For this second chronicle, I will be a chronicler in the sense that I will try, albeit as a philosopher, to address aspects of our current situation that, if they are not altogether immediate, are at least those of the present day in the broad sense. I mean the current situation of murderous and/or financial terror against the background of an overvaluation of God (whatever name he is given) and a devaluation of money (that of the shareholders, but even more the money of those who do not have any). This situation needs to be considered in a philosophical chronicle because it constitutes a philosophical actuality.

Hegel wrote—this is his famous sentence about the owl of Minerva—that philosophy appears when a form of life has become old. Since late antiquity, there has never been a growing-old as manifest as ours. The capitalist economy accumulates impasses, abscesses, and uncontrollable disorders. The society it governs does not believe in itself anymore. Words and concepts that were still valid fifteen years ago, like “the rule of law,” “human rights,” and “democracy,” are losing visibly and on a daily basis their practical as well as theoretical and symbolic credibility. Scientific, technical, juridical, and moral progress immediately displays, at every step, ambivalences that suspend the name “progress,” and along with it, those of “humanity,” “reason,” and “justice.”

That’s when one brandishes idols, that is to say, ideas reduced to a kind of belch. On one side, “God’s will,” on the other, “human freedom.” These expressions provide a front, of course, for large-scale maneuvers aimed at seizing power and wealth. But this front is marked with figures of identification (or rather, of subjection) and of mobilization (or rather, of compulsive repetition). And these figures are painted on bombs.

God, man, will, freedom: who does not see that these are the four terms of a metaphysical order whose combinations saturate the horizon of a world of autonomy? The form of life that has grown old is that of autonomy. Autonomy of premise, autocracy of choice and of decision, auto-management of the identical, auto-production of value, of sign and of image, auto-reference of discourse, all these are used up, exhausted, just as the automobile, when one takes a closer look, is already given over to senility.2

To speak of a “clash of civilizations” is a sign of thoughtlessness. It is the same civilization that exploits oil and the God of Abraham and Jefferson, that declares us all equal and leaves each one to fend for himself, that pretends to cheat death by phantasm or by denial. Civilization of self-sufficiency, of self-satisfaction—and of self-division.

Discerning what is happening, the aging of a culture of autonomy that at the same time forms the ethical and symbolic baggage of globalization (yes, it is an old animal that is globalizing), does not provide any means of action, but should allow us to imagine where to look, if this is possible, for the signs of another youth.

It seems to me that we might at least say this: we will not oppose autonomy with heteronomy, with which it forms a pair. Being heteronomous toward another subject that is itself autonomous changes nothing, regardless of whether this other autonomous thing is named god, the market, technics, or life. But, in order to open a new path, we could try out the word exonomy. This word would evoke a law that would not be the law of the same or of the other, but one that would be unappropriable by either the same or the other. Just as exogamy goes outside of kinship, exonomy moves out of the binary familiarity of the self and the other.

This would be a law always linked to the outside of law, of which we have a few images from the past in the Moira of the Greeks,3 in the election of Abraham, in Dante’s Beatrice, or in Hamlet’s lucid madness. These are sharply contrasting, even contradictory images. But they all sketch an outside that is not an autonomy, that is not a mastery, that is neither the same nor the other. These are not clear images, I know, and besides, they too have grown old. That is why we must, for today, dryly and enthusiastically give the last word to Beckett: “Imagination dead, imagine.”

25 October 2002