Afterword

Hardly a good basis for a public dialogue between philosophers. In the above citation, however, a discussion is understood in the very specific sense of an exchange of individual opinions whose ultimate aim is to reach a common conclusion on a given question. For Deleuze and Guattari, by contrast, the task of philosophy is rather to create concepts and to elaborate complex conceptual constructions around problems. Such conceptual work eludes discussion insofar as the latter’s ever-increasing clarity reduces the space for debatable ambiguities and eventualities, and for weighing up, making concessions, and negotiating. In a word, then, the task of philosophy is precisely to create that which escapes discussion.

This raises the question of whether a dialogue between philosophers can involve anything more than the interlocutors taking turns to pronounce self-contained theses that occasionally happen to concur with one another. Beckett would be the covert master of such dialogues, such as those between Vladimir and Estragon, which oscillate between surprising and absurd agreements and ostentatious refusals to communicate, without any guarantee of a common ground.

Yet just as we do not have to interpret Waiting for Godot as a proof of the impossibility of dialogue, and can rather understand its dialogues as unfolding in their own obstinate way, we perhaps do not have to share Deleuze and Guattari’s pessimism. It is true, of course, that philosophy is not known for its wealth of dialogues. Its history is littered with prominent refusals to engage in discussion. We might think here of an ironic Socrates, who does not shy away from exposing his interlocutor’s conceptual confusion while still calling on him to keep the apparent dialogue going with so many variations on “Yes, indeed, Socrates.” Yet no discussion takes place between them—neither as an exchange of opinions nor in any other form. We might also think of Derrida’s or Adorno’s texts. Certain attempts to understand them, that is, to treat them as addresses to the reader, only result in them retreating further inside themselves and carrying on a game of their own. At a crucial moment, they withdraw from communicative exchange. Finally, we might think of Hegel, who at the opening of the Phenomenology of Spirit contrasts the individual expression of opinion with universal truth. Language outstrips individual opinion because it necessarily expresses a true universality; we therefore cannot even say what we individually mean. Philosophy has no interest in opinion, and even beyond the level of opinion, it does not need dialogue in the strict sense, since there is nothing opposed to the universal.

The refusal of reciprocal discussion, the refusal to enter into relation through communicative exchange, and the refusal to recognize anything opposed to oneself: these are three strategies through which philosophy undermines the very basis of dialogue. We can surely conclude, then, that the discussion of opinions about various forms of the universal is a veritable absurdity for philosophy, a motley monster of arbitrariness from which every philosopher shrinks in fear. In the good-natured, liberal exchange of ideas, in the friendly, congenial adoption of the other’s arguments and the warm openness of one’s own, and ultimately in the shared, mutually elaborated conception of “the essence of the matter,” philosophy fears losing its own “essence [Sache],” namely, its capacity to draw distinctions. The discussion of opinions paves the way for consensus, and consensus building was never one of philosophy’s strengths. Philosophy therefore admits no results, resolutions, or decrees, and no common, considered evaluation of things; always somewhat aloof and vain, it makes few friends.

Yet if on the one hand philosophy evades and even fears dialogue, on the other it is always an address to everyone and continually seeks to realize itself as such. It is an eminently rational affair, a discourse of reason and argument conducted in the conviction that it is possible to speak with anyone whatsoever. It therefore avoids recourse or reference to esoteric, invisible sources and reasons via verifiable proofs and logical chains. As a rational discourse, philosophy aims to secure the other’s assent; it welcomes the well-founded argument and seeks progress in thinking. In its very rationality, then, it turns toward the public sphere, and it is in this public domain that it exhibits its rationality. It is thus a rational praxis. Socrates did not shrink from a single discursive debate; his entire philosophy consists in dialogues. Many of Derrida’s books were initially given as talks. Adorno willingly made many radio appearances, and even Hegel was essentially a lecturing philosopher. Philosophy cannot do without public speaking; it is impelled toward and needs the public sphere. In its very essence, it is a public activity, and even the book is a mode of writing that is oriented toward the public domain—one that reflects on praxis by drawing it back inside itself. From this perspective, then, there is no private philosophy—no philosophy that is not public from the outset, that has not already left the private sphere and begun to seek out a praxis as soon as it begins to think.

But what exactly does it mean to call the public domain a condition of philosophical thinking? Does philosophy need a large audience, a packed marketplace? The problem here can be illustrated by a striking scene from Plato’s Protagoras, in which the young Hippocrates asks Socrates to put in a good word for him with the sophist Protagoras, in the hope of being taken on as his student. They resolve to visit the sophist in order first to clarify what Hippocrates would be taught. When they find Protagoras, he insists that their conversation about the content of his teaching should take place in public, since as a sophist he aims to educate others. Since the sophist’s speech aims to educate, and thus requires the other as an interlocutor, one might then say that the sophists are public speakers par excellence. In Plato’s dialogues, however, they are continually shown up as not knowing precisely what they claim to know. Hippias, another sophist, wears himself out with his various attempts to define beauty, all of which rest on particular examples and fail to accede to the level of the universal. The sophists can neither give a substantial justification for their beliefs nor unite these various views on the beautiful, virtue, or thinking into any form of essence, since they ultimately all remain at the level of the individual example. And since this generates a state of inconclusiveness in which examples are multiplied and knowledge has to be continually refined, the sophists are in fact caught up in what might be called the privacy of particular beliefs.

It is then ultimately the sophist who, though speaking before a large audience, thinks privately rather than publicly. Forced into a corner by Socrates, Hippias has to ask for a few minutes to reflect; he needs to step back from the dialogue to reconsider his own beliefs. Plato thus exposes the sophist as someone who teaches publicly but thinks privately, whereas the philosopher thinks publicly but does not need a large audience to do so: he thinks via debate. Indeed, he thinks debate and distinction as such, which is why, as Socrates repeatedly notes, he has no particular content of his own that he could teach. The philosopher focuses on knowledge in order to question it, and perhaps in doing so he changes it, but he neither possesses nor presents his own knowledge. To borrow a phrase of Kant’s, the philosopher makes public use of his reason. Yet to think publicly in this way is always already to reflect on public matters, since these are objects of debate with any given other. In this fundamental sense, philosophy is always a form of dialogue and debate.

For the philosopher, then, dialogue is the most natural thing in the world, and dialogue is public from the outset. Yet this yields a rather complex image of philosophy, since it now proves to be both vain and aloof and a public act of thinking. Philosophy is a rational, public debate with anyone and everyone about public matters, yet one that that not only escapes any individualizing discussion of the matter at hand but also its practical summation in an easily communicable form of knowledge. We might then say that philosophy disturbs public communication through a public act, while having the temerity to do so in a wholly transparent manner. In Plato, this form of dialogue—this contradictory, public act of thinking—is called dialectic.

It is not hard to see that in today’s universal public sphere, where philosophy represents a singular voice of exception, this attitude is not particularly well regarded. Philosophy occupies a difficult position insofar as it undermines knowledge and confronts it with an idea that cannot directly serve its pursuit. It generates useless questions, it generates problems, and it subdivides what is seemingly one and the same time. On top of everything, it does so in a rational, structured manner, unfolding the endless complications of things, relieving them of their apparent simplicity and habitual usage, and even transforming our knowledge of them. In a word: it makes distinctions.

We can then summarize the first paradox of philosophical dialogue as follows: philosophy seeks a rational dialogue that rejects practical results and communication through the multiplication of distinctions, to such an extent that its unwieldiness carries over into the very forms of its discourse. Insofar as it is a rational discourse, it is then intelligible, and insofar as it eludes communication through the continual multiplication of distinctions, it is unintelligible. There is no philosophy without debate; the philosopher is always in debate with the thoughts and things confronting her. There can then also be a dialogue between philosophers just because they do not speak about the same thing. Such genuine dialogue, however, is marked more by contradictions and unrelated juxtapositions than by figures of mutual understanding. And it is by following this roundabout path that philosophical dialogue ultimately leads to an ambivalent form of agreement—one that pertains to the shared * essence of philosophy: its will to distinction.

Yet if philosophy only speaks insofar as it distinguishes, then this contradictory dimension of philosophical dialogue already hints at a further contradiction. Philosophy not only engages in a distinctive form of debate; at the formal level, it also continually oscillates between the spoken and the written word. It comes from writing, it is on its way to writing, and it needs writing in order to overcome the transience of the spoken word by inscribing itself in reality. It therefore needs the book. The dialogue first comes back to itself as a book, perhaps because the reader may regret not having been there to witness it in person, so that a certain interval emerges. And it is within this very interval—in which speech is already on its way to writing, to losing itself in writing—that philosophy charts its course.

Whether Socrates would have been a philosopher without Plato is no simple question. Let us nonetheless suggest that, in a strict sense, he would not. For the book is another form, and one that essentially belongs to philosophy. A philosophy requires written inscriptions to sustain the very presence that it constructs through dialogue. This philosophical presence is weak, and it risks vanishing with the dialogue in the mere course of time. The book sustains this philosophical presence, and in the movement between speech and writing philosophy constructs a presence that enters into debate with the present in which it finds itself. The philosophical inscriptions set down in books are not timeless propositions, but rather the result of their time, that is, the result of dialogues on public questions. The book is thus a necessary support for the weak voice, yet is itself no end point, since it only constitutes a further form of public address. And that is precisely the problem of the book: though it retains that which exceeds the contingency of individual opinions and the arbitrariness of passing time, it also threatens to turn philosophy into a form of knowledge that apparently lies outside time. Philosophy would then be something that could be taught and would no longer depend on debate. Yet philosophy lives on debate, while at the same time evading it, just as it produces books that subsequently require further debate. The book continues a complex, circuitous dialogue that circumvents mere opinion and progresses by way of contradictions and discontinuities; it is itself an element of dialogue. Herein lies the second paradox of philosophical dialogue: it is always already bound for the book, since it always already transcends the given moment; and yet the book itself is not its terminus, but just another turning point in the overall discussion.

Somewhere between an elitist intractability that conceives itself as a universal address and a form of speech that is always already bound for the book (without conceiving it as its terminus), the figure of the philosophical dialogue thus begins to emerge. This dialogue constructs its own space through a debate that avoids and recoils from the exchange of opinions and knowledge and continually oscillates between the book and the spoken word. It is a zigzag line that not only circumscribes its own space but also its very own temporality.

The essence of philosophy lies in this very shared space and temporality. This sharing traditionally finds expression in concepts—in the concept of the Idea, for example, which is shared by both Plato and Hegel. It also finds expression in the sharing of problems—such as the problem of language shared by Derrida and Adorno. Concepts and problems, moreover, continually refer to one another: if concepts are instruments for making distinctions, problems refer to the space of concepts. The dialogue is divided up into the intractability of the concept and the public character of the problem, just as the written text develops the concept that it inscribes as speech within a public problem. Finally, the shared essence of philosophy, in the space and present between the concept and the problem, also finds expression in a certain constellation, since it amounts to a debate with others. Plato, for example, shares the public sphere as a contested space with the sophists. Within such constellations, shared concepts and problems open up specific philosophical periods.

It is in these periods that the third paradox of philosophy emerges: the spatiotemporal unfolding of its thinking body. This is a complex process that generates a host of problematic names. What, indeed, is meant by “idealism,” or “structuralism”? Or, even more problematically, by “German philosophy” or “French philosophy”? Such names surely at first only sow confusion. National philosophers? Have we not come a little further than that?

If we approach philosophy along the branching lines of concepts, problems, and constellations and the intersecting fissures marked in speech and books, then we would increasingly have to ask what these names refer to. Do they express the commonality of an identity? Or does “German philosophy,” like “French philosophy,” not first of all refer to a contradictory constellation? Alain Badiou opens the foregoing discussion by dividing philosophy up into a chain of discontinuous periods, which he terms “Greek,” “German,” and “French.” He nonetheless includes Leibniz and Spinoza in the seventeenth-century “French” period. Jean-Luc Nancy, in turn, notes the difficulties Kant experienced in writing in a language that did not allow his thinking to unfold as he wished. Kant remained ensnared in an antiquated German, while at the same time being deeply attached to it.

The content of “German” or “French” philosophy is then defined neither by linguistic nor by national borders. Let us not then seek to understand “German philosophy” and “French philosophy” too hastily as denoting identities, but rather as indicating the broad frameworks of complex debates. As a universal mode of address, philosophy cannot be contained within national borders, nor even within the limits of a national language; it nonetheless takes a variety of forms that are often externally distinguished by their language. Furthermore, figures such as “German philosophy” and “French philosophy” tend to resurface through their various reinterpretations. In the foregoing dialogue, “German philosophy” comes into view through its reinterpretation by “French philosophy.” In this reinterpretation, it clearly assumes a very particular form, which differs from other manifestations of “German philosophy” in other discourses.

What, then, are “German” philosophy and “French” philosophy? Certainly not one or another of their manifestations, but rather the entirety of their consequences. There is nonetheless no definitive consensus as to what these are. Nancy, for example, notes the famous displacement that takes place between French and German philosophy in the wake of the French Revolution. German philosophy came to be marked by a certain distance, in the form of an expectation or fear of another revolution, or an attempt to foment it. And as Badiou remarks, a similar intersection gave rise to the contemporary “French” philosophical period, which was initially marked by a renewed engagement with German thinkers. Terms such as “German philosophy” and “French philosophy” describe complex constellations that, while referring to languages and nation states, above all play host to shared concepts and problems, though these take a range of forms. Perhaps this is why they can only reveal their full import in translation. Perhaps it is only then that they can appear in their true structure—not falsified as in some discussions, not in the form of the orthodoxies and dogmatisms of those who believe in unchanging knowledge, but rather in their essential import, which manifests itself in translation as a renewal of their distinguishing power. The translation of one philosophy into another thus develops what it traces back to its essential import. It renews and rejuvenates it by repeating its distinctions. It conducts a dialogue; it writes philosophy’s present.

What does it mean, then, to conduct a dialogue on German philosophy from a French perspective? It means, first of all, to exhibit the presence of philosophy, to share its essence, to develop problems by debating shared concepts. It means to rejuvenate its thinking body. A dialogue, then, is always an address, a praxis—an invitation, a letter.