Broken Hegemonies

NOTES

NOTES Volume One GENERAL INTRODUCTION 1. As far as I know, the expression “double bind” was coined in 1956 by Gregory Bateson. I retain the three formal traits he gives to this concept in Steps to an Ecology of Mind, London, 1972, pp. 206. First there is a primary injunction that decrees the law; then there is a secondary injunction decreeing a law in conflict with the first; and finally, there is a third injunction “prohibiting the victim from escaping from the field” constituted by the first two injunctions. Obviously I do not make use of these traits as they are applied in social psychology. 2. Friedrich Hölderlin, “In leiblicher Bläue,” Sämtliche Werke, ed. F. Beissner, v. 2, Stuttgart, 1951, p. 373. The translations of foreign language texts in these notes are mine (with some exceptions) even when I refer to a published French version. I will not indicate the particular modifications Iʼve made to existing translations. 3. Aeschylus, Agamemnon, v. 177 (cf. v. 250f). 4. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, II, section 57. 5. G. W. F. Hegel, Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, Preface; Werke, ed. Glockner, 3rd ed., Stuttgart, 1952, vol. VII, p. 35. 6. There can be no tragic sense without a sharp sense of our temporality, and therefore of our historicity . This was as true in the Attic age as it is for our age. Here is one indication among many. There are debates in the “philosophy of mind” concerning obligations toward the collective that are in conflict with those toward the individual self. They raise the question inspired by Descartes: How is it possible to render our beliefs objective? To reformulate the question in terms of perspectives (subjective and objective ) on ourselves: How is one to make the perspective of the particular person ensconced in the world agree with objective vision of the same world, such that this vision encompasses both the person and his perspective? The current state of the sciences requires a “fresh” analysis of the tensions between these two perspectives, an analysis that one conducts at great expense through “thought experiments” (thought experiments of this sort: What would remain of me if a part of someone elseʼs brain were implanted in me?). One discovers that it would be a good idea to temper both the subjective and objective; that a “convergence” of the personal and impersonal points of view is necessary (cf. Thomas Nagel, The View from Nowhere, Oxford, 1986, as well as Equality and Partiality, Oxford, 1991). This is argumentative freshness that has no sense of how stale it is. First of all, the smallest historical airing would show that the dilemma between the subjective and objective has its own date of birth and its own presuppositions, that this dualism is hardly the alpha and omega of philosophy pure and simple, and that the blackboard on which philosophy is inscribed is never erased (in these authors it would be easy to show this blackboard hugely engraved by a scientistic ideology)—in short, that the history of philosophy still remains the best guardrail against prejudices passing for common sense. Then and above all, one can only be disappointed to read with perfect clarity statements using the very same terms that constitute the tragic conflict when one then sees these authors unimaginatively conclude that we need a mixed point of view (Nagel, Equality and Partiality, p. 75), a little bit of loyalty to the universal, a little bit to the singular. More imaginative, because it does not obliterate the “obstinate relation to death” (with the temporalization and historialization that follows from it), is the linking of the singular to the universal such as it is expressed in the views of Michel Foucault, with whom I will conclude below. 7. Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, X, 7; 1177 b 33 (one could call this a critical resumption of Plato, Theaetetus, 176 b; Republic VI, 500 c.). The metaphysician in us has nothing to fear from his critics. Allying themselves with desire, he promises apantkein, to render “mortality” null and void. 8. Samuel Beckett, Worstward Ho, New York, 1983, p. 8. 9. “To be a principle is to be the cause of multiple effects without itself having any antecedents,” Aristotle, Metaphysics V, 26; 1024 a 1–3. 10. See the example of an infinite regression taken from Indian cosmology to which John Locke opposes philosophy: The Earth rests upon an elephant, which hangs on a tortoise. . . . (An...