Philosophy en noir

Miroslav Petříček Philosophy en noir Thought necessarily reflects the times. Following the tragedy of the Holocaust, this fact is becoming ever clearer, and it may be the reason postwar philosophical texts are so difficult to understand, since they confront incomprehensibly traumatic experiences. To exist in the second half of the 20th century and beyond, philosophy has had to rewrite its tradition and its discourse, radically transforming itself. Should it be capable of bearing witness to the time, this metamorphosis in philosophy is necessary. Philosophy en noir is a record of this transformation. “Miroslav Petříček is one of our most beloved intellectuals. He is, in a sense, a popular philosopher, someone who is not afraid to translate himself and his ideas for the public arena. This, however, does not mean that he trivializes philosophical issues; instead, he realizes that it is important to shift his perspective, so he can speak about them a bit differently.” Petr Fischer, Právo “Philosophy en noir is a book on philosophical darkness of astounding lucidity. It intrigues the reader with elegant and profound reflections on popular culture that may be compared to Siegfried Kracauer’s groundbreaking mid-20th century analyses of “mass culture,” film, and photography. The author masterfully demonstrates how to take the nonserious seriously and build it into a narrative of playful wisdom.” Ludger Hagedorn, Institute for Human Sciences, Vienna ISBN 978-80-246-3853-9 Václav Havel Series KAROLINUM PRESS VÁCLAV HAVEL SERIES Miroslav Petříček Philosophy en noir Rethinking Philosophy after the Holocaust VÁCLAV HAVEL SERIES petricek - obalka-2019-VHS_27mm.indd 1 16.09.19 14:12 Philosophy en noir Rethinking Philosophy after the Holocaust Miroslav Petříček Published by Charles University, Karolinum Press Translation by Phil Jones Cover and layout by /3. dílna/ Typeset and printed by Karolinum Press, Czech Republic First English edition Originally published in Czech as Filosofie en noir, Prague: Karolinum Press, 2018. © Karolinum Press, 2019 © Miroslav Petříček, 2019 Translation © Phil Jones, 2019 ISBN 978-80-2463853-9 ISBN 978-80-2463854-6 (pdf) ISBN 978-80-2463855-3 (epub) ISBN 978-80-2463856-0 (mobi) This work was supported by the European Regional Development Fund project “Creativity and Adaptability as Conditions of the Success of Europe in an Interrelated World” (reg. no.: CZ.02.1.01/0.0/0.0/16_019/0000734). Charles University Karolinum Press 2019 www.karolinum.cz [email protected] KAROLINUM PRESS Miroslav Petříček Philosophy en noir Rethinking Philosophy after the Holocaust To Aunt Hermanová and Ms. Doris CONTENTS PART ONE Crisis 11 PART TWO Catastrophe 109 Bibliography 363 16 Conway Carruthers and decides to feign collaboration with the armament manufacturers in order to thwart their dastardly plans. But do not be confused by the farfetchedness of the plot– Ambler’sbook is one of the first examples of the political thriller and masterfully evokes the atmosphere of living under the threat of atomic death, as well as its cultural and political backdrop. And just as Doctor Fu Manchu, though of oriental origin, is amaster of Western science, so science and its soft underbelly form the theme of Ambler’sbook, as is clear from the conversation Professor Barstow has with arepresentative of the weapon manufacturers: “The ideals of science are constructive, not destructive,” answered the Professor stiffly. “Science in the past has been shamefully exploited. But it has learnt to protect itself.” Simon Groom shook his head. “No, Professor, you are wrong. While scientists are men, science cannot protect itself. The desire for supremacy which is in the hearts of all men prevents it. Even as Italk to you now, events are proving you wrong. The first atomic bomb has been made!”2 We might also note that the ominous collocation “atom bomb” first appears in literature intended for “the widest readership”, namely the novel by H.G. Wells The World Set Free (1914). This book not only predicts the discovery of atomic energy almost twenty years before it happened (1933), but also the industrial applications that saw nuclear power definitively replace steam in 1953. However, in the book the discovery of cheap, easily available energy (nuclear plants are not only safe but smaller than traditional plants and can be situated everywhere) causes the complete collapse of civilisation, growing unemployment, unrest, and eventually adevastating war and 2 Eric Ambler, The Dark Frontier , Fontana Books, London 21967 (1936), ch. 1. 17 the dropping of an atom bomb on Berlin. The soldier in the plane carrying this new weapon, sat with his legs spread wide over the long, coffin-shaped box which contained in its compartments the three atomic bombs, the new bombs that would continue to explode indefinitely and which no one so far had ever seen in action.3 During the mid-1920s, H.G. Wells still imagined that adevastating world war would be the first stage in the establishment of anew system in aworld liberated from work in which man is transformed into artist. However, after the end of what was the First (bona fide) World War and in the period immediately preceding the Second, such adream was scarcely any longer feasible. Eight years after Husserl’slectures on crisis, Graham Greene, whose early novel AGun For Sale came out in 1936, published the next of what he termed his “entertainments”, the thriller The Ministry of Fear. The book depicts the atmosphere of akind of general but now unquestionably genuine crisis, firstly by setting the events in aLondon exposed night after night to German bombing, and secondly by virtue of the fact that what had hitherto been deemed fiction is now undeniably real. In the following passage, the hero of Greene’snovel has adream in which he speaks with his deceased mother and attempts to describe the world in which he is obliged to live: I’m hiding underground, and up above the Germans are methodically smashing London to bits all round me. (…) It sounds like athriller, doesn’t it, but the thrillers are like life– more like life than you are, this lawn, your sandwiches, that pine. You used to laugh at the books Miss Savage read– about spies, and murders, and wild motor-car chases, but, dear, that’sreal 3 H.G. Wells, The World Set Free. AStory of Mankind , MacMillan, London 1914, ch.2, sec. 3. 18 life: it’swhat we’ve all made of the world since you died. I’m your little Arthur who wouldn’t hurt abeetle and I’m amurderer too. The world has been remade by William Le Queux. (…) Let me lend you the History of Contemporary Society . It’sin hundreds of volumes, but most of them are sold in cheap editions: Death in Piccadilly , The Ambassador’sDiamonds , The Theft of the Naval Papers , Diplomacy , Seven Days’ Leave , The Four Just Men …4 The books he refers to are real and identifiable. William Le Queux is the author of exciting (albeit interminable) novels in which he gives vent to his concern for British politics with afictional description of the invasion of Britain by the German army. His Invasion of 1910 came out in 1906. However, in Spies of the Kaiser (1909), Revelations of the Secret Service (1911), and many other semi-fictional, pseudo-documentary books he exposed the danger to Britain of German spy rings and other forms of international conspiracy. Death in Piccadilly is awhodunit from 1936 written by Elliot Bailey, Seven Day’sLeave is afilm (aromantic comedy) made in 1942, and The Four Just Men is Edgar Wallace’sfirst novel, written in 1905. This last is especially noteworthy for its ambivalence: the four just men of the title, while murderers of noble origin and method, only liquidate those who represent amenace to society and whom the police do not have enough proof to prosecute. And finally there is Gregory Bellairs, author of detective stories written in the 1930s and 40s, who is possibly present in Greene’snovel in the guise of Mrs Bellairs, one of the conspirators. In order to ease out the links between these sensation novels and Europe’scrisis, let us remain amoment with the best known of the authors referred to, Edgar Wallace, the harbinger of this style in many respects. The blurb to the Czech translation of The Four Just Men, though referring to detective fiction, captures very accurately the emerging subgenre of pulp fiction, when it says of the author: 4 Graham Greene, The Ministry of Fear , Penguin, Vintage Classics, pp.95–96. 19 Edgar Wallace is an author with the mind of agenius. This novel, which displays masterly ingenuity, is agood example of his detection skills. The reader’simagination is refined and exercised by the inexhaustible combinations that pervade the complex web of intrigue. One is unable to resist the excitement of being caught up in this detective story. To turn apage of this book is to close the doors of the present and to be swept away from everyday life, to forget everything and to live with Wallace. And amoment spent in Wallace’scompany is simply priceless.5 The “four just men” are actually three (the fourth is hired). The novel is the first of aseries. Six books in total feature the same protagonists, the last being Again the Three Just Men published in 1929. In the first, the quartet of conspirators attempts to dissuade aBritish MP from submitting adraft bill on the extradition of foreigners who are in danger of being executed by their political opponents upon returning to their home country. They begin by sending warning letters that mysteriously find their way directly to the table of their addressee. However, the MP is determined and so the subsequent warnings (always announced in advance) are more spectacular: abomb planted in parliament, asecret visit to anewspaper editor, etc. All of this foments panic in the population at large. The perpetrators are invisible and elude capture: there is no saying where or when they will turn up next. State officials keeping their own private vigil over justice are apoplectic and sense athreat to the very foundations of civilisation itself: “It is monstrous,” said the Colonial Secretary hotly; “it is inconceivable that such astate of affairs can last. Why, it strikes at the root of everything, it unbalances every adjustment of civilisation.”6 5 Edgar Wallace, Čtyři spravedliví (The Four Just Men) , transl. Běla Vrbová-Pavlousková, Julius Albert, Prague 1940. 6 Edgar Wallace, The Four Just Men , House of Stratus, Cornwall 2001, p.72 (ch.VIII). 20 The inhabitants of London are horrified by the seeming ubiquity and omnipotence of these just men (not even the police can save the life of the MP, who is electrocuted by his telephone), and the atmosphere of the city on the day of reckoning is reminiscent of astate of war or emergency. And within an hour there was witnessed in London ascene that has no parallel in the history of the Metropolis. From every district there came asmall army of policemen. They arrived by train, by tramway car, by motorbus, by every vehicle and method of traction that could be requisitioned or seized. They streamed from the stations, they poured through the thoroughfares, till London stood aghast at the realisation of the strength of her civic defences.7 Edgar Wallace undoubtedly created the prototype, though his was avery free model allowing for considerable variability within agenre it is difficult to put aname to. Perhaps this is why we speak of a“sensation” novel (even though the term was originally applied to Victorian authors), since the category of detective story would be too narrow. The sensation novel sometimes contains the seeds of apolitical thriller, and in this respect Eric Ambler’sprecursor was H.C. McNeile (Sapper) in books featuring Bulldog Drummond (the first of which, Bulldog Drummond: The Adventures of aDemobilised Officer Who Found Peace Dull, was published in 1920), in which afaint echo could be heard of J. Conrad’sThe Secret Agent, published in 1907. All of these books are about more than merely untangling acriminal plot. The sensationalism of their narratives was not driven simply by an attempt to attract the most readers, nor did it reflect the gradual commodification of literature, aphenomenon very visible in the serialised novels and booklets sold in railway station kiosks referred to by Walter Benjamin8. These books also act as 7 Ibid., p.98 (ch. X). 8 Walter Benjamin, “Kriminalromane, auf Reisen”, Gesammelte Werke 4.1, ed. Rolf Tiedemann– Hermann Schweppenhäuser, 7 vols, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main 1972–1989. 21 amirror, however distorted, held up to that which is already here in that it is in the process of arriving. In their own way, sensation novels model an uncertain and indefinable, yet still real fear– the heart of darkness at the very core of civilisation, something akin to crisis. This disquiet, this testing of the boundaries of the classical whodunit (it was during this time that authors such as Agatha Christie, S.S. Van Dine, Freeman W. Crofts, Dorothy Sayers, et al. published their first books), is perhaps best illustrated in the books of H.C. McNeile, who wrote under the pseudonym Sapper, since as aserving officer in the British Army he was not permitted to publish under his own name. His hero, Hugh Drummond, is aman of action, though it is not only his superb physical condition that distinguishes him from his companions, but also his natural intelligence. His adversary in the first books is Carl Petersen, acriminal mastermind who operates under various different guises but whose modus operandi involves contract work for plutocrats with the aid of puppet conspirators. The sole aim of these plutocrats is to subvert the existing order and benefit from the ensuing chaos. In the very first novel we encounter aBolshevik revolutionary who has moved to England, where he is bent upon applying his skills: Iknow not what this young man has done: Icare less. In Russia such trifles matter not. He has the appearance of abourgeois, therefore he must die. Did we not kill thousands– aye, tens of thousands of his kin, before we obtained the great freedom? Are we not going to do the same in this accursed country?9 In his bruising struggle with the conspirators and their puppet masters, Hugh Drummond is reluctantly reminded of his wartime experiences: 9 H.C. McNeile (Sapper), Bulldog Drummond , Hodder & Stoughton, London 1920, VII, ch. I. 22 He felt singularly wide-awake, and, after awhile, he gave up attempting to go to sleep. The new development which had come to light that evening was uppermost in his thoughts; and, as he lay there, covered only with asheet, for the night was hot, the whole vile scheme unfolded itself before his imagination. The American was right in his main idea– of that he had no doubt; and in his mind’seye he saw the great crowds of idle foolish men led by afew hot-headed visionaries and paid blackguards to their so-called Utopia. Starvation, misery, ruin, utter and complete, lurked in his mental picture; spectres disguised as great ideals, but griming sardonically under their masks. And once again he seemed to hear the toc-toc of machine guns, as he had heard them night after night during the years gone by. But this time they were mounted on the pavement of the towns of England and the swish of the bullets, which had swept like swarms of cockchafers over No Man’sLand, now whistled down the streets between rows of squalid houses...10 Anarchists continue to undermine civilisation in Sapper’snext novel, The Black Gang (1922), in which, with the aid of corrupt politicians, they try to hammer “another nail in the coffin of Capital. And, by heaven! Abig one”11 and infect England with Bolshevism. In the third in the series (The Third Round, 1923), Carl Petersen muses on the workings of the world and says to his partner in crime and mistress: Take Drakshoff: that man controls three of the principal Governments of Europe. The general public don’t know it; the Governments themselves won’t admit it: but it’strue for all that.12 10 Ibid., IX, ch. II. 11 Sapper (H.C. McNeile) , The Black Gang , Hodder & Stoughton, London 1922, ch. 5. 12 Sapper (H.C. McNeile), The Third Round , Hodder & Stoughton, London 1923, ch. 1. 23 3 “Only from its extremes can reality be revealed,” wrote Siegfried Kracauer in 1929 at the start of his study The Salaried Masses.13 However, the same could be said of the relationship between the high and the low, the dominant and the marginalised, and, as the philosophical treatise The Detective Novel14 by the same author shows, the relationship between the sensation novel and serious reflections upon the phenomenon of crisis. Philosophers have displayed but asporadic interest in lowbrow literature. However, along with Walter Benjamin, who alludes to the novels of Gaston Leroux, Frank Heller and Sven Elvestad (highly popular in his day, though whose detective Asbjörn Krag is rather too similar to the master of disguise Nick Carter15) and others, Siegfried Kracauer is one of the exceptions. He wrote astudy of the detective novel in 1922–25, though only the chapter “Hotel Hall” was published during his lifetime as part of the collection The Mass Ornament (1963). In its own way Kracauer’s treatise also aims to diagnose and describe the concept of crisis, and his reading of detective stories provided him with the appropriate language, since the detective traditionally embodies the modern form of rationality. However, Kracauer’sdiagnosis is also facilitated by his Kierkegaard-inspired ontological differentiation of ahigher and lower realm that corresponds approximately to nature and transcendence. Man is the 13 Siegfried Kracauer, Die Angestellten , Suhrkamp, Frankfurt a.M., 1971 (first published in 1929 in Frankfurter Zeitung ). 14 Siegfried Kracauer, Der Detektiv-Roman. Ein philosophischer Traktat . Suhrkamp, Frankfurt a.M. 1979. There is useful material to be found on Siegfried Kracauer in Gertrud Koch , Kracauer. Zur Einführung . Junius Verlag, Hamburg 1996; Frank Grunert, Dorothee Kimmlich (eds.), Denken durch die Dinge. Siegfried Kracauer im Kontext. Wilhelm Fink Verlag, Paderborn 2009; Nia Perivolaropoulou, Philippe Despoix (eds.), Culture de masse et modernité. Siegfried Kracauer sociologue, critique, écrivain. Ed. de la Maison des Sciences de l’homme, Paris 2001. 15 Iam also acquainted with Elvestad’swork from Czech translations, e.g. Ples dobrodruhů , Nakladatelství Vendelina Steinhausera in Pilsen 1921, or Stíny dvou mužů , Obelisk, Prague 1925. Motrose was translated into Czech by Milena Jesenská (Borový, Prague 1928). 24 interbeing (Zwischenwesen), because humanity is determined both naturally and by its relationship to annunciation and redemption. The locus of the detective novel is (human) reality, areality that is in crisis because it has lost its relationship to the higher realm, even though it is only this relationship that grants the real any meaning: without this relationship, reality is de-realised. We are afforded aglimpse of this situation by lowbrow literature, which acts as asurface upon which phenomena are recorded (like aphotographic negative) without being interpreted and without that which is recorded being deprived of its specificity. In this way, lowbrow literature makes phenomena accessible to diagnostic tools, which are capable, as Benjamin says, of returning the world of the dream to the world of wakefulness, transforming the detective story into Denkbild or thought image. This is acrucial concept for Kracauer, by which he defines himself in opposition to the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) movement and the popularity of reportage that describes reality instead of searching for traces of its design flaws. An illustrative example of this is Kracauer’sharsh criticism of the famous “film symphony” Berlin by Ruttmann. Kracauer observes that the film aims to encapsulate the metropolis by presenting aseries of microscopic individual traits. However, instead of interrogating these traits in away that would betray atrue understanding of its social, economic and political structure (...) it leaves the thousands of details unconnected, one next to the other. There is nothing to see in this symphony, because it has not exposed asingle meaningful relationship.16 The film fails to reveal the connections offered to our gaze by the Denkbild, the image of athought (athought in the form of an image, athought-image). 16 Siegfried Kracauer,“Film 1928“, in: Ornament der Masse , Suhrkamp, Frankfurt a.M. 1977. The Mass Ornament, transl. T. Y. Levin, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass. 2005. 25 The Denkbild is illustrative reflection and reflected illustration in one. It combines (...) both methods of cognition. Shaping ( Gestaltung ) is permeated by theory, theory is absorbed by shaping. Cognition and experience, reflection and opinion, content and form, or however else this antinomy is referred to, permeate each other. And as they reach their limits, material reality is suddently transformed into significant image.17 The origin of this new instrument of thinking is to be found in the “Erkenntniskritische Vorrede” (Epistemo-Critical Prologue) preceding Benjamin’sessay on tragic drama and in his theory of ideas as constellations (ideas are to phenomena as constellations are to stars). The constellation is the tissue of an idea, which is objective in the sense that its parts are determined by concrete phenomena and its organisation expresses the internal logic implied in and distilled from reality. The concept was adopted in the 1930s by Theodor W.Adorno, who formulated more generally the meaning and objective of thinking, which now aims to grasp reality by means of the construction of thought-images instead of concepts. Adorno’sinterpretation is perhaps the more comprehensible, albeit at the expense of simplifying somewhat the original version propounded by Benjamin. For instance, in “The Actuality of Philosophy” he writes: Philosophy distinguishes itself from science not by ahigher level of generality, as the banal view still today assumes, nor through the abstraction of its categories nor through the nature of its materials. The central difference lies far more in that the separate sciences ( Einzelwissenschaften ) accept their findings ( Befunde ), at least their final and deepest findings, as indestructible and static, whereas philosophy perceives the first findings which it 17 Helmut Stalder, “Das anschmiegende Denken”, in: Grunert –Kimmlich (eds.), Denken durch die Dinge, p.70; trans. here by Phil Jones. Regarding the term “Denkbild” see Gerhard Richter, Thought-Images: Frankfurt School Writers‘ Reflections from Damaged Life , Stanford UP, Stanford 2007. 32 dated noble sentiments in obsolete forms– even if it means nothing more than that.26 The ornament qua cipher is ambiguous: by virtue of its abstractness it makes reference to rationality (whose abstractness sets it apart from empiricism). However, that which is beyond the reach of the empirical, which is lost in abstraction, is nothing concrete in the vulgar sense of the word, for we can say that abstraction is simply adistorted form of universality that belongs to transcendence– without abstraction it would be impossible to relate not to the law, but to the idea of justice. However, just to be clear, Iwould add that Kracauer’stopology in The Detective Novel is somewhat more complex: If an existential tension is to be manifested, the law cannot be the last frontier. Instead, joint being within the sphere of sanctioned forms must retain its connection with the mystery over fixed forms. Since most people remain in aspace surrounded by the law, from asociological point of view attempting this connection is amatter for the individual. This connection takes place in azone in which the power of the law does not apply without breakage, in the zone of that which contradicts the law and is above it, azone that conceals mystery and danger within itself. Inasmuch as the law determines the true centre, it must turn away that which contradicts the law in the same way as it itself is impeded by what is above the law. Upper and lower powers outside the law are connected in such away that the thread runs through the law. The human intermediate therefore demands that the whole life of existential community is played out in two spaces: in the space in which the law exerts control, and in the space in which the law is recognised as conditional.27 26 Ibid. p.79. 27 Kracauer, Der Detektiv-Roman , p.15 (trans. here by Phil Jones). 33 According to Kracauer, meaning resides precisely in the traces of the non-contingent present in the contingent. As soon as one is torn from the other, reality is meaningless. Returning to the diagnostics of crisis, we observe certain similarities with Husserl. Here and there its source is rationality that has either forgotten its relationship with the founding idea (Husserl) or with the realm of the non-contingent (Kracauer). However, Kracauer, more expressively than Husserl, considers “objectivism” an important symptom of crisis, especially if it is manifest in amechanisation pervading not only science but the level of the lived world. Several chapters are devoted to this idea of Kracauer’sextensive study on the hitherto unexplored “tribe” of employees,28 in which he examines the Taylorization of administration in large corporations. More important (and this applies to both Kracauer and Husserl) is the relationship of “meaning” and history, even if in Kracauer’scase this relationship is gradually developed, especially in his last, incomplete work on history from his exile in America.29 While for Husserl the crisis is situated on the boundary between forgetting and recollecting (it is this irresolution that is the impulse for Besinnung in the sense of the clarification of meaning that is somehow here but obscured by scientific achievements), Kracauer, especially in his essay on photography devoted to the mechanism of memory and recollection, speaks of crisis as a“go-for-broke game of history”.30 However, unlike Husserl he does not look for aclear therapy (which for Husserl is phenomenology), but rather for an approach appropriate to the situation that appears as crisis. He formulates this approach (present in the title itself) in the essay Die Wartenden of 1922.31 28 Kracauer , Die Angestellten . 29 Siegfried Kracauer, Geschichte– Vor den letzten Dingen . In: Siegfried Kracauer Werke 4, ed. Ingrid Belke, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt a.M. 2009. Original ed.: Siegfried Kracauer , The Last Things Before the Last . Completed after the death of the Author by Paul Oskar Kristeller. Marcus Wiener Publishers, Princeton 1995 (1. ed. Oxford University Press 1966). 30 Kracauer, The Mass Ornament , p.61. 31 Kracauer, “Those Who Wait”, in: The Mass Ornament . 34 Crisis is defined here as “metaphysical suffering from alack of some higher meaning in the world” and as residing in an empty space, which is perceived as exile and isolation. This can then lead to extreme relativism (there exists no binding horizon of values or ideas), or even to horror vacui. However, this unfortunate state of affairs has apositive aspect: waiting. Waiting is “hesitant openness”, zögerndes Geöffnetsein. This does not entail focusing on the last things, but a receptiveness to what cannot be predicted and what is unenforceable. In this respect the last sentences of the essay are crucial: Must it be added that getting oneself ready is only apreparation for that which cannot be obtained by force, apreparation for transformation and for giving oneself over to it? Exactly when this transformation will come to pass and whether or not it will happen at all is not at issue here, and at any rate should not worry those who are exerting themselves.32 Kracauer returns from the opposite pole, in apolemic with the spectre of universal history, to the restrained openness displayed by those who wait from the other side in his last book devoted to “the last things before the last”. He rejects the idea of the chronological, homogenous, linear time accepted without question by historiography, and on the contrary seeks to understand it as atissue of various shapes or forms in asynchronous cross-section, i.e. he foregrounds the discovery (inspired by Kubler, the theoretician of ancient art) that contemporary events are in fact mostly asynchronous if they belong to different time series or sequences whose character is always specific (aclaim he again corroborates with the example of human memory). From this perspective space-time is the meeting place where unexpected encounters take place between different series of events– he uses the image of arailway station waiting room (not amillion miles from ahotel lobby). But for this very reason 32 Ibid., p.120. Cited in Gertrued Koch, Siegried Kracauer: An Introduction , Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey 2000, p.117. 35 historical reality is like that which has no end, something like Vorraum, alobby or waiting room. And this calls for adifferent way of thinking (Vorraum-Denken und -Verhalten)– to remain on this earth and think through concrete things. If the subject of philosophy is to be the “ultimate truths” formulated in complete generality and with aclaim to objectivity, and if it is so incontestable that, as such, philosophy has nothing to say of relevance about things pertaining to the lifeworld (Kracauer deliberately uses Husserl’sterm Lebenswelt), then the solution to this dispute can only be the “complementarity principle”, i.e. not restricting ourselves to top down thinking, but thinking simultaneously in the opposite direction. Only this corresponds to that human “position in the middle” referred to in the book on the detective novel and which Kracauer now brings into convergence with the lifeworld of phenomenology in which, as he says, man does not deal with the last things but instead with the penultimate things as though they were the last (an idea captured more faithfully in the English rather than the German title of the book on history and historiography). If history is without end, it is deprived even of the aesthetic rescue of the past, the project attempted by Marcel Proust. And so history, like the present, must be viewed through the eyes of the exile, the extreme form of which inKracauer’slast book is Ahasver, the Wandering Jew. But then one thing is related to the other: he who waits is he who accepts his extra-territoriality as the basic human condition. The immense importance of this shift in accent is not always obvious. In The Detective Novel the last reference point is atonement in the theological sense as mediated by the Judaic tradition of Messianism, something Kracauer studied in depth when in 1920–22 he, along with Leo Löwenthal and Erich Fromm, visited the Frankfurt Freies Jüdisches Lehrhaus33, while in the essay on those who wait and in his last book the relationship to the last thing is character33 In this respect see Enzo Traverso, “Sous le signe de l’exteritorialité. Kracauer et la modernité juive”. In: Perivolaropoulou– Despoix (eds.), Culture de masse et modernité. 36 ised as “hesitant openness”. However, as Kracauer himself writes in aletter, we must turn our back on theology in the interests of theology itself. The emphasis is now on the insuperability of the boundary separating man from the absolute (which excludes any teleological speculation). Those who maintain permanent vigil awaiting the arrival of the Messiah or even want to expedite matters (such as Buber and Rosenzweig through the example of their Bible) are, according to Kracauer, Kurzschluss-Menschen or short-circuit people. In brief, history has no end, and yet it has (can have) meaning now as long as the unattainable, since absolute, “idea” is measured at every instant. This is aconcept the final seal of which is surely the last sentence of the final aphorism of Adorno’sMinima Moralia written immediately after the end of World War II: The more passionately thought denies its conditionality for the sake of the unconditional, the more unconsciously, and so calamitously, it is delivered up to the world. Even its own impossibility it must at last comprehened for the sake of the possible. But beside the demand thus placed on thought, the question of the reality or unreality of redemption itself hardly matters.34 Kracauer’sexposure of monograms, that is to say significant patterns, and his reading of the ciphers on the surface of the quotidian in his book Ornament der Masse and elsewhere, clearly follows in the tradition of Simmelesque sociology. However, for this very reason it is easier to place his microanalyses within the wider context of “crisis”, to amore precise understanding of which Georg Simmel contributed a range of important parameters aiding orientation. For example, it is impossible that Kracauer’stheme and position of exile or extra-territoriality, which is closely connected with his Vorraum-Denken, was not influenced by Simmel’sEssay About the 34 Minima Moralia. Reflections from the Damaged Life , trans. E.F.N. Jephcott, Verso, London and New York 2005, p.247. Ishall leave to one side the complex question of who inspired whom in the case of W. Benjamin, S. Kracauer and T. W. Adorno. 37 Stranger of 1908, and possibly by one of the first descriptions of the characteristic features of modernity contained in Simmel’sessay The Metropolis and Mental Life of 1903. Simmel’sstranger is neither pilgrim nor traveller, neither outsider nor wanderer. He does not arrive today and leave tomorrow. On the contrary, the stranger is he who arrives today and remains tomorrow. He is still potentially apilgrim or traveller (der Wandernde), since although he did not leave, he retains his freedom to come and go. He does not completely belong where he is, but lives within distance, with the consequence that for him that which is close is distant and that which is alien is close. However, this distance provides aspecific objectivity to his perspective made possible both by his detachment and his participation, a perspective that “alienates” the given, tradition, and “habituality”.35 Simmel, however, reveals the other side of this position in respect of the relationship the stranger has with the community in which he remains and of which he is apart, as is the indigent or, as Simmel states explicitly, the “enemy within”.36 If the community suffers internal division, unrest or revolt, whatever the cause, the party at threat will designate the stranger as an agitator or fifth columnist in order that it be possible to present the crisis as something originating from without. His whole life Kracauer was fascinated by photography because it offered apicture of an epoch extracted from linear time. This is an eloquent example of that exterritoriality that he sought as acritical observer of his time. Like Benjamin’sflâneur or Hannah Arendt’spariah,37 he wanted to move “in the near-vacuum of exterritoriality”, as he wrote in his book on history. 35 Georg Simmel, "Versuch über den Fremden", in: Individualismus der modernen Zeit . Suhrkamp, Frankfurt a.M. 2008, p.269. 36 Ibid., p.267. 37 During the 1930s, Hannah Arendt studied the tradition of the Jews as pariahs. She wrote abook on Rahel Levin-Varnhagen and came across the work of Bernard Lazar. See Enzo Traverso, L‘histoire déchirée, Ed. du Cerf, Paris 1997. 38 However, exile was soon to become his very real fate. In 1933, the year the Weimar Republic came to an end, he was forced to leave Germany. While staying in Paris in 1934–37 he wrote abook on Jacques Offenbach, an Austrian emigrant in France and his kindred spirit. Eventually he left for the United States. His mother perished in Terezín. 39 4 This encounter between books that, on the face of it, have nothing in common – early examples of the thriller genre, Graham Greene’s entertainments, and Husserl’s The Crisis of European Sciences– raises some questions. Is the word “crisis” in the title of Husserl’swork from the mid-1930s simply asomewhat exaggerated way of expressing certain misgivings harboured at that time regarding the exactness of the exact sciences? Or is it areaction to the relatively profound transformation science was undergoing, atransformation that was driving arevaluation of traditional ideas of accuracy and scientism, and even of rationality, i.e. the deductive construction of an axiomatic system from irrefutably first and simplest principles? After all, this idea of rational knowledge is difficult to sustain in an era of relativity theory, quantum physics and intuitionism in mathematics. All of these questions play arole in Husserl’sbook and Husserl himself refers tangentially to them. However, they are not the central issue, not the “crisis” he has in mind. In any case, Husserl was no doubt aware that revolutions in theoretical spheres rarely create panic in the population at large. Firstly, their scope is limited, and secondly, if they spread at all it is only after having been transformed and mediated by culture. All the more remarkable, therefore, is the dramatic tone that Husserl adopts in the introductory paragraphs, in which he introduces us to the phenomenon of crisis. The very language of these preliminary considerations is striking. Husserl speaks of the crisis of the sciences as “an expression of the radical life crisis of European humanity” (the title of the first section of the book). What caused the crisis is the fact that the “genuine scientific character [of science] (...) has become questionable” and that this has given rise to a“general lament about the crisis of our culture” etc. In short, the “crisis of sciences” is acrisis of rationality. Though Husserl, unlike 40 many of his contemporaries, does not speak of acrisis of culture or of “discontent” with culture as symptom of aloss of confidence in Enlightenment reason, his criticism of the instrumentalisation of science points in this direction, and it would perhaps not be going too far to claim that Husserl– albeit unwittingly, since he could not have suspected the extent of the future catastrophe (even though Benjamin’s essay on mechanical reproduction was published in 1936, followed ayear later by the opening in Munich of the exhibition Entartete Kunst)– anticipates the despairing question posed by Horkheimer and Adorno in Dialectic of the Enlightenment, namely “why mankind, instead of entering into atruly human condition, is sinking into anew kind of barbarism”.38 It might appear as though Husserl is simply retracing aline of argument that has already been addressed either head-on or implicitly by earlier authors in texts ranging from what is often dubbed trivial literature (the precursor of the political thriller) to the distinguished essay by Max Weber entitled “Science as aVocation” of 1919, in which Weber notes that “science has become aproblem in calculation, fabricated in laboratories or statistical filing systems just as ‘in afactory’, acalculation involving only the cool intellect and not one’s‘heart and soul’.”39 All this is hinted at, at least with hindsight, in The Crisis of European Sciences, where for instance the author observes “the appearance of puzzling, insoluble obscurities in modern, even mathematical sciences, and in connection with that (...) the emergence of aset of world enigmas which were unknown to earlier times.”40 It is clear that Husserl is by no means speaking 38 Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialektik der Aufklärung , in: GS 3, p.11 (“die Erkenntnis, warum die Menschheit, anstatt in einen wahrhaft menschlichen Zustand einzutreten, in eine neue Art von Barbarei versinkt.”). 39 Max Weber, “Science as aVocation”. Originally delivered as aspeech at Munich University, 1918. Published in 1919 by Duncker & Humblodt, Munich, p.5. English translation see http://www. wisdom.weizmann.ac.il/~oded/X/WeberScienceVocation.pdf Accessed January 2019. 40 Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology , transl. with an Introduction by David Carr, Northwestern University Press, Evanston 1970, pp.3 and 5. 41 of the special problems of the exact sciences, because that on which his “phenomenological philosophy” is now focused is the founding of science in subjectivity and therefore the relationship between reason and life. Hence the well known statement that summarises his perspective on the phenomenon of crisis: “In our vital need– so we are told– this science has nothing to say to us.”41 In fact all of Husserl’sreferences to “crisis” have aparticular, very ambiguous character. For instance: We make our beginning with achange which set in at the turn of the past century in the general evaluation of the sciences. It concerns not the scientific character of the sciences but rather what they, or what science in general, had meant and could mean for human existence.42 It is clear that the key phrase here is “scientific character”, i.e. something along the lines of rationality (characteristic of European culture), from which, however, existing rationality in the form of the objectivism of the exact sciences has somehow split and whose meaning it has forgotten. Yet what is striking is the extent to which an uncharacteristically personal tone creeps into these considerations on rationality and science, even though both are in crisis. This tone tells us that something of genuine import is at stake. Scientific, objective truth is exclusively amatter of establishing what the world, the physical as well as the spiritual world, is in fact. But can the world, and human existence in it, truthfully have ameaning if the sciences recognise as true only what is objectively established in this fashion, and if history has nothing more to teach us than that all the shapes of the spiritual world, all the conditions of life, ideals, norms upon which man relies, form and dissolve themselves like fleeting waves, that it always was and ever will be so, that again and again reason must turn into nonsense, and well-being 41 Ibid. 42 Ibid. 48 “And what does that somebody do?” “Spreads terror!”47 This terror is induced by the “elusiveness” of Fantômas: the outside that is now inside the inside escapes detection because within the “grid” of the interior it is unidentifiable. In the case of the Paris of Fantômas this grid comprises science in the form of anthropometry and the most highly advanced methods of police identification created by Alphonse Bertillon, one of the fathers of forensic science. And lest it escape our attention: this is another example of the “mathematisation” of the natural world, the numerical transcription of life (population statistics, taxes, birth and death rate curves, etc.): bertillonage is the numerical transcription of aperson that is intended to allow for reliable identification but which in Fantômas’ case fails repeatedly with catastrophic consequences. For (w)hile Bertillon’sarchive posited order for “the growing masses” of criminals, in which one criminal matched one series of numerical notations on one fiche d’identité , Fantômas disrupts the supposed numerical singularity of anthropometric identification by effecting multiple matches. Through the representation of acriminal whose identity corresponds to aconstantly increasing number of fiches d’identité , the series systematically defies the singularity of numerical criminal identity, while simultaneously reproducing the generalised numbers of probably criminality that comprise the archive of la police scientifique .48 Fantômas is unidentifiable in all senses of the word. So, for instance, in the first book the actor Valgrand, who played Fantômas on stage, is executed in his place. Furthermore, Fantômas is capable of appearing as several persons simultaneously. He possesses aphysical 47 Ibid, p.1. 48 Nanette L. Fornabai, “Criminal Factors: Fantômas, Anthropometrics, and the Numerical Fictions of Modern Criminal Identity”, Yale French Studies , No. 108 (Crime Fictions), 2005, pp.60–73. 49 existence only at the moment he becomes someone else. Before this he is merely ashadow (in the later works dressed in black with ablack cowl en cagoule, as he is portrayed in the films by Feuillade). In Fantômas the Elusive he is both man and woman in asingle house. In The Red Wasp Juve expresses his doubts: “Fandor, the unfathomable murder of Lady Beltham gives rise to amost disquieting thought. You hit the nail on the head when you were thinking out loud about the strange events that have taken place recently; there are possibly two Fantômases and we have only one of them under lock and key.”49 In order to apprehend him, Commissioner Juve himself adopts adisguise in amove guaranteed to cause chaos. In ARoyal Prisoner, Juve is arrested by his boss in the guise of Fantômas, while The Corpse Who Kills includes the following monologue by Juve: “For, who is Fantômas– the real Fantômas, among so many probable Fantômas? “Can you tell me that, Fandor?” continued Juve, who was getting excited at last. (...) “Igrant you that we have seen, in the course of our chequered existence, an old gentleman, like Etienne Rambert, athickset Englishman like Gurn, arobust fellow like Loupart, aweak and sickly individual like Chaleck. We have identified each one of them, in turn, as Fantômas– and that is all. “As for seeing Fantômas himself, just as he is, without artificial aid, without paint and powder, without afalse beard, without awig, Fantômas as his face really is under his hooded mask of black– that we have not yet done. It is that fact which makes our hunt for the villain ceaselessly difficult, often dangerous! (...) Fantômas is always someone, sometimes two persons, never himself!” Juve, once started on this subject, could go on for ever, and Fandor did not try to stop him: when the course of conversation led them to talk of Fantô49 Ibid., p.450 (trans. here by Phil Jones). 50 mas the two men were as though hypnotised by this mysterious creature, so well named, for he was really “Fantômatic,” aspectral entity: the two friends could not turn their minds to any other subject.50 By the end of the book the reader is inclined to ask: might not Juve actually be Fantômas? Not even Juve seems completely sure. And this is the horror of the outside inside: Fantômas can be anyone. So have we learned something new about crisis? Crisis is astate of indistinguishability. In the examples above the existing identification grid fails and there is no other to hand. This is aparticular state of transition in which the world becomes increasingly unintelligible. Nothing makes clear sense, generally acceptable institutions prove less than dependable, routine modes of conduct are suspended, in short ambivalence reigns. In Husserlian terms, the meaning of science for life has been lost, and life has shown itself to be immensurable. Rationality appears to be at odds with itself. This is because, as Husserl himself says in his original lecture,51 the scientist ceased being the subject of investigation. What he means is that the objectivism of modern science, i.e. its clear focus “outward” (on an “objective” reality that is supposedly completely independent of “subjectivity”), has stopped taking into consideration the fact that “no objective science can do justice to the very subjectivity which accomplishes sciences,”52 which is why such ascience has nothing to say regarding those questions that relate most closely to man. Rationality is at odds with itself inasmuch as the cause of the failure of rational culture, as Husserl states explicitly, “lies not in the essence of rationalism itself”.53 This is because reason has become embroiled in 50 Pierre Souvestre, Marcel Allain, Fantomas se venge [ Le Mort qui tue ], Livre de poche, Paris 1961, pp.313–14. 51 Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological philosophy, trans. David Carr, Northwestern University Press, Evanston 1970. 52 Husserl, The Crisis , p.295. 53 Husserl, The Crisis , p.299. 51 “naturalism and objectivism”. In other words, reason (in the guise of science) has forgotten its origin in the primordial element of subjectivity that is the life-world, Lebenswelt, or “natural world”. It has become ensnared in its own exterior. 52 6 At the instant that the relationship between inside and outside ceases to involve clearly differentiated moments separated by aclear boundary, the situation becomes far more complex. This applies to the phenomenon of the crisis and the strange forms of mutual interpenetration of inside and outside consequent thereupon (the enemy/ stranger within in the case of sensation novels, and ahesitant openness and unintelligibility in scientific theory in the case of serious reflection). This might involve, for instance, becoming entangled in the exterior as aconsequence of the inexorable infiltration of the outside into the inside, which is indeed the situation being played out in the sensation novels referred to. Here, however, we must broaden our field of investigation somewhat. Certain subgenres of the sensation novel (though not the classical whodunit) continue in along, somewhat vague tradition of adventure literature. However, at the end of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth they begin to remould this tradition. The event, in the sense of that which arrives suddenly, that which is unforeseeable, now finds itself foregrounded. However, if the event thus defined is unexpectable, then upon its arrival it is outside the current horizon of expectations. This raises aquestion regarding identification of the event qua event and identification of its meaning, ameaning indecipherable from the current horizon of understanding. And all of this presupposes the event is even recognisable as an event. There are ambiguous clues or hints: something happened– but what actually happened? We might summarise our preliminary findings thus: the event is the outside inside the inside (the outside-in) (this would be crisis as event), though takes the form of something incomprehensible and foreign. This is why the event carries the horizon of its understanding within it (and is only distinguishable after it happens), and this horizon is incommensurate with the horizons of that world in which the event takes place. 53 This subgenre of the sensation novel dating back to the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which stages this situation most effectively by appropriating certain features of adventure literature, is adepiction of the “war-to-come” that is closely associated with the spy novel.54 It finds its predecessor in Chesney’sThe Battle of Dorking (1871), and then spreads rapidly, not only in England, but in Germany and France. The genre is prodigious and includes Wells’ War of the Worlds (1898) and the technical science fiction by the same author (The War in the Air, 1908), as well as Le Queux referred to above (The Great War in England in 1897, 1888), and many others.55 The very term “adventure” would be hopelessly vague if not (again) for Simmel’sessay “Philosophie des Abenteuers” from roughly the same time (1910), in which adventure is primarily defined as severance from the context of life. Its time (or “temporality”), if we may express it thus, stands outside the continuity of linear and (seemingly) homogenous time. However, this is an outside that “if only by along and unfamiliar detour, is formally an aspect of the inside” and thus often takes the form of adream). The fact that adventure exceeds the given horizon of expectation is shown by the fact of its being torn from the context of memory and of being centred on meaning “that exists as such”. And this is avery accurate descrip54 Regarding the genesis of this type of novel, see I. F. Clarke, “Future-War Fiction: The First Main Phase, 1871–1900”. Science Fiction Studies , Vol. 24. No. 3 (1997), pp.387–412; I. F. CLARKE, “Forecast of Warfare in Fiction 1803–1914”, in: Comparative Studies in Society and History , Vol. 10, No. 1 (1967), pp.1–25; I. F. CLARKE, Voices Prophecying War: Future Wars 1763–3749. Oxford University Press, Oxford 21993; LeRoy L. Panek, The Special Branch. The British Spy Novel, 1890–1980 , Bowling Green University Popular Press, Ohio 1981; David A.T. Stafford, “Spies and Gentlemen: The Birth of the British Spy Novel. 1893–1914.” Victorian Studies , Vol. 24, No. 4 (1981), pp.489–509; Robert Lance Snyder, The Art of Indirection in British Espionage Fiction. ACritical Study of Six Novelists , McFarland, Jefferson, NC 2011. 55 It suffices to cite but afew titles at random: The Seizure of the Channel Tunnel (the reaction to the plan to build atunnel under the English Channel in 1882), The Taking of Dover, The Siege of Portsmouth ; La guerre franco-allemande de 1878 from 1877, the trilogy La guerre de demain de capitaine danrit (Emile Auguste Driant), La fin de la Prusse et le démembrement de l’Allemagne from 1913; Die Abrechnung mit England by Dr. Karel Eisenhart from 1900, and many others. 54 tion of the fact that the event (in respect of its meaning) carries the horizon of its understanding within itself. The adventure is freed of the entanglements and concatenations which are characteristic of (other forms of our existence) (it) is according to its intrinsic meaning (…) independent of the “before” and “after”; its boundaries are defined regardless of them. We speak of adventure precisely when continuity with life is thus disregarded in principle– or rather when there is not even any need to disregard it, because we know from the beginning that we have to do with something alien, untouchable, out of the ordinary.56 Temporality, which is actually the event in the strong sense of the word, could be called “adventurous time”: this is the form of time staged by sensation novels. Its irruption into linear time– the irruption of the “exterior”– is asymptom of crisis in that form in which it becomes the theme of the sensation novel. In this respect, novels about the war to come represent acurious paradox: they embody an expectation of the unexpectable. And this is precisely why spy thrillers develop in parallel, since the unexpectable can be expected only to the extent to which we are able to distinguish its traces in the current world. Spies must be unmasked as the ominous prelude to what is arriving. Spies are strangers set to become the “fifth column” and the “enemy within”. This is how the unexpectable introduces itself on the threshold of an impending crisis: from within on the threshold of the outside. The more complex time structure that characterises texts prophesying war is already powerfully present in the prototype of this literature, The Battle of Dorking by George T. Chesney from 1871, which reflects upon the transformation of power structures in Europe in 56 Georg Simmel, “Philosophie des Abenteuers”, in: Georg Simmel, Gesamtausgabe, 12, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt a.M. 2001. 55 the wake of the Franco-Prussian war.57 An old man tells his grandsons of the unhappy event that took place half acentury before, when Britain, weakened by the need to protect its colonies, pacify Ireland and defend Canada, and by an unwarranted confidence in its own powers, succumbed within amatter of days to abetter prepared enemy that routed its maritime fleet, penetrated the weak line of the army, and eventually reached London. The grandsons to whom all this is being recounted are preparing to emigrate from an England brought to its knees. Here the war to come is projected into the past and the cause of the defeat is adjudged to be afailure to recognise the signs of what was to come. For us in England it came too late. And yet we had plenty of warnings, if we had only made use of them. The danger did not come on us unawares. It burst on us suddenly, ‘tis true; but its coming was foreshadowed plainly enough to open our eyes, if we had not been wilfully blind. (...) After all the bitterest part of our reflection is, that all this misery and decay might have been so easily prevented, and that we brought it about ourselves by our own short-sighted recklessness. There, across the narrow Straits, was the writing on the wall, but we would not choose to read it. The warnings of the few were drowned in the voice of the multitude.58 Chesney’sbook is in reality characterised by acertain extratemporality. In 1914, it was republished and updated (“as though it were written yesterday” as it said in the new preface) and became one of many “admonitory essays in preparedness”59 gravely warning of the 57 See for instance I. F. Clarke, “The Battle of Dorking, 1871–1914”, Victorian Studies , Vol. 8, No.4 (1965), pp.309–328. 58 George Tomkyns Chesney, The Battle of Dorking , Grant Richards, London 1914, pp.17 and 94. 59 I. F. Clarke, “Future-War Fiction: The First Main Phase, 1871–1900”, p.392. 56 short-sightedness of domestic policy and the decline of patriotism, and laying bare what the authors deemed acrisis of governance. Though these projections of future war were based on thorough research, consultation with the military authorities, and a careful consideration of potential strategies, and, in the case of novels veering in the direction of science fiction (H.G. Wells and others), the invention of new weapons, they failed to break the barrier of the unexpectable. For instance, Le Queux in his Invasion (which combines fictive newspaper despatches from the battlefield with equally fictive official documents, posters, etc.) “quotes” the orders issued by the German General Kronhelm to the civilian populations in conquered territory. In fact, these are exact replicas of proclamations made in 1870. Not even forecasts of the damage wreaked are remotely hyperbolic – communiqués from occupied Essex announce the “destruction of one of our best golf courses” (chapter 5), and one searches in vain for any omen of Verdun or Ypres. When war finally broke out for real, the incommensurability of expectations with the unexpectable was shockingly apparent. In their own way then, novels about an impending war offer alesson in expectations of the unexpectable. They teach us that for our own sakes we have to learn how to read the signs, the writing on the wall, the auguries and portents, as they arrive. At the same time, however, it is clear that these pointers are unrecognisable through the identification matrix of the current world and hence ignored. The existing horizon of understanding is dis-interpreted. The “later” inscribed like amemento in these stories adumbrates the fundamental attribute of an event, the meaning of which is indecipherable within the context it threatens to infiltrate, is exterior to it, and as such only makes sense afterwards (after the event). The war-to-come genre unwittingly anticipates what Sigmund Freud, when speaking of wartime trauma, terms Nachträglichkeit or deferred action, which after the Second World War became subject to serious philosophical 57 reflection intent on unearthing the paradoxes of temporality. The starting point of these reflections would often be Husserl’sLectures on the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time, along with his concept of history as outlined in The Crisis of European Sciences. The paradox resides in the fact that the “later” “then” appears avoidable by virtue of being visible. The sensation novel (drawing in part on the tradition of the detective story running in parallel) is also alesson in the identification of clues, clues betraying the presence of the outside inside the inside, and is therefore inextricably linked to the espionage novel, since it is the spy, i.e. every foreigner getting through to “us”, who is the visible materialisation of the warning signs of impending danger. This interpermeation of both genres is best documented by two classics: Childers’ The Riddle of the Sands (1903) and The Thirty Nine Steps by John Buchan (1915). In the first novel, Carruthers, aminor official in the Foreign Office, sets off with his friend Arthur Davies on aholiday in ayacht named Dulcibella in the Baltic Sea. However, Carruthers senses something fishy. Before he hooked up with Davies, astrange group of Germans had tried to kill his friend by luring him onto asandbank during aprevious trip. The two follow the Germans’ tracks (three quarters of the novel, which is taken up with adetailed description of the difficulties of navigating narrow channels between shoals and negotiating the ebbs and flows of tides, might well test the patience of readers who are not as enthusiastic about sailing as Childers) and end up in an area in which the German navy is secretly preparing to invade England from its vulnerable north. They are being aided and abetted by acertain Dollmann, aformer officer in the Royal Navy, who has stolen secret defence plans in England, travelled to Germany, and is involved in plotting war against his own country. Even from this potted summary it is clear that the novel addresses (very effectively) one of the stumbling blocks of spy fiction: Carruthers and Davies are themselves forced into the position of 64 mately the same time as Husserl’sThe Crisis of European Sciences. The job of the uniform is to manifest and obtain order in the world, to arrest the confusion and flux of life, just as it conceals whatever in the human body is soft and flowing, covering up the soldier’sunderclothes and skin, and decreeing that sentries on guard should wear white gloves. So when in the morning aman has fastened up his uniform to the last button, he acquires asecond and thicker hide and feels that he has returned to his more essential and steadfast being. Closed up in his hard casing, braced in with straps and belts, he begins to forget his own undergarments, and the uncertainty of life, yes, life itself, recedes to adistance.74 Literature deemed trivial, no matter how closely bound by conventions, is in acertain sense free because it is situated in the interstices between worlds: between the world passing by and the world that is yet to arrive. At this point conventions become spectres, since the past, sedimented convention becomes entangled with that which is arriving and so is suspended. Convention still binds, but becomes agame. The sensation novel does not wish to decipher amysterious code, but transforms it into the protagonists of its stories. Literature deemed highbrow, on the other hand, attempts to construct ahorizon of understanding in this interspace intrinsic to that event that is only beginning to announce its arrival using the method of abduction. This interstice and this interspace is crisis. 74 Hermann Broch, The Sleepwalkers , trans. Willa and Edwin Muir, New York 1947, pp.20–21. 65 8 By taking the non-serious seriously, by introducing into the high the low that is excluded from it by deep-seated cultural antithesis, we arrive at away of demonstrating the outside inside the inside (the outside-in). In this respect Fantômas is the perfect example: one only has to reference French surrealism and the circle of authors associated with it. The Fantômas series became part of the iconology of high modernist art by virtue of its implicit anarchy and atreatment of time and space verging on the deranged. Moments of fantasy are released from the Victorian corset of the classic detective novel (and Fantômas stands completely outside the domain of deductive rationality and identification), and as for finding some kind of moral instruction... au contraire. The surrealists were fascinated by the wild, phantasmagorical poetics of this literature, and as Roger Caillois says, the energy concealed in the anarchy of these novels is so strong that it is capable not only of confronting but undermining the power of the system. So far, so indisputable. However, if necessary these findings can be bolstered by various cross-sectional comparisons. The traditional detective story has aclear structure: the mystery emerges against the backdrop of aclearly organised world that the crime has destabilised. According to Luc Boltanski, the detective and spy novels represent an innovation in the sphere of 20th century literary fiction. The crime is akind of anomalous singularity in stark contrast with the way that things normally present themselves: it is the “emergence of reality in the middle of the world”. The crime (the enigma) sows confusion in the world in its capacity as that which does not belong to the horizon of expectable events and therefore causes something we might term acrisis of the world. The traditional whodunit (Poe, Doyle, Agatha Christie et al.) chronicles the derailment of the system and its return (areturn realised by purely rational means). It depicts the restoration of order, the restitution of the world conceived as de iure 66 stable order. Inasmuch as the crime operates as akind of temporary aberration there is an analogy with Husserl: with the resolution of the crisis things return to normal. However, the restoration of order obliges Husserl to introduce another factor, namely responsibility. As in the thriller, in the traditional detective novel the restoration of order would not be possible without aprivate investigator (no matter what his motivation is), who then in the American hardboiled school of detective novels shoulders this “responsibility” explicitly. Philip Marlowe does not relate to the world but corresponds to the reality that has emerged in the middle of the world. This emergence of reality is dealt with in even more detail in the “Flitcraft parable”, unobtrusively inserted into The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett (published in 1930) and recounted by Sam Spade. 67 9 During the 1930s, Husserl explored the phenomenon of crisis in detail in what is commonly termed his late work. In 1936, he published in the Belgrade journal Philosophia the first of aplanned series of essays that were to examine the intellectual crisis of that time, especially the crisis afflicting the sciences. The aim was to advance his transcendental phenomenology as the only means of overcoming this crisis. This essay is all that was published of his last work; the text published in the collected works includes Husserl’scontinuation, unfortunately incomplete.75 His late period also includes Formale und transzendentale Logik of 1929 and Erfahrung und Urteil, published after Husserl’sdeath by Ludwig Landgrebe in 1939 in the Academia Verlagsbuchhandlung publishing house in Prague. However, the firm was closed down that year following the German occupation and dissolution of Czechoslovakia, and though the book had already been printed it did not enter the distribution network. The entire print run was pulped, apart from 200 copies that the publishing house had managed to send to their London partners. In 1948, aphotomechanical reprint of the first edition was published using one of these copies. At this point in the proceedings Prague enters the scene, since the Cercle philosophique de Prague, whose members had attempted to rescue Husserl’smanuscripts from his estate prior to the German occupation, were keen that the book be published. However, when it became clear that Prague was unsafe, Pater van Breda created the Husserl Archives in Leuven. The starting point of both the Vienna lecture and the book is the concept of crisis. Inasmuch as it appears that the Western world is 75 Edmund Husserl, Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie , ed. Walter Biemel, (Husserliana VI), Martinus Nijhoff, Haag 1976. Edmund Husserl, Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie. Ergänzungsband.Texte aus dem Nachlass 1934–1837 , ed. Reinhold N. Smid (Husserliana XXIX ), Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dodrecht 1993. 68 caught up in crisis, then according to Husserl this is because it has betrayed the very idea that defines it, i.e. the idea of philosophy, the idea of universal knowledge (including the special sciences), and the idea ensuing therefrom of an existence striving toward the ideal and norms of autonomous reason. European man has lost his relationship with this idea mainly due to the influence of apositivist conception of science and the concomitant process of specialisation (fragmentation) and technologisation (mechanical application). Science has eliminated questions relating to values and meaning (both of science itself and of human existence) from its sphere of interest and has capitulated to “naturalisation” (i.e. the investigation of man as object and the dominant status of the “fact”). However, in so doing the sciences have become incomprehensible (if not in respect of their content, then most decidedly in respect of their cultural or “existential” function). Science is the product of acertain intellectual, spiritual activity, and yet spirit has gradually been excluded from science as alegitimate field of enquiry. As aconsequence, science has lost its relevance to man because it has nothing to say about what matters to him most. And yet if Western man loses his faith in reason, he loses his faith in himself. The solution to this crisis could only reside in areturn to the original ideal, i.e. the primal establishment of scientificity (rationality as the cultural value of the West par excellence). This is the task of this new “introduction to phenomenology” and at the same time an explanation of why phenomenology must engage with history. (For that matter the concept of “crisis” implies “history”.) Phenomenology now attempts to unravel the complex history of the very idea of philosophy, this idea being something like the verborgene Einheit intentionaler Innerlichkeit (concealed unity of intentional interiority), which makes it possible to speak of Europe as of acertain “formation”. For if words such as “Europe”, “science” and “philosophy”, notwithstanding all empirical transformations (scientific discoveries, different philosophical theories, historically empirical events, etc.), delineate 69 something identifiable as aunity (an object), this is thanks to this primal establishment, from which everything is endowed with acertain (completely specific) meaning and which is both constitutive of and constituted by Europe. As we have seen, Husserl believes that Europe is aspiritual shape, something that originated, and so he turns his attention to history as aphilosophical problem. Origin is the same as establishment: Europe is aproject identical to the establishment of philosophy in ancient Greece, and this philosophy is established with the creation of the ideal of universal knowledge, i.e. aknowledge aimed at an idea that transcends man and that therefore man can only set for himself as ideal, as telos, amission by which he will henceforth gauge his knowledge (and, of course, his entire life). Telos– ultimate object, i.e. entelecheia– the endless pursuit of an objective set at the outset. An orientation on this internal teleology is at the same time anorm in the sense of constant self-normalisation. Afocus on the idea or ideal implies responsibility: by his every action man takes upon himself responsibility for abiding by this norm. Acompletely specific type of rationality or reason operates and appears within history, “the epoch of mankind that now seeks to live, and only can live, in the free shaping of its existence, its historical life, through ideas of reason, through infinite tasks.”76 This rationality characterises Europe as acertain whole, forever unified by its internal, immanent teleology. And so, for instance, Husserl can write: In the spiritual sense the English Dominions, the United States, etc., clearly belong to Europe, whereas the Eskimos or Indians presented as curiosities at fairs, or the Gypsies, who constantly wander about Europe, do not.77 The latter represent Europe’sexterior. 76 Husserl, The Crisis , p.274. 77 Ibid , p.273. 70 Husserl explains this concept of aspecific European rationality in detail in The Crisis of European Sciences, and it is enlarged upon both by the original lectures and the annexes to the treatise (manuscripts from his estate), especially The Origin of Geometry78. These additional texts contain, for instance, references to the “critical attitude” associated with this teleology, with Western rationality. The theoretical attitude (asynonym for European reason) is characterised by the universality of his (the “philosophical man’s”) critical stance, his resolve not to accept unquestioning any pregiven opinion or tradition, so that he can inquire (…) after what is true in itself, an ideality (…) The ideal truth becomes an absolute value.79 However, Husserl does not only diagnose the crisis, but devotes his essay to adetailed description of acure. And given that the text also serves as an introduction to phenomenology, it is clear that it is in fact phenomenology that represents the sought-after therapy. This is aphenomenology enriched by what the phenomenon of the crisis has brought to it, namely the dimension of history, aphenomenological interpretation of historicity. However, in many respects this is very specific and it is therefore not surprising that athinker who from the outset was concerned with the method of describing essences and essential structures should finally turn his attention to history. For such athinker, history is like the essence of Europe itself. It is aspecifically European phenomenon in the same way as science qua philosophy and philosophy qua science. Both one and the other are established at the outset, from which point onward they have meaning, and this meaning not only evolves but emerges from history. For history (not necessarily in the traditional sense of the word) is teleological. If meaning is put in jeopardy by cri78 The Crisis , pp.353–378 and Supplementary Texts, Appendix VI. 79 Husserl, The Crisis, pp.286–287. 71 sis because science has abandoned it, then this meaning must be rediscovered. The quest for the primal meaning is what Husserl terms Rückfrage: “regressive enquiry” or “backwards reflection” as arecollection of the original ideal, which (as this recollection reveals) is also a“task”, which means that this origin or original establishment of science (identical with Western rationality) somehow contains within it the dimension of directionality. There is aclose connection here between the ideal of “knowledge from the original insight” (the imperative of “evidence”), rationality (science, philosophy), and Europe. Husserl’sbook is an attempt to reanimate this origin and this connection. Fascinating though this connection is, Iwill leave to one side the relationship between Husserl’s“regressive enquiry” and Heidegger’s“destruction of the history of ontology”, the purpose of which is to release Being from its forgetfulness. To conceive of Rückfrage as the simple retracing of its own tracks would be to simplify matters. The purpose of “regressive enquiry”, i.e. the “return to origin”, is to reveal the innermost cause of the crisis (which cause, as becomes clear, is the “forgetting” of the origin). It is therefore within tradition (tradere: to deliver, betray– tradition passes down and hands over the origin, the primal establishment) that the origin of “crisis” must also be revealed; tradition must evince some kind of discontinuity. In simple terms: this regressive procedure should be hampered somewhere along the way. This of course is not completely accurate. Husserl does not allow for anything like this. However, using this observation Iwould like for the moment simply to hint at acertain internal difficulty associated with the project of “the way back”. If Iwanted to explore the problem in greater depth by means of acomparison, then for Bergson, for instance, every way back would of necessity be away forward, and in this respect Bergson is at odds with Husserl, despite the fact that both proceed on the basis of an “internal sense of time”. 72 Husserl is convinced that it is necessary somehow to correct tradition, which is clearly somehow unreliable in and of itself. It is for this reason that apure relationship to the origin as established by this very origin is arelationship of responsibility to the original establishment. It is atask. Tradition guarantees nothing; it is only tradition if man accepts responsibility for “traditionalising”. However, in general terms this means that traditionalising is inherently arisky relationship to that which is to be traditionalised. Adiscomfiting question arises: is this “instability”, this “discontinuity” of tradition, i.e. the disconnectedness that threatens it (this is what Husserl diagnoses as the “forgetting” that, as it were, periodically jeopardises tradition)– is this something contingent or necessary? If it is necessary, then it threatens the very possibility of regressive enquiry, and in acertain sense the traditional concept of tradition would thus be annulled. If it is contingent, then it would threaten the “transcendental” dimension of the whole of Husserl’smeditation on crisis, because “forgetting” would not have aphilosophical but simply ahistorical resolution. Forgetting and remembering: is this asymmetrical or asymmetrical relationship? This is basically the first circle of problems that need to be looked at. However, there is asecond circle too. In principle it is clear that this Rückfrage has been necessitated by the present era, i.e. the “crisis” itself, the present era as “critical”– the era finds itself in crisis. However, this means that the place from which to pose the question of origin is not contingent. For instance: previously it was impossible to sense, observe and diagnose this deviation on the part of tradition from tradition itself. It is only at the peak of acrisis that acrisis is apparent as such, and therefore necessitates critical reflection or Besinnung. However, if the present is (historically) privileged in this way, if it is aquestioning of the “situated”, and if its situatedness is the essential perspective of our view of the past, does this mean that we 73 can genuinely look back to the “origin” as it was? Is not every presence the relationship between forgetting and remembering? And if we cannot look back in this fashion on the “origin”, then how does it appear now? And this would entail alarge difference; this would mean that the recommencement born of remembrance is less areturn or anew acceptance than it is anew establishment, and not merely the repetition of what has already been established at some point, acontinuation of the way the whole of this constellation (European rationalism, Europe) was established. The new acceptance of tradition would then be something like anew, equally primal establishment, and would by no means have to be at odds with this tradition’sconcept of telos, with its teleologicality. We could, for instance, be inspired by Wittgenstein’sconception of the rule, which only emerges through its use, and is “re-established” anew at every step. This would be astrange situation: it would be possible to speak of abase, and yet there would at the same time be amoment of acertain fundamental baselessness or Grundlosigkeit. Iwill try to demonstrate that Husserl must always stand on one side in respect of these various alternatives, and yet is immediately obliged to take the other side into consideration; that he operates within astrange force field that is determined simultaneously by both sides. The side on which he stands has aboundary and Husserl ends by operating on this boundary as though to extend beyond it and into the other side. These first two points give rise to several themes and ageneralising problem. Firstly, there is historicity and the concept of the “origin” or the “original (primal) establishment”, i.e. the relationship between the empirical and the ideal, between that which is de facto and that which should be de jure. However, if it is impossible to separate and distinguish between the two– if the empirical is within the ideal, the historical within the ahistorical or essential– then we are faced with an exemplary case of crisis, i.e. of the outside-in. 80 10 The most detailed analysis of this movement within Husserl’sphenomenology was conducted by Jacques Derrida in his introduction to “The Origin of Geometry”.88 Areturn to acts establishing subjectivity presupposes aphenomenological history. Husserl will never investigate empirical history. He is interested in ideal history, i.e. the movement from the establishment of meaning via its ongoing development in recurrent reactivation until the moment of crisis, when evidence was lost from science. He is interested, then, in “intentional history” as atradition that nevertheless reproduces the very structure of intentionality, the basis of which is the temporality of consciousness (intention gravitating towards its fulfilment). Apresent that, in the movement of protention, holds onto and surpasses itself as past present, makes possible aretention of the past in the mode of sedimentation, and therefore allows for a“return” to the past, since the past remains held by the order of retention: it is a“deposit”. However, this deposition is possible only through the abandonment of the immanence of consciousness, the externalisation of the deposited in language, which is simply this deposit established as an intersubjectively shared objectivism. It thus becomes a“document” separated from purely intentional history (which makes possible various “lapses”), apoor reading of the deposited, an associative interpretation instead of evidence, etc. This is the first point. The second point is that ideal objectivity is always constituted within the lifeworld, within natural experience, for instance in the case of geometry through the gradual idealisation of natural, and not ideal, forms wholly similar to each other, i.e. through the process of “infinitisation”, through advancement to alimit. This is science, rationality: the transcending of all sensory or factual limits. 88 Jacques Derrida, “Introduction”, in: E. Husserl, L’Origine de la géométrie . P. U. F., Paris 1962). Jacques Derrida, Edmund Husserl’sOrigin of Geometry: An Introduction, trans. John P. Leavey Jr., Nebraska UP, Lincoln and London 1989. 81 Thus the institution of geometry could only be a philosophical act (...) The philosopher is aman who inaugurates the theoretical attitude: the latter is only the spirit’sradical freedom, which authorises amove beyond finitude and opens the horizon of knowledge as that of aprehaving, i.e. of an infinite project or task ( Vorhaben ).89 In “The Origin of Geometry” Husserl wants to grasp at its source the origin of apriority itself, i.e. that which establishes infinitisation. But if each infinitisation is anew birth of geometry in its authentic primordial intention (which we notice still remained hidden to acertain extent by the closure of the previous system), we may wonder if it is still legitimate to speak of an origin of geometry. Does not geometry have an infinite number of births (or birth certificates) in which, each time, another birth is announced, while still being concealed? Must we not say that geometry is on the way toward its origin, instead of proceeding from it?90 In his essay on the origin of geometry, Derrida, already prepared for areading of phenomenological texts by his doctoral thesis entitled The Problem of Genesis in Husserl’sPhenomenology,91 written in the first half of the 1950s, tracks step by step how the highly paradoxical idea of non-linear teleology is outlined. “Aprimordial consciousness of delay can only have the pure form of anticipation”,92 we read in conclusion. In other words, the objective that history has (teleologically) in its sights, as described by Husserl and established by its commencement, only ever becomes clear later (nachträglich), always in aspects determined by situation. The objective is inside history (teleology), though not in the sense of some arché (principium) 89 Ibid., p.125. 90 Ibid., p.129. 91 Jacques Derrida, Le problème de la genèse dans la philosophie de Husserl . P.U.F., Paris 1990. Jacques Derrida, The Problem of Genesis in Husserl’sPhilosophy , trans. Marian Hobson, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London 2003. 92 Derrida, Origin of Geometry. An Introduction , p.153. 82 that right from the start controls the movement flowing from it. It is for this reason that the continuity of this movement (tradition) is clear only in retrospect. Rückfrage or the retrospective questioning of the beginning is therefore productive. Rückfrage is amoment of this teleology, it reconstitutes this beginning, it repeats anew the establishment and discovers or revives meaning anew. However, “anew” means both “again” and “for the first time”. This summary, however, does not do justice to all the implications and consequences contained in the Crisis. Especially unclear is the analogy between the establishment of European science, i.e. specifically European rationality, the personification of which is the task of philosophy, and the establishment of geometry as aconcrete science with which Husserl works as with an example intended to illuminate his teleological conception of the history of meaning. Above all, this summary does not make clear how Husserl works with his concepts, by means of which his conception of crisis takes shape. If, when interpreting these concepts, we proceed “chronologically”, we quickly discover in The Crisis of European Sciences that there is acurvature of the time of factual history: we find ourselves in “phenomenological” history. The starting point must be the Urstiftung or primal establishment. In the case of science (rationality, philosophy, Europe) this is the discovery of the idea of knowledge as aresolution by which man, adopting atheoretical approach to the world, transcends the finitude of his existing awareness. The closed horizons of understanding in which practical actions take place are thus traversed by an infinitely open horizon, by the horizon of the ultimate purposeful idea of knowledge from evident observation. (W)hat is most essential to the theoretical attitude of philosophical man is the peculiar universality of his critical stance, his resolve not to accept unquestioningly any pregiven opinion or tradition so that he can enquire, 83 in respect of the whole traditionally pregiven universe, after what is true in itself, an ideality (...) Thus ideal truth becomes an absolute value.93 This overcoming of the finitude of knowledge is described in detail in The Origin of Geometry as it reconstructs the path to ideal objectivities as timeless and intersubjectively communicable, extricated from the situational conditionality of cognition. This new, completely unique horizon of human life is the horizon of infinite orientation upon the objective that man opts for, and because it is targeted upon infinity its fulfilment cannot be viewed as anything but atask. Science is primarily aproject that becomes anew purpose to life, and this affords it aspecific (European, rational) meaning. It is this meaning that is in the state of crisis that Husserl diagnoses when he discovers asignificant deviation from this project, the cause of which is forgetting, specifically forgetting the meaning within which the project was originally founded. However, if such adeviation is de facto possible, this would mean that teleology is not some application of the norm, but the acceptance and continued renewed acceptance of responsibility for said norm. Perhaps this is avery fine distinction. However, it is of crucial significance and must therefore be somehow concretised. Husserl often refers disparagingly to the “objectivism” of modern science. And yet asignificant aspect of true science is its orientation on ideal objectivities. This is not acontradiction. Objectivism entails forgetting the subsoil of the lifeworld from which it emerged (this is analysed by Husserl in §§ 34–36 of The Crisis). Furthermore, the construction of ideal objectivities is not an end in itself. It has ameaning, namely to overcome finiteness by virtue of the infinite alignment of the original resolution (cognition as finite can only take possession of the infinite in the form of atask). The problem therefore resides in the “traditionalisation” of the original 93 Husserl, The Crisis , p.286. 84 plan. Husserl addresses this problem not only in the published text of The Crisis, but also in manuscripts dating back to the period after the publication of its first version, e.g. in an essay entitled “Teleology in the History of Philosophy”, where we read: The only people who have objectives and tasks are those that set themselves tasks. To an extent this is so even when we accept atask on the basis of tradition. It is not simply subsequent comprehension or empathy ( Nachverstehen ). The same applies to every communication. Understanding it does not mean that it is accepted, but that by our own action we co-enact the validity in which the party communicating intends them ( selbsttätig mitvollziehen ). The judgement accepted will become our own, the assumed wishes and will our own.94 This is asubtle distinction that in the later work is aclear echo of the early Logical Investigations and its phenomenological semiology, the study of the sign and signification– Bedeutung.95 The sign is presented as something binary: on the one hand it is expression (Ausdruck), on the other indication (Anzeichen). Expression is determined as the immediate presence of the intended significance in asign and is thus primary, while indication is aderived mode of the sign because it only secondarily refers to the immediately seen. Husserl, as Derrida will formulate it,96 privileges full, unmediated presence, whose very possibility is the condition for the possibility of phenomenology, since its necessity is already implied by the “principle of all principles” articulated in the first volume of Husserl’sIdeas: 94 Husserl, Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie. Ergänzungsband. Texte aus dem Nachlass 1934–1937 , p.373 (trans. here by Phil Jones). 95 Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigations, Vol. 1 (International Library of Philosophy), trans. J. N. Findlay, Routledge 2001, pp.183–233. 96 Once in the “Introduction” to “The Origin of Geometry”, and once in Voice and phenomenon , Jacques Derrida, La voix et le phénomène . P.U.F., Paris 1967. 85 No conceivable theory can make us err with respect to the principle of all principles: that every originary presentive intuition is alegitimizing source of cognition, that everything originary (so to speak, in its “personal” actuality) offered to us in “intuition” is to be accepted simply as what it is presented as being , but also only within the limits in which it is presented there .97 The originary or original cannot be contaminated by anything unoriginal and must be present to the opinion that grasps it. This is the basis of phenomenological “evidence”. This is why both here and in the Crisis the primacy of “idealities” (ideal objectivities and thus pure meanings), which as idealities are repeatable within different contexts on the basis of the identity of their presence, were of fundamental significance for Husserl. However, is the implicit primacy of “presence” sustainable within the context of this differentiation (i.e. the possibility of aclear differentiation between expression and indication)? Let’ssum up what we have so far. Inasmuch as Husserl takes crisis to entail aforgetting of the original meaning, this can mean several things in respect of the distinction between expression and indication, or, as the case may be, subsequent understanding and co-execution: afactual omission during the fulfilment of the founding resolution, the cause of which (completely external) is factual or empirical history randomly diverting the direction of teleological historicity. This situation creates aneed for critical thinking (Besinnung) about the relationship to tradition, i.e. it makes it necessary to conduct retrospective questioning (Rückfrage) of the primary establishment (Urstiftung), its ideal meaning, and should therefore take 97 Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to aPure Phenomenology and to aPhenomenological Philosophy , transl. F. Kersten, Martinus Nijhoff, Haag 1982, § 24, p.44. For Husserl, Anwesenheit is: "die volle und vollständige Anschauung, die Unmittelbarkeit des Augenblicks, die Selbstgegenwart in der reinen Innerlichkeit", cf. Rudolf Bernet, "Differenz und Anwesenheit. Derridas und Husserls Phänomenologie der Sprache, der Zeit, der Geschichte, der wissenschaftlichen Rationalität", in: Ernst Wolfgang Orth (ed.), Studien zur neueren französischen Phänomenologie , Karl Alber, Freiburg and München 1986, p.57. 86 the form of an explicit awareness. It is only necessary to penetrate the sedimented, passively stored and hitherto unconscious layers of historical acceptance of the project and thus rediscover its true meaning– for instance, an infinite movement in the direction of ideal objectivities can always be seen behind objectivities. However, if Husserl is speaking of arevival motivated by crisis, if crisis is exclusively the work of empirical history, and if reactivation is the answer to aconcrete situation in the light of an idea, i.e. adecision taken on its meaning in the present and from the present, then every such reactivation of meaning is also productive insofar as it reveals aspects that could not have been evident at the outset. The Rückfrage conducted is Nachstiftung, i.e. something like asecond foundation or re-establishing. This is aterm that appears in The Crisis of European Sciences, for instance when Husserl writes: This we seek to discern not from the outside, from facts, as if the temporal becoming in which we ourselves have evolved were merely an external causal series. Rather, we seek to discern it from the inside. (…) For it (our history) has spiritual unity through the unity and driving force of the task which stands before us not merely as factually required but as atask assigned to us, the present-day philosophers. For we are what we are as functionaries of modern philosophical humanity; we are heirs and cobearers of the direction of the will which pervades this humanity; we have become this through aprimal establishment which is at once areestablishment (Nachstiftung) and amodification of the Greek primal establishment. In the latter lies the teleological beginning, the true birth of the European spirit as such.98 James Dodd explains this point very adeptly while at the same time respecting Derrida’sreading:99 to have atradition means dealing 98 Husserl, The Crisis , pp.70–71. 99 James Dodd, Crisis and Reflection. An Essay on Husserl’sCrisis of the European Sciences , Kluwer Academic Publishers. Phaenomenologica 174, 2004, pp.72 et seq. 87 with problems that relate to that which tradition means for us; the beginning, though already begun, must nevertheless continue to be clarified and stipulated, or the full extent of the assigned task will remain concealed in the apparent manifestness of traditionalised knowledge. The term Nachstiftung is therefore saying the same, again and anew, because it is saying it in a(historically) different world. The second time is the first time. (When Husserl speaks of Endstiftung,100 it is this movement he has in mind.) While “The Origin of Geometry” can still operate within ateleological horizon (something that must have happened for geometry to come into being, i.e. those deeds and actions that established it), then the “crisis” that motivates the retrospective questioning of the origin thus focused arrives from within, since the wider context of the entire volume on the crisis of the European sciences indicates, however Husserl wished to avoid this, that at least potentially the outside (indication, Nachverstehen) is always already inside, because without an active return to the passively accepted, teleology is impossible. However, this implies an essential moment of responsibility: meaning appears only through responsibility because it appears in aresponse to crisis. Teleological movement is the movement of Nachträglichkeit (“afterness” or deferred action), which only now, for the first time, reveals the meaning of the original establishment. The crisis is therefore itself already Urstiftung.101 The crisis is the irreducible dimension of phenomenological history. It is therefore inside. It does not arrive from outside, though the exterior (empirical history) is essential in order that this fact shows itself. Husserl’stexts from the period of the Crisis are always characterised by acertain ambiguity, inasmuch as they allow for the conclusion that “the very meaning of science, its function not only as the project of discovering the world but of opening the world to and for a‘genuine’ life in truth, is itself perpetually in astate of crisis. From the 100 Husserl, The Crisis , p.72. 101 For more on this point see Dodd, Crisis and Reflection , pp.44 et seq. 88 latter perspective, the opening of the world to understanding in the form of the true is never simply positive, but is always at the same time the opening of an experience of the questionableness of the world.”102 102 Dodd, Crisis and Reflection , p.52. 89 11 It appears, therefore, that the meaning of the word “crisis” is weightier than we might have thought. It does not involve simply arecognition of the productivity of crisis in the Popperian concept of falsification or Kuhn’sconception of the structure of scientific revolutions. Not only does Husserl not regard these examples as crises, he explicitly states that the radical transformation of concepts in theoretical disciplines has nothing in common with his concept of crisis. The key to what he diagnoses as crisis is the “crisis of scientificity”, i.e. athreat to the very framework within which paradigm shifts and the falsification of theories take place. For this reason, the problem with Husserl’sphenomenology as philosophical thinking resides in the question of whether this framework, i.e. “scientificity” as aspecific type of rationality that characterises Europe as a cultural formation, is as unproblematic as Husserl appears to think it is. This impression is given by the fact that the concept is the precondition of all his other reflections, which are framed by the feeling of the uninhabitability of the world inasmuch as man feels exiled in his own world.103 This is an issue that needs to be addressed if we are to reflect on the phenomenon of crisis on amore general level, albeit inspired by phenomenology. At first glance it is clear where doubts might arise in connection with Husserl’sconception of crisis and history. It suffices to mention the name of Michel Foucault, an author whose conception of discontinuity makes him in this respect the antithesis of Husserl. However, the concept of such aframework (idea, telos, founding ground) is difficult to sustain even from within and is problematic in Husserl’swork itself (the founding ground inasmuch as it presupposes the possibility of reactivation, identifying its repetition with its beginning). For in opposition to this imperative of areturn to the founding or originary ground, on the obverse of considerations justifying 103 This is how the feeling of crisis in Husserl is formulated by James Dodd, ibid., p.39. 96 All of this had already been predicted by sensationalist literature in which, in its way, this exceptional structure of meaning is also revealed: the meaning of meaning itself, meaning as crisis, meaning as the event of acrisis: the outside is inside, the crisis is astate and an event, action that is manifest as astate because it paralyses and suspends the existing order (suspense novel). But this paralysis has its own strange dynamic, an almost hectic movement: the city is teeming with police, the chaotic excitement of crowds, an atmosphere of general uncertainty and atense expectation of what is to follow. Think of the literature already quoted: Paris terrorised by Fantômas, London in the power of the Chinese, or London being fought over by gangsters. This last novel cited, by Edgar Wallace (When the Gangs Came to London), at one point even describes the “suspensive” aspect of the phenomenon of the “crisis” with almost clinical precision in aconversation between the American detective Jiggs Allerman and cabinet members at ameeting of what these days would be called a“crisis management team”: The prime minister asks: “What are we going to do, Captain Allerman? You know these people, you’re acquainted with the methods employed to deal with them– what’syour suggestion?” Jiggs did not speak for amoment. He sat by the table, drumming his fingers on the polished surface. Presently he lifted his head. “Any suggestion Imake, gentlemen, will sound immodest. The first is that Ibe given absolute control of the Metropolitan police force for amonth.The second is that you suspend all your laws which protect criminals– these fair play methods of yours are going to get you in worse than you’re in already. Isuggest you scrap every rule you’ve laid down for Scotland Yard; that you suspend the Habeas Corpus Act, and give us an indemnity in advance for any illegal act– that is to say, for any act which is against your law– that may be committed in the course of that month. If you’ll do this, I’ll put these two gangs just where they belong.” 97 “In prison?” Jiggs shook his head. “In hell,” he said. It was perhaps unfortunate that he used this extravagant illustration. The Home Secretary was avery earnest Nonconformist, who took his religion seriously. “That, of course, is...” He paused. “Fantastical,” suggested Jiggs. “I’m getting quite used to the word. It’sthe one you pull when any hard-sense suggestion is made to you.” “In the first place,” said the Home Secretary stiffly, “we could not give you complete control of the police. That, as Isay, is--um--impossible. I’m not so sure that it isn’t against the Constitution.” Jiggs nodded. “She’sanew one to me.”109 109 Edgar Wallace, When the Gangs Came to London , House of Stratus, 2001, ch. 7. 98 12 In the same year that an American policeman was searching for away of stemming the flood of gangsters into London, Carl Schmitt, whose ideas were probably inspired by Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution, was preparing the second edition of his Political Theology (1st edition 1922, 2nd edition 1933). Schmitt also published an expanded version of The Concept of the Political, as well as the no less well known essay Legality and Legitimacy (1932), and in all of these works we find what approximates to ajuridico-political commentary on what Captain Jiggs Allerman proposes in crude terms in Wallace’sWhen the Gangs Came to London, namely atheory of sovereignty and the “state of exception”. “Sovereign is he who decides on the exception” reads the first sentence of Political Theology110. And because the Ausnahmezustand or state of exception is simply another name for acrisis, it would be possible to draw on Schmitt’sconsiderations as the backdrop against which to examine Husserl’sconcept of crisis, nonlinear teleology, and above all the emphasis laid on responsibility. Leaving terminology to one side, Schmitt’s state of exception is aparticular manifestation of the general phenomenon of crisis (though this formulation could be inverted) in the sense that it displays the same underlying structure. The link between crisis and astate of exception is clear to the legal scholar Clinton L. Rossiter, as we see in the title of his Constitutional Dictatorship: Crisis Government in the Modern Democracies (New York 1948), in which he writes: “... in time of crisis ademocratic, constitutional government must be temporarily altered to whatever degree is necessary to overcome the peril and restore normal conditions (...) the government will have more power and the people fewer 110 Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab, MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts 1985, p.5. 99 rights...”.111 The “necessary degree” (clearly formulated in the demands set by Jiggs Allerman) is vague: are we still talking of alegal state or, on the contrary, acomplete suspension of the rule of law as handed down by precedent? Or is this astate in which political (state) and executive power has merged with legislative power and can no longer be distinguished? For this reason too, since the time of Roman law the state of exception has been associated with civil war, rebellion, an extreme threat to the state, states of emergency, etc. In brief, the problem is as follows: if the declaration of astate of exception were apurely political decision, it would be illegal and there would be arisk of chaos, because astate of exception must somehow be “legitimised” even though it suspends legality. This is where Carl Schmitt comes in, who understands the state of exception as aborderline concept, as the threshold of the law (the border or threshold implies ambiguity: neither-nor, both-and) Because the exception is different from anarchy and chaos, order in the juristic sense still prevails even if it is not the legal order. The existence of the state is undoubted proof of its superiority over the validity of the legal norm. The decision frees itself from all normative ties and becomes in the true sense absolute. The state suspends the law in the exception on the basis of its right of self-preservation, as one would say. The two elements of the concept legal order are then dissolved into independent notions and thereby testify to their conceptual independence. Unlike the normal situation, when the autonomous moment of the decision recedes to aminimum, the norm is destroyed in the exception. The exception remains, nevertheless, accessible to jurisprudence because both elements, the norm as well as the decision, remain within the framework of the juristic.112 111 Cited in Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception (Homo Sacer II) . The University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London 2005, p.8. 112 Schmitt, Political Theology , p.12. 100 This is not simply to say that the crisis is something that can be encountered or experienced in reality (up to the very boundary of banality or familiarity: Iwill leave to one side life or economic crises and even worse examples), though this is not without interest, because in such cases the crisis is something like aborderline situation, astate of limitation that, like state and event, being and becoming, is such that one cannot be separated from the other. This is why the “crisis” is also asituation of irreducible ambiguity. However, this complicates matters considerably, because the simple topological antithesis outside/inside implied in various theories of the state of exception is insufficient to explain the phenomenon it sets out to explain. Giorgio Agamben puts it thus in his monograph on the state of exception: If the state of exception’scharacteristic property is a(total or partial) suspension of the juridical order, how can such asuspension still be contained within it? How can an anomie be inscribed within the juridical order? And if the state of exception is instead only ade facto situation, and is as such unrelated or contrary to law, how is it possible for the order to contain alacuna precisely where the decisive situation is concerned? And what is the meaning of this lacuna? In truth, the state of exception is neither external nor internal to the juridical order, and the problem of defining it concerns precisely athreshold, or azone of indifference, where inside and outside do not exclude each other but rather blur with each other.113 But let us return for amoment to Schmitt and the quote from his Political Theology: “... the state of exception is something other than mere anarchy and chaos”. Astate of emergency is declared and is therefore the subject of adecision, asovereign decision, because it is adecision on an exception, which is always outside the norm, since the general norm can never cover an exception– neither indeed can 113 Agamben, The State of Exception (Homo Sacer II), p.23. 101 the general norm justify the decision that the situation in question is agenuinely exceptional case. It is adecision that cannot be extrapolated from any legal norm. Nor is it possible to claim that the state of exception arises necessarily from an emergency situation, since astate of emergency is not an objective fact: astate of emergency is simply that which is declared to be astate of emergency.114 This is why Schmitt says that the sovereign decides whether there exists astate of emergency.115 However, he also says: “The sovereign stands outside of the normally valid juridical order and yet belongs to it.”116 If this is true, then it is also true that the state of exception remains something other than anarchy and chaos. But how can this possibly be true? Easy– the state of exception is aborderline or liminal state, the threshold of the (juridical) order. Schmitt concretises and elaborates on the problem. Adecision that annuls the juridical order in this way manifests aspecific legal moment: the norm requires anormal form of life circumstances or it cannot be applied, which is why adecision on astate of exception first creates asituation in which legal provisions can apply and therefore in which norms may be applied. Order must first be established so that the rule of law be meaningful, and this in turn makes possible the declaration of astate of exception. Schmitt generalises this question as follows: Precisely aphilosophy of concrete life must not withdraw from the exception and the extreme case, but must be interested in it to the highest degree. The exception can be more important to it than the rule, not because of aromantic irony for the paradox, but because the seriousness of an insight goes deeper than the clear generalizations inferred from what ordinarily repeats itself. The exception is more interesting than the rule. The rule proves nothing; the exception proves everything: It confirms not only 114 Ibid., p.30. 115 Schmitt, Political Theology, p.7. 116 Ibid. 102 the rule but also its existence, which derives only from the exception. In the exception the power of real life breaks through the crust of amechanism that has become torpid by repetition.117 The norm is possible on the basis only of the exception: for Schmitt the fundamentum inconcussum of his legal theory, for Husserl the unintended yet possible consequence of his concept of crisis and teleology, which, on the contrary, is supposed to avert the threat of complete discontinuity in relation to tradition. In the case of Schmitt the Urstiftung or original foundation would be the sovereign decision that first creates the possibility of normativity and in its capacity as sovereign is itself without foundation, because there are no rules available pertaining to the decision to call astate of exception, and such adecision is not subject to any (juridical) control: however, as the boundary of juridical order it is both outside and inside. The state of exception is the moment when the order (law) detaches itself from its own power, suspending its power. In the case of Husserl this is in the name of adecision preceded by the suspension (in the sense of the problematisation) of the entire tradition heretofore as normalising, i.e. responsibility. However, in this case too we could say that this is an act that is both inside and outside. Husserl wants to retain the performance of responsibility within the framework or horizon of teleology, which is why he views it as aconscious endorsement of the original idea– this is why each new establishment in the sense of Nachstiftung is inside. However, if this Nachstiftung is somehow productive– if it is aresponse to crisis, i.e. if it corresponds to ahistorically arising situation– then it is not entirely clear whether it is possible to speak of a“ground” of responsibility inasmuch as no response can be passively inferred from the founding idea. The non-groundlessness recognised by Schmitt is athreat to Husserl that he fails to avert convincingly. He might indeed para117 Ibid., p.16. 103 phrase Schmitt: in acrisis “the power of real life breaks through the crust of amechanism that has become torpid by repetition.” This comparison could be transferred to alevel of greater abstraction. In ahighly original monograph, Michael Marder118 interprets Schmitt’s“political ontology” on the basis of the relationship between line and point, i.e. akind of proto-geometry of the original act of Landnahme, which Schmitt in his book Der Nomos der Erde119 describes as his form of Urstiftung. The earth as the antithesis of the sea, in which no structuration can leave any permanent trace, is arealm allowing for the establishment of afixed locus and border, astable order of localisation. This establishment of avisible nomos is “aconstitutive historical event– an act of legitimacy, whereby the legality of amere law first is made meaningful.”120 Rechtsetzung is manifest in the fixed lines thus charted that are born of the “punctuating” moment of establishment without this point being broken or surmounted by aline, since aline itself is nothing other than an infinite number of points. In Schmitt’sconcept of the political this basic scheme (line-point) is mirrored in the sovereign decision on astate of exception, in the exception or the irrepressible potentiality of the point. The exception is part of the line and yet transcends it. Schmitt extrapolates from this aradical political idea in which the decision on astate of exception is apermanent reminder that continuity lives in intermittency or discontinuity.121 To compensate for the normative groundlessness of its origination, the line appeals, in the last instance, to definite divisions ( bestimmte Einteilungen ) and demarcations engraved in the literal ground, the soil: the firm line and 118 Michael Marder, Groundless Existence : The Political Ontology of Carl Schmitt , Continuum, New York 2010. 119 Carl Schmitt, Der Nomos der Erde im Völkerrecht des Jus Publicum Europaeum . Dunckler & Humblot, Berlin 21974 (1950). Carl Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth, trans. and annotated by G.L. Ulmen, Telos Press, New York 2003. 120 Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth , p.73. 121 Cf. Marder, Groundless Existence , p.15. 104 nomos that flourishes from it can always fall back on the earth for their onto-phenomeno-political support. Rooted in such solidity (...) are the acts of appropriation consonant with the most elemental sense of nomos as well as the “standards and rules”, die Masse und Regeln , for human conduct that, much later, will generate the abstractions of normativitiy forgetful of their grounding in the earth. The repression of the concrete similarly isolated by Husserl as the cause of the crisis plaguing European sciences and collective consciousness, is further exacerbated by the extension of linearity to the whole planet. (...) The budding cold and uninhabitable abstraction of globality, which is but ageographic representation disengaged from the life-world of human beings, overrides the earth and the soil that bore the first lines of nomic demarcation. Yet, the extension of linearity is, in an equal measure, arupture, a“headlong leap into the nothingness” that, strangely, mimics the accomplishments of decision-making. It punctuates that which it extends, unhinging and ungrounding the line removed from its material support in the soil. Comparable qualitative leaps and punctuations will, henceforth, accompany every attempt at redrawing the global lines and remaking the international order (...) Akin to the decision that signals the end of indeterminacy and asserts its independence from infinite deliberations and rationalisations, the point is absolved from all relationality even as it negatively mediates the self-relatedness of space. This exceptional determination, this extranormative eruption, this performative declaration that is not buoyed up by anything but itself, aptly illustrates the sovereign decision on the exception in Political Theology .122 Acomparison with Husserl’sidea of teleological history and its beginnings in the establishment of the original idea will serve to demonstrate this strange borderline position, aposition that is not easy to understand. Unlike Walter Benjamin, who views the (juridical) order as permeated by the violence by means of which it was founded 122 Marder, Groundless Existence , p.16. 105 and thus constantly in the power of fateful forces, capable of being annulled only by “divine” violence completely exterior to the history to which it will one day put an end123, Carl Schmitt inclines to the idea of discontinuous continuity as an inexhaustible potentiality of history, and so acknowledges both the continuity of the line and the radical discontinuity of the sovereign decision, without postulating any external factor. Husserl’steleology also rejects and at the same time accepts both one and the other, but only inasmuch as both ensue from the potentiality of asingle origin and the idea founded within it; though it takes the moment of crisis seriously, the decision is only adecision if it is aresponse, if it responds to the original idea. Even here he applies to history (albeit in modified form) his concept of temporality, the flow of which guarantees the intentional interconnectedness of retention, impression and protention. However, impression here is something akin to acrisis that is aresponse bound anew to apast story (tradition), while the response opens afuture in which meaning will once again have the chance to limber up, as it were, ameaning that is to explain authentic traditionalisation. Hence recollection of the origin of event as responsibility for the history of meaning and as response. In simple, approximate, terms, the ambiguity of Husserl’snonlinear teleology is concentrated in the semantic proximity of the words “responsibility” and “response”, which can become an irreducible difference. Responsibility relates to acertain horizon– it is responsibility for traditionalisation in respect of its original establishment. However, the response is close to the performative utterance: if Ido not respond, Ido not know how Irespond and by what means in the singular moment of crisis Iseize the original idea in order to reincorporate it into the history in which it has been forgotten. Only then can we say that the basis of history is present in 123 Cf. Walter Benjamin, “Zur Kritik der Gewalt”, in: Gesammelte Schriften II.1, ed. R. Tiedemann– H. Schweppenhäuser, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt a.M. 1999, pp.179–204; Walter Benjamin , Über den Begriff der Geschichte . 112 15 Thinking after the end of the Second World War finds its original establishment, its Urstiftung, in the categorical claim made by Theodore W. Adorno in 1949 that first appears in the essay Cultural Criticism and Society: Cultural criticism finds itself faced with the final stage of the dialectic of culture and barbarism. To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. And this corrodes even the knowledge of why it has become impossible to write poetry today.124 The emphasis here is on both parts of the sentence, which is clear when Adorno cites himself and in the essay Art and the Arts writes: While the present situation no longer has room for art– that was the meaning of the statement about the impossibility of poems after Auschwitz– it nevertheless has need of it.125 Adorno never rescinded his original statement, though over time he clarified it: Perennial suffering has as much right to expression as atortured man has to scream; hence it may have been wrong to say that after Auschwitz you could no longer write poems.126 This correction was in order if only because Adorno himself was agreat admirer of the poetry of Paul Celan, as we see in his Aesthetic Theory, where we read that Celan’spoetry 124 Theodor W. Adorno, “Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft”, in: GS 10.1, p.30. Regarding the context of and changes to Adorno’s statement on poetry after Auschwitz, see Klaus Hofmann, “Poetry After Auschwitz– Adorno’s Dictum”, German Life and Letters , 58, 2, 2005, pp.182–194. 125 Theodor W. Adorno, “Die Kunst und die Künste”, GS 10.1, pp.452–453. 126 Theodor W. Adorno, Negative dialektik , GS 6, p.355. 113 is permeated by the shame of art in the face of suffering that escapes both experience and sublimation. Celan’spoems want to speak of the most extreme horror through silence. Their truth content itself becomes negative.127 This then gives rise to aquestion that it would be possible to answer in asimilar way, i.e. on the basis of Adorno’sown work: is philosophy possible after Auschwitz? And if so, then how? 127 Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor, Continuum, London & New York 1977, p.322. 114 16 At the same time as Husserl was attempting to salvage Europe’sidentity on the basis of its original idea and find away of reducing that which is exterior in respect of European rationality, aplan was being hatched for afinal solution to this exterior, aplan for its physical elimination. Husserl grappled with ideality and phenomenological historicity. What was about to arrive, however, was real history. No matter when it may be written, every story will henceforth be before Auschwitz, as Maurice Blanchot was to write much later.128 He is referring to akind of paralysis brought on by the facticity of an event that cannot be incorporated within the existing horizon of rationality, cannot be explained and thus accorded ameaning, ameaning that, notwithstanding, it must not be allowed to possess. This is not alogical contradiction, but atrauma. The ability to think is not only occluded, as Adorno says, but is removed from the game by the time of an event by which we are marked, an event we are obliged to maintain an awareness of and are unable to rid ourselves of because we are unable to retrieve it within the imagination. It is irreparable, somehow lost for us, but for this very reason we are still implicated in it.129 It is the original oblivion, the antecedent of the memory in which, nonetheless, it persists. However, if it is something irredeemable, this event can never be absent: that which we cannot encounter, we cannot escape from. Thinking can only testify. The outside is inside 128 Maurice Blanchot, Après coup , Les Ed. de Minuit, Paris 1983, p.99. “Aquelque date qu‘il puisse être écrit, tout récit désormais sera d‘avant Auschwitz.” 129 See, for example, Steven Shaviro, “Complicity and Forgetting”, MLN , Vol. 105, No. 4 (1990), pp.819–832, here p.820: “But the deepening tendency of thought, its political situatedness, is precisely this: that it cannot escape the unexpected demands of the present moment, or the return, the uncanny insistence, of alongburied past. ” 115 and remains before us. Not teleology, but the irruption of traumatic temporality into linear chronology. Adorno and Horkheimer’sDialectic of the Enlightenment is also aform of “retrospective questioning”, i.e. Rückfrage, in that it seeks aresponse to the question of “why humanity, instead of entering atruly human state, is sinking into anew kind of barbarism”.130 This, too, is critical thinking in the Husserlian sense of the word Besinnung, in that it involves a“reflection on the regressive moment”131 by which reason consumes itself. This, too, reveals the loss of meaning in the instrumentalisation of science and the mathematisation of qualities (with explicit reference to Husserl’sCrisis). However, its starting point is not crisis, but the catastrophe of the Holocaust. And in its response to the Holocaust it can no longer strive for areturn, but for an openness in thinking for the future that cannot, however, be anything other than an openness to the radically other. This is not about preserving tradition, but rescuing hope. The place that for Husserl was home to remembrance is now occupied by the response to factual history. However, in both cases reflection on the meaning of rationality is amatter of responsibility. This can be corroborated very briefly with two quotes. The first is from Adorno’sLectures on Negative Dialectics: But that after Auschwitz one cannot seriously speak of aworld in which that was possible, and in which the threat of arepetition in some other way looms daily, and in some comparable guise– Iam reminded of Vietnam– is probably happening this very second, as being meaningful; i.e. to maintain that this world in which we live is supposed to meaningful, that seems to me to express acynicism and afrivolity which is, simply, in terms of pre-philosophical experience, no longer justifiable. And aphilosophy which, imbued with afoolish arrogance of the spirit refusing to take cognisance of 130 Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectics of Enlightment , trans. E. Jephcott, Stanford University Press, Stanford 2000, p. xiv. 131 Ibid. 116 this reality– turns ablind eye to this and which insists, come what may, that there is meaning, that seems to me to be an exaction which cannot be imposed on anyone not entirely stupefied by philosophy; for philosophy can, without question, amongst the many other functions it fulfils, stupefy with success.132 The second is from Minima Moralia, in this case Adorno’sreflections at the very end of the war (autumn 1944): The thought that after this war life could continue on “normally”, or indeed that culture could be “reconstructed”– as if the reconstruction of culture alone were not already the negation of such– is idiotic. Millions of Jews have been murdered, and this is supposed to be only the intermission and not the catastrophe itself?133 The outside is irreducibly inside: afactual historical event has transformed post-war philosophy by compelling it to respond to factual history. Thinking lost the self-assuredness provided by its foundation in the idea of reason. As aconsequence, philosophy during the second half of the twentieth century is often difficult to understand. It invents new terms and searches for other traditions and other forms of argumentation. It will perhaps become more understandable if we read it as aresponse to the event that was Auschwitz, the very character of which excludes any rational assimilation. It would even be possible to show that the texts of many of philosophy’smost renowned practitioners, from Adorno via Levinas, Blanchot and Derrida to Agamben and Didi-Huberman and so on, also have akind of personal dimension inasmuch as they search for an appropriate philosophical language in which to express (personal) experience. 132 Theodor W. Adorno, Lectures on Negative Dialectics , trans. Rodney Livingstone, Polity Press, Cambridge 2008, p.19. 133 Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia. Reflections from Damaged Life , trans. E.F.N. Jephcott, Verso, London and New York 2005, p.55. 117 The Holocaust is an event that has necessitated the radical transformation of philosophical discourse, and unless we understand this transformation, their books will seem too complicated, paradoxical, or even capricious. However, the idea that they were merely involved in proposing academic solutions to academic problems could not be further from the truth. These writers are interested in the very meaning of thinking, and all of them share the conviction that philosophical thinking is only present where philosophy transcends itself. Now it is about something else, it is about bearing witness. And yet this bearing witness represents acompletely different type of showing. This is the lesson of the Holocaust. Auschwitz is aradical event inasmuch as we have to ask ourselves whether our conceptual understanding, interpretation and analysis are appropriate responses to it. Thinking reconstructs nothing in such away as to lend the event anarrative arc. It is touched by the event and responds to it, reflects upon it, while at the same time being areflection upon the concept of the event and its own relationship to the event. All of this is part of the process of bearing witness. All of this is stated clearly and harshly in Adorno’s Negative Dialectic : After Auschwitz, our feelings resist any claim of the positivity of existence as sanctimonious, as wronging the victims; they balk at squeezing any kind of sense, however bleached, out of the victims’ fate. And these feelings do have an objective side after events that make amockery of the construction of immanence as endowed with ameaning radiated by an affirmatively posited transcendence. Such aconstruction would affirm absolute negativity and would assist its ideological survival– as in reality that negativity survives anyway, in the principle of society as it exists until its self-destruction. The earthquake of Lisbon sufficed to cure Voltaire of the theodicy of Leibniz, and the visible disaster of the first nature was insignificant in comparison with the second, social one, which defies human imagination as it distils areal hell from human evil. Our metaphysical faculty is paralysed because 118 actual events have shattered the basis on which speculative metaphysical thought could be reconciled with experience.134 134 Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton, Routledge, London 1973, pp.361–362. 119 17 Between the response and the event, the event and experience, experience of the event and testimony thereof, there is clearly avery close relationship, all the more so if it is necessary to respond to the experience from the order of de facto. The event is something that happens out of the blue. At the same time it touches us and awakens us to life, inasmuch as that which we call life, as Jean-François Lyotard says, emerges from the violence that impacts upon our lethargy from without.135 Because we are not furnished with aspecial organ for perceiving the event, we have no choice but to describe our relationship to it in different ways. We are “struck by” the event, “caught unawares”, the event “relates to us”. These descriptions always contain an important lesson for thinking that ventures to deal with the event: philosophy must emerge from within itself and transcend itself. The fact of experience in relation to an event problematises the relationship between philosophical reflection and its subject matter. Experience of the event tests the boundary of thinking, and for this reason it seems that it bursts in upon the realm of philosophy like an unwelcome intruder from without. However, if the close relationship between event and experience is to be accepted, two conclusions may be drawn. Firstly, experience is present only where there is an event. Secondly, experience is the place from which an event is perceived. But if the experience of Auschwitz transformed thinking in the second half of the twentieth century, abasic question arises: is experience of the Holocaust even possible? And if so, can it still be called experience? These are questions in which the transformation of thinking is both enacted and reflected. If we know that in modern philosophy the term experience is subordinate to the function of recognition, then only that which is cognitively relevant is deemed 135 Jean-François Lyotard, Moralités postmodernes , Ed. Galilée, Paris 1993; idem, Postmodern Fables , University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, pp.235–250. 120 to be the content of experience. Otherwise, to borrow from Adorno: concretely experienced reality is subordinate to instrumentalised rationality (or the “positivism” of the modern world). The concepts that experience organises separate it from that which Husserl named the life-world or Lebenswelt. These questions are therefore basically self-evident, and on the eve of the Holocaust and still under the sway of the First World War, philosophy anticipated them in the texts by Walter Benjamin that relate to the specific experience of twentieth-century Man. Right at the start of his long essay The Storyteller (1936), Benjamin observes acertain decline in the traditional art of storytelling (the essay examines the work of Nikolaj Leskov) and writes: experience has fallen in value. And it looks as if it is continuing to fall into bottomlessness (...) With the (First) World War aprocess began to become apparent which has not halted since then. Was it not noticeable at the end of the war that men returned from the battlefield grown silent– not richer, but poorer in communicable experience? What ten years later was poured out in the flood of war books was anything but experience that goes from month to mouth (...) the communicability of experience is decreasing.136 The experience of the First World War was already such that it paralysed experience and its link to the chronicling of that experience, for which it was no longer possible to find adequate (communicable) expression. Closely related to this is the inability to relate in the manner of erstwhile storytellers. In Benjamin this is atheme that is subject to many variations, for instance in his earlier essay Experience and Poverty (1933), where we read: 136 Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings 3, Belknap Press, Cambridge 2006, pp.143–144. 121 this much is clear: experience has fallen in value, amid ageneration which from 1914 to 1918 had to experience some of the most monstrous events in the history of the world...137 (Benjamin uses the same formulation almost word for word in The Storyteller, but now expresses his idea on the very boundary of selfcontradiction.) However, we then read something that seems almost to anticipate Adorno and Horkheimer’sDialectic of the Enlightment, albeit from adifferent perspective: Indeed (let’sadmit it), our poverty of experience is not merely poverty on the personal level, but poverty of human experience in general. Hence, anew kind of barbarism.138 Benjamin, however, has something different in mind. He is alluding to the “positive concept of barbarism”. The barbarian, starved of experience, must begin anew, he is faced by atabula rasa (Klee and Loos, among others, turn to “the naked man of the contemporary world who lies screaming like anewborn babe in the dirty diapers of the present”). Poverty would therefore entail people attempting to rid themselves of experience in order that they might apply their internal and external poverty so purely that something decent emerges from it. This perhaps explains the “contra-dictoriness” referred to above: wartime “experience” is incommunicable because it has deprived man of everything in which he believed. He begins anew, and yet it is doubtful whether this will lead to his being able to return to experience in some original sense of the word. Rather, it involves the complete annihilation of tradition in the sense of the inherited traditionalised horizons of understanding (see Benjamin’sThe Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, the loss of aura, etc.) 137 Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings 2, p.731. 138 Ibid., p.732. 128 the relief, the overwhelming feeling of relief as we walked past the gate and continued toward the ‘sauna camp’ and entered it and through the windows could even see into the crematorium compound– all this Isomehow remember, but this experience did not persist in the memory. The primal experience, the one that persisted, is the trauma, recurring numberless times and encapsulating, like ahighly concentrated essence, the immutable law of the Great Death. Alaw that prevailed and applied to each and every one of us. Grappling with it– hopelessly– yet aspiring compulsively to escape its clutches, was aformative experience.149 Though Benjamin’spre-war theme of experience and its paralysis returns after the war in the writings of Adorno, the words remain but the meaning is completely transformed. In Minima Moralia Adorno writes: The sheer incommensurability of the body to the war of attrition the previous time around already made authentic experience impossible. No one could have talked about it the way the battles of the artillery-general Napoleon Bonaparte were recounted. The long interval between war memoirs and the armistice is not an accident: it testifies to the laborious reconstruction of memory, which remains conjoined to something powerless and even inauthentic in all those books, regardless of whatever horrors the writer witnessed. (...) World War II however is as completely devoid of experience as amachine is to the movements of abody, (the less can it leave behind) acontinuous and unconsciously preserved picture of memory. Everywhere, with each explosion, it has broken through the protective shield in which personal experience formed, the duration between the healing forgetting and the healing memory. Life has transformed itself into atimeless succession of shocks, between which gape holes, paralysed intermediary spaces (...) No one will be able to think of this, that every trauma, every unprocessed shock of that which recurs, is aferment of coming destruction.150 149 Ibid., p.33. 150 Adorno, Minima Moralia , pp.54–55. 129 18 The experience of the Holocaust is perceived as atraumatic experience. This means that its very re-presentation (leaving to one side the problematic nature of this term) by aphilosophical discourse that draws on the language of tradition is impossible if it does not want to falsify the event that this experience– in shock– encountered. Although this involves grasping something past historically, any attempt to reflect upon this experience makes it clear that the very structure of linearly conceived time is incommensurate with this experience. In brief: we are faced with the experience of the impossibility of experience. The past is not securely deposited in memory. The event is still with us, but not in the manner of something– literally– past, but as something that coming to terms with is atask we are forever faced with. It is for this reason that philosophical discourse seeks afoothold in the Freudian concepts of repetition compulsion (Wiederholungszwang) and afterness, or deferred action (Nachträglichkeit), since it is clear that with their help amore acceptable description of “traumatised” experience is possible. However, philosophy then comes up against temporality, which excludes the possibility of identification, since understanding comes up against the evasiveness of that which it is attempting to re-cognise, its irreducible absence in presence. This temporality is manifest in different ways and very often in paradoxes (which, given the traditional language of philosophy, is to be expected). For instance, the first sentence of Adorno’sNegative Dialectics reads as follows: Philosophy, which once seemed obsolete, lives on because the moment to realise it was missed.151 151 Adorno, Negative Dialectics , p.3. 130 The Holocaust is thus akind of consequence of the radical crisis of European rationality. If we wish to find causes, we must return and search in the tradition of European reason for that which remained overlooked until the outbreak of this radical crisis. We must reflect on the European tradition of rationalism. Inasmuch as the starting point of Husserl’scritical reflection (Besinnung) is crisis, and crisis itself calls for retrospective questioning (Rückfrage) aimed at the original establishment and the remembrance thereof, then for Adorno the starting point of ano less critical thinking (Nachdenken) is catastrophe. Though Adorno’sretrospective questioning is also directed at the “original establishment”, which is what he terms the Enlightenment and is basically identical to European rationality (even though its origin resides elsewhere, with Bacon, at the crossover point to myth or in myth itself), this is not in order to resuscitate some original idea but to find in it the “regressive moment” that caused the idea of the Enlightenment to repudiate itself. This does not entail– and in this respect there is an analogy with Husserl, though Adorno is far more radical– rejecting this idea, because freedom is inseparable from enlightened thinking. No, the therapy is more complicated than that. If the Enlightenment does not want definitively to seal its own fate, it must also include in itself acritical reflection upon this “regressive moment”.152 Clearly this does not imply teleology. However, like Husserl, Adorno identifies acrisis leading to catastrophe in the fact that science, as aconsequence of its instrumentalisation, has lost its meaning. In this respect Adorno and Horkheimer’sDialectic of Enlightenment is the continuation of Husserl’sThe Crisis of the European Sciences through the prism of the event that was the Holocaust, and thus marks the beginning of aradical transformation of philosophical discourse. The title Dialectic of Enlightenment tells us clearly what direction, pace Husserl, this Rückfrage conducted by Adorno andHorkheimer 152 Theodore W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment , trans. E.F.N. Jephcott, Stanford UP, Stanford 2002, p. xvi ("rückläufiges Moment"). 131 will take (the preface is dated May 1944, and the entire volume was published in 1947, which means it came out in the same year as Primo Levi’sIf This is aMan). The Enlightenment of its title is much broader in scope. The word is usually associated with the idea of “progress”. However, if this is how we choose to understand it, we are soon brought up short by the following sentence: “The curse of irresistible progress is irresistible regression.”153 From this we glean that, whereas for Husserl crisis is something that appears at acertain moment in history, for Adorno and Horkheimer the crisis is the very idea of the Enlightenment in that form in which it has developed up until the present day. The aim of the Enlightenment in the most general sense of the term was to release people from fear and grant them mastery. “Yet the wholly enlightened earth is radiant with triumphant calamity.”154 Or in other (better) words: the cause of the crisis is contained in the very establishment of the idea of enlightenment, i.e. in the very basis from which that rationality evolves in which the “regressive moment” is contained from the start. Adorno and Horkheimer are at their most provocative and radical when they overthrow the whole idea of achasm separating myth and (rational) science. An example of this is when they claim that the Enlightenment is mythical fear radicalised,155 which now emerges in the manifest form of an always latent crisis, right now as we pose the question of “why humanity, instead of entering atruly human state, is sinking into anew kind of barbarism”.156 Another example would be when they say that “the myths which fell victim to the Enlightenment were themselves its own products”.157 This is aparadox only if we cleave to the idea of adiscontinuity between myth and reason. If, however, we take reason to mean explanation, then myth already 153 Ibid., p.28 (“unaufhaltsame Regression”). 154 Ibid., p.1. 155 Ibid., p.11. 156 Ibid., p. iv. 157 Ibid., p.5. 132 fulfils this function, myth is already science (and on the contrary science succumbs to myth, e.g. the “myth of progress”). What is to be achieved through explanation? The answer to this question involves acritical reflection on the “regressive moment” when it shows that the ultimate goal of explaining is to achieve mastery over nature. Just as for Husserl the history of Europe is identical with acertain idea of reason, so the same is true of the Dialectic of Enlightenment. However, at the same time the two ideas are virtually incommensurate. For Husserl, science is identical with responsibility for the evidence of cognition, with insight, with an “intrusion” into the essence of the thing itself. However, according to Adorno and Horkheimer, science establishes itself as the attempt to gain dominion over reality by explaining it. The aim of science is to overcome amythicised world characterised by afear of nature in its capacity as unfathomable exterior, which is why power and knowledge are synonymous (though this is the basis of the tradition of enlightened rationality). Reason is instrumentalised, and this then means that it is not superior to purposes (sovereignty over nature), but is subordinate to them. Leaving aside the different frameworks, in many respects this analysis of the instrumentalisation of reason builds on Husserl, at times explicitly (Adorno’sdissertation was concerned with the transcendence of the noematic object, i.e. it was intended to reveal the implicit “materialism” of phenomenology through the irreducibility of the empirical moment in an intentional relationship). Adorno and Horkheimer cite Husserl and his account of how mathematics gained independence: An infinite world, here aworld of idealities, is conceived, not as one whose objects become accessible to our knowledge singly, imperfectly, and as it were accidentally, but as one which is attained by arational, systematically coherent method. In the infinite progression of this method, every object is ultimately attained according to its full being-in-itself (...) Through Galileo’smathematisation of nature, nature itself is idealised under the 133 guidance of the new mathematics; nature itself becomes– to express it in amodern way– amathematical manifold (Manningfaltigkeit).158 In its way the Dialectic of Enlightenment is saying something similar: the Enlightenment establishes only formal rationality because instrumental reason prioritises mathematical formalism and formal logic without reflecting on the goals to be achieved. Thinking becomes an automatic process (it competes with the machine, which it would like to replace159). The idea of science is positivistically diminished and becomes indifferent to questions of meaning. The problem is that only questions of meaning mean anything to Man. The world is agigantic analytical judgement. However, as Imentioned, the framework is different and this modifies the perspective. According to the Dialectic of Enlightenment, the driver of enlightenment is reason, rationality, science as power over nature (the outside), i.e. Herrschaft or sovereignty, dominion. However, both the nature without and the nature within, i.e. “human nature”, must be mastered in this way. At the same time, reason controlled by reality is rationalisation (the level of the general), to which the individual (or everything particular or specific) must be subordinate: anew collapse into myth, because auniverse controlled by general necessity then necessarily appears as fatum. Society, too, is “rationalised”: The generality of the ideas developed by discursive logic, power in the sphere of the concept, is built on the foundation of power in reality... Power confronts the individual as the universal, as the reason which informs reality.”160 The generalisation of instrumental rationality rules here and there. 158 Husserl, The Crisis , p.22. 159 At the very start of his career, Husserl had already subjected the first attempts at the formalisation of logic to the same critique and called for alogic of content. 160 Adorno, Horkheimer, Dialectics of Enlightenment , p.10, 16 ("rückläufiges Momen"). 134 This already anticipates the thesis of Negative Dialectics that “the whole is untrue”, since the philosophical concepts by which the world is interpreted and that are instruments of power raise the social conditions that justify them to the level of true reality by demanding general recognition (just as only the world as it is re-presented by science is raised to the status of “true world” by means of mathematisation). The idea of the Enlightenment contains the seeds of its own destruction in the form of instrumentalised rationality. This is the “regressive moment”, reflections upon which must be embraced by reason if it does not want to seal definitively the fate of the founding idea. In other words, reason must reflect upon its outside-in and not eliminate it by passing it off as something that is “outside” it. (This is Husserl’sgesture, agesture that, one might say, wants to force the “regressive moment” out into the outside). Reason must somehow be true to that which so-called progress destroys. This is because enlightenment must reflect on itself if humanity is not to be totally betrayed. (…) What is at stake is not conservation of the past but the fulfilment of past hopes.161 It is impossible to quit the Enlightenment or to remain within it without reflection. This paradox can only be resolved if historical development understands itself differently, if it follows the path to this other understanding illuminated by the catastrophic culmination of the history of European rationality. One might say that the history of European reason has from the very beginning been controlled by astrange dialectic– strange, because it is neither the Hegelian dialectic (the gradual sublation of contradictions on increasingly higher levels of consciousness, or “spiritualisation”), nor it is the Husserlian “dialectic”, which in the final analysis is not adialectics at all 161 Ibid, p. xvii. 135 since empirical history only derives meaning from the perspective of ideal teleology. Astrange dialectic indeed... it is difficult so much as to consider it as “movement”. Every progress goes hand in hand with regression. The revelation of the beginning reveals the end, overcoming myth is amyth, catastrophe illuminated the Urstiftung of rationality as crisis. Auschwitz does not mean areturn to apoint prior to the modern era, but is somehow the moment of just this era. After Auschwitz the mutual “constellation” of culture and barbarism swap places, and this helps us understand the claim that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric”. Without reflection upon the “regressive moment”, every example of progress is the progress of barbarism. The assiduous cultivation of culture can only mask the fact that we are once again falling back into barbarism. All this is complicated by the fact that the Holocaust is incomprehensible and unnameable and therefore in the realm of the incommensurable while at the same time being within rationality. Henceforth Adorno’sdialectic will work within adifferent, “traumatic” temporality. Adorno is uncompromising in this respect and his texts are often accompanied by acomplicated network of prolepsis and analepsis (in film language: flashback and flash forward). Take, for example, this aphoristic observation from Minima Moralia: What the Germans have committed is beyond comprehension, even the psychological kind, given that the horror seems to have been perpetrated more as blindly planned and alienated measures ( Schreckmassnahmen ) of terror than as spontaneous gratification. According to the reports of eyewitnesses, the torture and murder were carried out without enthusiasm, and perhaps for that reason went so far beyond all bounds. Nevertheless, the consciousness which would like to withstand the unspeakable sees itself thrown back again and again to the attempt to understand, so that it does not subjectively fall prey to the madness which objectively rules. The thought irresistibly obtrudes that the German horror was something like arevenge taken in advance. The credit system in which everything, 136 even world conquest, can be advanced, determines also the actions which prepared its end and the end of the entire market society, all the way to the suicide of the dictatorship. In the concentration camps and gas chambers the downfall of Germany is, as it were, being discounted (...) At the beginning of German imperialism stands Wagner’s Twilight of the Gods , the rapturous prophecy of their own doom, whose composition was undertaken simultaneously with the victorious war of 1879. In the same spirit, two years before WW II, the German public saw afilm of the downfall of their zeppelin in Lakehurst. Calm, posed, the ship went on its way, only to suddenly plummet straight down. If there remains no way out, then the destructive drive becomes completely indifferent as to what it never firmly established: as to whether it is directed against others or against its own subject.162 162 Adorno, Minima Moralia, pp.103–104. 137 19 Traumatic temporality is that in which the impossibility of experience is experienced, an experience that endures in consciousness as an unassimilable exterior. And so reason, as founded in the enlightenment project, can only be saved if amethod is found of reminding us of this experience. For this experience is paralysed, it must be brought to speech within philosophical reflection. Because this reflection moves within the element of concepts, it is necessary that aconcept become its expression without ceasing to be aconcept, i.e. it is essential that it also become an index of its exterior. Traumatic experience is (the experience of) suffering– Leiden. This word, which has many different meanings, is also used by Adorno as the keystone of different registers of reflection. Generally speaking, Leiden is the consequence of violence perpetrated against everything individual or other insofar as it is identified as such, i.e. apprehended in re-cognition by intellectual categories and concepts. However, Leiden is also experienced by the subject as an identifiable part of rationalised society. Leiden ultimately refers to the final solution, to the physical elimination of the unidentifiable exterior. European history is the history of suffering that surpasses identifying thought while at the same time being the last condition for the possibility of the transformation thereof. Within critical reflection upon itself, conceptual thinking must become an expression of suffering. The crisis of conceptual thinking consists of amisconception (in the case of Hegel) of contradiction as an index of the falsehood of identity, which is why it always left to one side that which escaped it. This explains the necessity for the negative dialectic: at the very instant the concept fails, it illuminates that which experience prevented it from expressing, and everything that had been suppressed and rejected by concepts comes to light. In respect of the concept this sedimented exterior is sedimented Leiden, and the truth is only articulated by the decaying remains of conceptual thinking. 144 attempt to control and eliminate the uncontrollable. Not even Marx escapes censure. In his Lectures on Negative Dialectics Adorno says that, for Marx too, the unlimited control of man over nature is beyond question, which is why his dream of aclassless society is akin to agiant joint-stock company for the exploitation of nature.173 The remedy to this situation must be just as remorseless, but at the expense of the concept, the system, and the act of identification (i.e. the belittlement of aunique entity by means of ageneral concept), at the expense of systematic, controlling, totalising thinking that forbids anything to remain outside. The task is to protect this outside. Adorno’s philosophy, i.e. his negative dialectic, is thus on the boundary of the modern and postmodern. It is about rescuing the “modern” (the idea of the Enlightenment) through areinterpretation of it that takes the form of acertain overthrow: “...consummate negativity, once squarely faced, delineates the mirror-image of its opposite”174 This would be the elementary form of the search for traces of the possibility of another modernist project within modernism itself. The authors who emerged in the 1960s differed from Adorno in that they were operating on the other side of this boundary (Lyotard, Levinas, Derrida, Blanchot, Agamben et al.)175 But why should this involve another modernist project? Because it involves the search for adifferent rationality to that which was not only unable to prevent the Holocaust, but actually made it possible, while acknowledging that reason cannot be surrendered. It is 173 Theodor W. Adorno, Vorlesung über Negative Dialektik. Fragmente zur Vorlesung 1965/66 , ed.Rolf Tiedemann, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt a.M. 2008, p.89. Lectures on Negative Dialectics: Fragments of aLecture Course 1965/1966 , Polity Press, Cambridge 2008, p.89. 174 Adorno, Minima Moralia , p.247. 175 Perhaps as (from the perspective of “postmodernism”) post-metaphysical thinking . In the case of Adorno is it relatively clear: it is the consequence of the maximum tightening of modern concepts to their limit (which is how he treats Hegel); pushing modern and classical philosophical concepts to their limit. Openness also means going beyond these limits. In philosophy it is therefore necessary to protect something from the system, namely that phenomena create coherence objectively, and not only on the basis of the classification to which the cognising subject subordinates them. 145 therefore essential to find the traces of another reason within rationality itself. This is clearly the sense of the passage from Minima Moralia quoted above (“mirror-writing of its opposite”). Reflections upon history should reveal the traces of another modernism, or, as Husserl might put it, should be arecollection of its original primary establishment. This is agood way of interpreting Adorno’snegative dialectic. Philosophy is thinking in concepts. It emerges from the act of identification (the recognition of the individual by means of the concept). However, the underbelly of the act of identification is that something inevitably leaves its trace in it, something that resists identification, something unidentifiable, i.e. the outside in relation to the identifying concept. Adorno calls this das Nicht-identische or non-identical. (And for that reason the “other” modernism referred to above would be unidentifiable within the context of the historical since its traces would only be visible later.) This reflection allows us to perceive in the act of identification the exercise of power (the acquisition of knowledge for the purpose of control, Herrschaftswissen), and thus the fundamental ambivalence of modern rationality. Furthermore, insofar as only one aspect of rationality prevails, namely that of power, we also perceive in that rationality the basis of the catastrophe of reason: the dominion of that claim to power that leads to rationality in the form of instrumental reason. Or to put it another way: rigorous reflection will lead us to recognise the disregard paid to ambivalence, the disregard paid to the dialectic of the Enlightenment. According to Adorno, this neglect can only be confronted or remedied by dialectical reason, regarding which he states very “dialectically” in Minima Moralia: Dialectical reason is, when set against the dominant mode of reason, unreason: only in encompassing and cancelling this mode does it become reasonable.176 176 Adorno, Minima Moralia , pp.72–73. 146 We therefore need to examine in detail what Adorno means by “dialectical”. In the lectures Einführung in die Dialektik of 1958 Adorno offers the following explanation: the concept must be appropriate to the thing, it should be the expression of the thing, since concepts are formed through their confrontation with that which they “conceive”. This means that The dialectic is indeed amethod which refers to the proces of thinking, but it also differs from other methods insofar as it constantly strives not to stand still, constantly corrects itself in the presence of the things themselves. We could define dialectic as akind of thinking which does not content itself merely with the order of concepts but, rather, undertakes to correct the conceptual order by reference to the being of the objects themselves (…). Dialectic is the method of thinking which is not merely amethod, but the attempt to overcome the merely arbitrary character of method and to admit into the concept that which is not itself concept.177 The word “dialectic” implicitly presupposes that thought equals conceptual thinking. However, the concept must be appropriate to the thing. The concept should be an explanation of the thing and therefore the thing must (constantly) correct itself, because concepts are formed through their conflict with that which they “apprehend”. The concept should not overcome the resistance of the thing (which is the struggle of instrumental reason serving “control”), but should unfold by means of this resistance. Though Adorno’sconcept of dialectic is clearly inspired by Hegel, it represents amuscular reinterpretation, since Hegel’sdialectic assumes, in the last instance, the absolute identity of all designations thus obtained about the thing. This is why in the end Hegel’sdialectic assumes awhole in which all of the thing’sresistance has been annulled and the concept and the thing become as one (truth is the whole, the outcome; this is the 177 Theodor W. Adorno , Einführung in die Dialektik (1958) , ed. Ch. Ziermann, Nachgelassene Schriften , IV: Vorlesungen, 2, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt a.M. 2010, pp.10–11. 147 significance of the term “totality” used by Adorno). For Adorno, on the other hand, the meaning of the dialectic derives from the fact that the “dialectic of the concept” is placed in opposition to the traditional ontology of the highest categories (the defining attribute of which is timelessness, immutability, aconstant structure178), in other words that the concept must follow its thing, it must forever compare itself with what it intends (the “intention” of the concept), and it must do this in such away that adifficulty (Schwierigkeiten) emerges between the concept and the thing that obliges us to change this concept during the process of thinking (without its being necessary to relinquish earlier designations): the divergence of concept and thing, Begriff und Sache auseinandertreten. Adorno’sdialectic is characterised by the priority granted the object. Perhaps Imay add here that what motivated me personally to turn to dialectics in adecisive sense is precisely this micrological motif, namely the idea that if we only abandon ourselves unreservedly to the compulsion exercised by aparticular object, by aparticular matter, and pursue this single and specific matter unreservedly, then the ensuing movement is itself so determined out of the matter that it possesses the character of truth even if the Absolute, as an all-embracing totality, can never be given to us.179 It should now be clear why Adorno refers specifically to “negative” dialectics. Firstly, something is revealed in this movement, something substantive (Sachhaltiges), something that is not identical with thinking. Secondly, this movement is inexorable, it can never be 178 Adorno, Lectures on Negative Dialectics , p.40:“Thinking would be aform of thinking that is not itself asystem, but one in which system and the systematic impulse are consumed; aform of thinking that in its analysis of individual phenomena demonstrates the power that formerly aspired to build systems. By this Imean the power that is liberated by blasting open individual phenomena through the insistent power of thought. This power is the same power that once animated the system, since it is the force which enabled individual phenomena, non-identical with their own concepts as they are, to become more than themselves.” 179 Theodor W. Adorno , Einführung in die Dialektik (1958) ; idem, An Introduction to Dialectics , trans. Nicholas Walker, Polity Press, Cambridge 2017, p.21. 148 terminated. From which we may conclude (pace Hegel’sphenomenology of spirit): the whole is untrue. The form in which we think of the thing is not the form of the thought thing itself. Dialectical thinking is the consequence. It is asustained critique of those very concepts with which thinking works conceptually. It must forever act with the concept in the name of the concept.180 Perhaps, therefore, we are justified in claiming that Adorno is on aquest to find the traces of adifferent modernist project, the traces of adifferent rationality. The first trace: Begriff und Sache auseinandertreten, or the divergence of concept and thing. This is virtually the “fundament” of the different thinking that will appear in avariety of forms, especially in thinking of and from difference. And here we find asecond important trace: reason (rationality) is intrinsically linked with the idea of justice, since it is about constantly being true to the thing as apprehended by the concept, while justice is the knowledge of the irreducibility of the non-identical moment, i.e. it is the unrealisable extent of the reality of our thinking.181 Thinking that is not measured against the idea of justice cannot prevent something like the Holocaust: nay, it bears responsibility for Auschwitz. It is thinking that eliminates, annihilates the outside, to oversimplify matters somewhat. In negative dialectics the outside is in acertain sense both outside and inside, inasmuch as truth is both aprocess and the outcome of this process that, however, is open, open for and to the outside.182 And here is where we find the third trace, namely the priority granted the object in negative dialectics. Everything (recognition, 180 According to Adorno aversion of this traditional ontology is Heidegger’suse of “existentiells”, i.e. categories by which the “structure of the being of Dasein” can be described. 181 Jacques Derrida: deconstruction is justice, because justice cannot be converted to law, “there is always aremainder”, c.f. Force of Law et al. 182 In his essay on Eichendorff, apoet in the tradition of German idealism, Adorno cites apassage in which Eichendorff reproaches the whole of post-Kantian philosophy for omitting everything dark, dissonant, i.e. that which cannot emerge in the glow of rationalism, the moment of the “irrational” ( An Introduction to Dialectics , p.37) as the ground of another thinking that implies adifferent rationality . 149 the articulation of experience) takes place in the element of thinking, but always with reference to the real (contemporary) world. Negative dialectics is the path to the articulation (expression) of the experience of the fundamental historicity of the world. In reality it is nothing more than Bewegtes und Werdendes, or movement and becoming; history (real history), i.e.the events of aworld in which the same is constantly becoming its own other, its own antithesis, takes priority over being. The price paid for failing to understand and act upon this is what the critical theorists of the Frankfurt School (inspired by Lukacs) termed reification (Verdinglichung). These three “traces” are artfully woven together so as to bring out their mutual implications by Roger Foster in his book Adorno: The Recovery of Experience, when he writes: This failure opens abreach within immanence, in which the transcendent appears within it as what cannot be said (and therefore as external to concepts). What Adorno calls the ‘unfreedom’ of philosophy is its dependence on historical experience, which, in turn, is not the idealist story of aselfrealising subject, but rather the subordination to ‘nature’, by which Adorno means that it is driven by blind, nonrational forces. But because interpretation retains the striving of thought to say the unsayable, even though it is impossible within current experience, it maintains the possibility of redemption in the form of hope. It is therefore the constant exertion of thought to say what it cannot say that preserves the transcendent within thinking.183 The divergence of thing and concept monitored and elaborated on by negative dialectics can in simple terms be expressed thus: there is never any equivalence between the concept and the thing. However, this very fact reveals– ex negativo– equivalence as abasic tool of acontrolling knowledge, of instrumental rationality: equivalence is the original principle of conceptual thinking that, through 183 Roger Foster, Adorno: The Recovery of Experience . State University of New York Press, New York 2007, p.84. 150 the identification of the particular by means of the concept, levels off the diverse as non-identical: identificatory thought is thought in equivalents (of things themselves)– the word Gleichschaltung is not far off. And so like goods, something like aconstruct emerges by means of abstraction from qualities and use value (reduction to an exchange value that allows for the comparability of the incomparable), and so the most diverse realities are comparable whensoever they are mediated by aconcept. Total convertibility permits nature to become controllable (the result on the level of society is “the abstract monotony of the administered world”, according to Negative Dialectics).184 Adorno of course adopts the concept of general equivalence from Marx’sanalysis of the function of money,185 but generalises it and in particular elicits further consequences from it: philosophical expression seeks to communicate something that is outside the plane of convertibility (it is not tied to “existing relations”) and must therefore reflect the method by which it is expressed. The philosophical text must be capable of communicating aphilosophically articulated experience of reality– of being its “equivalent”, albeit incommutable: it will help that which has no equal to itself to find expression. So again the problem of justice arises and with it aquestion: how not to speak of the Holocaust, to paraphrase Derrida. Perhaps this would suffice to legitimise the assumption that thinking after Auschwitz cannot be understood as a break with 184 Adorno, Negative Dialectics , p.6. 185 Nevertheless, mention is made of the principle of equivalence even by Georg Simmel: “money, with its colourlessness and its indifferent quality, can become acommon denominator of all values, it becomes the frightful leveller– it hollows out the core of things, their peculiarities, their specific values and their uniqueness and incomparability in away which is beyond repair. They all float with the same specific gravity in the constantly moving stream of money. They all rest on the same level and are distinguished only by their amounts. In individual cases this colouring, or rather this de-colouring of things, through their equation with money, may be imperceptibly small. In the relationship, however, which the wealthy person has to objects which can be bought for money, perhaps indeed in the total character which, for this reason, public opinion now recognises in these objects, it takes on very considerable proportions.” Georg Simmel, The Metropolis and Mental Life , Blackwell, Oxford 2002, p.16. 151 modernism but as asearch for the traces of adifferent project of modernity. The discovery of these traces leads to the transformation of philosophical discourse. Identificatory thinking in its capacity as eliminatory thinking, the deconstruction of which leads to asituation in which an other rationality is revealed in it, is the basic characteristic of modernist thinking, i.e. that against which philosophy of the latter half of the 20th century turns. Adorno’s negative dialectics slot perfectly into this context because his texts, by virtue of their style and their relationship to conceptual thinking and systematicity, exemplify the transformation of philosophical discourse. In order to demonstrate this Iwould like to take atypical passage from Negative Dialectics. A new categorical imperative has been imposed by Hitler upon unfree mankind: to arrange their thoughts and actions so that Auschwitz will not repeat itself, so that nothing similar will happen. When we want to find reasons for it, this imperative is as refractory as the given one of Kant was once upon atime. Dealing discursively with it would be an outrage, for the new imperative gives us abodily sensation of the moral addendum– bodily, because it is now the practical abhorrence of the unbearable physical agony to which individuals are exposed even with individuality about to vanish as aform of mental reflection. It is in the unvarnished materialistic motive only that morality survives. The course of history forces materialism upon metaphysics, traditionally the direct antithesis of materialism. What the mind once boasted of defining or construing as its like moves in the direction of what is unlike the mind, in the direction of that which eludes the rule of the mind and yet manifests that rule as absolute evil. The somatic, unmeaningful stratum of life is the stage of suffering, of the suffering which in the camps, without any consolation, burned every soothing feature out of the mind, and out of culture, the mind’sobjectification.186 186 Adorno, Negative Dialectics , p.365–366. 152 The formulation of this idea is characteristically complicated. Our understanding of it depends on our finding in it afigure outlined by the relations between individual moments. It is to be found in Part 3, “Models”, of which it is the third, entitled “Meditations on metaphysics”, which begins with the “section” (though Adorno does not sectionalise but uses brief indications in the form of headers) “After Auschwitz”. We can therefore read this as “metaphysics after Auschwitz”, though if metaphysics is traditionally prima philosophia or “ontology”, then we can also read it as philosophy after Auschwitz. However, Adorno’s“meditation” is upon the impossibility of ontology after Auschwitz (in the sense that philosophy after Auschwitz must be different and must rest on foundations other than traditional or modern philosophy consisting of metaphysics and ontology). The word “meditation” is deliberately ambiguous inasmuch as the best known “meditation”, i.e. Descartes’, (re)laid the foundations of modern systematic ontology or metaphysics. Adorno advocates thinking in models rather than thinking in a system (“thinking after Auschwitz” is a kind of model analysis). How should we understanding “model”? In the introduction to Negative Dialectics under the heading “Argument and Experience” Adorno offers ageneral critique of Systemphilosophie, which is based on agiven intellectual order (categories and first principles, i.e. the tradition of Aristotelian prima philosophia), into which intellectual content is inserted. However, this method eliminates its “own content”: the thought as bearer of (real) experience is subjected to regimentation. For this reason the opposite applies: the unregimented idea is by elective affinities connected with the dialectic that as criticism of the system reminds us of that which is outside the system. The force that in the act of cognition releases the dialectical movement is the force that revolts against the system.187 Models (in the plural) replace system (always in the singular). What 187 Cf. ibid., p.31. 153 is fundamental in models is the “force field” that arises through the configuration of moments that, like iron filings in amagnetic field, create acertain “figure” on their surface, an “image” that is its own “content” and that refers to the experience that the model is to apprehend. For this reason, too, the essay is the privileged form of philosophical discourse for Adorno: It is not so much that the essay neglects indubitable certainty as that it abrogates it as an ideal. The essay becomes true in its progress, which drives it beyond itself, not in atreasure-hunting obsession with foundations. Its concepts receive their light from a terminus ad quem hidden from the essay itself, not from any obvious terminus aquo , and in this the method itself expresses its utopian intention. All its concepts are to be presented in such away that they support one another, that each becomes articulated through its configuration with the others. In the essay discrete elements set off against one another come together to form areadable context; the essay erects no scaffolding and no structure. But the elements crystallize as aconfiguration through their motion. The constellation is aforce field, just as every intellectual structure is necessarily transformed into aforce field under the essay’sgaze.188 The basis of the discourse of traditional philosophy must be the “system”, since the idea cannot be contingent, but necessary, i.e. binding in some way– this guarantees its place in the system. However, if the (negative) dialectic represents thinking that reflects traces of the resisting exterior of the system, then its presentational form (Darstellungsform) cannot be a systematic interpretation, though this does not make it “unbinding”. And again we find ourselves at the “model”: 188 Adorno, Noten zur Literatur , p.21. 256 it is of itself and is thus able to reflect upon its content and acts and to turn in itself to itself in movement, which does not abandon the field of immanence as the field of evidence. Consciousness is immediately present to itself, to its content and to its operations. However, consciousness is astream, aflow, aflux (the condition of the possibility of syntheses, identifications and associations, the constitution of idealities, the completion of intentional opinion), and so it is essential that presence be retained in this flow that is also aflowing into the past. This important task of retaining that which is passing and has just passed (but not by means of re-presentation, which would introduce acertain discontinuity into the continuous stream of consciousness) is carried out by retentional and protentional (passively functioning) intentionality. This is why we cannot say that consciousness is in time (because it would then be necessary to find some other level of time prior to consciousness and the analysis would be threatened by infinite regress). Instead, it is necessary to show that the internal consciousness of time is in the end constituted and constitutive, i.e. that consciousness is time as perpetual “temporalising” or Zeitigung. However, this would mean that flowing, the stream, is somehow the same as nunc stans, standing time as “the moment from which consciousness radiates, reaching out to what is, what has been, and what will be”,310 and so every “now” has in acertain sense the dimension of the whole of time as lived presence (lebendige Gegenwart), adefinition that is tightened up in Husserl’slater texts as stehend urtümliche Lebendigkeit. This is something like Urgegenwart, which is not amodality of time and is not therefore the same as simply “the current immediate form of consciousness”, as Husserl still called this “live presence” in the Lectures,311 but is im Strömen verharrende vieldimen310 John B. Brough, “Notes on the Absolute Time-Constituting Flow of Consciousness”, in: D. Lohmar, I. Yamaguchi (eds.), On Time– New Contributions to the Husserlian Phenomenology of Time , Phaenomenologica 197, Springer Science-Business Media, 2010, p.44. 311 Husserl, Vorlesungen , Husserliana X, p.83. 257 sionale Gegenwart,312 which for the sake of differentiation Husserl also sometimes called Primordium and described it as “the primally original standing streaming (das urtümlich stehende Strömen).313 This consciousness as the most original lebendige Gegenwart (as the Primordium) does not only allow for– as the continuum of intentional modifications of the primal “now” (to which the ur-impressional “now” corresponds in the specific experience)– the potential transcending of current consciousness via itself, and thus for recurrent recollection, but also– and this is important from the perspective of Husserl’sCrisis of the European Sciences– the retrospective questioning of the original establishment and its restitution, as well as the concept of history as the fulfilment of the original telos and, finally, the element of evidence in which identification, Wesensschau, eidetic variation and aglimpse of idealities is possible. The fold in the reflexive relationship to itself is thus not afold: the world as the horizon of all horizons has its final form of temporalising as the horizon of all temporal horizons, and in this way (transcendental) consciousness potentially includes everything that can be thought (alles Erdenkliche).314 312 Edmund Husserl, Späte Texte über Zeitkonstitution (1929–1934), Husserliana, Materialien VIII, p.129. 313 Edmund Husserl, Zur phänomenologischen Reduktion , Husserliana XXXIV, ed. Sebastian Luft, Springer 2002, p.384. (1) Die Rückfrage von der Epoche aus führt auf das urtümlich stehende Strömen - in einem gewissen Sinne das nunc stans, stehende "Gegenwart", wobei das Wort "Gegenwart", als schon auf eine Zeitmodalität verweisend, eigentlich noch nicht passt. Eine erste Strukturanalyse ist also die der Form dieses Strömens als eines nur nach allgemeiner Form identifizierbaren. 2) Die erste Aussage ist: stehendes Strömen, stehendes Verströmen, stehendes Heranströmen. Im stehendem Strömen konstituiert sich der Strom; das Stehen besagt Ständigsein als "Prozess"– Prozess der Urzeitigung, Prozess der Zeitmodalitäten, der Wandlung, die ständig unterschieden hat Gegenwart, die in Vergangenheit sich wandelt (und Vergangenheit, die sich ihrerseits in Vorvergangenheit wandelt usw.), andererseits Zukunft, die sich wandelnd zu Gegenwart wird u. ff. Darin aber Konstitution von ständiger Zeit, ständigen Einheiten als zeitlichen Einheiten, die je in ihren Zeitmodalitäten strömend sich "darstellen", im zeitmodalen Strömen "stand"-halten, Stand haben, sich als Einheiten (Selbigkeiten) konstituieren.“ 314 Die Gegenwart ist allüberspannendes, sozusagen allwissendes Bewusstsein von sich selbst und all seinen intentionalen Bestanden - potentiell birgt ihre Struktur Allwissenheit der Welt in sich– als ideale Moglichkeit, wofem wir nur in Rechnung ziehen , dass der Dunkelheitshorizont, 258 It is for this reason that we can claim that everything unknown is amodus of the known. However, would it not thus be possible to claim that the project of rationality, which effaces the incommensurability of the incommensurable and that works with concepts as the ur-form of objectivising thinking thanks to which man rids himself of fear by eliminating everything unknown from thinking, remains implicated in the very foundations of phenomenology, in its establishment of time, in its identification of time with consciousness that is in itself of itself and for itself, as the authors of the Dialectic of Enlightenment might say? Nothing is allowed to remain outside, since the mere idea of the “outside” is the real source of fear.315 Husserl’sconcept of time wants to eliminate the event as the exterior with regard to the living present– and cannot do otherwise. For if the structural analogy still applied between the interpretation of the primary impression (Urimpression) forever retained by the order of retention, and the original establishment of the meaning or objective (Urstiftung) of acertain tradition that continually follows on from it, and if the idea was to show that this movement in itself and of itself (which is also the definition of teleological historicity) is irreducibly contaminated by some exterior– for example by the incalculable event that transcends existing horizons of understanding, or by aquality that is beyond our grasp– then this would mean that the very possibility of Rückfrage, the restitutive return to the in dem Vergangenheit und Zukunft des Bewusstseinsstroms verschwimmen, und der (die) Vollkommenheit der Selbstwahmehmung des Bewusstseins beschrankt, eine zufallige Schranke ist, die in infinitum erweitert gedacht werden kann, so dass als "Idee" erwachst ein allwissendes "gottliches" Bewusstsein, das sich selbst in vollkommener Klarheit umspannt. Auch das "endliche" Bewusstsein ist allwissend, auch seine Intentionalitat umspannt seine ganze Vergangenheit und Zukunft, aber nur partiell klar, im Ubrigen in einer Dunkelheit, die eine Potentialitat fur Klarheiten und Wiedererinnerungen ist“ Husserl , Bernauer Manuskripte , pp.45–46. 315 Adorno , Horkheimer, Dialectics of Enlightenment , p.11. 259 original establishment of meaning (that would in that case always only be attainable “then”, supplementarily (nachträglich), as always already modified in some way) would be at threat, and the Urstiftung would by analogy be something like the escaping quality of the ur-impression, atrace of meaning irrupting into the order of its apprehension/interpretations, without revealing itself in its presence in any of them. It would continue to differentiate itself and defer its full presence for consciousness. In other words (Derrida’sin this case), tradition would be subject to the movement of différance. Or, as Derrida might also say: the meaning of Europe would be this “secretum” of its history, its re-founding in every moment of “crisis” (which is, however, every present). Emmanuel Levinas will go on to say that Husserl’sconsciousness sleeps adogmatic, because objectivising, sleep, but that it is astep away from its awakening precisely there where phenomenological reduction penetrates Life as such as it is present, albeit covered by its forced synchronisation with the “somnambulism of identifying reason” in the concept of live or living presence, i.e. in the basic objective of phenomenology to interpret experience, Erleben. If, therefore, phenomenology is not to break faith with this objective, the true meaning of phenomenological reduction must be rescued, i.e. this “permanent revolution”, arevolution that will “reanimate or reactivate the life that is forgotten or weakened in [thematicising, objectivising] knowledge.” This is the most intrinsic establishment of phenomenology, its “style”. It turns the attention to that which shines from behind consciousness, which is the length and breadth of subjective life as layered by thinking that thematises, i.e. represents. In Levinas’sreading of Husserl, reduction in the final analysis liberates thinking from the norms of adequation, from “obedience to the completed work of identification“.316 He then immediately poses 316 Emmanuel Levinas, “La philosophie et l’évei", in: Entre nous , p.84. Levinas makes reference to Husserl‘sdistinction between apodicticity and evidence in § 6 of Cartesian Meditations : apodicticity can obtain even when the evidence is not complete and adequate. 260 aquestion that hints at the non-mandatory link to Husserl that is peculiar to Levinas: Is it, under the label erleben (to live (something)) just aconfused or obscure consciousness, merely something preparatory to the distinction between subject and object, apre-thematization, apreknowledge? Must we not affirm our psychism otherwise? Does not the adjective living, from the beginning of Husserl’swork on, underscore the importance of the word Erlebnis as expressing the way of the subject? The I’sprereflective experience, designated by the term Erlebnis– the lived, is not just amoment of pre-objectification, like the hulé prior to the Auffasen (apprehending). The ‘living present’: we know the importance this term took on in Husserl’smanuscripts on time. Its explosive and surprising character (similar to that of the present in the Bergsonian durée ) is expressed in The Phenomenology Internal Time-Consciousness as the primal impression . Unforeseeable, it is in no way prepared in some germinating seed that would bear the past. The absolute traumatism that is inseparable from the spontaneity of its upsurge is of as much importance as the sensible quality that it offers to the adequation of knowledge. The living present of the cogito-sum occurs not only on the model of self-consciousness, absolute knowledge; it is the rupture of the equanimity of the ‘even mind’, the rupture of the Same of immanence; awakening and life.317 In other words, the lebendige Gegenwart is not the same as selfconsciousness, but is an element of the emergence of the forever new (the ur-impression), perforating its presence in itself of itself and for itself, irrupting into immanence inasmuch as this invasion of the outside inside is an awakening to an alert life which is sensibility, which is living prior to hylé being transformed into the function of Abschattung. Our attention is therefore now turned to this point (and not only in the case of Levinas), to the pre-predicative sphere, 317 Emmanuel Levinas, “Philosophy and Awakening”, in: Entre Nous, p.85. 261 to the non-intentional operations of consciousness prior to the acts of thematisation, i.e. to its original openness to the outside, more to protention than to retention. This then returns, for instance, in Levinas’semphasis on suffering, i.e. amore passive experience that the passivity of receptivity, which through vulnerability refers to the presence of another as the other, and whence the only indisputable ethical principle of the 20th century that survived the “Holocaust as the paradigm of gratuitous human suffering, where evil appears in its diabolical horror.”318 This shift of focus, which nevertheless remains aform of the continuation as well as of the non-continuation of phenomenology and which takes place conspicuously in connection with the “internal consciousness of time”, continues in Derrida’sexposure of the resistance within the framework of immanence or difference within auto-affection (or self-affection). Though it might at first glance seem that Derrida’sthinking is closely linked to structuralist (or post-structuralist) semiology, asimple chronological list of his work shows that its starting point was in fact phenomenology.319 His doctoral thesis The Problem of Genesis in Husserl’sPhilosophy320 was written in 1953–54 and its choice of topic already makes reference to the problem of historicity, the history of meaning and by extension to temporality. Then there is his lecture “Genesis and Structure in Phenomenology” of 1995321 and to acertain extent the preface to the translation of The Origins of Geometry,322 one of the appendices to Husserl’sThe Crisis of European Sciences. Derrida deals explicitly 318 Emmanuel Levinas, “La souffrance inutile”, in: ibid., p.115. Emmanuel Levinas, “Useless Suffering”, in: Ibid., p.97. 319 For detailed information gleaned from archives, see Edward Baring, Young Derrida and French Philosophy 1945–1968. Cambridge UP, Cambridge 2011. 320 Jacques Derrida, The Problem of Genesis in Husserl’sPhilosophy, trans. Marian Hobson, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago & London, 2003. 321 Reprinted in Jacques Derrida, L’écriture et la différence , Ed. du Seuil, Paris 1967. 322 Jacques Derrida, Introduction et traduction de “L’Origine de la géométrie”, de Husserl, P.U.F., Paris 1962. 262 with consciousness and its temporality in Voice and Phenomenon.323 In general we can say that, at first indirectly, Derrida is constantly examining the very possibility of originally giving evidence as the presence of meaning in the original opinion of the thing itself, i.e. he asks whether this possibility is guaranteed by this concept of presence as elaborated by Husserl’sphenomenological analyses of the last level of consciousness/time as lebendige Gegenwart. However, his “deconstruction” is not criticism, but rather asearch for the traces of other possibilities of reading in the texts themselves. Inasmuch as Husserl is convinced, as he puts it in Cartesian Meditations, that the purely intuitive, concrete and apodictic way that phenomenology reports its findings “excludes all ‘metaphysical adventure’, all speculative excesses”,324 then Derrida seeks to verify whether this is the case. He asks whether the concept of presence in Husserl’stexts is indeed non-metaphysical in relation to temporality and whether, on the basis of this concept, an eidetic science would be possible, capable of guaranteeing the ideality of its concepts and claims. In other words he examines the sustainability of the principle of all principles. It would be sustainable if it were not possible to prove the role of irreducible absence during the constitution of idealities or the impossibility of the contamination of the expression by indication. It would be sustainable if there existed something like aphenomenological sign and phenomenological voice: aphysicality stripped of its physicality, i.e. of the outside. Because Husserl must work with the “sign”, he must simultaneously reduce the signification of the sign as outside, because the sign is traditionally the element of absence, non-originality. The sign is asign of something because it takes the place of the thing in its absence. The sign cannot be the beginning or vice versa. In the 323 Jacques Derrida, La voix et le phénomène . P.U.F., Paris 1967. 324 Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology , trans. Dorion Cairns, Springer 1960, p.139. 263 element of signs there is no beginning, we are always “in the middle”. If phenomenology aims at apresentation of the thing itself, it must reduce re-presentation or convert it into arepetition of the identical. Whence Husserl’sconcept of “expression” as opposed to “indication” and whence the strategy that begins in the Logical Investigations: Husserl shifts the problematic of expression to the immanence of consciousness. Derrida describes the specific approach to this reduction of the sign as follows: In order to distinguish expression from meaning (or signification), Husserl uses the German word “bedeuten” (nominative “Bedeutung”). When he says that the expression has Bedeutung, that etwas bedeutet, that it is bedeutend, he is saying that it is the expression of that which the speaker has immediately in mind, that which he intends to say, i.e. in Husserl’susage, which does not distinguish between Sinn and Bedeutung or meaning, “meaning”, or to put it more precisely: the ideal meaning as the content of expression (see also Ideas I). However, this cannot apply in real communication, in which Bedeutung is always woven into the network of significations. The act of communication for Husserl is external to the act of “bedeuten”; it therefore only applies in speech without communication, in “monolithic discourse”, in absolute silence (deprived of all materiality) of the voice of the solitary mental life, in which the relationship to the outside is suspended (though generally speaking this is the act establishing phenomenology). In Husserl’ssemiology, expression is asign bestowed with asignifying intention, i.e. bedeutsames Zeichen. “Bedeuten” is akey act: ideal objectivity (that which the speaker had in mind) is expressed without deserting, by virtue of its own exteriorisation, the interior, because everything takes place in the field of consciousness (the necessarily forever present in itself, of itself and for itself), which Husserl describes as einsames Seelenleben, the solitary life of the soul. It ensues from this that expression does not have to be genuinely articulated by speech, communicated (to someone else). Only conscious- 264 ness itself is communicated (everything takes place, to draw on later terminology, within the noetic-noematic sphere of consciousness, within the framework of the international relatedness to the outside inside). Anon-productive duplication is involved: the expressive intention emerges outside of itself only in the form of the phenomenological voice, while the content of the expression is ideality that does not exist in the world. If the expression as exteriorisation presupposes sui generis some kind of Deutung, then this is something like an “understanding listening”:325 everything is still under the control of “bedeuten”, because all “involuntary associations” linked with factual communication are excluded. In other words: Sense wants to be signified; it is expressed only in ameaning ( vouloir-dire ) which is none other than awanting-to-tell-itself proper to the presence of sense.326 Let us summarise for the sake of clarity. In his Logical Investigations Husserl attempts to lay the foundations of the scientism of science, formal logic. He must therefore demonstrate the possibility of apurely scientific speech, the unalloyed expression of ideal meaning or Bedeutung, i.e. the possibility of apurely expressive speech in which signifiers lead without equivocation to the signified. In this way, expression or Ausdruck would be “non-productive” (neither adding anything to nor subtracting anything from the ideal), simply “mirroring”. It would be the double of ideal Bedeutung. It would retain the veracity of Bedeutung, which is not dependent on expression since Bedeutung belongs to apre-expressive level. Its veracity is guaranteed by the illustrative “presence” of the object to which this Bedeutung is intentionally related. The veracity (objectivity) of testimony is thus transferred to the illustrative presence of the 325 Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena and other Essays on Husserl’sTheory of Signs, trans. David B. Allison, Newton Garver, Northwestern University Press, Evanston 1973, p.34. 326 Ibid., p.35. 265 object, i.e. the illustrativeness of the object for thinking that precedes speech (the aspect of that which Derrida terms “logocentrism”). And Derrida shows that the possibility of purely scientific speech is conditional upon what Husserl gradually eliminates from the game (the indicatory utilisation of signs, the impossibility of isolating the pure pre-expressive level of “labelling” and thus thinking).327 But what is the purpose of Derrida’s observations regarding Husserl’sconcept of sign and signification? They point to ahost of seemingly obvious eliminations. The physical side of speech is gradually excluded, along with everything that finds its origin in bona fide communication (the conveyance of something to someone else), because real communication is adimension of (mere) meaning, i.e. also the atrophication of Bedeutung (of ideal meaning, which then returns in The Crisis of European Sciences as the cause of the “crisis” in meaning, namely the forgetting of the original looking in its real traditionalisation). Everything is orientated on the last field becoming consciousness relating to itself in an internal monologue, since, as seems clear, if Ispeak to myself, Isimultaneously hear myself, and do not communicate anything to myself. Husserl’sdescription of the sign pushes to one side its signification and with it its materiality. It eliminates the very moment of re-presentation, since (Husserl is convinced) consciousness does not need to re-represent its experiences to itself, because on the field of consciousness “every experience is presently existing”. We relate to the acts of consciousness at the same moment that we experience them. Consciousness does not have to make anything known to itself from the power of the sign.328 We are in the sphere of pure auto-affection, the outside has disappeared inside. To put this in Derridean terms: Husserl wants to avoid all “metaphysical adventures” while at the same time repeating the founding gesture of the metaphysical tradition, which is the subordination of 327 See Bernet, “Differenz und Anwesenheit”. 328 Derrida, Speech and Phenomena , p.60. 272 35 An interest in tradition and traditionalisation that, indirectly, is without doubt aresponse to Husserl’sconcept of history and its implied concept of time thus becomes aprivileged site of the transformation of philosophical discourse. This takes the form of the deconstruction of assumptions regarding the continual temporality of the stream of consciousness, and, in the last instance, of horizontality as the last framework of synthesising identification. Unlike Husserl, Derrida views tradition using the “model” of inheritance and above all through the non-evidentiality of that which is traditionalised as testament (the legacy is avery paradoxical “beginning”), since if there exists some unity to inheritance, it can consist only in the injunction to reaffirm by choosing (...) one must filter, sift, criticise, one must sort out several different possibles that inhabit the same injunction. And inhabit it in acontradictory fashion around asecret. If the readability of alegacy were given, natural, transparent, univocal, if it did not call for and at the same time defy interpretation, we would never have anything to inherit from it. We would be affected by it as by acause– natural or genetic. One always inherits from asecret– which says “read me, will you ever be able to do so?” The critical choice called for by any reaffirmation of the inheritance is also, like memory itself, the condition of finitude. The infinite does not inherit, it does not inherit (from) itself. The injunction itself (it always says “choose and decide from among what you inherit”) can only be one by dividing itself, tearing itself apart, differing/ deferring itself, by speaking at the same time several times– and in several voices.340 However, inasmuch as Derrida shows that in the phenomenon of the legacy the return to the origin is always anew beginning, the 340 Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx, trans. Paggy Kamuf, Routledge, New York and London 1994, p.18. 273 purpose of his considerations is not apolemic with Husserl’sRückfrage as the restitution of the original establishment of acertain tradition that deviated from its telos. His (deconstructive) reading of texts is not about revealing contradictions, gaps in arguments or unsubstantiated assumptions, but rescuing the possibility of another way of thinking, traces of which are as clear in these breaches as the manifest meanings themselves. Where Husserl attempts to bring an idea to aconclusion and give it systematic form, for instance even in the form of teleological history explicating in time that which is implied in its original establishment, Derrida shows that agenuine adherence to tradition (the legacy) consists in openness, that its time is not acontinuity absorbing its own crises, but acontinual discontinuity of creative reaffirmation, i.e. of productive continuation by the new. In other words, time must be thought from différance, from the movement of difference, which is open to the coming of that which is on the point of arrival. Or perhaps: thought is there where happening is taking place, it is not ergon, but energeia. Retrospective questioning of the origin is always its renewed updating, its establishment anew, which becomes apparent if we link traditionalisation with the legacy or the fulfilment of the testament. We must therefore do everything we can to receive the legacy (and phenomenology itself is alegacy), which is impossible other than by means of its reaffirmation, i.e. adecision as to what we deem to be alive in it. Confirmation of tradition is both its continuation and its interruption, since the heir is afinite being: If our heritage assigns contradictory tasks to us (to receive and yet to choose, to welcome what comes before us and yet to reinterpret it, etc.), this is because it is atestimony to our finitude. Only afinite being inherits, and his finitude obliges him. It obliges him to receive what is larger and older and more powerful and more durable than he. But the same finitude obliges one to choose, to prefer, to sacrifice, to exclude, to let go and leave behind. Precisely in order to respond to the call that preceded him, to 274 answer it and to answer for it – in one’sname as in the name of the other. One is responsible before what comes before one but also before what is to come and therefore before oneself.341 The paradigm of inheritance is reaffirmation of the Husserlian concept of responsibility. This is asituated response in which the legacy is transformed into an event, the interpretation of which compels awithdrawal from the existing horizons of understanding. Inheritance is something like the givenness of the gift. However, though the word “situatedness” could be read as areference to Heidegger, in this case too it is acompletely Derridean acceptance of the testamentary legacy. This is best illustrated by Derrida’sbook Spectres of Marx. The framework of responses to the legacy is justice, in the name of which Iask the question of how to respond to the legacy of rights. However, justice establishes the principle of responsibility outside of all present living, Ianswer to the “phantoms” of those who are already dead or have not yet been born, and our present is inhabited by these very spectres, who demand that we respect them. In this way another temporality of tradition emerges. If we ask (thus situated between presently absent spectres, visitors to our present) where we want to head, then that which this question is driving at also always already precedes it. To put it slightly differently: the inheritance as aform of givenness is agift, i.e. basically discontinuous time, time that is forever out of joint, outcast, dislocated, forever exiting continuity, the time of events. Our presence is constantly being visited by the other, which means that “There is first of all the doubtful contemporaneity of the present to itself”.342 As gift, the legacy is this task: 341 Jacques Derrida, Elisabeth Roudinesco: For What Tomorrow?, trans. Jeff Fort, Stanford University Press, Stanford 2004. 342 Derrida, Specters , p.39. 275 It remains before us just as unquestionably as we are heirs of Marxism, even before wanting or refusing to be, and like all inheritors, we are in mourning (...) To be (...) means (...) to inherit. All the questions on the subject of being or of what is to be (or not to be) are questions of inheritance. There is no backward-looking fervour in this reminder, no traditionalist flavour. Reaction, reactionary, or reactive are but interpretations of the structure of inheritance. That we are heirs does not mean that we have or that we receive this or that, some inheritance that enriches us one day with this or that, but that the being of what we are is first of all inheritance, whether we like it or know it or not. And that, as Hőlderlin said so well, we can only bear witness to it.343 343 Ibid., p.54. 276 36 Why must the transformation of philosophical discourse be tracked in the transformation of the concept of time and temporality? Because the condition of the possibility of ateleological understanding of history and the meaning guaranteed by history to be transhistorical, which is lebendige Gegenwart or living presence, i.e. the continuous unity of now and its subsequent retentions and protentions, is unsustainable face to face with real history– the crisis has inexorably morphed into catastrophe. The time is out of joint and open to the incalculable. Thinking after the Holocaust rewrites Husserl’sThe Crisis of European Sciences: the living present is copresent with the dead and, thus, with the still unborn. The origin (Ursprung and Urstiftung) is alegacy, traditionalisation takes place as the acceptance of the inheritance, the meaning of which will again be decided anew at the moment of its acceptance, because its reaffirmation is always aunique response in history. This is not anticipation, but expectation, areceptiveness to that which is forever to come and beyond the horizons of expectation not only de facto, but de jure. Temporality therefore implies arelationship via irreducible difference, arelationship to the event, the openness of the inside to the outside. As Derrida explains in uncommonly succinct fashion, this is because the event, must not be seen arriving. The event is that which arrives; the arrival of another as an event is only worthy of the name, i.e. it is an explosive, inaugural, singular event, if we do not see it coming. The event that we anticipate, that we see arriving and that we predict, is not an event, or rather it is an event whose character is neutralised, amortised, withheld by anticipation. The experience of an event is apassive experience, to which and, Iwould say, against which, arrives that which we do not see arriving and that is to begin with completely unpredictable, unforesee- 277 able; part of what makes an event an event is that it arrives in an utterly surprising way, al’improviste .344 This event- (or “adventure”-) time is now inscribed in the identity of Europe. It is present, for instance, in Derrida’sGiven Time,345 which inter alia examines Patočka’s“European” interpretation of “care for the soul”, and in the essay L’autre cap (translated as The Other Heading), which can be read as adirect response to Husserl’slegacy since its central theme is that “what is still called Europe even if we no longer know very well what or who goes by this name”.346 Here, too, the transformation of discourse cannot be ignored: culture is necessarily special in that it is never identical to itself, it never has asingle origin, and so any idea of “mono-genealogy” in its history is always mystification. The deviation from itself in an identity with itself resides in the double bind that acertain tradition must conform to: as “Europe” it anticipates something as objective (direction, the promise, etc.), though at the same time (as historical tradition) it anticipates that this objective is not given either in advance or once and for all. At this point we cannot fail to hear adiscreet reference to how Husserl works with the concept of “idea in the Kantian sense”. However, for Derrida this concept already belongs under the rubric of analogical logic, for which identity is that which, in its direction or aim, transcends the boundary of the empirical and is open to the infinite, and inasmuch as it accepts this logic, does so with afundamental reservation: It is alogic (…) that Ido not wish to criticize here. Iwould even be ready to subscribe to it, but with one hand only, for Ikeep another to write or look for 344 Jacques Derrida, Penser à ne pas voir. Ecrits sur les arts du visible. Textes réunis et établis par Ginette Michaud, Joana Masó et Javier Bassas. Collection Essais, Ed. de la Différence, Paris 2013, p.55. 345 Jacques Derrida, Donner le temps. 1. La fausse monaie . Galilée, Paris 1991. 346 Jacques Derrida, The Other Heading , trans. Michael B. Naas, Pascale Anne Brault, Indiana University Press, 1992, p.5. 278 something else, perhaps outside Europe. Not only in order to look– in the way of research, analysis, knowledge, and philosophy– for what is already found outside Europe, but not to close off in advance aborder to future, to the to-come / à-venir / of the event , to that which comes / vient /, which comes perhaps and perhaps comes from acompletely other shore. 347 Once again we have arelationship via irreducible difference inscribed in temporality. However, this prudent reservation on Derrida’spart must be read against the backdrop of the phenomenological establishment of identity on the basis of the “coverage” of (simply) the analogous, i.e. against the backdrop of the world as the horizon of all horizons. Genuine openness (and another concept of time and history) is guaranteed only by the possibility that the horizon will be interrupted by something, though this does not imply an event that is by definition incompatible with the horizontal structure of showing and understanding. Is this apolemic with Husserl? Absolutely not. Transformation, reaffirmation, response, acceptance of the inheritance, the gesture of responsibility toward tradition that is not irresponsible because it does not abide by aprogramme given in advance that it would simply fulfil, respect for the legacy. The origin is not givenness, but agift. 347 Derrida, The Other Heading, p.69. 279 37 Factually speaking, all of these provocative or seemingly esoteric themes in which the legacy of phenomenology is nevertheless constantly reaffirmed are already contained in Derrida’sdeconstructive reading of the structuralist semiology of the sixties, areading that is asymmetrical counterpart to the problematisation of Husserl’sdifferentiation between sign and indication, inasmuch as in both cases Derrida lays emphasis on the irrevocable interplay of presence and absence to which the neologism différance he had already devised refers, even though in connection with the sign the starting point is the Saussurian dictum that language is “asystem of differential elements and not substance”. Whence derives the primordiality or productivity of the trace and non-identity: in the system of language the value of the sign is defined by its difference from other signs, which means that the sign is marked by its presence in the form of absence, or by the trace of the other. In other words, the trace is aspecial “phenomenon”. It must appear in the absence of that which left it (i.e. the trace), because otherwise it would not be atrace/sign, which in Peirce’sterminology is called index, apure, uncodified relationship (secondness). An example would be the language of semiology as Derrida works with it in his analysis of Austin’sand Searle’stheory of speech acts. Every sign must be capable of being cited, i.e. “it can break with every given context, and engender infinitely new contexts in an absolutely nonsaturable fashion”, because it has no validity outside (independent) of context. Therefore, there exist “only contexts without any centre or absolute anchoring”. Citationality is not arandom property, since what “would amark be that could not be cited? And whose origin could not be lost on the way?”348 348 Jacques Derrida, “Signature Event Context”, in: Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy , trans. Alan Bass, The Harvester Press, The University of Chicago 1982, pp.320 and 321. 280 Inasmuch as Derrida on the one hand reveals the ellipticity or atheticity of various texts (see Freud’sessay Beyond the Pleasure Principle),349 while on the other hand himself writing such texts, his strategy is clearly already pointing to the deconstruction of the semiological concept of the sign. It is also hinting at abroader context: here, now, is the source of his mistrust of “centralisation” or the “original (primal) establishment” (Urstiftung). It is also worth noting that, in connection with his analysis of the concept of the sign (as the inheritance of modern philosophy, the metaphysical primacy of presence and the concept of temporality deriving therefrom), he cites Levinas’s“past that has never been present”.350 And so we are not so far from the late books, which circle the phenomenon of the gift and the secret. This is why we already find neologism being used as away of pointing to that which is absent without betraying that which resists appearance: the restance non présente already referred to, away of denoting that which maintains in the phenomenon aresistance to becoming present and insists on its own disappearance.351 To put it another way, the concept restance lays an emphasis on that which cannot be expressed within the framework of atheory of presence, atheory of identity, or within the framework of an interpretation of time that priorities the determination of permanence, succession and coexistence. In relation to texts, then, deconstruction shows that there always remains acertain trace of that which was subject to deconstruction and that adeconstructive reading “educes” without actualising (whence the link between the secret and the gift, the possibility of understanding deconstruction as aresponse to tradition, etc.). Each reading points to acertain remainder (reste), which resists its own dissolution and leaves atrace. This is why there cannot be any talk of re-presentation in the sense of anew presence, since the trace is never able to restore and resti349 See “Ellipsis”, in: Derrida, Writing and Difference . 350 Derrida, "Différance", in: Margins of Philosophy , p.21. 351 Derrida, “Signature événement contexte”, ibid., p.318. 281 tute that which is atrace, namely restance non présente. Resistance as amode of showing. It is no coincidence that at the start of Of Grammatology Derrida cites Peirce’sdescription of an “infinite semiosis”, which precedes not only the connection between sign and trace, but also that restance that does not allow the process of signification (thinking) to find closure and is the irreducibly absenting base (knowledge, meaning, the present of that which is shown). In addition, it is the trace of another project of modernity in modern thinking itself. The thinking of Peirce, as Derrida perhaps felt when he welcomed him as an ally in the deconstruction of structuralist semiology, cannot be reduced to his theory and classification of signs. It has its assumptions and consequences. Its assumptions are perhaps most cogently formulated in two published articles: “The Fixation of Belief” (1987) and “How to Make Our Ideas Clear” (1878). On the one hand, Peirce claims that it is necessary that the cause of our conviction (belief, but also knowledge) be something exterior, completely independent of us (an “external permanency”), and this means that reality shows itself to us exclusively by virtue of its resistance to cognition. And on the other hand, he says that knowledge has no beginning, since anyone who makes an effort to cognise is burdened by the mass of the already known, i.e. that regarding which there has (until now) been no doubt. For this reason cognition takes place in the form of the passage from one conviction (belief as habit) to another, and we are obliged to acquire this new habit by asudden doubt regarding our existing knowledge. Life gradually leads us to new convictions and gives us the strength to question old beliefs. Derrida and Deleuze sometimes use the slightly strange phrase “transcendental empiricism”, and it would be possible to apply this term to Peirce’sphilosophy, since to the question of how reality shows itself we would look to the close links between the theory of meaning, concept and thinking and the theory of the sign. Reality makes its presence felt there where it resists expectations or 288 collateral experience . For instance, Ipoint my finger to what Imean, but Ican’t make my companion know what Imean, if he can’t see it, or if seeing it, it does not, to his mind, separate itself from the surrounding objects in the field of vision.358 This is why in an essay entitled Four Incapacities Peirce writes that every previous thought insinuates the thought that follows it, it is asign of something for it. The following thought denotes that which was meant in the previous thought. It would be difficult to express Derrida’smovement of supplementarity better. The interpretant is neither outside or inside, the dynamical object is both part of the endless semiosis and outside it, because the interpretant relates to it via irreducible difference, seals it and unseals it (as Derrida will go on to say in texts in which he explores the phenomenon of secrecy and the gift, the trace and the ellipsis), reveals it in its resistance to being revealed and in this way retains its uniqueness. The dynamical object could, therefore, be another name for restance non présente. 358 Ibid., 8.314. 289 38 Husserl works on the assumption that, if it is to be possible to treat Europe as acertain kind of “spiritual formation”, then it must have its identity, the identity of tradition, history and meaning. For this reason it must acquire its identity from its (specific) telos as objective and task in light of which it is an identifiable whole, even though this whole is not givenness but directed movement. It is not defined in relation to the other, but by the elimination of the other. However, Derrida intervenes at this point: if Europe is to be part of real history (history de facto), this telos cannot be given apriori and forever; if it has such atelos, then it is only that which is manifest in history and its peripeteias or vicissitudes. If Europe is not to disappear in these peripeteias, its tradition must reside in the possibility of diverging from this tradition. Adouble bind. If Europe is to have its own identity, it must be equal to itself and to the other, unless tradition is to be same as the fulfilment of aprogramme. However, Husserl’sconcept of responsibility is both asign of the fact that he was aware of this double bind and that he attempted to neutralise it. The project of modernity, whose direct heir is Husserl, links Adorno, Levinas, Lyotard and Derrida with the figure of the Homeric Odysseus. In Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno andHorkheimer write that Odysseus is ahero who loses himself simply in order to find himself anew. He plunges into peril not in order to expose himself to the risk of becoming lost, but in order to prove to himself his ability never to lose sight of his objective. Odysseus is the story of areturn, the overcoming of obstacles (the crisis) that prevent areturn to the origin. Husserl’sThe Crisis of European Sciences reads the history of Europe in the same way: as an odyssey of the European spirit. The Odyssey is astory of the identity of the beginning and end in which an encounter with the outside represents aconfrontation with arandomness that is indifferent to the beginning and end. This exterior, Levinas says, is always neutralised as soon as 290 it is grasped rationally. In fact, Odysseus is still travelling around his island, and in the world through which he wanders he encounters himself everywhere. Levinas projects the economy of exchange into Odysseus’stravels (whence to Derrida, who places the non-economy of the gift in opposition to the economy of exchange), and when he speaks of the relationship “face to face” he describes it as arelationship in which the “I”, on the contrary, rids itself of being closed within itself, of that existence in which all adventures are simply an “odyssey”, i.e. areturn to the island.359 It is this Odyssean nostalgia that afflicts traditional (Western) metaphysics. However, the movement towards the Other can never be areturn to the same. Imust give up the attempt to be acontemporary of the completion of my work. Lyotard adds that Odysseus lives in aworld in which there is no such human being that would arrive “from elsewhere and from behind”360, i.e. in aworld that is not marked by the experience of exile. “To the myth of Ulysses return to Ithaca,” he writes in one of the essays completing his interpretation of Husserl and Heidegger, “we would prefer to oppose the story of Abraham leaving his country forever for an as yet unknown land, and forbidding his servant to take back even his son to the point of departure.”361 The break by which the transformation of philosophical discourse is marked could hardly be more striking. “By faith Abraham, when he was called to go out into aplace which he should after receive for an inheritance, obeyed; and he went out, not knowing whither he went.” (Hebrews 11.8) Now the Lord had said unto Abram, “Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father’shouse, unto aland that Iwill shew thee.” (Genesis 12.1 King James Version) 359 Emmanuel Levinas, Alterité et transcendence , Fata Morgana, Paris 1995, p.72. 360 Jean François Lyotard, “Return upon the Return”, Humanities Press, Atlantic Highlands, NJ 1993, p.192. 361 Emmanuel Levinas, “The Trace of the Other”, Tijdschrift voor Philosophie (Sept. 1963), p.610. 291 As Levinas writes in one of the texts commenting upon the Talmud, Abraham represents a“miracle of time”, i.e. time as openness to that which is arriving and which it is forbidden to imagine according to the past and memory,since it transcends all of this,362 time which is (already) liquidating human history, as Walter Benjamin would say. For this reason praise is due to those who wait without anticipating, i.e. without attempting to identify the future, and who thus differ from the prophets, because the latter are capable of foreseeing only events in historical time. Levinas’scommentary is, moreover, very characteristically set within aconcrete situation, within the present. The unimaginability of that which is on the point of arriving is announced by unimaginable horrors and inhumane trials– the Holocaust, Hitler’sand Stalin’sconcentration camps, borne witness to in the novel by Vasily Grossman Life and Fate, which Levinas quotes extensively. Abraham changes the situation, and much of that which during the 1930s and 40s is only hinted at finds expression once again. Thus, for example, Adorno’sfinal aphorism from Minima Moralia is more understandable in light of this event-time. In its last sentence it suspends its base and is aperformative demonstration of the thesis that the whole is untrue: “... the question concerning the reality or nonreality of redemption is, however, almost inconsequential.” After the Holocaust there is nothing for it but to remind ourselves of the idea of redemption. And yet this idea has become highly problematic: the double bind. If it is still possible to think history, then it is not within the framework of atype of understanding that traces its roots back to modern, enlightened rationality. To look at things as they would be revealed from the perspective of redemption means forgetting them as we know them and proceeding from the inside (the Bannkreis des Daseins, the vicious circle of relations and existence within them) and finding the peace without. It means understanding 362 Emmanuel Levinas, Al’heure des nations , Ed. de Minuit, Paris 1988, p.48. 292 history from the perspective of exile, i.e. as radical openness in relation to the “home” that is not given by the original foundation, but is ahome where nobody is or ever has been. Derrida’sdifférance, difference as articulating deferral, but at the same time an extremely significant intellectual operation: the reading of the “thesis” under erasure. Presence together with absence, arelationship via difference, ellipse, undecidability between outside and inside, because thinking must remain prepared for that which is on the point of arriving and be thus within itself turned to the outside (though not its own), the unidentifiable. If Levinas wants these most remote things to be the rule of all present days, it is impossible in this exchange not to hear aremote echo of Kracauer’spatient waiting watchfully for the last things before the last, the non-anticipation of the “waiting”, whose time is “hesitant openness”. And it is impossible not to observe that the thinker of exodus is Maurice Blanchot, who, in an essay dedicated to Robert Antelme and his testimony regarding the concentration camps, understands exile as true movement, because it is the movement of the nomad who knows that “to go out (to step outside) is the exigency from which one cannot escape if one wants to maintain the possibility of ajust relation.”363 Hence impatient anticipation, an identification of the future on the basis of the past, is, as Kafka knew, an essential fault, because it misconstrues the very trueness of error which, like alaw, requires that one never believe the goal is close or that one is coming nearer to it. One must never have done with the indefinite; one must never grasp– as if it were the immediate, the already present– the profundity of inexhaustible absence. (...) is impatience which makes the goal inaccessible by substituting for it the proximity of an intermediary figure. It is impatience that destroys the way toward the goal by preventing us from recognising in the intermediary the figure of the immediate.364 363 Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation , p.125. 364 Blanchot, The Space of Literature, pp.79 and 80. 293 39 The interpretation of temporality, which is based not on flow and continuity, but on the event, and therefore emphasises discontinuity and heterogeneity, can be understand both as the terrain on which it becomes aclearly intelligible transformation of philosophical discourse generating new “concepts” (in inverted commas because after Adorno even the status of the concept has become problematic, to say the least, and differently defined after Deleuze) and their specific constellation within such atransformed philosophy, and afield allowing for the actualisation of another project of modernity whose traces have been hidden until now in modern thinking. This proves in an almost self-referential way the now virtually general belief that presence is not present itself, either because (as Derrida shows) it is always being visited by ghosts and that responsibility for an inheritance is not the reproduction of the origin but its re-production, which in tradition establishes anew starting point, as it were, or because it is open to the outside, to that which is forever on the point of arriving. If we were then to combine Derrida’sghosts or spectres from Spectres of Marx with his neologistic locution restance non présente (see above), i.e. with apast that was never present and that is, to simplify matters, atrace of escape or atrace of the unrealised, then this would be an “instance” that turns to us in every “now” and requires us to bear witness to it in our response. Here there can be no talk of the continuity of Husserl’s“living present” as the flow of retentions constantly linked via the present moment to protention, even though Husserl’sphenomenon of crisis could be considered as one of the junctions of this transformation. Time is open to the “other” in both directions, i.e. to the incalculable past that can at any time irrupt into the present “now”. However, this is another example of actualisation, since we can encounter this concept of time as far back as Walter Benjamin, above all in his emphasis on the operation of “remembrance” (Eingedenken), partly inspired by 294 Proust’smémoire involontaire and inspiring in its turn Adorno, who, for instance, in Minima moralia, writes: “No other hope is left to the past than that, exposed defencelessly to disaster, it shall emerge from it as something different.”365Adorno also speaks of the necessity of remembering the suffering that is sedimented in concepts.366 To formulate this radically: time is for Benjamin something that only has meaning via history because primarily it is not adimension of that which was but that which is not yet and perhaps never will be. Perhaps akey to understanding this idea is what he says in Section II from On the Concept of History regarding happiness, namely that our image of happiness is indissolubly bound up with the image of redemption. Adorno’saphorism “Zu Ende” from Minima Moralia suggests how this Messianism was understood by his contemporaries (and how it would later be understood by Derrida). This then ties in to what immediately follows: The past carries asecret index with it ( führt mit sich einen zeitlichen Index ), by which it is referred to redemption... If so, then there is asecret protocol between the generations of the past and that of our own. For we have been expected upon this earth.367 Happiness points to redemption (and thus to another time), because on the one hand it is something that, though possible in the past, was wasted by us, and on the other it is precisely in this knowledge of its wastage that hope is maintained that it will be attained in some “other time” as astill genuine possibility. Time is almost by definition the time of missed opportunities that are not part of that series of events as presented by traditional history.368 365 Adorno, Minima moralia , p.167. 366 Adorno, Zur Metakritik der Erkenntnistheorie , GS 5, p.47. 367 Benjamin, Selected Writings 4, p.390. 368 Cf. Werner Hamacher, “’Now’: Walter Benjamin on Historical Time.“ In: Heidrun Friese (ed.), The Moment. Time and Rupture in Modern Thought , Liverpool University Press, Liverpool 2001, pp.161–196. 295 If we were to transfer Benjamin’sidea of happiness into thinking after the Holocaust, the result would in all likelihood be that which Derrida understands as justice, which, as he himself says, is undeconstructible.369 Or as he also says: deconstruction is justice. Throughout his many riffs on this theme, the following argumentation always returns: the law prescribes, and this means that adecision in accordance with the law (not only in the positivist sense of the word) reduces the moment of personal responsibility for the decision, the moment of personal guarantee. Derrida invokes Montaigne and Pascal, both of whom claim that anyone who obeys the law simply because it is the law is not obeying it as they should. If adecision is to be just in the sense of justice, then in the act by which it takes place it must both be subject to the rule (it cannot be arbitrary or random) and at the same time must be outside of the rule, since the situation in which adecision must be taken is always unique, every case is sui generis (no two are identical, they do not “coincide” with each other) and requires aunique interpretation which, for this reason– without it being purely arbitrary– cannot be guaranteed by any of the existing (past and present) rules. And yet as adecision that seeks to be true to the idea of justice, it cannot be without any relation to the law. “(O)ne cannot speak directly about justice, thematize or objectivize justice, say ‘this is just’ and even less ‘Iam just’.”370 Therefore justice can never be thought of as something realised: not in the past, present or historical future. In this sense ajust decision would be an answer to aunique situation. When Derrida says that no first principle is the first, he also has in mind this critical situation and at the same time overturns the idea of the “principle of all principles” on which Husserl’sphenomenology is based. These are not simple aporia, but elliptical formulations: 369 Jacques Derrida, “Force of Law. The Metaphysical Foundation of Authority”, in: Drucila Cornell et al. (eds.) , Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, Routledge, London 1992, p.15. 370 Ibid., p.10. 296 Icannot thematise justice by uttering the sentence “this is just”, because in doing so Ideny its idea. Similarly, in the case of Benjamin happiness is knowable only through its absence; we know of happiness because we perceive it as apossibility that has passed us by. And this knowledge then casts another light on history: every possibility that was missed in the past remains an opportunity for the future precisely because it has not encountered its fulfilment. The past has afuture, and it has this future inasmuch as that which was missed seeks its realisation from adifferent “now” to that in which it was missed. This is undoubtedly the point to draw attention to the introductory sentence of Adorno’sNegative Dialectic: “Philosophy, which once seemed obsolete, lives on because the moment to realise it was missed.”371 The true dimension of history is the past’saddress to our “now”: “we were expected”. It is to the expectation of the unnamed and lost in the history of progress, which Benjamin identifies with catastrophe in Section IX of Theses on the Philosophy of History, that the concept of remembrance (Eingedenken) corresponds, a remembrance in which the past first understands itself in the correct way, i.e. with regard to justice. It is via remembrance that the dimension of history is opened in which there is space for every singularity and in which the past is saved because its unique meaning returns to it, as opposed to historicism, which “contents itself with establishing acausal connection between various moments in history. But no fact that is acause is for that very reason historical. It became historical posthumously, as it were, through events that may be separated from it by thousands of years.” (XVIII A). The true meaning of the unique event or fate is not given by its identification in respect of some whole or “grand narrative”, as Lyotard would go on to call it. In other words, the measure of history is justice, which must do justice to that which is 371 Adorno, Negative Dialectics , p.3. 297 for historicism qua the non-identifiable outside the history of progress qua historical norms, and because it is inadmissible that we justify the present in the name of those who were eliminated from history. That which is irredeemable in history (as it is understood by historicism) can therefore only be saved in another dimension of time. The historian of historicism empathises with the victor (VII). Translated into the language of Derridean deconstruction, it is only under the erasure of the history of the victors that the history of their victims becomes intelligible. For Benjamin, that which fractures the continuity of the history of progress (which is in its own way teleological history) is the “dialectical image”: It’snot that what is past casts its light on what is present, or what is present its light on the past; rather, image is that wherein what has been comes together in aflash with the now to form aconstellation. In other words, image is dialectics at astandstill. For while the relation of the present to the past is apurely temporal, continuous one, the relation of what-has-been to the now is dialectical: is not progression but image, suddenly emergent.– Only dialectical images are genuine images (that is, not archaic); and the place where one encounters them is language. The read image, by which is meant the image in the Now of recognisability, bears to the highest degree the stamp of the critical, dangerous moment which is at the basis of all reading. Awakening. (...) Every present is determined by those images which are synchronic with it: each “now” is the “now” of aparticular recognizability.372 Remembrance is an act capable of bringing to light that which should be preserved from past events or destinies. In the act of remembrance, the present is unexpectedly (an “awakening”) connected 372 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project , trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, The Belknap Press, Cambridge 1999, pp.462–463. 304 with Benjamin’s state of emergency that becomes the rule. The state of emergency or “Verordnung zum Schutz von Volk und Staat”, which was enacted by the Nazis in 1933 (in the same year as Martin Heidegger gave his first address as Rector of the University of Freiburg), was never recalled during Nazi rule. If the sovereign is he who is entitled to declare Ausnahmezustand, by which the legal order is suspended, this creates astrange sphere of jurisprudence that is capable of suspending itself– it is the threshold between inside and outside where the one does not exclude the other. However, it is here (according to Agamben) that the law manifests its pure form: it is applied by virtue of not being applied, it is power that refrains from exerting itself,385 it is valid without this meaning anything. It is in this space, and only in this space, that bare life appears, life abandoned by law, left to itself. Agamben thus reconstructs the hidden genealogy of biopower that Foucault situates in the modern era as the successor to sovereign power and discipline: one of the basic phenomena of the nineteenth century was what might be called power’shold over life. What Imean is the acquisition of power over man insofar as man is aliving being that the biological came under State control, that there was at least acertain tendency that leads to what might be termed State control of the biological. 386 Now Ithink we see something new emerging in the second half of the eighteenth century: anew technology of power, but this time it is not disciplinary. This technology of power does not exclude the former, does not exclude disciplinary technology, but it does dovetail into it, integrate it, modify it to some extent, and above all, use it by sort of infiltrating it, embedding itself in existing disciplinary techniques. This new technique does not simply do away with the disciplinary technique, because it exists at adifferent level, 385 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life , trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen, Stanford UP, Stanford 1998, p.23. 386 Michel Foucault , Society Must Be Defended. Lectures at the Collège de France 1975–76 , trans. David Macey, Picador, New York, pp.237–238. 305 on adifferent scale, and because it has adifferent bearing area, and makes use of very different instruments. Unlike discipline, which is addressed to bodies, the new nondisciplinary power is applied not to man-as-body but to the living man, to man-as-living-being; ultimately, if you like, to manas-species. To be more specific, Iwould say that discipline tries to rule amultiplicity of men to the extent that their multiplicity can and must be dissolved into individual bodies that can be kept under surveillance, trained, used, and, if need be, punished. And that the new technology that is being established is addressed to amultiplicity of men, not to the extent that they are nothing more than their individual bodies, but affected by overall processes characteristic of birth, death, production, illness, and so on. So after afirst seizure of power over the body in an individualising mode, we have asecond seizure of power that is not individualising but, if you like, massifying, that is directed not at man-as-body but at man-as-species. After the anatomo-politics of the human body established in the course of the eighteenth century, we have, at the end of that century, the emergence of something that is no longer an anatomo-politics of the human body, but what Iwould call a“biopolitics” of the human race.387 Along with biopower appears something new, a“person”, recognised neither by law nor discipline (neither the individual under the terms of acontract, nor the individual as individual body), but aperson-population that appears as apolitical problem, as abiological problem, as aproblem of power. “Biopolitics (...) tries to control the series of random events that can occur in aliving mass.”388 And it is in this turn to life that the fundamental transformation of power resides: “And now we have the emergence of apower that Iwould call the power of regularization, and it, in contrast, consists in making live and letting die.”389 387 Ibid. pp.242–243. 388 Ibid. p.246. 389 Ibid. p.247. 306 In an effort to demonstrate that, as astable realisation of an exception, the concentration camp is ahidden matrix of the political arena in which we live, Agamben goes further back in time. The Foucauldian thesis will then have to be corrected or, at least, completed, in the sense that what characterizes modern politics is not so much the inclusion of zoē in the polis– which is, in itself, absolutely ancient– nor simply the fact that life as such becomes aprincipal object of the projections and calculations of State power. Instead the decisive fact is that, together with the process by which the exception everywhere becomes the rule, the realm of bare life– which is originally situated at the margins of the political order– gradually begins to coincide with the political realm, and exclusion and inclusion, outside and inside, bios and zoē, right and fact, enter into azone of irreducible indistinction. At once excluding bare life from and capturing it within the political order, the state of exception actually constituted, in its very separateness, the hidden foundation on which the entire political system rested.390 It now becomes clear at least in part why the third part of Homo Sacer is entitled “The Camp as Biopolitical Paradigm of the Modern”.391 The concentration camp is areal fact, ahistorical fact. As such it is present, for instance, in Adorno’sclaim that to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. Philosophy must reflect this fact and reassess the meaning of the Enlightenment project of the modern era. This line of thinking abandons the traditional philosophy of history, but emphasises (Adorno again) that concepts of reason must constantly be corrected by their own subjects, and that it is essential that the idea be “affected” by real history. Similarly, after the war the con390 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer , p.12. 391 The book Homo sacer: Il potere sovrano e la nuda vita , Torino: Einaudi, 1995, is the first volume of along series that includes State of Exception ; Stasis: Civil War as aPolitical Paradigm ; The Kingdom and the Glory ; Homo sacer II , 2; The Sacrament of Language ; Homo sacer II, 3 ; Opus Dei ; Homo sacer II, 5 ; Remants of Auschwitz ; Homo sacer III ; The Highest Poverty ; The Use of Bodies; Homo sacer IV, 2 , etc. 307 centration camp becomes a“sign” around which the idea circles, concerned with cannot be named, what cannot be thought, what cannot even be understood, because understanding the Holocaust would mean the destruction of ethics. However, Agamben does not use the “concentration camp” as an empirical fact, nor as asign, but as aparadigm. And so in order to understand his proposition fully we must remind ourselves of what he has in mind when he speaks of aparadigm. In acertain regard this term is one of the fundamental concepts of Agamben’sthinking, inter alia because it implies an ambiguitiy vis-à-vis the inside and outside that is manifest at such time as astate of affairs pertains during which the exception becomes the rule. Moreover, though it is not obvious on first glance, as soon as exception and rule take their place in the centre of philosophical attention, the classical (metaphysical) assumption of the identity of thinking and being is excluded from the game. Given that the “camp” is ahistorical fact or event in real history, it is impossible when attempting to understand it to reduce the quaestio facti to aquaestio iuris (areduction that Husserl’sidea of teleology and the ensuing understanding of crisis is marked by). The idea of the paradigm and the paradigmatic method of investigation brings us to Michel Foucault. What is perhaps his best known analysis from Discipline and Punish sets out to demonstrate how Bentham’sprison reforms (the panopticon as acompletely concrete architectural figure or dispositif) exemplify the new organisation of power at acertain point in time. The panopticon is akind of diagram of power, an ideal form of political technology,392 which at any one moment in time is updated so as to meet the needs of many different institutions (school, factory, regulatory and administrative measures, scientific findings, etc.) as ahidden network that con392 Cf. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish , trans. Alan Sheridan, Vintage Books, New York 1995, pp.276 et seq. 308 nects them. This network or dispositif then mediates the relationship between power and knowledge393. The dispositif in the position of exemplar or paradigm is thus both part of that of which it is an example and, in exemplary form, excluded from this subset. It is both the rule and the exception to the rule, both inside and outside. The peculiarity of the paradigmatic method as ameans of knowledge is that it does not proceed from the particular to the universal, but from the universal to the particular. It remains on the level of the unique and thus problematises the antinomy of the particular or universal (which is, on the contrary, the basis of induction and deduction). The exemplum is asingularly representing instance and does not relate to the exemplified by virtue of “belonging to...”, i.e. not by virtue of what is common to the element of the exemplified subset in which everything is “covered”. The example is aunique case that is isolated from the context of which it is apart only until such time as it allows us to understand the whole by virtue of its singularity.394 In other words, the paradigm (the exemplum) does not allow for the identification of “that as that”, but recognises without converting singularity into the members of acertain class. On the one hand, every example is treated in effect as areal particular case; but on the other, it remains understood that it cannot serve in its particularity. Neither particular nor universal, the example is asingular object that presents itself as such, that shows its singularity. Hence the pregnancy of the Greek term, for example: paradeigma , that which is shown alongside (like the German Bei-spiel , that which plays alongside). Hence the proper place of the example is always beside itself in the empty space in which its undefinable and unforgettable life unfolds.395 393 Cf. Giorgio Agamben, What is an Apparatus , Stanford UP, Stanford 2009. 394 Giorgio Agamben, The Signature of All Things: On Method , trans. Luca D’Isanto with Kevin Attell, Zone Books 2009, pp.16 et seq. 395 Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community , trans. Michael Hardt, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, London 1993, p.17. 309 The testimony of all those who survived the Holocaust can be read in this way, as an example in the Agambenian sense. And it is in this way, from the particular to the particular, without generalisation, without integration into an overarching narrative, that Claude Lanzmann proceeds in his film Shoah. 310 41 The testimony of the survivors– If This Is aMan (Primo Levi), The Human Race (Robert Antelme)– indicates in its titles the extreme limits whose extension is the concentration and extermination camps in which the modern form of “bare life” appears: häftling or zek (convict). The conviction that life has apurpose is rooted in every fibre of man, it is aproperty of the human substance. Free men give many names to this purpose, and many think and talk about its nature. But for us the question is simpler. Today, in this place, our only purpose is to reach the spring. At the moment we care about nothing else.396 People do not die in the camp, but corpses are manufactured here. Life is not life here, nor does death die here. Foucault’sbiopolitics, as Agamben says, here coincides with thanatopolitics397, which is the result of what had until then been more alatent process, adescription of which could be understood as aparallel or concretisation of Adorno and Horkheimer’sdialectic of enlightenment. In his lectures entitled Security, Territory, Population, Foucault sets out the initial phase of this process, namely the transition from sovereign power to an emerging biopolitics. During the era of sovereign power the criminal, thief or murderer is punished exclusively on the basis of their crime, whereas in the era of disciplinary power they are punished only after athorough analysis of their character and after ascertaining both individual and collective conditions under which they perpetrated their crime. It is important these facts be ascertained in order that it be possible to predict whether they can 396 Primo Levi, If This Is aMan, trans. Stuart Woolf, Orion Press, New York 1959, p.79. 397 Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz. The Witness and the Archive , Zone Books, New York 1999, p.83. 311 be remedied or not. This is why the criminal is subjected to psychological examination, surveillance and rehabilitation. New “tactics” of power appear: prison, psychiatric institution, suspended sentences, etc. Amore detailed examination then ascertains the number of murders or thieves in the population as awhole, decides whether crime figures are rising or falling, in what demographic groups specific types of crime feature, and how it would be possible to regulate and control all of these variables in the optimal way. Discipline and biopower overlap: both represent apower over life (bios) that can be exerted on both individuals and groups: school workshops, prisons and psychiatric institutions relate to bodies inasmuch as they deviate from the norms, though there also exist population norms: fertility rates, death rates, public health and migration (average values and deviations therefrom). Though all of this takes place through the good offices of both institutions and the state, the state is already implicated in many institutions (e.g. schools and hospitals). We can therefore say that discipline relates to the micro-level of power relations, while biopower operates on the macro-level. Biopower in the form of “care” then creates asituation in which death becomes ascandal and suicide is understood as asubversive act of resistance, since death is beyond the reach of biopower. Power does not impact on death, it impacts on mortality rates. In the right of sovereignty, death was the moment of the most obvious and most spectacular manifestation of the absolute power of the sovereign; death now becomes, in contrast, the moment when the individual escapes all power, falls back on himself and retreats, so to speak, into his own privacy. Power no longer recognises death. Power literally ignores death.398 398 Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, p.248. 312 Biopower is therefore what we might call the administration of life, because it needs estimates, statistics, the specification of various demographic factors, population censuses, which, however, are not simply censuses, but the point of intersection of the population and the individual body. The Auschwitz crematorium for which the prisoners were simply statistical units or Stücke was able to burn up to ten thousand dead bodies aday.399 In the Soviet gulags, the number of victims was given in recommended figures specifying how many “boxes of soap” (which is how the prisoners were referred to) were to be delivered to the gulag slaughter house.400 If sovereignty is characterised by the right to “take life or let live”, then modern biopolitics embodies the principle of “make live, let die”. However, according to Giorgio Agamben, in totalitarian regimes both principles intersected in the paradox formulated by Foucault himself when he posed the question of how biopower can let die if its objective is to let live, and yet be manifest in the form of murder. In order to explain this we need to follow the process of gradual separation and exclusion during the biologisation of the originally body politic, the moment the “people” is doubled by the “population”. This opens up aspace for racial theory, the differentiation of Aryan and non-Aryan, i.e. the singling out of an outside in the hitherto homogenous realm of life. From here it is but ashort step to “homo sacer”. This general schema using which we must clarify Foucault’sanalyses then only needs aconcrete Massnahmen, ameasure of the Nazi state. Extermination, annihilation, Vernichtung, begins at the moment that non-Aryans are excluded from economic and political life as Fremdkörper or aforeign element, whose physical separation begins with exclusion into aghetto and continues with deportations beyond the borders of the Third Reich. This is how, up until 1939 at the latest, the Germans managed to 399 Filip Müller, Eyewitness Auschwitz. Three Years in the Gas Chambers , ed. and trans. Susanne Flatauer and Helmut Freitag, Ivad R. Dee, Chicago 1979, pp.59 et seq. 400 Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago . 313 make of German Jews socially dead persons,401aterm that Goldhagen adopts from the book by Orland Patterson Slavery and Social Death (1962): “Members of asociety conceive of the socially dead as being bereft of some essential human attributes and undeserving of essential social, civil, and legal protections.” 402 The legal system gives up on them de facto and de iure; proof of this is, for example, the letter written (Richterbrief, which had the status of adirective) by Otto Georg Thierack, Reich Minister of Justice from 1942 and president of the Academy for German Law on 13 September 1942: In order to liberate the German nation from Poles, Russians, Jews and Gypsies and in order to release eastern territories joined to the empire as settlement areas for the Germany people, Iintend to submit criminal proceedings against Poles, Jews, Russians and Gypsies to the imperial chief of the SS. Iam taking these measures on the basis that justice can only to asmall extent contribute to the extermination of members of these nationalities.403 Along with the occupation of Europe, and above all after the invasion of Western Poland by Germany and of Eastern Poland by the Soviet Union, stateless zones began systematically to emerge as extraterritoriality, non-places of concentration and extermination camps, which in asense were nowhere. The mechanism of this process is outlined by Timothy Snyder. It begins with the establishment of different racial institutions (to counter the racial threat) and continues with the destruction of states in an aggressive war that allows 401 Daniel Johan Goldhagen, Hitler’sWilling Executioners. Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust , Alfred Knopf, New York 1996, pp.90 et seq. 402 Cf. Goldhagen, Hitler’sWilling Executioners , p.168. 403 Ota Kraus, Erich Kulka, Noc amlha , Naše Vojsko-SPB, Praha 1958, p.16. After ameeting with Himmler on 18 September 1942, Thierack observed: “Korrektur bei nichtgenügenden Justizurteilen durch polizeiliche Sonderbehandlung. Es wurde auf Vorschlag des Reichsleiters Bormann zwischen Reichsführer-SS und mir folgende Vereinbarung getrofffen ... 2. Auslieferung asozialer Elemente aus dem Strafvollzug an den Reichsführer-SS zur Vernichtung durch Arbeit.” (cited from John M. Steiner, Power Politics and Social Change in National Socialist Germany , de Gruyter 1975, p.325.) 320 (T)hose who were lucid enough to warn the Jewish communities about the forthcoming destruction either through information or through foresight, were dismissed as ‘prophets of doom’ and labelled traitors or madmen.417 The unassimilability of the event is also addressed by Robert Antelme: Two years ago, during the first days after our return, Ithink we were all prey to agenuine delirium. We wanted at last to speak, to be heard. We were told that by itself our physical appearance was eloquent enough; but we had only just returned, with us we brought back our memory of our experience, an experience that was still very much alive, and we felt afrantic desire to describe it such as it had been. As of those first days, however, we saw that it was impossible to bridge the gap we discovered opening up between the words at our disposal and that experience which, in the case of most of us, was still going forward within our bodies. How were we to resign ourselves to not trying to explain how we had got to the state we were in? For we were yet in that state. And even so it was impossible. No sooner would we begin to tell our story than we would be choking over it. And then, even to us, what we had to tell would start to seem unimaginable .418 Others could be cited in this regard: Améry, Levi, Richard Glazar and many many others. Susan Sontag generalises when she says that one’sfirst encounter with the photographic inventory of ultimate horror is aparadigm of what “revelation” means for the twentieth century: negative epiphany. That which is given as testimony by survivors is somehow radically untransferrable, an experience eluding expression. Testimony regarding the Holocaust can never be bedeutsames Zeichen, because ahorizon within which it could be incorporated cannot exist. Salmen Lewenthal, amember of the Auschwitz Sonderkommando, who buried his notes in the grounds of 417 Felman– Laub, Testimony , p.83. 418 Antelme, The Human Race , p.3. 321 the crematorium (where they were discovered only in 1962), speaks of “events unimaginable for human beings”.419 The Nazi extermination centres produced not only dead bodies as though on aconveyor belt, but were also the site of awar on memory. They thwarted the very possibility of grieving inasmuch as “to remember the death of other humans in spite of their annihilation remains the last possible human act of ethical resistance against their desolation”,420and inasmuch as they systematically destroyed intergenerational continuity, i.e. the basis of lived or natural time, that wave that carries the individuals of each successive generation421, and even the possibility of being with the other that persists in mourning. To have afriend, to look at him, to follow him with your eyes, to admire him in friendship, is to know in amore intense way, already injured, always insistent, and more and more unforgettable, that one of the two of you will inevitably see the other die. One of us, each says to himself, the day will come when one of the two of us will see himself no longer seeing the other and so will carry the other within him awhile longer, his eyes following without seeing, the world suspended by some unique tear, each time unique, through which everything from then on, through which the world itself– and this day will come– will come to be reflected quivering, reflecting disappearance itself: the world, the whole world, the world itself, for death takes from us not only some particular life within the world, some moment that belongs to us, but, each time, without limit, someone through whom the world, and first of all our own world, will have opened up in aboth finite and infinite– mortally infinite– way. That is the blurred and transparent testimony borne by this tear, this small, infinitely small, tear, which the 419 Inmitten des grauenvollen Verbrechens. Handschriften von Mitgliedern des Sonderkommandos , ed. Jadwiga Bezwinska et al., Verlag des Staatlichen Auschwitz-Birkenau-Museums, 1996, p.34. 420 James Hatley, Suffering Witness: The Quandary of Responsibility after the Irreparable . State University of New York Press, Albany 2000, p.41. 421 Ibid., p.60. 322 mourning of friends passes through and endures even before death, and always singularly so, always irreplaceably.422 If the Holocaust is an event beyond all standards and referential frameworks to which our understanding relates, it is this way because it is an event that did not “create” witnesses. Firstly, its incomprehensibility made it impossible for the survivors to find it within themselves to bear witness to it (acharacteristic of the traumatic event), which is acondition of the possibility of their being able to bear witness before others. Secondly, the very institution of the death camp liquidates witnesses physically and without trace: only the dead victims would be genuine witnesses. Hence the title of the book oft-cited by Primo Levi: The Drowned and the Saved. The true witnesses are the “drowned”, while the survivors bear witness to the missing testimony of missing witnesses. The event itself is effaced. To the question of what is actually being borne witness to as the “Shoa”, “Holocaust” or “Auschwitz” we must therefore add another: Who is bearing witness? On the one hand, it is he who survived and who can speak. However, this is an atypical häftling or inmate, an anomalous minority, in the words of Primo Levi (Isopravvissuti sono una minoranza anomala). On the other, it is he who touched the bottom and looked into the face of the Gorgon (visto la Gorgone)– he should be the one to speak, but cannot. The survivors represent him and speak on his behalf. He is dead until such moment as the living lend him their voice, until he testifies to what is being said through him; the witness’sspeech transcends the witness (Levinas). Although the voice of silent victims is heard in the words of those who survived, there is nobody here who could say of themselves that they are agenuine witness. Silence is both at the very bottom and yet enters the speech of the survivors, which means that it is impossible to distinguish between the silent and the speaking in this 422 Jacques Derrida, “The Taste of Tears”, in: The Work of Mourning , ed. by Pascale-Anne Braul, Michael Naas, Chicago University Press, Chicago, London 2001, p.107. 323 testimony. This is an indistinguishability that in its highly radical way demonstrates the presence of the outside inside, the relationship via irreducible difference. However, in the testimony of survivors not only man and speech find themselves in aproblematic and risky relationship, but the very definition of man as zóon logon echón, or aliving being who has language, especially if the experience of the death camps is sometimes designated “unspeakable”, even though there are witnesses who talk about it. Levi’sparadox can only be resolved by achange of discourse, i.e. by acritical revision of our traditional understanding of speech. This forms the subject of Agamben’sRemnants of Auschwitz.423 The chapter “The Archive and Testimony” touches tangentially on Benjamin’sreflections on the atrophy of experience and directly on Émile Benveniste, who in his Problèmes de linguistique générale424 concludes that the “I” is primarily constituted as an instance of speech, i.e. ahuman being becomes asubject when he or she enters the order of speech. Subjectivity is the speaker’sability to position himself as the subject of speech, and it cannot, therefore, be defined either by some original perception or experience in itself, because this is but asecondary effect dependent on the linguistic establishment of the “I”, or by some psychological substance. “ ‘Ego’ is he who says ‘ego’ ”.425 The singular first person pronoun does not relate either to the concept (in Saussure’sterminology), or to the individual, but designates its speaker in the act of individual speech at the moment of its utterance. The reality to which it refers is the reality of this speech. Benveniste adds that if we are consistent in our considerations, then “there is no other objective testimony to the identity of the subject except that which he himself thus gives 423 Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz. 424 Emile Benveniste, Problèmes de linguistique générale I. Gallimard, Paris 1966. 425 Emile Benveniste, “De la subjectivité dans le langage”, in: Problèmes de linguistique générale I, p.260. 324 about himself.”426 That which is designated the subject is the materialised shadow that his speech casts upon the speaker, and this is why various traditional ideas of “transcendental subjectivity”, including Husserl’s, are chimerical. This is arough approximation of the first stage in Agamben’sargument. In the second stage, in which he refers back to earlier publications,427 he turns his attention to this discrepancy between the human being and language. The human being is that place in which we must localise that which we call experience, as well as the connection between experience and testimony. That which opens up access to this dimension is experimentum linguae: the speaker experiences the overthrow of the classical idea of man as abeing gifted with speech upon realising that language comes to him from without and that he must first embrace it. But then it would be possible to speak of silent inarticulate experience and of experience before it is expropriated by language. However, it is clear that only aperson who already speaks, i.e. asubject, could thus describe his state prior to entering the regime of speech. In other words, only and precisely the ability to speak refers to the “base”, which Agamben names infanzia, i.e. to the experience of speech as pure potentiality. This non-speaking does not refer to some chronological prevenience or originality; infanzia coexists in the human being with speech. However, this has consequences within broader contexts. For instance, the “origin” (including Husserl’sUrstiftung or original institution and including the early modern concept of the base) is not that which constantly recedes into the past, but that “which has not yet ceased to occur”.428 Experience from the perspective 426 Ibid., p.263. 427 Giorgio Agamben, Infanzia e storia: Distruzione dell’esperienza e origine della storia (1978) and La potenza del pensiero: Saggi e conferenza (expanded edition 2005). 428 Giorgio Agamben, Infancy and History. On the Destruction of Experience , trans. Liz Heron, Verso 2007, Verso, London, New York, 2007, p.57. 325 of infanzia is the difference between the human and the linguistic, which is aclaim that can be illuminated by contrast: if “experience” did not exist, speech would be the same as using language according to rules. However, because man is not identical with language, speech is like the ex-position of experience, aplace in which experience finds expression but is never identical to it– it is the site of arelationship via irreducible difference. Here, as in Agamben and elsewhere, an understanding of difference as athreshold or limit that does not belong to one or the other side (aseparator links, alink separates) and is azone of indistinguishability (see, for instance, the relationship of the human and in-human in man) plays afundamental role. This concept, in which the infanzia preceding speech is the potentiality of speech, i.e. both in-speech and speech, frees the transition from one to the other of incomprehensibility, for instance the transition (aproblem inherited from Saussurean structural linguistics) from langue to parole, from language to system to speech as communicating meaning, the transition that, according to Benveniste and Agamben, is essential if the subject is to constitute itself (from this perspective infanzia is the de-subjectivised possibility of subjectification). To express matters using Benveniste’sterminology: it allows us to understand the transition from the semiotic to the semantic. If amode of designation belongs to the semiotic that is particular to language, i.e. the sign designates, if it is recognised, identified as asign with acertain value, then the semiotic is actually adesignation that only comes into being in speech, in the act of testifying: significance is not recognised but understood. Between both is discontinuity– and Agamben’sconcept of non-speech is supposed to explain how it is possible that in fact this hiatus is constantly being bridged. It is the fact of man’sinfancy (in other words, in order to speak, he needs to be constituted as asubject within language by removing himself from 326 infancy) which breaks the closed world of the sign and transforms pure language into human discourse, the semiotic into the semantic.429 For this very reason, however, it is not possible to posit the semiotic and the semantic as two completely different realities. Instead, bearing in mind infanzia as potentiality, they should be regarded as transcendental limits. The semiotic would then be something like aprelinguistic vocalisation (an idea very close to the hum and murmur of speech; elsewhere in his speculations Agamben refers to glossolalia), which becomes the essential substratum of the semantic the moment that man acquires speech and abandons his muteness. Because Agamben’sparadigmatic method is amethod by analogy, this argument is aimed at both “ineffability” and at testimony as discourse imparting speech to the person who is not capable of speech as well as to the concept of the subject. For if the “I” is asubject only at the cost of accepting his de-subjectivisation, his inseparable link with the a-subjective infanzia, then analogously we might understand the survivor as the subject of testimony that is de-subjectivised by virtue of having him speak in his testimony the experience of the bottom unattainable by him. Man is able to become awitness precisely because he has speech as abeing capable of not having speech: because there is an inseparable division and non-coincidence between the inhuman and the human, the living being and the speaking being, the Muselmann and the survivor. Precisely insofar as it inheres in language as such, precisely insofar as it bears witness to the taking place of apotentiality of speaking through an impotentiality alone, its authority depends not on afactual truth, aconformity between something said and afact or between memory and what happened, but rather on the immemorial relation between the unsayable and the sayable, between the outside and the inside of language. The authority of the witness consists in his capacity to speak 429 Agamben, Infancy , p.64. 327 solely in the name of an incapacity to speak– that is, in his or her being asubject . Testimony thus guarantees not the factual truth of the statement safeguarded in the archive, but rather its unarchivability, its exteriority with respect to the archive– that is, the necessity by which, as the existence of language, it escapes both memory and forgetting. It is because there is testimony only where there is an impossibility of speaking, because there is awitness only where there has been desubjectification, that the Muselmann is the complete witness and that the survivor and the Muselmann cannot be split apart.430 This theme is expanded on in Remnants of Auschwitz, especially as regards the categories of potentiality and contingency. We can leave these aside, though not without pointing to their motivation, which is not areinterpretation of traditional concepts, but an examination of the necessity for aradical transformation of the philosophical discourse as aresponse to the event of the Holocaust. Auschwitz means the collapse of the traditional ontological operators, namely categories, because it is the event “in which the impossible is forced into the real. Auschwitz is the existence of the impossible (...) The Muselmann produced by Auschwitz is the catastrophe of the subject, the subject’seffacement as the placer of contingency and its maintenance as existence of the impossible.”431 In Potentialities Agamben states quite explicitly that the task of the next philosophy will be “to redefine the entire domain of categories and modality.”432 Two brief comments in conclusion. Firstly: Agamben summarises acomplex argument by saying that testimony places the inside and outside of language, the sayable and unsayable (indicibile), in arelationship. We might simplify matters thus: that which was thus or, to put it another way, was designated 430 Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz , pp.157–8. 431 Ibid., p.148. 432 Giorgio Agamben, Potentialities. Collected Essays in Philosophy , ed. and trans. with an introduction by Daniel Heller-Roazen Stanford, Stanford University Press, Stanford 1999, pp.76–5. 328 by language as this or that; if we wanted to eliminate “as”, we would come up against unsayability or ineffability. Or to put things another way (whence Agamben’sanalyses of the concepts of potentiality, actualisation, contingency433): the existence of language itself is unsayable. Perhaps this is how we should understand the following paragraph from the “Prologue” to Infanzia e storia: The ineffabile , the unsaid, are in fact categories which belong exclusively to human language; far from indicating alimit of language, they express its invincible power of presupposition, the unsayable being precisely what language must presuppose in order to signify.434 Among other things, however, Agamben also wants to say that unsayability is acategory that tradition has long surrounded with an aura of the sacred. If we wanted to rid ourselves of it in this form, this would mean having to remain silent about Auschwitz, so sacrificing its victims asecond time. This why those who assert the unsayability of Auschwitz today should be more cautious in their statements. If they mean to say that Auschwitz was unique event in the face of which the witness must in some way submit his every word to the test of an impossibility of speaking, they are right. But if, joining uniqueness to unsayability, they transform Auschwitz into areality absolutely separated from language, if they break the tie between an impossibility and apossibility of speaking that, in the Muselmann , constitutes testimony, then they unconsciously repeat the Nazis’ gesture.435 Secondly: the Prologue to Infanzia e storia cited above begins with aBlanchotesque consideration of the work. Agamben says that every written work must be understood as an introduction to that which 433 Conducted most thoroughly in the chapter “Bartleby, or On Contingency“, in: Potentialities. 434 Agamben, Infancy and History , p . 4. 435 Agamben, Remnantsof Auschwitz , p.157. 329 has never been written and which is destined to remain unwritten forever. All works that follow it will again be simply an introduction to others. The absent work defines each already written work as aprolegomenon or paralipomenon of the non-existent work. This too is adescription of an elliptical or a-thetic text and it too we may read as an analogy of irrevocable difference or discrepancy between language and experience, the outside (infanzia) and inside (language), or unsayability as the prerequisite of denotation, i.e. of arelationship via difference. However, were we to seek awider analogy, we could interpret this ellipticity as unambiguous confirmation of the non-identity of thinking and being, and thus as abreak with the classical philosophical discourse. This analogy would bring us back to Adorno’sresponse to the event of the Holocaust in Negative Dialectics (published in 1966) and in his university lectures from 1963 entitled Metaphysics: Concept and Problems, in which he presents several of the ideas that appear in the final section of Negative Dialectics. As opposed to “metaphysics” (the contents of the spirit’sthinking is the spirit itself), Adorno demands we return to concepts their embeddedness in time (in what Adorno calls Relevanz des Innerzeitlichen436), i.e. in real history. After Auschwitz this step is essential, since it is clear that that which was played out in time impacts fundamentally on thinking whose concepts and categories cannot be situated outside historical, eventor adventurist-time. 436 Theodor W. Adorno, Metaphysik. Begriff und Probleme , ed. Rolf Tiedemann, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt a.M. 2006, p.159. 336 with itself in self-consciousness that, according to him, simply conceals adeeper conflict in the subject. Because shame is not primarily amoral phenomenon, but rather stems from our inability to identify with what is in us and is alien to us (it approximates to the distinction between the life function and life history, or Binswanger’sdifference between the dreaming and waking state), which, however, emerges in the borderline situation of the destruction of humanity. It is something that we would want to conceal but cannot, either from the other or from ourselves. We cannot escape ourselves, we are bound to ourself, we are permanently present to this difference (the non-coincidence in us, the irreducible crisis inside), in our completeness. It is in this sense we should understand the statement that the “I” is present to itself (présence du moi à soi-même), i.e. that the “I” is witness to its own de-subjectivisation at precisely the moment it becomes asubject (in Agamben’ssubsequent formulation). Shame, as Levinas says, reveals being, which reveals itself and seeks an apology.447 Shame is asign of this non-identity as it reveals itself, the impossibility of concealing the outside inside, the fact that the subject is affected by its own receptivity. Voice, speech, shame, traumatic experience and the witness thereof, the semiotics of indexical signs (trace, ellipsis, secrecy), the relationship via irreducible difference, the non-identity of thought and being or consciousness and being, experience and language ... all of this is closely connected if philosophy responds to the event of the Holocaust by means of aroot-and-branch transformation of its discourse. However, this transformation must be monitored not only wherever concepts change their meaning, wherever new concepts appear and old ones fade into the background, wherever accents and the like shift, but wherever it is possible to observe something like an internal resonance between various different places of this discourse (whether we give them their authors’ names or label them by 447 Ibid., p.114. 337 specific problems or questions) that lends the transformed discourse its coherence. As Adorno wrote in Minima Moralia: “the soundness of aconception can be judged by whether it causes one quotation to summon another.”448 This applies not only to specific texts or works of aparticular author, but also to the discourse of philosophy as awhole. For this reason it would be difficult to find some minimal common denominator. It is more acase of strategic proximity, though this is not always clear at first sight. If, for example, in Derrida’sneologism différance we hear not only “difference” but also “deferral” in the sense of postponement, then the meaning of this invented concept is respect for resistance: if thinking does not attempt to identify something “as” something mediated via the already constituted horizon of expectation, this is not about becoming resigned to the failure of cognition, but rather an attempt to rescue that which always remains, since that which escapes, i.e. which resists exposure of this type, must be shown in this resistance, in the act of escape. In this way amutual correspondence will be found between testimony and Derrida’suntranslatable “concept” restance non présente, the echo of which is present in Agamben’sRemnants of Auschwitz. If we overlook the theological messianic connotations that the concept of the remainder or remains is surrounded by in the case of this author, the original interpreter of the texts of Walter Benjamin, in the phrase il resto we find firstly the present absence of the nonidentical (of the outside inside), and secondly (above all, one might add), another concept of temporality concealed within, adifferent dimension of time beyond chronology and teleology. In this sense il resto further develops the impulse provided by Benjamin’sreflections on the Jetzt-Zeit, the here-and-now. Il resto, remnant, restance– under no circumstances is this part of the whole449; the remainder or remains must be understood as an 448 Adorno, Minima Moralia , p.87 449 See, for instance, Leland de la Durantaye, Giorgio Agamben: ACritical Introduction . Stanford UP, Stanford 2009, p.298 et. seq. 338 excess. It indicates adivergence from the whole and as such refers to the impossibility of the identification of whole and remainder, their mutual cover (Deckung) as ameans of cognising the unique (of an event), i.e. it refers to the remainder of non-identity in every act of identification. In this sense, and to aextent that does not exclude either shifts or polemical dialogue between them, both Derrida’sand Agamben’sthinking links up to Adorno’snegative dialectics. However, at the same time Agamben’sil resto and Derrida’srestance refer to another temporality. In Agamben’scase acomparison offers itself with the “operational time” of the linguist Gustave Guillaume:450 the time that human thinking requires in order to construct for itself acertain image of time must be set aside from linear time. The idea thus created then refers back to chronological time. However, operational time is heterogeneous in respect of this time (all the more so in that, in order to create an image of time, we must be able to “contract” it in our thinking.451 This comparison illuminates Agamben’sconception of messianic time especially: “the time that time takes to come to an end” 452 (il tempo che il tempo ci mette per finire), the time that remains between time and its end. However, perhaps all of this is prefigured, albeit in simpler form, both in Kracauer’sapproach to waiting (Warten) as hesitant openness that does not look for when and whether time will end, because it is necessary that life focus on the last thing before the last in the “antechamber” (Vorraum) of the end, and in Adorno’srequirement of arelationship with the unconditional, the condition of which, however, is that it does not pose aquestion regarding the possibility (or impossibility) of its attainment– or redemption. Again, Derrida’sdifférance is not as remote as it might seem. 450 Gustave Guillaume, Foundations for aScience of Language . John Benjamin’s, Amsterdamn 1984, p.123. 451 Cf. Giorgio Agamben, The Time That Remains , trans. Patricia Dailey , Stanford University Press, Stanford 2005, p.65 et seq. 452 Ibid., p.67. 339 44 An integral aspect of the transformation of philosophical discourse is atransformation in the hierarchy of philosophical genres. The essay, fragment, dialogue, philosophical miniature or sketch initiated by apparently marginal or random observations once more comes into its own. Texts that say something by speaking of something else, texts whose content is presented by the very method of its presentation. This state of affairs was described by Adorno in Aesthetic Theory: art needs philosophy, since philosophy says what art cannot say, although it is art alone which is able to say it: by not saying it.453 And so the example of “internal architecture” from Benjamin’sOne-Way Street is actually not even an example: The tractatus is an Arabic form. Its exterior is undifferentiated and unobtrusive, like the façades of Arabian buildings, whose articulation begins only in the courtyard. So, too, the articulated structure of the tractatus is invisible from the outside, revealing itself only from within. If it is formed by chapters, they have not verbal headings but numbers. The surface of its deliberations is not enlivened with pictures, but covered with unbroken, proliferating arabesques. In the ornamental density of this presentation, the distinction between thematic and excursive expositions is abolished.454 453 Theodor W. Adorno, Ästhetische Theorie , GS 7, p.13. 454 Walter Benjamin, “One-Way Street”, in Selected Writings 1, p.402. 340 45 The question reads as follows: how do we show that which resists being shown, that which remains as il resto, remnant, as restance non-présente? How do we not lose that to which testimony refers? And in any case, what is testimony? These questions bring to life thinking that is not driven by method but declares itself as strategy. The very word strategy is already an explanation of sorts of this turn. Strategy, an approach that is not secured in advance, whose calculations are neither certain nor evident. In Adornian terms, the approach is justified by its outcome. Strategy implies agamble, whence the importance of the essay (“attempt” or “trial”) as aphilosophical genre and Michel Montaigne as its predecessor, for instance in Derrida’sForce of Law. Adorno provides amore detailed explanation in The Essay as Form, in which the word “method” becomes apaleonym. With regard to scientific procedure and its philosophic grounding as method, the essay, in accordance with its idea, draws the fullest consequences from the critique of the system. Even the empiricist doctrines that grant priority to open, unanticipated experience over firm, conceptual ordering remain systematic to the extent that they investigate what they hold to be the more or less constant preconditions of knowledge and develop them in as continuous acontext as possible. Since the time of Bacon, who was himself an essayist, empiricism– no less than rationalism– has been “method”. Doubt about the unconditional priority of method was raised, in the actual process of thought, almost exclusively by the essay. It does justice to the consciousness of non-identity, without needing to say so, radically unradical in refraining from any reduction to aprinciple. (...) It proceeds, so to speak, methodically unmethodically. (...) It is not so much that the essay ignores indisputable certainty, as that it abrogates the ideal. The essay becomes true in its progress, which drives it beyond itself, and not in ahoarding obsession with fundamentals. Its concepts receive their light from a terminus 341 ad quem hidden to the essay itself, and not from an obvious terminus aquo . In this the very method of the essay expresses the utopian intention.455 Strategy is arelationship to the incalculable, i.e. arelationship via irreducible difference, arelationship to that which is on the point of arrival. If we attempt to calculate this, it is precisely because we confront the unpredictable, we do not know: If astrategy were guaranteed in and of itself, if its calculation were sure, there would be no strategy at all. Strategy always implies awager– that is, acertain way of giving ourselves over to not-knowing, to the incalculable. We calculate because there is something incalculable. We calculate where we do not know, where we can make no determination.456 The substitution of the method by strategy, which on the one hand is anticipated by Benjamin and his constellations and dialectical image, and on the other by Hans-Georg Gadamer in his book Truth and Method (1960), can almost be followed step by step during the latter half of the twentieth century. In addition, in the background of Derrida’sdifférance is Saussure’sCourse in General Linguistics, in which the operation of language is compared to agame of chess: every move changes the entire system and so its scope cannot be precisely forecast. The response to this comparison is Derrida’searly essay Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences (1966),457 in which the internal movement of the decentred structure is called the “play of structure”,458 clearly in polemic with the classical concept in which transformations of the structure are limited or regulated by its “centre” (or the principle or origin, as it 455 Theodor W. Adorno, Noten zur Literatur , Suhrkamp, Frankfurt a.M. 1981, pp.16, 21. 456 Jacques Derrida and Maurizio Ferraris , ATaste for the Secret , trans. Giacomo Donis, Polity Press, Cambridge 2002, p.13. 457 Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference , trans. Alan Bass, University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1978, pp.351–370. 458 Ibid., p.352. 342 would be possible to say in other contexts). The game, as Benjamin knew (since he often had gambling in mind) requires more “presence of mind” than method, because only (the) presence of mind– open to that which is on the point of arrival– is capable of quickly clarifying the situation. He who asks fortune-tellers unwittingly forfeits an inner intimation of coming events that is athousand times more exact than anything they may say. He is impelled by inertia, rather than by curiosity, and nothing is more unlike the submissive apathy with which he hears his fate revealed than the alert dexterity with which the man of courage lays hand on the future. For presence of mind is an extract of the future, and precise awareness of the present moment is more decisive than foreknowledge of the most distant events.459 In other words, the paradigm of the game leads to the substitution of method by strategy. For Derrida this is one of the ways of introducing the movement of differánce: There are thus two interpretations of interpretation, of structure, of sign, of freeplay. The one seeks to decipher, dreams of deciphering, atruth or an origin which is free from freeplay and from the order of the sign, and lives an exile the necessity of interpretation. The other, which is no longer turned toward the origin, affirms freeplay and tries to pass beyond man and humanism, the name man being the name of that being who, throughout the history of metaphysics or of ontotheology– in other words, through the history of all of his history– has dreamed of full presence, the reassuring foundation, the origin and the end of the game.460 459 Benjamin,“One-Way Street”, pp. 402–403. Cf.: “Presence of mind as a political category comes magnificently to life in these words of Turgot: ‘Before we have learned to deal with things in agiven position, they have already changed several times. Thus, we always perceive events too late, and politics always needs to foresee, so to speak, the present.’” Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project , trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, The Belknap Press, Cambridge, Mass. and London 1999, pp.477–478. 460 Derrida, “La structure, signe et jeu...”, p.427. 343 Strategic thinking is called for, because the game is neither teleological movement nor the development of that which is wrapped in origin (Husserl’shistory is still both to acertain extent): neither is it movement without internal meaning. The turn toward strategy is aturn to an approach of hesitant openness that allows for the unpredictable and so is always in arelationship with that which is on the point of arrival and is capable of understanding appropriately both the event and its time. Within this context the inspiration of messianic time is unsurprising, though this traditional idea is deconstructed in various different ways by all the authors mentioned (beginning with Benjamin, moving onto Kracauer and Adorno and ending with Levinas, Derrida, Agamben et al.) Precisely because strategy calculates with the incalculable, it is able to relate to the event, i.e. to that which occurs earlier than is possible, and for this reason this relationship is arelationship via irreducible difference. Though asymmetrical, it is arelationship. However, thinking is only in this relationship to the event when it corresponds to it. The Holocaust, this “event unimaginable for human beings” (S.Lewenthal), in its capacity as event is achallenge to thinking, since it problematises it. It is unimaginable, it defies understanding, it is that which subverts the rationality of even attempting to understand. For this reason, however, the response to the fact of the Holocaust is the transformation of philosophical discourse. This response does not attempt to assimilate, identify or explain the event of the Holocaust, but seeks to present its testimony regarding the Holocaust. This is not easy: in modern (traditional, classical or modern) philosophy, testimony is aminority genre. Testimony does not submit direct proof. Its evidence is controvertible, which puts it on the lowest level of epistemological relevance. All the more so because it is singular and without guarantee (as Paul Celan says:”Niemand zeugt für den Zeugen”, “No one bears witness for the witness”), and that which it testifies to it only actualises through the mediation 344 of indication. It is not therefore on the side of the necessary but the probable, it belongs to rhetoric not to philosophy. If philosophy is to bear witness regarding the Holocaust, its response must consist of atransformation of the philosophical discourse (or as Deleuze would say, the “image of thought”), by means of which testimony becomes one of the central concepts or methods of showing. However, this presupposes, on acompletely general level, that philosophy will turn its attention to the resistance that events place in the way of our (identifying, assimilating) understanding, and cease to regard this resistance as that which is to be broken. Respect for the eventcharacter of the event assumes respect for the other, the unique, the inappropriable. Respect for the escape of that which resists its own showing. The philosophical response does not explain the event but embodies it as testimony. This understanding of the event is formulated radically by Derrida. The event is that which we do not see coming because it is outside all horizons that anticipate and allow for cognition. It is outside the world inasmuch as the world is understood in the Husserlian way as the horizon of all horizons. If it is that which the framework of its understanding has within itself, then we can say that upon the arrival of the event our world is cited within another context. The known is strange, the event is not inscribed within the continuous flow of time, but refers to atime that is somehow adventurist, reveals the event-meaning of time. The event relates to everything because it relates to meaning. The event’sintervention is radical inasmuch as it unsettles the horizon of all horizons by virtue of the consciousness of meaning that is irreducible to the horizon (that which makes sense is adeviation, achange of direction). It was this that Husserl had before his eyes, without being conscious of it, when he created the phenomenological base of evident cognition in the act of identification as the conformity of like with like that pushes the incompatible to the side, as well as when he came across the problem of “hyletic data” when 345 analysing perception and the internal consciousness of time. He left to one side the fact that the carrier of meaning could in fact be the incompatible, i.e. the event.461 For this reason the world must be defined differently, namely as that which can be reconfigured by an event in response to an event.462 The world does not determine possibilities. Instead, this function is performed by events, namely crises of the world. Whence another way of thinking about time. The event as external in relation to the current hermeneutic horizon of all horizons transcends presence. More precisely, the event is always present only as the past in the light of its future, and it can only ever be turned into atheme after the event, as it were. However, this does not only involve what is known as atraumatic relationship with the past, i.e. Freud’sNachträglichkeit or “afterwardsness”, since at this juncture Benjamin’sconcept of time as expressed in the Theses on the Philosophy of History once again enters the equation: the past can only be seen in an instant of danger. This could be rephrased as follows: in aworld after the Holocaust hitherto concealed traces come to light, traces of an unrealised project of another modernity that we call postmodernism. 461 See Claude Romano, L’événement et le temps , P. U. F., Paris 1999, pp.146–147. 462 Ibid., p.55. 352 The poems of Paul Celan bear witness to testimony by virtue of their idiomaticity. This does not reside simply in German and its possibilities, nor simply in the fact that the language of “willing executioners” is obliged to become the bearer of the voice of their victims, but in what is another name for strategy: in their poetics. Apoem can “bear witness” to apoetics. It can promise it, it can be aresponse to it, as to atestamentary promise. Indeed it must, it cannot not, do so. But not with the idea of applying apreviously existing art of writing, or of referring to one as to acharter written somewhere else, or of obeying its laws like atranscendent authority, but rather by itself promising, in the act of its event, the foundation of apoetics. It would be amatter, then, of the poem “constituting its own poetics,” as Krieger puts it, apoetics that must also, through its generality, become, invent, institute, offer for reading, in an exemplary way, signing it, at the same time sealing and unsealing it, the possibility of this poem.478 Since bearing witness is not synonymous with providing proof, it must appeal to faith. Aunique experience is involved and thus no proxy may stand in for the witness. “Deep down, the witness knew then, as he does now, that his testimony would not be received. After all it deals with an event that sprang from the darket zone of man. Only those who experienced Auschwitz know what it was. Others will never know.”479 But is it not then necessary to take another step and to ask the question whether everything Itell the other is not bearing witness? If Itell you what Iam thinking, Iwant you to believe me. And do Inot always seek recourse in my speech to some strategy, some poetics? If testimony is irreducible to concepts, because it refers to aspecific time and place, the Imust work on the concept in order that it become expression (Adorno). Poetics is 478 Ibid., p.8. 479 Elie Wiesel, Night , trans. Marion Wiesel, Hill and Wang, New York 2006, Preface to the new translation by Elie Wiesel, unpaginated. [Document text truncated for crawler view.]