Interlude: The Guiding Thread (on Philosophical Reading)

If one thinks, in the empty space above the earth, a chain, a wire, or a cord, fixed to an immobile point above the earth and stretched by its own weight, one can suppose it to be of such a length respective to the force of its cohesion, that it breaks under its own weight.—I will for the moment call this thoroughly uniform body a thread [Faden], whatever the material of which it is made.

—Immanuel Kant, Opus Postumum1

Live

Philosophy is above all, perhaps, to do with thinking, but it has not thought very much about the problem of reading (its own reading). Supposing that I know why I read philosophy—or even if I read philosophy in order to figure out why I read it—I still do not know how to read Philosophy (a philosophy, a philosopher, a philosophical text, a philosophical proposition, a philosophical concept?). At any rate, I do read philosophy, somewhat at random, following a movement I could not call “epistemophilic,” without really knowing how else to qualify it (not the pleasure of the text, at any rate, or else very rarely, and further still from Barthesian jouissance). From what I imagine to be a “traditional” philosophical point of view, I am like Pascal’s reader who goes too fast or too slowly, often in an uncomprehending disarray that does not stop me reading, but which puts me undeniably ill at ease.2

From a book of philosophy, I retain sometimes only the inadequacy of my reading, to the point of practically not daring to admit I have read it. Having read for the first time the Critique of Pure Reason years ago, I retained only a handful of details picked up along the way, about space and time, dialectic as logic of illusion, reason always about to run precipitously ahead of itself, a hallucinatory passage on the island of the understanding in the ocean of reason. But what I imagined to be the true substance of the book escaped me entirely. No one told me what was in it, even though I knew that in principle it is a “Copernican Revolution” in philosophy (I never “studied” philosophy, as they say, and even when I know what is supposed to be in this or that philosophical text, as is most often the case, this knowledge is not real knowledge, it does not count, I still understand nothing)—and my ignorance, so to speak, survives my reading. I would have to refer after the fact to books about Kant to find out what he “really says,” which I then recognize having read (or at least seen) but as though I had to forget my reading and replace it with this second version that I imagine must be the right one, the official one, the one, in any case, I would have to bring in an exam. But, like Proust’s narrator finally making it to the Guermantes’s dinner table, what I then see that I must have read without reading, what I thought I most wanted to know, is immediately disappointing and loses all interest for me. I was reading Kant in a rather disagreeable tension of incomprehension, and that tension is now resolved into an apparent understanding that seems to have no value.

Which is why I always have to envisage philosophical reading as an urgent invitation to a different rereading. The first time, I read along in order, from beginning to end, dutifully, without really understanding. The second time I must read differently, and the first reading is really only a pretext for this second attempt. This rereading does not know how to proceed, or even where it is going, for, on the one hand, it owes it to itself to be the right reading that the first never is (no excuse a second time), but, on the other, it ought to be able to free itself from the linear order of the book to access the text otherwise, in a different order that is not necessarily haphazard for all that (and that might, later, reconstitute a linear order). The point is not to advance toward a triumphant, or even modest, understanding—even if something of the order of understanding might happen along the way. I sense that in any case I will never understand. The point is rather to experience or endure something of the order of pure reading, which is as close as can be to stupidity, somewhere between Flaubertian stupor and bedazzlement. And this experience cannot be had simply by reading (it is not about being by the fire with a “good book,” far from it), because reading “itself” cannot fail to be disappointing from this point of view. Rather, as they used to say, I have to write my reading, not in order to transcribe something supposedly happening somewhere else (in my head) but to prove by that tracing that the reading I never did in a conscious present, in some inner place of thought, nonetheless took place.

On what conditions does this reading take place? I do not know before seeing it written. (I am writing this not at the end, most definitely not at the beginning, but somewhere in the middle, in the hopes of saving and relaunching my reading that is not done, that seems foggy and confused, congested, rusted up, that feels like I might lose it—like retaining nothing of a dream but its disappearance—but that I do not want to lose.) The reading that will have happened is going on or is still groping around in search of itself through revisions and reorganizations of this text that I am writing in fits and starts, pressed for time (but happy to be pressed for time or obliged by time, because it is impossible to take the time that it takes to read without feeling that time diminish along the way: if one had an infinite time, which is what it would take for a truly philosophical reading, nothing would ever get read, so it always has to go fast, always too fast)—pressed for time, in a hurry to be done, to be rid of it, to be able to return to reading.

This reading may be philosophical in the sense that it is trying very simply and naïvely—as close as can be to stupidity, then—to read what is written in the text. Lack of understanding is necessary if philosophy is to be read. And this lack of understanding has to be precipitate, anticipating from the depths of its confusion the moment when it will write its own inability to understand (philosophical stupidity is not simply idiocy). Many commentaries on philosophical texts presuppose that what is in the text is already known and sorted out, even if they then contest that knowledge. Nothing is more common that the academic gesture that consists in saying: here is what was previously thought to be the content of this text, and now here is the truth of the matter. But if that can help one to get ahead, and if it does seem necessary to pay attention to it, nothing like a reading is opened in this way. And, while dreaming of being accessible to someone who has not read Kant at all (with also some slight ambition to show the most accredited readers of Kant that they have not yet read him), this reading cannot—in spite of its pedagogical ambitions—pretend to be essentially a pedagogical presentation of Kant, cannot claim to replace Kant’s text with its content extracted, concentrated, and expressed.

So what is at stake in such a reading? Not simply to be accurate (no doubt that is a condition sine qua non, already unrealizable in practice, already of the order of the Kantian Idea, but it cannot be everything). Nor simply—in spite of some appearances—to stand under the reassuring banner of justice (because it is open to the other, all reading would supposedly be immediately ethical and/or political)3—unless one gives to the word justice a more radical sense that can be given by ethics or politics. Nor, to complete this apparently Kantian trilogy, to appeal to the aesthetic judgment. Reading, as such, cannot be answerable to these three eminently philosophical criteria (truth, justice, beauty) because it opens up their possibility and is always in withdrawal from them, like their shadow or their frontier. Reading is the frontier of thought, whereby the other (the other thought, the unthinkable, the incomprehensible) happens to it.

Trying to show that the structure of the frontier is, literally, inexhaustibly complex, fractal, I am proposing (always for reading, and so beyond any proposition, even speculative) a braid or tress that is made up of at least three threads or strings or wires. First, a partial exposition of Kant; then an argument, a claim about the quasi-concept of “frontier”; and finally a reflection (but one that must exceed any possible reflection, for reasons that will appear in the next sentence) on (philosophical) reading. But as this third thread of the braid is itself the braid (and so on ad infinitum), and as this fractally multiplying structure is mostly explained in the second thread, though on the basis of what is given by the first, it seems clear that this structure is not easily presentable.

Neutral

Now, I can think of this thread as being nowhere attached, but floating vertically above the earth in the direction of its weight, in empty space and immensely long (as many miles as you wish), stretched by its weight to an indeterminate length in inverse proportion to the square of the distance from its mid-point: there must be a given length of the thread at which, floating freely (attached to nothing) it breaks under its own weight: for as the moment of acceleration of the upper end is smaller than that of the lower, the latter tends to fall more strongly than the former can follow, the strange case would come about that a thread in empty space would break itself without addition of any other force (like two fists hitting against each other).

The fact remains that our point of departure is an attempt to read Kant, who also gave us something (however little) to read about (philosophical) reading.

Kant says that philosophy has to do with discursive concepts, or rather with a discursive use of reason, according to concepts. As opposed to mathematics, in which concepts are constructed and then immediately presented a priori to intuition, philosophy cannot construct its concepts but has to have them depend on an always uncertain a posteriori validation in experience.4

What does this mean? For us, here, that we have to read philosophy. It is not presented directly to intuition but goes via discursive “experiences” that we must not decipher but read. And if we must read philosophy, that means that we always run the risk of getting lost, like Kant in his old age:

In every discourse I first prepare (the reader or the audience) for what I intend to say by indicating, in prospect, my destination and, in retrospect, the starting point of my argument (without these two points of reference a discourse has no consistency). And the result of this pathological condition5 is that when the time comes for me to connect the two, I must suddenly ask my audience (or myself, silently): now where was I? where did I start from? This is a defect, not so much of the mind or of the memory alone, as rather of presence of mind (in connecting ideas)—that is, an involuntary distraction. It is a most distressing feeling, which one can guard against in writing, though only with great labor (especially in philosophical writing, where it is not always easy to look back to one’s starting point); but despite all one’s efforts, one can never obviate it completely.

It is different with the mathematician [. . .] (Conflict, 207)

This passage is part of the concluding part to the third Conflict, devoted to “The Power of the Human Mind to Master Its Morbid Feelings Merely by a Firm Resolution.” After subsections on sleep and diet, here are some precious pieces of advice about the practice of reading and thinking, in a subsection entitled “On Pathological Feelings That Come from Thinking at Unsuitable Times,” which is worth quoting in full:

Thinking—whether in the form of study (reading books) or reflection (meditation and discovery)—is a scholar’s food; and when he is awake and alone, he cannot live without it. But if he taxes himself with a specific thought when he is eating or walking, he inflicts two tasks on himself at the same time—on the head and the stomach or on the head and the feet; and in the first case this brings on hypochondria, in the second, vertigo. To master these pathological states by a regimen, then, all he has to do is alternate the mechanical occupation of the stomach or the feet with the mental occupation of thinking and, while he is eating or taking a walk (restoring himself), check deliberate thought and give himself over to the free play of imagination (a quasi-mechanical activity). But, in the scholar’s case, this requires the adoption, in a general way, of a firm resolution to go on a diet with regard to thinking.

The practice of occupying oneself with reading or reflecting when dining alone provokes pathological feelings; for intellectual work diverts vital energy from the stomach and bothers it. Reflecting while taking a walk also brings on these feelings, since the work the feet are doing is already draining one’s energy.* (The same thing holds true of studying by artificial light, if one is not used to it.) However, these pathological feelings arising from intellectual work undertaken at the wrong time (invita Minerva) are not the kind that can be eliminated directly and at once by sheer resolution. One can get rid of them only gradually, by breaking the habit through a principle opposed to it. And here we should be speaking only of those that can be mastered immediately.

* [Kant’s note] When a man of studious habits goes for a walk alone, it is hard for him to refrain from entertaining himself with his own reflections. But if he engages in strenuous thinking during his walk, he will soon be exhausted, whereas if he gives himself over to the free play of the imagination, the motion will refresh him—the reports of others whom I asked about this confirm my own experience. If in addition to thinking he also engages in conversation while he is walking, he will be even more fatigued, so that he will soon have to sit down to continue with his play of thought. The purpose of walking in the open air is precisely to keep one’s attention moving from one object to another and so to keep it from becoming fixed on any one object. (Conflict, 199)

This passage is rendered undecidable by its initial figure: from the moment that thinking (reading or meditation) is food, then in its relation to eating we are no longer sure what is the head and what the stomach, what is hypochondria and vertigo, what is mechanical and what is intentional.

How are we to mitigate this enormous disadvantage of philosophical discourse compared to mathematics (a disadvantage that is nothing other than the necessity of reading).6 Obviously—Kant does not say anything different—by leaving signposts in the text, milestones, which indicate the direction and meaning to the reader. This direction is immediately double: In reading we have to know not only where we are going but also (Kant seems to think this is harder) where we are coming from.

Any text (of a certain complexity)7 gives itself at least one reading. Which amounts to saying that any text reads itself, however slightly, or proposes a reading, even an institution of reading, for itself.8 Kant does not escape this rule any more than anyone else, this rule which flows directly from the discursive nature of philosophy. As such, the philosophical text is a text that tries exhaustively to prescribe the reading appropriate to it and thus to read itself without remainder. As it must (just because it is a text) fail in this endeavor, it makes (a) space or place for the reader, all the while surrounding this place with precautions, trying to forestall readings that it does not want. The most obvious example in this regard would be Hegel’s text, which is in a sense no more than the presentation of its own correct reading, the necessity of which is established in part by giving all other possible readings their partial place as moments in the good total reading.9 Which is why, reading Hegel, one becomes a Hegelian (the text here is in principle already the institution of its own reading, already its own quasi-tautological saturating interpretation). Without getting into that here, what, for Kant, is it to read (Kant)? Even if advice and instructions are not plentiful, Kant says enough to guide us.

There is a notable passage in the Theory of the Heavens that, in fact, provides almost all the elements we shall need here:

In the second part which contains the most essential object of this treatise, I seek to develop the constitution of the universe from the simplest state of nature through mechanical laws alone. If I may dare to suggest to those who are outraged at the boldness of this undertaking that they adopt a certain order in their examination with which they honour my thoughts, then I would request that they read the eighth chapter first, which I hope may prepare their judgement towards a correct insight. If, however, I invite the gentle reader to examine my opinions, then I am rightly concerned that, since hypotheses of this type are usually not held in higher esteem than philosophical dreams, it will be a sour favour for a reader to decide to undertake a careful examination of the histories of nature that I have thought up for myself and patiently to follow the author through the twists and turns by which he avoids the difficulties he encounters, in order finally perhaps to laugh at his own gullibility, like the audience of the London market crier. I can, however, confidently promise that if the reader is hopefully persuaded by the suggested preparatory section to dare to undertake such a physical adventure on the basis of such probable conjectures, he will not encounter as many dead ends and impassable obstacles on his way as he might have originally feared. [. . .]

Finally, I ask to be permitted a short explanation relating to the validity and the presumed value of those propositions which will appear in the following theory and according to which I would wish to be examined by fair judges. The author is properly judged according to the stamp he puts on his wares; I therefore hope that one will not require any more strict responsibility of my opinions in the different parts of this treatise than the value I give to them myself. In fact, the greatest geometrical acuity and mathematical infallibility can never be demanded of a treatise of this kind. If the system is based on analogies and harmonies in accordance with the rules of credibility and a correct way of thinking, it has satisfied all the requirements of its object. [. . .]

If, therefore, in the seventh chapter, enticed by the fruitfulness of the system and the attractiveness of the greatest and most admirable thing we are capable of imagining, and while adhering to the thread of analogy and a reasonable credibility, I extend the results of our doctrine as far as possible; if I represent the infinite nature of all creation, the formation of new worlds and the decline of the old ones and the unlimited realm of the chaos of the imagination: I hope the reader will grant the charming attractiveness of the object and the pleasure one experiences in seeing the agreement of a theory in its greatest extension, sufficient consideration so as not to judge it according to the greatest geometrical strictness, which does not in any case have any relevance in this type of consideration. It is precisely this fairness I expect in the third part. Nonetheless, the reader will find somewhat more than mere arbitrariness but somewhat less than undoubtedness in it. (Theory of the Heavens, 203–4)

And in a later example, reading Plato, in a famous passage we have already had occasion to quote, Kant posits rules for reading that are absolutely worthy of the interest of Kant’s reader:

Plato made use of the expression idea in such a way that we can readily see that he understood by it something that not only could never be borrowed from the senses, but that even goes far beyond the concepts of the understanding (with which Aristotle occupied himself), since nothing encountered in experience could ever be congruent to it. Ideas for him are archetypes of things themselves, and not, like the categories, merely the key to possible experiences. [. . .] I do not wish to go into any literary investigation here, in order to make out the sense which the sublime philosopher combined with his word. I note only that when we compare the thoughts that an author expresses about a subject, in ordinary speech as well as in writings, it is not at all unusual to find that we understand him even better than he understood himself, since he may not have determined his concept sufficiently and hence sometimes spoke, or even thought, contrary to his own intention. (CPR, A313–14/B370)

Can we still subscribe to this theory of reading today? Yes and no. Yes, especially now at a time of retrenchment when reading itself is being repressed again in the name of a new supposed “objectivity” or a supposed fidelity to the text, which often enough amounts to a simple refusal of reading in the name of “communication.” In order to read, one must start from the possibility of understanding better than the author what is written in the text, and it would be easy to show that any (philosophical) reading is based on this presupposition, whether it be admitted or not.

And yet, this opening of reading immediately opens it up to all manner of risks. How are we to avoid the slide into subjectivism, say, once we are no longer held to the strict literality of the text, when we are claiming to improve the text, as it were, in reading it? Kant, at any rate, a little later, as we have seen, does not hesitate to give instructions for exactly this type of situation:

The Platonic republic has become proverbial as a supposedly striking example of a dream of perfection that can have its place only in the idle thinker’s brain; and Brucker finds it ridiculous for the philosopher to assert that a prince will never govern well unless he participates in the ideas. But we would do better to pursue this thought further, and (at those points where the excellent man leaves us without help), to shed light on it through new endeavors, rather than setting it aside as useless under the very wretched and harmful pretext of its impracticability. (CPR, A316/ B372–73)

What is going to guide these “new efforts”? In Kant, clearly enough, the Idea itself. Plato thought the Idea without fully thinking it, or at least without thinking it through. If we need to read or reread Plato in order to extend his thinking, we must, then, take this idea of the Idea and bring it closer to the Idea of reason itself, according to the Idea of reason itself (i.e., the Idea of reason qua Idea). The Idea of the (rational) Idea should be the (rational) Idea of the (rational) Idea. And so on.

We can compare this structure directly with what is said in the “Architectonic of Pure Reason,” where the properly teleological nature of this theory of reading is still more clearly expounded and where we can see more clearly how it engages with the very rationality of reason. Knowledge is scientific only if it is systematic. To be systematic, to have the properly organic coherence of an animal body (CPR, A833/B861), it must not be rhapsodic but ordered toward an end that gives it its structure and dictates its schema, of which the scientist has an idea:

Nobody attempts to establish a science without grounding it on an idea. But in its elaboration the schema, indeed even the definition of the science which is given right at the outset, seldom corresponds to the idea; for this lies in reason like a seed, all of whose parts still lie very involuted and are hardly recognizable even under microscopic observation. For this reason sciences, since they have all been thought out from the viewpoint of a certain general interest, must not be explained and determined in accordance with the description given by their founder, but rather in accordance with the idea, grounded in reason itself, of the natural unity of the parts that have been brought together. For the founder and even his most recent successors often fumble around [herumirren] with an idea that they have not even made distinct to themselves and that therefore cannot determine the special content, the articulation (systematic unity) and boundaries of the science.10 (CPR, A834/B862)

What gives Kant’s theory of reading its enormous—insufferable—confidence and self-assurance is its certainty of knowing (or rather of having an Idea about) what reason is and where it is going (where it ought to be going, in the right line of a certain rightness we shall come across again later).11 And as it is also going toward its end, this is also the reason why we have to refuse, or at least modulate, this theory of reading and all it brings with it.

Does Heidegger do so in the famous passage from the Kantbuch in which he invokes problems of “interpretation”?12 This important passage is worth quoting in full, including its own long inner quotation from Kant:

Thus the fundamental intention of the present interpretation of the Critique of Pure Reason was to make visible in this way the decisive content of this work and thereby to bring out what Kant “had wanted to say”. With this procedure, the laying-out [Auslegung] creates a maxim of its own which Kant himself would have wanted to know had been applied to the interpretation of philosophical investigations and which he put in the following words at the end of a reply to the critique by the Leibnizian Eberhard:

Thus the Critique of Pure Reason may well be the proper apologia for Leibniz, even in opposition to his adherents who elevate him with dishonorable words of praise, as it can also be for various older philosophers about whom many writers of the history of philosophy, with all their praise, still let themselves speak nonsense. They do not discover the intentions of these philosophers while they neglect the key to all interpretations [Auslegungen] of the pure products of reason on the basis of mere concepts, the critique of reason itself (as the common source for all), and while they cannot see, beyond the etymology of what their predecessors have said, what they had wanted to say.

Certainly, in order to wring from what the words say, what it is they want to say, every interpretation [Interpretation] must necessarily use violence. Such violence, however, cannot be roving arbitrariness. The power of an idea which shines forth [vorausleuchtenden Idee] must drive and guide the laying-out [Auslegung]. Only in the power of this idea can an interpretation risk what is always audacious, namely, entrusting itself to the concealed inner passion of a work in order to be able, through this, to place itself within the unsaid and force it into speech. That is one way, however, by which the guiding idea, in its power to illuminate, comes to light. (Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, 141)

Heidegger appears to be subscribing unreservedly to Kant’s theory of reading, which seems to be identical here to the one we read in the first Critique. But the passage from Kant that Heidegger chooses to quote, apparently agreeing with it, perhaps has some resources that are different from those of the passage about Plato we were quoting. The passage on Plato certainly did prescribe that one read Plato in the sense of reason, but especially against his detractors who were too quick to mock the apparently unrealistic nature of Plato’s political doctrine. Here, Kant is rather reproaching the admirers of the philosophers he mentions, or at least the historians of philosophy, who clearly do not know how to read. This reference complicates things quite a lot, in that the remark quoted by Heidegger comes in the context of a defense of the first Critique against a bad reading (so we are looking at a defense of the very text that contains the passage on Plato that we quoted and that Eberhard, to whom Kant is replying in the passage given by Heidegger, has in principle at least already read). Whence the sense that Kant is irritated: The historians of philosophy are bad readers, and the best proof of this is that they have the people they are talking about say pure nonsense. In fact, the first Critique is less distant from Leibniz than the Leibnizians, who have no idea what Leibniz meant, which must be what Kant said, because Kant, in practicing the critique of pure reason, is presenting the very form in which all concepts must present themselves, and those concepts must include Leibniz’s concepts to the extent that they do no fall outside the bounds of pure reason. Leibniz and the others will therefore always have meant what Kant said, and their “intention” must be the same as Kant’s to the extent that they are in reason and that Kant is merely explicating that reason.

This irritation of Kant’s against the historians of philosophy is made clearer in the Prolegomena, a text provoked, as is well known, precisely by the fact that the first Critique was so badly read (or at least so little read).13 Kant’s argument is complex in that even though it indeed seems to confirm a certain teleologism of rational reading, it posits two different ways of presenting this reading. Two passages will suffice to show this.

First, the second paragraph of the text, in the preface:14

There are scholars for whom the history of philosophy (ancient as well as modern) is itself their philosophy; the present prolegomena have not been written for them. They must wait until those who endeavor to draw from the wellsprings of reason itself have finished their business, and then it will be their turn to bring news of these events to the world. Otherwise, in their opinion nothing can be said that has not already been said before; and in fact this opinion can stand for all time as an infallible prediction, for since the human understanding has wandered over countless subjects in various ways throughout the centuries, it can hardly fail that for anything new something old should be found that has some similarity with it. (Prolegomena, 5)

The historians of philosophy, then, who send news reports of what is happening in the land of philosophy, always report that nothing is happening, because nothing can happen, everything already having been said. For them, reading comes down to finding an ancient precedent for every apparently new proposition.

The second passage, at the very end of the preamble, which follows the preface: These scholars, who must be quite erudite, great readers (even if they are poor readers of contemporary philosophical texts) in that they do manage to find in ancient texts everything that can be said today, are not, in fact, such great readers, because, in reality, they depend secretly on the new texts to find out what was in the old ones, which they are unable to read before they have read the new ones. The historians, who seem to be imposing order in philosophy by finding old precursors for the new philosophers, are going backward, because they only find out after the new what was in the old. For it is not false that one can find old analogies for the newest ideas: Is not my very own biggest idea, says Kant, that of the division of judgments into synthetic and analytic, already to be found in Locke?

I find a hint of this division already in Locke’s essays on human understanding. [. . .] But there is so little that is definite and reduced to rules in what he says about this type of cognition, that it is no wonder if no one, and in particular not even Hume, was prompted by it to contemplate propositions of this type. For such general yet nonetheless definite principles are not easily learned from others who have only had them floating obscurely before them. One must first have come to them oneself through one’s own reflection, after which one also finds them elsewhere, where one certainly would not have found them before, because the authors did not even know themselves that their own remarks were grounded on such an idea. Those who never think for themselves in this way nevertheless possess the quick-sightedness to spy everything, after it has been shown to them, in what has already been said elsewhere, where no one at all could see it before. (Prolegomena, 22–23)

So this does not mean simply that the historians are necessarily wrong to find analogies with what has already been said, simply that they do not understand that what these analogies reveal is what is new in the new.

Kant will not disagree that nothing is more common than to see old ideas presented as though they were new:

We have long been accustomed to seeing old, threadbare cognitions newly trimmed by being taken from their previous connections and fitted out by someone in a systematic garb of his own preferred cut, but under new titles; and most readers will beforehand expect nothing else even from this critique. Yet these Prolegomena will bring them to understand that there exists a completely new science, of which no one had previously formed merely the thought, of which even the bare idea was unknown, and for which nothing from all that has been provided before now could be used except the hint that Hume’s doubts had been able to give. (Prolegomena, 11)

This gesture is complex, and it is easy to get lost between the old and the new, the apparently new and the apparently old. See too, in a note to “What Is Orientation in Thinking,” just after the passage quoted above batting off an accusation of Spinozism, Kant continues:

Similarly, another scholar detects skepticism in the Critique of Pure Reason, although the whole intention of this work is to reach firm and definite conclusions on the scope of our a priori knowledge. He likewise detects a dialectic in these critical investigations, although their whole aim is to resolve and eliminate for good that dialectic in which pure reason inevitably becomes trapped and entangled when everyone uses it in a dogmatic manner. The Neo-Platonists, who called themselves Eclectics because they managed to discover their own conceits throughout the works of earlier authors after they had themselves imported them into these, proceeded in exactly the same way; so in this respect, there is nothing new under the sun. (KPW, 246–47n)

On the basis of what is new, one realizes after the fact that it is perhaps not all that new, even if, if truth be told, it had never been properly thought out before. So Locke never really thought out the distinction between analytic and synthetic judgments, even if the distinction is stated in his text, as we realize after reading Kant.

So one can read Kant’s theory of philosophical reading two ways. First, we read upstream, as it were, according to reason that determines teleologically what will have been said by Plato or Leibniz, for example. We can figure out what Plato “meant” by his idea of the Idea, in spite of the obscurity of his writing, by reading according to the order of reason, which wants “Idea” to mean what Kant says it means in reading Plato in this way. But, second, this is possible only if Kant had already found, sponte sua, independently of Plato or anyone else, what is truly said by the word Idea, only to realize after the fact that the other had, obscurely it is true, thought and said it before him. The historian of philosophy goes wrong by thinking that, because it has been said before, nothing new has been said now, which it has insofar as it has been said anew; but it would also be a mistake to think that one can do completely without the history of philosophy and only read the new, because it is that history that bequeaths us a language that is still obscure but whose obscurity can be pierced by the double movement of philosophical reading.

How could one not agree?15

But does Heidegger, in taking up this theory of Kant’s, say anything new? This is a complex situation: Kant has bequeathed to us a way of understanding the relation of philosophy to its past, according to which the new is said anew. So we might expect that Heidegger, in taking up anew this new “anew,” would do so anew. If the passage we quoted does introduce something new into these tangled relations, it seems to be the motif of violence. Reading Kant according to Kant’s Idea, according to Heidegger, would not happen without violence. But this violence is not simply violence, to the extent that it is guided or channeled by “the power of an idea which shines forth.” Under the influence of an Idea (which is not itself violent), violence mutates into power, still with an element of risk and audacity, because the idea of the work is not stated in the work, all the while constituting its “concealed inner passion [verborgenen inneren Leidenschaft].” The inner passion gives the idea, which is confirmed by its capacity to illuminate the inner passion.

And yet, in spite of what seems new in this idea of violence, this Heideggerian reading of Kant’s theory of reading remains Kantian: The transformation of brute violence into ideal light constitutes the very movement of Kant’s thought, the very idea of its idea as sense-giving Idea. And this reading of Heidegger’s reading of Kant’s reading of reading again confirms the strange nachträglich logic we saw in the Prolegomena, because it is without a doubt Heidegger’s reading that allows us to uncover in Kant the thought of the aftereffect that allows us to claim that Heidegger is confirming Kant, etc.

While recognizing all that is powerful and indispensable in this schema, especially when it comes to the refutation of the historian’s reading of philosophy, we need to pursue the privilege still granted by Heidegger to the Idea itself. This idea of the Idea (as guiding or inspiring) that confirms the Platonic heritage, which Kant, as we saw, was the first to acknowledge, still remains the guiding Idea of Heidegger’s remarks here. Which, of course, agrees with Heidegger’s own insistence on the repetition at play in his reading.16

The guiding idea is the guiding idea, and this idea, even if it does not go without some violence, nonetheless places violence on the path of its retro-teleological justification.

Can we (ought we) escape from this very potent model of philosophical reading, that remains proudly, virilely, metaphysical through and through? Would we then, in laying claim to a certain violence of reading but trying to withdraw that violence from the perspective of the Idea (and therefore from interpretation in the strict sense and, a fortiori, from intended meaning, even if it were unconscious or secret)—would we then be allowing ourselves to venture into what Heidegger calls “roving arbitrariness”? Or, if we violently transpose this question into the vocabulary of this book, can we read, in violence, outside the perspective of (perpetual) peace, without losing meaning and ending up in “pure nonsense”? In other words, is there meaning that is not in the end that of reason? This is clearly the question that will have been not on the horizon of this book, but between every sentence, in every punctuation sign.

So we cannot here prejudge that question. But even supposing that we manage, after our passage through this theory of philosophical reading (which there is no question of simply refusing), to think a reading that is not ruled by the perspective of the Idea of the Idea of Reason, it would not do to rush too rapidly to the thought that we could read without ever appealing to a guiding thread. For even supposing that reading begins when repetition and recitation stop, even supposing that reading must at a certain moment abandon the text without immediately knowing which way to turn, how is it to orient itself?17

If these questions are unavoidable with respect to any text (how do we read once we read, once we are no longer content with more or less erudite commentary and even interpretation—for the opening to reading we are talking about must de jure precede any erudition, which tends to operate the authoritarian foreclosure of that opening), we might suspect that they take on a peculiar complexity when the text to be read (supposing that we can fix its bounds and limits) is signed by Immanuel Kant. For as we happily appeal to the notions of guiding thread and orientation, we cannot for long ignore the fact that these notions are to a certain extent themselves Kantian, signed with Kant’s name. Even if we are wary of the idea of the Idea of reason, we must nonetheless seek in the text for a guiding thread (or run the risk of not reading at all). But this guiding thread risks at every moment getting entwined with the guiding thread (der Leitfaden) itself, the (as always discursive) concept or figure of guiding thread that runs throughout Kant’s text.18

To avoid getting tangled up, then, perhaps we should simplify things for a while and take as a provisional guiding thread for reading Kant the guiding thread itself, which he has left behind in the labyrinth of his work to help the reader find his way.

What is the guiding thread? Kant does not present it directly in the context of his discussion of reading. He appeals to it rather in situations in which an empirical complexity risks overwhelming the philosopher who wants to get a clear view of things, to the point, as in the opening of the “Universal History” text, of provoking his dismay. The guiding thread will help one to find one’s way out of the labyrinth of the empirical (the figure of which is always diversity and dispersion) precisely by providing guidance, or at least an orientation, toward the exit. The guiding thread, which is indispensable in philosophy, is always a technical aid designed to help its user find the way out.19

The guiding thread initially accompanies the adventurer, who does not have a clear sense of where he is going or of what he might find when he gets there. Not only does the one who carries the end of the guiding thread not entirely know where he is going, but he knows that the guiding thread will not help him find out. If he carries the thread, it is to leave a trail or trace behind him, an inscription of the path he will have taken. This trace has a double function: On the one hand, the point is for the adventurer to be able to retrace his path in the other direction, to escape after the more or less hazardous encounter he risks having in the labyrinth, if he gets to the center, if it has a center; but on the other hand, this trace is useful to those who come after, either to bring help if he does not return after a certain length of time (but how long, exactly?) or to try again to bring off the adventure he may not have brought to a successful conclusion (how are we to know, if he has not come back?).

In the first case, one breaks a path that was closed or unknown until now. Here the guiding thread is of no immediate use and does not help to determine the path to take. At most one can use it to retrace one’s steps after a trip that went nowhere, and perhaps leave it there to mark the path not to take next time, until one finds the path (a path) that leads . . . where, exactly? To the end? That is, a specific place one knew of in advance and at which one hoped to arrive? Or perhaps (necessarily, in fact) the place where, after the fact, having arrived, one finds an end whose existence or nature one did not know, or that one did not know was the end.

This venturesome sense of the guiding thread is the one that is dominant (without being named as such) in, for example, the opening to the preface of the second edition of the first Critique:

Whether or not the treatment of the cognitions belonging to the concern of reason travels the secure course of a science is something which can soon be judged by its success. If, after many preliminaries and preparations are made, a science gets stuck as soon as it approaches its end, or if in order to reach this end it must often go back and set out on a new path; or likewise if it proves impossible for the different co-workers to achieve unanimity as to the way in which they should pursue their common aim; then we may be sure that such a study is merely groping about [herumtappen], that it is still far from having entered upon the secure course of a science; and it is already a service to reason if we can possibly find that path for it, even if we have to give up as futile much of what was included in the end previously formed without deliberation. (Bvii)20

This whole preface is written under the sign of the path to be broken or traced. Whereas logic, mathematics, and physics have entered on the correct path, metaphysics has not yet found it. Metaphysics, which must find its own path for itself (be its own pupil, says Kant), has not got there yet, even though it is older than the other sciences just named, and even though it would survive “even if all the others were swallowed up by an all-consuming barbarism [in dem Schlunde einer alles vertilgenden Barbarei gänzlich verschlungen werden sollten]” (CPR, Bxiv; this Schlunde or yawning chasm is again what we are calling “frontier”).

But once the correct path has been found, the point is to leave the guiding thread in place so that everyone can follow. In the case of speculative reason, where hypotheses become apodictic demonstrations, in principle all the reader has to do is hold on tight to the guiding thread and follow along, however difficult the path may be at times. From time to time one might stop with the guide to admire the scenery or to look back at the ground covered. Sometimes one might even listen patiently to stories of the misadventures of other travelers, and one might especially remember the story of a certain Seefahrer whose fate we envied a little in spite of everything. But in principle, by reading on along the guiding thread, we will eventually reach the end.

This way of thinking about the guiding thread has, then, two distinct moments: that of the adventurer who more or less heroically finds the right path and that of the reader who does not have to seek in this way but simply to follow the guide. And yet, this is not how Kant explicitly uses the figure of the guiding thread. If we are indeed dealing with a situation in which one is faced with an empirical confusion, a disorganized space that at first sight does not offer a clear path to follow (so this space can be a desert or an ocean as well as a labyrinth, and perhaps especially a desert or an ocean, where the trace of the path taken by ship or camel disappears more or less rapidly, making it harder to retrace it later),21 the guiding thread is used in situations where one will never arrive at the certainty of having followed the right path, where the hypothesis will never be transformed into apodictic certainty. Where, before, the guide could with absolute certainty indicate the right path that had been found at last, now he can only suggest a path to the reader without ever establishing that it is the only one possible. Here the guiding thread is chosen among others that are possible. It surely leads somewhere (for there are no chemins qui ne mènent nulle part),22 but one does not know exactly where it goes before getting there, and nothing guarantees arrival. Here the adventure is radicalized: Where, before, it ended up opening a sure path whence adventure was henceforth excluded, except in the form of the more or less hair-raising tales of others’ misadventures, we are now following a guiding thread in which we can never place our full confidence but on which we must depend all the more because it is our only resource where we are, always somewhat lost in nature.

We choose to have confidence in the guiding thread because we have no choice if we want to find our way out. The thread can mislead, be a poor guide, but we cannot but follow it. So the guiding thread is a strange concept (?) in Kant, and one that immediately doubles up. The guiding thread reassures us that there must be a guiding thread. It promises that there is a way out (from nature), and this way out turns out to be the promise that there is a way out. At the end of the guiding thread we find the guiding thread. It is the third Critique that makes this arresting and vertiginous logic most explicit:

This agreement of nature with our faculty of cognition is presupposed a priori by the power of judgment in behalf of its reflection on nature in accordance with empirical laws, while at the same time the understanding recognizes it objectively as contingent, and only the power of judgment attributes it to nature as transcendental purposiveness (in relation to the cognitive faculty of the subject): because without presupposing this, we would have no order of nature in accordance with empirical laws, hence no guideline [Leitfaden] for an experience of this in all its multiplicity and for research into it. (CJ, 72)

According to this logic, the guiding thread is always a guiding thread that leads to the guiding thread. This could take some time. This thread has, properly speaking, no end, and we can, and even must, follow it indefinitely. Its end is that there must be an end, but we can approach this end only without end.23

Ground

How would it be if an iron thread pulled by magnetic force were to break under its own weight?

If, then, in order to read Kant, we could only take the guiding thread as our guiding thread (according to a contingent necessity that we are trying to think through), we would read nothing but the guiding thread without end. So we must absolutely choose a guiding thread other than the guiding thread itself if we really want to read. According to a supplementary fold of necessity and contingency, this choice (but the term “choice” will not do, for we are as far as can be from the subjectivity implied by such a concept) must necessarily be contingent and must be made for contingency, in the name of contingency. In this book, we have indeed chosen a guiding thread that, as we are slowly coming to see, names contingency itself (i.e., the frontier). Our working hypothesis is that Kant, whose entire philosophy is an attempt to think the frontier as bound or limit24 (or as the frontier between bound and limit: we dwell at length on Kant’s distinction between Grenze and Schranke in the Appendix), never manages to think the frontier itself, while thinking of nothing but that. Kant limits the frontier.

Clearly, such a guiding thread is not even a guiding thread if “guiding thread” always implies, as we have just suggested, its own endless hypothetico-teleological confirmation. Because frontier names that which will inevitably cut any such thread, or perhaps the weight of the thread that will inevitably stretch it to breaking point. And so our reading, which set off to follow the guiding thread of the frontier, on the basis of texts where it seems it must be thought of literally and directly (i.e., the “political” texts, and especially the Perpetual Peace text that is, as it were, our guiding text), ends up sooner or later with the end of the thread in its hand. But this end, where the fibers of the cord are beginning to unravel, where the dis-tress begins, this end that must be somewhere, is at no determinable place on the Seekarte of Kant’s system. This uncertainty, which we think is radical (or more than radical, as there is no root to dig up here), is that of the frontier itself, which is never a simple line and always has a thickness, an abyssal zone where one finds oneself between . . . what and what? We do not know. In no-man’s-land.

Happily for us, the frontier (which as such is pure space or spacing, the priority of space—the “final frontier”—over time) cannot be pure and must cash out into plural and heterogeneous frontiers (which is why frontier is not a proper noun, not a concept or even an idea). In Kant, the frontier can be said to be nature, violence, warfare, radical evil, contingency, but also providence, critique, or peace. By allowing what is no longer a guiding thread to spread and disperse in this way, we are tending in our reading of Kant’s universe to follow a movement that can seem to be the converse of the one Kant imagines at the origin of the universe. Encouraging a certain dispersion, we are of course laying claim to a certain “materialism.” But this materialism (which is “immaterial,” as Lyotard might say)25 is not on its way (retro-teleologically, as it were) to any terminal dispersion, which would be merely the negative image of some absolute knowledge. If matter cannot gather itself enough to be matter without immediately idealizing itself (according to Hegel’s demonstration in the Introduction to the Philosophy of History)26 no more can it be absolutely dispersed (because all absolutes come down to the same). The stuff of our reading, then, is held in a partial dispersion, partially gathered, sufficiently (or so we hope) to give some access to the intelligibility and rationality it can only also contest.

It is obvious that such a dispersing reading sits uncomfortably with the linear order of the book. The guiding thread gives a sense of order, but what cuts it goes against that order. This text is made up of cuttings of Kant, cuttings that are juxtaposed, gathered up, scattered again.

---

1. Immanuel Kant, Opus Postumum, 7th fascicle, leaf 1, 1 (vol. 22, 4 of the Prussian Academy edition), my translation. This passage and those providing the epigraphs to the next two subsections are not included in the English selections from the Opus Postumum (ed. Eckhart Förster [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993]). They can be found in the French edition by François Marty (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1986), 121, 124. A number of contingent possibilities of reading that were available in the French edition of this book are difficult to maintain in this English version: The standard French translation of Kant’s Leitfaden, “le fil conducteur,” can be taken not only as a “guiding thread” but as a “conductive wire,” which motivated the three subtitles of this section (la phase, le neutre, la terre) in terms of the three wires in a standard household alternating current cable.

2. “Quand on lit trop vite ou trop doucement on n’entend rien [When one reads too fast or too slowly one understands nothing],” Pascal, Pensées, no. 57 (Lafuma), 69 (Brunschvicg), chosen as the epigraph to Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979). It bears recalling that this is not a straightforward recommendation of “slow” or “close” reading. We shall see in a minute that reading inevitably has to be “too fast” but leaves the question entire as to the appropriate speed at which to read a given text.

3. The rapid appeal to “the other,” to “difference,” and so on, however necessary in politics and elsewhere, has also allowed the formation of a new humanist self-righteousness that only survives by foreclosing everything about the other that really is other (and therefore necessarily other than human). This book is trying to show that any thinking of the other that does not take into account the structure of the frontier cannot fail to produce this self-righteousness.

4. “Besides intuition there is no other kind of cognition than through concepts. Thus the cognition of every, at least human, understanding is a cognition through concepts, not intuitive but discursive. [. . .] Thinking is cognition through concepts. Concepts, however, as predicates of possible judgments, are related to some representation of a still undetermined object. The concept of body thus signifies something, e.g. metal, which can be cognized through that concept. It is therefore a concept only because other representations are contained under it by means of which it can be related to objects” (CPR, A68–69/B92–94). For the distinction between philosophy and mathematics, see especially CPR, B743–45.

5. Kant suggests his condition is “a kind of gout that has penetrated the brain” (Conflict, 205).

6. Here and elsewhere I am indebted to Jean-Luc Nancy’s brilliant Le discours de la Syncope: Logodaedalus.

7. To be read as in Gödel’s theorem. How do we know if a given system is complex enough to give rise to undecidability—by seeing if it gives rise to undecidability. How do we know if a text is complex enough to read itself—by reading it. But as Nancy points out, this value of the undecidable can always simply settle into a new metaphysical term: “It is not enough to say that there is undecidability in a discourse. It is not enough to say it in order to have decided as to the fate, the structure or the potency of the discourse in question. Today, just about everywhere, one finds ‘the undecidable’ as a solution that some would gladly substitute for the well-worn solutions of such and such a ‘truth,’ or of Truth itself” (Nancy, Le discours de la syncope, 5/1).

8. See Jacques Derrida, “Mochlos ou le conflit des faculties,” 422/101.

9. See Derrida, Glas, 258–59/231–32.

10. Follow throughout these pages the interferences between figures and analogies from the natural world (the animal body, seeds, the fact that systems often seem in fact to be born like maggots, through generatio aequivoca) and those that seem more directly called for by the idea of an architectonic itself, of buildings and ruins: “an architectonic to all human knowledge, which at the present time, since so much material has already been collected or can be taken from the ruins of collapsed older edifices, would not merely be possible but would not even be very difficult” (CPR, A835/B863).

11. The same schema rules the principles of Biblical exegesis given in The Conflict of the Faculties: “If a scriptural text contains certain theoretical teachings which are proclaimed sacred but which transcend all rational concepts (even moral ones), it may be interpreted in the interests of practical reason; but if it contains statements that contradict practical reason, it must be interpreted in the interests of practical reason” (CF, 65).

12. The book was already written when Michel Lisse’s admirable work L’expérience de la lecture: 1. La soumission (Paris: Galilée, 1998) appeared. Lisse also reads this passage from Heidegger (63ff), and I note with satisfaction the ways in which our readings converge.

13. We would need to read the whole appendix to the Prolegomena, where Kant explains in sum that to judge the first Critique the standard of judgment has to be . . . the first Critique. One can judge what gives the principle of judgment only according to its own principle of judgment. It is clearly this problem, already abyssal in the first Critique, that will return in the third, according to a movement that is, as I shall try to show later, anything but teleological.

14. I recall that the Prolegomena, apparently entirely oriented toward future metaphysics but in fact turned toward the past (in the form of the first Critique, precisely), have a “Preface” (Vorrede), then a “Preamble” (Vorerrinnerung: a pre-memory, which concentrates the structure we are interested in). I analyze the structure of the Prolegomena in greater detail in “Towards a Criticism of the Future,” Legislations, 229–39.

15. It is not surprising to find exactly this schema at work in the Hegelian or Lacanian reaction to deconstructive work. It is loudly announced that this work brings nothing new, because everything it says (when read, badly, as a critique of Hegel or Lacan) is supposedly already there in Hegel or Lacan. So, for example, it is asserted that Derrida produces a bad reading of Hegel, then to attack a falsely teleological version of Absolute Knowing in the name of a “differance” that turns out, supposedly, to have been already thought by Hegel himself. One finds that Hegel, when read in a certain way, is already the thinker of differance, etc., forgetting that Derrida is not claiming anything other when he reads in Hegel (it is “in” Hegel, to be read) something no one could see there before. It could be shown that this is an a priori structure of misrecognition (of misreading) that defines historicism as such.

16. The last words of this third section of the Kantbuch (followed immediately by the fourth section that inscribes this motif of repetition in its title): “The laying of the ground for metaphysics grows upon the ground of time. The question concerning Being, the grounding question for a laying of the ground for metaphysics, is the problem of Being and Time. This title contains the guiding idea of the preceding interpretation of the Critique of Pure Reason as a laying of the ground for metaphysics. The idea, however, attested to through this interpretation, provides an indication of the problem of a fundamental ontology. This is not to be grasped as something supposedly ‘new,’ as opposed to the allegedly ‘old.’ Rather, it is the expression of the attempt to adopt in an original way what is essential in a laying of the ground for metaphysics, i.e., to aid in the ground-laying through a repetition [Wiederholung] of its own, more original possibility” (Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, 141–42).

17. It would not be difficult to show, on the basis of “What Is Orientation in Thought?,” that this very question only really arises in situations where orientation is impossible. Thought seeks to orient itself only when the Orient (the origin) has been definitively lost.

18. It has become common to find and even follow the Leitfaden in the third Critique and the political writings, but the term Leitfaden appears very early in the first Critique, in the title of the subsection entitled “Von dem Leitfaden der Entdeckung aller reiner Verstandbegriffe,” translated as “On the Clue to the Discovery of All Pure Concepts of the Understanding” (CPR, A66/B91).

19. Empiricity always retains something of the character of matter in general—i.e., of chaotic dispersion, such as that from which Kant has the cosmos emerge in Theory of the Heavens: “I assume that when all matter of which the spheres that constitute our solar system, all the planets and comets, consist, was dissolved into its elementary basic material at the beginning of all things, it occupied the entire space of the universe in which these formed bodies now orbit. This state of nature, even if one considers it in and for itself without regard to any system, appears to be the simplest that could follow upon nothingness. At that time, nothing had formed yet. The arrangement of heavenly bodies distant from one another, their distance moderated by attraction, and their shape that derives from the equilibrium of the assembled matter, are a later state. Nature as it bordered directly on creation, was as raw, as unformed as possible. However, even in the essential properties of the elements that make up chaos, the characteristic of that perfection can be felt that they have from their origin, in that their essence is a consequence of the eternal idea of divine reason. The simplest, the most universal properties that appear to have been designed without any intention, matter that seems to be merely passive and in need of forms and arrangement, has, in its simplest state, an endeavour to form itself into a more perfect state by a natural development. However, the difference in the kinds of elements contributes the greatest part to the regulation of nature and the formation from chaos by which the state of rest that would prevail under a universal equality among the dispersed elements, is eliminated and the chaos in the points of the more strongly attracting particles begins to form. The species of this basic material are without doubt infinitely varied judging by the immeasurability nature shows in all directions. For that reason, those with the greatest specific density and attractive force, which, on their own, occupy less space and are also less common, will, with the same distribution throughout the space of the world, be more widely dispersed than the lighter types. Elements of 1,000 times greater specific mass are a thousand, perhaps a million times more dispersed than those lighter by the same measure. And since these gradations have to be thought of as being as infinite as possible, the former type of dispersed elements will be distant by a so much greater distance from one another as the latter, just as there can be bodily constituents of one type that exceeds another in density in the same measure as a sphere that has been described with the radius of the solar system does another that has a diameter of one thousandth of a line./ In a space filled in such a way, universal rest lasts only a moment. The elements have essential forces to put each other into motion and they are a source of life for themselves. Matter immediately endeavours to form itself” (Theory of the Heavens, 227–28). Mutatis mutandis, the pure manifold of sensation in the first Critique retains something of this character of dispersion, as does the potentially “rhapsodic” character of perceptions that would not be unified into experience by being my experience (CPR, A156/B195) or indeed of disorganized philosophical exposition (A81/B106; A832/B860).

20. See too the Prolegomena, which are proposed as being “the plan and guide [als Plane und Leitfaden] for the investigation, and not the work itself,” that is, the first Critique, which “abandons all the usual paths and adopts a new one” (Prolegomena, 131, 130). The motif of the Herumtappen is the object of a remarkable analysis by Diane Morgan in Kant Trouble: The Obscurities of the Enlightened (London: Routledge, 2000).

21. See Jorge Luis Borges’s story “The Two Kings and the Two Labyrinths,” where the desert turns out to be the ultimate labyrinth. Recall Kant’s admiration for the camel as “ship of the desert.”

22. “Chemins qui ne mènent nulle part” is the title of a poem written in French by Rilke (number 31 of the Quatrains valaisans [1924]) and is used, without being attributed as such, for the title of the French translation of Heidegger’s volume Holzwege. I exploit the literal meaninglessness of the idea of a road leading nowhere in the more elaborated reading of Frege’s distinction between Sinn and Bedeutung in Frontiers, 320–21.

23. So we should have to say that in Kant all purposiveness is without purpose, or that the purpose of purposiveness is its very purposiveness (without purpose).

24. See Jacques Derrida: “Kantianism is not only a powerfully organized network of conceptual limits, a critique, a metaphysics, a dialectic, a discipline of pure reason. It is a discourse that presents itself as an essential project of delimitation: a thinking of the limit as positing the limit, foundation or legitimation of judgment with respect to these limits” (Du droit à la philosophie, 89/54; tr. mod.).

25. This book bears the traces of unpaid and unpayable debts: to recent readings of Kant by Jean-François Lyotard (that I also contest here or there), by Jean-Luc Nancy (unsurpassable), and by Jacques Derrida, whose importance for this book is beyond calculation and obviously is not limited to his work explicitly on Kant.

26. “Matter possesses gravity in virtue of its tendency toward a central point. It is essentially composite; consisting of parts that exclude each other. It seeks its Unity; and therefore exhibits itself as self-destructive, as verging toward its opposite. If it could attain this, it would be Matter no longer, it would have perished. It strives after the realization of its Idea; for in Unity it exists ideally” (G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, tr. J. Sibree [Mineola, NY: Dover, 1956], 31). See too Derrida’s commentary in Glas, 29–30/22–23.