The Hypocritical Imagination: Between Kant and Levinas (Warwick Studies in European Philosophy)

THE HYPOCRITICAL IMAGINATION

‘A true tour de force of a genuine philosophical imagination. It is a masterful achievement and stands as the best sort of challenge to philosophers working in the continental tradition today.’ Dennis Schmidt, Villanova University In this boldly provocative study John Llewelyn argues that imagination has not been given its due. He asks whether imagination might reach out as far as to touch the rational feeling that in the Critique of Practical Reason is named moral respect, reverence or regard. Might imagination stretch still further, below the moral law that is the ultimate object of awe for Kant to something like the an-archic enigma that Levinas calls the face? Is imagination given its due only by being extended beneath the Kantian root, across and below the discourses of all three Critiques, turned not simply, as the Neo-Kantian slogan enjoins, ‘back to Kant’, but back too beyond him, hypoCritically back beyond every root; so that only in doing justice to the imagination in this way would justice be done, as the Husserlian rallying call enjoins, ‘to the things themselves’? On the way to his affirmative answers to these questions, John Llewelyn conducts dazzling analyses of the work of, among others, Schelling, Hegel, Heidegger, Arendt, Derrida, and of the poetics of Emily Dickinson. The HypoCritical Imagination: Between Kant and Levinas is a brilliant treatment of a pivotal yet under-exploited topic and is essential reading for students of philosophy, art theory and literature. John Llewelyn first taught philosophy at the University of New England, Australia, and has been Reader in Philosophy at Edinburgh University and Visiting Professor at the University of Memphis and Loyola University of Chicago. His books include the acclaimed Emmanuel Levinas: The Genealogy of Ethics, also published by Routledge.

WARWICK STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY Edited by Andrew Benjamin Professor of Philosophy, University of Warwick

This series presents the best and most original work being done within the European philosophical tradition. The books included in the series seek not merely to reflect what is taking place within European philosophy, rather they will contribute to the growth and development of that plural tradition. Work written in the English language as well as translations into English are included, engaging the tradition at all levels – whether by introductions that show the contemporary philosophical force of certain works, or in collections that explore an important thinker or topic, as well as significant contributions that call for their own critical evaluations. Titles already published in the series: Bataille

On Jean-Luc Nancy

Writing the Sacred Edited by Carolyn Bailey Gill

The Sense of Philosophy Edited by Darren Sheppard, Simon Sparks and Colin Thomas

Emmanuel Levinas The Genealogy of Ethics John Llewelyn

Deleuze and Philosophy

Maurice Blanchot The Demand of Writing Edited by Carolyn Bailey Gill

Very Little…Almost Nothing

Body- and Image-Space Re-reading Walter Benjamin Sigrid Weigel (trans. Georgina Paul) Passion in Theory Conceptions of Freud and Lacan Robyn Ferrell Hegel After Derrida Edited by Stuart Barnett Retreating The Political Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy

The Difference Engineer Edited by Keith Ansell Pearson

Death, Philosophy, Literature Simon Critchley Blanchot Extreme Contemporary Leslie Hill Textures of Light Vision and Touch in Irigaray, Levinas and Merleau-Ponty Cathryn Vasseleu Essays on Otherness Jean Laplanche

THE HYPOCRITICAL IMAGINATION Between Kant and Levinas

John Llewelyn

London and New York

First published 2000 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2001. © 2000 John Llewelyn All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Llewelyn, John The HypoCritical Imagination: Between Kant and Levinas / John Llewelyn. (Warwick Studies in European Philosophy) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Kant, Immanuel, 1724–1804 – contributions in philosophy of imagination. 2. Levinas, Emmanuel – contributions in philosophy of imagination. 3. Imagination (philosophy) I. Title. II. Series. B2799.I55L57 1999 99-30340 128'.3–dc21 CIP ISBN 0–415–21361–4 (hbk) ISBN 0–415–21362–2 (pbk) ISBN 0-203-18777-6 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-203-18900-0 (Glassbook Format)

In memoriam Nelly Demé

If, below the level of consciousness, our imagination is at work tidying up the chaos of sense experience, at a different level it may, as it were, untidy it again.

Mary Warnock

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

xii

1 Prologue The hypothesis 1 The texts 4 Kant or Levinas 6 Deponence 10 ‘Is’ as ‘as’ 12 Schematizing logical and ontological connectives The hermeneutic ‘as’ 22 Reanimation 25

1

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PART I

Back through Kant

31

2 Imagination as medial diathesis: Heidegger’s reading of Kant Time and imagination 33 Schematism, respect and Gelassenheit 36 The integrity of time 41 Medial diathesis 45 Time, space and differance 48 3 Constructive imagination as connecting middle: Schelling’s reading of Kant This wondrous faculty 50 The transcendental imagination 51 Construction in philosophy 54 The beginning of the pragmatic history of the mind The end of the pragmatic history of the mind 60 ix

33

50

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CONTENTS

Return 65 The art of philosophy

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4 Antinomy as dialectical imagination in Hegel’s critique of Kant Hegel’s ‘exaltation of Kantianism’ 69 Quantity and discreteness 73 Dogmatism 76 Analytical and dialectical opposites 81 Transcendental illusion 85 5 Dialectical imagination as deconstruction: Derrida’s reading of Hegel Science of logic/Science of signature 88 Glasnostalgia? 94 Envoi 97 A point of almost absolute proximity to Hegel Scription Aufhebung reread 100 PS 101 6 Imadgination as the meaning of being: Sallis on Heidegger and Kant Distorted sense 105 What is a thing? 110 The chiasm of time and space 115 Higher things 116

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PART II

From Levinas

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7 Levinas’s critical and hypoCritical diction Holy ‘humanism’ 121 Criticism 124 Prediction 126 Messianism 128 Illeity 130 Criticism and the work of art 131 Dediction 133 HypoCrisy 136

x

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8 Arendt’s critique of political judgement The political as aesthetic 139 Political aesthetic as ethic 145

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PART III

To the things themselves

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9 Respect as effective affectivity: Michel Henry on Kant Respect as affect 153 Criteriological effectuation 157 Eckhart and life or Kandinsky and world? 164 10 Aesthethics Scarcely more than a dream 170 Two intentionalities 171 Test and testimony 172 Regarding regarding 174 Wherefore painters? Wherefore phenomenology? Chiasms 180

153

170

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11 Alethaesthethics: ethics as aesthetics of truth The renovation of banality 182 Just words 186 The ‘maybe’ of enigmagination 201 Political imagination 202

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12 Epilogue Uncommon roots 206 The rose hedge 214 A grain of sand 222 The concord and conflict of faculties 228 Imagination as hypoCritical creation 231

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235 258 269

Notes Selective bibliography Index

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

By kind permission of the presses and/or editors, parts of this book reproduce in revised form material that previously appeared as follows. Chapter 2: David Wood and Robert Bernasconi (eds), Time and Metaphysics, Parousia Press, Department of Philosophy, University of Warwick, 1982; Chapter 3: George MacDonald and Tony McWalter (eds), Kant and His Influence, Bristol, Thoemmes, 1990; the sections entitled ‘Hegel’s “exaltation of Kantianism” ’, ‘Quantity and discreteness’, ‘Dogmatism’ and ‘Transcendental illusion’ in Chapter 4: Stephen Priest (ed.), Hegel’s Critique of Kant, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1987; the section entitled ‘Analytical and dialectical opposites’ in Chapter 4: Gottfried Martin and Bernd Dörflinger (eds), Kant-Studien, Band 55, Heft 2, 1964; the sections entitled ‘Science of logic/science of signature’, ‘Glasnostalgia’ and ‘Envoi’ in Chapter 5: J.M. Bernstein and Robert Stern (eds), Bulletin of the Hegel Society of Great Britain, no. 18, 1988; the sections entitled ‘A point of almost absolute proximity to Hegel’, ‘Scription Aufhebung reread’ and ‘PS’ in Chapter 5: John Sallis (ed.), Deconstruction and Philosophy: The Texts of Jacques Derrida, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1987; Chapter 6: Kenneth Maly (ed.), The Path of Archaic Thinking: Unfolding the Work of John Sallis, Albany, State University of New York Press, 1995; Chapter 7: David Pellauer (ed.), Philosophy Today, vol. 41, supplement, 1997; Chapter 8: Hoke Robinson (ed.), Proceedings of the Eighth International Kant Congress, vol. 1, part 1, Milwaukee, Marquette University Press, 1995; Chapter 10: Eliane Escoubas (ed.), La Part de l’oeil, dossier: Art et phénoménologie, Brussels, Presses de l’Académie des Beaux-Arts de Bruxelles, no. 7, 1991 (in French); a shorter version in French of Chapter 9 was read at the conference on the work of Michel Henry held at the Centre Culturel International de Cerisy-la-Salle in 1996 and will be published by Les Éditions du Cerf, Paris, in a collection edited by Alain David and Jean Greisch under the title Michel Henry: L’Épreuve de la vie; a few paragraphs of Chapter 12 are derived from a paper in French read at the conference ‘Honneur à Emmanuel Levinas’ held in 1997 at Sophia-Antipolis, organized by the Association pour la Communication et l’Information Philosophique xii

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dans les Alpes-Maritimes with the support of the Conseil Général des AlpesMaritimes. I thank the publishers for permission to cite part of ‘Full moon and Little Frieda’, from Ted Hughes, Selected Poems 1957–1967, London, Faber & Faber Ltd, 1972. For their support I thank the General Editor of the Warwick Studies in European Philosophy, Andrew Benjamin, and Tony Bruce, Mark Ralph and Tony Nixon at Routledge. For his encouragement, not least his encouragement to take parts of the book back to the drawing-board, I thank Dennis Schmidt. For discussion of many of the issues raised I thank Charles Bigger (whose awe-inspiring Kant’s Methodology starts where my study does but follows paths of scientific and humanistic endeavour I do not tread), Robin Durie, James Giles, Fiona Hughes (whose forthcoming book on Kant’s aesthetic epistemology supplements mine with textual analysis of Kant beyond the limits to which I have had to restrict myself), Chris Jupp and John Trigg. I thank Ed Casey for his meticulous Imagining: A Phenomenological Study that, as another reader has said, ‘is destined to become a touchstone for all future writings on imagination’. Catherine Chalier kindly sent me a copy of her scrupulously just Pour une morale audelà du savoir: Kant et Levinas, albeit too late for me to mend my probably pagan ways. She came up with answers to my enquiries about matters Judaic even when she could be expected to sympathize no more than could Levinas with the hypothesis in support of which those answers were to be used. While I was writing about him, she was but one member of a chorus of others who had written about him that I fancied I could hear muttering incredulously over my right shoulder, in many languages, ‘Come, come’, notwithstanding that when on the point of bestowing upon Levinas’s words an especially violent inflection, I fancied I could hear another multilingual chorus whispering insistently over my left shoulder, ‘Go ahead’, ‘Allez-y’…From all members of both choruses, far too numerous to list here, I have learned much. As for ‘twisting free’ from Kant, if I do that, and do it with any finesse, it is because I have aimed at the standard of carefulness achieved in the work of John Sallis. But it is to the seminars of Alan Fairweather at Edinburgh half a century ago that I owe the beginning of my thinking of Kant’s theory of the imagination, and it is to the instigation of David Wood and a workshop at the University of Warwick rather more recently that I owe the beginning of the rethinking of it set out in the second chapter of this book. The penultimate chapter was elicited by him and the graduate committee of his present department at Vanderbilt, particularly Jason Winfree. My colleague at Edinburgh Stanley Eveling once remarked that I had found my own voice thanks to Jacques Derrida. I cannot say if he said this with some degree of that by no means ignoble form of hypocrisy that goes under the name of irony, but I do say after him: thanks to Jacques Derrida. One’s voice, or one of one’s voices, would be a lot to owe, and if you add to xiii

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that the debt of gratitude owed for his own voice and for his writings, not least those through which I was introduced to the writings of Emmanuel Levinas, you get an inkling of what may be called, between Levinas and Kant, sublime infinition. I thank Basil O’Neill for the exchanges we have had sitting face to face across a table or striding side by side (more or less) among such mountains as those that (according to the remark of Herr von Sassure reported in Kant’s third Critique) the simple-minded (and according to us wrongheaded) Savoyard peasant says it is foolish to love. For long long-distance telephone conversations on some of the topics discussed I thank Jill Robbins and David Llewelyn. For telephone hours sorting out problems of computer technology I thank Howard Llewelyn, and for similar help in times of crisis I thank Carol Finneron and the Computing Services of the University of Edinburgh, in particular Colin Davies and Crystal Webster. For being near I thank my wife Margaret and my adoptive sister Monica, ancillae philosophiae.

xiv

1 PROLOGUE

A community of decision, of initiative, of absolute initiality, but also a threatened community, in which the question has not yet found the language it has decided to seek, is not yet sure of its possibility within the community.1 (Jacques Derrida)

The hypothesis Imagination is singular, but not single. That it is not single has been noted by many who have written on the subject recently. Wittgenstein asks us to imagine cases in order to get us to see how ‘Many of our concepts cross here.’2 E.J. Furlong begins his book on the imagination by saying that ‘A philosopher surveying the territory defined by the term “imagination” finds it a dense and tangled piece of country.’3 Peter Strawson observes that ‘the uses, and applications, of the terms “image”, “imagine”, “imagination”, and so forth, make up a very diverse and scattered family’, adding that ‘Even this image of a family seems too definite’, for it would be ‘a matter of more than difficulty [of impossibility?] to identify and list the family’s members, let alone their relationships of parenthood and cousinhood.’4 Iris Murdoch writes that ‘The concept of imagination is…so ubiquitous that it is in danger of seeming empty.’5 Mary Warnock endorses Wittgenstein’s remark.6 Ed Casey endorses Strawson’s, yet at one point he appears to be less sympathetic than Strawson to Wittgenstein’s statements that ‘Essence is grammar’ and that ‘One ought to ask, not what images are or what happens when one imagines anything, but how the word “imagination” is used.’7 Having given us three examples of sentences in which ‘imagination’ is used (‘My imagination was playing tricks on me when I mistook that tree over there for a man’, ‘It was just my imagination when I thought I saw a rat in my bedroom’ and ‘In my imagination I thought that he was out to get me’), Casey comments that ‘Each of these three sorts of experience differs significantly from imagining proper.’8 I shall not be so bold in this book as to argue or assume that there is such a thing as imagining or imagination 1

PROLOGUE

proper. Least of all if properness means that in all proper cases there is a common denominator or invariant. I do not find that that is reached even when the technique of varying in the imagination as practised by Husserl is applied to the imagination itself. This manifoldness of the meanings of imagination (as manifold as the meanings of being) will be apparent throughout this book. The chances of survival for a onefold concept of imagination begin to look slim as soon as we find that Phantasie is the word in Husserl’s writings that is commonly translated by ‘imagination’ and that the words which ‘imagination’ and ‘imagine’ translate in the English edition of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations are Vorstellung, vorstellen, sich vorstellen and denken; all of these last four expressions are employed also ‘methodologically’ when, in order to show the fly the way out of the philosophical fly-bottle, Wittgenstein invites his readers to imagine certain sentences being used in certain circumstances. Although I take a hint from this use of ‘imagine’ to translate denken and shall argue that imagination is a case of thinking – thus courting the danger mentioned by Iris Murdoch of the concept of imagination seeming empty – my ‘hypothesis’ will be restricted to what I can extract from or read into what Kant says about the imagination. The ‘or’ here is non-exclusive, since, as Kant himself argues in the first Critique, one can extract only what up to a certain point one is responsible for putting in or under (hypo), in this case under Critique. My hypothesis will be a repetition of Kant which repeats his thinking to the point of posing the hypoCritical under his Critique of Imagination. Now Kant’s usual word for imagination in the Critical period is neither Phantasie nor Vorstellung nor denken. So the range of my discussion is much more restricted than is the range of the studies of imagination by the abovementioned authors. Yet I consider that I am given ample scope by the very facility proper to the imagination of admitting impropriety. The manifoldness of the imagination is a corollary of the generosity with which it tolerates being stretched. Already within the bounds of Kant’s Critical programme the elasticity of the imagination is manifest. As I shall go on to show, at some points in his Critical thinking Kant would have agreed at least with the spirit of a comment Charles Bigger makes concerning Wittgenstein’s remark that ‘It is no more necessary to the understanding of a proposition that one should imagine anything in connection with it, than that one should make a sketch from it.’9 Bigger warns ‘Wittgenstein’s authority, great as it is, should not lead us to bifurcate imagination and understanding.’10 Wittgenstein may have thought he was saying something in which a criticism of Kant is implied. I shall be interpreting Kant in a manner which does not expose him to that criticism, a manner which enables him to endorse Bigger’s warning. I shall be interpreting him moreover in a manner that, as well as not leading to the bifurcation of imagination and understanding, does not lead either to the bifurcation of 2

PROLOGUE

imagination and reason to which one might have been lead by the authority of Einstein had he said about reason what in fact he said about knowledge, namely that it ‘is wonderful, but imagination is even better’. I am conscious that in relying upon this flexibility or, using Hegel’s ‘Greek’ word, plasticity of the imagination in what I go on to say in this book on behalf first of something ‘Hebrew’, then of something ‘HebrewGreek’ , I may overstrain the tolerance and generosity of my readers. If that is so, I may be tempted to console myself with the presumptuous thought that what can be imagined is a function of history and that the time is not ripe for what I am trying to imagine. On the other hand, I may have to tell myself that what I am trying to imagine is unimaginable for all time or, since that statement is ambiguous in a way I shall later explain, that I am simply confused or wrong, or both confused and wrong. If so, and if I have in the end to admit that the dream is over, I shall console myself with the thought that any readers who get to the end of this book and do not like what they see there will at least have enjoyed reading or rereading the citations from the great texts through which our journey will have passed. My chapters are the product of reflection extended over several decades upon the imagination as treated by Kant, particularly, but not solely, upon those few pages of the Critique of Pure Reason where he writes of imagination as schematization. His account of schematization is an account of application. My chapters apply that account more or less directly as a clue to my reading of other mainly post-Kantian authors. So my chapters will bear a certain stamp, one which may put at risk the claim made in my first sentence that imagination is not single. For the German word for imagination which Kant uses is Einbildungskraft and he defines that as the power of In-eins-bildung, the power of forming into one. However, although the word is given that meaning by Kant, Grimm’s dictionary records its derivation from In-bildung. Following that clue we reach a sense closer to that of the English word ‘imagination’, the sense of something pictured inside, something inside the mind which could represent something outside it. Kant falls back on the Latin repraesentatio to signify the class of kinds of Vorstellungen (B320). In ordinary German usage, as illustrated by our reference above to the translation of the Philosophical Investigations, Vorstellungskraft is employed as an alternative to Einbildungskraft, but Kant uses ‘Vorstellung’ not only of the representations or presentations of the imagination. He uses that word for empirical or pure concepts and for empirical or pure intuitions. It is the connecting of concepts and intuitions in judgement that the first Critique assigns to the imagination as Einbildungskraft. It and the schema play a mediatory role. Does the clue from Grimm indicate a manner in which imagination and representation are more or less than mediation and connection? Yes indeed, if what it indicates is images stored inside the mind, specifically in the empirical imagination that in the pre-Critical Reflections on Anthropology 3

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Kant called Imagination,11 for understood in this sense imagination would be the repository of items to be connected rather than that which does the connecting. But maybe the reference to In-bildung in Grimm can be taken to indicate something beyond these two senses, namely, the very manner of mentality itself, but to indicate also that that manner of mentality is mentality’s being outside of itself. Whatever the reliability of this clue, I shall be arguing that the mind is beside itself, that the mind is out of its mind. I shall be arguing that imagination allows itself to be construed both as concertive unification and as disconcerting affection, which is its almost diametrical opposite. How this can be cannot be comprehended, least of all in a proslogion, but why it cannot be comprehended can be understood, even if that too cannot be comprehended as fully as can, according to the last sentence of Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, the incomprehensibility (Unbegreiflichkeit) of the practical unconditioned necessity of the imperative of the moral law. I hope this will be understood before we reach the last sentence of the present book. What Hegel says about Prologues in the opening paragraphs of the Prologue, the Vorrede, of the Phenomenology of Spirit is, roughly speaking, that any critically sharp distinction between a prologue and a chapter is bound to be artificial. Modifying this slightly, one might say that, after writing down the title ‘Prologue’, the wisest words to write under it are ‘See Epilogue’, provided that an epilogue is also one more chapter. And it is to the answer in the back of the book, in the Epilogue, that impatient readers of this book may want to turn before they look at the intervening chapters. Those chapters log explorations in which I thread my way slowly through texts, not only ones by Levinas or Kant – the ‘between’ of my title is historical as well as discursive – toward an unstable adjustment to each other of the writings of these two philosophers. I say ‘toward’, because ‘unstable adjustment’ may be judged a contradiction in terms, and my hypothesis may be judged to be precisely that. Just imagine – my threefold hypothesis is that the imagination can be extended from principles offered by Kant, that it can be subverted by the pre-principial ethicality of what Levinas calls the face, and that the scope of this last admits an extension in step with the extension of the imagination to do justice to the things themselves. How can this programme avoid doing violent injustice to Kant or to Levinas, or to both?

The texts For the benefit of the impatient readers just mentioned who propose first to skip to the end, and for the more cautious ones who prefer to set off with at least a rudimentary map in their rucksacks, I provide now a list of the main features of the terrain to be traversed.

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Chapter 2 explores Kant’s suggestion, and the reception given it by Heidegger, that the imagination is the hidden common root of sensibility and understanding. Chapter 3 considers Schelling’s – and, in passing, Fichte’s – reconstrual of this and related suggestions made by Kant. Mediation is very much the topic of the Transcendental Dialectic of the first Critique; mediation between apparently mutually exclusive opposites. Clearly, imagination must in the interim have been complicated beyond the limits of schematism, within which it operates primarily in the Transcendental Analytic, if it is going to be possible to trace it in the treatment of the antinomies and if it is going to be feasible to bring the Hegelian dialectic to bear, as Chapter 4 does, on what Kant’s Dialectic says about these antinomies and about the transcendental illusion he locates as their root. Hegelian superlation (Aufhebung) is a superlation of Kantian Einbildungskraft and of Hegel’s own notion of imagination as expounded, for instance, in the Philosophy of Spirit. If the imagination is stretched beyond the limits of sensibility and understanding so that it embraces reason and spirit or mind as a whole, it becomes an operation of synthesis, for instance the synthesis of the apparent opposites that give rise to the Kantian antinomies of pure reason. For reasons that will gradually become clearer as my studies proceed, I am uncomfortable with the comfort that synthesis assures. Let me hasten to add that I am a little uncomfortable too with taking Hegel as a paradigm case of synthetic systematicity. So it is a certain reading of Hegel that I take to yield such a paradigm. And this is by far the most common reading. Uncommon readers of Hegel have wrestled to trace a residue of unsystematicity in his system that in one way or another, not necessarily and fatally opposing it, ‘resists’ synthesis. I have space in the confines of this book to advert to only one of these uncommon readers. Thus Chapter 5, referring again to the Hegelian Aufhebung of Kant, makes this reference through a gloss on Glas, Jacques Derrida’s deconstrual of Philosophy, as personified by Hegel, in terms of literature and vice versa. To speak more carefully, it emerges in the course of this deconstrual that, viewed speculatively, through the looking glass – where what is behind the surface is a version of what is in front – philosophy and literature are not simply terms. Nor therefore are they terms that can be synthesized. There can be no synthesis here; not if synthesis is unification, Ineinsbildung! Nor can there be here any analysis if analysis is understood strictly as a division down to elements. There can be here no Transcendental Doctrine of Elements. By rehearsing the difficulties that stand in the way of a separation from each other of the universals of philosophy and the singularities of literature, Derrida takes a step beyond Schelling’s proposal that the handmaiden of philosophy is art. My later chapters apply the lessons learned from Schelling and Derrida. They hybridize philosophy with what are commonly taken as its others.

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In Chapter 6, drawing on the writings of John Sallis, in particular his reconstrual of Kant and Heidegger, I show how the work of the imagination explodes or implodes into that of what I call imadgination. Imadgination is imagination hypoCriticized. I explain in Chapter 7 how what Levinas calls the Critical is at the same time hypoCritical ethics. By the time Chapter 8 is reached determinant and reflective judgement are perceived to co-operate over a sufficiently wide range of experience to permit a step to be taken that is not one taken by Schelling. If, as he maintains, art is the ancilla of philosophy, the converse also holds. The reason for this is that the distinction cannot be simply made, not as simply as Hannah Arendt appears to think it can in her employment of the Critique of Judgement as the groundwork for a projected Critique of Political Judgement. Her sketch, like the Kantian Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals and the Critique of Practical Reason to which it also appeals, and like most other classics of philosophical literature, passes over a dimension of philosophy that classical and purely classificatory philosophy as such tends to suppress. Chapter 9, with reference to the work of Michel Henry and Kant’s doctrine of respect, raises the question of the relation of aesthetic to ethical affectivity, broaching the question of an ethical ‘logos of the aesthetic world’. With assistance from, among others, Merleau-Ponty, Chapter 10 focuses on an ethical dimension of the aesthetic. Chapter 11 treats of an aesthetic dimension of the ethical, bringing out the connection of the aesthetic imagination and the ethical imagination with truthfulness, indicating that epistemological representation is, in an extended sense of both terms, political representation.

Kant or Levinas As chapter succeeds chapter the more evident it will become that they are organized around the double axis of a love–hate relationship between the author and Immanuel Kant and a love–hate relationship between the author and Emmanuel Levinas. The chapters tell the story of an attempt to imagine if, without aiming at a bland and banal neutralization of the differences between these two great thinkers, what I love in the work of Kant and what I love in the work of Levinas can be recruited to support a hope that neither of them shares, but which is the ultimate motivation of my underlabouring in this book. What I love especially in Kant is what he says about the imagination. What I love especially in Levinas is what he says about saying. But Levinas says very little explicitly about the imagination. In one of the rare explicit affirmations he does make about it he says that ‘It is ultimately from moral relationships that every metaphysical affirmation takes on a “spiritual” meaning, is purified of everything with which an 6

PROLOGUE

imagination captive of things and victim of participation lends to our concepts.’12 This is a warning, in the ‘spirit’ of the Mosaic prohibition of graven images, against the dangers of allowing imagination to have its head: the imagination is an unruly horse. On the other hand, what Levinas calls face-to-face saying would be regarded by Kant as an unruly horse, a threat to the universality of reason. Maybe the place from which one can begin to reduce this seeming incompatibility would be the place beneath ruliness, the place of hypoCrisy. Maybe there the ethicality of face-to-face saying would be that moment of imagination when it is surprised by its own radical exteriority. ‘Maybe’ may be the mark of an imagination that is not punctually imagist, but is unpunctually stretched by something like what Levinas here calls moral relationships, so stretched that it is thanks to the imagination that these relationships are lent to our concepts. In the Critique of Pure Reason imagination is the intersection of concept and sensibility. But it is more. Following Levinas, Michel Henry and socalled sentimentalist or moral-sense philosophers of earlier centuries, I link imagination to sympathy and other affects, in particular the affect or feeling of respect. Respect is ambiguous in a manner analogous to perceptual imagination. Indeed, it is a form of perceptual imagination or imaginative perception. So the imagination is ambiguous, like the French word ‘conscience’, but it is doubly ambiguous. It is ambiguously ambiguous as between, on the one hand, perceptual consciousness, which is already ambiguous as between sensibility and understanding, and, on the other hand, moral conscience, which is ambiguous as between feeling and reason. Somewhat as Kant warns his reader that the transcendental schema is not to be confused with an image, Levinas warns his reader that the trace of the affect whose ethicality stems from the asymmetry of being faced by another human being cannot but be taken too for an image or sign. The trace is enigmatic. That is to say, the face as expression of a singularity that singles me out is at the same time the expression of the universality of law. When this happens the hypoCritical is also hypocritical. That is to say, what is prior to and distinct from categorial or conceptual distinction, from the topic of Kantian Critique, is hypocritical in the ordinary meaning of the word. For when this happens there is a pretence. The pretence here is not that referred to in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, of putting forward what can only be shown as what can be said. It is rather the pretence of putting forward as a content or object capable of being shown or said what can be only a saying which puts forward nothing but the sayer. But this pretension is a permanent and inevitable risk. It is what could be called, borrowing Kant’s phrase, a transcendental illusion. And if what Levinas calls the enigma cannot but find itself tempted to impute to itself the powers or faculties and virtues of what can be shown and conceptually said, if its weakness is its not being able squarely to face its weakness, this enigma could be called transcendental – unless we call it 7

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quasi-transcendental in order to recognize that its weakness will be discovered to be a strength in disguise; that is to say, there is a doubledisguise in the self-deception here at work, a dissimulative simulation, the pretence of a hypocrisy that is below the distinction between simulation and dissimulation, a hypocrisy which is hypoCritical. The transcendental imagination too is transcendentally or quasitranscendentally hypoCritical. For it is prior to the opposition of sensibility and understanding. It is hypocritical when it masquerades as the empirical imagination and is taken to be no more than one faculty among others, whereas it is imaginable that imagination is the meaning of being and time. If being and its temporality are hypoCritical they are also hypocritical when they get posited respectively as a being and as the time of scientific chronology. The transcendental imagination is also practical and productive. For Kant insists that the transcendental schema is a method of work, a procedure, a Verfahren (B179). And he gives us all the justification we need for adding that this procedure is to be understood by analogy with a legal procedure. For its outcome is a judgment in which particulars are subsumed under a law or a law is sought for the particulars. Similarly in the context of Levinas’s phenomenology of the invisible trace, when the trace masquerades as purely semantic signification, mimesis and image, there is a feigning. And, as observed for example by Hume, imagination works by feigning. But whereas the imagination’s feigning is not inconsistent with the circumstances imagined being in fact as they are imagined to be, what is traced according to Levinas’s notion of ethical trace is necessarily inconsistent with its being correctly imaged. Already to refer here to a what or to a fact, a quid or quid facti, is to misrepresent the logic of the trace and the face. It is to confuse saying with what can be said. Yet, to repeat, this confusion cannot be escaped. Moreover, if it could, there could never be ethical justice, for ethical justice requires the face-to-face saying in which the singular other addresses the uniquely chosen me to remain in contact with the plurality in which each human being is one among many. It is in the context of this generality that representation, understood as my standing in responsibility for the other, presupposes representation as semantic signification of the kind that is brought into play as soon as I have to imagine either the circumstances to which a law or maxim applies or the law that the circumstances imagined demand. On the other hand, where generality loses touch with the moment of face-to-face sensibility, it loses touch too with ethicality. No resolution in a dialectical synthesis is achievable here. What remains – ce qui reste, as Derrida says in his speculations in Glas on the infinite and absolute speculative wisdom of the Hegelian phenomenology of spirit – is infinite oscillation between the trace that escapes capture by the image and the image that nevertheless imagines it can image the trace. The image is overcome by the enigma. Imagination 8

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understood as imaging becomes enigmation. Seeing face-to-face is forever seeing in a glas(s) darkly, for my seeing of anything is ceaselessly troubled by the look that you turn toward me, turning epistemic perception into ethical regard – or rather revealing the latter in the former, troubling its clarity and distinctness. This hypocritical imagination is also hypoCritical, beneath Criticism, because Criticism is distinction (krinein) and reflective classification of powers – ‘glassification’ of ‘crystalline essences’ (Wittgenstein). Criticism in this Kantian sense is the division of labour between intuitions, concepts, ideas and principles, hence of what is or can be propounded or named: of what, to repeat what I have already said, is capable of being repeatedly said, dit and re-edited. But, as the following chapters will argue, the hypoCritical imagination is pre-principial, an-archic. Its hypocritical predicament is that of trying to have said the saying. It endeavours to have its cake and to eat it or, as Levinas would say, to give to the other the bread from one’s mouth and yet to swallow it oneself. It is thereby caught in the act of contradicting itself performatively. And this is a contradiction it must tolerate. For, paradoxically, the past of the past participial said – the having been, essence, to ti ên einai – is always less remote than the past of the seemingly here-and-now saying. For, as Chapter 7 will reiterate, what seems to be here and now, present in the moment in which one human being addresses another, testifies to a saying that is prior to the temporality in which saying is the correlative of what is said. The saying which the said and its merely correlative saying make resound is absolutely past in the sense that it can never have been consciously present or presently conscious. So whereas Hegel’s consideration of sense-certainty in the Phenomenology of Spirit maintains that an alleged moment of immediacy is already affected by conceptual mediation, Levinas holds that the saying that is indeed correlative with a conceptual said harks back to a saying of which the pastness is always passed. That saying is diachronic. It does not belong to the past of historical chronology and yet its not belonging to that chronology is not its belonging to the time of a dialectical logic or to the timelessness of any formal or transcendental logic. More generally, absolute an-archic saying is not the speech-active saying of what is commanded, asked, wished, promised or otherwise nonconstatively effected. Beneath that correlativity of the Austinian and Searleian theory of speech acts, below the Saussurian distinction between langue and parole, the saying in question, namely the saying which in any question is that of the questioner’s being put into question, is beyond such simple oppositions. But not simply beyond. For while this ab-original, anarchic, saying is beyond the correlative poles of saying and said, it is the very animation of them both. It is the psyche even of the said, what gives it and continues its life, what makes it what it is by preventing its being only what it is. It is, as the title of one of Levinas’s masterworks says, beyond 9

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essence. And it is beyond the hypocrisy to which, in an article about the Beyond in the writings of Levinas, Derrida refers when he writes: ‘Community of the question, then, in this fragile instance where the question is not yet sufficiently determined for the hypocrisy of a response to be already invited beneath the mask of the question, to let its voice be already fraudulently articulated in the question’s very syntax.’13 Beneath that hypocrisy, then, is another hypocrisy and another response (the Greek word hypokrisis can mean a response): a response to an uninitiable, because already absolutely initiated, responsibility of a community of decision that is a community of quasi-transcendental hypocrisy and Crisis, where unity, like the imagined unity of God, is the trace of uniqueness before the law, before the speech-active commandment, and where, therefore, there is not even a quaestio quid juris. This hypocritical hypoCrisy is quasi-transcendental, not simply transcendental, because it is a condition not only of possibility, but of impossibility as well. Quasi, qua si, comme si, comme, als ob, als, as if, as. As if Vaihinger, in his Philosophy of As If, without fully realizing it, may be tapping the vein of agate from which is made the point of balance on which the imagination oscillates, now this way, say toward the sinister column of Glas (a title in which Sa is turned into ‘as’, toward l’autre cap, the other heading), now that way, toward putative absolute knowledge, as displayed below in Chapter 5.14 Comme ci, comme si, comme ça, comme Sa, as in several of the headings of my chapters, where the agate edge is a point of almost absolute proximity, an almost nothing, a presque rien, as Derrida says in the remarks on the community of decision mentioned above, and as is said in titles of books by Vladimir Jankélévitch and in the title of a marvellous, marvelless book in which the three lectures of which it is comprised are splayed upon the midpoint of the second of them, where, giving to it no more pages than the few Kant gives to his discussion of the imagination as schematism, Simon Critchley inserts a ‘digression’ on ‘imagination as resistance’.15 Point of balance or point of imbalance. Point(e) d’équilibre. The letter d that disturbs the imagination may be seen as standing for disturbance, the disturbance that the multitude of others, the turba, introduces into the egological imagination of the person primarily concerned for his or her own survival. So it may stand for the upset mind and the upset initial of the word ‘psychosis’, for dementia, daemonia, delusion, deconstruction and many other things or almost nothings. D is for dia-bolic, the throwing apart to which what is thrown together in symbolism is exposed.

Deponence D is for deponence. Imaginor is a deponent verb. The Oxford English Dictionary defines the deponent verb as one that is passive or middle in form but active in meaning. It cites a grammar of 1859 according to which ‘A 10

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deponent verb is one which though exclusively passive or middle in its inflexions, has so entirely deponed or laid aside its original meaning, that it is used in all respects like a transitive or neuter verb of the active form.’ The dictionary maintains that this definition is erroneous. What in fact was laid aside or lost sight of was the reflexive meaning that originally characterized all Latin deponent and Greek middle-voiced verbs along with a reflexive form, as in utor, I serve myself, fruor, I delight myself, proficiscor, I put myself forward. That is to say, in all first-person singular deponents the I originally put itself forward. It did so not simply as the acting subject, but, approximating the Greek medio-passive, as the ‘intimately concerned’ receiving and affected sub-ject.16 It is therefore too precipitate to declare that the deponence of this self-proponence was also a laying aside of the passive sense and form that Latin substituted for the middle voice of Greek. So it is not entirely fanciful to suppose that a remnant of passivity haunts imaginor and imagination generally. This remainder does not blot out the active sense entirely. You can request a person to imagine something and the person can meet your request. However, although you may be able to meet the request when someone asks you to imagine something, your ability is contemporaneous with an inability. You are requested and required to expect more than you can at that moment imagine. If we say with Husserl that all consciousness is noetic-noematic, then the imagination is that proprotentional aspect of consciousness ranging beyond that of which I am conscious at any given moment. Its ‘You can’ announces something which you can not. It announces this not not merely because you cannot command the strength, and not only because your imagination is too weak; it announces something that exceeds psychological weakness and strength. ‘Imagine…’ is essentially, logically, grammatically promissory. Imagination as the performance of a thought experiment is inherently prefatory to what is exterior to the imaginable, prefatory to what is unimaginable. But this exteriority is at the same time interior to the life of the imagination in so far as the imagination has it in itself to be surprised and astonished by the tocome, the avenir, the future. It is adventively inventive to the extent that the exteriority that gives it its life is that which is imaginable at no time. In the words of Eliane Escoubas, ‘Imagination is therefore, strangely, the faculty of producing the unimaginable…’.17 The verb ‘to imagine’ is among those many verbs that, following the tendency of Latin verbs whose deponent inflexion became active, ‘hesitate between the two inflexions’.18 Analogous to this hesitation of form, imagination is characterized by a hesitation of sense, of sense in the sense of direction, sens, Sinn. On the one hand, to imagine is to take an initiative, to exercise the will. On the other hand, to imagine is to find oneself struck willy-nilly. Here, to adapt an example of a deponent verb cited by Meillet and Vendryes, copulantur dextras: in the imagination there is a reciprocal shaking of hands – as according to Celan and Levinas there is in a poem (see 11

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Chapter 10). It is as though my initiative is at best the occasion for what comes into my head.

‘Is’ as ‘as’ Suppose then that we speak with Kant of an imagination that is productive of something and of itself and yet go on to distinguish the hypoCritical imagination from the empirical, reproductive imagination and so from what is named fancy by Coleridge, who says of this in Chapter XIII of Biographia Literaria that ‘it must receive all its materials ready made’. We should take care not to suppose that the hypoCritical imagination is therefore separate from the reproductive imagination and that it could operate without it. This would be to underestimate the significance of Kant’s statement that thoughts without intuitions are empty and intuitions without concepts are blind (B75, B314, B345, B346). One thing this statement of Kant’s signifies is that the ambiguous function here described is more fittingly attributed to the imagination than, as is sometimes done in the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, to the understanding as opposed to sensibility (see below, Chapter 2). The danger consequent upon this latter move is that of partiality in the direction of conceptuality. That danger in interpreting Kant is matched by a prejudice in the opposite direction in reading MerleauPonty. Although it is not wrong to say that the latter proclaims ‘the primacy of perception’, this should not be taken to license the inference that imagination nowhere figures in his scheme.19 If rarely named, it nevertheless figures importantly in his scheme, as one might expect of a writer as admiring of Husserl as he is. The inclination to assimilate imagination either toward the concept or toward the percept is a symptom of a philosophy that takes its cue from a formal logic of the copula of the simple abstract judgement or proposition, and that stops short of the concrete act-passion of judging where the ‘is’ expresses the ‘as’ of a subject seen as, or as if falling under, a predicate or entering into a relation. And the ‘seeing’ here may be assimilated either to discovery or to deeming, that is to say, to either of two senses of ‘find’: the sense in which one finds or fails to find a needle in a haystack or a button under a wardrobe, and the sense in which one judges someone guilty. In the case of a discovery, I grant, it would be odd to say that the person making the discovery saw something as such and such. This is because in referring to this case as one of discovery one takes the judgement to be a judgement of how things in fact are. The button was indeed under the wardrobe. Its colour is indeed black. But it takes little imagination – which does not mean none – to see that one might be wrong in making these judgements. If no doubt is being entertained, this is only because, ex hypothesi, in this case no hypothesis is being made. There are no standard reasons for suspecting that the standard conditions conferring the right to make an unqualified claim to the truth of what one is saying are not 12

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fulfilled. But the confidence with which one holds the belief in the truth of what one says has often been shaken. Therefore, although in the circumstances as described one would not tag on to one’s claim the clause ‘unless I am mistaken’ or the letters ‘DV’ or cross one’s fingers, the truth of the statement is conditional upon that of other statements. It must be granted too that the truth of this statement, namely my metastatement that the truth of the statement that the button is black is conditional upon the truth of other statements, is itself conditional on the truth of the metametastatement that such reflective metastatements about ordinary discourse make sense, and does not depend entirely on the sense of ground-level statements within ordinary discourse. If that reflective meta-metastatement does not make sense, neither does the reflective meta-metastatement that such reflective metastatements about ordinary discourse do not make sense. That is why Wittgenstein tries to avoid making metastatements of any level or makes them while admitting that they do not make sense. The nonsense they make can only be whistled or sung. But never to be ready to make nonsense is to shirk one of philosophy’s chief tasks, the task that I may well be undertaking in this book. One of philosophy’s chief tasks is to imagine things as other than they are or might be, and that can lead to the need to talk what is nonsense by the standards of ordinary parlance or sound common sense. Hence the frequent invitations throughout Wittgenstein’s later writings to imagine something that one believes to be contrary to fact. This may entail imagining that what one believes to be the case is not the case and is only imagined: for example that the words you now take yourself to have just read are words that you have only imagined you read. In the first case it is what is imagined that is by hypothesis contrary to fact. In the second case what is by hypothesis contrary to fact is that what is imagined is only imaginary. And a counterfactuality of this second sort is entailed by a counterfactuality of the first sort in so far as to believe that something is merely imagined is ipso facto to believe that what is imagined is false. The concept of counterfactuality is implied in the kind of thought we call imagining because it is implied in affirmation, assertion and belief. Hypothesis is parasitic upon thesis – and vice versa. For the kind of thought we call imagining includes among its norms the so-called ‘laws of thought’, some set of principles of inference, standardly the principles of non-contradiction, excluded middle and tautology, and principles of inference may be cast in the form if-then (see below, in the section called ‘Schematizing logical and ontological connectives’), where the ‘if’ introduces a protasis that is a hypothesis. This means that if, as Freud says, dreaming is heedless of the principle of noncontradiction, there is some reason to deny that to dream is to imagine – or indeed to think at all. In dreaming one neither judges nor suspends judgement. I say that Freud’s remark gives only some reason for denying that to dream is to imagine, because dreaming has varying degrees of 13

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passivity, even if we leave out of consideration day-dreaming and wakeful ‘dreaming’ of, say, winning the lottery, where the dream is the entertainment of a not very robust hope. To be taken into account too are dreams in which it is as though one were affirming, believing or imagining something. For someone to say ‘it is as though’ something is the case is to suggest that this is believed not to be the case. And this belief could be mistaken. But we must be careful with the tenses here. The phrase ‘it is as though’ is tense-neutral. It may cover my present belief that I was imagining a particular thing, and that belief may be false. But it may cover also my now seeming to believe or imagine such and such now. That such and such is the case may be contrary to fact. But suppose (imagine) the such and such I believe or imagine is that I believe or am imagining something? On the one hand, this supposition seems to be necessarily true, ex hypothesi. On the other hand, it seems necessarily false, because if I (merely) imagine or (merely) believe that I am (merely) imagining or (merely) believe, I am not (merely) imagining or (merely) believing: I know what I supposedly (merely) imagine or (merely) believe. The logic of our waking life seems to reduce our speculation about dreaming into antinomy. This antinomy arises from a failure to distinguish imaging from imagining. Allowing for the stretching that the ideas of dreaming and imagining allow, dreaming is typically the having of images while one is asleep, whereas imagining is, typically, like Kantian schematizing and typification (see below, Chapter 2), a procedure according to logical norms. To imagine is typically to imagine that. That means that to be able to imagine or to fail to imagine something is to be able to apply rules of logico-grammatical syntax. And this latter ability is required even where imagination is perceiving one nameable or otherwise identifiable thing in terms of another, perceiving (seeing, hearing…) this as that, for example a huge boulder on a narrow ridge as a policeman (in mountaineering parlance a gendarme). The limiting case of such metaphorization or metonymy is one-place predication, applying a quality to a thing, presenting a thing qua. In Chapter 11 I shall give grounds for maintaining that this qua function, and therefore imagination, is at work even where one identifies something as and with itself. For a thing to be what it is and not another is for it to be classified as qua something. (Parenthetically, I give notice that we shall find furthermore that there can be a rhetorico-poetical and aesthetico-ethical reason for the seemingly mechanical repetition of pleonasm and tautology, a reason which might explain why God delivered to Moses two identical tablets engraved with the law.) Here again the polarity of truth and falsity is at play, even where the mutual exclusiveness of this polarity is paradoxically denied, as it might be in arguing for the truth of a doctrine of degrees of truth. I am arguing for a doctrine of degrees of imagination, so that imagination is minimally at work in thinking thoughts as apparently elemental as those expressed in saying ‘Here is an X’ and ‘Here I am’, or cogito, and 14

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maximally at work in the imagination of the creative scientist, mathematician, poet, philosopher and so on. Hence I am arguing that imagination is to be understood primarily not as a noun, but as a work, a liturgical work; that it is to be explicated adverbially and verbally, ultimately in both senses of the adverb ‘verbally’, and following the hint that the verb ‘to imagine’ is deponent. To imagine is to think deponently. Up to this point my argument has relied heavily on the interdependence of the thought of the truth or factuality of something and the thought of its falsity or its being contrary to fact. Now the logical interdependence of the concepts of falsity and truth emerges as subjunctivity in that kind of thinking called imagining. Subjunctivity is a feature of our understanding of the thoughts that grammatically indicative sentences express. This is a consequence of the fact that names have meaning only thanks to their being parts of or abstractions from sentences, and from the fact that sentences have meaning only because they are parts of or abstractions from languages as forms of life in which, given for example that one has made a certain assertion, one asks oneself what else one would be required to say or not to say. The subjunctive mood of the imagination is engaged in our operations with even such extremely formal forms of life as mathematical or logical systems. Nor is it surprising that subjunctivity should be the mood of the thinking that inference and calculation exemplify, if, as I have asserted, the understanding of the thought expressed in the simplest possible assertion already calls for the subjunctive mood if the understanding is to be more than minimal. Every ‘is’ is iffy, whether it be the ‘is’ of existence, of identity or of predication, and at the very least in the case of the ‘is’ of predication it is clear that the ‘is’ includes an ‘as’, namely the ‘as’ that is common to thesis and hypothesis, and is retained when what we believe becomes something we only imagine, whether or not what we imagine be true. The ‘as’ of imagination is the ‘common root’ of allegory, analogy, simile, metaphor, symbol and simple predication.

Schematizing logical and ontological connectives Instead of an account of imagination as essentially imaging or having imagery (these are not the same), I am proposing an account that, although it does not exclude imaging or having imagery, perceives the imagination as perceiving as. Imagination is seeing (or hearing or feeling or tasting or smelling) double. I have compared this to the function of metaphor and metonymy. But how does the ‘as’ relate to the ‘if’ in which subjunctive conditionality is expressed? Does there have to be a connection? These two little connecting words could still be indicative of the logic and phenomenology of imagining even if they were not connected to each other. But they may be seen as connected. Perhaps they must be so seen if I am to stand by my earlier statement that to imagine is to imagine that. And there is at least 15

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the connection that the logical connective ‘if-then’ can be used both to connect two propositions and as a connective through which is articulated the ‘as’ force that, it was argued above, is carried by the ‘is’ in statements of the form S is P. Inversely, the relation expressed by ‘this as that’ embraces the relation expressed by ‘if-then’ – and therefore the relation expressed by ‘because-then’ that is embraced by ‘if-then’ as a special case (as the logic of what Kant calls a counsel of prudence or pragmatic imperative presupposes the logic of what he calls a technical imperative or rule of skill).20 For to understand such a hypothetical is to perceive what is said in the then-clause as subsumed under what is said in the if-clause. Given that ‘being’ and ‘Sein’ are verb-nouns, it is not surprising that a subsumption can be articulated either in verbs or through nominalization to give, for example, ‘Xs being S as (a case of) Xs being P’. This last example shows that the structures of imagination are structures of play or entertainment, as distinct from positing (Setzung). The ‘as’structure suspends the assertivity of the ‘is’. It is its phenomenological reduction. But the ‘is’ can perform none of its functions, whether predicative, identifying or existential, without the as-structure being engaged. That this holds for the ‘is’ of existence calls to be emphasized at this early stage, because toward the end of the Epilogue much will be made of the notion of existence as such. The uncommittedness of imagination is precisely what Kant illustrates for the structure ‘if-then’ when in the Analytic of Concepts in the Critique of Pure Reason he takes the forms of judgement as a guiding thread to the forms of formal concepts. The form of the hypothetical judgement and the categorial relation of cause and effect have in common the bare notion of sequence, Folge. Although Kant himself does not spell this out, I am arguing that this notion, ambiguous as between logical and causal consequence, is at home in the imagination. I am arguing that there belong to imagination notions of being and of following that suspend, on the one hand, the logical normativity constitutive of categorical and hypothetical judgements and, on the other hand, the ontic-ontological normativity of the corresponding relations that in Kant’s table of categories are called the relation of inherence and subsistence, and the relation of causality and dependence. An analogous intermediate and what may be provisionally called sub-normative – hypo-Critical – notion is to be expected for the third of Kant’s pairs of triads of forms of relationality of judgements and of categories, which he entitles, respectively, disjunctivity and community or reciprocity between agent and patient. Kant insists that in the application of these third forms an act of mind is engaged that is different from that engaged in the first and second forms. Without that insistence he believes he would not be able to give an account of all the dimensions of time. In particular, he would not be able to give an account of all of the relational schemata by which the pure concepts of the under16

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standing are expressed temporally in principles. For although the third item of each triad connects the first and the second, this connecting (Verbindung) is not a derivation. Although community, for instance, is the causal interaction of substances, it cannot be analysed solely in terms of inherence and causality. To say that it can would be tantamount to saying that coexistence in time can be analysed in terms of temporal duration and temporal succession or that the schema of community or reciprocity could be analysed in terms solely of the schemata of substance and causality. Here I must explain how I understand these terms ‘schema of substance’, ‘schema of cause’ and ‘schema of community’ (B183). I read these as references to schemata by means of references to principles, namely, the principles of the three Analogies of Experience. If the references to substance, cause and community were taken as references to the contents of the schemata themselves, the schemata of the imagination would be indistinguishable from the principles of the understanding, and the doctrine of the productive imagination would be redundant; it would be indistinguishable from the doctrine of understanding, as many commentators have maintained. Against those commentators, I hold that the doctrine of productive imagination is not otiose, that Kant does not think so at least in the first edition of the first Critique, and that when in the second edition it looks as though he collapses the imagination into the understanding it is most fruitful to see this as a way of emphasizing that imagination is the essence of understanding and intelligence taken generally. The opposite mistake is to identify the schemata of the productive imagination with the dimensions of temporality, for example permanence, succession and coexistence. The schemata corresponding to these on the one hand and to the principles of the Analogies on the other are permanence, succession and coexistence according to a rule. That this rule is not specified in schematization as either a rule of formal logic or a rule of transcendental epistemology and ontology is what gives the productive imagination its special intermediate place. When I referred provisionally to what I called the imagination’s sub-normativity I meant only that the imagination itself is undetermined by specific laws such as those of formal or transcendental logic. I did not mean that it is not subsumed under normativity as such. As Kant says, the schemata are procedures that are subject to rules. They are apt for determination – we might risk saying that they invite or call for determination – but in themselves they are undetermined, or determined at most by a free regularity. In this they anticipate the purposefulness without purpose of the aesthetic imagination as the word ‘aesthetic’ is employed in the third Critique. The schemata already in the narrow sense of the first Critique, but more clearly when the word is used in the second as a synonym for Type, open up a space for the role played in natural sciences and mathematics by criteria that are aesthetic in the narrow sense of the third Critique. Moreover – though to say this may be to extend the imagination as 17

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described by Kant – the indeterminacy of the normativity of the schemata, their normativity without norms, leaves an opening for alternatives to the principles of understanding that figure in Kant’s table, and so for the demonstration by subsequent and maybe antecedent science that Kant’s tables of judgement, categories and principles, not to mention his table of Ideas, are not as indelibly engraved as the tablets of Moses. The freedom that imagination enjoys, because the general orderability of its spatio-temporality postpones orderedness by any specific system of laws, would explain why Kant is less ready to consider the possibility of alternative epistemological categories and alternative logics than he is to entertain, at least provisionally, the prospect of alternative mathematics, such as the non-Euclidean geometry, the possibility of which was mooted, although ultimately denied, by J.H. Lambert. Without claiming that in doing so I am arguing for an alternative logic to Kant’s, I must make an observation that would seem to relax the scope of the parallelism that Kant maintains between the transcendental categories, schemata and principles on the one hand, and the forms of judgement on the other. I have in mind the fact that whatever may be the case regarding the underivability of the category of community and its schema from the categories of succession and inherence and their schemata, the disjunctive ‘either p or q’ is equivalent to the conjunctive-hypothetical ‘if not p then q and if not q then p’. It is equivalent also to ‘not both not-p and not-q’. Kant himself devotes two paragraphs to an attempt to meet the avowed difficulty that the correspondence of the category of community ‘is not as evident as in the case of the others’ (B112). One would expect him to experience this difficulty if indeed the either-or form of judgement is dispensable. But it must not be overlooked that the forms of judgement are introduced by Kant not as foundations from which the categories are derived, but only as guide-lines. Now the either-or syntax does serve as a guide to what Kant means by community or reciprocity and adds to our picture of the syntax of imagination in its constructive operation something not expressed by the syntax of this-as-that or if-then. It articulates the structure of spatiality, not least the structure of logical space, which is already a space of imagination. It articulates also the structure of Euclidean space, which means for Kant that it articulates also the space of the Newtonian universe. Readers of Kant sometimes raise the objection that his doctrine of schematism treats of time at the expense of space. The objection is valid if interpreted as one about emphasis. Kant’s schematism treats primarily of the seriality, content, order and scope of time (B184) because he holds time to be the form of all appearances, whereas space is the form only of appearances of the material world. This priority has to be replaced by the priority of spatio-temporality or at least by that of time-space (Zeit-Raum) understood as the spatiality of time, once worldhood is extended, as it is for example in Heidegger’s rethinking of Kant, beyond that of the physical universe. In Kant the 18

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category of community is a concept of part and whole and so is already implicit in the category of substance, for in the entirety of a substance the parts reciprocally affect each other. Community is also implicit therefore in the second relational category, that of cause and effect, not only because causality is the action of substances but also because it is a relation between substances in a whole, and there is an almost minimal sense of spatiality even where the causality is psychological. This almost minimal spatiality is precisely that of the imagination. The imagination’s minimal spatiality would be that of the separation and proximity represented by the hyphens of space-time and time-space, so of the co-ordination of co-ordination and subordination. With a nod in the direction of Bergson’s doctrines of time as endurance and of the two sources of morality, this chôrismos is destined to become in the teaching of Levinas the hyphen between exteriority in its relation to my interiority and the public space of universal justice. It will be the vanishing distance between the regard of the other’s face and the regard of the other others always already implicit there. Kant’s aim to refute scepticism about scientific knowledge without the theological premiss Descartes uses in establishing the possibility of true science21 leads him to stress the role of the concept of interaction within the physical and for him Newtonian universe and its, for him, Euclidean spatiality. Already for Descartes, following the Platonic doctrine of the intermediacy of the mathematicals between the Forms and the flux of sensations, the field of pure mathematics is the field of the imagination. But the imagination is also the field of possible worlds – and indeed of impossible ones. As we may alternatively say, it is the field of counterfactual conditionality, of the moment when we pause to ask ‘What if?’, the moment when position is relaxed by supposition. Now it is true, as is maintained by for instance Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, that these possible worlds have a habit of asserting themselves either as alternative ways of seeing our own familiar world or as compartments added to it ‘without completely disrupting it’.22 But now let us go back to Kant. In those two paragraphs where he takes pains to justify his using either-or as a key to the concept of community, he is in fact invoking the idea of alternativity, which enters into the idea of alternative logics, mathematics and worlds. But it emerges that the alternativity he intends is that of mutual exclusion, the alternativity given priority by the Stoic logicians. In the logic of Russell and Whitehead it is non-exclusive alternation that is given priority and that figures in the definitions of the logical connectives – and so of what Kant calls forms of judgement – in terms of one another. This is still no reason for resisting the suggestion that the either-or is analysable in terms of the categorical or hypothetical or both taken together. For exclusive alternation (aut) can be defined in terms of non-exclusive alternation (vel). Thus ‘Either A aut B’ (‘aut A aut B’) can be defined as ‘either (not-B and A) vel (not-A and B)’. This in turn is still no reason for concluding that one can dispense with the 19

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exclusive alternation. For that aut-autness is part of the classical notion of identity already implicit in the form of the simple categorical proposition, and most clearly in the logical connective of negation that excludes p from not-p. However, it is not the exclusive alternation of analytical contradictories that is Kant’s topic in the discussion of disjunction in the Analytic of Concepts. That and how it relates in Kant’s theory of inference to dialectical opposition will be our topic in the section called ‘Analytical and dialectical opposites’ in Chapter 4. Our interest here is to force open a gap in Kant’s discussion of disjunction where an exchange with Levinas may take place. Referring to the sum of alternands as an aggregate, Kant writes that ‘in an aggregate – if one member of the division is posited, all the rest are excluded, and conversely’. If we turn this statement into one about a social aggregate we have a model for human beings each occupying its place in the sun (or the shadow), a context for Levinas’s remark, alluding to Pascal, that a person’s claim to a place in the sun is ‘the beginning and the image of the usurpation of the entire earth’.23 But, because mutual exclusion is mutual, that is, because it presupposes co-ordination, this mutual exclusion is also a context for Dasein carefully prosecuting its being towards death in community with others, rather than prosecuted by others as Levinas says in the provocative diction that will be explained further in Chapter 7. For a context – or rather a non-context – for this prosecution by others, for their summoning me to appear in court, we need go no further than Kant’s next sentences. Now in a whole which is made up of things, a similar connection is being thought; for one thing is not subordinated, as effect, to another, as cause of its existence, but, simultaneously and reciprocally, is co-ordinated with it, as cause of the determination of the other (as, for instance, in a body the parts of which reciprocally attract and repel each other). This is a quite different kind of connection from that which is found in the mere relation of cause to effect (of ground to consequent), for in the latter relation the consequence does not in its turn reciprocally determine the ground, and therefore does not constitute with it a whole – thus the world, for instance, does not with its Creator serve to constitute a whole. (B112) It is not in Kantian (or Newtonian or indeed Humian) community and co-ordination that the protosyntax of Levinasian ethics is to found. It is to be found in the disruption of this co-ordination by subordination, by a social asymmetry that cuts across social symmetry. What’s more, or less, the Relation of the Creator to what is created – and Kant stresses created things – is, so to speak, an analogy of non-experience or an analogy of 20

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‘experience’ of the Relation of the other human being to me in my place here in the sun: the story of a cosmogonic First Cause depends for its ultimate meaning upon an ethical interpretation of creation. Further comment on this must be postponed until the Epilogue, following the examination undertaken in Chapter 7 of some of Levinas’s other doctrines. However, further comment on the notion of postponement is apposite here. We saw earlier how what Kant writes in the Analytic of Concepts and in the section of the Analytic of Principles about the schematism of the pure concepts allows us to interpret imagination as work according to an idea of regularity or law, but postponing submission to any particular system of rules or laws. I wish now to take this idea a step further. I now wish to add, adding to what was said in the first paragraph of this Prologue, that such postponement, although a postponement of the inevitable, is a deferment out of deference for singularity. The imagination is the hinge between the universality sought in reflective judgement and the particularities to which determinant judgement applies universal concepts. But particularities are cases, and cases are subsumed under universals in which singularity is consumed. To repeat, singularity is to be distinguished from singleness. It is uniqueness, ‘like’ the incomparable uniqueness of God, though Levinas argues that its primary philosophical meaning is given in the ethical Relation of all relations in which I am faced by another human being. I argue in the third and last part of this book that Levinas’s astonishing teaching as to where philosophy begins admits of being extended to nonhuman beings, things, to use the word emphasized by Kant. This can be argued without disrespect to human beings – or to non-human animals. My argument treats of beings of every kind. I base my argument upon the thought that imagination is precisely a bearing of respect, on the one hand a respect for law, but on the other hand a respect for singularity before the law. Imagination is the ‘essence’ or sense of understanding in the way suggested by the lexicographical facts that the French entendre (not to be equated with comprendre) is both to understand (not to be equated with comprehend) and to hear, that the Welsh clywed (Latin cluere, Greek kluô) is to respond with sensitivity and not only to hear, and that the Greek kluô and Latin audire are not only to hear but also to attend to, to assent to, to learn from, to regard or to obey. Although imagining as schematizing is obedience to and application of law, say the moral law of Kant, there is in imagination at the same time, or out of the time of combination and coordination by the powers of law (Einbildungskraft), a power to withhold the imposition of power, to suspend the imposition of categories, to listen, yet not yet to judge. Yet not not yet to judge lest I be judged. For I am judged anyway. I am categorized in the sense of being called by other existents to justify my existence. My having a judgement imposed upon me is that aspect of the imagination whose simultaneity with its imposition of order is so

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difficult to imagine and impossible to model according to the Kantian forms of judgement discussed in this section.

The hermeneutic ‘as’ In our discussion of the inter-relationships among Kant’s forms of relational judgements enough was said to show that so-called simple judgements, propositions or statements are not as simple as all that. This complexity of so-called simple propositions follows first from the embeddedness of propositions in a formal network that gives it its sense. Its complexity follows also from the embeddedness of formal logic in the Lebenswelt and of statements in forms of life. Recognition of this embeddedness is what leads me to hope that even if some of my readers will consider that to stretch the imagination into the understanding of the simplest statements is to stretch it too far, no one (I imagine) will find the imagination overstretched as I now take it and its subjunctivity out of the sphere of assertion. It is because subjunctive conditionality is so much the preoccupation of Merleau-Ponty’s reflections that that preoccupation is with the imagination and its ‘as’. But whereas the ‘as’ I have been focusing upon so far is an apophantic ‘as’, the ‘as’ that Merleau-Ponty’s phanatology treats is primarily what Heidegger calls the hermeneutic ‘as’, the ‘as’ of one’s engagement in a world of things requiring to be done, of pragmata, knowhow and creativity or recreativity. In many of these contexts one speaks of what is done as done intelligently or unintelligently, but these adverbs cannot be analysed, as some rationalist and empiricist philosophers have done, in terms of the intellect taken in abstraction from sensibility and the emotions, and in terms of the ‘as’ of apophansis. To do that is to fall back upon the way of ideas that gives priority to concepts or percepts as objects present at hand or passively pictured in a dream or hallucination. The intelligent, perceptive or imaginative interaction with others, with timber and lathe, in the designing of a building and in the playing of a part in a play or on the football field are competences about which manuals may be written; but reading a manual, like playing football or backgammon, is the exercise of a skill. The general and banal and therefore often overlooked point that this illustrates is conceded even by Descartes, who is usually regarded as one of the most intellectualist of philosophers, when in his epistolary conversation with Princess Elizabeth he writes: ‘But it is the ordinary course of life and conversation, and abstraction from meditation and from the study of things which exercise the imagination, that teaches us how to conceive the union of the soul and the body.’24 Earlier in his letter Descartes has explained that by meditation he means metaphysical thoughts that exercise mainly the pure intellect, and that by imagination he means the exercise of sensibility upon the objects of geometry and kinematics. The soul 22

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can be conceived by pure intellect. So too can body, but body is better conceived by a joint use of intellect and imagination. This definition appears to confine the imagination to the sphere dealt with in the Transcendental Aesthetic of the Critique of Pure Reason. Kant’s definition is wider than that to the extent that the imagination is exercised in schematism. And since the Kantian schema is said to involve sense or meaning as well as sensibility, it must involve, beyond the singularity that according to Kant characterizes the forms of space and time, either the generality of the pure categorial intellect or a generality which is sui generis. The last option is taken by Merleau-Ponty when he writes of perceived typicalities, a notion drawn from Gestalt psychology but akin to the schema of the Critique of Pure Reason, to the type (Typik) of the Critique of Practical Reason and to the archetype of the Critique of Judgement. Is this option one that could be taken by Descartes? He tells Elizabeth that ‘what belongs to the union of the soul and the body can be known only obscurely by pure intellect or by intellect aided by imagination, but it can be known very clearly by the senses’. This last plural appears to rule out the possibility that Descartes’s argument turns on an acknowledged or unacknowledged ambiguity of the word ‘sense’ (sens) as between sensibility and meaning. Yet is not something like a concretion – or vinculation – of sensibility and intelligence admitted when, after saying that the union of body and soul is best understood by the senses, he goes on in the sentence cited above to put the senses in the context of ‘the ordinary course of life and conversation’? The nature of the union of body and soul, that is to say, in Descartes’s surprising words, their ‘being conceived as one single thing’, perplexes us so long as we persist in philosophizing about it, but ‘people who never philosophize’ are people who understand that they are people, not amalgams of bodies and souls. Fortunately, this is understood also by some people who philosophize. For them not to understand this, in at least a non-theoretical sense of understanding, is to court madness. They court that risk of going out of their minds in entertaining theories about the union of body and mind. But, as one of the first of them observed in the Phaedrus, philosophers cannot help running that risk. Without courting that risk of madness they would go mad. In courting the risk of losing their senses they escape doing so by remembering that their wildest imaginings are still imaginings. This holds too for the artist and the creative scientist. Mention of creativity once again here is a signal that a distinction now cries out to be made. This can be done with the assistance of Schneider. Schneider is a psychotic patient whose condition is examined by Gelb and Goldstein and re-examined by Merleau-Ponty in the Phenomenology of Perception. It so happens that his disability disables him from doing something at which philosophers excel. He is unable to abstract. He performs quite naturally the tasks that arise within the context of his daily life. But when no practical context obtains he finds himself at sea. For 23

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instance, he has difficulty responding to the request to point with his finger at a designated part of his body. He cannot do so because he cannot see the point of pointing. And suppose, without his belonging to a military corps, he is requested to give a military salute. The normal subject, on giving, to order, a military salute, sees in it no more than an experimental situation, and therefore restricts the movement to its most important elements and does not throw himself into it. He is using his body as a means to play acting; he finds it entertaining to pretend to be a soldier; he escapes from reality in the role of the soldier just as an actor slips his real body into the ‘great phantom’ of the character to be played. The normal man and the actor do not mistake imaginary situations for reality, but extricate their real bodies from the living situation to make them breathe, speak and, if need be, weep in the realm of the imagination. That is what the patient is no longer able to do.25 What the patient is able to do is perceive, recognize and therefore recollect. He is therefore not deficient in what in the first Critique Kant calls productive imagination. What he lacks is imagination in the sense of imaginativeness. He is no good at pretending, play acting, experimenting. He cannot get his mind around the notion of subjunctivity, in particular the subjunctivity of what is contrary to fact. Imagination as imaginativeness may amount to genius. As such it is a topic of the third more than of the first Critique. Imagination as a topic of the first Critique, transcendental imagination, is not something for which the manifestations of it are awarded an Oscar or a Nobel or Pulitzer prize. This does not mean that there can be no continuity between the two imaginations. Merleau-Ponty, Coleridge and some of the German Romantic philosophers at least sometimes maintain that there is. That continuity could be enabled by the inseparability of creative or recreative imagination from reproductive or associative imagination and by the earlier noted inseparability of imagination as reproductive or associative from the productive imagination that Kant holds to be the condition for the possibility of any experience whatsoever, however ordinary the experience may be. The latter conjunction, the conjunction of productive imagination and reproductive imagination, would be a prerequisite for the constitution of any worldhood at all. The former conjunction, the conjunction of the reproductive imagination and the creative imagination, would be the prerequisite for either the invention of a world or for a deepening of our sense of the world we discover ourselves to inhabit. But the following difficulty arises. On the one hand, it is clear that in all three of these manifestations of imagination – productive, reproductive and creative – there is an operation of what Coleridge calls the esemplastic 24

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power of Ineinsbildung. On the other hand, it would be natural to distinguish the worlds to which we have just referred as in one case the actual world and in the other case an imagined world. If this seems to imply that the imagination is not involved in both worlds, this is because we wrongly suppose that imagination is restricted to the invention of fictions. But, as noted earlier, what is imagined is not necessarily contrary to fact. The imagined is not only imaginary. Thus in the theory of imagination of the Critique of Pure Reason imagination is a moment in – the movement of – perception and understanding, and we shall go on to show that it extends into reason. Again, imagination is also a name for the representation in absentia exemplified by the recollection of what has actually happened and the anticipation of what will happen. This is well documented in the history of philosophy. It will be confirmed in the following chapters.

Reanimation Some of the following chapters will show too that the amphibology of the hypocritical and hypoCritical imagination at play in the paraphenomenologies of Levinas and Derrida, as a complicity between an inside and an essentially transessential ethical exteriority, is anticipated in the phenomenology of Husserl. Husserl’s phenomenology is amphibological or digraphic because of the imagination that, though now under the name Phantasie, he sees as the engine of his phenomenological method, in contrast to Hegel, who sees negation as the engine that drives his. Negation in the phenomenology of spirit drives a dialectical counterpoint of exteriorization and interiorization resulting in reconciliation. The paraphenomenologies of Levinas and Derrida stop short of reconciliation, settling for an unsettling chiasmic oscillation. The essentialist phenomenology of Husserl begins by assuming that reconciliation is in principle possible, but it goes on to recognize a factor that disconcerts the confidence with which that assumption was originally made in the Logical Investigations. This recognition is signalled in The Crisis of European Sciences, the crisis in question being that of an impossible choice between essentialist phenomenological science and the written-up record of science. The ideal of purity envisaged for the former suffers disappointment before the fact that the objectivity it seeks cannot be guaranteed by the intuition of essences (Wesensanschauung) alone, but is dependent upon the recorded history of research. The happening (Geschehen) of illumination can enter the publicness of testable science only through the narrative, and history as experienced happening (Geschichte) is unavoidably contaminated by history as told story (Historie), even if the story is told only to oneself. Failing that God on whom, in his Replies to the second set of Objections, Descartes calls in order to make truly scientific knowledge possible, Husserl must make do with the empirical record. In practice that will take the form of written documents. But there is 25

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no reason in principle why there should not be an oral tradition of science analogous to an oral tradition of folk-tale or myth – or the oral tradition that supplements the written Torah. In the case of both the written and the oral record a move has been made away from the isolated person’s alleged face-to-face encounter with a datum to a dependency on mediation through other people and a shared linguistic system. This mediation is the epiphenomenon of the non-mediatory because unconciliatory procedure that is its quasi-transcendental condition and which Derrida calls arche-writing. He calls it this because it has the features of the spaced-outness and separatedness that have been thought by many philosophers since Plato to distinguish writing in the usual sense from speech and, according to Plato, from the dialogue of the soul with itself. Arche-writing is the mark of the empirical in the putative purity of the transcendental, the coup de sifflet that wakes Husserl from the dream of a pure logical grammar that he entertained at the time of the Logical Investigations. An aftermath of that rude awakening is his concern in The Crisis with the question how the Galilean science of what Galileo himself called primary qualities can have been reached from our experience of a world clothed in secondary qualities, and how that apparently pure science of quantitatively measurable bodies and their motion can be applied to the qualitative and historical world of everyday life, the Lebenswelt. So Husserl’s question in The Crisis re-asks and re-enacts phenomenologically the question to answer which in his first Critique Kant proposed his theory of the schematizing imagination. But as presented in the first Critique, and especially in the first edition, the productive imagination pretends to be pure. As I have already affirmed, this does not mean that it can function independently of the empirical, reproductive and associative imagination. But can it function independently of what we might call the sociative imagination, meaning by that the imagination through which I am in the society of other people? The so-called problem of other minds seems to be not very explicitly faced by Kant, not as explicitly, for example, as it is by Fichte. In at least the first Critique that problem appears to get submerged under the problem of other bodies. But it is there, and comes out into the open as soon as we face the question of how the first Critique is related to the other two. That is the question how one self is related to another. Husserl begins to answer this last question in the fifth of the Cartesian Meditations. Chronologically and logically between the essentialist phenomenology germinating in the Logical Investigations and the historiology of The Crisis, a short section (§ 41) of Ideas II, even shorter than the section on schematism in the first Critique, sketches a phenomenology of the human body that begins to show how the problem of other minds and the problem of other bodies are not two problems, but one. Those few pages of Husserl’s were extended to several chapters by Merleau-Ponty. And in thus extending what Husserl says about one’s own lived body, the corps propre, 26

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he is extending what Kant says in the three Critiques about the schematizing and typifying imagination. The reflection on, and extension beyond, that topic, which goes on in my chapters progresses from Criticism to hypoCriticsm and hypocrisy via criticism as defined by Levinas. Because by the time I reach the Epilogue of this book I shall have had some critical words to say about what he says about criticism, I propose to let him have the penultimate words of this avant-dire. In 1983 Levinas published ‘De l’intersubjectivité: Notes sur MerleauPonty’. These notes on Merleau-Ponty begin by being notes on Husserl. We have just explained why this could be expected. What Merleau-Ponty writes about one’s own body recapitulates themes handed on from Descartes to Kant, from Kant to Husserl, and from Husserl to Merleau-Ponty himself. But it is the trajectory within Merleau-Ponty’s own work that is recapitulated in the following tribute: It is impossible to admire sufficiently the subtle beauty of the analyses Merleau-Ponty offers of that original incarnation of spirit where Nature reveals its signification in the essentially signifying (signifiants) – that is to say expressive – that is to say cultural – movements of the human body, ranging from the gesture to language, to art, to poetry and to science: where Nature reveals its signification (or its soul?) in Culture. Its progress will have allowed French philosophy to say what was unsaid – or at least unprinted – in the thinking of Husserl.26 If the second of these two sentences comes across as ever so slightly less warm in its praise for Merleau-Ponty than the first, it should be grasped that the first of them is itself on its way to being interpretable as faint praise when placed in the context of the work of a philosopher who adopted the nationality referred to, namely Levinas himself, to whose understanding of Husserl Merleau-Ponty’s work contributed. From that point of view it is easy to see Levinas’s parenthesized question as an evincing of his own desire to say the unsaid of the fifth Cartesian Meditation in a way that saves it from the anonymous intersubjectivity on which Merleau-Ponty’s saying of it puts most weight. For it is the emphasis Husserl puts upon the inaccessibility to me of the other person’s experiences that Levinas converts into an emphasis that turns epistemic inaccessibility into ethical separation. With that change of emphasis experience and expression become or discover that they already are ethical; the cultural meaning of nature is led back to a signifying which is an ethical signifiance. Here ‘-fiance’ marks an affiance that comes between the imposition of a sign and that upon which it is imposed. It expresses a placing of trust that deposes pure semiotics, disposing it toward the semioethics that is its ‘truth’, the truth of always inadequate respondence that both disables and enables truth as correspondence and adequation. The 27

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unsaid in the thinking of Husserl that Levinas thinks his own work says is the unsaid and unthinkable saying. Hence the soul to which in the passage just cited Levinas’s parenthetical question refers has to be referred further to the soul of the other human being. It is the other being’s soul that ensouls me. This ensouling, for which we might use the Husserlian word ‘Beseelung’ or the Latinate ‘animation’, is called by Levinas psychisme, provocatively going back to the Koinê, the common Greek language of the destroyer of the Temple, where he might instead have gone back to the Hebrew ruach, breath. My own body, the corps propre, is primordially not pour soi but pour l’autre. Not belonging to myself, I am possessed by the other: psychotic. The psychosis that echoes here is described quite openly by Levinas as folie, madness. So the questions to which the following chapters build up are these: Can that ethical madness, which according to Levinas re-echoes the madness that Plato describes as philosophy, also be the madness of the hypoCritical imadgination? Would the hypoCritical imadgination entail idolatry? And if it offered faces to things, would it do this only at the cost of defacing human beings? In the attempt to answer these questions it will be asked if recourse can be made to the very account of imagination which this Prologue has set aside, namely the Aristotelian account according to which imagination is phantasia, interpreted as the having of images as one has them in dreams, illusions, delusions and hallucinations, where alucinor is a deponent verb meaning to have a wandering mind, to indulge in digression. One reason why that account has been set aside is that the extended story of the imagination toward which this Prologue looks will be in terms less of wandering than of wondering. And that is a reason why this Prologue has emphasized the part played in imagination by the syntax of the subjunctive conditional if-then and by the syntax of the double vision of seeing this as that, two syntactical structures that, it was argued, can be seen as one, understood in terms of each other. ‘In terms of.’ At the time at which this Prologue is being written this phrase is on everyone’s lips. So too is the word ‘amazing’.27 It is amazing with what frequency statements are made in terms of these terms where, unlike with ‘is’, ‘as’ and ‘if-then’, alternatives are readily available. However, instead of or as well as lamenting the lip-service paid them, we might wonder if this frequency is evidence that they recur at the surface of the relaxed linguistic mentality because – basically (to employ another buzzword (to employ another buzz-word)) – the words ‘in terms of’, denoting the relationality of all relationality, and ‘amazing’, serving to evince generic surprise (the wonder of all wonder?), come together to give voice to a Grund-stimmung, a basic tonality of imagination as the hinge between reason and sensibility. In bringing out how this may be, one may wonder whether resorting to Aristotle’s limited analysis of phantasia may still be 28

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productive, provided its limitedness be acknowledged. It may enable us, in terms now of Being and Time,28 to trace back below careless reading (anlesen), careless writing (geschreiben) and careless talk (gereden) the responsively responsible Rede of the interminably amazed imagination, the Vorrede, the Pro-logue, which may be said to be the beginning of philosophy. To that beginning this book will return at its end, but in order to put an end to all ending.

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Part I BACK THROUGH KANT

2 IMAGINATION AS MEDIAL DIATHESIS Heidegger’s reading of Kant

The Kantian imagination is the faculty of scrambling all the faculties, of scrambling dichotomies and trichotomies. It is the antifaculty.1 (Eliane Escoubas)

Time and imagination It is in the 1781 edition of the Critique of Pure Reason that Heidegger claims to find the key to a proper understanding of time, as Husserl had claimed to find the first specimen of phenomenology in the Transcendental Deduction of that edition.2 In the first section of this chapter it will be argued that what Heidegger sees as a key in the first edition is, if mislaid, not thrown away in the second. One commentator says, and implies that Heidegger says, that the second edition makes no mention of the productive imagination.3 This is not correct. B152 speaks of the productive imagination in order to contrast it with the reproductive imagination that is here restricted to the empirical and psychological sphere. In spite of this, Heidegger states that ‘in the second edition the transcendental imagination is present only in name…Imagination is now only the name of the empirical synthesis’.4 Since Kant says in the second edition Deduction not only that the reproductive imagination, hence presumably the synthesis of reproduction in imagination, is empirical, but also that the synthesis of apprehension in intuition is empirical,5 we may take it that the empirical synthesis to which Heidegger refers here is the threefold synthesis of apprehension, reproduction and recognition in empirical concepts. Heidegger agrees that in the first edition this threefold empirical synthesis is founded on a threefold transcendental synthesis. His view of the second edition Deduction is that this symmetry is replaced by an asymmetry resulting from the denial that there is a transcendental synthesis different from that performed by the transcendental understanding. Hence the second edition throws away the key to a

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phenomenology of time that Heidegger believes is proffered in Kant’s remark that ‘there are two stems of human knowledge, namely, sensibility and understanding, which perhaps spring from a common, but to us unknown, root’, this being an allusion, Heidegger maintains, to the productive imagination (A15/ B29; compare A78/B103 and A835/B863).6 Heidegger’s pessimism about the Transcendental Deduction in B rests on two oversights. The first of these oversights is failure to see that when Kant says that imagination is a function of understanding (or of the understanding) he means understanding in the wide sense in which it is equivalent to mind or soul. In allowing this there is no need to brush aside the fact noted by Heidegger that in Kant’s own copy of the first Critique the word ‘understanding’ is substituted for the word ‘soul’ in the statement that imagination is ‘an indispensable function of the soul’. Heidegger moves too quickly from this and other evidence he cites to the conclusion that although the expression ‘transcendental imagination’ occurs in the second edition Deduction it refers to the empirical imagination. He cites the note in B162 which says: ‘It is one and the same spontaneity, which in the one case, under the title of imagination, and in the other case, under the title of understanding, brings combination into the manifold of intuition’. It is this which prompts Heidegger’s comment that ‘Imagination is now only the name of the empirical synthesis, i.e. the synthesis as relative to intuition.’ In this comment and the sentences following it Heidegger is guilty of a second oversight. He momentarily forgets that Kant posits a pure sensibility and manifold of intuition as well as empirical intuition. Kant’s phrase ‘one and the same spontaneity’ could also be a reference to mind or understanding in the wide inclusive sense. This would be consistent with his contrasting figurative synthesis (synthesis speciosa) with intellectual synthesis. Heidegger’s belief that the former is simply a different description of the latter fits ill with Kant’s assertion that ‘both are transcendental’ (B151, first emphasis added, second emphasis original). Kant explains that they are both transcendental ‘not merely as taking place a priori, but also as conditioning the possibility of other a priori knowledge’. This other a priori knowledge will include knowledge of the mathematical properties of the world made possible by the pure transcendental schemata of the imagination that Kant is at pains to contrast with both images and concepts in the chapter entitled ‘The schematism of the pure concepts of the understanding’. The ground for the problem dealt with in that section, the problem of applying the categories to what might be called objects of the senses in particular, is prepared in § 24 of the Transcendental Deduction in B, which is entitled ‘The application of the categories to objects of the senses in general’ and is the section in which Kant contrasts the productive imagination both with the empirical reproductive imagination and intellectual synthesis. If Kant, endorsed by Heidegger, can say of 34

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the chapter on schematism ‘I hold this chapter to be one of the most important’7 it follows that they must take a similar view of § 24 of the Deduction in B. In that same section, referring to the transcendental synthesis of the imagination, Kant says: ‘This synthesis is an action (Wirkung) of the understanding on the sensibility; and is its [i.e. the understanding’s] first application – and thereby the ground of its other applications – to the objects of our possible intuition. As figurative, it is distinguished from the intellectual synthesis, which is carried out by the understanding alone, without the aid of imagination’ (B152). This makes good sense if we allow that Kant is using ‘understanding’ here first in a wide sense as roughly synonymous with ‘mind’ (Gemüt) and second in the narrow sense in which it means apperception as opposed to imagination. Admission of this ambiguity also makes sense of Kant’s substitution in his own copy of the Critique of ‘understanding’ for ‘soul’ in the passage that, with Kant’s alteration, reads: Synthesis in general…is the mere result (die blosse Wirkung) of the power of imagination, a blind but indispensable function of the understanding, without which we should have no knowledge whatsoever, but of which we are scarcely ever conscious. To bring this synthesis to concepts is a function which belongs to the understanding, and it is through this function of the understanding that we first obtain knowledge properly so called. (A78/B103) In its second and third occurrences here ‘understanding’ plainly means understanding as opposed to imagination. On Heidegger’s reading it means this too in its first occurrence. My suggestion is that it be taken there in its wider sense. On this interpretation it will be possible to say that Kant substitutes ‘understanding’ at that point not because he wishes to make imagination an apanage of intellect, but because he wishes to avoid the preCritical implications that might be read into his use of the word ‘Seele’. Most of the appearances of that word in the first Critique are in the Dialectic. He has to use it there because he is there concerned to expose the fallacies of rational psychology and other arguments of pre-Kantian metaphysics. Among other places where Kant appears to be using the word ‘understanding’ in the inclusive sense is the statement in the first edition Deduction that ‘The unity of apperception in relation to the synthesis of the imagination is the understanding’ (A119). Understanding, i.e. apperception, as the faculty of rules and judgements (Urteile) (A126), and imagination as the faculty of applying rules, i.e. the faculty of judgement (Urteilskraft) are quite naturally treated at A136/B175 as parts of the transcendental doctrine 35

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of judgement. Indeed, at A131/B169 Kant notes that in current speech ‘understanding’ is employed not just of understanding taken in a narrow exclusive sense, but of understanding in that narrow sense and of judgement and reason, all three taken together. As noted above, Kant commonly follows common speech in his use of this word. Another place at which he does so is in the title of one of the sections of the Introduction that affirms that ‘We are in possession of certain modes of a priori knowledge, and even the common understanding is never without them’ (B3). The whole project of the first Critique is an attempt to justify these modes against the background of Locke’s merely ‘physiological’ Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Furthermore, Kant’s Leibnizian background and the dualism of sensibility and intelligibility embraced in his own Inaugural Dissertation oblige him to continue using the name ‘understanding’ for spontaneity in general as opposed to its opposite. What the opposite of spontaneity is will be in question during the remainder of this chapter. The conclusion of this first part is that Heidegger is unduly pessimistic about the second edition of the first Critique.

Schematism, respect and Gelassenheit Even if Heidegger were correct in his view that in the second edition Deduction Kant abandons the idea that the transcendental imagination is the common root of sensibility and understanding, this would not mean that the second edition cuts concepts off from the transcendental imagination and temporality. So Kant still has an answer to the frequently made objection that the problem the theory of schematism is introduced to solve is not a real problem. It is said that this is not a real problem because to possess a concept is to possess the capacity to apply it to instances. To this Kant can reply that his objectors are simply making his own point for him. To say that possession of a concept is possession of the capacity to apply it is another way of saying that properly understood concepts are schematized concepts, i.e. concepts restricted by a temporal condition. Where that condition is removed we do not know how to apply a concept or do not have a concept to apply. An unschematized concept has no theoretically cognitive application. When it is supposed that it has, it is being misapplied or misused. Its only proper use is as an Idea of Reason regulative of our practice, e.g. of our search for knowledge. True, Kant sometimes says that Ideas of Reason have schemata, but when he says this he must be understood to be intending what in his more careful moments he characterizes as analogues of the schemata discussed in the Transcendental Analytic of the Critique of Pure Reason. Schemata in this latter basic sense are what enable concepts, whether empirical, mathematical or transcendental, to apply to objects, events, processes, etc. of which we can have empirical experience. The psychological, cosmological 36

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and theological Ideas are ‘as ifs’ that we can think thanks to analogies taken from the understanding. For example: the moral law has no faculty but the understanding to aid its application to physical objects (not the imagination); and the understanding for the purpose of the judgement can provide for an idea of the reason, not a schema of the sensibility, but a law, though only as to its form as law…It is therefore allowable to use the system of the world of sense as the type of a supersensible system of things, provided I do not transfer to the latter the intuitions, and what depends on them.8 Bearing in mind these sentences, where Kant is at pains to warn that imagination and intuition must not be permitted to contaminate the supersensible moral law, it is with some surprise that we find Heidegger contending that if we are to appreciate the profundity of Kant’s thought we must recognize that practical reason and pure reason in general cannot be separated from intuition and the transcendental imagination. This is not an attempt to reinject intellectual intuition into Kant’s account of the human understanding. Heidegger’s approval of Kant’s insistence on the finitude of human understanding is tantamount to approval of his exclusion from it of intellectual intuition. Heidegger sees himself to be doing no more than drawing a corollary of his interpretation of the first-edition Deduction, in particular the thesis that the transcendental imagination is the root of sensibility and understanding, taken along with Kant’s thesis that ‘it is still only one and the same reason which, whether in a theoretical or a practical point of view, judges according to a priori principles’.9 To draw this corollary is to go some way to filling what many think is a gap in Kant’s practical philosophy by shedding some light on the question of how the moral law can be instantiated in an action performed at a particular time. Kant himself does little more explicitly than remove objections to the possibility that a person may be both a free moral agent and part of the natural world. He denies that he can explain positively how this can be. Our understanding of Kant’s Critical position would be enhanced if his thinking could be weaned away from the pre-Critical opposition between a timeless intelligible realm and a temporal sensible one. Unfortunately, Heidegger’s exploration of the temporality of practical reason in Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics is extremely brief. It begins by citing Kant’s observation that by the ‘practical’ he means everything that is possible through freedom (A800/B828). Now no judgement, including theoretical judgement, is possible except through freedom. As Kant says in the Groundwork, ‘we cannot possibly conceive a reason consciously receiving a bias from any other quarter with respect to its judgements, for then the subject would ascribe the determination of its judgements not to its 37

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own reason, but to an impulse’.10 So theoretical judgements about what is the case involve practical reason and freedom and, therefore, it may be added, the moral law. For those who do not acknowledge that they are under an obligation to be truthful are not treating themselves as ends in themselves. We shall enquire in later chapters how the common root that closes the gap between the practical and the theoretical in the moral theory of Immanuel Kant is ramified in the doctrine of the ethical expounded in the writings of Emmanuel Levinas, and how the ramification there goes to the extremity not simply of grafting branches on to that root but of turning that root into a branch. To go back to Kant, his closing of the gap between the practical and the theoretical is a narrowing of the gap between reason regarded as the faculty of inference and understanding regarded as the faculty of rules or judgements (Urteile). It therefore narrows the gap between reason and the faculty of subsuming under rules, i.e. the faculty of judgement (Urteilskraft), i.e. the productive imagination (A132/B171 ff.). The transcendental imagination mediates between reason in its practical use and the agent’s feelings and desires. Since what Kant calls Achtung, respect, reverence, veneration or awe, is a feeling directed at a rational principle, namely the moral law, it is difficult to resist the thought that it should be described not simply as a spring (Triebfeder) of action but a schema of the practical transcendental imagination. If we do entertain this thought however we will have to explain how this schema relates to the type. We appear to have a motor with two clutches. We return to this problem below. An act performed out of respect for the moral law is the act of an agent with a good will. It is understandable why Heidegger should recognize in the Kantian good will at least an ontic and possibly an ontological manifestation of the willingness to have a conscience treated in § 54 ff. of Being and Time.11 In § 57 conscience is said to be the call of care, Sorge. To take care is in die Acht nehmen,12 which brings us back to the root of Kant’s Achtung, attentive respect or reverence. This, for Kant, is regard for persons as ends in themselves. That is, the voice of conscience in the Kantian context is a pre-echo of the ontological conscience that Heidegger articulates with the help of the basic structures of Seinlassen and Gelassenheit. These are forms of receptivity, i.e. forms of submission. But it is important to remember that Eckhart’s Gelassenheit retains at least a trace of willingness (einer Spur des Wollens).13 It is important to remember too that the letting of the word ‘lassen’ can have the causative or occasioning force of getting in phrases like ‘etwas tun lassen’, to have something done, and that ‘lassen einen grüssen’ means to wish to be remembered to someone. The family of forms of Seinlassen, for which Heidegger employs the word ‘Gelassenheit’, is not comprised of forms of passivity if by passivity is meant the opposite of activity, i.e. the passivity with which the tabula rasa of the mind is alleged by 38

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some empiricist philosophers to be impressed by sensation, or the passivity in which we are said to be overcome or driven by passions. Conscientious respect in the sphere of practical reason speaks in the same voice as intellectual respect for truth, which calls for the use of judgement and imagination. It would be pleasing if there were an etymological connection between veritas and the deponent verb vereri, meaning to be affected by respectful attentiveness. Deponent verbs are as close as Latin gets to a form that functions like the Greek middle voice (see the Prologue, above, and below, in the sections entitled ‘Medial diathesis’ and ‘Time, space and differance’ and the Epilogue).14 Heidegger writes: The self-submissive, immediate surrender to…is pure receptivity; the free self-imposition of the law is pure spontaneity. In themselves, the two are originally one. Furthermore, only by understanding that the origin of practical reason is to be found in the transcendental imagination are we able to understand why it is that in the feeling of respect neither the law nor the active self is objectively apprehended but that both are made manifest (offenbar sind) therein in a more original, unthematic and unobjective way as duty and action, and form the non-reflective, active mode of being ourselves (Selbst-sein).15 What Kant says of respect illustrates the structure Heidegger and Heidegger’s Kant discern in the transcendental imagination. That is why I am dwelling on what Kant says about respect although Heidegger’s discussion of this in Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics is limited to one brief section. If Heidegger had not refrained here from examining the role played by the transcendental imagination in the third Critique it would have been easier to say why he thinks that Kant’s respect belongs to the transcendental imagination, hence to time, how pure reason is geared to the transcendental imagination, and whether in Heidegger’s view it is the Typik or rather respect that functions in relation to pure reason in the way that the schema does in relation to the understanding. His interpretation of Kant departs from that prevalent in Marburg in the years preceding his arrival there. Cohen and Natorp had put pure apperception at the root of their readings of the first Critique and played down the importance of the Transcendental Aesthetic. Heidegger wants to give equal weight to the spontaneity of the ‘I think’ and to the receptivity of sensibility by showing that they have their root in the transcendental imagination, hence in time. Perhaps therefore Heidegger would refuse to separate the Typik, i.e. the idea of the world governed by a system of natural laws, from respect, and would say that the one is related to the other as in Being and Time he relates Verstehen, understanding, to Befindlichkeit and Stimmung, state of mind and tonality 39

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or attunement or mood. You cannot have one without the other. Understanding is always bestimmt. Analogously, pure reason and neat feeling will be abstractions from their junction in the Janus structure of the practical transcendental imagination. Kant’s respect will be the middle ground between the moral law and other non-moral kinds of feelings or moods somewhat as Heidegger’s Angst mediates between ontic concern (Besorgen) and solicitude (Fürsorge) toward beings in the world and ontological care (Sorge) toward being. Fear and other affects will be related to Kantian Achtung as they are related to Heideggerian Angst. On this account respect should be architectonic of other feelings, i.e. should judge among them, as the moral law should be architectonic of practical maxims. The moral law is a meta-principle that determines which maxims we should not follow in seeking our happiness. It is our susceptibility to being motivated by self-love instead of by respect for the moral law that explains why for human beings the moral law presents itself to us phenomenologically as an imperative, i.e. as prescriptive rather than descriptive of our behaviour. Heidegger would point to this as a further illustration of what he and, on his reading, Kant mean by man’s finitude. He could also point to it as an illustration of the way in which the founding status of the transcendental imagination is confirmed by the structure of respect. Kant writes of respect that ‘it is not a feeling received (empfangenes) through influences, but is selfwrought (selbstgewirktes) by a rational concept, and, therefore, is distinct in kind from all feelings of the…sort which may be referred either to fear or inclination’,16 though respect, he goes on to say, has something akin to both inclination and fear. It has something akin to fear in that it is a law that we respect. It has something akin to inclination in that it is we who respect the law. In so far as we respect the moral law we are worthy of self-respect. Here, therefore, at the level of practical reason is an analogue of the theory of selfaffection which Kant invokes in his analysis of the perception and theoretical knowledge of the spatio-temporal forum in which practical reason is exercised. We have already observed that since perception and theoretical cognition in general presuppose respect for truth, theoretical reason and perception are not isolable from practical reason and the structures we have just been describing. But whereas the practical imagination as we have reconstructed it is what through the ‘rational feeling’ of respect earths the moral law in feelings that get catered for in counsels of prudence, counsels of prudence can be applied only in the light of our possession of rules of skill that are in fact encapsulations of theoretical knowledge, more or less technical laws of nature and rules of thumb. These latter and the a priori principles of the understanding that they in turn presuppose have to be applied to particulars in our spatio-temporal environment. This application is made possible by the transcendental

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schemata of the productive imagination that integrates the world’s temporality. There will be no discussion here of what Kant says about number, degree and the other transcendental schemata, since they are conditions specifically of the world’s being subject-matter of true mathematical and empirical sciences. Heidegger’s subject is more general as well as more concrete than this, so he does not enter into a detailed examination of the particular schemata. The remaining comments on Heidegger and Kant in this chapter are confined to two aspects of their Auseinandersetzung. The chapter closes with some less exegetical speculations.

The integrity of time In what manner does the transcendental imagination integrate time? The Transcendental Analytic of the Critique of Pure Reason aims to show that a pure synthesis is presupposed even by the analytic judgements that were accepted as valid by rationalist philosophers like Wolff and moderate empiricists like Hume. To consider only the latter case, a proposition in which a predicate term holds of a subject because it is extracted from the subject term by means of its definition makes use of terms, ideas or concepts that are alleged to be abstracted from the flow of sensations or impressions. My perception of this pencil now is the perception of the same thing as I perceived or could have perceived a moment ago. I must therefore retain and be able to reproduce the thought of seeing the pencil a moment ago. That is, in Kant’s terminology, the empirical synthesis of apprehension in intuition depends on the empirical synthesis of reproduction in imagination. (Indeed, at one point in the first edition Deduction Kant gives the name apprehension to the direct action of the imagination upon perceptions (A120), a fact that might be taken to imply that Heidegger was unduly optimistic about his interpretation of the first edition of the first Critique.) These empirical syntheses, Kant argues, are possible only if there are corresponding pure syntheses of the times at which I have the sensations and the empirical ideas based on them. The transcendental imagination holds together present and past moments of the temporal continuum that the Transcendental Aesthetic has shown to be the form of all representations. But what about futurity? In what way is that produced, protended or projected by the transcendental imagination? How can Heidegger maintain that it is, despite there being no mention of time when Kant moves on to describe what he calls the synthesis of recognition in a concept? Heidegger’s thesis that the transcendental imagination is the common root of sensibility and understanding is supported by the fact that the future is already implicated in my awareness that this pencil which I now perceive is the same thing I was perceiving a moment ago. For I cannot be aware of that without being aware that from the point of view of my past perception 41

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the present perception was to come. A pure synthesis of recognition is already involved in the subsequent return to a past now through the production of a pure reproduction of it. Such past futurity may be that of a projection I did not, but could have made. But I could not have made it without implying that I could now make a projection into the future future. So I do not agree with Rudolf Makkreel when he says that ‘the idea of “recognition (Recognition) in a concept” is hardly directed at the future’. Futurity is inseparable from the subjunctivity that, as we argued in the first chapter, is vital to imagination in its integrative role. And here we have the beginnings of an answer, I believe, to the objection that Dieter Henrich and Rudolf Makkreel make to Heidegger’s mapping of the three dimensions of temporality on to the three kinds of synthesis allocated to the imagination in at least some of the paragraphs of the Critique of Pure Reason, those that do not limit imagination to the synthesis of reproduction.17 Although I consider Heidegger’s reading of Kant worth applying for its own sake anyway, whatever textual evidence or lack of evidence there is for doing so, support for it is provided in those places where Kant holds not that there are three syntheses, but, as we explained above, one synthesis that is threefold. Phenomenologically in human experience recognition is first, but recognition implies apprehension and reproduction and they imply it and each other. Now recognition is recognition in a concept (A103). This means that the threefold synthesis regarded as an operation of imagination cannot be known unless there is also a synthesis of concepts. This is why imagination under its sensible aspect is blind, as he says also of all intuitions without concepts (A51/B75, A258/B314), and why imagination is under that aspect unknown to us. The protentive-retentive structure that we have described is what yields the unity necessary for the conversion of a form of intuition into a formal object of intuition. In an important footnote to B160 Kant says it is the understanding that is responsible for this unity. Let us not stop to argue that when he refers there to ‘the concept of the understanding’, ‘understanding’ is used in the broad sense of which much was made in the first section of this chapter, and that ‘concept’ denotes what at least once Kant calls sensible concepts (A146/B186), that is to say, the schemata of the transcendental imagination. Suffice it to quote the following: The procedure of understanding in these schemata we shall entitle the schematism of pure understanding. The schema is in itself always a product of imagination. Since, however, the synthesis of imagination aims at no special intuition, but only at unity in the determination of sensibility… (A140/B179)

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and to observe that at the end of the footnote to B160 there is a reference across to § 24 where Kant makes it clear that it is the transcendental imagination that is the source of the integrating structure of time. Since it is the imagination that represents things in their absence, it is the pure productive imagination that is the origin of the having-beenness and the tocomeness of what is not present and of the possibility of representing what is now past. Imagination is the faculty of representing in intuition an object that is not itself present…and its synthesis of intuitions, conforming as it does to the categories, must be the transcendental synthesis of imagination. This synthesis is an action (Wirkung) of the understanding on the sensibility; and is its first application – and thereby the ground of all its other applications – to the objects of our possible intuition. (B151–2) As the action of the understanding in the wide sense and, specifically, the imagination is the foundation of all the other applications of the understanding, it is the foundation of the understanding considered in abstraction from the schemata properly so called. That is, the transcendental imagination and the schemata properly so called that it produces remain the foundation of the unschematized use of the concepts of the understanding in practical thinking, as was shown in the second part of this chapter where we started from above with pure reason before describing in this present part what Kant calls his argument ‘starting from below’ (A119). Furthermore, the foundational imagination is an Einbildungskraft that constructs (bildet) its schematic sensible concepts. These Bilder are gewirkte, the term Kant also uses of respect. And the cognitive imagination has the Janus structure that is manifested in the pure practical imagination or, as perhaps we should say, the pure imagination in its practical use. Now since all our intuition is sensible, the imagination, owing to the subjective condition under which alone it can give to the concepts of understanding a corresponding intuition, belongs to sensibility. But inasmuch as its synthesis is an expression of spontaneity, which is determinative and not, like sense, determinable merely, and which is therefore able to determine sense a priori in respect of its form in accordance with the unity of apperception, imagination is to that extent a faculty which determines the sensibility a priori. (B151–2) Notice, by the way, that Kant states that the transcendental imagination belongs to sensibility on the one hand. But Heidegger does not take this as a 43

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cue for lingering here over the antiphony of gehören zu, to belong, and zuhören, to listen, as he does frequently elsewhere, especially when treating of the event of disclosive appropriation, Ereignis. However, he does take the opportunity to capture the subtle double agency-receptivity of the transcendental imagination by calling on the resources of the verb lassen. When the transcendental imagination forms time, die Zeit bildet, it lets time spring forth, entspringen lässt. Entspringen alludes to the source of the river of time. But, as we have mentioned, lässt is ambiguous as between getting something done and allowing it, an ambiguity not lost in ‘let’, as in ‘Let (Suffer, sinite, aphete) the little children (to) come unto me.’ This duplicity of seinlassen, gehörenlassen and the other members of Heidegger’s large Gelassenheit family may come into play when Kant uses the word ‘veranlassen’ where he says in the Inaugural Dissertation that sensations occasion the activity of the mind which by producing order among sensa enables us to acquire (erwerben) the primordial constructs (Urbilder), space and time. Time is both acquisition and construct. It is not acquired from the data of sensation in the way empirical concepts are, but is a pure diagram (Bild, A142/B182), plan (Plan),18 pattern, stencil or matrix (Schablone)19 acquired from the mind’s marking (achthaben) of its act of affecting and effecting representations by building into them the form of successiveness. Kant calls this action a generation or begetting of time itself (A143/B182), and it is therefore natural that in the Transcendental Aesthetic, although that is in principle concerned with intuition rather than conception, Kant should speak of time (and space) as concepts. Conceiving, begetting and producing are, as Heidegger might have reminded us, the essence of nature or phusis. He does remind us that Kant calls this productive action Bewegung (B152). In so far as this action of the productive imagination projects a pattern to which all sensation and conception, i.e. all experience (Erfahrung), conform, it is comparable with the Be-wegung that, according to Heidegger’s Der Weg zur Sprache, lays down the paths along which we must move if we are to put anything into words. This making way is Ereignis, appropriative disclosure and disclosive appropriation. It has the Janus structure of Gelassenheit. Disclosive appropriation, needing and using man’s appropriations, lets (lässt) Saying reach speech. The way to language belongs to Saying determined by disclosive appropriation. Within this way, which belongs to the essence of language, the peculiar property of language is concealed. The way is disclosively appropriating…For since the being of language, as Saying that shows, rests on disclosive appropriation which makes over to us humans the lease (Gelassenheit) of free listening, therefore the way-making of Saying into speech first opens up for us the path along which our thinking can pursue the authentic way to language.20 44

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One of the ways of letting in play in this passage is precisely that of the listening to which the passage also refers. Lassen is to let and to listen, to let someone have his, her or its say. And to listen, as etymology in many languages bears out, is to obey. This must be borne in mind as being quite fundamental in this book, just as Kant says that the general observation that all our knowledge is finally subject to time must be borne in mind as being quite fundamental in the Critique of Pure Reason (A99). We may even find reason to say that the latter fundamentality follows from the other. Formations with the verb lassen recur in Heidegger’s writings on Kant. For example, he describes the ob-jectifying role Kant attributes to the mind as a Gegenstehenlassen,21 and a Begegnen-lassen, ‘a letting encounter which happens through us’.22 Kant’s epistemology, with the time-outlining imagination regarded as its root, lends itself to Heidegger’s phenomenological ontology in which ‘the function of the logos lies in merely letting something be seen, letting entities be perceived, Vernehmenlassen’.23 Kant’s logic of judgement is largely Aristotelian and he claims to be following Aristotle in holding that logos, discourse, lets something be seen, phainesthai, from the very thing that it is about: apophainesthai. These Greek forms are middle voiced, as also is legesthai,24 the part of legein that Heidegger tries to represent in German through phrases that mean something like letting lie gathered before. It is an ancestor of Kant’s ‘synthesis’. Heidegger goes as far as to say that legein means apophainesthai. Since he also connects phusis with phôs,25 it is not surprising that he should bring together phusis and logos. That is, the burden of Heidegger’s meditations on Parmenides and Heraclitus reverberates in his retrieval of Kant. It could be said that where Kant sees the time-productive imagination as the root of sensibility and understanding, he is most mindful of the original Greek understanding of the disclosive belonging together of words and world. Heidegger’s attempt to repeat this with the help of verbal forms of lassen is an attempt to renew the force of the Ancient Greek middle voice or medial diathesis.

Medial diathesis The relation of what Kant says about the transcendental imagination and what Heidegger says about Gelassenheit to each other and to the Greek and Sanskrit middle voice can be brought out with the help of what is said about this last by Jan Gonda and Émile Benveniste. Gonda and Benveniste agree in rejecting a traditional view that the middle voice indicates an interest that the subject has in the action. For could not the subject have an interest in the action when this is indicated in the active voice? This traditional view is unacceptable as stated because it is too vague. It does not distinguish, for example, one’s taking an interest in

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something from one’s having an interest in something, i.e. being affected by it, whether or not one is aware of the fact. Benveniste contrasts the active and the middle voices or diatheses as follows: In the active verbs denote a process which is accomplished from (à partir de) the subject and outside him. In the middle…the verb indicates a process of which the subject is the seat (siège), the subject is interior to the process.26 This is puzzling. If the subject is the seat of the process, how can the subject be interior to it? Is it not rather interior to the subject? No wonder Gonda finds Benveniste’s account unclear. It becomes slightly less unclear in the light of examples and of what Benveniste goes on to say about them. Always medial in Sanskrit and Greek – or deponent in Latin – are verbs meaning to be born, to lie or lay, to die (birth, copulation and death), to grow, to speak and, significantly for our purposes, to imagine. In these cases, says Benveniste, ‘the subject is the centre as well as the actor of the process; i.e. he accomplishes something which accomplishes itself in him…He is well and truly inside the process of which he is the agent.’ Passing to examples of verbs that admit of both active and medial forms, he contrasts the active luei ton hippon, ‘He unties the horse’, and the medial form luetai ton hippon, ‘He unties the horse and in doing so affects himself’ (since as a result the horse is now his). The active form says the subject effects something. The middle form says the subject effects something and in so doing is affected himself. Benveniste proposes that instead of the terms ‘active voice’ and ‘middle voice’, which suggest a less satisfying opposition than ‘active voice’ and ‘passive voice’, we mark the opposition with the terms ‘external diathesis’ and ‘internal diathesis’. The expression ‘internal diathesis’ captures a part of the force of the middle voice as this is interpreted by Gonda, who, after a detailed survey of the evidence, concludes that: the ‘original’ or ‘essential’ function of the medial voice was not exactly to signify that the subject ‘performs a process that is performed in himself’ but to denote that a process is taking place with regard to, or is affecting, happening to, a person or a thing; this definition includes also those cases in which we are under the impression that in the eyes of those who once used this category in its original function some power or something powerful was at work in or through the subject, or manifested itself in or by means of the subject on the one hand and those cases in which the process, whilst properly performed by, or originating with, the subject, obviously was limited to the ‘sphere’ of the subject.27 46

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What Gonda means by limitation to the ‘sphere’ of the subject is illustrated by the difference between louein, to wash something, and louesthai, which refers to a person’s washing itself or bathing. There need not be much effort expended on the part of the person concerned. It may simply let itself into the water. There need be no act of will such as is expressed by the active verb ethelô; there need only be willingness as expressed by the middle verb boulomai, which comes from the same root.28 At least the early part of Gonda’s conclusion is unsatisfactory because it omits this element of willing participation that is common to Kant’s transcendental imagination and Heidegger’s Gelassenheit. Gonda comes within an ace of reducing the middle voice to the passive. He is drawn into this by his understandable desire to explain why so many verbs one might expect to be medial are in fact active in form. His explanation turns on the generally accepted idea that languages have tended to lose the medial forms and replace them (either with passives or) with personal active forms as man came to see himself more as the master of a desacralized environment. He speculates that active forms that one might have expected to be medial, e.g. Greek or Sanskrit verbs for ‘to fear’, ‘to be hungry’, ‘to blow’ (of the wind) and ‘to suffer’ (!) derive from impersonal forms contemporary with a pre-technological, animist mentality. This explanation appears to have induced him to assimilate the medials to the impersonal forms like es regnet, it is raining, es donnert, it is thundering, and…es gibt, there is. It is inconvenient for our interpretation and application of Heidegger’s reading of Kant that the Greek esti (Sanskrit asti), to be, and eimi, I am, are active, but (pace Benveniste, p.171) esomai, I shall be, is medial.29 At least, what one loses on the swings one gains on the roundabouts, for we can observe that the special importance Heidegger gives to the future tense may be reflected in the fact that the Greek futures often have medial forms. This, Gonda suggests: may be associated with, and partly explained from, widespread and fundamental habits of thought, which have tended to prevent man from acquiring…a modern command of the fundamental conception of time, involving recognition of the ideas of before and after, past, present, and future, in the sequence of events…time is not regarded as a straight line, as a regular succession of single and irrevocable moments, but as duration or as periodical recurrence…This category [the middle voice] allows the speaker to observe a certain reserve with regard to the part of the subject in a process which belongs to the future, to be guarded in his statements of the future activity or initiative of himself, his interlocutors or other people…About the future man can never and nowhere be completely certain; the time which will come hereafter is vaguely filled with possibilities.30 47

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These possibilities include the possibility of the impossibility of possibility, as Heidegger describes death, though he would say that what Gonda describes is an inauthentic futurity.

Time, space and differance In ‘Time and being’ Heidegger retracts the attempt he says he makes in § 70 of Being and Time to derive spatiality from, or reduce it to, temporality. Being and Time, as its title implies, focuses attention on temporality more than on spatiality. Yet distancing, de-distancing, towardness and regionality are there said to be basic structures of Dasein. There is an analogous interplay of space and time in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. That book’s chapter on schematism, which both Kant and Heidegger consider to be of prime importance, deals with the structures of time. However, in the second edition of Refutation of Idealism the structures of the spatial are emphasized. In the Transcendental Deduction of that edition Kant says: ‘Even time itself we cannot represent, save in so far as we attend, in the drawing of a straight line (which has to serve as the outer figurative representation of time), merely to the act of the synthesis of the manifold’ (B154). Kant’s scientific space-time, like Bergson’s, is remote from the existential space-time described by Heidegger. But both Kant and Heidegger – and the same could be said of Bergson – recognize what, in Derrida’s words, if not in Derrida’s sense, can be called the becoming-space of time and the becoming-time of space, tracing, differance.31 Of course Kant at any rate is working within the context of the classical conceptual system in which, as Derrida writes: differance could be said to designate the productive and primordial constituting causality, the process of scission and division whose differings and differences would be the products or constituted effects. But while bringing us closer to the infinitive and active core of differing, ‘differance’ with an a neutralizes what the infinitive denotes as simply active, in the same way that ‘mouvance’ [compare Kant’s and Heidegger’s ‘Bewegung’] does not signify in our language the simple fact of moving, of moving oneself or of being moved. Nor is resonance the act of resounding. Here in the usage of our language we must reflect on the fact that the ending -ance is undecided between active and passive. And we shall see why that which lets itself (se laisse) be designated by ‘differance’ is neither simply active nor simply passive, but announces or rather recalls something like the middle voice, that it speaks of an operation which is not an operation, which lets itself (se laisse) be thought neither as a passion nor as an action of a subject upon an object, neither as starting or departing from [à partir de; compare Benveniste’s 48

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formulation of the middle voice quoted above] an agent or a patient, neither from nor with a view to any of these terms. Now maybe philosophy, constituting itself within this repression, began by hiving off into the active or the passive voice a certain nontransitivity, the middle voice.32 Now maybe what, constituting itself within this repression, philosophy hived off, what could be designated the productive and primordial constituting causality, is what could be designated the hypoCritical imagination.

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3 CONSTRUCTIVE IMAGINATION AS CONNECTING MIDDLE Schelling’s reading of Kant It is to be hoped that time, the mother of all development, will…foster and eventually develop, unto the completion of the whole science, those seeds of great disclosures about this wondrous faculty which Kant has sown in his immortal work.1 (F.W.J. Schelling)

This wondrous faculty The imagination, the Einbildungskraft, is the wondrous faculty referred to in the words of Schelling cited above. As for the seeds of great disclosures about this wondrous faculty sown by Kant, if Schelling’s hope for their development is realized it is because time’s mothering is supplemented by not a little husbandry at the hand of Schelling himself. No one contributes more than he to explain in what way the imagination is, as he puts it, ‘the connecting middle’ between theory and practice and, by implication, to explain in what way the third Critique mediates between the other two. Imagination…is analogous with theoretical reason inasmuch as this is dependent upon cognition of the object, and analogous with practical reason insofar as this produces its object, itself. Imagination actively produces an object by putting itself in complete dependence on that object, into full passivity. What the creature of imagination lacks in objectivity, imagination itself supplies by the passivity which, through an act of spontaneity, it voluntarily assumes toward the idea of that object. Thus imagination could be defined as the faculty of putting oneself into complete passivity by full selfactivity.2 If, following the cue of the words Schelling stresses here, we consider the polarity of the theoretical and the practical within the architectonic of the three Critiques, we are struck by the thought that imagination is already involved in the first of them qua concerned primarily with theoretical 50

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knowledge and that it is arguably involved in the second of them qua concerned primarily with practice. The argument for this latter claim would turn on whether one understands the role of the Type (Typik) to be primarily practical or indistinguishable from the imagination’s role as a connecting middle between theory and practice. But it can be a connecting middle only if it partakes of both the theoretical and the practical through being their common root. One reason for saying that the Type is a product of the practical imagination is that, according to Kant, the imagination is the faculty that produces an example or model for the application of a law. In so far as the law to be applied is a rule of skill or counsel of prudence it reduces to a falsifiable theoretical statement about the empirical world. Only the moral law is irreducibly practical. Nevertheless, our understanding of its universal applicability in the intelligible world of ends can be assisted by the thought of a world in which everyone in the world of ends and means behaves according to the principle of prudence or self-love. Here, however, it is only the universal form of the moral law that is modelled by the law of self-love. Since the moral law is a law of pure reason prescribing with regard only to the form of subjective maxims, hence not grounded in sensibility, the law of the system of nature that typifies it does so only in respect of form. ‘Consequently the moral law has no faculty but the understanding to aid its application to physical objects (not the imagination).’3 ‘Not the imagination’. These words seem to settle once and for all that there is no place in Kant’s thinking for pure practical imagination. This may indeed be so, unless in the second Critique a place can be found for the ambiguity to be found in the first, for example at B162, note b, between imagination contrasted with and imagination identified with understanding or regarded as the understanding performing one of its roles. Whether or not a place can be found in the second Critique for this ambiguity and thereby for the notion of a properly practical imagination, one of the lessons to be drawn from some of the writings of Schelling seems to be that a place for such a notion must be found, and that the way to find it is along a path that reconstructs each Critique in terms of the others with the help of an intellectual intuitus originarius that Kant denies to man. In attempting in this chapter to follow Schelling’s first steps along this path let us set out from the theory of transcendental imagination of the first Critique.

The transcendental imagination On a simple reading of Kant’s theory of theory, the transcendental imagination occupies a Zwischenland between sensibility and understanding defined as the faculty of pure a priori concepts and principles. It is the faculty of judgement where judgement is taken to mean the subsumption of particular cases under concepts and principles. Here the simple reading encounters the complication of the ambiguity announced in the footnote to 51

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B162, which we have already mentioned and will have occasion to mention once more: ‘It is one and the same spontaneity, which in the one case, under the title of imagination, and in the other case, under the title of understanding, brings combination into the manifold of intuition.’ Kant’s movement between an account that contrasts and an account that assimilates imagination and understanding is sometimes said to be a symptom of his partial realization that the capacity to apply a concept or principle is part of understanding it. Indeed, there is no reason why Kant should be said to reject this inclusive notion of understanding so long as we recognize what it includes. If we fail to recognize this, we shall fail to recognize that there is a sense in which someone can be in possession of a concept theoretically and be able to define it, yet still be hopeless at picking out instances of it. A person may reach an understanding of the kind that can be learned by rote yet lack the so-called mother wit that at B172 Kant calls ‘so-called’ perhaps because, however innate this intelligence may be, it still requires practice if the fluent exercise of it is to be possible. In that case, Kant’s distinction between a more and a less abstractly intellectual understanding of concepts is preserved at any rate for empirical concepts through the concession that the capacity to apply them in practice, which is part of the fuller understanding, is itself acquired through practice. If Kant nevertheless wishes to distinguish also between, on the one hand, the particularity of a dog or of a physical or mental picture of a dog and, on the other hand, the schema intermediate between the abstract universal concept of it and the particular, the empirical schema appears to end up being nothing other than the acquired capacity to pick out dogs and pictures of dogs rather than something that enables us to acquire that capacity. All it will enable is an improvement in that capacity. Nevertheless, where pure non-empirical concepts are concerned, there is a role for the schema to perform that does not reduce to that of an acquired expertise. Hence, the acquisition of empirical concepts would not be explicable solely in the terms of an empiricist theory of learning. For empirical concepts presuppose pure schemata, namely mathematical ones in the narrower sense, that is to say geometrical, arithmetical or algebraic ones, and transcendental ones, that is to say mathematical and dynamic ones in the sense in which Kant employs these terms to separate each of the quadruples of pure categories, pure schemata and pure principles into two pairs. Although, in calling these categories, schemata and principles pure, Kant is rejecting genetic empiricism, this does not prevent his sometimes arguing for a variety of logical empiricism along the lines of the logically behaviourist account of understanding we have just been discussing, according to which the understanding of a concept is the ability to cash it by referring to specific instances that do and don’t fall under it. Just what variety of logical empiricism Kant subscribes to will depend on what he would count as a specific instance.

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Take, for instance, the concepts of mathematics, considering them first of all in their pure intuitions. Space has three dimensions; between two points there can be only one straight line, etc. Although all these principles, and the representation of the object with which this science occupies itself, are generated in the mind completely a priori, they would mean nothing, were we not always able to present their meaning in appearances, that is, in empirical objects. (B299) The mathematical principles and concepts in question would have no meaning or sense without this reference to empirical instantiation. Furthermore, we cannot define any of the categories and principles, meaning by that not just the specially mathematical ones but the transcendental ones as well, ‘without at once descending to the conditions of sensibility’ (B300). By sensibility here he means not solely pure sensibility, but empirical sensibility. Without that there is no Sinn. This word is translated by Kemp Smith on at least one occasion as ‘sensible meaning’ (B299). This translation receives support not only from etymology but also from the adverbial phrase in Kant’s remark that without ‘relation to the object’ we cannot define any of the categories ‘in any real sense’. But we have seen that in the passage cited from the previous paragraph, mathematical concepts ‘mean nothing’ (gar nichts bedeuten) unless their meaning can be laid before us (ihre Bedeutung darlegen) in empirical objects. That, we are then told, is how it is with all the categories and principles tabled in the Transcendental Analytic. Without pretending that the paragraphs here in question pose no problems, it must be said that they do not compel us to draw the embarrassing inference that a pure concept can have a purely empirical, so to speak purely ‘impure’, instance. If there are empirical instances of the pure concept triangle they are instances in the literal sense of the word Bei-spielen: they are instances falling under the concept only in the mode of standing in for and playing alongside it. Pure concepts can have real meaning, as Kant says, only if they are able to present their meaning in empirical objects. Their meaning and the empirical presentability of it are two stages. Thus, the pure concept of magnitude ‘seeks its support and meaning (Sinn) in number, and this in turn in the fingers, in the beads of the abacus, or in the strokes and points which can be placed before the eyes’ (B299). The words ‘in turn’ (diese aber) here make it clear that Kant is not saying that the science of arithmetic is a counting of fingers, beads or of mental images of any such things. That cannot be right if mental images of beads are as particular as beads, for that would lead to an infinite regress that he seeks to avoid by stating quite explicitly that counting particulars presupposes schemata that are not particular things because they are not things at all but rather procedures or methods for identifying things. The four fingers of a particular empirically perceivable hand exemplify 53

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magnitude, which is a universal intellectual concept of the understanding, thanks to the schema of number, which is a sensuous concept constructed in the imagination. The purely intellectual concept is introduced to the empirical objects of sense, presented to them, not directly, but through the mediation of a construct, the construct of the number four and of number as such. In calling the schema a construct, we seem to be calling it a thing. But the schema as construct is inseparable from the process of constructing. The numbers four and five are unities at which we arrive. They are totalities built up in time by the combination of a plurality of units: the category of quantity temporalized. Number in general is ‘the unity of the synthesis of the manifold of a homogeneous intuition in general, a unity due to my generating time itself in the apprehension of the intuition’ (B182). Similarly, the undetermined concept of ground becomes determined as the concept of mechanical cause, and the purely logical sequence (Folge) of hypothetical judgement becomes determined as causal sequence through the mediation of the schema of temporal sequence according to a rule. Since sensible intuition is the only intuition available to human beings according to Kant, construction is restricted to time, as too is the real meaning of the categories of the understanding. These pure concepts have only a purely logical meaning. They have no objective reference unless they are given it by the schemata. What difference would it make to the critical idealism of Kant, we may now ask, when it is argued, as it is argued by Schelling, that sensible intuition is not the only intuition available to human beings, and that we have access to non-discursive intellectual constructive intuition as well?

Construction in philosophy A convenient point of departure from which to move toward an answer to this question is the piece ‘On construction in philosophy’, published anonymously in the Critical Journal of Philosophy in 1802.4 Although some commentators have attributed this to Hegel and others have suggested that it is a joint production by the co-editors of the journal, most authorities now agree that it is by Schelling. ‘On construction in philosophy’ is a review of Carl H. Höyer’s Treatise on Philosophical Construction, published in the previous year.5 These two titles indicate that what is at stake is Kant’s assertion in the Transcendental Doctrine of Method of the first Critique that philosophical knowledge is discursive or acroamatic, i.e. knowledge gained by reason from the analysis of concepts, whereas mathematical knowledge is knowledge reached by reason through pure temporal or temporo-spatial synthesis, i.e. the construction of concepts in intuition that as such is concrete and individual rather than abstractly or otherwise discursive (B741, B758). Schelling maintains against this that there is a place for construction in philosophy. So are we going to find that whereas Kant, because he believes that there is no place for construction in philosophy, rejects 54

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Spinoza’s and Wolff’s assumption that the method of philosophy can begin with definitions, Schelling will allow the possibility of this, even though the construction allowing it will not be one of pure time or space? Schelling makes five main points. 1

2

The first critical point Schelling makes against Kant in his article depends, if I read his intention correctly, on the fact that mathematics, on Kant’s account, employs schemata, and each of these is a unity of a given pure intuition or form of intuition that is particular and is the product of an act (Handlung) of construction. It is this act that brings the concept of unity to the pure sensible datum. It is the conceptual partner in the constitution of the schema. Now since the schema is a unity of this with a sensible datum, the intellectuality of the schema as a whole dominates the pure sensibility that is offered as, so to speak, the temporal receptacle in which the constructing takes place. In this interpretation of Schelling’s first objection to Kant a distinction is made between the intuitive and the constructive aspects of the schema. Strictly speaking, therefore, we should have to say that it is the constructing that is intellectual. Schelling, however, considers that his objection entitles him to claim to have found an opening for intellectual intuition. This locution can be justified on the grounds that it is with distinguishable but inseparable aspects of schematism that we are concerned, as the constructing is distinguished from the construct produced. Unless we insist on this, the notion of schematism will be open to the objection that a second order schema is required to bridge the gap between its two parts and a third and fourth to bridge the gap between their sub-parts, and so on. Kant’s insistence that the schema is a process or procedure (Verfahren) puts his reader on guard against this regress. Further, a reason for protesting against Schelling’s talk of intellectual intuition or intellectual intuiting would be a reason for protesting against Kant’s reference to the schema as a sensible concept. Schelling writes: ‘Space, as according to Kant it grounds geometry, and time, as according to him it grounds arithmetic, is wholly intellectual intuition, but expressed there in the finite and here in the infinite.’ (Der Raum, wie er der Geometrie, und die Zeit, wie sie der Arithmetik nach Kant zu Grunde liegt, ist die ganze intellectuale Anschauung; aber dort im Endlichen, hier im Unendlichen ausgedrückt.)6 Does ‘there’ mean in the case of space and ‘here’ in the case of time, as seems likely? Or does ‘there’ refer to the case of the mathematician and ‘here’ to the case of the philosopher, which are mentioned in that order in the preceding sentence? In the preceding sentence, Schelling says that the absolute difference between mathematics and philosophy cannot lie for Kant in the fact that there is non-empirical intuition in the latter but not in the former, since Kant argues that geometry does call for non-empirical 55

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intuition. The difference must therefore lie in the fact that whereas for the mathematician intellectual intuition is reflected in sensibility, for the philosopher it is reflected in itself, in sich selbst. This would be a reason for saying that in philosophy intellectual intuition is infinite, for it is not limited by something other than itself as is the case with intellectual intuition in mathematics, where it is limited by sensibility. This does not exclude the possibility that philosophy’s intellectual intuition is temporal. And, indeed, Schelling maintains that it is. His way of maintaining it, furthermore, brings together into one story the two interpretations of the words ‘here’ and ‘there’ in the sentence in question. For philosophy’s intellectual intuition is an intuition of pure time. Here the purity of time is its independence of spatiality and its closer kinship with arithmetic as against geometry. True, on Kant’s account the representation of the arithmetical continuum depends upon the spatial continuum as a (for humans) contingently necessary auxiliary. Even time itself we cannot represent, save in so far as we attend, in the drawing of a straight line (which has to serve as the outer figurative representation of time), merely to the act of the synthesis of the manifold whereby we successively determine inner sense, and in so doing attend to the succession of this determination in inner sense. (B155) So the notion of succession, presupposed in counting, is a notion of pure active motion, Bewegung, regarded as an act, Handlung, presupposed both by the representation of time that, Kant elsewhere tells us, cannot itself be perceived, and by the representation of space: their connecting middle or common root, which explains why Kant says that the schema is not a thing but a Verfahren. This movement as act is, in Fichtean terms, a striving (Streben) that, as striving, presupposes the resistance of the Anstoss, the ob-jection of the impact of the spatiotemporally real. This opposition is the origin of the feeling of selfawareness, that is to say, of the self’s awareness of its own temporality. Schelling asks: ‘how, then, does the self become an object to itself as inner sense?’; that is to say, how does it become an object for itself as sensation combined with consciousness? He answers: ‘Simply and solely through the fact that time arises (entsteht) for it’; not of course time as already externally intuited but, he says, in words that relay Kant’s reflections on time back to Augustine and forward to Bergson, Husserl and Heidegger, ‘time as mere limit, mere point (blosse Grenze, blosse Punkt)’, that is to say, ‘as pure intensity, as activity which can expand itself only in one dimension, but is now concentrated at a single point’.7 The intensio of time as limit or point is not yet time itself. It is how time 56

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3

4

arises for the self. It is time when the unidimensionally extensible activity becomes an object to itself. This is entailed by the first principle that the self is self-consciousness, activity conscious of itself, from which it follows that the self itself is time conceived of in activity, in Thätigkeit gedacht. The intensio of time as the tension of a spring or as source is inconceivable in isolation from the idea of, respectively, expansibility or flow (distensio). Since this idea of the subject being a temporally extended object to itself implies that of the subject’s being conscious of an object in space, we can say that the intensio or intensity of the self implies the intentionality of consciousness, and vice versa. So we could formulate Schelling’s second objection against Kant by saying that the latter fails to see that a corollary of his own argument is that without intellectual intuition sensible intuition is blind. The origin of geometry, and of arithmetic and algebra, the origin of mathematics is the origin of philosophy. Schelling’s third objection, or perhaps a strong reformulation of the one we have just considered, is that Kant contradicts himself. For, as we have indeed confirmed, Kant maintains that philosophy is the analysis of concepts. But concepts will be empty unless there is some object to which they can be referred. Since he denies that in philosophy they are independent of intuition of sensible objects, whether empirical or pure, they must, on pain of vacuity, be given determinacy of meaning by being referred to intellectual intuition. Hence intellectual intuition is presupposed by transcendental imagination and its schematism, by the pure synthesis of transcendental self-consciousness. Provided this alleged intellectual intuition of the ‘I am’ is temporal despite not being spatial, a refutation of subjective idealism analogous to Kant’s is available to Schelling, as we have just seen. From our discussion of Schelling’s first objection against Kant it is clear that in mathematics intuition has two aspects, a universal and a particular. According to Kant mathematics treats of the universal in the particular, whereas philosophy treats the particular only in the universal (B742). Schelling doubts the validity of both of these characterizations. He casts doubt on the first by citing Kant against Kant. Kant does indeed say that in geometry the concept of a figure, for example a triangle, is expressed in a particular pure or empirical intuition; he also says however: the evident propositions of numerical relation are indeed synthetic, but are not general like those of geometry, and cannot, therefore, be called axioms but only numerical formulas. The assertion that 7 + 5 is equal to 12 is not an analytic proposition…But although this proposition is synthetic, it is also only singular. So far as we are here 57

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attending merely to the synthesis of the homogeneous (of units), that synthesis can take place only in one way, although the employment of these numbers is general. (B205)

5

Schelling does not cite or refer to these sentences explicitly, but it must be on them that he bases his statement that Kant himself concedes that arithmetic treats of particular numerical formulae stating a relation between individual magnitudes that are expressed in the universal. That would make arithmetic a part of philosophy on Kant’s definition of this. Schelling does not, however, share this definition of philosophy. Because the opposition between philosophy and mathematics cannot be based on whether the particular is expressed in the universal or vice versa, and because, in either case, a true identification of the universal with the particular is as such an intuition, the difference between mathematics and philosophy is a difference of intuition or construction. In mathematics, construction is distinguished by having two aspects, the universal and the particular, the former expressing or presenting the latter and vice versa. In philosophical construction what in mathematics is distinguished is united in a point of absolute indifference or identity that is an identity of identity and difference. With this notion of constructive intuition in which the opposition of the two kinds of expression is overcome, a new notion of particularity emerges and with it a new notion of universality, concrete universality, universality concresced from the expression of the metaphysical in the physical and the physical in the metaphysical. This concrescence of visible spirit and invisible nature is, in the language of Spinoza, the identity of Thought and Extension, the point of indifference between two ‘or’s: the sive of Deus sive Natura and the sive of Deus sive Spiritus. In the language of Hegel and the Introduction of the Critique of Judgement (part IV), it is a resultant of the joint expression of a determinant and a reflective judgement. This absolute universality is the universality not of a discursive concept but of a concrete Idea that is the object of intellectual intuition. Whereas Kant cannot both maintain the difference between mathematics and philosophy and secure real sense through reference for the concepts of philosophy, Schelling does both by distinguishing two kinds of intuitional object. If Kant had recognized that he is committed to admitting intellectual intuition in both mathematics and philosophy but that the particularity and generality in each case are of two absolutely different kinds, he would have recognized too that to ask a philosopher to work out the sum of the angles of a triangle from the concept of a triangle is like asking a sculptor to make a statue out of musical notes or a musician to perform a sonata with pigments. 58

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The beginning of the pragmatic history of the mind In the System of Transcendental Idealism Schelling endorses Fichte’s partial endorsement of Descartes’s Discourse on Method and Meditations. Up to a point this is also another endorsement of Kant’s deduction from the ‘I think’. The beginning of the system set out philosophically is the end of the method of discovery, and the structure of the end is reflected in that of the beginning. The identity of intuitive construct and constructing, of thought and thinking, in the Absolute Idea is reflected in the ‘I am’ that is ‘the first, absolutely unconditioned principle’ that Schelling takes over from Fichte’s Science of Knowledge, as illustrated by Fichte’s statement that in the act of positing ‘I am’, the self ‘is at once the agent (das Handelnde) and the product of action (der Handlung); the active (das Thätige), and what the activity (die Thätigkeit) brings about’.8 For this identity of the producing and product or constructing and construct, acting (Handlung) and act performed (That), Fichte adopts the word Thathandlung. This word is commonly used of violent deeds and is therefore appropriate to describe what Schelling and Fichte say is for human beings a unique coincidence through imagination of product and producing or, as we might alternatively say, of constative and non-constative performance, such as might be supposed to be reserved for a divine causa sui. Einbildungs-kraft is a craft, a quiet force, and in writings of Schelling later than those with which we are here immediately concerned it becomes a name for the creativity of God. Schelling observes: In becoming an object of myself through self-consciousness, there arises for me the concept of the self, and conversely, the concept of the self is merely the concept of becoming-an-object-tooneself…Thus we have here that original identity of thought and object, appearance and reality, for which we were searching, and which is nowhere else to be found…That this identity between being-thought and coming-to-be, in the case of the self, remains hidden from so many, is due solely to the fact that they neither perform the act of self-consciousness in freedom, nor are able to reflect in so doing upon what arises therein.9 So pure consciousness, self-consciousness, usually gets hidden by empirical consciousness. Our consciousness is normally directed to things around us or to the feelings to which they give rise. Because such empirical consciousness is not unchallengeably veridical on any specific occasion it cannot supply the supreme principle of knowledge. This is why Fichte and Schelling begin their search for that principle with a principle of logic, the principle of identity A = A that is usually taken to be presupposed by any synthetic proposition. They agree, however, that an identical proposition conveys no knowledge. They agree with Kant that it is purely formal and that for a proposition to convey real knowledge objective content must be 59

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provided in some way. The only proposition that fulfils the requirements of absolute priority is one that like A = A is identical, but which is, at the same time, synthetic. That proposition is ‘I = I’ or ‘I am’. From this synthetic identical proposition in which form and content are one, Fichte sets out, in the wake of Augustine, Descartes and Kant, to construct a science of the world. Our main interest here is in the method of construction that Schelling employs. Having now acquainted ourselves with some of the workings of this method first at the end and now at the beginning of his version of what Fichte calls the ‘pragmatic history of the human mind or spirit’10 let us return to the end.

The end of the pragmatic history of the mind Marking out the ground for Hegel’s history of spirit, the Geschehen of Geist, and Heidegger’s history of the concealment and advent of being, the Ereignis of Sein, Schelling conceives philosophy as ‘the free recapitulation (Wiederholung) of the series of acts into which the one act of selfconsciousness evolves’.11 As the science of science, the knowledge of knowledge, philosophy is the one science with a double seriality, that of the reflective and specifically philosophical series and that of the reflected series of ordinary consciousness that in the end coincide. Seven years before the publication of the Phenomenology of Spirit a pre-echo can be heard in Schelling’s System when we read: ‘subject and object which are absolutely united in the absolute act of self-consciousness – must be constantly kept distinct for purposes of philosophizing, that is, in order to allow this unification to take place before our eyes’.12 So, as Hegel says in the Introduction of the Phenomenology, ‘all that is left for us to do is simply to look on’.13 Philosophy is a pragmatic history because it is a repetition of deeds analogous to the procedure in a law-court through which the necessity of those deeds is brought out. As the words pragma, Tatsache and ‘fact’ remind us, an act may be the doing and what is brought about, whether the doing be praxis or poiêsis. This two-in-one reflected in the language of ordinary consciousness is matched by the philosophical term of art ‘point of indifference’ that Schelling introduces for the identity of constructing and the intuited object whose transfigurations evolve from original selfconsciousness and whose so-called indifference therefore is far from the indeterminacy of a night in which all cows are black or a ‘formless whiteness’ like that of the blank page purporting to portray the Absolute in a certain burlesque of the philosophical journal Mind entitled Mind! 14 Schelling complains that when he refers to his ‘real idealism’ as a system of absolute identity the word ‘identity’ has been misinterpreted when it has been taken to imply that the system suppresses the distinctions between matter and spirit, good and evil, truth and error.15 Likewise, indifference is 60

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not sheer emptiness, nothing or night.16 More like the polemos of darkness and light to which Heraclitus and Hölderlin allude, it is a ‘conflict of absolutely opposed activities…one that originally reaches out into infinity…the real, objective, limitable activity; the other, the tendency to intuit oneself in that infinity…the ideal, subjective, illimitable activity’.17 In the System of Transcendental Idealism the genesis of the figures of consciousness follows approximately the order of the Transcendental Doctrine of Elements of the Critique of Pure Reason and the order of the three Critiques. Apart from a disagreement over the doctrine of the thingsin-themselves, the chief difference is that from the deduction of the absolute synthesis of self-consciousness, the movement of the deductions takes the form of graduated resolutions of contradictions by transition to some third thing common to each of the opposites. The main body of the book is divided into the three major transitions that Schelling calls epochs: from original sensation to productive intuition, from productive intuition to reflection and from reflection to the absolute act of will, this last being the transition from theory to practice. Of these two, as we noted, Schelling undertakes to trace the common root. Given the already evident similarities in many respects of Schelling’s System of Transcendental Idealism to the transcendental idealism of Kant, we are primed to expect agreement between them as to this common root of theory and practice. Given the ubiquity in Schelling’s System of constructive intuition, how could this common root fail to be the imagination, where schematism performs its ‘art concealed in the depths of the human soul’ and ‘whose real modes of operation (Handgriffe) nature is hardly likely ever (schwerlich jemals) to allow us to discover, and to have open to our gaze’ (B180–1)? How can this fail to be in one guise or another the imagination which as productive imagination it is not unreasonable to identify with the ‘common, but to us unknown, root’ of sensibility and understanding (B29)?18 True, there is a difference between the strong ‘to us unknown’, on the one hand, and the weaker ‘hardly likely ever to allow us to discover’ of B180–1 and, let us now add, ‘of which we are scarcely ever conscious’ of B103. But this should not lead us to conclude that the ‘to us unknown root’ is a reference to the thingin-itself, for the root is said to be that of two stems of human knowledge. Another candidate for radicality might be said to be reason as contrasted with sensibility and understanding. But although to say that is to say, as Kant does explicitly, that reason thus interpreted is architectonic of human knowledge, to say that it is a root of sensibility would be to abandon the Critical philosophy and to return to pre-Critical rationalism. After all, on the Kantian doctrine of strict knowledge we could be said to have less than strict knowledge if we had only sporadic consciousness, even if such glimpses might not have to be so downgraded as to be qualified as a dream (B520–1) or ‘less even than a dream’ (A112), ‘for us as good as nothing’ (A111). 61

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Therefore, without abandoning the possibility of discovering through but beyond Kantian Criticism, through and beyond Schelling (and through and beyond Levinas) a hypoCritical connectedness between reason and imagination where reason is neither architectonic nor radical in the ways Kant seems to intend these metaphors, I propose to take the weaker and stronger formulations distinguished in the immediately preceding paragraph to refer to imagination and its procedure of schematization. They both anticipate the reference in the Critique of Judgement to the ‘unconscious’ process of the imagination that ‘is able on occasion, even after a long lapse of time, not alone to recall the signs for concepts, but also to reproduce the image and shape of an object out of a countless number of others of a different, or even of the very same, kind’ – ‘in a manner quite incomprehensible to us’.19 If constructive intuition in Schelling is the imagination, it has to be granted that in the discussion of what he calls productive intuition, that is to say, in the section dealing with the construction of objects, Schelling is coy about using the word ‘imagination’. The word is very rarely used there. The simplest explanation for this is one that sheds some light also on the fact that in classical lists of the powers of the mind sometimes both memory and imagination are mentioned, but sometimes the former is subsumed under the latter. The importance Schelling attributes to construction leads him to think of imagination primarily as constructive and his decision to keep more or less in step with the first Critique in his ordering of the treatment of topics means that imagination will not receive the full treatment until his System reaches the stage equivalent to that of Kant’s few pages on schematism. The System’s section on productive intuition is roughly equivalent to Kant’s transcendental deduction of the conditions of objectivity. So any mention it makes of imagination will be such as is licensed by the fact that in the Critique of Pure Reason imagination has been considered at this stage only in its capacity as the reproductive component of the threefold synthesis where it is in synergy with recognition in concepts and apprehension in intuition. Kant’s phrase ‘apprehension in intuition’ may well have suggested the phrase ‘productive intuition’ to Schelling. A productive intuition is a productive image, where the reference to image must be read as a reference to Kant’s teaching that ‘The pure image (Bild) of all magnitudes (quantorum) for outer sense is space; that of all objects of the senses in general is time’ (B182). This statement is made in the section on Schematism where it is argued, as we have seen, that the application of magnitude (quantitas), a general concept of the understanding, to these pure particular objects of intuition is managed by the schema of number. That productive intuition is another name for the imagination is suggested by the fact that we have found Schelling referring to the imagination as ‘this wondrous faculty’ in 1795 and now find him speaking in 1800 of ‘the marvel (das Wunder) of productive intuition’.20 Its marvellous art, notwithstanding its 62

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being an art that conceals art, is discovered by Schelling, with Fichte’s aid, to be that of effecting a suspension of the oscillation (Schweben) between, on the one hand, the restriction imposed upon the self by, for example, sensation – when the self senses itself opposed to itself – and, on the other hand, the self’s infinite striving to pass beyond this real opposition to its ideal activity, and to overcome this difference, which can neither persist nor be simply done away with (aufgehoben), in the identity of a third activity. The fact that this ‘third thing’ is still an activity and destined to give rise to a higher-level oscillation or wavering may explain why the imagination is here described as the resolution of a conflict whereas in the Science of Knowledge Fichte says imagination is itself an oscillation. Phantasia in the De Anima is a kinêsis (429a1). This idea of movement is implied in the etymology of pha, which conveys the idea of emerging or coming to light, phainesthai. It is what Merleau-Ponty would call the ‘good ambiguity’ of the imagination that moves the mind from each of its epochs to the next. This is why it crops up not only in Schelling’s first and second epochs, that is to say, not only in the transition from feeling to productive intuition and from its unconscious operation there to reflection. It emerges also in the transition from reflection on objects to the conscious willing of objects as ends, those produced when the art concealed in the depths of the soul emerges in objets d’art. The methodological way-making (Bewegung) from Schelling’s second epoch to his third is a shift from reflection to schematism. In other words, it is a transition from what in the third Critique Kant calls reflective judgement to what he there calls determinative judgement. If, in ascending from one epoch to another, the structure of the less complex is refigured but retained in the next, then the highest flight of imagination will be symbolic in the special sense defined by Schelling in the lectures on the Philosophy of Art first delivered in 1802. There schematism is defined as a presentation (Darstellung) in which the universal signifies (bedeutet) the particular or in which the particular is intuited through (angeschaut durch) the universal. The allegorical is defined as presentation in which the particular signifies the universal or in which the universal is intuited through the particular. The symbolic is the logical product of these, or, as he says, their synthesis, in which neither does the general signify simply the particular nor does the particular signify simply the general, but in which these signifyings are absolutely one.21 Although in making these distinctions Schelling must have had the third Critique open before him at § 59 – for his modes of Darstellung are what Kant there calls kinds of hypotyposes and exhibitiones – his definition of the symbolic is slightly but significantly more articulated than Kant’s. Although, like Schelling, Kant contrasts the symbolic explicitly with the schematic (the determinative or determinant), he does not, unlike Schelling, contrast the symbolic explicitly with the allegorical (the reflective). The symbolic, on Kant’s definition, is a variety of what Aristotle calls analogy. It is an analogy with a double function. It functions as a schema, 63

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applying a concept to an intuited object; but the rule of procedure it applies to that intuited object is applied also to another object, as when a living body is taken to represent a monarchical state governed by constitutional laws. Here symbolism is similation by simile made possible by a structural rather than an intuitional resemblance between a constitutional monarchy and a living body. A symbol thus defined is a metaphor and corresponds to what Schelling rates as a lesser form of art. For Schelling, symbolism is imagination at its most developed. And although there are some forms of art that are schematic and others that are allegorical, the highest form of art is symbolic. It may be that in symbolism, as defined by Kant, both schematism and allegorism are at work, but they are not fused as they are in symbolism as defined by Schelling. We have just seen that although Schelling says that symbolism is a synthesis of the other two modes of presentation, he also says that neither of them operates as such. Their becoming one is to be understood in the way that, in the triads of categories deduced by Kant, the third, though a synthesis of the first and the second, is something entirely new. That schematism and allegory achieve an Indifferenzpunkt in the symbolic is neatly encompassed in the German word for symbol, Sinnbild, which mirrors the unity of meaning and form.22 Schelling evinces his wish to ensure that this mirroring be not confused with a onesided dependency relation of copying or causing, subsumed under the principle of sufficient reason when the phrase ‘mere speculation’ in the Introduction to the first edition of the Philosophy of Nature (1793) is replaced in the second edition (1803) by the phrase ‘mere reflection’, thereby enabling ‘speculation’ to be retained for a nobler role, as it is also by Hegel.23 Perhaps the conjunction of his belief that the imagination is fully developed in art with his belief that it is in the sphere of art that the imagination is usually thought to be most at home explains Schelling’s reservations over using the word ‘imagination’ for the earlier stages of the history of the mind. Coleridge begins Chapter X of Biographia Literaria as follows: ‘Esemplastic. The word is not in Johnson, nor have I met with it elsewhere’. Neither have I. I constructed it myself from the Greek words, eis hen plattein, to shape into one; because having to convey a new sense, I thought that a new term would both aid the recollection of my meaning, and prevent its being confounded with the usual import of the word, imagination.24 To ‘shape into one’ is also a translation of In-eins-bildung, which is the power of Einbildungskraft on Schelling’s account of imagination.25 Schelling does not want this to be confounded with the merely associative reproductive imagination of the empiricists. Hence, when he is treating the oscillation between the infinite will and the finite reality that opposes it and makes it 64

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possible he acknowledges that he has not yet demonstrated his right to employ the word ‘imagination’ of this oscillation between, and ultimate unification of, the finite and infinite. A similar caution is expressed by Fichte when of a certain activity he has found it necessary to postulate in the course of the argument of the Science of Knowledge he writes in parentheses ‘its name is imagination, as will appear in due course’.26 If the imagination is most fully developed in art and art is most fully developed in symbolism, symbolism is most fully developed in mythology. Schelling’s most favoured cases among extant mythologies are those presented in Homer. There the individual is the universal and the universal is the individual. The Sinn is the Bild and the Bild the Sinn, rather than either signifying (bedeutend) the other, which is what happens once mythology gives way to allegory, as Homer’s mythologies do for a later age, or when his myths are succeeded by such allegories as that of Eros and Psyche. That Homer’s Odyssey should be accorded such a privileged place is in keeping with the pragmatic history of the human spirit being described as spirit’s odyssey.27 It is the history of a homecoming in that the end of that history is the fulfilment of its beginning. The original judgement, the Ur-teil, of that beginning is the simple twofold root of self-consciousness from which grows the highest form of self-consciousness, the aesthetic imagination that is ‘the productive intuition reiterated to its highest degree’ (die in der höchsten Potenz sich wiederholende produktive Anschauung)28 and whose expression in the work of art is the objective organon of philosophy. Let us retrace the path followed by this return.

Return Schelling’s statement that productive intuition of objects reiterated to its highest degree is the poiêsis of aesthetic intuition becomes more comprehensible when it is set alongside certain statements made by Kant. In the section of the Critique of Pure Reason dealing with the transition from the table of forms of judgement to the table of categories, Kant writes: ‘The same function which gives unity to the various representations in a judgement also gives unity to the mere synthesis of various representations in an intuition’ (B104). We know that this function which gives unity to the mere synthesis of various representations in an intuition is sometimes called ‘imagination’ by Kant and sometimes ‘understanding’. ‘It is one and the same spontaneity, which in the one case, under the title of imagination, and in the other case, under the title of understanding, brings combination into the manifold of intuition’ (B162, note b). Schelling must surely intend his reader to recognize that he is repeating this sentence when he writes, with reference to poetic intuition and to productive intuition (that is to say intuition productive of the space in which real objects appear): ‘it is one and the same capacity that is active in both, the only one whereby we are able to think 65

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and to couple together even what is contradictory (das Widersprechende) – and its name is imagination’.29 If Schelling and Kant are agreed that this capacity, spontaneity or function, may sometimes be entitled imagination and sometimes understanding, how does this agreement stand in relation to the sentence cited from the Critique of Practical Reason at the beginning of this chapter: ‘the moral law has no faculty but the understanding to aid its application to physical objects (not the imagination)’? Kant says this because the moral law is purely formal and the order of a moral realm of free agents can have as an analogy in nature only the formality of a system of natural laws, that is to say, an order of understanding whose laws are not exhibited in concrete spatio-temporal reality by schematism. This does not mean that the moral idea of reason cannot be exhibited in an aesthetic idea, an ideal type or archetype constructed by the poetic imagination. When Schelling writes that an Idea of reason is not a concept of the understanding, he is thinking of the antinomies that Kant has shown to arise if this is forgotten; for example, if it is forgotten that freedom is not a concept of the understanding, but an Idea of reason. Remembering the distinction between the practical employment of Ideas of reason and the theoretical employment of concepts of the understanding makes it possible to couple together – to construe, to construct – what would otherwise be contradictory, for example the infinitude of the will and the finitude of resistant reality without which there can be no willing. Remembering this distinction allows not only for this overcoming of contradiction. Since contradiction is overcome by ‘the connecting middle’ entitled imagination we can now see that the ambiguity between imagination and the schematized understanding to be found in the first Critique is matched in Schelling’s reading of the threefold Critical synthesis by the further ambiguity on the possibility of which we touched in our opening paragraphs. There is an ambiguity between fully fledged imagination and unschematized understanding in that the fully fledged form of the latter, the Idea of freedom presupposed by the categorical imperative, is practical reason whose application is guided by the former, that is to say, by an aesthetic Idea. The constructions of aesthetic intuition are the fulfilment of the constructions of mathematical and intellectual intuition of which philosophy becomes conscious when it reflects on the selfconsciousness of the ‘I am’. So philosophy’s becoming conscious of this is its becoming conscious of its own limitations. In the final section of this chapter we shall examine in a little more detail why this is so, and indicate in broad terms where the philosophy and art of philosophy which emerges from Schelling’s reconstruction of Kant stands in relation to philosophy’s past and future.

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The art of philosophy The aesthetic intuition of the poetic faculty (Dichtungsvermögen) objectifies in a work of art the intellectual intuition that operates unconsciously in the production of objects and in our movement among them in action. It is the document and organon that philosophy needs to make manifest the absolutely simple identity of the conscious and the unconscious that, because it is prior to predication, cannot be fully described and must therefore be otherwise presented, exhibited or performed (dargestellt). However, if philosophy can make this manifest only through art, the idea of philosophy as the science of sciences will have to be revised. If Schelling wishes to say that art is the ancilla of philosophy, is paramount for philosophy, and that it is paramount over philosophy, as might seem to be indicated if, as he says, philosophy returns to poetry, logos to mythos, then philosophical constructing and mytho-poietic intuition fuse in what we shall have to think of as the heir to what used to be called philosophy. That this is so is suggested by the following sentences from the last pages of the System where it seems that both the poetic and the philosophical genius become absorbed into the political community: What intellectual intuition is for the philosopher, aesthetic intuition is for his object. The former, since it is necessary purely for purposes of that special direction of mind which it takes in philosophizing, makes no appearance at all in ordinary consciousness; the latter, since it is nothing else but intellectual intuition given universal currency, or become objective, can at least figure in every consciousness. But from this very fact it may also be understood that, and why, philosophy as philosophy can never become generally current. The one field to which absolute objectivity is granted, is art. Take away objectivity from art, one might say, and it ceases to be what it is, and becomes philosophy; grant objectivity to philosophy, and it ceases to be philosophy, and becomes art. Philosophy attains, indeed, to the highest, but it brings to this summit only, so to say, the fraction (ein Bruchstück) of man. Art brings the whole man, as he is, to this point, namely to knowledge of the highest, and this is what underlies the eternal difference and the marvel of art.30 Now for Schelling, as we have seen, the most marvellous marvel of art is mythology. Mythology is accorded this pre-eminence because at the end of its history philosophy, the ‘whole science’ referred to in the quotation from Schelling with which we began, returns to the mythological source from which it sprang. Philosophy was born and nourished by poetry in the infancy of knowledge, and with it all those sciences it has guided toward 67

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perfection; we may thus expect them on completion, to flow back like so many individual streams into the universal ocean of poetry from which they took their source. Nor is it in general difficult to say what the medium for this return of science to poetry will be; for in mythology such a medium existed, before the occurrence of a breach (Trennung) now seemingly beyond repair. But how a new mythology is itself to arise, which shall be the creation, not of some individual author, but of a new race, impersonating, as it were, one single poet – that is a problem whose solution can be looked for only in the future destinies of the world, and in the course of history to come.31 This is a problem we shall be touching on again when in Chapter 8 the possibility of a Critique of Political Judgement is treated. It is not a problem we shall pursue here beyond observing that the future destinies of the world and the course of history will see this idea of philosophy realized less in the conceptual thinking of the author of the Science of Logic than in the denkendes Dichten of the third of the three Tübingen friends, Hölderlin, and in the dichtendes Denken to which Hölderlin provoked Heidegger at a time when talk of mythology and race was once more in the air. Heidegger, following Schelling and Kant, is much given to delving for hidden roots, in particular the root shared by theory and practice. In this chapter we have been examining why, in the paragraph from the Philosophical Letters on Dogmatism and Criticism which we cited at the outset, Schelling believes this root to be imagination. When in that paragraph Schelling writes with reference to imagination, whose Schweben can mean oscillation but also suspense, that it voluntarily assumes a state of passivity toward an object, it is not difficult to hear his words as an expression of the belief that the common root is less likely to be disclosed by grasping (Begreifen) than by letting be (Seinlassen). In the Further Expositions of my System of Philosophy (1802) Schelling distinguishes ratiocinative Begreifen, which explains by subordination, from the non-hierarchic thinking of identity, where the ‘of’ signifies a genitive that is both subjective and objective, a ‘speculative’ genitive we could perhaps say, where the equal right and value of opposites is acknowledged, and where each thing is allowed to be (seynlassen) in its power the same as the other is in its.32 In learning how imagination is a connecting middle for Schelling and Kant we learn how Schelling is a connecting middle between Kant and Heidegger.

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4 ANTINOMY AS DIALECTICAL IMAGINATION IN HEGEL’S CRITIQUE OF KANT

These Kantian antinomies will always remain an important part of the critical philosophy; they, more than anything else, brought about the downfall of previous metaphysics and can be regarded as a main transition into more recent philosophy.1 (G.W.F. Hegel)

Hegel’s ‘exaltation of Kantianism’ In a letter sent to Marcus Herz in May 1781 Kant writes that he would have done well to begin the exposition of his critique of reason with ‘what I have entitled the “Antinomy of Pure Reason”, which could have been done in colourful essays and would have given the reader a desire to get at the sources of this controversy’.2 For the reader of Hegel this raises the following two questions. How well would Hegel have done to begin his Science of Logic with an exposition of the Kantian antinomies? And does Kant’s Antinomy of Pure Reason point in the direction of what Hegel sees as the source of the ancient controversies that Kant deals with in the chapter on the antinomies in his Transcendental Dialectic? Hegel’s answer to the first of these two questions is given in the section of the Science of Logic entitled ‘With what must the science begin?’ The science must begin with the doctrine of being, he says. But he does touch briefly on the topic of Kant’s antinomies in the Introduction to that work. There it soon emerges that he agrees with Kant that one of the chief tasks of philosophy is to solve antinomies. The discussion of Kant’s antinomies did not appear in the Encyclopaedia until the edition of 1827 where it is part of a historical section on attitudes to objectivity. This is a section that could be regarded as a preface or introduction and is indeed so called by a commentator whose views on Hegel’s judgement of Kant’s Antinomy of Pure Reason the present chapter will use as a filter. In the Philosophical Propaedeutic the Kantian antinomies are dealt with summarily in an Appendix. In the Jena Sketch towards a System the Kantian antinomies are not mentioned. Nor are they in the Phenomenology 69

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of Spirit or in the Berlin Phenomenology. A few pages are devoted to an exposition and appraisal of them in the History of Philosophy, but the most detailed analyses occur in Notes or Remarks included in the chapters of the Science of Logic that treat of quantity and quantum. Kant errs, Hegel says, in thinking that there are only four cosmological antinomies. He also errs in his method of attempting to show this by using his table of categories as a guide. This method is contaminated by the dependence of that table of categories on the merely empiric findings of Aristotle, on which Kant bases the table of the forms of judgements which is his guide to the table of categories. Aristotle’s sceptical predecessors were already ahead of Kant in so far as they perceived that antinomies ‘appear in all objects of every kind, in all conceptions (Vorstellungen), notions (Begriffen) and Ideas (Ideen)’.3 Does this not mean that the answer to the second question posed above must be that Kant does not point in the direction of what Hegel considers to be the source of the antinomies that the ancient sceptics discerned? And is not the correctness of this answer confirmed by Hegel’s statement regarding the second antinomy that ‘infinitely more ingenious and profound than this Kantian antinomy are the dialectical examples of the ancient Eleatic school, especially those concerning motion, which likewise are based on the concept of quantity and in it find their solution’?4 This is hardly the ‘culminating point’ of ‘the exaltation of Kantianism’ that Martial Gueroult finds in the judgement Hegel makes about Kant’s Antinomy of Pure Reason in the Science of Logic.5 Do we not find rather that if any philosopher is exalted in Hegel’s discussion there of Kant’s antinomies it is Aristotle, whose solutions to the traditional paradoxes are applauded for being framed in terms of ‘genuinely speculative notions of space, time and motion’? Kant, on the other hand, is lumped along with Bayle who considers Aristotle’s solution ‘pathetic’ and who, Hegel says, fails to understand that matter can be infinitely divisible without being actually divided. Presumably Hegel does not mean anything more by this comparison of Kant with Bayle than that each is a kind of empiricist. They restrict theoretical reason to the phenomenal. As Hegel says, Kant believes the general structure of the world to be as it appears. It is this belief that prevents Kant from achieving the right solution of the antinomies, the solution hinted at by Aristotle. Hegel also says that in the course of his arguments for the thesis and antithesis of the second antinomy Kant makes certain dogmatic assumptions. The thesis of the second antinomy is: ‘Every composite substance in the world is made up of simple parts, and nothing anywhere exists save the simple or what is composed of the simple.’ Kant’s proof of this is that if we suppose the opposite we are faced with a dilemma. Either we can think away all composition or we cannot. If we can, we shall have thought away everything and therefore all substance, since ex hypothesi there are no simples. If we cannot think away all composition, we shall still have thought 70

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away substance, since it must be possible to think away any compositeness from substances, compositeness with them being an accidental property. The antithesis of the second antinomy states the contrary of the thesis – or rather implies it, for the antithesis speaks of things whereas the thesis speaks of substances. The antithesis is proved indirectly again by the argument that if the first half of the thesis is supposed to be true, that is, if we suppose that every composite substance in the world is made up of simple parts, it will follow that the simple is a composite of substances, which is absurd. This will follow because any composition of substances must be in space, but because every part of space is a space, hence not simple, every part of the composite in it must occupy a space. This holds for the supposed simple parts. And the supposition is that these parts are real. However the real which is in space must be substantial, for externally related accidents cannot exist except as accidents of substance. Therefore the supposition entails that the simple is a composite of substance. Because this is absurd we must deny the supposition from which it follows and affirm instead the antithesis. Hegel protests that in the proof of this antithesis Kant ought not to have put substances in space. Before considering why Hegel thinks this, let us pause to ask if the proof of the antithesis does put substance in space. Two arguments could be advanced for the view that it does. First, it could be pointed out that in taking the view that the proof of the antithesis does not put substance in space we should be treating this proof as symmetrical with the proof of the thesis that does not put substance in space. The thesis, admittedly, may well be about the phenomenal world in space and time, but what it concludes about it is that in reality it is not in space and time, that the reality on which the phenomenal is founded is, as Leibniz maintained, noumenal simples. Second, the sentence in which the antithesis is formulated does not contain the word ‘substance’, and the negation of the first part of the antithesis whose reductio Kant claims to produce is worded in such a way as to leave it open for the proponent of the antithesis to avoid committing himself to there being substances at all, whether simple or compound. The proof begins: ‘Assume that a composite thing (as substance (als Substanz)) is made up of simple parts.’ The antithesis is about things in general. It is only the propounder of the thesis who will say that among these things there are substances. The argument of the antithesis is about alleged substances, socalled substance. The word is written between invisible scare-quotes. The concept of substance, or at least the old concept, is suspended. Why, it may be asked, does Kant handle this concept so gingerly? Has he not demonstrated our right to, and need of, this concept in our cognitive claims about the spatio-temporal world? He certainly believes that he has. But the proofs of the theses and antitheses of the Antinomies of Pure Reason are supposed to be independent of the conclusions of the Transcendental 71

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Aesthetic and the Transcendental Analytic. And the advocate of the antithesis of the second antinomy must not be identified with Kant, any more than may the advocate of the thesis. If the advocate of the antithesis has to be given a name, it will be the name of someone like Heraclitus or Hume or Bergson, thinkers who think there are only accidents. Naturally, the old force of the word ‘accident’ will also have been sapped along with that of its partner. And it cannot be denied that once we entertain the possibility that the advocate of the antithesis is not only rejecting simples but rejecting or revising the concept of substance, we have to allow that he is rejecting or revising the concept of reality, for his argument includes the following sequence: Now since everything real, which occupies a space, contains in itself a manifold of constituents external to one another; and since a real composite is not made up of accidents (for accidents could not exist outside one another, in the absence of substance) but of substances, it follows that the simple would be a composite of substance – which is self-contradictory. (B464) So the anti-substantialist reading of the proof of the antithesis would also be anti-realist, that is, subjective idealist, as we should expect if a position is being defended that is in opposition to the position occupied by the thesis, and we take this latter to be an assertion of substantial realism. This anti-substantialist reading of the antithesis would reinforce that part of Gueroult’s criticism of Hegel’s criticism of Kant, which argues that in the case advanced for the thesis the sensible (continuity and parts of space) is intellectualized (by composition and the concept of substance) and that in the case advanced for the antithesis the intellectual is sensibilized. ‘The proof of the thesis consists in stating the consequences of an intellectualization of the phenomena; that of the antithesis states the consequences of a sensualization of the thing in itself.’6 Another result of accepting the antisubstantialist reading of the antithesis would be to increase the number of objections Kant could make to Hegel’s conclusion that in the proof of the antithesis ‘the substances ought not to have been put in space’.7 This conclusion is beside the point if the propounder of the antithesis is denying that there are substances. If we are reluctant to say that the propounder of the antithesis is an antisubstantialist we can still allow Kant to object to the argument by which Hegel reaches the conclusion that, in the proof of the antithesis, substances ought not to have been put in space. Hegel’s argument is as follows: once composition is assumed as an external relation, then spatiality itself (in which alone composition is supposed to be possible) is for 72

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that very reason an external relation for the substances, which does not concern them or affect their nature any more than anything else does that can be inferred from the determination of spatiality. For this very reason, the substances ought not to have been put in space.8 This argument misrepresents Kant’s proof of the antithesis. In that proof the domain of the spatial includes the domain of external relatedness, and the domain of external relatedness includes that of compositeness. In other words, compositeness entails externality and externality entails spatiality. But this leaves open the possibility that, even if Kant makes the domain of externality coterminous with that of spatiality, part of the domain of spatiality is outside the domain of the composite, not coterminous with it as Hegel has Kant say it is. To express the difference in terms of Venn diagrams, Hegel supposes Kant to draw only one circle standing for the domain of the spatial, the external, and the composite, while Kant’s text calls for at least two circles, an outer one standing for the spatial and the external, and an inner one standing for the composite. Hence at the stage of the proof where Kant sets out these implications it cannot be assumed that the only substances are composite ones, and from these implications alone it cannot be ruled out that there are non-composite substances that have spatiality as a property. Furthermore, Hegel’s reference to the nature or essence of substances suggests that he may be equating externality with the accidentality that is opposed to essentiality. It is not evident that Kant means anything more by externality than spatiality, what the Critical doctrine calls outer sense; and it seems that compositeness of substances is not assumed at this early stage of the proof to be the only respect in which substance is spatial. At a later stage of the proof, as we have seen, he denies that a real composite is made up of accidents, but the non-accidentality of a real composite is entailed by its reality, not by its compositeness.

Quantity and discreteness The most revealing charge that Hegel makes against Kant’s arguments in the second antinomy is that Kant is partial in opposite ways in his argument for the thesis and in his argument for the antithesis. Hegel puts his point by saying that both thesis and antithesis are really not about space, time, substance or matter, but about quantity – and this goes for the thesis and antithesis of the first antinomy too, notwithstanding that they are cast in terms of the limitedness or otherwise of the world in space and time, and that Kant’s exposition and exposure of the antinomies would be more likely to attain his objective of giving the reader a desire to get at the source of the controversies if cast in the same terms as the well-known controversies handed down by the Eleatic philosophers to Aristotle, Leibniz, Clarke and Bayle. Hegel would say that these earlier versions too were really about quantity in general. 73

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Of Kant’s second antinomy Hegel says that the proof of the thesis considers one moment of quantity, namely discreteness, whose principle is the one, in isolation from the other moment of quantity, namely continuity, whose principle is the many, whereas the antithesis does the converse. Kant, Hegel says, trades on the difference between discreteness and continuity. In the proof of the thesis he forgets about the moment of continuity of space, time and substance, remembering only the moment of discreteness. In the proof of the antithesis he does the opposite. So both proofs commit the fallacy of four terms. There is therefore no compulsion to proceed as Kant does to the dualistic solution that links empirical realism with transcendental idealism. The correct solution lies in recognizing that: the moment of the atom is contained in continuity itself, for this is simply the possibility of division; just as said dividedness, discreteness, sublates all distinction of the ones – for each of the simple ones is what the other is – consequently, also contains their sameness and hence their continuity. Since each of the two opposed sides contains its other within itself and neither can be thought without the other, it follows that neither of these determinations, taken alone, has truth; this belongs only to their unity. This is the true dialectical consideration of them and also the true result.9 In this passage Hegel is negotiating the barrier that Kant placed across the road between transcendental idealism and objective idealism when he asserted that space and time have parts that fall within them, not instances, whereas concepts have instances that fall under them, not parts.10 For the crossing over between the thesis and the antithesis of the second antinomy is a crossing over between an argument revolving about a concept – the concept of substance – and an argument revolving about spatio-temporal intuition. The scheming by which in this exchange Hegel cunningly endeavours to accredit a laissez-passer is a speculation upon the tour de passe-passe that Kant calls schematizing. It is at this crux that Hegel must decide how moved he is to be by his earlier judgement that the productive imagination is for Kant the hidden root of conception and sensibility. Is he to remain as moved by this as Heidegger will be? Is he to stand firm at the position he occupied in the Difference essay and in Faith and Knowledge? Or is sensuous intuition to be seen henceforth in a yet more subordinate role, and the ghost of sensuous intuition to be withdrawn from the scene in the last act when the order of priority of art and religion, on the one hand, and philosophy, on the other, is reversed, so that it can no longer be said that philosophy has to stop short of religion and art?11 Is the productive confusion of the transcendental imagination with the transcendental unity of apperception on which Hegel’s thinking turns at this time, as does Schelling’s and (on some interpretations) Kant’s, productive enough to 74

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explain the plasticity of reason? We know that, despite their time-generative Bewegung, the schemata, the sensible but not empirical concepts of the Transcendental Analytic (B154),12 even when they have become distilled into Hegel’s intellectual intuition cum intuitive understanding,13 are found inadequate to the task of accounting for the motivation of spirit and history. Construction must be supplemented or replaced by negation. So instead of pursuing further the guiding thread of Kant’s Schematism of the Pure Concepts of the Understanding and the extension the constructivist theory there sketched undergoes in the third Critique and in Schelling’s philosophy of constructive identity, Hegel picks up the thread of the Antinomy of Pure Reason. Both threads, it will be noted, connect with what could be called the problem of judgement understood as the problem of the relation of predicates to the spatio-temporal particulars. And although Hegel believes that we are taken nearer to a solution by following the clue of the Antinomy of Pure Reason, what Kant says there is also found wanting. It is found wanting because it makes certain dogmatic assumptions. Some of these alleged assumptions we have already considered. We shall now consider what precisely Hegel means when he describes them as dogmatic. This can be explained effectively in conjunction with a brief explanation why Hegel directs the charge of dogmatism also at Fichte and Schelling. Thanks to the constructive schema, Schelling says: the particular becomes absolute form by the universal becoming one with it, and the universal becomes absolute existence by the particular becoming one with it. But these two unities, as in the Absolute, are not outside one another, but in one another, and therefore the Absolute is absolute indifference of form and existence.14 The Absolute is the indifference point where the particular and the universal, finite and infinite, object and subject, percept and concept ‘are both the equal roots of the Absolute’. Hegel complains that this Ein-bildung or In-Eins-Bildung, as he calls it, this Einbildungskraft, this power of the imagination to construe two chiasmically as one, is merely asserted. And Schelling’s subjective and objective powers, Potenzen, are impotent. The difference in the measure of subjective and objective power that is supposed to give rise to individual entities is merely quantitative. It is therefore not true difference. It is only an external relation. Since Schelling’s theory results from combining Adam Eschenmeyer’s concept of mathematical Potenz with an elaboration of Kant’s doctrine of schematic construction, it is not difficult to understand why Hegel should think that it continues to be no less immersed in the sensuous than is the philosophy of the Critique of Judgement and why he should write that Schelling ‘advanced only as far as the organism, and did not reach the presentation of the other side of knowledge, that is, the philosophy of spirit’.15 Schelling’s philosophy and 75

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Kant’s are one-sided. That is to say, they are dogmatic. Thus, although according to Schelling art is intellectual intuition become objective, this sensuous objectivity falls short of the objectivity of the Notion that is comprehended necessity.16 True, Schelling asserts of ‘the absolute point of identity of philosophy’ that ‘it is not equal to any particular Potenz, and yet it comprehends all of them’17 But this comprehension is an engulfment in ‘the One, and just this unique One’ of an identity which is indifferent to difference. Schelling envisages a synthesis of the subjective and objective, but the former vanishes into the latter and he does not carry the passport of Aufhebung that saves the former from vanishing without trace.

Dogmatism A philosopher is dogmatic in Kant’s sense if he fails to investigate the scope and limits of reason, that is, if he is not only uncritical but un-Critical (Bxxv). Yet Kant’s own Critical philosophy is dogmatic in Fichte’s sense of the term. The thing, which must be determined independently of our freedom and to which our knowledge must conform, and the intelligence, which must know, are in experience inseparably connected. The philosopher can leave one of the two out of consideration and he has then abstracted from experience and raised himself above it. If he leaves out the former, he retains an intelligence in itself, that is, abstracted from its relation to experience, as a basis for explaining experience; if he leaves out the latter, he retains a thing-in-itself, that is, abstracted from the fact that it occurs in experience, as a similar basis of explanation. The first method of proceeding is called idealism, the second dogmatism.18 Dogmatism in Fichte’s sense then is one-sidedness in favour of transcendental realism or, more generally, in favour of the object. In Hegel’s sense of the term any one-sidedness is dogmatic, including Fichte’s idealism with its partiality toward the subject, as well as Schelling’s with its underdeveloped comprehension of the subject, and Kant’s because it ‘does not let itself be brought beyond the empirical element to thought’.19 The source of this onesidedness is the supposition that one of a pair of opposed judgements must be rigidly true, if it is true, and the other rigidly false.20 The conjunctive disjunctivism of reason to which Hegel believes this exclusive disjunctivism of the understanding must yield is anticipated only verbally and superficially in Fichte’s statement that in our experience the thing and intelligence are inseparably connected. That is a statement about the understanding, and although Fichte posits an object over against the subject, he holds that the object is a posit by the subject. Hence, as Hegel expresses it in the Difference 76

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essay, the subject-object remains a subjective subject-object.21 Hegel applauds Fichte’s resolution to improve the Critical system by adding to it a thoroughgoing deduction of the categories and by subtracting from it the doctrine of the thing-in-itself. He fails, in Hegel’s estimation, because his way of seeking to make these repairs in Kant’s system commits him to the no less defective idea of a vicious infinite progress, the melancholy spectacle of a spurious progress to infinity that is ‘only the perpetual repetition of the same content, one and the same tedious alternation of this finite and infinite’,22 the idea of the Idea to which Kant believes he himself is committed by his own solution of the antinomies treated in the three Critiques. The ‘is’ of Kant’s thing-in-itself is superseded in Fichte’s philosophy by the ‘ought’ of the Kantian Idea. Thereby one absurdity is superseded by another. The infinite striving of the ego needs the non-ego to make this practical striving possible, yet this striving, which is, as Sartre too will say, the freedom that comprises the ego and not merely a property of a substantive self, makes sense only if the opposition which is its condition can be overcome. Sartre accepts this absurdity as part of the human condition that absorbs it through the stratagems of bad faith. Sartre’s philosophy swallows hard, making believe it can stomach such ontological tragedy. It is otherwise with the romantic rationalisms of Kant, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel. But Hegel objects that the antidote to tragedy that Kant and Fichte prescribe is no more than a blind faith that the opposition of Sein and Sollen will be overcome. They do not realize, he says, that it is implicitly already overcome, as is made explicit in the absolute speculative Idea in which theoretical and practical knowing are seen to be one with each other, with life, and with that which is known. The content of the speculative Idea is none other than the system of categorial notions set out in the Science of Logic, that is, the Notion writ large. Its form is the method. This, Hegel says, with his finger pointing at the practice of treating methodology as if it were a mere appendix to science, is the necessary dialectical movement of the Notion itself by which we achieve a retrospective grasp of its self-development. Comprehended in that retrospect is the knowledge that what Kant calls the Ding an sich is superseded by what Hegel calls the Sache selbst. The latter is quite literally the subject matter, but an objective subject matter, not the one-sided subjective subject-matter of Fichte’s philosophy. With this knowledge it is no longer possible to fix a gulf between reason and the world as Kant does in order to solve the antinomies. It is no longer possible to locate the source of these antinomies in reason and its misuse as opposed to in the world. If there is contradiction it will be in the world as much as in reason, for reason and the world are ultimately and originally not opposed. By the same token, however, contradiction will be as much in reason as in the world. This is why in the Encyclopaedia Logic, immediately after 77

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making this observation that Kant’s solution of the antinomies restricts contradiction to reason, Hegel is bound to say that Kant here touches on the fact (Hier kommt es zur Sprache) that the contradiction is induced by the subject matter (Inhalt), namely by the categories. However much Kant may regret that we become embrangled in contradiction, when he says our susceptibility to dialectical illusion is transcendental and endemic to our reason he confers on dialectic a dignity it was denied by the Eleatic dialecticians and even, Hegel implies, by Plato,23 because their dialectic is external and purely negative, arising out of a subjective mania to reduce to nought what is ordinarily accepted without question. This may or may not be an underestimation of the Eleatics and of Plato. Anyway, Hegel is more generous to Plato elsewhere, for example in certain pages of the Lectures on the History of Philosophy,24 though this generosity seems to be based on a misreading of Sophist 259b.25 But Hegel’s estimate of Kant here is fulsome enough to merit Gueroult’s word ‘exaltation’. However, it is an exaltation of Kant’s insight regarding what he entitles the seat of transcendental illusion. It is not an exaltation of the particular arguments Kant uses as proofs of the theses and antitheses of the antinomies; Hegel considers these scarcely worth considering, though he considers them at some length. Nor is it an exaltation of the general strategy that Kant has in view in setting out the antinomies, or of Kant’s solution. Hegel judges Kant’s strategy and solution to be misconceived, as is plain from what has been said earlier in this chapter. Now Gueroult believes that Hegel’s criticism of Kant’s solution does Kant an injustice. He also believes that Hegel’s praises of Kant are misplaced and that if he had been less predisposed to see Kant’s theory of dialectic as an anticipation of his own he might have perceived the injustice of his criticism of Kant’s solution. Gueroult believes this because he believes Hegel to be mistaken in thinking that Kant holds dialectic to be internal to reason. Hegel is mistaken because although in the proofs of the thesis and antithesis of the second antinomy unschematized reason goes through a form of marriage with reality, in Kant’s view this union is purely formal and unconsummated. When transcendental idealism is substituted for transcendental realism the partners go their separate ways. There was only a mirage of marriage within each proof. And because there was no matrimony there, there can be no antinomy between the thesis and the antithesis: no dialectic of contradiction, either external or internal. Hegel’s mistake, Gueroult argues, is evident in the following passage of the Encyclopaedia Logic: Probably nobody will feel disposed to deny that the phenomenal world presents contradictions to the observing mind; meaning by ‘phenomenal’ the world as it presents itself to the senses and understanding, to the subjective mind. But if a comparison is instituted between the essence of the world and the essence of the mind, it does seem strange to hear how calmly and confidently the modest 78

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dogma has been advanced by one, and repeated by others, that it is not in the essence of the world, but in the essence of thinking to be intrinsically contradictory. It is no escape to turn round and explain that reason falls into contradiction only by applying the categories. For this application of the categories is maintained to be necessary, and reason is not supposed to be equipped with any other forms but the categories for the purpose of cognition. But cognition is determining and determinate thinking: so that, if reason be mere empty indeterminate thinking, it thinks nothing. And if in the end reason be reduced to mere identity without diversity…it will in the end also win happy release from contradiction at the slight sacrifice of all its content and value.26 How would Hegel have us understand the imagined explanation that he formulates here in the words: ‘reason falls into contradiction only by applying the categories’? As Gueroult rightly implies, if this is meant to be a report of an explanation given by Kant, it would be more accurately reported by saying that reason falls into contradiction only by misapplying the categories. For Kant’s position is that where reason is taken narrowly, that is, as but one faculty of reason taken broadly, another faculty being understanding, the categories are available to it only as unschematized. When it is supposed that the categories employed independently of schemata can be constitutive of theoretical knowledge, the path of thought becomes blocked by dialectical contradiction. From this Gueroult infers that Kant’s teaching is that ‘contradiction has its seat neither in the world, nor inside reason, but in the relation established between the two as a consequence of applying the latter to the former’.27 This is indeed Kant’s teaching. But, as we have seen, Kant himself refers to reason as the seat of transcendental illusion. One of his titles near the beginning of the Transcendental Dialectic runs: ‘Pure Reason as the Seat of Transcendental Illusion’ (B355), and what he says under that title puts it beyond all doubt that this title describes a view held by the author. So there are two responses that Hegel could offer to Gueroult’s contention that he is wrong in asserting that out of tenderness for the world Kant makes contradiction interior to reason. He could agree with Gueroult that dialectical contradiction is not interior to reason in Kant’s narrower sense of reason and agree that the contradiction arises from reason in this narrow sense and the understanding with which it is contrasted. This response is compatible with the title, Critique of Pure Reason, and entails the dialectical contradiction’s being internal to reason in the wide sense in which it is employed in that title. However, Hegel might think more could be achieved by responding otherwise to the charge that he is mistaken in attributing to Kant the view that dialectical contradiction has its seat in reason. He might simply point to the title given at B355 and reproduced at the beginning of 79

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this paragraph, noting that ‘reason’ is there used narrowly. Kant plainly distinguishes understanding as the faculty of rules (Regeln) whose synthetic a priori principles, as Kemp Smith calls them, are what Kant calls Grundsätze, from reason, which is the faculty of inference whose principles, as Kemp Smith calls them, are Prinzipien. These Prinzipien, for example the principle that everything has an absolutely sufficient reason, require that for any rule reached by understanding we reach out to an absolutely unconditioned condition. The use of reason is ‘formal’ or ‘logical’ when it is the maxim of an inferential procedure obliging us to seek higher premisses from which to deduce the major premiss of any given syllogism. The use of reason is ‘pure’, ‘real’ or ‘transcendental’ when it presumes to affirm that the absolutely unconditioned condition exists. Note that this is a distinction between two employments of pure reason. Subsection C, beginning at B362, is about a pure, as opposed to a merely logical, employment of the pure reason mentioned in the title of the section beginning at B355. We have already observed that in that section the word ‘reason’ is given a narrow sense relative to the broad sense Kant gives the word in the title of his first Critique. To be more precise, Kant may sometimes have the narrow sense in view when he mentions that title, but the pure reason there referred to usually covers pure understanding and often pure sensibility as well. If the reason referred to in the title is taken narrowly, then critique would have to be taken narrowly and negatively as criticism of the dogmatic misuse of pure reason. But no equivalent narrow sense of critique seems to be appropriate in the titles of the second and third Critiques. That in the section on Pure Reason as the Seat of Transcendental Illusion pure reason is not intended ‘promiscuously’, as Kemp Smith puts it,28 but in the sense of ‘isolated reason’, as Kant puts in the note at Bxix, is patent. For instance, in the first paragraph occurs the phrase ‘Reason, like understanding’, and of the former it is asserted that ‘it contains within itself the source of certain concepts and principles, which it does not borrow either from the senses or from the understanding’. The same opposition of pure reason and pure understanding is manifest in B359, B363 and B364–5. Now according to Gueroult it is on account of the opposition just referred to that Kant holds antinomy to arise. He therefore insists that Hegel is distorting what Kant says in attributing to him the view that antinomy or contradiction is internal to reason. We could still say on Hegel’s behalf that on Kant’s view antinomy or contradiction would be internal to reason in the indiscriminate sense. Hegel might not thank us for saying this. He would see in the first Critique a closer approximation to his own doctrine of reason if Kant could be found subscribing to the view that antinomy and contradiction are internal to reason in the narrow sense. He would prefer that we press the claim that it is reason in this sense that Kant entitles the seat of transcendental illusion. But it must now be said on Gueroult’s behalf that a claim about the seat of transcendental illusion is not in itself a claim about 80

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the seat of antinomy. One may easily be led to think that it is because Kant sometimes calls the illusion dialectical and it would be natural to take this to imply that the illusion has to do with a conflict between two points of view. This is to misconstrue what Kant means by dialectical illusion. For him dialectical illusion is an invalidity of inference where a logical requirement of reason is treated as an ontological requirement, a subreption where a canon of reason is purloined and misemployed as an organon of reason, a formal idea being misrepresented as material (B85, B88). Now this dialectical illusion is operative not only in Rational Cosmology where antinomies do arise, but in Rational Psychology and Rational Theology where, Kant says, they do not (B701). Furthermore, the antinomies that arise in Rational Cosmology are, Kant says, ‘no real self-contradiction of reason’ (B768). ‘There is, properly speaking, no polemic in the field of pure reason’ (B784). These words may seem to settle once and for all that Gueroult is justified in holding that Hegel exaggerates the extent to which Kant’s antinomies anticipate his own doctrine that contradiction is internal to the Notion. In fact Kant’s words say something with which Hegel would agree. For by ‘contradiction’ here Kant means contradiction according to the logic of the understanding, and denying such contradiction in the field of pure reason, where reason is contrasted with the understanding, is compatible with there being a different, speculative, kind of contradiction that motivates the Notion. Of course this is not as positive an anticipation as Hegel believes he sees. The nearest Kant comes to a positive doctrine of unrest that motivates reason is his insistence that even when criticism has supplanted dogmatism and the sceptical ‘euthanasia of reason’, with the result that we recognize that dialectical illusion is intrinsic to human reason, momentary aberrations will repeatedly continue to occur (B355, B450). A momentary aberration in Kant’s reasoning calls for consideration here, before we conclude our discussion of the relationship between Hegelian dialectic and Kantian antinomy.

Analytical and dialectical opposites In his solution of the mathematical antinomies in B530–5 of the Critique of Pure Reason Kant makes a distinction between two ways in which propositions may be opposed. He calls 1

The world is infinite in extension

2

The world is not infinite

and

analytical opposites or simple contradictories. Of a pair of analytical opposites one and only one member must be true. He calls (1) and 3

The world is finite (non-infinite) 81

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dialectical opposites. Of a pair of dialectically opposed propositions both may be false. This, Kant asserts, is the case with the thesis and antithesis of the mathematical antinomies. The solution of these antinomies therefore consists in noting that dialectical opposites have been mistaken for analytical opposites. Why is it that although Kant calls (1) and (2) contradictories he nowhere refers to (1) and (3) as simple contraries, but prefers to introduce the new name ‘dialectical opposites’? One reason for preferring this title is that it harks back to the illusion that Kant diagnoses as the cause of our wrongly taking a pair of dialectically opposed propositions for a pair of analytical opposites. He usually calls this kind of illusion transcendental, but he also describes it as dialectical (e.g. B426, B544, B609, B697, B820). Further, if Kant had spoken of (1) and (3) as contraries only he would have been leaving unmarked a difference between the way they admit of a third alternative and the way in which a third alternative is admitted by the pair 4

All post office boxes are red

5

No post office boxes are red

and

and by the pair 6

This post office box is red

7

This post office box is yellow.

and

The (4)–(5) pair admits the possibility that only some post office boxes are red. The (6)–(7) pair admits the possibility that the box in question is some colour other than red or yellow. Both of these pairs presuppose that a post office box is coloured and there is nothing false or selfcontradictory in the supposition that post office boxes are coloured. In the case of (1) and (3), on the other hand, it is presupposed that the world has a determinate magnitude; and this, according to the doctrine of the Critique, is false. As the Critique also puts the point, ‘It is…false that the world (the sum of all appearances) is a whole existing in itself’ (B535). Unlike (4) and (5), (6) and (7) could both be true as they stand and so are not contraries in the sense in which this label is used of propositions in the square of opposition. Post office boxes might be two-toned. The logical status of the (6)–(7) pair is in this respect similar to that of the pair with which in the Critique Kant introduces his distinction between dialectical and analytical opposites, namely, 82

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8

All bodies have a good smell

9

All bodies have a bad smell.

and

For all bodies might smell good to some people but bad to others. But what Kant wants to make use of is the fact that both (8) and (9) presuppose that all bodies have a smell. Since this may be false, ‘both the conflicting (widerstreitenden) propositions may therefore be false’. It is by analogy with (8) and (9) that he argues that (1) and (3) might both be false since they presuppose something false, namely, that the world has a determinate magnitude. When we turn to the Prolegomena (§ 52b–§ 53) we find a very different analogy used to bring out the manner in which (1) and (3) are opposed. There (1) and (3) are likened to 10 A four-cornered circle is round and 11 A four-cornered circle is not round. Whereas (1) and (3) may both be false because they each presuppose something that may be empirically false, (10) and (11) may both be false according to the Prolegomena because they each presuppose a concept that is self-contradictory. ‘For as concerns the first it is false that the said circle is round, because it is four-cornered; but it is also false that it is not round, i.e. has corners, because it is a circle. For the logical mark of the impossibility of a concept consists precisely in this, that when it is presupposed two contradictory propositions are both false…’ Analogously, (1) and (3) are now said to be both false because ‘the concept of a world of the senses existing for itself is contradictory within itself’. So in the Prolegomena (1) and (3) are described as contradictories, though we should expect Kant to say that they are contraries or, on the basis of the solution of the mathematical antinomies given in the Critique, that they are dialectical opposites. Each of (1), (3), (10) and (11) is a self-contradictory proposition, but it is odd to speak of the (1)–(3) pair and the (10)–(11) pair as pairs of contradictories. Kant states that in this special case we have contradictories both of which may be false: ‘Of two contradictory propositions both cannot be false, unless the concept that lies at the ground of both of them is selfcontradictory.’ But he could by parity of reasoning have concluded that both of the propositions are true, tautologically true, as follows: ‘ “A fourcornered circle is round” and “A four-cornered circle is not round” are both true. For as concerns the first it is true that the said circle is round, because it is a circle; but it is also true that it is not round, i.e. has corners, because it is four-cornered.’

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Examination of the solution of the mathematical antinomies as it is expounded in these passages shows then that Kant was unsure what analogy to choose in order to illustrate the kind of opposition in which (1) and (3) stand. In the Critique he holds that the (1)–(3) pair is like the (8)–(9) pair and that both are pairs of dialectical opposites. The pair (1)–(3) is contrasted with the pair (8) and 12 All bodies are not good-smelling and with the pair (1)–(2). (8)–(12) and (1)–(2) are pairs of analytical opposites. In terms of the analogy employed in the Prolegomena, however, no pair of analytical opposites can be framed to serve as a contrast for (1)– (3). Although Kant calls (10) and (11) contradictories we have seen that they are not simple contradictories or analytical opposites. The explanation for Kant’s shift from one kind of example to another as an illustration of the sort of opposition in which (1) and (3) stand would seem to be that he was ambivalent on two issues of interpretation. First, in the Critique he inclines to treat ‘The world has a determinate magnitude’ as empirically false, while in the Prolegomena he thinks of it as selfcontradictory. Second, in the Critique the ‘inadmissible (unstatthafte) condition’ is regarded as part of what is stated, while in the Prolegomena it is interpreted as something that is presupposed but not stated. Thus in the Critique he writes of (1) and (3) that ‘the one…says some thing more than is required for a simple contradiction’ (B532; emphasis added). In other words he analyses (1) in the Russellian way as ‘The world has a determinate magnitude and the world is infinite’ and (3) as ‘The world has a determinate magnitude and the world is finite.’ Both of these say that the world is determinate in magnitude. On the other hand, (2) does not state the first conjunct and contradicts (1) by asserting only the contradictory of the second conjunct of (1); and it is compatible with and might be short for the syntactical statement ‘The world is neither infinite nor finite’. In the Prolegomena Kant considers ‘The world has a determinate magnitude’ not as a part of what is stated by any of the opposites but as the selfcontradictory answer to a prior question. By analogy with (10) and (11) he reads the subject of (1) as ‘The determinate magnitude of the world’ and, since this refers to a concept through which ‘nothing whatever can be thought’, a proposition with the same subject can be a dialectical but not an analytical opposite of (1). Not surprisingly, a penchant for this pattern of analysis is detectable in both editions of the Critique itself; e.g.: If our question is directed simply to a yes or no, we are well advised to leave aside the supposed grounds of the answer, and first consider what we should gain according as the answer is in the affirmative or in the negative. Should we then find that in both cases the 84

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outcome is mere nonsense, there will be good reason for instituting a critical examination of our question, to determine whether the question does not itself rest on a groundless presupposition. (B513; emphasis added) A few pages earlier a question that rests on such a groundless presupposition is said to be ‘null and void’ – ‘nothing’. To remain consistent with these remarks about questions that do not arise Kant should have contented himself with saying that their yes and no answers ‘both fall to the ground’ (B531). Instead of which, misled by the false scent of the body odour analogy, he classifies them as both false.

Transcendental illusion Although, as has been demonstrated, Kant maintains that, in a profound sense of the word ‘false’, dialectical false consciousness is inherent in reason considered narrowly; he thereby leaves unexplained why and how reason should be induced to abuse a merely subjective logical maxim by treating it as though it were valid of something objective and real. Such an explanation would have been forthcoming if he had pursued the implications of the analogy he draws between transcendental illusion and illusions of sense. In connection with the latter he writes: Sensibility, when subordinated to understanding, as the object upon which the latter exercises its function, is the source of real modes of knowledge. But the same sensibility, in so far as it influences the operation of understanding, and determines it to make judgements, is the ground of error. (B351) If transcendental illusion had been attributed to reason in the inclusive interpretation of ‘reason’, that kind of illusion could have been accounted for as a result of the influence on reason of the sensibility, the understanding or the imagination, whose schemata, because of their equivocal nature as intermediaries, are liable not only to be mistaken for images but to have what Kant calls the logical schemata of reason mistaken for them (B432, B693, B698, B702, B710). Instead, that ‘isolated’ reason, ‘in itself (an sich) dialectical’ (B805), is presented as a brute fact, no attempt being made to show its necessity and thereby to provide a basis sufficient to justify Gueroult’s reference to Hegel’s exaltation of Kant in the sense he appears to intend. We have already observed that this brute fact about the seat of dialectical illusion should not be directly equated with a fact about the seat of dialectical contradiction. If Hegel does not make this equation, he at least omits to make the distinction when he writes of Kant that: 85

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the general idea on which he based his expositions and which he vindicated, is the objectivity of the illusion and the necessity of the contradiction which belongs to the nature of thought determinations…their nature is precisely what they are in reason and with reference to what is intrinsic or in itself.29 The distinction has to be made because while Kant does not invoke the understanding or sensibility to explain dialectical illusion, he must do so to explain dialectical contradiction: the antinomies arise because we confuse the spatio-temporal world with reality-in-itself. And, to repeat, there can be dialectical illusion, according to Kant, without dialectical contradiction and antinomy. Nevertheless, if there cannot be dialectical contradiction without dialectical illusion, and the seat of the latter is pure reason interpreted strictly, reason thus interpreted could fairly be described as the seat of the former too by someone who thought reason to be more fundamental and real than the concepts of understanding. Hegel does think this. On different grounds so too does Kant, and that thought may be in his mind when he adverts to ‘a certain antinomy of reason which, inasmuch as it is founded on the very nature of reason (eine gewisse Antinomie der Vernunft, die, da sie auf ihrer Natur beruht)’ (B772). In any case, when judging the assessments Hegel makes of the contributions made by his forerunners to the history of philosophy, his reader must have in mind Hegel’s own contribution to the philosophical understanding of what it is to have something in mind. In the Lectures on the History of Philosophy, referring to Kant’s assertion that the antinomies are unavoidable, Hegel writes that ‘The most important point involved in this assertion of Kant’s is, however, contrary to his intention (gegen seine Intention).’30 Did Kant have at the back of his mind the more important point involved in this assertion even though it was contrary to his explicit intention? Again in Faith and Knowledge a similar remark is made in relation to Kant’s assertion that whereas the solution of the mathematical antinomies has the purely negative corollary that reason is powerless to decide in favour of the thesis or the antithesis, the solution of the dynamic antinomies, because their topic is existents, but not uniquely existents in space and time, permits affirmation of the absolute separation of the intelligible and sensible worlds. This affirmation of their absolute separation has the virtue, Hegel says, of being a move in the direction of an affirmation of their absolute identity. ‘But’, he then adds, ‘this was not what Kant intended when he separated them so sharply…What is positive in these antinomies, their middle, is not recognized.’31 Does the doctrine of the identity of contradictory opposites, which Hegel seems to have been wrong to attribute to the author of the Sophist, imply that an author who meant (voulait dire?) what he said also meant the opposite of what he said, its Gegenteil, what was gegen seine Intention? 86

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It is by no means unusual to find in Hegel ‘exaltations’ of authors deemed to have had his own insights without fully realizing they were having them.32 In this chapter we have been concerned with Hegel’s statement that the insight that enables Kant ‘to unfold from its deeply concealed sources in human reason’ (B366) the Antinomy of Pure Reason, namely: the objectivity of the illusion and the necessity of the contradiction which belongs to the nature of the determinations of thought…grasped in its positive aspect, is nothing else but the inner negativity of the determinations as their self moving soul, the principle of all natural and spiritual life.33 That Hegel should state this will not surprise anyone who recalls this other statement, in the Phenomenology of Spirit (a work that, if it is an exposition of the science of the experience of consciousness, is also an exposition of the science of the experience of the unconscious): ‘We learn by experience that we meant something other than we meant to mean; and that this correction of our meaning compels our knowing to go back to the statement, and understand it in some other way.’34 But the last word of this chapter may be left to the author of the Critique of Pure Reason: it is by no means unusual, upon comparing the thoughts which an author has expressed in regard to his subject, whether in ordinary conversation or writing, to find that we understand him better than he has understood himself. As he has not sufficiently determined his concept, he has sometimes spoken, or even thought, in opposition to his own intention. (B370)

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This impotence of nature sets limits to philosophy, and it is quite improper to expect the Concept to comprehend these contingent products of nature – and, as it is put, construct…them…Nature everywhere blurs the essential limits of species and genera by intermediate and defective forms, which continually furnish counter examples to every fixed distinction; this even occurs within a specific genus, that of man, for example, where monstrous births, on the one hand, must be considered as belonging to the genus, while on the other hand, they lack certain essential determinations characteristic of the genus. In order to be able to consider such forms as defective, imperfect and deformed, one must presuppose a fixed, invariable type. This type, however, cannot be furnished by experience, for it is experience which also presents these so-called monstrosities.1 (G.W.F. Hegel)

Science of logic/science of signature On the first page of Glas, Derrida writes in the left column that ‘This’ is a legend, not a fable. ‘This’ could be that or this pronoun. It could be Hegel’s signature, Sa signature referred to a few lines earlier, Hegel’s corpus, also referred to earlier on that page, what Derrida is in the course of writing, and much else. Not Hegel’s whole corpus, however, but two passages: the religion of flowers and the phallic column of India. On each page there are two columns. The right column has to do especially with Jean Genet, especially with Genet’s writing about flowers, especially the flower of the broom, genêt, but genêt is also a common noun for a kind of Spanish horse, a jennet. In other words, the religion of flowers and its role as an introduction to the religion of animals are in play also in the right column. And just as the right column plays on the possibilities of taking a mark as a proper and a common name, so too does the left column, for example on the chances of hearing the name of the eagle in the name of the philosopher, chances which are quite high when these names are pronounced à la 88

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française. So pronunciation has an important part in this. But reading has an important part in pronunciation, legein in logos. The fable thought of as pure thought without mark, immaculate conception, is at stake in Glas. ‘Glas’ means the voice that speaks, as ‘fable’ is from fari, to speak. So is the reader about to discover in Glas something that sticks in the throat of the Hegelian system, resisting digestion there, a materialism of the idea that resists Aufhebung to absolute knowledge? Or is Derrida lifted thither in the eagle’s talons? For does not the dialectic thrive on resistance? Would it not be a bad reading of Hegel’s text that failed to comprehend this? However: What would it mean not to comprehend (Hegel) the text Sa? If it is a matter of a finite failure, the failure is in advance included, comprehended in the text. If it is a matter of an infinite fault or lack, one would have to say that Sa does not think itself, does not say itself, does not write itself, does not read itself, does not know itself, which no longer means anything, by definition. Sa always ends by being full, heavy, pregnant with itself. So the hypothesis of a bad reading, here, has no place. It has not even taken place ( 259ai; 231ai–232ai)2 Is not Derrida’s reading too good? Like Flaubert oiling the hinges of the doors through which Madame Bovary will pass to her fate, does he not, in the left column, make Hegel’s passage too smooth? Now and then his exposition pauses to offer a morsel that threatens to be too hard for the system to digest. For example, the sister, the orphan and the bastard seem at first to resist incorporation within the Hegelian family circle. But the resistance is soon overcome. The same holds for the passage from the Holy Family to absolute knowledge. On a superficial reading of this there would appear to be no way of grasping how the dialectic’s logic could apply to this transition. The transition is supposed to be a move from an already that is not yet fully itself and for itself to a fulfilment that is empty of time. If we cannot comprehend how the adverb read temporally can be translated into an adverb read non-temporally, that, Hegel says, is because our comprehension is too formalistic and Jewish. And Derrida does not seem to be disagreeing with this when he observes that if the adverb ‘yet’ is here being read on the condition of not being read, ‘That is because reading has been defined simultaneously as semantic (ful)filling and as remain(s) of semantic void’ (254a; 228a). How are we to comprehend this ‘remain(s)’? The translators offer their readers the option of the s because the French word they are translating is reste, and this can be both verb and noun. They sometimes write r(est)e, indicating a relation with the verbal noun Sein. The pocket edition of Glas carries on its cover a subtitle asking Que reste-t-il du savoir absolu? There are 89

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at least two questions being posed here: What remains of absolute knowledge? What remains over from absolute knowledge? The answers to the first question that an innocent reading of the left and the right columns might be expected to yield are, respectively, Everything and Nothing. The answers to the second question that such a reading might be expected to yield are, respectively, Nothing and Everything. A suspicion that this impression of orderliness will be effaced on a more cunning reading is raised as soon as it occurs to us that it may not be without significance that the side of the law, of the author of The Philosophy of Right, is the sinister one, whereas the right column is the one that deals with a thief who wrote The Thief’s Journal in which there is mention of a mother who is a thief, not unstained like the mother in the Holy Family. Hence when the Hegel column is on the recto page there is a thief on either side, as on Golgotha. When the ledger is closed each page is a foil to the other: the column that may stand for the paternal phallus and the column that may stand for the maternal phallus read each other. When the pages are open they regard each other across the fault, the culpIC colpos or lap between the rounded columns of each page, the lapse joining them and separating them at one and the same time. As Descartes reminds us in the Fifth Meditation, what goes up must come down; there cannot be a mountain without a valley; there cannot be a mounting without a going down. ‘ln Greek colpos is the mother’s (de la mère), but also the nurse’s breast (sein), as well as the fold (pli) of a garment, the trough of the sea (repli de la mer) between the two waves, the valley pushing down into the breasts (sein) of the earth’ (83b; 71b). The signatures (seings) of Hegel and Genet are coupled in the galactic space between, where the glas resounds: a peal of bells (volée) conjugating theft (vol) and the eagle’s flight (vol), a peal of laughter at the idea of the Truth and the False antithetically opposed. This not-so-sure sounds in the faussure, the place at which the mouth of the bell begins to open wide. Not so sure is the idea of the transcendental signified that Saussure cannot cast off as long as he persists with his distinction between signified and signifier (signifiant, which is also signified by Sa). The idea of the sign and its meaning as free-standing positive terms must give way as soon as we take seriously Saussure’s idea that signification is less a matter of position than of systematic opposition. Derrida takes this idea seriously, and takes it further in Glas and elsewhere, constructing experiments to demonstrate how it applies even to proper names and signatures and how forlorn are Saussure’s hopes of cutting langue loose from history. In these experiments Derrida is extending the scope of Hegel’s ‘simple experiment’ with shifters, the experiment in which ‘here’, ‘this’, ‘now’ and ‘I’ are written down. But the difference this writing down does not make, according to Hegel, is different from the difference that is not made, according to Derrida, by what we ordinarily understand by writing. The latter is a differance spelled with an a that is not simply the a of Sa, but also the a of ça (id), the pyramidal A that 90

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gets its crown doffed when the State denies the right of the rite of burial to the brother who prefers to stay in the bosom of the family;3 the A that crowns the name of Genet when he dons the circumflex as a sign of the omission of the s of the Saturnalian dissemination that takes place when his proper name becomes the common name for the Spanish planta genista; the a of glas, the bell that tolls between the Hegel column and the Genet column, reversing Sa after the unspeakable gl as if to give voice to a Glassenheit between a lifting that would be teleological Aufhebung and a lifting which would be theft, maybe the purloining of a letter or of a postcard from Socrates to Freud and beyond.4 As if the upper-case A of Absolute knowledge is reduced to the lower-case a of Sa and converted to the imagination’s ‘as’ or ‘as if’. Hegel writes himself down, with the help of Genet’s pen. ‘It is necessary to let silently elaborate itself the glas of the tongue’ (187bi; 166bi), as though Hegel, like Socrates with the slave boy, were saying to us readers of Glas ‘all that is left for us to do is simply to look on’.5 Of course, just as Socrates nudges the boy’s memory in the Meno, Hegel prompts the reader of the Phenomenology of Spirit. And Derrida, Genet, Bataille et Compagnie offer guidance on how to read Glas. If we are lulled by the fluent advance of the Hegel column into thinking that we are watching a match of which the worst result for him can be a draw, we may be put on our guard by the weighting of the inscriptions in the judases, those fenestrations in each column that shed light by which the columns may be read. If either Hegel or Genet is betrayed by these, it is more likely to be the former. Genetic spies let into the left column read Hegel’s Sa as Ça, whereas Hegelian infiltration into the Genet column does not seem to take place – although this may be because it is rather more subtly concealed. Double crossing between the columns there is, but the only chiasmus is the ‘almost perfect’ chiasmus of the cross-eyed, the bigle (53b, 130bi; 43b, 113bi). We have become cockeyed through focusing so much on the father that the mother is held only in the periphery of our view; we lookers-on, that is, philosophers and theoreticians of all kinds whose phallogocentrIC vision calls for correction by such reading exercises as Glas provides. ‘This is – a legend’ that may bring the hitherto neglected partner into clearer view. Hegel describes a passage to Sa by way of revealed religion that leaves behind the virgin mother. Jesus has an actual natural mother and a father who remains in himself no less immaculate. However, the mother gets left behind when the son returns to the father. Why then, when revealed religion gets raised to unrepresentative absolute knowledge, is the latter represented by the feminine possessive Sa? In order to signal that Hegel (and Freud and Lacan), for whom the original sign is the name of the father, must make a concession to Genet, whose mother is the parent from whom he takes his name. Another symbol of this fairer deal is the fourfold, made up by the two columns and their respective series of running commentaries, which squares Hegel’s family circle, supplementing his Lutheran Trinitology – but not with 91

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Mariolatry! Philosophy, thought thinking itself, putative immaculate conception (IC), is maculated by writing. Je m’éc…S’avoir, the selfpossession of savoir absolu, is absolved from its absoluteness, cut off from its cutting off, by the s’écrit, Sec, the writing of letters.6 Logos ‘is’, copulates with legein, but a legein that, instead of assembling the whole truth and nothing but the truth, assembles and dissembles spare parts, bricolating pièces detachées. The origin of philosophy is the origin of literature. Philosophy has to be written down and read. Not opposed: ‘deconstruction is not…an anti-philosophy or a critique of philosophy’.7 This is – a legend. This singularity of ‘this’, ‘here’, ‘now’, etc. is left behind (reste, remain(s)) because it is swallowed up in the ultimate universality of the absolute knowledge to which it is dialectically on its way, and on its way back in so far as the beginning of philosophy is a leap back, a Resultat. But this singularity is regurgitated and remains (reste) in the glottis, neither inside nor outside, when Hegel is read as Ekel through Genet’s looking glass. As a judas on the first page of Glas forewarns, ‘remain(s) to be thought [penser; panser, to bind]: it (ça) does not accentuate itself here now but will already have been put to the test on the other side’, especially if it does not accent itself either, but is repeated there as caca, as what is perhaps not a what if a negative answer must be given to the question asked by general medical practitioners and veterinarians, whether it is well-formed, or to the question asked by Plato, whether it can have a form at all. The opening entries on the other side of the first page explain that Genet’s Ce qui est resté d’un Rembrandt déchiré is divided in two, two columns, like the remain(s). Comme le reste. ‘Of the remain(s), after all, there are, always, overlapping each other, two functions.’ There is Hegelian remaining as verb, conservation by the spiritualizing erection of Aufhebung. There is also a place in the Hegelian story for reste as noun, the remains that are left behind, the remains of Polynices. But his corpse, strewn with a handful of dust by his sister Antigone, daughter of Oedipus, is merely a moment in the supersession of the private law of the family by the universal law of the community. An essential moment, however. Hegel says: ‘The community…can only preserve itself by suppressing this spirit of singularity, and, because it is an essential moment, all the same produces (erzeugt) it and precisely by taking a suppressive attitude toward it as a hostile principle.’8 ‘So’, Derrida comments: suppression produces just what – the singularity of the unconscious, the irony of femininity – it suppresses as its own ‘essential moment’. It traps itself, and glues, limes itself in its own essence. Whence the eternal burst (éclat) of laughter of the unconscious – or of the woman, the exclamation that indefinitely harasses, questions, ridicules, mocks the essence, the truth (of man).

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Thus does the family collapse, cave in, ‘engulf itself’, ‘gulp itself down’. The family devours itself. But let one not go and see in this, precipitately, the end of phallocentrism, of idealism, of metaphysics. The family’s destruction constitutes a stage in the advent of Bürgerlichkeit (civil and bourgeois society) and universal property, proprietorship. A moment of infinite reappropriation, the most reassuring metaphysical normality of idealism, of interiorizing idealization. A ruse of reason or the woman’s eternal irony, each able to take itself for the other and to play the other. If God is (probably) a man in speculative dialectics, the godness (déité) of God – the irony that divides him and makes him come off his hinges – the infinite disquiet of his essence is (if possible) woman(ly) (femme). (211a; 188a) This helps to explain perhaps why, in the essay on Emmanuel Levinas that Derrida published six years after Glas, ‘Il’ and ‘E.L.’, standing for the Other and for Elohim, the singular plural God, give way in the final pages to ‘Elle’.9 But why ‘probably’ and ‘if possible’ in the final lines of this passage from Glas? Probably, possibly, because nothing is quite decided here where womanly irony comes into play. The decided is de-cided, the cut dis-cut. What is in play here is the coup de dé of the game of dice that the god Thoth is said to have invented, along with calculation and writing. The godness of God is the deity’s dé-ité. One way to discut a cut is to graft or, as the translators of Glas propose, to strewk (a graft of ‘sew’ and ‘stroke’ or ‘cut’ (coup(e))). And one kind of cut is a canal, which, like ‘lack’, is a speculation on the unvoiced letters LAC, CLA, etc. that Derrida permutes in various places, and is set at an angle to the voiced group AGL, GLA, LAG, etc. that includes Lagen. On to Lacan’s psychoanalytic science and Hegel’s science of universal logic is being grafted, with the help of Genet’s science of botany, a science of the singular, Aristotle notwithstanding. From the wing of the aigle and the genêt ailé the alea falls. But ‘The alea here is no longer accidental.’10 And the singular is not a case. This gaia scienza is a study of laws, but its laws are not formal or semantic. They are what the formalist or the semanticist would call laws of the signifier, Sa. But this science of the signature is a science of what is left behind by the science of logic, meaning and truth. This glad science is a study of remains, a work of mourning. Woman’s work. But the feminine here is not to be understood in a sexual sense, any more than Genet’s homosexuality should be seen, precipitately, as the beginning of phallocentrism: the mother (whatever forename or pronoun she may be given) stands beyond the sexual opposition. This above all is not a woman. She only lets herself, detached, be represented by (the) sex.

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This is why the thief distinguishes between the maternal and the feminine. And he does so in what you call a man. (153b; 134b) In Glas the subject matter of this science of the singularity of the signature is the corpus left behind by Hegel and Genet and others, the nonlinguistic corpus of their writing.11 Non-linguistic because non-logistic and because the logos of the science of logic takes itself for a pure compresence of the subject with the object and itself. What the practitioner of the science of the signature accompanies is the body of the departed. Mary, Antigone, Gabrielle Genet; the thinking (penser) that they practise is binding (panser, bander), a double binding: stricture of the corpse and erection of the monument, an Umwertung of Aufhebung, its trans-struction, transstrewking, perestroika. Countersigning the science of Aufhebung, the science of the signature cannot be a negatively dialectical reversal. Nor can it be a hermeneutic science that forgets that Hermes-Thoth was a thief. The science of the signature, of the firma, is affirmative. Whereas the Sa of the science of logic is non-representational because it purports to return to a parousia of presence, the science of the signature, the sein(g), is non-representational because its business is the re- that is not representative of a present that is to come or a present that has been: ‘it is busy with a past that will never have been present and so can never be presented nor allow any hope for presentation, the presently presenting’ (134bi; 152bi). It is a thanatography that inscribes the epitaph of an absolutely ancestral mother who, like death, fascinates from the absolute of an already that is always already read and always already dead. That is why this fascination produces an excess of jealousy, and ‘This is why metaphysics, which is jealous, will never be able to account, in its language, the language of presence, for jealousy.’ Its absolute sticks in the gullet of absolute knowledge.

Glasnostalgia? So is Glasnost glasnostalgic? Is this reference to the absolute ancestor a Derridean descendent of what some readers consider to be ‘Heidegger’s nostalgic return to the Greeks in the manner of a well-known German tradition’?12 Heidegger has defended himself against this interpretation. Derrida notes this, then goes on to say that: although it is not a question of returning to the Greek language, one must presuppose at least something absolutely forgotten which already dissimulates itself always behind the Greek language, an archi-maternal language, a grandmotherly language…that cannot be touched.

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But this absolutely forgotten something is not a thing. The tomb of the virgin aïeul absolu at which Genet lays the gladiolus, gl-aïeul, is an empty tomb, as empty as the last judas on the penultimate page of Glas where the Genet column treats of the engraving of a name that cannot be recalled and the judas in the Hegel column treats of the gala occasion of Easter. The remains, r(est)e, are beyond the ontological difference of being and beings. It is the difference of this difference that makes it and ontology possible as effect but impossible as foundation, Grund, or Abgrund, abyss. In Glas this restance or trace is described with the help of what Hegel writes in the Phenomenology of Spirit and in the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion about sacrifice or holocaust and of what in ‘Time and being’ Heidegger writes about es gibt Sein. What is perhaps at stake in this strewking is what is at stake for Dasein in Being and Time. It is a question of (es geht um, il s’agit de) the question of being. Derrida’s peut-être, with its pyramidal circumflex, is maybe a repetition of the Seinkönnen of Being and Time. And when he says that it is the stake, l’engage, that is at stake in this column, there is a chance of hearing this as langage. Enunciation is being announced: language, the house of being, Babel and the gift of tongues. This gift can be a poisonous gift, like Thoth’s gift of writing that Plato writes about in the Phaedrus and Derrida writes about in ‘Plato’s pharmacy’, where we are reminded that a pharmakon such as writing is said to be both remedy and poison, a Gift. Just as Derrida’s enunciation of this annunciation hovers between power and unpower, Macht and Ohnmacht, when he writes: Ceci peut-être: le don, le sacrifice, la mise en jeu ou à feu de tout, l’holocauste, sont en puissance d’ontologie (269a; 242a). For en puissance d’ontologie the translators of Glas give ‘under the control of ontology’. This is because, as Derrida says, the gift etc. cannot not give birth to ontology. Its seductions and those of the dialectic and hermeneutics of sense are irresistible. The absolutely free gift of the es gibt is a don that is also a donc, the ‘therefore’ of a necessity, anangkê, fatum. The Saturnalian fête – Hegel’s Bacchic Taumeln, Nietzsche’s Dionysiac dance (Feyerabend’s Feierabend, the holinight of the liberation from the corset of method?) – pronounces the fate of a return to Sa. The all-burning fire backfires. (A brûle-tout is also a device for saving candle ends.) The good or bad turn returns. ‘I give you – a pure gift, without exchange, without return – but whether I want this or not, the gift guards itself, keeps itself, and from then on you must/owe, tu dois.’ What Derrida calls the event or advent of the gift is what in ‘Time and being’ Heidegger calls Ereignis. When Derrida calls this advent ‘irruptive’ this word irrupts into his text from Levinas’s and must trigger off in it seismic tremors. Although prior to philosophy, hence prior to both logical and chronological priority, this irruptive event is destined to return to philosophy as inevitably as a present, however freely given, gives itself at least the promise of receiving receipt in return ‘by these presents’, as legal contractual documents say, except that the beginning is less like an original 95

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contract than like the contraction of God leaving room for responsibility to be undertaken by humankind. Does this mean that Derrida is here capitulating to Hegel? To conclude that he is would be as precipitate as the judgement that Heidegger makes a nostalgic return to the Greeks. Of course, we must not overlook the ‘nonetheless’, néanmoins, which prefaces Derrida’s judgement on this judgement. Nonetheless, we must not overlook the second reading of the phrase en puissance d’ontologie employed in the paragraph of Glas in which Heidegger is enlisted to help us read Hegel. Although the gift cannot not give birth to ontology, and is in that sense in ontology’s power, the gift is also in power over ontology in the sense that, without ontology being a case falling under the event of the coming into being of the gift (Ereignis), the latter carries, overflows and de-limits ontology. This second reading is the more prominent one, not surprisingly, in the pages of Spurs where the para(gra)phs that Derrida interweaves with para(gra)phs of Heidegger and Hegel are interwoven with para(gra)phs of Nietzsche. Especially significant for Derrida’s reading of Hegel in Glas is his statement in Spurs that in what Heidegger calls Ereignis is encountered the very limit of the opposition between the metaphysical and the non-metaphysical. That oppositional limit is itself de-limited.13 ‘There is no such thing as a gift of Being from which there might be apprehended and opposed to it something like a determined gift (whether of the subject, the body, of (the) sex or other like things).’14 Hence, after announcing early in Spurs that woman is to be his subject, now, toward the end, he tells us that ‘woman, then, will not have been my subject’. Not his subject or his topic. Woman’s place is not in the home because woman neither has nor is a topos. The non-lieu of woman, that is to say of truth, is between giving oneself and giving oneself out as or dissimulation. When truth becomes woman: Truth, unveiling, illumination are no longer decided in the appropriation (Ereignis) of the truth of being, but are cast into its bottomless abyss as non-truth, veiling and dissimulation. The history of Being becomes a history in which no being, nothing, happens (n’advient) except Ereignis’s unfathomable process. The property (proprieté) of the abyss [das Eigentum des Ab-grundes] is necessarily the abyss of property, the violence of an event which advenes without being.15 Woman as truth is no place and has no place, least of all in the home, because the home of being, language, is no place to be once ontology and truth are the gift of Es, Ça. Is there then no place for nostalgia, a desire to return home? Is home undesirable? Is it so terrible, this absolute dé-jà? On the very last page of Glas, in the Genet column, which may be regarded as the more oriental of the two, Derrida cites from the Before Sunrise section 96

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of Also Sprach Zarathustra Nietzsche’s ‘vast unbounded Yes’. This Ja is perhaps also an affirmation of the déjà by a certain DJ (a jockey on a jennet back to front?) or JD. But that JD writes also elsewhere: There is a relation to the intact nucleus that is pre-historical, preoriginal, that from which any desire whatsoever can constitute itself. So the desire or the phantasm of the intact nucleus is irreducible, but there is no intact nucleus. I would oppose desire to necessity, Anangkê. Anangkê is that there is no intact nucleus, there is none, there never was one, and it is this that we want to forget, the forgetting that in a certain way we want to forget. It is not as though there is something forgotten: what we want to forget is that there is nothing to forget, that there never was anything to forget.16 That is to say, we are prone to something like what Kant called transcendental illusion. As Derrida puts it at the end of La voix et le phénomène (Glas in phenomen),‘contrary to what phenomenology – which is always phenomenology of perception – has tried to make us believe, contrary to what our desire cannot fail to be tempted into believing, the thing itself always escapes’.17 The desire to return to the immaculate absolute ancestor (and therefore any desire for a determinate thing), the desire for a transcendental, self-signifying, self-conscious Sa is possible only because it is frustrated of fulfilment by the Ça, ça, ça that resounds on Glas’s last page tempting our desire to turn back to the first to see if we can make both ends meet. This desire to return is the unheard difference between Sa and Ça, the desire of the text that sends its readers, sends them for example from one column of the text of Glas to the other, has sent them already, as when the bell inclines to the right the clapper in its mouth inclines to the left, compensatingly rebounding, doubly thinking-binding thinking (penser) with binding (panser).

Envoi At the end of the essay entitled ‘Sending: On representation’ Derrida writes: The law has often been considered as that which puts things in place, posits itself and gathers itself up in composition (thesis, Gesetz, in other words what governs the order of representation), and autonomy in this respect always presupposes representation, as thematization, becoming theme. But perhaps the law itself manages to do no more than transgress the figure of all possible representation. Which is difficult to conceive, as it is difficult to conceive anything at all beyond representation, but commits us perhaps to thinking altogether differently.18 97

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Glas is a series of experiments in the different thinking called for if there is to be a science of the law whose necessity is not opposed to arbitrariness but necessitates it and is presupposed by the law of position and opposition that operates in Hegel’s science of logic and science of the experience of consciousness.

A point of almost absolute proximity to Hegel Why almost? Why is the point of proximity between Derridian differance with an a and Hegelian difference with an e also a point of rupture?19 Because the conflict of forces that goes by the pseudonym differance, as opposed to the conflict of positions in dialectical contradiction, refuses incorporation (strange word) into the encyclopaedia and is refuse for the phenomenology of spirit. That is to say, differance and dialectical difference are not dialectically opposed. They are not opposed as one diction is to another. They are opposed in the way that a contradiction is to the unconscious pre-scription that makes contradiction possible as semantic effect but impossible as a means toward some transcendentally signified Resultat. Results of speech acts of denial and of other abnegating activities (Tätigkeiten) are to be reread as effects of affirmative forces. So, too, are the so-called primal words embodying opposite senses listed in the paper by Karl Abel that Freud reviews and later adverts to in his own paper ‘Das Unheimliche’.20 ‘Unheimlich’ itself, assuming it is an itself, is such an antithetical word according to Freud because it is opposed to ‘heimlich’ yet at the same time subsumed under it on account of the fact that ‘heimlich’ can mean both that which is homely, familiar and within our ken and, on the other hand, that which is hidden, dangerous, uncanny and unconscious. Freud says, incidentally illustrating what he calls elsewhere the effect of déjà raconté, of already told, that it was reading Abel’s paper that enabled him to understand ten years après coup what he had himself written in The Interpretation of Dreams about the uncanny way in which the dreamwork finds it difficult to say no.21 Difficult because it seems not to know the word ‘no’, with the consequence that there is no easy way by which the analyst can know whether an element that admits (of) an opposite is to be taken as having a positive or negative force. No easy way, says Freud. No way, says Derrida, ‘in the last analysis’, for the so-called last analysis is the psychoanalysis of the unconscious of a certain familiar psychoanalysis. The temporary undecidability is the effect of a pre-originary undecidability that cannot be talked away. This anasemic undecidability of differance that is the condition of the ambivalent concepts to which Freud refers is also the condition of the Gegensinnigkeit of the Aufhebung (its being both cancellation and preservation) that gives the movement of Hegel’s dialectic its direction (Sinn) from the unconsciousness of the in-itself toward the selfconsciousness of the in-itself-for-itself. Differance is not a condition in the 98

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manner of a category, a formal concept of concepts or their phenomenological ground. It is a condition paradoxically in the concept, re-citing and re-siting it.22 Something like a transcendental, except that what the Scholastics called transcendentals (e.g. being and unity) belong to every genus and are common to every concept, whereas differance ‘is’ the degeneration of genus that prevents the genus being authentically selfpossessed in absolute proximity to itself and foments disunity in the concept. In the Concept. How close does Hegel come to recognizing this transcendental, transphenomenal differance in Differenz that turns the latter inside out? Some way, Derrida suggests, pursuing a remark of Koyré’s, when in the Jena Logic Hegel replaces his usual word for difference, Unterschied, by the phrase absolut differente Beziehung, where differente is the active infinitive opposed to itself, maintenance losing a grip on itself, the decompresence of the Gegen-wart.23 And in the Encyclopaedia, Derrida says: Hegel recognizes, in passing, certainly, but quite clearly, [that] there is not and there cannot be a purely phonetic writing. The alphabetic system as we practise it is not and cannot be purely phonetic. A script never permits itself to be saturated through and through by the voice. The nonphonetic functions, the operative silences, if one may so put it, of alphabetic writing are not matters of accidental fact or waste products that one could hope to reduce (punctuation, figure [chiffre], spacing). The fact of which we have just spoken is not just an empirical fact; it is the example of an essential law that irreducibly limits the fulfilment of a teleological ideal. In effect, Hegel concedes this in a parenthesis that he closes very quickly and [that] deserves to be underlined.24 Derrida then reproduces the following words of the Encyclopaedia: Leibniz allowed himself to be misled by his understanding (Verstand) in considering that it would be highly desirable for communication between people of different nationalities, especially scholars, if we had a perfect written language constructed after the style of hieroglyphics, which already obtains in some measure with [bei] alphabetic writing (as in our signs for numbers, planets, chemical substances and suchlike).25 Is Derrida being over- (or under-) generous to Hegel in seeing in Hegel’s parenthetical remark recognition of more than the empirical fact that we sometimes use figures alongside words? Is Hegel recognizing that there cannot be a purely phonetic writing? Is he acknowledging the necessary 99

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permeation of the phonetic by the graphic, its transfiguration? Perhaps we should note [entre crochets] that Derrida may be alluding less to the words between the parentheses than to the brackets themselves that, like commas and other punctuation marks, have, most remarkably in German, a grammatical function that cannot be reduced, cannot be bracketed away. In any case, it is not obvious what counts as a recognition, particularly a recognition ‘in passing’. Are Spaniards recognizing the necessary graphematicity of the phoneme when they call names nombres? Strangely intestinal to the cunning of reason is the uncanniness of differance. Foreignly heimlich, somewhat like the circumferential ducts, wastepipes, elevators, moving staircases, and other processional inwards of the Centre Pompidou. No more than somewhat. At most almost. For while the pompe funèbre of the phenomenology of spirit is the self-deconstruction of an eternally self-consuming and self-consummating ring, differance ‘does not pass around a circular field, but works it otherwise’.26 Differance is an absolute exterior that no longer permits itself to be internalized.27 An insideout restance that is the non-negatively improductive force without which there would be no restlessly self-sublating source, no sich aufhebende Ursprung. The sourdre de la source, the surgeance of the zugegrabenen Brunnen,28 the spirit and spurt of the unheimlich buried spring.

Scription Aufhebung reread We shall never be finished with the reading or rereading of the Hegelian text, and, in a certain way, I do nothing but try to explain myself on this point. In effect I believe that Hegel’s text is necessarily fissured; that it is something more and other than the circular closure of its representation. It is not reduced to a content of philosophemes, it also necessarily produces a powerful writing operation, a remainder (reste) of writing of which one must re-examine the strange relationship it entertains with the philosophical content, the movement by which the latter exceeds its meaning, allows itself to be turned away, turned back, repeated outside its self-identity.29 This question of the outside of the Hegelian text is picked up again in the sixty-seven prefatory pages of the unbook entitled La Dissémination. ‘Ceci (donc) n’aura pas été un livre’, Derrida tells us in the first line of this plurally prefatory part to which he gives the title ‘Hors Livre’. This hors livre is Derrida’s Differenzschrift on the philosophical systems of Hegel and Feuerbach, notwithstanding that mention of the latter is limited to a footnote, which may seem a sad irony in view of the fact that this note cites the following statement from Feuerbach’s ‘Preliminary theses on the reformation of philosophy’: ‘The philosopher must introduce into the text of philosophy that side of man that does not philosophize, that is rather 100

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against philosophy, opposes abstract thinking, that therefore which in Hegel is relegated to a note.’30 Philosophy must begin with non-philosophy, Feuerbach goes on to say in a sentence that would provoke Derrida to ask if we are clear about this opposition of philosophy and non-philosophy. Does not Feuerbach himself refer to non-philosophy as the ‘Prinzip des Sensualismus’? And can the text of philosophy be so simply distinguished from the Anmerkung? Are not the remarks already introduced, aufgenommen, into the text? Or are they introduced only into the introduction, or into the preface or prologue, the pretextual endpapers? According to Hegel, random remarks about the empirical circumstances attending the genesis of a philosophical system and anticipatory observations about its structure should be restricted to the hors livre. But, as Derrida observes in ‘Hors livre’, Hegel’s philosophical system is omnivorous. In the end it digests its own empty shell. The foreword is no less an afterword, the hors d’oeuvre a suite, die Sachertorte selbst, the Resultat of the Tat, the real McCoy. What Hegel identifies as extraneous to philosophy, the formal, empirical and methodological comments of his predecessors and contemporaries, what is allegedly foreign to philosophy is a moment that melts into its for intérieur, subliminated into the Concept itself.31 Lost so that it shall have been saved. Thus, willy-nilly, Hegel recognizes that there is only the text. And there is that much proximity between him and Derrida. But the textuality of the text according to Hegel is conservative. It is a restricted, thrifty economy of absolute knowing in which the end is at the beginning and the beginning is at the end, in which the not yet is already there and the archê and the telos are intestinally intersusceptive, the snake that swallows its tail – though not to the point at which it has turned itself inside-out. In the cycle of dialectical speculation Hegel’s pre-text is a Monsieur Teste ‘étant, et me voyant’ (‘debout avec la colonne d’or de l’Opéra’, ‘étayé par la grosse colonne’), so strongheadedly en-tête that it penetrates and vanishes into the semantics of the text. Hegel is the last philosopher of the book, but, because he is the first thinker of writing,32 he is both as near and as far as possible from Derrida’s ancient and modern description of writing and the text. For with Hegel, since he thinks writing, the prefatory is fated to be raised up to the text. With Derrida ‘there is’ a general pretext that loses its head, does not know what heading to take, whether this one or the other, l’autre cap.33 It has no sense of direction. No sense. In the book, says Hegel, for ça, das Diese, read Sa, Savoir absolu. For Sa, says Derrida, read ça, ‘la-chose-qui-n’est-pas’,34 and, because the book is strangely, unheimlich, inscribed within an appended part, for Phenomenology of Spirit read PS.

PS How can one read without thinking? Was hisst Denken? What jacks thinking up, jacks it off, puts it out of play and puts it into play? What 101

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hoists thinking with its own petard? What is the force that through the green fuse drives it to dehisce? How can the general economy of a spendthrift text dispense with and deconstrict a thrifty economy of thought that makes full compensation? This is the 64,000 dollar question, a question that may beg the question jusqu’à un certain point,35 at any rate if it is cast in the form ‘Why?’, ‘What is this?’ or ‘What does this mean?’ Derrida gives us a metaphor to help us on our way, the metaphor of ‘a machine defined in its pure functioning, and not in its final utility, its meaning, its return, its work’.36 Defined? Only if the limit laid down by the definition is also delimited. And only if this delimitation is an in-finitizing that amounts neither to what is a bad infinite nor to what is a good infinite according to Hegel, but, beyond good and evil, ‘exceeds the always-already-constitutedness of meaning and truth in the theo-logico-encyclopaedic space of selffecundation without limen’.37 What is of special interest to us here is this ‘up to a certain point’ of Derrida’s writing, the way its path passes through a point of almost absolute proximity to Hegel and explains why he says that he is performing no more than a repeated rehearsal of Hegel’s lines. Indeed, his machine metaphor is based on the lines in which Hegel insists that calculation is an unthinking, mechanical business, and that only speculative logic can save mathematics by infusing into its forms Berechtigung, Sinn und Wert, justification, meaning and value.38 Could there be a machine, a calculating machine that would be safe from that salvation, which would succeed in Zarathustra’s mission to ‘sauver le hasard’ (Blanchot), without risking the reassurance of being ‘outside at all costs’39 as does the author of a concluding unscientific postscript whose path, although, like Derrida’s, indirect, may pass through a point so close to the path of the Phenomenology of Spirit that it coalesces with its Unhappy Consciousness? This machine cannot be conceived. But can it be contrived? Can such a machine be improvised,40 machinated? And can it be got to go, marcher, without having to be driven by the travail of contradictory negation? Not simply by negating that negation or attempting to put the dialectic in reverse. Nor by consigning the project to silence, contenting ourselves with the thought ‘Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen.’ We bricolate a contraption and see if it works. Such a contraption as Glas. The glas is about to be tolled. There are always too few minutes left to tell of the minutest minutiae. Minutes cannot be kept. There is no time to chronicle the particular questions into which Glas shatters its overriding question, ‘Que reste-t-il du savoir absolu?’ What remains over of and from absolute knowing? Questions like: (1) As we make the last step in the Phenomenology of Spirit over the threshold from revealed religion to its absolute philosophical truth, how can we read encore, still and again, and pas encore, not yet or one more step? Is this a step usque ad hanc horam, jusqu’à cette heure, up to this time, or is it a step out of time, to the concept 102

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from the concept that is there, coram? Can the temporal adverb be read according to the absolute concept? Or without it? In the former case it loses its temporal sense. In the latter case it sacrifices its absolute conceptuality and prohibits comprehension. In neither case is it read. ‘In both cases it is read provided that it is not read’ (254a; 228a). The strange word ‘read’, legein, has been read both as semantic plenitude and as semantic void. For dialectical contradiction read dyslectic double-bind. (2) Is the bastard conceivable in the dialectic of Aufhebung? (12a; 6a). (3) Is the orphan? (186a; 165a–66a). (4) Is the sister, the sister of Polynices? (170a; 149a). (5) Is repression? (214a; 191a). (6) Is murder or suicide, murder which is suicide, where the line between life and death is so thinly drawn that no dialectical concept seems able to grasp its inexistence? (158a; 139a). Each of these apparently undecidable questions that are catalogued in the column of Glas in which Derrida takes stock of Hegel’s phylo-phallo-genealogy turns out to be only almost undecidable, ‘presque indécidable’ (159a; 140a) – like Freud’s problems over whether a bipolar element in a dream is to be interpreted negatively or positively. With difficulty, but a difficulty that facilitates their resolution, all these questions and problems can be resolved or dissolved, aufgelöst, by being aufgehoben. Unless… Unless Aufhebung is upheaved. Such an upheaval is activated in Glas. Glas takes a rise out of Aufhebung, repeating it as rhizomatic relay, less lift than nomadic laterality, but without reducing it to subjective unilaterality41 or to unmotivated free play. Its recto and rectal column may be read as an attempt to show that from the system examined in its left column there is something that it is a relief to leave behind. Someunthing, an almost nothing (rien, presque),42 the residual subsubstantial je ne sais quoi of which Plato could not decide if it had a form, the dropping of a Swabo-Prussian eagle, ‘le vomi du système’, ‘neither solid nor liquid, neither out nor in’ (183a, 162a; p. 71a, 84a), the orallyanally disgusting Ekel of which Kant treats in the Anthropology,43 the innominable dégueulassenheit, neither one thing nor the other, of which (duquel? de laquelle? donc dont) gl is the obscene cloakroom trace (‘cloca: horseman’s cape named from its bell shape [clock]’, Concise Oxford Dictionary). A declination of Hegel’s indeterminate sphinx, an unmentionable sphincter, gl is that ersatz glottis in the Cointreau bottles on sale duty-free at international airports nowadays that so infuriates us, especially scholars, insbesondere die Gelehrten, whatever our language, because it hoists the tongue but lets it fall back again (263b; 236b), because it is the indefinite dyad that announces the spasme, final, de la glotte,44 the glas of classification, of binary opposition and of the syllogistic Trinity (eglan OE, agljan f. egle troublesome [Goth. aglus]). Troublesome (simple inversion won’t make it go glug-glug; try solicitation), yet what no home should be without. Perhaps it is what Bradley was needing in order to glue terms to the 103

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relations that glue terms to the relations that glue…. Hume and Wittgenstein kept a tube of it handy. This agglutinative ‘principle of all principles’ of differentiation is what the an(a)thematic, prothetic, galactic, Genet-ic column of Glas applies to its thematically genealogical partner as the condition that makes Hegel’s dialectical synthesis an effect produced by a nécéssité hasardeuse.45 ‘L’infini sort du hasard’ (Mallarmé, Igitur). Hence, gl is the cadence that syncopates ascendance, the ruiner concealed, without being cancelled, in the almost absolutely anagrammatical réunir, the protocol of Hegel’s prefaces and of his and our PS. Save that if we have said what gl is, it is not what we have said. We shall have read Glas as a Möbius strip. We shall have misconceived it, because we shall have conceived it. We shall have annulled the remainder by annulation. Whereas a remainder remains in the space between. Between the columns and between the pages where what remains on the left is what is incorporated by being assimilated and by living on, while what remains on the right is incorporated as an eliminated foreign body,46 the nonlinguistic corps impropre of writing,47 Limited Ink. The glas, which is the glas of classification and the glas of classification (strange word, of) swings between in the space that some of his readers reckon Kant’s schema attempted to fill and that remained unfilled by Hegel’s Aufhebung. Unfilled and unfillable, because the always already begun beginning takes place in the space of the imagination’s this-as-that, which is repeatedly reopened by the reciprocal excession of the universal as singular and the singular as universal, determinative judgement and reflective judgement each competing to outstrip the other in response to the other’s and the Other’s demand (of which more remains to be said and left unsaid in the discussion of some pages of Levinas conducted in later pages of this book). The unbook Glas, like a porte à brisures, a folding partition that is open when it is closed and vice versa, would machinate a non-Euclidean geometry in which the Hegelian circle is squared and the Hegelian triangle is forcibly opened up to a rectangular stage (carrefour, theatrum)48: ‘(almost) pure spacing, going on forever and not in expectation of any Messianic fulfilment’,49 the mise en (s)cène of nothing more nor less than a deus ex machina.

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6 IMADGINATION AS THE MEANING OF BEING Sallis on Heidegger and Kant

Is imagination not the meaning of being?1 (John Sallis) Nous sommes des imaginations.2 (Gilles Deleuze)

Distorted sense Might imagination be congenitally mad? Might it be intrinsically out of its mind? Imagination, madness and the relation between the two are topics to which the writings of John Sallis repeatedly return. A biographical note to one of his essays states that his recent work ‘ventures a recovery of imagination within the contemporary context of deconstruction and postHeideggerian thinking’.3 But a book of his published ten years earlier has as its epigraph the following sentence from Rousseau’s Émile: ‘C’est l’imagination qui étend pour nous la mesure des possibles soit en bien soit en mal, et qui par conséquent excite et nourrit les désirs par l’espoir de les satisfaire.’4 We may well wonder what measure the imagination could be discovered to extend to us when we learn from the page facing the one on which this epigraph is printed that a chapter in the book is headed ‘Reason, imagination, madness’. We know that we shall still be asking this question when we take up Spacings – of Reason and Imagination, a book whose date of publication is between those of the other two works by Sallis so far mentioned, and glance ahead to that book’s end, if it is one, where, in a chapter entitled ‘Ending(s)’, the author risks wondering ‘whether imagination can detach itself from presence so disruptively as to exceed being regathered into the circle of self-presentation. Can imagination be so disruptively detached as to be in excess of spirit?’ Must we follow in the circle of § 408 of the Encyclopaedia, Sallis asks, where Hegel deals with cases of imagination apparently afflicted by madness, Verrücktheit, either by excluding them from psychology as incurable physiological disease, hence no threat to the totalizing power of rationality, or by including them as only 105

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apparently unamenable to reason but in fact susceptible to treatment by rational measures such as that of the acting cure that Hegel describes: if someone imagines he is dead, don’t tell him he must be mad; humour him, as did the person who took him in his coffin where there lay in a coffin a third person who, acting as though he had been in the realm of death long enough to be accustomed to its routines, after a while sat up and partook of food. The first man was induced to follow his example and consequently was cured. Sallis wonders if this story illustrates a too dismissive estimation of the wonder in which philosophy is supposed to begin (see our Prologue and Epilogue). He wonders if, against Hegel, there may be a residue of wonder that philosophy cannot dismiss and that cannot be put into words or concepts as readily as the insane ‘dead’ person in Hegel’s parable is spirited into sane life. May there not be a reserve of sensible images that, without being alienated from reason as non-rational or irrational, resist being raised from the dark pit of unconscious memory (Erinnerung) to be commemorated publicly in, as it were, the pyramid of a universal sign? Against Hegel. In allowing this question to ‘multiply’,5 Sallis must be on guard against ‘against’. In the concern he shares with Nietzsche to give sensibility its due he will not want to expose himself to the trap Heidegger says Nietzsche sometimes falls into of only confirming Platonist grading when he describes his overturning of Platonism as an Umdrehung that stands Plato’s statements on their heads. Platonism can be superseded only by Herausdrehung, a twisting free. That this is so becomes clear to Heidegger’s Nietzsche only when at the end of his life, like his Empedocles at the edge of the abyss, Nietzsche becomes mad. It becomes clear to Sallis’s Nietzsche even before The Birth of Tragedy, in the birth of tragedy from the crossing of Dionysus and Apollo.6 Reading Sallis, it becomes clear to us that the outcome, let us not say Resultat, of such a twisting free must itself be twisted and tormented, let us say mad. This becomes clear as he thinks with Nietzsche and with Heidegger, but also sometimes almost without Heidegger,7 and therefore with and without Kant and Fichte and Schelling. Following Sallis, and for the most part oscillating between Heidegger and Kant, this chapter will show that the twisted outcome of this twisting free is imagination with a difference, imagination where the classically parallel lines of sensibility and intellect or reason wind up by being crossed, imagination that rewrites itself with a ‘d’ for differance and death that sets imagination at naught. Lest this reinscription be read as a prescription for irrationality, it will be salutary to remember that the chiasm of the optic nerves is a condition of seeing straight. Sallis is not giving reasons for the rejection of reason or meaning, whatever that might mean. Nor is he falling into that other now familiar trap of subordinating reason to unreason. With the reinscription of

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imagination we have also reinscribed reason. And sensibility. And meaning or sense. In what sense sense? In the double sense of sense and sens and Sinn that are at one and the same time the sensibility and the intelligible or conceptual meaning that coincide in the conceptual sensibility of the schemata of the Kantian transcendental imagination through which, as argued in the first of the Critiques, the objectivity of objects in space is articulated in time, in the rational sensibility (respect) treated in the second, and in the aesthetic ideas treated in the third. Because this transcendental imagining, wähnen, is undecidably both in and out of its senses, its ambiguous meaning, Sinn, is a Wahnsinn, a madness, in which the imagination points in opposite directions at once. Hence on the one hand Kant sometimes identifies the imagination with intuition, and on the other he sometimes identifies it with the understanding. This twofold elision is facilitated by and reflected in his speaking of apprehension in intuition, reproduction in imagination and recognition in a concept as a threefold synthesis, as though each is an aspect of a complex whole, so that each so-called faculty or function is a function of the others. Kant’s singling out of reproduction as a power specifically of imagination reflects the already mentioned duality in the history of philosophy, according to which memory is sometimes listed as a faculty in its own right and sometimes subsumed under imagination as one of the ways in which the latter represents something absent. What he thus singles out as reproductive imagination is sometimes empirical or associative imagination. But his Critical doctrine of time as a pure a priori form of sensibility requires a reproductive imagination that is, however paradoxical it may seem, an aspect of pure, transcendental productive imagination. Heidegger believes that Kant’s doctrine meets this requirement. If it did not it would be exposed to the danger of putting the clock back to the preCritical doctrine of his Thoughts on the True Estimation of Living Forces (1747), which maintains that the existence and structure of time and space are contingent on whatever laws of interaction among substances obtain at, to speak naïvely but significantly, whatever epoch of cosmic time we, to speak with Heidegger, find ourselves thrown. However, this danger may be one of those dangers through which Hölderlin and, following him, Heidegger say that the chance of rescue is increased. Here the rescue would be the rescue of Heidegger and his readers from the danger of failing to see that fundamental ontology requires to be supplemented by metontology. That Heidegger would regard this failure as in part a repetition of Kant’s failure to see that temporal schematism requires supplementation by spatial schematism is confirmed by Heidegger’s declaration in ‘Time and being’ that the attempt made in § 70 of Being and Time to trace spatiality back to temporality cannot be sustained.8 On the page of Echoes where reference is made to this repudiation Sallis argues that the turning toward spatiality demands not simply a turning from 107

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the question of being that defines fundamental ontology to the question of beings as a whole with which metontology is occupied, but an Umschlag or metabolê that is a violent turning of the former question into the latter.9 A clue to what this means is given when Heidegger compares what he calls metontology to what Aristotle calls theologikê, the contemplation of ‘what simply is – the heavens: the encompassing and overpowering, that under which and at which we are thrown, by which we are benumbed and overtaken, the overwhelming’. Does not Heidegger tell us already in ‘What is metaphysics?’ that we shall be awakened from our dogmatic numbness to the urgency and agency of the question of the meaning of being as such only through being benumbed, overtaken and overwhelmed by the wonder that there is a cosmos rather than nothing? Now the Postcript added to the 1943 edition of ‘What is metaphysics?’, after fumblings in earlier editions, affirms both that being cannot hold sway without beings and that beings cannot be given their due as such unless we experience the force and drive or drift of the question of being, hence the shock of the realization that the totality of beings is in place of nothing. In the existential analytic of Being and Time the place of the experience of the Anstoss of this, let us say, meontological difference between there being the totality of what is and there being nothing is the there-being of Dasein in its being toward its death. This experience checks rather than stops Dasein in its tracks, for Dasein is always underway. The experience is an Erfahrung, not an Erlebnis. Not a livedthrough event in its life, but the way of Dasein’s being on its way. On its way toward naught. This endingness without end of the to-be-there means that the intentionality of the meaning of being, if we dare employ here ‘the very last word to be used as a phenomenological slogan’,10 is an intentionality without an intentional object, transcendence via things toward nothingness and so toward being. Recognition of what Heidegger will call the ontological difference between beings and being implies that the Sinn von Sein is not an accusative. Not an accusative, but accusatory, in so far as my recognition of the force of the ontological difference is an acknowledgement of an original ontological guilt, a hearkening to the call of conscience. Recognition is not cognition here, any more than acknowledgement is knowledge. Not certainty, but certification is what is here at stake. Not wisdom, but witness. Attestation, Bezeugung, Heidegger’s word for Dasein’s ontic testification to the possibility of its authenticity. And yet, though indeed anticipating the radical overturning broached in the draft of metontology, the turn back to beings, clearly the turn to conscience is, in the end, governed largely by the project and the directionality of fundamental ontology; it is a turn back that is, quite decisively, for the sake of the advance toward the beyond of Being.11

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That is, it is a turn back that is toward time, hence back to the topic of the Kantian transcendental Ein-bildungskraft, with the difference that whereas Kant founds the Ein-heit that the imagination achieves on a threefold synthesis each fold of which, at least according to the interpretation given in Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, corresponds to one of the three ecstases of time, this unity is founded according to the fundamental ontology of Being and Time on the threefold existential structure of care. However, this structure is destined to destructuration. Attesting is a testing to destruction. Just as from the beginning the history of being is marked by an epochal passing away that may be a passage to another beginning, destruction is of the essence of Dasein’s existential structure or, more precisely, kinêsis,12 Bewegung. It is a foundation found(er)ed on an abyss, a Grund grounded in an Abgrund, what we might call a principle of deficient reason that destabilizes the principle of sufficient reason, turning it into what is literally a Satz vom Grund. For Sorge, the principle of Dasein’s unity, goes with, presupposes,13 Dasein’s being a whole, and this is made possible by Dasein’s being toward death, the condition of all its possibilities, itself the metapossibility of impossibility, literally a Vor-aus-setzung that stretches the imagination beyond breaking point, because death stretches the imagination beyond the concept and the Bild understood as schema further than the Bild understood as schema is stretched beyond the Bild understood as image; stretched to the limit at which the totality of therebeing is not all there, to the limit that is also a beyond of limit, where beingthere is intrinsically extrinsic to itself, ent-setzt, de-posed. Therefore, in so far as the Kantian transcendental imagination is taken by Heidegger as a clue only to an analysis of Dasein’s temporality, it will leave untouched the problem of the spatiality of beings as a whole that metontology would face up to when metaphysics remembers that the factical existence of Dasein and the factual extantness of un-Daseinish beings are presupposed by the possibility of Dasein and of the Reich of the world across which Dasein, the being of Ent-fernung, distancing and dedistancing, reaches, reicht, toward its death and the possibility of a remembrance of the ontological and meontological differences. If the investigation of these differences has to be allocated either to fundamental ontology or to metontology, it seems that it would not figure on the agenda of the latter. This is why it was said above that the failure to keep in mind the difference between fundamental ontology and metontology can be regarded by Heidegger only as, up to a point, a repetition of Kant’s failure to grasp that temporal schematism calls to be supplemented by spatial schematism. Heidegger adapts Kant’s doctrine of schematism to what he is still calling fundamental ontology in 1929, after this had been distinguished from metontology the year before. And, as Sallis brings out, metontology is introduced, though not by name, into the Introduction (in)to Metaphysics of 1935, by which date Heidegger is less inclined to mention 109

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fundamental ontology and the imagination by name. A place for metontology is prepared when in The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, in words that correspond to ones in the antepenultimate paragraph of the first division of Being and Time and respond to the claims of German and Irish idealism, ‘World is only, if, and as long as a Dasein exists (existiert). Nature can also be (sein) when no Dasein exists.’14 In other words, whereas beingin-the-world belongs to the being of Dasein, it does not belong to the being of rocks, stones, trees, and all entities studied by the natural sciences, though these are necessarily in a world once they are discovered (entdeckt). As well as raising the question of the totality of Dasein’s being-in-the-world toward its death, philosophy must ask about the totality of nature – and indeed of cultural and historical entities whose coming to be necessarily belongs to a world yet whose passing away is possible when there is no longer Dasein, hence no longer being-in-the-world. The philosophy that asks these two questions is called metaphysics in The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic. It would be short-sighted to suppose that whereas the first question is a question for fundamental ontology, the second question, the metontological one, is a metaphysical one in the traditional sense. If the first one is not this then neither can the second one be, for, as we have noted, what Heidegger projects is a radicalization of fundamental ontology that produces a metontology by ‘an overturning of ontology out of its very self’.15 As we have also noted, following Sallis, Heidegger ceases to employ the words ‘metontology’ and ‘imagination’. We have seen how these notions are connected through the linkage of imagination and totality through mortality, a linkage indicated in Sallis’s chapter titles, ‘Imagination – the meaning of being?’ and ‘Mortality and imagination – the proper name of man’. Still following Sallis’s indications and oscillations between Heidegger and Kant, the remainder of this chapter will adumbrate grounds for thinking that Heidegger continues to be preoccupied with the topics of metontology and imagination even although he no longer favours these names, and that imagination as he and a certain Kant treat it is imagination treated as if mad.

What is a thing? Mortals make moral claims. They also make moral climates. Moral climates do not fall ready made from the sky. And moral climates are mortal. They are cultural institutions whose decay and passing away, unlike human artefacts like hammers, are no less tied to the being there of historical Dasein than is their being instituted. This does not mean that moralities do not embrace and are not embraced by things that belong to nature, things which include among them the bodies that for a while survive human death. By morality here is meant an ethos in the broad sense which that word has 110

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in the ‘Letter on “humanism” ’. It is of ethos that ‘The origin of the work of art’ speaks when it refers to the different styles and measures according to which the world, which is ‘the clearing of the paths of the essential guiding directions with which all decision complies (fügt)’, ‘lets beings attain to the Open of their paths’ where ‘each being emerges in its own way’.16 Each being is a being of a regioning of what in later essays and lectures Heidegger calls the fourfold, the gathering together, still each in its own way letting beings be, of mortals, immortals, sky and earth. World is worlding, the fourfold regioning and fouring, Vierung, as these late essays and lectures say. It is still the measure and pattern or patron, the peras and dikê or ground of justice and order (Fügung). Fourfold regioning is, in Rousseau’s phrase, ‘the measure of what is possible in matters either of good or evil’, the measure by which is decided ‘what is holy and what is unholy, what great and what small, what brave and what cowardly, what lofty and what slight, what master and what slave’.17 It determines the limits of all that is, which, we might speculate, is the topic or at least the heir to the topic of what Heidegger may have meant by metontology. In so doing it determines also the limits of what is no longer called fundamental ontology, and its relationship to this is described by what is no longer called metaphysics or ontology and could now perhaps be called ecology. Observe that when Heidegger refers to what is holy, great, etc., and what is not, he is speaking of what may be up for decision, and that ‘Every decision, however, bases itself on something not mastered, something concealed, confusing; else it would never be a decision’. This Nichtbewältigtes, Verborgenes, Beirrendes he calls earth. In the ‘The origin of the work of art’, dating from the mid-1930s, earth duals with world in the Open. In the texts of the 1950s this twofold is articulated into a fourfold in which earth is one member among four and so apparently more restricted in its scope. And the task previously performed by the expressions ‘World’, ‘Open’ and ‘Clearing’ is distributed among a multiplicity of expressions connoting various temporal and/or spatial notions, among them verbal Vierung and Verweilen, along with Ort, Stätte, Raum, Stelle. This is to be expected, given that the earlier text is focused on the question of truth and we are told that the holding sway of truth (truth’s Wesen or Wesung, which could be thought perhaps as also a Schweben, an oscillation, suspense – or hovering) is the open middle between the unconcealing or clearing of world and the concealing of earth, the betwixt of the lethic and the privative alethic that the work of that extra-special thing, the great Kunstding, par excellence displays. The later texts in question are not concerned especially with the work of art, but with artefacts of other kinds and with things of nature. They return to the question ‘What is a thing?’, which Heidegger had asked in a book with that title based on lectures contemporary with those published under the heading ‘The origin of the work of art’.

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What is a Thing? returns to Kant, but to the logical doctrines of the first Critique, not to the parts dealing with schematism and the imagination with which Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics had been especially concerned. Heidegger’s second time of asking ‘What is a Thing?’ in the 1950s is also in its way a turn back to Kant. Not, however, to a Kant for whom space and time are a priori forms with which sensibility anticipates the experience of things, but to the pre-Critical Kant we referred to above, except that whereas in his Thoughts on the True Estimation of Living Forces space and time are epiphenomenal to the active forces of non-spatial substances, so that ‘Things can actually exist and yet not be present anywhere in the world’,18 on Heidegger’s account of the thing as a four-in-one, the thingness of a thing is its where-and-when, and its four-dimensional where-and-when is the thing’s distinctive way of letting other things be. It is difficult to see how matters could have been otherwise without denying that the meaning of being is time or/and withdrawing the analysis of time-space that is outlined in the Beiträge zur Philosophie and which, although supplemented, seems not to be abandoned in the lecture on ‘Time and being’ delivered in 1962. The first Critique itself teaches that for human experience the modalities of temporality, namely permanence, succession and coexistence, are inseparable from the dynamic principles of the three Analogies. ‘The thing’ and ‘Building dwelling thinking’ step back to, but also beyond, Kant by proposing that this particular teaching regarding experience calls to be grounded in the pre-mathematical and more generally pre-scientific prescience of the ways of being and interplay that these essays describe ‘poetically’. So that corresponding to Kant’s assertion that the experience of the sequence of events is not independent of the concept of cause is Heidegger’s assertion that experience is dependent upon a biding or whiling, Verweilen, whose weilen means staying, but whose weil could mean because.19 In other, though not all that other, words, there would be an anticipation here too of Kant’s teaching that the concept of substance, whose special schema is permanence, is implicated with the concept of causality the special schema of which is succession. The French chose, we are told, is etymologically connected with causa, and the German Ding with bedingt. How Heidegger would ground the concept of community and the schema of coexistence is not a question we need go into here, so long as we remember Kant’s discovery that the schematized concept of community cannot enter our experience without the assumption of space. As we have already remarked, there is a parallel for this in the history of Heidegger’s thinking. His discovery is articulated in his reflections on time-space, in his demonstration in ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’ (without benefit of commas) that the middle term of these three is indeed a middle in the sense that the other two belong to each other through belonging to it, and in his interpretation of the thing as an intersection of the regions of the fourfold that gives rise to locality or neighbourhood, Ort or Ortschaft, which in turn makes 112

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possible place, Stätte, positions, Stellen, and space. To cite words saying what is said in another of Sallis’s epigraphs, that of Delimitations: Raum means a place cleared or freed for settlement and lodging. A space is something for which room has been made, something that is cleared and free, namely within a boundary, Greek peras. A boundary is not that at which something stops but, as the Greeks recognized, a boundary is that from which the presencing (Wesen) of something begins…Accordingly spaces receive their being (Wesen) from locations and not from Space.20 Location and whiling or biding are Heideggerian schemata, this Greek noun being cognate with the verb echô, among the meanings of which are to house and to dwell, to be on home ground. They are the ground of homogeneous space and time in an extremely eccentric way, as Sallis brings out through what Heidegger writes in the section of the Beiträge zur Philosophie on time-space. In light of what we know Heidegger says about the withdrawal of earth in ‘The origin of the work of art’ we are prepared for the ‘leap from the ground’ of what we have called the principle of deficient reason once we learn that in the contemporary Beiträge zur Philosophie, a long section of which is entitled Der Sprung, ground or reason is itself grounded in earth. Grounded therefore as disgrounded. Not ungrounded, which would be to replace ground by its simple opposite and by the negative emptiness of place. Grund and Ab-grund (not Un-grund) cross and supplement each other chiasmically. They make up for each other’s deficiencies in a way that recognizes the deficiency of the principle of sufficient reason. The negative emptiness of absence of occupants from the homogeneous space and time of calculable measure is not the originative, ur-sprünglich, emptiness of the Heideggerianly schematized time-space. This dis-groundingly grounding ‘first clearing of the Open’21 is the Ursprung, the first fissure – for a Sprung is a crack or cis(s)ion or Scheide as well as a leap and a source,22 the first scissure of a jarring ajarness, an Aufklaffung, a seismic sagging and giving way, a Versagung of the ground that both donates Dasein’s way and at the same time defers Dasein’s arrival at a destination. The Ab-grund of Grund is Wegbleiben and Weg-bleiben, both staying away and staying a way.23 Always underway, Dasein’s striving thither, its Hinwollen, as Heidegger says, its Streben, as Fichte and Schelling say, its Bestreben, as Kant says,24 is checked by an Anstoss, as Heidegger says,25 following Fichte and Schelling, an Abstossen, as Kant says.26 This is not however the resistance (for Versagung is also resistance) of an object, but of an obstacle that is no such thing, no thing whatsoever, but being. This resistance of non-resistance, this de-limitation of delimitation, takes place, and takes place away, at the no man’s land where the call of being, the voice of Dasein’s conscience that comes overcomingly from it as though 113

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from inside and from out (OE fram, from which English gets ‘from’), is met by Dasein’s heedful or heedless response. This place is the place of displacement and of the moment of decision, Entscheidung. Heidegger says that this Augenblick is the moment and movement of Ereignen. It corresponds in Kant to the moment of imagination that is suspended and wavers between sensibility and understanding, which in parts of the first Critique appears to become understanding, and which in parts of the third Critique, those parts where it leans on the second Critique and where aesthetic judgement answers to an echo of the moral law, will often be difficult to tell apart from reason. Imagination. Kant’s later writings retain the word, despite its not being employed as a name for one of the faculties listed in the Preface to the third Critique, as noted by Sallis,27 who wants to retain it too. Although it occurs in Heidegger’s later writings,28 it is employed much more sparingly than in his earlier ones, reminding us of Schelling’s coyness regarding the use of the word at a certain point of his System of Transcendental Idealism (see above, Chapter 3, in the section entitled ‘The beginning of the pragmatic history of the mind’). This and the fact that the decreasing frequency of its use coincides with the increasing frequency of occurrence of the word Ereignis could be interpreted as a sign that he continues to be preoccupied with what goes under (in) the name of imagination in Kant and the German Idealists on whom he is lecturing at the end of the 1920s and the beginning of the 1930s: the complicitous manifold of the proto-theoretical, proto-ethical, proto-legal, proto-political, proto-poietic and proto-aesthetic Einbildungskraft. Might it not be this that is sealed in the name Ereignis? Might not Ereignen be the schematizing whose artful schemings are concealed in the depths of the Da and Seyn whose cunnyng philo-polemical manoeuvrings (Handgriffe) are the shifting ground that juts through, performs and prepares the way for (bewegt) the handwork (Handwerk) Kant identifies with the action (Handlung) of ‘I think’ and whose overtures we are hardly likely ever to persuade mother nature, mother Isis, to lay bare to our eyes?29 Might it not be to this, imagination differently imagined so differently named, no longer named as a human faculty but as the advening of phusis as being as such, might it not be to this that is made the sacrifice of understanding and of the understanding of being named in the title of a chapter in Echoes? That chapter marks the stages of this sacrifice beginning with ‘What is metaphysics?’, the Postscript of ‘What is metaphysics?’, the Introduction to Metaphysics and ‘Zur Kritik der Vorlesung’. This last undated note is a criticism of the too Critical manner of questioning adopted in the Introduction. It calls for a passage vom Seinsverständnis zu Seinsgeschehnis.30 But Seinsgeschehnis is a synonym or pseudonym for Ereignis. In the Beiträge zur Philosophie, subtitled Vom Ereignis, and in what should perhaps be retitled ‘The primal split of the work of art’, earth, although reserved, nevertheless juts or towers through the Open and 114

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through the world, and as closing rises up, even – for aufgehen can have this sense when said, for example, of a door – opens.31 Reciprocally, as we have seen, world grounds and dis-grounds itself, constructing (bildend) itself and deconstructing itself in earth. But, because Ab-grund is not to be confused with Un-grund, there is no logical product by dialectical determinate negation in which these movements come to rest. It is not as though a deep, dark inside is opposed to an outside that is all light. Although, as just indicated, Heidegger may have more than one view of the matter, the chasm we have been locating in terra infirma is not something already there independent of earth’s chiasm with world. It is not a something present or absent, hence it is not something that could be represented to our view or imagined, any more than is imagination itself, which is not a self, not something that ‘is’ or, it should be added, ‘is not’, any more than ‘is’ the Es of the statement regarding Ereignis in ‘Time and being’ that Es gibt and that what gives is time and being. Saying Es ist would be a Ver-sagen, a missaying where there would be a more serious breakdown of predication than when we say ‘It is raining’ and suppose there must be another entity denoted by this ‘it’. Although it is only the rain that raineth everyday, it is appropriate to refer to it by ‘it’. Of Appropriation, Ereignis, we can say with truth rather than mere correctness neither Es ist nor Es gibt, but only Das Ereignis ereignet.32

The chiasm of time and space Die Einbildung bildet ein. It prevails as In-eins-bildung. But also as Bildung in zwei. At the unstill point where – to cite a third epigraph from Sallis, this time his echo in Echoes of Heraclitus Fragment 60 – the way up and the way down are the same, there happens the philo-polemic of the sway of the truth of a-lêtheia (Heraclitus Fragments 8, 80), whose hyphen hints, winkt, not at an interval, but at an oscillation in the very Wesung or sway of truth as concealing-unconcealing without interval (Heraclitus Fragment 123). This swaying, Schwingen,33 is the crossing of the betwixt where/when timing and spacing belong to each other chiasmically. There is not a synthesis but a chiasmus, because separateness is preserved. For although space allows time, unlike time it is never enrapturing, entrückend, and although time allows space, unlike space it is never encapturing, berückend.34 By comparison with the homogeneous space and time of the transcendental imagination in Kant, this imagination is verrückt, mad or, as is said of a clock, put back, regulated, deregulated, deranged, changed. ‘Mad’ derives from the past participles of verbs with the Indo-Germanic root mei- , meaning altered or changed. Compare the Latin mutatus and motus, moved, stirred, set in motion, shaken, disturbed, removed, caused to waver, dislodged, displaced; that is to say, once again, verrückt, as when Heidegger describes as displacement, Verrückung, the alienation from our accustomed relations to 115

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world and earth brought about by the Anstoss of our being struck by the ‘that it is’ of and brought out by the work of art.35

Higher things The working hypothesis of the final section of this chapter is that ‘The origin of the work of art’ is a repetition of the Critique of Aesthetic Judgement, especially of what is written there about the imagination and the sublime. The absence of the word ‘sublime’ from these lectures no more counts against the plausibility of this hypothesis than does the absence from it of the word ‘imagination’. And it is a hypothesis that impels us to take notice, all too briefly, of some of the remarks Sallis makes in the chapter on the third Critique in Spacings which is entitled ‘Tremorings’ and is ambiguously subtitled ‘Withdrawals of the sublime’. These very withdrawals of the sublime confirm the plausibility of our hypothesis, and turning to consider Sallis’s remarks on them enables us to return now at the end of our own remarks to clarify and respond affirmatively to our and Sallis’s opening question. That opening question was whether imagination might be congenitally mad. Could imagination be uncontrollable by reason, not because imagination is in a coffer isolated from reason so that, no matter how diseased the imagination may be, reason remains safe and sound, but because reason participates in imagination so that reason is congenitally mad? Sallis’s hypothesis is that it could. The plausibility of his hypothesis is a corollary of the plausibility of the hypotheses that, while in Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics Heidegger is giving a ‘destructive’ reading of the doctrine of imagination and related doctrines presented by Kant in the first and second Critiques, in ‘The origin of the work of art’ he is doing likewise for the doctrine of imagination presented in the third. Toward the end of his discussion of the doctrine of the sublime presented in the third Critique Sallis proposes ‘tremoring’ to mark the rapid oscillation between repulsion and attraction in the complex feeling of the sublime. We are pained by and recoil from a sensible object of nature, of ‘nature itself in its totality’, phusis-Isis,36 or of art, when the comprehension of it as a whole exceeds the imagination and the imagination fears to lose itself as though in an abyss. However, once the difference between the subject’s sensibility and the object that the imagination strives unsuccessfully to comprehend becomes the schematization of the difference between a striving of imagination and an Idea of a totality controlled by a law of reason, namely the moral law that is the subject’s own freedom, ‘here there is the same amount of attraction as there was repulsion for the mere sensibility’.37 Thus ‘especially in its beginning’, as Kant writes, the ‘tremoring’ – so called by Sallis because the word itself hovers between the ‘trembling’ of the subject and the ‘tremor’ objectively considered – oscillates or hovers. This hovering 116

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continues as long as something is felt to be sublime, for without a sensible object to occasion it, the feeling of sublimity would give way to some other feeling, for instance the feeling of respect. But especially in its end, as we might say, the object of the feeling withdraws away from the abyss toward reason, the subject’s own ground. This movement of partial polarization takes the direction opposite to that which we have found to be decisive in Heidegger’s account of what, following Kant, he calls the proper self, der eigentliche Selbst.38 Opposite? Decisive? Not simply opposite, because the difference between the Grund and the Abgrund to which Heidegger and the work of great art would have us attend cannot be the difference between sensibility and reason if it is, to speak with Schelling, the indifference of ground or reason and abyss within the time-space of which must take place any distinguishing between faculties of the mind, between special areas of philosophy, science, etc., and between theory, practice and production. Not simply decisive, because these last-mentioned distinctions are distinctions in an Entscheidungsraum in which choices are to be made among ontic or existentiell alternatives.39 Prior to such decisions is the Ent-scheidungsraum, which takes choosing away even though it makes place for the whether-or of regulation and law, ‘for decision what is holy and what unholy, what great and what small…’ etc.,40 and even though its priority over such whether-or questions and the way it lets us ‘restrain all usual doing and prizing, knowing and looking’41 can be brought out through asking such whether-or questions calling for such decisions as ‘whether man wants to remain “subject” or whether he grounds Da-sein’.42 What if this grounding is abyssal? What if decision is grounded in dis-cission? As the cission between sensibility and reason would be if imagination, although sometimes said by Kant to be a component along with sensation of the faculty of knowledge, 43 sometimes assimilated to understanding and sometimes said to be a faculty along with and between sensibility and understanding, were, as he also says, the common root not just of sensibility and understanding, but of sensibility and reason. What if, instead of remaining subject, imagination is ‘the openness of existent Dasein’,44 as, without being so named, it begins to become when Da and Sein are interpreted through the time-generative functions (Handlungen) attributed to the productive imagination by Kant and supplemented by Heidegger from the 1930s on with a multiplicity of topologies that he might well have brought together under the title Being and Space or ‘Space and being’? When the productive imagination of the first Critique is pro-duced as it is in the third, it is still less likely that the root of reason can be under reason’s control. Because no concept of the understanding can comprehend what in the critique of aesthetic judgement, by analogy with the schematic sensible concepts of the critique of knowledge and the rational sensibility of the critique of practice, Kant calls aesthetic ideas, Sallis can justly say: ‘Now imagination is so freed 117

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from the rule of understanding that, conversely, it can govern understanding – though in its own playful way – by provoking thought.’45 But can it govern reason, and can it do so without reason being lost? Although according to Kant the feeling of beauty is restful whereas the feeling of sublimity is an e-motion in that the mind feels itself set in motion and depends on an unceasing oscillation,46 the feeling of sublimity is directed toward the putatively stable centre of rationality, legality and freedom that is (re)presented by the aesthetic idea. If the fact that the aesthetic idea is itself a product of the imagination’s free play should lead us to suspect that imagination is an exercise of reason, we should be prepared to admit that reason is an exercise of imagination when we remember that Kant has said, in a sentence reproduced by Sallis from the first Critique: ‘This unconditioned is always contained in the absolute totality of the series as represented in imagination.’47 That is to say, the idea of absolute totality is both an idea of reason and an idea of imagination. Furthermore, this involvement of the imagination is not limited to the moment in which we succumb to transcendental illusion, the illusion that might be compared to the inclination to mistake for something outside us what is only in our mind and that, Kant says in the Anthropology, ‘accounts for the giddiness that comes over us when we look into a chasm (Abgrund)’.48 It is of some mentally sick people (einiger Gemüthskranken) that the Anthropology says they have a fear that they may throw themselves into the abyss. The Critique of Judgement ascribes the fear of giving way to this inclination to the imagination.49 Just as this inclination is not restricted to the mentally deranged persons referred to in this section of the Anthropology, so transcendental illusion is ‘inseparable from human reason’.50 It is therefore inseparable from human imagination, for the so-called ideas of reason in which the illusion has its source are inseparable from imagination, and Kant concedes this at B444. Sallis is thus right when he says that Kant’s heading oversimplifies when it claims ‘Pure Reason as the Seat of Transcendental Illusion’. Besides, although the illusion that Kant says is inseparable from human reason is regarded as a propensity that, although ineliminable, can be guarded against provided we remember that the ideas are employed rationally only when they are employed regulatively, what could that employment be except an employment of imagination if it is a gathering of reason that gathers hermeneutically as if in a focus imaginarius? It is as if imagination were the vertiginous abyss in reason’s ground, in sanity.

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7 LEVINAS’S CRITICAL AND HYPOCRITICAL DICTION

It is the law of goodness to produce hypocrisy.1 (J.B. Mozley)

Holy ‘humanism’ Toward the end of his life Levinas was apt to say that what his thinking had been most concerned with was the holy, the saint. Heidegger too could have said this of his own thinking. However, Levinas equates Heidegger’s notion of the holy, the heilig, with the heil understood as a kind of wholeness and haleness. Levinas interprets the holy as the apart, the kadosh. In Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence the holy is the utter apartness of utterance, of outerance à outrance, of the to-say, the Dire of ex-pression that interrupts expression interpreted as the description and de-cryption of an idea waiting only to be called to mind by posing obstetric, mnemotic, Menotic questions to someone who speaks Greek. If there is questioning here it is the questioning of the question. The calling of the question into question, by asking not ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’ but ‘What are you doing here?’ And to this question the only true answer is always ‘Not enough’. This second question is older than the first. It is older maybe than God’s question to Job, ‘Where then were you when I created the earth?’ In putting a question which will be satisfied by news I am being put into question. And if it seems that I can put myself into question, this is only because I am already put into question by another. This other is not just the alter ego of the soul’s dialogue with itself. It is the alter tu to whom I cannot fail to remain answerable even when I succeed in coming up with news and knowledge. Indeed, only because dialogue is more than covert monologue is there something that is entitled to be called really new, something by which we can never be satisfied, something of which we can never have enough. For the Desire that animates the soul of the soul in its depths increases with the increase of the satisfaction of the desires of the conative ego. Ethical 121

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Desire is not the correlate of satisfaction. It is Absolute Relation that disturbs all correlation, bad conscience that provokes consciousness, the itch of the other under my skin. Every apology pro vita mea is ever increasingly lame. For the other under my skin, who is, as Levinas says, the very psychisme of my psyche, commands me to responsibility even for the other’s responsibilities. Moreover, the more I endeavour to meet these responsibilities the more specific responsibilities I incur. This is not only because, for each response I am ethically bound to make, there is a failure on my part to respond to countless other others the neglect of whose claims no moral law can justify.2 It is also because the acts that meet my duties are acts of the agent enjoying existence in its singular place in the sun; so that, as is repeated six times in half that number of pages at the end of the section of Totality and Infinity on the ethical relation and time, the very endeavour to escape the self-centredness of egological existence, altruistic though it may be, confirms its egologicality. The word ‘confirmation’ brings together these two reasons for saying that the more I meet my responsibilities the more responsibilities I have to meet. For Levinas writes of confirmation not only of my egological singularity. He goes on to write of it as the confirmation – with overtones of the religious rite of confirmation or bar mitzvah – of my ethical singularity before the singular other that is the suspension of general principial ethics as understood by Hegel and Kierkegaard, yet is the anarchic condition from which Levinas maintains that general ethics is suspended.3 This holds when my act is no more than a speech-act expressing what I want to say, articulating my désirer- or vouloir-dire. As the doctrine of the good beyond being might have led us to expect, Levinas shows that Socrates’ insistence in the Phaedrus that a speaker or writer must remain ready to authenticate his words is tantamount to the assertion that parousial representation or significance of one thing standing for another entails representation in an ethical and proto-political sense, a signifying by the speaker of herself or himself as always open to critique. I stand by what I say not in the sense that I refuse to take back what I say, but in the sense that I expose myself to refutation. Plato is something of a Critical Rationalist, even if the interlocutors to whom he exposes his Socrates are often too ready to agree with the latter, and despite Karl Popper’s judgement that Plato is an enemy of the open society. I can only stand up for myself if I stand up for the other’s right to reply. The self is always already, as self, though not as only ego, responsible to the other in being responsible to the self. For my selfhood is inseparable from the other, undetachable from the detachment that is accomplished in the proximity to the other. The responsibility here is absolute, a priori as Kant would say, as is the Kantian moral law. But like the Kantian moral law, it is not to be confused with a particular ethical obligation. When Levinas speaks of the ethical it is not specific responsibilities that he means. He is speaking of humanity as such, 122

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though the force of the as such, the kath auto, receives an emphasis that elevates it above its classical philosophical sense, and this emphasis itself is elevated beyond dialectical Aufhebung. Levinas is attempting to make sense of a humanism defined not by the moral law or the principles of the understanding, but a humanism of the other human being in which the categorical imperative is expressed in the face of this singular and not merely particular other human being whose command ‘Thou shalt not kill’ converts the identity of the first-person subjective I concerned for its own survival into the hyper-identity of an accusative and accused me. My asymmetric relation to the other is not natural altruism, but the paradoxical condition of the possibility of altruism, of egoism and of mutual sympathy. The almost irresistible temptation here is to say that just as my identity as ego is a case of the egohood of which other egos are other instances, so the ethical self is but one among many. Levinas recognizes that he is exposing himself and his readers to that temptation when in Otherwise than Being he appears to be giving an account of human identity and human nature as such, an account on which he himself elsewhere confers the title, Humanism of the Other Man. The title is a provocative allusion to eighteenth-century doctrines of the rights and lights of man, to post-Nietzschean declarations of the demise of man, to another title according to which Existentialism is a Humanism, and, especially, to the reaction made to Jean Beaufret’s reference to the author of this last-named book by the author of the ‘Letter on “Humanism” ’. In Heidegger’s title, though not often in citations of it by commentators, the word ‘Humanism’ is put between inverted commas of one kind or another. This could be a sign of Heidegger’s embarrassment over describing as an -ism an existential ontology of Dasein that has, as he emphasizes in Being and Time, an existenziell point of departure. Part of what this means is that the point of his analysis will be missed unless the reader acknowledges that the analysis and what is under analysis (being) addresses itself to what is unique to that reader – as might be said too, it is not irrelevant to add, of what is addressed to the person lying on the psychoanalyst’s couch. Already in describing as je-meinig what is unique to each reader and in employing the common noun, Jemeinigkeit, Heidegger has given himself and his readers further cause for embarrassment, the embarrassment into which the propounder of sense-certainty is thrown when pressed by the author of the Phenomenology of Spirit to write down what he says about the this, the here and the now. Levinas could say that the inverted commas that accompany Heidegger’s use/mention of ‘Humanism’ are a device of dediction, unsaying, dédire. Some of Levinas’s readers would say, in light of his invocation of the word ‘Illeity’ that I shall use as a title for a section of this chapter, that he too should have placed the word ‘Humanism’ in inverted commas when he used it in the title of his book.

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Criticism What does Levinas mean by dédire? This can be discovered by discovering what he means by criticism, and something can be learned about that by discovering what criticism means for Husserl. Toward the end of his teaching career in Paris, Levinas gave seminars on The Crisis of European Sciences and Western Phenomenology. Briefly stated, the crisis to which Husserl’s title refers is the critical decision (and, remember, krinein already means to decide) with which the scientist is faced: either to accept the unfalsified written inheritance of the science in the interests of accumulating more knowledge and saving time, or to present her- or himself with the original experimental evidence again and again thereby reanimating the archival corpus. Even if the dilemma can be overcome by distributing these tasks among different members of a team, rapid acceleration of the mass of data and theory to be reprocessed seems bound to reduce the proportion of those scientists who can be working at the living edge of discovery and invention. Even so, this working and reworking must go on if science is to be more than the collection and recollection of sedimented memories. That is why the worker in what Husserl calls the science of phenomenology must go back to the beginning again and again. The beginning is not to be understood simply as a chronological point like that at which Thales or whoever began the science of geometry. Such a return to the start is a beginning in Husserl’s sense only if it is an originary rethinking and reworking of the proofs, whether of theorems discovered thousands of years ago or only last week. So the solution of the crisis of European science is to take both options. What can it profit science if fresh findings are not written up in Nature or put on the Internet? Publicity is the condition of objectivity since the condition of objectivity is exposure to criticism. The crisis of science is therefore not an irresoluble dilemma. It is a difficulty that is of the essence of scientificity. The appearance of unbreakable antinomy arises from taking as a simple opposition what is a chiastic or a dialectical complexity. A chiastic complexity differs from a dialectical one by giving rhetorical priority to that member of a pair of apparent opposites to which history has denied even equality, and where the apparent opposition is not absorbed into a higher unity but revealed as the histrionic effect of a disunity that is ineradicable because unradical or anarchic. Adopting a word that Levinas employs, a word to which we shall return in the final and penultimate sections of this chapter, one could say that this disunity is hypoCritical, criticism before Criticism, in that it is an in-depth or vertical and preternatural separation antecedent to the horizontal separation or choice of natures, classes or objects. What Husserl says of animation and reanimation is put too by him in terms of forgetting, sleeping and being awakened, especially in the lectures on Philosophical Psychology dating from 1925, drawn on in lectures 124

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delivered in 1928, followed by lectures on intersubjectivity in 1928–9. Levinas attended the two later courses. He draws upon them in, for example, the essay, ‘De la conscience à la veille’ (1974).4 There he repeats some of the above-mentioned ideas about reanimative repetition that Husserl was to go on to express in the Crisis written in the mid-1930s, by which time Levinas had translated the Fifth of the Cartesian Meditations. In his essay on conciousness and vigilance Levinas applies these ideas about reanimative repetition and re-presentation to the main topic of the fifth of these Meditations, consciousness of others, arguing that this application begins to be made by Husserl himself. It would take too long to repeat his argument here. Suffice it to say that although Levinas recognizes the importance of the pages in which Husserl attempts to show how the other makes possible a transcendence of the ego’s monadological immanence, those pages are embarrassed by their refusal to transcend consciousness and ecstatic intentionality. By that refusal Husserl is constrained to attempt to show how the other’s consciousness can enter mine thanks to an analogical coupling, the precise nature of which remains obscure because it depends upon an obscure notion of an apodicticity that does not demand an evidential adequacy of cogito and cogitatum. Clamped into the assumption that objectivity even of axiological and practical judgement is based upon consciousness of noematic objects, Husserl’s exploration of passive temporal synthesis stops short of considering if objectivity might have a deeper base in an intentionality that is not a mode of my consciousness of an object, but an intentionality of which I am the ‘object’,5 a certain aconsciousness that is not a mode of knowledge but a mode of a certain always prior acknowledgement; not a mode of appearing but a mode of having been always already summoned to appear; not a mode of testing but a mode of attestation in advance. These phrases, ‘always already’ and ‘in advance’, allude to what I call prediction or pre-diction because the ambiguity of this term enables it to refer both to an absolute past, as I am concerned to explain now, and to an absolute future, as I shall be concerned to explain later on. Prediction can be a saying that has a priority prior to any purely ontological or epistemological apriority. This saying belongs as it were to a past, but a past more passed than any that can be comprehended within a synthesis of recollection. It exceeds the memory of the living and the memory of the dead. And yet this transcendence in immanence is the very life of the psyche, the soul of the soul, going beyond the psychology treated in Aristotle’s De Anima, animating the animation that for Husserl and Plato consist in reconducting, reducting, reducing, leading memory back to a renewal of the experience it records. Such renewal is but the appearance of renewal because it is a repetition of the same, for such a reduction is only the rediction of the said. Really creative renewal is accomplished only in the rediction that is a dediction of the said, of the dit that supports the restated constated message by performing a renewal of the 125

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speaker’s good faith. The finite and finished said is a dead said. Life for it is paradoxically secured only by an infinitive to-say, a dire that breaks into it like a serial thief. The break-in has to be iterated. For every dedicted diction is to be dedicted again until one’s last breath.

Prediction Suppose for a moment that Levinas’s dire corresponds to Saussure’s parole or the speech acts of what used to be called informal logic. And suppose we take Levinas’s dit to correspond to a propositional content defined in terms of the system of a language in Saussure’s meaning of langue, or to a Fregean thought or to the noematic content, which according to Husserl may be the doxic core indifferently of assertive, axiological and practical judgement. Then it will seem unreasonable to give logical priority to saying over the said as Levinas does.6 We shall be puzzled why he does not grant that they are equiprimordial. We may be inclined to say that if either is logically prior then this priority must be given to the said, the dit, and to the content of thought, precisely because our question is one of logical priority, the kind of priority proper to the said and the content and form of thought. We shall continue to be puzzled by Levinas’s insistence on the priority of saying until we distinguish two distinctions: first, the distinction between the saying and the said as this regards acts of speech and the meaning and truth that some of them claim, and, second, the distinction between that which is an act or passion in the sense of traditional theory of theory and practice, and the absolute passivity and passedness of the pre-diction of the speaker her- or himself. This pre-diction is prior to the diction of heard words and understood message. Levinas contrasts the signifying of myself by this predictive appeal with the signifying of Heidegger’s peal or resonance of silence, the Geläut der Stille in which language as poem gives voice to being prior both to the acoustic, phonetic and physiological vocalisation of communicative discourse and to the inhibition of such vocalisation. On Levinas’s reading of what Heidegger says about this pre-dictive Sagen or Sagan, being can resound through the poem only if it is a resounding of a said.7 We shall see later (in the section entitled ‘Criticism and the work of art’) that a less questionable reading of what Heidegger intends could have been given by Levinas in light of his own reflections on the saying of the poem. But the relevant point to be made now is that what signifies in Levinasian pre-diction – and on my reading this much holds too for Heideggerian pre-diction – is not words that are written or spoken, nor words that are only thought. Pre-diction is not that which may or may not be expressed in the sense of put into audible or legible words. It is the expression of the human being itself that tears open the envelope in which the message is contained. For, as the references made in the next section to Levinas’s understanding of messianism will confirm, on his account of the 126

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an-archic condition of the ethical the human being is called to an obedience before it understands or hears the content of a command. That is not irrationality. It is the height of rationality, though of a certain madness of rationality for which Levinas adapts the words ‘folie’ and ‘psychosis’. And this is not plain irresponsibility, but irresponsibility without which there is no freedom or responsibility. It is the freeing of the freedom of the rational will by the responsibility above the obligations and rights determined by law. It is the freeing of the freedom of the other. This is why it is so appropriate for Levinas to say that I am a hostage for the other, however traumatized by his use of this term some of his readers have been. My incarceration liberates others. And, incidentally, myself. The pre-dictive giving of a sign that calls for the dediction of semantic signs is prior response, the pre-response of a human being as such to another human being as such, where, as we now know, the universal essence of as-suchness is hybridized by singularity and uniqueness. In pre-dictive signifiance to another I am in a super-relation to the other that is prior to relation as narrative and to relation as biological kin. It is absolute relation in that it is absolved from what classical logic calls relations and properties. So it is prior to and independent of gender, race, class and income. Only if we overlook this are we likely to be outraged by Levinas’s affirmation that I am always responsible for the other. When Levinas writes, countersigning, adding his signature, his firma, to the Scriptural statement that the other is always in the position of the orphan, the widow and the stranger, this is to be understood in a manner that permits these qualities to be predicated even of my most affluent neighbour. For the Scriptural reference is to be taken as a concrete figuration of the dissymmetrical relation in which I am more responsible than anyone for the other simply as other, as naked face.8 The first ethically other is absolutely orphaned, widowed and cold, whether or not she be empirically orphaned or widowed or cold. She need be neither rich nor poor nor empirically naked. Nor need I. My empirical nakedness might serve as a clothing and my empirical poverty might serve as a property coming between the other and me as the other’s absolute servant. My ethical nakedness denudes me of my empirical nakedness. If both accidental and essential properties are secondary to my absolute responsibility to the singular other facing me, so also is substance. Substance, whether ontic or ontological, is supported by substitution, my unsubstitutable substitution for the other in which not my nature, but my ipseity consists. Levinas’s emphatic rethinking of identity is a rethinking of Heidegger on the topic of Identity and Difference, and one that repeats at a deeper level what we recall Heidegger saying about existenziell Jemeinigkeit. Levinas teaches that Jemeinigkeit (my being for myself, though not out of natural egoism) is, as we might put it, in-stenziell Je-deinigkeit (my being for the other, though not out of natural altruism) – and Jedienlichkeit (my being the other’s servant, without being the other’s slave). 127

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My uniquely own mineness is my unique thineness, my being at your service, but without being your property or your slave. Pre-diction is predication, but in the sense of a proclamation that is prior to the predication of properties. At this point this teaching may seem to be vulnerable to an objection provoked by the defence just proposed against the objection that Levinas’s teaching concerning responsibility permits an outrageous distributive injustice. If absolute responsibility demands absolute passivity, denucleation of the self, kenôsis, sacrifice of the self, how can any sense be given to the idea of response? There seems to be nothing left to respond.9 I do not pretend to be able to make complete sense of this notion of response. And I do not wish to appeal prematurely to Levinas’s own admission that his attempt to make sense out of the nonsense threatened by rumours of the death of God and of man will be haunted by a nonsense peculiar to that attempt. But I think that some of the sting is taken out of this objection about the coherence of Levinas’s idea of the responsibility of the denucleated self if we recognize that its responsibility to the Good beyond being does not deprive the absolutely responsible self of its embodied ego living in and living off an economic and cultural environment and its ontic goods. Absolute responsibility to the Good entails this embodiment and these goods, for it is concretely realized in the sacrificing of the enjoyment of these goods by giving them to the other, not going to the other empty-handed, giving to the other the coat without which I shall suffer from the cold, and the nourishing bread whose taste I am in the process of relishing. S’offrir is souffrir. One reason for describing absolute responsibility as face-to-face is that the face and the eyes are vulnerable parts of the body. And as for the nakedness, that is still an exposure of skin sensitive both to the supercutaneous caress and to the subcutaneous bite of conscience. Absolute dyadic responsibility and the relative responsibilities of general society are not parallel to each other. They intersect, just as the demands of multiple comparative and distributive justice and the common language they imply are implicit in the look of the other other, the third who already regards me in the first other’s eyes, that first other’s sister or brother or neighbour. The chiasmus of ethical regard is the suspension of visibility by invisibility in the wink of an eye, in the Augenblick or moment or instant, where this last term alludes to a tribunal before which one is arraigned. This chiasmus of seeing and unseeing is a chiasmus of saying and unsaying the said.

Messianism The time of this crossing of the saying and the said is the ‘impossible’ ‘dead time’ (temps mort, which can also mean injury time or time wasted) of the crossing over of the time of the mortal other and the time of the interval between this very moment now and the for me ‘impossible’ moment of my 128

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death. That interval is a time of the possibility of my ethically impossible failure to respond to the other’s ‘Thou shalt not kill’. Yet the response too is impossible in the sense that, as previously explained, the responsibility increases the more my responsibilities are met. This impossible performance goes back to an impossible performativity. I warned earlier of the danger of drawing too close a parallel between Austinian performativity and the rededication of the self to the other that dediction performs. I had in mind not only that the Austinian performative is an act of speech, but also that this act takes place at a present point in time that is marked by the ‘hereby’ which can always be added to a performative utterance if it does not already contain it: for example, ‘I hereby promise’, ‘I hereby disclaim all responsibility’, this latter being operative as a disclaimer, of course, only if in saying it I claim absolute responsibility for what I say. But, as Derrida notes, the strange Levinasian performative belongs to a past, an absolute past. Again, we must beware of supposing that this locates that strange performative at a point in time that is older than any other, like an initiatory Big Bang. We are speaking neither of cosmology nor of cosmogony nor of chronology here. And this holds too for those few places where Levinas refers to an absolute future. Preoccupation by thoughts of the millennium should not be allowed to prejudice our interpretation of what he says about the absolute future or the messianism to which he also alludes in this connection. What in this and other contexts he calls prophecy, meaning by that speaking for the other, and what, with a meaning that includes prophecy, I have called pre-diction are no more and no less concerned with divining future history than they are with retrodiction. Levinas comments upon an ‘Anachronism which, according to the recoverable time of reminiscence, is no less paradoxical than a prediction of the future.’10 The paradoxicality of foretelling the future is not half as paradoxical as that of absolute prediction or of what he calls retro-ascendence, for the ana-chronism of both absolute past and absolute future is outside the time of memory and oracle, yet it is what keeps both of those times alive. It does so by folding the absolute past and the absolute future into each other in the strange meeting between dedictive saying and the said in a presence of one human being presented to another which makes possible and impossible what we call a present moment in the temporality of recuperable time. No more than the absolute past is the absolute future of messianism as interpreted by Levinas an ecstasis of existential temporality. And it is no more to be pictured as a state of the or a world to come than the absolute immemorial past is to be pictured as a state of the or a world that has elapsed. Messianism is vigilant attention to the other. It is a patient waiting upon the other that is not the waiting for any person or thing, but attente sans attendu.11 It is always already too late to wait, if to wait is to expect. The Messiah of this messianism is not someone expected to come and bring about the end of history, but the human being acknowledging responsibility toward other 129

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human beings at this very moment.12 The Messiah is me, accused and categorized, summoned to appear as witness for the other, as the one who, according to the Cabbala and to one of the characters in The Brothers Karamazov, is called to support, in Levinas’s words, tout le monde. By this he means everyone else, but some of Levinas’s readers will want to go on asking whether those words tout le monde should be taken to refer, as do the words of Dostoevsky’s novel which they translate, not only to everyone, but also to every thing.13 This is an item on the agenda of Part III.

Illeity Another task that must remain on the agenda of Levinas’s readers is that of working out whether what he calls the extraordinary but also abusive name God is either ultimately dispensable or definable in terms of an ethical interpretation of what he calls illeity or of in-finity meaning both not finite and in the finite.14 Illeity is sometimes described by Levinas as the third person He that keeps God separate, in the spirit of the statement that we should not allow the love of God to divert us from the love of the Torah.15 I should like to think that this statement is tantamount to the statement that the love of God should not be allowed to divert me from the love of the neighbour, and that Levinas continues to speak to those who would be turned away if the approach of the other, the tu or the vous, had to be made via the other other whose proname is God or Il, He. This He is the excluded middle that is set apart in order to prevent ethical Desire for the undesirable collapsing back into desire for the desirable, the fulfilment of a need or the intermediate condition of erotic desire that, on Levinas’s account of it, does not seek possession. To return to a question posed at the end of the immediately preceding section, could this Il stand not for He but for It, so that It would be a proname for each and everyone and each and every thing, and I am responsible for autrui because autrui is an autre among the many other others, autres autres, for which I am responsible? I am not unaware that this would go against the spirit of what Levinas writes and, depending upon how we understand his word Autre here, may go against the letter when he writes that ‘waiting for God…is…waiting for what cannot be a term and which is always referred from the other (l’Autre) to autrui’.16 As according to Levinas God has no meaning outside search without end, so responsibility is answerability without answer or ability. Perhaps that is why the comédie humaine is a divine comedy, the enigma of the temple and the theatre, the theatre where a play by Beckett may be being staged, the theatre where Nietzschean laughter may be gloriously holy, kadosh. For – repeating Heidegger’s repetition of Heraclitus’ statement that the gods are even here in the humble kitchen, altered only by the addition of 130

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the adverb ‘maybe’ to which Levinas has incessant recourse, and remembering that re-petition, re-quest, may be the question into which I am put before I can ever ask a question – the gods are maybe even in the theatre where it might be thought that the proscenium arch of art suspends responsibility.

Criticism and the work of art The work of art is the topic of one of Levinas’s very early essays, and, like so many of his writings, that essay, ‘Reality and its shadow’ (1948), closes by drawing the reader’s attention to a topic that has not been treated in it, but is earmarked for future treatment by Levinas himself. In this essay he compares the work of art to a shadow doubling reality. It is an image suspended in a frozen moment of eternal duration that is neither the eternity of the concept nor the temporality of reality. An account of the temporality of reality cannot be given without an account of the relation with the other human being, and to give an account of the relation of the work of art to the other human being is to give an account of what the final paragraph of the essay calls the ‘ “logic” of the exegesis of art’.17 This word ‘logic’, put in inverted commas, anticipates what Levinas will say in later writings about the connection between art and the distinction between saying and the said. Yet hints in that direction are made through the references to criticism in ‘Reality and its shadow’, the first section of which is headed ‘Art and criticism’, and the last section of which is headed ‘For philosophical criticism’. ‘Criticism’ or ‘critique’ is one of a host of words that are unsaid, dedicted and tropically resaid by Levinas in that their semantic signification is doubled by an ethical signifiance that exceeds and crosses the doubling of the meaning of a word by the meaning or intention of someone who uses it. The image is a double of reality, isolated in an interim duration from the time of reality. But criticism, often considered inferior to artistic creation, is capable of effecting a rapprochement between the dehumanisation of art and the human world. There are two stages to this process. The process is begun when the attention of the critic is turned to the way the artist works on the raw material and to the manner in which he or she is influenced by the tradition. This already reintroduces the work of art into history. There appears to be no reason for describing such criticism as philosophical. But criticism is philosophical when it concerns itself with deciding what it is to be a work of art and recognizes that the work of art is essentially myth, muthos, and so calls for interpretation. This holds for music. Levinas maintains that all art, including literary art, is essentially musical in the sense that rhythm is of its essence and in the sense that it is as though the artist is dictated to, inspired, as we say, by the muse, so that the work of art seems to be created anonymously. In modern literature at least from Shakespeare and through Molière, Goethe and 131

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Dostoevsky, the artist becomes his own philosophical critic, so that the work of art veers into philosophy when muthos is converted into the logos of a chosen exegetic conceptualization of the myth. This only apparently Hegelian intellectualist turn may seem to turn its back on precisely what is the marvel of the work of art, namely the unfinishedness that requires the reader, the viewer or the listener to take part in its continued creation and life. But Levinas sees in the image the opposite of creation and life. Only the fake future of fixed fate and death can be read in the eyes of the statue. That is why in some religions the image is proscribed. A real future dawns, and rejuvenation becomes possible only when the idol, like Galatea receiving the breath of life from Aphrodite, is given speech. For this means the replacement of muthos, legend, by logos understood, in contrast to muthos, as work, ergon, and indeed leitourgia, liturgy. As logos is amphibological as between what is said and the to-say, so ergon is amphibological as between dynamic mechanical or social interaction and ethical service without return, without even the return of gratitude. It is ultimately in this ethical sense that critique is to be understood. In its active and interactive sense critique is critique of the other or of oneself. That discursive and recursive critique is still only allergy in the sense of friction. It is not ergon in the sense of liturgy, the ethical work in the service of which the work of art takes on an ethical dimension and the aesthetical becomes ethical: aesthethical. Let us not be misled by this turn of phrase into supposing that when the purely aesthetic becomes truly sacrosanct by sacrificing itself to the ethical, it becomes a cog in a utilitarian system of means and ends. The time-honoured contrast between art and utility is not here being dropped. It is only being revised. The work of art is still other than the work of instrumental readiness to hand. For when through criticism, that is to say, conceptual exegesis and interpretation, its status as pure image is superseded, it is yet a further remove from interest and inter-esse-ment than the aesthetic image taken as pure play. When the otherness and strangeness commonly attributed to the work of art becomes its relation to the otherness of the other human being, art undergoes an emphasis or hyperbolization of dis-inter-est-edness and dés-intéresse-ment, that is to say, of its non-negative, non-meontological difference from the ontological difference of being and beings. This translation of the image into concept does not mean the substitution of the closure of a concept for the openness of an image. For the concept, and this holds for the philosophical concept, is infinitely interpretable. Not only semantically. The point is not just that, despite aspirations to completeness that philosophers sometimes entertain, the philosophical text is as polysemic as the scriptures of the Hebrew Bible that according to the rabbis are susceptible to infinite midrashic exegesis. That would be a feature of whatever in the text is said, the content – though it should be noted that the dediction of content, the interruption of the said by the saying, opens up the ground for polysemic rediction that is the ever renewed youth of 132

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language. More important than that infinite interpretability guided by tradition is the dimension of ethical infinity opened up through each interpretative said being prophetic, for another. It is a response, whether to a holy scripture and to other interpreters of it, or to a handed-down philosophical text – for instance a text by Levinas – and to contemporary and future interpreters of it.18 So that if it is an ethical responsibility that I shoulder in affirming what I say, this is not only because that constative affirmation is supported by a performative affirmation analogous to the appending of my signature (firma). That would still be the undertaking of responsibility understood as an act of my free will. The secret superessence of the ethical beyond essence and otherwise than being is not that simply of how to do things with words. It is how at the same time to undo things with words.19 It is how to undo the thing in saying the thing – according to the ‘ “logic” of philosophical exegesis’ suggested by the Hebrew word davar, which means thing and word and word as verbe or parole, which I give to the other in giving myself as signifying witness. So the thing that is undone here is the word. To undo words said is the saying word’s most dramatic and most drastic deed. It is this because it is the undoing of the sayer. The subject of the susceptibility to infinite exegesis is my subjectivity.

Dediction Levinas says that every dit must be dédit, every dictum must be dedicted, or, rather, that it already has been. Dediction is pre-diction. The dictum is backed by an always already uttered, absolutely past performance of a Saying, a Saying that, despite its present participial grammar, has the logic of a pluperfect tense (temps) of which the time (temps) is that of the other, not that of my protentive and retentive consciousness or unconscious. In that saying my subjectivity must have signified itself unreservedly. But, Levinas says, binding prediction and dediction to dedication: For subjectivity to signify unreservedly, it would then be necessary that the passivity of its exposure to the other not be immediately inverted into activity, but expose itself in its turn; a passivity of passivity is necessary, and in the glory of the Infinite, ashes from which an act could not be born again. Saying is this passivity and this dedication to the other.20 Dedication to the other is not simply a saying of the said. It is also a ‘Saying saying itself (Dire disant le dire même), without thematizing it, but exposing it again’, ‘the pre-reflexive iteration of the saying of this very saying’. No such positing of a said is without a pre-reflexive exposition of myself as sheer saying that is my giving of myself to the other, not merely indicating that I am indifferently somewhere, Da, but that I am here, ici, at 133

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your service. ‘Here I am’ (me voici, hineni) is pre-reflexively and multiply token-reflexive or indexical. Therefore each word – the adverb of place, the pronoun and the tensed verb – must be iterated if the signification they obtain from the place at which they are uttered, from the person uttering them and from the tense of the utterance is not to be sucked into an errance by which responsibility could be located anywhere and anywhen in anyone whomsoever, or nowhere and nowhen in no one at all. Here again the Greek logos of thematization presses us to ask about the chronos of the again of the re-iterative saying of the saying. Notwithstanding the lesson to be inferred from the statement that ‘Although Sinai belongs to the past, the entire Jewish Law is commanded today’,21 we incessantly ask about the temporal relation between the saying and the said today, at this very moment and at every other moment that will be another today for whomever is commanded then. We must answer no less incessantly that this question misses the difference between the said of the Greek logos and the saying for the exposition of which Levinas appeals to the Hebrew davar – and could have appealed to the Arabic bayan.22 This is an exposition of exposition, a displacement not merely from one place in time to another, but a displacement of times, a diachrony, where the ‘dia-’ has more the meaning of ‘sundering’ or ‘differing’ than its common meaning of ‘through’, unless the through is that of temporalities, mine and the other’s, cutting through each other. The diachrony of the time of the other interrupting my time interrupts any question of priority presupposing a common time, just as no question of logical contradiction can arise between the diction of the saying and the diction of the said unless the former is neutralized by being reduced to the latter. As has already been said, the very question is already called into question, and with it the questioner. If for Heidegger Dasein is essentially the questioner for whom the question of its being is always an issue, for Levinas the human being is the creature that is called into question. This being called into question is critique.23 And it is critique of critique if the latter critique is understood in the classical sense of logical and epistemological class distinction or discernment according to ethical or religious norms. E-normative critique is hypercriticism. Higher than the higher criticism of nineteenth-century Biblical hermeneutics, it is also higher than the criticism of Western philosophy confined to what is said. Philosophy itself is ‘wonderfully hypocritical! For it loves the madness which it supervises’,24 so that, as practised not only by Levinas, but as prescribed at its very beginning in the Phaedrus, it bursts through the limits of its classical constraints when what is philosophically said is reduced to saying over and over again, for example when philosophical scepticism returns despite the logical inconsistency between what it says and the fact of its saying it. Whereas philosophical criticism as practised by Kant and Husserl and in Platonic dialectic as superficially understood formulate procedures for deciding to what class something belongs and what to call it, 134

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as enigmatic hypocriticism it is the philosopher’s having been called, having been summoned to appear, to comparaître rather than to apparaître: the philosopher’s having been indicted. Here this ‘having been’ is interpretable neither as a simply chronological nor as a simply logical priority, any more than the pre- of pre-diction signals such a logical or chronological priority of one diction to another diction. We could say that the priority is phenomenological, but only if the phenomenology engages with the phenomenon of what exceeds disclosure in consciousness (Husserl), the concealing of being (Heidegger), and the concealing of consciousness in the unconscious (Freud). Levinas’s ethical humanism of the other human being exceeds the dogmatic empiricist and rationalist oppositions of activity and passivity and of apriority and aposteriority. Hence, when Levinas writes that there is a simultaneity of activity and passivity in the welcome of the other, this can only be the non-synchronous simultaneity of two times understood as the time of the other’s being towards his death interrupting the time in which I could be the cause of that death despite the ‘Thou shalt not kill’, which is as readable on the other’s face as it is on the tablet of my own soul, because the other is the very soul of my soul. If then we attempt to construe activity and passivity together as a middle voice, that middle must be a broken middle and that voice a broken voice, broken at the moment of action based on the foundation of my place in an economy when that moment is also the moment of the disestablishment of foundation, whether this foundation be the Husserlian principle of all principles or the Kantian moral law. For when the other is found to have broken and entered into the home of my economic selfhood, that selfhood is found to have been unselved, torn away from the solely egological substantivity of its for-itselfness toward anarchic substitution for the other. This is not the substitution of dialogue for monologue. The community of the discourse of dialogue and discourse ethics is monotemporal comm-unity, reciprocity in one and the same time, even if it allows for the distinction between what one of the interlocutors has said and his saying it. Beyond that distinction between dire as speech act and dit as the content of what is said is the quasi-transcendental diremptive Dire of that dire, an avant-dire anterior to the speech act that affirms content. It is the contentless and contextless ‘Thy servant heareth’ in response to the command ‘Thou shalt not kill’ or ‘Love thy neighbour as thyself’. This response alters the unity of my egological self and of the temporality of the quest for its own salvation into the uniqueness of my having been elected to give priority to the needs of others. The call of the other animates my psyche a priori, but not in the manner of a Platonic idea. The other is under my skin both a priori and a posteriori, according to a posterior anteriority of the experience of rationality and the rationality of experience that by the standards of Greek logic is absurd.25

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This barbarian chiasmus of before and after, before and after the usual opposition of before and after and of experience and reason, raises the question whether Levinas should allow that what he describes as a passivity beyond the usual opposition of passivity and activity is not also an absolute activity beyond that opposition. An affirmative answer to this question seems to be implied in his assertion that ‘The term welcome of the Other expresses a simultaneity of activity and passivity which places the relation with the other outside of the dichotomies valid for things: the a priori and the a posteriori, activity and passivity.’26 Because the activity said here to be simultaneous with passivity is not activity opposed to passivity it does not entail the identification of reason with free will made by German Idealism. Furthermore, Levinas refers both to Abraham’s obedience on Moriah in ignorance of the sacrifice that God says He will provide and to Exodus 24: 7 according to which ‘Moses took the book of the covenant, and read in the audience of the people: and they said, All that the Lord hath said will we do, and be obedient.’ Levinas favours the gloss that sees in the order of the words of this last statement – the last word of which (nishma) can mean hearing or understanding – a precedence of doing over understanding. This supports and is supported by the so-called Judaic notion that love can be commanded, for to love is to act, and the command to love one’s neighbour has a privileged place in the decalogue. It has a special place too in Levinas’s thought. Against the caricature of Judaism that maintains that it rates the Law above love, Levinas maintains that love can be commanded only because it is commanded by love.27 That love, like the love of the Israelites promising to do before they have heard what that love commands them, is action in the everyday world in which I am face-to-face with my neighbour. How can we make sense of Levinas’s references both, on the one hand, to absolute responsibility as not ‘assumed’ or ‘welcomed’ and, on the other and the same hand, to ‘taking up a position’, ‘placing oneself under the judgement of God’, ‘welcoming’ the (unwelcoming) other and ‘supporting the world’, unless these words denote a passivity that is not ‘allergically’ opposed to activity yet that is cashed in action in the everyday world? Action is the expression of the passion of loving obedience, so the action and the passion cannot be opposed to each other. There can be no opposition between absolute passivity and action if passivity is ‘produced’ or ‘accomplished’ as action, where these key terms of Levinas’s mean both realization and revelation.28

HypoCrisy The objection may be made that Levinas is not entitled to cite Biblical texts in texts that he is keen to have regarded as Greek or ‘Greek’. His reply to this objection is that he does not use these citations as premisses in a philosophical argument.29 Anyway, what entitles the objector to assume a 136

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priori that there is no ‘Hebrew’ element in the ‘Greek’? For maybe confessional and philosophical texts have a common source. That this is so cannot be known. We can say only, as does Levinas, combining two of the most Greekly philosophical words of all in the word peut-être, ‘maybe’. Maybe, as Levinas says of Blanchot’s explanations of what is said in his own books, what is said in Levinas’s books must be said in the modality of this ‘maybe’, a word of which more must be said in this book (see Chapter 11).30 Maybe, as has already been glimpsed, there is no philosophy as love of wisdom that is not enigmatically, hypocritically and chiastically related to philosophy as wisdom of love. And maybe there is no questioning that is not also crossed by prayer without request – sans demande. In one of his last interviews Levinas confesses: ‘I have often wondered – Je me suis souvent demandé – if the beginning of truth, the first Cartesian truth, the cogito, prior to every chance it contains of leading back one day to God – is not already a prayer that cries out from the depths of a solitude of doubt.’31 We do well to remember that however frequently Levinas may cite Biblical and Talmudic texts in his putatively ‘Greek’ ones and in the many oral face-toface interviews that relate to them rather as do the prefaces to the chapters of his ‘Greek’ texts and as does the oral to the written Talmud, the predictive Saying towards which these philosophical works hint is ‘prior to every chance it contains of leading back one day to God’. So it is not true that Levinas has reached the beginning of truth only when Totality and Infinity has analysed the transition in Descartes’s third Meditation from the doubting and therefore finite ego via reflective meditation upon the idea of infinity, to the interruption of that reflective meditation by a meditative prayer in praise of God’s majesty.32 The beginning of truth is the humbler prayer of saying je vous en prie, prego, bitte, I beg you, to another human being, where, no more than in Descartes’s prayer to God, the begging is not asking the other for something for oneself, for instance for one’s own salvation. Nor is it even asking for the other to forgive me. It is giving an acknowledgement of responsibility for meeting the other’s needs. And this acknowledgement is not mediated by acknowledgement that the other or myself is made in the image of God. That is why we should remember that Levinas thinks that not only philosophical reflection on the image of God in the human being, but philosophical reflection on the image as work of art may lead back to the humble beginning of truth in the sincerity of one human being shaking hands with another. We should also remember – though we shall note a qualification of this in the Epilogue – that we are exposed to what we might expect him to regard as the danger of idolatry when the passage from the aesthetic to the ethical is reversed, and that in our anxiety to hold at arm’s length the God of monotheism we may rush into the tentacular arms of polytheism. We should remember that the personal he-ness, she-ness or it-ness of the witness of Illeity that names me and the anonymous, impersonal it-ness and is-ness of il-y-a-ity leave traces 137

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of themselves in each other, and that there is no criterion, no clear and distinct critical mark by which the accusing call to the Good and to God – à-Dieu or adieu – may be distinguished without doubt from the menace of the Evil Genius, of the Devil, of Satan the Accuser.33 The genius of evil is indeed its capacity to present itself as banal in both the original sense of the word, anathema – the sense that tends to be forgotten in discussions of Hannah Arendt’s so-called thesis of the banality of evil – and in its now commonplace sense of commonplace.34 We should remember that it is such simple, commonplace, unmemorable sayings as ‘Here I am, how can I help?’ that embody the unrememberable prediction whose ‘logic’ cannot be construed by philosophy without the pre-criteriological, hypoCritical reorientation that his philosophy traces in philosophy and elsewhere.35 This ‘elsewhere’ includes the where of the everyday, where the ambiguity between philosophy as love of wisdom and philosophy as wisdom of love is duplicated in the ambiguity between hypoCrisy, which predicts criticism as the unceasing unsaying of the said that Levinas calls sincerity, and hypocrisy in its commonplace sense of insincerity. Greek philosophy as resaid by Levinas in a Hebrew tone of voice announces beyond what Husserl calls the crisis of European sciences, which in the second section of this chapter was deemed resoluble, an irresoluble crisis that would be not merely one of what some would call moral sciences, but one that exposes the essence of all scientificity to the bifrontal enigma of a sceptical – which is to say watchful – ‘maybe’.

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8 ARENDT’S CRITIQUE OF POLITICAL JUDGEMENT

Since Kant did not write his political philosophy, the best way to find out what he thought about this matter is to turn to his ‘Critique of Aesthetic Judgement’.1 (Hannah Arendt)

Hannah Arendt made the statement cited above in the Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, which she delivered in 1970 at the New School For Social Research. In this chapter I shall first describe how she attempts to justify this statement. I shall then consider briefly how her case looks in the light of certain strategies and conceits put to work in the writings of Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida.

The political as aesthetic The word ‘Judging’, followed by two epigraphs, was the title on the sheet of paper left in her typewriter at the time of Hannah Arendt’s death. It was to have been the title of the third part of her work, The Life of the Mind, the first and second parts of which are entitled Thinking and Willing.2 In conceiving and beginning to carry out the plan for that work she was following in the footsteps of Kant. It is natural to speculate with Mary McCarthy, one of her editors, that in the Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy Arendt both indicates what she might have said at greater length in her equivalent of Kant’s Critique of Judgement and begins to make up for what she sees as Kant’s own failure to produce the Critique of Political Judgement that in her view his programme demanded. When she says that Kant did not write his political philosophy, what she means is that he never wrote anything that deserves to be called a Fourth Critique of political judgement, notwithstanding that this description has been used by at least one commentator of the body of relatively short essays including ‘Perpetual peace’, ‘Idea for a universal history’ and others that find their way into anthologies of Kant’s political writings. Of ‘Perpetual

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peace’ she remarks that although it is ‘by far the most important’ of these essays, Kant himself says it consists of ‘ “reveries” (as though he were thinking of his early fun with Swedenborg, his Dreams of a Ghost-Seer, Elucidated by Dreams of Metaphysics)’.3 The ghost will return to haunt us before my own remarks on Arendt’s scheme are complete. But note next what Arendt says in connection with the essay entitled ‘Idea for a universal history’ and particularly what she calls the ‘Conjectural beginning of human history’, for her comment points to a question to which her own speculations on history and those of Levinas and Derrida offer a response, namely, the question how to meet the challenge laid down in Hegel’s thesis that it is the history of the world that prescribes what is ultimately just: die Weltgeschichte ist das Weltgericht.4 Although in the Postscript to the first volume of The Life of the Mind she opposes this Hegelian thesis to the Kantian thesis of ‘the autonomy of the minds of men and their possible independence of things as they are or as they have come into being’, in the Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy she draws attention to an aspect of Kant’s thinking on history that seems very much more like an announcement of the Hegelian position that it is the history of the world that prescribes what is ultimately just: ‘at first it looks almost as though Kant, like so many after him, had substituted a philosophy of history for a political philosophy’. But to correct this impression, she says, one must remember that: In Kant, history is part of nature; the historical subject is the human species understood as part of the creation, though as its final end and creation’s crown, so to speak. What matters in history, whose haphazard, contingent melancholy he never forgot, is not the stories, not the historical individuals, nothing that men did of good or evil, but the secret ruse of nature that caused the species to progress and develop all its potentialities in the succession of generations…Kant is never interested in the past; what interests him is the future of the species…only once, almost in passing, in a parenthesis, does Kant state that it is a question of bringing about ‘the highest end intended for man, namely, sociability (Geselligkeit)’.5 The expressions ‘sociability’, ‘stories’ and ‘secret ruse of nature’ hint at the paradoxically non-philosophical and doxic political philosophy that Arendt will attempt to tailor for herself and for Kant. I shall say a little about each of these three expressions, taking them in reverse order. In her reference to ‘the secret ruse of nature’ she is reaching back to Adam Smith’s ‘hidden hand’ and Hegel’s ‘cunning of reason’. If history is to be a guide to political judgement history must be understood in a sense that does not make it turn on the wiliness of individual human beings. Again, if history is to be a guide to political judgement, it must not be understood in a 140

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sense that makes it turn on, to speak pleonastically, the human being’s morally rational will. Following Kant’s location of aesthetic judgement between, on the one hand, practical reason involving desire or will and, on the other hand, theoretical understanding, Arendt outlines a critique of political judgement that, without being a science of human nature, is nevertheless theoretical in the literal sense of that word. It is theoretical because political judgement is the prerogative of the spectator of human history. Although this history must of course include the past, Kant is interested in the past only because it serves his interest in ‘the future of the species’. Like aesthetic judgement according to Kant, political judgement according to Arendt’s reading of Kant is neither a matter of action and will nor of cognitive science. Political judgement is a matter of opinion. So it is not a matter of philosophy. It is not a matter of metaphysics, even of the Critical metaphysics of experience that sets limits to what we can know. It is rather a matter of history both in the sense already mentioned of being about the past, and in the etymological sense of the Greek term historeô, to tell a story about what one has learnt, to narrate. Not any old story, and not a lie, but one that fits what one has discovered by questioning and research. It will be a story that is believed to fit the facts. Moreover, it will be a story with which one will expect anyone else apprised of the facts to agree. This is the force of ‘sociability’, the third of the three expressions I extracted from Arendt’s comments on Kant’s understanding of history as the natural history of mankind. Sociability, mention of which is relegated to a footnote in Kant’s theory of history, is interpreted by Arendt in terms of the ‘common sense’, the sensus communis, which performs so signal a role in Kant’s theory of judgement in the third Critique. In the analysis of the judgement of an object as beautiful two harmonies are involved. First there is the agreement with my judgement that I believe ought to be manifested in judgements made by others. Second there is the agreement upon which that first agreement is based: the agreeableness experienced in the concord of the faculties of understanding and imagination, agreeableness as agrément for which Kant’s own word is Wohlgefallen, feeling well pleased. This shared euphoria is a component of Arendt’s extension to political judgement of Kant’s analysis of the judgement of taste. How does imagination fit into her scheme? Imagination, Einbildungskraft, the power of unifying construction, is what is expressed in narration, talent for historia, the art of telling stories. So Arendt’s application to politics of Kant’s critique of art and aesthetic judgement in general is akin to Schelling’s application of that Kantian critique to philosophy in the System of Transcendental Idealism. In this book, as we saw in Chapter 3, Schelling speaks of how myth both returns to a time before the separation of science from poetry and looks forward to a time in which the philosopher’s intellectual intuition of subjectivity achieves objectivity in the 141

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aesthetic intuition of the poet. The new mythology he envisages is the mythology not of an individual poet but of a new as it were poietic race. How that mythology is to arise, he writes in concluding the System, in words whose apocalyptic tone pre-echoes that of Heidegger, ‘is a problem whose solution can be looked for only in the future destinies of the world and in the course of history to come’.6 Since this is a vision of a historical race it is, like Kant’s Critique of Aesthetic Judgement and Arendt’s propaedeutic for a Critique of Political Judgement, about human beings in a particular culture, not, like Kant’s second Critique, about rational beings in general and human beings as such. For Schelling, for Kant and for Arendt the faculty of judgement is concerned with the particular. The mythological narrative anticipated by Schelling may be a grand narrative, but it is not concerned with universal intelligibility or cognition. This holds, in Arendt’s reading of Kant, all the more evidently for the smaller-scale narratives authored by the politicopoietic judgement of individuals rather than of the collective unconscious of a race or generation, a Geschlecht. This is why, in her reading, political judgement is neither theoretical nor practically cognitive. A story, for example Vergil’s Aeneid, may be intended to have and may acquire the general applicability of an exemplar, but the exemplar, whether the epic itself or the character Aeneas of whose exploits it tells, is particular. And other particular real or imaginary exemplars might serve in its place. Whether or not they can will be a historical contingency. The fittingness of the story is not its deducibility from a concept or its justifiability by reference to an end. It may well serve an end, for instance that of political stability. But, as with the work of art and the idea of an organization of the greatest possible variety of phenomena subsumed under the least possible number of laws, the experience of the mutual fit of the exemplary story and the events and actions it is meant to describe is the experience of being pleased by the appearance of teleological orderedness independent of if that is an orderedness to an end. This holds too for the end in itself of the good will. The beautiful is no more than a symbol of the morally good.7 It is true that according to Kant the free conformity of the imagination to laws of the understanding is a mediating link between the concept of nature and the concept of free will and even ‘promotes (befördert) the sensibility (die Empfänglichkeit) of the mind for moral feeling’.8 Nevertheless, the moral feeling, that is to say, reverence or respect or awe, is respect for a law of reason, for rationality as such. With this rationality as such judgement can have nothing to do except to promote the susceptibility of the mind to the moral law’s appeal (or, I would add here in passing, to the moral law’s appalling awesomeness, a matter to which we shall turn in the section of this chapter entitled ‘Political aesthetic as ethic’). With rationality as such judgement can have nothing directly to do because whereas judgement is of the particular, rationality 142

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pertains to the universal. So, Arendt infers, there is no room for judgement in the Critique of Practical Reason. Nor, despite the reference of its title to practice, does that book have action as its topic. Here is a book that, according to its author, is concerned with the question ‘What ought I to do?’, yet, according to Arendt, it has nothing to do with action. On what ground can she make this seemingly perverse pronouncement? On the ground that the title of the second Critique contains also the word ‘Reason’ and that it is a Groundwork, like the shorter treatise on morals whose title contains that word. Those works treat of the moral law as a test of moral maxims. Since a moral judgement is a judgement that this particular action is right and that particular action is wrong, no moral judgements are to be found in these works. The examples they cite, for instance the four given in the second section of the Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, are examples of maxims introduced to show how they survive the test of universalizability. They are not examples of the sort of which Kant says at B173 of the first Critique that they can weaken the effort required to comprehend rules in their universality, that reliance on them encourages the practice of using rules as rules of thumb rather than as principles, and that they are the go-cart of judgement to which recourse is made by those in whom is lacking the natural talent of judgement. This talent, like Aristotelian phronêsis, is neither philosophical wisdom nor technical cleverness. But if it is a gift only of the onlooker, it cannot be phronêsis, since that is a practical sagacity in the management of oneself and of human affairs. For the unreflective, and for men and women of action so engaged in public affairs or so inflamed by the heat of commerce or war, that they do not have the time to think coolly about first principles, the examples and exemplars cultivated by the political but non-philosophical spectator of history suggest a framework that gives meaning, encourages a sense of social consensus and inspires hope in times of crisis like those of the, for Kant, recent events of the American and French Revolutions. The poietico-political scientist’s communication with actors on the stage of history is a corollary of a general obligation to make one’s opinions public. His or her interventions are not those of a minister for propaganda. Goebbels was a partial agent. The Kantian political scientist seeks impartiality and is aided in this search by occupancy of a seat not only in the theatre of one nation at one particular time, but in the theatre of his or her memory and imagination of the state of this and other nations. That is the best possible position that can be occupied by a human being who wishes to be a judge of human progress. And it is precisely this, Arendt says, that gives rise to the following difficulty: Infinite Progress is the law of the human species; at the same time, man’s dignity demands that he be seen (every single one of us) in his particularity, and, as such, be seen – but without comparison and 143

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independent of time – as reflecting mankind in general. In other words, the very idea of progress – if it is more than a change in circumstances and an improvement of the world – contradicts Kant’s notion of man’s dignity. It is against human dignity to believe in progress.9 What does Arendt mean by her parenthetical phrase ‘if it is more than a change in circumstances and an improvement of the world’? What more could progress be? Her answer must lie in a distinction made in her Ninth Lecture when she cites Kant’s view that war can bring about more than technological progress, which I take to be synonymous with what in the parenthetical phrase in question she calls an improvement of the world. War can also bring about an improvement of mankind by strengthening its disposition to make arrangements to secure perpetual peace, even if the full securing of peace is achieved only in the grave, as is wryly suggested by Kant’s title Zum ewigen Frieden with its double reference to the sepulchral and to the name of an inn: ‘war is so awful that, the more awful it gets, the more likely it is that men will become reasonable and work toward international agreements that will lead eventually to peace’.10 Now, as Kant insists, we can never know if a human action has been motivated by a good will. Kant’s grounds for saying this, Arendt observes, are not necessarily proto-Freudian. It is not just that the hidden root of action is self-deception or bad faith. It is just that Criticism reveals that the root of action, motivation, is hidden from theoretical knowledge. In any case, political science, even though it claims to be science, claims to advance no more than opinions. So if human dignity is defined solely in terms of the human will’s endorsement of maxims because of their lawfulness in a purely intelligible kingdom of ends, human dignity will indeed be independent of progress. And if, as Arendt remarks in an earlier parenthesis of the same cited passage about infinite progress, human dignity is independent of time, then of course it does not admit progress. But it does not exclude progress within the time of the nations and the history of international relations where the good will of human beings calls for concrete expression in regulations and laws. It does not exclude political progress, least of all if that is measured by legal and administrative arrangements that reduce misery, as it is also one’s at least conditional or imperfect duty to endeavour to do according to Kant. Is it not Kant’s idea that progress is an asymptotic approach to the summum bonum? Is not the greatest happiness of humankind that is consistent with virtue part of that? That part at least is within human capacity, notwithstanding that what the happiness of one person consists in specifically may be very different from what defines that of another. It is precisely that empirical contingency that is respected by virtue, which is the other side of the highest good. So when Arendt quite properly reminds us of the importance for Kant of the idea of the tribunal and the judge, and that this 144

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model holds for the impartial political judge and therefore for the judgement of the particular, the particular includes the maxims and laws by which one community is distinguished from another. These are subject to reform. Whether or not the political scientist as such is involved in such reform, his or her as far as possible impartial comparative judgements of socio-political structures are not inconsistent with the incomparability of persons regarded at once as citizens and legislators of the timeless republic of ends whose justice is defined by the moral law. And there is every reason why the political judgements of persons so regarded, persons regarded as persons as such, should be taken into account by the legislatures of republics on earth that make the laws with reference to which the rightness of judgements made in courts of law is determined. I therefore conclude this first part of my discussion of Arendt’s sketch for a critique of political judgement by questioning her verdict that there is a contradiction between Kant’s defence of human dignity and his argument for infinite human progress.

Political aesthetic as ethic The distinction just referred to between the legislator and the judge is the distinction made in the first Critique between supersumption, bringing a particular to a concept, auf Begriffe bringen, and subsumption, bringing a particular under a concept, unter einen Begriff bringen.11 This distinction is covered in the third Critique by the distinction between determinant judgement and reflective judgement, except that there, as anticipated in the Dialectic of the first Critique, the concept to which the particular is brought is more strictly called an Idea, the Idea of a whole presenting itself as if it were directed toward the realization of an end. What further complicates the distinction as made in the third Critique is that the commonality proper to formal or empirical concepts and to Ideas of reason is exhibited in a particular, whether a purely aesthetic object, a utensil or other functional object viewed aesthetically, or, following Arendt’s further articulation, a politico-aesthetic exemplar like Achilles was for the Greeks, Aeneas for the Romans, Napoleon for the French and perhaps Frederick of Prussia for Kant himself and his contemporaries in the age of the German Enlightenment. It is not only that the political historian seeks a general notion like courage or honour or enlightenment in terms of which to give meaning and connectedness to the particular events in the life of a nation. That generality is itself bodied forth in a particular. But this peculiar logic of the generality of the particular and the particularity of the general is something for which we have already been prepared by the two preceding Critiques. The crossbred status of the example or exemplar in the Critique of Judgement is foreshadowed in the schema of the first Critique, which is described as a sensible concept, and by the Typik or type of the second Critique, which is 145

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also sometimes called a schema there, and which is the concept of the world of empirical understanding serving as a representation of an intelligible world ordered by pure reason. To describe these three medial representations as cross-bred is however to beg a radical question. That phrase suggests that the intermediary is an offspring of the terms it mediates. Whereas Kant himself hints several times in the first and third Critiques that the terms may be the offspring of or abstractions from it. And in the second Critique and Groundwork there is at least a hint of this doctrine in the description of moral respect or reverence, achten, as rational sensibility. This rationally sensible achten of the second Critique makes itself felt in the feeling of the aesthetic sublime treated in the third Critique, just as in the third Critique the play between imagination and the understanding treated in the first makes itself felt in the enjoyable feeling for the beautiful. It seems to me that in her sketch for a fourth Critique, a Critique of Political Judgement, Arendt forgets that one expects others to share not only our feelings regarding the beautiful, but also our feelings regarding the sublime, and that the latter too might have a more important role to play in a Critique of Political Judgement than she allows. She does note that the Analytic of the Sublime refers to the sublimity of war and says: comparing the statesman and the general, men may argue as they please as to the pre-eminent respect which is due to either above the other; but the verdict of the aesthetic judgement is for the latter. War itself, provided it is conducted with order and a sacred respect (Heiligachtung) for the rights of civilians, has something sublime about it…On the other hand, a prolonged peace favours the predominance of a mere commercial spirit, and with it a debasing selfinterest, cowardice, and softness, and tends to degrade the character of the nation.12 Nevertheless, Kant’s final verdict is neither an aesthetic verdict in favour of the military general and of war nor an aesthetic verdict in favour of the statesman and of peace. It is an ethico-political verdict in favour of the statesman and of peace. This is the implication of his qualification that war is sublime only on condition that it does not ride roughshod over civil rights. To allow that would be to contravene the precept of the essay on ‘Perpetual peace’ that ‘No state at war with another shall permit such acts of hostility [for example assassination, breach of agreements and the instigation of treason within the enemy state] as would make mutual confidence impossible during peace.’13 Apart from the possibility that there could be aesthetic sublimity in a pacifist’s verbal ‘war’ for peace, the objective validity claimed for the awe-fulness of the aesthetic sublime is, because it makes claim to a feeling shared with some part of humankind, narrower in scope than that claimed for the awesomeness of the ethical, 146

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where the claim is that the feeling of respect would be shared by the whole of humankind. Narrower in scope therefore is the validity claimed for the politico-aesthetic exemplar. Yet would not Kant maintain that just as with an ethical maxim, so with a political and/or aesthetic exemplar and the positive law of a state, all must at least accord with, be in conformity with, the moral law, so that if, in the words of the first Appendix of ‘Perpetual peace’, politics, for instance, says ‘Be ye therefore wise as serpents’, morality adds ‘and guileless as doves’? If so, the outcome would be a Kantian politico-ethical aesthetic that appears to be a mixture or compound of the beautiful and the sublime in which the holy respect for the moral law, of which the feeling of sublimity is the aesthetic counterpart, is as it were domesticated by the feeling for the beautiful. Domesticated because the body politic is a self-contained system ordered by the formality of mutually consistent laws. The body politic presents to the political scientist whom Arendt discovers in Kant’s texts the spectacle of a nation or international federation, toward which the spectator’s dominating feeling would seem to be the pleasure associated with contemplation of the beautiful object and associated therefore too with a sense of being at home among its citizens, whether they be citizens of one’s own society or citizens of the world. For the outer limit of this world is a line that defines what is right from what is wrong. It is one in which the stranger is made so much at home that he or she might well have difficulty deciding whether being thus assimilatively welcomed was preferable to being banished beyond the pale. Not that he or she would prefer not to be recognized as a citizen sharing with other citizens their civil rights. The point can be put by returning to the paragraph from the last page of the last lecture of the Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, where it will be recalled that Arendt says, purporting to paraphrase Kant: ‘man’s dignity demands that he be seen (every single one of us) in his particularity and, as such, be seen – but without any comparison and independent of time – as reflecting mankind in general’. How, we may ask, does one do that? How does one see a person as reflecting mankind in general without comparison? Is not seeing him or her as reflecting mankind in general comparing him or her, if only in general terms, as a case of humanity, that is to say, as a particular, meaning by this an instance falling under a concept? Is that not to treat him or her as one of a number, so as a number, not as a person – to treat him or her as personne, as a nobody, even if one does that in order to credit him or her with rights? The question arises if there is, as we may put it with Derrida and Levinas, a justice that is higher than rights. As Dennis Schmidt once remarked to me, ‘there may be something better than ethics’. This may be what Levinas would nevertheless call the ethical, the non-essential essence of the ethical that one could distinguish from the ethical in the Kantian sense by calling it the proto-ethical. Levinas sometimes writes of primary justice, meaning by 147

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that the asymmetrical justice of the face-to-face encounter in which I am not a spectator but rather am looked to by the stranger, that is to say, by you, or you, or you, whoever of you happens to appear first on the scene, and in which I learn from you of a ‘justice [that] does not include me in the equilibrium of its universality’, a ‘justice [that] summons me to go beyond the straight line of justice’.14 It is as though an actor on Arendt’s and Pythagoras’ stage were to turn to a spectator in the theatre and address to him or her the words ‘Thou shalt not kill’. As though the theatre were to become a temple, and all the world were not just a stage, but also altered into an altar, as at one and the same time a stage often used to be. Primary justice would be what de-limits the limits set by law. It would be a justice thanks to which the particular is first a singular, and always a singular, notwithstanding that he or she is as well – which is just as well – unavoidably a case, a determinate case to be compared and counted along with others when the thin gruel is being distributed at Auschwitz, to mention another exemplar. So if the world and all that therein is cannot but be a spectacle, it is a spectacle that is haunted by spectres. The ghost who/which, as entertained in Derrida’s Spectres de Marx, defies the to-be-or-not-to-be, ontology disturbed by hauntology, is the intangible trace of the uncanny that calls into question the confident ‘I can’.15 It is the unheimlich ghost of the father of the Prince of Denmark that prevents one from feeling entirely at home with the thought that the possible, for instance the possibility of progress toward perpetual peace, is like the possibility of the natural emergence of the fruit from the seed. Possibility understood as potentiality, dunamis, is dynamited by possibility as event, événement or eventuality understood not teleologically or even messianically if that is understood to imply the arrival at, or of, a state. An arrival and a future, avenir, à-venir, advent, Zu-kunft, would be an approaching with no determinate thing or person that approaches and no state other than the rottenness in the State of Denmark, the perpetual state of time’s being out of joint, perhaps never to be put right – or at best only to be put right, putatively brought to law, but still not contained by the justice by which law is exceeded. The emergence of perpetual peace would be the emergence of perpetual emergency. Crisis would again and again raise its ugly head. So that there could be no hope of a politico-aesthetic exemplar sustaining undiluted hope for an odysseic homecoming through episodic crises of revolution and war. There would be, there must be, il faut, as Derrida is fond of saying, perpetual crisis and no peace of mind. There can be no peace of mind because there is always something I have failed to do, something demanded by the responsibility of the il faut, the more than original sin of omission (faute), by the I ought, the ich soll that utterly exceeds Heidegger’s ability-to-be, his Seinkönnen, and Kant’s ich kann. The shared pleasure of the sense of the beautifully

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organized state is overwhelmed by the displeasure of the ever guilty conscience. Is this then a revanche of the sublime? Not yet. Not if sublimity depends on the proud self-congratulatory thought that as vehicle of the moral law I am master or mistress of the most awe-ful spectacles with which I may be confronted. For the spectre does not confront. He, she, it faces and haunts. He, she, it? Who knows? Derrida’s spectre, if not Levinas’s still slightly though singularly Kantian Other, prevents me from being at home even with the thought that the other is a person, a personification or an impersonation of God. There is no assurance that the new messianism apparently without Messiah, messianism without messianism, the New International democracy, as Derrida writes, rewriting, ghostwriting Marx, would be in Kant’s sense an intelligible kingdom of ends. Not if that kingdom must be kept in mind by the politico-aesthetic scientist and he or she, like the sovereign according to Kant, is also a citizen of that realm. Not if the spectator is always also an actor on the stage of the world, as Arendt ultimately concedes when she says that the criterion by which the political spectator chooses which stories to tell is embodied in the principle ‘Always act on the maxim through which the original compact of humanity can be actualized into a general law.’16 For although the onlooker must heed that principle of universalizability and is thus not only a politico-aesthetic but also an ethical judge, if nevertheless I am the onlooking politico-poietic scientist charged with telling a story that shows how every citizen of a particular nation can enjoy a place in the sun, I cannot but be conscious of and conscience-struck by the fact that, whatever story be told, I occupy a place in the sun that could be occupied by another somewhere: Bosnia, Rwanda, Somalia, Tibet, Israel or Palestine. An onlooker looked at and looked to by the other, my political judgement subjected to judgement, I cannot but be traumatized by my being cast in the role of a messiah, burdened like Sysiphus with a never fulfilled responsibility that throws the life of the mind into a condition of perpetual unpeace. This would be one reason for saying, as Kant says, that since the progress to peace is perpetual, there can be no essence of humankind, and contentment can never prevail.17 It would also be a reason for saying, as Arendt does not, that political judgement appeals not only to the appealing idea of beautifully ordered peace triumphing over the sublimity of war, but at the same time to the appalling sublimity of the call to action that disrupts the order of the idea, disquiets the idea of order, and never allows contentment to prevail, not simply because the progress to peace is infinite, but because this sublimity afflicts with bad conscience the consciousness that would merely look on. This bad conscience becomes infinitely enlarged to the point where it cannot be put to rest by the good feeling that accompanies consciousness of the fact that I share symmetrically with other human beings a power to order every other feeling under the feeling of respect for the moral law. There can be no 149

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such basking in the equable warmth of the supersensible sun where the supersublime face of the orphan, the widow and the stranger left out in the cold looks to me to justify asymmetrically my occupation of a place in the sun on this earth. Accused by this look, whatever sense of community – of sensus communis – I may feel is pierced by a sense of isolation.

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9 RESPECT AS EFFECTIVE AFFECTIVITY Michel Henry on Kant

Respect as affect Kant’s account of moral respect is the topic of a section of Michel Henry’s book, The Essence of Manifestation, first published in 1963.1 That section is almost as brief as the section on Schematism in the Critique of Pure Reason. Perhaps that section is as much a key to the book of which it is a part, as the one on Schematism is to the book in which it appears and to the entire Critical programme in the view of Kant – and to the post-Critical phenomenology that draws on that programme in the fundamental ontology of Heidegger. Henry argues that Heidegger’s so-called fundamental ontology is not fundamental and that Kant’s analysis of transcendental presuppositions overlooks what those presuppositions presuppose. The thinking of both of these philosophers begs a question. It is caught up in a vicious circle. This charge is directed also at Descartes. Whether or not Descartes’s reflections on the cogito are invalidated by the ‘Cartesian circle’ familiarly attributed to it, it is circular in a usually unnoticed way. Moreover, this holds with one or two exceptions, Henry maintains, for the entire philosophical tradition described by him – Heidegger would say pleonastically – as Occidental or Greek. That tradition is the tradition of opposition between enlightenment and benightment, between darkness and light, between confusion or obscurity and distinctness or clarity. Along with this thinking of chiaroscuro comes a privileging of objectivity and of an exteriority and space in which objects are viewed by subjects, however various the manners in which objecthood and subjecthood may be construed. Over-againstness (Gegenständlichkeit), distancing and alienation within the horizon of a world in which consciousness is an intentional relation to objects and ends comprise the essence of philosophical theories, ranging from the Platonic theory of ideas through the Objective Idealism of Hegel to the noeticonoematic structure of Husserlian phenomenology and the ecstatic temporality of the Dasein described by Heidegger as a being of distance.2 The 153

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being of Dasein is being-in-the-world. It is precisely this worldhood, Henry holds, that has come between philosophers and what he understands to be the essence of manifestation. Among the philosophers who have been thus misled he chooses to give special attention in The Essence of Manifestation and in Phénoménologie matérielle (1990)3 to Hegel, Husserl, Scheler, Heidegger and Sartre. Some of his criticisms would bear on structuralism and on post-structuralist writings like those of Derrida that claim to bring into the open an irreducible gappiness or écart and insecurity in what presents itself as the safety of real presence or parousia. Both Derrida and Henry bring out what is presupposed in the use philosophers make of the expressions ‘for-itself’, ‘in-itself’ and ‘for-the-other’. But Henry would contend, I imagine, that he is bringing out a presupposition that remains over from Derrida’s dismantling of presence, something that might be described in terms of the subtitle of the paperback edition of Derrida’s Glas as not only ce qui reste du savoir absolu, what remains of or outside of absolute knowledge, but also as what is left over or out of Derrida’s dissolution of absolute knowledge, or, as Derrida would prefer to say, left over or out of absolute knowledge’s dissolution of itself. Would Henry say the presupposition of the work through which presence is disturbed in the writings of Derrida is none other than presence itself? I shall not answer that question here. I shall however take up later the question as to how what Henry says about the essence of manifestation bears on what Heidegger says of Dasein’s distancing or separation and what Levinas says of the pour l’autre, bearing in mind the stress Levinas lays upon the way that my face-to-face confrontation with another human depends upon the separateness of the ego, and the way that that separateness and the exteriority of face-to-face confrontation prima facie imply the context of a world. The context of a world seems to be implied in the very idea of moral respect. So let us turn our attention first to what Henry has to say about what Kant has to say about this. Respect seems to be tied to the contextual worldliness either of an intelligible realm of ends in themselves or of a sensible realm of ends and means and causality or to a worldliness that is both intelligible and sensible. The very notion of respect brings with it the notion of distance. To respect someone or something is, minimally, not to invade the space of that to which the respect is directed, to grant it a degree of autonomy, Abstand halten, to lay off it. Connection by disconnection, respect in general is care which may recognize sameness, but only if at the same time it acknowledges difference; it is deferential heed, consideration or regard. Its opposite is contempt, Verachtung. All this holds for moral respect. Of moral respect, Achtung, Kant says that it is held always for persons only, never to things,4 but he says this because he says that only persons can be respecters of the moral law. It is ultimately the moral law for which moral respect is held. As he himself goes on to grant, the respect we have for 154

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a person is ‘properly speaking for the law, that his example exhibits’.5 So I cannot respect myself as a person unless I respect the moral law. Now the moral law is the essence of rationality as such. But how for rational animals can that law have efficacy? How can it motivate practice? For Kant no less than for Hume, pure reason on its own cannot move human beings to action. For human beings to be moved to action the rationality of human nature must somehow be married with its sensibility. Kant’s account of how this marriage is effected fails, Henry affirms, because it performs a sleight of hand, an escamotage. Kant makes disappear from the view of his reader and from his own that what the account is supposed to be explaining is made use of as part of the account. The analysandum is employed in the analysans. That Henry is justified in affirming this is borne out by the examination of those few paragraphs of the Critique of Practical Reason entitled in Abbott’s translation ‘Of the motives of pure practical reason’ and in Beck’s translation ‘The incentives of pure practical reason’. The term ‘incentive’ is one that Kant might have favoured as a translation of his own word Triebfeder. Abbott’s word ‘motive’ suggests a positive reason that would supply a full explanation why a person does a certain deed. The word ‘incentive’ may bear the idea of a supplementary explanatory factor, a bonus, like an increase in a worker’s wage that encourages greater productivity. In the technology of watchmaking and the construction of automata a Triebfeder is a mechanical spring. This is why some translators offer ‘trigger’ for Kant’s word, where a trigger has something of the force of an occasion as when in the terminology of Malebranche an occasion is contrasted with a cause, whether the cause be a sufficient condition or only a necessary one. An occasion as so intended is not a universally necessary condition. It is the last one, the one that leads to the action or occurrence in question. It is a release mechanism. That, at any rate, seems to be the idea in Kant’s mind when he writes that the moral law ‘removes a resistance’ (den Widerstand aus dem Wege schafft) and is the ‘dislodgement of an obstacle’ (die Wegräumung eines Hindernisses). The problem is to understand how the moral law can remove a resistance, given that, as Kant says, ‘for this law there is no feeling’. In the paragraph where he says this his explanation is that the inclination to indulge the pleasures that when systematically combined constitute happiness can be either checked or blocked. They are merely checked when unbridled selfishness becomes rational self-love or benevolence by being exercised according to the letter of the moral law. One of the inclinations we are liable to indulge is the propensity to have a high opinion of ourselves. Without that there can be only limited self-love. Any such high opinion of ourselves based on the satisfaction of inclinations conducive to our own happiness is struck down by the thought of the moral law. The moral law turns the pleasantness of misplaced self-conceit into the pain of 155

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self-contempt. In thus taking away the pleasure that prevented our actions from being motivated by anything other than sensuous desires the moral law blocks that sensuous motivation. The way is cleared for us to be motivated by the moral law. But, it must be asked, how can this be more than an explanation of why we no longer act out of self-love either as sheer uninhibited selfishness or as self-interest enlightened by being exercised according to the law, that is to say where the observance of the law is a means to our happiness. How can the moral law move us not merely not to act out of self-love but positively to act for the sake of the law? Surely, that is possible only if as well as self-love we have love for the moral law. We must care about it. The moral law itself must affect us. On Kant’s account it is only indirectly and by supervenience that the moral law gains our respect. The thought of the moral law or the example of another person who respects it humiliates us. It leads us to hold in low esteem our preoccupation with our own pleasures. This is an unpleasant thought. But how can even this so far only negative effect on our feelings be experienced unless there is already a positive regard for the moral law, unless the thought of the moral law is already infused with the affectivity that Kant calls respect? Kant says that ‘the lowering of the pretensions of moral selfesteem, that is, humiliation on the sensuous side is an elevation of the moral, i.e. practical, esteem for the law on the intellectual side’.6 This ‘is’ (so ist) could be taken as an admission on Kant’s part that the humiliation itself presupposes the feeling of respect for the moral law and does not give rise to it or open a door or window through which it may come in. Yet he goes on to say in the same paragraph that although respect for the moral law is a positive effect of the law on feeling, it is only an indirect one, in contrast to the directness of the moral law’s determination of the will. The distinction between the indirect effect of respect for the law upon feeling and direct effect of the law upon the will is the distinction between subjectivity and objectivity. Michel Henry’s criticism of this Critical distinction is that objectivity cannot be isolated from affectivity. Kant writes: ‘Now the recognition of the moral law is the consciousness of an activity of practical reason from objective principles, which only fails to reveal its effect in actions because subjective (pathological) causes hinder it.’7 Henry is saying, if I understand him aright, that this objective but not yet subjective acknowledgement and activity are manifestations of an affectivity from which the objectivity of the intelligible world of morality can no more be separated than can the objectivity of the world of natural science. I shall suggest later that in the inseparability of the moral and the scientific objectivity from affectivity these objectivities are inseparable from each other, and, in particular and perhaps less controversially, that affectivity is inseparable from practice. Otherwise put, the three Critiques are inseparable one from another. And with Henry’s assistance it might be possible to demonstrate a further inseparability of the three Critiques from 156

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Religion within the Bounds of Reason Alone, except that the appropriateness of this title is called into question once reason is seen to have its affectivity too. Nihil est in ratione quod non fuit prius in affectione. I shall not attempt here to produce arguments for this last claim, only noting two of its corollaries. First, Kant insists that love of God cannot be pathological, that is, it cannot be a sensuous inclination or feeling. This is because such pathological sensibility cannot be commanded, whereas we are commanded to love God through loving our neighbour. Now we are commanded to love our neighbour as ourselves. But, aside from our selfish inclinations, which can no more be commanded than pathological love of others, it would seem that our love of ourselves must be inflected by affectivity – by self-affection, in the phrase that Henry borrows from Kant. So that the command to love others and God as we love ourselves would be an injunction to endeavour to make love of others our second nature on analogy with the affection for ourselves in which our first nature consists. Second, if the reason mentioned in the title of Kant’s book on religion is indeed shown to be grounded in affectivity, it is not impossible that the Divine reason or will is so grounded. This is perfectly compatible with Kant’s statement, as translated by Beck, that ‘absolutely no incentives can be attributed to the Divine will’8 if by ‘incentive’ we understand not reason, ground or motive in a general sense, but an occasion consisting in the removal of a sensuous resistance according to the explanation given earlier and amplified by Kant’s assertions that: how a law in itself can be the direct determining ground of the will (which is the essence of morality) is an insoluble problem for the human reason. It is identical with the problem of how a free will is possible. Therefore, we shall not have to show a priori why the moral law supplies an incentive but rather what it effects (or better, must effect) in the mind, so far as it is an incentive.9 Once we say with Michel Henry, however paradoxically, that affectivity is the essence of rationality, it is no longer an insoluble problem for human reason how the essence of rationality as expressed by the moral law can be the direct, and not merely indirect, determining ground of the will. And, with the usual precautions required in saying anything at all theological, the same can be said when the will in question is the will of God.

Criteriological effectuation Let us for the moment say no more about God, or about respect except to observe that respect is a determinate affect, and that Henry is concerned with affectivity as such. He is concerned with the being and essence of 157

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affectivity or feeling, and with persuading us that it is the essence and foundation of manifestation. It is the concrete being of affectivity or feeling with which his thinking is concerned, not with their being understood logically as a general or dialectical concept: ‘Thinking of the essence of feeling, its power and impotence, their unity and their identity, not as concepts, but in their concrete effectuation.’10 His topic is not their logical what, but their ontological how, their Seinsweise. To suppose that a general concept could be a foundation and concrete effectuation would be as misguided as to suppose that sleep could be explained by saying that it is the effect of a vis dormitiva. It is not a logical, but a phenomenological and ontological analysis of effectivity that Henry’s The Essence of Manifestation conducts. Broadly speaking, its universe of discourse is that of Being and Time. Why are Henry’s findings so at variance with those of Heidegger’s book? Because Henry finds that time as described by Heidegger is not the meaning or the truth of being. The essence of manifestation is neither alethic disclosure in the sense of Heidegger’s rethinking of Heraclitus and Plato, nor is it ecstatic in the sense of Heidegger’s rethinking of Husserl. Read superficially, Henry can appear to be carrying out a fairly faithful rethinking of Heidegger. As has already been noted, Henry challenges what he calls the monism of Western reflection, which gives priority to what is seen or intended as object or objective or to the conditions of truth of this objectivity, whether the conditions be such as are characterized in, for example, Hegel’s science of absolute knowledge or in Heidegger’s thinking of a-lêtheia. In both of these there is no alternative to opening or lighting or visibility, on the one hand, and concealing or invisibility or night, understood as the opposite of opening, lighting and visibility. These alternatives, Henry argues, exclude something that his philosophy would rescue, namely, an invisibility or night that is not the opposite of visibility or light. Yet the language in terms of which he attempts to do this is often the language of Being and Time. This is of course inevitable if he is to engage with in order to question the discoveries that Heidegger believes himself to have made. But the agreement seems to go beyond one of terminology. As was plain from our earlier references to Kant’s hydraulic theory of respect, Henry is not out to replace the rationality and intellect that play so important a part in Kant’s theory of respect with an irrationalism. He is raising doubts about the original purity of reason, giving reasons for saying that it is grounded in affectivity. Now is that not precisely what Heidegger is saying when in Being and Time he declares that understanding or comprehension, Verstehen, is always bestimmt, determined by a Stimmung, a mood, which is what Henry refers to as a tonalité? But Heidegger declares also that every tonality is verstehend. And he regards Stimmung, feeling-tone or tonality – this last being his word for the Affekt and passions of the philosophical tradition culminating in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and including Kant – 158

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as a mode of Befindlichkeit, the way in which Dasein finds itself (sich befindet) thrown into the world, like it or lump it. This fundamental factical situatedness, this Grundbefindlichkeit of Dasein’s finding itself there in a world without its being the ground of this event is experienced in the fundamental tonality, the Grundstimmung, of anxiety. That is to say, Heidegger’s analysis of anxiety is cast in terms of prejected project, and this is a version of what Henry calls objectivity. Hence, despite the many pages devoted to tonality by Heidegger, his so-called fundamental ontology is, says Henry, an objectivist monism in which no more than lip-service is paid to affectivity or feeling. The same holds for the account of affectivity advanced in Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values (the first volume of which appeared in 1913), where Scheler defends the notion of an amatory a priori as an alternative to the conceptions of apriority put forward in the ethics of Kant. In this book and elsewhere Scheler distinguishes four levels of feeling ranked as follows and correlated with increasing possibilities of depth: 1 2 3 4

sensible feelings or feelings of sensation (Empfindungsgefühle or Gefühlsempfindungen); feelings of the lived body, Leibgefühle (as states), and feelings of life, Lebensgefühle (as functions); pure psychic feelings, rein seelische Gefühle, (reine Ichgefühle); spiritual feelings (feelings of the personality), geistige Gefühle (Persönlichkeitsgefühle).11

Scheler warns us against confusing the first category, sensible feelings, with sensations. Henry issues a similar warning: ‘Affectivity has nothing to do with sensibility, with which it has been constantly confused, but is rather structurally heterogeneous to sensibility.’12 The confusion here referred to is made by philosophers in the tradition of Locke when their distinction between ideas of sensation and ideas of reflection prevents their seeing that feelings are not ideas. But Henry takes exception both to this way of ideas and to Scheler’s way of distinguishing feelings from sensations. For although Scheler denies that what he calls purely sensible feelings bear any trace of intentionality, a denial with which we would expect Henry to agree, Scheler ascribes to such feelings a bodily location. Not a location in a body viewed from outside, but a location in the body as lived, such as the pleasant or uncomfortable feelings that are associated with different organs and affect more or less extended parts of the body. This Schelerian account, Henry argues, imports into the essence of affectivity a spatiality and transcendence that does not belong. It does this because it confuses the representation of a feeling with original affectivity.13 In fairness to Scheler one should add that he himself warns us of this confusion when he says that all feelings possess a relatedness to the I or the 159

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person, which distinguishes them from other contents and functions like sensing, willing, thinking and representation (Vorstellen). The difference, according to Scheler, is that whereas an increase in the activity of sensing, willing and representing or imagination increases their attachment to the self, an increase in this activity tends to a detachment from the self of feelings, which latter are originally at home there (von Hause aus am). Feelings can be distanced and kept away only by continual effort. They can be controlled only indirectly through mastery of their causes and effects. This caveat concerning the difference between feelings and representations leaves Scheler still vulnerable however to Henry’s charge that the relation of the feelings to the self is described representatively, namely, through the mediation of the spatio-temporality of the corps propre. For Henry this is tantamount to depriving the lived body of its life. For it substitutes constituted being for the original being of affectivity. Only after he has begun his phenomenological descriptions not at the level of the original ontology of affectivity but at the level of derivative constituted ontology does Scheler make his distinctions between levels and depths of feeling. Inevitably, therefore, these four levels are distinguished eidetically from each other by him within an exteriority. In claiming primordiality and foundationality for this exteriority Scheler is putting the cart before the horse. When Scheler states that feelings can be controlled only by controlling their causes and effects, after the word ‘effects’ he writes parenthetically ‘expression (Ausdruck), action (Handlung)’. Although especially in the case of sensible feelings the causes and effects may be third-personal events like the administering of a drug, in the cases of his other categories of feeling ‘expression’ and ‘action’ admit of interpretation in terms of intentionality and norms. They have an axiological implication. As we noted in the criticism of Kant’s explanation of respect, the removal of the barrier to moral action comprised by self-love presupposes that the moral law is already something for which we care, as we put it, and something we value, as Scheler would say. As Hume would say, there would otherwise be no explanation why it could be a motive to action. How is the connection between the motivating power of affectivity and action to be construed? How is it construed by Scheler? According to Henry, Scheler remains too loyal to the way of ideas or perception followed by Locke and by Hume. It is not enough to maintain, for example, that the Kantian explanation of the possibility of moral respect presupposes that the moral law is affectively perceived. It must be recognized too that affective perception is only one kind of affectivity and not affectivity’s essence. Although the sensualist doctrines criticized by Scheler offer no account of this essence of affectivity, their theory of primary vital needs points the way to such an account when it describes hunger as an ‘internal sensation’ of a lack which one seeks to meet without the mediation 160

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of a representation of the value of what is believed or expected to meet it. The action expresses the essence of the hunger. So too ‘Affectivity which determines action is the essence of affectivity.’14 But the expression and determination here must not be understood causally. The relationship between affectivity and action is not a relationship of action with something else which would provoke it from outside and would constitute its foundation as an outside foundation, it is a relationship of action to itself insofar as this relationship, constitutive of its reality, resides precisely in its affectivity, in affectivity as such. Actually it is in this way that affectivity determines action, not as an antecedent determines a consequent, not as a cause, a reason or incentive, but as essence.15 The determining is not causal, but ontological and phenomenological, Henry would say. Would this be to say something like William James is saying when he observes that ‘we feel sorry because we cry, angry because we strike, afraid because we tremble, and not that we cry, strike, or tremble, because we are sorry, angry, or fearful, as the case may be’, where the first ‘because’ is understood causally and the second ‘because’ is understood logically and criteriologically?16 Or would Henry regard the criteriological reading of James’s aphorism as a reversion to the representationalist and perceptualist account of affectivity for which he criticizes Scheler and the ‘Greek’ tradition? Let us remind ourselves that Heidegger too challenges the pretensions to priority of representation, perception and in general presence-to-hand in everyday being in the world, but that the ontology of circumspective concern, solicitude and readiness-to-hand that Heidegger maintains are primary in everyday being in the world is deemed by Henry to lack primordiality precisely because they are structures of the ecstatic temporality and exteriority of a world. Does not the very word ‘circumspection’, Umsicht, imply a kind of sight, the viewing, the vu, which in the Greek philosophical tradition conceals the vitality, the vécu, in which Henry holds the essence of manifestation to consist? How much more critical we might expect him to be therefore of the claim that action furnishes the criteria of feelings. For are not criteria doubly exterior? Not only are they exterior to the structure of my experience and my expression of my feeling; they are also characteristics I and my behaviour present to those who observe me from outside. So has not any alleged immanence of feeling become totally alienated into the transcendence of behaviour on this criteriological analysis? To return to our test case, is not a criteriological analysis of respect foreign to its phenomenology? I think not. If an agent respects the moral law he will either act upon it from time to time or behave in a way consistent with the judgement that he would have acted upon it had there not obtained 161

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circumstances of a kind that excuse his not so acting. This is a conceptual analysis of the notion of respect in terms of what the agent does or would do if…These terms then are multiply transcendent in that they involve not only the third-person point of view, but the transcendence implicit in conditionality and intentionality. Nevertheless, it seems to me, this conceptual analysis must be part of the phenomenological analysis of the feeling of respect. By this I do not mean that the phenomenology of respect demands that if I respect a particular thing I must know how respectful people behave. And it certainly does not mean that in behaving respectfully I must think what respectful behaviour consists in. As Henry writes in another context, ‘in general human beings carry out their movements without thinking about them, but not always without knowing (connaître) them’.17 What I know is how to behave, and that I know this is shown in my behaviour. In the absence of the behavioural criteria – among which are to be included those for someone’s suffering remorse or regret, allowing that only a selection of the generally recognized criteria need be presented in a particular case – then I as agent am deprived of the means to describe a feeling I may have as a feeling of respect. I may feel as though I am feeling respect, but that is a different matter. And the point is not that I cannot know what I am feeling unless I know what the criteria are for the ascription to me of that feeling by another. I cannot have that feeling without knowing this. But the knowing need not be the theoretical knowing of a fact. It need be only knowing how to respond to a person of whom someone else or myself on reflection would be able to state what the marks of respect are. In either case the knowledge, like all knowledge, is in the public domain, though the knowledge-connaître may be no more than a knowing-savoir how appropriately to interact, an ability that falls short of a knowing that. My knowing and my bearing toward someone who has the feeling I have are reciprocally constitutive; they arise together and are born together in the sense of con-naître. That you or I feel respect for each other or for someone else is knowledge we can all share. It would be pleasing to think that this might have been what Husserl was struggling to say, and for the reasons I have given, through the notion of appresentational Paarung in the Fifth of the Cartesian Meditations, the one that Levinas translated. The aforementioned difference between respect and what feels like respect is illustrated perhaps by the difference between what Levinas writes with reference to respect in Totality and Infinity (1961) and what he says in Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence (1974). In the latter and later book respect seems to be limited to what is fundamentally self-respect interpreted as a phenomenon of reflective self-consciousness in which ‘I remain beyond reproach in respect’, ‘je demeure inattaquable dans le respect’,18 a saved ‘beautiful soul’, recuperated and protected even under the eye of the alter ego that reflects upon me, integrating and consolidating me in a manner reminiscent of the primary narcissism that is effected at the mirror stage of 162

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infancy according to Lacan.19 In Totality and Infinity respect is not a state of consciousness abstracted from a disposition to make a practical response to the other. He tells us that in this work: metaphysics has an entirely different meaning. If its movement leads to the transcendent as such, transcendence means not appropriation of what is, but its respect. Truth as respect for being is the meaning of metaphysical truth…Reason and freedom seem to us to be founded on prior structures of being whose first articulations are delineated by the metaphysical movement, or respect, or justice – identical to truth.20 Although the language in Totality and Infinity is still largely the Heideggerian language of being and truth, it is of a truth that is the surpassing of being by being, and the respect for surpassed being is respect for a truth that, on Levinas’s reading of Heidegger, surpasses alethic truth. It is respect as justice that is not respect and justice defined solely in terms of the moral law, but respect for the singular other human being, the person who is more than a case subsumed under the universality of that law. Ethical respect thus understood as absolute passivity is not the passivity that is opposed to action, but entails action. It is not definable phenomenologically as a state of feeling distinct from behaviour. It is a call to arms, and a call to hands, hands with which to bring bread to the orphan, the widow and the stranger. Levinas says it is patience, but this patience is not that of the passive voice. Its voice is more like the middle voice, in which felt suffering reaches out to the suffering other. Suffer me, I say, to come to your assistance. Let me help. Give me to hear, tenli lishmoa. See me here and send me, hineni. The active aspect of my patience is the aspect that from the point of view of the other may be criteriological behaviour. Is it therefore exemplarily intentional in the sense of Husserlian centrifugal objectivating noesis or Heideggerian ecstasis, both of which are deemed by Henry to be secondary to affectivity? Yet Levinas himself describes absolute ethical patience as affectivity. How can affectivity be an intentionality? By being an inverted intentionality, a centripetal, incoming intentionality or an outgoing expenditure, centrifugal in a sense different from that in which I am the centre: one in which the centre of gravity is the other human being outside my ego, which does not mean that the other is outside my ipseity. Ipseity according to Henry is, if I read him aright, the affectivity of the ego, what in Levinas would correspond to enjoyment or suffering, or suffering or enjoyment in a more fundamental sense acknowledged by both Levinas and Henry to cover both enjoyment and suffering conceived oppositionally. Ipseity according to one of Levinas’s uses of the word is the ego as servant, though not slave, of the other. It is not in my being toward my own death, but in service to the 163

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mortal other that Jemeinigkeit is accomplished. Jemeinigkeit, my uniqueness, is accomplished in Jedeinigkeit, your uniqueness. What Husserl calls the Ichstrahl, the ray projected by the ego, encounters a Dichstrahl, the Blickstrahl from your face. The Hebrew word for face, panim, can also mean presence and person, though it is used too of the face of an animal and the face of the earth. Recall that included within it is the word aynim, eyes. When in the face and the eyes of the other present before me I read the categorical imperative ‘Regard my regard’, ‘Respect me’, we approach each other in a moment and movement of glory and respect, kavod. At this moment, en ce moment même, at this very Augenblick, very same but at the same time verily split, at this moment of truth the intentionality of my approach to the other is always already crossed, hybridized and chiastically refracted by the other’s approach to me. In Levinas’s phrase ‘approach of the other’, approche d’autrui, the ‘of’ is ambiguous. And so too is affectivity. Ad-fectivity. If I am affected, how can I not be affected by something other than myself? When the affection is self-affection? But for Levinas selfaffection would be affection by the other at the same time or, rather, at the chiasmic crossing of two times. A chiasmus is not a meeting, and perhaps it should be said therefore that for Levinas self-affection is affection by the distance kept in the approach of the other, the Entfernung saved in Entfernung, when not only the familiarity of the tu is held at arm’s length by the respectfulness of the vous to whom I take off my hat, but the vous is transascended when it is inscribed by the trace of the he or the she or the it, that is to say, by the il of illéité (or the Il of ilelléité?) to which I show my respect by putting on my kippah and by refraining from vainly naming il as God, lest it be loved by me more than the Torah. For Henry self-affection is not affection à distance,21 but absolute immanence. Is he then substituting a monism of subjective interiority for the monism of objective exteriority that he says has been handed down by all philosophers in the Western tradition with one or two exceptions?

Eckhart and life or Kandinsky and world? One of these exceptions is Eckhart, ironically and provocatively the very thinker by whom the notion of Gelassenheit has been handed down to one of the philosophers most in question in The Essence of Manifestation, one of the philosophers of whose ontology Henry, like Levinas, asks est-elle fondamentale? Another of those philosophers is Hegel, and it is from Eckhart that Henry takes the paradigm of absolute feeling that he sets against and finds to be more fundamental than Hegelian absolute knowledge. In words that, read ontologically rather than theologically, anticipate Husserl’s claim that absolute consciousness can survive the destruction of the world,22 Heidegger’s assertion that being is more holy than any being called God, and the thought Levinas draws from Descartes’s Meditations 164

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that the idea of God brimmeth over with the Sache Selbst, Eckhart writes, as cited by Henry: ‘The least creaturely idea that ever entered your mind is as big as God…Because it will keep God out of you entirely. The moment you get [one of your own] ideas, God fades out and Godhead too.’23 ‘I pray God that he may quit me of god, for unconditioned being is above god.’24 Only through atheism can we be quit of God. The evidence of God is the e-vidence of God, God’s emptying. God is avoided when God is voided. And since the thought of God is the thought of one of God’s creatures, we must be quit too of all creatures and things if we are to attain to the reality of God that is Godhead, Gottheit, God’s unconditioned being. The good riddance of God must be a good riddance of every thing. The challenge Michel Henry presents us with is that of interpreting this no-thing-ness as self-feeling of being, which does not need even that being whose way of being is to be there. The hyphen of the expressions ‘self-feeling’ and ‘self-affection’ is to indicate not a gap but the closing of every gap. It is a trait d’union. But in order to comprehend this closure, or at least in order to conceive it, must not feeling and affection be abstracted from every particular feeling, affection or tonality? It sounds as though such an abstraction is being called for by Henry himself when he writes: ‘The affect is not at first any particular affect, but life itself in its substance phenomenologically irreducible to that of the world.’25 This seems to settle once and for all that it is not the lifeworld, the Lebenswelt, that Henry holds to be phenomenologically primordial, but living that lives off itself. And he might protest that any abstraction being referred to here is not the abstraction of the Leben from the Lebenswelt, of the living or the to-live from the world we inhabit, but the abstraction–abstractness that insists that living or being is living or being in the world. Henry will say that he is asking us to consider not the seen or the sensed or the felt, but the to-see, the to-sense and the to-feel, which Heidegger neglected in favour of the to-be interpreted ecstatically via the reaching toward being of the to-be-here-or-there (Dasein). He will say further, with Scheler, as we have noted, that feeling is to be distinguished from sensation and sensibility, but he objects against Scheler that feeling and sensibility are ‘structurally heterogeneous’ to the point of disallowing a degree of analogy that Scheler allows.26 Whereas with a sensation there is a distinction between what is sensed and the sensing of it, so that there is a distance between, for example, the seeing and the seen, there is no such difference in the case of feeling or affection. The feeling feels itself, affection is autoaffection. This holds for the feelings of love, respect, etc., despite the conceptual content through which they are related to something or someone else. The conceptual transcendence does not destroy the immanence of the feelings themselves. The feeling itself ‘receives itself and experiences itself in such a way that this capacity for receiving itself, for experiencing itself, of being affected by itself, constitutes what is affective in it, this is what makes 165

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it a feeling’.27 Moreover, this self-feeling of feeling is the Self-feeling of the Self. The Self, the Soi, is constitutionally immanent. Henry may say too that the to-feel was betrayed also by Levinas when, after his preliminary phenomenology of the ego at home with itself in enjoyment, he finds that this enjoyment is discomforted as though by a malin génie whose voice turns out to be that of bad conscience to which the self’s to-say is discovered to have been the already given response, somewhat as the ego of Descartes’s Third Meditation is discovered to have been always already called up by God. It is at this always already that the paths of Levinas and Henry converge and diverge. And it may well be that Henry has Levinas in mind when in a letter to Bernard Forthomme he writes: ‘the experience of the other comes to pass in the immanence of life, producing itself as a modification or overturning (bouleversement) of the latter’.28 The word ‘bouleversement’ is one Levinas often uses to speak of what he too calls the expérience d’autrui, which he sometimes refers to as expérience par excellence, though he also says sometimes that to the word ‘expérience’ he prefers the word épreuve, the one Henry employs when he speaks of l’épreuve de la vie and l’épreuve affective. Both Henry and Levinas give a certain priority to the épreuve de la vie understood as my enjoyment of life. But the épreuve in that sense is, Levinas maintains, subjected to an épreuve understood as an ethical test. I find myself required to produce an apologia pro vita mea, an apology for my life, an apology that will fall short right up to my death and beyond. The life hitherto lived egologically is surprised to find itself to have been all along called to make sacrifices for the other. So in its blissful self-enjoyment was its life one of complete immanence? Yes and No. Yes in the time of its in principle recollectable past. No in so far as that time is always threatened by another time, the time of the other in which the past is not recollectable, an absolute past, a past of absolute passion, absolute patience, absolute suffering. The absolute suffering and absolute enjoyment of which Henry writes appear not to be under this threat. Yet there comes a moment toward the end of Phénoménologie matérielle when he tells us that ‘regard is in itself an affect, in such a way that it can be a desire’.29 And he might even be willing to go along with Levinas in writing that last word with an upper-case initial, meaning ethical Desire. What’s more, and more than Levinas, except at exceptional moments, is willing to do, Henry is ready to extend affection to the face of the whole world. As we had suspected all along, Henry does not want to exclude the world from what he understands by immanence. It is only the abstract world he excludes. Having with Eckhart said Goodbye to God and every thing that is, the philosopher returns to this world and the world turns to him. If at first he seems to be saying with Augustine, Noli foras ire, in te redi, in interiore homine habitat veritas, this turning in is also a turning out, a foras ire, for, Henry tells us suddenly, I am subject to the 166

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épreuve of a ‘Pathos-with that is the widest form of community conceivable’, a community that ‘includes the real world – the cosmos – of which each element – form, colour – ultimately is only in so far as it is auto-affected (s’auto-affecte)’.30 In my inmost being I am the subject of a pathetical – a pathethical? – community that includes the external world, even the dead matter within it. He cites Kandinsky: ‘The world is filled with resonances. It constitutes a cosmos of beings exercizing a spiritual action. Dead matter is a living spirit.’ Resonances. Correspondences is what Baudelaire might have said. Could we say responses, regard, respect, for every dead and living thing? In Voir l’invisible Henry reproduces from Kandinsky the following passage that he rightly describes as a ‘texte admirable’: Every ‘dead’ thing quivered. Not only the stars, the moon, the forests, the flowers of which the poets speak, but also a cigarette-end lying in an ashtray, a white and patient trouser-button which regards us from its puddle in the street, a little piece of docile fabric which an ant grips in its mandibles and drags over the tall grass in the direction of unsure and important destinations, the page of a calendar toward which stretches the hand that forcefully rips it from the warm community of the pages remaining on the block – all that showed me its face, its intimate being, the secret soul that more often remains silent than it speaks.31 ‘Face’, ‘regard’, ‘coup d’oeil’. In Greek, the Greek of Western philosophy, but also in Latin and Hebrew and Arabic and Persian and Chinese and Welsh and so on, the eye is named by a word that can also mean fountain, source, as the eye is the source of tears. It is the pathethical regard of the eye and the face that finally exorcizes perhaps the spectre that has haunted this chapter, the spectre of the question whether the world must be lost in order that life may be saved. At a session of the colloquium dedicated to the work of Michel Henry, held at Cerisy-la-Salle in September 1996, Gabrielle Dufour-Kowalska projected slides of the series of paintings by Kandinsky’s friend, Alexei Jawlensky. Recalling Bachelard’s declaration, ‘tout ce que je regarde me regarde’, it occurred to me that the series of paintings called ‘Paysages’ could as well be called ‘Visages’, the title Jawlensky gave to another series, and that the landscapes could be seen chiasmically as faces. Such a chiasmus might be the enigma behind the closed eyes of the face portrayed in the painting called ‘Salvator Mundi’, a title that raises the question of how wide a scope may be allowed to that genitive. That is the question on the answer to which appeal to Kandinsky or Jawlensky does after all permit an exorcism of the anxiety over whether order to save life one must lose the world. Would this exorcism amount to the recognition that the feeling of respect is a particular feeling, and therefore one to be distinguished from 167

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self-affection as such? Or does this exorcism show rather that respect is constitutive of the fullness of the joy and the suffering of the agapeistic love of life, where the latter ‘of’ marks a genitive that is ambiguously subjective and objective? This is a question that we can hardly begin to answer without entering into the territory explored in another admirable text, Michel Henry’s C’est moi la vérité: Pour une philosophie du christianisme.32 It is a question that would lead us to consider the statement in 1 John 4: 8–16 that God is simultaneously life and love. So it is a question that would lead us to wonder whether Henry’s philosophical phenomenology of life depends upon the acceptance of a particular religious creed or has undergone a theological Kehre.33 To this last question it must be replied that Henry claims that his phenomenology of Christianity is presented as a means through which he considers a general phenomenology of life that can be approached and illuminated without any religious faith being assumed as its foundation. His approach is in this the same as that of Levinas, who claims that the Biblical citations made in his ‘Greek’ writings never serve as a basis of argument. Whether or not Henry’s and Levinas’s claims are always supported is another matter, as is whether I can in turn make an independent philosophical point by drawing attention to Henry’s reference to Jesus as ‘an exceptional, even extraordinary man whose work, the construction of a magnificent morality, implies in any case respect’34 in order to pose the question whether respect is not implied in the case of the Son’s love of the Father, of the Father’s love of the Son, and of the love between the Son and the Father and the son and the daughter. Is not respect implied in multiple philiation, and is not the latter the truth of all filiation and filliation that has life? Life, it becomes clear in C’est moi la vérité, does indeed have at its core a radical alterity. There is an Exteriority in or ‘in’ its interiority, as Levinas too would say. Would Henry agree with Levinas that the alterity is less a root than an uprooting, less ‘radical’ than eradicative? He writes that the absolute alterity, which he does not deny but enthusiastically affirms, is ‘more interior to myself than myself’. Would he agree with Levinas that the Self (Soi) and the soi to which Henry refers, notwithstanding the references he also makes to a double self-affection (s’auto-affectation), is not one of egoity but one of ipseity, not one, but more than one, and less, with an identity that is disrupted by alterity? This double self-affection appears to lend itself to a symmetry and reciprocity: a ‘reciprocal relation of interiority of Life to the living and of the living to the Life which is in him, her or it (lui)’.35 According to Levinas the face to face ‘relation’ is not reciprocal. It is dissymetrical hetero-affectedness. However, one crucial point of either agreement or almost absolute proximity between the ‘Judao-Greek’ and the ‘Christiano-Greek’ must be mentioned in concluding this chapter. The love of which Henry writes with such intensity – and not only in the title of one of his works,36 is a ‘love with eyes closed’. It is a love that closes its eyes the better to experience the life 168

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and Life that penetrates its own self. So it would be quite wrong to equate this with narcissism. The eyes of Narcissus are open in order that he may see himself reflected in a world spread out ecstatically before him. Yet, despite what I described as the exorcism of the spectral thought that the world must be lost in order that life – or Life – may be saved, despite Henry’s response to the epiphany expressed in the sentences he cites from Kandinsky, that moment of insight seems to get forgotten, eclipsed perhaps after all by the theology so passionately preached by Eckhart. And does a different theology after all accomplish a similar ‘turn’ in the ‘Greek’ writings of Levinas? (And is my asking of this question motivated by a yet different theology or atheology in my own writings?) Is there not in the thinking of both Levinas and Henry a turning away from and a failure of due respect for at least some of the things of this world, and with that a failure to get back to some of the things themselves? This, with reference to Levinas, is the question with which the next chapter will be concerned.

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…you cry suddenly, ‘Moon! Moon!’ The moon has stepped back like an artist gazing amazed at a work That points at him amazed.1 (Ted Hughes)

Scarcely more than a dream Levinas maintains in ‘Reality and its shadow’ that the aesthetic phenomenon is scarcely more than a dream in which responsibility is suspended.2 It might well be said that thus evaluated this phenomenon is tailored for phenomenological description. For it seems that with the work of art, as with a system of pure mathematics, the bracketing of ethical and empirical questions required by phenomenological reduction has already begun. According to Levinas the disinterestedness of art is a consequence of its inter-est-edness, its intér-esse-ment. Art is disengaged because it is ontological. Art suspends finality and does not go beyond the confines of being. When Heidegger writes that being is the element of art he gives Levinas his reason for writing that the work of art is ‘the very work of being’.3 The work of art is only a more or less refined and aufgehoben reflection of what Levinas calls the il y a. The there-is is what remains after ‘the imagined destruction of all things’, that is to say the unspeakable ‘irremissibility of pure existence’, the presence of the absence of all things that returns like ‘the plenitude of the void’, ‘the murmur of silence’, anonymous insomnia, impersonal immortality.4 Levinas’s il y a is the ‘element’ – like the water of Heraclitus’ river in which you can bathe not even once – that makes a mockery of the alleged generosity of the Heideggerian es gibt and of the power to recreate things that the work of art boasts.

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Two intentionalities Although volume 23 of the Husserliana treats of imagination, imaging and memory,5 the published work of Husserl does not say a great deal explicitly about the work of art. What it does say about aesthetic appreciation could only reinforce Levinas’s view that any interruption of the eternal return of the il y a can come only from a certain exteriority beyond art. In The Theory of Intuition in Husserl’s Phenomenology Levinas criticizes the father of phenomenology because his theory is too theoretical. Levinas writes: if, in comparison with the Logical Investigations, Ideas modifies that thesis according to which representation would be the foundation of all acts, this book does not modify it enough to prevent our saying that every position of being (thesis) includes a representative, doxic thesis. It must therefore be stressed immediately that with Husserl being presents itself as the correlate of theoretical intuitive life, of evidence of an objectivating act. That is why the Husserlian conception of intuition is tainted with intellectualism and is perhaps too narrow. For every attempt Husserl makes to introduce into the constitution of being categories which do not have their source in theoretical life fails to cancel both the primacy of the theoretical attitude and its universality. The properties of value, utility, etc., can exist only as grafted on to the existence of the correlative being of the representation.6 The appreciation of the work of art implies a ‘double intentio’.7 For example, the spectator directs his attention at the picture perceptively, but he also directs his attention non-perceptively at its value. This double intentionality becomes multiple when to this double attention are added ‘acts of feeling and will’. Yet this multiplication remains a multiplication of noematic accusatives, a complication for the conscious subject of objectivation (Objektivation). Thanks to this objectivation we find ourselves confronting in this natural attitude, hence as occupants of the natural world, not only natural things, but values and practical objects of all kinds: cities, streets with lamp posts, houses, furniture, works of art…etc.8 Levinas’s bold move would reduce the phenomenological reduction that suspends the natürliche Einstellung. This second reduction would teach us that objectivating intentionality is doubled by an inverse intentionality in such a way that the manifold of objects in perceptual space constitued by the ego’s noetic acts is suspended from an ethical exteriority where the centre of gravity is no longer the subject confronting objects, but the other whose look declines my ipseity in the accusative. The other accuses me. The 171

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other accuses me. Despite what Sartre claims, the other does not objectivate me. He does not subjugate me. For the dyadic face-to-face without which ethics would be injustice and primary violence is not a quasi-dynamic relation between terms. It is anallergic, otherwise than energeia, and older than relationality between terms. The inverse intentionality of the Levinasian face-to-face is therefore not the dialectical other of direct Husserlian intentionality. If it were that, the face-to-face would not have broken the cyclic to-and-fro of systematic totality and would make of the subject to which it is directed a noematic object. It is the ‘condition of possibility’ of projective ec-static intentionality, the impower of primary justice without which the power of the ‘I can’ is injustice and violence.

Test and testimony Might such an inverse intentionality be the condition of the possibility of the work of art? That is, notwithstanding Levinas’s contention that art is related to the ethical as the shadow is to reality and as the dream is to waking life, might the ethical face-to-face be the condition not only of the possibility of the work of art, but also the condition of that condition, namely the poietic condition, as in ‘the human condition’? The reply to this question will no doubt depend upon the particular work of art one has in mind. If what we are considering is a play by Shakespeare or a novel by Dostoevsky, perhaps it will be said that the poietic condition cannot be distinguished from the human condition. But what about a work of plastic art? How can a work of plastic art, say a painting by Cézanne, suffer ‘the rupture of the plastic forms of phenomenality and appearing’ demanded by ethical responsibility?9 When Levinas writes that ‘This responsibility would be called upon and awakened by the face of the other man’, he tells us that a distinction must be made between the visibility of the phenomenal face at which I look and the invisibility of the ethical face that looks at me. Now if this distinction is made with respect to the moment when the other is before me in flesh and bone, should it not be made with respect to the moment when I am confronted by his portrait? This question is none other than the problem of idolatry, and a less extreme solution to it is on hand than the final solution of the classical iconoclasts. For the theological version of this problem ‘The solution is as simple as it is prodigious: in inverting the relation of the one looking (regardant) and the what is looked at (regardé) – in imposing God, no longer as an object of contemplation but rather as a subject who contemplates us.’10 And instead of ‘God’ here may we not read ‘the other’, autrui? If something is said by the all-seeing eyes of the Pantocrator who eyes us from up there in the apse, might not something be said by the eyes of the gardener in the portrait painted by Cézanne, even if we cannot be sure that we see them in the shadow beneath the brim of his hat? No doubt what is said remains 172

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infinitely determinable, a ‘bad’ infinity, a hermeneutic infinity. But by what right can we doubt that the looking of his eyes is an interpellative saying, a ‘good’ infinity? Whatever he might allow in the case of the portrait, it would seem that Levinas could not allow that there is any ethical saying in the case of a still life or a landscape painting in which no people are portrayed. That would be nothing short of paganism. He allows that the face in the ethical sense can be the back of the neck or of the hand. But he does not grant that there is a face and therefore an ‘obligation to look at the face’ where there is no ‘exposition to death and an order given to me not to abandon the other’.11 Does not the painter learn and teach that ethical saying is expressed otherwise because more widely than Levinas usually recognizes? Is not Cézanne (Chardin, Turner, Morandi…), whether he knows it or not, the spokesman whose obligation to regard responds to the saying of visible things, to their claim to be regarded? ‘The landscape thinks in me’, he says, ‘and I am its consciousness’. Speaking of what Claude Lorrain does when he avails himself of shadows to render the presence of light, Merleau-Ponty observes: It is a matter of giving testification rather than of providing information. The drawing is no longer to be read…it will no longer be dominated by the look, we are no longer to seek in it the pleasure of embracing the world; it is to be received, to concern us as a decisive word.12 It is that by which we shall be con-cerned, as Levinas writes of the other human being. If the work of art is a work of witness, so too is the work of opening, of fenestration, that phenomenology performs. Both the painter and the phenomenologist – so Levinas himself – are witnesses to the chiasmic decision and intersection of the visible and the invisible. The word ‘witness’ has legal and ethical connotations. But this image of the artist-witness is not at odds with the image of the artist-immoralist above the law. The artist is above the law in that, like the legislator and as legislator, he or she reminds us that the law is not made for the sake of the law. With reference to Pascal’s pensée that ‘ “This is my place in the sun”. Such is the beginning and the paradigm of the usurpation of the entire earth’, Levinas comments: ‘My being-there is to be justified in my responsibility for the other man: being-there, is that not already to occupy someone else’s place? The Da of Dasein is already an ethical problem.’13 The words ‘usurpation of the entire earth’ should serve as a reminder to me that the other whose place in the sun I occupy may be other than the other human being, and that as well as a prejudice in favour of the world of objects humankind knows a prejudice in favour of humankind. 173

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Regarding regarding Toward the end of his life Merleau-Ponty distinguished, on the one hand, a bad ambiguity of finitude and universality, of interiority and exteriority, an ambiguity such as that of the phenomenology of Husserl that takes perception as its model, and, on the other hand, a good ambiguity such as that of the phenomenology of expression that ‘brings together in one tissue the plurality of monads, the past and the present, nature and culture’ and that ‘would at the same time supply the principle of a morality’.14 In the last of his books published during his life there are signs that the morality he envisaged would acknowledge direct, that is to say, underived responsibilities toward non-human beings. On the back of the cover of that book we read: ‘Signs, that is to say, not a complete alphabet and not even a consecutive argument, but rather sudden signals, like a glance (regard) received from events, books and things’,15 things as seemingly unimportant as the button in the puddle, of which, in the sentences cited in the immediately preceding chapter, Kandinsky says that it regards us. It catches our eye like a Member of Parliament needs to catch the eye of the Speaker. That Merleau-Ponty believes that the plastic arts can facilitate the discernment of these Winke is suggested by his citation of André Marchand’s remark, following Klee and perhaps the first strophe of Baudelaire’s Correspondances, ‘From time to time, in a forest, I have experienced the feeling that it was not I that was looking at the forest. I have sometimes had the feeling that it was rather the trees that were looking at me, speaking to me…I was there listening.’16 In the same essay Merleau-Ponty writes: Painters have often dreamed about mirrors because, beneath this ‘mechanical effect’ as beneath the effect of perspective, they recognized the metamorphosis of the seeing and the seeable by which their vocation and our flesh are defined. That is also why they have often liked (and, judging by the drawings of Matisse, still like) to represent themselves in the act of painting, thereby supplementing the things they saw with what the things saw of them, as though to attest that there is a total or absolute vision outside which nothing remains and which closes upon themselves.17 Primitivist animism? Prelogical participation? Hallucination? Apparition? Sartre writes: With each of his paintings Giacometti takes us back to the moment of creation ex nihilo. Every one of them raises anew the old metaphysical question: Why is there something rather than nothing? And yet there is something. There is this stubborn, unjustifiable and superfluous apparition. The person in this painting is hallucinating

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because he presents himself in the form of an interrogative apparition.18 And immediately following the sentences just reproduced from L’Oeil et l’esprit, Merleau-Ponty asks: ‘How are we to name or locate in the world of the understanding these occult operations and the philtres and idols they prepare?’ Here is the language of magic potions and idols that Levinas deems to be unavoidable when we write about art. We have seen that in treating of this subject Levinas also speaks of dreams. So too does MerleauPonty, but he learns from Cézanne that the oneiric cannot be clearly and distinctly opposed to a world of operations and things that can be clearly and distinctly named. The instant du monde that Cézanne wanted to paint and which is long since gone is still projected for us by his canvases, and his Montagne Sainte-Victoire creates and recreates itself from one end of the earth to the other, otherwise, but no less energetically than in the hard rock overlooking Aix. Essence and existence, imaginary and real, visible and invisible, the painting blurs all these categories in deploying its oneiric universe of fleshly essences, of efficacious likenesses and of silent significations.19 This is the good ambiguity of a Cézanne. The (let us say) 177 studies of the Montagne Sainte-Victoire left by Cézanne and the interrogative apparition of the portrait of Diego by Giacometti raise the following questions. Is there an ethical dimension to the appearing – the apparoir, as Levinas might say – of the pictures of the man and the mountain? Is the mute signification to which these pictures supply a voice a signifying in Levinas’s sense of signifiance, an imperative saying, dire? Does the invisible to which a phenomenology of visual expression responds include more than the unperceived or only implied aspects (Abschattungen) of the physical things and psycho-physical alter egos of which a phenomenology of perception treats? Or does it include also a call to responsibility coming not solely from a human being or from a superhuman being whose voice is heard at the top of a mountain, but from the mountain itself?20 Is the phenomenology of artistic expression and of ‘the logos of the aesthetic world’ a phenomenology of my exposition to the other? Is the aesthetic one with the ethical?21 Will a logos of the aesthetic world be an ethics of the aesthetic world? A place for these questions on the topic of inverse intentionality begins to be cleared when, notwithstanding his preoccupation with egological intentionality, Husserl reflects in Ideas II (§ 36) on the experience of touching the touched. This reflection paves the way for reflection on the phenomenology of aesthetic and moral Begegnenlassenheit where I am encountered, regarded, er-äugnet, and touched by the other 175

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human and non-human being, where the other and the other other shake my hand, but without theirs ever achieving even the non-simultaneous reversibility of the intimacy of one of my hands holding my other.22 Not to mention the intimacy whose unachievability is acknowledged in the tragicomical ‘Darling, how was it for you?’ implicit in the Fifth of the Cartesian Meditations, the one that, let us remind ourselves once more, was translated by Emmanuel Levinas. And let us remind ourselves once more also in this context of the meaning of Levinas’s – and Kant’s – first name. What would it be like for God to be with us? To judge by the testimony given by Heidegger, these forgotten questions about the face-to-face with things and about responsibility toward them were posed in the epoch of the formation of form, of the idea of the eidos inherited by the eidetic phenomenology that the ethical face-to-face deforms. Is it credible that the Greeks responded to the ethical face that is announced in the phenomenal façade? Although idea refers back to idein (noein), the meaning of the word is precisely not what is re-pre-sented in representation, but on the contrary the shining forth of the looking look itself: what the look offers for regarding. What the word denotes is precisely not, in the modern sense, the relation to a ‘subject’, but rather the presencing, the shining forth in the looking look as what in presencing grants at the same time endurance. Here lies the origin of the distinction between the ti estin (essentia, quidditas) and hoti (existentia) in the temporality of the idea…The being is being in the enduring presence, idea, the en-visaged in its en-visagedness (alêtheia).23 That is to say, as Bachelard says in The Poetics of Reverie, ‘everything that shines sees’, tout ce qui brille voit.24 After the gods have forsaken the forests, rivers and mountains Cézanne makes us see that things see, that they can be otherwise than as objects and otherwise than as means for human projects, that they are, as according to Heidegger they were for the Greeks, Anblick bietend, en-visaged, endowed with a visage, with a face that they endow, looked at and looking, regarded and regarding.25 As again Bachelard writes, tout ce que je regarde me regarde. A painting, as according to Celan a poem, can be a handshake. The Sache selbst that gives itself in the phenomenological reduction does not have the inertia that ideas of material things have according to Berkeley. Thanks to the painter, the alleged ‘idea’ of material substances becomes a motif. To employ the word that Berkeley reserves for spiritual substances, it becomes a ‘notion’. And a motion. The material thing as motif motivates. It becomes once more a prime mover. The painter renders and gives back the immediately given, the donnée immédiate de la conscience, as something that gives itself. The given is a gift whose regard invites our regard, inviting us to invite it to speak. 176

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Appearances will inevitably take on the appearance of inertia and passivity if they appear as objects seen either as means or as obstacles,26 or as beings of which the esse is percipi. That, Heidegger maintains, is not how they presented themselves to the Greeks. When in the rough and ready translation of his words ‘to gar auto noein estin te kai einai’ Parmenides says being and knowing are the same, or, less glibly put, ‘For the same: taking to heart is so also the presencing of what is present’, he does not assert in Greek what Berkeley asserts in Latin. For the Greeks: the being does not become a being because first of all the human being looks at it just in the sense of representation as a kind of subjective perception. It is rather the human being who is looked at by the being…so that for the Greeks the world cannot become a picture (Bild ).27 Heidegger does not mean by this that the Greeks were unable to represent their world in paintings. He means that their world did not present itself to them as a composition or system and was not conceived and grasped as a representation. Even if it is in this way that the world has been perceived by so-called Westerners since, say, the Dioptric of Descartes, that does not prevent this pictoriality (Bildlichkeit) being subverted and this composition (classis) undergoing decomposition (klassis). Paradoxically, it is precisely this that takes place when the world becomes a portrait in the paintings of Cézanne or in the phenomenological descriptions of Husserl, MerleauPonty and Dufrenne. According to certain modern ideas of progress and enlightenment, this decomposition is a regress to primitivism. But a Schritt zurück, a step back, may be at the same time zukünftig, a step forward into the future. This step cannot be merely an unproductive repetition of the Greek or Judeo-Christian tradition if the pagan gods have left the forests and the rivers and the mountains, and if, madly or not, we no longer share with the Bishop of Cloyne the belief in an author of the book of the world that has led to the crisis of idolatry.

Wherefore painters? Wherefore phenomenology? Wozu Maler? Wozu die Phänomenologie? The painter and the phenomenologist stop us in our tracks by interrupting the pursuit of our technical and economic interests. The phenomenologist and the painter retranslate the environment, the Um-Welt, into world. Clearly, when Chardin, Cézanne and Morandi take utensils as their motifs, they suspend their everyday teleologicality. The representation of a knife in a still life is no good for cutting an apple. Furthermore, in bracketing off this teleologicality the painting brings out the thing’s deontologicality. It reveals the thing as something that commands us to regard it as an end in itself. The purpose177

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fulness without end or purpose attributed to the work of art by Kant opens up into the end without purposefulness of the work as such and of, in the case of heterofigurative art, every thing figured in it. Although this opening is produced thanks to the painting without necessarily being explicitly sought by the painter, the latter feels himself no less bound by the categorical imperative that commands him to ‘tell the truth in painting’.28 Cézanne does what he does not because he wants to. He does it because his motif, whether it be Vallier or the Montagne Sainte-Victoire, commands it. His brush-strokes fulfil a responsibility regarding the world, a responsibility to hold it in regard. That these are the enactment of an aesthetic response does not mean that they do not at one and the same time execute an ethical responsibility. Levinas writes: ‘If we reproach Buber with extending the IThou to the thing, it is not because he seems to us to be an animist in relation to nature. – It is rather because he seems to be an artist in his relation with human beings.’29 But the recognition of an underivative responsibility toward things does not exclude respect for their differences. On the contrary, it demands it. Likewise for the rigorous art called phenomenology. The pictorial moment of the phenomenological reduction is the deontological moment of ontology that puts in parentheses the superstructures and substructures – not least the economic ones – of the world of everyday life, in order to make more evident the deeper structures on which they are based. This is the moment that also suspends normal science. It is the moment of revolutionary science when the prose of the world finds itself interrupted by the poetry of the world, and when one has to leave unresolved the ambiguity between discovery and invention and between science and art in order to leave things be in their being where natura naturata does not cease to be natura naturans and where, to turn the phrase Michel Henry cites from Kandinsky, nature morte does indeed mean still life. Like the art of painting to which it has recourse, the art-science of phenomenology testifies to a vision. It matters little that this vision seems fantastic and detached from our ordinary world; it still teaches something about it: that underneath this ordinariness an extraordinariness is waiting to emerge. The vision of phenomenology, as we shall see, cannot but be truly phantastic. It opens up a new dimension of depth, that dimension of which Merleau-Ponty writes that it is the most ‘existential’ one. This dimension of depth is the most existential because ‘it obliges us to reject the prejudice in favour of the world’, because it is the dimension of the regarded regard that accuses us.30 The phenomenologist and the painter say to us: Wait a moment. Attend. Pay attention. Regard the regard. The inverse intentionality of the Augenblick der Welt, the instant of the world that the paintings of Cézanne still cast before our eyes, testifies that the eidos of things – no less than the eidos of the eidolon – is Anblick bietend. The eidos is the look offered by the painter’s motif. The painter Cézanne 178

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‘wanted…to show how it touches us’.31 Whether it be the look of Vallier or of the Montagne Sainte-Victoire, it remains true that ‘Cézanne has only said what they wanted to say’.32 By dint of effecting a ‘coherent deformation’ of perspective – such, for example, as that which Cézanne produced in Les Maisons à l’Estaque in the National Gallery at Washington, where the ‘retentions’ and ‘protentions’ are deranged – by dint of realizing his motif in a surreal juxtaposition and of surrounding them with a solid or empty frame, the painter reconnects us vertically and horizontally to the original but now renewed world of which the painting is an integrating and transitively disintegrating part. The painting is ‘of it’, en est. The painter lets things speak. When ‘The “blanks” in effect, assume importance, first strike’,33 it may happen as perlocutionary effect that the signs suspended in this blankness or whiteness strike again. Warhol’s can of soup is indeed ‘condensed’ when it appears against a white or blank ground. It is doubly condensed, doubly ver-dichtet in being ge-dichtet. And, paradoxically again, the importance and import, the signification and the signifiance of the mountain are already put in relief by the fact that Cézanne separates it from its familiar surroundings, raising it as a figure against a white ground. This detachment is a reattachment. There occurs not only a chiasm of two ambiguities: the ambiguity of the painting as Gegenstand and of the mountain as Objekt, and the ambiguity of the painting as Objekt and of the mountain as Gegenstand. There occurs a chiasm of the mountain looked at through the medium of the painting and the mountain looking at us, an interlacing of its Schein with the Schönheit of its Scheinen – and hence with our Schonen, our Sorge, our care, the soin that responds to the mountain’s besoin, its need to be let be. The objet d’art and its motif become objects of love, to erasmiôtaton.34 The beauty, the ‘bright and beautiful’ of the hymn, to kalon, is the truth, the a-lêtheia, of the emergence into the light: to ekphanestaton, where the pha is the pha of the phainesthai of phenomenology that, in momentarily excluding the natural attitude, includes the appearing of nature like in the days of Genesis, like the creations of the painter that ‘have almost their entire lives before them’,35 like the portraits of the gardener and of the mountain that want to say on behalf of their motifs and of themselves ‘Regard us. Have regard for us’, and that, since the kalon cannot not be the agathon, testify thus to the epekeina tês ousias and to a double inverse intentionality. No more than in the case of the separation performed by the painting does the separation performed by the phenomenological reduction amount to hermetic isolation. ‘The most important lesson of the reduction’, Merleau-Ponty writes, ‘is the impossibility of a complete reduction.’36 This impossibility derives not only from the fact that Husserl is no more endowed than Cézanne with ‘the intelligence of the Pater Omnipotens’,37 and is therefore incapable of repeating the genesis of the entire world. This impossibility derives too from the fact that the creation of a single part of 179

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the world does not guarantee that it won’t become once again an object of the Weltbild that we explain, use or register – regarding it as a landscape for which we have no regard. There is ‘normal science’, but there is also ‘normal art’. Husserl felt that he had always to begin again. We share this feeling as we read his work. If we do not we have missed the point. Similarly, however much Cézanne wanted to be left alone in front of his easel, the images that he produced upon it will never leave us alone. They oblige us to recreate them as perspectives that the imagination varies ‘otherwise, and more or less energetically’ without respite: 178, 179, 180…In lending ourselves to this ‘miraculous multiplication of the sensible’,38 we must pay attention to the ochres and cobalt blues that could have originated in the minerals of that triangle of rock that overlooks Le Tholonet and Aix; we have to study the deep geometry of which these colours – and the pieces of canvas or paper that the painter has left blank – are the flesh and the bones. For, as is demonstrated by the more cubist paintings of Cézanne and the abstract painting they announce, it is exactly the autofigurativeness of these heterofigurative paintings that makes visible what is invisible to the socalled profane eye: the fact that the signified and the signifier change places with each other all the time, making time and marking time; the fact that the sign is the sign of the other only in being at the same time a sign of itself; the fact that the idea becomes material in a ‘mineral language’, as Levinas might say.39 The painting ‘is a spectacle of some thing only in being a “spectacle” of nothing, in bursting “the skin of things” in order to show how things make themselves things and how the world makes itself world’.40 If, however, we take seriously the painter’s testimony to his being looked at by what regards him, we must recognize that a mineral language can be a moral language too. The painter does not simply render visible the aspect, the Abschattung, which remains invisible to the eye that remains profane. It renders visible also the invisibility of the zero point of Schatten at the origin of the regard of that which regards him, and whose Typik is the dissimultaneity of the chiasm of touching the touched.41 As for the chiasm of touching-seen touched on above,42 not even Michelangelo succeeds in enabling us to see the touching of the finger of God.

Chiasms If with Merleau-Ponty we maintain that the inverse intentionality of the regard of the thing facing us is not only an analogy of the regard of the conscious being who regards us, that is to say, if with Merleau-Ponty we hold that it is not only the conscious or even living being that can regard us, we must say with him too that the primacy of perception implies the primacy of being. ‘We must say: Being is that strange encroachment such that although the visible pertaining to me cannot be superimposed upon that pertaining to the other, it opens on to the other, and both open on to 180

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the same sensible world.’43 But we must also say that the word ‘other’ here is not just the personal pronoun autrui. If we also say that the thing that regards us imposes upon us an underivative responsibility toward it,44 we are rejecting the restriction of direct responsibility Levinas affirms when he limits such responsibility to my being the one accused by the look of the other human being (or of God). This means that meaning is anarchically grounded in the invisible pertaining to ethics. But this does not mean that we must reject the chiasm of meaning and sensibility, of sense and nonsense, of sensibility and responsibility, of ‘the logos of the aesthetic world’ and the logos of moral reason; not, at least, if the invisible is not the opposite of the visible; not if the ethical invisible, although – because every attempt to make it seen in the world makes it disappear – it does not present itself, is found to be ‘in the line of the visible’; not if ‘it is its virtual point of focus, and if it is inscribed in it (like a watermark)’;45 not if there is a trace of the ethical invisible in the visible, perhaps even in the il y a; not if the paths of Merleau-Ponty and Levinas make contact at the heart of a chiasm.

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11 ALETHAESTHETHICS Ethics as aesthetics of truth

Tell all the Truth but tell it slant– Success in Circuit lies Too bright for our infirm Delight The Truth’s superb surprise As Lightning to the Children eased With explanation kind The Truth must dazzle gradually Or every man be blind–1 (Emily Dickinson)

The renovation of banality It may be a too hasty reading of Hegel that presents him as an enemy of the radically new. But that is how he has been read by those Romantic and Existentialist thinkers who have not been able to persuade themselves that he is really one of them. Their stumbling block has been Absolute Knowledge. However other than stasis, however inseparably connected with the labour of the negative and however much emphasis is put upon its being a Result, Absolute Knowledge is a resolution. It is a reconciliation that, if sublime, risks being also sublimely banal. It runs this risk because although, as I have suggested, Hegelian sublation, Aufhebung, may be seen as a reconstrual of the Kantian transcendental imagination, it is a reconstrual in which both the empirical and the aesthetic imagination are subordinated despite being saved in that sublation. Not only, as in the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, is imagination lost in intellectual understanding; the Hegelian dialectic threatens to lose both in Reason or Spirit. Notwithstanding the agony and despair of the journey, the Hegelian dialectic is ultimately as optimistic as the Christianity of which it sees itself to be a philosophical reflection. With the ebbing of the sea of religious faith, either, on the one hand, hope was set on the possibility of a secular happy ending – and it is not difficult to equate that hope with Hegelian optimism, as Marx seems to have done – or, on the other hand, the very idea of a 182

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happy ending became suspect. That suspicion has been expressed no more forcefully in the twentieth century than by Emmanuel Levinas, a suspicion he nevertheless manages somehow to reconcile (baleful word) with more than a sneaking admiration for Marx, with serious reservations about the suspicion cultivated by Freud, and with an ebullient though different confessionally religious faith. Not only Levinas’s confessionally religious faith, but his confessedly humanist if not secular philosophy is buoyed up by a thirst for the radically new that could not be quenched by philosophies as diverse as those of Hegel, Bergson and Heidegger precisely because all three of these are philosophies centred on being. Sublimation by dialectical negation, the élan vital and self-authenticating ecstasis within the bounds of one’s birth and death are variations on the same theme, different versions of the same. With Bergsonian creative evolution, plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose; even nonbeing is a mode of being. Where in Hegelianism the other is the other of the same and indeterminate being and nonbeing are the same, in Bergsonism nonbeing is another determinate way of being. No wonder that when Heidegger and Sartre come on the scene the subject matters of their phenomenological analyses include boredom and the Langeweile of the endurance of egological synchrony. Levinas’s phenomenological descriptions of the indeterminate there-is (il y a), of the hypostasis of determinate human being and his postphenomenological analysis of the longueur of the time of the other human being who survives me recognize a creativity not modelled on poiêsis. As for radical newness, to ask how a thirst for it can be quenched is to ask a misleading question. Such thirst lies outside the sphere of quenching. Appearances to the contrary, altération lies outside the reach of désaltération. With this outside as topic, my aim will be to get as close as possible to an explanation of the syntax of Levinas’s thinking of the new and, by implication, therefore to that one of its contraries that is called the banal. This explanation of the syntax of this pair of contraries will also be an explanation of their anatax, where ana- here means ‘anew’, as in the word ‘anabaptist’, and where anatax therefore has implications for banality. Banality is a common name for the property of being commonplace. It happens to be a name in which ‘ana’ has a place, a happy accident that opens the question whether more can be said about the relation between the new and the banal than that they are contraries. An explanation of Levinas’s thinking on this question could take as its point of departure and foil what Heidegger says about the obvious, the selbverständlich, and about the free-floating language on holiday of hearsay that gets repeatedly passed along, nachgeredet, and the wish-wash of Geschreibe, writing supported by the minimum of thought. Instead, I choose a first approach that has to do more directly with what, for example in his treatment of parts and wholes in the third Logical Investigation, Husserl calls the selbständlich and the unselbständlich, the independent and the 183

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nonindependent. It will become clear in due course that in choosing this approach I am up to a certain uncertain point choosing not choosing. For the problem of which I shall be speaking is the one to which Heidegger and Derrida respond by continually revising the words they use to retell what Heidegger refers to as the history of being. That history is a history of the sedimentation of more or less permeable layers or epochs. But so too is the history of that history as construed by philosophical deconstruction. Deconstruction must deconstruct itself. Better said, in so far as deconstruction remains deconstruction, that is to say, in so far as deconstruction deconstructs remainance to the point where one would wish to have buried or burned the word ‘deconstruction’ itself, it will go through a wardrobe of less and less fashionable styles, rewriting and then unwriting itself: for Heidegger as phenomenology, fundamental ontology, hermeneutics; for Derrida as differance, supplement, mouvance, pharmakon, hymen, tympanum, ear (or ear-ring or erring),2 trace, mourning, hauntology, archewriting, deconstruction. To change the trope, like Canute, they are continually having to change their site. The most far-fetched metaphor or catachresis seems to be no safe seat against concernment by the creeping tide of banality. And just as well too, for safety, for example its own safety, is the last thing with which deconstruction is concerned. But is otherness destined always to be engulfed by sameness and therefore exposed to the risk of the loss of risk that goes by the name of banalisation? Or can we escape this danger if words are as paper boats? Of Emily Dickinson, a poet who, from the edge of the Calvinistic world of New England in which the word ‘salvation’ is passed along, writes that Escape is her saving word (Poem 1347) another poet, Archibald MacLeish, writes: She has a little harbour full of frequently voyaging words any one of which would now be regarded as leaky enough to sink an ordinary lyric: Grace, Bliss, Balm, Eden, Calvary, Chosen, Morn, Noon, Bee, Bird, Bind, Earl, Pod, Plush, Peninsula, Circumference and so on. Her poems somehow support them: she is able to persuade us to read them not as worn-out generalizations, borrowed, many of them, from the hymnals from which she borrowed her metrics, but as symbols whose very banality makes them, in the innocence of her context, new. But in spite of this paradoxical triumph no one, I think, would contend that Emily’s words explain Emily.3 How far can we get toward explaining MacLeish’s words ‘banality’ and ‘new’ when he writes, to repeat, of ‘symbols whose very banality makes them, in the innocence of her context, new’. Perhaps one can better get a grip on what he means not by explaining as a lexicon explains, but by hearing and seeing how they work in the context of her poems, for instance 184

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Poem 1405, from which it immediately becomes apparent that one has indeed to see how they work rather than only hear them, so that when one listens to a reading of her poems one needs also to see the text: Bees are Black, with Gilt Surcingles– Bucanneers of Buzz. Ride abroad in ostentation And subsist on Fuzz. Fuzz ordained–not Fuzz contingent– Marrows of the Hill. Jugs–a Universe’s fracture Could not jar or spill. This poem contains four dashes, if that is what they are, in only twice as many lines. One of her poems (Poem 524) is composed of only thirty-two words, twenty of these have capital initials, and the number of dashes amounts to eighteen. Poem 344 has twenty-two short lines but double the number of dashes, and as R.W. Franklin points out, nineteen of these come in one seven-line stanza.4 This–was the Town–she passed– There–where she–rested–last– Then–stepped more fast– The little tracks–close prest– Then–not so swift– Slow–slow–as feet did weary–grow– Then–stopped–no other track! How are we supposed to read this? What difference would result for our reading if the dashes were omitted? Would we be inclined to read it a little too quick quick? On the other hand there are poems that contain no dashes at all, for example Poem 1179: Of so divine a Loss We enter but the Gain Indemnity for Loneliness, That such a Bliss has been. This last word ‘been’, unlike the word for the insect concealed in it, does not appear in MacLeish’s shortlist. But both are listed in A Concordance to the Poems of Emily Dickinson.5 The word for the insect appears there some 130 times, whereas the word ‘been’ has only seventy-two entries. However, if 185

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these latter are supplemented with occurrences of ‘be’ the tally exceeds 800, a figure that is multiplied many times if one counts and counts in, as the Concordance does not, occurrences of ‘is’, ‘are’ and ‘was’. This reflects the commonness in the English language of the word ‘being’ and its cognates. The word ‘being’ is very common, and one of the words that dictionaries give as a possible substitute for ‘banal’ is the word ‘common’, presumably ‘common’ in the sense of socio-linguistically commonplace, not in the sense of logically universal, for if the latter were the sense of the word ‘banal’ all common nouns would have to be so described. Hence if words taken out of context can be banal, then the word ‘being’ is very banal indeed. By comparison with the homological word ‘being’ the word ‘banal’ is heterological, that is to say, what it connotes is not predicated of itself; that is to say, the word ‘banal’ is not banal. But by the time we have reached the last page of this book, we may have discovered reason to suspect that things are not just as they seem with ‘being’, ‘existence’, ‘It is’ and cognate ontological words.

Just words Can words taken out of context be banal? Is it not rather what is expressed with words, whether common or uncommon, that is banal or unbanal? Thus what MacLeish calls banal is not Dickinson’s common words, but the words functioning as symbols, where the primary signification of a word is a necessary but insufficient condition of the symbolic role it performs in, for instance, the hymns familiar to Emily Dickinson’s New England contemporaries. And, MacLeish adds, it is the hymnographic banality of these symbols combined with the innocence of the context to which she transports them that enables the symbols to acquire a new force. In what sense is the context of her poems innocent? There is at least an air of innocence in the way those poems put together very concrete words and images with very abstract words and concepts, for example, ‘Gilt Surcingles’ and ‘Jugs’ with ‘ostentation’ and ‘ordained’, while appearing not to acknowledge how difficult it may be for the reader to bridge the gap between these extremes. Now such juxtapositions of the abstract and the concrete are to be found already in the Puritan and Calvinistic hymns from which we are told that many of Emily Dickinson’s symbols derive. They function in those hymns to give to the faithful down-to-earth analogies, allegories or, using MacLeish’s word, symbols for lofty moral and theological ideas, as parables do and, in foreign parts if not in her New England, as frescoes do and windows of stained glass. They function there so frequently that the analogies and symbols become trivial and trite, two other meanings dictionaries give for ‘banal’. However, in the context of her poems such juxtapositions of extremes is effected through grammatical, rhetorical and logical devices so perverse that they can be deemed trivial 186

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only in the sense of pertaining to grammar, rhetoric and logic, the first three liberal arts of the mediaeval Trivium. For instance, as illustrated in the two poems cited, she gives capital initials to some of her words, usually nouns, but not as consistently as the German custom would dictate; and it is not necessarily the nouns for grand abstractions that get majusculed by her. Thus while ‘Buzz’ and ‘Fuzz’ get dignified at least ironically or mockheroically with capital initials, ‘ostentation’ is taken down to the lower case. Then there is her partiality to half-rhymes or assonance. She is mistress of the near-miss. Poem 1405 alternates full rhymes with unrhymes. But Poem 1179 limits itself to pairs of half-rhymes. Longer poems alternate or irregularly mix these two schemes. All these procedures store up surprises for the reader. Even when one has learned to expect them, a sense of oddity persists, a sense of what is new. This word ‘new’ is the one MacLeish contrasts with ‘banal’. But he does not oppose these words to each other. For we saw that he is not referring to the words as listed in a lexicon, but to their use in symbols ‘whose very banality makes them’, he says, ‘in the innocence of her context, new’. Now the innocence of her context is noticeably due to the fact that her poems are usually quatrains of the form and metre of the hymns she could have sung any Sunday if she had chosen to join the congregation of one of Amherst’s five prim Congregationalist chapels, and would have at least heard at the momentous meeting in 1854 when she witnessed the Rev. Charles Wadsworth’s sermon at Arch Street Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia. It is noticeable too, however, that whereas in those hymns connections are made by appropriate parts of the banal verb ‘to be’, in her poems, where a copula might be placed she puts what in most printed editions of her works is represented by a dash. Geoffrey Hartman says this so-called dash is a hyphen-hymen, because it signifies both separation and union, and that it ‘persephonates Emily’, this phrase being an allusion to the fact that Jupiter, Persephone’s father, ordained that she should spend half of each year on earth with her mother Ceres and half as the queen of hell choosing which human beings should die.6 Now it is true that although in her handwritten manuscripts there is inevitably some arbitrariness about how many ems Emily allocates to the punctuation marks in question and to the space before and after them which she leaves blank, the marks generally have the length one would allow for a hyphen. On the other hand, they do not occur only between words or parts of words, but frequently between phrases or between words and phrases. How should one construe these marks and what significance should one ascribe to her capitalizations? Like much nineteenth-century handwriting, especially, it seems, that of women, letters from my very dear and very longlived Aunty Flossie were sprinkled with common nouns dignified with capital initials, not to mention underlinings according to a system, if there was one, which I have not fathomed to this day. Such capitalization and 187

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hymen-hyphen-dashes are features of Emily Dickinson’s letters. And they are to be found not only in her poems and letters, but also in the recipes written on the back of some of the slips of paper on which her poems were written down. This has led R.W. Franklin to remark: If we follow John Crowe Ransom’s theory, the capitals are Emily’s ‘way of conferring dignity’ upon the ingredients of Mrs Carmichael’s cake, or are her ‘mythopoetic device’ for pushing Butter, Flour, 6 Eggs, and a Cocoa Nut (grated) into ‘the fertile domain of myth’.7 This is a little unfair. For at least two reasons. To detect profundity in the homely context of a recipe is to invite ridicule. But to detect both homeliness and unhomeliness, Heimlichkeit and Unheimlichkeit, in the context of a poem is not. That this combination is to be detected in many of Emily Dickinson’s poems is perhaps what MacLeish means when he speaks of innocence, and what Hartman means by persephonation. Persephone was the bringer of death, pherein phonon, to those who dwelt on earth. The second reason why Franklin’s bit of fun is unfair is that it simply does not follow from the fact that in her correspondence and her domestic jottings these graphic characteristics reflect a style she shares with other members of her social class that they are not to be taken seriously where they occur in writings to the presentation of which she would have given close attention – and this could hold of many of her letters as well as of her poems. That she takes this matter seriously may be what is suggested by her decision not to publish more of her poems during her lifetime after the few that were submitted on her behalf appeared with the capitals converted to the lower case and the dashes either dropped or replaced by commas. That she gives this typographical matter very close attention, perhaps as close as that which Mallarmé gives to the appearance on the printed page of Le coup de dé, is not merely suggested, but is demonstrated by the number of versions of each poem that the variorum edition of them reproduces. The comparison with Mallarmé is apt in another respect.8 As he nursed the ambition to write what he called, with a majuscule, the Book, assembling pages with great care to that never-to-be accomplished end, so she from quite early in her literary life, assembled poems into fascicles, sets of up to six folded or unfolded leaves pierced and held together at the spine by thread to form booklets. Mention of these booklets brings me to the point at which I must make more articulate the logico-philosophical questions that have been at the back of my mind throughout the lexico-graphical remarks to which it may seem I have limited myself so far. So far I have been listing features of poems by Emily Dickinson that resist any attempt to saturate them with meaning. To those so far mentioned are to be added their not beginning with a title and their often being unfinally ended with a 188

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question-mark where they are not unfinally ended with a dash. But there is another feature we have not so far mentioned. It is one that leads Sharon Cameron, in her study Choosing Not Choosing, to choose to revise the reading she had given thirteen years earlier in her book Lyric Time: Dickinson and the Limits of Genre.9 The nature of that revision is summed up in the later volume by her statement that: I mean to ask how reading a lyric in a sequence is different from reading the lyric as independent, for to do the latter is to suppress the context and the relations that govern the lyric in context – a suppression generating that understanding of Dickinson’s poems as enigmatic, isolated, culturally incomprehensible phenomena which has dominated most Dickinson criticism, including my own.10 So the canon from which Sharon Cameron is separating her new reading is that which sees a poem of Emily Dickinson as having, in Geoffrey Hartman’s phrase, ‘revoked…referentiality’, as enthymematic or elliptical poems of, in Jay Leyda’s phrase, the ‘omitted center’, poems that, in the words from her own earlier book, ‘excavate the territory that lies past the range of all phenomenal sense’.11 Yet these last words of the commentator echo those of the poet to whom she applies them when the latter writes in Poem 239, putting the first word, be it noted, between inverted commas: ‘Heaven’–is what I cannot reach! The Apple on the Tree– Provided it do hopeless–hang– That–‘Heaven’ is–to Me! The Color, on the Cruising Cloud– The interdicted Land– Behind the Hill–the House behind– There–Paradise–is found! Her teazing Purples–Afternoons– The credulous–decoy– Enamored–of the Conjuror– That spurned us–Yesterday! Paradise, she says, without benefit of inverted commas, is found there. So this is not a poem about paradis perdus. Not straightforwardly. It is, slantly, about what goes or went under the name of ‘Heaven’ Yesterday! Today, Paradise is postponed to a Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow ever over the horizon, ever ‘Behind the Hill’, ever ‘past the range of all phenomenal sense’, so in that sense ultraphenomenological. Paradise is the 189

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proname for a revoked referent, a centre displaced to what she often calls the Circumference. And its purple Afternoons communicate with the Winter Afternoons of Poem 258 dating from approximately the same time (1861): There’s a certain Slant of light, Winter Afternoons– That oppresses, like the Heft Of Cathedral Tunes– Heavenly Hurt, it gives us– We can find no scar, But internal difference, Where the Meanings, are– None may teach it–Any– ’Tis the Seal Despair– An imperial affliction Sent us of the Air– When it comes, the Landscape listens– Shadows–hold their breath– When it goes, ’tis like the Distance On the look of Death– Now in bringing these two poems into communication I have done what Sharon Cameron does in Choosing Not Choosing. Taking as her cue the fact that Emily Dickinson bound many of her poems in fascicles and that she saved her variant versions, Cameron questions the assumption that the standard of identity in reading her work is the single poem. So she is not saying simply that the reading of her work must be intertextual. That implies that the poem is a text. The text is rather the nexus in which ‘variants are parts of the poem outside of which they ostensibly lie’,12 outside in that they may appear in the margin or between lines or in an earlier or later version on a separate sheet, a fact that introduces a historical dimension into the reading, so a narrativity that one would usually expect in a novel but not associate with the usually immediate lyric. Here then is a texture that promises to complicate sameness to the extent that because there remains an indeterminacy as to what is being said, and to the extent that banality is a property of what is said, albeit one contingent upon social and historical context, the risk of banality is banished. The logical (dis)connective of the semi-incorporation of this textuality is not then that of the non-exclusive ‘or’, equivalent to the Latin vel and to the v of formal logic, a symbol that is equivalent in turn to ‘at least this or that’. Nor is Dickinson’s (dis)connective the inclusive ‘or’ equivalent to ‘both this and 190

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that’ such as is exemplified in the lines from Wallace Stevens’s ‘Sunday morning’: We live in an old chaos of the sun, Or old dependency of day and night, Or island solitude, unsponsored free Nor is the logic here that of the exclusive aut/aut, the ‘either/or’ of Kierkegaardian choice. It is a conjunction of the conjunctive ‘or’ (or ‘bothand’) and the appearance of the exclusive ‘or’. For the final fair copy of the poem creates the presumption that a choice has to be made, and this impression is strengthened by the simple innocence of the metrical hymnlike form. But this presumption is subverted by the variations on the brink of and as it were outside the single poem. Emily Dickinson’s imagination is hypocritical or, as she might have written, hypoCritical. It is hypoCritical, for instance, because it is both on the one hand ultraphenomenological, reaching, as noted earlier, beyond the horizon of the phenomena, and on the other hand phenomenological, presenting, as noted now, the appearance of an exclusive alternative. MacLeish’s ‘paradoxical triumph’ of the new is an amphibological paradox, where the doxology governing doxa, controlling the ‘internal difference,/Where the meanings, are–’ of what is said loses some of its control to what is said slant, said otherwise, said otherwhere and said otherwhen. A censorship is relaxed. One could say that a corn law is repealed in view of the fact that the word ‘banal’ derives from the edict pronounced by a Persian, Hungarian, Slavonian or Croatian, suzerain, viceroy or ‘ban’ prohibiting the processing of grain at any other mill than his own. One could say too that in refusing to bind her reader to one alternative – and to ban is to bind or to bond – Emily Dickinson achieves an effect contrary in spirit to that of the operation that results in what according to the Robert dictionary is described as a voiture de police banalisée, that is to say, a police vehicle deprived of all signs distinguishing it as one. Such a vehicle appears to leave us to our own devices but does not, because the police remain invisibly on the scene, always ready to pounce and enforce the law. Emily’s device appears to limit our choice to an exclusive word visible in her poem, but in the wider context of her variants we are given no choice except to range over them all. The police are cryptic in not appearing to show their hand. The poem is cryptic in appearing to show its hand. Since both forms of cryptography are forms of pretence, both are forms of hypocrisy written with a lower-case ‘c’, that is to say, both are forms of hypocrisy in the informal, everyday and commonplace sense of the word. The poem, however, Emily Dickinson’s poem, is typically also hypoCritical spelled with an upper-case ‘C’, that is to say, in the esoteric sense of crossing the line that would bound the Critical in the Kantian sense of that 191

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which is concerned with what is this side and what that side of a line between concepts. The hypoCritical passes below and beyond conceptuality to preconceptual indeterminacy. If it does this while letting go of conceptuality and words altogether it descends to the indeterminacy of the il y a. Far from doing this, the Dickinsonian poem retains a devotion to concepts and words but combines this with a devotion to indeterminacy. As Sharon Cameron’s title puts it, Emily Dickinson is concerned with Choosing Not Choosing. However, this phrase is ambiguous. Does it describe a kind of choosing, namely choosing-not-to-choose (something)? Or does it describe the opposition between choosing and not choosing? The former is what Sharon Cameron usually and correctly says a Dickinsonian poem usually does: it chooses not to chose while appearing to make an exclusive choice. But at one point in her study Cameron writes almost as if choosing/not choosing taken as a contradictory opposition between choosing and not choosing is what the poem exemplifies, a contradictory opposition however where the opposition is not analytically but dialectically contradictory – contradictory in a Hegelian way, a way, that is, which allows for the contradiction to be resolved as a synthesis of the thesis and its antithesis. This seems to be what she intends when she refers to Freud’s review of Karl Abel’s article ‘The antithetical sense of primal words’ as though Abel and, by implication, Hegelian Aufhebung explained the sense of the logical operation performed in poems of Emily Dickinson.13 The antithetical sense that delights Abel and Hegel is only partially glimpsed in Abel’s question, cited by Freud and Cameron, as to how a concept, being ‘the twin of its opposite’, could be thought in the first place and communicated to others ‘except by being measured against its opposite’. What is most remarkable is not that concepts are measured against their opposites or contraries as the height of one twin might be measured against that of another, but that the fact that understanding a concept means understanding its opposite seems to require that at least primal words are semantically Siamese twins, so to speak, with meanings as contrary as that of male and female, or, as in the case of the very word ‘Aufhebung’, cancellation and preservation. Is the basis of language, as Freud says of the basis of dreams, self-contradictory? Or does ‘basis’ here mean the same as ‘abyss’? Is the Urgrund of language an Abgrund or at least an Ungrund? Following these clues, Sharon Cameron observes that: the formal boundedness of the quatrain and the subversion of boundedness in the heteroglossia of the variants are not matters of Dickinson’s form subverting Dickinson’s project. They are rather matters of form revealing the audacity of the project as founded on identity that can only be understood as deriving its element from opposition.14

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By ‘element’ here Cameron cannot mean what is underived, since she speaks of identity as ‘deriving its element’ from opposition. She may mean by ‘element’ the medium proper to something, as a fish is in its element in water, but it remains unclear how opposition can be that from which identity derives its element. Does she mean that opposition is the element of identity, is identical with it? Despite this unclarity (toward the dispersal of which one further comment will be made below), it is clear that she is attributing to Dickinson a concept of identity that is apparently univocal, monoglossic according to appearance or form, but where the appearance is, as I have said, hypocritical and hypoCritical. The identity of Dickinson’s poetic text speaks with more than one voice. Furthermore, it speaks with contradictory voices, one pretending that it is one, the other or the others subverting that pretension, one announcing condensation, the other or the others announcing displacement. So there is a revealing-concealing going on here that may make us think not only of Freud’s theory of the relaxation, in dreams and hypoconsciousness, of censorship and law, including the law of contradiction. This revealing-concealing may make us think also of things said about the work of art by Heidegger. I have already mentioned a third name, that of Hegel, raising the question whether it is a Hegelian concept of identity that Cameron sees at work in Dickinson’s syntax. I was careful to use the phrase ‘It is almost as if’ with which Cameron introduces her comparison of Dickinson with Freud, Abel and, by implication, Hegel. What is indicated here is at most ‘an almost absolute proximity to Hegel’ (see above, Chapter 5, in the section entitled ‘A point of almost absolute proximity to Hegel’).15 The distancing from Hegel in this proximity takes place when Cameron’s talk of conceptuality is interrupted by talk of voice. This distancing from Hegel, I wish now to claim, is an absolution – that is to say, an unbinding or debanalisation – from the conciliatory resolution of Hegelian and Hellenic absolute knowing or wisdom, and it is at the same time a nearing to Levinas and perhaps even to a Hebraic wisdom that preserves the distance between the one who is taught and the one, the other, who teaches, preserves that distance in proximity by pronouncing an eirenicon that proposes peace in the salutation ‘Shalom’. This rapprochement is a rapprochement between the logics or paralogics of identity as, with Sharon Cameron’s help, we have found it articulated in the work of Emily Dickinson and as we find it spelled out in the writings of Levinas. It is facilitated by MacLeish’s statement about Poems 241, 508 and 1227 that ‘No one can read these poems or any of the tens of others like them without perceiving that he is not so much reading as being spoken to.’16 This statement is matched by statements Levinas makes of, for example, the poems of Paul Celan and the prose of Marcel Proust so long as we understand it not only as a statement about the tone of voice, the Stimmung, of these authors, not as a statement about what the authors say or how they say it, but as a statement about their very 193

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saying. It is this very saying that explains why, as MacLeish says, ‘no one, I think, would contend that Emily’s words explain Emily’. To contend that Emily’s words explain Emily would be tantamount to contending that the invisibility of the third dimension of end-on depth separating me from someone by whom I am addressed can be turned through ninety degrees without loss into side-on visibility. When the vertical declines to the horizontal something is lost that was never in my possession. The verticality is rather my being possessed: psychosis. This Levinasian trope of psychosis touches not only on Freud and the psychoanalytic project that would purport to explain Emily. It touches also on Heidegger and the hermeneutic project to show that rather than possessing language, language possesses us. To that allegedly primordial psychosis and to the excess of earth over world in Heidegger’s schematism of things, Levinas would prefix my being possessed by the other human being. Ethics precedes not only the existence that precedes essence. Ethics precedes hermeneutics. For Levinas’s claim is that the first claim upon me is that which makes me responsible to the other human being, not to the other word. My claim is that, however we construe the order of precedence, my responsibility to the other human being entails a responsibility to the word. I can only keep my responsibility to be truthful or sincere to the other human being if I am duty-bound to seek the mot juste. Only by seeking the mot juste can I do justice to that to which my words refer, only so can I begin to face the responsibility to say the truth that is entailed by my responsibility to the other, the obligation to veracity and sincerity understood as an absolute responsibility that is the condition even of lying and hypocrisy. This responsibility is hypoCritical in that its place is the ethical place of a me who hears and is here, chosen before choosing and so before choosing not choosing. I am chosen-selected-elected to choose my words with care, and that care requires me to choose other words, lest any of them should be assumed to be final. Infinite midrash is the conditio sine qua non of the responsibility of what Levinas calls criticism, criticism that is hypoCritical in that it has to do with being chosen before choosing, with the ethical before ethics defined by maxims controlled by moral law. This hypoCritical Criticism beyond criticism is what Levinas is referring to when he cites, as he so frequently does, the passage of the Phaedrus (275–6) that speaks of two words or discourses, one of doubtful parentage, the other its legitimate brother: the one word or discourse is that which, ‘once written, is tossed about from hand to hand’ – nachgeredet or nachgeschreibt or angelesen, Heidegger would say – ‘equally among those who understand it, and those for whom it is in nowise fitted’; the other word or discourse is that which is also written, Socrates says, but ‘written in the mind of the learner who understands it’. This understanding involves knowing when not to use a particular word with a particular interlocutor, being able to find a substitute that better suits the interlocutor’s level or kind of knowledge. So this 194

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understanding is a readiness to be economical with the truth in order ultimately to get across the truth in a manner suited to the audience. This way of glossing what Socrates says may seem to assume a context in which I am the teacher and the other is the taught. But in this Socratic context what I teach is what, perhaps with the aid of a philosopher who questions me, I have learned from being introduced to ideas by which I am preconsciously possessed, ultimately the ideas of the just, the beautiful and the good beyond being. These ideas are already other than me therefore in the Socratic context, and their alterity is already affected by the alterity of the other human being in that I as learner fall short in learning until I have judgement regarding which word to choose on which occasion. Here is an aspect of Platonism that is ‘Aristotelian’ in stressing a kind of knowing that is more practical than theoretical and that relates to the inexactitude and incalculability of the ethical. This aspect of the ethical, of the good, to agathon, is at the same time an aspect of the aesthetic in a sense of that word sufficiently banalised to extend beyond the bounds allocated to it by Baumgarten and Kant. This aspect of the ethical is an aspect of the beautiful understood generally as to kalon, a word that takes in the just or the fair in both senses of this last word. So it takes in the tact and judgement called for in choosing the right word, le mot juste, as determined on the one hand by the person or persons to whom the word is addressed – the topic of the ‘other kind of saying’ of Phaedrus 276a, the text underlying what Levinas (and Derrida) says of critique – and as determined on the other hand by the thing to which the word refers. This interconnectedness of the just, the good and the beautiful is what makes it feasible to speak of an aesthethics of truth. It is this alethaesthethics that I hear proclaimed at least in Levinas’s second thoughts on poetics and in Emily Dickinson’s injunction ‘Tell all the Truth but tell it slant’. Her mots anglés, her English and New English words set to each other obliquely, as Derrida and David Wood would say, emphasize in the sometimes rarefied context of poetry a responsiveness and responsibility both to the people to whom she speaks and to the people and things of which she speaks. The ‘to whom’ and the ‘of which’ are inseparable. Responsibility to the addressee and responsibility to the subject matter addressed are interdependent. Les mots et les choses, Words and Things, but the ‘and’ here is both disjunctive and conjunctive. We distinguish words from things, but among things are words. One cannnot be careful with words without being careful with things and vice versa. Emily Dickinson is a close writer, but her micrography, like that of Nabokov, Annie Dillard and Ponge, goes along with an attention to things botanical that is intensely microscopic.17 If for Levinas the origin of time is the other’s mortality, for Dickinson it is the evanescence of everything and every thing. Because ‘I would eat evanescence slowly’ and ‘Because I Could Not Stop for Death’, ‘she takes inventory’, Alfred Kazin 195

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writes, ‘of all the changes, all the masquerades, that Nature provides…She can break the reader’s heart by the stupendous act of resistance that so much precision, this everlasting attention, exerts upon and against the intrusion of death in human affairs’18 – or against evanescence, as I should prefer to say, using her less exclusive and more responsible word. What I have said about the inseparability of the ‘to whom one speaks’ and the ‘of which one speaks’ holds not only for the special context of literature. It holds for any context in which one speaks of anything to anyone. To say that ethical responsibility entails aesthetic responsibility is to say something that holds not only for moments of high poetic and poietic tension, but for moments when one’s attention is slack and one utters what may seem utterly and irresponsibly banal. What I am uttering will sound banal to at least some of my listeners. So I would remind them that there remains as a reason for saying it at least the fact that it is unlikely to have sounded banal to Levinas. Pursued by anxiety lest he should allow too much leeway to Heideggerian poietics, Levinas nowhere to my knowledge recognizes that what he calls the ethical is inseparable from what I call the aesthetic in a banalised sense, that is to say, a sense that covers the place common to everything that can affect our sensibility. Yet just as my claim turns on a banalisation of the aesthetic, Levinas’s claim turns on a relative banalisation of the ethical. In saying this I have in mind the ethical charge he grants to expressions like ‘Hullo’ and ‘Goodbye’ – so ‘God be with you’, despite what Levinas calls the extraordinariness of the word ‘God’. Because it is no part of my purpose to deny an ethical charge to the use of these words, it cannot be part of my purpose to deny an aesthetic charge or power to the banal. How can this be, you will ask, given that a prime power of the uses of words in artistically aesthetic contexts is to make what they say sound new, whereas I have throughout this discussion followed MacLeish in treating the banal as a contrary of the new? My answer is that contraries need not be mutually exclusive opposites. Indeed, one of the most difficult challenges to the poietic imagination is to make heard as though for the first time what in a particular context has become banal through being said over and over again to the point where it would seem it ought to go without saying. When an often repeated word, phrase or sentence is repeated yet again one of at least three responses ensue. First, the hearer concludes that, since what has been repeated by now goes without saying, the speaker, perhaps out of tiredness or stupidity, is not attending to what he is saying. Second, precisely because there is no obvious reason to say what is said, the hearer concludes that there is a nonobvious reason for the repetition. The triumph of the new in this latter case is paradoxical. Instead of the experience of the meaning of words or the point of uttering them becoming evacuated by repetition, the word now assumes the status of a purely non-signifying thing, the repetition leading through this very thingness to a condition of being spell-bound by the non196

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signifying properties of the sound or mark. A third response ensues when, via this stage of Bedingung, of having become a thing, that thing becomes a word again, but one now invested with a new sense. This is the experience for which I fancied one might see as a symbol the occurrence in the middle of the word ‘banal’ of the sequence spelling ‘ana’, which may mean ‘anew’. I like to fancy too that the dialectic here outlined demonstrates how stupidity is a constructive factor in thaumazein, which we may translate as ‘amazement’ if we wish to reinforce the current banalised use of this word. This constructiveness, this contribution to the purification of the language of the tribe19 is on offer not only from stupidity such as the hearer is momentarily gripped by in the second and third responses just described. It is on offer too from stupidity such as is attributed to the speaker in the first of these three cases. In that case I mentioned the possibility that the repetition might be put down to stupidity or tiredness. As a degree of tiredness conducing to reverie or dream opens up the imagination to otherwise unimaginable thoughts, stupidity, a dulled imagination, may on account of its very underactivity be a receptive milieu for the propagation of flora so rare and beasts so monstrous that you would say this imagination must be mad.20 If fatigue, stupor or folly are supposed to explain the prima facie pointless repetition of a sentence, they may also be taken to explain repetition within a sentence, as within apparently tautological sentences like ‘This is this’. We may say, persuaded by Hegel’s comments on the certainty of sensibility, by Wittgenstein’s remarks on the language of sensation or by Derrida’s treatment of presence, that it goes without saying that for all thises, this is this. For all things, a thing is what it is and not another thing. So much for the logic of shifters. But the logic of shifters does not defeat the rhetorical force that distinguishes saying something once from saying it twice, as in the anaphora of appositional saying anew of King David’s ‘O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! would God I had died for thee, O Absalom, my son, my son!’ (2 Samuel 18: 33), of Faulkner’s repetition of this repetition in the title of his novel, Absalom, Absalom, of Howard Spring’s repetition of it in the title of his novel, My Son, My Son, of the Rev. Francis Kilvert’s repetition of it in his diary when he writes ‘Oh, Aberedw, Aberedw. Would God I might dwell and die by thee’,21 of the cry of God and God’s Messenger to man ‘Abraham…Abraham, Abraham’ (Genesis 22: 1; 11), of Abraham’s ‘hineni’, ‘See, send me’, pronounced first as son to the Father and again as father to the son, of the cry of man to God or to his Messenger or to Himself ‘My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?’ (Matthew 27: 46) or as in the copulative anaphora of ‘This is this’ or of the ‘I am that I am’ who inscribed the law on both sides of the tablet, and who, as far as one can tell from Exodus 32: 15, may have repeated them on the second side literatim. What saying the same thing accomplishes here is a saying differently, an otherwise saying that 197

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distinguishes this singular thing as singular, as other than everything else. It does so paradoxically, tapping the poetry beneath the prose of the world, by saying the thing as though for the very first time. In so doing it responds at one and the same time to the thing of which the word is used and to the person to whom the word is addressed. And, in at least some of the examples just given, that of which the word is used is also that which is addressed. At least because there is a response to the person addressed the second saying repeats the ethical saying of the first, as the recollection of it dwindles into something that has been said. Is it too fanciful to think that this ethical reanimation owes something also to the response as a response to that which is addressed, and that this is so not only when that which is addressed is a human being, but, for example, a place, say a place like Aberedw? In any case, what is remarkable is that this ethical or poethical re-motivation is performed when the repetition is of the same form of words. Paradoxically, going on to different words can more easily draw one away from the ethico-creative dimension of saying toward that which is said, the ‘content’. No less paradoxically, repetition of the same form of words draws our attention from the form of what is said to what breaks up formality. When repetition puts on hold the passage to new words, one may discover newness where nothing new is said. The kind of stupor that repetition, as of a mantra, may inculcate, can be a benumbing that makes one more vigilant to what is all too easily missed when one moves ahead smoothly on the glossy surface of richly inventive diction, deaf to the simpler in-ventiveness of the in-come of address. Some of the poems of Emily Dickinson already referred to are about stupor, the stupor of mourning. Poem 341 is another of these. It contains the line ‘A Quartz contentment, like a stone–’ which prompts Sharon Cameron to write in Lyric Time ‘but quartz is a stone, and without explanation, the meanings overlap seemingly without purpose’.22 The overlap takes place at what she describes as ‘the simplest level of relationship’. I take this simplest of all relationships to be the relation of identity, the relation that some logicians say is not a relation at all. The overlap would be one of complete identity if Dickinson’s line had spoken of a quartz contentment like quartz. Then the word ‘like’ would have seemed even more without purpose. But both in the case of the line thus modified, where there is arguably not just overlap but coincidence at what I would regard as the simplest level, and in the case of the line that Dickinson actually wrote that Cameron considers to be the simplest level of overlap, it is precisely the iteration that compels us to focus our attention on this, this now being the stoniness of the contentment, such stupor and privative astonishment as is contained by the emptiness of our thoughts as we stand at the edge of a grave. The word ‘like’ would state the usually possible but here almost hermetically closed off happy release that we reach for when we reach for a comparison. Usually, in the everyday world, but also usually in the world of 198

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the poet as poet, we are unable to see what lies before us for what it is. So the imagination turns away to something with which to associate that from which we have turned. Of course, the turning away is at the same time an oblique turning towards, the trope of a trope that is human kind’s response to its inability to bear very much reality. Turning away from poetics to logic, one can compare this inability with the inability of a language of logically proper names, a language in which one cannot effect comparisons, analogies, allegories and symbols, where a one-placed or pluri-placed predicate is the limiting case of all these. So we find ourselves thinking or thinking that we are thinking that this here at this very moment is at least like itself even if it is like nothing else on earth; moreover like itself as it is at this very moment, not just at this moment like it was or will be at some other moment in or out of time. This latter would be the likeness of the repetition on which turns Hume’s account of the role played by imagination as the forming of habits that lead us to take a succession of like impressions as impressions whose corresponding ideas are predicated of one and the same continuing thing. This predicament of predication, the irony that the signatura rerum are written elsewhere, does not spell the death of singularity. As philosophers and poets and philosopher-poets have shown, this apparent death of singularity is the triumph of its life, and the apparently absolute banality of ‘This is This’ is the paradoxical triumph of the new. This holds for the apparently deep banality of the life and death sentence ‘I am I’. Passing over Schelling’s analysis of this in his reflection on Kant and Fichte, I limit myself here to observing that in the analysis Levinas would give of this apparently vain repetition of the subject and its complement, the second occurrence of the first-person singular would become the accusative and accused ‘me’. This is because as well as the amphibology of the repetition of the logoi that are said, the sentence marks the amphibology of the said and the saying, The saying is one meaning of the logicality of the amphibological. The said is the other meaning of this logicality. It is this second meaning that is predominantly relevant to the discussion of the syntax of Emily Dickinson’s lexicon. But suppose we agree with MacLeish – and with Levinas, as I read what he says of, for example, Celan and Proust23 – that the poet speaks to the reader. To say this more precisely, suppose, following Levinas’s (and Heidegger’s) reading of the Phaedrus, you and I are, to cite once more MacLeish, ‘not so much reading as being spoken to’. Then there is an ethical bond between her and each one of us, as there is, according to Levinas, through someone’s always already having bound us when, repeating those most banal and everyday words, he or she bids us Goodday or Goodbye. He or she, the other, teaches me that, and the asymmetry of that relation is not lost when I respond to him or her or to another other. I pass the lesson along by performing it, even when I formulate it in a proposition, but that proposition is de-said or dis-said, dédit, by my saying 199

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it and by my saying it again and again, as I must ad infinitum, for what is missed in the said is absolutely missed, a sublime secret that is l’absente of all things said. ‘I’ is one of the many amphibological words on which Levinas’s writings pivot. One might say the one, since, standing for the chiasmus of ego and me, the subject as subjected to the other’s ethical demand, it is implicit in his other amphibological words, for instance ‘assumption’, ‘welcome’ and ‘desire’. In the case of the last of these amphibologicality is indicated by Levinas’s variation between a capital and a lower-case initial. I take his use of the otherwise same word as evidence of his philosophical desire/Desire to articulate the wisdom/Wisdom of philosophy as desire or love of wisdom and as Wisdom of Desire or Love. Therefore, although in the chronological order of the stages of the analysis of the self as followed in Totality and Infinity (Levinas’s Meditations on First Philosophy and Phenomenology of Spirit) the hypostatized first-person singular persistence in being precedes the self affected by the other, in the so to speak ontological order adopted in Otherwise than Being (Levinas’s Principles of Philosophy and Science of Logic) affection by the other is always already there – or, if not there (Da), here (ici), in the breath expelled in saying ‘Here I am’. So the self-affection that Ricoeur and others think Levinas neglects24 – and I wonder if Michel Henry is to be included among these – is not neglected provided we construe and deconstrue it as both desiring and Desiring in the same moment, but the same moment that is a moment where the synchronizable and recuperable time of memory and the Critical imagination that synthesizes what it analyses is crossed by the unsynchronizable time of being hypoCritically addressed. Self-affection can only be at the same time affection by the other under my skin, for the self is irreducibly amphibological. Levinas stands by the irreducibility of the amphibological in standing by the word ‘ontological’ at least throughout Totality and Infinity. As desire must be experienced as Desire, where ‘as’ is an indication that the imagination is at work, so ontology must be experienced as repeating itself in that book, troping itself as fundamental ontology and as ethical ontology, ‘ontology’ or Ontology. As hinted earlier in this chapter, much – perhaps everything, every thing – will turn on the chance that the words of ontology are thus troped. The reason for this may not strike us, if it strikes us at all, until we have reached my own book’s last page. But in case it be thought that a trope is a purely semantic notion, it must be said without delay that the word ‘trope’ is also troped. Emphasized, Levinas would say, where that word too is emphasized – and where troping and emphasis and repetition of each of these words will go on infinitely, because that is how long it takes to stem the tide of banalisation.

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The ‘maybe’ of enigmagination This ever unfinished re-petition is the work of the hypoCritical imagination – of the enigmagination, as we may say in order to acknowledge that Levinas uses the word ‘enigma’ of the trace that masquerades hypocritically as a sign. For this ambivalence he also uses that most ontological sounding word ‘maybe’, ‘peut-être’. The fine risk Levinas wittingly courts in using this word hangs on the fact that it could be taken to combine the very notions of possibility and being that Heidegger uses in his account of what is at stake for Dasein. Levinas’s word is therefore haunted by the ghosts of the nonontophenomenological words concealed and revealed in their Heideggerian erasures. But Levinas’s word must be read in its turn as an erasure of Heidegger’s erasures. Not, however, as therefore a return to the traditional logical, empirical and metaphysical meanings. Not as a negation of Heidegger’s crossing-out so as to return to a position by double negation – for Heidegger’s crossing-out in the first place is itself not a negation. It is not a simple subtraction. Nor is it a simple addition. It is both a less and a more, the tertium quid that Derrida would call – or would once have called – a supplementation. And Levinas’s peut-être could be called a supplementation of a supplementation. For at stake are senses of being and possibility – and probability, given that Levinas also qualifies his claims often with the word ‘probably’ – which are comfortably at home neither in the universe of discourse of classical modal logic, science and metaphysics, nor in the universe of discourse of ontophenomenology. His word is at home nowhere. It never rests in peace. It lives at the limit of sleeping and waking, of life and death, in the no man’s land that is the land of every human being disquieted by the appeal of every other human being. It marks an enigma at the intersection of the image or concept where rigor mortis has set in and, on the other hand, a response to the appeal of, and from, the other. So the word has not abandoned entirely the universe of discourse in which from Plato through Descartes and beyond it has signified the opposite of knowledge or certainty, and it therefore still communicates with and, Levinas maintains, breathes life and sense into that universe of discourse and into the otherwise moribund revision of the Cartesian notion of certainty elaborated by Heidegger. Because of the surplus and minus it supplies to epistemological and phenomenological meaning, the ‘maybe’ that Levinas writes at especially sensitive moments in his texts cannot be simply an expression of epistemological or psychological uncertainty. Although he inevitably uses the word often in that way, at decisive junctures it signals a scepticism that modifies the classical epistemological scepticism where in the first volume of his First Philosophy Husserl says first philosophy begins. Insinuating a first philosophy before that beginning, at the decisive juncture of the last section of the last chapter of Otherwise than Being and in the essay in Proper Names on Derrida, Levinas wonders if an ethical moment is announced in the Utopic relation between epistemological scepticism and the refutation it 201

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seems to bring upon itself by assuming that one can know that nothing can be known, a seeming inconsistency that is not dodged by the claim, both weaker and stronger, that nothing merits belief. Now the classical refutation of scepticism takes the principle of non-contradiction as a necessary condition of rationality. But if the lapse of time is a more archaic or anarchic necessary condition of human existence, maybe there is a loophole for scepticism in so far as a contradiction assumes timelessness or at least a reference either to or at one and the same time. The repeated return of scepticism despite its refutation may be a sign or trace of another scepticism, a scepticism of vigilance. To be skeptikos is to look and think with care, with regard not simply to what is said, the contents of propositions, but with regard to the saying and the sayer and the addressee. Levinas’s ‘perhaps’ would be a marker of a new philosophical scepticism that sees its task to be that of reducing to the moment of ethical non-consciousness and otherwise than being not only the Husserlian reduction of reality to the field of phenomenological consciousness but also the Heideggerian reduction of the phenomenological consciousness of being and beings to being as such, and the responsibility toward being of Dasein in its being towards its own nonbeing in death. I shall say nothing here about the role played by ‘peut-être’ in the writings of Derrida and Blanchot and of vielleicht in those of Heidegger, other than to observe that a reference to the last is implicit in the little I have said about Heidegger and certainty.25

Political imagination As with speaking about what Hegel calls sensible certainty, one cannot speak about the hypoCritical saying except conceptually, as is done by Levinas in his texts and as is being done at this very moment in this text by me where I am talking about ‘one’, das Man, not exposing the unique, chosen chooser betrayed by the proper name Levinas and the token reflexive pronoun ‘me’. Betrayed in the duple and duplicitous way of what Levinas calls an enigma. Because the enigma is ambiguous or – as I have given reason to prefer saying against Levinas’s own usual practice – amphibological, its aspect as immemorial trace gets forgotten under its aspect as present sign. Like Heidegger, for good or ill, Levinas is working below the usual oppositions, hypoCritically. But that philosophical work is not performed without an acute attention to the ‘schematism’ by which it is made concrete in the world of everyday life and death. This is why, although the hypoCritical imagination is the complex amphibological ‘root’ of the distinctions that Criticism makes between the sensibility, understanding and reason, between the theoretical, the aesthetic, the practical and the religious, it is not cut off Critically from the Critical any more than the phenomenological is a pure layer of formality that subsists an sich independently of its 202

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concrete appearing. If we are to go on using the Kantian Critical metaphor of the hidden common root we shall have to say that a root can be derived – a concession to some degree licensed by such facts as that a root is sustained by the photosynthesis effected by a plant’s leaves, a fact that may help to dispel our puzzlement over Sharon Cameron’s endorsement of the idea of an element’s being derived. This would be a way of saying, with Wittgenstein and others, that the elementary is not simply and absolutely opposed to the complex, and that what is simple from one point of view is complex from another.26 The hypoCritical imagination understood as the complication of theory and practice would explain the last sentence in the following comment made by Levinas in the essay ‘Judaism and Christianity’: A short while before her death Hannah Arendt spoke on the French radio about how as a child in her native Königsberg she once said to the rabbi who was teaching her religion ‘I must tell you I have lost my faith’, to which the rabbi responded ‘But who requires it of you?’ The response was typical. What matters is not faith but ‘deeds’, and doing means acting morally, but also ritual. After all, is believing any different from acting?27 In Eichmann in Jerusalem Hannah Arendt says of Eichmann that he: never realized what he was doing. It was precisely this lack of imagination [emphasis added] which enabled him to sit for months on end facing a German Jew who was conducting the police interrogation, pouring out his heart to the man and explaining again and again how it was that he reached only the rank of lieutenant colonel in the S.S. and that it had not been his fault that he was not promoted. In principle [emphasis added] he knew quite well what it was all about, and in his final statement to the court he spoke of the ‘revaluation of values prescribed by the [Nazi] government’. He was not stupid. It was sheer thoughtlessness – something by no means identical with stupidity – that predisposed him to become one of the greater criminals of that period.28 Eichmann’s fault was being a man of principle, a man of principle and no more. Enough of a thinking man to speak of a revaluation of all values, he was evidently not thoughtful enough to think values as other than a kind of fact, not thoughtful enough of the other to understand that principles are for people not people for principles. Perhaps if he had been stupid he would have been more thoughtful, less lacking in imagination, since, as suggested above, imaginative thoughtfulness is the receptive vacancy that stupidity shares with wonder, with the thaumazein with which begins philosophy not 203

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solely as love of wisdom but at the same time as wisdom of love. Banal to the point that makes one want to break into laughter, Eichmann’s thought of a change of principles or values was the thought of a change made and prescribed by someone else, the Nazis. To think for oneself of alternatives is to be able to choose not to choose, to entertain subjunctive conditionals, including that which enables you to put yourself in the place of another and to see yourself as another sees you. I can do this, Levinas maintains, only because when it strikes me that I am in a place that might be occupied by another it strikes me that another is always already under my skin, turning my comfortable place in the sun into an ethical location that is as uncomfortable as the place that the Timaeus calls chôra, because that location is determined by a responsibility in which no one can stand in my stead. Eichmann was too lacking in hypoCritical imagination to be struck by the terrible glory that self-understanding is sensibility toward the other who breaks into my dwelling from outside. In Mourning Becomes the Law, the testamentary work of love that she saw as her Paradiso and that I see as at once a response to the way the glas is tolled throughout Derrida’s works of mourning and as a response to Levinas on behalf of Simone Weil, Gillian Rose says that ‘To arrest one’s self-understanding in a classification is to prevent the development of mutual recognition – it is to aestheticize politics.’29 Levinas says that mutual recognition is quasi-conditioned by pre-recognitive one-way welcome of the unwelcome – pre-recognitive because precognitive (though extremely rational). What I am trying finally to say with the help of these philosophers, going back through the philosopher of critique par excellence and thanks to the assistance at her word of the poet Emily Dickinson, is that if politics can be ethical then it must also be aesthetic. In saying this I am asking again what Levinas asks when he writes: But does politics constitute the ultimate framework of Being and the sole guide to action? Is the poetic vision which transcends it for ever doomed to remain ‘belles-lettres’ and perpetuate phantasms? Is it not, on the contrary – and this is probably the very definition of poetry – the thing that makes language possible?30 I ask also however whether what makes language possible is not also what makes politics possible, and whether politics – for instance the politics of the unwritten Critique of Political Judgement for which Hannah Arendt set out the schema31 – is not aesthetic in a sense other than that of the aestheticization of politics that Gillian Rose says is entailed by the self’s self-fixing in classification. I answer Yes to these last two questions not only because the thing that makes language possible is ultimately the ethical and because this is a matter of a certain sensibility, but also because ethical responsibility for the other entails saying things slant. The ethical entails poetics. It is an 204

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aesthethic that consists in offering to the other alternatives even when alternation does not look or sound like an alteration of words but nevertheless achieves what substitution of one word for another can achieve: a reanimation of my relation to the other, a desaying of the dit that is a desaiding of the to ti ên einai, that is to say, of the essentially past, through a renewed and renewing resaying of the dire: ‘Recuperation and Rupture…proximity’,32 proximity in separation and absence that is the enigmatic mode of the presence of the other human being and of the God the syntax and anatax of whose Shekhina is expressed in the preposition à of the extraordinary and ordinary word ‘à-Dieu’. Incessant ad-journment, incessant alternation of saying and said and unsaying by resaying, repetition and re-petition are both the cause of banality and the hope for the paradoxical triumph of the new. This is how time is regenerated time and time again if, following Heidegger’s reading of Kant on imagination as the generation of time (see above, Chapter 2), that reading is reread through the lense of the spiritual optics of Levinas’s hypoCritical ethics of responsibility. But, to turn now once more and not for the last time to politics, Levinas seems to have taken the view that the language of politics can be slant only in the banal sense of the word ‘hypocritical’ and that sincerity or truthfulness and the saying that is beyond essence are beyond the political domain. Hence Gillian Rose’s reference to ‘Levinas’s complete lack of interest in political virtue’, a phenomenon she finds puzzling given his avowal ‘it seems to me that the whole of philosophy is only a meditation of Shakespeare’.33 Is there political virtue only in the old sense of the word meaning ‘strength’ or ‘might’ or ‘power’, virtù? There are both philosophical reasons reaching via The Prince back to The Republic as well as biographical ones why Levinas might have chosen not to think of the language of politics otherwise than as a system of banal signs. The question is in part one of definition, that is to say, of classification and Critique. But a meditation of Shakespeare is maybe just the thing to assist the enigimagination of the signs of the semiotics of politics as semio-aleth-aesth-ethical traces and hypoCritical signatures: signatura rerum that, like the traces (ichne) that precede but announce critical distinction in the Timaeus, schematize epistemological representation as ethico-political representation, as standing for, as advocative assistance in the sense of the words of the Phaedrus to which Levinas responds, as social responsibility that stretches the imagination to include other others than only the human or divine.

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Maybe it is time to see hypocrisy as not only an ignoble contingent human default, but as the underlying fault of a world bound at the same time to philosophers and to prophets.1 (Emmanuel Levinas) Finally, it must be clear that it is our business not to supply reality but to invent allusions to the conceivable which cannot be presented. And it is not to be expected that this task will effect the last reconciliation between language games (which, under the name of faculties, Kant knew to be separated by a chasm), and that only the transcendental illusion (that of Hegel) can hope to totalize them into a real unity.2 (Jean-François Lyotard)

Uncommon roots In the Prologue of this book about imagination construed as Einbildungskraft acknowledgement was made of the difficulty that that construal presents for any attempt that would also construe imagination ethically in the sense in which Levinas maintains that first philosophy is ethical. How can such an application be made? How can schematization and typification, the functions of imagination according to the extended reading of Kant carried out in this book, schematize or typify or be schematized or typified by face-to-face saying that is a disruption of the image and the concept? Toward the end of the Prologue it was suggested that imagination as Einbildungskraft is mapped on to the corps propre as construed by Merleau-Ponty following Husserl. But how can what Merleau-Ponty describes as incarnation and flesh be seen as what Levinas describes as disincarnation? Is not the former integrative and the latter disintegrative? In the paragraph leading up to the one from which the Prologue cited Levinas’s warning against the perils of ‘imagination captive of things’, he declares ‘The Other is not the incarnation of God, but precisely through his 206

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face, where he is disincarnate, the manifestation of God is revealed.’3 Is Merleau-Ponty not, as we suggested in the Prologue, giving us a revised version of what Descartes was speaking about when he wrote to Princess Elizabeth that it is in the ordinary course of life and conversation that we learn most about the union of the body and the soul? Notwithstanding this advice, Descartes maintains the separation of body and soul. He conceives this as the separation of substances, and separation according to Levinas is first discovered as the enjoyment of life by a substantial, that is to say independent and therefore atheistic, ego. However, Levinas goes on to show that in the proximity of one human being to another this substantiality ‘produces itself’ as my substitution for the other – where ‘produces itself’ for Levinas means ambiguously the being brought into existence and being brought on the scene.4 Levinas will go on to show that this self-production is what is effected in the movement or mouvance from the cogito (which includes sentio, volo, etc.) of the finite ego to the thought of the infinite in the Meditations of Descartes. But maybe it can be shown that this selfproduction produces itself too in the productive imagination of Kant, especially if the ontological-epistemological ambiguity of the productive imagination asserted in Kant’s transcendental idealism and empirical realism is multiplied by the phenomenological-ethical ambiguity entailed by the extension the doctrine of imagination of the first Critique undergoes when we read back into it what Kant says in the second and third. When we do this, the realism of Kantian empirical realism, without becoming grounded in a transcendental or transcendent ontological or epistemological realism of the thing-in-itself, produces itself ethically as the nonphenomenal, ‘noumenal’ face that categorically commands my response. This imperative kath auto is what is responsible for the substantivity of my ego producing itself as substitution. The epistolary exchange between Descartes and Elizabeth and MerleauPonty’s reflections upon this imply that the erstwhile ego is primarily faceto-face with the other in conversation, intersubjectivity and dialogue, where the con-, the inter- and the dia- signal asymmetry. I am primarily sub-ject as called to assist the other to whom and for whom I am face to Face in a pairing (Husserl says Paarung) of an order other and beyond that on which the fifth of the Cartesian Meditations turns. Primarily, but outside logical and chronological primacy, dialogue is at once prologue, speaking for the other, and epilogue, speaking at the service of the other. So Levinas would have us pass through the intersubjectivity of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, and through the conversation of Descartes and Elizabeth to something like unpetitionary prayer. He would have us pass to what he says is always already passed, to the non-theological religio without confessional religiosity, to which he deems Descartes’s Metaphysical Meditations Concerning First Philosophy bear witness at the moment in which their ontological metaphysics becomes metaphysics as ethics that, like 207

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the Platonic Good, is beyond being. That is the moment announced in the failure of any image or idea of God to comprehend what it purports to conceive, the moment when purport and interest, even interest in speaking about the existence of God, are overcome by the thaumazein that gives Descartes pause for a while in order to contemplate God Himself. This is the moment when for Levinas this Himself comes to be expressed as the Luimême-lui-autre of illéité, the very same other He of He-ness, when ‘Greek’ thaumazein is translated as ‘Hebrew’ wonder of wonders and the wonder of wonders is what Levinas calls ‘the banal fact of conversation’.5 At this moment commentary is interrupted when an apologue for its astonished author’s own existence is called for by the aporetic amphibology of the question how to speak and how to avoid speaking, especially of oneself: comment (ne pas) parler?, comment (se) taire?6 Near the beginning of the Prologue of this book about imagination acknowledgement was made of the fact that earlier in its career Einbildung was Inbildung. But it is precisely the point made by Kant and those who go back to him, as it is the point too of those who would go back to the things themselves through Husserl, that Inbildung as the reception of a representative image or idea is not possible without Einbildung as the ‘horizontal’ combination of that ‘vertical’ relationship with other such representations in recollection or retention and anticipation or protention. Already the notion of the receptivity of Inbildung (in-magination) is prepared by a nuance of activity borrowed from the constructive power of Einbildung. This is why it is noted by a commentator on Kant to whom Merleau-Ponty frequently and other philosophers too infrequently refer that: strictly speaking space is not then a form of receptivity or sensibility in the sense that the subject receives Empfindungen [sensations] in it, but is rather the only means by which the mind can represent to itself the positing of Empfindungen, that is to say, its own receptivity; it is not the form of receptivity, but the form of the representation of receptivity, unless this last term is understood not as a passivity in respect of impressions from reality, things or objects, but as the subject’s capacity to constitute itself a milieu of the universe in which to situate the totality of phenomena including the empirical self.7 Once again the implication is that receptivity is to be distinguished from passivity – unless, of course, this last term is understood as receptivity with the sense of almost active preparedness, a sense to which the notion of passivity lends itself and to which the notions of suffering and passion are by no means immune. Some philosophers, usually one’s with inclinations toward empiricism, have needed to put up quite a fight to defend a notion of passivity that is not already tinged with activity. But signs of that struggle 208

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are strewn across the pages of as allegedly rationalist a philosopher as Descartes. In his case it is partly because he does not cast off entirely some of the empiricist elements of the Scholasticism from which he is at the same time breaking away. In particular there lingers in his account of ideas a phantasm of the Thomist sensible phantasm whose passivity has to mesh with the agency of the intellect whose ideas correspond to Thomas’s species, which in turn correspond to the Aristotelian eidos. The distinction between sensible phantasms and intellectual ideas is not parallel to the distinction between ideas taken on the one hand, as he says, formally, that is to say as psychological contents, and, on the other hand, ideas in their ob-jective, that is to say representative capacity. For the psychological-cum-formal versus epistemological-representational distinction holds for intellectual ideas on their own. Does their representationality demand some sort of activity? If so, is the latter different from the activity of using an idea in a judgement? And is an act of judgement a use of will? Must the answer to this last question be that it need not be, since with some clear and distinct truths one is not free to deny them? These and other questions are made all the more difficult to answer if Descartes’s account of ideas is a way of talking about thoughts: pensées, cogitationes. For the lists Descartes compiles of these include both objects and acts of mind. Kant decides that Descartes’s account of these acts must be reworked in terms of the following of rules.8 Not the rules of Descartes’s Regulae, but those at which we would arrive by taking more seriously than Descartes himself does the advice he gives to Elizabeth to take conversation as the key to an understanding of the union of body and mind. Descartes’s rules for the direction of the mind take their direction from the laws of mechanics. Although Kant remains Cartesian to the extent that his principles of the understanding are the conditions of the possibility of mechanistic science, and although Descartes inherits from Aristotle through the Scholastics that respect for empiricism to which we have just referred, Descartes does not share the respect for Aristotelian logic that allows Kant to take the Aristotelian forms of judgement as a clue to his table of principles. Now Aristotle’s clue to those forms was the conversation with people around him. And it is back to concrete discourse that Kant’s transcendental principles must lead if they are to be applied via nontranscendental concepts to the sensible world. That application is what the schematism of the imagination makes possible. Against Aristotle and his Scholastic reincarnation, Descartes literally locates the imagination, for the imagination according to him is spatial and material. Rule XIV says that it is ‘nothing more than a really material body possessing extension and figure’. Its material body is the pineal gland. Itself spatial, it is yet the organ and organon wherein the figures of the different senses participate in the figure (schêma) that is common to them all, the sensus communis that is the figure of space. Kant seeks to retain mechanism without rejecting hylomorphism. For the Kantian schema is ambiguously sensible-intellectual. Its 209

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figures, however, are ones that are common to inner sense. They are primarily figures of time, but time expressed arithmetically as the possibility of measurement, so of counting. The procedures of Kantian schematism are the procedures of enumeration. They are figures in the sense of numbers. Through the form of inner sense the schematization is also the figuration of space, geometrical figuration. So Kant’s theory of figurative schematization revises Plato’s doctrine of mathematicals. It does so without endorsing the implications of Plato’s image of the line and its sharp divisions. For that image it substitutes ambiguous hylomorphism suggested by Aristotle’s account of imagination in De Anima. Husserl, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty inherit from Kant the problem of rethinking the Kantian imagination in a manner in which spatiotemporality is returned to ‘the things themselves’ of phenomenology from which the Kantian schemata can now be seen as derivative abstractions. On the one hand, what Husserl refers to in the second of the Cartesian Meditations as ‘the passively flowing synthesis in the form of the continuous consciousness of internal time’9 echoes Kant’s reference to synthesis speciosa in B151 of the Critique of Pure Reason and his statement two pages later that this transcendental synthesis of imagination affects the inner sense of the passive subject. On the other hand, as modalities of the lived body, schemata are the intersubjective patterns of what Merleau-Ponty would call one’s hold upon the world. And indeed the Greek noun schêma is cognate with the verb echô, and among the many senses of that word are those of to have and to hold, senses that in turn bring in what Kant calls the schemata or species of the form of inner sense. That verb also admits of a passive form meaning to be possessed. This fact returns us once more to what Levinas refers to as the psychosis of my being called by the other human being and to the question how that possession that is my belonging to someone else – rather than being most owned by myself (eigenst) as according to Heidegger Dasein is when in the mode of authenticity (Eigentlichkeit) – could possibly belong to my imagination. There is a hint that this might be possible in the etymology of the German word Einbildungskraft. It was noted in the Prologue that the Latin word imaginari is deponent. But deponence is also found in the German translations of the Latin, even if grammarians would deny that ‘deponence’ can be used strictly of the grammar of German verbs. There is also a deponence in the crossing over (Übersetzung) from one German translation (Übersetzung) of imaginari to the other, from In-bilden to Einbilden; though what interests us here is the hint this historical deponence makes toward the possibility of a deponence in the Einbildung that reverses the direction of the historical transition: the possibility of the integrative force of Einbildung being sacrificed at least intermittently in favour of imagination as passive in-vention.

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Einbilden has at least an active sense in Kant. Lexicographers tell us that even the past participle ‘eingebildet’ acquired an active sense in the eighteenth century, supplementing the passive sense that seems to have been general until then as illustrated by phrases like ‘eine eingebildete Krankheit’, ‘an imagined illness’.10 To express the active force before that historical transformation of ‘eingebildet’ recourse was had to the word ‘einbildisch’, meaning ‘conceited’. The active force of the more recent word is anticipated in an early use where ‘eingebildet’ means not imagined, as in ‘imagined illness’, but imagining, as in ‘Der eingebildete Kranke’, which translates Molière’s title ‘Le Malade imaginaire’. A still earlier and perhaps original use is that of thirteenth-century mysticism, where ‘in-bilden’ and ‘ein-bilden’ mean to in- or im-print, like einprägen. Here imagination is indistinguishable from passive impression, as of Aristotle’s and Descartes’s wax, and what is imagined is what is imaged. This is where ‘imagination’ translates ‘phantasma’. Except that the phantasma makes something visible. This idea of making visible does not fit well the idea that lexicographers put forward as the original use of ‘inbilden’ and ‘einbilden’, for in that allegedly original use what is impressed is the image of God. But such an image is an image of an image, not a real image. It is what can be only imagined as an image. So where the dictionary says that ‘einbilden’ is here used ‘somewhat as “to be imprinted like a picture” ’ (‘etwa als “sich wie ein Bild einprägen” ’), the likeness is as qualified as the ‘as’ is by ‘somewhat’. This as-it-were picture of the transcendent God is no more a pictorial image than is the transcendental schema whose unlikeness to an image is emphasized by Kant when he advises us that schematism is a procedure. And it is in agreement with Kant that Levinas says there can be no sign or indicative symbol of the transcendent. The qualifications to be made when the phrase ‘imago Dei’ is used might include those made in Levinas’s essay ‘ “In the Image of God” according to Rabbi Haïm of Volozin’. It would not be altogether wrong to say that when those qualifications are taken into account Volozin’s and Levinas’s teaching turns out to be that God or, more precisely, the word ‘God’ is to be understood through the image of man or, more precisely, of the other human being. ‘Only the face can translate transcendence. Not in order to provide the proof of the existence of God, but the uncircumventable circumstance of the signification of the word, of its first enunciation.’11 The word of God is, Eckhart and Luther say, ingebildet or eingebildet. It comes in from outside and affects the imagination. To describe that affect as a phantasm is, strictly, to describe only the visual imagination. ‘As sight is the most highly developed sense’, Aristotle writes in De Anima (429a), ‘the name phantasia has been formed from phaos (light) because it is not possible to see without light’. This is not to deny that the scope of the imagination extends beyond the reach of visibility and light. When Levinas speaks of the face he is speaking of the face that speaks. And he is saying that if the word of God 211

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and the word ‘God’ have any meaning, that meaning is heard thanks to the categorical imperative pronounced by the other human being who faces me. I am outfaced by a ‘transcendence inseparable from the ethical circumstances of responsibility for the other’.12 The word of the other devisages me, me dévisage. It makes me lose my composure. I am disturbed in the imagination of my heart by the call of the so-called common crowd, the turba whose hubbub (turba) in the agora is the cause of my agoraphobia by day, and which, as anticipated in the incessant murmuring heard or imagined – I never know which – beyond the wall of my room at night, afflicts me with claustrophobic insomnia. Is there someone there or not? Maybe. Maybe not. Whether what obsesses my imagination be the hypoCritical illéité of the good beyond being or the hypoCritical il y a, the there-is of being prior to determination,13 it disconcerts me, it leads me to loose my composure, il me fait perdre contenance.14 My imagination cannot contain it. My imagination is stretched beyond limit. The stretching is not the switching from the Cartesian imagination that cannot contain the chiliagon to the Cartesian intellectual idea that can. That is a stretching of a Critical kind, a stretching between kinds. The stretching of imagination called for by Levinas as read through what is said about the imagination by Kant and, following him, Heidegger, is a stretching of the hypoCritical imagination, the imagination as the (anarchic) ‘common root’ of the Critical distinctions between imagination, intellect, sensibility and reason. So there is a stretching of the hypocritical imagination that takes the form of an expansion either in the direction of sensible singularity or in the direction of rational universality. This may sound like a return to Leibniz, to the doctrine of ideas that belong to a gamut ranging from the confused and obscure sensible ideas to the clear and distinct intellectual ideas where the difference between the extremes and between any two points on the gamut is but a difference of degree. But the Leibnizian analogy is invalid if only because no idea can contain the face-to-face as the ‘essence’ of the ethical. Reluctant though Levinas would be to admit this, a closer analogy is that of Spinoza, at least in so far as the scientia intuitiva of his Ethics integrates the particularity of sense with the universality of intellect. This analogy is in its turn invalid, however, in so far as it glosses over the disintegrative moment of the hypoCritically ethical. Ethical monotheism is not ontological monism. The latter, understood not as singleness of system but as the pre-systematic, hypoCritical apeiron of the il y a, is disrupted by the former as hypoCritical illéité. A clarification is called for here. Because the order of Levinas’s exposition in Totality and Infinity goes from the menacing murmur of ilyaity prior to language via the hypostasis of the ego and its conversation with the other to the production of illeity and ethical alterity, we can say that the latter are hyperCritical, for they presuppose Critique and the conceptuality of language. But Levinas is following the pattern of argument of the 212

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Meditations of Descartes, where we learn that the ‘hypostasis’ of the finite ego cogito is the hypo-thesis of the Infinity of God. We can say also, therefore, that Levinas’s ethical analogue of the latter is hypoCritical in the sense that it is a singularity prior to the universality of Critique and classification. Ilyaity is also prior to the universality of classification, so it too is hypoCritical. Between these extremes and reaching out its hands in opposite directions toward them is the hypoCritical imagination. In the direction of the impersonal tohu bohu, raising themselves from the elements, things of the natural world present themselves to our grasp. Retelling philosophically the story told in the Hebrew Bible, Levinas is alarmed at the risk of being sucked back into an ethical equivalent of polytheism if we regard natural things as things for their own sakes. But who speaks of gods? To regard trees and stones and panthers as gods is possibly not to regard them as themselves. It is possible to imagine them as gods, but it is also possible not to. Danger there may be, but there are dangers everywhere, and the one Levinas alerts us to has not a little to do with the fact that, although he emphasizes that ‘It is our relations with men…that give to theological concepts the sole signification they admit of’,15 he speaks of ethical alterity in terms of the One God. Once you do that you run the risk of seeing in terms of a plurality of deities alternatives to the monotheistic way of envisaging the other, and of thereby failing to recognize ‘the differences of the creature’ that, as we shall soon see, Levinas says he wants to respect. You also run the risk of seeing as alternatives what may not be mutually exclusive. Yet it is Levinas himself who offers a way beyond mutual exclusivity, a way indicated also by the Critique of Ethical Imagination that can be produced out of the doctrines of Kant. Levinas says that to be affected by a face is to find myself affected by an Empfindung, a sensation. It is to be impressed by a superimpression, a surimpression. The superiority of this impression over purely sensory impressions is that it is both sensible and rational. Its universality is sensible, its sensibility is rational, its rationality is singular and its singularity is universal. Up to a certain point, this complex schema can be seen as a reconstrual of what Kant says about schematism in the Critique of Pure Reason, about typification in the Critique of Practical Reason, and about determinant and reflective judgement in the Critique of Judgement. That is to say, up to a certain point, it can be seen as a reconstrual of the system of transcendental idealism. Up to a certain point it can be seen as a reconstrual of what Schelling says in the System of Transcendental Idealism. But only up to a point, the point at which we saw Hannah Arendt’s outlines for a Critique of Political Judgement stop short. Those outlines stop short because they are systemic. My outlines sketch a reading of Levinas with Kant which is chiasmic. The lines cross. At the point of crossing, the imagination stretched beyond the Critical imaginology becomes hypoCritical, because, when the logic of what is said is interrupted by the logic of saying, the 213

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ambiguity in which the power of the Kantian imagination lies becomes an amphibology. It follows that the concreteness of the hypoCritical imagination and its singular universality cannot be equated with the concrete universality of Hegel or of the British or unBritish neo-Hegelians. It is not enough to argue that the ontologico-epistemological imagination of the first Critique and the aesthetic imagination of the third are expressions of an imagination that expresses itself in the second Critique as ethical. For although an ethicality defined in terms of the feeling of respect for the moral law embodies a rationality not patently present in ethicality defined in terms of sympathy or humanity as understood by, for example, Hume and Adam Smith, that rationality is one in which universality is the opposite of a particularity of the case, and that particularity is not to be confused with the singularity of the face. Conversely, both universal sympathy and the sympathy I might feel with a single human being are still a feeling with. Feeling with or sympathy, feeling into or empathy, and seeing myself as others see me are ways of playing god, the god of whom one secularized equivalent is Adam Smith’s Impartial Spectator. The feeling here is the common feeling or the feeling of community, the sensus communis of imagination as constructive co-ordination, the general will become general pathos, moral awe before the moral law. Indeed without this integration of reason and feeling through the moral imagination there is no sense of justice, no respect for the moral law. But also with this integration there can be no sense of justice, unless morality defined as respect for the moral law is demoralized to the extent that response to the law is preceded by response to the singular face, by the response of the disintegrative imagination in the inwyt of witness by me here to you there. If it is not, the impartial spectator will be the equivalent of the ‘indifferent bystander’ in a sense of the adjective that Adam Smith did not intend.16 In the dia-pathy of affection by the singular other human being who calls on me by name as Samuel was called on by God, singling me out, the obligation of justice I owe to everyone as a case of humanity is, as Levinas puts it, exasperated, that is to say rendered ever more burdensome by a responsibility, in which no one else can be my substitute, to substitute my very self for this very other. As Levinas also says, it is I who am responsible for his or her freedom. And that is why he says I am a hostage. I have been selected, perhaps sELected.17

The rose hedge Inevitably, I have also selected. I am obliged to respond to this human being, and in doing so I fail to respond to another whose need may be no less great and no less urgent. Justice is injustice. It may be contended that, taking all circumstances into account including what it is in my power to do, I can reach a balanced judgement about what obligation is most binding. It may be contended too that where an equally binding obligation has to be 214

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neglected I can at least attempt to meet the obligation to make reparation to the person who was in the first place arbitrarily ignored. I may decide that I can do something to help the widow and nothing to help the orphan on the grounds that I was here and not there. But the fact that I cannot be everywhere is no alibi. That no more shields me from the orphan’s accusation than my failure to take responsibility for the other’s freedom is excused by the thought that his freedom is no concern of mine. My responsibility to the widow and the orphan is a responsibility to the stranger and everyone is a stranger to me in ethical fraternity or sorority. For everyone as a face I carry an impossible responsibility that provides the absolute incalculable contextless circumstance of the relative circumstances in terms of which I determine what is within my power. The intrusion of this absolute responsibility into the relative responsibilities of the systematic ethics in which ‘I ought’ implies ‘I can’ is the impower – im-Potenz – that saves such ethics from violence. Unless it is interrupted by justice to the face, justice to the case is injustice over and above the injustice I do to that other there simply because I choose to do justice to this other here. My absolute responsibility before the face is hypoCritical in that it is below the ‘I can’ and the rationality of choice, below Critique as the krinein of decision and choice. But this antecedent responsibility is not decisively cut off from the decisions and choices of the ethical life to which it is antecedent. It does not preserve for itself an ‘aesthetic’ purity of indifference like that of the addressee of the letter in the chapter of Kierkegaard’s Either/Or entitled ‘Equilibrium between the aesthetical and the ethical in the composition of personality’. Its hypoCrisy is not to be confused with the hypocrisy of merely respectful feelings. Rather than living a life of its own, it depends for its expression upon the conceptual and practical discriminations of the ethics of the third party, and that ethics of principles of justice depends for its life upon it. Without it one could say of the moral law what Kant says of a rule of skill and a counsel of prudence: that it is a theoretical law descriptive of the factuality of a world, albeit an intelligible world of ends, just as it would be descriptive rather than prescriptive of the conduct of a holy will. For human beings its prescriptiveness and its imperativity is an epiphenomenon of its not being in preestablished harmony with the promptings of desire. And it is only the contingent differences among the ways by which human beings seek the satisfaction of the natural desire for pleasure, including the gratification of the instincts human beings share with animals, that individuate one human being from and sets him or her against another. Homo hominis lupus. What individualizes the human being according to Kant is the natural passions and desires. What individualizes the human being according to Levinas is the Desire with a capital D, which according to me is the d of imadgination writ large, Desire that by the criterion of the moral law or the principles of universal justice or the rights of man is, Levinas says, nothing short of folly. 215

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This Desire or Passion for the other is rationality par excellence, because it is what breathes ethical life into the life of reason determined by the Kantian moral law as criterion of consistency, the breath of the singular other facing me without which the Spirit of the Hegelian Concept would mean suffocation. This singular Desire or Passion is the hypocriteriological counterfactuality of the ethical imagination, without which the imagination would hypocritically convince itself of the possibility of a happy ending. The happy ending, the summum bonum, the highest teleological good, happiness as the sum of felt pleasure in equilibrium with virtue – equilibrium between the aesthetical and the ethical in the composition of personality – is contrary to fact, a figment of the imagination. This is borne in on the imagination by the acceleration of my responsibilities the more I attempt to attend to them, the more I thereby exclude other others from my attention. Mauvaise conscience understood as self-deception, and hypocrisy understood as a failure of consciousness, are epiphenomena of a bad conscience that exceeds consciousness and phenomenality. But bad conscience is prone to parade as a state of constative consciousness and as a mauvaise conscience that is hypocritical self-deception when it takes on the appearance of a good conscience because based on the flattering consciousness that at least one is recognizing that one’s duty is unaccomplished. Yet neither is my nontransferable responsibility for the other’s freedom in equilibrium with the reward of the good conscience of duty accomplished.18 The fully happy hour of bonheur is aposymptotically deferred. It recedes ever more with every virtuous deed. So the idea of a collective summum bonum comprehending my own felicity is as hypocritical as are the ideas of personal perfection and personal salvation, of which Levinas says, interpreting Sanhedrin 36b–37a, that they are, ‘despite their nobility, still egoism, and that the purity of man which the rose hedge protects is not an end in itself’.19 The French word ‘conscience’ is far from being the only one that betrays an epistemological/ethical ambiguity. I have elsewhere compiled a lexicon and alephbet of about eighty such words that play a pivotal role in Levinas’s texts.20 Pivotal, because ‘a configuration of purely ontological notions turns here into ethical relations’,21 relations that are the epilogical relationality of relationality pronounced by the phrase ‘in terms of’ whose banality was noted in the Prologue. The last entry in that extensive but extendible Greekas-Hebrew-and-Hebrew-as-Greek glossary is the word ‘welcome’. A far more far-reaching micrology than my own of the ambiguities of Levinas’s uses of that word is conducted in the lecture on ‘Le mot d’accueil’ that Derrida gave a year after Levinas’s death and which has been published together with the ‘Adieu’ spoken by him at Pantin cemetery.22 In ‘The word of welcome’ are spelled out the amphibologies of a hospitality in which welcome extends over my being both hostage and host and ramifies even into the lexicon of hostility. I shall not repeat here its articulation of those complicities. I shall instead raise again a question 216

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concerning welcome and configure it with this book’s Adieu. The question is raised by Derrida in The Gift of Death when he writes this: What binds me to singularities, to this one or that one, male or female, rather than that one or this one, remains finally unjustifiable (this is Abraham’s hyper-ethical sacrifice), as unjustifiable as the infinite sacrifice I make at each moment. These singularities represent others, a wholly other form of alterity: one other or some other persons, but also places, animals, languages. How would you ever justify the fact that you sacrifice all the cats in the world to the cat you feed at home every morning for years, whereas other cats die of hunger at every instant? Not to mention other people. and this: By preferring my work, simply by giving it my time and attention, by preferring my activity as a citizen or as a professorial and professional philosopher, writing and speaking here in a public language, French in my case, I am perhaps fulfilling my duty. But I am sacrificing and betraying at every moment all my other obligations: my obligations to the other others whom I know or don’t know, the billions of my fellows who are dying of starvation or sickness (not to mention the animals that are even more other others than my fellows).23 In one of his tributes to Jankélévitch Levinas wonders if he had read the statement in Sanhedrin 37a ‘every man is obliged to think that the entire universe was created on his account’. Anthropocentrism? God creates a space into which He invites man and puts everything else in it at the service of His guest? If there is anthropocentrism in the interpretation that Levinas puts upon these words, it is an anthropocentrism that puts at its centre not humanity in general, but the man or woman or child who is other than me. And things do not perhaps rest there. For Levinas goes on to cite Rabbi Haïm of Volozin’s gloss on that mishnaic gloss. Rabbi Haïm hears that statement as this: ‘every man is obliged to think that the subsistence of the entire universe depends exclusively upon him; it is upon him that the responsibility for it lies’.24 My gloss on this may be hypocritical. It is certainly a gloss that welcomes from Levinas the emphasis upon what I have been calling the hypoCritical understood as that which comes up from below into critique understood as criteriology, classification, distinction, decision and choice, as if it were beyond or below yet at the same time in critique.25 But my gloss also takes seriously this crossing over each other of the Critical and the hypoCritical. That is to do no more than Levinas himself does when he speaks of the 217

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ambiguity of saying and said, which I prefer to call an amphibology because this word reminds us explicitly of the two sides of the logos, the logos as saying and the logos as said, and because it reminds us of the word ‘amphiboly’ as used in the Critique of Pure Reason with the sense of ‘the confounding of an object of pure understanding with appearance’ (B326) that corresponds with the sense I give to Levinas’s word ‘enigma’, namely the confusion of trace and sign, of saying and said. I take seriously too Rabbi Haïm’s reference to man’s responsibility for the entire universe. Levinas is far from endorsing all of the Cabbalistic doctrines embraced by the author of The Soul of Life.26 One of the aspects of that book that Levinas admires is its vigilance to what he considers to be the excesses of a Hassidism tempted by a spiritualism that transcends the ethical. The spiritualism beyond all difference which would come from the creature signifies for man the indifference of nihilism. Everything is equal in the omnipresence of God. Everything is divine. Everything is permitted. But God that everywhere excludes the differences of the creature is also God that is nowhere.27 Such a spiritualism beyond the ethical is not entailed by taking literally Rabbi Haïm’s statement about the human responsibility ‘for the entire universe’. In writing of the Rabbi’s book Levinas sometimes says not ‘tout l’univers’, but ‘tout le monde’, and that would open up for him the opportunity to say that by ‘tout le monde’ he, and perhaps also the Rabbi, means not everything, but everyone. In the context of Christianity it raises the question as to which world God so loved that he gave for its sake his only begotten son (John 3: 16). My question is whether we can take ‘world’, ‘monde’ and ‘kosmos’ to mean both everything and everyone, or take everything to include humankind, and, maintaining the differences in the manner demanded by Critique, reconfigure what Levinas calls configuration in terms of what he calls the face. The French word ‘figure’ means ‘face’ or ‘countenance’. It configures the ontological and the ethical force of what Levinas usually calls visage, vis-à-vis or face-à-face. The word ‘face’ is a Janus word, facing two ways at once: toward the ontological-phenomenal countenance, and towards the ethical, that is to say toward my responsibility toward you in response to a demand that comes to me, however, ‘from I do not know where’.28 There is always the enigma of an invisible trace being perhaps no more than a sign. Taking the word ‘figure’ to mean ‘face’, and taking it back to the figura that are the diagrams that Kant calls the schemata of the imagination in the Critique of Pure Reason, we have the beginnings of a programme by which the hypoCritical responsibility that is Levinas’s great thought may welcome as its recipients everything in space and time, including things that, on his account of my welcoming the other 218

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into my home, get what ethical relevance they have only by being donanda, that is to say as food, drink, clothing, and suchlike, as things to be given to my guest. Cannot things sometimes be given back to themselves? In order that they may be regarded as faces that regard me, concern me, must it be possible to see them as somehow belonging to the other human being, like the arm of a statue by Rodin of which Levinas is willing to say that it does qualify to be regarded as a face?29 If an answer in the affirmative to the first of these questions and an answer in the negative to the second are to be rendered imaginable by following the programme of this book, the imagination must be seen in its working through all three of the Kantian Critiques. As I have also argued in this book, the Kantian account of the imagination must be reinterpreted phenomenologically along lines suggested by the author of the call to philosophers to go back to the things themselves (zu den Sachen selbst) through phenomenology motivated, as he says it is, by imagination. The programme whose possibility I entertain is not inconsistent with Husserl’s, and, as I have hinted in this book and argued at length in another,30 it is implied in Heidegger’s conception of what it is to go back to the things themselves. Heidegger even begins that step back by going back to Kant. This book rebegins that step back to the things themselves by going back through Kant, through a Critical doctrine of the imagination catastrophized by the hypoCritical ethicality of what Levinas calls the face-to-face. Perhaps the reason why Levinas would refuse to make this other beginning is that he is still too Kantian in a certain respect despite what he himself sees as the madness of his own teaching that all ethical teaching starts not with the moral law, but with the anarchical response that precedes it. For somewhat as Kant maintains that I can have an underivative duty only to a being that can have an underivative duty toward me, so Levinas maintains that I can be responsible ultimately only to a being that can speak. In an essay reprinted in a section of Difficult Freedom that is entitled ‘Au-delà du pathétique’ but which does not seek to go beyond the rational pathos of the ultra-passive passivity of my being traumatically affected by the other human being, Levinas says: ‘Things lay themselves open or give themselves to be grasped (donnent prise); they do not offer a face. They are faceless beings. Perhaps art seeks to give a face to things, and in this reside at once its greatness and its deception.’31 In De l’oblitération, and with allusion to what he had said in Difficult Freedom, Françoise Armengaud asks Levinas if he sees Sacha Sosno’s sculptures as an attempt to redeem art and to offer to things a face.32 Levinas responds by speaking of whether art gives or attempts to give a face to things. In other words, between them Françoise Armengaud and Levinas construe deconstructively what Levinas says in his book. They turn what in the book is a simple opposition into what I can only welcome as an imaginatively productive chiasmus. Therefore Levinas’s response is probably not a reply unless perhaps in the sense in which Greek 219

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calls a reply a hypokrisis. With all the generosity that his own responsiveness to works of art commands, he questions if the work of art needs to be redeemed. The work of art commits no sin, he says, meaning of course not that it is too holy to do that, but that it is not up to being sinful because it is not up to being either sinful or holy. It is capable only of the hypocritical holiness, the sainteté tartuffiée that goes under the name of sacredness. One difference between the holy and the sacred is that the latter tolerates idolatry. But Levinas explains now that it is not the danger of idolatry he has in mind when he says that art seeks to give a face to things. Yet, when he goes on to rejoice in the way in which things are in a certain sense animated by art, the things he mentions are the human faces in a painting or in a sculpted figure. As though it were only to a face that art can give a face, and then only if the work of art gives rise to the saying of expression or criticism leading to teaching that opens me to the life of another human being. Thus the breath that art breathes into matter, bringing into it lightness where there was only the heaviness of its raw being there, is none other than the breath of human beings speaking and listening to each other. It is only the spoken word that saves art from the laisser être that is no different from the indifference of laisser faire. Listening to Emmanuel Levinas, is it hypocrisy to reply that perhaps laisser faire is not the same as laisser être, and that precisely because things, as he says, unlike faces, give themselves to human hands, to be used and disposed of with violence, human beings are called, from I do not know where, to leave the indifference of their laisser faire in order to let things be? If these questions are ad hominem, they are also ad res. They put questions that put me in question: whether it is a violence and a begging of the question to limit violence to the human face, as Levinas sometimes does, and whether his imagination is maybe more responsive and responsible when he says that violence can be done also to things. This is the crux of the quarrel with Levinas to which I referred in the Prologue. I referred there too to a love-hate relation with Kant. That turned on the alternation discussed in Chapter 2 between Kant’s wish to give the imagination its due in the first edition of the first Critique and the tendency in the second to absorb the imagination into the understanding as contrasted with it. That absorption may be seen as the beginning of a process in which the imagination gets given its due by being taken up into the understanding, where understanding has the broad meaning of mind. That is the process continued by Hegel, though the point of departure I took in this book was Heidegger’s step back to the so-called hidden root. Throughout the ensuing chapters the hypoCritical imagination has discovered itself to be latent because it is so patent. Its hypoCrisy is a hypocritical hypoCrisy because it is at the same time Critical. Its being below is its being on the face and the surface of things, even less rootlike than a rhizome.33 Extirpated from the night of the pit of the empirical imagination that in his pre-Critical Reflections on 220

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Anthropology Kant calls Imagination and which is where the psychology of imagination of Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind begins,34 the imagination shows itself in broad daylight to be those procedures of all thoughtfulness that a classical account of the imagination touches upon when it says that imagination is representation in absence, as though imagination weren’t at work also when confronted by what the classical account meant by presence. This story of images or pictures as subsistent entities present to the mind and re-presenting other entities is only a part of the story of the imagination and one that must be translated, metaphorized – imagined – as the story of the adverbiality of procedures, whether or not these procedures are associated with such denominable mental things. These are the procedures of what Kant called schematization, typification and symbolization, etc., which he was keen not to have us reify and which I have marked throughout this book by such expressions as ‘as’, ‘if’, ‘as if’, ‘if-then’ and ‘maybe’. These expressions, the conditional tense and the subjunctive mood are Leitfaden to the syntax of what it is to treat one thing as another whether or not such treatment reflects how things stand. A metaphorization takes place that is consistent with counterfactuality and factuality, although from its a-factuality the finding of facts may ensue. The imagination thus construed extends ‘upward’ to the most abstract and formal concepts and rules of reason and ‘downward’ to the singular referent. Where singularity and universality coincide in the concrete universal,35 as in a work of art, there remains the task of relating it to a concrete singular. That is to say, again, the movement up and the movement down are both moments of judgement. But even when judgement means propositional predication or reference in propositons, ‘judgements’, it presupposes a pre-propositional skill, the possession of what we call ‘judgement’, which some people may have more of than others. Judgement is the hypoCritical aptitude of imagination that is exercised wherever deliberation concludes in a judgement, and it is an adaptitude that is improved by the making of judgements. It is not practical as opposed to theoretical. It is engaged wherever a decision is called for, wherever there is a krisis, in every domain of critique. It applies to the subject matters of the Critique of Pure Reason and to the Critique of Practical Reason. It applies also to that of the Critique of Judgement, and it is ‘aesthetic’ in the sense both of that book and of the Critique of Pure Reason. I have argued further and will continue to argue below that the aesthetic moment cannot be excluded from the subject matter of the Critique of Practical Reason. In the context of the Critical programme in its entirety, including within that programme Religion within the Bounds of Reason Alone, the moment of the imagining of the aesthetic sublime epistemological representation becomes ethico-political representation, associative reproduction becomes social remembrance and recognition as a repetition of knowledge becomes recognition as performative acknowledgement. However, that moment as the moment of acknowledgement of 221

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and the moment of the feeling of respect for the moral law must be itself motivated by respect as response to the singular face. This fact that judgement as imagination and imagination as judgement range from one extreme of mentality to the other and across all three Kantian Critiques explains why judgement is called both sense and intelligence. Its responsibility as obedience to law is inseparable from responsiveness to whatever or whomsoever the law is applied to, however apparently insignificant.

A grain of sand So much then for my arbitration with Kant. His account of imagination does more than preserve imagination in the way that Hegel does when the latter asserts that Aufhebung is not only cancellation, but also elevation that preserves. In place of the Hegelian sens unique Kant maintains a just balance that allows for movement in either direction or in both directions at one and the same time. I endorse Hegel’s insistence, which is not incompatible with what Kant writes, that the imagination produces itself as productive imagination through the word. That production is deep poiêsis. But – and here I shake hands with Levinas – the depth of poiêsis is the depth of the third dimension of the face-to-face rapport with one to whom I listen and one my words are addressed to and for. This is not ultimately the two-way con-versation that, in his exchange with Princess Elizabeth, Descartes recommends as the only way the connection between body and mind may be understood. It is another sens unique, as Levinas would say, but streets away from the one in which Hegel is at home. I have done no more than add to Levinas’s extension of Kant’s teaching on the ethical in the manner I have described the thought that when the other human being judges me and I respond, my being just to the other human being means my being just to whatever my judgement is about – whatever or whomsoever, in and maybe beyond the reach of this world. Justice to you may entail injustice to another, as Levinas and Derrida have shown. But is not a primary injustice and violence done to things if we either allow violence to be done to them even though they do not have faces or deny that violence can be done to them because we deny that they have faces? If we deny that we are called to represent them ethico-politically, deny them our vote and our advocacy, we are denying them a place in the sun. We are denying hypocritically the existence of that on which we acknowledge our own existence depends. Not only are we thereby doing an injustice and violence to those to whom we speak of things; by ‘disappearing’ things we are acknowledging that a responsibility is imposed upon us by sheer existence as such, by the ‘that it is’ in abstraction from the ‘what it is’ – beyond essence. This is the responsibility of the double bind invoked by Coleridge when, going back through Schelling and Kant, and having found the word ‘esemplastic’ to name imagination as reflective 222

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power to construct and make whole, he finds words, just words, to denominate imagination as the affective impower thanks to which mind in its entirety is undermined by the trauma of astonishment: ‘Hast thou ever raised thy mind to the consideration of EXISTENCE, in and by itself, as the mere act of existing? Hast thou ever said to thyself thoughtfully, IT IS! heedless in that moment, whether it were a man before thee, or a flower, or a grain of sand?’36 By a stretch of the imagination that lets the imagination be we learn that to say indicatively no more than ‘It is’ is to say also imperatively ‘Let it be’. The imagination’s stretch embraces the truth that the Platonic good beyond being is the good that is beneath Aristotle’s manifold kinds of being. Imagination as the meaning of being is affected underneath its own taut skin by the sore experience of the ‘ought’ of a responsibility that supports the ‘is’ of all things subliminally – hypoCritically – and sublimely, but with a sublimity that is prior to ‘impersonal sublimity, aesthetic or ontological’37 and that is without the hypocrisy of the slightly smug pleasure that in the Kantian sublime palliates the soreness of the moral law’s ‘ought’, making me feel proud that the moral law humiliates my pride. Admittedly, Levinas speaks of responsibility as a ‘glory’, but this is no reference to a pleasant state of consciousness. Nor is it a reference to the power of reason, expressed in the moral law and the free will, and outweighing the might of the sublime in nature that violates the imagination. It is not even a reference to the humility described by Kant as ‘a sublime temper of the mind voluntarily to undergo the pain of remorse as a means of more and more effectually eradicating its cause’.38 This Kantian humility is still an exercise of the power of free will, of the free will employed moreover within a teleological and technological frame. When reflecting philosophically on humanity, Levinas says that sacrifice as substitution for the other is the wonder of all wonders. But the wonder of all wonders is prior both to voluntary choice, to philosophical reflection and to any concept of humanity. It is prior to all conceptuality in the singularity of your facing me. There is that much analogy with the non-conceptuality and the singularity that characterize aesthetic judgements according to Kant. But, in contrast to the equality between all citizens in the Kantian moral realm of ends, my humility according to Levinas is my being ethically unequal to you in your height, unequal in that I make no claim of right on my own behalf. Your height is your glory, the glory of the first other on the scene, you as orphan, widow and stranger, whom Levinas embraces under the single singular word ‘God’. And the Biblical kavod (‘glory’) of God, and therefore of the Good of the other human being according to Levinas, embraces weight (Genesis 49: 6), majesty (Psalm 24: 7–9, Exodus 24: 16), honour (Psalm 8: 6), even heart or soul (Psalm 16: 9). In modern Hebrew it is used to say before one’s signature in a letter ‘Yours truly’, ‘Yours sincerely’ or ‘Yours respectfully’. ‘Glory’ refers to the ‘good’ sublimity of the ‘ought’ that is not an asymptotic approach to a telos, but a responsibility 223

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that is infinitely increasing.39 My being determined (bestimmt) by the affect (Bestimmung) of respect for the moral law is not to be divorced from my being moved by the voice (Stimme) and face of the singular other. This has the consequence that ‘The more just I am, the more severely I am judged’, ‘The more I am just, the more culpable I am’.40 In ethics there is no last judgement. In ethics every judgement I make generates further judgements by me that in turn, along with my failures to judge, are evermore ever more severely judged by another. In ethics the dies irae is a dies illa, as Jean-Luc Nancy so justly says.41 The day of wrath is another day, a day deponed, a day adjourned. It is a day of illaity. Another’s day, this procrastinated day is a day of illeity. Not today, but tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, it is a day ahead, yonder, illic: a day of illicity. Although postponed, this illicit day is always a day too late. It is always a day on which I have missed my chance. I am always out of time. The time in which I do what I do ‘in my own time’, the time in which I ‘take my own time’, is a time that is taken by the other. I am out of the finite time of my being simply toward my death, because the simplicity of that time is complicated by the intrusion into it of the time of the mortality, vulnerability and fragility of the other that pursues and persecutes me infinitely, sine die. In the time of the ethical creation of time, of the generation or begetting of time itself by which my days are numbered, as Kant says in the first Critique (A143/B182), there is no sabbath. Dans cette genèse, il n’y a pas de jour de repos.42 There is no rest for the just. For where there is justice according to the law there is a certain injustice according to the face, as explained in the passages cited in the preceding section from Derrida, where the aporia of injustice in justice is only tightened by the tension between ‘not to mention other people’ and ‘not to mention the animals that are even more other others than my fellows’. The wonder of all wonder is a heavy burden to support, to the point where (as noted in the Prologue) I am persecuted by the other. I am both affected by the other as focus of affection or attraction – the Anziehen that is one aspect of the feeling of the Kantian sublime – and at the same time, or alternatingly, I experience the other as a resistance (Anstoss) to the advance of my egological desires. There is a love-hate relation between us. The responsibility and the ‘ought’ that supports the ‘is’ of all things is the responsiveness and sensitivity of imagination as standing under, as understanding: substitution as the ethical meaning of substantiality. Precisely because substantiality denotes independence, existence within its own right, indifference to an existent as existent does not make rational sense. It is in this sense that every thing that exists is dependent upon me. This does not mean that I usurp the place of a Creator-Preserver. As will be re-emphasized below, the dependence here is not ontological, but ethical, and it is I who am created by what I support. Further, everything in existence is dependent upon me only where existence is distinguished from first-order properties, whether these be the qualities of things or their 224

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relations, such relations as for instance their spatial location or the place they occupy in a hierarchy of means and ends. The ‘relation’ we are primarily concerned with is the Relation of all relations, as a passage in the Critique of Pure Reason helps us to explain. Kant observes there of existence and the other categories of modality (possibility and necessity, and the opposites of all three) that through them no additional determinations of the object are thought; ‘the question is only how the object, together with all its determinations, is related to understanding and its empirical employment, to empirical judgement, and to reason in its application to experience’ (B266). Our topic is not empirical knowledge, but we say analogously that our topic is how this modality of existence is in turn related to the subject. This higher-level modality is a higher level of necessity than the empirical necessity of which Kant treats. It is the Not-wendigkeit, the ‘turning of need’ that we call obligation or responsibility, but the necessity of which we are treating is necessity before and under the law in the sense of prior to the law. Likewise, of the modality of the forms of judgement that Kant takes as a clue to these categories Kant says that ‘it contributes nothing to the content of the judgement…but concerns only the value of the copula in relation to thought in general’ (B99–100). That value acquires added value when the judger is judged. The judger is judged to have been unjust when he or she fails to use the mot juste of any existent. This is where the notion of poietic and aesthetic responsibility introduced in the section entitled ‘Just words’ in Chapter 11 intersects with the notion of responsibility for the existent as existent that has now been introduced. Existence as such, the that it is in abstraction from the what, is already a ground for responsibility. That responsibility includes the responsibility to take care how one describes the existent, to seek the mots justes, the fairest words, the most beautiful words. And this responsibility includes the responsibility to recognize that the superlativity of the most beautiful is exposed to the erosion of usage, and therefore announces the superlativity of the sublime, the unimaginable that the hypoCritical imagination cannot forget. This responsibility is at one and the same time a responsibility to that existent, which may not be something that can speak, and to those with whom we do speak. This is not only a responsibility one owes to the truth, which is as abstract a principle as is the good and the just defined by the moral law. It is in addition a responsibility to this and that singular existent regarded as not only a case or instance falling under a concept or law. And if this latter responsibility is also a responsibility to the truth or to those with whom one speaks, it is not a responsibility to the truth as opposed to the good, or the just. For truthful dealing is part of ethical dealing. Describing carefully the what of an existent is part of what it is to behave responsibly to it qua existent, for it is a part of what is called for if the existent is to be respected for its own sake. It is the only way to knowing what is needed, what we must do or not do if that 225

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respect is to be shown. But we can only proceed to that response to specific needs if acknowledgement is made first of the prima-facie responsibility to support an existent because it is, in abstraction from what it is. Only hypoCritical imagination can support hyper-Critical imagination. Only thus can our cosmopolitics be both plurally and universally ‘democratic’. Only thus can our ethics not be partially anaesthetics. Only thus can imagination be more than the producing of a beautiful ‘aesthetic’ whole and escape partial anaesthesia by exposing itself to the unimaginable in the sublimity of the singular that exceeds the universality of the moral law, so that ‘imadgination’ is properly-improperly spelled with a ‘d’. In the Prologue it was proposed, following Kant and Schelling, that imagination be construed as construction, forming or building into one. That operation was interpreted in terms of the banal form of words ‘in terms of’, shorthand for the interchangeable ‘this as that’ and ‘if-then’. It was acknowledged that on this interpretation predication and inference, procedures Kant assigns respectively to understanding and reason, would be procedures of imagination. These procedures are all procedures of synthesis and analysis, that is to say classification and distinction, in a word: Critique. Imagination understood in this way is no longer opposed to understanding and reason. As the ‘faculty’ of judgement that mediates in both directions between the singularity of sensibility and the universality of understanding, reason, rule and law, not least through the feelings of moral respect and the aesthetic sublime, it mediates between the aesthetic in the meaning it has in the first Critique and the aesthetic in the meaning it has in the third. But in all these functions it is a procedure of mediative liaison and, broadly speaking, synthesis.43 I say in all these functions in order to allow for the fact that while in the judgements that express the aesthetic sublime reason in the form of the moral law is synthesizing, this cannot be said of that moment and movement of the experience of sublimity that Kant calls Erschütterung, the concussive and temporarily stupefying Augenblick in which the progress of temporality is replaced by what may be compared with an oscillation between repulsion and attraction – a comparison that may be compared in turn with the alternation between the said of the sign and the saying of the trace in the Levinasian enigma, except that the trace is the face and not in the first instance law. Now Aristotle says that imagination (phantasia) is a movement, a kinêsis. What prevents our interpreting this movement as procedure, something like the Verfahren of the first Critique (B179), is the imagist account of the imagination that Aristotle also gives, according to which the imagination is exemplified by the pictures passively registered in dreaming. We turned away from that account. Can we now turn back to it in order to rescue from it something at least analogous to the moment of suspense without which our account of the sublime and therefore of the imagination is incomplete – that something with which the imagination itself is seen as inevitably incomplete, namely the adventitiousness of so much 226

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that appears in dreams and hallucinations? Not if this appearance of adventitiousness belongs also to our normal waking experience. What we learn from going back to Aristotle’s theory of dreams seems to strengthen our objection against it. Only if it seems to us in dreams that we are thinking and acting subjunctively in an environment, not passively receiving impressions like images on a cinema screen, can it be for us in dreams as though something is being discovered, as though we are confronted with reality, which, however, we are not, even when our oneiric fictions do happen to replicate fact. We discover that our fictions are not factual by performing experiments whose subjunctive conditional logic is that of the imagination functioning in its synthesizing role, enabling it to bind one tract of experience with another. But this criterion of ‘coherence’, far from being an alternative to ‘correspondence’, is rather its necessary condition. This is so whether or not one adopts a position of metaphysical realism or one of metaphysical idealism. Both of these metaphysical positions must be able to accommodate the phenomenological ‘resistance’ that Fichte refers to as the Anstoss of things outside us. We are struck by them. This is, but is also more than, a mechanical or dynamic relation. The ob-jectivity of things, the risk of their being obstacles thrown in our way, is at the same time an objectivity constituted by the very rules of coherence articulated in the imagination’s if-then. And where there are rules there is the thought of someone other than myself to confirm or disconfirm my findings in the empirical and juridical senses of this word, senses that are inseparable, since the juridicality is what keeps open the possibility that my so-called empirical finding is empirically false, and the empiricality keeps open the possibility that the rule or law will need to be changed. This inseparability is nothing other than the inseparability of the questio quid juris and the questia quid facti in the procedures of the imagination across its whole range, or, better, across the range that is never whole. For, as the exploration of the reaches of the imagination conducted in the preceding chapters has tried to persuade you, my hypocrite lecteur, the whole range of the imagination symbolized by the stretching of Kant’s three Critiques over one another is a boundedness into one that is bound not only by universality and law, but by a responsibility of the author to the person addressed. That much is what Emmanuel Levinas adds to Immanuel Kant, in the wake of Kant’s demonstration that, through the implication of the moral law in the aesthetic sublime, according to one pattern of imbrication the second Critique overlaps the other two. What the preceding chapters have attempted to add to or unfold from that is the thought of a respondence such that what Levinas describes as ‘imagination captive of things’ may be seen as an imagination liberated, though into an exceedingly difficult freedom, once it is seen double: as inseparably bound to do justice to the other human being to and for whom one speaks and bound to be just to that of and for which one speaks: the 227

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things that have been made captive to us. The addressee may be the interlocutor whom one addresses. It may also be what or whom one addresses in doing so – those human or non-human beings of which or of whom the topic treats, with which or with whom what one says corresponds if what one says is true, to whom one responds if one addresses them truly. Addressees of both kinds, the interlocutor and that of which the locution treats, are also addressers. With each one of them – he, she or it – the exteriority of its epistemological objectivity is doubled by exteriority to which my ethical sub-jectivity is due in both senses of the word: I owe myself to my owing myself to the other. While I address him, her or it they address to me a categorical imperative that singles me out to choose with care my words both for the singularity of the human being who ‘has the word’, and for the singularity of the non-human thing that needs me to give it my word. That my word ‘imagination’ is the mot juste for this co-respondence to the human and the non-human addressee will be more readily acknowledged when qualified by the adjective ‘hypoCritical’. For it is a respondence not only to the universal categorical imperative of the Critical philosophy of Kant or to a particular case falling under it. It is responsive also to the singularity of what Levinas calls a face, albeit that I am extending the force of his word to the singularity of non-human beings by using it of whatever exists, ‘without distinction of persons’ because prior to Critical distinction. Levinas distinguishes responsibility as super-rationality, but not in order to deny that it is sensibility at one and the same time.

The concord and conflict of faculties The question was raised parenthetically at the end of the Prologue if the nowadays banalised word ‘amazement’ would be a good one for the feeling or mood or tonality that, to use Aristotle’s word, moves the imagination. In the Prologue I took care to say that the word was being used there for the genus or species of surprise. However, I have elsewhere used this word to translate Bestaunen, Heidegger’s word for a response that does not grade that to which it is a response, and does not put upon it a value or a price.44 In this respect it is a more appropriate word than Bewundering, Heidegger’s word for an admiration that does assume itself to be equipped with a standard by which it coolly evaluates its object. It is a less appropriate word in the Heideggerian context than Er-staunen, which I translate by ‘wonder’ or ‘astonishment’. In amazement one is out of one’s mind. And because in amazement one is without criteria, one turns this way and that way, as though in a maze. But what amazes is what strikes one as extraordinary. What strikes one in wonder or astonishment is also extraordinary, but it is the extraordinary in the ordinary, for example in the kitchen of which Heraclitus says that the gods can be found also there – or in the ordinary and banal words ‘amazing’ and ‘in terms of’, to which one should be able to 228

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restore so much life that the first of them de-termines the others, terminates termination, reveals in finitude the trace of infinition. According to Levinas, it is in the ordinary word ‘Goodday’ that the ethical wonder of all wonders leaves its trace. In this ordinary word, as more audibly in the ordinary word Goodbye, adieu, pronounced in what is simultaneously a proximity to and a separation form another human being, Levinas hears the extraordinary word ‘God’. This is a pro-noun, a name of the name for what comes in from outside affecting the drum of the simultaneously super-rational and supersensitive ear with a super-impression, a surimpression, or, as Blake says, a Spiritual Sensation or Imagination.45 In the letter in which Blake says this he cites Bacon, whose Instauratio Magna has a Praefatio or Prologue from which Kant cites sentences that serve as a preface to the Preface of the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason. Sections of Bacon’s Advancement of Learning anticipate Kantian critique in that they classify the powers of the mind, assigning them their scope and limits. One of these sections is the source of the sentence cited by Blake in a letter to the Rev. Dr. John Trusler of 23 August 1799: ‘Sense sends over to Imagination before Reason have judged, & Reason sends over to Imagination before the Decree can be acted.’46 Bacon writes this in order to explain what he means when he says that imagination is an agent or envoy (nuncius) ‘in both provinces’, the judicial and the ministerial, that is to say, respectively, the theoretical powers of the mind of man, to wit understanding and reason, and the practical powers, to which he gives the titles will, appetite and affection. Bacon’s statement that the imagination functions ‘in both provinces’ foreshadows the doctrines of schematism developed in the first Critique and of typification developed in the second. The co-operation of these procedures outlined by Kant in the third Critique is at least not excluded by the comments Bacon goes on to make about the working of the imagination in the sphere of faith and religion and in the arts. He writes that ‘in matters of Faith and Religion, we raise our Imagination above our Reason; which is the cause why Religion sought ever access to the mind by similitude, types, parables, visions, dreams’. As for what he refers to as ‘poesy’, this ‘is rather a pleasure or play of Imagination, than a work or duty thereof’. That is, Bacon is concerned here to show that matters of faith and the arts, as too of rhetoric, which ‘we think it best to refer to the Arts of Reason’, do not fall within the two precincts of knowledge. In the course of showing this he argues that in these allegedly non-cognitive fields imagination exceeds the role of messenger, agent or servant earlier attributed to it. In support he reproduces Aristotle’s assertion ‘That the mind hath over the body that commandment, which the lord hath over a bondsman; but that reason hath over the imagination that commandment which a magistrate hath over a free citizen.’47 The reference is to Aristotle’s Politics, and it takes us back to the treatment in Chapter 8 of Hannah Arendt’s proposal on Kant’s behalf for a Critique of Political Judgement. Bacon’s references to ‘poesy’ and to 229

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‘types’ and to ‘duty’ take us back to the topics of Chapters 9, 10 and 11. The arguments set out in those chapters imply that Bacon’s imagination is insufficiently elastic to stretch to the thought that a duty or responsibility of imagination may be in play in ‘poesy’ heard as poiêsis. Nor does it stretch to the idea that poiêsis as creative production is therefore at work not only in practical reason but in the practice of theoretical reason, not least in the hypothesizing that is the nerve of natural science. In this respect, though honoured by the citation that constitutes the proto-preface of the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason and hailed in the Preface of the second edition as an illustrious instigator of the scientific revolution (Bxii), Bacon falls short of seeing how that revolution is Copernican. That he may not fall as short as Kant thinks is suggested by the above-mentioned hint in Bacon of something approaching the notions of schematism and typification. He certainly falls short of the insight that leads Blake to say in his letter to Trusler: The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the Eyes of others only a Green thing that stands in the way. Some see Nature all Ridicule & Deformity, & by these I shall not regulate my proportions; and some scarce see Nature at all. But to the Eyes of the Man of Imagination, Nature is Imagination itself. As a man is, So he Sees. As the Eye is formed, such are its Powers. You certainly Mistake, when you say that the Visions of Fancy are not to be found in This World. To Me This World is all One continued Vision of Fancy or Imagination. Not that Bacon denies the imagination a role in the acquisition of knowledge of nature or in the executive zone. What he holds, as observed earlier, is that it plays a role in the province of theoretical reason generally and in that of conduct and morality, but that in each of these provinces it is intermediary in the manner described in the sentence from him quoted by Blake. This means at least that in the two realms of knowledge imagination does not rule reason or decree, where to decree, from cernere, is to decide (see below). Having read that imagination plays this mediatory role in each of the two realms, we now read ‘that this Janus of Imagination hath differing faces: for the face towards Reason hath the print of Truth, but the face towards Action hath the print of Good; which nevertheless are faces,Quales decet esse sororum’.48 If, however, the faces are as the faces of sisters, is not Bacon on the edge of the insight that imagination also plays a mediatiory role between the two realms? And what if that role were being performed precisely by the poetic imagination that he considers to be exterior to the realms of Truth and the Good? The third sororial face might be the one that faces us from between the right and left profiles of Janus or Jane. This image would then represent the thought that the imagination 230

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interpreted along lines suggested by Kant expresses the ‘essence’ of mentality and of the concord of faculties. On the other hand, a simultaneous conflict of faculties would seem to be suggested by Bacon’s displacing of imagination in its ‘raised’ form to an exteriority allegedly beyond the provinces of theoretical reason and morals, an exteriority where he says imagination is a freedom that would reign over reason.49 But the imagination can be seen doubly as both the overlapping thread woven through the powers of mentality and the exteriority that, because it is not a power, does not reign over reason, but is reason itself as the logos of a hypoCritical pro-logue and epi-logue reminding the Critical mind of its calling. So imagination as integrative construction would be for the sake of the thirsty other (alter alteratus), whether this human, this animal, the tree that moved Blake to tears or the one on behalf of which Jonah was angry even unto death (Jonah 4: 9, 10). In the passage he cites from Aristotle’s Politics, Bacon’s word ‘imagination’ translates orexis, which could be translated also by Bacon’s word ‘appetite’. Putting these senses together we get a sense of the reach of the imagination, its stretching or desire. But desire is ambiguous as between the movement outward from the possessor of the desire and the movement inward toward the being possessed by desire – or by Desire, as Levinas writes with a square-lettered initial when what he means is what he also calls affection, as do too, we have seen, Michel Henry and Bacon.

Imagination as hypoCritical creation For this unenergetic or, better, anergetic ethical force of a gravity centred outside the ego Levinas also uses the already mentioned pro-name ‘God’, which puts one in mind of the Aristotelian nous and the Platonic Good beyond being, and spells out a thirsty alterity which is non-noematic, nonnuminous and non-noumenal, unless by noumenal is meant not a thing in itself behind the phenomenal, but the ethical regard of the face of the other. This ‘extraordinary word’ therefore spells out a non-negatively theological God separate to the point of atheism understood as my persistence as a free substantial being. But when atheism thus understood becomes ashamed of the arbitrariness and self-centred interiority of its facile freedom, it learns of an exteriority exposure to which is not the negation-preservation-uplifting of this interiority, but a marvel more marvellous than the miracle of ontological creation ex nihilo. Neither a product emanating from the One, nor a moment proceeding toward incorporation in a totality, the created being is one whose obligation to the other arises from nothing. My responsibility derives from no contract or lapse. And it is in this responsibility ex nihilo for the other that my being created consists. The miracle of ethical creation may be the topic of Derrida’s remark, made in one of his exegeses of Blanchot, that ‘the miracle is the essential 231

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hyphen between testification and fiction’.50 I hear in this and in Levinas’s gloss on creativity a schematization of imagination as not restricted to the true or the beautiful or the sublime in opposition to the good, but as their aleth-aesth-ethical hyphenation. That is to say, it is their proximity in the separation without which, to borrow from Derrida again, there is no invention of alterity. As the hyphenation of science, art, philosophy, religion and prophecy or prologue, the imagination, extended like a hand toward not only human beings but to the things themselves, can be seen as a hyphen between Levinas and Kant when what Kant calls critique, meaning by this the breaking up of mind into faculties and its objects into forms, kinds, categories and Ideas, is broken into by that for which Levinas himself uses the word ‘hypocrisy’, the word that in this book we have traced back through Kant and have therefore frequently spelled with an upper case C. For in the sentence in which Levinas employs this word he once more employs also the adverb ‘maybe’ in a sense other than that implying scepticism or doubt as opposed to epistemological certainty. The word ‘certainty’, like the word ‘decree’ (see above), derives from cernere, the Latin near-equivalent of krinein, which is cognate with ‘decision’, ‘crisis’ and ‘critique’. Levinas says critique otherwise, as hypocritical and hypoCritical. He says: ‘Maybe it is time to see hypocrisy as not only an ignoble contingent human default, but as the underlying fault of a world bound at the same time to philosophers and to prophets.’51 Maybe it is time to see imagination as not only a lowly faculty bound to insinuate the idolatry of graven images or see the human face as an aesthetic object with no ethical appeal. Maybe it is time to see the imagination as enigmadgination that, tidying and untidying by turns, iconoclastically deconstrues and reconstrues in terms of each other the words in which the philosopher, prophet, poet and indeed scientist – at least in so far as science is poietic,52 respond simultaneously to each other and to the world. Seeing the imagination as this and seeing as evidence for so seeing it the if-then and this-as-that arguments of the preceding pages would itself be no less and no more than a response of the hypoCritical imagination that works its wonders in the space of the connective-disconnective hyphen between fiction and testification, a space as enigmatic as the chôra of which an ‘illicit’ language treats in the scheme of creation imagined in Plato’s Timaeus. In the preceding pages it was argued in terms of these logical connectives that the imagination is that moment of the mind that chooses not choosing, depones and postpones the choice of a system of syntax, even the system of these logical connectives that Kant calls forms of judgement. We can imagine a system of forms and connectives that models the exercise of the imagination as construction (see the section entitled ‘Schematizing logical and ontological connectives’ in the Prologue). But we are in difficulty when we try to imagine a system of forms and connectives that models the connection between the imagination as constructive and the imagination as hypoCritical ethical response. 232

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The difficultness of the imagination difficile is that my facing the other is the ethical implication of the ontological fact of my occupying a place in the sun. When we try to figure out a logical representation of this implication we find ourselves already unable to formalize one of its terms. The ethical term of the implication – or of the intrigue or plot, as Levinas would say – de-forms form and de-terminates the terms both of the determinant and of the reflective judgement. The best we can do is to state a standard ‘analogy’ and immediately state an exception. We can say that the logical constant or form of judgement that defines my relation to the other is an imbrication of, first, the mutually exclusive either-or – except that the relation is not symmetrical; second, the subordination of if-then – except that the subordination here means my not being the other’s equal; and, third, the categorical – except that the subject is not substance but substitution, and the categoricality is not that of a judgement I make, but that of an imperative or judgement imposed upon me. Not only a being that categorizes, but a being categorically commanded, the human being is summoned to make testification.53 Its learning is more and less than the education that accumulates in the manner of the Goethean Bildungsroman with which the Phenomenology of Spirit is sometimes compared. This does not mean, however, that it cannot be learned through the work of the hypoCritical Einbildungskraft. In the letter to Princess Elizabeth cited in the Prologue Descartes writes that ‘it is the ordinary course of life and conversation, and abstraction from meditation and from the study of things which exercise the imagination, that teaches us how to conceive the union of the soul and the body’. But the imagination he has in mind in this letter is the mathematical imagination. To suppose the mathematical imagination could teach us how to conceive the union of soul and body would be worse than to suppose that my experience of the dimension of spatial depth is preserved in the perception of width that it becomes for someone observing it at an angle of ninety degrees to my line of vision. The imagination we have had in mind in this book when we have called it ‘hypoCritical’ is that of the ordinary course of life and conversation. Moreover, we can say with Levinas that what this teaches is the union of soul and body. For the ordinary course of life and conversation is the place where we are amazed by the analogy of experience that is affection by the other, and that affection is the soul of the soul, its animation and reanimation. However, this does not teach us how to conceive the union of soul and body. It teaches us rather, when we resort to philosophical meditation upon it, why it cannot be conceived, why the imagination is more and less than conceptual Critique, why of this so-called problem of the union of body and soul, as it appears to be posed anew by Levinas and by this book in his and in Kant’s wake, there can be no resolution if by resolution we mean something like a diagram whose grammatical structure could be fully, clearly and distinctly exposed in a truth-table or upon the 233

EPILOGUE

two sides of the tablet of the law. The problem can have a resolution only if by a resolution we mean one like Kant’s solution or dissolution of the antinomies as explained in Chapter 4, where the problem is shown to be only the appearance of a problem and the antinomy is shown to be only the appearance of an antinomy once appearance is distinguished from reality, analytical opposites are distinguished from dialectical opposites, and knowledge is distinguished from faith. For resolution is simultaneously a binding and an unbinding, a deciding (entschliessen) and a de-ciding (entschliessen), critique and hypoCritique, a concluding and a setting free. On the one hand, critique as conceptual categorization is required if justice is to be done to the other other, but, on the other hand, hypoCritique is required if that justice is to be done to the other other, that is to say, if one is to acknowledge the contingency of the fact that the third party might have been the first to come my way. The ‘logic’ of the amphibological chiasm between the Critical procedure and the hypoCritical liturgy of imagination is that of a relation between a Copernican revolution in epistemology and a Ptolemaic counter-revolution. I understand by Copernican revolution the turn from supposing the standard of knowledge to be outside the mind to the positing of it in the mind, and by Ptolemaic counter-revolution I mean the locating of the centre of gravity of ethics outside the epistemological subject. Therefore the ‘counter’ announces between these revolutions and between Levinas and Kant not the violence of war but the violence of peace. This is not the ‘counter’ for which the syntactical marker would be the formally logical or Hegelian dialectical ‘not’. The ‘counter’ in question is that of the chasmic and chiasmic double liaison of attraction and repulsion, where what is bound is, on the one hand, the logical connectivity of which the syntactical marker is the subjunctive counterfactual ‘if-then’, the metaphorological or metonymical ‘this as that’ and the not necessarily tautological ‘this as this’ or ‘if p then p’, and, on the other hand, the heterological connectivity – proximity and separation – to the sublimely singular human or non-human other, effected by the hypoCritical signature.54 The violence of peace is the violence that the Critical-hypoCritical imagination does to the faculties of the soul by putting into question both the separation and the integration of the faculties in turning and attuning them all – sensibility, understanding and reason or will – to respond to the sublime call of the singular other with the most banal and most amazing words of prologue and of epilogue that say, respectively, Goodday and I am respectfully yours.

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1 PROLOGUE 1 Jacques Derrida, ‘Violence et métaphysique: Essai sur la pensée d’Emmanuel Levinas’, L’Écriture et la différence, Paris, Seuil, 1967, p. 118; ‘Violence and metaphysics: An essay on the thought of Emmanuel Levinas’, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978, p. 80. 2 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe, Oxford, Blackwell, 1953, pp. 388–98, 211–14. 3 E.J. Furlong, Imagination, London, Allen & Unwin, 1961, p. 15. 4 P.F. Strawson, ‘Imagination and perception’, in L. Foster and J.W. Swanson (eds), Experience and Theory, Amherst, University of Massachusetts Press, 1970, p. 31. 5 Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, London, Penguin, 1992, p. 322. 6 Mary Warnock, Imagination, London, Faber & Faber, 1976, pp. 158–60, 183– 95. 7 Edward S. Casey, Imagining: A Phenomenological Study, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1976, p. xv. 8 ibid., pp. 9–10. 9 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, p. 396. 10 Charles Bigger, Kant’s Methodology: An Essay in Philosophical Archaeology, Athens OH, Ohio University Press, 1996, p. 288. 11 Immanuel Kant, Reflexionen zur Anthropologie, in Gesammelte Schriften, Prussian Academy of Sciences (ed.), Berlin, de Gruyter, 1902–83, p. 334. For a synopsis of Kant’s pre-Critical uses of terms based on bilden, see Rudolf A. Makkreel’s admirable Imagination and Interpretation in Kant: The Hermeneutical Import of the Critique of Judgment, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1990, ch. 1. 12 Emmanuel Levinas, Totalité et Infini: Essai sur l’extériorité, The Hague, Nijhoff, 1980, pp. 51–2; Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. A. Lingis, The Hague, Nijhoff, 1969, p. 79. 13 Derrida, ibid. 14 A.H. Vaihinger, The Philosophy of As If, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1924; Jacques Derrida, Glas, Paris, Galilée, 1974; Glas. Que reste-t-il du savoir absolu?, Paris, Denoël/Gonthier, 1981; Glas, trans. John P. Leavey Jr. and Richard Rand, Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press, 1986. 15 Vladimir Jankélévitch, Philosophie première: Introduction à une philosophie du ‘presque’, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1954; Le je-ne-sais-quoi et le presque-rien, Paris, Seuil, 1980; Simon Critchley, Very Little…Almost Nothing:

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16 17 18 19

20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27

28

Death, Philosophy and Literature, London, Routledge, 1997. See also his The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas, London, Blackwell, 1992, the indispensability of which is so widely acknowledged and goes so much without saying that, to my consternation, I discovered that I had allowed it to go without mention in the Bibliography of my Emmanuel Levinas. The Genealogy of Ethics, London, Routledge, 1995. Carl Darling Buck, Comparative Grammar of Greek and Latin, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1933, p. 237. Eliane Escoubas, Imago mundi. Topologie de l’art, Paris, Galilée, 1986, p. 49. A. Meillet and J. Vendryes, Traité de grammaire comparée des langues classiques, Paris, Champion, 1924, pp. 328–9. Warnock, Imagination, p. 144: ‘paradoxically, although phenomenologists exclude imagination from our perceptive awareness of the world, yet the role of imagination in this awareness becomes clearer the more one considers the theory which attempts to do without it’. Laying emphasis upon the difference between perception and imagination, as Sartre does, does not mean that the former can do without the latter. And Mary Warnock shows on pp. 177–9 of her valuable book that at least some of Sartre’s arguments entail that imagination is inherent in perception. I think too that, instead of making her comment about phenomenologists quite generally, she would have done better to restrict it to Sartre. What she says about him does not, it seems to me, hold of Husserl or MerleauPonty, neither of whom makes the play with the notion of nothingness that Sartre adapts from Hegel and uses in his distinction between imagination and perception. L’Imagination, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1936; Imagination: A Psychological Critique, trans. Forrest Williams, Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 1962; L’Imaginaire, Paris, Gallimard, 1940; The Psychology of the Imagination, trans. Mary Warnock, London, Methuen, 1948. Immanuel Kant, Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals, in Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason and Other Works on the Theory of Ethics, trans. T.K. Abbott, London, Longmans, 1959, pp. 33–4. In the third Reply to the second set of Objections. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, La phénoménologie de la perception, Paris, Gallimard, 1945, p. 456, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962, p. 398. Epigraph to Emmanuel Levinas, Autrement qu’être ou au-delà de l’essence, The Hague, Nijhoff, 1978, Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis, The Hague, Nijhoff, 1981. Descartes to Elizabeth, 28 June 1643, Descartes, Philosophical Letters, trans. Anthony Kenny, Oxford, Blackwell 1970, p. 141. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, La Phénoménologie de la perception, pp. 121–2; Phenomenology of Perception, pp. 104–5. Emmanuel Levinas, Hors sujet, Paris, Montpellier, Fata Morgana, 1987, p. 148; Outside the Subject, trans. Michael B. Smith, London, Athlone, 1993, p. 98. At the time of writing, when ‘brilliant’ has lost its gloss, ‘amazing’ is heard on average three or four times during a radio or televised chat-show lasting half an hour. When in turn it goes out of fashion, will ‘astonishing’ come into vogue? Would that be a stretching of the lexical imagination or a contraction or both? See Chapters 11 and 12 of this book. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, Oxford, Blackwell, 1967, § 35.

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2 IMAGINATION AS MEDIAL DIATHESIS 1 Eliane Escoubas, ‘Kant ou la simplicité du sublime’, in Jean-Luc Nancy (ed.), Du sublime, Paris, Belin, 1988, p. 94. 2 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. N.K. Smith, London, Macmillan, 1929; Edmund Husserl, Ideen I, 1913, Husserliana 3, The Hague, Nijhoff, 1950, § 62. Cp. Erste Philosophie (1923–4), part I, Husserliana 7, The Hague, Nijhoff, 1956, pp. 284–7, and Martin Heidegger, Phänomenologische Interpretation von Kants Kritik der reinen Vernunft (1927–8) (Gesamtausgabe 25), Frankfurt am Main, Klostermann, 1977, p. 431. 3 Richard I. Sugarman, Rancor Against Time, Hamburg, Meiner, 1980, p. 104. 4 Martin Heidegger, Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik (G3), Frankfurt am Main, Klostermann, 1951, pp. 149–50; Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, trans. James S. Churchill, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1972, p. 170 (trans. Richard Taft, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1990, p. 112). 5 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B160, B162. Cp. A120–1, note b. 6 Heidegger, Kant, p. 41, p. 41 (p. 24). 7 ibid., p. 106, p. 118 (p. 77). 8 Kant, Critique of Practical Reason and Other Works on the Theory of Ethics, trans. T.K. Abbott, London, Longmans, Green and Co., 1889, pp. 160–1. 9 ibid., p. 217. 10 ibid., p. 67. 11 Heidegger, Kant, p. 146, p. 166 (p. 109). 12 Heidegger, ‘Moira’, Vorträge und Aufsätze, Pfullingen, Neske, 1967, vol. 3, p. 42. 13 Heidegger, Discourse on Thinking, trans. John M. Anderson and E. Hans Freund, New York, Harper, 1966, pp. 61, 80; Gelassenheit, Pfullingen, Neske, 1985, pp. 33–4, 57–8. 14 See J. Gonda, ‘Reflections on the Indo-European medium’, Lingua IX, 1960, p. 178, and John Llewelyn, The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience: A Chiasmic Reading of Responsibility in the Neighbourhood of Heidegger, Levinas and Others, London, Macmillan, New York, St Martin’s Press, 1991. 15 Heidegger, Kant, p. 146, p. 166 (p. 109). 16 Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, p. 17. 17 Rudolf A. Makkreel, Imagination and Interpretation in Kant: The Hermeneutical Import of the Critique of Judgment, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1990, pp. 21–5; Dieter Henrich, ‘Über die Einheit der Subjektivität’, Philosophische Rundschau 3, 1955. 18 Kant, On the form and principles of the sensible and intelligible world (Inaugural Dissertation), in Selected Pre-Critical Writings and Correspondence with Beck, trans. G.B. Kerferd and D.E. Walford, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1968, p. 70 (§ 15, D). 19 ibid., p. 63 (§ 13). 20 ‘Das Ereignis lässt in der brauchenden Vereignung die Sage zum Sprechen gelangen. Der Weg zur Sprache gehört zu der aus dem Ereignis bestimmten Sage. In diesem Weg, der zum Sprachwesen gehört, verbirgt sich das Eigentümliche der Sprache. Der Weg ist ereignend…Weil nämlich das Sprachwesen als die zeigende Sage im Ereignis berüht, das uns Menschen der Gelassenheit zum freien Hören übereignet, öffnet die Bewegung der Sage zum Sprechen uns erst die Pfade, auf denen wir dem eigentlichen Weg zur Sprache nachsinnen.’ Heidegger, Unterwegs zur Sprache, Pfullingen, Neske, 1975, pp. 260–1 (G12); On the Way to Language, trans. Peter D. Hertz, New York, Harper, 1971, pp. 129–30. 21 Heidegger, Kant, p. 175, p. 198 (p. 132).

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22 Heidegger, Die Frage nach dem Ding, Tübingen, Niemeyer, 1962, p. 180 (G41); What is a Thing?, trans. W.B. Barton and Vera Deutsch, Chicago, Regnery, 1967, p. 242. 23 Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, Tübingen, Niemeyer, 1972 (G2); Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, Oxford, Blackwell, 1962, p. 34. 24 ibid., p. 28. Heidegger, Holzwege (G5), Frankfurt am Main, Klostermann, 1972, p. 301; Vorträge und Aufsätze, vol. 3, p. 19; Early Greek Thinking, trans. David Farrell Krell and Frank A. Capuzzi, New York, Harper, 1975, pp. 18, 73. 25 Heidegger, Einführung in die Metaphysik, Tübingen, Niemeyer, 1953, p. 54 (G40), An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Ralph Manheim, New York, Doubleday, 1951, p. 59. 26 Emile Benveniste, Problèmes de linguistique générale, Paris, Gallimard, 1966, vol. 1, p. 172. 27 Gonda, op.cit., pp. 66–7. 28 ibid., p. 180. 29 Oswald Szemerényi, Einführung in die vergleichende Sprachwissenschaft, Darmstadt, Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1970, p. 232. 30 Gonda, op.cit., pp. 61–2. 31 Jacques Derrida, Marges de la philosophie, Paris, Minuit, 1972, p. 8; Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1982, p. 8. 32 ibid., p. 9, p. 9. 3 CONSTRUCTIVE IMAGINATION AS CONNECTING MIDDLE 1 F.W.J. Schelling, The Unconditional in Human Knowledge: Four Early Essays (1794–6), trans. Fritz Marti, Lewisburg, Bucknell University Press, London, Associated University Presses, 1980, p. 190; K.F.A. Schelling (ed.), Sämtliche Werke, Stuttgart and Augsburg, J.G. Cotta, 1856–61, hereafter SW, vol. I, p. 332. 2 ibid. 3 Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason and Other Works on the Theory of Ethics, trans. T.K. Abbott, 6th edn, London, Longman, 1909, p. 161. 4 Schelling, ‘Über die Construction in der Philosophie’, Kritisches Journal der Philosophie (1802), SW, vol. V. 5 Carl H. Höyer, Abhandlung über die philosophische Construction als Einleitung zu Vorlesung in der Philosophie, Stockholm, Silverstolpen, 1801. German version, Hamburg, F. Perthes, 1801 (1803). 6 Schelling, ‘Über die Construction’, p. 279. 7 Schelling, System of Transcendental Idealism (1800), trans. Peter Heath, Charlottesville, University Press of Virginia, 1978, hereafter STI, p. 103; SW, vol. III, p. 466. 8 J.G. Fichte, Science of Knowledge (Wissenschaftslehre), with the First and Second Introductions, trans. Peter Heath and John Lachs, New York, Appleton Century/Crofts, 1970, hereafter SK, p. 97; Gesamtausgabe, vol. 1, 2, StuttgartBad Cannstatt, Reinhard Lauth and Hans Jacob (eds), Friedrich Frommann Verlag, 1965, p. 259 (I, 96). 9 Schelling, STI, p. 25, cp. p. 43; SW, vol. III p. 366, cp. p. 389. 10 Fichte, SK, pp. 198–9; Gesamtausgabe, vol. 1, 2, p. 365 (I, 222). 11 Schelling, STI, p. 49; SW, vol. III, p. 397. 12 ibid., p. 42, cp. p. 73; p. 389, cp. p. 427. 13 G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1977, p. 54, cp. pp. 36, 57.

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14 ibid., p. 31. 15 Schelling, SW, vol. X, p. 107. 16 ibid., vol. IV, p. 403; cp. Martin Heidegger, Beiträge zur Philosophie, Gesamtausgabe, vol. 65, Frankfurt am Main, Klostermann, 1989, p. 199. 17 Schelling, STI, p. 49; SW, vol. III, p. 398. 18 Cp. Martin Heidegger, Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik (Gesamtausgabe 3), Frankfurt am Main, Klostermann, 1951, p. 41; Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, trans. James S. Churchill, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1962, p. 41 (trans. Richard Taft, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1990, p. 24). 19 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Aesthetic Judgement, trans. James Creed Meredith, Oxford, Clarendon, 1911, p. 77. 20 Schelling, STI, p. 70; SW, vol. III, p. 423. 21 Schelling, The Philosophy of Art, trans. Douglas W. Stott, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1989, p. 46, SW, vol. V, p. 407. 22 ibid., p. 49, p. 412. 23 See K. Düsing, ‘Spekulation und Reflexion: Zur Zusammenarbeit Schellings und Hegels in Jena’, Hegel-Studien V (1969), pp. 95–127, and Jean-François Courtine, ‘Le Déploiement schellingien de l’unité: De l’universio à l’universitas’, Les études philosophiques 3 (1978), p. 351, note 12 (Jean-François Courtine, Extase de la raison: essais sur Schelling, Paris, Galilée, 1990, p. 118, note 1). 24 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Kathleen Coburn (gen. ed.), Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1969–, vol. 7 (I); Biographia Literaria, James Engell and W. Jackson Bate (eds), pp. 168–70. 25 Schelling, Philosophy of Art, p. 32; SW, vol. V, p. 306. 26 Fichte, SK, p. 150, Gesamtausgabe, vol. 1, 2, p. 314 (1, 160). 27 Schelling, STI, p. 232; SW, vol. III, p. 629. 28 ibid., p. 230, p. 626. 29 ibid., p. 230, p. 625. 30 ibid., p. 233, p. 629. 31 ibid., pp. 232–3, p. 629. 32 Schelling, SW, vol. IV, p. 344. 4 ANTINOMY AS DIALECTICAL IMAGINATION IN HEGEL’S CRITIQUE OF KANT 1 G.W.F. Hegel, Science of Logic, trans. A.V. Miller, London, Allen & Unwin, 1969, p. 190. 2 Immanuel Kant, Philosophical Correspondence 1759–1799, trans. Arnulf Zweig (ed.), Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1967, p. 96. 3 Hegel, Logic, Part One of the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1830), trans. William Wallace, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1975, p. 78. 4 Hegel, Science of Logic, p. 196. 5 Martial Gueroult, ‘Le Jugement de Hegel sur l’Antithétique de la Raison Pure’, Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale 38 (1931), p. 423. A German translation of this article is included in Rolf-Peter Horstmann (ed.), Seminar: Dialektik in der Philosophie Hegels, Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp, 1978. 6 ibid., p. 436. 7 Hegel, Science of Logic, p. 196. 8 ibid., p. 195. 9 ibid., p. 197. 10 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. N.K. Smith, London, Macmillan, 1929, B40, B47.

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11 Hegel, The Difference Between Fichte’s and Schelling’s System of Philosophy, trans. H.S. Harris and Walter Cerf, Albany, State University of New York Press, 1977, pp. 171 ff., 51, 58. Hegel, Early Theological Writings, trans. T.M. Knox, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1971. But see H.S. Harris, Hegel’s Development, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1972, p. xxi: ‘Hegel’s ideal was not in the end a philosophical but a religious-aesthetic one’. Compare ibid., p. 391. 12 As W.H. Walsh pointed out to me, at B180 it is the mathematical concept of a triangle in general that is said to be a pure sensible concept. Compare B181, where the schemata of sensible concepts are distinguished from those of pure concepts of the understanding. This is not, I believe, in conflict with what Kant says at B40 and B47. Although a triangle and the space it occupies have parts, the concept of a triangle in general does not. Nor is it in conflict with Kant’s doctrine that the schemata both of pure sensible concepts and of pure concepts of the understanding are (pure) sensible concepts, i.e. time determinations attributable to the transcendental imagination. The pure sensible concepts of B180 and B181 are pure concepts of sensibility, or concepts of pure understanding. The sensible concepts of B186 are opposed to both of these as the pure transcendental imagination is opposed to both the mathematical imagination and the transcendental understanding. These sensible concepts do not have parts because they are not images but procedures. It has to be granted, however, that we still need a solution to the infamous problems as to how a procedure can escape having temporal parts, and why in the Aesthetic Kant calls space and time ‘concepts’. 13 Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, trans. E.H. Haldane and F.H. Simson, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974, vol. 3, p. 44; Difference, p. 69, n. 32. 14 Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, vol. 3, p. 538. 15 ibid., p. 534. 16 ibid., p. 524. 17 F.W.J. Schelling, The Philosophy of Art, trans. Douglas W. Stott, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1989, p. 15; Sämtliche Werke, K.F.A. Schelling (ed.), Stuttgart and Augsburg, 1856–61, vol. 5, p. 367. 18 J.G. Fichte, Science of Knowledge, trans. Peter Heath and John Lachs (eds), New York, Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1970, pp. 8–9. 19 Hegel, Science of Logic, p. 199. 20 Hegel, Logic, p. 52. 21 Hegel, Difference, p. 133. 22 Hegel, Science of Logic, p. 130. 23 ibid., pp. 55–6. 24 Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, vol. 2, pp. 64 ff. 25 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Hegel’s Dialectic, trans. P. Christopher Smith, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1976, p. 22. 26 Hegel, Logic, p. 77. 27 Gueroult, op. cit., p. 433. 28 Norman Kemp Smith, A Commentary to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, London, Macmillan, 1923, p. 2. 29 Hegel, Science of Logic, p. 56. 30 Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, vol. 3, p. 450. However, the translators are inaccurate in saying ‘unintentional’. 31 Hegel, Faith and Knowledge, trans. W. Cerf and H.S. Harris, Albany, State University of New York Press, 1977, p. 42.

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32 See Gadamer, op. cit., ‘Hegel and the dialectic of the ancient philosophers’, and Guy Planty-Bonjour, ‘Hegel et la dialectique selon les Grecs’, Revue Internationale de Philosophie, 1981, pp. 119–40. 33 Hegel, Science of Logic, p. 56. 34 Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1977, p. 39. 5 DIALECTICAL IMAGINATION AS DECONSTRUCTION 1 G.W.F. Hegel, Encyclopaedia of Philosophical Sciences, trans. W. Wallace and A.V. Miller, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1971–5, § 250, note. 2 References in the text are to Jacques Derrida, Glas, Paris, Galilée, 1974; Glas, trans. John P. Leavey, Jr. and Richard Rand, Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press, 1986. The letters a and b indicate the left and right columns, in that order; the figure i indicates a judas. 3 Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1977, p. 286. 4 Derrida, La carte postale: De Socrate à Freud et au-delà, Paris, Flammarion, 1980; The Post Card from Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. Alan Bass, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1987. 5 Hegel, Phenomenology, p. 54. 6 Derrida, ‘Signature événement contexte’, in Marges de la philosophie, Paris, Minuit, 1972; ‘Signature event context’, in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1982. 7 Derrida, ‘Ja, ou le faux-bond’, Digraphe 11, 1987, p. 119. 8 Hegel, op. cit., p. 288. 9 Derrida, ‘En ce moment même dans cet ouvrage me voici’, in François Laruelle (ed.), Textes pour Emmanuel Levinas, Paris, Jean-Michel Place, 1980, and in Derrida, Psyché. Inventions de l’autre, Paris, Galilée, 1987; ‘At this very moment in this work here I am’, trans. Ruben Berezdivin, in Robert Bernasconi and Simon Critchley (eds), Re-Reading Levinas, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1991. See also John Llewelyn, ‘En ce moment même…une répétition qui n’en est pas une’, in Le passage des frontières. Autour du travail de Jacques Derrida, Colloque de Cerisy, Paris, Galilée, 1994, pp. 245–8. 10 Derrida, ‘Entre crochets’, Digraphe 8, 1976, p. 111. 11 ibid., p. 112. 12 Derrida, L’Oreille de l’autre: Otobiographies, transferts, traductions, Claude Lévesque and Christie V. McDonald (eds), Montreal, VIB, 1982, p. 152. 13 Derrida, Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles, trans. Barbara Harlow, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1979, pp. 116, 117. 14 ibid., pp. 120, 121. 15 ibid., pp. 118, 119. 16 Derrida, L’Oreille de l’autre, p. 153. 17 Derrida, La Voix et le phénomène, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1967, p. 117; Speech and Phenomena, trans. David D. Allison, Evanston, Northwestern University Press, 1973, p. 104. 18 Derrida, ‘Envoi’, in Psyché, pp. 142–3, ‘Sending: On representation’, trans. Peter and Mary Ann Caws, Social Research 49, 1982, pp. 325–6. 19 Derrida, Positions, Paris, Minuit, 1972, p. 60; Positions, trans. Alan Bass, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1981, p. 44. 20 Sigmund Freud, Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, London, Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-analysis, vol. XVII, 1955, pp. 218 ff.

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21 22

23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30

31 32 33

34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49

See also vol. XI, pp. 154 ff. for Freud’s review of Karl Abel, ‘The antithetical sense of primal words’. Freud, ibid., vol. IV, 1953, pp. 243, 318–19, and vol. V, 1953, pp. 434–5, and (On Dreams) pp. 660–2. Derrida, ‘Fors: les mots anglés de Nicolas Abraham et Maria Torok’, Introduction to Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, Cryptonymie: Le verbier de l’homme aux loups, Paris, Aubier-Flannmarion, 1976, p. 48; ‘Fors: The anglish words of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok’, trans. Barbara Johnson, The Georgia Review 31, 1977, p. 96. Derrida, Marges, pp. 14–15; Margins, pp. 13–14. ibid., pp. 111–12, pp. 95–6. Hegel, Encyclopaedia of Philosophical Sciences, § 459. Derrida, ‘Ja, ou le faux-bond’, p. 118. Derrida, Marges, p. 339; Margins, p. 285. ibid., p. 353, p. 297. Derrida, Positions, pp. 103–4, pp. 77–8. Ludwig Feuerbach, Gesammelte Werke, Kleinere Schriften, vol. 2, Berlin, Akademie Verlag, 1970, p. 254. See Derrida, La Dissémination, Paris, Seuil, 1972, p. 36; Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1981, p. 30. Derrida, La Dissémination, p. 26; Dissemination, p. 18. Derrida, De la grammatologie, Paris, Minuit, 1967, p. 41; Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974, p. 26. Derrida, La Dissémination, p. 27; Dissemination, p. 20. Derrida, L’Autre cap suivi de la démocratie ajournée, Paris, Minuit, 1991; The Other Heading: Reflections on Today’s Europe, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Nass, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1992. Derrida, ‘Ja, ou le faux-bond’, p. 121. Derrida, Marges, p. 126; Margins, p. 107. ibid. Derrida, La Dissémination, p. 61; Dissemination, p. 53 Hegel, Science of Logic, vol. 1, bk. 1, § 2, ch. 2, remark 2. Derrida, La Dissémination, p. 42; Dissemination, p. 36. Derrida, ‘Ja, ou le faux-bond’, p. 99. Derrida, ‘Envoi’, in Psyché, p. 124; ‘Sending: On representation’, p. 313. Derrida, ‘Mallarmé’, in Tableau de la littérature française: De Madame de Staël à Rimbaud, Paris, Gallimard, 1974, p. 376. Derrida, ‘Economimesis’, Sylviane Agacinski et al., Mimesis des articulations, Paris, Aubier-Flammarion, 1975, pp. 91–3. Derrida, ‘Mallarmé’, in Tableau, p. 379. Derrida, La Dissémination, p. 56; Dissemination, p. 48. Derrida, ‘Fors’, p. 18, p. 72; ‘Ja, ou le faux-bond’, p. 93. Derrida, ‘Entre crochets’, p. 112. Derrida, La Dissémination, p. 386; Dissemination, p. 347. ibid., p. 383, p. 345. 6 IMADGINATION AS THE MEANING OF BEING

1 John Sallis, Echoes: After Heidegger, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1990, p. 97. 2 Gilles Deleuze, Différence et répétition, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1968, p. 101.

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3 Sallis, ‘Monet’s Grainstacks: Shades of Time’, Tema Celeste 30 (March–April 1991), p. 67. 4 ‘It is imagination which extends for us the measure of what is possible in matters either of good or evil, and which consequently excites and nourishes desires with the hope of satisfying them’. John Sallis, The Gathering of Reason, Athens OH, Ohio University Press, 1980, p. ix. 5 Sallis, Spacings–of Reason and Imagination, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1987, p. 155. 6 Sallis, Crossings: Nietzsche and the Space of Tragedy, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1991, p. 5. 7 Sallis, Echoes, p. 97. 8 In Zur Sache des Denkens (Tübingen, Niemeyer, 1969) what Heidegger declares unviable is the attempt to reduce (zurückführen) Dasein’s spatiality to its temporality. He says already in § 70 of Being and Time that the grounding of Dasein’s spatiality in its temporality cannot take the form of deducing (deduzieren) space from time, or dissolving (auflösen) space in pure time. It is important to distinguish not only the verbs but also the nouns, Zeitlichkeit from Zeit and Räumlichkeit from Raum, if one is to begin to understand the bearing what is being said here has upon the doctrines of Kant, Hegel (Encyclopaedia § 257: ‘so wird der Raum zur Zeit’) and Kierkegaard (Being and Time, p. 338n) which Heidegger has in mind. 9 Sallis, Echoes, p. 115. 10 Martin Heidegger, Prolegomena zur Geschichte des Zeitbegriffs (Gesamtausgabe 20) Frankfurt am Main, Klostermann, 1979, p. 63; History of the Concept of Time, trans. Theodore Kisiel, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1985, p. 47. 11 Sallis, Echoes, p. 147. 12 Sallis, Spacings, p. 105. 13 Heidegger writes that in metaphysics and its overcoming thinking that regresses to presuppositions is indispensable, but a further step back must be made to thinking supposition as such. Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis) (G65), Frankfurt am Main, Klostermann, 1989, p. 93. 14 Heidegger, Die Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie (G24), Frankfurt am Main, Klostermann, 1975, p. 241; The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, trans. Albert Hofstadter, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1975, p. 170. Compare Wegmarken (G9), Frankfurt am Main, Klostermann, 1976, p. 306. 15 Heidegger, Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Logik im Ausgang von Leibniz (G26), Frankfurt am Main, Klostermann, 1978, p. 200; The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, trans. Michael Heim, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1984, p. 157. 16 Heidegger, Holzwege (G5), Frankfurt am Main, Klostermann, 1977, p. 43; Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter, New York, Harper & Row, 1971, p. 55; Holzwege, p. 51; Poetry, Language, Thought, p. 63; Holzwege, p. 49; Poetry, Language, Thought, p. 61. 17 Heidegger, Holzwege, p. 32; Poetry, Language, Thought, p. 43. 18 Immanuel Kant, Kant’s Inaugural Dissertation and Early Writings on Space, trans. John Handyside, Chicago, Open Court, 1929, p. 8. 19 The becausal possibilities of weilen and Verweilen first occurred to me while reading the gloss on Heidegger’s phrase ‘sich lichtend-währende Anwesenheit des Je-Weiligen’ proposed in Jeffrey Librett’s sublime Introduction to his translation of Du sublime, Jean-Luc Nancy (ed.), Paris, Belin, 1988; Of the Sublime: Presence in Question, Albany, State University of New York Press, 1993.

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20 Heidegger, Vorträge und Aufsätze, 3 vols, 3rd edn, 1967, Pfullingen, Neske, 1954, vol. 2, p. 29; Poetry, Language, Thought, p. 154. 21 Heidegger, Beiträge, pp. 380, 384. 22 The relevance of this resonance of Sprung sprang to my attention when reading David Krell’s remarkable Daimon Life: Heidegger and Life-Philosophy, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1992. It is confirmed at, for example, Beiträge, p. 255, when to explain what is meant by ‘this easily misunderstood word’ Heidegger refers to the cleavage of Beyng, the Zerklüftung des Seyns. The sense of being coiled like a spring is also in play when Sprung is described as ‘the release of a readiness for attentive belonging in appropriation’, ‘die Er-springung der Bereitschaft zur Zugehörigkeit in das Ereignis’. Auf dem Sprunge sein is to be ready. 23 Heidegger, Beiträge, p. 381. 24 For example, Kant, Critique of Aesthetic Judgement, trans. James Creed Meredith, Oxford, Clarendon, 1911, § 25, cited by Sallis at Spacings, pp. 110 and 111. 25 Heidegger, Holzwege, p. 53; Poetry, Language, Thought, p. 65. 26 Kant, Critique of Aesthetic Judgement, § 27. 27 Sallis, Spacings, p. 87. 28 For example, at Vorträge und Aufsätze, vol. 2, p. 75; Poetry, Language, Thought, p. 226. 29 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith, London, Macmillan, 1968, B180; Critique of Aesthetic Judgement, § 49n. 30 Heidegger, Einführung in die Metaphysik (G40), Frankfurt am Main, Klostermann, 1983, p. 219. 31 Heidegger, Beiträge, p. 383; Holzwege, p. 44; Poetry, Language, Thought, p. 55. 32 Zur Sache des Denkens, p. 24; Time and Being, trans. Joan Stambaugh, New York, Harper & Row, 1972, p. 24. 33 Heidegger, Beiträge, p. 383. 34 Heidegger, Beiträge, pp. 385–6; Erläuterungen zu Hölderlins Dichtung (G4), Frankfurt am Main, Klostermann, 1981, p. 52 (53); Nietzsche, 2 vols, Pfullingen, Neske, 1961, vol. 1, pp. 226 ff.; Nietzsche, trans. David Farrell Krell, San Francisco, Harper-Collins, 1991, vol. 1, pp. 195 ff.; Sein und Zeit (G2), Frankfurt am Main, Klostermann, 1977; Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, Oxford, Blackwell, 1967, pp. 338, 339, 401. 35 See also Heidegger, Beiträge, p. 235. 36 Kant, Critique of Aesthetic Judgement, § 29, § 49n. 37 ibid, § 27. 38 Heidegger, Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik (G3), Frankfurt am Main, Klostermann, 1990; Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, trans. James S. Churchill, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1962 (trans. Richard Taft, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1990), § 30; Die Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie (G24), Frankfurt am Main, Klostermann, 1975, pp. 224–5, 242– 3; The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, pp. 158, 170; Kant, Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten, Ak., vol. IV, pp. 458, 461; Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, in The Moral Law, trans. H.J. Paton, London, Hutchinson, 1961, pp. 126, 129. 39 Heidegger, Beiträge, § 44. 40 Heidegger, Holzwege, p. 32, Poetry, Language, Thought, p. 43. 41 ibid., p. 54, p. 66. 42 Heidegger, Beiträge, p. 90.

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43 Kant, Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht, in Kant, Gesammelte Schriften, Berlin, Königlich Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1902–, § 15, vol. VII. 44 John Sallis, The Gathering of Reason, Athens OH, Ohio University Press, 1980, p. 175. 45 ibid., p. 173. 46 Kant, Critique of Aesthetic Judgement, § 27, p. 258 (p. 107). 47 Sallis, Gathering, p. 162; Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B444. 48 Kant, Anthropologie, § 32. 49 Kant, Critique of Aesthetic Judgement, p. 258 (p. 107). 50 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B354. 7 LEVINAS’S CRITICAL AND HYPOCRITICAL DICTION 1 J.B. Mozley, Sermons Before the University of Oxford and on Various Occasions, London, Longmans Green & Co., 1876, vol. 2, p. 40. 2 See Jacques Derrida, ‘Donner la mort’, in Jean-Michel Rabaté and Michael Wetzel (eds), L’Éthique du don. Jacques Derrida et la pensée du don, Paris, Métailié-Transition, 1992, pp. 70–1; The Gift of Death, trans. David Wills, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1995, pp. 70–1. 3 Emmanuel Levinas, Totalité et Infini: Essai sur l’extériorité, The Hague, Nijhoff, 1980, pp. 222–4; Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis, The Hague, Nijhoff, 1969, pp. 244–7. 4 Levinas, De Dieu qui vient à l’idée, Paris, Vrin, 1982. 5 ibid., p. 156. 6 Levinas, L’Au-delà du verset, Paris, Minuit, 1982, p. 157. 7 Levinas, Autrement qu’être ou au-delà de l’essence, The Hague, Nijhoff, 1978, p. 172; Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis, The Hague, Nijhoff, 1981, p. 135; Martin Heidegger, Unterwegs zur Sprache, Pfullingen, Neske, 1975, p. 252 (G12); On the Way to Language, trans. Peter D. Hertz, New York, Harper, 1971, p. 122. 8 Another analogy is offered by Beckett’s piece for television called Not I, where the whole of the screen is taken up by the organ of speech, which is also the place that takes in the food one enjoys and from which bread may be taken to give to the hungry stranger. Implied in the mouth is the ear through which are heard the words that imply the other speaker to which the tongue and the lips address their response. The words spoken may also be a response to what is seen, and the mouth is shaped like an eye. It is first of all the eye that Levinas takes as a metonym of the face, and indeed in Hebrew the words for face and eye (panim and ayn) overlap. But he goes as far as to say that the face in his sense may be the nape of another person’s neck – where would be tied the knot of one of the phylacteries that contain the Biblical texts about being tied by the Law, where the yoke is felt, and where the axe and the guillotine strike. Despite his remarks elsewhere about the dead eyes of the statue, Levinas seems to be willing to say that the face may even be a statue’s arm – corresponding on the left arm of a living being to the place near the heart where the other phylactery is tied. (See Levinas, ‘L’Autre, l’utopie et justice’, in Entre Nous, Paris, Grasset, 1991, p. 262, where mention of a sculpture by Rodin suggests that the reference to the nudity of the arm is not only to that of the flesh-and-blood arm represented in the sculpture but also to that of its stone representation. See also Jill Robbins, ‘Tracing responsibility in Levinas’s thought’, in Adriaan T. Peperzak (ed.), Ethics as First Philosophy. The Significance of Emmanuel Levinas, New York and

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9

10 11 12 13

14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30

London, Routledge, 1995, p. 180.) The Hebrew word for eye and therefore the cognate word for face are cognate with a word meaning fountain or source: source of tears, source of words, the words ‘Thou shalt not kill’ and De profundis clamavi. The lips of the mouth straddle this zone of ethical Desire and that of the erotic, a connection that we could go on to connect with that between the organs of sex and of micturition. Instead of reproducing the details of anatomical chiasmus recorded by Hegel in the Philosophy of Nature, let me end this note by recalling that it arose from the need to stress that when Levinas writes of the face-to-face it is of the significance of sheer humanity that he is speaking, not of properties like property or poverty (Autrement qu’être, p. 117; Otherwise than Being, p. 92) or sex that differentiate one particular human being from another. In the only version of Beckett’s work Not I (Not Eye?) that I have seen, the mouth belongs to an actress. However, to the ear if not to the eye, she does have a sexually undifferentiated name (namely Billie – Billie Whitelaw). See, for example, Michel Haar, ‘L’Obsession de l’autre. L’éthique comme traumatisme’, in Catherine Chalier and Miguel Abensour (eds), Emmanuel Levinas, Paris, L’Herne, 1991, and Bernhard Waldenfels, ‘Response and responsibility in Levinas’, in Adriaan T. Peperzak (ed.), Ethics as First Philosophy. Levinas, Autrement qu’être, p. 192; Otherwise than Being, p. 150. Levinas, De Dieu qui vient à l’idée, p. 151. Levinas, Difficile liberté, essais sur le judaïsme, Paris, Albin Michel, 1976, p. 120; Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism, trans. Seán Hand, London, Athlone, 1990, p. 90. John Llewelyn, The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience: A Chiasmic Reading of Responsibility in the Neighbourhood of Heidegger, Levinas and Others, London, Macmillan, New York, St Martin’s Press, 1991, p. 112. For comment on other topics see John Llewelyn, Emmanuel Levinas. The Genealogy of Ethics, London and New York, Routledge, 1995. Levinas, Autrement qu’être, p. 198; Otherwise than Being, p. 156. Levinas, Difficile liberté, pp. 189–94; Difficult Freedom, pp. 142–8. Levinas, De Dieu qui vient à l’idée, p. 151. Levinas, ‘La Réalité et son ombre’, Les Temps Modernes 38, 1948, p. 789; ‘Reality and its shadow’, trans. Alphonso Lingis, in Seán Hand (ed.), The Levinas Reader, Oxford, Blackwell, 1989, p. 143. Levinas, Autrement qu’être, p. 25; Otherwise than Being, p. 20. I thank Robert Bernasconi for suggesting this adaptation of the title of John Austin’s How to Do Things with Words, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1962. Levinas, Autrement qu’être, pp. 181–2; Otherwise than Being, pp. 142–3. Levinas, Difficile liberté, p. 248; Difficult Freedom, p. 191. Bernard Forthomme, Une philosophie de la transcendance: La métaphysique d’Emmanuel Levinas, Paris, Vrin, 1979, p. 78. Levinas, Totalité et Infini, p. 61; Totality and Infinity, p. 89. Emmanuel Levinas, Sur Maurice Blanchot, Montpellier, Fata Morgana, 1975, p. 42; Proper Names, trans. Michael B. Smith, London, Athlone, 1996, p. 149; Autrement qu’être, p. 233; Otherwise than Being, p. 185. Levinas, Totalité et Infini, p. 25; Totality and Infinity, p. 54. ibid., p. 62, p. 89. Levinas, Difficile liberté, p. 247; Difficult Freedom, p. 191. Levinas, Totalité et Infini, p. XIV; Totality and Infinity, p. 26. Richard A. Cohen (ed.), Face to Face with Levinas, Albany, State University of New York Press, 1986, p. 18. Levinas, Sur Maurice Blanchot, pp. 30, 77–8.

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31 Augusto Ponzio, Sujet et altérité: Sur Emmanuel Levinas, suivi de deux dialogues avec Emmanuel Levinas, Paris, L’Harmattan, 1996, p. 148. 32 Levinas, Totalité et Infini, p. 187; Totality and Infinity, pp. 211–12. 33 See ‘Transcendance et mal’, in De Dieu qui vient à l’idée; ‘Transcendence and evil’, in Levinas, Collected Philosophical Papers, trans. Alphonso Lingis, The Hague, Nijhoff, 1987. 34 Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, London, Penguin Books, 1977. 35 While acknowledging that the first noun in the title of Jeanne Delhomme’s La Pensée et le réel (Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1966) distinguishes a mode of thought akin to what is indicated by the Otherwise than Being of his own title, Levinas observes that she restricts to philosophy the saying of that mode of thought. See Autrement qu’être, p. 60, note 32; Otherwise than Being, p. 189, note 32. 8 ARENDT’S CRITIQUE OF POLITICAL JUDGEMENT 1 Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, Ronald Beiner (ed.), Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1982, p. 61. 2 Arendt, The Life of the Mind, Mary McCarthy (ed.), New York, Harcourt Brace Jovanovitch, 1978. 3 Arendt, Lectures, p. 7. 4 ‘The history of the world is the tribunal of the world.’ Although Arendt attributes these words to Hegel, and indeed they appear in the section on Weltgeschichte in Hegel’s Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, they are not put together in that order there. As mention of them by Adorno reminded me, they occur verbatim in Schiller. For giving me the specific reference to their occurrence in the penultimate verse of the poem ‘Resignation’ (Gedichte, 1776–88) I am grateful to Amit Sen. 5 Arendt, Lectures, p. 8. 6 F.W.J. von Schelling, System of Transcendental Idealism (1800), trans. Peter Heath, Charlottesville, University Press of Virginia, 1978. 7 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Aesthetic Judgement, trans. James Creed Meredith, Oxford, Clarendon, 1911, § 59. 8 ibid., Introduction, part IX. 9 Arendt, Lectures, p. 77. 10 ibid., p. 54. 11 ibid., p. 83; Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith, London, Macmillan, 1969, B104. 12 Arendt, Lectures, p. 53; Kant, Critique of Aesthetic Judgement, § 28. 13 Kant, Perpetual Peace, trans. Nicholas Murray Butler, New York, Columbia University Press, 1932, p. 7. 14 Emmanuel Levinas, Totalité et Infini: Essai sur l’extériorité, The Hague, Nijhoff, 1968, p. 223; Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis, The Hague, Nijhoff, 1969, p. 245. 15 Jacques Derrida, Spectres de Marx, Paris, Galilée, 1993. 16 Arendt, Lectures, p. 75. 17 ibid., pp. 9, 58; Kant, On History, Lewis White Beck (ed.), New York, Liberal Arts Press, 1963, pp. 51, 79.

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9 RESPECT AS EFFECTIVE AFFECTIVITY 1 Michel Henry, L’Essence de la manifestation, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1963; The Essence of Manifestation, trans. Girard Etzkorn, The Hague, Nijhoff, 1973. 2 Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, Tübingen, Niemeyer, 1972 (Gesamtausgabe 2); Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, Oxford, Blackwell, 1967, §§ 23, 27. 3 Henry, Phénoménologie matérielle, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1990. 4 Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason and Other Works on the Theory of Ethics, trans. Thomas Kingsmill Abbott, London, Longmans, 1873, p. 169. 5 ibid., p. 170. 6 ibid., p. 171. 7 ibid. 8 Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, trans. Lewis White Beck, New York, BobbsMerrill, 1956, p. 74. 9 ibid., p. 75. 10 Henry, L’Essence de la manifestation, p. 833; The Essence of Manifestation, p. 663. 11 Max Scheler, Der Formalismus in der Ethik und die materiale Werthethik, Bern, Francke, 1966, p. 334; Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values: A New Attempt toward the Foundation of an Ethical Personalism, trans. Manfred S. Frings and Roger L. Funk, Evanston, Northwestern University Press, 1973, p. 332. 12 Henry, L’Essence, p. 578; The Essence, p. 463. 13 ibid., p. 607, p. 761. 14 ibid., p. 808, p. 644. 15 ibid., p. 811, p. 646. 16 William James, Principles of Psychology, Chicago, Benton, 1952, p. 743. 17 Henry, Philosophie et phénoménologie du corps: Essai sur l’ontologie biranienne, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1965, p. 74: ‘les êtres humains en général accomplissent leurs mouvements sans y penser, mais non, toutefois, sans les connaître.’ 18 Emmanuel Levinas, Autrement qu’être ou au-delà de l’essence, The Hague, Nijhoff, second edn, 1978, p. 117; Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis, The Hague, Nijhoff, 1981, p. 92. 19 Jacques Lacan, ‘Le Stade du miroir comme formateur de la fonction du Je’, in Ecrits, Paris, Seuil, 1966, pp. 93–100. 20 Levinas, Totalité et Infini: Essai sur l’extériorité, The Hague, Nijhoff, 1990, p. 279; Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis, 1969, pp. 302–3. 21 Henry, Phénoménologie matérielle, p. 175. 22 Edmund Husserl, Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie, Erstes Buch: Allgemeine Einführung in die reine Phänomenologie, K. Schuhman (ed.), Husserliana 3, The Hague, Nijhoff, reprint 1976; Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, trans. W.R. Boyce Gibson, London, Allen & Unwin, 1931, § 49. 23 Henry, L’Essence, pp. 534–5; The Essence, p. 426; Meister Eckhart: A Modern Translation, trans. Raymond B. Blakney, New York, Harper & Row, 1941, p. 127. 24 Henry, L’Essence, p. 538; The Essence, p. 429; Meister Eckhart, p. 231. 25 Henry, Phénoménologie matérielle, p. 174. 26 Henry, L’Essence, p. 578; The Essence, p. 463.

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27 ibid., p. 580, p. 464. 28 Bernard Forthomme, ‘L’Épreuve affective de l’autre selon Emmanuel Lévinas et Michel Henry’, Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale 91, 1986, n. 1, p. 93. 29 Henry, Phénoménologie matérielle, p.178. 30 ibid., p. 179. 31 ‘Toute chose “morte” frémissait. Non seulement les étoiles, la lune, les forêts, les fleurs dont parlent les poètes mais aussi bien un mégot gisant dans un cendrier, un bouton de culotte blanc, patient, qui nous jette un coup d’oeil de sa flaque d’eau dans la rue, un petit morceau d’étoffe docile qu’une fourmi serre dans ses mandibules et tire à travers l’herbe haute vers des buts incertains et importants, une feuille de calendrier vers lequel se tend la main qui l’arrache de force à la chaude communauté des feuilles qui reste sur le bloc – tout cela me montrait son visage, son être intérieur, l’âme secrète qui se tait plus souvent qu’elle ne parle.’ Vassily Kandinsky, Regards sur le passé, trans. Jean-Paul Bouillon, Paris, Hermann, 1974, p. 93; Michel Henry, Voir l’invisible: Sur Kandinsky, Paris, François Bourin, 1988, p. 236. I thank Eliane Escoubas for making a copy of the latter book available to me. 32 Henry, C’est moi la vérité: Pour une philosophie du christianisme, Paris, Seuil, 1996. 33 See Dominique Janicaud, Le Tournant théologique de la phénoménologie française, Combas, Éclat, 1991. 34 Henry, C’est moi la vérité, p. 338. 35 In a personal communication, Michel Henry writes of an ‘altérité absolue…plus intérieure à moi-même que moi-même’ and of ‘le rapport d’intériorité réciproque de la Vie au vivant et du vivant à la Vie qui est en lui.’ 36 Henry, L’Amour les yeux fermés, Paris, Gallimard, 1976. 10 AESTHETHICS 1 Ted Hughes, ‘Full Moon and Little Frieda’, Selected Poems 1957–1967, London, Faber & Faber, 1972. 2 Emmanuel Levinas, ‘La Réalité et son ombre’, Les Temps Modernes 38, 1948, pp. 771–89; ‘Reality and its shadow’, in Emmanuel Levinas, Collected Philosophical Papers, trans. Alphonso Lingis, The Hague, Nijhoff, 1987, pp. 1–13. 3 Levinas, Le Temps et l’autre, Paris, Quadrige and Presses Universitaires de France, 1979, p. 26; Time and the Other [and additional essays], trans. Richard A. Cohen, Pittsburgh, Duquesne University Press, 1987, p. 44. 4 ibid., pp. 26–7, pp. 46–7. 5 Edmund Husserl, Phantasie, Bildbewusstsein, Erinnerung. Zur Phänomenologie der anschaulichen Vergenwärtigung, Texte aus dem Nachlass (1898–1925), (ed.) E. Marbach, 1980. 6 Levinas, La théorie de l’intuition dans la phénoménologie de Husserl, Paris, Alcan, 1930, pp. 141–2, The Theory of Intuition in Husserl’s Phenomenology, trans. André Orianne, Evanston, Northwestern University Press, 1973, pp. 94–5. 7 Husserl, Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie, The Hague, Nijhoff, 1976, I; Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, trans. W. R. Boyce Gibson, London, Allen & Unwin, New York, Humanities Press, 1931, § 37. 8 ibid. Husserl’s emphasis. 9 Levinas, Hors sujet, Montpellier, Fata Morgana, 1987, p. 64; Outside the Subject, trans. Michael B. Smith, London, Athlone, 1993, p. 44. 10 Jean Paris, L’Espace et le regard, Paris, Seuil, 1965, p. 154.

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11 Levinas, Hors sujet, p. 64; Outside the Subject, p. 44; François Poirié, Emmanuel Levinas qui êtes-vous?, Lyon, La Manufacture, 1987, p. 98. 12 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, La Prose du monde, Paris, Gallimard, 1969, p. 204; The Prose of the World, trans. John O’Neill, Evanston, Northwestern University Press, 1973, p. 150. 13 Levinas, Hors sujet, p. 69; Outside the Subject, p. 48. 14 Merleau-Ponty, ‘Un inédit de Maurice Merleau-Ponty’, Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale 67, October–December, 1962, p. 409. 15 Merleau-Ponty, Signes, Paris, Gallimard, 1960; Signs, trans. Richard C. McCleary, Evanston, Northwestern University Press, 1964. 16 Merleau-Ponty, L’Oeil et l’esprit, Paris, Gallimard, 1964, p. 31; ‘Eye and mind’, trans. Carleton Dallery, in Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Primacy of Perception, James M. Edie (ed.), Evanston, Northwestern University Press, 1964, p. 167. 17 ibid., p. 34, p. 169. 18 Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘Les peintures de Giacometti’, Les Temps Modernes 103, June 1954, p. 2226; ‘The paintings of Giacometti’, trans. Benita Eisler, in Jean-Paul Sartre, Situations, Greenwich CT, Fawcett, 1965, p. 129. 19 Merleau-Ponty, L’Oeil et l’esprit, p. 34; ‘Eye and mind’, p. 169. 20 Particularly if with Levinas one takes the sense of the ‘extraordinary word “God” ’ to depend unavoidably on responsibility to the other human being, an analogy to the alternatives posed here is posed by the difference between translations of the first verse of Psalm 121. The King James version says ‘I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help…’ The subordinate clause is replaced in the Jerusalem Bible by a question, to which the answer given is ‘My help comes from the Lord’. The Hebrew of the original allows both. 21 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D.F. Pears and B.F., McGuiness, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961, 6.421. 22 Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, Tübingen, Niemeyer, 1972; Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, Oxford, Blackwell, 1962, pp. 31, 44, 326, 329. Paul Celan, letter of May 18 1960 to Hans Bender, in Volker Neuhaus (ed.), Briefe an Hans Bender, Munich, Hanser Verlag, 1984, pp. 48–9: ‘I see no difference in principle between a handshake and a poem.’ Levinas, ‘De l’être à l’autre’, Noms propres, Montpellier, Fata Morgana, 1976, p. 59; Proper Names, trans. Michael B. Smith, London, Athlone, 1996, p. 40. 23 ‘Obzwar idea auf idein (noein) bezogen ist, so meint das Wort gerade nicht das Vor-gestellte des Vorstellens, sondern umgekehrt das Aufscheinen des Aussehens selbst, was die Aussicht bietet für ein Hinsehen. Das Wort will gerade nicht, neuzeitlich gedacht, den Bezug zum “Subjekt” anzeigen, sondern die Anwesung, das Aufscheinen im Aussehen und zwar als das, was anwesend zugleich Bestand gibt. Hier ist der Ursprung der Unterscheidung in das ti estin (essentia, quidditas) und hoti (existentia) in der Zeitlichkeit der idea…Das Seiende ist seiend in der beständigen Anwesenheit, idea, das Gesichtete in seiner Gesichtetheit (alêtheia).’ Heidegger, Beiträge zur Philosophie (Gesamtausgabe 65), Frankfurt am Main, Klostermann, 1989, pp. 208–9. For further reflections on this passage and the topics treated in the paragraphs leading up to my citation of it, see John Llewelyn, ‘Seeing through God’, in Jill Robbins (ed.), Thinking God Otherwise: Theology and Philosophy in Heidegger, Derrida, Levinas, Albany, State University of New York Press, forthcoming. Without pretending that when Heidegger and Hegel say that German and Greek are the languages most apt for philosophy they should have said the same of Welsh, I record that I have not yet been persuaded by the experts that dychmygu, commonly translated as ‘imagination’, has an etymology that includes a word for ‘picture’ or ‘image’, unless these words are given the sense Heidegger attributes to their

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24 25 26

27

28

29 30 31 32

Greek counterparts. The Latin mico can mean ‘to flash’, ‘to gleam’ or ‘to shine’. That ties in with what the Dictionary of the University of Wales says under mygr and, more distantly, with what it says under edmyg. Now all those meanings are possible for the Greek phantasia, which also carries the sense of (re)presentation and so of image. But I can imagine no etymological route from dychmygu to phantasia – or, for that matter, from phanstasia to imago. I can imagine a route from dychmygu to imaginare, but none of the meanings given for mygr contains the force of copying or re-presenting that the Greek may just bear. If, however, dych can function like re-, the prefix I find in the Dictionary in translations of some words beginning with dych, then dychmygu could mean something like ‘re-shine’, which would be enough to force me to concede that my hopes of finding no sense of representation or idea (eidos as Vorstellung) in the Welsh word are unfounded. I am aware that the objection could be made that my hopes must be dashed from the first if what the Dictionary gives for the Welsh word is accepted; but I want to understand how the etymology works. A lot turns on whether dych can function like re-. If it doesn’t, one will have to ask again whether that sense of representation or copying can be borne by mygu or mygr. Lewis and Short offer IC (AIC) as a root for imago, and the sense given for that is ‘like’ (l-ik-e!). That may be all there is to say. Unless one goes on to say too that this IC is to be found also in the Greek ichnos or ikhnos (ixnoj), ‘mark’, ‘trace’, ‘footstep’, ‘track’, which do have that sense of re-presentation, repetition, signification, idea, image, etc., though not unambiguously or unenigmatically in Levinas’s interpretation of it as ‘trace’. Gaston Bachelard, La Poétique de la rêverie, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1974, p. 173, see also p. 159; The Poetics of Reverie, trans. Daniel Russell, Boston, Beacon Press, 1969, p. 200, see also p. 185. Heidegger, Beiträge, p. 191. ‘There is activity when a conscious being uses means with an end in view. And we call those objects passive on which our activity is exercised, in as much as they do not spontaneously aim at the end which we make them serve.’ Sartre, L’Être et le néant, Paris, Gallimard, 1943, p. 32; Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel E. Barnes, London, Methuen, 1969, p. xl. ‘Das Seiende wird nicht seiend dadurch, dass erst der Mensch es anschaut im Sinne gar des Vorstellens von der Art der subjektiven Perception. Vielmehr ist der Mensch der vom Seienden Angeschaute,…weshalb im Griechentum die Welt nicht zum Bild werden kann.’ Heidegger, ‘Die Zeit des Weltbildes’, in Holzwege (Gesamtausgabe 5), Frankfurt am Main, Klostermann, 1972, pp. 83–4, ‘The age of the world picture’, trans. William Lovitt, in Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, New York, Harper, 1977, p. 131. Cézanne, letter to Émile Bernard of October 23 1905, cited by Jacques Derrida, La Vérité en peinture, Paris, Flammarion, 1978, pp. 6–18; The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1987, pp. 1–13. Levinas, ‘Martin Buber et la théorie de la connaissance’, Noms propres, p. 48; Proper Names, p. 33. Merleau-Ponty, La Phénoménologie de la perception, Paris, Gallimard, 1945, p. 48; The Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962, p. 256. Emphasis added. Merleau-Ponty, ‘Le Doute de Cézanne’, Sens et non-sens, Paris, Nagel, 1966, p. 33; Sense and Non-Sense, trans. Hubert C. Dreyfus and Patricia Allen Dreyfus, Evanston, Northwestern University Press, 1964, p. 19. ibid., p. 35, p. 21.

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33 ‘Les “blancs” en effet, assument l’importance, frappent d’abord.’ Stéphane Mallarmé, Preface to Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, Paris, Gallimard, 1945, p. 455. 34 Plato, Phaedrus, p. 250. 35 Merleau-Ponty, L’Oeil et l’esprit, p. 93; The Primacy of Perception, p. 190. 36 Merleau-Ponty, La Phénoménologie de la perception, p. VIII; The Phenomenology of Perception, p. xiv. 37 Merleau-Ponty, Sens et non-sens, p. 33; Sense and Non-Sense, p. 19. 38 Merleau-Ponty, Signes, p. 23; Signs, p. 16. 39 Levinas, Noms propres, p. 65; Proper Names, p. 45. 40 Merleau-Ponty, L’Oeil et l’esprit, p. 69; The Primacy of Perception, p. 181. 41 Merleau-Ponty, Le Visible et l’invisible, Paris, Gallimard, 1964, p. 314; The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis, Evanston, Northwestern University Press, 1968, p. 261; Husserl, Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie, Zweites Buch: Phänomenologische Untersuchungen zur Konstitution, The Hague, Nijhoff, 1952 (Husserliana IV); Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, Second Book: Studies in the Phenomenology of Constitution, trans. Richard Rojcewicz and André Schuwer, Dordrecht, Kluwer, 1989, § 36. 42 Merleau-Ponty, Sens et non-sens, p. 33; Sense and Non-Sense, p. 19. 43 Merleau-Ponty, Le Visible et l’invisible, p. 269; The Visible and the Invisible, p. 216. 44 John Llewelyn, The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience: A Chiasmic Reading of Responsibility in the Neighbourhood of Levinas, Heidegger and Others, London, Macmillan, New York, St Martin’s, 1991. 45 Merleau-Ponty, Le Visible et l’invisible, p. 269; The Visible and the Invisible, p. 215. 11 ALETHAESTHETHICS 1 The Poems of Emily Dickinson, Thomas H. Johnson (ed.), Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press, Belknap Press, 3 vols, 1955, Poem 1129. Numbers given in the text are those of this edition. 2 Mark C. Taylor, Erring: A Postmodern A/theology, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1984. The second letter of the first word of the original title is reversed. While my departure from the letter of that title is a mark of my personal computer’s limitations (and those of the technology responsible for the title as printed on his book’s copyright page), I have every confidence that the author will acknowledge that my rewriting faithfully captures his title’s spirit. 3 Archibald MacLeish, ‘The private world’, in Emily Dickinson: Three Views, papers delivered at Amherst College as part of its observance of the bicentennial celebration of the Town of Amherst, Massachusetts on 23 October 1959, Amherst, Amherst College Press, 1960. 4 R.W. Franklin, The Editing of Emily Dickinson: A Reconsideration, Madison, The University of Wisconsin Press, 1967, p. 121. 5 S.P. Rosenbaum, A Concordance to the Poems of Emily Dickinson, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1964. 6 Geoffrey Hartman, Criticism in the Wilderness: The Study of Literature, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1980, pp. 129–32, cited by Sharon Cameron, Choosing Not Choosing: Dickinson’s Fascicles, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1992, p. 3. 7 R.W. Franklin, op. cit., p. 121.

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8 See John Llewelyn, ‘Derrida, Mallarmé and Anatole’, in David Wood (ed.), Philosophers’ Poets, London, Routledge, 1990, pp. 93–110. 9 Cameron, Lyric Time: Dickinson and the Limits of Genre, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979. 10 Cameron, Choosing Not Choosing, p. 19. 11 Cameron, Lyric Time, p. 9. 12 Cameron, Choosing Not Choosing, p. 5. 13 Sigmund Freud, Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, London. Hogarth Press and The Institute of Psycho-analysis, vol. XVII, 1955, pp. 218 ff. 14 Cameron, Choosing Not Choosing, p. 29. 15 Derrida, Positions, Paris, Minuit, 1972, p. 72; Positions, trans. Alan Bass, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1981, p. 44. 16 Archibald MacLeish, op. cit., p. 19. 17 Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, London, Cape, 1974; The Writing Life, London, Picador, 1989. 18 Alfred Kazin, A Writer’s America: Landscape in Literature, London, Thames & Hudson, 1988, p. 126. 19 Stéphane Mallarmé, ‘Le tombeau d’Edgar Poe’, Oeuvres complètes, Paris, Gallimard, 1945, p. 191; T.S. Eliot, ‘Little Gidding’, line 127, and ‘Note sur Mallarmé et Poe’, La Nouvelle Revue Française XIV(158), 1926, pp. 524–6. 20 G.W.F. Hegel, Encyclopaedia of Philosophical Sciences, trans. W. Wallace and A.V. Miller, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1971–5, § 250, Note. 21 Like someone singing a blues or gospel number ‘one more time’, Kilvert intones throughout the entire paragraph a ‘once more’ in which ‘nevermore’ can be heard: ‘Oh, Aberedw, Aberedw. Would God I might dwell and die by thee. Memory enters in and brings back the old time in clear vision and waking dream, and again I descend from the high moor’s half encircling sweep and listen to the distant murmur of the river as it foams down the ravine from its home in the Green Cwm and its cradle in the hills. Once more I stand by the riverside and look up at the cliff castle towers and mark the wild roses swinging from the crag and watch the green woods waving and shimmering with a twinkling dazzle as they rustle in the breeze and shining of the summer afternoon, while here and there a grey crag peeps from among the tufted trees. And once again I hear the merry voices and laughter of the children as they clamber down the cliff path among the bushes or along the rock ledges of the riverside or climb the Castle Mount, or saunter along the narrow green meadow tree-fringed and rockbordered and pass in and out of Llewellyn’s cave, or loiter down the valley to Cavan Twm Bach and cross the shining ferry at sunset, when the evening shadows lie long and still across the broad reaches of the river. Oh, Aberedw, Aberedw.’ Kilvert’s Diary 1870–1879: Selections from the Diary of the Rev. Francis Kilvert, William Plomer (ed.), London, Penguin Books, 1977, pp. 304–5. 22 Cameron, Lyric Time, p. 15. 23 Levinas, Noms propres, Montpellier, Fata Morgana, 1976, pp. 59–66, 155–6; Proper Names, trans. Michael B. Smith, London, Athlone, 1996, pp. 40–6, 104–5. 24 Paul Ricoeur, Soi-même comme un autre, Paris, Seuil, 1990, pp. 387–93; Catherine de Bauw, L’Envers du sujet. Lire autrement Emmanuel Levinas, Brussels, Ousia, 1997. For a review of the latter see John Llewelyn, Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 20(2), 1999. 25 See Rodolphe Gasché, ‘Perhaps – a modality? On the way with Heidegger to language’, Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 16(2), 1993. 26 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe, Oxford, Blackwell, 1953, pp. 46–50.

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27 Levinas, A l’heure des nations, Paris, Minuit, 1988, p. 192. I have heard it said that Emily Dickinson is a poet of accidie. 28 Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, London, Penguin Books, revised and enlarged edition, 1965, pp. 287–8. 29 Gillian Rose, Mourning Becomes the Law: Philosophy and Representation, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996, p. 98. 30 Levinas, ‘La Poésie et l’impossible’, in Difficile liberté, pp. 176–8; ‘Poetry and the impossible’, in Difficult Freedom, p. 132. 31 Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, Ronald Deiner (ed.), Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1982. 32 Levinas, ‘Transcendance et mal’, in De Dieu qui vient à l’idée, Paris, Vrin, 1982, p. 207; ‘Transcendence and evil’, in Collected Philosophical Papers, trans. Alphonso Lingis, The Hague, Nijhoff, 1987, p. 186. See also Levinas, Autrement qu’être ou au-delà de l’essence, The Hague, Nijhoff, 1978, pp. 210–18; Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis, The Hague, Nijhoff, 1981, pp. 165–71. 33 Rose, Mourning Becomes the Law, p. 135, citing Levinas; Time and the Other, trans. R.A. Cohen, Pittsburgh, Duquesne University Press, 1987, p. 72 (Le Temps et l’autre, Paris, Quadrige/Presses Universitaires de France, 1983, p. 60). 12 EPILOGUE 1 This is my own faulty translation of: ‘Il est peut-être temps de reconnaître dans l’hypocrisie, non seulement un vilain défaut contingent de l’homme, mais le déchirement profond d’un monde attaché à la fois aux philosophes et aux prophètes.’ Emmanuel Levinas, Totalité et Infini: Essai sur l’extériorité, The Hague, Nijhoff, 1980, p. XII; Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. A. Lingis, The Hague, Nijhoff, 1969, p. 24. 2 Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1984, p. 81. 3 Levinas, Totalité et Infini, p. 51; Totality and Infinity, p. 79. 4 ibid., p. XIV, p. 26. 5 Levinas, Difficile liberté: Essais sur le judaïsme, Paris, Albin Michel, 1976, p. 21; Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism, trans. Seán Hand, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins Press, 1990, p. 7. 6 Levinas, ‘Comment parler?’, section 1 of ‘Jean Wahl sans avoir ni être’, in Hors sujet, Montpellier, 1987, pp. 100–3; Jacques Derrida, ‘Comment ne pas parler. Dénégations’, in Psyché. Inventions de l’autre, Paris, Galilée, 1987, pp. 535–95. 7 Pierre Lachièze-Rey, L’Idéalisme kantien, Paris, Vrin, 1950 (first edn 1932), p. 378. Lachièze-Rey was a predecessor of Merleau-Ponty’s at the University of Lyon. 8 See Brenda Judge, Thinking about Things, Edinburgh, Scottish Academic Press, 1985, ch. 3. 9 Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology, trans. Dorion Cairns, The Hague, Nijhoff, 1960, p. 41. 10 The lexicographical sources used here are Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Deutsches Wörterbuch, dritter Band, Leipzig, Hirzel, 1862, Friedrich Kluge, Etymologisches Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache, Berlin, Walter de Gruyter, 1989; Alfred Götze, Im Auftrag der Arbeitsgemeinschaft für deutsche Wortforschung, Berlin, Walter de Gruyter, 1940. 11 ‘ “A l’image de Dieu”, d’après Rabbi Haïm Voloziner’, in Levinas, L’Au-delà du verset. Lectures et discours talmudiques, Paris, Minuit, 1982, pp. 182–200.

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12 ‘De la signifiance du sens’, in Levinas, Hors sujet, Montpellier, Fata Morgana, 1987, p. 142; Outside the Subject, trans. Michael B. Smith, London, Athlone, 1993, p. 95. 13 Levinas, De l’existence á l’existant, Paris, Vrin, 1981, pp. 93–105; Existence and Existents, trans. Alphonso Lingis, The Hague, Nijhoff, 1978, pp. 57–64; Totalité et Infini, pp. 164–5; Totality and Infinity, pp. 190–1. For a concise statement about the il y a see also the candid but always friendly work of Adriaan Theodoor Peperzak, Beyond: The Philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, Evanston, Northwestern University Press, 1997, especially pp. 196–7. For further references see the index of John Llewelyn, Emmanuel Levinas. The Genealogy of Ethics, London, Routledge, 1995. 14 See Catherine Chalier, De l’intranquillité de l’âme, Paris, Payot, 1999, a slim volume with contents of huge scale. Chapter 2 treats of the deceptions of Stoic ataraxia. 15 Levinas, Totalité et Infini, p. 51; Totality and Infinity, p. 79. 16 Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, London, Bohn, 1853, part I, section I, ch. II. 17 John Llewelyn, ‘sELection’, in Alan Milchman and Alan Rosenberg (eds), Postmodernism and the Holocaust, Amsterdam and Atlanta, Rodopi, 1998. 18 Levinas, Hors sujet, pp. 131, 142; Outside the Subject, pp. 87, 94. 19 Levinas, Quatre lectures talmudiques, Paris, Minuit. 1968, p. 185; Nine Talmudic Lectures, trans. Annette Aronowiicz, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1990, p. 87. 20 John Llewelyn, Emmanuel Levinas. The Genealogy of Ethics, pp. 196–7. 21 ‘Le nom de Dieu d’après quelques textes talmudiques’, in Levinas, L’au-delà du verset, p. 156, 22 Jacques Derrida, Adieu à Emmanuel Levinas, Paris, Galilée, 1997. 23 Derrida, ‘Donner la mort’, in Jean-Michel Rabaté and Michael Wetzel (eds), L’Éthique du don. Jacques Derrida et la pensée du don, Colloque de Royaumont, December 1990, Paris, Métailé-Transition, 1992, pp. 70–71, 69 respectively; The Gift of Death, trans. David Wills, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1992, pp. 71 and 69 respectively (translation slightly modified). The question is treated also in John Llewelyn, The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience: A Chiasmic Reading of Heidegger, Levinas and Others, London, Macmillan, 1991. 24 Levinas, Hors sujet, pp. 131–2; Outside the Subject, p. 88. 25 ‘Au-delà de l’état dans l’état’, in Levinas, Nouvelles lectures talmudiques, Paris, Minuit, 1996, pp. 45–76. See Derrida, Adieu à Emmanuel Levinas, p. 138. 26 Rabbi Hayyim de Volozhyn, L’Âme de la vie (Nefesh Hahayyim), trans. B. Gross, Paris, Verdier, 1986. 27 ‘ “A l’image de Dieu”, d’après Rabbi Haïm Voloziner’, in Levinas, L’Au-delà du verset, pp. 199–200. 28 Levinas, Hors sujet, p. 141; Outside the Subject, p. 93. 29 Levinas, Entre nous: Essais sur le penser-à-l’autre, Paris, Grasset, 1991, p. 262. 30 In The Middle Voice. See especially chapter 6, in particular pp. 136–7. See also David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a MoreThan-Human-World, New York, Pantheon, 1996, for a jubilant expression of faith that much of my programme can be carried out, drawing especially on the work of Merleau-Ponty. 31 ‘Ethique et esprit’, pp. 15–24 in Levinas, Difficile liberté, p. 22; ‘Ethics and spirit’, pp. 3–10 in Difficult Freedom, p. 8. 32 Levinas, De l’oblitération, Entretien avec Françoise Armengaud à propos de l’oeuvre de Sosno, Paris, Éditions de la Différence, 1990, p. 8.

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33 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Rhizome: Introduction, Paris, Minuit, 1976. The connection, rhizomatic or otherwise, between the rhizome in the writings of Deleuze and anarchy in the writings of Levinas is a question I hope to discuss elsewhere. 34 G.W.F. Hegel, Encyclopaedia, Philosophy of Mind, trans. William Wallace, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1971, § 455. 35 ibid., § 456, Zusatz. 36 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Kathleen Coburn (gen. ed.), Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1969–, vol. 4 (I), The Friend, Barbara E. Rooke (ed.), p. 514. See also p. 519, note 3: ‘Both Plato (Socrates in Theaetetus 155d) and Aristotle (Metaphysics 982b) say that philosophy begins in wonder.’ Levinas says that responsibility is the wonder of that wonder. 37 Levinas, Totalité et Infini, p. 51; Totality and Infinity, p. 79. 38 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement, trans. John Creed Meredith, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1911, § 28. 39 Levinas, Autrement qu’être ou au-delà de l’essence, The Hague, Nijhoff, 1978, pp. 119–20, 179–94; Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis, The Hague, Nijhoff, 1981, pp. 93, 140–52, 193. 40 Levinas, Difficile liberté, pp. 39, 107; Difficult Freedom, pp. 22, 78; Levinas, Autrement qu’être, p. 143; Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, p. 112. I thank Catherine Chalier, Rabbi René Gutman, Peter Hayman and Rabbi David Sedley for identifying the ‘Talmudic text’ Levinas refers to as probably Yebamoth 121b and Bava Kamma 50a. The latter version reads: ‘R. Aha, however, said: Nevertheless…[thus bearing out what the Scripture] says, “And it shall be very tempestuous round about him”, which teaches that the Holy One, blessed be He, is particular with those round about Him even for matters as light as a single hair. R. Nehonia derived the same lesson from the verse, “God is greatly to be feared in the assembly of the saints and to be had in reverence of all them that are about Him.” ’ See also Ps 50:3: ‘Our God shall come, and shall not keep silence: a fire shall devour before him, and it shall be very tempestuous round about him.’ 41 Jean-Luc Nancy, ‘Dies Irae’, in La faculté de juger, Colloque de Cerisy, Paris, Minuit, 1985, p. 54. 42 ibid. 43 I use the word ‘synthesis’ broadly enough to cover what Kant might prefer to call synopsis and co-ordination. Rudolf Makkreel takes the key notion of synthesis for Kant to be that of adding to the concept of an object the concept of one of its attributes, where these attributes are empirical or categorial. But Kant’s definition of synthetic judgements in the third Critique is not that specific. It says only that synthetic judgements ‘go beyond the concept and even the intuition of the object’, which allows what goes beyond to be a feeling, for instance of pleasure or displeasure. Because that feeling is an empirical feeling on the part of the person making the judgement of taste the judgement would count as synthetic on Makkreel’s definition; it would be synthetic a posteriori. However, because the judgement implies that everyone should agree with the person making it, it is synthetic a priori. Makkreel holds that when Kant says ‘Judgements of taste are synthetic’ (Kant, Critique of Judgement, § 36) what he means is that they are synthetic only in form. Whether or not we agree with him on this terminological question, we can agree that judgements of taste are not cognitive, but express rather a feeling of pleasure or pain. In the case of the judgement of beauty the feeling of pleasure is based on a harmony of understanding and imagination. In the case of the judgements expressive of what Kant

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44

45 46 47 48 49

50 51 52 53 54

calls the dynamic sublime an initial disconcerting disharmony is resolved into a sense of reconcertedness under reason and the moral law. Both aesthetic states are ultimately states of regress to stasis, of the suspension of the progression of linear time. As such they are an analogue in the Critique of Judgement to the side-by-sideness of synopsis in the Critique of Pure Reason. My broad sense of synthesis includes harmony and synopsis along with synthesis strictly defined. The common factor is the notion of a whole, whether that toward which one moves or of a whole that is presupposed. It is worth noting that synthetic judgements in Kant, as in Aristotle, may also be regarded as non-tautologically analytic of the state of affairs they describe. It depends on whether we are thinking of the order of advancing to knowledge or of the retrospective order of being. See Rudolf A. Makkreel, Imagination and Interpretation in Kant: The Hermeneutical Import of the Critique of Judgment, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1990, pp. 47–8. Martin Heidegger, Grundfragen der Philosophie: Ausgewählte ‘Probleme’ der ‘Logik’ (G45), Frankfurt am Main, Klostermann, 1984, ch. 5; John Llewelyn, ‘On the saying that philosophy begins in thaumazein’, in Andrew Benjamin (ed.), Post-Structuralist Classics, London, Routledge, 1988, pp. 173–91. Geoffrey Keynes (ed.), Blake: Complete Writings, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1972, p. 794. ibid., citing Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, bk. 2, in John M. Robertson (ed.), The Philosophical Works of Francis Bacon, London, George Routledge & Sons, 1905, p. 110. Aristotle, Politics, bk. 1, ch. 5, 1254b 3–4, in Richard McKeon (ed.), The Basic Works of Aristotle, New York, Random House, 1941, p. 1132. Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, p. 110. Immanuel Kant, The Conflict of Faculties/Der Streit der Fakultäten, trans. Mary J. Gregor, New York, Abaris Books, 1979; John Llewelyn, ‘Ancillae (the concord of faculties)’, in Richard Rand (ed.), Logomachia: The Conflict of Faculties, Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press, 1992, pp. 127–53. Jacques Derrida, Demeure: Maurice Blanchot, Paris, Galilée, 1998, p. 98. See above, note 1. This qualification adverts to my hope to discuss on another occasion what is referred to as ‘science, delusion and the appetite for wonder’ in the subtitle of Richard Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow, London, Penguin, 1998. Levinas, Totalité et Infini, pp. 35, 61, 268–9; Totality and Infinity, pp. 63, 89, 292. Jacques Derrida, La Vérité en peinture, Paris, Flammarion, 1978, p. 148; The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1987, p. 129.

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J.G. Fichte, Science of Knowledge (Wissenschaftslehre), with the First and Second Introductions, trans. Peter Heath and John Lachs, New York, Appleton Century/Crofts, 1970; Gesamtausgabe, Reinhard Lauth and Hans Jacob (eds), Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt, Friedrich Frommann Verlag, 1965, vols 1, 2. ——, Gesamtausgabe, Reinhard Lauth and Hans Jacob (eds), Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt, Friedrich Frommann Verlag, 1965. Bernard Forthomme, ‘L’Épreuve affective de l’autre selon Emmanuel Lévinas et Michel Henry’, Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale 91, 1986. ——, Une philosophie de la transcendance: La métaphysique d’Emmanuel Levinas, Paris, Vrin, 1979. R.W. Franklin, The Editing of Emily Dickinson: A Reconsideration, Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 1967. Sigmund Freud, Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, London, Hogarth Press and The Institute of Psycho-analysis, 1955–74. E.J. Furlong, Imagination, London, Allen & Unwin, 1961. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Hegel’s Dialectic, trans. P. Christopher Smith, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1976. Rodolphe Gasché, ‘Perhaps – a modality? On the way with Heidegger to language’, Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 16(2), 1993. J. Gonda, ‘Reflections on the Indo-European Medium’, Lingua IX, 1960. Alfred Götze, Im Auftrag der Arbeitsgemeinschaft für deutsche Wortforschung, Berlin, Walter de Gruyter, 1940. Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Deutches Wörterbuch, dritter Band, Leipzig, Hirzel, 1862. Martial Gueroult, ‘Le Jugement de Hegel sur l’Antithétique de la Raison Pure’, Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale 38, 1931. A German translation of this article is included in Rolf-Peter Horstmann (ed.), Seminar: Dialektik in der Philosophie Hegels, Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp, 1978. Michel Haar, ‘L’Obsession de l’autre. L’éthique comme traumatisme’, in Catherine Chalier and Miguel Abensour (eds), Emmanuel Levinas, Paris, L’Herne, 1991. H.S. Harris, Hegel’s Development, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1972. Geoffrey Hartman, Criticism in the Wilderness: The Study of Literature, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1980. G.W.F. Hegel, Faith and Knowledge, trans. W. Cerf and H.S. Harris, Albany, State University of New York Press, 1977. ——, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1977. ——, The Difference Between Fichte’s and Schelling’s System of Philosophy, trans. H.S. Harris and Walter Cerf, Albany, State University of New York Press, 1977. ——, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, trans. E.H. Haldane and F.H. Simson, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974. ——, Early Theological Writings, trans. T.M. Knox, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1971. ——, Encyclopaedia of Philosophical Sciences, trans. W. Wallace and A.V. Miller, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1971–5. ——, Science of Logic, trans. A.V. Miller, London, Allen & Unwin, 1969. Martin Heidegger, Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis) (Gesamtausgabe 65), Frankfurt am Main, Klostermann, 1989.

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——, Time and the Other [and additional essays], trans. Richard A. Cohen, Pittsburgh, Duquesne University Press, 1987. ——, De Dieu qui vient à l’idée, Paris, Vrin, 1982. ——, L’Au-delà du verset, Paris, Minuit, 1982. ——, De l’existence á l’existant, Paris, Vrin, 1981; Existence and Existents, trans. Alphonso Lingis, The Hague, Nijhoff, 1978. ——, Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis, The Hague, Nijhoff, 1981. ——, Totalité et Infini: Essai sur l’extériorité, The Hague, Nijhoff, 1980; Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. A. Lingis, The Hague, Nijhoff, 1969. ——, Le Temps et l’autre, Paris, Quadrige and Presses Universitaires de France, 1979; Time and the Other [and additional essays], trans. Richard A. Cohen, Pittsburgh, Duquesne University Press, 1987. ——, Autrement qu’être ou au-delà de l’essence, The Hague, Nijhoff, 1978; Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis, The Hague, Nijhoff, 1981. ——, Difficile liberté, essais sur le judaïsme, Paris, Albin Michel, 1976; Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism, trans. Seán Hand, London, Athlone, 1990. ——, Noms propres, Montpellier, Fata Morgana, 1976; Proper Names, trans. Michael B. Smith, London, Athlone, 1996. ——, Sur Maurice Blanchot, Montpellier, Fata Morgana, 1975; Proper Names, trans. Michael B. Smith, London, Athlone, 1996. ——, Quatre lectures talmudiques, Paris, Minuit. 1968, Nine Talmudic Lectures, trans. Annette Aronowicz, Bloomington, Indian University Press, 1990. ——, ‘La Réalité et son ombre’, Les Temps Modernes 38, 1948, p. 789; ‘Reality and its shadow’, trans. Alphonso Lingis, in Seán Hand (ed.), The Levinas Reader, Oxford, Blackwell, 1989, p. 143. ——, La Théorie de l’intuition dans la phénoménologie de Husserl, Paris, Alcan, 1930; The Theory of Intuition in Husserl’s Phenomenology, trans. André Orianne, Evanston, Northwestern University Press, 1973. John Llewelyn, ‘Seeing Through God’, in Jill Robbins (ed.), Thinking God Otherwise: Theology and Philosophy in Heidegger, Derrida, Levinas, Albany, State University of New York Press, forthcoming. ——, review of Catherine de Bauw, L’Envers du sujet. Lire autrement Emmanuel Levinas, Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 20(2), 1999. ——, ‘sELection’, in Alan Milchman and Alan Rosenberg (eds), Postmodernism and the Holocaust, Amsterdam and Atlanta, Rodopi, 1998. ——, Emmanuel Levinas. The Genealogy of Ethics, London, Routledge, 1995. ——, ‘En ce moment même…une répétition qui n’en est pas une’, in Le Passage des frontières. Autour du travail de Jacques Derrida, Colloque de Cerisy, Paris, Galilée, 1994. ——, ‘Ancillae (the concord of faculties)’, in Richard Rand (ed.), Logomachia: The Conflict of Faculties, Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press, 1992. ——, The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience: A Chiasmic Reading of Responsibility in the Neighbourhood of Heidegger, Levinas and Others, London, Macmillan, New York, St Martin’s Press, 1991. ——, ‘Derrida, Mallarmé and Anatole’, in David Wood (ed.), Philosophers’ Poets, London, Routledge, 1990.

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——, ‘On the saying that philosophy begins in thaumazein’, in Andrew Benjamin (ed.), Post-Structuralist Classics, London, Routledge, 1988. Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1984. Archibald MacLeish, ‘The private world’, in Emily Dickinson: Three Views, papers delivered at Amherst College as part of its observance of the bicentennial celebration of the Town of Amherst, Massachusetts on 23 October 1959, Amherst, Amherst College Press, 1960. Rudolf A. Makkreel, Imagination and Interpretation in Kant: The Hermeneutical Import of the Critique of Judgment, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1990. Stéphane Mallarmé, ‘Le tombeau d’Edgar Poe’, in Oeuvres complètes, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, Paris, Gallimard, 1945. ——, Preface to Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard, in Oeuvres complètes, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, Paris, Gallimard, 1945. A. Meillet and J. Vendryes, Traité de grammaire comparée des langues classiques, Paris, Champion, 1924. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, La Prose du monde, Paris, Gallimard, 1969; The Prose of the World, trans. John O’Neill, Evanston, Northwestern University Press, 1973. ——, Sens et non-sens, Paris, Nagel, 1966; Sense and Non-Sense, trans. Hubert C. Dreyfus and Patricia Allen Dreyfus, Evanston, Northwestern University Press, 1964. ——, L’Oeil et l’esprit, Paris, Gallimard, 1964; ‘Eye and mind’, trans. Carleton Dallery, in Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Primacy of Perception, James M. Edie (ed.), Evanston, Northwestern University Press, 1964. ——, Le Visible et l’invisible, Paris, Gallimard, 1964; The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis, Evanston, Northwestern University Press, 1968. ——, The Primacy of Perception, James M. Edie (ed.), Evanston, Northwestern University Press, 1964. ——, ‘Un inédit de Maurice Merleau-Ponty’, Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale 67, October–December, 1962. ——, Signes, Paris, Gallimard, 1960; Signs, trans. Richard C. McCleary, Evanston, Northwestern University Press, 1964. ——, La Phénoménologie de la perception, Paris, Gallimard, 1945; Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962. J. B. Mozley, Sermons Before the University of Oxford and on Various Occasions, London, Longmans Green & Co., 1876. Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, London, Penguin, 1992. Jean-Luc Nancy (ed.), Du sublime, Paris, Belin, 1988; Of the Sublime: Presence in Question, trans. Jeffrey Librett, Albany, State University of New York Press, 1993. ——, ‘Dies Irae’, in La Faculté de juger, Colloque de Cerisy, Paris, Minuit, 1985. Jean Paris, L’Espace et le regard, Paris, Seuil, 1965. Adriaan Theodoor Peperzak, Beyond: The Philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, Evanston, Northwestern University Press, 1997. —— (ed.), Ethics as First Philosophy. The Significance of Emmanuel Levinas, New York and London, Routledge, 1995. Plato, Theaetetus, Phaedrus.

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François Poirié, Emmanuel Levinas qui êtes-vous?, Lyon, La Manufacture, 1987. Augusto Ponzio, Sujet et altérité: Sur Emmanuel Levinas, suivi de deux dialogues avec Emmanuel Levinas, Paris, L’Harmattan, 1996. Paul Ricoeur, Soi-même comme un autre, Paris, Seuil, 1990. Jill Robbins, Altered Reading: Levinas and Literature, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1999. ——, ‘Tracing Responsibility in Levinas’s Thought’, in Adriaan T. Peperzak (ed.), Ethics as First Philosophy. The Significance of Emmanuel Levinas, New York and London, Routledge, 1995. Gillian Rose, Mourning Becomes the Law: Philosophy and Representation, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996. S.P. Rosenbaum, A Concordance to the Poems of Emily Dickinson, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1964. John Sallis, Crossings: Nietzsche and the Space of Tragedy, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1991. ——, ‘Monet’s Grainstacks: Shades of Time’, Tema Celeste 30, 1991. ——, Echoes: After Heidegger, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1990. ——, Spacings – of Reason and Imagination, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1987. ——, Delimitations: Phenomenology and the End of Metaphysics, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1986. ——, The Gathering of Reason, Athens OH, Ohio University Press, 1980. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel E. Barnes, London, Methuen, 1969. ——, ‘Les Peintures de Giacometti’, Les Temps Modernes 103, June 1954, ‘The paintings of Giacometti’, trans. Benita Eisler, in Situations, Greenwich CT, Fawcett, 1965. ——, L’Être et le néant, Paris, Gallimard, 1943. ——, L’Imaginaire, Paris, Gallimard, 1940; The Psychology of the Imagination, trans. Mary Warnock, London, Methuen, 1948. ——, L’imagination, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1936; Imagination: A Psychological Critique, trans. Forrest Williams, Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 1962. Max Scheler, Der Formalismus in der Ethik und die materiale Werthethik, Bern, Francke, 1966; Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values: A New Attempt toward the Foundation of an Ethical Personalism, trans. Manfred S. Frings and Roger L. Funk, Evanston, Northwestern University Press, 1973. F.W.J. Schelling, The Philosophy of Art, trans. Douglas W. Stott, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1989; K.F.A. Schelling (ed.), Sämtliche Werke, Stuttgart and Augsburg, J.G. Cotta, 1856–61, vol. V. ——, The Unconditional in Human Knowledge: Four Early Essays (1794–6), trans. Fritz Marti, Lewisburg, Bucknell University Press, London, Associated University Presses, 1980; K.F.A. Schelling (ed.), Sämtliche Werke, Stuttgart and Augsburg, J.G. Cotta, 1856–61, vol. I. ——, System of Transcendental Idealism (1800), trans. Peter Heath, Charlottesville, University Press of Virginia, 1978; K.F.A. Schelling (ed.), Sämtliche Werke, Stuttgart and Augsburg, J.G. Cotta, 1856–61, vol. III.

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——, K.F.A. Schelling (ed.), Sämtliche Werke, Stuttgart and Augsburg, J.G. Cotta, 1856–61. ——, ‘Über die Construction in der Philosophie’, Kritisches Journal der Philosophie (1802); K.F.A. Schelling (ed.), Sämtliche Werke, Stuttgart and Augsburg, J.G. Cotta, 1856–61, vol. V. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, London, Bohn, 1853. P.F. Strawson, ‘Imagination and perception’, in L. Foster and J.W. Swanson (eds), Experience and Theory, Amherst, University of Massachusetts Press, 1970. Richard I. Sugarman, Rancor Against Time, Hamburg, Meiner, 1980. Oswald Szemerényi, Einführung in die vergleichende Sprachwissenschaft, Darmstadt, Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1970. Mark C. Taylor, Erring: A Postmodern A/theology, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1984. A.H. Vaihinger, The Philosophy of As If, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1924. Rabbi Hayyim de Volozhyn, L’Âme de la vie (Nefesh Hahayyim), trans. B. Gross, Paris, Verdier, 1986. Bernhard Waldenfels, ‘Response and responsibility in Levinas’, in Adriaan T. Peperzak (ed.), Ethics as First Philosophy. The Significance of Emmanuel Levinas, New York and London, Routledge, 1995. Mary Warnock, Imagination, London, Faber & Faber, 1976. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D.F. Pears and B.F. McGuiness, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961. ——, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe, Oxford, Blackwell, 1953.

268

INDEX

Abel, K. 98, 192–3 Abgrund (abyss) 96, 109, 113, 117–18, 192 Abraham 136, 197 absolute feeling 164 absolute knowledge 10, 88–92, 94, 154, 158, 164, 182, 193 accusative/accusatory 108, 123, 138, 150, 171–2, 181, 199 Accuser 138 active/passive 9–11, 48–9, 50, 135, 136, 163, 208, 211 addressee 195–8, 200, 215, 222, 227–8 aesthetic 17, 116, 132, 141, 170, 215, 226; ethical 132, 137, 145–50, 170–81, 195–6, 213; ideas 117–18; political 139–45, 148–9, 204 affectivity 156–61, 164, 166, 200, 224, ‘amazing’ 28–9, 170, 197, 228, 233, 234; see also thaumazein, wonder amphibology 132, 199–200, 202, 214, 234 Anstoss (resistance, impact, offence) 113, 115–16, 224, 227 antinomy 66, 69–81, 86, 234 approach 164 Arendt, H. 6, 136–50, 203, 213, 229 Aristotle 93, 229; nous 231; phantasia 28, 63, 211, 226; phronêsis 143 Armengaud, F. 219 art 67–8, 74, 111, 116, 117, 131–3, 137, 170–81, 219–20; science 180 as 10, 12–15, 28, 91, 200, 211, 221, 226, 232, 234; hermeneutic 22 atheism 165, 207, 231

Aufhebung (subl(im)ation) 5, 63, 89, 91–4, 100–4, 123, 170, 182–3, 192, 222 Augustine 166 Austin, J. 9, 129 Bachelard, G. 167, 176 Bacon, F. 229–31 banalisation 138, 182, 184, 186, 193, 196, 200, 203, 205, 216 Baudelaire, C. 167, 174 Bayle, P. 70, 73 Beaufret, J. 123 beautiful 118, 142–3, 146–7, 149, 179, 195, 226, 232 Benveniste, É. 45–8 Bergson, H. 19, 48, 72, 183 Berkeley, G. 176–7 Bigger, C. 2 Blake, W. 229–30 Blanchot, M. 102, 137, 231 boredom 183 Bradley, F.H. 103 Buber, M. 178 Cabbala 130 Cameron, S. 189–93, 203 Casey, E. 1 Celan, P. 11, 176, 193, 199 Cézanne, P. 172–3, 175, 176–9 choice see decision chôra (room, place) 204, 232 Coleridge, S.T. 12; esemplastic 24, 64, 222; existence 223 concrete universality 58

269

INDEX

conscience (consciousness/conscience) 7, 108, 122, 125, 128, 135, 149, 165, 173, 216 construction 54–62, 66, 75, 115, 214 contradiction 66, 77–8, 81–6, 98, 103, 134, 192–3, 202 counter, against 106, 234 counterfactuality 13, 221, 234 creation 20–1, 23, 59, 121, 132, 191, 224, 231 Critchley, S. 10 critical, critique 9, 122, 124, 131, 132, 134, 191, 194–5, 200, 202, 205, 212–13, 215, 217, 220, 226, 232–4 cryptography 191 dead time 128–9 decision, choice 1, 10, 48, 86, 93, 108, 111, 113–14, 117, 124, 134–5, 173, 191, 204, 215, 217, 221, 230, 232, 234 deconstruction 184 dediction 123–4, 126, 133–6, 199, 205 Deleuze, G. 105 deontology 178–9 deponence 10–12, 15, 28, 39, 210, 232 Derrida, J. 1, 4, 184, 224; arche-writing 26; Blanchot 231; differance 48–9, 98, 100, 184; Glas 88–97, 103; miracle 231; mourning 204; performative 129; remainder 8, 89–90, 92, 102, 154; spectre 148–9; welcome 216 Descartes, R. 19; certainty 201; cogito 137, 153, 207, 213; God 137, 164–6; Princess Elizabeth 22–3, 207, 209, 222, 233 desire/Desire 121–2, 130, 141, 166, 200, 215–16, 224, 231 Devil 138 diachrony 9, 134 Dickinson, E. 182–98, 204 differance 48–9, 98, 100, 184 dogmatism 75–81 Dostoevsky, F. 132, 172 Dufour-Kowalska, G. 167 Eckhart, Meister 164–6, 169, 211 ecology 111 Eichmann, A. 203–4

Einbildungskraft (imagination) 3, 5, 21, 59, 64, 75, 109, 115, 141, 206, 208, 210–11, 233 Einstein, A. 2 element 170, 193 empathy 214 emphasis 123, 200 enigma 7, 9, 167, 189, 201–2, 205, 218 enigmadgination 232 enigmagination 201, 205 Ereignis (event) 44, 95, 96, 114–15 Escoubas, E. 11, 33 ethical 114, 122, 132, 135, 137, 142, 145–50, 195–6, 206, 215, 222; aesthethical 175, 178, 195–6, 214; poetico-ethical 204–5; politico-ethical 146, 221; proto-ethical 147, 171 evil 138 exemplar 145, 147 existence 186, 222–5 experience 20–1, 108, 166 exteriority 168, 171 face, face-to-face 4, 8–9, 127, 128, 136, 137, 148, 154, 164, 172–3, 176, 206–7, 211, 218–19, 220, 222 fancy 230 Feuerbach, L. 100–1 Fichte, J.G. 56, 59, 63, 65, 106, 227; dogmatism 75 forgetting 97, 124 fourfold 91, 104, 111, 112 Franklin, R.W. 185, 188 Frege, G. 126 Freud, S. 13, 91, 103, 135, 144, 183, 192 Furlong, E.J. 1 Gelassenheit (letness) 38, 44–5, 164 Genet, J. 88, 90–5, 104 God 59, 93, 96, 121, 128, 130, 137–8, 149, 157, 164–5, 172, 176, 181, 196, 205, 207, 211–13, 218, 221, 229, 231 Goethe, J.W. 131, 233 Gonda, J. 45–8 good beyond being 128, 179, 195, 208, 231 goodbye, goodday 196, 199, 229 Gueroult, M. 70, 78–81, 85

270

INDEX

happy ending 182–3, 216 Hartman, G. 187–9 Hassidism 218 Hegel, G.W.F. 5; antinomy in Kant 69–81; antithetical senses 192; Aufhebung 5, 91, 94, 103, 192; cunning of reason 140; Derrida 88–97; history 140; monstrosities 88; negation 25, 75, 234; plasticity 2; prologues 4; sense-certainty 9, 197 Heidegger, M. 6, 184; amazement 228; ecstasis 163; dichtendes Denken 68; Ereignis 44, 95; Gelassenheit 38, 44–5, 68; history 140; history of being 184; idea 176; truth 163 Henry, M. 6, 7, 153–69, 231; affectivity 156–61, 164, 166; life 164–6, 168–9; love 154–5, 157, 159, 165, 168; self-affection 157, 164, 165, 167–8; spatiality 153–4, 159–61, 164 Heraclitus 61, 72, 115, 130, 158, 170, 228 hineni (behold me at your service) 163, 197, 200 history 131, 140, 190 Hölderlin, F. 61, 68, 107 holy 111, 121, 130, 164, 220 Höyer, C.H. 54 Hughes, T. 170 human 121–3, 131, 147, 176, 198, 205, 214, 215, 217–18, 220, 223, 228 Hume, D. 41, 72, 104, 155, 160, 199 Husserl, H. 2, 180; crisis of European sciences 25–6, 124, 138; doxic thesis 171; imagination 219; intentionality 163; noetic-noematic 11, 171; other minds 26, 207; passive synthesis 125, 210; Phantasie 2; reanimation 124–5; zu den Sachen selbst 219 hyper-Critical 134, 226 hypocrisy 121, 134, 138, 191, 194, 205, 206, 216, 217, 220, 227, 232 hypoCritical 8–10, 16, 27, 124, 136–8, 191–4, 200, 202, 212–13, 215, 217, 220, 226, 233 iconoclasm 172 if-then 13, 15–19, 28, 221, 226, 227, 232–4

il y a (there-is) 137, 170–1, 181, 183, 192, 212–13 illeity 123, 130–1, 137, 164, 208, 212, 224 image 34, 62, 65, 132, 137, 176–7, 221, 226; of God 211 imagination: Aristotle 210, 226; associative 24; Descartes 209; disintegrative 212, 214; Hume 199; Husserl 2, 219; imadgination 6, 28, 105–18, 215, 226; is/is not 115; manifold meanings 1–3; oscillation in Fichte 63, 65; productive 24, 33, 117; spatiality 19; Thomism 209; and understanding in Kant 33–6, 66; see also Einbildungskraft, In-bildung, phantasia, Phantasie ‘in terms of ’ 28, 216, 226, 228 In-bildung (imagination) 3, 4, 208, 210–11 indifference point 58, 60, 64, 75 intellectual intuition 37, 51, 55–7, 67, 75, 76 intentionality: centrifugal/centripetal 125, 162, 163, 171–2, 180 irony 92–4, 100 is 12–16, 28, 115, 116, 186, 222–4 James, W. 168 Jankélévitch, V. 10, 217 Jawlensky, A. 167 judgement 13, 35–6, 51, 65, 139, 145, 149, 195, 221–2; aesthetic 141; determinant 21, 54, 58, 63, 104, 145, 213, 225, 233; of God, 136; and intuition 65; moral 143, 224; political 141, 145, 149; reflective 54, 104, 145, 213, 233; of taste 141; will 209 justice 128, 140, 145, 147–8, 163, 172, 195, 214–15, 222, 224, 227, 234 Kandinsky, V. 167–9, 178 Kant, I.: antinomy and Hegel 69–81, 86; Bacon 229; common root 5, 34, 36–7, 51, 56, 61, 74, 203, 212; dogmatism 76; history 139–40; Imagination 221; modal categories 18–20; moral law 51, 66, 114, 122, 135, 142, 145, 147, 149, 154–6;

271

INDEX

motive/incentive 155–7; peace 139–44, 146; politics 139–40; respect 6, 38–41, 149, 153, 154, 158, 169; schematism 3, 7, 14, 15–18, 27, 36, 42, 52, 74, 104, 109, 112, 154, 210–11, 213, 221, 229; understanding and imagination 33–6, 51–2, 66; war 146; see also judgement, sublime kavod (glory, honour, respect; yours respectfully, truly, sincerely) 164, 223, 234 Kazin, A. 195–6 Kierkegaard, S. 191, 215 Klee, P. 174 Lacan, J. 91, 93, 163 Lachièze-Rey, P. 208 Lambert, J. 18 laughter 130, 204 law 21, 51, 93, 97, 99, 116, 121, 144, 148, 173, 191, 193, 203, 225–7, 234; Jewish 134, 136; moral 51, 66, 114, 122, 135, 142, 145, 147, 149, 154–7, 214, 215, 219, 222, 225 Lebenswelt (lifeworld) 22, 165 Leibniz, G. 73, 99, 212 Levinas, E.: aesthetic 170–81; affectivity 163–4; Buber 178; criticism 27, 124, 195; dediction 123–4, 126, 133–6; Desire 121–2, 200, 215–16, 231; disincarnation 206; hypocrisy 206; il y a 137, 170–1, 181, 183, 192, 212–13; illeity 123, 130–1, 137, 164; Merleau-Ponty 20, 182, 206; mineral language 180; myth 131–2; Pascal 20; philosophy 137–8, 200, 201; prediction 125–8, 138; production 207; sacrifice 223; saying/said 9, 28, 121, 126–8, 173; Shakespeare 205; signifiance 27, 127, 131, 175, 179 life 164–6, 168–9, 199 liturgy 132 Locke, J. 159, 160 love 51, 134, 136, 137, 154–5, 157, 159, 165, 168, 179, 204; see also desire/Desire Luther, M. 211 Lyotard, J.-F. 206

MacLeish, A. 184–7, 191, 193, 199 madness 105–6, 110, 115, 127, 134, 177, 197, 219 Makkreel, R. 42 Mallarmé, S. 104, 179, 188 manifestation 154, 158 Marchand, A. 174 Marx, K. 182, 183 maybe 95, 130, 131, 136–7, 138, 201–2, 212, 221, 232 mentality 4, 220, 231 meontology 108–9, 132 Merleau-Ponty, M. 6, 12, 22–4, 175; ambiguity 63, 174; corps propre 26–7, 206, 210; depth 178; incarnation 206; other 181–2; reduction 179; testification 173 messianism 126–30, 148–9 metaphor 64, 184, 221, 234 metontology 107–11 metonymy 234 middle voice 10–11, 45–9, 135, 163 Morandi, P. 173, 177 Moses 7, 14, 18, 136 mot juste 194, 225 mourning 198, 204 Murdoch, I. 1–2 Nancy, J.-L. 224 necessity 97–8, 104, 225 new 182–4, 187, 191, 196–8, 205 Nietzsche, F. 95, 96, 106, 130 or 18–20, 190–1, 233 oscillation 8, 10, 25, 63–5, 68, 106, 111, 115–18 Parmenides 177 particularity 142–3, 145, 147, 212, 214 Pascal, B. 20, 173 passive/active 9–11, 48–9, 50, 135, 136, 163, 208, 211 passive synthesis 125, 210 passivity 50, 68, 126, 128, 133, 135, 136, 163, 177, 208, 209; see also receptivity pathethical 167 peace 139, 144, 146, 148–9, 193, 201, 234 performative 129, 133, 221

272

INDEX

phantasia: Aristotle 28, 63, 211 Phantasie: Husserl 2 place 112–13 Plato 78, 103, 106, 125; chôra 204, 232; good beyond being 128, 179, 195, 208, 223, 231; mathematicals 19, 210; Phaedrus 23, 95, 122, 134, 194, 199, 205; Sophist 78, 86; Timaeus 204, 205, 232 poetry, poietic 67–8, 112, 126, 141–2, 149, 172, 183, 196, 198–9, 203–4, 222, 225, 229, 230, 232; and science 178, 180, 230 political: aesthetic 139–50, 148–9, 202–5; ethical 146, 221–2; poietic 149, 225 polytheism 137, 213 Ponge, F. 195 Popper, K. 122 prediction 125–8, 138 presence 94, 113, 154, 160, 176, 205 production 136, 207 progress 143–4, 148–9, 177 Proust, M. 193, 199 psychisme 28 psychosis 10, 28, 127, 194, 210 reason, rational, rationalist 3, 5, 7, 28, 36–41, 43, 50–1, 54–5, 61–2, 64, 66, 69–70, 75–81, 93, 100, 105–6, 109, 113–14, 116–18, 122, 127, 135–6, 140, 142–6, 156–8, 163, 182, 202, 209, 213–14, 216, 228, 229, 231, 234; principle of sufficient/deficient reason 64, 109 receptivity 39, 208 recognition 108 regard 174–7, 202, 231 religion 74, 102, 132, 168, 202, 207, 228, 232 repetition 196–9, 201, 205 respect 6, 38–41, 142, 146–7, 149, 153, 154, 158, 160, 162, 167, 169, 222 responsibility 121, 127–8, 130–1, 133, 170, 172–4, 176, 181, 194–5, 205, 212, 215, 222–7, 231 rhizome 103, 220 Ricoeur, P. 200 rights 147, 223

Rodin, A. 219 root 5, 34, 36–7, 51, 56, 61, 65, 68, 74, 144, 168, 202–3, 206, 212, 220 Rose, G. 204 Rousseau, J.-J. 105, 111 sacrifice 128, 223 Sallis, J. 6, 105–18 salvation 135, 137, 184, 216 Sartre, J.-P. 77, 172; Giacometti 174 Saussure, F.: langue/parole 9, 90, 126 saying/said 9, 28, 121, 126–8, 173, 194–5, 197–9, 213–14, 218; see also dediction, prediction scepticism 19, 134, 201–2 Scheler, M.: affectivity 159–61, 165 Schelling, F.W.J. 5, 6, 50–68, 106, 213; allegory 63–5; construction and schematism 54–62, 66, 75–6, 226; contradiction 66; Heidegger 68; indifference point 58, 60, 64, 75; judgement 142; myth 65, 67–8, 141–2; Potenz 63, 75; symbolism 63–5 schematism 3, 7, 14, 15–18, 27, 36, 42, 52, 63, 74, 85, 104, 109, 112, 114, 202, 205, 206, 209–11, 213, 221, 229, 232; construction in Schelling 54–62, 66, 75, 226 Schmidt, D. 147 science 178, 180, 230, 232 Searle, J. 9 self-affection 157, 164, 165, 167–8 sensus communis (common sense) 141, 150, 209, 214 Shakespeare, W. 131, 172, 205 signature 88, 90, 94, 127, 133, 199, 205, 234 signifiance 27, 127, 131, 175, 179 singularity 1, 7, 21, 92, 93, 104, 122, 123, 126, 127, 198, 213–14, 216–17, 222, 228, 234 Smith, A.: hidden hand 140; impartial spectator 214; sympathy 214 Sosno, S. 219 space, spatiality, distance, exteriority 18–19, 26, 40, 48–9, 53–7, 62, 66, 71–4, 86, 90, 99, 102, 104, 105, 107–9, 111,

273

INDEX

112–13, 115, 117, 153–4, 159–61, 164, 165, 168, 171, 174, 190, 209, 231, 234 Spinoza, B. 212 Stevens, W. 191 Strawson, P. 1 structuralism 154 stupor, stupidity 196–7, 198, 203 subjunctivity 15, 204, 227, 234; see also if-then sublime 116–18, 146, 149–50, 182, 200, 221, 223, 224, 226–7, 232, 234

111, 137, 158, 163, 176, 178, 179, 182, 194–5, 225, 230, 232, 233 typification 14, 17, 23, 27, 39, 51, 145, 180, 206, 213, 221, 229

thaumazein 106, 197, 203, 208, 228; see also ‘amazing’, wonder things, ‘things themselves’ 20, 97, 110–15, 165, 169, 175, 195–8, 206, 219, 227 this 88, 198 time-space 18, 117, 118 trace 8, 137, 148, 164, 181, 202, 205, 218 transcendental illusion 7, 78–9, 82, 85, 97, 118, 206 trope 199–200 truth, alêtheia, truthfulness 93, 96, 102,

war 144, 146, 149, 234 Warhol, A. 179 Warnock, M. 1 Weil, S. 204 welcome 136, 200, 204, 216–18 Wittgenstein, L. 1–2, 7, 9, 13, 104 Wolff, C. 41 woman 92–4, 96 wonder, astonishment, marvel 2, 10, 28, 106, 203, 208, 223, 224, 228, 231–2; see also ‘amazing’, thaumazein Wood, D. 195

undecidability 96, 98, 103, 107, 190 understanding: wide and narrow senses 34–5, 42, 51–2, 182, 220 Vaihinger, H. 10 Volozin, Rabbi H. 211, 217–18

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