Border and Limit
The cipher of the ‘glocal’ – of the interface-relation or short-circuit global/local – which distinguishes our present sits ill with the traditional descriptions of social and political subjectivity. Entrusted to conceptual nomenclatures still of an industrial stamp, these descriptions not only are unable to escape capture in the vice of state and market but actually strengthen the cogency and vocation of totalisation to the highest degree. More than an antithesis, it is an indissoluble binomial. The state/market pincer inevitably tightens each time the presumed opposition of the terms is emphasised as an alternative between the logic of ‘privatisation’ and the pure logic of ‘defence’ of the social state. The factor that, for Hannah Arendt, constituted the peculiar element and the means of subsistence of politics, the public sphere – understood in its autonomy from the institutions of the state, both in the sense of ‘civil society’ reduced to a system of needs and as mere economic ratio – tends to disappear in the pincer of state and market, of ‘statism’ and ‘free competition’. Nevertheless, the search for a new public space that is able to escape from the dichotomous pincer that – with the tacit complicity and confusion of roles between ‘right’ and ‘left’ – always makes the ‘public’ coincide with the statist and ‘private’ demands with the anti-statist, even for it simply to begin, requires an even more radical operation than the one envisioned by Arendt: namely, to problematise the very concept of politics which had turned on the simultaneous and intersecting adoption of the concepts of ‘border’ [confine] and ‘difference’.
Accordingly, we will attempt to approach the subject of ‘difference’ in the contemporary philosophical (and post-philosophical) debate from a specific perspective delimited by the notions of ‘border’ [confine] and ‘limit’. To adopt difference as an optical standpoint of displacement and a perspectival shift from the traditional metaphysical nomenclatures of ‘Subject’ and ‘Substance’ implies a theoretical practice of borders [confini] where the logics of identity come to be destructured and redefined by the irruption of new insurgencies. These new insurgencies are no longer characterised by an ontology of ‘participation’ and ‘gender commonality’ but, rather, by an anti-essentialist criterion of singularity and symbolic relationality. Such an operation appears, today, not only indispensable for the attempt to ‘update’ the analysis but literally pre-liminal (precisely, the limen) to any discourse on politics that really wants to be adequate to the challenges of the present, of our binding and involving ‘global time’.
We shall begin by considering the words ‘border’ [confine] and ‘limit’. Every time we speak of the ‘border’ [confine], we should not lose sight of the dual valence of the term. Alongside the meaning of final margin, of terminal line, con-fine recalls the sense of a shared border [condivisione] with alterity or the extraneous. The border [confine] is not only the limit, but the shared limit. There is also another meaning of ‘confine’ [confine], linked to the idea of ‘to confine’ [confinare], to relegate to the margins. This is the crucial sense in another discursive context, for example that which invests all the forms of power and the spatial organisation of society modelled on the binomial of centre and periphery, but it is less important for the theme that I am concerned with.
The modern philosophical dispute on the border/limit [confine/limite] harks back to the celebrated notion introduced by Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason: the notion of Grenzbegriff, or limiting concept. The function of the Grenzbegriff, which we could also translate by ‘marginal concept’, is for Kant that of ‘limiting’. The German verb used by Kant for this purpose is einschränken. There arises here a first problem, inasmuch as einschränken refers also to Schranke, a term that does not specifically denote the limit or border [confine] so much as barrier or obstacle. The Kantian limit-concept (which as we know is the noumenon: the key concept of the critique whose philosophical significance we shall not enter into here) also bears with it a dual valence. On the one hand, Grenzbegriff delimits in the same way as a margin, an edge. On the other hand, it attaches [incardina] the presumption of knowledge to the Schranken, to specific architectonic barriers. It goes without saying that, in Kant, the notions of border [confine] and limit are presented as negative or inhibiting. This makes way for a field of tensions and subversive potential that will then be translated by Hegel and Marx into the need for a dialectic of Grenze and Schranke, ‘limit’ and ‘barrier’.
There is no doubt, therefore, that the Kantian tradition defines the limit-concept as a negative, inhibiting, hinging [incardinante] notion, one that poses delimitations, barriers to knowledge and to its pretensions. It is also unquestionable that in philosophy, today, we can see a decisive turn, to which I shall try and remain faithful: the turn to a positive declension of the limit. Such a positive declension of the limit means to put in question – as Foucault has acutely noted – not all of Kant, but a certain Kant: the Kant of the ‘first Critique’. In a renowned lecture at the Collège de France, the later Foucault spoke of two traditions, two trajectories of modern philosophy both of which stem from Kant: first, that of the analytic of finitude, the analytic of true and false propositions; second, the trajectory of the ontology of the present. It is not difficult to detect in the identikit of the two trajectories the physiognomy of the philosophical dualism that has characterised post-Kantian philosophy: the analytic tradition and the hermeneutical one. Nevertheless, we face, today, a different setting from the one that Foucault traced for us in his inimitable style. It is one that demands not only the interaction between the two traditions, but the disruption of the borders [confini] between the two traditions: so that the theme of finitude affects that of the ontology of the present; the ‘linguistic turn’ is absorbed into the notions of action and forms of life; language, insofar as it is an originally practical and culturally situated dimension, becomes the cipher for the limit and radical contingency. The inherence of our practices to an irrepressible and irreducible plurality of forms-of-life and the consequent necessity of relating them through ‘passages’ confers upon the positive declension of the limit the significance of a passage-to-the-limit, in which the theme of experience and its redefinition become crucial. But let us take one step at a time.
In what does the positive declension of the limit consist and where can it be seen? In contemporary philosophy, the most macroscopic aspect is that represented by the irruption of the concept of ‘difference’. This irruption is visible both in the Continental tradition (from the Nietzschean and Heideggerian revival of the 1970s to the first theorisations of ‘sexual difference’ in feminist thought) and in the Anglo-Saxon tradition (observe the parabola of the ‘politics of difference’). Taken in radical form, this concept postulates precisely the transvaluation of the idea of limit. It is the crux of the thesis that I wish provocatively to articulate here. However, difference is not a simple concept. Its declension takes two forms, which I shall attempt to outline below.
Beyond the Nature-Culture Dualism
Currently, what we may call the two ‘canonical’ acceptations of the notion of ‘difference’ tend to be classified in terms of the distinction between ‘sex’ and ‘gender’. Roughly, the alternative is thought to be between an ontological (or, even, naturalistic) version of difference and a cultural one. Such a classification is best ignored, as it fails to do justice to either of the two already internally multifaceted and complex theoretical tendencies. It leaves out the fact that the former is constituted from its very beginnings in contrast to the metaphysical tradition, whereas the second turns upon a lively dispute – as chance would have it – with the anthropological concept of culture.
Therefore, I will define the former version as the strong concept of difference (absit iniuria verbo: but I cannot think of a more appropriate way to define this line of thought). This concept, developed by the earlier philosophies of sexual difference, picks out the sexualised body as ‘the Repressed’, the conical shadow that demarcates the originary logocentric limit of Western metaphysics, inasmuch as Western metaphysics is a universalism constructed on indifference and the absence of limit, on the presumption of the self-sufficiency and autochthony of a logic completely entrusted to mythology and to the jurisprudence of the neutral. In this strong concept of difference, the body is configured as the vital and concrete space subtracted from the logocentric obsession with time. Thus, a linear and accelerated, homogeneous and undifferentiated temporalisation of events that unfolds fully only in the modern era is said to betray the formally neutral but substantively male inclination for verticality and productive accumulation inscribed from the beginning in the genetic origin of Occidental thought. In the face of this mono-logic and its pretences-presumptions to self-sufficiency, the spatiality of the sexualised body – and, in the case in point, of the feminine body as the source of generation exemplified by the silent persistence of its cycles – erects itself as an intransitive and untraversable place. I am perfectly aware that my rendition sacrifices important variations and distinctions. However, the very theorists of sexual difference maintain that this first, strong – ‘inaugural’ – version of the concept had to pay the heavy price of a rigid and heavy localisation of the capacity for representation and narration of the feminine in order to counter the logocentric plan of Western philosophy. The critique that second-generation feminism directed at this version of sexual difference goes, more or less, as follows. In this strong, heavy postulation of sexual difference that posits the uncrossable body-space against the logocentric dominion of the neutral, the feminine risks being construed not as the alternative to the ontological nomenclature but as its specular double. Having begun as a critique of the metaphysical Subject, the strong version of difference ends up giving rise to a hypersubject; its radical challenge to the metaphysical foundation and to institutional orders that stem from it risks issuing in a hyperfoundation, in a foundation to the second power that presents itself as better than the former because it promises real stability and real order.
I shall now turn to the second acceptation of the term ‘difference’. Once again, I will refer for simplicity’s sake to a particularly explicit and radical version, drawn from the most recent results of North American thought: the postfeminist thinking of Donna Haraway and her well-known and provocative formulation of the feminine cyborg. For Haraway, the dualism sex/gender is nothing but the reproposition of the nature/culture dichotomy. We must, therefore, insist on gender as a notion that is increasingly emancipated from the fixity of sex. Briefly, gender understood as sexual difference is also a constituted difference. We could add here, a culturally constituted difference. But such a specification would only be justified had we decided to remain within the nature/ culture dichotomy. Such a dichotomy is – as chance would have it – what Haraway explodes. Gender is not a mere cultural construct. Rather, it is the product of a construction that cannot remain indifferent, for example, to the revolution in the understanding of the physical world, in the idea of the bíos, of life, and so it cannot be indifferent to the break-up of the logic of identity following the advent of biotechnologies. Such a technology turns the body, that body-space from which the previous feminist thought set out, into a constructable entity: both a scientific but an aesthetic artifice as well. In Haraway’s constructivism, the borders [confini] between the aesthetic and the biological tend to contaminate one another, or literally become con-fused, revealing a complete partage. In this extreme postfeminist thought, amongst which we can also place other significant thinkers, such as Judith Butler, that I cannot discuss here, we have the irreversible crisis of sources of identity. This crisis projects us decisively in the direction of the post-human, of the hybridisation of the body with the machine. Bodies increasingly appear in the form of coded texts.
To grasp the sense of this passage, we must take note of the silent revolution that has invested the concept of nature in the Occident over the last decades. To summarise: in the Western tradition of thought we have, until very recently, worked with two dominant concepts of nature that we can sum up as follows: nature as temple, as kósmos: a perfectly delimited, perfectly enclosed harmonious space (it is no coincidence that ‘cosmos’ and ‘cosmetics’ derive from the same etymological root) within which events occur. All hybris, every violation of the sacredness of the confines [confini] of the kósmos gave way to a reaction, to an equal and contrary violent backlash that would restore the shattered order. This is the dominant idea of nature during the classical age, transmitted from the Greek and Roman eras (with a number of significant amendments that we will not specifiy here) through the Middle Ages to the time of the first scientific revolution of modernity, that of Galileo and Newton.
A new concept of nature takes over after the ‘Copernican revolution’. Once again resorting to metaphor, I shall define this concept as ‘nature as laboratory’: no longer kósmos, no longer temple or preconstituted, pre-delimited, sacred ‘zero-sum’ space but universum. This term, which literally means ‘one-way unfolding’, expresses the homologating power of a uniform, mathematical space that is no longer qualitative (as in antiquity) but quantifiable and measurable. Therefore, nature is transformed into a laboratory; a section of homogeneous universe-space that can be carved out and extrapolated for experimentation, as a necessary step to extract from nature its secrets and formulate its laws. This is the praxis-idea of nature that was widespread until the exhaustion of the era of the Industrial Revolution.
Nature as temple; nature as laboratory. The scenario today is radically different from that of the images of nature mentioned above, which were so influential and so prolonged. Not only because of the rupture produced by events such as Einstein’s relativity theory, quantum mechanics and the developments contemporaneous with them (whose philosophical implications I have attempted to tease out in Minima temporalia and Kairós), but also because of the silent revolution, the subcutaneous overturning of the modern scientific paradigm that has taken place in the last decades and that has now effected its Durchbruch ins Freie, irruption into the open, through the hegemonic function of biology, of the life sciences. The unbridled result of this silent revolution was to introduce a new concept of nature: nature as code. In the idea of nature as code we have, when compared to the two preceding intuitions of nature, the upsetting of another traditional dualism that had traversed the entirety of ancient and modern thought: the dualism of subject and object. It is a resounding case of limit-experience and dissolution of the traditional border [confine] lines. The current representation of the nature of subject and object no longer views them as an antithesis. They appear formally homologous: isomorphism in the code. The investigating and experimenting subject is informed by a code in exactly the same way as the object of investigation and experimentation. It borders [con-fina] with it in the sense of sharing the same border rather than in the sense of estrangement and separation. The limit is posed, in the sense that one cannot observe the code on the basis of what one observes. This type of paradox was consummately prefigured, at least in philosophy, by the early Wittgenstein – in logico-philosophical terms – and then overcome pragmatically by the later Wittgenstein. As for the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus, we are unable to escape language, which coincides in every way with the extension of ‘our’ world – just as we are unable to ‘say’ the limits of language or, which comes to the same thing, we cannot describe the totality of the language-world but only ‘show’ its borders. Therefore, the dominant scientific paradigm today is unable to escape the code, but only force its limits from within – manipulating and reproducing it; thereby making nature itself into the product of artifice. Once again, then, we discover violated borders [confini]. And the upsetting of the borders [confini] evokes another celebrated classical dualism: that of nature and artifice. One should pay heed, however, to the manner in which the dualism is evoked: nature appears, as such, ‘artificialised’ inasmuch as the artifice itself participates in the code-character of nature. Biology of artifice: no formula appears to adapt itself better to the climate of this passage/turn of the millennium. Subject and object are similar insofar as they belong to the same code. Observer and observed are within the ‘great code’. The great code overshadows and embraces not only the bíos, not only that circular and self-referential dispositif, that ‘eternal golden braid’1 that is the DNA code, but the concept of matter itself. Has not the physics of subatomic particles told us that an informational energy lies at the basis of the matter of bodies?
Although, today, the concept of nature as code presents itself in dramatic colours, at home, apparently in the current postmetaphysical and postmodern climate, in fact it relates back to an extremely ancient idea. It harks back to the old cabalistic and hermetic image of nature as a ciphered language susceptible to deciphering. The couple ciphering/deciphering or coding/decoding, semiotic couples par excellence, are currently used (in a more or less conscious and reflected-upon form) in the applied sciences as well as the theoretical ones.
Returning to the theme of difference, it seems to me that what is at stake in postfeminism becomes clearer in the light of the results of this scientific revolution. If the confines [confini] of bodies must be freed from their organic barriers, this liberation is all the more true of the logics of identity. This raises, once again, the relationship of border [confine] to barrier. Once the organic barriers are unhinged, the body presents itself as a code in perennial transformation, which incessantly dislocates and redesigns its own borders [confini], in the same way as a dynamic whole that is composed, essentially, of three aspects: sign, context and time. These are the coordinates of the body and of identity. Every body is a system of signs, a contingent ‘putting-into-form’ of signs that exists, situatedly, in determinate contexts or forms-of-life and that is continually remodelled in the course of time. The confines of identity are, therefore, subject to an incessant process of deconstruction-reconstruction. Identity is never given. We are decidedly outside a logic of identity in the shape of a stable, spatial map. Normalised functions are nothing but the relative stability of that map, whose configuration always appears contingent and precarious. Thus, we must leave behind the image of the ‘I’ as a stable spatial map, whether it is understood in the traditional metaphysical and ‘subject-centred’ sense, or the postmetaphysical and ‘structure-centred’ sense of systemic self-referentiality. Once these models are surmounted, the question of subjectivity will be given its most appropriate translation by the image of a map in the process of becoming, in constant deconstruction-reconstruction, in which the transaction occurs between sign, context and time. As Donna Haraway says, in this way bodies become material semiotic and generative modes.
Multiple Self: Difference and Identification
Let us shift our attention to another aspect for a moment, in order to allude rapidly to the revolution in the concept of personal identity that has occurred in recent years within postanalytic philosophy. I am referring to a very important text by Derek Parfit from 1984, Reasons and Persons. In this book, we find Parfit taking up again and developing a theme that had already been tackled by the later Wittgenstein (in Philosophical Investigations): the subject of identity as the succession of partial and contingent ‘I’s. Each one of us does not so much ‘have’ an identity that ‘is made’ in time (an image that in every way can be reconciled with the dialectical process). Rather, each of us has an identity that ‘is’ composed of subjectivity part-time. In short, we are all a cluster, a plurality of part-time ‘I’s that unfold in time. If we wanted to indicate the synchronic aspect of this conception, we would have to refer to the observations of another postanalytic philosopher, Jon Elster. The key notion introduced by Elster is that of ‘multiple self’: a ‘self’ that is at once individual but irreducibly multiple. Multiple identity is never a self-referential, unitary and homogenous ‘I’. Within the space of identity there coexist or, rather, cohabit a number of identities, which are sometimes in conflict with one another. The decisive point is this: the inherence of the community within the individual and the contrasts that this inherence induces. More simply, the ‘I’ is not a subject-substance nor a homogeneous structure. Rather, it is a space, like the cavity of a theatre in which echo diverse imperatives, values and normative frameworks stemming not only from heterogeneous and ‘asynchronic’ traditions, but sometimes incompatible and potentially conflicting ones.
It is not illegitimate to note that these postanalytic reflections on the problem of identity reveal some significant points of contact or even convergence with hermeneutic standpoints. However, a hermeneutic approach is able to interact fruitfully with these themes only if it abandons certain apologetic or edifying attitudes, which can be traced back to an excessive faith in the virtues of a ‘communication’ or ‘social conversation’ that finds consolation via a historicising reference to the authority of tradition. If one is to take seriously the postanalytic challenge, one will have to critique that accommodating version of hermeneutics for which not only (and not so much) has the subject always been ‘thrown’ into or ‘situated’ in a tradition that it must each time interpret, but rather which draws its criterion of truth as interpretation from the fact of finding itself – as Gianni Vattimo has recently suggested – the illegitimate child of that culminating phase of the history of nihilism and the weakening of being (that is to say, our epoch) whose point of arrival would coincide with the idea of truth as interpretation. The question remains whether such a dispositif – according to which we are justified by the fact that, not today in the same way as yesterday, but precisely today in contrast to yesterday, the nihilistic trajectory has (supposedly) concluded with the beneficial dissolving of truth into interpretation – is nothing but the repetition in disguise of the philosophy of history.
But beyond these disputes – to which we shall have to return – the challenge of the postanalytic approach to the theme of personal identity poses a question to hermeneutics that is truly subtle and difficult to sidestep. The ‘self’ immersed in the tradition is problematic, in itself, because it is constitutively multiple. Which of these ‘selves’ – observing things from a parte subjecti – is each time called upon to interpret? And – observing things from a parte objecti – which tradition does the ‘self’ interpret? There are many interpreting ‘selves’ and many traditions that must be interpreted. Contingency even acts retroactively on the hermeneutic programme of weakening the classical notions of truth and subject, investing the very liberating significance of interpretation understood as the point of arrival of the history of nihilism.
In contrast, one of the implications of the concept of ‘multiple self’ (Jon Elster) and ‘successive selves’ (Derek Parfit) does seem to me liberating: the radical destitution of the foundation of a constant of Western thought, which in Kairós I called the ‘patrimonial conception of the subject’, that is, the idea of subject mit Eigenschaften, ‘with properties’ (as Musil would put it). Such a subject is identifiable only insofar as he is the legitimate proprietor of certain qualities and owner of certain attributes. It is only by virtue of this patrimonial logic and grammar that the paradigms of rational action are constituted – so influential in modern economics and politics – which entrust the realisation of the person to the strategies of ‘possessive’ or ‘acquisitive’ individualism.
By this route the idea of the ‘self’ as stable, titular possessor of his or her own identity is put in question. In the most recent developments concerning the mobile frontiers of identity, we encounter the delineation of a no-self theory that tries to push the consequences of the desubstantialised image of the subject as a succession of contingent and partial ‘selves’ as far as they will go. It is difficult to deny the suggestive force and the descriptive pertinence of these approaches. Each of us will, on occasion, have considered how he or she was ten or twenty years ago and tried to ideally establish a relationship with ‘one’s self’ at that time similar to the one we might establish with a good friend or, occasionally, with a stranger or even an enemy (to the extent that we become aware of a feeling of estrangement or – even – of hostility towards our past ‘self’). Naturally, it is also possible that one might perceive one’s life, the unfolding of one’s personality in time, as a perfectly unitary and coherent process. I would not blame someone for doing so but I most certainly would not envy that person either.
In any case, no one – whatever idea they may have of their life: whether they conceive of it as a series of caesurae or turns, or as a compact and coherent unity – can evade this question: to what extent and under what conditions can we say that the past we have lived is ‘ours’? The finest (not only philosophical) thinking of the twentieth century has provided a variety of answers to this nagging question, but it always rejected the atomistic and solipsistic prejudice of the individual as a preconstituted entity. The biography of the individual, like the individual him or herself, describes a problematic process of construction, which is closer to the weaving of a plot – always composite, frequently knotted and contorted – than to the unfolding of an uninterrupted and coherent thread. It is only from taking cognisance of the relational and irredeemably intricate nature of our history that is born the incessant activity of connecting that – following narrative or constructive strategies – throws a bridge between different phases and aspects of our ‘selves’. What is true retrospectively, for the elaboration of the link of past and present, is also true prospectively, for the link of present and future. Between my current ‘self’ and my future ‘self’, I am able to establish relations like – at the limit – those between the experiences of person A and those of person B. Not, therefore, two existential phases or states but precisely two different ‘persons’. Perhaps it will be another person who will develop the results I have arrived at today. As is the case with every decomposition, that of a subject not only determines separations and fractures but also – not despite of but thanks to them – new relational and communicational possibilities. It may be true that my future ‘I’ will be a person B different from the person A that I am today but, equally, some features of A (of my current state) may be taken up again and developed by another. It is in terms of this double movement of disarticulation and rearticulation – where the decomposition is not only a dissolution or fracture but also the virtuality of new relational interweavings – that we must understand the revolutionising of the classic notion of identity, replaced today by the image of an uninterrupted migration of successive ‘selves’. From this perspective, postanalytic thought revisits Hume’s federal conception of the mind. In order to overcome the obsession with identity, Hume is a thinker that can be reclaimed by post-metaphysical thinking (as did Gilles Deleuze).
As is well known, the dissociation between the concepts of continuity and identity is an exquisitely Deleuzian motif. To begin to think of what is radically Other to metaphysical custom (and not what is merely a drift away from it) involves, first of all, separating the problem of becoming and the experiential continuum (a continuum furrowed by constant folds and fracture lines) from the logic of identity. Metaphysics told us that continuity was nothing but a variable dependent upon identity. In contrast, we must learn to think of continuity as something other than identity. The concluding thesis I now wish to propose is the following: continuity (of dynamic contexts, of forms-of-life) can be given from the perspective of difference.
But at this point, what difference are we speaking of? Not difference as anti-foundation, which always becomes a hyper-foundation, nor the difference that dissolves into the differences of Donna Haraway and of post-differentialism. The difference that I will discuss now in deliberately drastic and provocative terms develops in a, perhaps, heretical manner some ideas that I have encountered in Deleuze’s work.
How is one, then, to understand difference, difference understood not as dialectical negativity, nor as the mere opposite of the logic of identity, but difference as the cipher of the unidentifiability of being? Being does not tolerate identifications. It has no identity card. If it is true that the strange complex of events that we call ‘world’ is, inasmuch as it occurs, made up of differences, then it follows that differences never identify being but, precisely, they differentiate it. Precisely because they differentiate it, they produce the phenomenon of the becoming of life. The becoming of life is given insofar as there is no identifiability of being. There can be, obviously, identification and classification of events, but we must be aware that they have nothing to do with the order of the world. Rather, they are a response to a practical need – as Nietzsche saw so well. Only by grasping this passage can we explode the dispositif of metaphysics, which is at one with the dispositif of power: the idea of the One as the unity of differences. However, we must guard against the all-too-easy – and ‘too human’ – overcomings of metaphysics that are so commonplace on the cultural market. Metaphysics has thought about difference. It has thought about it as obsessively as it has thought about identity. But – and this is the point – it has done so in the sense that its thought of being has coincided, from Aristotle to Hegel, with the thought of the unity of differences. On this insidious ridge of metaphysical thought nestles the dispositif to which I have just alluded: the dispositif that is common to both power and to the logic of identity. I am increasingly aware of the fact that the thought of the One as the (functional, structural or even dialectical) unity of differences is born of a fundamental confusion; the confusion between the stoicheion, the ‘constitutive’, the constituting, and the ‘identitarian’.
Thus, I am convinced that the future of the concept of ‘difference’ and the entire future of post-philosophical thought is entrusted to our ability to carry out a symbolic inversion of the logic of identity, keeping the thought of the constituting apart from that of the One. The constitutive is the contrary of the One. Instead, if we insist on the strategic game of foundational logic, wagering on our ability to reabsorb the thought of the stoicheion within the self-referential circle of the One, we will do nothing but ‘reset’ the question of the ‘common’, of what constitutes us, within the architectonic barriers of the logic of identity. In which case, the metaphysical obsession with identity, having been thrown out the front door, will return through the welcoming windows of the neo-functionalist and systemic models. Once captured by the cogency of these models, we will no longer be able to frame the question of the ‘common’ as it should be: as the question of the cum, of the infra, of the relation, of proximity and difference, of the bond and the conflict between irreducible differences that can never identify being. Not even the being of subjectivity, from which all differentiation begins.
1Douglas R. Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid.