There is one central question for Monique David-Ménard. In a first approach, we could call it purely speculative, since it is a kind of variant of the ancient question: ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’ However, this question rather cuts transversally across the double qualification of the author: both philosopher and psychoanalyst. For what is at stake is a problem of encounter: how do we encounter the heterogeneous existent? The fact is that there must be, for thought, a radical exteriority, and that thought must open up a mode of access to it. How? According to which protocols? And by taking which risks? Monique David-Ménard is passionate about deciphering this enigma, in the double register of what it discovers in terms of sense in the philosophical tradition and of the symptom in psychoanalysis. Or perhaps it is in terms of the symptom in philosophy, and of sense in the analytical construction of the Subject.
Monique David-Ménard’s first axiom at bottom treats of the mystery of the ‘there is’. It states – in a lexicon that is already Kantian, by its adoption of the category of the object: ‘If the object is truly constituted as other than the subject, this heterogeneity implies that truth is the encounter of the heterogeneous for thinking’ (p. 161).
There must be an encounter with the existent as such. And it is at this point of the subject’s capacity for the encounter that the scene of truth plays itself out, truth about which the author will say that it is ‘the cross of philosophy’ (p. 161).
The very beautiful book La Folie dans la raison pure (Madness in Pure Reason) takes on the task of telling us – in a highly conceptual story that is also as suspenseful as a detective novel – how the philosopher Kant bore his cross.
The point of departure is, I think, doubly marked. There is first of all an observation typically guided by analytical flair, which in and of itself, by its illuminating force, is a veritable find: before patiently bearing his cross of truth in an infinite and cautious labour, Kant bore the cross of madness. David-Ménard will say, in lapidary style: ‘thinker tempted by occultism’. Enlightened man put to the test by the temptation of delirious obscurantism. This temptation functions as symptom, to the point that the whole theoretical oeuvre constitutes its heavy therapeutics. This point justifies the subtitle, Kant lecteur de Swedenborg (Kant as Reader of Swedenborg). But it is clearly much more than as ‘reader’ that Kant relates to Swedenborg. What is terrible in this first encounter is that it indicates the possibility that the other and crucial encounter, that of the heterogeneous existent, may never take place. For in the speculative delirium of madness, which Swedenborg shows us can become the law of a subject, thinking never joins up with its Other. It moves within the homogeneous. The ‘there is’ is subtracted. It is a matter, says the author, ‘of a pure universe of discourse in which thought never encounters anything but itself, in which it never manages to seize anything different from itself’ (p. 176).
How to be sure that we are indeed in the encounter with a real existent? How not to confuse homogeneous immanence and its delirious productions with a legitimate knowledge of what is? Monique David-Ménard will show that the Kantian category of the object, with its extraordinary system of guarantees, comes in as an obstacle, or a break, with regard to the risk that there would be nothing else for thought than thought itself. Kantian objectivity is the philosophical therapeutics of a terrible exposure to Swedenborg’s speculative delirium. This exposure, at bottom, would tend to identify thought and desire within the subjective immanence. It would be the moment, both sickly and tempting, when thought is as if eaten away and dissolved by the mechanism of blind belief, or deregulated discourse. Starting form there, one imagines the particularly ambiguous resonance of Kant’s famous declaration according to which, with regard to the supreme interests of reason, he had to substitute belief for knowledge! The fact is that, in order to extricate himself from the encounter with madness, he had first had to separate – and with what rigour! – knowledge from belief.
But the properly philosophical stroke of genius – a magnificent lesson in reading – consists in following the trace, or the trajectory, of the delirious temptation (of which Kant takes on the conceptual auto-analysis) within the architectonics of the Critique.
The first effect is that of a reversal. David-Ménard shows, I dare say demonstrates, that it is on the basis of the transcendental dialectic and the antinomies of reason that the aesthetic and the analytic take on meaning, even though the latter come first in the order of exposition. In effect, it is only from the point of view of reason at risk of falling prey to a discourse without escape, without ‘exit’, that the Kantian constitution of the object becomes clear.
Kant’s Critique in fact goes from negation to existence. This is both and at the same time its therapeutic movement, with regard to the temptation of madness (which links the subject to the Nothing), and its movement of sublimation, which under the severe law of the heterogeneous object detaches thought from the constraints of desire.
One will observe the profound logic of this renunciation of the temptation of the homogeneous, of totally free thought, which deals with nothing except itself: it is indeed a matter of renouncing, in favour of alterity and the heterogeneous, the autonomous and desiring delights of the nothing of being. The renunciation, and this idea is admirable, is not that there is nothing, it is that there is something. At bottom, the human being desires for there to be nothing – nihilism is a structure of desire, of which the speculative madness is the symptom. The cure, the severe discipline, consists in holding that there is some existent.
The fundamental intuition will thus touch upon the relation between the something and the nothing, between the object and the void, between being and nothingness.
This is why the two strongest chapters in my eyes are the first, ‘Negation and Object in the Critique of Pure Reason’, and the fourth, ‘The Position of Existence in Kant’.
I will retain two points from the first of these chapters. Monique David-Ménard shows very well that the Kantian dialectic seeks to flush out the presuppositions of existence within discourse that are masked by the apparent necessity of the concept. The general scheme – which amounts in sum to bar the path to the judgement of existence when one does not dispose of a universal property of the entity in question – inverts the desiring tendency of delirious madness. Since for the latter ‘existence’ is not itself anything but an attribute of thought and does not entail any encounter with the heterogeneous, it endlessly concludes by inferring ‘existence’ on the basis of universal predications: from the fact that I sense myself in all things, universally, the object of an all-powerfulness, I draw the conclusion of the existence of a persecutor. Kant, as Monique David-Ménard summarizes, will say on the contrary: ‘“God is all-powerful”: this is necessary, if God is. But it is not contradictory for Him not to be. And if He is not, He is not all-powerful’ (pp. 51–2).
It is in my eyes crucial to be clear about what is at stake in purely logical terms – that is, the relation of a universal proposition and an existential one. From the affirmation that ‘every x has the property P’ (for example, every God has the property of being all-powerful), the delirious thinker concludes in general that there exists in effect a being endowed with this property. For him, there is no desiring interest in universalizing except if an existent case of the universal concerns him personally. Formally, the thing can be written as follows (inference of an existential from a universal proposition):
(∀x) P(x) → (∃x) P(x)
Kant forbids this inference which, because it does not undergo the test of any exteriority, makes existence into an immanent predicate of thought, and does not allow us to break with madness.
What is actually most curious is that pure logic vindicates the mad person rather than Kant. Indeed, the statement:
(∀x) P(x) → (∃x) P(x)
is a theorem in most presentations of first-order predicate calculus.
But this bizarre fact will prove enlightening. Indeed, in this whole affair the point is not pure logic, but ontology. What is a non-delirious ontology? Such is the true question of the philosopher. If the logician admits that from the universal proposition an existential one can be drawn, it is because he excludes all interpretations of his calculus in an empty universe. In an empty universe, indeed, the statement in question could not be valid: you may well suppose that ‘every’ object has the property P; if there exists no object, none will have the property either. Consequently, if the universe is the empty set Ø, the statement is false. This means that first-order predicate logic is not a logic of the void. The logician implicitly decides in favour of heterogeneous existence, in that the theorems of pure logic that are his are valid only in non-empty universes (in which there exists at least one object).
Let us say then that what the antinomies of reason unveil for us is that, in spite of the desiring impulses tempted by empty universes, one could not have consistency in thought except by accepting the axiom: ‘there is something, and not nothing’, and by drawing from it all the consequences, which in fact are already at work in the aesthetic and the analytic, even though their subjective motif becomes clear only in the dialectic.
In her truly remarkable analysis of the categories of the nothing (pp. 60ff.), David-Ménard shows how, once it is freed from mere subjective vacuity, the nothing gives itself in the correlation between understanding (or concept) and sensibility (or intuition). At issue here is what I would like to call the disciplined nothing, such that the position of the object organizes its exercise, precisely in that such ‘nothings’ allow one to stake out the absence of any object.
There would be a nothing that is essentially logical, or corresponding to the understanding, which presents itself as concept without intuition; and an ‘ontological’ nothing, corresponding to sensibility, which presents itself as an intuition without a concept. In both cases, the experience is ‘annihilating’ in that it delivers no object. On the contrary, the heterogeneity of existence is signalled, in the form of the object, as full correlation of the concept and the intuition.
Existence takes off from the nothing by aligning experience upon the object, in the double avoidance of the logical nothing and the ontological nothing. Objectivity establishes itself at the very point where the un-chaining, and thus the un-leashing, of the faculties (understanding and sensibility) would deliver thought over to the delirious phantom of its self-sufficiency.
Thus, to be able to think the nothing (as disarticulation of the cognitive faculties) is a necessary mediation in the therapeutics of madness, whose mainspring is the constraining of the object.
But the price paid is then that the object is a category of the phenomenal. The noumenon, the transcendental ‘object = x’, will be posited beyond. As such, they will be subtracted from presentation. In this regard Kant organizes a logic of the empty place (the place of the unpresented) as the correlate without intuition of a subject that is itself empty. This double emptying out is required so that experience may be definitively pegged to heterogeneous existence.
The object is that which sustains thought between two voids. I would call this figure of the guaranteeing of existence: the encircling of the Other. David-Ménard clearly shows that it is a question of displacement:
The theory of the negativity of the noumenon is mediately linked to the denegation of the rapport to Swedenborg, by virtue of the displacement by which the void of the hallucinated world becomes the void of the intelligible world. For a psychoanalytical reading, what we are dealing with here is indeed a displacement (Entstellung). (p. 148)
But by now we are already in the chapter on existence. The crucial question is the following: why is existence (Dasein) in Kant always the existence of objects, and never that of the subject?
The (subtle) response is that ‘existence’ does not designate presence to representation. If the object is the category of existence, it is because ‘object’ names precisely that which is heterogeneous to the subject. The result is that what exists must necessarily ex-sist to the subject.
From this point of view, David-Ménard organizes a very fine critique of Heidegger’s reading of the twists and turns in the Kantian analytic. In substance, it appears that thanks to the emphasis placed on the transcendental imagination, Heidegger attempts an integrally subjective re-appropriation of Dasein and misses the radical dimension of Kant’s claim with regard to existence. Contrary to what Heidegger thinks, Kant was right to ‘draw back’ before the abyss opened up by the subtleties of the imagination. For this abyss, in which the painstakingly conquered and cherished security of heterogeneous existence risked being lost, opened up once again the ‘Swedenborgian’ peril.
We must hold that existence is strictly ob-jective, that it objects to the solipsistic delirium. Whence, moreover, the paradigmatic value of the sciences as being strictly inhuman and in no way flattering to the subject’s presumption.
The object establishes reality as the ‘deconstruction of idealism as system of belief ’. This is the whole point of the famous passage in the Critique on the refutation of idealism. David-Ménard will call this whole protocol of thinking ‘the position of existence between conclusion and belief’ (p. 168).
It is from this ‘in-between’ that psychoanalysis can be grasped. David-Ménard can thus conclude with a kind of baton passing from Kant to Freud: ‘It is psychoanalysis that can assume the movement sketched out by Kant: that of inscribing the metaphysical question of reality into a problematic of belief’ (p. 234).
My questions, or punctuations, will be limited to three.
1. Aside from the empty concept without object and the empty object without concept, should we not suppose the empty or void object with concept, that is, the concept of the void itself? And is it not for lack of such a – let us say fully ontological – concept of the nothing that Kant finds himself constrained to contain the heterogeneous existent within the strict figure of the object? In effect, it may be that the nothing, rigorously (mathematically) subsumed under a concept, is precisely that which sustains the heterogeneous existent. This would mean that, given that the void is certainly not an object (even if perhaps it is a letter), we are not constrained, in order to avoid madness, to the phenomenal confinement of objectivity (since the void is not a phenomenon either).
One could then suppose that it is not so much under the effect of the temptation of madness that Kant grounds his doctrine of objectivity, as much as it is because his logic, too marked in this regard by the discovery of English empiricism, remains resolutely intuitionist. By ‘intuitionist’ let us understand the fact of requiring for all existence a constructive donation, that is, precisely, a mixture of intuition and concept. That all heterogeneous existence must be intuited and constructed is an empiricist dogma, rather than a necessary precaution against dogmatic fits. Besides, and to our very own day, this dogma turns out to be compatible, and first of all in Kant, with the ‘reasonable’ admission of all kinds of moral and religious chimeras. Which is something that the path carved out by Epicurus and Lucretius, for whom the void is the first name of the heterogeneous existent, splendidly indifferent to subjects as much as to gods, seems to exclude much more radically.
Let us say that the Kantian doctrine of the object is captive to a logic that, by the foreclosure of the void in its ontological sense, misses precisely the point of the heterogeneous and prepares the rehabilitation of the imperatives of religious morality.
2. Aside from the void, it is clear that Kant forecloses the infinite from all cognitive experience (which, here again, allows him to reserve it for religious postulates). The figure of the object as emblem of the heterogeneous is first and foremost a clause of finitude.
David-Ménard points at this in her rigorous analysis of the relation between ‘object’ and ‘world’:
The object of knowledge is the solution of the problem posed by the idea of world, provided that it allows us slightly to modify the terms of the problem by constraining thought so as not to demand an infinite synthesis for the object (Objekt) that it thinks; the latter, by this restriction (Beschrankung), can become an object (Gegenstand). The object is that which, by slightly transforming the conditions of the synthesis in which the problem of the world consists, renders possible the – displaced – solution of the problem. (p. 48)
This ‘restriction’ is in reality quite drastic. What it obliterates is that it is not at all required that the infinite be given by way of synthesis. As Cantor has established, and as differential and integral calculus already required before him, the infinite can be given as literal materiality which founds a universe that is non-closed but consistent. This donation opens onto a multiple heterogeneity that no longer lets itself be folded back into the figure of the object, nor disposes a world. What Kant in the empiricist discipline of the object cannot see is that the infinite is precisely this field of the thinkable that is neither object nor world.
At bottom, the Kantian ‘restriction’ is once again comparable to the security restrictions with which intuitionism overburdens mathematics and for which, after the void, the infinite must pay the price.
3. David-Ménard has a nice formula to recapitulate the ‘case’ of Kant: ‘A the junction of a post-Newtonian epistemology and a melancholic character’ (p. 217).
The whole problem is summed up in what we can distribute along the two slopes of this ‘junction’:
•Post-Newtonian? Except that Kant does not really enter into the infinitesimal resources of the underlying mathematics. His logic remains experimental and numerical (7 + 5 = 12), his (induced) conception of time and space is not really armed with the science of his time. On these questions (everything that philosophy is meant to think of the ‘labyrinth of the continuous’), we should have the courage to say that Kant falls short of Leibniz, and, moreover, well short of the otherwise laborious efforts expended by Hegel. The fact that the post-Galilean mental revolution first of all touches not upon the category of causality but upon the literal handling of the infinite does not seem to concern him at all. The equation ‘existence = objectivity’ is also the outcome of a view of mathematics that in fact is still Greek. Kant is thus deprived of what constitutes the heart of the problem: the immediately infinite extension of the donation of existence, which Pascal had already grasped and understood as undermining the simply ‘objective’ view of the real.
•Melancholic? The philosophical melancholy of the Critique is certainly courageous enough to state what we must know how to lose, or rather know how to let be beyond all grasp (the suprasensible world). But this courage is also a step back. It is a question of developing some security mechanism, reinforced with a great deal of guarantees, against any renewal of the loss. From this point of view, what I see at work in the Critique’s subtle twists and endless reprises, in its vain distinctions and its forbidding legislations, is the labour of obsession, always exposed to denial.
Allow me, therefore, to counter-balance, rather than to contradict, Monique David-Ménard’s diagnostic with the following one: the Kantian doctrine of phenomenal objectivity is the junction of a pre-Leibnizian mathematics and the locking mechanism of an obsessional.