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Conclusion: Further Questions
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203 Conclusion Further Questions The research agenda for what we have been calling “continental philosophy ” can be summed up in one sentence. This kind of philosophy aims to construct a discourse that leads us to an experience that puts ourselves in question. In other words, it aims to invent concepts that lead us to an experience that transforms how we think of ourselves, that transforms who we are and what we do. The experience is the experience of powerlessness . Leading us to the transformative experience, we must first negate and destroy anything that might count as a simple, undifferentiated, pure, and static presence. That is, we must deconstruct anything that might count as an origin or an end, anything that might count as a foundation or ground, such as God, truth, the good, or nature. Anything that suggests the metaphysics of presence must be criticized and overcome. We must then affirm non-presence and groundlessness, which means that we must affirm immanence. Our starting point then is no different from that of Descartes in the first two meditations: “I am thinking, I am thinking about . . . , I am thinking about my own ideas.” The starting point therefore is auto-affection. Auto-affection is not a deliberate act of reflection through which an object called the self is given in a representation. Below reflection and as its origin is the basic experience of my own thoughts. Since Plato’s Theaetetus, thinking has been defined by means of an interior monologue (189e–190a): hearing oneself speak. The auto-affection called “hearing oneself speak” seems to include two aspects. On the one hand, I seem to hear myself speak at the very moment that I speak and without 204 · Early Twentieth-Century Continental Philosophy delay, and on the other I seem to hear my own self speak and not someone or something other. Let us now examine the particular experience of hearing oneself speak. When I engage in interior monologue, when, in short, I think—it seems as though I hear myself speak at the very moment I speak. It seems as though my interior voice is not required to pass outside of myself, as though it is not required to traverse any space, not even the space of my body. So my interior monologue seems to be immediate, immediately present, and not to involve anyone else. Interior monologue seems therefore to be different from the experience of my speaking to another and different from the experience of my looking at myself in the mirror, where my vision has to pass through, at the least, the portals of my eyes. It is important to hear the “seems” in the preceding sentences. We are now going to deconstruct the appearances in order to expose the essential structure or process below what is apparent or believed. So the problem with the belief that interior monologue (in a word, thought) is different from other experiences of auto-affection is twofold. On the one hand, the experience of hearing oneself speak is temporal (like all experience). The “timing” of interior monologue means that the present moment involves a past moment, which has elapsed and which has been retained. It is an irreducible or essential necessity that the present moment comes after, a little later; it is always involved in a process of mediation. The problem therefore with the belief that interior monologue happens immediately (as if there were no mediation involved) is that the hearing of myself is never immediately present in the moment when I speak. The hearing of myself in the present comes a moment later; there is a delay between the hearing and the speaking. This conclusion means that my interior monologue in fact resembles my experience of the mirror image in which my vision must traverse a distance that differentiates me into seer and seen. I cannot; it is impossible for me to hear myself immediately. But there is a further implication. The distance or delay in time turns my speaking in the present moment into something coming second. Temporalization implies that the present is not an origin all alone; it is compounded with a past so that my speaking in the present moment is no longer sui generis. Therefore it must be seen as a kind of response to the past. The fact that my speaking is a response to the past leads to the other problem with the belief that interior monologue is my own. Besides the [3.15.221.67] Project...