Broken Hegemonies

CHAPTER 9: On the Erratic Differend

C HAP T E R 9 On the Erratic Differend The transgressive strategies that topple a hegemony result from singularizations and from a temporalization which renders them capable of being narrated; such is the work of indetermination—and therefore of death—which inevitably ruins the determinant work of life erecting normative constructions. In order to grasp how the time of the singular breaks the natura, let us first recall the expectation inherent in the ultimate referents. The fantasmic maximization departs from a singular, relational given—my nature, my voluntary choices, thus the confessed “I”—and inflates its intrinsic relations to subsumptive dimensions without remainder. The point of departure of this operation is only shown or described; it escapes the rational grasp. As theticism has always maintained, the singular is ineffable. As for the end point, it also escapes reason. If it could be deduced without error, a simply constraining authority would remain ineffable due to its very simplicity, its unicity, its supremacy {archie}, its primacy. An ultimate principle serves as a referent for all reasoning, but only an intuition brings it to a halt. One might as well say that it is posited, a positing whose well-foundedness is negotiated (in the sense of the Aristotelian dialectic) in the see-saw of preponderances in representation. The topology of fantasms informs us directly of the thetic standards which gave order and life to an epoch by providing it with the law; and indirectly, it also informs us of the singular from which their maximization started out. There is no genus for the traits of natality and mortality, which are ultimates. Hence there is a fracture in thetic edifices, whatever their intuitive underpinnings might be. To the positive and sovereign triumph is joined a different triumph: The temporalizing undertow of the singular that erodes all sovereignty from within. Philosophy has never ceased to bear in mind this work of death, even if it does so by a fidelity that is rather oblique to the ultimates as the originary phenomena. Now, time has never more clearly destabilized theticism than in the discourse of the early Latin world which posits a particular city as natural. For Cicero, it is Rome; for Augustine, heavenly Jerusalem. In their politics and ethics alike, it is not exactly a particular being that persists in the maximizing work and that resists subsumption . Rather, it is “offices” in Cicero and divine “wisdom” in Augustine that are the relational terms raised up to the superlative. They are “terms” because they stop the proliferation of references; they are relational because they sometimes connect Its Institutions (Cicero and Augustine) 223 certain roles and other times certain rewards; they are “raised” to the superlative, finally, because compared to them nothing higher can be conceived on the normative scale. The same is true with respect to the political. In the singular republic that was Rome, the system of telic relations is natural, a system of continuity or equivalence that we call its constitution. The promised Jerusalem is natural as well, and is just as singular in its telic homology that we call charity. In its institutional beginnings the political discourse that speaks in the name of nature maximizes the laws of a city, one that was and another that will be. For Aristotle, the guiding phenomenal region that incited archic investigation was that of the change brought about by man and studied by physics. The region from which the early Latins extracted their hegemonic fantasm is altogether different. It is the political. It entails a different temporalization of being that is no longer that of the observable kinetic processes, but is that of narratable mnemonic processes. Discourse must keep alive the memory of the ancestral city as well as that of the Jerusalem to come. Both will serve as antidotes for the pains of the present inasmuch as memoria draws up its faithful chronicle. Cicero puts it simply—“through discourse we retain the republic of which for some time we have not been able to retain the public thing.”43 Caesar having abolished the maiorum instituta, the temporalizing act is to have piety for the city that was. In the theticism of republican Rome, time is constituted by the memory of the past. In Augustine, it is constituted by the memory of the city that will be. It is now necessary to inquire here into that temporality from which singularization arises. On a normative singular that was In the most patriotic epic...