Lyotard, Jean-François. The sign of history. (124-180)
(excerpted by Clifford Stetner)
Wordsworth, Ann. Derrida and Foucault: writing the history of historicity.
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In the conclusion to Pre-Capitalist Modes of Production Hindess and Hirst observe that 'by definition, all that is past does not exist. To be accurate the object of history is whatever is represented as having hitherto existed'. [n1] A Marxist analysis registers these representations as the effect of social and political ideologies. Idealist and positivist historians claim that the real is reached through these representations, either because history is a rational order and its movements express an essence accessible to knowledge, or because knowledge of history can be got through given facts. By posing the historian's conception of history as the unity of the hitherto existent, Hindess and Hirst make it clear that there is no real object 'history', only a philosophy of history; the historian's work reduces to its ideological positions.
The mechanisms of ideology are used to account for the construction of literary texts as well as of historical ones; yet when Derrida says that 'literary criticism has already been determined, knowingly or not, voluntarily or not, as the philosophy of literature', [n2] he does not use the theory of ideology to identify idealist or positivist readings. For this reason, among others, the political effectivity of Derrida's work comes under suspicion: he is readily accused of turning everything into a scene of writing, a play of undecidables as elegant as it is reactionary. As the confrontation between Derrida and Foucault concentrates both the radical claims of Derrida's work and the fiercest attack on it, we might take the 'moves opened by Derrida in his questioning of Foucault's strategy in the pages which make a kind of prologue to the second chapter of Madness and Civilization, that is, Foucault's reading of Descartes and the Cartesian Cogito. [n3]
In Madness and Civilization (1961) Foucault argues that an epistemological break occurred between the medieval and classical periods: while in the medieval era reason and madness enjoyed a 'free exchange', the inauguration of the Age of Reason was predi
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cated upon the silencing and banishment of madness. According to Foucault two exemplary and complementary instances of this historical shift can be found in the thesis of the Cartesian Cogito and the redeployment of the empty lazar-houses for the incarceration of the insane. Foucault's project in his book is to write a history of madness by constructing an archaeology of its silence since the medieval period.
In his 1963 review 'Cogito and the History of Madness', Derrida poses two major questions: if history is a rational concept, how is it possible to write a history of madness? And second, if Foucault claims to speak for a madness that by definition must remain _ilent does he not risk reappropriation by the very mode of exclusion that he claims to avoid? His attempt to use a language that refuses the support of reason is not without problems: 'we have the right to ask what, in the last resort, supports this language without recourse or support. . . ? Who wrote and who is to understand, in what language and from what historical situation of logos. . . this history of madness?' (WD 38). Derrida then examines Foucault's - reading of the text from Descartes's Meditations arid denies the claim that Descartes excludes madness from the identification of doubt.
Foucault's reply, 'My Body, This Paper, This Fire', makes in turn a bitter and powerful accusation against Derrida's work which has been returned to frequently by many of Derrida's critics: 'in his reading Derrida is doing no more than revive an old old tradition. . . the reduction of discursive practices to textual traces; the elision of the events produced therein and the retention only of marks for a reading. . . what can be seen here so visibly is a historically well-determined little pedagogy. A pedagogy which teaches the pupil that there is nothing outside the text.' [n4]
The reading that Foucault denounces as a fetishising of the text is provoked by the work of translation that Derrida continuously performs as the process of deconstruction. Psychoanalysis provides an example: 'every language has its own dream language. The latent content of a dream. . . communicates with the manifest content only through the unity of a language - a language that the analyst must thus speak as well as possible.' Derrida emphasises this obligation in order to elaborate the processes of resistance to any reading - clinical, everyday, philosophical, critical, etc. - that language maintains. He goes on :
As well as possible: progress in the knowledge and practice of language being by nature infinitely open. . . are not the insecurities and insufficiencies
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of analysis axiomatic and irreducible? And does not the historian of philosophy, whatever his method or project, abandon himself to the same dangers? Especially if one takes into account a certain embedding of philosophical language in non-philosophical language. (WD 308)
The gain of Derrida's initial work in his first series of questions is the opening of a certain space that Foucault's description cannot use and is prevented from using by the very articulation of the project - to write 'a history of madness itself before being captured by knowledge, an archaeology of silence'. In Derrida's eyes the effect of an archaeology is simply to reproduce the conditions that already accuse and objectify madness, the very process that Foucault sets out to displace. Hence his question, 'Is not an archaeology, even of silence, a logic, that is, an organized language, a project, an order, a sentence, a syntax, a work?' (WD 35). It is only by ignoring the force of this questioning that Foucault can then reduce deconstruction to textual tracing; and by similarly ignoring these questions, the demand to archaeologise, historicise, contextualise, continues to remain dangerously naive.
The problems seem to centre most clearly around the assumptions of 'a history'. Thus:
A history, that is, an archaeology against reason doubtless cannot be written, for, despite all appearances to the contrary, the concept of history has always been a rational one. It is the meaning of 'history' or archia that should have been questioned first, perhaps. A writing that exceeds, by questioning them, the values 'origin', 'reason', and 'history' could not be contained within the metaphysical closure of an archaeology. (WD 36)
From here the underlying requirements of each project can more easily be gauged. For Foucault to write the history of madness will mean the execution of a structural study of an historical ensemble. For Derrida such a writing must first submit to a translation of the terms that establish its terrain, that these may then be spoken 'as well as possible'. In this speaking, the terrain will change insofar as the language of classical oppositions - reason, unreason - will lose its defining order and different articulations will take place. Taken from its archaeology, silence, for instance, will have different effects: 'within the dimension of historicity in general, which is to be confused neither with some ahistorical eternity, nor with an empirically. determined moment of the history of facts, silence plays the irreducible role of that which bears and haunts language, outside and against which alone language can emerge' (WD 54).
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Reading Foucault, in his turn, against that 'most powerful, extended, durable, and systematic formation' of our "culture"', 5 Derrida finds the most productive moments emerging first from Foucault's need to speak madness in 'a language without support', one refusing 'in principle, if not in fact, to articulate itself along the lines of a syntax of reason' (WD 37); and second, from Foucault's sense of the profound link between the articulation of madness as historically constituted and the 'possibility of history' (WD 42). Both these moments, however, are obscured and hampered by the premises of archaeology: by the homogenising of madness as 'madness itself' with a specific 'history'; by the need to 'speak it' ; and by an objectification of the link madness/history at a certain moment and in a certain text, viz. the creation of the houses of internment for the mad and the Cogito. Derrida works both these moments out of the archaeology and reinscribes them as effects in what he calls 'a cleavage. . . interior to meaning in general' (WD 38), a first dissension of logos, more ancient by far than the emergence of classical reason in the enlightenment, and constitutive of the logical-philosophical inheritance which marks the project of archaeology. It is necessary to unsettle the symmetrical relation of madness and reason and to trace the exclusion of madness to a crisis of the logos; without this re-staging, Foucault's project and language are bound within the tradition they work to dissolve.
In taking the opposition of determined reason and determined madness back to the interiority of the .logos, to language, Derrida uses Foucault's definition of madness: 'madness is the absence of work'. He proceeds via the Cogito whose 'mad audacity' would consist in a return to an original point 'which no longer belongs to either a determined reason or a determined unreason, no longer belongs to them as opposition or alternative. . . It is therefore a question of drawing back towards a point at which all determined contradictions, in the form of given, factual historical structures, can appear, and appear as relative to this zero point at which determined meaning and nonmeaning come together in their common origin' (WD 56). The economy of this point which Descartes enacts and represses as the Cogito exceeds every finite and determined totality and institutes meaning and nonmeaning, the order of reason and silence. In seeing the Cogito as reenactment of this 'hyperbolic extremity', Derrida reinscribes the rhythms of history in a deconstructed version of Foucault's linking of madness and history:
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Descartes knew that, without God, finite thought never had the right to exclude madness etc. Which amounts to saying that madness is never excluded, except in fact, violently in history; or rather that this exclusion, this difference between the fact and the principle is historicity, the possibility of history itself. Does Foucault say otherwise? 'The necessity of madness is linked... to the possibility of history'. (WD 310)
Similarly, using the same work of translation on Foucault's text, its conclusions are reinscribed: 'the extremity of hyperbole' found in the Cogito re-enacts the originary economy of language: there are two separate tendencies at work within the Cogito, the function of the first, certainty, being to limit. the force of the second, hyperbole, or excess. According to Derrida the very historicity of philosophy can be located in the movement between the two:
The historicity proper to philosophy is located and constituted in the transition, the dialogue between hyperbole and the finite structure, between that which exceeds the totality and the closed totality, in the difference between history and historicity; that is, in the place where, or rather at the moment when, the Cogito and all that it symbolizes here (madness, derangement, hyperboles, etc.) pronounce and reassure themselves then to fall, necessarily forgetting themselves until their reactivation, their reawakening in another statement of the excess which also later will become another decline and another crisis. (WD 60)
There is a rhythm, a temporality of crisis and repression, but this is not the timing of a chronology. It is rather 'the movement of temporalization itself' (WD 61).
If it is possible to register this description and somehow to make it, not familiar certainly, but to some extent thinkable, then Derrida's critique of Foucault's archaeology or history of madness becomes clearer. The Cogito does not as a point in a determined historical (
structure inaugurate a new era in which madness is excluded; the Cogito is inhabited by the structure of writing: 'The relationship between reason, madness, and death is an economy, a structure of deferral whose irreducible originality must be respected. . . It is more written than said, it is economized. The economy of this writing is a regulated relationship between that which exceeds and the exceeded totality: the differance of the absolute excess' (WD 62).
If this economy, structure of deferral, differance, inaugurates historicity in general, well, to put it flatly, the pedagogy of textual traces has come a long way. And it is not surprising that other. discourses, critical, political etc. will have their own systems of predicates shaken and put at risk.
This effect is felt (and manfully repressed) throughout Derrida's
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interview with Houdebine and Scarpetta first published in Promesse in 197 I. Persistently, Houdebine tries to assure Derrida that:
dialectical materialist logic, whose general economy is articulated on the basis of the conceptual series 'matter. . . / contradiction / struggle of the contraries, unity-inseparability-convertibility of the contraries in the process of their transformation etc.' . . . is necessarily caught in an economy whose double register appears fundamentally in the dual unity. . . historical materialism / dialectical materialism. (P 60)
Dialectical materialist logic and deconstruction, in short, have a reciprocating vocabulary and could use, perhaps further, each other's terms with advantage. Houdebine specifies: Derrida's problematic of writing and the materialist text have common grounds; they
encounter in the process of the deconstruction of the logocentric discourse insofar as the materialist text 'has long been the historical text repressed-suppressed by logocentric discourse (idealism, meta physics, religion) taken as the discourse of a ruling ideology in its different historical forms' (P 61). Similarly, Houdebine goes on, the Marxist concept of ideology puts in question the self-certainty of consciousness as does differance, though it does not use that particular motif; so too does contradiction, despite its metaphysical name, insofar as it acts as a 'radical heterogeneity' (matter meaning) and in its double moment surpasses the notion 'spacing'. The eager flurry of Houdebine's claims stems from the wish to assimilate Derrida's thought and to take from it, let's say, the 'rational
kernel'. Perhaps the relation to deconstruction should be seen as a sort of extraction process, or a laundering: certainly the movement of Houdebine's assimilation of Derrida's work is suspiciously simple as indeed has been that of more recent assimilations. However, there is a further more critical movement that Houdebine continues in the correspondence after the interview and which stems from his discreetly unstated suspicion that deconstruction hatches idealism. If these idealist tendencies could be corrected, chief among them the reduction to language, there would be gains for both dialectical materialist logic and deconstruction. To effect this, Houdebine proposes isolating spacing/alterity from their relation to differance and then, with an ease that surprises Derrida (he asks in his reply, 'is it not rather new to define the system spacing j alterity, on which we agree, as an essential and indispensable mechanism of dialectical materialism ?'), reclaims them as heterogeneity, 'the materialist motif par excellence', thereby inscribing the differences that have not 'fallen from the sky' in a 'necessary articulation with the entirety of a differentiated social
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practice' (P 93). The system of differences, read through a logic of contradiction, can then be linked, via Lacan's 'symbolic', to 'social practice in the aspect of its signifying means of production (language)' - thereby saving the whole system of predicates, history, ideology, practice etc. from Derrida's cautionary quotation marks.
Nevertheless, such adaptation of terms is not successful - nor indeed possible; nor are the parallels that Houdebine claims to make. The terms of deconstruction are not detachable. Perhaps Derrida's explanation of the strategic necessity of a kind of paleonomy, the maintenance of an old word in a deconstructed operation, can help to make this clear:
Taking into account the fact that a name does not name the punctual simplicity of a concept, but rather a system of predicates defining a concept, a conceptual structure centered on a given predicate, we proceed: (I) to the extraction of a reduced predicative trait that is held in reserve, limited in a given conceptual structure. . . named X; (2) to. the delimitation, the grafting and regulated extension of the extracted predicate, the name X being maintained as a kind of lever of intervention in order to maintain a grasp on the previous organization, which is to be transformed effectively. (P 71)
Extraction, graft, extension: this is the process that Derrida calls writing. If it now comes back to writing it is not by chance - though all the assumptions that lie behind that cliche are now at risk: we have not reached our destination or any proper conclusion and we have not returned to' acknowledge the ancient model of an old, old tradition. We are back to writing.
Terry Eagleton has recently praised the force and centrality of style in Fredric Jameson's work: 'Jameson composes rather than writes his texts. and his prose. . . carries an intense libidinal charge, a burnished elegance and unruffled poise, which allows him to sustain a rhetorical lucidity through the most tortuous, intractable materials.'6 But Derrida's writing cannot be praised as the release of an effective style. Extraction, g-raft, and extension decompose rhetorical lucidity: 'one must speak several languages and produce several texts at once'.7 This is the strategy of Glas and of La Carte postale and of Derrida's insistence that modern teaching of philosophy must take into account, not thematically but as a form of expropriation, the techno-politics of the media. It is these interventions in academic practice, the effect of structures of expropriation. (differance, pharmakon, hyperbole, techne etc.) working across texts and disciplines, that are forgotten when Derrida is accused of a reactionary pedagogy.
If we now return to Derrida's work on the Cogito it is perhaps to see more clearly the expropriating structure working against the historical and anthropological reading of Descartes and the historical and linguistic assumptions of Foucault's writing. The Cogito enacts both temporal originality (hyperbole, 'the project of exceeding every finite and determined totality' (WD 60)) and the movement of temporalisation that presents it as discourse. That this enactment necessarily inaugurates writing "and simultaneously recasts it, and that every work bears the mark of this economy, makes for a difficult kind of reading and commentary. Derrida's 'several texts at once', the styles, the expropriating words make up a writing that works this scene. Recognition of it becomes easier when Derrida relates a particular piece of commentary to the (inadvertent) enactment of such a scene: Foucault's reading of Descartes's Cogito makes it possible to open the Cogito by what in both Foucault and Descartes resists such an opening_
The same opening appears through similar strategies in Derrida's essay 'Freud and the Scene of Writing' (WD 196-213) and shows how Freud in his struggle to describe the initiation and trajectory of memory finds (and loses) this opening in the change from a traditional use of scriptural metaphor (writing as transcription or translation\ from thought to expression) to the use of writing and writing machines as the enactment of locations, processes and chronicities. For Freud, the Mystic Pad, with its erasable writing surface, its retention of legible marks on the underlying wax and the periodic nature of the actions needed to lift the top sheet and clear the surface, represents structuring of the psychic apparatus. But the clarification of Freud's' neurological and metapsychological thinking does not interest Derrida; his interest lies in showing the effects of Freud's metaphor, not as an expository device (whose limits Freud points out), but from the moment when, rejecting the machine because it cannot reproduce from within as the psychic apparatus can, Freud returns to the metaphysical structure of oppositions: passive machine/active psyche, life/ death. Its contribution to Freud's theory is finished; not however its effects in the scene of writing. By working Freud's metaphor out of its metaphysical alignments Derrida can then demonstrate what its pathbreaking work had really shown - the enactment of what is called writing inscribing itself always already in what is presumed external to it : matter, consciousness, discursive practice.
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That writing is not a mere transmission of content, however eloquently or rigorously performed, is only one of the disruptions that Derrida makes. The space of communication that extends classically from the limited range of voice and gesture to the written, from thought to speech, from sender to receiver is also put at risk, that milieu 'that is fundamentally continuous and equal to itself, within a homogeneous element across which the unity and integrity of meaning is not affected in an essential way' (MP 311). To back out of this voluminous element is precisely to move from the isolation of texts in their pre-given orders, the certainties of destination and identity, and to attend to the non-ideal exteriority of writing, the graphics of expropriation, differance, the trace, supplementarity etc.
This is the radical demand of Derrida's work and the source of its resistance to both accusations of pedagogy and to forms of academic re-assimilation. As he himself puts it at the moment of his thesis presentation:
The reproductive force of authority can get along more comfortably with declarations or theses whose content presents itself as revolutionary, provided that they respect the rites of legitimation, the rhetoric and the institutional symbolism which defuses and neutralizes whatever comes from outside the system. What is unacceptable is what, underlying positions or theses, upsets this deeply entrenched contract, the order of these norms, and which does so in the very form of work", of teaching or of writing. s
NOTES
1 Barry Hindess and Paul Q. Hirst, Pre-Capitalist Modes of Production (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975), p. 309.
2 Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, tr. Alan Bass (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), p. 28. Further references will be cited in the text as WD.
3 Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, tr. Richard Howard (New York: Vintage/Random House, 1973).
4 Michel Foucault, 'My Body, This Paper, This Fire', tr. Geoff Bennington, Oxford Literary Review 4: 1 (1979), 26-7.
5 Jacques Derrida, Positions, tr. Alan Bass (London: Athlone, 1981), p. 102. Further references will be cited in the text as P.
6 Terry Eagleton, 'The Idealism of American Criticism', New Left Review 127(1981), 60.
7 Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, tr. Alan Bass (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1982), p. 135. Further references will be cited in the text as MP.
8 Jacques Derrida, 'The Time of a Thesis: Punctuations', in Philosophy in France Today (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 44.
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Lyotard, Jean-François. The sign of history.
Under the somewhat enigmatic title, 'The sign of history', I am going to suggest an introduction to a reconsideration of the historico-political reality of our time. In order to do this I shall appeal to the critical thought of Immanuel Kant. I hope that you will see why. this detour is necessary as you follow it with me.
Anyone who tries to reflect on historico-political reality today (as always) comes up against names—proper names. These names form part of the treasure of phrases that he has received in his share of language and that he must continue by allowing new phrases. For we have all of us a sort of debt, or a sort of rivalry, with respect to names.
These proper names have the following remarkable property: they place modern historical or political commentary in abeyance. Adorno pointed out that Auschwitz is an abyss in which the philosophical genre of Hegelian speculative discourse seems to disappear, because the name 'Auschwitz' invalidates the presupposition of that genre, namely that all that is real is rational, and that all that is rational is real. Budapest '56 is another abyss in which the genre of (Marxist) historical materialist discourse seems to disappear, because this name invalidates the presupposition of that genre, namely that all that is proletarian is communist, and that all that is communist is proletarian.
[Soviet tanks in Budapest, Hungary in 1956. Radio Free Europe broadcasts encouraged the Hungarians to battle on in the false understanding that they would receive reinforcements from the West.]
Nineteen sixty-eight is an abyss in which the genre of democratic liberal discourse (republican dialogue) seems to disappear, because this name invalidates the presupposition of that genre, namely that all that concerns the political community can be said within the rules of the game of parliamentary representation. The crisis of over-capitalisation that the world economy has been suffering since 1974 and will suffer for some time to come invalidates the presupposition of the discursive genre of post-Keynesian political economy, namely that a harmonious regulation of needs and the means to satisfy them in work and in capital, with a view to the greatest enjoyment of goods and services for all- that this regulation is possible and on the way to being achieved.
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One is tempted to close these wounds as quickly as possible, to forget these names, to re-establish these genres in their respective pretensions to universal validity in terms of historico-political reality, and to carry through to completion the project of 'modernity', as Habermas puts it. From all sides we are being urged to restore confidence in one or other of these genres. The philosopher tries, rather, to take his inquiry further, although in fact these names show him no direction to take, but only directions not to take. He sees that he is dealing with a sort of fission affecting the unity of the great discourses of modernity.
At the same time, this fission affects the rules of philosophical discourse itself. The genres available to this discourse - the Treatise, the Manual, the Meditation, the Discourse, the Dialogue, the Lecture, the Manifesto, the Diary - which are so many ways of proceeding in thought, seem to the philosopher to damp the echo of this fission with the deafness of established forms. For these genres of philosophical discourse have their rules for the formation and linking of phrases, and their rules for the presentation of objects (examples) which can validate these phrases.
The philosopher who is willing to echo the shock associated with these names of history thus discovers or rediscovers that, whatever the genre involved, philosophical discourse obeys a fundamental rule, namely that it must be in search of its rule. Or, if you prefer: its rule is that what is at stake is its rule. How to form phrases and how to link them together is the question of literature too: philosophy adds to this question that of knowing what sort of presentation can validate those phrases and linkings. The philosopher discovers or rediscovers that his discourse takes place only in order to find out how it has the right to take place: and thus that it takes place before that finding-out, and that he therefore judges without any criterion (in the absence of established rules) that such and such a phrase is philosophical and that such and such a case permits it to be validated. Philosophical discourse is waiting for its criterion.
By describing the current situation of thought in this way, we cannot fail to encounter the critical reflexion of Kant. Indeed, we are already in his company. The name 'Kant' (it is not the only one) marks at once the prologue and the epilogue to modernity. And as epilogue to modernity, it is also a prologue to postmodernity. The historian assigns to this name a definite chronological place (the end of the eighteenth century), but the philosopher accords this name (and others) the status of a sign, a sign of thought, which is not only
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determined by its historical context, but which 'gives food for thought' with respect to many other historical contexts, with respect to the context which is ours.
The philosophical phrase according to Kant is an analogon of the political phrase according to Kant. It can be this analogon only insofar as it is critical, and not doctrinal. The doctrinal, or systematic, phrase must come after the critical phrase: the rule for it is to be found in the regulation implied by the idea of system, and is an organ of the organic body of doctrine - a legitimated phrase. In order to establish its legitimacy, it has been necessary to judge its pretension to validity: if it has the pretension of speaking the truth, this means judging if and how it manages to do so; if its pretension is that of speaking the just or the good, this means judging if and how it manages to do so; and so on. These judgements bearing on the respective pretensions of the various families of phrases (cognitive, ethical, juridical, etc.), and these verdicts which establish the respective validity of each of them in its field, territory or domain are the work of the critique. It is well known that Kant often symbolises the critical activity as that of a tribunal or a judge. But this judge cannot simply be a magistrate, for he has at his disposal no code of law, criminal or civil, nor even a collection of already-judged cases, for the conduct of his enquiry or the formulation of his verdict. He does not judge pretensions with the yardstick of an established, incontestable law. This law must in its turn come under his examination. From this point of view, critical philosophy is in the position of a juridical authority which must declare: 'this is the case, this phrase is the right one' (with respect to the true, the good, even the just) - in this position, rather than in that of an authority (in any case entirely illusory, and in the first place illusory for Kant himself) which would only have to apply, without further ceremony, an already established rule to a new piece of data. This does not mean that this authority has at its disposal no criterion by which to make its evaluations, but that the applicability of the criterion in the given case is itself subject to evaluation. And then either one must admit a regressive search for criteria of criteria ad infinitum, or else place one's faith in ‘that gift of nature' called judgement, which allows us to say, 'here, it is the case'. Now, according to Kant, it is the case of philosophy, as critical philosophy, to say 'it is the case'.
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Next, how does the critical philosopher judge that it is the case when there is no intuition to present for the case? In the Critique of Judgement, Kant makes a distinction between two modes of presentation, or hypotyposes. For determinant judgements, that is, when we are dealing with descriptive phrases, either these phrases are experience-phrases (empirical concepts), and intuition presents them with objects as examples, or else they are knowledge-phrases, and pure intuition presents them with objects as schemata. When we are dealing with Ideas (of the world, of the beginning, of the element, of the first cause or origin, of God and of course of historical totality), in which case intuition cannot, by definition, present anything as an object, presentation takes place indirectly by analogy: 'One submits an intuition such that with respect to it the procedure of the faculty of judgement is simply analogous with the procedure it follows when it schematises.' The form of presentation, that of the intuitive mode (the schema) is drawn out from the concept which can be intuited (since this latter is absent), and under this form is placed another intuition, 'equally empirical', which would, in sum, allow the validation of the Idea if it were a concept of the understanding. In other words, the non-cognitive phrase, which is descriptive but dialectical, is presented with an 'as if' referent, that is, one which would be its referent if the phrase were cognitive. This indirect presentation is called symbolic presentation, or presentation by symbols, and makes use of analoga. [Piagetian formal operations]
In this way the critical philosopher can continue judging a phrase, even when there is no empirical case directly presentable for its validation. Through the analogy all properly philosophical (i.e. critical phrases) operate like an external critique, and must do so, at least if they are striving for conformity with their Idea. It is because it has to judge, and more particularly to find analoga (symbols or others) for its Ideas (including the Idea of itself) that philosophy cannot be learned: 'At most, one can learn to philosophise'.
It remains to argue the assertion that this reflecting condition is analogous with that of the political, as Kant sees it. Kant's historico-political texts are, grosso modo, scattered through the three Critiques and a dozen or so opuscules. The Critique of Political Reason [Kant’s Republic?] was not written. It is legitimate, within certain limits yet to be determined, to see in this dispersion, whatever its 'cause' (demanded too hastily by the phrase of understanding, the cognitive phrase), the sign of a particular heterogeneity of the political as an 'object' of phrases. This heterogeneity of the object is already noticeable in the third Critique. Here the faculty of judgement is provided not with one specific object, but with at least two - art and nature.
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I say 'at least', because of the problem (which might be the whole problem) of knowing whether this faculty of judgement is indeed a faculty. Kant has previously given this word 'faculty' a precise meaning - a potential of phrases subject to a group of rules of formation and presentation (in the Kantian sense), when it was a matter of sensitivity, understanding and reason for theoretical matters, of reason alone for practical matters. But in fact judgement intervenes already and necessarily, every time one has to say that 'it is the case': in other words in order to establish presentation - in cognitive phrases under die rule of the schema, in dialectical argumentative phrases under that of the symbol, and in prescriptive phrases (in evaluation of responsibility and morality) under that of the type.
In the Introduction to the third Critique, the dispersion of families of phrases is not only recognised, but is dramatised to such an extent that the problem is that of finding 'transitions' (Ubergänge) between these heterogeneous types of phrases. And because of its very ubiquity which I have just recalled (that is, the fact that it is called on every time a phrase has to be validated by a presentation), the 'faculty' of judgement is seen as a potential of interfaculty 'transitions', to such an extent that it is given a major privilege over other faculties when it comes to unification, and simultaneously a major defect when it comes to knowing what object would be specific to it - this defect is that it has no determined object. This is why we might wonder if it is indeed a faculty of knowledge in Kant's sense. In all the families of phrases, however heterogeneous they are with respect to each other, what Kant obstinately calls the 'faculty of judgement' is the determination of the right mode of object-presentation for each of these families.
Suppose we had to present an object for the Idea of the proliferation of the faculties seen as capacities for having objects (as domains, territories or fields) : this object with which to validate the dispersion or fission of the faculties can only be a symbol - I would suggest that of an archipelago. Each family of phrases would be like an island, and the faculty of judgement would be (at least in part) like a ship-fitter or an admiral, sending out expeditions with the job of presenting one island with what they had found ('invented', in the etymological sense) on the others. This task-force or venture-force has no object, but requires a milieu: the sea, the Archepelagos, the major sea as the Aegean used to be 'called. In the Introduction to the third Critique, this sea has a different name, that of the 'field', the Feld:
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'To the extent that concepts are referred to objects without one's considering whether a knowledge of these objects is possible or not, they have their field, which is determined solely according to the relationship of their object to our faculty of knowing in general.' And the end of the same Introduction tells us that this faculty of knowing in general includes the understanding, the faculty of judgement, and reason. All these faculties find their objects in the field, some marking out a territory, others a domain: the faculty of judgement marks out neither, but looks after the transitions between those of the others. So this faculty is, rather, that of the milieu in which all marking-out of limits to legitimacy takes place. More still, it is what allowed territories and domains to be marked out, and what established each family's authority over its island. And it could do this only because of the commerce it keeps going between them.
At this point we ought to establish this on the basis of cases drawn from critical activity itself. [Separate regions continually scanned by waves across the cortex= admiral’s archipelago expeditions] We would examine how, and at the cost of what transitions, the beautiful can stand as a symbol of moral good, as explained in the third Critique. How, and at the cost of what transitions, the maxims of ethical action, the categorical imperative, as Kant writes in the second Critique, 'must withstand the test of the form of a natural law in general', i.e. how and at what cost the pure 'Act' is accompanied by the analogical 'so dass (meaning "in such a way that" and/or "as if") the maxim of your will could be laid down as the principle of a universal legislation'. Here the transition is called a type: Kant writes, 'Natural law serves only as a type for a law of freedom'. Were it not for this type, which results from a transfer from nature to the will, the imperative would provide no guiding thread, but would simply prescribe action without suggesting any regulating Idea (that of a supersensible nature, of a community of practical, i.e. free, beings) to guide the judgement of what must be done. We would examine as further cases of transitions other strange objects of Kant's thought, such as the Ideas of the imagination, which result from a transition from Reason to imagination by inversion: these are intuitions without a concept, whereas the Ideas of Reason are concepts without a sensory intuition. Or again - and these are perhaps more paradoxical - we would examine the ideals of sensibility, which Kant calls 'monograms', and which are 'inimitable models of possible empirical intuitions', that is, 'floating designs', 'incommunicable phantoms' inscribed in the sensibility of painters (and physiognomists), which do not to be sure give them
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determined rules (of plasticity, for example), but which nonetheless direct their judgement in matters of sensibility.
The importance of the philosophy of the beautiful and the sublime in the first part of the third Critique lies both in the de-realisation of the object of aesthetic feelings, and in the absence of a real aesthetic faculty of knowing. The same thing holds, perhaps even more radically, for the historico-political object, which as such has no reality, and for any political faculty of knowing, which must remain inexistent. The only things that are real (i.e. that for the concept of which intuitions can be presented) are phenomena, all of them both conditioned and conditioning.
[but some phenomena correspond to structures likely to characterize the material universe. The historico-political object corresponds to nothing material, but nonetheless corresponds to the metaphysical structure of a political history which is objective, observable, and highly predictable.]
The series of these phenomena, which makes up the history of humanity (and not even its natural history, only its cosmological history), is never itself given. This series is not given, but is the object of an Idea and, insofar as it is a human world, comes under the same antithetics as the cosmological series in general.
In general in Kant's work the cognitive phrase, with its double criterion of pertinence (with respect to negation or the principle of contradiction on the one hand, and to intuitive perception on the other), is opposed to vain hopes, false promises and prophecies. It is used to refute the right of insurrection and to condemn the violent substitution of a new authority for the old one. The argument runs as follows: the existence of the 'common being' (das gemeine Wesen) is the referent of a phrase which is either cognitive (of the understanding) or objective-teleological (finality in organised beings). This common being's proximity to the Good is judged in a subjective-teleological phrase (moral finality in rational beings). Revolution breaks open (Abbruch) an existing common being: another cannot fail to replace it (by natural law). The heterogeneity of the two families of phrases is not modified. Revolutionary politics is based on a transcendental illusion in the political domain, confusing what can be presented as an object for a cognitive phrase and what can be presented as an object for a speculative and/or ethical phrase - in other words it confuses schemata or examples with analoga. The progress of a common being for the better is not to be judged on the basis of empirical intuition, but on the basis of signs.
The expression 'sign of history' is an outstanding example of the complexity of the 'transitions' which have to be made in order to phrase the historico-political. The question posed (against the Faculty of Law) is whether it can be asserted that the human species is
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progressing continuously for the better, and if the answer is yes, how it can be asserted.
The first difficulty lies in the fact that such a phrase has as its referent a part of human history yet to come, and is thus a phrase of Vorhersagung, of anticipation, a prognostic. Kant immediately distinguishes it from the Weissager's (fortune-teller's) phrase, by showing that, following the rule for cognitives, there can be no direct presentation of the object of this phrase when it bears on the future.
So we shall have to change our family of phrases in order to produce the required demonstration. We shall have to look in the experience of humanity, not for an intuitive datum (a Gegebene) (which can only validate the phrase describing it, and no more), but for what Kant calls a Begebenheit, an event, a deal (in the card-playing sense) - a Begebenheit which would only indicate (hinweisen) and not prove (beweisen) that humanity is capable of being not only the cause (Ursache) but also the author (Urheber) of its progress. More precisely, explains Kant, this Begebenheit delivered in human historical experience must indicate a cause the occurrence of which remains undetermined (unbestimmt) with respect to time (in Ansehung der Zeit) - and we recognise in this rule the clause stating the independence of causality by freedom from the diachronic series of the mechanical world. This is the price to be paid for being able to extend this cause's possibility of intervening to past and future too.
And this is still not all. The Begebenheit must not itself be the cause of progress, but only an index (Hindeutend) of progress - a Geschichtszeichen. Kant immediately makes clear what he means by sign of history: 'signum rememorativum, demonstrativum, prognosticum'. The Begebenheit we are looking for will have the job of 'presenting' causality by freedom along the three temporal directions - past, present and future. What is this enigmatic, even contradictory 'fact of being delivered'? We might expect some heroic deed to be the looked-for 'deal' bearing witness to the power of free causality. But such a heroic deed is still only a datum. Certainly it can be given several readings (descriptive phrase, dialectical phrase), but this only means that it is an equivocal object which can be seized on by one 'or other of these phrases indifferently. Here the critical judge's requirements go further, to the extent of seeming paradoxical. He is not satisfied with letting the advocate of determinism and the advocate of freedom or finality be reconciled by an arrangement satisfying both, but leaving the decision whether to phrase one way rather than the other indeterminate (in the sense of contingent).
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The Begebenheit, which is a datum in experience at least, if not of experience, must be the index of the Idea of free causality. With this Begebenheit we must get as close as possible to the abyss to be crossed between mechanism on the one hand and liberty or finality on the other, between the domain of the sensory world and the field of the supersensible - and we should be able to leap across it without suppressing it, by fixing the status of the historico-political - a status which may be inconsistent and indeterminate, but which can be spoken, and which is, even, irrefutable. This is the price to be paid for being able to prove that humanity has a natural inclination to use its reason, and for being able to anticipate with certainty a continuous progress of its history for the better.
At this point Kant goes off on what can seem to be an unexpected detour in order to present this Begebenheit, but this detour also allows the most minute location of this 'as if object', the historico-political, and the location most faithful to its complexity. We have, he writes, a Begebenheit satisfying the conditions of the problem, and which is not a great deed: 'We are here only concerned with the way of thinking [Denkungsart] of the spectators [Zuschauer] as it reveals itself [or betrays itself, veyrat, as one betrays a secret] in public [offentlich: a public use of thought then, in the same sense as the article on the Aufklarung distinguishes a public use of reason] on the occasion of [this,is how I translate bei, which does not mean in] this drama of great transmutations [Umwandlungen] [this drama, dieser Spiel: which drama? Kant will give the example of the French Revolution, the text dates from 1795], in which is expressed a taking of sides [a participation, a taking up, eine Teilnehmung] for one set of antagonists against their adversaries, a taking of sides so universal and yet so disinterested - even at the risk that this taking of sides can be of disadvantage to them (the spectators) - that it provides the proof [beweist] (because of its universality) that there is a character of mankind as a whole and (because of its disinterestedness) that this character is a moral one [moralisch] at least as a disposition [Anlage], and this character not only allows us to hope for human progress, it is already this progress, insofar as its scope is within reach of what is possible at present.' Kant adds that th_ recent Revolution of a people which is geistreich, rich in spirit, may well either fail or succeed, accumulate misery and atrocity, it nevertheless 'arouses in the heart [in den Gemiitern, in the spirits] of all spectators (who are not themselves caught up in it) a taking of sides according to desires [eine Teilnehmung dem Wunsche nach] which borders on enthusiasm
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[Enthusiasm] and which, since its very expression was not without danger, can only have been caused by a moral disposition within the human race'.
I will not give a detailed commentary on this text which contains in condensed form Kant's thought (maybe the whole of his thought) on the historico-political. I shall simply make three observations, the first on the nature of enthusiasm, the second on its value as a Begebenheit in the historical experience of humanity, and the third on its links with critical thought. All three observations will be made in accordance with the clause controlling the elaboration of the sign of history, that is, that the meaning of history (i.e. all phrases pertinent to the historico-political field) does not only show itself in the great deeds and misdeeds of the agents or actors who become famous in history, but also in the feeling of the obscure and distant spectators who see and hear them and who, in the sound and fury of the res gestae, distinguish between what is just and what is not.
The first observation is that according to Kant the enthusiasm they feel is a modality of the sublime feeling: sublime feeling rather than feeling of the sublime since, if we are to believe the third Critique, 'it is not the object which must be named sublime, but the disposition of the mind provoked by a certain representation which occupies the reflective faculty of judgement'. The imagination attempts to provide an object given as a totality in intuition, i.e. to provide a presentation for an Idea of reason (for the totality is the object of an Idea: for example, the totality of practical rational beings) - the imagination fails, and thus feels its impotence, but at the same time discovers its calling (Bestimmung, its destination), which is to realise its accord with Ideas of reason by providing a suitable presentation. The result of this inhibited accord is that instead of having a feeling for the object, we have on the occasion of this object a feeling, 'for the Idea of mankind in us as subjects'. In this text from paragraph 25, the feeling Kant comments on is that of respect. But the analysis works for any sublime feeling inasmuch as it involves a 'subreption' (Subreption) which substitutes a regulation (which is in fact a nonregulation) between the faculties of a subject, for a regulation between an object and a subject.
The regulation of the sublime is a non-regulation. By contrast with taste, the regulation of the sublime is good when it is bad. The sublime involves the finality of a non-finality and the pleasure of an unpleasure: 'We discover a certain finality in the unpleasure felt in proportion with the extension of the imagination necessary if it is to
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fit with what is without limit in our power of reason, i.e. the Idea of an absolute whole, and consequently also in the non-finality [Unzweckmassigkeit, the non-affinity, the incommensurability in terms of the goal] of the power of the imagination for the Ideas of reason, and the arousing [Erweckitng] of these Ideas. . . The object is apprehended as sublime with a joy which is only made possible by the mediation of pain.'
Even the most extensive imagination cannot manage to present an object which could validate or 'realise' the Idea. Whence the pain: from the inability to present. What is the joy which, nonetheless, is grafted onto this pain? It comes from the discovery of an affinity in this discord: even what is presented as being very big in nature (including in human nature and in the natural history of man, such as a great revolution) is still and will always be 'small compared with the ideas of reason'. What is discovered is not only the infinite scope of Ideas, which are incommensurable with any presentation, but, also, the calling of the subject, 'our' calling, which is that of having to supply a presentation for the unpresentable and thus, in terms of Ideas, to go beyond anything that can be presented.
;;':Enthusiasm itself is an extreme form of the sublime feeling: the attempt to provide a presentation not only fails, thus giving rise to the tension I have described, but also, so to speak, is reversed or inverted so as to provide a supremely paradoxical presentation, which Kant calls a 'simply negative presentation', and which he characterises with some audacity as a 'presentation of the infinite'. We have here the most inconsistent of all 'transitions' - a blind alley. Kant even ventures to give examples of it: 'There is perhaps no passage in the Old Testament more sublime than the commandment: Thou shalt not make graven images, nor any representation of the things on high in heaven, below on earth, and under the earth. . . Only this commandment can explain the enthusiasm that the Jewish people, in the period when it was flourishing, felt for its religion when it compared itself with other peoples, or the pride inspired by the Mahometan religion.' And he continues, 'It is the same with the representation of the moral law and the disposition to morality within us'.
What is required of the imagination, for this abstract presentation which presents nothingness, is that it should 'unlimit' itself. The fact remains that this extreme painful delight called enthusiasm is an Affekt, a powerful affection; and that as such it is blind and thus cannot, writes Kant, 'serve as a satisfaction for reason'. It is even a dementia, a Wahnsinn, in which the imagination is 'unleashed'. As
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such, it remains of course preferable to the Schwarmerei, to the tumult of exaltation, which is a Wahnwitz, an insanitas, a 'disorder' of the imagination, an 'illness deeply rooted in the soul', whereas enthusiasm is a 'passing accident which can affect the most healthy understanding'. The Schwarmerei gives rise to an illusion, to 'seeing something beyond all limits of sensibility', i.e.: to thinking that there is a presentation when there is not. It makes a non-critical transition which is comparable to the transcendental illusion (the illusion of knowing something beyond all the limits of knowledge). Enthusiasm, on the other hand, sees. nothing, or rather sees the nothing and refers it to the unpresentable. Although it is to be condemned ethically as pathological, 'it is aesthetically sublime since it is a tension of forces due to Ideas, which give the soul an elan which acts much more powerfully and durably than the impulsion given by sensory representations'. Historico-political enthusiasm thus borders on dementia. It is a pathological attack and as such has in itself no ethical validity, since ethics requires one to be free of all motivating pathos, allowing only the apathetic pathos which accompanies obligation and which is called respect, and not the Affektlosigkeit which is still too sublime, and which Kant proceeds to discuss immediately in his study of the sublime. And yet the pathos of enthusiasm in its episodic outbursts retains an aesthetic validity; it is an energetical sign, a tensor of the Wunsch. The infinite nature of the Idea draws all other capacities (i.e. all the other faculties) to itself, and produces an Affekt 'of the vigorous type', which is characteristic of the sublime. The 'transition', then, does not take place; it is a 'transition' in transit, and its transiting, its movement, is a sort of agitation on the spot, in the blind alley of incommensurability, above the abyss, a 'shaking', writes Kant, 'that is the rapid succession of repulsion and attraction for the same object'. And this is the state of the Gemut of the spectators of the French Revolution.
Second observation: this enthusiasm is the Begebenheit looked for in the historical experience of humanity in order to validate the phrase, 'Humanity is continually improving.' Great changes such as the French Revolution are not in principle sublime in themselves. As objects they are like those spectacles of physical nature on the occasion of which the spectator feels the sublime: 'It is rather in its chaos and its disorder (if grandeur and force manifest themselves) in its wildest and most unbridled devastation, that nature best provokes Ideas of the sublime.' What best determines the sublime is the indeter
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minate, the Formlosigkeit: 'the sublime of nature. . . can be as if without form or figure'; 'no particular form of nature is represented therein'. The same must be the case for the Revolution, and for all great historical upheavals - they are the formless and figureless in historical human nature. Ethically there is nothing valid about them: on the contrary they come in for critical judgement as we have seen; they are the result of a confusion (which is the political illusion itself) between the direct presentation of the Gemeine Wesen and the analogical presentation of the Idea of a Republican contract.
As an event in the historical nature of mankind, the Revolution belongs to the residue of data, the remainder made up of sing-ularities and existences waiting for a phrase once the cognitive phrase has taken charge of what belongs to it in the intuitions it can subsume under regularities, in the mode of the presentation of examples. This remainder is waiting for the teleological phrase, and yet its lack of form looks as if it ought to cause the absolute failure of this phrase. But in the enthusiasm aroused in the Gemut of the spectators by this formlessness, this failure of all possible finalisation is itself finalised. The dementia of enthusiasm for the Revolution and the revolutionary party bears witness to the extreme tension felt by spectating mankind - a tension between the 'nullity' of what is presented to it and the Ideas of reason - i.e. the Idea of the Republic which unites the Idea of autonomy, of the people and that of peace between States. What is given in this Begebenheit is thus a tension in the Denkungsart occasioned by an object which is almost pure disorder, which has no figure, which is however extremely big in historical nature and which is a sort of abstraction refractory to all functions of presentation - even by analoga. But because of these negative properties of the object which is the occasion of this tension, it proves all the more indubitably by the very form it imprints on feeling, that it is polarised, cauls Idealische, towards something Ideal, und zwar rein Moralische, that is something purely moral, to which the concept of right is similar'.
Third observation: Kant writes in the third Critique, 'All that matters in the resolution of an antinomy is that two propositions which apparently contradict each other do not in fact do so, and can be maintained alongside each other even if the explanation of the possibility of their concept surpasses our faculty of knowing'. Let us call this solution parathetical.
What are, notably, involved in the para the tical solution of the Antimony are also the senders and addressees of the various families
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of phrases. In principle their situation is regulated, i.e. subject to determination, according to the way the referent is presented by the phrase. This is at least what was established by the Analytic: of the first Critique. But in certain cases, and in the first place that of the ethical phrase, only the situation of the addressee is regulated the sender of the moral law remaining indeterminable. (In fact the situation of the referent is regulated too, since one of the properties of the ethical phrase is that the sender must bring the referent into existence - the referent being the action prescribed by the imperative.) In other cases, and in the first' place that of the aesthetic phrase, what is regulated is the fact that there is no rule, since there is no determinable presentation of the referent. And yet this rule of nonregulation nonetheless appeals to a possible agreement between sender and addressee of the ethical phrase about a referent which is, however, never directly presentable. There is thus a bond of 'communicability' between them, which is not subject to the rule of presentation which is valid for the cognitive phrase. This communicability is required 'as a duty, so to speak', and taste is the faculty which judges it a priori. The sensus communis is thus in the aesthetic field like the totality of rational practical beings in the ethical domain. It is an appeal to the community made a priori, judged without a rule of direct presentation: simply the ethical community is mediated by a concept of reason, the Idea of freedom, whilst the aesthetic community of the senders and addressees of the phrase on beauty is immediately situated in feeling, in that it is a priori to be shared between those senders and addressees.
Enthusiasm as a 'Begebenheit of our time' is thus phrased accord ing to the rule of the aesthetics of the most extreme mode of the sublime. Extreme firstly because the sublime is not only a disinterested pleasure and a universal without a concept, but also because it involves a purposiveness of anti-purposiveness and a pleasure by pain, as opposed to the feeling of the beautiful, the purposiveness of which is only without purpose, and the pleasure of which is left to the free accord of the faculties amongst themselves. With the sublime we go a long way into heterogeneity, so that the solution to the aesthetic antinomy appears to be more difficult for the sublime than for the beautiful.
A fortiori more difficult when we are dealing with enthusiasm, which is at the extreme limit of the sublime. Kant recognises that 'the disposition of the mind supposed by the feeling of the sublime requires eine Empfanglichkeit to Ideas [that the mind be susceptible to Ideas,
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sensitive to Ideas]'. And a little later, 'The judgement on the sublime in nature [of human nature too] needs a certain culture', which does not mean that it is produced by that culture, for 'it has its foundation . in human nature'. Kant says no more on this subject in this paragraph. But this allusion to culture is cleared up in the critique of teleological judgement in the paragraph dealing with the ultimate aim of nature. Here (as in many of the political opuscules) Kant refutes the thesis that this goal could be the happiness of the human race, and shows that it can only be its culture. 'To produce in a rational being the general aptitude for the aims which please him (and consequently in his freedom), that is culture.' Culture is the ultimate aim pursued by nature in the human race because culture is what makes men more 'receptive to ideas', and is the condition which opens the door to thinking the unconditioned.
In the same paragraph Kant makes a distinction between the culture of skill and the culture of will : and in the former, between the material and the formal culture of skill. Now the formal developments of the culture of skill requires the neutralisation of conflicts of free beings on the individual scale, by means of a 'legal power in a totality called bilrgerlich Gesellschaft, civil society'. And if men get ahead of the plans of natural providence, the development of the culture of skill requires the same neutralisation, but this time on the scale of the State, by means of a 'cosmopolitical totality, ein weltbilderliche Ganzes', the federation of States. In this way the enthusiasm which is publicly revealed on the occasion of the French Revolution - firstly because it is an extreme sublime feeling, secondly because this feeling already requires a formal culture of skill, and finally because this culture in turn has as its horizon civil and perhaps international peace - this enthusiasm, then, in itself, 'not merely allows us to hope for human improvement, but is this improvement, insofar as its scope is within reach of what is possible at present'.
So not just any aesthetic phrase can provide the proof (beweisen) that humanity is in constant progress in improvement - but only the phrase of the extreme sublime. The beautiful will not do: it is only a symbol of the good. But because the sublime is the affective paradox, the paradox of feeling (of feeling publicly) in common a formlessness for which there is no image or sensory intuition - because of this, the sublime constitutes an 'as if' presentation of the Idea of civil and even cosmopolitical society, and therefore of the Idea of morality; where however there can be no such presentation in experience. This js how the sublime feeling is a sign. This sign does no more than
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indicate a free causality, but it nonetheless counts as proof for the phrase affirming progress: since spectating mankind must already have made progress in culture to be able to feel this feeling, or in other words to make this sign, by its 'way of thinking' the Revolution. This sign is progress in its present state, as far as can be, although civil societies are not, far from it, close to the Republican regime, nor States close to worldwide federation.
The faculty of judgement at work in critical philosophy (in Kant writing the Contest of Faculties) sees a sign of history in the enthusiasm of the people for the Revolution, because it is a proof of the progress of the faculty of judgement in mankind as a whole as a natural species. However, this faculty appeals to the anticipated bond of the sensus communis and, in feeling, mankind judges the Revolution to be sublime, despite its lack of form. This sign is indicative when it is evaluated against the rule of presentation of the phrases of historical knowledge: it is a simple Begebenheit among the Gegebene of historical data open to intuitions. But in the family of the strange phrases of judgement it is a proof for the Kantian phrase which judges that there is progress, since it is itself this phrase of the people, which is not 'spoken', to be sure, but which is publicly expressed as a feeling which can in principle be shared, on the occasion of an 'abstract' datum. Kant's reflecting phrase, 'there is progress' does no more than reflect the 'there is progress' of the people, which is necessarily implied in their enthusiasm.
This is why Kant can continue rather solemnly: 'Without the mind of a seer, I now maintain that I can predict [vorhersagen] from the aspects and precursor-signs [Vorzeichen] of our times, the achievement [Erreichung] of this end, and with it, at the same time, the progressive improvement of mankind, a progress which henceforth cannot be totally reversible.' For, adds Kant, 'a phenomenon of this kind in human history can never be forgotten [vergisst sick nicht mehr]'. No politician (the politician of politics, whom Kant calls the 'political moralist') would have been 'subtle enough to extract from the previous course of things) this capacity for improvement in human nature, discovered by enthusiasm. He adds, 'Only nature and freedom combined within mankind in accordance with principles of right, have enabled us to forecast [to promise, verheissen] it; but only in non-determined fashion in terms of time, and only as a chance Begebenheit.' The aspects of intemporality and fortuitousness remind us of the necessarily, determinedly indeterminate character of the 'transition' between nature (i.e. the Revolution and the pathological
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aspect of the feeling it arouses) and freedom (i.e. the tension towards the moral Idea of absolute Good which is the other, universal and disinterested, aspect of the same feeling).
'There is progress': the critical judge can legitimate this phrase every time he can present a sign to be a referent for this assertion.
But he cannot say when such 'objects' will present themselves, because historical sequences forming a series only give data to the historian (data which are at best statistically regular) - and never signs. The historico-political only presents itself to assertions through cases which operate not as examples, still less as schemes, but as complex hypotyposes (perhaps what Adorno was asking for 'under the name Modelle); the most complex being the most certain. Popular enthusiasm for the Revolution is a highly validating case for the historico-political phrase, and thus permits a very certain hypotyposis, for the simple reason that it is itself a highly improbable hypotyposis (recognising the Idea of the republic in a 'formless' empirical datum in which 'grandeur and force' are revealed). As for the philosophy of history which cannot even be considered in critical thought, it is an illusion born of signs being a semblance of examples or schemes.
It seems to me that the datum (which can only be a Begebenheit) which we are dealing with, the Begebenheit which marks what has been called 'postmodernity' to designate our time, is (if you will allow me to use a symbol - but the critical judge must allow me to use it) - this Begebenheit is the feeling produced by the fission of the great discursive nuclei I mentioned at the beginning of this . lecture.
As the Begebenheit Kant was faced with was occasioned by the French Revolution, the Begebenheit we shall have to think through as philosophers and moral politicians, and which is in no way homologous to the enthusiasm of 1789 (since it is not aroused by the Idea of one purpose, but by the Idea of several purposes or even by Ideas of heterogeneous purposes) - this Begebenheit for our time, then, would induce a new type of sublime, more paradoxical still than that of enthusiasm, a sublime in which we would feel not only the irremediable gap between an Idea and what presents itself to 'realise' that Idea, but also the gap between the various families of phrases and their respective legitimate presentations.
At the beginning of this lecture, I named certain events which provide a paradoxical, negative occasion for this highly cultivated
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community sense to reveal itself publicly: Auschwitz, Budapest 1956, May 1968 . . .
Each one of these abysses, and others, asks to be explored with precision in its specificity. The fact remains that all of them liberate judgement, that if they are to be felt, judgement must take place without a criterion, and that this feeling becomes in turn a sign of history. But however negative the signs to which most of the proper names of our political history give rise, we should nevertheless have to judge them as if they proved that this history had moved on a step in its progress; i.e. in the culture of skill and of will. This step would consist in the fact that it is not only the Idea of a single purpose which would be pointed to in our feeling, but already the Idea that this purpose consists in the formation and free exploration of Ideas in the plural, the Idea that this end is the beginning of the infinity of heterogeneous finalities. Everything that fails to satisfy this fission of the single purpose, everything that presents itself as the 'realisation' of a single purpose, as is the case with the phrase of politics, of the 'political moralist', is felt not to be up to (angemenen), not akin to (abgezielt) the infinite capacity of phrases given in the feeling aroused by this fission. And when I say: not commensurable, this is the least one can say. This pretension to realise a single purpose can, as we know, be threatening enough to embalm what is already dead, as is the case in Red Square, or to give life to a fable by terror and massacre, as under the Third Reich.
The idea of commensurability (in the sense of affinity with no rule to act as an established criterion) is of decisive importance in Kant's thought, and especially his thought about the historico-political. But for us today it moderates too strongly the event of fission. The exploding of language into families of heteronomous language-games is the theme that Wittgenstein, whether he knew it or not, took from Kant and which he took as far as he could towards rigorous description. For Kant's judge it is not enough to decide one way or the other; he must also admit at least the coexistence of heteronomous phrases. The obligation to compromise presupposes an attraction or general interaction of families of phrases, despite or because of their heteronomy.
Kant pulls the idea of this drive to commerce between phrases down onto that of a subject which otherwise would fall to pieces, and of a rationality which otherwise would be in conflict with itself and no longer worthy of its name. We today - and this is part of the Begebenheit of our time - feel that the fission given in this Begeben
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heit attacks that subject and that rationality too. Since Marx, we have learned that what presents itself as unity for the phrases of the postmodern Babel, as something that is capable of verifying them, at least in experience subject to concepts and direct presentation - we have learned that this is the imposter-subject and blindly calculating rationality called Capital, especially when it lays hold of phrases themselves in order to commercialise them and make surplus-value out of them in the new condition of the Gemeinwesen called 'computerised society'. But in the unnamed feeling I have suggested we make the Begebenheit of our time, we can easily find what we need to judge the pretension of Capital's phrase to validate all phrases according to its criterion of performativity, and the imposture which puts that phrase in the place of the critical judge - to judge this pretension and this imposture, to criticise them and to re-establish the rights of the critical tribunal - which will, however, not be the same as the tribunal of Kant's critical philosophy. For we cannot judge them according to the Idea of man and within a philosophy of the subject, but only according to the 'transitions' between heterogeneous phrases, and respecting their heterogeneity. This is why a philosophy of phrases is more 'akin' to this Begebenheit than a philosophy of the faculties of a subject. But then, what can a tribunal be? Is the only purpose of the reflective function which is ours to transform, as Kant thought, dispute [differenclJ into litigation, by substituting the law-court for the battle-field? Is not its aim also that of emphasising disputes, even at risk of aggravating them, of giving a language to what cannot be expressed in the language of the judge, even if he is a critical judge?
NOTE
'The Sign of History' was first delivered as the inaugural Michel Benamou memorial lecture at the Center for Twentieth-Century Studies, Milwaukee, in 1982,
Translated by Geoff Bennington.