The philosopher must accept this “unsaid” to better signify “the proximity itself in which the Infinite comes to pass.”127 Philosophy, by the demonstration of its defeat, by this unsaid that it accepts, by this coherence that it rejects, gives way to another mode of expression—revelation and prophetic speech:
The revelation is made by him that receives it, by the inspired subject whose inspiration, alterity in the same, is the subjectivity or psyche of the subject. The revelation of the beyond being is perhaps indeed but a word, but this “perhaps” belongs to an ambiguity in which the anarchy of the Infinite resists the univocity of an originary or a principle. It belongs to an ambiguity or an ambivalence and an inversion which is stated in the word God, the apex of vocabulary, admission of the stronger than me in me and of the “less than nothing,” nothing but an abusive word, a beyond themes in a thought that does not yet think or thinks more than it thinks.128
The performative contradiction thus becomes a trace of God, an expression of the sublime. Remember that in his treatise On the Sublime129 Longinus already regarded the rhetorical figure expressing the sublime to be an oxymoron, the union of opposites. Performative contradiction allows one to conceive the infinite in the finite, the unsayable at the very heart of what is said. Performative contradiction would be the “appearance of the Infinite,” an appearance that, in Kant’s terms, is given in the impossibility of its appearance, as in the second commandment, for Kant the most sublime passage in the Old Testament.130 But—and this is the decisive point for understanding Levinas’s movement from philosophy to religion—contradiction, oxymoron, is the stylistic figure most often employed in the Psalms; it is the privileged mode of expression for prophets, who, in the face of God’s word and the prohibition to represent it, resort to this expression that destroys expression. To say the infinite in the finite is to introduce the inexpressible in the expression and thus to destroy the expression at the very moment that it is made. Such is the structure of the words of the prophets; such is the theory “of saying” that Levinas proposes. The series of substitutions in Otherwise Than Being—just as in Nine Talmudic Readings,131 which, significantly, followed this book—leaves no doubt: Levinas articulates a performative contradiction, he accepts and reverses it, by making our impossibility into the outstripping of the trace of God in us. We are rejecting philosophy for religion, Husserl for Isaiah—who, significantly, is invoked in Otherwise Than Being, which asserts a performative contradiction.
This examination is of capital importance in that we see here how the nonresolution of a performative contradiction requires the abandonment of philosophy in favor of religion. It is not at all my aim to condemn this recourse to religion, which others have shown to constitute “the very heart of Levinas’s thought,”132 nor to criticize a style that tends to revive the words of the biblical prophets against the apophansis of Greek philosophy.133 My task was only to analyze the structure of a discourse that was meant to be critical of philosophy, and here, too, I was able to establish that this discourse takes the form of a performative contradiction. Levinas—who asserts, assumes, and even calls for this contradiction—proves it.
Conclusions: Performative Contradiction and Oscillation Between Skepticism and Positivism
The conclusions of these analyses are completely identical with those of the first chapter, namely, that performative contradiction and oscillation between skepticism and positivism mark every discourse relative to the end or the supersession of philosophy.
Of course, at the heart of phenomenology, the oscillation between radical skepticism and scientism is transformed into a swaying between literature and metaphysics. The impossibility of reflecting upon the status of one’s discourse or, as Jocelyn Benoist says, of “conceiving the look that sees,” leads too many phenomenological analyses to oscillate between a discourse that would give up a claim to truth in order to become a purely poetic proclamation and an essentializing discourse that at its height would reduce the infinite wealth of a singular real to the generality of a concept. But however this difference in accent may appear—doubt or science on one side, literature or metaphysics on the other—it is the same structure that leads a corpus to go from one extreme to the other, often at the same time and in the same respects.
Of course, phenomenology—at least in Levinas—does not suffer but rather proclaims a performative contradiction, taking the defeat of Logos, the ruin of reason, all the way to the end, harbingering a turn to religion. But this distinctively Levinasian feature must not mask what is important for my initial inquiry, namely, that the end of philosophy cannot be articulated without contradiction. It can certainly be wished for, so that the time of prophets and religion will come, so that the unrepresentable will happen and God will arrive, but it cannot be discursively uttered.
Beyond this common structure—oscillation, contradiction—this examination also yields another conclusion: the critique of philosophy in this chapter has been done in the name of a new theory of meaning. If, to put it in Putnam’s terms, skepticism (analyzed in the first chapter) was born from excessive respect for the sign and scientism from excessive respect for reference,134 in this second chapter, the “catastrophe of the semantic triangle” was avoided even though necessarily the new theory of signification did not supersede the structure (contradiction, oscillation) encountered in the first chapter. The distinguishing feature of this new theory of signification was to understand the “saying” in the “said.” Of course, “saying” and “said” do not have the same meaning in Austin as in Levinas! I have shown enough to be able to ask whether these two theories of signification could be understood on the basis of a single theme—overcoming the semantic triangle by showing, beyond the content of what is said, the “saying.” This theory of signification justifies a posteriori my apparently paradoxical, even provocative, grouping of them; in fact, this proximity between Austin and Levinas can be reformulated more precisely. They both share the idea that representation must be overcome. This representation, in both cases, is understood as the imperialism of reference or of the object—the spoken object for Austin, the seen object for Levinas. But, it will be said, this project of overcoming representation can be attributed to the entirety of contemporary philosophy;135 so it should be specified that Levinas and Austin propose an overcoming beginning with the implementation of a new theory of signification that, in both cases, takes account of “saying.” Moreover, for them both, taking account of “saying” signals the end of philosophy, which must be superseded by another practice—linguistics for Austin, or ordinary language for Austin again and Cavell,136 religion for Levinas (or poetry for some of his disciples).
Of course, I am not trying to reduce these two tendencies of current philosophy by amalgamating them in a bizarre syncretism. The relevant concepts in phenomenology for understanding and criticizing representation are the visible and the invisible, limits and the infinite, that is, iconic concepts; on the other hand, the salient oppositions in the pragmatic current are reference and utterance, hence, concepts of the theory of signs. This gap between sign and face, between the linguistic and the iconic order, is especially clear in current debates about aesthetics, which are split between phenomenological and analytic trends, between analysis of signs and of images. Nevertheless (though the idea of a common structure for images and signs never frightened the Port-Royal school—but that is not the issue here137) I have been able to show that Austin, like Levinas, attempted to escape from representation by taking account of “saying” and that this accounting led, in both cases, to a reappraisal of philosophy. The two authors’, or trends’, originality with respect to those I discussed in chapter 1 is clear: they do not start from a semantic theory (investing in signs—Rorty—or referents—scientism) but from a theory of saying in what is said. They nevertheless share with the authors from chapter 1 the idea of a necessary overcoming of philosophy. But the articulation of this end demonstrates the same symptoms, too—namely, an oscillation between
two antinomic discourses (skepticism and scientism, metaphysics and literature) within a single way of thinking, and a pragmatic kind of contradiction.
Can we find these symptoms in other schools of thought that do not claim to be representative of either the generally Anglo-Saxon analytic philosophy, nor classical epistemology, nor the more “Continental” phenomenology—schools of thought that, like these, also proclaim the end of philosophy?
As I said in the introduction, we must examine not only the most blatant claims but also the most surreptitious assertions, for the proclamation of the end of philosophy has become more and more muffled, nuanced, and prevalent. We are arriving at an area of philosophy that does not declare itself, like Rorty, to be antiphilosophy, that does not conceive, like Levinas, of overcoming philosophy in religion, but that nevertheless assigns a more and more restricted role to philosophy. On this point, Habermas’s position appears to me to be absolutely exemplary in that he first tried to maintain philosophy as an autonomous, even first discipline, but then—in a progression that I will reconstruct—made it into a discipline whose contours were less and less clearly defined, a practice that was more and more dependent upon the empirical sciences.
3
The Antispeculative View: Habermas as an Example
A Philosophy in Three Movements, Epitomizing Three Possible Antispeculative Approaches
Jürgen Habermas’s philosophy seems, across its different periods, to display the most salient trait of contemporary philosophy. This contemporary philosophy is characterized by what we can call its “antispeculative” habitus, a habitus that is entirely structured around a critique of classical metaphysics, generally characterized as a symbol of the hubris of a human thought that desires to subjugate the entirety of what there is under its almighty power. All the trends that I have already discussed could be united under this banner, as could just as easily Derridian deconstruction. Habermas has illustrated this vast genre, the veritable backbone of contemporary philosophy in three periods (or movements), each in turn embraced and then abandoned: a therapeutic approach, a critical approach (that is, the idea of philosophy as bringing out a phenomenon’s conditions of possibility), and finally, his most recent approach, which adopts a certain form of naturalism.
Before Habermas, the therapeutic current had numerous representatives, since it encompasses different positions according to which philosophy is possible only as a simple deconstruction of illusion or as therapy, as a simple analysis or demonstration of the inherent error of the discipline. To deconstruct illusion and not to construct a Weltanschauung—this approach is embodied first and foremost by Wittgenstein, for whom metaphysics is a sickness and the analysis of language its cure. This approach clearly dates back to Kant and is carried out in the themes of Habermas’s first major work, Knowledge and Human Interests. Habermas exemplified the second approach, namely, the critical approach as an investigation into conditions of possibility, in his subsequent foray into “universal pragmatics.” Finally, starting in 1999 with Truth and Justification, Habermas seems to make do with a certain form of naturalism, for which the foundational authority for everything and every thought is the evolution of the species. This illustration of very different approaches by a single author is quite beneficial for me, for it allows us to understand, dynamically and from an internal perspective, the aporias proper to each of these approaches. For in the end, what has pushed Habermas to progressively abandon these different faces of his thought? The answer to this question (along with a contextualization of three fundamental moments in current philosophy, moments that Habermas sums up through his disavowals, changes, and his very evolution) will be given as the story of the defeat of the “maintaining of philosophy,” Habermas’s initial concern. Indeed, we will see how the different stages of Habermas’s philosophy can be read as the progressive abandonment of the idea of a philosophy as autonomous, distinct, and primary.
The route that has led Habermas from Knowledge and Human Interests1 in the 1960s, to The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity2 in 1985, to Truth and Justification3 in 1999, is a route marked by breaks, which has seen an overall shift from a critical theory understood as the deconstruction of illusions to a universal pragmatics that was part of the “linguistic turn”4 (more than his first stage, which was still dependent upon the paradigm of the Kantian subject), to finally arrive, today, at a sort of fallibilist perspective, in which philosophy is no longer critical theory nor linguistic analysis but becomes a science among others, in the same way as physics or sociology. This evolution in three movements is, without any doubt, the source for the profound differences of interpretation to which Habermas’s philosophy has given rise. Indeed, conflicting positions have been imputed to Habermas, thus some thinkers define his project as an attempt to transfer the traditional predicates of subjectivity (purposiveness, self-reflection) to language in order to avoid any reference to a subject. Manfred Frank proposes this reading (in order to critique it)—in his eyes, when Habermas speaks of language, he “is not very far from the position of a philosophy of origins reviewed and corrected by Heidegger and Derrida, for whom sometimes being, sometimes the text, speaks as if it were a subject capable of action and reflection.”5 Others, like Niklas Luhmann, assert to the contrary that, despite his paradigm shifts, Habermas revives the old concept of subjectivity by transforming it: “Habermas essentially considers the subject as well as the intersubjectivity that precedes it as a potential suitable foundation for truth: in his view, human subjectivity rests on the capacity for giving reasons … , which supposes a much more deeply rooted concept of the subject.”6 Thus for Frank, the subject is nonexistent in Habermas; for Luhmann, it is omnipresent. Interpretations as diametrically opposed as these cannot simply be the result of a misunderstanding by one or the other of the readers but is indeed anchored in Habermas’s philosophy itself and, in my view, in his paradigm shifts.7 Let’s consider each of these evolutions in turn to show how the symptoms of the current crisis persist, regardless of the period studied or the paradigm chosen by Habermas.
Philosophy as Therapy: Knowledge and Human Interests
I have said that Knowledge and Human Interests marks the first period of Habermas’s philosophy. In this text, he shows himself above all to be concerned to maintain philosophical discourse’s distinctness in the face of a triumphant positivist trend, whose only task is to legitimate a largely dominant technical and scientific rationality. Against this discourse, he commits himself to promoting self-reflection as a philosophical method. His critical theory is defined by a dual reflexivity: on the one hand with respect to the context from which it emerges, on the other with respect to its context of application. Following a clearly (and, moreover, self-proclaimed) Kantian movement, self-reflection appears, simultaneously and in the same respects, as both a radical questioning of rationality about its conditions of possibility and as the critical dissolution of illusions. Thus the truth will come out of a reflection upon the false, which Habermas interprets in Knowledge and Human Interests as domination in general, whatever ideological forms it may take on. Through self-reflection (which is understood in Knowledge and Human Interests as a development of communicative activity in social life), the subject will come to an accurate understanding of himself, and thereby, to “emancipation.”
But this critical theory, at the risk of itself being a mere ideology produced by society, must find a foundation. After an attempt to ground critical theory in the historical subject of the Enlightenment (an attempt that corresponds to two publications from the early 1960s, Theory and Practice8 and The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere9), this foundation will, beginning in 1965, take the form of a revived albeit transformed transcendental philosophy. Indeed, all the chapters of Knowledge and Human Interests aim to show that human interests, tied to the fundamental conditions of the reproduction and constitution of the species and of which there are three (technical mastery of nature, a practical orientation, and emancipation), are expre
ssed in types of activities that, though subject to historical modifications, nevertheless constitute “transcendental” frameworks. Habermas here is still largely dependent upon the Kantian idea of a transcendental subject. Indeed, even if, hostile to any absolute rational foundation, he refuses to consider self-reflection as the activity of an “I” and relocates this process in a contingent human species, the fact remains that this species must constitute itself as a conscious subject—self-reflection, which grounds the emancipatory interest, aims at a transparency, a self-comprehension of the subject by himself. And yet, after Knowledge and Human Interests, Habermas will abandon this support for Kantian self-reflection and this conception of a philosophy that would be only a deconstruction of illusions. Why? We must now look at the internal difficulties at the origin of this shift.
In Habermas’s early philosophy, self-reflection was understood as unconstrained communication, whose engine was “the interest in emancipation.” This emancipation is necessarily connected to its opposite, domination, always first in the collective consciousness. But this proposition—apparently simple since it says only that emancipation presupposes domination or ideology (just as, for Wittgenstein, therapy presupposes an illness)—nevertheless implies a number of theses that will be the source for this first system’s implosion. First of all, emancipation needs domination. Servitude, the first ideology, and the restless wanderings of the collective consciousness are the factual conditions for a future emancipation. In a word, without an initial servitude, there is no need to rid oneself of it; without illness, no need for therapy. Second, domination is ultimately inexplicable, as Jacques Rivelaygue very rightly remarks, “Institutions and ideologies are grounded in the facticity of a preexisting domination.”10 And indeed, in order to explain domination, Habermas can neither refer to the Hegelian theory of history—which presupposes an absolute knowledge that he rejects—nor identify this domination with simple economic exploitation—which, in his view, would repeat Marx’s error of conflating production and reflection, work and interaction. Domination thus appears as a difference without reason, as an irreducible remainder, that is to say, irrational. This second thesis, finally, calls forth a third: an impassible divide between the real and the ideal. We are, indeed, thrown back upon the opposition between an always false (because ideological) empirical communication and a direct communication that, however, remains ideal. This ideal is conceived as an inaccessible beyond that, in the final analysis, renders all communication inadequate. Here Habermas is back in the most characteristic aporia of Kantian philosophy—this aporia will raise the problem of maintaining philosophy as a critical theory, as self-reflection on an external content (ideology), a self-reflection that would aim at a self-understanding (liberation or emancipation). Indeed, if we accept these three theses (emancipation needs domination, domination is inexplicable through reason, the schism between the real and the ideal cannot be overcome), we are led to genuine internal contradictions. Thus, philosophy as critical reflection (or, to continue the comparison to Wittgenstein, as therapy) aims at the disappearance of its other, ideology (illness), but if its aim were to be realized, philosophy would disappear. It follows, in the final analysis, that philosophy aims at its own eradication. Moreover, if we maintain that domination is in fine irrational, and if we renew ad infinitum the Kantian schism between the real and the ideal, then a critical discourse, as a liberating practice allowing the dissolution of illusions, is impossible. To illustrate this contradiction, even more basic than the first, let’s consider the example of psychoanalysis. Habermas interprets psychoanalysis as a practice of clarification that participates in the exercise of emancipation by means of self-reflection. The analyst and patient are comparable to the “for us” of the philosopher and the “for itself” of consciousness, and each step of the cure is understood according to the philosophical categories of alienation, self-reflection, and appropriation. On the basis of this reading, Habermas thus makes psychoanalysis the model of a self-reflective science with the same status as philosophy. But if we apply the three statements identified earlier (again: emancipation needs domination, which is irrational, and thus there is an irreducible schism between the real and ideal) to psychoanalysis, we get the following theses: (1) the subject’s self-understanding depends upon a preexisting neurosis or psychosis, which corresponds to the claim that critical reflection must confront ideology in order to be exercised. There is nothing surprising in this first statement, and it even seems like simple common sense (who indeed would dream of seeking treatment if he neither was nor felt ill?)—but the same is not true for the next two theses; (2) self-understanding, the intended goal, will never be achieved (there will always be a schism between the real and the ideal). From a therapeutic perspective, this is a relatively distressing statement because it means, indeed, that no one will ever be cured. The third statement will accentuate this; (3) neurosis is, in the final analysis, irrational (indeed, the reasons behind neurosis cannot be articulated without sinking into a brutally causalist or essentialist explanation, proper to a Hegelian, Marxist, or even biological model that Habermas rejects). But liberation or emancipation presupposes an understanding of the reasons behind a syndrome. If this understanding is not possible, then the chances for a recovery are zero. These propositions are even more untenable if we transpose them onto social domination. But we are entitled to effect this transposition, because Habermas purely and simply identifies repression in the Freudian sense with social censorship: “The same configurations that drive the individual to neurosis move society to establish institutions.”11 If we extend this analysis consistently, it gives us the following theses: On the one hand, philosophy must wait for events (for example, Nazism) before it interprets them (the owl of Minerva). Only after the catastrophe is complete can philosophy discover, through the work of critical reflection, the power of the illusion. On the other hand, if historical catastrophes are, in the final analysis, irrational, it is utterly impossible to predict them by bringing to light the reasons that caused them and to make sure that they do not appear again. This clearly challenges the definition of self-reflection as capable of transforming the real. Therefore, to summarize the consequences (which, so we could see them more easily, I took the liberty of illustrating with the example of psychoanalysis), we are led to the following conclusions: Initially wanting to legitimate philosophical discourse against its positivist dissolution in a hard science, Habermas very closely adheres to the Kantian explanatory model and is logically led to this series of conclusions: First, philosophy is sterile in that it cannot produce any content (the object of its investigation is always outside it); second, it cannot claim to explain the real (domination is, in the last analysis, without reason); finally, it cannot even transform the real, because it is obligated to work on accomplished facts and because, moreover, it cannot through its analysis of reasons prevent the eventual return of those facts (the symptom in psychoanalysis, barbarism in history). But this cascade of paradoxes and contradictions is brought about by the seminal idea of a philosophy as simple therapy, that is, as deconstruction of illusions. We could also find these paradoxes in Wittgenstein, or at least in those who read Wittgenstein only as a therapist.12 Therapy accepts illness, but what makes the illness? It can be answered that to try to determine that would be to risk adopting foundational hypotheses (for example, that illusions stem from human nature, or from the intelligible character of humanity, or even from the necessary movement of history), a stance that Wittgenstein rejects. Nevertheless, if it is necessary to reduce illusory metaphysical subjects to ordinary language, the sole purveyor of truth, how is it that this language could engender deviant languages like that of metaphysics? Is it ordinary language that gives rise to the illusions of philosophy? How, in that case? This question is all the more pressing for if the truth is in ordinary language, I cannot see how the latter could give rise to such a monster (the metaphysicians’ delirium). Here again, we fall into troubling aporias, aporias that alre
ady appeared in my analysis of Austin.
The Death of Philosophy Page 12
