the object in "the alchemy of infinitesimal calculus" (intensive magnitude is the differential, that is, the scientific objectifying of intensity through infinitesimal calculus) indissocia ble from the genesis of internal sense: by discovering the order of time beneath the empty form of ordinary time, streaked by any given moment, in man's capacity to derive a function in relation to time, to master the process oftemporalization. A time that is not that of the absolute darkening of the world but the blinding overexposure of its quintessence: the City, that time-become-surface, of which we must take the risk of saying that it follows after the time that does without chronology and history by exposing itself instantaneously as pure force.312 Kant, the last Scotist, the first philosopher of cities? 1781-90: Konigsberg, or the brain/city. I shall conclude this medieval chapter by pointing out the positivity of that "nominalist revolution" whose importance cannot be neglected within the scientific context of physicist representation.

Fides Efficax

Now, in a way that at first glance appears disturbing, the best historians of medieval philosophy have all recognized the extreme difficulty of grasping its tenor. Brehier, Gilson, Vignaux, de Gandillac, to name only my own teachers, are agreed in thinking that "the nominalism of this period was not simply a particular solution to the special problem of universals."313 One must agree, for from the point of view of doctrinal history, if it were only a matter of denying the concrete, real, and really distinct existence of universals, of recognizing the essential intervention of the intellect in their constitution and aim, well, then, it can be said that the case was heard long ago, and that all in all, William of Ockham's positions on the matter are less extremist, once again, than those of someone like Roscelin. Does he not recognize a certain immediate reality of essences when he avers that "there effectively exists in nature some sets of individuals to which it is legitimate to attribute the same predicates"? Without making him appear "like a 'realist' who would be just as 'naive' as his adversaries,"314 this admission will pose a few problems of "adjustment" for him at the level of his theory of the concept. In the text: "Universale non est figmentum tale cui non correspondet aliquid consimile in esse subjectivo... et propter illam similitudinem in esse objective potest supponere pro rebus extra" (The universal is not a fiction of such a kind that nothing entirely similar corresponds to it in subjective being... and because of that similarity in objective being it can be put on the outside in the place of things).315 It would be necessary, then, to circumscribe a new spirit. But this new attempt risks coming up short right away if the two principles from which it has been desired to see Ockhamism arise are each, already, present in Duns Scotus: divine omni-potence limited only by the requirement of noncontradiction, or the absolute, separating potency, and the principle of economy.316 "Duns Scotus," Etienne Gilson confirms, "is indeed the first philosopher in whom the spirit of the fourteenth century manifested itself, and this same spirit is the one that will determine the dissolution of Scotism itself."317 The voluntarism of theology de potentia Dei absoluta knows no further restraint (theme of the odium Dei, God could make another world in which it would have been meritorious to hate the Creator), while Ockham's razor will be used in a privileged manner against the proliferation of Scotist entities, beginning with the plurality of forms and the diverse nature of distinctions. If the only real is the singular ("omnis res positiva extra animam eo ipso est singularis" [everything positive outside the soul is singular in and of itself]), there is no longer any unity other than the numerical unity of the individual, any distinction other than real. Paul Vignaux sums it up: "In no case does thought distinguish something within being where being itself does

232,3

not already make the distinction, where it is not separable into two realities that are able to exist and are visible each without the other." Ockhamism is thereby constituted from a critique of abstraction that prohibits "thinking apart what is not given apart."318 The adequation of cognition to Being is accomplished on the model of an intuitive cognition of the singular presenting itself as an integral, logical empiricism, which is effectively close to certain theses of the circle of Vienna.319 (To sum up in advance the meaning of the Aristotelian reference in Ockham when he takes up the definition of time as the number of motion: he emphasizes that it is not a matter of a definition according to the thing, to the essence, but of a definition according to the name.}320 The Scotist formal nonidentity, like the Thomist distinction of reason, would transgress the principle of contradiction by striving in its will to hold together identity and distinction, reduced by Ockham to the sole logical truth of two propositions whose predicates are contradictory: a is b, b is not a, with no consideration at all of any hierarchy of beings. "Nunquam potest esse distinctio conceptuum nisi propter aliquam distinctionem a parte rei" (A distinction can never be a concept unless it is because the distinction is to some degree from part of the thing).321 No precept could be found that better expresses that strange and constant relation of filiation and opposition that binds together Ockham and Duns Scotus. On the appreciation of this relation depends the whole evaluation of Ockhamism and the logica modernorum.322 I will limit myself to separating out in succession what seems to me to constitute the three most important "aspects" of the Ockhamian position. 1. The critique of the distinctio formalis leaves its first principle intact a priori. That principle is (a) logicized in the postulate of a correspondence between real distinctions and the linguistic decoupage carried out by the terms of the language; and (b) theo-logicized by the argument de potentia absoluta Dei, insofar as it defines critically the notitia intuitiva as such independently of the existence or nonexistence of the thing, insofar as it apprehends metaphysically the essence of all cognition in its specific character of self-autonomy.323 At the heart of this twin dimension of coexistence and autonomy, the self-evidence (of the truth of the proposition) becomes the criterion (with no degree) of a purely deductive cognition, of a radically propositionalized science whose unity is no longer constituted by its "object" but by the "subject of science" identified with the intellect.324 2. Every linguistic term, like the subjective act of intellecting, supponit pro re. This is the Ockhamian doctrine of the suppositio subordinating, in a first moment, signification to representation—which, Duns Scotus specifies, can sub-

Fides E f f i c ax

sist even in the absence of what is represented; to the extent, Peter Aurioli explains in his Commentaries on the Sentences, that "the soul seems to give things an objective, intentional, visible and apparent being"—before, in turn, surpassing it from the perspective of a logic of the sign. The propositio reads positio pro (alio), position for. ex-propriation of the thing it stands for by substituting itself for it, by speculating on the thing in a movement of the sign anticipating itself in advance. Let's follow out this play of writing whose logocentric value scarcely needs to be stressed. While the sign as "signifier" — the derived sign, derivation being the very origin of the notion of signifier, as Jacques Derrida recalls in the very first pages of his Grammatology—"indifferently coins the capital accumulated in savings and available in the model's reserve, and is only valid when propped up against that tottering hold of cash, the linguistic sign in the act of 'supposing' inscribes upon itself a 'mortgage' for a differed payment, at a discount perhaps, but surely unavailable, supposition being nothing other than that movement of 'mortgaging itself.' "325 In the act of supposing, the sign is neither derived nor originary. Suppositio is the tip of non-reserve as the instant is the point of nonpresence; it is differance, the production of what is differed in the affirmative slipping away of the truth, of the esse objectivum of the species informed by the thing. Nothing, therefore, is less sure than Ockham's assertion: what is saved by the species can also be by the act of intellecting.326 By dint of renouncing species, scientific truth rests exclusively on the metalinguistic rule of the suppositio, non consideratio rei extra. "Every science only refers back to propositions as what is known, for there are no propositions other than known ones."327 A project for a general linguistics is sketched out here—in the crisis of the concept of truth opened by the Scotist break between the intentional adequation of the cognizing subject and the cognized object—with the conquest of a semiotic point of view supposing the destruction of traditional ontology as well as the affirmation of a "pure combinatory efficiency" that finds in God a model "where contemplation and the exercise of power are one and the same thing."328 The logic of the name supposes the assimilation of the predicamental relation with a transcendental relation of a purely logical status; it implies a "prepositional" definition of truth ("veritas est propositio vera, falsitas est propositio falsa")329 setting it apart from every founding, adequate (from adaequatio) relation between concept and thing. 3. Only in the case of the act of intellecting, intelligo, close in this to faith, is the intuitive notitia necessarily caused by its own object—identical to the esse reale of the subject—posited absolutely as existing de facto. It makes manifest the only speculatively indubitable evidence insofar as divine power cannot be substi-

234,5

tuted for the causality of that pure, reflexive intelligible without entailing the contrary proposition: non intelligo.330 The Ockhamian cogito materializes the inevitable psychological "limit" of absolutist theology, while it founds that signaling operation (of science) of what exists brought back to the act of the soul that holds its place "even in the position of the thing as the point of application of the signifying relation."331 Every sign is something preposited of the advancing presence of a cogito deceiving presence [la presence devanqante d'un cogito decevant la presence], insofar as it posits itself below, as it sub-poses, receives its impetus from the writing game of supposition (substitution). From the Augustinian cogito to the Ockhamian cogito, what ends up being broken is the originary link between truth and the voice (phone, vox) of being, affirmed in the distinction of reason (logos) between the soul of cognition and the thing that appears. In the nominally delimited space of its self-evidence, along with the displacement of truth toward the certitude of representations dissociated from the order of things and the foundation of every existent in subjecthood, the Ockhamian cogito is a blank check drawn on the Great Book of the World written in mathematical language.332 But is it well proven that this Ockhamian cogito, thus interpreted, no longer "has anything to do with the Augustinian cogito"?333 That would be to depreciate that "techno-(theo)logical" dynamics of transcendence that has led us from the religion of interpretation to a logic of experimentation that, in a programmatic fashion, calls on the unprecedented possibility of an a priori empirical knowledge where "technology appears, even if unbeknownst to Ockham himself, as the avant-garde of ontology."334 That Ockhamism allows for the complete realization of this possibility is what John Buridan seems to have doubted, conscious as he was of the risk of logicizing the Scotist quidditas as a mere name, despite the assertion that names refer to res, not to ideas. Reduced to a linguistic technique, scientific knowledge would be figured in the web of the proposition including even the solipsism of a subject that the fear of committing the capital offense (of attributing to the existent characteristics proper only to concepts, that is, the great error of realist metaphysics) would have left "without a world" at the very moment when that subject intended to affirm a world of pure singularities.335 A subject caught in the trap of the originary dispersion of existents, of a singulus that originally signified solus: sole, outside of any relation in Pierre Alferi's translation. Motivated by the most immediately political ulterior thoughts of putting the papacy into play in its struggle against the Faculty of Arts, the "Statute

F i d e s E f f i c ax

of the Faculty of Liberal Arts in Reprobation of Certain Erroneous Ockhamist Doctrines," dating from December 29, 1340, says nothing else. That is even its indefinitely modulated subject: May no master, bachelor, or student, who takes courses at the Faculty of Liberal Arts in Paris, have the audacity to declare absolutely false or literally false /de virtute sermonis falsay a well-known proposition by an author on the book he is teaching; if he judges that this author, in establishing this proposition, wanted to say something correct, he must instead either accept that proposition or distinguish the correct signification from the false, for otherwise, by virtue of the same reasoning, some biblical propositions would have to be declared false, when taken purely by the letter, which is dangerous... When one admits or refutes a proposition, one must consequently not pay so much attention to the proper signification of the words /ad proprietem sermonisy as to the thing that is at their base /ad materiam subjectam/. A dispute that starts only from the proper signification of the words and grants no value to a proposition that would not be correct taken in its literal sense degenerates into pure sophistry. In dialectical or doctrinal disputes, where the quest for truth is at issue, one does not pay too much attention to words /de nominibus/. Just as no one asserts that there is no knowledge of things /de rebus/, but only and always a knowledge of signs /signa/, that is, of concepts and expressions /termini vel oratores/, for in the sciences, we use concepts /terminis/ for things /pro rebusj that we cannot transpose to our disputes. Our knowledge is consequently a knowledge of things, even if it goes by way of concepts or expressions /Ideo scientiam habemus de rebus, licet mediantibus terminis vel orationibus/.336 Let's stop at this last sentence. If there is indeed a critique of Ockhamism, what is its meaning and determination? For, inevitably, a question arises: didn't they wish to sidetrack us by carrying out not much more than a change of accent? The document having canceled the essential link between knowledge and things, we can still recognize that this link is produced by an aim, in function of the intentio of intellective acts. On this point, the Statute's antagonism toward Ockham's attitude would be completely relative. The aim would be less to establish the most impervious frontier against the assaults of the secta occamica than to "contain" it within a different economic distinction—the aim would be less the inversion than the perversion of its textual chain. According to the Statute's driving proposition, the critique bears upon "literality" (de virtute sermonis) and "verbal sense," to the benefit of the primacy of "the thing that is at their base" set opposite thereby to "the proper signification of words," which Ockham takes into consideration in his very definition of logic. "Est facilitas virtutem sermonis et proprium modum loquendi percipendi,"337

236,7

one of his major applications consisting in studying the strict rules of the virtus sermonis: "following the literal signification, that is, following the general rules [secundum virtutem sermonis, hoc est secundum regulas generates}, according to which such propositions and similar ones ought to be judged."338 To which our Statute, in a passage I omitted, very precisely "runs counter" by developing the idea of the arbitrariness of general linguistic usage and its conventions. And as human discourse /sermo/ does not draw its signifying virtue from itself, but solely from an arbitrary imposition /ex impositione/ of the general linguistic usage /ex usu communi/ of authors or other persons, verbal sense /virtus sermonis/ is regulated by the general linguistic usage of authors and according to the thing in question /materia/; in effect, one ought to understand the declarations of people /sermones/ by considering the thing that is at the base /penes materiam subjectam/.339 Ex impositione, for the verbal sign, in its signification as much as in its supposition, Buridan specifies in his Summa logicae, "possesses no signifying force, except for what it receives from us": "non habet virtutem propriam nisi ex nobis."340 The privilege given to the materia subjecta, to that thing that is "at the base," is carried out on the "basis" of a subjectivity freed from the obligatory character of language (one can impose a new sense on an expression)341 and from the univocal relations between words and things. A subjectivity that represses the word behind the representation by governing its access and sense. Thus, the word above all signifies the concept in its active aspect, at the very moment when it is asserted that to signify is to constitute an intellection of something.342 Consequently, the sign will no longer be a word still able, as in Ockham, to be immediately supposed for things (res extra, extra animam) despite the primacy conquered from the semiotic point of view, but the sign is an image that supposes the metamorphosis of the quidditas into pure aspect, which presupposes in turn the latter's reduction to the materiality of an objective matter determined independently of language "in the intellectual system of an 'external space' that is fundamentally homogeneous, in-animate, and physical. "343 It's not only the Quarrel of the Universals that fades away under the vigilant pen of Rector John Buridan, it's the Theological Age that comes to a close, referring the exegesis of Nietzsche's diagnostic ("I rather fear that we will never get rid of God, since we still believe in grammar") to a wholly other twilight, a wholly other archeological threshold. The problem is no longer that of the consistency of the universal with regard to the status of representation, but of the insistence of the real substitutively represented by representations dissociated from the (re)presented in the relation of

Fides E ffi c ax

conceptualization. If the Cartesian res cogitans was sketched out in statu nascendi in the Ockhamian operation, it is not impossible that the res extensa is heralded in the Buridanian determination of the supposititio personalis, measured by the ell of the natural legality of the perceptive act being applied to external things, as suppositio significativa: the supposition of a designated image by the conceptual representation of the thing. Knowledge is henceforth comprehended as a unilateral action of the subject in reference to represented images—primary representations directed at the "external world" or secondary representations of the "intramental sphere" — and no longer without mediation to real things that are in themelves external to consciousness. The totality of the existent turns out there to be dependent on the human in its being. To be is to be experienced by means of a representation that, from an action (in the Aristotelian sense: the making present of the thing itself), has become an ob-ject, a decisive pro-ject of a world moved by efficient causes, for which only arbitrarily manipulable signs can hope to account. The sign has been substituted for the singular and present things it designates by lifting them to the rank of objects of an "objective nature." We can therefore acknowledge, on the one hand, the privilege of the present entailed by the state of the term (status termini) in its normal reference to present signifieds;344 on the other hand, we ought to apprehend, from the pragmatic point of view of the Master of Bethune's physicist representation, the forced motion of the logistics of the sign that tends to disjoin every present from its self-identity, to mortgage it in an anticipatory movement unaware of the specific form and identity of presence, with the prompt result of no longer latching onto anything but the numerical unit of the instant. This "restriction of the presence of the existent to the instantaneousness of perception," with the loss of originary time consonant with the summation and stabilization of nature, is made manifest in the most exemplary fashion in the Buridanian doctrine of the impetus where, for the first time, speed is represented according to the proportion between a distance traversed and a given amount of time. Being born at every instant of time, the impetus implies "the restriction of the cause-effect relation to that same instantaneousness" in the causal explanation of this relation, analyzed from the guiding point of view of the efficacity of its representation.345 From the point of view of the world's reproductive consciousness as objecthood conditioned by the structure of representation. In any case, conceptualist nominalism is certainly no stranger to that time that gave birth, beginning in the first half of the fourteenth century, to a pictorial perspective that "may be understood with equal justice as a triumph of

238,9

the distancing and objectifying sense of the real, and as a triumph of the distancedenying human struggle for control; it is as much a consolidation and systematization of the external world as an extension of the domain of the self."346 There is nothing surprising in the fact that the perspective disposition expresses the systematic space of the infinite city and the reproduction of things through the angle of numerical values brought back virtually to the a priori order of time — to the temporal unity of the moment presiding over the triumph of portrait art, of the subjectimage in solidarity with the discovery of the time of the picture whose manifested essence that subject is. In response to the old question "why did capitalism develop in the West rather than in the East?" perhaps we can at present add a new piece to the file: the objectivation-subjectivation of being and of time is in no way carried out in the Orient.347 Western Europe is where that "very pestilential disease" germinates, mentioned right from the beginning of the Statute, lodged in the cloister of the theological age, which turned countless masters away from the "texts of Aristotle, of other masters and exegetes of old texts" to plunge them into those "philosophical questions and other strange disputations, opinions, and suspicious, alien doctrines" that are useful "neither for the home, nor in the fields, nor elsewhere."348 Let's propose that Buridan's detour consisted in establishing the practical relevance of coming to terms with the realization of that "elsewhere." Elsewhere: the outfitting, the transportation, the departure of being from the "house" of language (logos, vox), from the cosmo-theo-psychological "field" of time (oikos, paupertas).349 The trick of this history, which is still our own, was in its wanting the university authorities to perceive in those reticular subtleties the prodrome of a black plague about to ravage Europe.350 The advent of what was supposed to be offered for thought in a "historial" fiction in the mode of "the global night of nihilism" would be that much more delayed.

F i d e s E ffi cax

This page intentionally left blank

Apostil

Just an apostil to forestall an "objection" that is bound to present itself, and to open onto what will follow, about Kant, about a reading of Kant placed under the heading of ontology and methodology, setting the speculative spine of these tales from the conquest of time in that chapter — die Kante [the edge]: "If one wished to put it very drastically, one could say that your study is located at the crossroads of magic and positivism. That spot is bewitched. Only theory could break the spell..." Under Adorno's pen at the time of acknowledging receipt of Benjamin's Baudelaire, theory signifies: isolating the universal dialectical mediation ("... your dialectic lacks one thing: mediation") so as to be in a position to negotiate, for the sole benefit of the global process, the relation between material structure and ideal superstructure — and to dismiss, with the least expense, the specter of vulgar materialism (and of vulgar idealism). Bringing the controversy back onto its original terrain, Hegelian historicism and Marx's critique of it in the 1844 manuscripts, Giorgio Agamben knowingly reminds us that the dialectical correction of the causal relation between infra- and super-structure twice (not just once) betrays the Marxian conception of praxis as original, concrete, and unitary reality: as immediate unity of the two terms in praxis. "The only materialist point of view," he writes, "is that which radically overcomes the separation of structure and superstructure, because praxis is posited as the only single object in its original cohesion— that is, as 'monad' ... the monad of praxis is presented above all as a 'textual

repertory,' as a hieroglyphic which the philosopher must construct in its factitious integrity, in which elements of both structure and superstructure originally converge in 'mythical rigidity.' "351 This place of convergence, in which the historical apparatus is elaborated, is what I thought I recognized from its Aristotelian point of departure in the nexus established between processes of temporalization, functions of subjectivity, and systems of capitalization (the resounding system). In a praxis where one passes from one pro-position of time to another, not by reason of external social and historical determinations, nor by a dialectic of notions, but by an original motion— that is, neither "originary" nor "derived" — of disjuncture by virtue of which what is held to be aberrant in an arrangement produces a disequilibrium, a deflection of time, or an intemperateness [intemperie], which will be invested in a new apparatus. This investment is the presentation itself of time as an active, "objective" temporality: as a potential-time that creates alterity and alteration— multiple processes of temporalization exceeding on all sides the metaphysical vulgarity of there being but one Western representation of time, which in all rigor supposes the scientific revolution as well as the neo-Kantian operation of subsuming being under Method. But though it may bring us "to the utmost form of suffering [when, where] there exists nothing but the conditions of time and of space" (Holderlin, in the Remarks on Oedipus), this operation will not proceed without historically opening ontology back onto the question of its initial unruliness (being as potential, Sophist 247e), without leading to the reassertion of a discordance where the sensible is valid for itself as a potential of events, which are deployed "to form strange combinations as the sources of time, 'arbitrary forms of possible intuitions.' "352

Notes

Foreword 1. [The expression conduites du temps refers less to a behavior in relation to time than to the ways in which time is led, steered, or driven (the literal sense of the French verb conduire from Latin conducere). Hence the ensuing use of the term allure, which I have chosen to translate as "stride" to retain its primary meaning of a characteristic gait, pace, or motion (for example, of a horse). A set of strides or paces thus makes up a certain way time is conducted, a "conduct of time," a formulation whose ambiguous use of the genitive conforms to the sense of Alliez's opening sentence in his Introduction.—Trans.] Introduction 1. Cf. Nicomachean Ethics IX, 1168 b25-28, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. Jonathan Barnes, rev. Oxford translation (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984); and Remi Brague's commentary: "Moral action is the locus of the subject... Virtue is anything to which it is up for me to conform" (Aristote et la question du monde [Paris: PUF, 1988], 132-33). On the paradoxical character of this subject, see the "synthesis" proposed by Jean-Pierre Vernant in "L'individu dans la cite," in Sur Tindividu, Colloque de Royaumont (Paris: Seuil, 1987), 20-37. 2. Its fundamental attitude is well known: a search for foundation, by diving all the way down to the final

justificatory foundation of being and of the existent's existence. "The basement that, in 1841-1842, speaking four languages in four words, Marx calls 'das reelle ens (hypokeimenon, Subjeckt),'" as Emmanuel Martineau recalls in his preface to Rudolf Boehm, La metaphysique d'Aristote. Le fondamental et I'essentiel (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), 43 n. 66bis. 3. "In other words, the labor embodied in exchange values could be called human labor in general. This abstraction of human labor in general exists in the form of average labor, which in a given society the average person can perform... The characteristics of this average labor are different in different countries and different historical epochs, but in any particular society it appears as something given" (Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, trans. Victor Schnittke, in Collected Works [New York: International Publishers, 1975-92], 29: 272-73). This is an eminently problematic proposition as will be verified in the following note. Hegel, in the 1805 Philosophy of Spirit (Jenaer Realphilosophie), takes up this idea that "what is abstract in its movement is the being-for-itself, activity, labor." Also, "since work is performed only to satisfy the need as abstract being-for-itself, the working becomes abstract as well... The ego as laborer having no concrete labor, his power consists in analyzing, in abstracting, dissecting the concrete world into its many abstract aspects" (Hegel and the Human Spirit: A Translation of the Jena Lectures on the Philosophy of Spirit

[1805-6], ed. and trans. Leo Rauch [Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1983], 121; emphasis added).

O'Brien, "Aristote et la categorie de quantite. Divisions de la quantite," Les Etudesphilosophiques 1 [1978]: 26).

4. Marx, Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, 307. In the note relating to this text, Marx comments on the corresponding passage from the Nicomachean Ethics (V, 8): "What he seeks is the oneness of commodities as exchange values, and since he lived in Ancient Greece it was impossible for him to find it." The same theme appears in Capital (trans. Ben Fowkes [New York: Random House, 1976], 151-52): "Aristotle himself was unable to extract this fact, that, in the form of commodity values, all labor is expressed as equal human labor and therefore as labor of equal quality, by inspection from the form of value, because Greek society was founded on the labor of slaves, hence had as its natural basis the inequality of men and of their laborpowers."

12. Martin Heidegger, "Die Physis bei Aristoteles," in Gesamtausgabe (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 1968), 183.

5. Marx, Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy, 271-72. 6. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 41. 7. Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy, trans. Frida Knight, in Collected Works (New York: International Publishers, 1976), 6, 127. "But this equalizing of labor," Marx adds, "is not by any means the work of M. Proudhon's eternal justice; it is purely and simply a fact of modern industry." 8. "This man was Benjamin Franklin, who formulated the basic law of modern political economy in an early work" (Marx, Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy, 285-86). On this subject, see Max Weber's admirable pages in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (New York: Scribner's, 1952 [1930]), 47-65. 9. Kairos here recovers its tragic sense of the final moment when destiny turns toward misfortune. It will be remembered that kairos "is the moment when the course of time, insufficiently directed, seems as if to hesitate and vacillate, for the good as well as for the bad of man" (Pierre Aubenque, La Prudence chez Aristote [Paris: PUF, 1963], 104). 10. Because "form is indivisible" (Aristotle, Metaphysics Z, 8, 1034 a8; trans. W. D. Ross, in Complete Works); translation modified. Cf. Metaphysics a, 2, 994 b 12-20. 11. Cf. Arnaud Berthoud, Aristote et I'argent (Paris: Maspero, 1981), 169-70. This no doubt needs to be related to what Albertus Magnus noted (De praedicamentis, tract. Ill, cap. 1): the absence in chapter 6 of the Categories of a definition of quantity. "An absence all the more striking since the analysis of substance, of relation, and of quality... begins by formulas having, more or less, the character of a definition" (Denis

13. Cf. Marx's famous letter to Engels of June 22, 1867, on the "secret of the money form," trans. Christopher Upward, in Collected Works, 42:384; and Bernard Schmitt, Monnaie, salaires et profit (Paris: PUF, 1966). 14. Jean-Joseph Goux, "Le symbole insense," in Les Iconoclastes (Paris: Seuil, 1978), 162. 15. Cf. Karl Marx, Grundrisse der Kritik derpolitischen Okonomie (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1974), 173. The Hegelian inspiration of these texts has been extensively commented on in two works by Henri Denis: Z,' "Economic" de Marx. Histoire d'un echec (Paris: PUF, 1980), and Logique hegelienne et systemes economiques (Paris: PUF, 1984). The "capture" dimension is grievously lacking in this interpretation, however. At the other extreme, see Antonio Negri, Marx beyond Marx, trans. Harry Cleaver, Michael Ryan, and Maurizio Viano (South Hadley, Mass.: Bergin and Garvey, 1984), from which I have borrowed plenty in these few lines offering a "tendential" exposition of the Grundrisse. See also chapter 13, "La costituzione del tempo. Prolegomeni," of Antonio Negri, Machina Tempo. Rompicapi, Liberazione, Costituzione (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1982). 16. These elements cannot be developed here as they merit; let me simply refer to Eric Alliez and Isabelle Stengers, "Energie et valeur: le probleme de la conservation chez Engels et Marx," in Contretemps: Les pouvoirs de I'argent, ed. Michel de Maule (1988), 66-99. 17. Marx, Grundrisse, ISO, 433. 18. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 89. 19. Ibid., 89-90. 20. Regarding this reversal, I "completely" subscribe to Remi Brague's conclusion in his "La phenomenologie comme voie d'acces au monde grec. Note sur la critique de la Vorhandenheit comme modele ontologique dans la lecture heideggerienne d'Aristote," in Phenomenologie et metaphysique, ed. Walter Biemel, published under the direction of Jean-Luc Marion and Guy Planty-Bonjour (Paris: PUF, 1984), 269, 273: "If such is the case, Sein und Zeit must be more than the book about Aristotle that Heidegger initially planned to write. It must be a book uphill from Aristotle. It must be like an attempt to go back upstream, in order to restore the text of that original that was never written and which is solely possible. Heidegger's work is an attempt to write the original of which philosophy, since the Ancients, is but a

244,5

copy... Heidegger never aims to modernize the Ancients, but to be the ancient of the Ancients, to repeat metaphysics, to take it up again [reprendre] one could say, in the sense that the French verb means both 'to correct, to reprove' and 'to continue, to pursue.'" 21. "Socialism is right as long as it is founded upon the idealism of ethics. And it is the idealism of ethics that founded socialism... As a theoretician of politics, Kant expressly drew upon Plato and fought energetically in favor of the realizable and true character of the Republic, which in fact has remained the ideal of all Utopias. He is the true and actual founder of German socialism [der ivahre und ivirkliche Urheber des deutschen Sozialismus]" (Hermann Cohen, Ethik des reinen Willens [Berlin: B. Cassirer, 1902], 36). For a recent book, a late offspring of those old alliances, to be presented as a weapon against some so-called Pensee 68, is in the nature of things. [The reference here, of course, is to Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut, French Philosophy of the Sixties: An Essay on Antihumanism, trans. Mary H. S. Cattan (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1990).— Trans.] As far as I can tell, Italian Marxism (and, in particular, the works of Antonio Negri) has pushed the farthest the critique of the "socialist" dimension within Marxism itself. Very logically in Negri's case, the critique of dialectics leads to a rediscovery of ontology as a politics of being. The phrase "the word of the end" was, we are told in a letter to his father (November 1837), the last line from a (lost) dialogue written by the (very) young Marx, Cleanthes: or, The Starting Point and Necessary Continuation of Philosophy: "My last proposition was the beginning of the Hegelian system... [in such a way] that now even I myself can hardly recapture my thinking about it, this work, my dearest child, reared by moonlight, like a false siren delivers me into the arms of the enemy" (trans. Clemens Dutt, Collected Works, 1:18). There is no need to see any "conceptual ruse" in the fact that a certain Marx beyond Marx, the Marx of the Grundrisse, falls back "into the arms of the enemy" when analyzing the functioning of capital as absolute subject. In collaboration with Isabelle Stengers in "Energie et valeur," I tried to show (a) that "relation-value" substituted external measure with a concept of measure that necessarily had to be situated in relation to what Hegel calls real measure; and (b) that the theory of the "subject/capital" marks the move from external reflection (the doctrine of Being) to Teleology and Life (the doctrine of the concept): to the profound identity between finality and domination. 2 2. Hermann Cohen, Kants Begriindung der Ethik (Berlin: B. Cassirer, 1910 [1873]), 137. In order to operate in concrete formats, the abstract machine of capitalism must (nonetheless) compose its order of consistency from a principle of reason that is doubly articulated. I will refer to this in the second

volume of this study as the quadruple root of the capitalistic Principle of Reason: (la) any given object as the correlative of any given subject operating within (Ib) the order of ordinary time as the principled method of determination; (2 a) the categorical imperative as correlative of the will determining (2b) the universality of the law as empty form. To paraphrase Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), capitalism is a lobster or a double set of pincers, a double bind between pure reason and practical reason. 23. Paul Natorp, Die logischen Grundlagen der exakten Wissenschaften (Leipzig: Teubner, 1910), 219, 14. 24. "Historico-critical" in the sense that Nietzsche, in his Untimely Meditations, opposes critical history to what he calls monumental history and antiquarian history. Having remembered this distinction, Henri Dussort goes on to say: "Shouldn't one ask every 'historian of philosophy' to declare right from the beginning what he wants to do, and why he is doing it? Many polemics would thus be clarified, indeed they would be shown to be useless" (Introduction to L'Ecole de Marbourg [Paris: PUF, 1963], 2). We know Nietzsche's answer: "Only he who is oppressed by a present need, and who wants to throw off this burden at any cost, has need of critical history, that is to say a history that judges and condemns" (Untimely Meditations, trans. R. J. Hollingdale [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983], 72). 25. Cf. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 190. 26. Cf. Friedrich Nietzsche, Der Wille zur Macht (Leipzig: Kroner, 1934), no. 604: "What alone can knowledge be? 'Interpretation,' the introduction of meaning—not 'explanation'.. .There are no facts" (The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufman and R. J. Hollingdale [New York: Random House, 1967], 327). We are all post-Kantians ... 27. Michel Foucault, Introduction to The Use of Pleasure, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Random House, 1985), 8. 28. Acknowledged by Jean Guitton in the preface to the publication of his doctoral thesis, Le Temps et I'e'ternite' chez Plotin et saint Augustin, 3d ed. (Paris: Vrin, 1971), 7. The present text constitutes a revised version of a doctoral thesis in letters titled "Naissance et conduites des temps capitaux" and defended at the University of Paris-VIII on December 12, 1987, before a committee composed of Gilles Deleuze (thesis director), Maurice de Gandillac (chair), Rene Scherer, Michel Serres, Isabelle Stengers, and Heinz Wismann. 29. At the moment of completing this Introduction, I would like to quote the opening lines of Stengers's doctoral thesis: "The thesis you are about to read will surely give the impression of an annoying proliferation.

Notes to Introduction

Perhaps it will be said that its author was unfortunately unable to define and master her subject. If mastery means the purified definition of an object that at the same time determines the tools that are adequate and the questions that are legitimate, then I recognize the truth of the criticism without the slightest scruple, but I would like, from this moment on, to explain why I was not unable but unwilling to purify my object" (Isabelle Stengers, "Etats et processus. Quelques aspects de la transformation conceptuelle de la physique dans ses relations avec le probleme du phenomene chimique," doctoral thesis, Universite Libre de Belgique [1982-83], 1). 30. Jacques Le Goff, Your Money or Your Life: Economy and Religion in the Middle Ages, trans. Patricia Ranum (New York: Zone Books, 1988), 93. 31. Jacques Le Goff, The Birth of Purgatory, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 311. Cf. also Le Goff, "The Usurer and Purgatory," in The Dawn of Modern Banking (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 25-52. 32. Ezra Pound, "Canto XLV": "With usura the line grows thick / with usura is no clear demarcation / and no man can find site for his dwelling" (The Cantos [New York: New Directions, 1956], 23). 33. Le Goff, Your Money or Your Life, 12. It would be necessary to take up again Foucault's analysis of confession in The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Random House, 1978). The year 1215 is a great date for the dynamics of transcendence along the slope of subjectivization: the Fourth Lateran Council, in its canon XXI, Omnis utriusque sexus, made aural confession, from mouth to ear, a requirement for every Christian at least once a year. From 1215 on, the subject is officially a "product" of self-fear. 1. The Accident of Time: An Aristotelian Study 1. Remember the syllogism presented in the Nicomachean Ethics V, 5: exchange is what allows political bonds to be maintained (1132 b34), but need is what founds exchange (1135 b7); hence, need constitutes the bond in political communities (1133 b6). See Pierre Pellegrin's excellent commentary in his book review of Arnaud Berthoud, Aristote et I'argent (Paris: Maspero, 1981), entitled "Monnaie et chrematistique. Remarques sur le mouvement et le contenu de deux textes d'Aristote a I'occasion d'un livre recent," Revuephilosophique de la France et de I'etranger 4 (1982): 631-38. 2. Nicomachean EthicsV, 5, H33 a27 (trans. W. D. Ross, revised byj. O. Urmson). Cf. Plato, Republic, 369b. Money is thus "by convention a sort of representative of demand" (H33 a29). Money "becomes

in a sense (pos) an intermediate" (1133 a!9). This is to say, Pellegrin stresses, that money passes itself for an intermediate term, which it really is not (635). The importance of this remark will be verified later. 3. It is too often forgotten that only with the Timaeus does the "world" effectively become "cosmos" in the very move whereby kosmos and ouranos ("heaven") are given as interchangeable (cf. Timaeus 28 b3). Aristotle owes much to this synonym effect. For its prehistory, see Plato, Gorgias 507e-508a, who attributes the use of kosmos to certain sophoi to mean the order of the universe, to express respect for order (kosmioteta) in the universe. Moreover, it is hard to argue that the formulation of the doctrine of the Primum Mobile brings Aristotle close to Plato. As Victor Gomez-Pin has well observed, after the failure of the concept of the ether, the Stagirite "definitively renounced searching for a foundation within what is founded" (Ordre et substance. L'enjeu de la quete aristote'licienne [Paris: Anthropos, 1976], 126). 4. Most directly: "That which holds by nature and is natural can never be anything disorderly; for nature is everywhere the cause of order" (phusis aha past taxeos; Physics VIII, I, 252 a I Iff). On the same level, also see Physics VIII, 7, 260 b22f. ; De caelo III, 2, 300b-30la, where it appears that the critique of infinity (according to the view of those philosophers who imagine "infinite bodies moving in an infinite") is based on the argument that disorder is what is natural, and order or world what is unnatural: ten men ataxian einai kata phusin, ten de taxin kai ton kosmon para phusin (301 all-12). 5. Cf. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics V, 5. As a kind of first reading: (1) The commensurable function of money, determined by its role as intermediate term between goods (C-M-C), defines currency in its "economic" use; currency is supposed to record the possible discrepancies between the formal equality of measurement and the real equality obtained by just measurement (the practice of measurement can be done either in excess or with lack). (2) Need is the real benchmark, which, by assuring the organic cohesion of the community, guarantees the reciprocity of exchange; need is the just measure of exchange as social bond. (3) Because need finds its conventional representative in currency, a fair price is "the cipher of social recognition." On this political exchange, this political science of exchange issuing forth in an ethics, see Berthoud, Aristote et I'argent, especially 18-24. Marx's initial response, written at the same time as the 1844 manuscripts: "If money is the bond binding me to human life, binding society to me, connecting me with nature and man, is not money the bond of all bonds'? Can it not dissolve and bind all ties? Is it not, therefore, also the universal agent of separation'? It is the coin that really separates as well as the real binding agent" (Karl Marx, Collected Works [New York: International Publishers,

246,7

1975-92], 3:234; emphasis in the original). We really are on the threshold of the Politics... 6. Aristotle, Politics I, 1256 b40ff., trans. Benjamin Jowett (translation modified). 7. Ibid., 1259 b!8. 8. Aristotle, Physics III, 6, 207 a7, trans. R. P. Hardie and R. K. Gaye. 9. Before it came to qualify law in the political sense of the term, nomos held a religious and moral sense akin to kosmos: order, arrangement, correct distribution. Cf. Jean-Pierre Vernant, Myth and Thought among the Greeks (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983), 2:56. On this cosmic nomos and the parallelism between political and cosmological thought—"which reveals in the polis a microcosm ruled by nomos just as nomos rules the macrocosm" — see Edouard Will, Le Monde grec et rOrient (Paris: PUF, 1972), 1:427-28. 10. Aristotle, Metaphysics a, 2, 994 b!2f., trans. W. D. Ross (translation modified). 11. Aristotle, Politics I, 1257 a!4-b8; trans. Benjamin Jowett (translation modified). See M. Austin and Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Economic et societes en Grece ancienne (Paris: Armand Colin, 1972), 185-90. Earlier (1256 b26-30), Aristotle analyzes an "art of acquistion" that "by nature" is a branch of the household economy to the extent that it procures riches (khremata) useful to the political or familial community. 12. See Karl Marx, Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy, "Chapter on Money," in Collected Works, 28:139. 13. Edouard Will, "Trois quarts de siecle de recherche sur I'economie grecque antique," Annales ESC (1954): 17. On the importance of import and export for the city-state, see Aristotle, Rhetoric I, 4, 1360 a!2-17. 14. Politics I, 2, b29-30, following R. Weil's interpretation in Aristote et I'histoire. Essai sur la "Politique" (Paris: Klincksieck, I960), 411. See also Politics II, 6, 1265 a20-22, where politikon signifies "in relation with neighboring states" in the framework of a critique of the isolationism of the ideal Platonic citystate. The confusion of certain translators (replacing politikon by polemikon) manifests the "difficulty" present in the Aristotelian text. 15. Karl Marx, Capital, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Random House, 1976), 208-10 (translation modified). 16. Nicomachean Ethics V, 5, H 3 3 b l l - I 3 . 1 n a more direct rendering, H. Rackham translates, "Money serves as a guarantee of exchange in the future." (The Nichomachean Ethics, rev. ed. [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982]). 17. Michel Aglietta and Andre Orleans, La Violence de la monnaie (Paris: PUF, 1982), 48. Without turning

Aristotle into the first theoretician of the market economy (which would be perfectly absurd: in these texts no theory of prices is found, no analysis of the relation between value and prices that is constitutive of a "political economy"), it should be noted that these considerations allow one to account for the apparent contradiction between the Nicomachean Ethics, where the irreducibly conventional character of money (nomosnomisma) is asserted, and the Politics (I, 9, 1257 a36-7), which acknowledges, as if in passing, its being "intrinsic and useful." Moreover, in the Ethics, immediately after the passage cited about money as the guarantee of future exchanges, one reads that "money is subject to the same fluctuations as other commodities, yet it tends to be steadier" (V, 8, H33bl3-l5). 18. On emporia and kapelike, cf. Karl Polanyi, "Aristotle Discovers the Economy," Karl Polanyi, Conrad M. Arensberg, and Harry W. Pearson, Trade and Market in the Early Empires: Economies in History and Theory, 2d ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 91-92. It remains true that—"platonically" — the polis cannot do without the emporoi who, according to this point of view, can be considered the producers of an "opus" (ergon). Cf. Gilbert Romeyer D'Herbey, Les Choses memes. La pensee du reel chez Aristote (Lausanne: L'Age d'homme, 1983), 296. 19. Nicomachean Ethics V, 5, 113 3 b 13 -15. Michel Foucault's magnificent sentences in The Order of Things (New York: Random House, 1970) should be recalled: "The signs of exchange, because they satisfy desire, are sustained by the dark, dangerous, and accursed glitter of metal. An equivocal glitter, for it reproduces in the depths of the earth that other glitter that sings at the far end of the night: it resides there like an inverted promise of happiness, and, because metal resembles the stars, the knowledge of all these perilous treasures is at the same time knowledge of the world" (173; emphasis added). 20. Only at this level of analysis does Aristotle's assertion that "sophistry is... a kind of art of moneymaking" really make sense (Sophistical Refutations XI, 171 b28). 21. Marx, Capital, 240-41 and 209, respectively. Cf. Alfred Sohn-Rethel, Intellectual and Manual Labor: A Critique of Epistemology (London: Macmillan, 1978), 19: "In the form of money riches become abstract riches and, as owner of such riches, man himself becomes an abstract man, a private property-owner. Lastly, a society in which commodity exchange forms the nexus rerum is a purely abstract set of relations where everything concrete is in private hands." On the other side of the discourse of genesis, an imaginary dialogue between Engels and Aristotle might be prolonged a moment: ENGELS: Hence, no society can for long remain master of its own production and continue to control the social effects of its production process,

N o t e s to C h a p t e r 1

unless it abolishes exchange between individuals (Friedrich Engels, Origin of the Family, in Collected Works, 26-216). ARISTOTLE: Clearly, then, the ideal limit for a city-state is the largest possible extension of the population compatible with a self-sufficient life and which can be taken in at a single view (Aristotle, Politics VII, 5, 1326 b22-25). 22. "For a city ought to be a market, not indeed for others, but for herself (Politics 1327 a27-28). 23. Pellegrin, "Monnaie et chrematistique," 634-35; cf. Nicomachean Ethics, 1133 a27. Pellegrin insists (and correctly, to my mind) on a certain fatalism in Aristotle, which in these pages draws him near a Stoic position: "no longer reform the world, but save oneself in spite of the world" (641)—in spite of the agony and the death of the polis, whose end he intimates and not just in "the tragic mode," as Berthoud wrote somewhat literarily. On money as a "factor of perversion in the economy," see P. Moreau, "Aristote et la monnaie," Revue des etudes grecques 83 (1969). 24. "Hier aber stutzt er," wrote Marx in "The Commodity," chapter 1 of part I of book 1, in Capital (p. 151), citing the famous line from the Nicomachean Ethics V, 5 1133 bl8-19: "Now in truth it is impossible that things differing so much should become commensurate."

32. Djuna Barnes, Ryder (New York: H. Liveright, 1928), 33-35. 33. Cf. Metaphysics K, 6, 1063a; and Brague's commentary, which emphasizes that "the world is taken for an ethical model only because it is first taken as an ontological model" (Remi Brague, Aristote et la question du monde, [Paris: PUF, 1988], 265). Chrematistics has at least the following in common with sophistry: the sign takes the place of things and introduces, among other regimes, the regime of "pure" representation. For his part, Deleuze emphasizes that "repetition is essentially inscribed in need, since need rests upon an instance which essentially involves repetition: which forms the for-itself of repetition and the for-itself of a certain duration" (Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton [New York: Columbia University Press, 1994], 77). In following through on the analysis of the first synthesis of time, he does a good job of showing the true sense of the distinction between natural and artificial: "Natural signs are... signs of the present, referring to the present [what] they signify... Artificial signs, by contrast, are those which refer to the past or the future as distinct dimensions of the present, dimensions on which the present might in turn depend" (p. 77; emphasis added; translation modified).

2 5. Referring to Nicomachean Ethics X, 1174 a 19ff. Gilbert Romeyer D'Herbey recalls that Aristotle would never have dreamed of measuring the common value of products based on their labor time because he could "only conceive of a completed piece of work, not fractions of one." Labor only is insofar as it is the work (I'ceuvre) (Romeyer D'Herbey, Les Chases memes, 298).

34. Charles Peguy, Clio (Paris: Gallimard, 1932), 269, cited by Deleuze. It goes without saying that this future is the complete opposite of what defines, through final cause, the future's attraction for the flowing present of becoming according to the necessities that flow from its "supratemporal" presupposition (following Dominique Dubarle's expression in "La nature chez Hegel et chez Aristote," Archives de philosophic 38, no. I [January-March 1975]: II).

26. Almost every commentator has had to recognize this "intertwining of the normative with the descriptive" (for example, Romeyer D'Herbey, 290) at the core of the Aristotle's analysis of exchange.

35. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 81 (emphasis added).

27. We are not afraid of referring the reader to the Eudemian Ethics III, 4, 1231 b39-1232 a4, where Aristotle defines use-value as the "proper use of one's property" (kath' hauto) and exchange value by "an accidental mode of using" (kata sumbebekos). 28. Politicsl, 11, 1258 b2ff., trans. BenjaminJowett (translation modified); cited by Marx, Capital I, part II, chapter 5, 267). 29. Nicomachean Ethics I, 1096 a6: "ho de khrematistes biaios tis estin" [The life of moneymaking is one undertaken under compulsion]. 30. Georg Simmel, The Philosophy of Money, trans. Tom Bottomore and David Frisby (London: Routledge and KeganPaul, 1978), 75. 31. Berthoud, Aristote et I 'argent, 177.

36. Cf. Nicomachean Ethics I, 1, 1094 a26-28: "we must try, in outline at least, to determine the nature of the chief good, and of which of the sciences or capacities it is the object. It would seem to belong to the most authoritative [kuriotate] and science and that which is most truly the master science. And, Politics appears to be of this nature" (translation modified). 37. Henri Maldiney, Aitres de la langue et demeures de la pense'e (Lausanne: L'Age d'homme, 1975), 95. "Insofar then as the 'now' is a boundary \peras], it is not time, but an accident of it" (Aristotle, Physics III, 220 a21-22; translation modified). 38. Physics V, 224 b7-8, 229 a25. 39. Maldiney, Aitres de la langue et demeures de la pense'e, 113. This definition of the perfect subtends the Aristotelian constitution of time. (On the determination of presence as perfect, see 104-13.) Already for the

248,9

reason that eliminating the first moment in which a being begins to change, "is to posit that the change is not grasped through the aorist, that the grasping does not bear upon an absolute incidence" (65). Or an event. Which suffices, parenthetically, to debanalize the usual assertion whereby Aristotelianism wholly hangs on to the attempt to reintegrate motion into being. 40. Physics VILl, 263bl4-15. 41. Politics I, 1252 b32-34: "The nature of a thing is its end. For what each thing is when fully developed, we call its nature." 42. Cf. Maldiney, Aitres de la langue et demeures de la pensee, 55. 43. "Past andposse are contradictory," Vladimir Jankelevitch emphasizes, "since the past indicates a direction incompatible with the exercise of power" (L 'Irreversible et la nostalgic [Paris: Flammarion, 1974], 181; cf. 256, on the definite future as "the normative patrimony of a certain group of men," "the magnetic pole of value"). 44. Following something pointed out by Brague, we can really "wonder whether it is not from a thought about the kairos that remains implicit that the concept of 'oneself [soi-meme] gets its meaning, in Aristotle as everywhere else" (Aristote et la question du monde, 131). Does it need to be added, however, that Aristotle never arrived at the point of saying what he meant by "oneself," which he would have identified with human nature? On the side of virtue — "anything to which it is up for me to conform" — the Stagirite would come up against the essentially public character of Greek life; on the side of the nonegoistical desire postulated by the Aristotelian doctrine of friendship, "the self cannot be taken as a goal... where the relation to self is not objectifying" (ISO). There remains a completely other desire basing itself on the fact that human beings most frequently choose to put action above contemplation to the extent that they are made up of something other than what they truly are. ("To choose to be alienated, it is necessary to be alienated already, to have stepped out of one's nature," 190.) Without being utterly false in its expectations, this analysis sins through a serious fault in its presuppositions: it has to ignore the civic model (the Greek model!) of virtue founded on a correlation between the individual and the city such that it implies "for each of them, a certain form of relationship of the individual with himself (Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 2, The Use of Pleasure, trans. Robert Hurley [New York: Random House, 198 5], 79—which refers to the great text of Politics VII, 14, 1332a, 33-34: "A city can be virtuous only when the citizens who have a share in the government are virtuous"; translation modified). 45. In fact: "Chrematistic exchange is an exchange that seems to give a price to time because it is essentially an

exchange between different moments of time" (Berthoud, Aristote et I'argent, 178). 46. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 88, 113 (translation modified). Vidal-Naquet uses the same expression ("time gets unhinged") in his commentary on the passage from the Timaeus (43d-e) when the circles of the souls undergo "every injury and every possible trouble." "In the mixture that is man, like every living being," he writes, "time will be circular to the exact extent that the divine prevails over the material" (Pierre Vidal-Naquet, "Temps des dieux et temps des hommes," Revue d'histoire des religions January-March I960]; now included in Le Chasseur noir [Paris: Maspero, 1981], 89-90). 47. Berthoud, Aristote et I'argent, 169-70. 48. Charles Peguy, Note conjointe (Paris: Gallimard, 1935), 290-91 (emphasis added). 49. Cf. Martin Heidegger, "Die Physis bei Aristoteles," 187. This is the thesis developed by Polanyi: "Aristotle was trying to master theoretically the elements of a new complex social phenomenon in statu nascendi. The economy, when it first attracted the conscious awareness of the philosopher in the shape of commercial trading and price differentials, was already destined to run its variegated course towards its fulfillment some twenty centuries later. Aristotle divined the full-fledged specimen from the embryo" ("Aristotle Discovers the Economy," 67-69). Remember that Gustave Glotz was able to speak, with regard to this period, of a true capitalism. 50. Cf. chapter 3, "Savages, Barbarians, Civilized Men," in Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, AntiOedipus, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (New York: Viking, 1977). 51. On the problem of retrospective categories, posited from a Heideggerian perspective, see Reiner Schurmann, Heidegger on Being and Acting: From Principles to Anarchy, trans. Christine-Marie Gros (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 222-44. On the impossibility of an economic evolutionism, see Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), especially 430-31. It is to be regretted that this type of consideration was at no time introduced into the framework of the polemics between "primitivists" and "modernists" with respect to ancient economy. We will limit ourselves here to referring to the work of M. I. Finley, The Ancient Economy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973). Finally, remember Clio's beautiful commentary at the very beginning of Difference and Repetition: "They do not add a second and a third time to the first, but carry the first time to the 'n th> power. With respect to this power, repetition interiorizes and thereby reverses itself: as

N o t e s to C h a p t e r I

Peguy says, it is not Federation Day which commemorates or represents the fall of the Bastille, but the fall of the Bastille which celebrates and repeats in advance all the Federation Days; or Monet's first water lily which repeats all the others" (1). 52. On the theme of time the destroyer, see Physics IV, 221a30-b3,222bl6-17. 5 3. "And we always assume the presence in nature of the better, if it be possible." Cf. Physics VIS., 7, 260 b22, and Physics VIII, l , 2 5 2 a l l , o n nature as the cause of order. 54. "In effect," writes Bergson, "Aristotle's whole aim is to oppose the emancipation of place, if I may say so, and to enclose ane%w within bodies the space that had so inappropriately come out of it" (Quid Aristoteles de loco senserit, in Henri Bergson, Melanges [Paris: PUF, 1972], 11). Aristotle would thus have rejected the modern theory of space, "prematurely emancipated by Leucippus and Democritus," in order to substitute "in the place of the infinite theater of motion, the inclusion of finite things within finite things." Bergson concludes: "This is something we can hardly reproach him for, if we notice how modern and nearly as recent as yesterday is the distinction between form and matter, insofar as it bears on the act of knowing rather than on the thing known (11; emphasis added). 55. Physics W, 223 a21-22. 56. Ibid., 219 a3-6. 57. Jacques Derrida, "Ousia and Gramme: Note on a Note from Being and Time" in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 49.1 would like to point out that Joseph Moreau, drawing Aristotle toward Kant, had already tried to bend the Aristotelian notion of time in the sense of an a priori condition of representation; see Joseph Moreau, "Le temps selon Aristote," Revue philosophique de Louvain 46 (1948), reprinted in L'Espace et le temps selon Aristote. The problem seems to me better stated in a more recent article by Moreau: "It can be agreed then with Aristotle that the representation of time, that of mathematical time, figured by a line whose successive instants are symbolized by points, is a representation elaborated from the experience of change; but it does not follow from this that time itself is, as Aristotle says, a determination or a dependency of change; it is first of all the condition that makes change possible... The very direction of the succession, the opposition between before and after, can be grasped by consciousness only on the condition of being produced by it" (Joseph Moreau, "Le temps de la representation, ou Kant heritier d'Aristote," Les Etudesphilosophiques 3 [1980]: 281,280). 58. Octave Hamelin, Le Systeme d'Aristote (Paris: F. Alcan, 1920).

59. Physics IV, 218 b32-219 al (translation modified). 60. PhysicsVll, 244 bll. 61. De caelo III, 7, 306 al7 (translation modified). 62. De anima III, 8, 432 a3-4. 63. Physics IV, 208 a3l-32 (translation modified). One may also consult book VIII, chapter 7. 64. Simplicius, In Aristotlis physicorum lihros quattor priores commentaria, ed. Hermann Diels (Berlin: G. Reimeri, 1882), 759, 17-21. Check the demonstration of the Categories: "For the destruction of the perceptible carries perception to destruction, but perception does not carry the perceptible to destruction" (7, 7 b36). 65. Metaphysics^, 1072 a!7 (translation modified) and 1075 a!9, where Aristotle employs the term oikos to illustrate the nature of the order reigning in the universe. 66. A. J. Festugiere, "Le temps et Tame selon Aristote," Revue des sciences philosophiques et theologiques 23 (1934): 15, reprinted in Etudes de philosophic grecque (Paris: Vrin, 1971). 67. Cf. Aetius I, 22, 6. The content of this doxographic notice is, of course, what interests us (every commentator has noted the anachronistic presence of the term hupostasis), as well as the fact that it is ignored by Aristotle in his examination of the traditional doctrines on time (218 a32-b!8). Do we dare dramatize the meaning of this absence by getting help from an indication given by Victor Goldschmidt: that this thesis offers a poor resemblance to Aristotle's conception? (See Victor Goldschmidt, Temps physique et temps tragique chez Aristote [Paris: Vrin, 1982], 17.) According to Mario Untersteiner, it is in the framework of his polemic against Gorgias that Antiphon exposits this proposition deduced from "that part of Gorgias' first theory in which it is denied that eternity and Becoming are possible predicates of Being" (Mario Untersteiner, The Sophists, trans. Kathleen Freeman [Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1954] 236). 68. Physics IV, 223 a21-29 (translation modified). It is useful here to reproduce Saint Thomas Aquinas's commentary: "As soon as one posits motion, one also necessarily posits time, for the anterior and the posterior, to the extent that they are quantifiable, constitute time itself (Physica Aristoteli Expositioni, ed. P. M. Maggiolo [Rome: 1954], lect. 23, 629). 69. Goldschmidt, Temps physique et temps tragique chez Aristote, 114. The strongest expression of a gnoseological realism is found in the Categories (7, 7 b22-38). 70. Metaphysics G, 4, 1007 a33. 71. Metaphysics G, 2, 1004 b8. This "correct idea" of essence is precisely what impels the overcoming of

250,1

Platonism ("to save phenomena") because essence, in order to be, must be involved with the (sensible) subject: essence can no longer be defined by itself, outside the existential sense of being. This leads the Stagirite to refuse any separation between sense and cognition. As Goldschmidt recalls, quoting Etienne Gilson, for Aristotle actual being has a character that is "irremediably given" and no longer just thought (Victor Goldschmidt, Le Systeme stoicien et I'ide'e du temps [Paris: Vrin, 1953], 15-16; and Etienne Gilson, L'Etre et ressence [Paris: Vrin, 1948], 49f.). In two brief sentences, Gilson perfectly summarizes the opposition between Aristotle and Plato: "Described in Aristotelian language, a Platonic Idea is nothing more than a term 'predicatable on a subject'... An Idea is thus not a 'being,' in the true, primary, and rigorous sense of the term, because it is not a 'subject.'" From this point of view, Platonic antisophistry is condemned to be nothing but the reverse of sophistical speech. For a thorough analysis of Aristotle's anti-Platonic strategy, see Michel Narcy, "Platon revu et corrige," Introduction 2 to Barbara Cassin and Michel Narcy, La Decision du sens. Le livre Gamma de la Metaphysique d'Aristote (Paris: Vrin, 1989). 72. De generatione et corruptions 315 b9: against Leucippus and Democritus. 73. Metaphysics theta, 10, 1051 a34 (to de kuribtata on alethes e pseudos). See also Sophistical Refutations 18, 176 b35: "whereas one solves merely apparent arguments by drawing distinctions." 74. Cf. Pierre Aubenque, Le Probleme de I'etre chez Aristote (Paris: PUF, 1966), 2d ed. rev., 128: "It is because things have an essence that words have meaning"; and the felicitous commentary of the conclusion of Barbara Cassin, "Du faux ou du mensonge a la fiction (de pseudos a plasma)," in Le Plaisir de parler, ed. Barbara Cassin (Paris: Minuit, 1986), 16-17: "Discourses are true according to how they resemble the actual things" (De interpretations 9, 19 a33; translation modified). Whence, that every properly called definition is a "statement of essence" (logos tou ti estin, cf. Posterior Analytics II, 10, 93 b29; translation modified) based on the existence of the thing (ibid. II, 7, 93 a!7-20). 75. Metaphysics E, 4, 1027 b25, where one can verify the importance of Aristotle's engagement on the terrain of sophistry (the truth of things being found in man rather than in things themselves) to parry that "apparent wisdom because it is knowledge of what appears." For a powerful evaluation of the cost of the Aristotelian operation in book G of the Metaphysics, see Barbara Cassin, "Parle, si tu es un homme," Introduction 1 to Barbara Cassin and Michel Narcy, La Decision du sens, especially 36-40. Along with the notion of signification appears the possibility that words have a meaning even though no essence corresponds to them.

76. Aubenque, Le Probleme de I'etre chez Aristote, 167. Aubenque refers here to Metaphysics IX, H, 10, 1051b, and quotes this unambiguous sentence: "It is not because we think that you are white, that you are white, but because you are white, we who say this have the truth" (emphasis in the original). Cf. also De anima 426 a20: "The earlier students of nature were mistaken in their view that without sight there was no white or black, without taste no savour" (according to Simplicius, Aristotle is here taking on Democritus); and Metaphysics theta, 3, 1047 a6-7, against the Megarics who fall into Protagoras's error by asserting that the perceptible is nothing in the absence of the perceiving. 77. Theaetetus 154a (trans. F. M. Cornford, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns [New York: Random House, 1961]). Plato concludes this passage by reaffirming his individualistic interpretation of Protagoras's doctrine. Similarly, for Aristotle, the anthrbpos metron means "that which seems to each man assuredly is" (Metaphysics K, 6, 1062 b!5). For the commentary on this interpretation, and on the value of the Theaetetus for the exegesis of Protagorism, see Eugene Dupreel, Les Sophistes (Neuchatel: Editions du Griffon, 1948), 15f. 78. Meno 76e (trans. W. K. C. Guthrie, in Collected Dialogues of Plato). 79. "As a matter of fact, knowledge and perception are measured rather than measure other things" (Metaphysics I, 1, 1053 a33; translation modified). For the Aristotelian critique of the anthrbpos metron, see chapter 1 of D'Herbey, Les Chases memes, especially 56-57. On to pragma, check D'Herbey's Introduction (13^-2) and the article by Pierre Hadot, "Sur les divers sens du mot pragma dans la tradition philosophique grecque," in Concepts et categories dans la pensee antique, ed. Pierre Aubenque (Paris: Vrin, 1980), 309-11, for the importance of its use in refuting the Sophists. Finally, the translation of metron proposed by Untersteiner will be recalled: "mastery" over something, in The Sophists 41-42,81. 80. Respectively, Physics III, 8, 208 a!5-16, and 204 b4 and 10. 81. "The polemics against the Sophists is everywhere present in his opus, not only in his logical writings but also in the Metaphysics and even in the Physics, and that polemics can be divined in numerous passages where sophistry is not expressly targeted" (Aubenque, Le Probleme de I'etre chez Aristote, 94). 82. Timaeus 90d (trans. Benjamin Jowett [translation modified], in Collected Dialogues of Plato}. It should be remarked that, stricto sensu, the rigorous determination of the sign is thinkable, even for us today, only with Aristotle and in his wake (see note 75 of this chapter). That determination is strictly contemporaneous with

N o t e s to C h a p t e r I

the denunciation of its imperialism, with the possibility of a signifying autonomy (a stag story) at its limit. To speak truthfully, that determination would be identified with the anti-Sophist war machine built by Aristotle, were it not necessary to account for the surface effects of meaning that persist up through the "dialogue" between Derrida and Deleuze about Plato. See Jacques Derrida, "Plato's Pharmacy," in Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981); Gilles Deleuze, "Plato and Simulacra," in The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990); and Eric Alliez, "Ontologie et logographie. La pharmacie, Platon et le simulacre," forthcoming. 83. At the same stroke, Heidegger's affirmation of this statement, grafted onto the ontological paradigm of the Vorhandenbeit is "relativized" ("dedramatized"?). A good account can be found in Remi Brague, "La phenomenologie comme voie d'acces au monde grec. Note sur la critique de la Vorhandenheit comme modele ontologique dans la lecture heideggerienne d'Aristote," in Phenomenologie et metaphysique, ed. Walter Biemel, published under the direction of Jean-Luc Marion and Guy Planty-Bonjour (Paris: PUF, 1984), 247-73. From an utterly different point of view, that of the phenomenological conditions for an "ultraHeideggerian Greece," see Barbara Cassin, "Dire ce qu'on voit, faire voir ce qu'on dit: la phenomenologie d'Aristote et celle des sophistes," part I, Cahiers de I'ecole des sciences philosophiques et religieuses (Facultes Universitaires Saint-Louis), 5 (1989): 7-37. 84. Metaphysics G, 2, 1004 b 1-2. 8 5. Physics IV, 219 b 13 -3 2 (emphasis added; translation modified). What we have gotten into the habit of translating on the one hand by essence (here: "what the 'now' never ceases to be": touto d'en autoi to nun) and on the other hand by substratum or subject (here: "what it turns out to be then": ho pote on) is always already said according to two modes of time. The "now" is always already caught in the effects of its being said. 86. See Simplicius, In Aristotelisphysicorum libros quattuorpriores commentaria, 752, 2. 87. Cassin quotes pas logos aletheuei of Antisthenes: "all discourse avers" (Proclus, In Cratylum 37, 429b). She calls this the world-effect of sophistical demiurgy. 88. Remi Brague, Du temps chez Platon et Aristote (Paris: PUF, 1982), 129; see chapter 3, "Sur la formule aristotelicienne o pote on." 89. Physics 219 b33-220 et al. This double proposition follows right after the passage last cited (see note 85).

arithmos of logos." A bit further, he adds: "The logos is in effect the only aspect under which the soul is presented here. The soul is nothing more than the place of the logos" (Brague, Du temps chez Platon et Aristote, 140, 144). 92. See Philippe Hoffman's commentary on Physics IV, 222 a24, where the adverb pote is defined on the basis of the nun "understood, in the broad sense, no longer as something indivisible, but as a 'field of presence' that also englobes the recent past as well as the near future" (Philippe Hoffman, "Les categories pou et pote chez Aristote et Simplicius," in Concepts et categories dans la pensee antique, 221). 93. See chapter 4, "Positions de Phomme," in Brague, Aristote et la question du monde. Brague notes the importance of the analogy between cosmic hierarchy and social hierarchy, which is tributory to the opposition between theoria-phronesis and polupragmosune (the "busying about" characteristic of the slave's condition). ["Cosmodicy" is a neologism obviously derived from "theodicy"—Trans.] 94. The italicized statement is the third theorem of deterritorialization as given by Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 174. 95. Plotinus, Enneads III, 7, 9, II. 68-73 and 78-79, trans. Stephen MacKenna, rev. ed. (London: Faber and Faber, 1969); translation modified. 2. The Time of Audacity: Plotinus 1. Enneadslll, 7, 12, trans. Stephen MacKenna, rev. ed. (London: Faber and Faber, 1969); translation modified. Cf. Enneads VI, 1,5, where time is shown to be a quantity only by accident, to the extent to which it is measured, but as such it is of "another nature." Whence the critique addressed to Aristotle in this first tractate, On the Kinds of Being: for having paid attention just to the categories of the sensible, he neglected those of the intelligible. Perhaps the explicit formulation of the thesis that the measurement of movement is accidental to time has to be taken back to Plutarch. In the eighth of his Platonic questions, he shows that what is essential to time is its being the cause of the "order that moves the nature of everything because it is supplied with a soul" (1007 be). The primacy of the ordered motion of the universe expresses the cosmological parturition of the Platonic theory of time. This long tradition is precisely what Plotinus breaks with, under the cover of constant references to Plato. Numerous indexes of this evolution are found in middle Platonism. 2. Enneads III, 7, 9 (translation modified).

90. Ibid., 220 a21.

3. Enneads III, 7, 8.

91. "If we think out articulation [which is how Brague proposes to translate arithmos], we must get close to the

4. EnneadsIII, 7, 12 (emphasis added; translation modified).

252,3

5. These tractates conclude what is customarily called the "mature period," namely, 42, 43, and 44 for the tractate On the Kinds of Being, which studies the categories, divided into three parts by Plotinus's editors (VI, 1; VI, 2; VI, 3). The tractate On Time and Eternity (III, 7) bears the number 45. In respect of usage, I will henceforth write as needs be: III, 7, 12 [45]; VI, 1, 16 [42]. Brehier's account of the reliable character of Porphyry's chronology can be read with profit; see Emile Brehier, Edition des "Enne'ades" (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1924-38), Introduction generale l:xviii-xx. In his unedited course notes Henri Bergson attributed a central role to these tractates that he judged to be unappreciated. He saw in them, recalls Maurice de Gandillac, the beginnings of a "subjectivizing" analysis of the categories, and even "the index of something that prefigures critical philosophy" (Maurice de Gandillac, "Le Plotin de Bergson," Revue de theologie et de philosophic 2 [1973]; reprinted in Etudes neoplatoniciennes [Neuchatel: La Baconniere, 1973], 99-109). It is all the more remarkable that Bergson, despite the importance accorded these texts, continued to understand "Plotinism" as an avatar of "the natural metaphysics of the human intelligence." A brief overview in this direction can be found in Pierre Aubenque, "Plotin philosophe de la temporalite," Diotima 4 (1976). 6. EnneadsVI, 3,22 (emphasis added; translation modified). 7. Brehier, "Notice," in Edition des "Enne'ades" VI, 1,2, 3, 56-57. 8. EnneadsVI, 3, 24 (translation modified). 9. Maurice de Gandillac, La Sagesse de Plotin, 2d ed. (Paris: Vrin, 1966), 166-67. In VI, 3, 24, for example, if we bypass the "external circumstances" and turn toward "what there is alike and in common in all these motions" — straight or circular, upward or downward — what do we find? That the body in motion is transported to its appointed place. Only one sentence of Brehier's "Notice" will be retained: "Plotinus's audacious intuition . . . made possible a rational mechanics and mathematics, independently of any qualitative consideration of totality and the final cause of movement; mechanics is what will triumph in the seventeenth century amid the ruins of Aristotelianism" ("Notice" VI, 26). Let me specify again that if a critique of the Aristotelian theory of proper places is found in Plotinus ("there is no thing contrary in a place, because a place is not a quantity"), it is not impossible that it is directly inspired by the position Plato developed on this subject; cf. Timaeus 63 a2-6. A short and excellent discussion of the current status of this question can be found in the critical edition of the tractate Sur les nombres by Plotinus (Paris: Vrin, 1980), 176-79. 10. Respectively, VI, I, 16 and VI, 3, 23. Cf. IV, 4, 7 [28]: It "would be like dividing the forward movement

of the feet into a number of separate movements, and finding a this or a that and an entire series in this single act." (emphasis added). Bergson's most important text in this regard may be found in chapter 4 of Creative Evolution, "The Cinematographical Mechanism of Thought and the Mechanistic Illusion," especially 308ff. (trans. Arthur Mitchell [New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1911]): "We do not see that the trajectory is created in one stroke, although a certain time is required for it; and that though we can divide at will the trajectory once created, we cannot divide its creation, which is an act in progress and not a thing" (309). Also see Henri Bergson, La Pense'e et le mouvant, 1377'f. of the edition just cited. On the relations between Bergson and Plotinus, turn to Rose-Marie Bastide, Bergson et Plotin (Paris: PUF, 1959), which examines the fundamental intuition of the two philosophers beyond the broadly polemical character of the references to Plotinus in Bergson's works, by utilizing Bergson's courses of 1897-98 and 1901-2 on Plotinus. Whatever the upshot for Bergson — and that's the whole question—Plotinus remains Platonist. 11. Enneadslll, 7, 9. 12. Metaphysics I, I, 1053 a3l-35 (emphasis added). 13. Enneadslll, 7, 13. 14. Victor Goldschmidt, Temps physique et temps tragique chez Aristote (Paris: Vrin, 1982), 75. 15. Physics IV, 233 b!5-!8 (emphasis added; translation modified). 16. Enneadslll, 7, 12. 17. Ibid. Very often less rigorous than the translations by Werner Beierwaltes, Arthur Hilary Armstrong, or Vincenzo Cilento, Brehier's translation has, during those passages whose calling is descriptive and not "genetic," the merit of sparing us fastidious paraphrases. Elsewhere, not having always been able to understand the corrections in the edition of Paul Henry and HansRudolf Schwyzer edition (Paris and Brussels: 1951-59) (which Goldschmidt also admits!), I have had systematically to renounce proposing my own translations — an enterprise that by all evidence surpasses my philological competence (see the article "Plotinos" by H. R. Schwyzer, Paulys Realencydopadie, vol. 21 [1951], col. 471-592, on Plotinus's grammar). I restrict myself, whenever the case arises, to modifying Brehier's translation, which remains for me, after a good many hesitations, the edition of choice for references. It is not useless to recall Porphyry's testimony that Plotinus "could not bear to go back on his work even for one rereading; and indeed the condition of his sight would scarcely allow it: his handwriting was slovenly; he misjoined his words; he cared nothing about spelling; his one concern was for the idea ... he made mistakes in certain words ... just such errors as he committed in his

N o t e s to C h a p t e r 2

writing" (7, 9). Under these conditions, one can imagine the kinds of limits encountered just for the philological establishment of the text, as Karl Jaspers remarks in "Plotin," in Die grofien Philosophen [for the English translation, see The Great Philosophers trans. Ralph Mannheim (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1962-93), 2:40]. His writings abound in thoughts rather than words, Porphyry adds of this master who put down Longinus for being more of a philologist than a philosopher. Plotinus opposes textual analysis with philosophical intuition, which requires a distrust of language. [Faced with the manifold perils of translating (into English) a translation from Greek (into French), I have decided to render Alliez's quotations from Plotinus (in his "modified" version of the Brehier translation) directly into English with the help of Stephen MacKenna's revised translation (London: Faber and Faber, 1919) as a loose guideline. The reader can thereby better gauge Alliez's argument in terms of his own interpretation/translation of Plotinus.—Trans.] 18. Cf. EnneadsVI, 1,5: "The very fact that we can say how many things there are shows us that these things are different from their number; time is not a quantity. For quantity in the strict sense is precisely just this number; if things are called quantities by mere participation in quantity, then (not only time but) substance itself would be identical with quantity" (translation modified). 19. EnneadsIII, 7, 12 (translation modified). 20. According to Aristotle, Wolfson insists, "the object which has infinite motion cannot truly be described as being in time, which in the strict technical sense of the term means to be comprehended by time and transcended by it... It is still described by him as being in time in the less technical sense of being with time, that is to say, of being when time is" (cf. Physics IV, 221 a9-l 1); see Harry Austryn Wolfson, The Philosophy of Spinoza (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1934), 1:360. 21. Enneads III, 7, 12. As will be explained, Scripture gives Saint Augustine a singular "confirmation" of this argument that he puts to use in book XI of the Confessions. 22. Following Paul Claudel's expressions in Poetic Art, trans. Renee Spodheim (New York: Philosophical Library, 1948), 23, 30. 23. Enneads III, 7, 13 (translation modified). 24. This is the question Plotinus raises in Enneads III, 7, 11,11.43^5. 25. EnneadsV, 2, 1. 26. Cf. Enneads III, 7, 11. 27. Enneads VI, 3, 22.1 will return later to the set of themes stated here by way of a mere prospectus.

28. Enneads I, 5, 7 (translation modified). 29. Cf. Enneads III, 8, 10: "And what will such a principle essentially be? The potentiality of everything" (dunamis ton panton); V, 3, 15; V, 8, 9. Regarding the concept of will, see EnneadsVI, 8, 13. It is not a matter of indifference that these terms of will and freedom, which rightfully belong to the vocabulary of psychology, appear in this treatise, placed in its entirety nonetheless under the sign of analogy, when the One needs to be qualified as pure action. "If such a transposition is possible, it is because the source of the soul's freedom, as well as of its temporality, is to be sought at a higher level than that of the intelligence," writes Pierre Aubenque. It is thus not very surprising that the temporal analogy imposes itself more often than the metaphor of eternity to suggest the infinitude of the Primary and of its dunamis, which is the condition of eternity (which is no more than the second hypostasis) and of time "of which, having done away with all intermediaries, it can just as well be said that it is the image of the One, eidolon ton henos (III, 7, 11,1. 53)" (Aubenque, "Plotin philosophic de la temporalite"). It is as if this use of the word dunamis, which marks a complete break with its Aristotelian sense, "comprehended" the One in some fashion as originary time. 30. EnneadsV, 1, 10 (translation modified). The Plato reference is wholly in Plotinus's style. If we follow Brehier's reference to Akibiades 130c (at least as far as its sense is concerned, he says, if not as far as its very terms), it will be perceived that the terms are effectively different (estin anthrbpos) but most especially that Plato had no other ambition than to "demonstrate" that "the soul is the human being itself because the soul is in command of a body. The fact that Plotinus concludes this chapter on the separation of body and soul, "if we can go back up," changes nothing—it is obvious we are moving about in a different universe. His commentary on the myth of Phaedrus gives the best indication, as representing (by definition, one would like to say) the most beautiful illustration of that movement of interiorization according to which absolute essence is in no way foreign to self-consciousness ("the clear-eyed hold the vision within themselves; though they possess many things without knowing that they possess them; and thus they contemplate these things as an object one sees; they aspire to see them; but everything one looks at as an object to see is seen outside of oneself. But one must bring the vision within, and see it as one, and see it as one's own self [V, 8, 10; translation modified]). Cf. as well VI, 7, 35 and 36, and V, 3, 5, where Plotinus concludes from the identity of what sees with what is seen, of the act of contemplation with the contemplated object, to the identity of intelligence with the intelligible. This is an anti-Platonic assertion if there ever was one; in Plato, "a genus is distinct from the existence in which

254,5

it finds itself as subject" (Hegel, Encyclopedia §552). Pierre Hadot said at the opening of the Royaumont colloquium that at its limit Neoplatonism would be a pseudo-Platonism. In his commentary on the Timaeus, Proclus writes that "the whole is not just what is seen but also the eye that sees" (In Timaeum II, 84, 5). On Plato's inner human, cf. as well The Republic 589a, where the context itself (politics, that is, the public) points to its essential limit: one is all on the outside, extroverted in an organic society whose center is the agora. Which is not to say that one "lacks" self-consciousness but that one's consciousness of oneself—as a Greek of the classical era — is public, or rather publicist in a text whose parodic effects have, incidentally, been very widely underestimated (remember that Plato is responding to Aristophanes' Lysistrata). Only when ancient humanity's civic image crumbles during the Hellenistic and Roman periods does a process of interiorization begin whereby humanity, in ceasing to belong to the world, ceases to belong to itself (mysticism); what Bakhtin calls the coming into consciousness of European humanity begins to be formed. 31. A. Forest, "La philosophic antique," Etudes philosophiques 3 (1979): 343. This is a review essay of Joseph Moreau, Plotin ou la gloire de la philosophic antique (Paris: Vrin, 1970). 32. As for what we hear in/by the philosopher's cry, see the definition J. Schlanger gives of ideal intuitions: these are "brief, sparkling, dogmatic, for what they express is a state of things that imposes itself by its force, by its self-evidence, and by its immediacy. The ideal intuition is not spelled out in discourse, it asserts itself. To make an intuition explicit is already to explicate it, that is, to bypass the stage of a resolved assertion for that of its being taken into consideration, for that of its defense. To explicate is to admit otherness, even when it is a question of putting the other to flight. After the offense of ideational intuitions comes the defense of explications" (J. Schlanger, La Structure metaphysique [Paris: PUF, 1975], 55). Following this path, we also encounter Ortega y Gasset's proposed distinction between beliefs and ideas: "Beliefs are not ideas that we possess but ideas which we are... Ideas are what one has and defends, beliefs are what have and sustain us" (Jose Ortega y Gasset, Ideas y Creencias [Buenos Aires: Espasa-Calpe,] 1945, 17). 33. Enneads III, 9, 6 (translation modified). 34. Schlanger, La Structure metaphysique, 131 (emphasis added). 35. This last formulation, borrowed as is the preceding one ("an inside deeper...") from Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, trans, and ed. Sean Hand (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), may closely define the ex-static experience. Schlanger's explanation is perhaps not as enlightening as it seems at first glance,

when he writes that "ecstasy is in reality an in-stasy, an inner discovery of self which is authentic, a presence of self to self (119). Everything considered, wouldn't these expressions better suit the level ofarchical intelligence? 36. Martin Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, trans. Richard Taft (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 33. This proposition needs to be unpacked at the two levels of the originary and the derived, and of the authentic and the inauthentic. 37. Cf. Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, vol. 2, trans. David Farrell Krell (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1984). Eigensucht might be a good translation of the archein antes that commands the birth of time, of the audacity (tolma) of the soul that turns away from Intelligence, "immobile and eternal abundance of itself (V, 9, 8). Archein hautes... einai hautes (III, 7, 11,11. 15-16): in this repetition is woven something that, in retrospect, could appear as the first categorical incidence of the will's will, whose original economy would refer back to that will to be for oneself (to boulethenai de heautdn einai) that makes souls flee from God (V, 1,1, 11. 5-8). We are clearly no longer in the realm of hubris, which still united Plato and Aristotle to the thinkers of early Greece. To Eigensucht thus understood can be opposed Eigensein, Immanence, the immanence of the Soul to the Intelligence. The Innesein could state the inherence of the One in the soul, its Inhesion. 38. Pierre Klossowski, Origines culturelles et mythiques d'un certain comportement des dames romaines (Paris: Fata Morgana, 1968), 70. 39. Alexandre Koyre should be quoted here: "Vacherot sensed it well, and in my opinion he was very right when he said: 'The doctrine of the school of Alexandria has only the language and the form of Greek philosophy. Its basis is a purely Oriental one dressed up as Greek'" (Alexandre Koyre, L'Idee de Dieu dans la philosophic de saint Anselme [Paris: Vrin, 1923], 90). As far as Plotinus is concerned, this position is to my mind perfectly indefensible. It would, in effect, erase what differentiates him most from his successors, admirers of the Chaldaic Oracles: his constant rejection of all non-Hellenic thought (the great tractate against the Gnostics being the best manifesto of this; see Enneads II, 9, 6,1. 6f.: "These are the inventions of people who are not attached to ancient Hellenic culture"). Cf. E. R. Dodds, "Tradition and Personal Achievement in the Philosophy of Plotinus," Journal of Roman Studies 50 (1960). 40. "It might even be found that the Christian Neoplatonists [all the great theologians of the Greek church] were more faithful to the fundamental ideas of Neoplatonism than the pagans were" (Koyre, L'Idee de Dieu, 63). This is rather confusing given the way Christians are treated in the tractate against the Gnostics ("They are willing to address the lowest of men as brothers ... the soul of the least of humankind,

N o t e s to C h a p t e r 2

they declare deathless, divine; but the entire heavens and the stars within the heavens are soulless!" Enneads II, 9, 18; II, 9, 5; translation modified). 41. Plato, The Sophist 258d-e; see the four other occurrences of the term tolma at 237a, 237b, 24la, and 247c. "What was but a requirement for philosophical thought," N. Baladi admirably summarizes, "becomes in Plotinus the foundation of ontological genesis" (N. Baladi, "Origine et signification de Paudace chez Plotin," Le Ne'oplatonisme, Colloque international du CNRS [Paris: CNRS, 1971; Royaumont, 1969], 90). The closest origin for the Plotinian assertion of an audacity of being is found in the Pythagorean current ("the dyad is discord and audacity"), which Plotinus considers the great precursor of his own doctrine about the One (V, l,9;V, 5, 6). 42. Pierre Aubenque, "Hegel et Aristote," in Hegel et la pensee grecque, ed. Jacques d'Hondt (Paris: PUF, 1974). Hegel would nonetheless write that it is only after Philo that "unity turned back on itself is no longer just a thought, but God alive." The defense of the Hegelian reading attempted not without panache by Gerard Lebrun, after the publication of Aubenque's article, is unconvincing to me; see Gerard Lebrun, "Hegel, lecteur d'Aristote," Etudesphilosophiques 3 (1983): 329-47. On Aristotle's rejection of the self-moving soul, see De animal, 3,406bl2f. 43. I take this last expression from Joseph Combes, "Damascius, lecteur du Parmenide," Archives de philosophic 38 (1975): 33. An excellent remark by Pierluigi Donini marvelously summarizes my feeling here: "Even the search for the 'sources' of the Plotinian reflection on relations that brought together this meditation on society and on the culture of the time is worthy of convincing us even more of the absolute genius of the last representative of the great Hellenic philosophical tradition" (Pierluigi Donini, Le scuole, I'anima, I'impero: lafilosofia antica da Antioco a Plotino [Turin: Rosenberg and Sellier, 1982]). 44. Alexandre Kojeve, Essai