The Gathering of Reason: Second Edition

Preface to the Second Edition

Preface to the Second Edition With only the slightest fancy one could envisage this book as a tissue of translations. Most comprehensively it translates Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, not only exposing it to the drift of another language but also reinscribing it in this language in such fashion as to remark the breaks, connections, and openings of the critical discourse. The reinscripted text is, in turn, carried over to other hermeneutical levels, the translation being governed at each level by a different directionality, by a different turning. Thus The Gathering of Reason not only doubles the critical discourse but also ventures to project it, to invert it, and to subvert it. The network of translations is composed with the aim of laying out a way to imagination, to what at the time of composition I called the issue of imagination, thereby designating, at once, the emergence, lineage , and manifestation of imagination. This way necessarily leads through the critique of reason, yet not simply in order to arrive at Kant’s theory of imagination, as though this theory could be set apart and developed independently of critique as a whole. Neither does this way through critique lead finally—as Kant had hoped—out of critique into a beyond where it would become possible to institute, in place of crisis, a system of pure reason, the true metaphysics. It is rather a way that swings indecisively between two sites, on the one side, a site where reason seems—to its detriment—to be abandoned by imagination and, on the other side, a site where the very potency of reason in its failure appears to derive from imagination’s complicity in the production of dialectical illusion. It is as if, in the gathering of reason, imagination xiii were to efface its operation while remaining nonetheless the very force most responsible for the dialectic in which pure reason is ensnared. Kant insists that this dialectic is natural and unavoidable, even though—paradoxically—it would seem most remote from nature, even though it would seem to trace precisely those lines along which metaphysics would always have sought to transcend nature and everything merely natural. Kant himself tacitly broaches the paradox by declaring dialectical illusion to be just as irrepressible (even after its detection by critique) as is the illusion that the moon is larger at its rising (even after its astronomical explanation). In its title The Gathering of Reason announces another translation in which it is, as a whole, engaged, a translation belonging to another order. It is a double translation: of reason into ó and of ó into gathering—in both cases a translation both of sense and of word. In strict terms it would need to be called a double countertranslation, since it runs backward, reversing or undoing translations effected in the history of metaphysics and before that history. This countertranslation would confront reason with its largely forgotten origin; it would draw both the crisis of reason and the resultant task of critique back toward the Greek beginnings. Thus it would let that origin both inform the sense of reason and open it to deconstruction. From the translation of reason a web of further translations extends. Among the most decisive is the translation of the two stems that Kant identifies as arising from the common root of the power of knowledge . These two stems, the rational and the empirical, are directly translatable—or rather, countertranslatable—into the terms by which the Platonic Socrates delimited the inauguration of philosophy. This delimitation is carried out in the Phaedo in the guise of a second sailing (  o o): it consists in having recourse to óo , as, in the absence of wind, sailors have recourse to the oars. It is a turn from things in their sensible presence that seeks their truth by engagement with óo. As such, it comes to be translated ever again in the course of the history of metaphysics, translated, most notably, into the metaphysically definitive turn from the empirical to the rational. The inaugural move thus becomes and remains one of having recourse to reason. Confronted with the fragmentation of experience and of experiencebased knowledge, unable to see beyond the plethora of things, blinded by their presence, metaphysics has recourse to reason as its means of xiv THE GATHERING OF REASON conveyance beyond. Or rather, metaphysics is precisely this having recourse to reason’s power to convey one’s vision...