The Gathering of Reason: Second Edition

CHAPTER VII. METAPHYSICAL SECURITY AND THE PLAY OF IMAGINATION

1. THE PLAY OF ABSENCE The beginning of metaphysics cannot remain simply intact. On the contrary, the archaic reflection, still only partial, has already adumbrated the issue of crisis, the crisis of metaphysics, of its beginning. For that beginning is marked by that “point at which the common root of our power of knowledge divides and throws out two stems, one of which is reason”: Metaphysics begins in a retracing of this division, a retracing in which, turning away from the immediately present, one comes to have recourse to reason. And the schema defined by this beginning, the structure constitutive of metaphysics, cannot simply accommodate that encroachment upon reason that I have sought to release by bringing into play the manifoldness, the insecurity, the openness , of the new beginning traced in Kant’s texts. Two severe shocks have been absorbed by this structure, at considerable cost to its security. The first was brought by the projective interpretation : Here the strategy aimed at recovering what remained only subliminally in that concept of reason by which the traditional structure is largely determined, at interpreting reason as gathering (into presence), so as, in effect, to open up within the Kantian text itself the difference between the traditional structure and its Greek origin, so as to unsettle the traditional structure by confronting it with its forgotten origin, to unsettle it by the return to its beginning. To the concept of reason, thus unsettled, the inversive interpretation (or rather that phase of it that remains within the limits of the first Critique) brings a CHAPTER VII Metaphysical Security and the Play of Imagination 157 still more violent shock by installing imagination at the very origin of reason and its gathering. The autonomy of theoretical reason is thus undermined, its autonomy even as dialectical, as agency of illusion; and in place of autonomous reason thinking the absolute in utter aloofness from articulated, intuitive presence, there is inscribed the dyad, reason /imagination, imaging in the mirror of perversion, of madness, the dyad by which the fulfillment of the gathering of understanding was secured. Both the traditional structure and the Kantian retracing of it, both metaphysics and critique, are thrown out of joint by the encroachment of imagination upon reason. For imagination is intrinsically connected with absence, with a play of presence and absence, a play for which a principal condition is the irreducibility of the difference between presence and absence. Imagination makes present something which is in another regard absent and which remains in that other regard absent with a necessity of the same order as that of the passing of time. This absence is not such that, turning away, one would eventually annul and surpass it by having recourse to a more primordial presence, but rather it is such as to be sustained in all making-present, sustained as a condition of the possibility of making-present. Even that paradigmatic gathering into presence that is retraced in the Transcendental Analytic is inscribed ineffaceably in the arc of such absence: Kant’s text, almost contradictorily, turns in this arc through a series of positions. At one extreme is the gesture with which the Transcendental Aesthetic opens: Though one can experience objects only if affected by them, though even then thought also is required to supplement the intuition, nevertheless when these conditions are met, one does actually have experience of the objects; they are actually present to one’s knowing, even if only partially, from a limited perspective, merely as they appear. Without entirely suppressing this gesture, the Transcendental Analytic adds another: Since knowledge is built up entirely from mere sensations within the subject that informs them, there remains no identity, no continuity whatsoever, between the object by which, precritically speaking, one would be affected and the object actually experienced by being reconstructed from the sheer fragments. This gesture invokes the irreducible absence of the object; and it is of utmost significance that the arc joining these gestures, the circling between them, proves to be insuppressible, short of destroying the entire Kantian project.1 Jacobi’s 158 THE GATHERING OF REASON well-known declaration retraces this circle: Without the thing-in-itself one cannot enter the Critique of Pure Reason, but with the thing-initself one cannot remain within it.2 Even Fichte’s strategy, extending the arc by incorporating even affection into the constructive power of the subject—even this strategy, rather than erasing the...