Broken Hegemonies

Preface: Analytic of Ultimates and Topology of Broken Hegemonies

Preface: Analytic of Ultimates and Topology of Broken Hegemonies With desire we take hold of a law That can serve as the weapon for our passion.1 —Goethe Is the law, as these lines suggest, a weapon to brandish in the defense of our passions ? A passion turned into a weapon, perhaps? A singular passion—the passion for some singular—which desire would promote, exalt, institute as a universal rule? If this is the way it is, if the law first of all protects this or that particuar private passion , then public law will prove of rather modest extraction. As in all dazzling ascents, the humble conditions of the beginnings will continue to make themselves felt even in the effects of fame and renown. The singular point of departure from which the law arises, a singularization, will fracture from within the universal endowed with the force of obligation. Renown {Renom}—the word well describes the career of the law. A proper noun named anew, renamed {re-nommé} for the purpose of subsumption, carried to the level of the most common name, maximized: that is what the law will be.2 Speaking “in the name of” will always amount to speaking of the proper name or noun, and then of renown. The whole problem of normativity, of principles, of appellate recourse, of the ultimate authority, is lodged in this “and then.” It will be useful to reflect on the persistence of the singular, the object of passion, at the heart of the common referents that enjoy the renown of law. To reflect thus means to put into question the rallying names in which we trust as if their legislative prestige went without saying: names such as “progress,” “people,” “race,” “freedom.” . . . By submitting ourselves—you and I—to such common representations, we become capable of understanding each other—which is, by the way, why anomy is bound to remain a dream. The prestige of the common makes for actual knowing, and it prompts thinking. The persistence of the singular under the law, however, with the various senses of “passion” that follow from it, is something that we fathom {savior}. We actually know things in calling them by their name. Knowledge grows and gains strength in the light of the common. Without specific and generic names expressing laws, the world would remain impenetrable to us. Cognitive laws state the necessary relations linking phenomena. On the other hand, we think when we ask ourselves and others: In the name of what do I do what I do, say what I say, judge as I judge? Here, where meaning is at stake rather than kinds, we use a different name and a “common” that is different. Consequently we use a law that is different, one which 344 VOLUME TWO states not relations that are, but those we are convinced ought to be. Thought relations always remain more tenuous than cognitive relations; an understanding that rests on a common thought remains more precarious than one imposed by a known truth. In the absence of names that give it meaning, the world would become unlivable for us. Cognition and thinking are not everything. The laws that regulate the true and those that regulate meaning do not exhaust all the law that we call normative. Our understanding cannot but comply with the true that constrains it—it is a hard law. Reason, on the other hand, debates convictions—it is a more supple law in which freedom enters. This is to say that both in their turn depend on conditions. Consequently philosophy has as its mission to seek the unconditioned that renders possible the conditioned. Outside of this, it lapses into some “theory of,” into the theory of knowledge or theory of correct meaning, as well as some other such theories. None of these is philosophy. As for the unconditioned, we have a knowledge of it. Neither hard nor soft, this knowledge can be neither demonstrated nor even discussed. What, then, do we know of the law, prior to demonstrations establishing the true and discussions negotiating meaning? Not all a priori knowledge is ultimate (which is why, in Kantian terms, our theoretical as well as practical makeup is arranged according to an order that deductions trace; the only ultimate function being apperception). Could the ultimate that we know bear both on the common which desire promotes, exalts, declares, and institutes as law, and on the singular which pertains to a passion? Could this bear upon...