Broken Hegemonies

Introduction: Proteus Alone Can Save Us Now

Introduction: Proteus Alone Can Save Us Now “Only a God can save us now”1 —Heidegger For a century and a half—since the deaths of Hegel and Goethe—hegemonic fantasms have suffered a polymorphous suspension. Hölderlin declared that he had received from the gods a knowledge heavier than he could digest, a knowledge which had to do with a certain condition of being becoming obvious in this late modernity; then Russians appeared, calling themselves nihilists and anarchists; lastly, Nietzsche announced that the true world had become a fable. . . . The half-century which elapsed between Hegelʼs death in 1831 and August 5, 1881, when the thought came to Nietzsche that the world is made up of incessant constellations of forces—these five decades are doubtless the most difficult ones to understand in our entire history. One might say that gazes then dared to wrest themselves away from authorities that were posited as consoling and consolidating, and that once again they allowed themselves to bear witness to the truly primary condition, the tragic condition that, since Euripides, the functionaries of humanity had busied themselves with banalizing by subsuming it under a genus (“mors et alia huiusmodi,” ‘death and other things of that kind {genre},ʼ Thomas Aquinas will say in a sovereign manner2 ). The fracture that death inflicts on any ultimate thesis or position is declared in discourses unheard of until the middle of the nineteenth century. Hölderlin and Nietzsche felt as if they were stricken by the oldest of obvious facts—that of the mortal labor that exerts the disparate on life. The tragic is defined, as was seen, by that labor. How could the truth of this suspension, which has become our manifest destiny, be gathered up? Here, even more than was the case with the destitution of the hen and natura, it is important to read carefully. That the Greek “one” and the Latin “nature” lost their power to impose a regime troubles hardly anyone but those persons nostalgic for an immutable order (a nostalgia which illustrates how slow fantasms are in dying off). But whoever takes the hegemony of self-consciousness to task should beware. The utopianists of an ideal discursive community are watching, avatars of the philosophical bureaucracy assigned to transcendental and reflexive service. One must take note immediately of a certain pars pro toto in contemporary discussions concerning ultimate normative groundings. The new functionaries of humanity issuing from Kantian criticism speak of intersubjectivity, transcendental reflection, and communicative rationality—always of a self-consciousness, if a socialized one— but that is evidently not the only referent stemming from the Reformation and the 514 PART THREE. THE MODERN HEGEMONIC FANTASM Enlightenment which is at stake when they add: “If that is no longer, all is lost.” Normative regimes in general would sink away with the primacy of the reflective subject. For want of social integration through consensus, everything is sinking away, they cry out in Frankfurt. Everything, that is to say, every form of a koinon which would generate obligations. Indeed, everything has sunk away, answered the genealogist of conscience in Paris not long ago: “The search for a form of morals which would be acceptable to everyone, in the sense that everyone should submit to it, appears catastrophic to me.”3 On both sides of the line of demarcation that appeared in the nineteenth century—a line which was to separate for some time a constructive and a deconstructive thinking—they are in agreement. The fate of hegemonies tout court is what is at stake in the hegemony of self-consciousness. An attentive reading becomes necessary, for a thinking of the tragic differend might prove to be more faithful to the critical and emancipatory turn which established modernity than the theses of dialectical reconciliation and pragmatic consensus. If indeed it did turn out that with the eclipse of referential self-consciousness, we experience the kenosis, the emptying out of any ultimate authority—if, pars pro toto, the “end of the subject” means the “end of hegemonies”—then it is not, properly speaking, a destitution that has been going on for a century and a half. To destitute an authority is always to oppose a No to a prior Yes, it is always a counter-thesis, an anti-authoritarian reaction. The counter and anti gestures necessarily operate right in the middle of that which they commit themselves to denying. No one is more solidly fixated on the figure of...