What Is Philosophy?

5. On the relationship of friendship with the possibility of thought in the modern world, see Maurice Blanchot, L’amitié (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), and the dialogue between two weary men in Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). See also Dionys Mascolo, Autour d’un effort de mémoire (Paris: Nadeau, 1987).

6. F. Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufman and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1968), 409.

7. Plato, The Statesman, 268a, 279a.

8. In a form that is deliberately like a schoolbook, Frédéric Cossutta has proposed a very interesting pedagogy of the concept: Frédéric Cossutta, Eléments pour la lecture des textes philosophiques (Paris: Bordas, 1989).

1. This history, which does not begin with Leibniz, passes through episodes as diverse as the constant theme of the proposition of the other person in Wittgenstein (“he has toothache …”) and the position of the other person as theory of possible world in Michel Tournier, Friday, or The Other Island (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974).

2. On the survey and absolute surfaces or volumes as real beings, cf. Raymond Ruyer, Néo-finalisme (Paris: P.U.F., 1952) chaps. 9-11.

3. G. W. Leibniz, “New System and Explanation of the New System,” in Philosophical Writings, ed. G.H.R. Parkinson (London: Everyman’s Library, 1973), p.121.

4. Gilles-Gaston Granger, Pour la connaisance philosophique (Paris: Odile Jacob, 1988), chap. 6.

1. On the elasticity of the concept, see Hubert Damisch, preface to Jean Dubuffet, Prospectus et tous écrits suivants (Paris: Gallimard, 1967), vol. 1, pp. 18-19.

2. Jean-Pierre Luminet distinguishes relative horizons, like the terrestrial horizon centered on, and changing with, an observer, and the absolute horizon, the “horizon of events,” which is independent of any observer and distributes events into two categories, seen and nonseen, communicable and noncommunicable. “Le trou noir et l’infini,” in Les dimensions de l’infini (Paris: Institut culturel italien de Paris, n.d.). We refer also to the Zen text of the Japanese monk Dôgen, which invokes the horizon or “reserve” of events: Shôbogenzo, trans. and with commentary by René de Ceccaty and Ryôji Nakamura (Paris: La Différence, 1980).

3. Epicurus, “Letter to Herodotus,” 61–62, in Letters, Principal Doctrines, and Vatican Sayings, trans. Russel M. Geer, (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1964), p. 22

4. On these dynamisms see Michel Courthial’s forthcoming Le visage.

5. François Laruelle is engaged in one of the most interesting undertakings of contemporary philosophy. He invokes a One-All that he qualifies as “nonphilosophical” and, oddly, as “scientific,” on which the “philosophical decision” takes root. This One-All seems to be close to Spinoza. François Laruelle, Philosophie et non-philosophie (Liege: Mardaga, 1989).

6. In 1939 Etienne Souriau published L’instauration philosophique (Paris: Alcan, 1939). Aware of creative activity in philosophy, he invoked a kind of plane of instituting as the ground of this creation, or “philosopheme,” animated by dynamisms (pp. 62–63).

7. Cf. Jean-Pierre Vernant, The Origins of Greek Thought (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982), pp. 107–29.

8. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. N. Kemp-Smith (London: Macmillan, 1929): space as form of exteriority is no less “in ourselves” than time as form of interiority (“Critique of the Fourth Paralogism of Transcendental Psychology”). On the Idea as “horizon,” cf. “Appendix to the Transcendental Dialectic.”

9. Raymond Bellour, L’ entre-images: photo, cinéma, vidéo (Paris: La Différence, 1990), p. 132, on the link between transcendence and the interruption of movement or the freeze-frame [arrêt sur image].

10. Jean-Paul Sartre, The Transcendence of the Ego, trans. Forrest Williams and Robert Kirkpatrick (New York: Noonday Press, 1957), p. 23 (reference to Spinoza).

11. Antonin Artaud, The Peyote Dance (a translation of Les Tarahumaras), trans. Helen Weaver (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976.

12. E. Naville, Maine De Biran, sa vie et ses pensées (Paris: Naville, l857), P. 357.

13. Cf. Heinrich von Kleist, “De l’élaboration progressive des idées dans le discours,” in Anecdotes et petits écrits (Paris: Payot, 1981), p. 77; and Artaud, “Correspondence with Rivière,” in Antonin Artaud, Collected Works, trans. V. Corti (London: Calder and Boyars, 1968), vol. 1.

14. Jean Tinguely: Swiss Sculptures (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, Musée nationale d’art moderne, 1988).

15. Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), p. 46. On the un-thought in thought, see Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (London: Tavistock, 1970), pp. 322–28. See also the “distant interior” in Michaux.

1. On the Idiot (the uninitiated, private, or ordinary individual as opposed to the technician or expert) in his relationships with thought, see Nicholas of Cusa, The Idiot (trans, of Idiota [1450]; London, 1650). Descartes reconstitutes the three personae under the names of Eudoxus, the idiot; Polyander, the technician; and Epistemon, the public expert. “The Search for Truth by Means of the Natural Light,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), vol. 2.

2. Leon Chestov takes the new opposition from Kierkegaard, first of all: Kierkegaard et la philosophie existentielle, trans. T. Rageot and B. de Schloezer (Paris: Vrin, 1972).

3. Herman Melville, The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), chap. 44.

4. Michel Guérin, La terreur et la pitié (Arles: Actes Sud, 1990).

5. Cf. the analyses of Isaac Joseph, who draws on Simmel and Goffman: Le passant considérable: essai sur la dispersion de l’espace public (Paris: Méridiens, 1984).

6. On the persona of the Stranger in Plato, see Jean-François Mattei, L’Etranger et le simulacre (Paris: P.U.F., 1983).

7. Only cursory allusions will be given here: to the bond of Eros with philia in the Greeks; to the role of the Fiancée and the Seducer in Kierkegaard; to the noetic function of the Couple according to Pierre Klossowski, Les lois de l’hospitalité (Paris: Gallimard, 1989); to the constitution of the woman-philosopher according to Michèle Le Doeuff, Hipparchia’s Choice, trans. Trista Selous (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991); and to the new persona of the Friend in Blanchot.

8. On this complex device, cf. Thomas de Quincey, “The Last Days of Immanuel Kant,” in David Masson, ed., Collected Writings, vol. 4, pp. 340–41 (Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black, 1890). [Translators’ note: the passage reads, “… for fear of obstructing the circulation of the blood, he never would wear garters; yet, as he found it difficult to keep up his stockings without them, he had invented for himself a most elaborate substitute, which I will describe. In a little pocket, somewhat smaller than a watch-pocket, but occupying pretty nearly the same situation as a watch pocket on each thigh, there was placed a small box, something like a watch-case, but smaller; into this box was introduced a watch-spring in a wheel, round about which wheel was wound an elastic cord, for regulating the force of which there was a separate contrivance. To the two ends of this cord were attached hooks, which hooks were carried through a small aperture in the pockets, and so, passing down the inner and outer side of the thigh, caught hold of two loops which were fixed on the off side and the near side of each stocking.”]

9. Søren Kierkegaard, “Fear and Trembling,” in Kierkegaard’s Writings, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), vol. 6, p. 49.

10. François Jullien, Procès ou création (Paris: Seuil, 1989), pp. 18, 117.

11. Nietzsche, Musarion-Ausgabe (n.p., n.d.), vol. 16, p. 35. Nietzsche often invokes a philosophical taste and derives “sage” from sapere (sapiens, the wine taster, sisyphos, the man of extremely “keen” taste). Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, trans. Marianne Cowan (Chicago: Henry Re-gnery, 1962), p. 43.

12. Cf. Emile Bréhier, “La notion de problème en philosophie,” in Etudes de philosophie antique (Paris: P.U.F., 1955).

13. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. W. Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Random House, 1967) vol. 1, 6.

1. These problems have been renewed profoundly by Marcel Detienne. On the opposition of the founding Stranger and the Autochthon, on the complex mixtures between these two poles, and on Erechtheus, see “Qu’estce que’un site?” in Marcel Détienne, éd., Tracés de fondation (Leuven: Peters, n.d.). Cf. also Giulia Sissa and Marcel Detienne, La vie quotidienne des dieux grecs (Paris: Hachette, 1989). For Erechtheus, see chap. 14; and for the difference between the two polytheisms, chap. 10.

2. V. Gordon Childe, The Pre-History of European Society (Harmonds-worth: Penguin, 1958).

3. Jean-Pierre Faye, La raison narrative: Langages totalitaires (Paris: Bal-land, 1990), pp. 15—18. Cf. Clémence Ramnoux, in Histoire de la philosophie (Paris: Gallimard, n.d.), vol. 1, pp. 408-9: pre-Socratic philosophy is born and expands “on the edge of the Hellenic area as defined by colonization toward the end of the seventh and the beginning of the sixth century, and where, precisely through commerce and war, the Greeks confront the kingdoms and empires of the East”; it then wins over “the extreme west, the colonies of Sicily and Italy, thanks to migrations provoked by Iranian invasions and political revolutions.” Friedrich Nietzsche, Naissance de la philosophie (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), p. 131: “Think of the philosopher as an émigré who has arrived among the Greeks; this is how it is for these pre-Plato-nists. In a way they are disorientated strangers.”

4. On this pure sociability, “before and beyond any particular content,” and democracy and conversation, cf. Georges Simmel, Sociologie et épistémo-logie (Paris: P.U.F., 1981), chap. 3.

5. Today, by freeing themselves from Hegelian or Heideggerian stereotypes, certain authors are taking up the specifically philosophical question on new foundations: on a Jewish philosophy, see the works by Lévinas and those around him, Les cahiers de la nuit surveillée 3 (1984); on an Islamic philosophy, according to the works of Corbin, see Christian Jambet, La logique des Orientaux: Henry Corbin et la science des formes (Paris: Seuil, 1983), and Guy Lardreau, Discours philosophique et discours spirituel (Paris: Seuil, 1985); on a Hindu philosophy, according to Masson-Oursel, see the approach of Roger-Pol Droit, L’oubli de l’Inde: une amnésie philosophique (Paris: P.U.F., 1989); on a Chinese philosophy, see the studies of François Cheng, Vide et plein (Paris: Seuil, 1991), and François Jullien, Procès ou création (Paris: Seuil, 1989); and on a Japanese philosophy, see René de Ceccaty and Ryôji Nakamura, Mille ans de littérature japonaise, and the translation with commentary of the monk Dôgen (Paris: La Différence, 1980).

6. Cf. Jean Beaufret: “The source is everywhere, undetermined, Chinese as well as Arab and Indian … But then there is the Greek episode, the Greeks having had the strange privilege to call the source being” (Ethernité 1 [1985]).

7. Friedrich Nietzsche, “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life,” in Untimely Meditations, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 1, pp. 63–64. On the philosopher-comet and the “environment” he finds in Greece, see Nietzsche, Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, trans. Marianne Cowan (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1962), pp. 33–34.

8. See Etienne Balazs, Chinese Civilization and Bureaucracy, trans. H. M. Wright (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964), chap. 8.

9. Karl Marx, Capital (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1972), vol. 3, part 3, chap. 15, p. 250: “Capitalist production seeks continually to overcome these immanent barriers, but overcomes them only by means which again place these barriers in its way and on a more formidable scale. The real barrier of capitalist production is capital itself.”

10. Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. D. Carr (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1970). Cf. Droit’s commentaries, L’oubli de l’Inde, pp. 203–4.

11. F. Braudel, Capitalism and Material Life, 1400–1800, trans. Miriam Kochan (New York: Harper and Row, 1967).

12. On these types of utopia, see Ernst Bloch, Le principe espérance (Paris: Gallimard, 1982), vol. 2. See also the commentaries on the relationship of Fourier’s utopia with movement in René Schérer, Pari sur l’impossible (Paris: Presses universitaire de Vincennes, 1989).

13. Immanuel Kant, The Contest of Faculties, trans. Mary J. Gregor, (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992), part 2, 6, pp. 153–57. The full importance of this text has been rediscovered today through the very different commentaries of Foucault, Habermas, and Lyotard.

14. Hölderlin: the Greeks possess the great panic Plane, which they share with the East, but they have to acquire the concept of Western organic composition; “with us, it is the other way round” (letter to Bölhendorf, 4 December 1801, with commentary by Jean Beaufret, in Friedrich Hölderlin, Remarques sur Oedipe (Paris: 10–18, 1965), pp. 8–11. See also Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, L’imitation des modernes (Paris: Galilée, 1986). Even Renan’s celebrated text on the Greek “miracle” has an analogous complex movement: what the Greeks possessed by nature we can rediscover only through reflection, by confronting a fundamental forgetfulness and world-weariness; we are no longer Greeks, we are Bretons: Ernest Renan, Souvenirs d’enfance et de jeunesse (Paris: Gallimard, 1983).

15. We refer to the first lines of the preface to the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, trans. N. Kemp-Smith (London: Macmillan, 1929), pp. 7–8: “The battle-field of these endless controversies is called metaphysics … Her government, under the administration of the dogmatists, was at first despotic. But inasmuch as the legislation still bore traces of the ancient barbarism, her empire gradually through intestine wars gave way to complete anarchy; and the sceptics, a species of nomads, despising all settled modes of life, broke up from time to time all civil society. Happily they were few in number, and were unable to prevent its being established ever anew, although on no uniform and self-consistent plan.” On the island of foundation we refer to the great text at the beginning of chap. 3 of the “Analytic of Principles” (p. 257). The critiques include not only a “history” but above all a “geography” of Reason, according to which a “field,” a “territory” (territorium), and a “realm” (ditio) of the concept are distinguished (Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement, trans. J. H. Bernard [New York: Macmillan, 1951], introduction, sec. 2, “Of the Realm of Philosophy in General”). Jean-Clet Martin in his forthcoming Variations has produced a fine analysis of this geography of pure reason in Kant.

16. David Hume: “Two men, who pull the oars of a boat, do it by an agreement or convention, tho’ they have never given promises to each other.” A Treatise of Human Nature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), p. 490.

17. It is a “composite” feeling that Primo Levi describes in this way: shame that men could do this, shame that we have been unable to prevent it, shame at having survived, and shame at having been demeaned or diminished. See The Drowned and the Saved, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (London: Sphere Books, 1989), also on the “grey zone, with ill-defined outlines which both separate and join the two camps of masters and servants” (p. 27).

18. On the critique of “democratic public opinion,” its American model, and the mystifications of human rights or of the State of international law, one of the strongest analyses is that of Michel Butel in L’autre journal 10 (March 1991): 21–25.

19. Charles Péguy, Clio (Paris: Gallimard, 1931), pp. 266–69.

20. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (London: Tavistock, 1972), pp. 130–31.

1. Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers, Entre le temps et l’éternité (Paris: Fayard, 1988), pp. 162–63. The authors take the example of the crystallization of a superfused liquid, a liquid at a temperature below its crystallization temperature: “In such a liquid, small germs of crystals form, but these germs appear and then dissolve without involving any consequences.”

2. Georg Cantor, “Fondements d’une théorie générale des ensembles,” in Cahiers pour l’analyse 10 (n.d.). From the beginning of the text Cantor invokes the Platonist Limit.

3. On the instituting of coordinates by Nicolas Oresme, intensive ordinates and their placing in relationship with extensive lines, cf. Pierre Duhem, Le système du monde (Paris: Hermann, 1913–59), vol. 7 (La physique parisienne au XIVe siècle), chap. 6. And, on the association of a “continuous spectrum and a discrete sequence,” and Oresme’s diagrams, see “La toile, le spectre, le pendule,” in Gilles Châtelet’s forthcoming Les enjeux du mobile.

4. G.W.F. Hegel, Science de la logique (Paris: Aubier, 1981), vol. 2, p. 277 (and on the operations of depotentialization and potentialization of the function according to Lagrange).

5. Pierre Vendryès, Déterminisme et autonomie (Paris: Armand Colin, n.d.). It is not the mathematization of biology that is of interest in the works of Vendryès but a homogenization of the mathematical and biological function.

6. On the meaning taken by the word figure (or image, Bild) in a theory of functions, see Vuillemin’s analysis concerning Riemann: in the projection of a complex function, the figure “brings into view the course of the function and its different affections”; it “makes the functional correspondence” of the variable and the function “immediately visible.” Jules Vuillemin, La philosophie de l’algèbre (Paris: P.U.F., 1962), pp. 320–26.

7. G. W. Leibniz, “D’une ligne issue de lignes” and “Nouvelle application du calcul,” both in Oeuvre mathématique de Leibniz autre que le calcul infinitesimal, trans. Jean Peyroux (Paris: Blanchard, 1986). These texts are considered to be the foundations of the theory of functions.

8. Having described the “intimate mixture” of different types of trajectory in every region of the phase space of a system with weak stability, Prigogine and Stengers conclude: “We may think of a familiar situation, that of the numbers on the axis where each rational number is surrounded by irrational numbers, and each irrational number is surrounded by rational numbers. Equally, we may think of the way in which Anaxagoras [shows how] every thing contains in all its parts, even the smallest, an infinite multiplicity of qualitatively different seeds intimately mixed together.” Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers, La nouvelle alliance (Paris: Gallimard, 1979), p. 241. [Translators’ note: the English version of this book, Order out of Chaos (London: HarperCollins, 1985), differs considerably from the original French, but see p. 264 of the English version.]

9. The theory of two kinds of “multiplicity” is present in Bergson from Time and Free Will, trans. F. L. Pogson (New York: Macmillan, 1910), chap. 2: multiplicities of consciousness are defined by “fusion” and by “penetration” terms that are equally found in Husserl from The Philosophy of Arithmetic. The resemblance between the two authors is, in this respect, extremely close. Bergson will always define the object of science by mixtures of space-time, and its principal action by the tendency to take time as an “independent variable,” whereas, at the other pole, duration passes through every variation.

10. Gilles-Gaston Granger, Essai d’une philosophie du style (Paris: Odile Jacob, 1988), pp. 10–11, 102–5.

11. Cf. the great texts of Evariste Galois on mathematical enunciation: André Dalmas, Evariste Galois, revolutionnaire et geometre (Paris: Nouveau Commerce, 1982), pp. 117–32.

12. Jacques Monod, Chance and Necessity, trans. Austryn Wainhouse (Glasgow: Collins/Fount Paperbacks, 1977), p. 78: “Allosteric interactions are indirect, proceeding exclusively from the protein’s discriminatory properties of stereospecific recognition, in the two (or more) states accessible to it.” A process of molecular recognition may introduce very different mechanisms, thresholds, sites, and observers, as in the recognition of male-female in plants.

13. Bertrand Russell, “The Relation of Sense-Data to Physics,” in Mysticism and Logic (London: Longmans, Green, 1918).

14. Throughout his work, Bergson opposes the scientific observer to the philosophical persona who “passes” through duration. In particular, he tries to show that the former presupposes the latter, not only in Newtonian physics (Time and Free Will, trans. F. L. Pogson [New York: Macmillan, 1910], chap. 3) but in relativity (Duration and Simultaneity, trans. Leon Jacobson [Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965]).

1. Cf. Bertrand Russell, The Principles of Mathematics (London: Unwin, 1903), especially appendix A; and Gottlob Frege, The Foundations of Arithmetic (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1953), 48 and 54, and Translations from the Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege, trans. and ed. Peter Geach and Max Black (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1979), especially the papers “Function and Concept,” “On Concept and Object,” and, for the critique of the variable, “What Is a Function?” See also Claude Imbert’s commentaries on these works in the French translations of Frege: Les fondements de l’arithmétique (Paris: Seuil, 1970) and Ecrits logiques et philosophique (Paris: Seuil, 1971). See also Philippe de Rouilhan, Frege, les paradoxes de la représentation (Paris: Minuit, 1988).

2. Oswald Ducrot has criticized the self-referential character attributed to performative statements (what one does by saying it: I swear, I promise, I order): Dire et ne pas dire (Paris: Hermann, 1980), pp. 72f.

3. On projection and Gödel’s method, see E. Nagel and J. R. Newman, Gödel’s Proof (London: Routledge, 1959).

4. On Frege’s conception of the interrogative proposition, see Gottlob Frege, Logical Investigations, trans. P. T. Geach and R. H. Stoothoff (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1977), and also for the three elements: grasping thought, or the act of thinking; recognition of the truth of a thought, or judgment; the expression of judgment, or affirmation. See also Russell, The Principles of Mathematics, 477.

5. For example, between true and false (1 and o), degrees of truth are introduced that are not probabilities but produce a kind of fractalization of the peaks of truth and the troughs of falsity, so that the fuzzy sets become numerical again, but through a fractional number between o and 1. However, this is on condition that the fuzzy set is the subset of a normal set, referring to a regular function. See Arnold Kaufmann, Introduction to the Theory of Fuzzy Subsets, trans. D. L. Swanson (New York: Academic Press, 1975), and Pascal Engel, who devotes a chapter to the “vague” in Le norme du vrai: philosophie de la logique (Paris: Gallimard, 1989).

6. On the three transcendences that appear within the field of immanence, the primordial, the intersubjective, and the objective, see Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, trans. Dorion Cairns (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1960), especially 55–56. On the Urdoxa, see Ideas, General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, trans. W. R. Boyce Gibson (New York: Humanities Press, 1969), especially 103–4; and E. Husserl, Experience and Judgement: Investigations in a Genealogy of Logic, trans. James S. Churchill and Karl Ameriks (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1973).

7. G.-G. Granger, Pour la connaissance philosophique (Paris: Odile Jacob, 1988), chaps. 6 and 7. Knowledge of the philosophical concept is reduced to reference to the lived, inasmuch as the latter constitutes it as “virtual totality”: this implies a transcendental subject, and Granger seems to give “virtual” no other meaning than the Kantian one of a whole of possible experience (pp. 174–75). It is noticeable that Granger gives a hypothetical role to “fuzzy concepts” in the transition from scientific to philosophical concepts.

8. On abstract thought and popular judgment, see the short text by Hegel entitled “Qui pense abstrait?” in Sämtliche Werke, vol. 20, pp. 445–50.

9. Marcel Detienne shows that philosophers lay claim to a knowledge that is distinct from the old wisdom and to an opinion that is distinct from that of the sophists. Marcel Detienne, Les maîtres de vérité dans la Grèce archaïque (Paris: Maspero, 1973), chap. 6, pp. 131ff.

10. See Heidegger’s celebrated analysis, and Beaufret’s, in Jean Beaufret, ed., Le poème (Paris: P.U.F., 1986), pp. 31–34.

11. Alain Badiou, L’être et l’événement (Paris: Seuil, 1988), and Manifeste pour la philosophie (Paris: Seuil, 1989). Badiou’s theory is very complex; we fear we may have oversimplified it.

12. See Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality (New York: Free Press, 1979), pp. 22–26.

13. Paul Klee, On Modern Art, trans. Paul Findlay (London and Boston: Faber, 1966), p. 45.

14. Science feels the need not only to order chaos but to see it, touch it, and produce it: cf. James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science (London: Sphere, 1988). Gilles Châtelet in his forthcoming Les enjeux du mobile shows how mathematics and physics attempt to retain something of a sphere of the virtual.

15. Péguy, Clio, pp. 230, 265. Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), pp. 90, 122, 126.

16. James Gleick, Chaos, p. 186.

17. On the meanwhile [l’entre-temps], we refer to a very intense article by B. Groethuysen, “De quelques aspects du temps,” Recherches philosophiques 5 (1935–36): “All events are, so to speak, in the time where nothing is happening.” All of Lernet-Holonia’s novelistic work takes place in meanwhiles.

18. Joe Bousquet, Les Capitales (Paris: Le Cercle du livre, 1955), p. 103.

19. Stéphane Mallarmé, “Mimique,” Oeuvres complètes (Paris: La Pléiade, Gallimard, 1945), p. 310.

1. Edith Wharton, Les metteurs en scène (Paris: 10–18, 1986), p. 263. It concerns an academic and worldly painter who gives up painting after seeing a little picture by one his unrecognized contemporaries: “And me, I have not created any of my works, I have simply adopted them.”

2. Joachim Gasquet, Cézanne: A Memoir with Conversations, trans. Christopher Pemberton (London: Thames and Hudson, 1991), p. 164.

3. See François Cheng, Vide et plein (Paris: Seuil, 1979), p. 63 (citation of the painter Huang Pin-Hung).

4. Antonin Artaud, “Van Gogh: The Man Suicided by Society,” in Jack Hirschman, ed., Artaud Anthology (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1965), pp 156, 160 (translation modified): “As a painter, and nothing else but a painter, Van Gogh adopted the methods of pure painting and never went beyond them. … The marvelous thing is that this painter who was only a painter … among all the existing painters, is [also] the one who makes us forget that we are dealing with painting” (pp. 154–56).

5. José Gil devotes a chapter to the procedure by which Pessoa extracts the percept on the basis of lived perceptions, particularly in “L’ode maritime.” Fernando Pessoa ou la métaphysique des sensations (Paris: La Différence, 1988), chap. 2.

6. Gasquet, Cézanne, p. 154. See Erwin Straus, Du sens des sens (Paris: Millon, n.d.), p. 519: “The great landscapes have a wholly visionary characteristic. Vision is what of the invisible becomes visible … The landscape is invisible because the more we conquer it, the more we lose ourselves in it. To reach the landscape we must sacrifice as much as we can all temporal, spatial, objective determination; but this abandon does not only attain the objective, it affects us ourselves to the same extent. In the landscape we cease to be historical beings, that is to say, beings who can themselves be objectified. We do not have any memory for the landscape, we no longer have any memory for ourselves in the landscape. We dream in daylight with open eyes. We are hidden to the objective world, but also to ourselves. This is feeling.”

7. Roberto Rossellini, Le cinéma révélé (Paris: Etoile-Cahiers du cinéma, 1984), pp. 80–82.

8. In the second chapter of The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, trans. T. Ashley Audra and Cloudesley Brereton with the assistance of W. Horsfall Carter (New York: Henry Holt, 1935), Bergson analyzes fabulation as a visionary faculty very different from the imagination and that consists in creating gods and giants, “semi-personal powers or effective presences.” It is exercised first of all in religions, but it is freely developed in art and literature.

9. Virginia Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf ed. Anne Olivier Bell (London: Hogarth Press, 1980), vol. 3, pp. 209, 210.

10. Antonin Artaud, The Theatre and Its Double, trans. Mary Caroline Richards (New York: Grove Press, 1958), p. 134.

11. Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, HAI (Paris: Flammarion, 1991), p. 7 (“I am an Indian”—although I do not know how to cultivate corn or make a dugout). In a famous text, Michaux spoke of the “health” peculiar to art: postface to “Mes propriétés”–in Henri Michaux, La nuit remue (Paris: Gallimard, 1935), P. 193.

12. André Dhôtel, Terres de mémoire, (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1979), pp. 225–26.

13. Emile Bergson, The Creative Mind, trans. Mabelle L. Andison (West-port, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1946), pp. 59–60.

14. These three questions frequently recur in Proust, especially in “Time Regained” in Remembrance of Things Past, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin; and by Andreas Mayor (London: Chatto and Windus, 1982), vol. 3, pp. 931–32 (on life, vision, and art as the creation of universes).

15. Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963), p. 183.

16. Osip Mandelstam, The Noise of Time: The Prose of Osip Mandelstam, trans, with critical essays by Clarence Brown (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1986), pp. 109–10.

17. Mikel Dufrenne, in Phénoménologie de l’expérience esthétique (Paris: P.U.F., 1953), produced a kind of analytic of perceptual and affective a priori, which founded sensation as a relationship of the body and the world. He stayed close to Erwin Straus. But is there a being of sensation that manifests itself in the flesh? Maurice Merleau-Ponty followed this path in The Visible and the Invisible, trans. A. Lingis (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1969). Dufrenne emphasized a number of reservations concerning such an ontology of the flesh (see L’oeil et l’oreille [Montreal: Hexagone, 1987]). Recently, Didier Franck has again taken up Merleau-Ponty’s theme by showing the decisive importance of the flesh in Heidegger and already in Husserl (see Heidegger et le problème de l’espace [Paris: Minuit, 1986] and Chair et corps [Paris: Minuit, 1981]). This whole problem is at the center of a phenomenology of art. Perhaps Michel Foucault’s still-unpublished book Les aveux de la chair will teach us about the most general origins of the notion of the flesh and its significance in the Church Fathers.

18. As Georges Didi-Huberman demonstrates, the flesh gives rise to a “doubt”: it is too close to chaos. Hence the necessity of a complementarity between the “pink” [incarnat] and the “section” [pan], the essential theme of La peinture incarnée (Paris: Minuit, 1985), which is taken up again and developed in Devant l’image (Paris: Minuit, 1990).

19. Vincent Van Gogh, letter no. 520 to Theo, 11 August 1888, in The Complete Letters of Vincent Van Gogh (Greenwich, Conn.: New York Graphic Society, 1958), vol. 3. Broken tones and their relationship with the area of plain, uniform color are a frequent theme of the correspondence. Similarly for Gauguin; see letter to Schuffenecker, 8 October 1888, in Lettres (Paris: Grasset, 1946), p. 140: “I have done a self-portrait for Vincent … I think it is one of my best: absolutely incomprehensible (for example) it is so abstract … its drawing is completely special, complete abstraction … The color is a color far from nature; imagine a vague memory of pottery buckled by great heat. All the reds, the violets, scored by the fire’s blaze like a furnace glowing to the eyes, seat of the struggles of the painter’s thought. All on a chrome ground sprinkled with childish bunches of flowers. Room of pure young girl.” This is the idea of the “arbitrary colorist” according to Van Gogh.

20. Cf. Artstudio (n.d.), no. 16, “Monochromes” (Geneviève Monnier and Denys Riout on Klein, and Pierre Sterckx on the “current avatars of monochrome”).

21. Wilhelm Worringer, Form in Gothic (London: Putnam’s and Sons, 1927).

22. Piet Mondrian, “Réalité naturelle et réalité abstraite,” in Michel Seuphor, Piet Mondrian, sa vie, sa oeuvre (Paris: Flammarion, n.d.), on the room and its unfolding. Michel Butor has analyzed this unfolding of the room into squares or rectangles, and the opening onto an interior square, empty and white like the “promise of a future room.” Michel Butor, “Lecarré et son habitant,” Répertoire III (Paris: Minuit, 1992), pp. 307–9,314–15.

23. It seems to us that Lorenz’s mistake is wanting to explain the territory by an evolution of functions: Konrad Lorenz, On Aggression, trans. Marjorie Kerr Wilson (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1966).

24. Alan John Marshall, Bower Birds (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954); and E. T. Gilliard, Birds of Paradise and Bower Birds (London: Weidenfeld, 1969).

25. See Jakob von Uexküll’s masterpiece, Mondes animaux et monde humain, Théorie de la signification (Paris: Gonthier, 1965), pp. 137–42: “counterpoint, motif of development, and morphogenesis.”

26. Henry van de Velde, Déblaiement d’art (Brussels: Archives architecture moderne, 1979), p. 20.

27. On all these points, the analysis of enframing forms, and of the town-cosmos (the example of Lausanne), see Bernard Cache’s forthcoming L’ameublement du territoire.

28. Pascal Bonitzer formed the concept of deframing [décadrage] in order to highlight new relationships between the planes in cinema (Cahiers du cinéma 284 [January 1978]): “disjointed, crushed or fragmented” planes, thanks to which cinema becomes an art by getting free from the commonest emotions, which were in danger of preventing its aesthetic development, and by producing new affects. See Pascal Bonitzer, Le champ aveugle: essais sur le cinéma (Paris: Gallimard–Cahiers du Cinéma, 1982): “system of the emotions.”

29. Mikhail Bakhtine, Esthétique et théorie du roman, trans. Daria Olivier (Paris: Gallimard, 1978).

30. Pierre Boulez, especially Orientations, trans. Martin Cooper (London: Faber, 1986), and Boulez on Music Today, trans. S. Bradshaw and Richard Rodney Bennett (London: Faber, 1971). The extension of the series into durations, intensities, and timbres is not an act of closure but, on the contrary, an opening of what is closed in the series of pitches [hauteurs],

31. Xavier de Langlais, La technique de la peinture à l’huile (Paris: Flammarion, 1988); Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Theory of Colors (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1970), 902–9.

32. See Christian Bonnefoi, “Interview et comment par Yves-Alain Bois,” Macula (n.d.), 5–6.

33. Hubert Damisch, Le fenêtre jaune cadmium; ou Les dessous de la peinture (Paris: Seuil, 1984), pp. 275–305 (and p. 80, on the thickness of the plane in Pollock). Damisch has insisted more than other writers on art-as-thought and painting-as-thought, such as Dubuffet in particular sought to institute. Mallarmé made the book’s “thickness” a dimension distinct from its depth; see Jacques Schérer, Le Livre de Mallarmé (Paris: Gallimard, 1978), p. 55. Boulez takes up this theme on his own account for music (Orientations).

1. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. N. Kemp-Smith (London: Macmillan, 1929), Transcendental Analytic, “The Synthesis of Reproduction in Imagination.”

2. On Cézanne and chaos, see Gasquet, Cézanne; on Klee and chaos, see Paul Klee, “Note on the Gray Point,” in Théorie de l’art moderne (Paris: Gonthier, 1963). See also the analyses of Henri Maldiney, Regard Parole Espace (Paris: L’Age d’homme, 1973), pp. 150–51, 183–85.