EDITED BY EDUARDO CADAVA,
PETER CONNOR, JEAN-LUC NANCY
ROUTLEDGE
NEW YORK AND LONDON
Contents
Preface vii
Introduction 1
Jean-Luc Nancy
1 Another Experience of the Question, or Experiencing
the Question Other-Wise 9
Sylviane Agacinski
2 On a Finally Objectless Subject 24
Alain Badiou
3 Citizen Subject 33
Etienne Balibar
4 Who? 58
Maurice Blanchot
5 The Freudian Subject, from Politics to Ethics 61
Mikkel Barch-Jacobsen
6 Voice of Conscience and Call of Being 79
Jean-Franr,;ois Courtine
7 A Philosophical Concept. ... 94
Gilles Deleuze
8 "Eating Well," or the Calculation of the Subject:
An Interview with Jacques Derrida 96
Jacques Derrida
9 Apropos of the "Critique of the Subject" and
of the Critique of this Critique 120
Vincent Descombes
10 Being and the Living 135
Didier Franck
11 Who Comes after the Subject? 148
Gerard Granel
12 The Critique of the Subject 157
Michel Henry
13 Love between Us 167
Luce Irigaray
14 Descartes Entrapped 178
Sarah Ko/man
15 The Response of Ulysses 198
Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe
16 Philosophy and Awakening 206
Emmanuel Levinas
17 Seisus communis: The Subject in statu nascendi 217
Jean-Franr;ois Lyotard
18 L'Interloque 236
Jean-Luc Marion
19 After What 246
Jacques Ranciere
Name Index 253
About the Editors and Contributors 256
The essays collected in this
volume present the current research of nineteen contemporary French philosophers
on one of the great motifs of modem philosophy: the critique or the
deconstruction of subjectivity.
The project was initiated by
Ermanno Bencivenga, joint editor (with Enrico M. Forni) ofthe international
review of philosophy Topoi. Bencivenga wished to devote a special issue
of Topoi to an important aspect of contemporary philosophical
activity in France. The organization of the project was entrusted to Jean-Luc
Nancy, who served as guest editor ofthe September 1988 issue of Topoi, in
which a number of these essays first appeared, and who proposed to organize the
issue around the question "Who Comes after the Subject?" The
following year a French edition of this issue of Topoi was published as
the final number of Cahiers Confrontations (no. 20, Winter 1989), under
the direction of Rene Major. The French version included new contributions by
Etienne Balibar and Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, plus the entirety of Nancy's
interview with Jacques Derrida, only partially published in Topoi. In
the summer of 1989, we approached Nancy about the possibility ofbringing out an
American edition of these and other essays addressing this topic. The present
collection therefore includes all texts from the earlier English and French
versions, together with previously unpublished essays by Sylviane Agacinski and
Luce Irigaray, and previously untranslated essays by Sarah Kofman and Emmanuel
Levinas.
We have sought to bring to
each ofthe translations a single notion of consistency, even while respecting
as much as possible the individual contributions of each translator. We want to
thank each of the translators for their patience and help with
this work. We would also like to thank Rene Major, Michel Delorme, and the D.
Reidel Publishing Company for their cooperation. Finally, we would like to
express our gratitude to William P. Germano for his enthusiasm and support.
E.C. and P.C.
Philosophy, today, world-wide:
what might this mean? It would not mean a diversity of fields, schools, streams,
or tendencies with in philosophy. At leas t, it would not mean only this, or
perhaps it would not mean this at all. This has been the traditional way ,of
looking at such a topic. Nowadays, it would rather mean: different ways of
thinking about philosophy itself. Different ways of understanding the word
itself, and even ways of understanding that the thing it names is gone, or
finished. Or different ways of inquiring about philosophy as something
essentially linked to Western civilization, something with which other
civilizations or a general shifting of cultures, also wi thi n the Western
area�now have to deal (and what does "to deal with" mean here? What
between or beyond "praxis" and "theory" would this imply? Do
we have a philosophical language for this task?).
It is very likely that no one
"philosophy"�if something like this still exists, and is not merely
something shelved in our libraries�is able to grasp this situation, nor to
think it through. It is very likely that there is no "Weltanschauung"
for it. "Weltanschauungen" belong to the epoch when the world had not
become the world, world-wide. The becoming-world of the world does not mean wh
at is usually called the "uniformization" of everything and
everyone�even through technology, which one assumes to be essentially identical
to itself. In many respects, world also differentiates itself, if it does not
indeed shatter itself. The becoming-world of world means that "world"
is no longer an object, nor an idea, but the pl ace existence is given to and
exposed to. This first happened in philosophy, and to philosophy, with the
Kantian revolution and the "condition of possible experience": world
as possibly of (or for) an existent being, possibility as world for such a
being. Or: Being no longer to be thought of as an essence, but to be given,
offered to a world as to i ts own possibility.
Such a program (if we can use
this word) is not to be completed i n a day. It does not take "a long
time," but the totality of a history: our history. The history of philosophy
since Kant (i f not indee d since the remote condition of possibility of Kant
himself at the beginning of the "Western" as such, of the Western
"Weltanschauung") is the history of the various breaks out of which
emerges, out of the "possible worlds" (the "Anschauungen"),
as well as out of a simple necessity of the world (another kind of
"Anschauung"), the world as possibility, or the world as
chance for existence (opening/closing of possibility, unlimitationldisaster of
possibility).
Each of these breaks is a
break of philosophy, and not within philosophy. Therefore they are
incommensurable with and incommunicable to one another. They represent a
disarticulation of the common space and of the common discourse of
"philosophy" (of what one assumes to have been such a commonplace). Their
names (I mean their emblematic names up to the first half of this century) are
well known: Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Heidegger, Wittgenstein.
We are the second half of the
century. A "we" without "we," a "we" without
philosophical community (apart from the fake one of conferences, congresses,
etc.). Many lines of rupture traverse us�which does not necessarily imply any
"hostility," but which means this: philosophy separated from itself,
outside of itself, crossing its own limits�which means, perhaps, discovering
that it never did have proper limits, that it never was, in a sense, a
"property."
One of the most visible lines
of rupture runs between two ensembles (each of which is itself heterogeneous). These
ensembles are most often designated, especially in Anglo-Saxon countries, in an
ethnogeographic manner: "Anglo-Saxon philosophy," "continental
philosophy," and, more particularly, "French philosophy" (a kind
of partitioning, therefore, of the Western itself). These appellations are, of
course, extremely fragile. There is "Anglo-Saxon" philosophy in
Europe, as there is "continental" and "French" philosophy
in the Anglo-Saxon world (to say nothing of the one and the other in the rest
of the world, nor of this rest itself, of this immense "rest" as the
space of unimaginable possibilities for these philoso-
phies, beyond each of them . . . ).
These names have no simple,
absolute reference, nor pertinence, but their meaning is nonetheless not void. The
ethnonational partitioning of "philosophy" (languages, cultures, institutions,
etc.) would require a very long and complex analysis. This collection of essays
proposes nothing of the kind. In this regard, it simply proposes, at once
under the name and on the name "French," a kind of practical
exercise.
These ensembles are also
identified by "theoretical" names, the pertinence of which is no less
problematic. One says "analytic philosophy," for example, which leads
to a misconception about both the diversity of kinds of "analysis"
with which it deals, and the variety of logical, linguistic, ethical,
aesthetic, and political preoccupations within the "Anglo-Saxon"
domain. One says, on the other hand, "post-structuralism"�which, in
this case, is a baroque designation, because there has neyer been one
structuralism, and because what it deals with did not come "after,"
nor as a "posterity." Moreover, what this word claims to cover is
similarly of a very great diversity. But the more than insufficient nature of
these denominations is itself a testimony to the line of rupture�whose traces
are complex, sinuous, sometimes difficult to grasp, multiple, or effaced.
It must surely seem unfair to
have restricted this collection to French thinkers: there is outside of France
more than one thinking, more than one kind of work, that would answer to what
"French" denotes here. But not only would the project have become
excessive from a practical point of view, it would moreover have been no less
unfair to have blurred the contours of a French specificity recognizable in
certain characteristic traits�although neither systematic nor even simply
convergent�over the last thirty years (let us say, very broadly, since the
closure, on the one hand, of a certain type of French "rationalism"
and/or "spiritualism"�in this respect, "French" thought
today proceeds in part from a "German" rupture with a certain
philosophical "France" (which is also a rupture within a certain
"Germanity")�and on the other hand, since the close of the Sartrean
enterprise).
However, one will find no
unity here. The differences are extreme, and opposing views are not lacking. The
invitation to participate in this issue left entirely open the potential range
of philosophical approaches. With one exception, brought about by the choice of
the theme (for which 1 am responsible and the reasons for which 1 will give
later), 1 did not send my question ("Who comes after the subject?")
to those who would find no validity in it, to those for whom it is on the
contrary more important to denounce its presuppositions and to return, as
though nothing had happened, to a style of thinking that we might simply call
humanist, even where it tries to complicate the traditional way of thinking
about the human subject. If 1 state that such a return stems in fact from the
forgetting of philosophy, 1 am no doubt speaking only for myself. But it is no
less true that I am also encouraged to say this by virtue of all the
contemporary work witnessed in the authors brought together here. Those among
them who challenge the terms of my question�and some do, as shall be seen�at
least do not do so in the name of a return backward, something that has never
had any meaning or sense, in philosophy or elsewhere.
The reader of these essays
will no doubt perceive their diversity, and, should he or she perceive also
something that is neither a unity nor a homogeneity but something that partakes
of a certain "tonality," this will be a kind of "French accent"
in many different philosophical tongues. 1 sent out my invitations keeping in
mind at once the work of each contributor in regard to the question asked (I
accept responsibility for its arbitrariness�but it is a reasoned arbitrariness,
as we shall see in a moment)�and the distribution of current research in
France.
One will recognize some of the
principal axes at the source of this distribution: for example, the Husserlian,
the Marxian, the Heideggerian, and the Nietzschean traditions. But one will not
find anything like a "tradition" in the ordinary sense. Nobody here
stands within a custom or a school. Each entertains a complex rapport to many
of these traditions (and in such a way that it would be perfectly impossible,
short of a lengthy study, to endeavor to present them one by one: it is
incumbent on the texts to do this). Several have already been recogni zed as
what I would risk calling the inventors of a thinking. All are concerned in one
way or another with an unreserved questi o ning of "phi losophy" and
its "traditions," with a determined reevaluation of the
"philosophical" as such and not with variations of
"Weltanschauungen." All are the thinkers of an age in rupture. Which
means also: they take responsibility for this age, because the questions they
are di sc ussi ng, and especi ally here, obviou sly engage all the ethical and
political challenges of our time (as well as the debates about what
"ethics" and "politics" mean today).
I asked the question:
"Who comes after the subject?" to settle on one of the principle
rupture lines. The critique or the deconstruction of subjectivity is to be con
si dered one of the great motifs of contemporary philosophical work in Francc, taking
off from, here again and perhaps especially, the teachings of Marx, Nietzsche,
Freud, Husserl, Heidegger, Bataille, Wittgenstein, from the teachings of
linguistics, the social sci ences, and so forth. (But one should not forget the
practical, ethical, and political experience of Europe since the 1930s: the
fascisms, Stalinism, the war, the camps, decolonization, and the birth of new
nations, the difficulty in orienting oneself between a "spiritual"
identity that has been devastated and an "American" economism,
between a loss of meaning and an accumulation of signs: so many instances for
the i nv est iga tion ofthe diverse figures of the "subject. ") The
question therefore bears upon the critique or deconstruction of interiority, of
self presence, of consciousness, of mastery, of the individual or collective
property of an essence. Critique or deconstruction of the firmness of a seat
(hypokeimenon, substantia, subjectum) and the certitude of an authority
and a value (the individual, a people, the state, history, work). My question
aimed in the first place to treat this motif as an event that had indeed
emerged from our history�hence the "after"� and not as some
capricious variation of fashionable thi nking. But at the same time I wanted to
suggest a whole range�no doubt vast�in which such a critique or deconstruction
has not simply obliterated its object (as those who groan or ap plaud before a
supposed "liquidation" of the subject would like to believe). That
which obliterates is nihilism�itself an implicit form of the metaphysi cs of
the subject (self-presence of that which knows itself as the dissolution of its
own difference). There is nothing nihilistic in recognizi ng that the
subject�the property of the self�is the thought that reabsorbs or exhausts all possibility of being in
the world (all possibility of existence, all existence as being
delivered to the possible), and that this same thought, never simple,
never closed upon itself without remainder, designates and delivers an entirely
different thought: that of the one and that of the some one, of the
singular existent that the subject announces, promises, and at the same time conceals.
Moreover, one will see in the
texts that follow at least two very different uses of the word "subject. "
Sometimes it has the value of the metaphysical concept I have just recalled.
sometimes (for example, for Granel or Ranciere) it has the value of a singular
unum quid, less present to itself than present to a history, an event, a
community, an oeuvre, or another "subject."
Not only are we not relieved
of thinking this some one�this some one that the subject has perhaps always
pointed towards or looked for, and that brings us back to the same figures: the
individual, a people, the state, history, production, style, man, woman, as
well as "myself' and "ourselves" . . . �but it is precisely
something like this thought that henceforth comes toward us and calls us forth.
Such at least was the hypothesis I was following, thinking not to be too
disloyal to a certain singularity of the era, common to all and particular to
no one, circulating anonymously amidst our thoughts. This is what I tried to
indicate with the verb "comes," and with the pronoun
"who?": With whi ch "one" have we hence forth to
deal?
I reproduce here the passage
from my letter of invitation (February 1986) that presents the qu estion: Who
comes after the subject? This question can be explained as follows: one of the
major characteristics of contemporary thought is the putting into question of
the instance of the "subject," according to the structure, the
meaning, and the
value subsumed under this term in modern thought, from Descartes to Hegel, if
not to Husserl. The inaugurating decisions of contemporary thought whether they
took place under the sign of a break with metaphysics and its poorly pitched
questions, under the sign of a "deconstruction" of this metaphysics,
under that of a transference of the thinking of Being to the thinking of life,
or of the Other, or of language, etc.�have all involved putting subjectivity on
trial. A wide spread discourse of recent date proclaimed the subject's simple
liquidation. Everything seems, however, to point to the necessity, not of a
"return to the .subject" (proclaimed by those who would like to think
that nothing has happened, and that there is nothing new to be thought, except
maybe variations or modifica tions of the subject), but on the contrary, of a
move forward toward someone� some one else in its place (this last expression
is obviously a mere convenience: the "place" could not be the same). Who
would it be? How would slhe present him/herself? Can we name her/him? Is the
question "who" suitable? (My formulations seem to presuppose that
none of the existing designations for example, Dasein or "the
individual" would be suitable. But my intention of course is to leave open
all possibilities.)
In other words: If it is
appropriate to assign something like a punctuality, a singularity, or a
hereness (haecceitas) as the place of emission, reception, or transition (of
affect, of action, of language, etc.), how would one designate its specificity?
Or would the, question need to be transformed or is it in fact out of place to
ask it?
At this point I have
fulfilled�at least I hope I have�my role as editor, and I wil' let the texts
speak. They are the "subjects" of this issue.
The role of editor, I must
admit, has made me forget that I could and probably should, having asked the q
uestion, have written a response my self. It's too late to do this now, and
perhaps this is not .such a bad thing. In the interview with Derrida, I make
some observations that will perhaps serve to clarify my position. B u t I will
add a few words here to indicate the precise direction my answer might have
taken.
The dominant definition of the
philosophical (or "metaphysical") subject is to my way of
thinking the one proposed by Hegel: "that which is ca pable of maintaining
within itself its own contradiction." That the contradiction would be its
own (one recognizes here the dialectical law), that alienation or
extraneousness would be ownmost, and that subjectity (following Heidegger here,
and distinguishing the subject structure from anthropological subjectivity)
consists in re a ppropri ating this proper being outside-of itself: this is
what the definition would mean. The logic of the subjectum is a grammar
(cf. Nietzsche�but also Leibniz: pmedicatum inest subjecto) of the
subject that re appropriates to itself, in advance and absolutely, the exteriority
and the strange n ess of its predicate. (A canonic Hegelian example, at least
according to the way it is usually read: "The rational is actual.") This
appropriation is made by the verb "to be." "To be" thus has
the func tion here of an operator of appropriation: in fact it means "to
have" or " produce" or "understand" or
"support," etc. In a rather hasty manner, I could endeavor to say it
is the technological interpretation of Being.
Still, for this to be the
case, it would be necessary that the subject be, absolutely and without
predicate. It is at this point that the institution of the subject of modem
philosophy begins: ego sum. "To be" means then that which the
Cartesian redundancy states: ego sum, ego existo. Being is the actuality
of existence (or again, this "notion which belongs in an absolute way to
all the individuals of nature"� Spinoza). Existence as actuality "is
not a predicate but the simple position of the thing" (Kant); existence is
the essence of the subject to the extent that it is, prior to any
predication. (And this is why�again Spinoza�the essence of an infinite substance�or
God�necessarily envelops existence.)
Descartes, Spinoza, Kant�one
could continue: metaphysics itself indicates that what is posed here as the
question of an "after" (in history) is just as much a question of the
"before" (in the logic of being�but this would invite a different kind
of retracing of history: that which comes to us has preceded us). Before the
subj ect of a predication (let us say: before the subject-of) there is
(il y a�this is Levinas's "word"�Heidegger's word is: es gibt,
it is given, it gives) the Being of the subject, or the subject without
"of," the subject-being, existence. Metaphysics, de-constructing
itself (this is its logic and its history), indicates this
"before" as "after": existence. Not the subject of
existence but existence subject: that to which
one can no longer allot the grammar of the subject nor, therefore, to be clear,
allot the word "subject."
But what existence? It is not
an essence, it is the essence whose essence it i s to exist, actually and in
fact, in experience, "hie et nunc." It is the existent (and
not the existence o/the existent). With this in mind, the question asks
"who?" Which means that the question of essence�"What,
existence?"�calls forth a "who" in response. The question was
therefore a response to the question of existence, of its "being" or
its "meaning," nothing more and nothing less. (But whenever one responds
to a question with another question, what one does is defy the first question
from ever coming to be asked. . . . )
Every "what" that exists
is a "who," if "who" means: that actual, existent
"what," as it exists, a factual (even material) punctuation of Being,
the unum quid (and it is not by chance that this is Descartes's formula
for the quasi-third substance that is the union of soul and body, the reality
of human existence, as evident as the reality of the ego).
"Before/after the
subject": who. This is first of all an affirmation: the being is who.
In a sense, it is Heidegger: Being is simply existing withdrawn from every
essence of Being and from every being of essence. (But this still does not tell
me if it is proper to determine this existent in the way Heidegger describes
the Dasein supposing that this description is sufficiently clear to us
now. "After the subject": men, gods, living beings, and what else? I
would not go further than this.)
But this is also a question:
who is who? It is not "What is who?"�it is not a question
of essence, but one of identity (as when one asks before a photograph of a
group of people whose names you know but not the faces: "Who is
who?"�is this one Kant, is that one Heidegger, and this other one beside
him? . . . ). That is to say, a question of presence: Who is there? Who
is present there?
But what, presence? It is the
presence of the existent: it is not an essence. Present is that which occupies
a place. The place is place�site, situation, disposition�in the coming into space
of a time, in a spacing that allows that something come into presence,
in a unique time that engenders itself in this point in space, as its spacing. (Divine
places, where presence withdraws, places of birth, where presence presents
itself, common-places, where places are shared, places of love, where presence
comes-and-goes, historic places, geography of presences, etc.).
There where there was nothing
(and not even a "there"�as in the "there is no there there"
of Gertrude Stein), something, some one comes ("one" because
it "comes," not because of its substantial unity: the she, he, or it
that comes can be one and unique in its coming but multiple and repeated
"in itself." Presence takes place, that is to say it comes
into presence. It is that which comes indefinitely to itself, never stops
coming, arriving: the "subject" that is never the subject of itself. The
"ipseity" of presence lies in the fact that it engenders itself
into presence: presence to itself, in a sense, but where this "self'
itself is only the to (the taking place, the spacing) of presence. "I
engender time" is the phrasing of Kant's first
schema (schema: tracing, spacing). Strictly speaking it means: I engender
"I," I engender myself as the "a priori form of internal
meaning" that is time. The "internal" engenders itself as
exteriority�in order to be the "internal" that it is, in order to
exist. It is most intimately in this coming into presence. Presence
to: To what? To whom? To the world, but the world is the shared taking
place of all places. Presence thus comes to presence, without being to
its-self (this is why "to engender oneself' is a poor metaphor for
"to exist," which is thc metaphor for the carrying over of the self
outside of the self before the self . . . ). Presence to the world: and the so
called "technological" world should not be excluded from this,
from the moment the technological interpretation of Being will have allowed
some places to come about as the places of a presence to technology.
This presence to that is not
to itself is not a "contradiction," and does not imply a dialectical
power that "would retain it within itself." 1 can find no other name
for this than the name of "freedom." Not freedom as the property of a
subject ("the subject is free"), but freedom as the very
experience of coming into presence, of being given up to, necessarily/freely
given up to, the to (the to of the "toward," of the
"for," of the "in view of," of the "in the direction
of," of the "alongside," the to of abandoning to, of the
offering to of "to one's core," of the "with regard to," of
the "to the limit," and also of the "to the detriment of,"
"to the bitter end": freedom is wherever it is necessary to make
up one's mind to ... ).
"I engender time" as
the schema, the spacing of the place where I (who) takes place, where I
comes into presence. (Who? I am coming�here I am). The "I" does not
preexist this schematization. It does not come after it either; it
"is" it, or it "exists" it, if one can (if "I"
can) use the verb like this. If existence, as Heidegger insists, exists
according to the Jemeinigkeit, the "in each case mine," it is
not in the manner of an appropriation by "me," at each moment,
ofevery taking-place. Freedom is not a quality, nor an operation of the existent:
it is her/his/its coming into the presence of existence. If presence is
presence to presence and not to self (nor of self), this is because it is, in
each case, presence in common. The coming into presence is plural,
"in each case ours" as much as "mine." This community without
the essence of a community, without.a common being, is the ontological condition
of existence as presence-to. The plural coming is a singular coming� and this
is not a prediction. But how could one say what it "is"? One (Who?)
might try by saying: the plural liberates (or shares) the singular, the
singular liberates (or shares) the plural, in a community without subject.
This is what we have to think about. Who thinks, if not the community?