Broken Hegemonies

Introduction

Introduction When we now read some of Plotinusʼs texts our study will involve addressing precise questions to these texts which stem from the reading of Parmenides: Above all, how does the initiatory impulse of natality suffer the counter-blow {contre-temps} of mortality (chapter 7), and more generally, how does time {temps} effect the stable referent which is the one (chapter 6). Thus for the moment Plotinus will thus speak on behalf of the closure of the Greek epoch,1 that is, for the destitution of the hen-fantasm. This may seem surprising , for indeed who instituted the metaphysics of the One, if not Plotinus? And yet . . . First of all, there is here an instituting which for all that does not depart from the sphere of the Greek language. In the third century of our era, the Greek language surely was no longer that of Parmenides. Nevertheless, the latterʼs vocabulary can be found almost intact in Plotinus, broadened by numerous tributaries of which some, particularly the Alexandrian ones, remain mysterious to us. Subsequently the architecture bequeathed by Plotinus was quickly furnished and inhabited by squatters: the Christian theologians. This appropriation by a foreign dogma will institute its own “efficient history”; but before the guardian of the Acropolis could make Proclus say “Had you not come, verily I would have closed”2 —before Proclus, then, was officially designated as the last Greek philosopher—Plotinus began anew. Neoplatonism means, with him at least, new Platonism. In Plotinus we have a creative recommencement that more truly marks an ending than does the learned recapitulation of a Proclus. So it will not be so much a matter of submitting some texts to the law of the One, but rather of subjecting the law to some texts. This court appearance will pair up two gestures. On the one hand, the One that holds together—the principle of order—will be exposed to some Plotinian statements (on union, first; on voluntary impetuses, thelémata , next) in order to see how it “defends itself.” We may say straight out that the defense , that is, the legitimization, which Plotinus provides of this fantasm will exhaust henology as a metaphysics of order. Posited as trans-noetic, the One indeed fulfills its organizational function outside all rational control. This follows from the very archi- 140 PART ONE: THE GREEK HEGEMONIC FANTASM tectonic of the universe in which the movement of ascent passes from the hypostatic Soul (of which the visible world is the border) to the hypostatic Intelligence, and from there, by a backwards step which is incomparable to the first, it passes to the One. The “second departure” of the kouros in Parmenides, beyond the gates of night and day, is translated here into a second transcendence: into a surpassing of the Intelligence. Hence, by exposing the legislating One to these texts we will have to grasp how, in the new arrangement, the One makes and undoes the law; we will have to learn to think it other than as being in the service of order. On the other hand, in summoning the law to appear in front of texts I will expressly have recourse to Heidegger, especially in the beginning. The debt is greater here than in any other of the readings in which I will try to arouse the poignancy of the “legislating tragic.” Summoning the law before the letter of the Enneads would indeed not have been thinkable without anticipating—if only as a simple reading tool, displaced over seventeen centuries to foreign surroundings—the occurrent singularization in which one will recognize, at the end of the journey with Heidegger, the contretemps of mortality which has always broken hegemonies. As was seen in Parmenides, nothing so purely attests to natality as the impetus which brings one to think the One. To follow this impetus to the end, we must ask the Plotinian One: How do you make the law? Uniformly, it will be said. We shall see. Only one question haunts Plotinus: “How did the One not remain in itself?” (En. V, 1, [10] 6, 6)3 . The question concerns pure and compact simplicity, not the multiple other stemming from it.4 The enigma of enigmas can be seen precisely in that the One was not able to be content with its self-possession (he uses the mythical preterite tense which indicates, as is often the case in Plotinus, a priority of order). Let us step back so as to situate...