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CHAPTER 1 The Identity of the “I” Transcendental logic and consciousness in a differend with itself impose upon Luther a single necessity. What is the obvious fact that gives rise here both to a new logic and to a new sense of the tragic? Topography of speech* The logic of the formal I and the aporia of the differend that is its consequence are not only announced by Luther in a single breath; he puts them forth with autobiographical accents betraying an urgency which is at first neither theological nor psychological. The new logic is allied with a new sense of the tragic as early as his Commentary on the Letter to the Romans. In this text, the young Luther still follows medieval practice. For each verse commented upon, he offers a short analysis of words (glose, from glossa, ‘tongueʼ), then a doctrinal explication (scholies, from scholion, ‘annotationʼ). In such a setting, one does not expect confidences. Accordingly , the autobiographical “I” only rarely pierces through here. On the page which is the most remarkable in this regard, he expresses himself with crude formulas (in this period, these were not yet Lutherʼs stamp, as they would progressively become with the progression of the controversies). These are the lines where Luther repudiates the logic of things and solemnly affirms the tragedy of the simul. “Either it is me who has never understood anything, or the scholastic theologians have . . . dreamed.” Both of these seem to have been the case: “Foolish as I was, I remained incapable of seeing. . . .” “I struggled with myself without knowing that pardon is real, even though, for all that, it does not cleanse us of sin.” The context is that of pardon. Does it wipe away sin or not? The Scholastics believed that it did. Thus to them he says “O you senseless ones! O Theologian pigs! Here I say to you: Get a move on! Now, I pray you, stir your hands! Be men! Place there all of your strength that evil desires may no longer be in you!” (sch. 4,7 cor.). If these desires are allowed effectively to be uprooted, then pardon will render man as innocent as Adam before the Fall. If, on *Speech here translates parole. Occasionally it will be rendered as word, especially when it is understood in its theological context as well as when it is necessary to de-emphasize the abstractness of the noun “discourse” in favor of the concrete event of hearing. 372 PART THREE. THE MODERN HEGEMONIC FANTASM the contrary, they persist, even seeking occasion to be inflamed like matches (fomes, from fovere, ‘to heatʼ), then foolish will be the one who claims our will is capable of stripping them away. What will follow from this, then, is that we still remain corrupted by a “radical evil” (ibid.) that cannot be extirpated. These accents signal that it is essential to read attentively. What do the dreamers maintain? That all species of sin—original sin transmitted since Adam, as well as actual sins committed according to occasion—can be wiped away. How, then, do they understand these sins? “As if here it were a matter of certain things that could be whisked away in a split second.” It is a question of presence and absence, where the entire problem of injustice—which is to say of evil—will be about knowing whether justice “is found to be given or to fail to appear.” But, asks Luther, what is it that can be found either as given or as failing to appear? What is it that is sometimes present and sometimes absent? In what region of experiences does one encounter these phenomena susceptible of being the case here and now, but not there or later on? Luther says that it is in the region of those phenomena that are called res, things. Do we not qualify as “realist” those doctrines which call true that which concerns things and their ways of being? In Lutherʼs time the science of “saying the truth,” of vere loqui, is logic (coupled with the science of recte loqui, grammar, and that of ornate loqui, rhetoric). But what logic? That which examines the signifying modes (modi significandi) manifesting the modes of understanding (modi intelligendi ) which, in their turn, manifest the modes of being (modi essendi). What are these last modes? They are divided first into being present and, as Luther puts it, being “lifted off and swept away”—being absent. Such...

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