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Thinking through French Philosophy
The Being of the Question
By Leonard Lawlor Indiana University Press
Copyright © 2003 Leonard Lawlor
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-00065-1
CHAPTER 1
"If Theory Is Gray, Green Is the Golden Tree of Life"
Philosophy and Non-philosophy since Hyppolite
Derrida's claim that "the problem of language will never [be] simply one problem among others" (DLG 15/6) could be used to define what we are calling "French philosophy of the Sixties." In the Fifties, however, there were three signs heralding the approach of this philosophical movement. The first sign is Jean Hyppolite's Logic and Existence, which being a book on Hegel's logic begins with philosophy of language; indeed, Hyppolite calls Hegel's logic a "logic of sense" (LE 221/170, 228/175). The second sign is Maurice Merleau-Ponty's "Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence," which being one of the first discussions of Saussure's linguistics ends up investigating silence; indeed, Merleau-Ponty claims that language expresses as much by what it does not say as by what it does say (S 56/45). Lastly, there is Martial Gueroult's Descartes's Philosophy Interpreted According to the Order of Reasons, which aiming to respect both the soul and style of Descartes's Meditations ends up analyzing the structure of the work; indeed, Gueroult calls the work a "monument." Hyppolite's book, Merleau-Ponty's essay, and Gueroult's study, all three of which appeared in 1952, provided a spectrum of philosophical possibilities. In 1969 Michel Foucault places Hyppolite in the middle of it:
Hyppolite intentionally put his own project into confrontation with two of the great works which were contemporaneous with him ...: that of Merleau-Ponty, which was the investigation of the originary articulation of sense and existence and that of Gueroult, which was the axiomatic analysis of coherence and philosophical structures. Between these two benchmarks, Hyppolite's work has always been, from the beginning, the attempt to name and to bring to light — in a discourse at once philosophical and historical — the point where the tragedy of life makes sense in a Logos, where the genesis of a thought becomes the structure of a system, where existence finds itself articulated in a Logic. Between a phenomenology of pre-discursive experience — à la Merleau-Ponty — and an epistemology of philosophical systems — as we find in Gueroult — Hyppolite's work can be read as a phenomenology of philosophical rigor as well as an epistemology of philosophically reflected existence. (EU 782–83)
Foucault is giving us here a spectrum, a diffraction, of philosophical options with Hyppolite in the middle. The "middle" that Hyppolite's name represents is expressed by one comment from Logic and Existence: "immanence is complete" (LE 230/176). The announcement of the completion of immanence is why Foucault states (again in 1969) that Hyppolite's Logic and Existence formulates "all the problems which are ours" (EU 785). The most basic problem is this: how to conceive, within immanence, the difference between logic and existence (the Logos and time), structure and genesis, thought and experience, the said and the unsaid, monument and soul, philosophy and non-philosophy. All of the great French philosophy from the Sixties amounts to a series of solutions to this most basic problem. Therefore, while in the Fifties Hyppolite occupied a middle between a phenomenology of pre-discursive experience and an epistemology of philosophical systems, in the the Sixties, the spectrum, so to speak, narrows to a point with the result that Derrida, Deleuze, and Foucault themselves form a spectrum across the "middle" called "Hyppolite." Thirty years later, our task is clear: in order to construct new philosophical concepts — beyond différance, the trace, and deconstruction; beyond difference, repetition, and construction; beyond the statement, force, and genealogy — we must determine the philosophical options that expand across the "Hyppolite" middle. We are going to begin with Foucault.
I. Only If Theory Is Gray, Then the Golden Tree of Life Is Green
It is possible to determine with some confidence the philosophical connection between Foucault and Hyppolite since Foucault has written, at least briefly, about Hyppolite explicitly: his 1969 eulogy "Jean Hyppolite. 1907–1968" (from which I quoted above) and the end of his 1970 inaugural address at the Collège de France, L'Ordre du discourse. These two works reinforce one another in their attempt to define Hyppolite's "philosophical and historical discourse." Hyppolite's enterprise, according to Foucault, is not that of a historian of philosophy (EU 780) and not that of a historian of Hegel's philosophy (OD 76/236). Instead, Hyppolite is a historian of "philosophic thought" (EU 780); as such, he brings about "displacements" in Hegel's philosophy (OD 77/236). The displacements come about as responses to the one question that guides this history of philosophic thought: "what is philosophical finitude?" (EU 781). For Foucault, philosophical finitude refers to the limits that particular philosophies fix and always trangress, the limits of their beginnings and of their ends (EU 781). Hegel's philosophy, in particular, marks for Hyppolite the moment when philosophy "became entitled to the problem of its beginning and its completion" (achèvement) (EU 784). Particular philosophies always transgress the limits of beginning and end because of the type of relation that philosophy has with non-philosophy. Foucault claims that philosophy maintains a relation with what it is not — science or everyday life, religion or justice, desire or death (EU 783) — that is at once interior, already there silently inhabiting nonphilosophy, and exterior, never necessarily implicated by any science or practice (EU 783). This very specific sort of relation means that philosophy itself never actualizes itself in any discourse or system (EU 780). Either a philosophic discourse is interior to non-philosophy and therefore is not yet itself but still death; or it is exterior to nonphilosophy, and therefore it is itself, but as philosophy it loses contact with what gave it life (EU 784). Since philosophy itself never actualizes itself in any particular discourse or work, philosophy for Hyppolite becomes a "task without endpoint [sans terme]" (OD 77/236). Never complete, philosophic thought is devoted to the "paradox of repetition," and the paradox, according to Foucault, takes the form of a "question that is constantly taken up again in life, death, and memory" (OD 77/236). According to Foucault, therefore, Hyppolite transforms "the Hegelian theme of the completion of self-consciousness into a theme of repetitive interrogation" (OD 77/236).
When Foucault states that Hyppolite transforms Hegel's conception of philosophy into a "task without endpoint," Foucault interprets this task as "a task always rebegun [recommencée]" (OD 77/236). Moreover, he says that philosophy in Hyppolite "re-establishes contact with non-philosophy," approaches "as close as possible not to what completes it but to what precedes" (OD 78/236; cf. EU 782). What is at issue, therefore, in Foucault's own philosophy is the re-beginning of philosophy (and not its end or ends); hence the importance of the word "archeology" in Foucault (and not eschatology). The archeological concern is why he asks, "What is the beginning of philosophy?" (OD 78/236). In the eulogy, Foucault answers this question by saying that philosophic thought in Hyppolite is the "moment when philosophic discourse makes up its mind, uproots itself from its refusal to speak [mutism], and distances itself from what henceforth is going to appear as non-philosophy" (EU 780, cf. 783). What the historian of philosophic thought must do is enter into this moment. When that happens, one enters into the space of philosophy itself, which systematically erases one's own subjectivity (EU 781). The historian of philosophic thought remembers in the Bergsonian sense; "one has to form the sharp point, actual and free, of a past which has lost nothing of its being; one regrasps one's shadow by a sort of self-torsion" (EU 782). This memorial moment, in which one loses one's subjectivity and thus turns this memorial moment into a moment of counter-memory, is when discourse becomes the voice of no one (personne) (EU 779; OD 7/215, 81/237; LE 6/5); it becomes gray, and then it is possible "to open [a philosophic work up and] ... deploy it" so that it lives (EU 781). Foucault therefore concludes his eulogy by saying that, with Hyppolite, it is always necessary to recall that "if theory is gray, green is the golden tree of life" (EU 785).
This sentence — "If theory is gray, green is the golden tree of life" — alludes to lines 2038–39 from Goethe's Faust (Part I, "Study"). Hegel quotes these lines in the chapter on Reason in The Phenomenology of Spirit (in particular, paragraph 360), and Hyppolite emphasizes them in his analysis of Hegel's so-called "philosophy of language" in Logic and Existence, Part 1. But, what is most important is that Foucault changes the structure of the sentence. In the Goethe original and in Hegel and in Hyppolite, the sentence is a conjunction: "theory is gray and green is the golden tree of life"; in Foucault's reformulation, it is a conditional: "if theory is gray, green is the golden tree of life." For Hyppolite, interpreting Hegel, this sentence, uttered by Faust, represents a decision to attempt "a turn back" (un retour en arrière) from knowledge, mediation, and language to experience, immediacy, and silence (LE 19–21/16–18). Gretchen and Faust, in other words, represent the type of consciousness that despises "the understanding and science, the supreme gifts of man" (lines 1850–51). For Hyppolite, by "turning back" to the immediacy of pleasure, as Mephisto recommends, this type of consciousness thinks that it is plunging headfirst from dead theory into life itself, but, as Hegel shows, actually it is rushing straight into mute experience, into the ineffable, into indeterminateness. In short, this consciousness goes into the ground: zu Grunde gehen. Instead of plunging into concrete particularity, this consciousness ends up in abstract universality; instead of ending up in life, it ends up in death. For Foucault, however, changing the structure from a conjunction to a conditional, this sentence represents a necessity to attempt to re-begin, to return (cf. PD 534/34). For Foucault, it is necessary that theory be gray; if theory is gray, then the golden tree of life is green. In other words, in this formulation, life's enhancement depends necessarily on theory being gray; theory must become gray. In order for theory to become gray, for Foucault, one must enter into the ineffable experience that Foucault in Histoire de la folie à l'âge classique called madness. The truth of Hegel's discussion, as presented by Hyppolite, is that the subject goes into the ground in such a moment of pleasure. In his 1966 essay on Blanchot, "The Thought from the Outside," Foucault, speaking of Ulysses, describes the moment in the following way:
In order for the narrative that will never die to be born, one must listen but remain at the mast, wrists and ankles tied; one must vanquish all desire by a ruse that does violence to itself; one must experience all suffering by remaining at the threshold of the alluring abyss; one must finally find oneself beyond song, as if one had crossed death while still alive only to restore it in a second language. (PD 538/42)
Madness alone occurs if one only rushes to the sirens and does not remain tied to the mast; not to remain tied is stupidity and even suicide (cf. DR 197–98/152). What Ulysses experiences instead, as he remains tied to the mast and listening, is madness bent into thought. He experiences philosophic thought or the thought from the outside. The silence into which Ulysses enters is not subjective and interior; it is a "mutism," a refusal to speak, which allows one to listen. This "ruse" or experiment which problematizes desire places one "this side" (not beyond) the limit of discourse, in "the placeless place" (PD 537/52), in "the interstices" (OD 7/215), in forces (PD 525/27), in what must be called the "informal" (informel) (F 120/112–13, 129/121). In the placeless place, death is partial and continuous with life; here, one dies, on meurt (F 102/95). Only by crossing death in this sense, only by living as the set of functions which resist death (RR 71/54; F 102/95), can one hear the voice of "no one," personne (which is not the voice of the subject called "Ulysses"). Only then will the narrative that will never die be born. Only then, subjectless, does discourse become a monument of this singular moment; only then do forces get folded, pleasure used, ethics invented. Only if theory is gray, then the golden tree of life is green.
II. Foucault's Three Great Concepts: Metaphysics, the Actual, and Genealogy
Any attempt to determine the Foucaultian option of the "Hyppolite" middle must include a discussion of Foucault's famous 1971 essay "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History," which was first published in a volume entitled Hommage à Jean Hyppolite. In fact, the color gray can be used to define the three great concepts that Foucault presents in this essay. The first great concept is that of metaphysics. Metaphysics is not gray; it is blue. To say that the color of metaphysics is blue for Foucault means that its gaze is skyward, "lofty and profound" (NGH 146/140), toward "distances and heights" (NGH 162/155). In regard to history, metaphysics adopts a suprahistorical perspective (NGH 159/152, 167/160). Foucault provides two names for the supra-historical perspective: Platonism (NGH 167/160) and Egyptianism (NGH 159/152, 163/156). What joins these two together, for Foucault (following Nietzsche), is Socrates. Egyptianism is the belief in the immortality of the soul, the proclamation of the existence of a "beyond" as a promise of a reward (NGH 162/156), a "millennial end" (NGH 160/154). Socrates accepts this Egyptian religious belief. What then defines Platonism, according to Foucault, is its success in "founding" the religious belief (d'être parvenu à la [la croyance à l'immortalité] fonder) (NGH 167/160). Platonism founds the belief in the immortality of the soul by means of universals (NGH 165/158), objectivity (NGH 165/158), and the certainty of absolutes (NGH 159/153). Relying on universals, objectivity, and the certainty of absolutes, metaphysics conceives history in a number of ways: "the meta-historical deployment of ideal meaning and indefinite teleologies" (NGH 146/140); "monotonous purposiveness" (NHG 145/139); "to bring to light slowly a meaning buried within the origin (NGH 158/151); "a teleological movement or natural structuration" (NGH 161/154); "the obscure work of a destination ... the anticipatory power of sense" (NGH 155/148). Foucault specifies these formulations by examining the historian's concept of origin (exact essence or identity of things, greatest perfection, purest possibility, site where truth corresponded to discourse) (NGH 148–49/142–43), the historian's concepts of event (recognition, reconciliation, successive forms of a primordial intention, and ideal continuity) (NGH 159/152, 161/154), and the historian's conception of end (result, totality fully closed in on itself) (NGH 161/154, 159/152). These conceptions of origin, event, and end imply what Foucault calls an "inversion of the relationship of will and knowledge" (NGH 165/158). This inversion is "hypocritical" because it hides a perspective behind a fiction or lie of eternal truth. The inversion takes place by "bridling," "by fighting relentlessly against" one's individual will (silencing preferences, surmounting distaste, miming death) in order to show to others the inevitable law of a superior will (NGH 165/158). This inevitable law of a superior will — "Providence, ... final causes" (NGH 165/158) — is that toward which metaphysics gazes. Metaphysics therefore for Foucault supports history with an "apocalyptic objectivity"; in other words, it gives support to history from "outside of time" (NGH 159/152).
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Thinking through French Philosophy by Leonard Lawlor. Copyright © 2003 Leonard Lawlor. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
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