Notes
Unless otherwise indicated, all translations from French and German are by Christine Irizarry.
ON BEGINNING AND PART I: EUROPE CROSSWAYS
1. See, e.g., Deleuze, Image-mouvement, pp. 11–12. On moving trains, see Althusser, Sur la philosophie, pp. 64–65; Écrits philosophiques et politiques, 1: 581ff.
2. An apt formulation for this might be: the beginning is the passage, which is the Derridean hypothesis, in a sense, and Montaigne’s as well. I hope to be able to specify elsewhere what I owe each of them.
3. “[T]here are three generations in a hundred years” (Herodotus, Histories 2.142, p. 152).
4. On this topic, see Guénoun, “Un Sémite,” p. 23.
5. In honor of my father’s memory, I should be more specific: not at the same time as so many others but a year earlier, in 1961, to flee from the fascistic terrorism of the O.A.S. (Secret Army Organization) after an attack aimed at him, who was in favor of Algerian independence, an attack which nearly nailed us—my father, his wife (my mother, maman), and me—there, if I may put it this way.
6. Citation from the French historian Hippolyte Taine in the Petit Robert (1990), p. 1699.
7. See the Petit Littré (1959), p. 1968.
8. For example, see the figures in Bergson, Matière et mémoire, p. 115 (picked up by Deleuze in Image-temps, p. 65), pp. 159, 169, and 181; Husserl, On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time, p. 29; Deleuze and Guattari, Qu’est-ce que la philosophie? p. 30; or further, among many other possible examples (Wittgenstein, Lacan), the very unexpected graphic representation of Dasein (I thank Paola Marrati for locating it) in Heidegger, Zollikoner Seminare, p. 3.
9. Deleuze, rereading Bergson, analyzes the problem of immobile sections of movement in the first chapter of Image-movement, pp. 9ff. [See Deleuze, Movement-Image, p. 61.]
10. The myth of Japheth attests this expansive constitution of Europe. Noah’s three sons (Shem, Ham, and Japheth) provided the substance of a mythological geography during the Middle Ages, since they were said to have received the “three parts of the world” to share out among themselves. In this distribution, Europe goes to Japheth. The interpretation by medieval commentators sees in this the attribution of extensio as such to Europe, based on Gen. 9.27: “God shall enlarge Japheth” (Bible [KJV]). Denis de Rougemont writes about this: “The word all these exegetes stress is the one we underlined . . . : dilatet in the Vulgate. Japheth (or Yepheth, from phatah, ‘to enlarge, to spread’) denotes latitude, width, expansion” (Rougemont, Idea of Europe, p. 20).
11. Relating continence and continentality is etymologically evident but semantically bold. Nevertheless, this occurs in some referential texts about Europe. There is the bull who carries off the princess (we shall discuss this later on), which, according to the geographer Mercator, whose Atlas was published in 1595, is “of great continence, but when brought to the other sex is in extreme heat. . . . Such is the nature of Europeans, notably the most Northern ones” (as quoted in Rougemont, Vingt-huit siècles d’Europe, p. 21). [The published translation, in The Idea of Europe, condenses this passage and omits any reference to “continence”: “. . . the bull-god ‘does aptly represent the natural disposition of the European’” (pp. 15–16).—Trans.]
12. See Derrida, “D’où vient l’Europe?” in Penser l’Europe à ses frontières, p. 22.
13. Kant, “Idee zu einer allgemeinen Geschichte in weltbürgerlicher Absicht” (henceforth cited as Idee), p. 407; “The Natural Principle of the Political Order Considered in Connection with the Idea of a Universal Cosmopolitical History” (henceforth cited as UH), no pagination; Idée d’une histoire universelle au point de vue cosmopolitique (henceforth cited as Idée), p. 25 [emphasis added, except for the terms “History” and “Romance”; further references to this text appear in the body of the text.—Trans.].
14. Kant, UH; Idee, pp. 408–409; Idée, pp. 25–26. [The words “progress though the political institutions” have been changed to “progress through the civil constitution,” the word “Continent” has been changed to “part of the world,” and parentheses have been added to conform to the cited German text and the French translation.—Trans.]
15. Kant, UH; Idee, p. 408; Idée, p. 25n. [Parentheses and the word “one” in the last sentence have been added to conform to the German text.—Trans.]
16. Kant, UH; Idee, p. 397n; Idée, pp. 17–18n; emphasis added. [The phrase “in the edifice of the world” has been substituted for “in the universe,” used in UH.—Trans.]
17. This seems to me Kant’s consistent and organized position in this text. Of course there are other texts in which he does mention Europe. Bernard Bourgeois cites some of them in “La philosophie allemande et l’Europe (de Kant à Hegel),” pp. 84–86, noting in his comment that “as reason is established (as the negation of any particularism), it does not owe anything to its European manifestation.” And further, “Europeanism is constituted by cosmopolitism and not the other way around”—which coincides, at least in one sense, with what I am trying to articulate here with regard to the priority of the universal as an expansion. On this score, it is fitting to establish, as Bourgeois does, that “rational Europe is not properly speaking European.” It is true that this touches on some astonishing formulations by Kant, who stated [in a handwritten note—Trans.], “I call a nation European only if the constraint it accepts is lawful” (“Europäisch nenne ich eine Nation, wenn sie nur den gesetzmäßigen Zwang annimmt”) (Kant, Ak. 15/2, p. 773), which excludes quite strictly any geographical or continental determination, and prefigures further developments, such as Étienne Balibar’s remarks about the Europes outside of Europe (see Balibar, “Quelles frontières de l’Europe?” in Penser l’Europe à ses frontières, pp. 90–100). In this context, is it suitable for Bourgeois to state, at the outset of his analysis, that “Kant carries out the identification of this continent with rationality”? He does immediately specify, however, that it is a continent that “negates its own particular and natural character, as well as any differentiation in its geographical determination.” But does it then even make sense to call it a “continent”? It is somewhat useless and can be hazardous in other analytical contexts, to which I shall come back later, by making Europe (precisely as a continent, that is to say, as a figure, as an identity) the subject of world history, exactly inasmuch as Europe would be the only place capable of negating itself—a sort of negative colonialism, in a way. The sentence “Europe is itself, and only as [n’est elle-même que] the locus of reason, universality, and self-identity” is unclear: while this “is . . . only as” [n’est . . . que] means that thinking of Europe in this way makes it nongeographical, it is Europe as such (“is itself”) that is the subject of this thought, and an equivalence between “universality” and “self-identity” is given, which should at least lend itself to a discussion. In any case, this leads Bourgeois (in the quoted sentence: “we shall discover a regular movement of progress through the civil constitution of our part of the world”) to translate Welttheil with “continent,” and thus to posit that “Europe is the continent ‘which is probably destined to give laws to all other parts of the world,’” which Kant does not say quite this way (he says neither “continent” nor “Europe,” precisely).
18. This dating will be discussed later on.
19. “Europe” seems to have been a fairly rare word in Greek antiquity, especially in its geographical meaning. Aside from mentions of Princess Europē, there are two occurrences in the Homeric Hymns (Hymn to Apollo, ll. 251 and 291), but none in the Iliad or the Odyssey; none in Hesiod; two in Pindar (Nemean 4, l. 70; Fragments, l. 70); four in Aeschylus (Persians, l. 799; Prometheus Bound, l. 736; Fragments, ll. 191 and 322); one in Sophocles (Fragments, p. 39); frequent uses in Herodotus, but very few in Thucydides.
20. Chantraine, Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue grecque, 1: 388.
21. Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Roman Antiquities 1.2.2; Pindar, Nemean 4, ll. 69–70; Aeschylus: Persians, l. 799, Prometheus Bound, l. 736; Euripides: Andromache, l. 801, Hecuba, l. 482, Ion, l. 1587, and some mentions in Fragments; Herodotus, Histories 1.4.103; 2.103; 3.96; 4.89, 143; 5.1, 12; 6.33, 43; 7.8–10, 20, 33, 50, 54, 56, 73, 126, 148, 174, and 185; 9.14.
22. See Herodotus, Histories 4.86.
23. “So Darius crossed . . .” (Herodotus, Histories 4.89; see also 4.143: “he took ship for Asia, leaving a Persian called Megabazus in command of his troops in Europe”); “towards the western darkness” (Pindar, Nemean 4, ll. 69–70); “Will not the whole barbarian army cross . . .” (Aeschylus, Persians, l. 799; see also Prometheus Bound, ll. 730–36: “This you must leave with stout heart and pass through the channel of Maeotis; and ever after among mankind there shall be great mention of your passing, and it shall be called after you the Bosporus. Then, leaving the soil of Europe, you shall come to the Asian continent”); “when on that earlier day Zeus’ famous son Heracles . . .” (Euripides, Andromache, l. 801); “The Persians . . .” (Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Roman Antiquities 1.2.2).
24. “Asia, for Herodotus, generally means the land of the Persian Empire during the time of Darius, and more particularly the peninsula of Anatolia” (Barguet, in Herodotus, OEuvres complètes, p. 1343n1).
25. See Euripides, Ion, “the two mainlands, Asia and Europe, on opposite sides” (ll.1586–87). “Continents” translates ēpeiroin, for which Liddell and Scott’s Greek-English Lexicon gives the following definition: ēpeiros, “terra firma, land, opp. the sea . . . later, a continent, esp. of Asia” (p. 776, col. 1). Bailly defines it as “Europe or Asia. The two continents (Europe and Asia, Libya being usually associated by the Ancients now with Europe now with Asia)” (Dictionnaire grec-français, p. 906). This latter detailed explanation demonstrates that tricontinentality (which Herodotus mentions and questions as such, e.g., Histories 2.16 and 4.42, 45, and 198) arises from the face-to-face structure, as a kind of duplication of a face-to-face relation with a set term, and that this head-on op-position, constitutively, is what opposes Europe and Asia, which is to say, as we shall see, Asia and its outside: “he had a dream. He seemed in his dream to see Hystaspes’ eldest son with wings growing out of his shoulder-blades; with one wing he cast a shadow over Asia, with the other he overshadowed Europe” (Herodotus, Histories 1.209, pp. 91–92).
26. See this remark by Boccaccio, as quoted by Denis de Rougemont: “There is no part of the world that may be said to be common to all nations unless it be the island of Crete. . . . The ancients liked to divide the inhabited world of our upper hemisphere into three parts, which they named Asia, Europe, and Asia. . . . And the island of Crete seems to be situated at the borders of these three continents” (Rougemont, Idea of Europe, p. 37).
27. See Euripides, Ion, “Their sons in turn, at the appointed time, will settle in the island cities of the Cyclades, and the lands along the shore, which will give strength to my land; they will colonize the plains of the two mainlands, Asia and Europe, on opposite sides” (ll. 1580–87; emphasis added).
28. See Herodotus, Histories: “India, for example, is the most easterly part of the inhabited world. . . . Then again, Arabia is the most southerly inhabited land. . . . These are the most remote countries in Asia and Libya. However, I have no reliable information to pass on about the western margins of Europe, because I at any rate do not accept that there is a river which the natives [barbarians] there call the Eridanus (said to issue into the northern sea . . .) . . . despite my efforts, I have been unable to find anyone who has personally seen a sea on the other side of Europe and can tell me about it” (3.106, 107, and 115, pp. 212–14, 216).
29. This can twice be confirmed—ad absurdum: first, we cannot remain insensitive to the fact that the name “Europe,” so frequently used by Herodotus, is so rare in Thucydides. Indeed, the question of crossing continents, and their relation to one another, at the very heart of the former’s project, is less actively present in the latter’s work. This reinforces the impression that, linguistically speaking, the name was not very commonly used, since, by contrast, Thucydides does mention Persia, Xerxes, Darius, and so on, several times. The name Europe is only featured once in Aeschylus’s Persians—where one might expect it more often. Second, in Herodotus both mentions of Europe as a kind of country, as a locus posited for itself, rather corroborate one’s intuition: the statements, “he also invariably added . . . that Europe was a particularly beautiful place” (Herodotus, Histories 7.5), and “Ionians—the ones living in Europe” (7.9) are only uttered by two Persians—rather treacherous ones, in fact, since they prod Xerxes to go to war when he “was at first rather reluctant to make war” (7.5, p. 405). Europe’s wealth, as a country (“a particularly beautiful place, where every kind of cultivated tree grew and the soil was excellent” [7.5, p. 405]), is a fantasy or deception derived from Asians. Furthermore, it is important “not to let those despicable Ionians—the ones living in Europe—get away with making fools of us” (7.9, p. 408; emphasis added).
30. For example, “Eventually this expedition of his across the mainland brought him from Asia over into Europe, where he defeated the Scythians” (Herodotus, Histories 2.103); “So Darius crossed over into Europe . . .” (4.89); “The Persians crossed the Hellespont by ship and began to march through Europe” (6.43); “You say that you will bridge the Hellespont and march through Europe to Greece” (7.10); “the army the Mysians and Teucrians raised—this was before the Trojan War—with which they crossed the Bosporus, invaded Europe, conquered the whole of Thrace” (7.20); “Meanwhile, his men had been bridging the Hellespont from Asia to Europe” (7.33); “Xerxes poured a libation from a golden cup into the sea and, facing the sun, asked the sun-god to avert any accidents which might stop him from reaching the outer limits of Europe and conquering the whole continent” (7.54); “Over on the European side, Xerxes watched his army” (7.56); “as soon as they learnt that Xerxes was poised to enter Europe, they sent messengers to the Isthmus” (7.172); “Xerxes was on the verge of crossing over into Europe from Asia” (7.174); and so forth. In addition to these, there are the previously quoted instances in Aeschylus, Euripides, Pindar, Dionysius of Halicarnassus (as well as Thucydides).
31. Histoire de l’Europe, ed. Carpentier and Lebrun, p. 13.
32. Grand Larousse encyclopédique, 7: 7122.
33. Editor and translator Philippe-Ernest Legrand in [Moschus], Bucoliques grecs, p. 141.
34. This first developed narrative thus dates from a fairly late period. See Rougemont, Idea of Europe, pp. 7ff.
35. Not as far as this text is concerned, of course, but in terms of the legend that is told. [References to Moschus are given parenthetically in the body of the text.—Trans.]
36. The Greek word pothos means passionate desire, sensual desire, love (see Liddell and Scott’s Greek-English Lexicon; Bailly, Dictionnaire grec-français, p. 1580).
37. This African ancestry through the mother seems collateral. But the paternal line is direct: Agenor is a son of Libya. See Graves, Greek Myths, pp. 194ff.
38. See the description of this astonishing bovine (whose “body was bright chestnut” and whose eyes “ever sent forth lightning of desire”) in Moschus, p. 192.
39. “So spake he, and all he spake was fulfilled” (Moschus, p. 196). Robert Graves tells us that Zeus’s seduction of Europe occurred at the beginning of May, as “part of the fertility ritual during which Europe’s May-garland was carried in procession” (Greek Myths, p. 197). The tale of the abduction also appears in a much shorter form in Ovid, Metamorphoses 2.836.
40. “Asia is, characteristically, the Orient quarter of the globe—the region of origination. It is indeed a Western world for America; but as Europe presents on the whole, the centre and end of the old world, and is absolutely the West—so Asia is absolutely the East.
“In Asia arose the Light of Spirit, and therefore the history of the world” (Hegel, Philosophy of History [Sibree], p. 104).
41. Herodotus, Histories 4.45, pp. 249–50; emphasis added.
42. Hegel, Philosophy of History (Sibree), p. 95.
43. The discovery of America reproduces the gesture that constitutes Europe and its (re)becoming-visible: in this sense, America is Europe re-produced: the abduction, the formative movement of Europe reconstituted, bared and openly displayed. “There lies your way, due west / Then westward ho!” (Shakespeare, Twelfth Night 3.1, p. 72).
44. Chantraine, Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue grecque, 1: 388.
45. Homer, Hymns, pp. 22–23; emphasis added. There are two identical mentions in the Hymns, in “To Apollon”: ll. 285–92 and, above, ll. 247–52.
46. This statement is reinforced by Aristotle, who writes: “The nations in cold regions, particularly in Europe, are full of spirit but are deficient in intelligence and skill. . . . By contrast, those in Asia have intelligent minds and are skilled in the crafts, but they lack spirit. . . . But as far as the race of the Greeks, just as it occupies an intermediate region, so it shares in both conditions” (Aristotle, Politics 7.7, p. 12; emphasis added). Greece is thus an intermediate region between (cold) Europe and Asia. Therefore it is not strictly speaking in Europe. Note also Denis de Rougemont’s remark that Herodotus’s definition of Europe is of “a northern region not too clearly distinguished from Scythia (which we think of today as the Russian plain). According to him, its axis is the Danube, which he calls the Ister” (Rougemont, Idea of Europe, p. 35, on Herodotus, Histories 4.48–49).
47. This idea of a passage to Europe as constituting Europe itself—its formation and its concept—should, at this point, lead us to ask what comes across in this passage, what is transported, abducted, and carried away. We shall come back to this, of course. For now, let us just note that Plato (though an unverified or suspect Plato) says that what comes across, is abducted and carried away, is the law. “Socrates: But whence is it that the best of those ordinances come? Do you know? Companion: From Crete, so they say. Socrates: Then the people there use the most ancient laws in Greece? Companion: Yes. Socrates: Then do you know who were their good kings? Minos and Rhadamanthus, the sons of Zeus and Europa; those laws were theirs” (Plato, Minos 318c–d). The children that Zeus has with Europē in Crete, at the end of the journey, are the makers of laws.
48. Edmund Husserl, “The Vienna Lecture: Philosophy and the Crisis of European Humanity,” p. 276. The lecture was given in Vienna, on May 7 and 10, 1935. Cited in the text as “Vienna Lecture.”
49. “The spiritual telos of European humanity, in which the particular telos of particular nations and of individual men is contained, lies in the infinite, is an infinite idea toward which, in concealment, the whole spiritual becoming aims, so to speak. As soon as it becomes consciously recognized in the development as telos, it necessarily also becomes practical as a goal of the will” (Husserl, “Vienna Lecture,” p. 275; emphasis added, except for telos).
50. Shortly after drafting these pages, I became acquainted with Jacques Derrida’s admirable commentary on Francis Fukuyama’s book The End of History and the Last Man, specifically: “Permit me to recall very briefly that a certain deconstructive procedure, at least the one in which I thought I had to engage, consisted from the outset in putting into question the onto-theo- but also archeo-teleological concept of history—in Hegel, Marx, or even in the epochal thinking of Heidegger. Not in order to oppose it with an end of history or an anhistoricity, but, on the contrary, in order to show that this onto-theo-archeo-teleology locks up, neutralizes, and finally cancels historicity” (Derrida, Specters of Marx, p. 93). I am in total agreement with these words: they validate, after the fact, what the discovery of Derrida brought many of us, and the enthusiasm this generated during the years his thinking emerged. I would only add today that we should read Hegel (and Marx even more, of course) like this as well, it seems to me; that is, to spot in them the work of a nonteleological historicity, which also inhabits their concept of history. Which comes down to this: reading Hegel against himself; reading in Hegel the historicity of the process rather than his assigning ends and origins; reading Hegel in movement rather than in his beginning or ending; or, reading (taking) Hegel right in the middle. All things considered, this may come close to what Louis Althusser, at a different time, was suggesting with the concept of “process without a subject,” in which he saw the “greatest theoretical debt linking Marx to Hegel” [“la dette principale positive de Marx à l’égard de Hegel”] (Althusser, “Marx’s Relation to Hegel,” p. 183; “Sur le rapport de Marx à Hegel,” p. 109).
51. See Barker, “Conception of Europe,” in Legacy of Rome, ed. Bailey, pp. 45–89.
52. Why favor the democratic model rather than other types of power organization found in Greece? Because, as a clue or marker of the “eventfulness” or the newness of the Greek moment (to remain faithful to Kant’s text, quoted earlier), I am using the criterion of the greatest transfer, the greatest transmission of history (and stories, and thinking), and of this public culture of the “learned public.” And we owe Athens the greatest quantum of text transmission, thinking, and history. It is in Athens that history begins—with Thucydides, Kant said. It is not an accident that this place, this time, and this point are the ones of the democratic—or archi-political—experience as well.
53. See Guénoun, L’enlèvement de la politique.
54. To refer to the political reality of their city-state, Athenians would not have said “Athens” as we do (as in Athens declares war; Athens gives itself a constitution, and so on), but rather “the Athenians.”
55. In this regard, it is meaningful that Athens is one of the few Greek political city-states (the only one?) that is not exactly restricted to a city. As a political entity, which is to say, Attica, Athens is already the product of a (small) internal colonization, as it were. Now, more than any of the other cities, it is Athens that brings about the later evolution (as a commercial city, as well as a culture, politics, and way of thinking).
56. See Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Social Contract, bk. 3, chaps. 12 (“How the Sovereign Authority Maintains Itself”) and 15 (“Deputies or Representatives”).
57. I am proposing here that the public, the publicness of the public (the publicness of the thing—the res publica, or what we now term public space), is exactly the supposedly common locus of a nonassembled body politic. The public is the nonassembled common—communication.
58. See Jean-Luc Nancy, introduction to Penser l’Europe à ses frontières, pp. 14–16.
59. “In Italy at large the inequality between allies who were really subjects and Roman citizens who acted as sovereigns produced a second and even more menacing cleavage; and though after the Social War a remedy was sought in the grant of Roman citizenship to the allies (88 b.c.), it is obvious that a grant of citizenship which only meant inclusion in a civic assembly that they could not attend was no real bond of union between the Italians and the city of Rome” (Barker, “Conception of Europe,” in Legacy of Rome, ed. Bailey, p. 56; emphasis added).
60. “[I]t is obvious that a grant of citizenship which only meant inclusion in a civic assembly that they could not attend was no real bond of union between the Italians and the city of Rome, and only proved the inability of the City-State, which, with the world in its hands, remained in the sphere of civic ideas, to form even an Italian State. But it was neither the struggles in Rome nor the cleavage in Italy which in the issue subverted the civic constitution: it was the condition and the problems of the provinces of the Mediterranean littoral” (Barker, “Conception of Europe,” in Legacy of Rome, ed. Bailey, p. 56; emphasis added).
61. “Thus there is no sharp boundary between the world and the ‘great household’ of the empire. . . . There is no boundary in principle between the world and the empire” (Patočka, HE, p. 21). “For that reason there can be no substantive separation or difference between the empire and the universe” (p. 34).
62. “Cet empire absolu sur la terre et sur l’onde, / Ce pouvoir souverain que j’ai sur tout le monde . . .” (Corneille, Cinna 2.1; emphasis added). Trans. in id., The Cid; Cinna . . . , p. 138.
63. “Rome, avec une joie et sensible et profonde, / Se démet en vos mains de l’empire du monde” (Corneille, Cinna 5.3.1765–66; emphasis added). Trans. here from Greenberg, Canonical States, p. 126.
64. See my essay “De l’assemblement,” in L’exhibition des mots.
65. Thus in this sense, this (common) place is the locus of a divergence. It is the (common) place from which the opposition of the theological and the political is posited—their opposition, the mimetic rivalry between church and empire. And this gives a slightly different resonance to this double term (the theologico-political), compared to what one often hears, especially in the wake of Carl Schmitt. Indeed, this compound often designates a kind of unique reality or homogeneous medium that is both theological and political, be it at the cost of the difference, between the first and the second part of the compound, of a secularization.
If the political were a “secularized theological,” then the political would always be theological. And this brings the permanent risk of a kind of dissolution of the specificity or autonomy of the political in relation to the “religious.” But such is not the setup suggested here. The locus (Rome) that joins the theological and the political is the space of their rivalry, their competition, their war, and their hatred. Clearly, this war remains incomprehensible if one fails to determine the common space where it takes place, its battlefield: the space of their common provenance, of their kinship, and of their multiple connections. But it is a war, in fact—symbolic, or military—in which politics and “religion,” precisely, never cease to posit, display, and reassert their adversity and difference. Decisively, the theologico-political is the locus of the theologico-political difference. Or to put it another way, the mark that associates its terms does divide them; the connecting mark that hyphenates them is the very mark of their disunion.
66. Though it does not uniformly concern all of Greece and involves spaces other than Greece, including parts of Rome itself, in time and in space.
67. Toward the Agora, followed by the Pnyx, then the Odeon—successive places in Athens where the ecclesia was convened: first the common space of the marketplace, the political, and theater; then the separate space of the political; and finally the unique place of the political and theater together.
68. See Guénoun, L’enlèvement de la politique.
69. See Guénoun, L’exhibition des mots.
70. On this differentiation, see Dommange, “Sommes-nous capables d’un monde?”
71. See Nancy, L’oubli de la philosophie, p. 102; “The Forgetting of Philosophy,” in id., Gravity of Thought.
72. This question will come up again in pt. IV.
73. Although this book owes a great deal of its original theoretical impetus to Brague, Europe, la voie romaine (trans. as Eccentric Culture), which analyzes the many links binding Europe to the Roman heritage, I must object to it that Europe is not strictly Roman. Brague shirks two major problems in ascribing Europe solely to Romanity: (1) Rome has heirs other than Europe, or heirs who are not strictly European (in a certain sense, Islam, but also the Eastern Orthodox Church and the Byzantine Empire); (2) Europe, as Europe, also has a non-Roman ancestry (Germanity). Europe, then, is at least the overlapping of these heterogeneous layers, and one needs to understand by which process this overlapping comes to produce a sharply drawn figure, instead of a shapeless confusion. On this overlap, see Balibar, “Quelles frontières de l’Europe?” in Penser l’Europe à ses frontières, p. 94.
74. See the entry for face à in the Petit Robert (1990 ed.), p. 746.
75. Obviously, the reference here is to Lacan, “Le stade du miroir comme formateur de la fonction du Je,” in id., Écrits, pp. 93–100; “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience,” in Écrits: A Selection, pp. 3–9. See also political commentary on this issue in Dommange, “Le miroir identitaire.”
76. And in this way, the movement of figuration is a process of identification. Indeed, if the figure is to be conceived of as a return (that is, as return to self, reversal toward oneself), what it carries out is a return to itself, a return identifying oneself as one’s selfsame self. This is the fate of the return to the origin, as it were (of the return as producing the origin, as redoing the beginning as the origin): it comes back to the same, and posits the origin as the very identity toward which it is coming back—only to fail to recognize itself and to miss itself, in good specular logic.
77. From a factual point of view, one could bolster this hypothesis in various ways. Let us note three of them. First, a somewhat trivial reminder: it seems that the first attested mention of the inhabitants of various European countries (in the modern sense of the word), named “Europenses,” occurs in the Mozarabic Chronicle of 754 (once attributed to Isidore, bishop of Beja), which narrates the victory against the Arabs at Poitiers (see Rougemont, Idea of Europe, p. 44). Second, more significantly, as various commentators have noted (and often downplayed), most of the plans or projects to unify the states of present-day Europe (often considered forerunners of the idea of a European union) have been projects that their authors have justified as necessary to unite against the Saracen or Turkish enemy. That is true of the first two supposedly “European” schemes: Pierre Dubois’s treatise De recuperatione terrae sancte (1306), which aimed to organize “Christian society” or the “Christian republic” (since it is still explicitly a question of Christendom, and not Europe) as a kind of federation, for and by “reconquering the Holy Land” (see Rougemont, Idea of Europe, pp. 61ff. [and also Pierre Dubois, Recovery of the Holy Land—Trans.]; and also Bernard Voyenne, Histoire de l’idée européenne, pp. 53–58; and Traité d’alliance & conféderation entre le Roi Louis XI. Georges Roi de Boheme et la Seigneurie de Venise, pour résister au Turc [1463; sic; the title of the treatise, as Rougemont points out, is the one found in the table of contents of volume 2 of the 1747 edition of the Mémoires of Philippe de Commynes, which reprints the treatise with corrections, starting on p. 424—Trans.], a project by George or Jiříz Poděbrad, king of Bohemia, inspired by Antoine Marini, a Frenchman). Not to mention, obviously, what will later function as a retrospective ideology in the foundation, or fundraising, of the Crusades. Furthermore, it is remarkable that the “eclipse” of the European idea during several centuries in the Middle Ages, underscored by Rougemont (who firmly believes in “twenty-eight centuries” of Europe [Idea of Europe, p. ix]), falls between two periods in which the dangers of Islam seem much more active on the continent (and thus during a long period of a kind of latency): between the eighth century, after forays into the south, and the fifteenth century, during the threat in the east—or to put it another way, between the after-Poitiers and the after-Constantinople. Between these two periods, “several centuries of ‘European’ silence” occurred, and they may well correspond with a provisional and relative stabilization of the relationship between Islam and Christianity (Rougemont, Idea of Europe, pp. 49ff.).
78. This proposition is structurally based on Brague, La voie romaine, pp. 15–18, but the latter asserts that the east-west schism is what constitutes Europe (p. 13).
79. A more nuanced approach is needed here. We shall come back to this later on.
80. This fiction has a complicated but distinct relationship with that described in Lacoue-Labarthe, La fiction du politique (trans. as Heidegger, Art and Politics).
81. See pt. III of this book, which discusses this topic.
82. The word “straits” = détroits in French.—Trans.
83. “Hesiod died at Ascra. Later, when the town was destroyed by the Thespians, the inhabitants who survived the ravage found refuge in Orchomenus. An oracle then gave the order also to collect Hesiod’s ashes. They were placed in a tomb at the center of the agora, next to the tomb of Minyas, their eponymous hero, and this means that Hesiod, like Minyas, was honored as a founder of the town. This fact was noted by Aristotle in Constitution of Orchomenus” (Mazon, preface, in Hesiod, Théogonie, p. ix).
84. See Husserl: “Spiritual Europe has a birthplace. By this I mean not a geographical birthplace, in one land, though this is also true, but rather a spiritual birthplace in a nation” (“Vienna Lecture,” p. 276).
85. Dating Europe’s constitution as such from the end of the Middle Ages this way clashes with the widely held conviction that Europe was born during the Middle Ages, or at least experienced its first prosperous period as Europe then. This belief ignores the rare but unquestionable appearances of the terms “Europe” and “Europeans” as early as the seventh century, however: see, e.g., what is called Carolingian Europe, “Europa vel regnum Caroli,” in the East Frankish chronicles known as the Annals of Fulda (end of the ninth century). In this regard, let us note the following: (1) The constitution of Europe that I am describing is a process: while this movement seems to lead to a set configuration after the symmetrical fall of Constantinople, on the one hand, and Granada, on the other, this does not mean that the idea of Europe springs out of nothingness, fully armed, around 1450. It is the fruit of a long elaboration, spread over several centuries, making this concept available, little by little (alongside those of Christianity, the Occident, and the empire), to designate an ongoing process. The same could be said (and will be said: see pt. II of this book) of numerous other historical constellations: the ideas of reformation, revolution, and nation, which take on a stable and determined structure only after undergoing a long formative period. What I am saying here is that the dominant idea of the Middle Ages (if it is possible to encompass such a complex span of time) is not the idea of Europe—far from it—but the idea of Christianity, with its various avatars. A process is nonetheless already at work with its first designations, but this will not precipitate decisively into a continental figure until the fifteenth century. (2) Furthermore, the idea of Europe does not directly impose itself either, as a direct designation for the new situation, during the Renaissance, when Europe had firmly taken shape. For all its explicit statements, the sixteenth century is only moderately European. It is during the seventeenth century that the idea imposes itself and that the name comes into common use as appropriate. Ideas take time. See Rougemont, Idea of Europe, pp. 51–123; Pastoureau and Schmitt, Europe: Mémoire et emblèmes, pp. 49–140; and Lecoq, “L’Europe, émergence d’une image” (which Laurent Ripart kindly brought to my attention).
86. See Moschus, pp. 190ff. The description takes up more than twenty verses.
87. See Herodotus, Histories 4.45.
88. In a sense, the cow too will come back. Europa’s brother Cadmus leaves Tyre to look for his sister: “Cadmus and his companions proceeded on foot to the Delphic Oracle. When he asked where Europe might be found, the Pythoness advised him to give up his search and, instead, follow a cow and build a city wherever she should sink down for weariness. . . . some cowherds . . . sold him a cow. . . . This beast he drove eastward through Boeotia, never allowing her to pause until, at last, she sank down where the city of Thebes now stands, and here he erected an image of Athene” (Graves, Greek Myths, 58e–f, p. 195, following Pausanias, Description of Greece, 9.12.1–2).
89. See Brague, Europe, la voie romaine, pp. 30–34.
90. On the sea, see Hegel, Philosophy of History, pp. 92ff.
91. For example, Europe crossing over, Europe abducted. This myth is admittedly not Roman, but Rome did not invent the sea; it extended and universalized it into the principle of its space and its world. The marine element calls for some transportation at the origin, and the myth of Europe, a myth of sea- and border-crossers, is a striking example. But foundation is something else: in order to found, one has to tear the origin away from the motion of the marine element, snatch it away from the sea, and bury it. “An oracle had warned Hesiod to avoid the ‘Nemean’ area. Thus Hesiod took care to stay away from the Peloponnesian road. But he went to Oenoë, in Ozolian Lokris, and there he seduced the daughter of his host. The young woman’s brothers trapped him in a place precisely called ‘Nemea,’ killed him, and threw his body into the sea. A pod of dolphins found him; they carried his body to the mouth of the Corinthian Gulf, at Rhion and Molykria. The Lokrians were celebrating the feast of ‘Rhia,’ at Molykria, when they saw the poet’s body, with his marine cortege, wash ashore. They immediately sought out the murderers, found them, and threw them into the ocean. Hesiod’s body was buried near Nemea, but the exact place is unknown: the people of Naupaktos are keeping it a secret so as to prevent the Orchomenians, who want to remove the poet’s ashes, from doing so” (Paul Mazon, preface to Hesiod, Théogonie, pp. xii–xiii). Let us recall that this body is the body of a founder; see n. 83 above.
92. “Her genius was not creative but assimilative; its function was not to originate but to adapt; and not unfrequently, in the process of adaptation, to transmute. Her intellectual activities are, I think, happily described by one of the writers as those of a great ‘intermediary’” (H. H. Asquith, introduction to Legacy of Rome, ed. Bailey, p. 2). See also Brague, Europe, la voie romaine, pp. 30ff.
93. “If this were all, one might be disposed to conclude that Rome had left little of her own to the modern world. . . . There is, however, one great and conspicuous exception—the legacy of Roman Law. This was the domain in which Rome showed constructive genius. She founded, developed, and systematized the jurisprudence of the world” (Asquith, introduction to The Legacy of Rome, ed. Bailey, p. 8). [Note that the French translation introduces “civilized” here: “la jurisprudence du monde civilisé” (Héritage de la Grèce et de Rome, ed. Finley and Bailey, p. 465).—Trans.] See also Brague, Europe, la voie romaine, pp. 30ff.
94. See Hegel quoted in this book, pt. I, §7.
95. Imperial Roman law is the becoming universal, extensive transfer, and topical generalization of this abstraction, and specifically of its Greek metaphysico-mathematical aspect.
96. Arma, obsides, frumentum, pecuniam imperare: such Latin phrases, referring to the procurement, respectively, of arms, hostages, corn or wheat, and money, appear in Julius Caesar, Gallic War.—Trans.
97. Ernout and Meillet, Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue latine, p. 311.
98. “The development of a common law for the empire accompanied, as it helped to promote, the development of a common citizenship. From early days, far back in the history of the Republic, the praetors had been gradually formulating in their edict a new procedure and system of law, which should be generally applicable to cases in which others than Roman citizens were concerned. . . . Commercial reasons dictated the growth of the new jurisprudence: a law was needed for commercial cases, in which foreign traders were concerned, and which grew more and more frequent as Rome became more and more a commercial city. The ius civile of Rome . . . was too archaic, and too much the law of a limited agricultural community, to suit these cases; and the law which the praetors began to apply, and which was thus the foundation of the ius gentium, was the more modern merchant law which had come into being, and attained a general validity, in the Mediterranean area. Building on this foundation . . . the praetors formulated in their edict a system of law which had at once the simplicity . . . and the universality of application which would suit the conditions of general Mediterranean trade. This simple and universal law, thus formulated by the praetors, became connected with the conception of a law of nature” (Barker, “Conception of Europe,” in Legacy of Rome, ed. Bailey, p. 68).
99. Thus far I have used the two terms “Christianity” and “religion” parsimoniously, because of my circumspect approach to their apparent self-evidence. One would have to produce the concept of “religion” (e.g., Christian religion) with some rigor and accept that the (Christian) religious as such is not contemporaneous with the events discussed here (that is, the constitution of the empire and the church). The constitution of Christianity, and thus of the “Christian religion,” comes later and is something else. Overlooking this, in a way, would be like refusing to take into account the birth of aesthetics during the Enlightenment with the pretext that cathedrals and frescoes already existed during the Middle Ages. But we have to admit that refusing to think of the assembly (ecclesia) of the first disciples of Christ as religion is consonant with a certain (Protestant) theology, Karl Barth’s, for example. That is too bad—or good. See pt. II, §12 of this book.
100. See pt. III of this book.
101. At least the first part, “neither Greek nor Jew”: see Gal. 3:28, Rom. 10:12, Eph. 2:14–15, Col. 3:11.
102. “There remains another branch of Literature . . . in which Rome can truly be said to have led the way: that of Letter-writing. Cicero was here the pioneer, and in his eight or nine hundred letters he has shown himself a master of all the resources of epistolary Art” (Asquith, introduction, Legacy of Rome, ed. Bailey, p. 3). Cicero: according to this hypothesis, the consolidation of this genre barely preceded the formation of the empire.
103. Hegel, Philosophy of Right [Dyde], p. 233; emphasis added and text modified to approximate more closely the German text and its French translation, which introduce the notions of legal relations and contracts. German text: “So bringt sie ferner durch diß größte Medium der Verbindung entfernte Länder in the Beziehung des Verkehrs, eines den Vertrag einführenden rechtlichen Verhältnisses” (Hegel, Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechtes, p. 234). French translation cited by the author: “ce trafic lui-même crée des rapports juridiques où s’introduit le contrat” (Hegel, Principes de la philosophie du droit, para. 247, pp. 252–53). Dyde’s original translation is as follows: “By means of the sea, the greatest medium of communication, the desire for wealth brings distant lands into an intercourse, which leads to commercial exchange.”—Trans.
104. “Heaven’s high providence in vain / Has sever’d countries with the estranging main [i.e., sea—Trans.]” (Horace Carm. 1.3, in The Odes and Carmen Saeculare).
105. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, pp. 233ff.; emphasis added and trans. and punctuation slightly modified.
106. Apropos of this last segment, the [French] translator and commentator Robert Derathé adds the following note: “As E. Fleischmann notes (op. cit., p. 250 [i.e., Fleischmann, La philosophie politique de Hegel]), this is an allusion to Fichte, who writes in ‘Der geschlossene Handelsstaat’ [The Closed Commercial State] (bk. 3, beginning of chap. 3): ‘Certain parts of the surface of the earth, together with their inhabitants, are visibly determined by nature to form whole political entities. Their entire area is kept apart from the rest of the earth by large rivers, seas, inaccessible mountains. . . . It is these hints from nature—regarding what should remain together or be separated—to which one refers when one speaks of the natural boundaries of realms: a consideration one should take far more seriously than one commonly does’” (Hegel, Principes de la philosophie du droit, p. 252n; Fichte, “Der geschlossene Handelsstaat” [The Closed Commercial State], p. 480).
107. Dr. Jean-Marc Fischer, who for years has lived and worked with the Macuna people in the Amazonian region of Colombia, has called the zone where they gather “Apaporis,” after the name of a tributary of the Amazon River along which they are scattered—and this designates their meeting. “Water is in fact the uniting element, and it is the mountains which create divisions. . . . France and Spain, for example, are separated by the Pyrenees. . . . Mountains create divisions between nations, customs, and characters. But a country is constituted by the river which flows through it, and both banks of the river properly belong to one and the same country. Silesia is the basin of the Oder, Bohemia and Saxony are the valley of the Elbe, and Egypt is the valley of the Nile” (Hegel, Philosophy of World History [Nisbet], p. 159; emphasis added).
108. “Similarly, history tells us that Brittany and Britain were united for centuries under English rule, and it took many wars to sever the links between them. Sweden formerly possessed Finland, as well as Courland, Livonia, and Estonia. Norway, however, did not belong to Sweden, but had a far more cordial relationship with Denmark” (Hegel, Philosophy of World History [Nisbet], p. 160). To choose a random Mediterranean example, the links between Oran (Algeria) and Valence (France), or Oran and Alicante (Spain), exhibit an undeniable, centuries-long vitality, despite the religious, political, national, and thus military, barriers that have kept the south and north Mediterranean coasts apart.
109. Here is another ordinary example, picked up during a trip, which confirms Hegel’s remarks: residents of Bergen (Norway) today sometimes mention their city’s stronger ties until the twentieth century with London than with the Norwegian hinterland. We can see that this is not a matter of proximity. Here Hegel goes very far: “Cadiz used to have closer links with America than with Madrid” (Hegel, Philosophy of World History [Nisbet], p. 159).
110. Fichte, “Der geschlossene Handelsstaat” [The Closed Commercial State], p. 480; emphasis added.
111. Hegel, Philosophy of World History (Nisbet), p. 160.
112. “Allow me a piece of advice when working: there is always an advantage, when analyzing concepts, in starting from very concrete and simple situations and not from philosophical precedents, or even from the problems as such (the one, the multiple, etc.)—for example, regarding multiplicities, you have to start from, What is a pack (of animals, different from a single animal)? What is an ossuary? Or, as you have done so well, What is a relic? And regarding events, What is five p.m.?” (Deleuze, preface, in Martin, Variations, p. 8).
113. Hegel, Philosophy of History (Sibree), p. 95.
114. “Elle est retrouvée. / Quoi?—L’Éternité. / C’est la mer allée / Avec le soleil [It has been found again. / What?—Eternity. / It is the sea gone away / With the sun]” (Rimbaud, OEuvres, p. 160).
115. See Brague, Europe, la voie romaine, p. 9.
116. Or even other empires. The (truly fascinating) question regarding what the very idea of empire owes to orientalism remains to be discussed in depth. See Barker, “Conception of Europe,” in Legacy of Rome, ed. Bailey. See also Jan Patočka’s hypotheses, discussed in pt. III of this book.
117. See Derrida, L’autre cap; the famous quotation by Paul Valéry appears on p. 26. In this, Rougemont sees a topos of geographical discourse, more particularly in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. [See Rougemont, also quoting Valéry, in Idea of Europe: “‘Will Europe become what it is in reality—that is, a little cape on the continent of Asia? . . .’ Elsewhere Valéry calls Europe ‘a kind of cape of the old continent, a western appendix to Asia’” (pp. 30 and 30n26).—Trans.]
118. Hegel, Philosophy of World History (Nisbet), p. 196. And he goes on, “The sea provides that wholly peculiar outlet which Asiatic life lacks, the outlet which enables life to step beyond itself. It is this which has invested European political life with the principle of individual freedom.” We may juxtapose to these remarks facts (or fantasies) such as: “Europe is the continent of water. . . . This restless, infinitely carved-up peninsula, is in fact the most watered place in the world: there is a kilometer of coast for every 289 square kilometers of land. Water seeps in everywhere, travels upward into broad estuaries or fjords, and surrounds coastal islands or islets. There is no distance from the sea that much exceeds a thousand kilometers, and most places are much closer (Switzerland, known as a continental country, is less than six hundred kilometers away from the ocean and three hundred from the Adriatic Sea). . . . But water is not only at the periphery. Three great liquid avenues start from the ‘water tower of Europe’ bordered by the triangle formed by Bern, Stuttgart, and St. Moritz, and they have been (and still are) the axes of the West’s traffic. In the webbing of this primary network, a system of rivers takes shape, which harmoniously distributes water everywhere, diversifies broad connecting basins, unfolds, and then meets the sea” (Voyenne, Histoire de l’idée européenne, p. 12).
119. And this brings about the ambiguous heritage of Rome for Europe: “the Roman Empire could not have arisen in the continent” (Hegel, Philosophy of World History [Nisbet], p. 196). Like Rome, Europe is constituted by its relationship with the sea. But as a continent, Rome was impossible—for Europe, of course, this is more equivocal: Europe is really a continent, but a noncontinental continent, as it were, a peninsula. (See the theme of Europe as a bigger Greece, e.g., in Rougemont, Idea of Europe, p. 31.)
120. As we know, this is what Marxism will thematize as its “three sources”: English political economy, French socialism, and German philosophy.
121. See Balibar, “L’Europe après le communisme,” p. 82.
122. See Guénoun, “Sur les (prétendues) sorties du (prétendu) communisme.”
123. See Balibar, “L’Europe après le communisme.”
124. As Derrida puts it; see id., Schibboleth, p. 96, and Specters of Marx.
125. As Karl Marx proposed to do with Hegelian dialectics.—Trans.
PART II: ON NATIONAL REVOLUTION
1. Whereas Muslims who preserved their religious allegiance remained after Islam lost political control elsewhere (e.g., in Aquitaine and Sicily), in Andalusia it was wiped from the map, according to Stétié, Lumière sur lumière. Though Stétié’s argument is valid only for western Europe, and the situation in the Balkans was different, it perhaps corresponds in some respects to my characterization of the constitution of Europe as the repression [refoulement] of Islam. However, Islam is making a comeback, as with all repressed memories.
2. See the debate over whether Turkey belongs in Europe.
3. See Brague, Europe, la voie romaine, pp. 108–20.
4. The Eastern Roman Empire thus invokes Greece to reflect on its difference with Rome. (From Fichte to Heidegger, Germanity similarly claimed to be a return to Hellenicity, above and against the reference to Rome and the Latin legacy.) Nevertheless, Byzantium remains the Eastern Roman Empire: Constantinople is a Rome redone, reproduced, and doubled. See Histoire de l’Europe, ed. Carpentier and Lebrun, pp. 185–86, esp.: “When Constantine decided to found Constantinople, he intended to reproduce Rome on the shores of the Bosporus. Even if it was necessary to twist the map a bit to find seven hills in it, the city’s organization strove to reproduce the ancient city in Latium” (p. 184).
5. On the long genesis of the European idea during the Middle Ages, see, e.g., Lecoq, “L’Europe, émergence d’une image.” The awareness of a purely “western” singularity evidently played a large part in the constitution of what we call Europe, that is to say, western Europe. This related, of course, to the schism with the Eastern Orthodox Church, the existence of the Eastern Roman Empire, and the ongoing rivalry with it. But let us reiterate that this difference, no matter how important, does not seem characteristic of the idea of Europe in this process. What is worked up in it again is simply the idea of the Occident, which does not clearly delineate Europe, since the debate about what constitutes eastern Europe is endless. Its eastern limit is Europe’s undecidability. As for the southern limit, there is no difficulty in determining it. One has to read the process of Europe’s formation within the history of its relationship with Islam, notably in preaching and raising armies for the Crusades and being involved in them. Notwithstanding that it has often been said that this was when Europe was formed, however it was more in the nature of a gestation or genesis: Europe takes shape, no doubt, but it does not recognize itself as such—and does not take on this name. For Europe as a figure clearly to come to light, it will require the image (and the imaginary) of the continent, which is not drawn up until the late fifteenth century, in the double and opposite movement of the fall of Constantinople and the takeover of Granada.
6. “The essence of a thing never appears at the outset, but in the middle, in the course of its development, when its strength is assured” (Deleuze, Movement-Image, p. 3). Approximately during the fifteenth century because approaching things in their movement is an approximation, the capture of processes and propagating waves, and not the figural vision of fixed essences.
7. It cannot be regarded as a coincidence that the collapse of Europe’s western extreme coincides with its delimitation as a continent, forcing it to formulate its difference from the New World by attempting to set a new marker. This will later influence two typologies of Europeanism: the first seeking to integrate Europe—western Europe, in essence—and (North) America into an all-encompassing Occidentalism; the second, to resituate Europe at the center of the world, between its age-old east and the newly appeared west: a Europe of the middle, central Europe. And thus the two problematic parts of Europe (western Europe, central Europe) will always correspond to two very different ideas of European specificity and will not be able simply to be two distinct neighboring regions: each carries its own supposed essence of Europe, a destinal affirmation divergent from the other. Finally (and mainly) the appearance of America reproduces—exactly—the initial gesture from which Europe came forth: torn away from a native land, carried away overseas, toward an unknown, nameless land mass across the way. In this sense, America is evidently a remade and doubled Europe, and this will not fail to have effects upon Europe’s own awareness of itself during its decisive configuration as the old continent.
8. Charles V’s relations with Rome are more than ambiguous: to bring back Germany to Rome presupposes remaking Rome, even if it means breaking it. See Chastel, Le sac de Rome, passim.
9. The configuration of these places is often prescribed by the old divisions of the empire, and the kingdoms confine themselves to the spaces of old imperial provinces. We shall come back to this in the context of the Germanic kingdom.
10. Benveniste, Indo-European Language and Society, pp. 311–12.
11. Clearly, the limits of the kingdom are not those of the crown lands or royal domain. However, it is the determination on the ground of the royal domain that constitutes its heart and model, which stands out increasingly in the course of history. It is the royal domain’s power to extend and progressively become homogenized (through annexation and the subordination of vassals) that tends to absorb the kingdom and blend it with itself. The kingdom, which might be nothing but a coalition of seigneuries, is established and turns into a kingdom starting from its local determination, and the royal domain provides its dynamic pole, its territorial scheme, and its base. See the expression domaine du royaume [royal domain] in Dictionnaire historique de la langue française, ed. Rey, 1: 622.
12. “Rex Franciae est imperator in regno suo”: see Berl, Europe et Asie, p. 300; Beaune, Naissance de la nation France, pp. 56–57 and n. 135; Krynen, Empire du roi.
13. In the course of these analyses, it will have become clear to the reader that the provisionally adopted concept and designation of the theologico-political are ill-suited, on both sides of the structure. “Theological” is not a suitable term for ecclesiality construed as the element of the common or commonality, that which comes to be assembled. Rather, it designates a discourse about gods—and this is not the targeted object here, even if one should ponder the mutual connection of these notions. And “political” is even less suitable on some levels, since this whole matter comes about as a division of the political, which splits into “sovereignty” versus “community.” In certain respects, the term “political” might even better suit the church: archeologically, at least, the political is the agency of that which assembles itself. (Let us note, for example, that the first division between the “King’s Two Bodies” analyzed by Ernst Kantorowicz in an English context differentiates between the “natural Body” [which is ordinary and human] and the “Body politic” of the king. Now, in this opposition, the “Body politic” relates to “the mediaeval concept of the king’s character angelicus. The body politic of kingship appears as a likeness of the ‘holy sprites and angels,’ because it represents, like the angels, the Immutable within Time” [Kantorowicz, King’s Two Bodies, p. 8]. Here, the political is thus exactly the ecclesial—the supposed theological, if you will.) If I have clung to this (double) term, it is to bring out the tension between the hypotheses formulated here and the analyses circulating nowadays, and to signal toward some fields of effectiveness that these analyses cover: the indestructible relation, since Roman times, that links questions of power and “religious” questions, in their dissociation and their agreement. We shall come to terms with the “religious” later on. Unfortunately, the term “ecclesio-imperial” is not a winner as far as euphony is concerned. What to do?
14. My reticence regarding this formulation is understandable, since it assumes the equivalence of the political with the field of sovereignty, which is inappropriate inasmuch as anachronistic for the period in question, in which the term “political” was not used in this sense, and has the drawback of blocking any reflection about the rise and the constitution of politics, in the continuation of the process.
15. “The Capetians persist in preserving the original character of kingship. The coronation and the sacred character of kingship are revered . . . and the role of the royal minister approaches that of the bishop by design. Liturgical and other practices, such as the king’s [therapeutic] touching of sufferers of scrofula [for this reason called “the King’s evil” in England—Trans.], reinforced the importance of religious and mystical elements” (Genet, Le monde au moyen âge, p. 92). Or, in a wider context: “The king is anointed by the Lord . . . he should not be counted among the laymen: ‘His separation from them is proper,’ said a polemicist from that time. ‘For anointing him with holy oil has made him partake in the priesthood’” (Bréhier, Antiquité et moyen âge, p. 101). But this sacerdotal charge is already present in the etymological characterization: “This dual notion is present in the important expression regere fines, a religious act. . . . This is the operation carried out by the high priest before a temple or a town is built and it consists in the delimitation on a given terrain of a sacred plot of ground [l’espace consacré]. The magical character of this operation is evident: what is involved is the delimitation of the interior and the exterior, the realm of the sacred and the realm of the profane, the national territory and foreign territory. The tracing of these limits is carried out by the person invested with the highest powers, the rex” (Benveniste, Indo-European Language and Society, pp. 311–12; emphasis added). See also Curtius, Die französische Kultur, p. 58. In the English example, the symmetry of functions was especially clear: the king is “pope in his realm” (Kantorowicz, King’s Two Bodies, p. 19).
16. “‘Singularizing oneself’ carries away with it the actual, practical, and empirical individual, which is to say, the body. For Aristotle and then for Thomas Aquinas himself, individualism resides in materiality. Aquinas fashioned a particular concept for this, the concept of materia signata, that is, ‘designated’ or determined matter. Completely determined matter, materia signata vel individualis, is matter one regards with the determined dimensions of a singular body—that is to say (as the same text, De ente et essentia, puts it), hoc os et haec caro, this bone and this flesh. This determination, which is also the display, or material, physical, extended, and corporeal exposition, is what I shall call the last and ultimate transcendental trait of the singular. . . . Singular ones are not possible as pure spirits” (Jean-Luc Nancy, “Un sujet?” in Homme et sujet, ed. Weil, p. 101).
17. This could spark a problematization of the sacred (which I have left out as a concept until now). The sacrament would be that which the church lays or deposits (as the sign of itself) upon a person or a thing. The sacrament is an ecclesial deposit upon a body. And this deposit of a sign de-sign-ates an injection, or infusion, of being: what is injected (condensed) in a body in this way? The being of the church, of the assembly: that is to say, being-in-common. The sacrament, in depositing a sign onto a body, is a sign of the infusion or the condensation of the common in the singular. It thus becomes understandable that the essential sacrament, the archsacrament, is the Eucharist. (See pt. III of this book.) From time immemorial, the common, inasmuch as it is assembled, has sought refuge outside of the world, in the beyond of another world removed from the authority of the empire. The sacrament, then, is the deposit of this commonality (which is removed from the world) onto a corporeal singularity. That is why, as many have noted, the sacred can appear in the operation of separation (of the delimitation or disjunction of the sacred and the profane). This dissociation pertains to the world and its ecclesial double, marked upon the world: in truth, it bears the mark of the common, which has withdrawn. The sacrament is the deposit upon the body of the sign of this (withdrawn) commonality, which thus comes back—condensed—in the body.
18. On the church and the body of Christ, see pt. III of this book.
19. Which is to say, the territory as an abstract land, defined by a deed, a record of ownership, competence, or scope.
20. Alain Rey’s Dictionnaire historique de la langue française says of the term royaume [kingdom]: “masculine noun; first, reialme (ca. 1080 C.E.) then roiaume (ca. 1196) and royaume (13th cent.), is an alteration, in connection with ‘royal,’ of réiame, roiame, ‘state governed by a king,’ traced to the end of the 12th cent. and until the middle of the 14th cent., but probably older. This word, taken to come from the Latin rex, regis (‘king’), in fact represents the Latin regimen, -inis, ‘direction, government,’ which gave the more academic régime. Old Provençal, which uses all three terms regeme, regeime, and realme for ‘state governed by a king,’ supports this hypothesis” (2: 1844). It is worth noting that this meaning (of the kingdom as the state), the main one in French, is unknown in Latin, which possesses equivalent terms for roi [king], “direction,” and “government,” but not the term royaume. This entity is post-Roman.
21. Hegel, Philosophy of Right (Dyde), states: “[258] The state, which is the realized substantive will, having its reality in the particular self-consciousness raised to the plane of the universal, is absolutely rational. . . . Rationality, viewed abstractly, consists in the thorough unity of universality and individuality. . . . [260] The state is the embodiment of concrete freedom. In this concrete freedom, personal individuality and its particular interests, as found in the family and civic community, have their complete development. In this concrete freedom, too, the rights of personal individuality receive adequate recognition. These interests and rights pass partly of their own accord into the interest of the universal. Partly, also, do the individuals recognize by their own knowledge and will the universal as their own substantive spirit, and work for it as their own end” (pp. 240–48). In Hegelian terms, this moment of the universal is that of the union of universality and singularity. See also Kant, “Das Staatsrecht,” in Kant’s Werke [Ak.], 6: 315 [“Rechtslehre,” para. 47; in English, Kant, “Doctrine of Right,” in The Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Mary Gregor].
22. But it is a process: the kingdom is not a completed unit, but, on the contrary, the movement of unification of multiple functions, which progressively form a web of links (the texture of their organization as a state). “The royal domain . . . roughly extends from the Oise River to the Loire, around the episcopal cities of Senlis, Paris, Orleans, and Sens. The Capetian ruler is Count of Paris, Dreux, and Orléans. . . . He keeps in touch with the ‘royal bishoprics’ (strategically, Bourges, Reims, and Langres are the most important ones). All the same, one should not picture this domain to be united and homogeneous, like a modern territory: it is a composite set of rights and powers, over which lords and vassals harshly fought” (Genet, Le monde au moyen âge, p. 90).
23. Notably the Gallican and Anglican churches.
24. See the French law on the separation of the churches and the state of December 9, 1905.
25. And therefore also the nobility and the clergy.
26. In French, “l’identité de l’État, c’est bien lui,” echoing Louis XIV’s statement, “l’État, c’est moi.”—Trans.
27. Rey’s Dictionnaire historique de la langue française says of the term religion: “It seems that unlike other languages, even Indo-European ones, western languages have given a specialized sense to a term distinguishing the apparatus of beliefs and rites from all other social institutions. This break and this transfer correspond to a distinct thinking about an area that had never been thought to be separated, since archaic societies do not isolate sacrality from sociality, the constitution of the social being intrinsically religious for them” (2: 1758). This dissociation of the socialized and the sacralized only takes effect when several “sacralities” are distinguished amid a common sociality, a process that obviously precedes any possible “desacralization.” Or in other words, “de-sacralization” appears first as another sacrality—as religion.
28. This etymology is doubtful. See ibid. and discussion of the term in Benveniste, Indo-European Language and Society. In any case, the “re” is shared by the two main etymological hypotheses—religare and relegere.
29. See Benveniste, Indo-European Language and Society, chap. 7, “Religion and Superstition,” pp. 516–28.
30. “What does religio mean? The question has been discussed since ancient times, and even then scholars were unable to agree. Modern scholars remain no less divided. Opinions waver between two alternatives each of which is favoured from time to time and finds new supporters” (ibid., p. 518).
31. “It seems to us that this sense, which is demonstrated by ancient usage without the slightest ambiguity, imposes as the only possible interpretation of religio the one given by Cicero, who attached it to legere” (ibid., p. 521).
32. Ibid., pp. 521–22.
33. One should perhaps attempt to think through this the other way around: every party, perhaps, is religious in some fashion. I am not proposing a bland typology of behaviors (scissionism, sectarism, and so on), but something more radical, which would require some research about the constitution of politics from religious division. This is a task that goes beyond the limits of the present work.
34. “Reformation” is a rather peculiar term. If one follows Benveniste’s interpretation, and “religion” signifies to “take up again a choice already made,” “retractare,” “to revise the decision which results from it,” it designates exactly what is proper or essential to the religious disposition as such. Reforming implies reconstituting the supposedly initial religious choice, coming back to it and re-producing it, making it resurface in its purity at its origin and its originality: because of this, reformation, which is always a return to the (supposed) origin of the cult, breaks with its dominant form—a heterodoxy posited as a recovered orthodoxy. In this sense, one may say that all the founders of religions have been reformers, and every great religion the product of reformation gestures: by Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad, but also Gautama Buddha, Confucius, and Luther.
35. Reconquista of the peninsula—Europe, that is, which earned them the dignified designation of Catholic King and Queen (granted by Pope Alexander VI in 1496).
36. Documented in Beaune, Naissance de la nation France.
37. See Sieyès, Qu’est-ce que le Tiers-État? pp. 12–13; What Is the Third Estate? (Blondel), p. 60.
38. It is best, however, to avoid giving too much fetishistic credit to these archeologies. It would be dangerous as well as simplistic and simply wrong to insist on construing European divisions on the basis of an indefinite reproduction of differences in origin, that is, Germanity versus Romanity—all the more so since a closer look shows these matters to be far from simple. Let us rather say that, even if this old rift has left actual traces in the “country,” and its local or social delineations, it is above all true that when the new divisions occur (and religious scission is one of them), they can summon up the old delineation as an imaginary recourse to help identify or guarantee the new break. Luther keeps invoking the old division to think up the new one. But it is a recourse, a fixation: the appeal to an image while aiming at an identity and ensuring it. It is not a predetermination of the new by the old.
39. See Michelet, Renaissance et Réforme, pp. 358ff.; “La Réforme française,” ibid., pp. 419ff.; and sections of “Les guerres de religion,” ibid., pp. 496–616.
40. The Grand dictionnaire encyclopédique Larousse states: “Signed by Henri IV at Nantes on April 13, 1598. . . . Declared ‘perpetual and irrevocable,’ this Edict grants Protestants the freedom of conscience in the entire kingdom and authorizes them fully and freely to practice their worship . . . in two localities of each bailiwick . . . and in the castles of lords with the power of life and death [hauts justiciers]; but Protestant worship remains outlawed at the court, in Paris, and within a radius of five miles around the capital, as well as in a few episcopal cities. Protestants will have to observe Catholic holidays and pay taxes to the clergy. They will enjoy all civil rights and be admitted to colleges, universities, and hospitals, and be allowed to hold public office. Chambers . . . composed of a balance of Catholic and Protestant magistrates and established at Paris, Castres, Grenoble, and Bordeaux will deal with their judicial proceedings. [Protestants] keep the right to have their own consistories, colloquies, and synods at the provincial and national levels, and for eight years are granted about one hundred fortified places [places de sûreté] whose [Protestant] governors and garrisons will be paid by the king. . . . With this act of tolerance, the principle of the unity of faith, considered . . . the most solid foundation of the unity of the state, is officially abandoned. Very audacious for its time . . . the Edict of Nantes turns the French state into a Catholic and Protestant state, and its king, who is Catholic [having converted from Protestantism—D.G.], the protector of Protestant churches”(7: 7268). This is a rather strange outcome twenty-five years after the massacres. The theologico-political unity seems split along a vertical line, prolonging the unity implemented at the head (in the person of the converted king) with a kind of slit from top to bottom, slicing the trunk of the kingdom into two part(ie)s, with each religion garnering high-level dignitaries, nobles of various ranks, local magistrates, towns, assemblies, and fortified strongholds.
41. Edict of the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, signed by Louis XIV on October 18, 1685, “which ended the legal existence of Protestantism in France (except in Alsace). . . . This edict . . . makes Protestant worship illegal, orders the demolition of [Protestant] churches, the closing of Reformed schools, compulsory Catholic baptism and marriage, [and] the expulsion of pastors who refuse to convert” (ibid., 9: 8957–58).
42. Huguenots fled to the Netherlands, England, Germany, and Switzerland (ibid.).
43. Benveniste, Indo-European Language and Society, p. 307.
44. In the early 1980s, in thinking about mass dissidence—for example, in Poland—the emerging concept of “society” in this sense mattered (see La Pologne, une société en dissidence, ed. Erard and Zygier).
45. Dictionnaire historique de la langue française, ed. Rey, 2: 2055.
46. All things considered, this metaphor—a push from the bottom to the top, where what comes back or returns does not necessarily reoccur at the same point, but instead resurfaces here or there—is more fitting than that of a return to the initial place. Résurgence: “reappearance on the surface, as a spring with a large output, of an underground body of water” (ibid., p. 1789).
47. Ibid., p. 2055.
49. Surrection, “The use of the word is attested for ‘the act of rising’ (1507, surrexion). It is seemingly not used before the beginning of the twentieth century, at which time its usage becomes geological, to mean (1904) the uplift in one piece of a zone of the terrestrial crust. Its figurative meanings are ‘apparition, emergence’ (about 1950)” (ibid., p. 2056).
50. Ibid., p. 1800.
51. To pursue the medical fantasy: cancer is the pathology of the repressed (reemerging).
52. See Weber, Protestant Ethic, esp. chap. 2.
53. The said process will encounter the effects of extension that the revolutionary sequence—let’s say the French one, which is the focus here—itself produces, though this sequence is not global and worldwide in its first manifestation, but revolutionary, precisely—coming back to the place of what has been repressed. It nevertheless has global effects (1830, 1848, and so on), just as capitalism or Protestantism soon produce revolutionary effects (e.g., the American Revolution). This serves as evidence that the resurgence of the repressed fits rather badly within the framework that the figure of the return outlines for it (the idea of revolution). It always-already overflows it. Later on, revolution will determine the world, the world as a whole, as the only place to which it can come back. A worldwide revolution, then. But this comes later: the theme of the revolution is not yet articulated in this way in the phase in which I am trying to characterize it. On the contrary: at this point, the world and society stand as the two poles of a dual choice.
54. Alternatively: the corporeality of the kingdom is not “only” metaphorical; rather, it is its metaphoricity (its transferential quality) that constitutes the effectivity of the political as such. The transfer of this corporeality to a collective entity makes up politics, in the modern sense of the word (see pt. III of this book).
55. To describe the metaphorical logic of the murder of the king by decapitation is not to approve it. I unhesitatingly place myself in the camp of the revolutionaries but refuse to take pleasure in or justify this murder. One can try to explain a murder in terms of its circumstances or its time period—but I am denying this one any justice. It is time to stop subscribing to the logic of murder, regardless of its circumstances. Instead, let us think that in this act, the revolution was caught up in its own imaginary and figural ploy—that, in this, it manifested its entrapment by the imaginary of the return (of revenge, vengeance, debt, and capital punishment). Which is to say—in prevision—its defeat.
56. “Populus autem non omnis hominum coetus quoquo modo congregatus, sed coetus multitudinis iuris consensu et utilitatis communione congregatus” [the people is not every group of men, associated in any manner, but is the coming together of a considerable number of men who are united by a common agreement about law and rights] (Cicero, Republic 1.25). No doubt, one of the specificities of the dēmos is that it is summoned to the assembly. Dēmos differs from ethnos, for example, in that the latter word “is not solely used of men but also of animals, such as bees, whereas dēmos is never used in such applications” (Benveniste, Indo-European Language and Society, p. 372).
57. This memory persists in a certain determination of the people inasmuch as they are the people, which is to say, as being, substratum, and substance of the common, which “conquers” sovereignty only on this account and at this price: as subject—subject of sovereignty, sovereign-subject. See my book L’enlèvement de la politique.
58. Dictionnaire historique de la langue française, ed. Rey, 2: 1306.
59. One can also see this (and though the correlation is too blunt and calls for a sharper elaboration, it is valid in its principle) in the tracing of borders and selection of elites by the French colonial and the Russo-Soviet empires. In each case, what was involved was the local refiguration of a project of universality. One could more broadly say that something national as such comes up in the de-composition of empires. “Since the end of the Roman Empire, or rather since the disruption of the Empire of Charlemagne, Western Europe appears to be divided into nations. . . . Nations, understood in this way, are a new feature in history. Antiquity knew them not,” Renan observes in What Is a Nation? (p. 63). On such “production of nations,” see Dommange, “Le miroir identitaire,” and Guénoun, “Sur les (prétendues) sorties du (prétendu) communisme” (this hypothesis owes much to Étienne Balibar; see esp. Balibar and Wallerstein, Races, nations, classes).
60. Gens de robe in French.—Trans.
61. Sieyès, What Is the Third Estate? (Blondel), p. 72; see also chap. 2.
62. Qu’est-ce que le Tiers-État? opens with the famous formula: “The plan of this book is fairly simple. We must ask ourselves three questions. 1. What is the Third Estate? Everything. 2. What has it been until now in the political order? Nothing. 3. What does it want to be? Something” (ibid., p. 51).
63. “The old aristocracy detests new nobles. . . . Thus it relegates the other nobles to the order of the Third Estate to which, obviously, they no longer belong” (ibid., p. 62).
64. Ibid., p. 57; emphasis added.
65. Ibid.
66. Ibid., p. 61. (The emphasis on the repeated word “common” is mine. Sieyès emphasizes “one.”—D.G.)
67. Ibid., p. 58.
68. The story is wonderfully told in Michelet, French Revolution.
69. “On the 15th of June, Sieyes, with boldness and prudence, demanded that the Commons should assume the title of Assembly of the known and acknowledged representatives of the French nation. . . . They knew Sieyes too well not to suspect that this proposal was a step to lead to another, bolder and more decisive. . . . And indeed, on the second day of the battle, the light burst forth. Two deputies served as precursors to Sieyes. M. Legrand proposed that the Assembly should constitute itself a General Assembly. . . . M. Galand demanded that . . . the Assembly should constitute itself the legitimate and active Assembly of the representatives of the French nation. Sieyes then laid aside every obscurity and circumlocution, and proposed the title of National Assembly. . . . On the following morning, at the moment of voting. . . . The different motions might be reduced to three, or rather to two:—1st. That of Sieyes—National Assembly. 2ndly. That of Mounier—Assembly of the Representatives of the Major part of the Nation, in the absence of the Minor part. The equivocal formula of Mirabeau [‘representatives of the French people’—D.G.] was equivalent to Mounier’s, as the word people could be taken in a limited sense, and as the major part of the nation. . . . With Mounier’s arithmetic and unjust justness, and with Mirabeau’s equivocation, the nation remained a class, and the fixed property—the land—constituted also a class in the face of the nation . . . Sieyes, being put to the vote at once, had near five hundred votes for him, and not one hundred against him. Therefore the Assembly was proclaimed National Assembly. . . . In presence of a multitude of four thousand deeply affected spectators, the six hundred deputies, standing in profound silence, with up-raised hands and contemplating the calm, honest countenance of their president, listened to him whilst reading the formula [of the oath—D.G.], and exclaimed: ‘We swear.’ A universal sentiment of respect and religion filled every heart” (Michelet, French Revolution, pp. 98–103).
70. “The king, still undecided, . . . was contented to command (in order to prevent the clergy from uniting with the Third Estate) that the hall be shut on the morrow (Saturday June 20th); the pretext was the preparations necessary for a royal meeting to be held on the Monday. . . . At eight o’clock, the hour appointed the night before, [Bailly, the president—D.G.] repaired to the door of the hall with a great number of deputies. Being stopped by the sentinels, he protested against the hindrance, and declared the meeting convened. Several young members made a show of breaking open the door; the officer commanded his soldiers to arm. . . . Behold our new kings, put out, kept out of doors, like unruly scholars [écoliers (schoolboys—Trans.)]. Behold them wandering about in the rain, among the people, on the Paris avenue. All agree about the necessity of holding a meeting, of assembling. Some shout, Let us go to the Place d’Armes! Others, to Marly! Another, to Paris! . . . . The deputy Guillotin made a less hazardous motion, to repair to Old Versailles, and take up their quarters in the Tennis-court [Jeu-de-Paume]—a miserable, ugly, poor, and unfurnished building, but the better on that account. [The Assembly—D.G.] remained standing all day long, having scarcely a wooden bench” (ibid., pp. 106–7). “Behold them now in the Tennis-court [Jeu-de-Paume—Trans.], assembled in spite of the king. But what are they going to do? . . . It was one of the moderate party, Mounier of Grenoble, who proposed to the Assembly the celebrated declaration: That wherever it might be forced to unite, there was ever the National Assembly [up to this point, emphasis added]; that nothing could prevent it from continuing its deliberations. And, till the completion and establishment of the constitution, it took an oath never to separate” (ibid., p. 108).
71. On the topic of assembling as coming-to-be-common, see Guénoun, L’enlèvement de la politique and “De l’assemblement,” in L’exhibition des mots.
72. Michelet, French Revolution, p. 105.
73. This is clear when Sieyès writes, “I do not speak of the clergy here. In my way of thinking, the clergy is not an order but rather a profession charged with a public service. . . . From this point of view, which is the true one in my opinion, there is only one order, that of the nobility. They are truly a people apart but a false people” (Sieyès, What Is the Third Estate? [Hunt], p. 67).
74. Rousseau’s words are recognizable here: see Rousseau, “The Social Compact,” in Social Contract, bk. I, chap. 6; and Guénoun, L’enlèvement de la politique.
75. Nation: “Legal person constituted by the collection of individuals composing the state,” in the definition officially adopted by the Assembly (Dictionnaire historique de la langue française, ed. Rey, 2: 1306).
76. In other words, what obliges the assembly to cohere around its own embodiment as a person? See, further, Guénoun, L’enlèvement de la politique and pt. III of this book.
77. Sieyès constructs and elaborates this concept based to a great extent on Rousseau’s arguments and permeates it with precise philosophical references, even when they remain implicit. See his last chapter: “What Remains to Be Done. Development of Certain Principles” (Sieyès, What Is the Third Estate? [Blondel], pp. 140ff.).
78. “Declaration of the Rights of Man,” The Avalon Project: Documents in Law, History and Diplomacy (Yale University), http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/rightsof.asp (accessed October 31, 2012).—Trans.
79. Ibid.: “3. The principle of all sovereignty resides essentially in the nation. No body nor individual may exercise any authority which does not proceed directly from the nation. 4. . . . the exercise of the natural rights of each man has no limits [bornes—Trans.] except those which assure to the other members of the society the enjoyment of the same rights” (emphasis added).
80. This scene was replayed at the trial of Nicolae and Elena Ceauceşcu in Romania in 1989: the revolution declared the death sentence imposed on the Ceauceşcus to be the last one, but it could not avoid pronouncing it and executing it. This is how the dependence builds (and expresses itself) in the relationship with the parental figure of the couple put to death. The fascination with them immediately took on the conspicuous form of an edited montage of life- and death-images, a hallucinated long shot. [The images of Libya’s former ruler Mu‘ammar Gadhafi following his death in 2011 are another example.—Trans.]
81. “The National Assembly declaring then that the French nation renounces the declaration of any war aimed at conquest, and that it will never use its powers against the liberty of any people” [May 22, 1790]; and then, “The National Convention decrees: . . . Art. 11. The French nation declares that it will treat as an enemy the people who, refusing liberty and equality, or renouncing them, might wish to keep, recall, or deal with the prince or the privileged castes” [December 15, 1792] (Godechot, La pensée révolutionnaire, pp. 120, 161).
82. Revault d’Allonnes, D’une mort à l’autre, p. 44.
83. This double constitution appears at the very inception of the empire. “Under Augustus, the decision is made to put down the Germans by occupying their land all the way to the Elbe River. At the end of a military campaign that lasted three years (from 12 to 19 B.C.E.), Drusus reached this river. Germany, attached to Belgium, becomes a Roman province. But . . . a plot, instigated and inspired by Arminius (‘Hermann’), succeeds in routing the Roman legions in the Teutoburg Forest. The Roman defeat becomes an open wound during the reign of Augustus, and it leads to a punitive expedition that allows Germanicus to avenge this affront at Teutoburg and to announce the complete pacification of the country to Tiberius, in 17 C.E. However, the emperor does not opt for complete occupation. He makes the decision to cut Germany in two: the land on the left bank of the Rhine is integrated into the Roman world; the land farther away from the Rhine remains in the ‘half-barbarian world.’ . . .‘Roman Germany,’ which remains faithful to Rome overall, develops along with the empire. . . . As for ‘independent Germany,’ the scarcity of available clues hardly makes it possible to arrive at a clear idea of its history” (Poidevin and Schirmann, Histoire de l’Allemagne, p. 20).
84. Benveniste, Indo-European Language and Society, pp. 507–8.
85. The same will apply to Italy, as is predictable in this schema. See Leopardi, Discorso sopra lo stato presente dei costumi degl’Italiani (Discourse on the Present State of Italian Customs), p. 18.
86. This does not rule out the dream (on the contrary, it explains it) that every kingdom has of being the empire restored. It is a dream, a fictive identity, inescapable but imaginary: in truth, the kingdom is the empire undone.
87. Poidevin and Schirmann, Histoire de l’Allemagne, p. 32.
88. I am borrowing the phrase “the people as such” from Balibar and Wallerstein, Races, nations, classes, pp. 126ff.
89. Gravier, introduction, in Les grands écrits réformateurs, p. 28. He adds: “The formula . . . can be found in Inspicientes (die Anschauenden), a dialogue by Hutten” (ibid.). Ulrich von Hutten (1488–1523) was a humanist knight whose writings, shortly before Luther, express the precise point of view of the “Christian Nobility of the German Nation” to whom the reformer would address his “Open Letter.”
90. I use “theological” to clarify the stakes here. Strictly speaking, one should say “ecclesiological.” See Dostoyevsky, The Possessed, pt. 2, chap. 1, §7, in which Shatov reveals his theories about the nation and religion.
91. Luther, “An Open Letter to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation Concerning the Reform of the Christian Estate,” titled in German “An den christlichen Adel deutscher Nation von des christlichen Standes Besserung.”
92. This passage deals with the agents and partisans of the papacy. Ibid. p. 65; emphasis added. [Henceforth, page references for Luther’s “Open Letter” will appear in the body of the text.—Trans.]
93. “For as the body is one, and hath many members, and all the members of that one body, being many, are one body: so also is Christ. . . . we [are] all baptized into one body, whether we be Jews or Gentiles, whether we be bond or free. . . . For the body is not one member but many. . . . If the whole body were an eye, where were the hearing? If the whole were hearing, where were the smelling? . . . And if they were all one member, where were the body? . . . And the eye cannot say unto the hand, I have no need of thee: nor again the head to the feet, I have no need of you. . . . Now ye are the body of Christ, and members in particular” (Bible [KJV], 1 Cor. 12:12–27).
94. “But ye are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, an holy nation, a peculiar people. . . . Which in time past were not a people, but are now the people of God” (1 Peter 2:9–10).
95. “And [Thou] hast made us unto our God kings and priests: and we shall reign on the earth” (Rev. 5:10).
96. “For as we have many members in one body, and all members have not the same office: / So we, being many, are one body in Christ, and every one members one of another” (Rom. 12:4–5).
97. See the passages of 1 Cor. and 1 Peter quoted earlier.
98. The Greek answer was fairly clear: it is the polis that assembles. Who assembles there? The dēmos. Now, the dēmos is also delimited by a place. (“Dēmos is a territorial and political concept, and it designates both a division of land and the people who inhabit it” [Benveniste, Indo-European Language and Society, p. 372; emphasis added].) The circumscription that the polis traces out (starting with the dēmos and sometimes against its previous delimitations) is the intra muros space of the city-state, of the city, or (as in Athens) the grouping of spaces that it determines. In truth, the political question about the place and the gathering—asking which came first and was at the origin and at the foundation—is irrelevant and senseless in this context. The question as such only arises from the moment when the assembly and the place become dissociated and incompatible—let us say, from the moment of the constitution of the republic and then of the empire, as the circumscription of a space whose inhabitants cannot possibly all gather. It is colonization and the movement of extensive universalization that produce what will become the national question: where do those who are assembling come from? Of which place are they natives?
99. One could say it is in the Germans’ hands partly because of an error: “the pope unjustly and by violence robbed the true emperor of his Roman Empire . . . and gave it to us Germans.” But, Luther adds, “I would not advise that we give it up”; “it matters not to Him where an empire comes from; it is His will that it shall be ruled” (“Open Letter,” p. 156).
100. See Guénoun, Le printemps, pt. 3, pp. 133ff.
101. It is paradoxical that the French use the Latin name of the imperial province of Germania [as opposed to the word Allemagne—Trans.] to designate all that is specifically Germanic and foreign to any Romanity. On the names of Germany, see Nancy, “Monogrammes.”
102. Grands écrits réformateurs, Gravier introduction, pp. 30 and 50.
103. “Annates” = “The first-fruits, or entire revenue of one year, paid to the Pope by bishops and other ecclesiastics of the R.C. Church on their appointment to a see or benefice”—Oxford English Dictionary, s.v.
104. “Germany is no longer a state,” Hegel asserts, which is admittedly a little different. He keeps repeating this strange thesis—it’s a kind of leitmotiv—in “The German Constitution (1798–1802)” (e.g., pp. 6–7, 14–15). On pages 10ff., where the focus is on a (very rapid) history of Germany with respect to this question, for example, we move directly from the assertion (about Germany, in the Middle Ages, presumably) that “the nation constituted a people without being a state” (p. 10) to an analysis of the contemporary situation, characterized by an undermining of the state (pp. 11ff.), without ever coming across a time in which the state was formed as such. Hegel seems to suggest that the German state was natively formed in a defective and failing way, as a fault or default of the state: “These spheres of power were fixed with the passage of time. The parts of the universal political power became a multiplicity of exclusive property, independent of the state itself . . . every individual member of the political hierarchy . . . everything which has rights or duties in relation to the state—has acquired them for itself; and in view of this reduction of its power, the state has no other function but to confirm that it has been deprived of its power. . . . The principles of German public law should therefore not be derived from the concept of the state. . . . German constitutional law is not a science based on principles but a register of the most varied constitutional rights [Gm., Staatsrechte (i.e., rights of the state—Trans.)] acquired in the manner of civil law [Gm., Privatrecht (i.e., private law—Trans.)]” (pp. 11–12). Or later, this astounding formula: “The German political edifice is nothing other than the sum of the rights which the individual parts have extracted from the whole [state]” (p. 13), which suggests precisely that the state (the political edifice) is constituted in Germany as lack of the state (the sum of the rights subtracted from the state), the summation of a subtraction, a cumulative collection of what was taken away from a state that has never been effectively constituted. The sentence goes on to state that “this justice, which watches carefully to ensure that no power remains in the hands of the state, is the essence of the constitution” (p. 13; emphasis added).
105. See Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, Mythe nazi, pp. 28ff.
106. The town of Biberach in Swabia.
107. Wieland, “Ueber teutschen Patriotismus,” pp. 5–6. [Further page references to this essay appear in the body of the text.—Trans.]
108. Hegel, “German Constitution,” p. 12.
109. In parentheses, Wieland adds, “as a patriotic spirit also breathed through them [our imperial cities—Trans.], and the constitution as well as the circumstances of that time were still protecting them from the pressures of their neighbors” (Wieland, “Ueber teutschen Patriotismus,” p. 7; emphasis added).
110. See Lacoue-Labarthe, Fiction du politique, pp. 107 and 118–22. My thinking about Germany owes a great deal to the analyses in this book and other books by Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe (in particular, Musica ficta: Figures de Wagner), as well as to many conversations with him, so numerous that I shall not even try to identify them by date.
111. Fichte, Addresses to the German Nation; e.g., pp. 59, 69.
112. Wieland underscores, “. . . who love it above everything else, and are ready to bring considerable sacrifices not only for its safeguard and protection against a common enemy but also, when the danger has passed, for its well-being, the healing of its injuries, the promotion of its acceptance, its inner flourishing, and its outer appearance” (Wieland, “Ueber teutschen Patriotismus,” p. 7).
113. “Our languages are different—should our concepts differ because of that? Are Liberté and Égalité no longer the same jewels of mankind if we call them Freiheit and Gleichheit [liberty and equality—Trans.]? Since when has the difference in languages made it impossible to obey the same law? And Russia’s sovereign despot—doesn’t she rule over a hundred populations with different tongues? Aren’t Hungarians, Bohemians, Austrians, the Brabantians, and the Milanese all speaking their own language, though they all are the subjects of the same emperor? And weren’t half the inhabitants of the world once called citizens of Rome? Why would it be more difficult for free people as a community to subscribe to eternal truths, grounded in the nature of man, than it was for the slave to obey his master? . . . Away with these hypocritical, feeble pretexts. What is true remains true, in Mainz as well as Paris” (Georg Forster, “On the Relationship of the People of Mainz to the Franks”); see also Jean Jaurès, La Révolution et l’Europe, on Foster, pp. 198–99, and more information about this entire episode, pp.161–209. See also Guénoun, La levée, pp. 46ff.
114. See the annotations to the French translation of the essay (Wieland, “Du patriotisme allemand,” p. 28n5).
115. It will have become clear that, in my view, there is no patriotism of this kind anywhere, no autonomous “natural” feeling expressing the autoposition of a “national reality.” Patriotism is a production of feeling carried out at a determined juncture, such as the German situation mentioned here.
116. “The nation is revolutionary” (h11).
117. As did Napoleon himself, German political thinkers—justifiably, for the most part, at least in this matter—regarded Napoleonic imperialism as descending directly from revolutionary expansionism. (The question of what was lost in the transition from the Revolution to the empire is obviously distinct.) It is impossible to cite these authors, given the way in which this corpus of writings about the hostile reaction to the Revolution and the empire seems to blend with the whole history of political, philosophical, and literary romanticism. In any case, romanticism is mixed up in this project of Germany’s (counter)revolutionary (re)constitution, running along one of its (two) principal trajectories, from Hegel (“The German Constitution”) to Fichte (Addresses to the German Nation [see also Fichte, Werke 1808–1812—Trans.]), E. T. A. Hoffmann (e.g., “Die Vision auf dem Schlachtfelde bei Dresden” [The Vision on the Battlefield at Dresden], in Sämtliche Werke, vol. 2/1, published in French in Hoffmann, Contes retrouvés, pp. 37ff.), Richard Wagner, and even Martin Heidegger. On the two romantic trajectories, see Guénoun, “Walter Benjamin et ‘nous,’” reprinted in L’exhibition des mots.
118. The repercussions of the king’s trial followed by his execution led to lengthy comments and debates in Germany. See Lefebvre, La Révolution française vue par les Allemands, chaps. 4 and 5, pp. 83ff. See also Rogozinski, “Crime inexpiable.”
119. For Kant (though he was well disposed toward the revolutionary spirit, and quite a francophile in this regard), this is the “inexpiable crime”: not the king’s murder (other peoples had put their monarchs to death in earlier times) but his being tried in court and his execution made legal—a complete reversal of European judicial principles. See Rogozinski, “Crime inexpiable.”
120. See esp. Frederick II, “Considérations sur l’état présent du corps politique de l’Europe” and “Essai sur les formes de gouvernement, et sur les devoirs des souverains” (1777), both in OEuvres posthumes, 6: 3–52, 53–88; Anti-Machiavel; and De la littérature allemande (1780), which “while proclaiming the nonexistence of a national literature (in 1780), greatly contributed to sparking a reaction with the blossoming of Weimarian literature,” according to Robert Pitrou, “Frédéric II,” in Grimal, Dictionnaire des biographies, 1: 560.
121. E.g., see Luther, “Open Letter,” p. 83.
122. See Beaune, Naissance de la nation France; Sieyès, What Is the Third Estate? (Blondel), p. 60 (“Why should [the Third Estate] not repatriate to the Franconian forests all the families who wildly claim to descend from the race of the conquerors . . .”).
123. As well as educational, in the spirit of Jules Ferry, and republican.
124. De Gaulle said in a speech at the meeting of the Free French in Kingsway Hall, London, on March 1, 1941: “Il y a un pacte, vingt fois séculaire, entre la grandeur de la France et la liberté du monde” [There is a pact—it is twenty centuries old—between the greatness of France and the freedom of the world], a claim reproduced on the De Gaulle Memorial at Colombey-les-Deux-Églises. Ms. Catherine Trouillet of the Charles de Gaulle Institute kindly provided me with this information. (It is worth noting that De Gaulle places the birth of France at the same time as the Roman Empire—and Christ.)
125. See the third address in Fichte, Addresses to the German Nation.
126. Revolutionized society is an archi-nation.
127. Like Germany facing Napoleon—but Spain and Russia as well.
128. Lenin, “Three Sources,” pp. 21–28. See also Balibar, Philosophie de Marx, p. 9.
129. Italian Fascism arose at the junction of the French postsocialism of Georges Sorel and the influence of German idealism (Giovanni Gentile), and the fact that this took place in Rome should be carefully considered.
130. Germany, Spain, Italy, but not England.
131. Because Europe was the world’s center of gravity, as well as the place where worldhood was generated and realized.
132. Because Germany was Europe’s center of gravity—the hub of its industrialization and proletarization—and the locus of its defeat.
133. These phenomena are named for the Portuguese dictator António de Oliveira Salazar (1889–1970); Charles de Gaulle (1890–1970); and Joseph Stalin (1879–1953).—Trans.
134. Lenin’s death helps to date—or give some context to—the situation. The determining factor is that the German revolution was crushed and the European revolutionary process stopped.
135. What remains to be explained, among many other things, is the persistence of Stalinism after the fall of Nazism. See Guénoun, “Sur les (prétendues) sorties du (prétendu) communisme.”
PART III: TRANSPORTS OF ORIGIN
1. See Marx, Capital, vol. 1, §3. Marx’s famous note to the French edition is a reaction to the phrase “labor process” [procès de travail]: “The word ‘procès’ (process) which expresses a development considered in the totality of its real conditions has long been a part of scientific language throughout Europe. In France it was first introduced slightly shamefacedly in its Latin form—processus. Then, stripped of this pedantic disguise, it slipped into books on chemistry, physics, physiology, etc., and into a few works of metaphysics. In the end it will obtain a certificate of complete naturalization. Let us note in passing that in ordinary speech the Germans, like the French, use the word Prozess (procès, process) in the legal sense [i.e., trial].” Althusser quotes Marx’s note in “Marx’s Relation to Hegel,” p. 185.
2. Althusser defines this “theory of history we owe to Hegel as a dialectical process of production of forms (figures)” (Althusser, “Marx’s Relation to Hegel,” p. 181).
3. The French title of this chapter is “Charges.”—Trans.
4. “This point is indeed a mere idea, a focus imaginarius” (Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, p. 533).
5. See pt. I, §8 of this book.
6. “The only subject of the process of alienation is the process itself in its teleology” (Althusser, “Marx’s Relation to Hegel,” p. 183). The emphasis is Althusser’s.
7. See Jean-Luc Nancy, “Un sujet?” in Homme et sujet, ed. Weil, pp. 47–114.
8. “There is no subject to the process: it is the process itself which is a subject in so far as it does not have a subject” (Althusser, “Marx’s Relation to Hegel,” p. 184).
9. Deleuze has thought about this tearing away [arrachement] of pure becoming (and therefore of time) away from the movement (and therefore from space) as the passage from the movement-image to the time-image. See Deleuze, Image-mouvement and Image-temps (esp., e.g., Image-temps, pp. 7–37). On the idea of setting apart pure time, as the time of pure change, see Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time.
10. See Deleuze, Image-mouvement, p. 37; Movement-Image, p. 22.
11. We can see that this diverges from the thought of transport being “eigentlich leer” (properly empty). [In German: “Der tragische transport ist nemlich eigentlich leer . . .” (for tragic transport is actually / properly empty), in Hölderlin, “Anmerkungen zum Ödipus,” p. 250 (“Remarks on ‘Oedipus,’” p. 101).—Trans.]
12. Though the tracing is never “pure”: see Derrida, De la grammatologie, pp. 61–62, Psyché, p. 87, and Mémoires d’aveugle, pp. 48–49. Paola Marrati has kindly provided these precise references.
13. Indeed, in this (turned-around) sense, Europe is Roman. Rémi Brague’s thesis is confirmed (see Brague, Europe, la voie romaine): Romanity is what makes Europe. But it does not exhaust the directional sense of it: there still has to be the returning, which, for its part, proceeds from an exhaustion, a reversal of the Roman movement.
14. See G. H. Stevenson, “Communications and Commerce,” in Legacy of Rome, ed. Bailey, pp. 141–72.
15. The French title of this chapter is “De l’étant.”—Trans.
16. Analogously, one could say that our “western” religions feed on themes, place-names, and various terms that originated in places of the Orient: Galilee, Babylon, Jerusalem, and so on. As for Rome, what it borrowed from Greece extends much farther than religious mythologies—to all kinds of discourses.
17. See also earlier discussion in pt. I, chap. 2, of Husserl’s “Vienna Lecture.” See also Derrida, Problem of Genesis in Husserl’s Philosophy, pp. 154–57; and Gérard Granel, “L’Europe de Husserl.” [Page references to the “Vienna Lecture” appear in the body of the text.—Trans.]
18. On the equation between History and European history, see Patočka, Plato and Europe, p. 222: “in this sense, we say that history is the history of Europe.”
19. See also ibid., pp. 65ff.
20. “We speak in this connection of the natural primordial attitude, of the attitude of original natural life, of the first originally natural form of cultures, whether higher or lower, whether developing uninhibitedly or stagnating” (“Vienna Lecture,” p. 281).
21. How can passion occur without interest? Without wishing to deal with this problem fully (“We shall not go into this in detail,” p. 285), Husserl suggests a pathway: incipient theoretical interest is “a variant of curiosity” (ibid.). Disinterested passion springs from wonder or astonishment (Gk., thaumazein) and develops “as an intrusion into the course of ‘serious living,’ either as a result of originally developed life-interests or as a playful looking-about [Gm., spielerische Umschau; Fr., regard jeté par jeu] when one’s quite immediate vital needs are satisfied or when working hours are over. Curiosity (here understood not as a habitual ‘vice’) is also a variant, an interest which has separated itself off from life-interests, has let them fall” (“Vienna Lecture,” p. 285; emphasis added). It is tempting to set these indications alongside Freud’s discussion of curiosity in Leonardo da Vinci, pp. 25–28. See also Curiosité en psychanalyse, ed. Sztulman and Fénelon, pp. 7, 32–53, and passim (thank you to J. Ph. Schlick for this reference).
22. The triad nature-native-nation is a little less visible in German but Husserl nonetheless explicitly enunciates it within a few lines: “The individual men who reorient themselves, as men within their universal life-community (their nation), continue to have their natural interests; through no reorientation can they simply lose them; this would mean that each would cease to be what he has become from birth onward” (“Vienna Lecture,” p. 281; emphasis added).
23. “Extrascientific culture, culture not yet touched by science, consists in tasks and accomplishments [Gm., Aufgabe und Leistung] of man in finitude” (“Vienna Lecture,” p. 279).
24. Husserl, “Vienna Lecture” (Lauer), p. 156. [For a closer match with the original, this text quotes from two translations of the “Vienna Lecture” (see Works Cited), in imitation of the author, who uses both the Granel and Derrida and the Ricoeur translations, with an eye on the German text. For the text in French, see Husserl, “La crise de l’humanité européenne et la philosophie,” in La crise des sciences européennes et la phénoménologie transcendantale, trans. Gérard Granel and Jacques Derrida, 347–83 (Paris: Gallimard, 1976); and La crise de l’humanité européenne et la philosophie, trans. Paul Ricoeur, bilingual ed. (Paris: Aubier-Montaigne, 1977).—Trans.] The theme of infinity runs throughout the text; see, e.g., “Vienna Lecture,” pp. 276–78. [“Infinite task” is a phrase also quoted by Rodolphe Gasché in the title and throughout his book Europe, or the Infinite Task.—Trans.]
25. “. . . a new human epoch emerging and beginning to grow, the epoch of a humanity that from now on will and can live only in the free fashioning of its being and its historical life out of rational ideas and infinite tasks” (Husserl, “Vienna Lecture” [Lauer], p. 156). This brings to mind Ludwig Feuerbach: “The consciousness of the infinite is nothing else than the consciousness of the infinity of the consciousness; or, in the consciousness of the infinite, the conscious subject has for his object the infinity of his own nature [Gm., Wesen; Fr., essence]” (Feuerbach, Essence of Christianity, p. 21.). With Husserl, this consciousness of infinity occurs, in history, as theoria.
26. Patočka, Plato and Europe, pp. 77–78.
27. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, notes from the seminar “Littératures et philosophie mêlées” at the University of Strasbourg, March 22, 1994. Starting with this hypothesis, Lacoue-Labarthe determined the literary experience as the experience of the return from the dead, as rising up again from the abode or the house of the dead—as the matrix of a certain determination of experience as such. A similar theme is broached in Lacoue-Labarthe, La poésie comme expérience, pp. 143–44.
28. “This is that singular thing about Europe: as I told you, only in Europe was philosophy born in this way, in the awakening of man out of tradition into the presence of the universe, only in Europe, or better said, in what was the embryo [Fr., germe—Trans.] of Europe—Greece” (Patočka, Plato and Europe, p. 88).
29. In the development that follows, I mainly refer to Patočka, Plato and Europe and Patočka, Heretical Essays. Patočka makes direct reference to Husserl’s “Vienna Lecture” in Heretical Essays. [Further page references for these two works, respectively designated as PE and HE, can be found below and in the body of the text.—Trans.]
30. “. . . the Athenian polis is something that crystallizes gradually in conflicts with its neighbors as well as in the struggles of political parties. . . . Here, in very specific conflicts on a modest territory and with minimal material is born not only the Western world and its spirit but, perhaps, world history as such. The Western spirit and world history are bound together in their origins: it is the spirit of free meaning bestowal, it is the shaking of life as simply accepted with all its certainties and at the same time the origin of new possibilities of life in that shaken situation, that is, of philosophy” (HE, p. 41; emphasis added).
31. “All these myths have the same meaning: man is at the same time a creature of truth and this truth is damnation for him. . . . The greatness—that which made Greek philosophy what it is and that which made it the foundation of all of European life—is that from this Greek philosophy developed a plan for life, one that stated it is not damnation, but human greatness! . . . What is told to us by myth is the natural human stance. Human life is damnation, it is horror, because, as Pascal said, ‘The end is always bloody, however famous the comedy may have been.’ This is the natural human stance. . . . The Greek idea is the following: in just this situation it is shown that man has various possibilities on the basis of this original situation. Only then, in this situation, he has to prove himself; only then he has to show himself as a creature who really does make phenomenon, that means clarity, truth the law of his life” (PE, pp. 35–36; Patočka’s emphasis).
32. “For Plato, because he discovered the principle of the care of the soul, for the first time the soul is something that even in its fate after death is something that lives from within” (PE, p. 126; emphasis added).
33. “This motive is captured in myths just in a mythical, and that means in a purely material, way” (PE, p. 53).
34. “. . . a stance of uprootedness” (HE, p. 76).
35. This is the theme virtually driving Patočka’s books Plato and Europe and Heretical Essays.
36. See HE, pp. 39–40.
37. See on this topic Guénoun, “Le dénudement,” in L’exhibition des mots.
38. “History differs from prehistoric humanity by the shaking of accepted meaning” (Patočka, HE, p. 62).
39. For example, “The basis of meaning, in Weischedel’s terms, is problematicity; in Heidegger’s terms, the concealment of what-is [i.e., beingness—Trans.] as a whole as the foundation of all openness and all uncovering” (HE, p. 77).
40. The concept of world, as it is used here, undermines its elaboration in this book (see pt. I, §3). Husserl and Patočka write “world” to designate what theoria is targeting, or what is revealed as phenomenon. In this they may be at risk of a confusion, or an anachronism—or both: they do not seem, properly speaking, to aim either at the cosmos (in its Greek sense) or specifically at the mundus, and it seems to me that these two notions should not be viewed as the same. It is about “beingness” (“what is”) [das Seiende (Gm.); l’étant (Fr.)—Trans.] that they are speaking; about totality, or baring [mise à nu], or that-which-is as such. Then why this insistent, marked word? Why the “world”? See the discussion in pt. II, §22.
41. “After the catastrophe of the Greek polis, it became important that this inheritance remain alive, an inheritance of thinking about the state where philosophers might live, about a state of justice founded not on mere tradition, but rather on looking-in” [Cz., nahléd-nutí] (PE, p. 88). See also: “I would only like to show that in the conception of the care of the soul is encompassed something like the ideal of the truthful life, that is a life that, as much as [sic] in praxis as in its activity of thinking, always directs itself by looking-in” (PE, p. 107).
42. “[Vilem] Mrštík therefore speaks of ‘that dreadful immobility of suicides’” (HE, p. 59).
43. Patočka emphasizes “one”; my emphasis for the remainder.—D.G.
44. “. . . how fundamental is the difference between home and foreign [Cz., cizina]. . . . The near world is the world of good, which is proven by a long tradition of human action in precisely tried and still repeated forms. Only within them is man capable of trust and living-at-home within existence, trust that does not disappoint. While at the same time, there is the constant threat of that which is unusual, not falling into these forms of rootedness, that which Germans call unheimlich, das Unheimliche, that is, what is threatening par excellence” (PE, p. 54).
45. “When Plato says θαῦμα ἀρχῂ τῇς σοφίας (wonder is the origin of wisdom), and Aristotle speaks of how people started to philosophize διὰ τὸ θαυμάζειν (it is owing to their wonder), out of wonder, amazement—this is what they mean. There is no amazement in myth; myth is not in wonder about anything, it knows everything beforehand” (PE, p. 59).
46. Husserl, “Vienna Lecture” (Lauer), pp. 175–76; emphasis added. The last sentence does not appear in the German editions that I consulted. But the consequential relation is clearly laid out in the development on this page and the preceding one. [German text: “Die in der Tradition konservativ Befriedigten und der philosophische Menschenkreis werden einander bekämpfen, und sicherlich wird der Kampf sich in der politischen Machtsphäre abspielen. Schon in den Anfängen der Philosophie beginnt die Verfolgung” (Husserl, “Krisis des europäischen Menschentums,” p. 335); my emphasis—Trans.].
47. See Patočka, PE. [E.g., “the philosophical ideal of life in truth” (PE, p. 104); “. . . man could make at least the human world a world of truth and justice. How this can be achieved is the very subject of the care of the soul” (PE, p. 36).—Trans.]
48. “This philosophical-political schema, where the philosopher does not perish . . . also revolves around the problem of the soul and care for it. . . . And that is the reason why . . . Plato introduces this connection to political life in context of the state” (PE, p. 111).
49. “And naturally, understanding this matter means coming into conflict with ordinary perception, which understandably looks at right and justice and so on entirely differently, which looks at right and justice as a matter of utility, an external utility. . . . In ordinary perception, right and justice is regard for others. . . . This dual way of seeing, the common way of seeing and the way of seeing of the philosopher are inevitably in conflict” (PE, pp. 104–5).
50. “When the question [raised by Adeimantus, explicitly so in the French translation—Trans.] of law-giving comes into the new community, Socrates says that these are small details, with which he will not concern himself. We are interested not in law-giving in its entirety and in its details—it does not concern what will be, let us say, taxes, and what punishments will be meted out [Plato, Republic 4.425ff.], but rather that most important thing—the only one this is about—the regulation of upbringing, education, which leads the guardians from the first moment of their existence” (PE, p. 121).
51. “We could also speak of the natural world . . . if we were to understand by it the world prior to the discovery of its problematic character. The nonproblematic world is one in which concealment is not experienced as such. That does not mean that such a world would not have or know secret things, the sacred, or the mysterious; on the contrary, it can be full of such things . . . but it lacks the experience of the transition [Fr., passage], of the emergence of what-is [Fr., l’étant] as phenomenon out of obscurity into the openness in the course of which even that which allows what-is to become manifest shows itself and thereby and only thereby sets questions about what-is on a firm foundation” (HE, p. 12). [“What-is” translates the German term das Seiende. It is often translated into French as l’étant, and in English as “what is,” “that which is,” “beingness,” “being,” “entity,” and so on (in an ontological, at times Heideggerian, context). It stands in contrast to the substantivized form of “to be” in German (das Sein) and French (l’être); in English, “to be” lacks any potential for being reasonably substantivized, except in the gerund (“being” or “Being”).—Trans.]
52. “. . . the life of such societies is focused on the acceptance and maintenance of life . . . it is rooted in the immediacy of being human, for which openness itself is not revealed or life problematic . . .” (HE, p. 29).
53. On the Greek word nomos, which forms part of oikonomia, see PE, p. 104.
54. Nahlédnutí in Czech.—Trans.
55. I am borrowing this expression from Thomas Dommange, “Sommes-nous capables d’un monde?” See also Patočka, Plato and Europe: “And because of this, the soul capable of something like that must be cared for” (p. 80). And further, “. . . for all that, it must take place in something that is capable of looking-in. To look-in means to see. This means it all takes place in a being to whom the world manifests itself. The being has its own special privilege in contrast to all other worldly beings of which we are aware” (PE, p. 95).
56. “Their manifestation, however, is itself historical” [Fr., historiale] (HE, p. 10).
57. “. . . this conception—the problem of manifesting and manifestation—is from the very beginning the ground of all reflection of European peoples reflecting upon their situation in a peculiar guise” (PE, p. 42).
58. “. . . transcendence towards the world” (HE, p. 49).
59. “For in the Roman Empire the care of the soul assumes the form of striving for a rule of law throughout the global community” [oikoumenē (Gk. for community) in the French translation—Trans.] (HE, p. 83). And also, “The moment this great empire was wrecked, the primeval example [Fr., prototype] of all empires, it left behind a heritage—if we have states at all it is because this empire existed” (PE, p. 89).
60. Patočka asks the question explicitly, in Plato and Europe, and in Heretical Essays (“These reflections should not be understood as an idealization of the Greek polis” [HE, p. 41]).
61. The sudden appearance of the political principle was marked by the victory of Greece over the Asian empire—the “most powerful that had hitherto ruled over the world, the synthesis of all eastern monarchies in the form of the Persian Empire” (PE, p. 110). Thus, this “situation demonstrated the principle of freedom . . . to be more powerful, to be, in fact, the most powerful on earth” (PE, p. 82). But Rome also inherits its collapse: “Altogether we can thus say that the European heritage remains the same in the various forms in which the care for the soul is transformed in the two great historical catastrophes, that of the polis and that of the Roman Empire” (HE, p. 83). “The contemporary decline of the Athenian community is, as we know, represented by the fate of Socrates” (PE, p. 110).
62. “From the moment that the perishing of the polis had already been decided, philosophy transformed itself into what was to be its image for millenia [sic], transforming itself into metaphysics in Plato and Democritus” (HE, p. 65). “Metaphysics itself grows out of a particular historical situation, from the situation of the decline of the polis, the decline of Athens” (PE, p. 129).
63. On the liberation that political life represents and Arendt’s interpretation of Aristotle, see HE, p. 40. And further, “. . . we could deduce the very beginning of history in the proper sense of the word. We can speak of history where life becomes free and whole, where it consciously builds room for an equally free life” (HE, pp. 40–41). “[T]he Greek world is the representative of the principle of freedom. But of course, we have to understand this in the Greek sense of the word: this is the world of free nobles, that is people who are—as Hannah Arendt nicely phrased it—despots in their own home so they might be equals in their city. They are absolute masters of their households, but in the city they are equals” (PE, pp. 81–82).
64. “The Greek world is not united. It is organized into independent tiny city-states (πóλεις), and these have various regimes, such as democracy, such as aristocracy where only a certain group rules, such as tyranny where only one rules. And of course, tyranny is already a retreat from this Greek principle, it already is decline. Yet in the Greek cities, tyranny can only last for a short time. Of all the Greek cities, Athens is the most Greek, because it is the guarantor of freedom for every other city. That was shown in the Persian wars” (PE, p. 82; emphasis added).
65. “That, however, means life on the boundary which makes life an encounter with what there is, on the boundary of all that is where this whole remains insistent because something quite other than individual entities, interests, and realities within it inevitably emerges here” (HE, p. 39).
66. “[W]ithin this care of the soul I catch sight of the essential heritage of Europe, that is to say, what in a certain sense made European history what it is. This does not mean that these thoughts were realized here, it only means that they were a certain ferment, without which we cannot conceive of European reality” (PE, p. 107; emphasis added). And further, “Metaphysics itself grows out of a particular historical situation, from the situation of the decline of the polis, the decline of Athens. It creates a heritage that can survive in the declining polis, and survives even the decline of Hellenism, and helps so that after the decline of the Roman Empire still another formation is conceived, that is, Europe in the proper sense of the word. The surviving of the heritage is obviously also its change, but this metaphysical foundation still endures. And surprisingly, upon it the domain of European life is spread out, is generalized” (PE, p. 129; emphasis added).
67. Philosophy (and science to a certain extent) seems less productive during this time than during its intense beginnings—with massive exceptions, however, such as the Stoics’ contribution, which provides a kind of “philosophical ideology” to the empire, by putting much work into the elaboration of the schemas of universality.
68. Let us recall that the poem was written at the exact same time as Augustus’s constitution of the imperial regime.
69. The Aeneid has been seen as an Odyssey (bks. 1–6) followed by an Iliad (bks. 7–12), dividing it into two equal halves following the (reversed) structure of the Homeric poems.
70. Laying claim to Trojan origins did not stop with Rome: the foundation narratives of France (and Germany, too) feature them as well. See Beaune, Naissance de la nation France, pp. 25–74.
71. But stating this still does not explain it. Shall one say that the theoretical, at bottom, did not come to terms with imperial domination, as domination of the world? That no matter what one may say, it may be with something other than the world that the theoretical is dealing, and much rather with beingness, the illuminating transcendence of (and toward) that which is; and not the world, which deals with subjection and hegemony? Domination could then capture this illumination, fix it (as an image), and transmit it—but not reproduce it.
73. Unlike Marcel Gauchet (Désenchantement du monde, pp. 12ff.), I reject dependence on the past as an autonomous structure that is independent and thinkable by itself. It presupposes, it seems to me, the constitution of a temporality that seems (“intuitively”) posterior to the structures of the “first religion” of which Gauchet speaks. The idea of this dependence mobilizes a temporality set apart, as an autonomous category, in which I tend to see one of our structures in organizing the world. To put it in terms of debt, as Gauchet does, I would rather seek something like being indebted to the locus, to the “there.”
74. With the first ancestor, and just like him, the first god also arrives. The issue of what makes the gods ancestors or not is discussed later. But with arrivals, the link is clear. Thus, Herodotus, explaining that the “names of almost all the gods also came to Greece from Egypt,” sees the explanation in the founders’ arrival in Greece. “I will absolutely deny that the similarities between the Greek and the Egyptian versions of the [Dionysian—Trans.] rites are coincidental. . . . The most likely scenario, in my opinion, is that Melampus [introducer of the rites into Greece] learnt these Dionysian rites from Cadmus of Tyre and those who accompanied him on his journey from Phoenicia to the country now known as Boeotia” (Histories 2.49–50, pp. 115–16). Recall that Cadmus came to Greece to look for his abducted sister Europē (Histories 4.147; and on the ancestors’ divine descent, see 2.143–44).
75. I obviously owe this concept to Derrida, but its proposed use here distinguishes itself from his, to a certain extent—perhaps a question of materialism.
76. As time passes, it comes back more: time goes by and the remains diminish.
77. See Rousseau, “Discours sur l’inégalité,” in OEuvres complètes, 2: 224. On gathering points, see Rousseau, Essai sur l’origine des langues, p. 102. [In English, “Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality Among Men, or Second Discourse”; “Essay on the Origin of Languages,” both in The Discourses and Other Early Political Writings].
78. See Aristotle, Physics 4.1–5; Rhetoric 1.2.1358a10–31; 2.22–26; Topics, passim. See also Brague, “Le lieu,” in Aristote et la question du monde, pp. 273–322; and Thionville, De la théorie des lieux communs dans les ‘Topiques’ d’Aristote.
79. Aristotle, Rhetoric 1.2.22.
80. See Chantraine, Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue grecque, 1: 1125.
81. See Aristotle, Rhetoric 2.26.1403a18: “element (or topic) [topos—Trans.] is a head under which several enthythemes are included,” which Moreau and Hamelin translate as follows: “Un lieu, c’est ce en quoi coïncident [sic] une pluralité de raisonnements oratoires” (Moreau, Aristote et son école, p. 48n2; Hamelin, Système d’Aristote, p. 228). The Ruelle and Vanhemelryck translation is: “ce à quoi reviennent beaucoup d’enthymèmes” (Aristotle, Rhétorique, p. 294). [On the translation of “enthymemes” by (Fr.) “raisonnements oratoires” (oratorical reasonings), see Aristotle, Rhetoric 1.2.8: “I call an enthymeme a rhetorical syllogism.”—Trans.]
82. Aristotle, Physics 4.4; emphasis added.
83. On the other hand, we know that “Aristotle declares transport / locomotion [phora—Trans.] to be the first movement, ranking it first in the plurality of movements” (Brague, Aristote et la question du monde, p. 276n2; numerous references appear here).
84. Aristotle, Physics 4.1. Brague comments on this passage (Aristote et la question du monde, pp. 274ff.).
85. Aristotle, Physics 4.2.
86. “. . . for not everything that is is in place, but only movable body [kinēton sōma]” (ibid., 4.5). A passage, then, from the proposition to the term? From syntax to semantics?
87. Ibid., 4.2.
88. Ibid., 4.5.
89. Brague, Aristote et la question du monde, pp. 278ff.
90. “This example is you. Aristotle calls on the listeners of his teaching in away so rare as to be remarkable. This procedure is not without parallel but it is unique in the Physics. We should therefore ask why Aristotle needs such an unusual example, all the more striking in that it interrupts the flow of the argument” (Brague, Aristote et la question du monde, p. 287).
91. See Nancy, Des lieux divins, for a problematic on this topic that is quite different.
92. Dictionnaire historique de la langue française, ed. Rey, 1: 1127.
93. Hegel, Aesthetics, 2: 638.
94. Ibid., 1: 84.
95. Ibid., pp. 85–86.
96. Ibid., p. 84; emphasis added.
97. Isa. 40:3–5 (KJV). See also Luke 3:4–6: “As it is written in the book of the words of Esaias the prophet, saying, . . . Prepare ye the way of the Lord.”
98. Hegel, Aesthetics, 1: 84; Ästhetik I/II, pp. 143–45.
99. See Hegel, Aesthetics, 2: 638; Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik, 2: 276; Esthétique (Jankélévitch), 3: 33.
100. French text: “le but de la cohésion et cette cohésion même” (Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik, 2: 276; my modified translation and emphasis—D.G.). German text: “dem Zweck dieses Zusammenhalts und als dieser Zusammenhalt.”
101. “Die Gemeinsamkeit der Konstruktion wird zugleich der Zweck und Inhalt des Werkes selbst” (ibid.). [Zweck is also “purpose.”—Trans.]
102. Ibid.
103. Ibid.
104. Hegel, Aesthetics, 2: 638; Esthétique (Jankélévitch), 3: 33; Esthétique: Textes choisis, p. 27. Emphasis added.
105. Of course this brings to mind Peter Brook’s famous incipit: “I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage” (Brook, Empty Space, p. 9).
106. Hegel, Ästhetik I/II, p. 144; Hegel Aesthetics, 1: 84: “the lightning-flash of individuality.”
107. See Aristotle, Physics 4.2, 4. [“Containance” is used to translate contenance, introduced by the author with an added element of “containment.”—Trans.]
108. See Heidegger, “Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes,” in Holzwege, pp. 22ff (29ff. marginal pagination).
109. Hegel, Aesthetics, 1: 85. German text: “[Die Gemeinde (community—Trans.)] ist die geistige Reflexion [spiritual reflection—Trans.] in sich jenes sinnlichen Daseyns. . . . Die gediegene Einheit in sich [compact unity in itself—Trans.] des Gottes in der Skulptur zerschlägt sich [is shattered—Trans.] in die Vielheit vereinzelter Innerlichkeit [into the plurality of the inner lives of individuals—Trans.], deren Einheit keine sinnliche, sondern schlechthin ideell ist. Und so erst ist Gott selber als dieses Herüber und Hinüber [this to- and-fro—Trans.], als dieser Wechsel seiner Einheit in sich und Verwirklichung im subjektiven Wissen und dessen Besonderung, wie der Allgemeinheit und Vereinigung der Vielen, wahrhaft Geist—der Geist in seiner Gemeinde” (Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik, 1: 110–11; Hegel, Aesthetics, 1: 85–86).
110. Hegel, Aesthetics, 1: 86; Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik, 1: 111.
111. “. . . it is a rule in the Divine activity to prepare no ‘place’ without it receiving a Divine spirit” (Ibn al-‘Arabi, Wisdom of the Prophets, no pagination; Sagesse des prophètes, p. 22, and also pp. 71–72, 93, and 169).
112. “Local gods, identified with objects in the sky, were thought to be embodied in stones, trees and other natural things; good and evil spirits were believed to roam the world in the shape of animals. . . . It has been suggested . . . that gods were thought of as dwelling in a sanctuary, a haram, a place or town set apart from tribal conflict, serving as a centre of pilgrimage” (Hourani, History of the Arab Peoples, p. 11; emphasis added).
113. See Exod. 13:21–22, 14:19–20.
114. See Drai, Sortie d’Égypte, passim.
115. See Ernst Bloch, “Exodus in the Concept of Yahweh,” in Atheism in Christianity, pp. 71ff (German ed.: Bloch, “Exodus in der Jachwevorstellung selber, Enttheokratisierung,” in Atheismus, pp. 115–66).
116. Ibid.
117. The clear-cut mark of what Bloch terms futurity—with the “future as open determinedness of Being” (Gm., “Mit Futurum als offener Seinsbestimmtheit”)—is conveyed by the future tense of God’s reply to Moses, “I will be who I will be” (Gm., “Ich werde sein, der ich sein werde”), unfairly translated, it seems (and thus hellenicized; see Exod. 3:14), as “I am that I am” (Bloch, Atheismus, p. 85; see also Drai, Sortie d’Égypte, p. 22).
118. Exod. 20:2–4, from the Elohist as translated by Jean Bottéro in id., Naissance de Dieu, pp. 62–63; emphasis added. [Shown here is my English version of Bottéro’s translation, which deviates from other versions. The King James Version is as follows: “I am the Lord thy God, which have brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. / Thou shalt have no other gods before me. / Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth: / Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God . . .”—Trans.]
119. Bottéro, Naissance de Dieu, p. 63; emphasis added.
120. Kant, Critique of Judgment, para. 29, p. 143. See the comment on this passage in Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, “La vérité sublime,” in Courtine et al., Du sublime, pp. 97–147.
121. Kant, Critique of Judgment, para. 29, pp. 143–44.
122. Ibid.; emphasis added.
123. Ibid.
124. Freud, Moses and Monotheism, pp. 111–22. [Further page references to this book, abbreviated as MM, appear parenthetically in the body of the text.—Trans.] Lacoue-Labarthe, for his part, makes a connection with Freud, Moses of Michelangelo. See Lacoue-Labarthe, “La vérité sublime,” in Courtine et al., Du sublime, pp. 119–23.
125. Though this point is not unchallengeable. Let us recall its discussion by Spinoza (see Spinoza, Theologico-Political Treatise, chap. 3). [On the term “sublime”: in German (e.g., in Kant), the sublime is das Erhabene, but sublim is also used. Freud makes reference, in this religious context, to the “heights of sublime abstraction,” i.e., “zu den Höhen sublimer Abstraktion” (Freud, Der Mann Moses, p. 33).—Trans.]
126. In a footnote Freud explains that he uses this compound term, Triebverzicht [Trieb (drive or instinct) and Verzicht (renunciation)] as an abbreviation for “renouncing the satisfaction of an urge [or drive, or compulsion] derived from an instinct.”—Trans.
127. The distinction between the Greek and Jewish contributions—their heterogeneity—continues to be at issue here. Nevertheless, they have in common a tendency to oppose magic and ritualism, or myth, insofar as it conveys and legitimizes rituals and magic. On this point, there are remarkable parallels between Husserl’s analyses in the “Vienna Lecture” and Freud’s in Moses and Monotheism. Cf. also Scholem, Walter Benjamin, p. 259: “What matters is not infinity but eliminating magic” (“Es kommt nicht auf die Unendlichkeit an, sondern auf die Ausschaltung der Magie”).
128. Transcendence toward: we frequently take transcendence to be an autonomous and separate space (by erasing the moving and transitioning aspects that this term implies)—e.g., divine space as opposed to human space. But the term denotes a way onward, an elevation, an access—a passage across, temporal as well as spatial, a crossing of boundaries and barriers. One should perhaps distinguish two modes of transcendence, a transcendence-toward, and a transcendence-of. Transcendence-of would function as a deposit or folding-back of the movement of transcendence-toward: a transcendence-toward, too, but immobilized, reduced, spatialized in op-position—deposed transcendence.
129. “While it is not a question that Aristotle thematized, the concept of world is a question addressed to his thinking, precisely and paradoxically insofar as it is missing from it” (Brague, Aristote et la question du monde, p. 6).
130. Classical? Brague adds a nuance: “this absence . . . then turns out to be characteristic of Hellenism before Aristotle and after him” (ibid.).
131. Ibid. See also Plato, Timaeus: “Now the whole Heaven, or Cosmos, or if there is any other name which it specially prefers, by that let us call it” (28b). See also Chantraine, Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue grecque, 1: 570.
132. On this articulation, see Plato, Timaeus 17a–28b.
133. Husserl, “Vienna Lecture,” p. 276; emphasis added.
134. In a very partial sense, the distinction made here can be backed up with one stage of Heidegger’s analysis: “Neither the ontic description of innerworldly beings nor the ontological interpretation of the being of these beings gets as such at the phenomenon of ‘world’” (Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 64). This allows the view that Greek thought, even insofar as it examines the being of what is [l’être de l’étant], does not aim at the worldliness of the world as such. The focus on what I have termed the transcendence of beingness or what-is is not enough to qualify a thought system as a thinking of the world. Wordliness is not the being of beingness, nor is it even the position of the being of all beingness or all that is. Heidegger adds a little later, “‘Worldliness’ is an ontological concept and designates the structure of a constitutive factor of being-in-the-world” (ibid.). On this score, “‘World’ is ontologically not a determination of those beings [Fr., l’étant—Trans.] which Dasein essentially is not, but rather a characteristic of Dasein itself” (ibid.). And so the world is determined by a mode, moment, or characteristic of being-in-the-world [Fr., être-au-monde]. In this sense, and to bring this thesis nearer to the present problematic, the worldhood of the world is situated less in the position of the being of that which is [l’être de l’étant], or the being of all beings [de tousles étants] (which the Greeks knew, of course) than in a mode of positing and constituting a determined way of grasping this being [être], namely, what I am designating here as the mode of unity of the unity of the totality of that which is or beingness. What makes up the world is the mode—moment or character—of the experience by way of which one posits the unity of the totality of the world, in accordance with a certain determination of this unity.
136. On Marcus Aurelius, see www.iep.utm.edu/marcus (accessed July 8, 2012).—Trans.
137. That the invention of the empire is thus a question of metaphor, recurrence, and, partially at least, because of the geopolitical situation, the transfer of non-Greek (e.g., Persian) models need cause us no difficulty here; this is not enough of a reason to consider the Roman empire to exemplify an immovable imperiality whose essence manifests itself in all the great despotic formations, including China and pre-Columbian monarchies of the Americas. The empire that we are dealing with here is Roman because the concept that designates it was constructed during Roman times, at the same time as the reality that it describes. It is this Latin word that we use to designate “empires.” A rigorous approach demands that one consider the supposed earlier empires as nothing but possible provenances, and the later ones as derivative—and still other ones as hypothetical assimilations.
138. That is, in the conflictual space of the difference of religions.
139. Most of the early Christian apologies were personally addressed to emperors. “In the technical sense of the term, apologies were legal defense speeches, and in fact these works are legal arguments to obtain from emperors the legal recognition of the Christians’ existence in an officially pagan empire. One finds in them partial reports about the Christian faith, and a few attempts to justify it to Greek philosophy,” Étienne Gilson points out in Philosophie au moyen âge, p. 15. Justin’s First Apology is addressed to Hadrian, and his Second Apology to Marcus Aurelius, as are Melito of Sardis’s Apology and Athenagoras’s Supplication, and so on (ibid., pp. 15–33). [See Justin Martyr, Apologies; Melito, On Pascha and Fragments; and Athenagoras, Apologeticks.—Trans.] There is no mystery about these addresses: even if their object seems modest and aims at allowing worship and not at converting emperors, the empire is the space where the new religion—and its framework of possible dissemination—has to be authorized, and on this score, together with Greek thought, the empire is its common locus. The emperors’ conversion will be an outcome; the determining phenomenon is the spreading of Christianity and its congruence with this world. Gilson’s allusion to “a few attempts to justify it to Greek philosophy” is not restrictive: it was because of their very precocious character that there were only “a few attempts.” Justifying the Christian religion to Greek philosophy was an ongoing process (ibid., pp. 34–137).
140. Virgil’s Bucolics 4 anecdotally suggest that Christianity is the religion of the “age of the empire,” since it has been seen as both a prophetic announcement of the birth of Jesus and a hymn celebrating Augustus’s childhood, which seems more plausible. More than the balance of divination and flattery, however, it is the interchangeability of the two interpretations that is thought-provoking.
141. Later, when Catholicity is called into question, and thus becomes an object of thought, it will be designated by this Greek name.
142. The determination of this god as god of the exit, of liberation already precedes this henotheism. The assertion of this god’s priority, preeminence, and the “jealousy” that makes him demand exclusive worship follows.
143. I allude to the difference between contemplated space and traveled [parcouru] space suggested by Pierre Alféri, which Thomas Dommange comments on in “Sommes-nous capables d’un monde?”
144. The limitations were local: “most of them local gods, dating from the period when the country was divided into numerous provinces” (MM, p. 19).
145. MM, pp. 20–21; emphasis added. See also: “The new imperialism was reflected in the development of the religious ideas . . . the idea arose of a universal god Aten to whom restriction to a single country and a single people no longer applied” p. 59). “In the case of the genesis of monotheism, however, we can point to no external factor other than the one we have already mentioned—that this development was linked with the establishment of closer relations between different nations and with the building up of a great empire” (MM, p. 108).
146. However, as Freud shows, the reduction of polytheism affects theism itself: (a) starting with the religion of Aten, “everything to do with myths, magic and sorcery is excluded from it” (MM, p. 24); (b) “Nothing was to be heard any more of Osiris and his kingdom” (ibid.); and above all, this process produces a “highly spiritualized religion” (p. 46). Freud throws a very distinct light on this “spiritualization” of religion.
147. Outside of the logical genesis of the concept of empire, this probably corresponds to the factual genesis of the historical empire, the premises of imperiality having taken shape during what has been termed “Athenian imperialism,” which was inherent in the constitution of Athens. See pt. I, §3 of this book.
149. The lag is quite slight. This is the time that focuses on a Judeo-Hellenic rapprochement, the centuries from the first to the fourth C.E., when this intersection constitutes itself as a primordial theological question and acquires its structure. See Gilson, Philosophie au moyen âge.
150. Why put “Jewish” in quotation marks? Because while the Greeks think of themselves as, and call themselves, Greeks, the “Jews” neither think nor name themselves “Jewish” plainly and evenly from the beginning to the end of the process that the biblical tales relate. Although there is a filiation and a tradition from Abraham to Daniel—and of course even to Jesus—it seems quite reductionist to gather these fifteen centuries of history under the category of one “religion,” and, what is more, one that is assimilated to what we term “Judaism” today. Judaism as a religion has a point of birth and particularization that needs to be determined: Jean Bottéro, for example, places the date within the later prophetic era (see Bottéro, “Ezéchiel et la fondation du judaïsme,” in Naissance de Dieu, pp. 145ff.). Whether or not one agrees with this dating, one should understand Judaism as a concrete historical entity, seen through its formation and its transformations, and not as a transhistorical essence running from Abraham to the disputes of the Chief Rabbinate of Paris.
151. John 3:16 (KJV). See also: “. . . and the bread that I will give is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world” (John 6:51).
153. See, e.g., KJV: “For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved” (John 3:17); “[We] know that this is indeed the Christ, the Saviour of the world” (John 4:42); “I came not to judge the world, but to save the world” (John 12:47); and also, no doubt metaphorically, “As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world” (John 9:5).
154. This is what makes the death of Christ into a new exodus, according to the schema of Easter. This death is thematized as a new exit from Egypt, which is to say setting across and away, free of the world—with Old Testament Egypt retrospectively reinterpreted as the figure of the world, as mentioned. See, e.g., John 13–17, from “Now before the feast of the passover, when Jesus knew that his hour was come that he should depart out of this world unto the Father . . .” (John 13:1), to the long prayer that follows (John 17:1–26). But also, “Moreover, brethen, I would not that ye should be ignorant, how that all our fathers were under the cloud, and all passed through the sea; / And were all baptized unto Moses in the cloud and in the sea; / And did all eat the same spiritual meat; / And did all drink the same spiritual drink: for they drank of that spiritual Rock that followed them: and that Rock was Christ” (1 Cor. 10:1–4). The Pauline accent here is quite different.
155. See Bailly, Adieu.
156. E.g., Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, p. 590; Nietzsche, Gay Science, para. 108, p. 109.
157. The Greek word skhēma is translated as figure in the French Jerusalem Bible: “Car elle passe, la figure de ce monde.” [The KJV translates it as “fashion”: “For the fashion of this world passeth away.”—Trans.]
158. Let us say gnostic, but not only in the narrow meaning of the term. Patočka’s “Christian Platonicism,” for example, is not completely devoid of this, since he energetically denies the importance of the Hebraic contribution to Christianity and therefore to Europe. See Patočka, Plato and Europe, pp. 128, 149ff. [See also Gasché, Europe, p. 238.—Trans.]
159. Matt. 26:31.
160. We can see that this branching out is also scriptural: the tale of the institution of the Eucharist appears in the Synoptic Gospels (Matt. 26:17–29, Mark 14:12–25, Luke 22:7–20), and in Paul (1 Cor. 11:23–25). However, it is absent from the story of the paschal meal in John 13:17, and it is precisely the Johannine text that forcefully develops a theology of the world. It is as if two theological interpretations of the death of God stood side by side (or opposed): the one as exit from the world, the other as bodily transfer (and these perhaps come down to two ways of understanding incarnation: coming to the world or incorporation). One would then have to interpret why the one comes later than the other (in the process, probably, of the passage from the practices of the early communities to a more “worldwide” view). It remains that in the corpus constituted as an organic whole (“Christianity”), the birth functions as a coming to the world, and the death as a transfer to the bodies of the disciples.
161. One can easily see here a premise and a condition for what the West will later develop as the transcendence of individuality.
162. Luther, Ausgewählte Werke, 2: 137. [“Denn Christus sagt: ‘Wo zwei miteinander eins sind auf Erden, da bin ich in ihrer Mitte.” Here Luther modifies his own translation, which had been, “Denn wo zween oder drey versamlet sind in meinem Namen / Da bin ich mitten unter inen” (Where two or three are gathered in my name, there I am among them) (Matt. 18:20, in Luther Bible [1545]); my emphasis.—Trans.]
163. See Guénoun, L’enlèvement de la politique.
164. Not in inmost interiority—in privacy and secrecy, and on this score supposed to be outside of the world—but precisely between and among you, Ernst Bloch protests: “Jesus hat nie behauptet: ‘Das Reich Gottes ist in euch,’ die Stelle (Luk. 17,21) lautet vielmehr richtig übersetzt: ‘Das Reich Gottes ist mitten unter euch [Gk., entos umōn]’” (Jesus never asserted, ‘The kingdom of God is within you’; instead, rightly translated, this passage [Luke 17:21] says, ‘The kingdom of God is in the very middle among you’”) (Bloch, Atheismus, p. 125). But doubt is no longer permissible after the Eucharist: it is in you, within each of you, within the body of each of you.
165. Why only the baptized? We should stop at this, of course, and determine the significance of this separation, which provisionally limits the ability of the Reformation to extend “democratically.”
166. We can see in this a Protestant precedent for the generality of Rousseau’s will, which resists any particularity (any appropriation by a part of the common) in exercising one’s will.
167. Paul’s indications are quite numerous. They do not, as far as we know, establish any explicit and direct link with Eucharistic sharing, but formulate the unity of Christians (or men; or men and women) as the unity of the body of Christ, either on the model of a functional cohesiveness, or in accordance with the schema of the gathering. “For as we have many members in one body, and all members have not the same office: / So we, being many, are one body in Christ, and every one members one of another” (Rom. 12:4–5). See also 1 Cor. 12:12–28, esp. 27–28; and also, for a somewhat different aspect, 1 Cor. 6:15; or Eph. 1:22, 2:14–16, 3:6 (“the Gentiles should be fellow heirs, and of the same body, and partakers of his promise in Christ by the gospel”), 4:4, 4:12–16 (esp. “for the perfecting of the saints, for the edifying of the body of Christ: / till we all come in the unity of the faith”; emphasis added), 5:23–30; and Col, 1:18–24, 2:17–19, and 3:15 (“also ye are called in one body”).
168. During one of the sessions of Jean-Luc Nancy’s seminar “Geophilosophy of Europe,” Université Marc Bloch, Strasbourg, fall and winter 1991–92.
169. Nancy’s remark was brief and allusive. This explanation is my own.
170. See Stétié, Lumière sur lumière, p. 49.
171. See Dagorn, Geste d’Ismaël, p. 162n42, and Delcambre, Mahomet, p. 22.
172. We may assume that “the abrogating verses in Sūrat an-Najm exalt the Ka‘bah at the expense of the other shrines. It is worth remembering in this connexion [sic] that with the growth of Muḥammad’s power, these shrines were all destroyed,” William Montgomery Watt writes (Muhammad at Mecca, p. 104).
173. Hourani, History of the Arab Peoples, p. 17.
174. Watt, Muhammad at Mecca, pp. 96, 158–61.
175. The original controversy, of course, and not the other one (not, i.e., Salman Rushdie’s novel of that title, even if the violent response evoked by Rushdie's book can doubtless be understood in connection with the ambiguity of the original story). See Watt, Muhammad at Mecca, pp. 104–9, and Benslama, Fiction troublante, passim.
176. See Watt, Muhammad at Mecca, pp. 33ff., 39, 158–61. For a simplified discussion of this, see Delcambre, Mahomet, pp. 32, 40, and 42.
177. Hourani, History of the Arab Peoples, p.7; Watt, Muhammad at Mecca, pp. 1–23.
178. Receding nomadic lifestyles (sedentarization), but also urbanization, nonagricultural sedentarization, based on new commercial and financial practices, offer some hints. Watt insists on this aspect of the situation in Mecca: “The Qu‘rān appeared not in the atmosphere of the desert, but in that of high finance” (Watt, Muhammad at Mecca, p. 3). What is involved is a changing flow (from nomadic traffic to financial exchanges) as much as the passage from mobility to fixity or the other way around.
179. See Hourani, History of the Arab Peoples, p.7; Watt, Muhammad at Mecca, pp. 1–23.
180. See Hourani, ibid.; Watt, ibid.
181. See Koran, surah 30 (The Romans), 2–9: “The Romans are vanquished, / In a near land, and they, after being vanquished, shall overcome, / Within a few years. Allah’s is the command before and after; and on that day the believers shall rejoice, / . . . but most people do not know. / . . . Have they not travelled in the earth and seen how was the end of those before them? They were stronger than these in prowess, and dug up the earth, and built on it in greater abundance than these have built on it, and there came to them their apostles with clear arguments; so it was beseeming for Allah that He should deal with them unjustly, but they dealt unjustly with their own souls.”
182. Ibid.: “Then evil was the end of those who did evil, because they rejected the communications of Allah and used to mock them.” See the whole text of surah 30.
183. See Rodinson, Mahomet, chaps. 1 and 2, pp. 21–59.
184. The term débilité is from Berl, Europe et Asie, p. 53.
185. Ibid., p. 54.
186. Koran (Berque), p. 674.
187. Koran, surah 87 (The Most High), 18–19. There are numerous other mentions, of course, as shown for example in the index to Berque’s translation of the Koran (or in any other similar compilation), with its multiple entries linked to Old or New Testament figures (Abraham, Jacob, Isaac, Solomon, Gabriel, Jesus, Mary, and so forth). A traditional tale reports that Muhammad’s (older) wife, after one of his “mystical” crises, sought advice from a cousin. “His name was Waraqa ibn Nawfal and he was a scholar with a wide knowledge of the scriptures, both Jewish and Christian. . . . He said, ‘This is the nāmūs that was revealed to Moses’” (Rodinson, Muhammad, p. 73). [According to Rodinson, nāmūs “was the Greek word nomos, meaning Law” (ibid.).—Trans.]
188. The way in which Judaism developed and spread during this era defines and inscribes it within the structures of the Roman world. The Jewish Diaspora was [in this sense] Roman. And, from this point of view, even if the Judaism that Muhammad encountered was doubtless quite peripheral, it was not isolated, or separable, from what Judaism had become, during more than five centuries, as a component of the Roman world.
189. In this context, let us note the idea, echoed by Bernard Lewis, that the very concept of religion might be linked to the emergence of Islam: “Indeed, it has been argued with perhaps some exaggeration that the notion of religion as a class or category, of which Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are individual examples, originated only with the advent of Islam and the ability of Muslims to perceive and recognize two distinct predecessors to their own form of religious revelation and polity. No such awareness can be found among earlier Christians or Jews nor among any of the other cults of the ancient world. For a Muslim, the advent of Muḥammad and the revelation of the Qur’ān marks the last in a series of similar events through which God’s purpose was revealed to mankind. There had been a number of prophets whom God had sent on a mission to mankind as bearers of a revealed book. Muḥammad was the seal of the prophets and the Qur’ān the final and perfect revelation. All that was of value in earlier revelations was contained in it. What was not contained in it was due to the corruption or distortion of earlier revealed texts” (Lewis, Muslim Discovery of Europe, p. 64). And Lewis adds: “The principle of separateness and coexistence is usually justified by citing Sura 109. ‘Say: O Unbelievers! I shall not worship what you worship. You do not worship what I worship. . . . To you, your religion. To me, my religion.’ This was a new notion, without antecedents in either Christian or Jewish belief and practice” (ibid., p. 65; emphasis added). This view is clearly very close to what I have suggested about the religious as inscribing division, as well as a bond between that which has been divided. See pt. II, §12 of this book.
190. One of the canonical episodes of the Prophet’s biography reports a trip during his adolescence to Syria, in Byzantine territory. See Watt, Muhammad at Mecca, pp. 33ff., and Delcambre, Mahomet, pp. 32–33.
191. “The usual account is that on one day shortly after his return to Medina from al-Ḥudaybiyah Muḥammad sent out six messengers with letters for the Najash-ī or Negus of Abyssinia, for the governor of Bostra (Buṣrā) to hand on to the Byzantine emperor, for the Persian emperor (perhaps sent by way of the Yemen), for the Muqawqis or ruler of Egypt” (Watt, Muhammad at Medina, p. 41). According to the same traditional accounts, which Watt does not accept as credible on this issue, what these messages contained was a kind of summons addressed to the rulers: “he conceived of Islam as a universal religion and summoned the Byzantine and Persian emperors and other lesser potentates to accept it” (ibid.; see also p. 44).
192. However, the relation to Abrahamic genealogy is ambiguous.
193. This phase cannot be dated with exactitude: its movement is a component of the entire constitution of Islam, from the first conflicts with Meccans, the struggles and the decision to leave, to most of the stay at Medina. It will not be absent either (at least not completely) from the following time period. Let us say that it is a dominant trend in the first phase, before a kind of reversal, which I shall try to show. Regarding this first phase, I essentially follow Rodinson, Muhammad.
194. Ibid., p. 159.
195. See also Watt, “These scanty details are sufficient to show that Muḥammad’s interest in the tribes on the route to Syria was not simply a matter of chance. These tribes were either Christian or had some acquaintance with Christianity, and because of this may have been more attracted to Islam than to the pagans farther south” (Muhammad at Medina, p. 45). And further, “the road north had a prominent place in Muḥammad’s strategic thinking” (p. 105).
196. See ibid., pp. 13ff.
197. Koran, surah 2 (The Cow), 140–44. See also Rodinson, Muhammad, pp. 215ff.
198. French translations of this passage in the Koran are: “Ainsi vous constituons-Nous communauté médiane” (Berque); “une Communauté éloignée des extrêmes” (Masson); “une nation intermédiaire” (Kazimirski).
199. It may be Arabism as such that is born in this way. It seems that the signifier “Arab” in the meaning of “national” is absent from testimonies predating the Koran. See Watt, Muhammad at Medina, p. 143.
200. In French, h18 is: “L’Islam (se) retourne vers le lieu.”
201. See Watt, Muhammad at Medina, p. 69.
202. I owe my knowledge of these details linked to Muhammad’s family genealogy, as well as the meanings of the Zamzam Well and the recourse to the genealogy of Ishmael, to Fethi Benslama, Nuit brisée, pp. 208–18; “L’enfant et le lieu,” pp. 56–58.
203. See Dagorn, Geste d’Ismaël, passim, esp. chap. 4, pp. 127–66.
204. The link between the two genealogies is not only one of ancestry: like all Arabs, Muhammad does descend from Ishmael, but his personal connection is more of a doubling: in a way, the story of Muhammad restarts the story of Ishmael, repeats the same near-death and the same act of saving him. Moreover, Muhammad’s ancestor (his grandfather) discovers the ancestry, unearths the origin, and reveals the source.
205. Gen. 21:17 (KJV). See also Dagorn, Geste d’Ismaël, passim.
206. Still, it is noteworthy that the stone and the spring are adjacent. Even if each seems to convey an ontological primariness of the place (as plenitude by way of the stone, and as re-origination or re-sourcing by way of the spring), each nonetheless carries distinct values: the place as a being-there [être-là] that is compact and homogeneous within itself, on the one hand; and the place as gift, rushing, and extroversion of being, on the other—thus a split, after all, which dualizes this absolutely first unity as if by a double absoluteness and primariness.
207. One of the most contentious theological vices is shirk, or associationism, that is, giving God associates, and thus betraying, altering, or affecting his uniqueness, and both Christianity (because of the Trinity) and philosophy (because of the theory of secondary causes) are guilty of it. See Gardet, Hommes de l’Islam, p. 206 and n. 10.
208. Islam involves neither an original sin nor a historical incarnation: it lacks the division that makes the fall, or redemption, ontologically possible. That is why it only knows one language (as the language of revelation), and one space.
209. See Rodinson, Fascination de l’Islam, pp. 35–53, and passim.
210. We often hear that the specificity of Europe is based on the break with the empire and Eastern Orthodox Christianity. This is true, but let us recall that this separation is indefinitely produced as ambiguous and never clear-cut. Strictly, the split with the east can only posit a west. The Byzantine schism traces out the opposition between western Europe and eastern Europe in our geography. But that distinction, as the words themselves clearly put it, does not posit any European specificity: since there are two Europes opposed in it, and therefore, if you will, two parts of Europe, which presuppose a common concept of Europe. Of course, eastern Europe is in a sense also an outside of Europe. Patočka repeats this insistently—Europe amounts to its westernness, in a very deep sense (see Patočka, HE). But in my view, this shows that it is only in its ambiguity that this oriental difference is constitutive of Europe, whereas Islam and the retreat before it posit Europe as such, as the figure of a withdrawn world [monde replié].
PART IV: NO RETURNS
1. My reflections here on the common, being-common, and being-in-common were made possible by writings by Jean-Luc Nancy, especially La communauté désoeuvrée (The Inoperative Community) and “La Comparution / The Compearance,” although the proposed hypotheses often differ from his.
2. On the determination of the common as being [être], see pt. IV, §27.
3. In French: “du peuple manque” (see Deleuze, Time-Image, p. 220).
4. As in the saying, “J’étais au bal, y avait du populaire” (I was at the dance, there were lots of folks—Trans.).
5. See Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, p. 392; Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (Ogden), p. 31.
6. Hypotheses such as “one has to think the real in its regional differences, as multiple, partial, without homogeneous totalization,” etc., are obviously unifying propositions—ideas involving the world.
7. See Braudel, Civilisation matérielle, vol. 3: Le temps du monde, and id., Dynamique du capitalisme, pp. 82 ff.
8. See Lenin, “Imperialism as a Special Stage of Capitalism,” in Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, pp. 265ff.
9. I am not looking here into the validity of Lenin’s descriptions (made in 1916, in the middle of the “imperialist war”).
10. This analysis of worldwide globalization opens with very famous words: “A spectre is haunting Europe” (Marx and Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party [henceforward cited as Manifesto], p. 14).
11. “From the serfs of the Middle Ages sprang the chartered burghers of the earliest towns. From these burgesses the first elements of the bourgeoisie were developed” (Marx and Engels, Manifesto, p. 15).
12. Marx and Engels, Manifesto, p. 15. I am indebted to Thomas Dommange for rereading this passage and the next one from this perspective. These pages owe a great deal to suggestions he made.
13. Immanuel Wallerstein insists on this worldwide dimension from the start of what he terms “historical capitalism”: “In the real world of historical capitalism, almost all commodity chains of any importance have traversed these state frontiers. This is not a recent innovation. It has been true from the very beginning of historical capitalism” (Wallerstein, Historical Capitalism, p. 31). He locates these origins precisely “in late-fifteenth-century Europe” (p. 19). More particularly, he forcefully asserts: “The modern state was never a completely autonomous political entity. The states developed and were shaped as integral parts of an interstate system” (pp. 56–57), which seems to agree with my hypothesis that states constituted themselves from fragments of the preceding Roman empire and not from their own internal logic. To my way of thinking, it is this native interinvolvement that transforms into the states’ later interdependence—and perdures because (global) structural dependence does not stop at the fall of the empire. Wallerstein analyzes this worldwide globality not with the concept of imperialism but by reworking that of “world-economy” or “capitalist world-economy” (pp. 19ff.), sometimes construed as “world-system” (pp. 19, 39), and even “European world-economy” (p. 19). It is a matter of accounting for the fact that “the historical development of capitalism has involved the thrust towards the commodification of everything” (p. 16). And this does not necessarily imply that the category “empire” is abandoned: Wallerstein has recourse to the notion of “world-empire” (“the dynamic of the concentration of military power led to recurrent thrusts to transform the interstate system into a world-empire” [p. 57])—which after all is not far removed from the canonical definition of imperialism. Most interesting in these analyses (it seems to me) is the fact that worldwide globalization is not considered according to the common view that sees it as de-localization (the loss of local singularity for the benefit of a single, homogeneous, and undetermined worldwide space). On the contrary, “world-economy” proceeds as localization or relocalization (p. 36), by way of a “hierarchization of space” (p. 30), and notably the “polarization between the core” (defined as the winners in unequal capitalist exchanges) and “peripheral zones” (p. 30, defined conceptually as the zone of the losers in this exchange). It is not the opposite; it is not the position that implies a win or a loss, but the fact that one is globally winning or losing that defines a zone as central or peripheral (pp. 31–32). Capitalism produces its geography (pp. 38ff.), and the space of the world is not smooth. A cynical geography, to be sure, but not in-different.
15. Whether this grasping should legitimately be called “experience” is a question that we shall have to ask ourselves.
16. Without claiming to remake a history of art or a systematic aesthetics, let me formulate two remarks: (1) I am taking theater here to be the paradigmatic art form in the epoch or age of the assembly. But we could articulate the concept of it together with that of architecture or sculpture, at least as arts that preceded image capture. Neither architecture nor sculpture is essentially grappling with images as such; they are not arts of frontality, and the audience has no need to stand in front, but rather inside or around—and these are determinations that correspond to modes of assembling. From the Charioteer of Delphi to the Laocoön statue, we know that one of the evolutions most easily noticed is precisely the passage from a sculpture made to be seen from more than one side, which convenes its viewers around it, to a sculpture wanting to be seen from the front—frontalized—and thus arguably a sculpture from the age of painting (see Schefold, Art of Classical Greece, p. 22). (2) At the other pole, it seems that we have little to gain (and much to lose) from thinking of video as an extension of cinema. It is altogether different. To reflect upon this question in a useful way, one has to start by analyzing the process of constituting an audience before a television or video monitor, and understand what relation it establishes with what is offered to one’s view and hearing—because of the spectators’ mode of assembling, their behavior during ongoing programming, screens of various sizes, audiovisual articulation, and finally (especially?) the effects induced or produced by the simultaneity of live shows. In this sense, any general rhapsodizing about “screens”—the whole downscaled “screenology” ubiquitous in magazines and some seminars—most often displays (through pointless assimilations, as in references to the “civilization of images,” and so on) an abysmal lack of thinking. Of course, video comes from the world’s factory of images (but also and perhaps even more so from radio); however, it comes from it with procedures that one has to analyze carefully simply to avoid missing what is new—something that goes out of the world in order perhaps to invite us to think its exit.
17. See Fried, Absorption and Theatricality, passim; and Eisenstein, “Du cinéma en relief,” in Le mouvement de l’art, pp. 97–158.
18. See Guénoun, L’exhibition des mots, pp. 12–19.
19. Heidegger, “Die Zeit des Weltbildes,” in Holzwege, pp. 75–113 (marginal pagination [henceforth in parentheses following the page number—Trans.], pp. 69–104); in French, “L’époque des conceptions du monde,” in Chemins qui ne mènent nulle part, pp. 99–146. The form of the title in French is obviously surprising. Let us skip over the translation of Zeit by époque, having to do with the “epoch,” no doubt, since the translation (like Zeit und Sein [Time and Being]) is from 1962. The translation of Bild [image] by conception is more astonishing, all the more so since the text analyzes the relation of Bild with vision and seeing. But, ultimately, what is most questionable is this substitution of the plural les conceptions for the singular of des Weltbildes, a substitution that the translators themselves point out (p. 453n) in all honesty. Here the most peculiar and revelatory operation is at work: what the translation resists is admitting that the image of the world as such (and not such or such an image, even unified under the concept of their plurality) marks the “epoch” [Fr., époque] or defines the new age [Gm., Neuzeit]. Many thanks to Paola Marrati for her suggestion that I reread this text carefully.
20. Heidegger, Holzwege, p. 89 (82); Chemins qui ne mènent nulle part, p. 117. [The translation of passages from Holzwege (henceforth HW) are mine.—Trans.] 21. “Here, ‘world’ is naming beingness as a whole” (ibid.).
22. “To represent [Gm., vorstellen] here means to say: to set up [Gm., stellen] before oneself something one has taken from oneself [Gm., von sich her], and to secure what is set up [Gm., das Gestellte] as such a thing. . . . Being is no longer what has been present here, but rather that which only representation will have set up opposite us, the ob-ject [Gm., Gegen-ständige]” (HW, p. 108 [100]; Chemins qui ne mènent nulle part, pp. 140–41). [Further page references to Heidegger, Holzwege are mostly given in the body of the text.—Trans.]
23. I would like to suggest the phrase image-monde [in French] for Weltbild, since this sentence is built on their opposition—in the sense in which Deleuze differentiates movement-image or time-image from images of movement or time.
24. “But in every place where [wo] beingness does not become interpreted in this sense, the world cannot shift into the picture, and there can be no world image” (HW, p. 90 [83]). The translation [both into French and into English—Trans.] here includes the rather heavy term “become” to bring out wird [from werden, “to become”; used as an auxiliary verb to form the passive—Trans.] in the original [Heidegger’s sentence is: “Überall dort, aber, wo das Seiende nicht in diesem Sinne ausgelegt wird.].
25. See HW, p. 100 [92], addendum (Zusatz) 5; and Being and Time, paras. 11–24.
26. I am thinking here of the concept obraznost, which Sergei Eisenstein formed—as François Albéra tells us—from the Russian word obraz, image. Albéra translates it as imagicité [“imaginicity” in literature about Eisenstein—Trans.], a term that suggests the intermediary term “imagic,” which is not necessary and does not (as I understand it) come up in Russian. Imagéité (imageness) is made from “image,” or, if we need an adjective, from imagé (imaged or pictured). See François Albéra, introduction, in Eisenstein, Cinématisme, peinture et cinéma, p. 10.
27. This (wide) periodization of the “modern” matches exactly Hegel’s periodization of the “romantic,” which is also very extensive—and relies perhaps on an implicit reminder of what is Roman in the word romantic. See Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, L’absolu littéraire, pp. 11–13. Definition of “modern”: “1361, Oresme, from Vulgar Latin modernus (6th century, Cassiodorus), from modo, recently” (Dauzat et al., Nouveau dictionnaire étymologique et historique; alphabetically arranged, s.v. moderne). Cassiodorus: “Latin statesman and writer (490–580). Praetorian prefect; historiographer for Theodoric the Great; mediator between the Roman and barbarian worlds; in 540, he retired to the monastery at Vivarium [in Calabria], which he had founded and where he introduced the custom of copying manuscripts. In his main work, Institutiones divinarum et saecularium litterarum, which served as a guide for medieval culture, he gathered important religious and secular knowledge” (Grand dictionnaire encyclopédique Larousse, 2: 1847).
28. It may be the general structure of the imago mundi that “modern art” tackles, starting from the image and in the age of the image, in contemplating the displacement of this mode of pictoriality, challenging or de-constructing it. Modern art: that which, from Manet to Kandinsky (and around and beyond them), seeks to make images say, Let’s break the image, let’s get out of it—enough with images already. An image at the limits of the image, an image wishing to push the boundaries of any image, of all that can be pictured, or imagined; a program of pressuring the imaginary, summoning the imaginary to the extreme outer borders of its unimaginable limits—by all means, then, an art of the sublime.
29. “The time period [Gm., Zeitalter] that is determined through this event . . . sets itself up on its own as the new one [Gm., das neue]. Being new pertains to the world that has become image” (HW, p. 92 [85]).
30. “With Descartes, the completion of Western metaphysics begins. But since such a completion is only possible again as metaphysics, modern thinking has its own prominence” (HW, p. 99 [91]).
31. “However, one should not interpret [machine technology], wrongly, as a simple practical application [Gm., Anwendung] of modern mathematical science [Gm., mathematische Naturwissenschaft]. Machine technology is itself an autonomous transformation of praxis in such a way that it then requires the use [Gm., Verwendung] of mathematical science” (HW, p. 75 [69]).
32. I.e., “Hellenicity” (p. 94 [86]); “beginning of Greek thinking” (p. 105 [97–98]); “to Greek appreciation” (p. 91 [84]); “the Greeks” (p. 94 [87]); “Man in the Greeks’ basic relationship to beingness” (p. 105 [97]).—Trans.
33. German text: “Das Seiende ist das Aufgehende und Sichöffnende, was als das Anwesende über den Menschen als den Anwesenden kommt” (HW, p. 90 [83]).—Trans.
34. Let us recall Patočka’s gesture—his gesture, precisely, because what is at stake here is rather different—when he writes, “From the moment that the perishing of the polis had already been decided, philosophy transformed itself into what was to be its image for millenia [sic], transforming itself into metaphysics” (Patočka, HE, p. 65). And further, “[in the European heritage] the care for the soul is transformed in the two great historical catastrophes, that of the polis and that of the Roman Empire” (ibid.).
35. Heidegger, HW, pp. 100–101 [93]; emphasis added. One might boldly translate Zusammenstand [substantive related to zusammenstellen—Trans.] into French as con-tenance [“con-tainance”], or continence, in the “continental” sense that I have been using here. Continent, “masculine noun, borrowed (1532) from the Latin continens, adjectival present participle of continere (see contenir): to hold together” (Dictionnaire historique de la langue française, ed. Rey, 1: 486).
36. “Machine technology to this day remains the most visible offshoot of the essence [Gm., Wesen] of modern technics, which is identical with the essence of modern metaphysics” (HW, p. 75 [69]).
37. And this is shown by Italy’s singular place in the process of the Renaissance, as well as, in the Italian peninsula, by the decisive significance of unearthing the remnants of Rome, a kind of trauma brought on by the display of this buried world—still there. See Chastel and Klein, L’âge de l’humanisme, pp. 95–100 (esp. pp. 99–100); and Du Bellay, Antiquities of Rome, passim.
38. On the avatar of the idea of empire and the (positive) idea of “spiritual imperialism,” see Fernando Pessoa, “Sébastianisme et le cinquième empire” [Portuguese title: “Sebastiano e o Quinto Imperio.”—Trans.], in id., Chemin du serpent, pp. 295ff.
39. Descartes, Discourse on Method, p. 35. “Masters,” in any case. And on determination “to change my desires rather than the order of the world,” see ibid., p. 14.
40. This military vocabulary also appears elsewhere: “The fundamental process of modern times is the conquest [Gm., Eroberung] of the world by the image” (HW, p. 94 [87]). What is dominated is also the very thing that resists (see pt. III, §2). It is not as if a benevolent harmony had preestablished the predisposition of the dominated ones to resist, and that in this way everything that is subjected might have an affinity for resistance. No. The concept of domination is simply understood here as that which exerts itself over that which resists—without which there is nothing at all to dominate. That which is dominating subjects that which is dominated inasmuch as this domination is not a given, being the stakes of a struggle or a confrontation. “Domination” means imposition, forcing, and ultimately violence toward beings. Domination is not superiority; it is mastery, overlordship, sovereignty, or suzerainty over things or beings—Herrschaft, indeed. And so, the concept of domination calls for the idea—the physical or energetic idea, as it were—of a resistance that has been opposed, subjected, and (temporarily, at least) overcome. The mastery bears upon that which (slave or subject) has been enslaved or subjected. In saying this, one is thus indicating, provisionally—in view of a completely different development or program from the one in this book—that if the world is what is subjected to the empire, it is also necessarily that which is resisting it. The world resists imperiality. In a sense, there is a constitutive necessity for the world to enter into a relationship of resistance with the empire (with imperialism, caesarism, or the Reich). Should one rely on this and expect its victory to project a liberated future? That is the question, and it is political. Or should one fear that this resistance of the world might be too closely associated with the domination it opposes, too caught up in its economy and its game—and choose instead to move to another terrain?
41. Marx, Capital, p. 41 and elsewhere. [Spellings of Marx’s terms in German here follow Marx, Das Kapital (1883)—Trans.]
42. Wallerstein, Historical Capitalism, p. 16.
43. Debord, Société du spectacle, p. 24.
44. “In the same way the exchange values of commodities must be capable of being expressed in terms of something common to them all, of which thing they represent a greater or less [sic] quantity. / This common ‘something’ [Gm., dieß Gemeinsame] cannot be either a geometrical, a chemical, or any other natural property of commodities” (Marx, Capital, p. 27; Marx, Das Kapital [1883], p. 69). [Quotations are from Marx, Capital, unless this English edition from 1887 diverges much from the German text of 1883 or the French text quoted by the author. When it does, I have used and translated the relevant passages in Marx, Das Kapital (1883). The author’s main source is Marx, Le capital (trans. Lefebvre et al.).—Trans.]
45. And also, “the exchange of commodities is evidently an act characterised by a total abstraction [Gm., Abstraktion] from use value” (Marx, Capital, p. 27). [Further page references to Marx, Capital, mostly appear in the body of the text.—Trans.]
46. See Rodrigo, “Marx et la phénoménologie,” pp. 94–95.
47. See Pierre Macherey, “À propos du processus d’exposition du Capital,” in Althusser et al., Lire Le Capital, 1: 234ff.
48. Marx, Das Kapital (1883), p. 64.
49. Ibid., p. 82, gives the phrase “Träger von Werth” in quotation marks. In Marx, Le capital, p. 53, Roy translates it as porte-valeur. Rancière, “Concept de critique,” p. 136, writes Wertträger. [The standard English translation (see, e.g., Marx, Capital, p. 35) is “depository of value.”—Trans.]
50. Marx, Das Kapital (1883), p. 101. [German text: “Das Geheimnißvolle der Waarenform besteht also einfach darin, daß sie den Menschen die gesellschaftlichen Charaktere ihrer eignen Arbeit als gegenständliche Charaktere der Arbeitsprodukte selbst, als gesellschaftliche Natureigenschaften dieser Dinge zurückspiegelt . . .”—Trans.]
51. See Rodrigo, “Marx et la phénoménologie,” p. 95; and Rancière, “Concept de critique,” p. 135.
52. Marx, Capital, p. 47; Das Kapital (1883), p. 101.
53. Marx, Das Kapital (1883), p. 110 (my emphasis; the interpolation is Marx’s). Toward the end of the pages about fetishism, Marx is seized with the curious desire to make commodities speak. “Could commodities themselves speak, they would say: Our use value may be a thing that interests men. It is no part of us as objects [Gm., Er kömmt uns nicht als Dingen zu]. What, however, does belong to us as objects [i.e., as things; Gm., Was uns aber dinglich zukömmt—Trans.], is our value” (Marx, Capital, pp. 51–52). Strange prosopopeia. Indeed, Marx notes that use value is a human fact—unarguably, since it takes human beings to have an “interest” in use; and, furthermore, exchange and use are opposed (as he has repeatedly said), and therefore, from this strange point of view of the commodities (the point of view of exchange: “What, however, does belong to us as objects [things—Trans.], is our value. Our natural intercourse as commodities proves it” [p. 52; emphasis added]), the difference from use thus appears as the difference from the human. And this makes the commodity—expressing itself as such—posit itself as nonhuman, and therefore as a thing. Commodities speak as things; commodities are formulated and shaped as things. This is the trap into which the economist falls when, speaking from the bottom of the soul of the commodities [Gm., aus der Waarenseele heraus], he believes that he is discovering that what belongs [Gm., zukömmt] to the “commodities as objects [as things—Trans.] is [their] value” (ibid.).
54. As in the colloquial expression “to be fixated on something” (to fetishize something).
55. Balibar, Philosophie de Marx, p. 66.
56. Marx, Capital, p. 47; emphasis added.
57. Marx speaks here of the “mystical character of commodities,” and of “the mystical veil” of the “life-process of society” (Marx, Capital, pp. 46, 51).
58. Balibar, Philosophie de Marx, p. 66.
59. Objectality linked to “object choice” (e.g., of partial objects), of which fetishism could be a specific example. Jacques Lacan speaks of “a finality that allows itself to be instinctual, in the sense that it is based on the image of the maturation of an ineffable object, the Object with a capital O that governs the phase of objectality (to be distinguished, significantly, from objectivity by virtue of its affective substance)” (Lacan, “The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of its Power,” in Écrits [trans. Sheridan], p. 269).
60. It is in the sense of “being a reflection” and not “to reflect” that the commodity mirrors or reflects the image—as a reflection, not as a mirror. One could not argue that the commodity is the mirror, the real thing that sends an image back to an observer. The commodity is this image itself, this reflection—what Balibar, in a psychological sense, terms “this representation.” In the opposite hypothesis, the commodity, qua commodity, would have to be a material reality that is the mirror and send back the image; and Marx does precisely indicate, in the development of his optical comparison, that “the existence of the things qua commodities, and the value relation between the products of labour which stamps them as commodities, have absolutely no connection with their physical properties and with the material relations arising therefrom. There is a definite social relation between men, that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things” (Marx, Capital, p. 47; emphasis added). The commodity is not a material object that “sends back” an image; it “reflects” in the way our words reflect our thoughts. The commodity is the reflection itself, not the reflecting surface.
61. Marx, Capital, p. 47. See also n. 60 above on the commodity as reflection.
62. See Rancière, “Concept de critique,” p. 137, as well as the rest of the passage, pp. 133–38.
63. Marx, Capital, p. 46. In this context, Rancière calls upon a great quotation from Marx: “This inversion (Verkehrung) by which the sensibly-concrete counts only as the form of appearance of the abstractly general and not, on the contrary, the abstractly general as property of the concrete, characterises the expression of value. At the same time, it makes understanding it difficult. If I say: Roman Law and German Law are both laws, that is obvious. But if I say: Law (Das Recht), this abstraction (Abstraktum) realises itself in Roman Law and in German Law, in these concrete laws, the interconnection [is] becoming mystical” (cited in Rancière, “Concept de critique,” pp. 137–38). [Marx’s text is from Marx, “The Value-Form,” para. 3, no pagination. The word “is” has been added.—Trans.] And Rancière adds, “The process that here characterizes the mode of existence of value is the one that characterized the operation of Hegelian speculation for Marx in his youth, as he illustrated it in Die Heilige Familie [The Holy Family—Trans.] with the dialectics of abstract fruit realized in concrete pears and almonds. . . . Reality is speculative” (ibid., p. 138).
64. See Heidegger, “Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes” (The Origin of the Work of Art), in HW, pp. 1–74.
65. See Rancière, “Concept de critique,” pp. 189–98.
66. See Iacono, Fétichisme, who reminds us that “the word ‘fetish’ comes from the Portuguese feitiço, which in turn comes from the Latin facticius, meaning ‘artificial’” (p. 5).
67. Marx, Capital, p. 27. The word “Erscheinungsform” is in quotation marks in the 1989 German edition (i.e., Marx, Das Kapital [1883]). Rancière’s translation is forme d’apparition (on pp. 131, 139, 145, and others); he also cites Jules Molitor whose translation of the phrase is forme de manifestation (on pp. 128, 147–48, 161; see Rancière, “Concept de critique”).
68. See Marx, Das Kapital (1883), p. 70.
69. Marx, Capital, p. 28. See Rodrigo, “Marx et la phénoménologie,” pp. 94–100.
70. Marx, Capital, p. 28. The price is not the same as the value. See Marx, Capital, pp. 66ff.
71. Marx, Capital, p. 28, has “embodied”: “human labour in the abstract has been embodied or materialized in it.” See also Das Kapital (1883), pp. 70ff.—Trans.
72. Marx, Capital, p. 28. This is one of the first occurrences in the text of the term “world of commodities” (Waarenwelt).
74. Balibar, Philosophie de Marx, p. 65.
75. Waarenwelt is the spelling used in Marx, Das Kapital (1883). The current spelling is Warenwelt.—Trans.
76. One additional remark: the analysis that we have followed here in Marx has a kind of echo or analogy at one point of Heidegger’s analysis. In the sixth addendum (Zusatz) to his essay “Die Zeit des Weltbildes” [The Time of the World Image], Heidegger analyzes two developments of the essence of the image (Wesen des Bildes) as expressing the modern interpretation of beingness (Gm., Auslegung des Seienden [HW, pp. 100–101 [93]). The first is domination [Gm., Herrschaft] of the system (see pt. IV, §25 of this book). Then Heidegger adds, “For the modern interpretation of beingness, the representation of value [Gm., die Vorstellung des Wertes] is as essential as the system” (ibid.). Obviously, the value whose concept appears at this point is not determined as a merchant value. However, articulation of the becoming-image with the formation of values follows, which cannot but attract our attention from the present perspective. The image–value articulation, it should be noted, is related to a deprivation or loss of being (Gm., des Seins verlustig), which never appears as such in Marx (even if a fair number of his interpreters have wanted to detect it there, for a variety of reasons). The loss (Gm., Verlust) of being comes up at the exact point where Marx summons up abstraction: at the point of letting go of thingness and suspending it, a kind of epochē of the use-value, and therefore of the thing. This (arguably essential) difference noted, Heidegger’s analysis nonetheless leads to observing how one “measures [Gm., bemißt] . . . beingness in accordance with values, and makes the values themselves into the goal of all one’s doings, comings and goings [Gm., Tuns und Treibens]” (HW, p. 101 [93–94]). He adds, “This is only one step away from making the values themselves into objects” (ibid.). Values made into objects: let us admit that we are not far removed from a theory of value-objectivity (Gm., Wertgegenständlichkeit). This movement here pertains to the world’s becoming-image: “Value is the objectivization of one’s needful aims in representatively settling oneself in the world as image” (HW, pp. 101–2 [94]). (The difference between Heidegger and Marx also has to be seen in regard to their respective positioning of the concept of representation. See Rancière, “Concept de critique”; Althusser et al., Lire Le Capital, 2: 170. But this becoming-image is a loss. With Marx, it is an abstraction (see Macherey, “À propos du processus d’exposition du Capital,” in Althusser et al., Lire Le Capital, 1: 248).
78. Europe is not Rome’s only daughter: Islam, with its claims to planetary unification—like capitalism, and against it in certain respects—is another. This unification, then—in this mode, which I have characterized as monotheistic, and thus monotopical—is a kind of alternative, a fundamentalist alternative, if you will, as is capitalist fundamentalism itself. But one cannot be sure that future becomings (history and stories) are going to be willing to restrict themselves to this face-to-face framework.
79. Debord’s Société du spectacle was first published in 1967.
80. See Guénoun, L’exhibition des mots, p. 30.
81. It is not surprising that Heidegger would subscribe to a counterrevolutionary program, conveying as such something of the revolutionary idea and will.
82. Debord, Société du spectacle, p. 25. The entire second section, “La marchandise comme spectacle” (The Commodity as Spectacle), deals with this analysis. In the quoted sentence, the expressions (notably ne . . . plus in French) point toward the schema of loss noted earlier, which is very present in these pages, even explicitly: Debord speaks of “loss of quality” (in the quantitative becoming of things, p. 22). In any case, Debord’s Société du spectacle summarily articulates most of the themes covered in my argument: fetishism (p. 21), worldwide globalization (p. 22), visualization (p. 25), effectivity of illusions (p. 28), abstraction (p. 49). The text—allusively but clearly—invokes the same texts by Marx. These themes had undoubtedly been explored at considerable depth earlier by others, e.g., in Althusser et al., Lire Le Capital. Debord would no doubt have objected strongly to a comparison with Lire Le Capital, however, given that it dates from 1965, and the analyses of the specular commodity developed in it were masked by more controversial concerns at the time. But in retrospect, there is patently a thematic convergence.
83. Or desired as a possession. Images, as we know, efficiently play with desire—the desire to possess something.
84. If word assonances and the play between their signs were to be automatically validated, one would evidently have to make the connection, here, in French, between l’avoir (“the to have” or “having”) and l’à-voir (“the to see” or “that which there is to see”). But setting these terms side by side, while quite welcome for obvious conceptual reasons (pulling together acquisition and image, as in taking pictures [prise de vue]), remains gratuitous from a lexical vantage point. “Having being” [l’avoir l’étant] is more important: being [l’étant] as having [avoir]; having [l’avoir] as assignation of beingness [l’étance], and thus as beingness itself [l’étancemême]; being and having [l’étant et l’avoir] conjoined or merged.
85. The two are not unrelated, as we have just seen with respect to the image and the commodity. This was Debord’s clairvoyance.
86. In some respects, one could imagine a different underneath: the underneath of repression [refoulement], of active burial—in the present, so to speak—underneath as a function of the present, because what one buries there is that which one wishes to neutralize or conceal. A production of underneath is imaginable, in the objective sense of a complement, because it is indeed imaginable that here and there the common that one wishes to distance from the world is constituted there as being underneath. But it is always an “as.”
87. The feeling is clear (though the development of this thesis would require quite a different [“ontological”] ambition than the one displayed here) that this statement (the common is the becoming of being) implies another latent one, impatiently asking to be unfurled: that the common is the being of being [le commun est l’être de l’être]. For the becoming of being is what makes being into that which is coming on—being, not as a state (a being), but as the act “to be,” the coming of “to be,” and the process of “to be”—as the verb “to be,” the verbality and processuality of being, not the substantivity, substantiality (nominality) of being; that which raises “to be” into being, its becoming-being—and thus the common. To bring the question of the common into close proximity with the ontological difference: this is the demon that lurks in these very lines; for instance, a little earlier, when we suggested that being proper (the property of being) is at bottom a modality of having—an essentialization or an identifying return of possession—and that common being, therefore, stands out on the background of what I have proposed we think of as being having [l’étant l’avoir]. On being as being in common, see Nancy, Communauté désoeuvrée, pp. 201ff.
88. The word “sense” is here used in a meaning close to that elaborated by Jean-Luc Nancy, even if his use of it is set up very differently—particularly with regard to the world. See Nancy, Sens du monde, passim.
89. This renewed attention to genesis I owe to Paola Marrati. See Marrati, Genesis and Trace, and Derrida, Problem of Genesis in Husserl’s Philosophy.
90. As far as the Persian Empire is concerned, this is evidently questionable. Universal history would not be what it is without its relationship with Persia. We can see this clearly, from Herodotus to Hegel.
91. Ancient societies, seen and characterized from a historical position that is ours: a teleological concept, if you will, but in which the telos is simply our present history—not as the finality of a determined future to-come [à-venir] but as the acknowledgment of a history that has taken place.
92. Surely, “history” itself is a determined production, a discursive type and body born and developed in certain places and at certain dates—a historic formation. It is probable that there are societies that have known no such thing. But to recognize this historicity of history itself does not in any way mean conceding anything to a supposed immobility of “empires.”
93. Like a fly or midge [moucheron] “caught in a cobweb”; see Petit Robert s.v. moucheron.
95. When an empire says, “I am immobile,” one should not take it at its word—it is untrue. The proof for this is that they die. A certain fiction regarding the nonhistoricity of empires, or societies, gives credit to their imaginary designs.
96. In this context, the complex workings of “we” in philosophical exposition should be analyzed. There is the customary “we” that avoids the “I” (why?). But also Kant’s “we,” for example, in his description of a common experience: “In all judgments through which we state that something is beautiful, we let no one have a different opinion” (Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, para. 22, p. 239). And further, the assertive “we,” such as Nietzsche’s in “Wir guten Europäer” (We good Europeans) (see Nietzsche, preface, and elsewhere, in Jenseits von Gut und Böse [Beyond Good and Evil]).
97. Plural because it is dual; duality opens up this nonclosure of the one. See Badiou, “Qu’est-ce que l’amour?” (What Is Love?), in id., Conditions, pp. 256ff.
98. “For this reason, social analysis can learn incomparably more from individual experience than Hegel conceded. . . . In the hundred and fifty years since Hegel’s conception was formed, some of the force of protest has reverted to the individual . . . part of the social force of liberation may have temporarily withdrawn to the individual sphere” (Adorno, Dedication, in Minima Moralia, pp. 17–18; see also para. 97, pp. 148ff.)
99. See Petit Littré, s.v., transport: “Violent movement of passion that puts one beside oneself. ‘For him I feel transports of hatred’ (Corneille)” (p. 2304). And see, e.g., Rousseau, Essay on the Origin of Languages, in Discourses and Other Early Political Writings, p. 268; and Derrida, De la grammatologie, pp. 269–72.
100. See Gunkel, “Le transport musical de Jean-Jacques Rousseau.”
101. “How do we let ourselves be moved to pity? By transporting ourselves outside ourselves” (Rousseau, Essay on the Origin of Languages, in Discourses and Other Early Political Writings, pp. 267–68; cited by Derrida, De la grammatologie, p. 272n). Or more clearly still, “In effect, how can we let ourselves be stirred by pity unless we go beyond ourselves [en nous transportant hors de nous] and identify ourselves with the suffering animal? By leaving, so to speak, our own nature and taking his?” (Rousseau, Emile, bk. IV, no pagination; Derrida, ibid.).
102. In Rousseau, the imagination has something to do with the development of human commerce, language, and exchanges. For example, “The imagination which causes so many ravages among us, never speaks to the heart of savages” (Rousseau, Discourse on Inequality, pt. I, no pagination; in French, OEuvres complètes, 2: 225). It is no doubt because certain dispositions or faculties seem “quite out of reach for savage man, for want of any communication with his fellows, which is to say, for want of the instrument used in this communication and the needs that make it necessary” (Rousseau, OEuvres complètes, 2: 250). It is not that he is lacking imagination, which is a natural faculty; imagination does not “speak” to him [or her], according to Rousseau.
103. A symptomatic script often present in Rousseau, even more so than the one of imaginary transport. See Gouhier, “Expansion et resserrement selon Rousseau,” in Les méditations métaphysiques de Jean-Jacques Rousseau, pp. 107–17.
104. Political transport should be mentioned: insurrectional transport, for example—passionate, at times aesthetic, in great part ethical—as in transports (a “rush”) of solidarity.
105. Rousseau, OEuvres complètes, vol. 1, passim, e.g., pp. 381–83. [In English, see Rousseau, Rousseau, Judge of Jean-Jacques. The term amour-propre is mostly used nowadays to designate one’s pride, as in amour-propre blessé, “hurt pride.”—Trans.]
106. Platonic love does not aim at the existing other but, through him or her, at an ideal. “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself” is the commandment in the Old Testament (Lev. 19:18), and, without wishing to reduce the significance of this, it is, precisely, as thyself. “Love your enemies,” Christ says in Matt. 5:43–46; there is no merit in loving one’s friends.
107. It should still be noted that at the very point where this self-sufficiency of individuals extremely and radically attempts to experience or express itself, it exceeds itself absolutely. Auto(bio)graphical undertakings bear witness to this. With Augustine, this opens up as a confession: the self narrates itself because of a divine call, which posits and shapes it. With the moderns, the telling loses this foundation in divine exteriority, instead experiencing and stating itself as a defect, the self stealing away from itself (Montaigne), or expanding itself to the dimensions of the absolute collective—madness of the self, often played out in an identification with Christ. See Rousseau, Rousseau, Judge of Jean-Jacques; Nietzsche, Ecce homo. The position of the self as an essence drives to madness—mad about the common, mad about the divine. (The reference here is to the seminar Écriture de soi [Self-Writing] held at the University Marc Bloch in Strasbourg in 1993–94, organized by Yves Delègue, Camille Dumoulié, Denis Guénoun, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, and Jean-Luc Nancy, with the participation of Jérôme Thélot and Jean-Christophe Bailly.)
108. “The contents of the dream of happiness, however, are linked with what could be termed the unhappiness of man: in that the beginning of our existence in the care of others who are accepting us most closely approaches total satisfaction, a total satisfaction that encompasses all sides and dimensions of the human essence, leaving none aside. This happiness of total acceptance, which is so fully satisfied that it cannot even let any wish emerge, turns out to be the other side of the fundamental unconcealment and exposure of one’s own being, which is its fundamental sensibility [Gm., Grundbefindlichkeit]; and in this is based the deep wish, in intoxicated self-oblivion, to rid oneself of this fundamental burden, thanks to the acceptance of our whole being on the part of another who sets off and keeps up this intoxicated desire, and this, he or she will only do when he or she finds the same desire safely kept in our own acceptance of it. For this fundamental reason, Eros is the only way of overcoming our worldly burden [Gm., Weltlast] that is equal [Gm., ebenbürtig] to one’s fundamental sensibility, and the other has therefore turned into the underwriter and center of one’s own happiness and life meaning. It is not an insidious aggression of the other’s freedom, nor a will to incorporate him or her, nor the achievement of freedom denied, nor an abuse of the other for one’s own purpose; rather, it is an attempt to be carried by carrying, to give happiness by taking it, and in this blending and exchanging of happiness, to transform the burden into fulfillment” (Patočka, “Réflexion sur l’Europe,” pp. 204–5; “Die Selbstbesinnung Europas” [Europe’s Self-Reflection]). [My translation, from the typescript of the original text, which Patočka wrote in German, kindly provided by Erika Abrams, Jan Patočka’s renowned translator and editor.—Trans.]
109. See Heidegger, “The Problem of the Finitude in Man and the Metaphysics of Dasein,” in id., Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, pp. 226ff.
110. What passes across death and punctures it? Spirit? Perhaps. But this is rather Derrida’s proposition: beneath the syntagma la vie la mort [life death], the schema of passing across death—and life. A revenant, a specter. For me, things fall in place differently. It is life that is passing. Or to say it in my way, it is matter, in a certain sense. Matter as bearer-of-life: that which travels across death (my death, death of my self). Matter goes across finitude, poking a hole in it. Within a thinking of finitude, materialism does not fit (behave) so well.
111. Feuerbach, Essence of Christianity, p. 20. [Translation modified. Emphasis in German text.—Trans.]
112. “The animal can exercise no generic function [Gm., Gattungsfunktion] without another individual external to itself” (ibid., p. 20 [translation modified—Trans.]).
113. Ibid., p. 22.
114. Marx reads this page (published in 1841) and reorganizes it in his problematic known as that of the “young Marx,” and thus under the authority of the schema of alienation, as an infinite degradation of the man-woman relationship as well as the relationship of man to himself. See Marx, “Private Property and Communism.”
115. Feuerbach, Essence of Christianity, p. 206; emphasis added [slightly modified—Trans.]. See also Michel Henry’s aggressive commentary, in Henry, Marx, vol. 1: Une philosophie de la réalité, pp. 92–102, and esp. p. 98.
116. Even if it is also that—the I is nothing else except a projected image. See Lacan, Écrits, pp. 93ff.
117. Rousseau, Essay on the Origin of Languages, in Discourses and Other Early Political Writings, p. 268. He goes on, “Think how much acquired knowledge this transport presupposes!” (ibid.). See also Derrida, De la grammatologie, pp. 269–72.
118. See Dictionnaire historique de la langue française, ed. Rey, 1: 762, s.v. expérience.
119. The reference here is to the thought of Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, particularly in La poésie comme expérience, passim, and pp. 30–31 on the etymology of “experience.”
120. On the etymology of Europē, see Rougemont, Idea of Europe (“The Etymologies,” pp. 25–30); “Eurôpé . . . a woman with large eyes, a lovely way of looking, a beautiful face” (p. 28).
121. This interpretation of the myth converges with Massimo Cacciari’s while being its opposite. For him, in the west, Europe carries on with its own “[sun] setting” (It., tramonto) nature—the horizon of its own vanishing. His hypothesis (or one might say his orientation) is thus closely related to mine. A closer reading, however, shows that his analyses seem to invite Europe to set and lie down, or eclipse itself, through a kind of hatred (It., odio), fight (It., lotta), or war (It., guerra) carried out against (It., contro, versus) oneself. (Hence the positive reference to the sobs of the princess, found in Horace’s “Ode to Galatea”—see Rougemont, Idea of Europe, pp. 14–15.) Here, on the other hand, what is involved is letting go, and a kind of faithfulness, which is another thing. See Cacciari, Geofilosofia dell’Europa, pp. 157–59.
122. See Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise, chap. 3 (“On the Vocation of the Hebrews, and Whether the Prophetic Gift Was Peculiar to Them”).