RECODING METAPHYSICS

Digitized by the Internet Archive

in 2022 with funding from
Kahle/Austin Foundation

https://archive.org/details/recodingmetaphys0000unse
RECODING METAPHYSICS
The New Italian Philosophy

Edited by
GIOVANNA BORRADORI

Northwestern University Press

Evanston, IL
Northwestern University Press
Evanston, IL 60201

Translations copyright © 1988 by Northwestern University Press.

All rights reserved.

Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Recoding metaphysics : the new Italian philosophy / edited by Giovanna

Borradori
p. cm.
Translated from the Italian.
Bibliography: p.
Includes index.
ISBN 0-8101-0799-6 (alk. paper). ISBN 0-8101-0800-3 (pbk. : alk.
paper)
1. Philosophy, Italian—20th century. 2. Metaphysics
—History—20th century. |. Borradori, Giovanna.
B3601.R4 1988 88-26014
195—dc19 GIP
Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS vii

GIOVANNA BORRADORI
Introduction: Recoding Metaphysics:
Strategies of the Italian Contemporary Thought

UMBERTO ECO
Intentio Lectoris: The State of the Art

GIANNI VATTIMO
Metaphysics, Violence, Secularization
Toward an Ontology of Decline

ALDO G. GARGANI
Friction of Thought

MARIO PERNIOLA
Venusian Charme
Decorum and Ceremony 105

PIER ALDO ROVATTI

Maintaining the Distance Pie
The Black Light 123

FRANCO RELLA
The Atopy of the Modern eg
Fabula 147

MASSIMO CACCIARI
The Problem of Representation 155

EMANUELE SEVERINO
Time and Alienation 167
The Earth and the Essence of Man N77,

CONTRIBUTORS 199

NOTES 201

INDEX 223
 ]

Io Ss Qi i]

i? Vaesgni&i0.s asia

trp i : >

U Ù

= JF > >! re
»
î

I) 7, f È
i Pula
7
VY
Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the Italian Foreign Affairs Bureau for their
generosity in funding the translation of the essays in this volume. I would
also like to thank Silvio Marchetti and Gerlando Butti of the Italian Cultural
Institute for their assistance. Finally, Iwould like to thank Giacomo Donis,
Howard Rodger MacLean, and Barbara Spackman for translating the es-
says, with special thanks to Barbara Spackman for her editorial work on
this volume.

The essays collected in this volume originally appeared in the follow-

ing Italian publications and are used here with permission.

Gianni Vattimo, “Verso un'ontologia del declino,” in Al di la del soggetto:

Nietzsche, Heidegger et l'ermeneutica (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1981).

Vattimo, “Metafisica, violenza, secolarizzazione," in G. Vattimo, ed., Filosofia

‘86 (Bari: Laterza, 1986).

Aldo G. Gargani, “L’attrito del pensiero,” in Vattimo, ed., Filsofia ‘86.

Mario Perniola, “Lo ‘Charme’ Venusian,” in Transiti (Bologna: Cappelli,

1985).

Perniola, “Decoro e Cerimonia,” in Transiti (Bologna: Cappelli, 1985).

Pier Aldo Rovatti, ‘Tenere la Distanza,” in Aut Aut 202-203 (July-October

1984).
Rovatti, “La luce Nera,” in Aut Aut 206-207 (March-June 1985).

Franco Rella, “Il Sogno della Ragione,” in Metamorfosi: Immagini de pensiero

(Milan: Feltrinelli, 1984).

Franco Rella, “Fabula,” in La Battaglia della Verità (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1986).

Massimo Cacciari, “Il problema della rappresentazione,” in L'angelo neces-

sario (Milan: Adelphi, 1985).

Emanuele Severino, “Tempo e Alienazione,” in Gli Abitatori del Tempo (Rome:

Armando, 1978).

Severino, “La terra e l'essenza dell'uomo,” in Essenza del nichilismo (Milan:

Adelphi, 1982).
rta 7 “ianne 209beefo a

ie, n
ditta natin e pe 4 dnt) 3A i
i oe oh Ci rae bra di

apres fat ai ; artdir is sissi noi ia

>
ra ‘|Beny? ASA)Od ast
ar,
Si i ei iano n ac dot i
ws x nt .* SAL

We. ce er
oe hieni ‘costia dati sine
Si
lo —— ioral i ennai uma dt sii,
= :

ob iaia eet veg. ecs pei

Sa Sy = ii
ev ntidpi Fog ind rode 2"

tina, — yee di ibiza cet mao

am) id atom tf ie ati nd —_

a Sat ah sR zia
M * en
woh

= SR
sel antcittà i tame Vit. agi feed! id oni
a sù Tie UR Luana - ae Pr re
INTRODUCTION

GIOVANNA BORRADORI
Recoding Metaphysics:
The New Italian Philosophy

The rise of a “national” segmentation of cultural discourse is almost

always linked to a condition of weakness and marginality. This can be the
case either of a community in search of its national identity, or of a nation
unable to retrieve its sense of identity in the continuity with tradition be-
cause its past is “untranslatable” within the new terms imposed by in-
tegration in the postcolonial and postindustrial scene. There is no need
to state that, for historical and de facto reasons, this is not the type of
marginal condition in which the Italian philosophical community finds it-
self; and it is not even the motivation for choosing an “Italian case.” It is,
however, an objective fact that within its most legitimate framework, that
of continental philosophy, we find Italian philosophy relegated to a sub-
liminal position: with the exception of Benedetto Croce’s neo-idealism
and the revision of Marxism carried out by Antonio Gramsci, from a criti-
cal point of view the Italian debate of the century remains, if not un-
noticed, then at least disarticulated, episodic, and fragmentary.' Hence,
if on the one hand the proposal of focusing the discussion on Italian
philosophy wishes to emphasize its undeservedly marginal position
within the international community, on the other hand this proposal is
suggested by the intrinsic nature of the Italian panorama, marked in its
historic development by an extreme singularity and autonomy with re-
spect to the Franco-German paradigms upon which non-European philo-
sophical historiography is generally based. To presuppose an eminently
“Italian” character of continental philosophy thus means embarking upon
a genealogical reconstruction that, starting from the present-day situa-
tion, will illuminate the background of those ideas, conceptualizations,
and recurrences whose philosophical declension today seems to be pre-
cisely and exclusively of an “Italian School.”
Many factors have contributed to the perpetuation of a limited and
discontinuous interest in the development of twentieth-century Italian
philosophy on the part of the non-European critical community. There is
no doubt that the Fascist dictatorial adventure, lasting more than twenty
years, with its glorification of autarchy, did not help the diffusion and re-
ception of Italian culture abroad. In a parallel situation, German Nazism
2 RECODING METAPHYSICS

did not have equally paralyzing results thanks to a massive intellectual

emigration, Jewish above all, whose internationalism not only maintained
the already existing network of contacts but also considerably strength-
ened interest in German culture and language between the wars and
during and well after the Second World War. The obstacle created by lan-
guage, laden with consequences for the very accessibility of Italian liter-
ary and philosophical culture as a whole, should, therefore, be em-
phasized. Unlike French, which was promoted to the role of a “language
of diplomacy” from the Enlightenment until the Second World War, Ital-
ian, at least after the Renaissance, was no longer an international lan-
guage, except in specific disciplines such as art history and in musical
terminology.
One should add that Italian emigration did not export the national
idiom but rather a series of local dialects belonging to a predominantly
oral tradition and having little connection with the literary sphere. The
property of little more than small family communities, dialects have al-
ways been characterized as strongly antagonistic to the prospects of in-
tegration and emancipation sought after by new generations. Lacking the
linguistic instrument with which to decipher their tradition, emigrants en-
countered not only a “material” difficulty in attempting to recover an orig-
inal tradition, but also a “cultural” difficulty in recognizing what and
where that tradition might be.
The problem of the diffusion of Italian as a language with respect to
the impact of philosophic culture in particular has, perhaps, suffered from
yet another factor that has been dominant above all during the past two
decades: the clear predominance in exportation of “visual” over “verbal”
messages. Whether on the plane of mass culture or that of high culture,
good examples of this tendency can be found in painting, architecture,
object design, high fashion, or, more generally, the design of images. If
one were to deduce that this is a historic tendency in postwar Italy, one
could also offer the clamorous success of neorealistic cinema as an
example. Such an almost inveterate practice of thinking of Italian culture
in terms of visual codes has certainly not encouraged the translation of
written texts. Indeed, even in the sector of contemporary literature, with
the exception of some acclaimed masters of our postwar period, the work
of diffusion has certainly not ventured into areas of experimentation, not
even into those areas which are by now classical.
The question of translation, however, is not merely quantitative: the
loss of historical perspectives and the consequent impossibility of recon-
structing the internal horizon of referents in which the discourse of con-
temporary Italian philosophy takes place are the primary causes of the
inability to “translate” the problematics and products of this debate
within the context of continental philosophy. The first and most serious
of the consequences of this is the emergence of the prejudice that Italian
philosophic culture does not possess genuinely “theoretical” traits but is
simply a historic-critical experience. To assert the contrary, however, is
Recoding Metaphysics 3

possible only if one reconstructs the physiognomy and declinations of the

historic radical with which present-day thinkers still continue to engage
in dialogue.’
The Two Sides of the Debate:
Hermeneutics and the Dissolution of Metaphysics
Before starting out on the long journey of reconstructing the histor-
ical genealogy of the Italian philosophical tradition, it is important to
advance a premise about the nature and disposition of today's inter-
locutors.’ This anthology is concerned with illustrating, as far as possible,
that part of the Italian philosophic debate which, in the interdisciplinary
panorama of the humanities, particularly in the United State, is today
increasingly defined by the ecumenical notion of “theory.” In consequence,
we have not taken into consideration those discussions, though interest-
ing and original, which are in some way univocally referable to a single
philosophic “material,” such as the philosophy of language, science, poli-
tics, law, or logic. With the field limited in this way to the sphere of strictly
theoretical-aesthetic pertinence, it is interesting to point out that the
stakes are substantially shared: one can, in fact, refer them back to Hei-
degger's radical critique of the Western metaphysical tradition—in
other words, to the recognition of the fundamental inadequacy of its lan-
guage. Dominated by the model of the “simple presence,” the metaphys-
ical tradition from Plato to Nietzsche has identified and confused Being
with beings (entities), thereby forgetting the essential ontological “differ-
ence” that distinguishes them. But going beyond metaphysics is not a
simple operation, since it is not the product of a remote theoretical
“error” but the rendering explicit of a “destiny” whose achieved realization
is the contemporary world, prey not only to material domination, but also
and above all to the cultural domination of technology.
Within this vast horizon of referents, which the Italian debate shares
with many exponents of the continental scene (ranging from Hans Georg
Gadamer to Karl Otto Apel, Emmanuel Lévinas, Paul Ricoeur, Gilles De-
leuze, Jean-Francois Lyotard, and Jacques Derrida), there are two posi-
tions that are both preeminent and in the greatest conflict:
1. The first converges around the proposal of interpreting the Hei-
deggerian conceptual fabric by means of philosophical hermeneutics. A
conspicuous number of thinkers fall on this side, albeit with different in-
flections and influences, including Gianni Vattimo, Mario Perniola, Aldo
Gargani, and Pier Aldo Rovatti (from the authors included in this volume)
as well as Giorgio Agamben, Gianni Carchia, Carlo Sini, Alessandro Dal
Lago, Armando Rigobello, and Gianfranco Dalmasso.* The hermeneutic
concern most of these share lies in recognizing the self-referentiality that
would characterize every attempt aimed at a radical overcoming of meta-
physics; that is, the modalities of its language. In other words, this means
acknowledging the impossibility of placing oneself “beyond” meta-
physics, for to undertake its radical overcoming would lead to accepting
4 RECODING METAPHYSICS

just that totalizing function of thought no longer held to be theoretically

legitimate. It therefore ensues that it is indispensable to maintain a
dialogical-conversational relation to metaphysics, and that the current
task of philosophy resides precisely in the negotiation with its language.
A maieutic process par excellence, philosophy in fact corresponds to an
increasingly more critical consciousness of the totalizing and self-referen-
tial presuppositions on which metaphysics is founded. From this arises
the absolute centrality of the hermeneutic instance—that is, the institut-
ing of knowledge as a “system” of interpretative reference.
2. On the opposing side is the position of those who are willing to
give up on the “radical” critique of the metaphysical tradition and on the
construction of a thought capable of posing itself “beyond” that nihilistic-
technological destiny that has characterized the concept of Being in all
of Western philosophy, from Plato to Nietzsche. This position would con-
front the question of Being in a “constructive” sense, breaking down the
limit that Heidegger himself had accepted by giving up on the writing of
the third part of Being and Time: “Time and Being” was to have been its
ambitious title, given that precisely this final section was to have faced
the problem of Time in relation to Being as such, and not the problem
of Being in relation to Time and the ephemeral becoming of existence.
The proposition of an ontological question of time, in fact, defines the area
in which the second side of the Italian debate moves, inaugurated by
Emanuele Severino and continued, in certain aspects, by Massimo Cac-
ciari.’ To pose the ontological question of time thus means soliciting the
necessity for a “radical” thought in that it obliges philosophy to operate
on the level of the “foundations” and not the “ways” of thinking. In clear
opposition to the notion of Being as interpretation, as the movement of
referral from sign to sign, from symbol to symbol, and from definition to
definition, Severino arrives at the logical demonstration that the “becom-
ing” of time is a purely illusory given. Becoming does not exist because
it is founded upon an original nihilistic aporia. According to Severino it
is, in fact, precisely becoming—that is, the conviction that beings arise
and are annihilated in time—which founds the secular developments of
Western metaphysical tradition, from Plato and Aristotle onward. I will
later clarify the terms and justifications with which he proposes a “return
to Parmenides,” that is, to a static and contemplative conception of pre-
Platonic Being.

Hermeneutics and Historicism

It is above all toward the hermeneutic side that international criti-
cism has turned its attention. Nevertheless, simple curiosity has failed
to evolve into a more authentic and scientific interest because of the dif-
ficulty of reconstructing the network of referents internal to Italian tradi-
tion within which contemporary Italian thinkers have profound roots.’ In
order to understand their real theoretical “originality” it is not sufficient
to investigate the evident affinities that Italian hermeneutics shares with
Recoding Metaphysics 2,

the continental scene. For contemporary Italian philosophy, the her-

meneutic code does not, in fact, represent a deliberate choice but rather
a hereditary given, ingrained in its genetic patrimony—at least since Vico
aligned himself against Descartes at the dawn of the Enlightenment and
modernity. Whereas France elected itself the land of rationalism, England
the cradle of empiricism, and Germany the guardian of metaphysics, Italy,
with historicism, withdrew into an imaginary past, abandoning the role of
cultural catalyzer that during the Renaissance had placed it at the center
of the European koiné.
The first symptoms of a “national” coagulation of Italian philosophy
took place in response to the need for a textual confrontation with tradition:
I say textual because here the tradition does not appear as a definite
complex of values, behaviors, and institutions but as a composite horizon
of historical writings. Each of these writings, moreover, is hermeneutic by its
very nature in that it represents a “historical” stage of a process of con-
tinuous interpretation of a monumental past, more imagined and desired
than philologically deduced, beginning with archeological fragments.
Even the construction of the cultural unity of the nation took place, in
Italy, within a kaleidoscopic play of historic lenses: the Risorgimento, the
mid-nineteenth-century movement to unite Italy, elected the Renais-
sance as its antecedent; the Renaissance in turn had recognized its ele-
ment of formal and political cohesion in classical thought, in turn handed
down through the words of the great Hellenistic historians and masters
of rhetoric. A picture within a picture, a regressus ad infinitum at whose end
lies a historical invention, a museological obsession.®
The discussion in historical writing regarding writings which had pre-
ceded it is neither playful nor necessarily ironic: its figure is neither sym-
bolic nor surreal. This is one of the most distinctive traits of the mental
garment of historicism and was to remain a legacy for Italian art and cul-
ture of this century: from the metaphysical painting of de Chirico, Carra,
and Savinio to the “Novecento” movement up until that “radical quota-
tionism” that weak thought shares with the visual experiences of neo-
Mannerism and the Transavanguardia. For “historical writing,” the open-
ing to the imaginary, the dream, the fantasy, and the irrational is never
abandoned to the cathartic play of free association but is always guided
by a fundamental lack of innocence. The sign always already possesses
formal, conceptual, historical, and cultural connotations that guide its
constant movement of reference to another sign in the dynamics of the
interpretation. Thus in the hermeneutic circle the grammar of the refer-
rals from sign to sign is constructed starting from the relative predictabil-
ity of a “de-sign,” and not from the relative unpredictability of the “free
play” (Derrida). It should be specified that the hermeneutic mechanism
of the de-sign is always implicitly a project of historical-cultural disarticu-
lation of the sign, whereas Derridean “deconstruction” is instead oriented
by the “pure” free play, or the desire for discovering—in continuation—
new semantic horizons of the grammatological difference (differance).
6 RECODING METAPHYSICS

But before we can undertake any discussion of contemporaneity, we

must briefly reconstruct the roots of this hermeneutic tradition of the de-
sign which, beginning with Giambattista Vico, has forged the relationship
between Italian philosophy and the codes of modernity in the form of an
essential incompatibility.

Vico and the Tradition of the “De-sign”

Vico’s centrality with respect to the Italian hermeneutic tradition is
marked by a series of positions which, in many ways, were also to be
shared by Rousseau and will determine his marginal position within the
rationalistic and positivistic developments of the French culture of mo-
dernity. A generation older than Rousseau, Vico was already suspended
between an initial enthusiasm for and a final rejection of the new objec-
tivistic and rationalist methodologies which led from Descartes to the ex-
perience of the Encyclopedists. Vico, like Rousseau, was to become one
of the authors most quoted by the romantics and by the German idealists.
Unquestioned Altvater—as he was designated by Goethe—of the compara-
tive method in the fields of jurisprudential right, ethics, and mythology,
he also shared with Rousseau an interest in linguistic investigation, which
has often given rise to the claim that he was “an unknown giant of
linguistics” as a discipline in its own right. But unlike Rousseau, who,
emblematically, directed French culture toward the idea of emancipation
through action, Vico convinced Italian philosophy of the priority of mem-
ory and of form as necessary metalinguistic memory, without which not
even poetry can exist; he argued for the priority of rhetoric and eloquence
over grammar, for the absolute supremacy of history. For Vico, reason is
a stage of historical evolution which belongs to the cycle of “courses and
recourses” (corsi e ricorsi) of human history and which is developed after
perceptive intuition and imagination. Hence myth, the invisible fruit of
the notion of primitive “poetic knowledge," phenomenon among
phenomena, belongs to the history of mankind. The scienza nuova is there-
fore the science of human history and for whose fruitfulness the principle
of the identity of truth with fact is the guarantor (verum ipsum factum),
given that man is certainly the author of the human world—language,
myths, institutions, laws. The field of historical investigation thus cir-
cumscribes the boundaries of legitimacy of knowledge: in Kantian fashion,
it renders the critical function of knowledge explicit.
History represents the defense against Cartesian ratio: Vico's histori-
cism imprinted a profound antirationalist bias on later Italian philos-
ophy, from Croce to the present. The very concept of “weak thought,” the
latest result of Italian hermeneutic reflection, is defined in clear-cut op-
position to the Cartesian-rationalist tradition, with which it identifies tout
court the totalizing root of the innovative and revolutionary “ideologies”
of modernity. This “weakness” (debolezza) of thought is in fact taken up as
the product of “a rationality which must de-strengthen itself from within,
cede ground, have no fear of drawing back, ... must not remain paralyzed
Recoding Metaphysics x

by the loss of the luminous, unique and stable Cartesian reference.”

Whereas in French philosophy Descartes inaugurated the research on the
new subjectivity as research on the heart of darkness of perception, in Ital-
ian philosophy Vico inaugurated it under the aegis of the ineluctability
of the relationship between human finitude and the universality of the
time of history. We can trace that radical difference between the two fig-
ures who opened the doors to the philosophy of the twentieth century in
France and Italy, Henri Bergson and Benedetto Croce, to this seven-
teenth-century divergence between the two orders of the discussion—
those of perception and history.
But what was it that spurred the no-longer-young Vico to take on the
anti-Cartesian polemic with so much fervor? What induced him to hypos-
tatize the necessity of that “humanistic” modus which the Italian tradition
after him would never abandon? In his critique of Descartes, and of
rationalism in general, Vico let himself be led by the Neoplatonic tradi-
tion, which even before Augustine had been initiated by Plotinus and Por-
phyry. This tradition came down to Vico by way of that particular under-
standing of Renaissance hermetic Neoplatonism which derived from
oriental wisdom the idea that the root of “truth” lies only in poetry: a
theme dear to Vico that was to induce him to recognize in the aesthetic
“the first operation of the human mind,” and to erase the epistemological
boundaries betwen philosophy and philology. Yet with the Scienza nuova
and the exposition of the theory of the courses and recourses of history,
Vico, in a historicist sense, translated the static, metahistorical, and ar-
chetypal emphasis that the hermetic tradition attributed to poetic truth.
In the Scienza nuova, poetic truth, which remains the ground of imaginative
activity (spiritual activity, par excellence), is submitted to the cyclical
evolution and involution of human history, so that it is no longer poetry
but history that is elected the text of texts, book of books, and writing of
writings. History thus takes on the indispensable role of “formal” medi-
ator of that original spiritual essence of which poetry is the depository.
Hence the necessity of elevating interpretation to an epistemologi-
cal category, the fervor of the anti-Cartesian and antirationalist polemic,
and, finally, the profoundly autochthonous matrix of Italian hermeneutics
which owes little, in the genealogical sense, to the contemporary German
hermeneutic ontology of Heidegger and Gadamer.
In opposition to Descartes, Vico asserts that knowledge consists not
in the “consciousness” of existing but in the “science” of one’s own think-
ing, given that the way in which thought is produced remains a mystery.
The primary factor is the modality in which thought states itself: form,
style, and writing become textual and not metatextual events. So it is
that, with Vico’s Scienza nuova, the Italian hermeneutic tradition defines
itself to an ever greater extent as the archaeological and museological
examination of the relics of ancient languages and civilizations which are
“textually adrift.” In this respect let us read the etimologia fantastica that Vico
suggests for the Latin substantive “scientia”: “Not fortuitously does it
8 RECODING METAPHYSICS

seem that the erudite Latin substantive scientia has the same etymon as
the adjective scitus, which also means beautiful [bello]: inasmuch as beauty
consists in a just symmetry as much of the members between them-
selves, as in their total combining in a beautiful body, thus should sci-
ence not be considered if not as the beauty of the human mind?”!°
Vico judges as “impious” that Promethean impetus with which Des-
cartes tries to return to the “zero degree,” to the perception of the “con-
sciousness of existing.” To this objection one could counter that to
acknowledge an absolute centrality of history also represents an act of
impiety. However, it is important to bear in mind that for Vico historic
research was not the result of atheistic reflection but of a process of sec-
ularization of Christian thought: the revelation of the role and the temporal
power of knowledge. And here there emerges a “spiritualist” radical of
Augustinian stamp which impresses a decidedly eudaemonistic character
on Vico's antirationalist position. Augustinian spiritualism directs Vico's
position toward the search for the equilibrium of the soul by way of the
developing of internal analysis; it convinces it of the “positive” and not
destructive potential of existential excavation; and it spurs it on toward
the thematic formulation of the infinite in terms of “analytics of infin-
itude.”
Side by side with the Renaissance hermetic tradition, Augustinian spir-
itualism represents a second aspect of Neoplatonic reflection whose influ-
ence is not limited to Vico but extends throughout the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries: from the romantic return to the ancien régime tradition
which characterized the thought of Antonio Rosmini, Pasquale Galuppi,
Vincenzo Gioberti, and Giuseppe Mazzini during the Italian Risorgimento; to
the conjugation of existentialism with the religious problematic carried out,
above all, by Luigi Pareyson; and finally to the aura of postexistentialist
humanism in which the hermeneutic notion of pietas is located, and with
which Gianni Vattimo stigmatized the rethinking of metaphysics and its
world—a rethinking that can take place only under the banner of “a weak
ontology, which thinks Being as trans-mission and monument . . a patri-
mony constituted and handed down on the basis of prophetic illumina-
tions.”'' Following the first historicist disinterment of Vico, by way of
Risorgimento-romanticism and postwar existentialism, spiritualism has
taken shape as a highly specific and distinctive trait of Italian thought.

The Choice of Historiography as the Horizon of Meaning: Benedetto Croce

The ghost of both Vico and historicism has always haunted the re-
lationship between Italian philosophy and the quest for the “moderniza-
tion” and rationalization of thought attributable to the Aufkldrung. And this
became increasingly true following the peculiar reissue of Vico's thought
offered during the first twenty years of this century by Benedetto Croce.
For many intellectuals of our postwar period, Vico, through Croce, was
the symbol of the “closure” of the Italian academy within the nation’s bor-
ders and its isolation with respect to the broader themes of the interna-
Recoding Metaphysics 9

tional debate. Poised between nostalgia for an ancien régime by now de-
clining and the ferment of the new age of progress and emancipation,
Vico and Croce were—and for some, still are—emblems of an endemic
conservatism to be surpassed. In this violent reaction to historicism set
in motion between the two world wars, which continued at least until the
end of the 1950s with the contribution of Marxists, a handful of existen-
tialists, and some phenomenologists, an important part was played by
the proximity of Fascism and “neoidealistic” philosophy. Even though of
the two leaders of this school, Croce and Giovanni Gentile, only the latter
approved of the regime, accepting active appointments of considerable
importance, Croce (who never participated in the academic structure, al-
ways playing the role of the free thinker of democratic tradition) also un-
derwent the unjust screening of “anti-Fascist censorship.” In some re-
spects, the Fascist regime identified Croce as its “official” opponent, at
times for both national and international demagogic ends. Yet not-
withstanding a thorough confrontation with Marxism, Croce had always
been the promoter of a bourgeois liberalism that immediately found it-
self in open contradiction with the emancipatory emphasis and the per-
vasive “politicization” of Italian left-wing culture after the Second World
War. At the root of the anti-Crocean polemic, however, lie also more-
strictly theoretical motivations, intrinsic to the rereading of Hegel’s ideal-
ism in a “historicist” key.
The most important is an epistemological “discrimination” against
the exact and social sciences, conducted on the basis of an aprioristic
distinction between the “theoretical domain” (falling within the compe-
tence of art and philosophy) and the “practical domain” (the competence
of ethics and economics).!* In fact, Croce did not intend—unlike Wilhelm
Dilthey and the German historicists—to confer on the human sciences
(Geisteswissenschaften) an epistemological status equal to that given by
positivism to the sciences of nature (Naturwissenschaften): for Croce, no
such proposition of method asserted in the abstract was necessary. In his
radical “antienlightenment’—which is a precise derivation from Vico's
antirationalism—Croce maintained that there was no real “critical” prob-
lem of historiography in the Kantian sense, since the epistemological
question, considered as a whole, is solved in the immanentistic affirma-
tion that “life and reality are history and nothing other than history.” In
this perspective, which Croce himself defined as “absolute historicism,”
the domains of the theoretical and the practical influence each other re-
ciprocally and are internally interdependent, with the aim of perpetuating
the cyclical movement of history itself. Philosophy depends on art, which
furnishes the former with the language, the means of its expression; and
the practical domain depends—by its very nature—on theoretical knowl-
edge, which illuminates it; and, finally, within the same practical domain,
the economic-utilitarian moment influences the ethical moment and vice
versa. History, which here is superimposed on the Hegelian notion of
Geist, traverses its moments and its fundamental forms cyclically: each
10 RECODING METAPHYSICS

time it proves to be enriched with the content of the previous circula-

tions, without ever repeating itself.
It is precisely this idealistic and metahistorical conception of history
that is the cause and the place of the collapse—in the Crocean system—
of that emancipatory necessity upon which the materialist vision of his-
tory is based. But the Crocean concept of history is not the major point
of friction for Marxists alone: those (few) existentialists who declared
themselves anti-Crocean also found the element of maximum incompati-
bility in “absolute historicism,” insofar as it is improperly interpreted as
negation of the notion of subjectivity as awareness of human finitude.
And lastly, the movement of the so-called “return to reason” also aligned
itself in open antithesis to the compactness of neo-idealist philosophy
taken as a whole. In this group we might include those adepts of be-
haviorist pragmatism who, following John Dewey, inaugurated interest in
such human and social sciences as anthroplogy, linguistics, sociology, as
well as the followers of Anglo-American neopositivism, who took charge
of definitively debunking Benedetto Croce’s “humanistic rhetoric.” After
more than thirty-five years, we can certainly affirm now that neither the
pragmatist nor the neopositivist “opening” has consistently contributed
to the formation of “original” thought in postwar Italian philosophy.|?
The anxiety to “internationalize” Italian culture—the professed pro-
vinciality of which was certainly to be blamed more on the Fascist autar-
chic regime than on the philosophy of Croce—led to accepting excessive
simplifications. First of these was the idea that the Crocean system was
a monolithic block endowed with a formidable compactness and trans-
parency; in reality it was the tormented fruit of half a century of second
thoughts and rehabilitations stemming from Croce’s encounter with the
most important currents of continental thought: ranging from fin-de-siécle
neo-Kantism to Marxism; to the psychology of Johann Herbart; and to
Dilthey, Simmel, and Bergson. Nor did Croce's approach to Hegel repre-
sent an episode of national conservatism, given that it was connected to
the contemporaneous “discovery” of the German thinker by Wilhelm Dil-
they: and Hegel, between the two wars and after, was retrieved and made
sacred by the Hegel renaissance, or else his “existentialist renaissance,”
to which figures like Alexandre Kojéve, Jean Hyppolite, and Jean Wahl
contributed. Max Weber's and Georg Simmel’s elaborations of Croce's
thought should convince us of the pertinence of Croce's contribution to
the contemporary European debate. In his Philosophie des Geldes, Simmel
once again takes up Croce’s approach to Marxism. Paradoxically, Croce's
detractors accused him of two opposite sins: in the notion of “absolute
historicism” some detected the signs of a regressive “metaphysical
character,” whereas many “professional” philosophers repudiated him for
not being a “real” philosopher but instead a “critic” of culture, of litera-
ture—in other words, a moralist, a rhetorician. The contradictory nature
of these judgments testifies to the lack of ideological serenity with which
many intellectuals railed against Croce in the postwar period, when a
Recoding Metaphysics Il

judgment of the guilts of the Fascist period was unjustly superimposed

on the judgment of philosophy.
Benedetto Croce did not have only detractors, however: bypassing
the more extensive field of the humanities (from literary history to art
criticism and the philosophy of jurisprudential right), where one can say
that his influence coincided with the “sentiment of culture” of an entire
age, his impact was also crucial in the more specific field of philosophy.
Together with Dilthey and Hermann Nohl, Croce was among the first in
Europe of the 1910s to emphasize the centrality of Hegel’s thought with
respect to the formation of contemporary consciousness and subjectivity.
This centrality, already glimpsed by Antonio Labriola and subsequently
emphasized by Gramsci, stands at the origin of the antiscientistic and
anti-Engels revision of Marxism and of the revaluation of the young Marx
as opposed to the Marx of Capital and at the same time, in France and
Italy, inaugurated that Hegel renaissance which was a fundamental ingre-
dient of existentialism.
Thus in France, at the close of the 1960s, Jean Hyppolite acknowledged
that practically from the Second World War on it was in the pages of Croce
that the existentialist generation was initiated to Hegel (to the "romantic
and mystical” theoretician of unhappy consciousness, to the revolution-
ary and not conservative Hegel). About ten years before, in Italy, Enzo
Paci attributed to Croce a founding definition of life, not completely iden-
tifiable with the Hegelian notion of spirit, and therefore in correspon-
dence with the “negative” sensibility of existentialism. As Paci wrote:
Croce's last writings seem to be the introduction to a new Crocean
philosophy, a critical rethinking of the path run, a new interpretation
of the relations of Croceanism with Vico and Hegel. Vico is no longer
only the philosopher of art but also the philosopher of ‘vitality’ as
barbarism, “of the terrible force of vitality,” as Croce writes. And vital-
ity leads Croce back to Hegel because ‘vitality ... is restlessness that
is never satisfied” and precisely for this reason ends up by becoming
the “spring” of dialectic... . Vitality is positivity but within it there is,
nevertheless, a “persistent negativity’: vitality is also evil... . “When
I am asked what Hegel has done I reply that he redeemed the world
from evil because he justified it from evil.”'*

In Croce, Paci identifes the prophet of a new sentiment of life who recog-
nizes vitality as “ambitious dimension,” as “the original sin of reality.” For
nascent Italian existentialism, Croce’s neo-Vichian historicism rep-
resented a primary point of reference with respect to the national tradi-
tion: none of the three “masters” of existentialism in Italy—Enzo Paci
(1911-76), Nicola Abbagnano (1901-), and Luigi Pareyson (1918—)—has
ever denied such a lineage.

Paci and Pareyson: Existentialism, Historicism, and Phenomenology

The arc of the development of the Italian “philosophical figure”
shows substantial continuity from Vico to nineteenth-century romantic
12 RECODING METAPHYSICS

spiritualism; to Croce; to the existentialist adventure, which, starting in

the 1940s will remain upon the scene as background noise to the “return
of Husserl” of the 1960s; to the beginning of the debate on hermeneutics;
and to the discussions concerning the crisis of Marxism. There were two
versions of Italian existentialism which chiefly inscribed themselves on
the contemporary scene.
The first was headed by Enzo Paci, who in his mature work joined
the existentialist problematic to the phenomenology of the later Husserl
and to some aspects of historic materialism. On a ground of referents
comparable to the one on which Maurice Merleau-Ponty worked in
France, and once again within the Italian tradition, Paci directed his re-
search not toward the field of perception but toward the field of history,
toward the relationship between subject and object mediated by a “pro-
jectuality” of a temporal order. From Vico and Croce, Paci inherited the
propensity, within the concreteness and the contradictions of history, to-
ward resolving the dialectical clash between reason and life, Being and
being, reality and desire.'? Paci did not develop a familiarity with psycho-
analysis nor did he venture into the purely metaphysical dimension of a
radical nihilism—conceptual horizons which define, instead, the esprit of
French thought and the Geist of contemporary German thought. If his in-
terest in history moved Paci toward Marxism, materialism, and the ques-
tion of intellectual engagement, it also introduced him to some expressions
of American neopositivism (above all to Alfred North Whitehead), in
which he found theoretical terms for capturing the complexity of the rela-
tions between subject and object, philosophy and other fields of know-
ledge.
It was the interest in formalizing the existential link between subjec-
tivity and the world, and also the epistemological relationships between
different disciplines, which led Paci to Husserl, particularly to the phe-
nomenology of the later Husserl, which Merleau-Ponty was then rediscov-
ering in the Louvain archive. Phenomenology for Paci was a transcenden-
tal science in a strictly methodological sense: the epistemological web of
the great encyclopedia of sciences, the idea-limit of the interdisciplinary
project.'’ This phenomenology, which owed much to the confrontation
which Husserl himself faced during the last years of his life with the exis-
tentialist transgression of Heidegger, is not a “pure” science in the Kan-
tian sense. The subject is not an originary terminus ab quo, a remote and
archetypal Ur-ich, but the product of an ineluctable historical and inter-
subjective intentionality: the relation between “subjectivity” and its pro-
ject is consequently fundamental, often resolved in the coming to con-
sciousness of an emancipatory desire. For the contemporary Italian de-
bate, the return to Husserl begun by Paci during the 1960s enjoyed a role
very similar to the one played by structuralism in France: the preemi-
nence of an inter- and transdisciplinary formalistic hypostatization of the
method as an end in itself. The dream of the method's self-justification
animated the French structuralist experience and the Italian phenom-
Recoding Metaphysics 13

enological one in parallel fashion; and the fear of the totalization and
complete self-referential state of that method similarly animated the
French poststructuralist experience and the hermeneutic and postphe-
nomenological experience in Italy. What, then, divides them?
The “phenomenological structure” precludes the analysis of the un-
conscious and therefore any version of psychoanalysis, but not the anal-
ysis of the anamnesis of the historic and formal accretions of its appear-
ing. The phenomenon, increasingly more so with respect to the structure,
brings with it traces of a belonging: the “sign” emerges as a still-undivided
entity of cultural “meaning.” Now it is no longer by starting out from the
subject—alone, pure, transparent, and still Cartesian—that the dissemi-
nation of the center and the dismemberment of the structure are carried
out: the metaphor of the rhizome no longer represents the labyrinthine
dispersion of the desiring subject but the labyrinthine dispersion of in-
terpretations—in other words, of the historical backgrounds of the phe-
nomenon, of the potential “literariness” proper to its surrounding world.
To this extent language becomes the anamnestic horizon of interpreta-
tion, the line of demarcation between Being and being, historic memory
and subjective memory, historicism and existentialism.
With the concept of “intentionality” phenomenology establishes that
psychic activity must be in relation to an object or to other subjects, that
consciousness is always consciousness of some thing. In other words,
both consciousness and its object exist only within a reciprocal, inten-
tional relation. “Weakness” or debolezza (Vattimo), “friction” or attrito (Gar-
gani), and “distance” or distanza (Rovatti) are the rhetorical figures of this
relation, which gradually comes to extinguish itself but is not yet inter-
rupted.'® Originary Being, absolute phenomenal purity, and the will to
total suspension of every form of relationship with metaphysics are still
metaphysical acts. The critique addressed by Italian hermeneutics to
many versions of French poststructuralism (above all that of Deleuze,
Foucault, and Jean Baudrillard) is that their attempt to go beyond meta-
physics is still too radical, that the “glorification of simulacra” risks giving
back to them that very ontos on proper to metaphysics.'? Weakness, fric-
tion, and distance, on the other hand, are suggestions, or even only allu-
sions to the necessity of maintaining a dialogue with a metaphysics that
is worthy of attention precisely because it is worn and eroded by self-criti-
cism. The modalities of this progressive attenuation of the intentional
relationship between subject and object delimit the unstable space of
Promethean action left to philosophy.
Within a horizon of referents clearly distinct from that of Paci we find
the second version of Italian existentialism, that elaborated by Luigi Par-
eyson. Even today, it continues to exert a significant impact on the con-
temporary debate on hermeneutics. Whereas existentialism for Paci
belonged to a markedly “atheistic” sphere of reflection (in tune with the
historicism of Vico and Croce and subject to being comprised by and
systematized within the methodological grid of phenomenology), for
14 RECODING METAPHYSICS

Pareyson “existential finitude” is the answer to an ontological and reli-

gious question implying the possibility of a Christian existentialism.
Referring to a certain mystical element introduced by Schelling into
romanticism, to Kierkegaard and Gabriel Marcel, Pareyson takes up the
spiritualist tradition of Platonic and Augustinian origin, which, side by
side with Vico's historicism, represents the second soul of the fundamen-
tal antirationalism of Italian thought.?° The conviction that one must pro-
ceed to an interior analysis (that is, to an Augustinian dilatation of time)
in order to grasp the omnipresent ontological problem affirms the abso-
lute actuality of existentialism. Pareyson understands existentialism as a
“philosophy of the person” which consciously assumes the impossibility
of proposing any “objectifying” solution to philosophical problems.?! The
“speculative” character of philosophy lies exactly in this, in the indissolu-
ble connection between truth and person, Being and person, and freedom
and person. This “personalistic’ perspective would, according to Parey-
son, also remedy the negative conception of the individual in which both
French and German existentialism have run aground. The renewal of the
spiritualistic tradition, from which Pareyson at a certain point draws
away, is absolutely not to be undertaken in an “intimistic’ but in an on-
tological key. The “positive” character of the person as such depends on
his ontological and “creatural” relationship with God, the recognition of
whom is source and stimulus of the search for truth, always and only to
be found in interpretation.
It is precisely the identification of this correspondence between exis-
tentialism and ontological dimension in the Italian debate between the
1970s and 1980s which renews the dominant interest in hermeneutics
and opens an extremely close dialogue with the section of continental
philosophy comprising the later Heidegger, Gadamer, Lévinas, Ricoeur,
and Derrida.?? The actuality of existentialism within the new ontological
and hermeneutic sensibility, all directed ‘toward an immanent criticism
of the Western metaphysical tradition, continues to be formulated in
Pareyson’s terms; that is, as “the first present-day model of revivification
of non-Enlightenment, ‘romantic’... reason not content with the ‘mod-
est’ and basically ‘lazy’ tasks of a theoretical, empirical, or technological
reason, but not for this less critical of technological reason—in fact, more
vigilant and aware.”??
The presence of an existentialistic leitmotiv in the recent Italian her-
meneutic community characterizes its sense of “hermeneutic philosophy”
in a way differing considerably from the formulations of Heidegger, Lé-
vinas, and Ricoeur. It is once again the “historical” instance that identifies
the specificity of Italian philosophical thought: it is significant in this re-
spect that Pareyson had already sought to resolve the ontological prob-
lem in terms of an “ontology of freedom,” that is, of the manifestation of
Being to the person in history, and not in terms of an epochal ontology
or “ontological difference.” Just as Pareyson’s ontology of freedom is not
projected onto an absolutely transcendent scenario but is found in the
Recoding Metaphysics 15

milieu of interferences between the subject and its historical surround-

ings, so neither do the “weak ontology” (Vattimo) and the “friction of
thought” (Gargani) represent the vacuum of pure différence. Instead, they
portray the fullness of a Being understood as recollection and monu-
ment, memory, “that which is handed down.” In this way weak ontology,
like the friction of thought, registers an always-waning intensity of the
conflict between the subject and its surrounding world: the progressive
weakening of the clash between historic projectuality and historic reality.
It is precisely this which places Italian hermeneutics closer to Gadamer
than to any other thinker, and which similarly distances it from Lévinas
and Derrida. It is again thanks to these considerations that one could de-
velop the already suggested comparison between the kind of hermeneu-
tic deferral proper to the “de-sign” (which is set in motion by the desire
to disarticulate the historical-cultural “meaning” of the “sign”), and the
kind of deconstructionist deferral proper to free play (which is set in mo-
tion instead by a centrifugal desire for associative dissemination).

Toward a Hermeneutics of Secularization

Beginning in the 1970s, interest in the ontological question related
to post-Heideggerian debate gained force among the generation that, un-
like the existentialists, had not taken an active part in the events of the
Second World War or in the culture of postwar reconstruction. It was this
generation that had personally witnessed the debate on the status of
Marxism after Gramsci and Lukacs (culminating in the spring of 1968) and
the “historical crisis” of Marxism, terminating in Italy with the internal di-
vision of the left and the tragic experience of terrorism. In fact, the recent
flowering of hermeneutics has often been judged—particularly in relation
to the personal experiences of individual authors who, like many French
poststructuralists, had dedicated part of their energies to political engage-
ment—a reaction to the “crisis of ideology,” in which the “crisis of ideol-
ogy” is to be understood as an overturning of the categorical framework
of modernity. More specifically, in the crisis of ideology we also find a
crisis of legitimacy of rationality’s “grounding reason”, the state of ob-
solescence in which the figure of the “organic” intellectual, along with his
social commitment, finds himself; and the loss of confidence in a general
“humanistic alternative” able to oppose the increasingly ever more exten-
sive processes of technological rationalization, reification, and predomi-
nance.
Although the debate on Marxism and the crisis of ideology in a
broad sense are to be considered events of great importance in Italian—
and European—intellectual development of the past twenty years,
nevertheless I think it hasty, if not simplistic, not to identify (as much
criticism does not) the very deep roots that present-day hermeneutics
sinks into the most consolidated humus of Italian tradition. Even if to
criticize the totalizing supposition intrinsic to every “strong” ideological
position—including Marxism—is an essential objective of hermeneutic
16 RECODING METAPHYSICS

reason, this does not imply that a critique of Marxism is its only objective
or that Marxism is its privileged referent. Instead, the specificity of con-
temporary hermeneutic discussion lies in its being a sort of methodolog-
ical “anamnesis” of the Italian philosophical tradition from Vico to post-
romantic spiritualism and twentieth-century existentialism. To acknowl-
edge the multiple traces that root Italian hermeneutics in its national
past is not only the expression of historical curiosity but also an indis-
pensable operation aimed at the comprehension of the text. In fact, only
a diachronic analysis is capable of deciphering the complexity of the in-
tertextual references and of situating contextually the background of cer-
tain statements.
For example, the idea that reason can no longer-be grounded beyond
the rules and boundaries of language—a presupposition central to her-
meneutic discourse—was already present in Vico and Croce if one thinks
that these elements of the definition of language are once more under-
stood in a truly “historic” sense. Furthermore, the “Italian” concept of her-
meneutics is distinguished by the fact that language or writing are not
granted a superior ontological status (something which takes place in dif-
ferent ways and to different degrees both in Heidegger and in Derrida);
language, like the hermeneutic process that defines its interpretation, is
accepted instead as the historical horizon within whose extension one
carries out the progressive “desacralization’ or secularization of metaphysi-
cal discourse. This is why Vattimo, before speaking of “weak thought,”
explored the notion of “ontology of decline.” Linked to the concept of
“sunset,” crucial to the posthistoricist Italian and German traditions, Vat-
timo’s formulation of decline starts from Heidegger's well-known thesis:
that is, “the name ‘Occident,’ Abendland, not only designates our civiliza-
tion's place in a geographical sense but names it ontologically as well in-
sofar as Abendland is the land of the setting sun, of the sunset of Being.”?4
The distinctive characteristic of the new ontology is “sunset,” under-
stood as the progressive “weakening” of the persuasiveness of every uni-
vocal definition of Being. In other words, the new ontology is founded
upon decline, to the extent that decline is not to be understood as the
beginning of the end of a certain reality but as the unavoidable process
of secularization that today defines our relationship to metaphysics.
The “weak” modality of our thinking therefore shares with its histori-
cist ancestor the idea that language is “the crystallization of acts of the
word, of modes of experience, located in the casket of death.’?? And it
owes its existentialist progenitor for the idea that finitude is the “unit of
measure” of human acting: that is, the idea that “casket’—which is
death—'is also, finally, the source of those few rules which can help us
move in existence in a way which is neither chaotic nor disordered, while
knowing that we are not headed anywhere.””° Even the key in which the
connection between hermeneutics and nihilism is proposed reveals a his-
toricist peculiarity, given that the concept of nihilism is also formulated
within a methodological horizon. In Italian hermeneutics, nihilism, in
Recoding Metaphysics LT

fact, is reborn under the guise of “genealogical method,” aimed at un-

masking false values and ideological mystifications. Interesting in this re-
spect is the flowering of Italian studies on Nietzsche in his “middle
period,” author of Gay Science and Human, All-Too-Human, a freethinker and
critic of culture. Whereas much French criticism—from Derrida to De-
leuze—has concentrated on the final phase of Nietzsche’s production, at-
tempting to attribute to him real ontological “theses” (for example, the
idea of Being as difference), Italian criticism has focused instead upon
the pseudoenlightenment and “experimental” Nietzsche, admirer of the
“moralist” tradition from Montaigne to Voltaire, always taking care to
maintain thought distant from any a priori and programmatic obsti-
nacy.?’ This methodological adoption of the nihilistic viewpoint has also
played an important role in the renewal of the Marxist categorical frame-
work, especially as far as the question of technology is concerned.”®
Technology in fact has come to occupy a “destinal” horizon, since it no
longer represents a variable of economic development but is established
as the “destiny,” both congenital and irremediable, of the Western meta-
physical discourse. What the possibilities are of interfering with this des-
tiny, and the modalities of the “conversation” to be held with it, are
questions that still find themselves at the center of the Italian debate. As
will become clear, this is the watershed that divides the hermeneutic
camp from the more radical proposal of a definitive dissolution of meta-
physics. The fate of “historicization” that falls to nihilism invests every
element of the categorical picture of Italian hermeneutics: modes and
itineraries—and not absolute concepts—give meaning to experience.
More than ever before a consistent part of Italian thought today ques-
tions and reinterprets methodologically the antirationalist specificity of
its national tradition. And it is in this aspect that its singularity within
continental philosophy should be acknowledged. The debate on the crisis
of reason and its foundationalist potentialities is, in reality, a revival of
the dialogue with the secularizing function of historicist reason which a priori
demystifies those questions concerning the “loss of referent” and the
“glorification of simulacra” on which a large part of the French poststruc-
turalist discussion is hinged.*?
Indeed, the task of the secularizing function of reason is to discern
and “interpret” formal quality, the decorum—or dignity—of appearances
(Perniola). From this point of view both the original and the copy (the
two theoretical poles of the notion of simulacrum) come to find them-
selves in a melting pot of pragmatic interferences, uses, habits, rituals,
and “ceremonies” which confuse their respective values of authenticity
and artificiality. This continuous movement of dissolving between the
original and the copy distinguishes the typically aesthetic, “Venusian”
charme—to cite Perniola—of interpretation. The most irreducible mark of
Italian hermeneutics is to be found here: in the sensibility, the curiosity,
and ability in manipulating the ethical and aesthetic deposit of the civitas
which is to be found in every object—be it original or a copy. Going
18 RECODING METAPHYSICS

beyond metaphysics can come about only by way of a secularization of

the new hieratic value of metaphysics itself, a process to be carried out
in accordance with an “ethic of thinking.”
The figures that animate Italian hermeneutics—Vattimo's “decline,”
Gargani's “friction,” Rovatti’s “distance,” Perniola's decorum, and Rella's
“thresholds” (limina)—represent the modalities of expression of this
“ethic of thinking,” insofar as the idea of an intentional relationship
between subject and object has not yet been completely abandoned.
The horizon of absolute transcendency within which phenomenology
has inscribed the dualism between consciousness and the world is, by
now, merely a recollection: it is substituted for, today, by a minute “care”
vis-à-vis the relations and implicit pragmatic interferences in that re-
lationship. Friction, distance, the rhetoric of the “margin,” as well as the
decline of any foundational ontology, all express the need for a pause,
the need to apply a brake to the Cartesian arrogance of reason. In short,
they describe a new space of mobility of memory understood as disloca-
tion of subjectivity in time.
The construction of meaning is therefore subordinated to the in-
eluctable activity of memory, which once again takes on the purely “liter-
ary” character of the studia humanitatis. Memory corresponds to meditation,
to a state of internal absorption, to the retreating from the “care” of the
world. Recollection, while it scans the time of the “affabulation” and nar-
ration, lives contemporaneously within the space of pietas, which is both
proof of wisdom and requisite of beauty. Ethics and aesthetics fuse to
the point of constituting themselves as the sole founding dimension of
thinking: rhetoric represents its instrument of argumentation. Relieved
from the worry of posing as universal methodology, proper to linguistics
of structuralist stamp, the art of eloquence becomes a simple mnemonic
technique—that is, a series of technical precepts by which to systematize
and classify the activity of memory. Rhetoric therefore assumes the func-
tion of “control” and the systematization of memory. Umberto Eco recon-
structs its theoretical background as follows:
When I say that a mnemotechnics is a semiotics, | use the term semio-
tics in the sense given it by Hjelmslev: a mnemotechnics is a connota-
tive semiotics. To assert that the arts of memory are a semiotic
phenomenon is little more than banal. Linking “y” with “x” in some
fashion usually means using one as the signifier of the other. The fact
that the signifier is frequently a mental image (a memory place can
be either real or imaginary) does not change things. From Ockham to
Peirce we have assumed that a mental icon or concept can be under-
stood as a sign as well.*°
This is what exonerates Italian semiotics from the self-referential
labyrinth of structuralism. And Umberto Eco is to be credited with the
explication of this difference. Semiotics is “necessarily” an art of memory
given that semiotic process is in its own right a mechanism of “making
present,” of recollection.
Recoding Metaphysics 19

“Every assertion, more than presupposing, posits the entities that it

names; renders them present in the universe of discourse with semiotic
force, even if only as the entity of a possible world . . . it [is] impossible
to use an expression to make its own content disappear. If the arts of
memory are semiotics, it is not possible to construct arts of forgetting on
their model.’*' The impossibility of conceiving an ars oblivionalis, a rhetoric
of oblivion in semiotic terms, is what gives rhetoric, tout court, the charac-
ter of an art of memory. If it is impossible to forget (or to forget to re-
member), it is therefore inevitable to remember. Semiotics is thus to be
considered a technique of systematization and classification that is im-
manent to language, which in turn is nothing other than the making pres-
ent of the anamnestic artifice. Understood in this way, semiotics is also
only a different declension of the hermeneutic position of Italian phil-
osophy: of that tradition of de-sign inaugurated by Vico at the dawn of
modernity. In attempting to define the relationship between his own her-
meneutic notion of the text and the deconstructionist concept, Eco him-
self recognizes that “more than a parameter to use in order to validate
the interpretation, the text is an object that the interpretation builds up
in the course of the circular effort of validating itself on the basis of what
it makes up as its result. I am not ashamed to admit that I am so defining
the old and still valid hermeneutic circle.”??
The text, like the sign, is not an almost abstract referentiality to which
are addressed those infinite textual and intertextual interpretations of
the user, as deconstruction and the aesthetics “of reception” sustain. Nor
is it the self-referential product of coherences internal to the system of the
text, as structuralism would have it. It is, instead, the double reciprocal
projection of a “model reader,” implicit in the text as intentio operis, and a
model interpretation that the reader constructs starting out from his own
interpretation of the model reader (intentio lectoris). It is therefore correct
within this “moderate” perspective that the text be attributed with an au-
tonomous and complete intentionality, an established intentio operis, as
Augustine has already suggested, on the basis “of an examination of the
text as a coherent entity” (Eco). Just as the interest of hermeneutics lies
not in the total leveling of the dialectic between subject and world, or of
the difference between language and historicity, but in the pragmatic res-
idue inherited from these metaphysical dualisms, so also the interest of
semiotics—according to Eco—is to defend the rights of interpretation, dis-
tinguishing between the use and the interpretation of a text. Although
both use and interpretation are theoretical possibilities which in the em-
pirical practice of reading always prove to be unpredictably combined, it
is nevertheless necessary to preserve the sense of a polarity between
them, which implies the sense of an identity of the text in its own right.

Necessity as the Unconsciousness of the Western Unconscious

As already mentioned briefly at the opening of this “genealogical” re-
construction of Italian thought, hermeneutics is not the only voice engaged
20 RECODING METAPHYSICS

in contemporary debate: in opposition to it we find the position of those

who have not given up on the attempt to “go beyond” metaphysics by
proposing a radical critique of its language.
Whereas the propositions of contemporary Italian hermeneutics are
deeply rooted—and even “determined’—in a national past stretching
from Vichian historicism to postromantic spiritualism, to Croce and exis-
tentialism, the proposal of going beyond metaphysics is connected to the
tradition of Italian thought in a much more indirect way. It in fact takes
up certain themes and modes of argumentation of medieval Scholasti-
cism which—from a new point of view—supply the key to reviving some
topics of Greek speculative thought (from Parmenides to Plato and Aris-
totle). This theoretical instrumentation, in part already explored by the
Italian neo-Scholastic movement between the end of the 1940s and the
1950s, has been exhumed by Emanuele Severino and superimposed on
the rethinking carried out by Heidegger covering the arc of Western
thought from Plato to Nietzsche, thus giving Severino the linguistic and
categorical references that allow him actively to confront the great ques-
tions of contemporary European debate.
It is interesting to recall some of the problems of neo-Scholastic re-
flection, given that in Italian postwar philosophy it followed an itinerary
completely separate from that of the dominant existential and phenom-
enological interests of Paci and Pareyson, the “masters” of the present-
day hermeneutic line supported by Vattimo, Gargani, Rella, Rovatti, Per-
niola, and—to some extent—Eco. In the atmosphere of general rejection
of every form of absolute thought and of transcending the “radical his-
toricity” of the human condition (which constituted the reply of European
culture to Fascism and Nazism) neo-Scholasticism represented the inter-
rogation of Christian thought with respect to the possibilities of meta-
physical reason and ethical universality. At the close of the 1940s Etienne
Gilson and Jacques Maritain in France and Gustavo Bontadini, among
others, in Italy reproposed the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas as the in-
dispensable starting point for a new foundation of ethics, of the relation-
ship between faith and reason. In order to reassert ethics as absolute
value (hence also metaphysical) Gustavo Bontadini (1903—)—who was
Severino's teacher—set about establishing a process of extreme “essen-
tialization” of metaphysical discourse.
Primarily in opposition to neopositivism, Bontadini wanted to reaf-
firm that fullness of Being which modern thought from Descartes to Kant
had dissolved into the dualisms between certainty and truth, between ap-
pearance and reality. In particular, he asserted that the discourse of full-
ness of Being could begin once again by recuperating the threads of
idealism on which, according to him, one ought to bestow the merit of
having reopened the metaphysical possibility, in having reunited the an-
tithesis between phenomenon and noumenon. The meaning of this full-
ness was reconstructed on the basis of the consideration—taken from
Parmenides—that Being cannot be referred only to its determinate con-
Recoding Metaphysics 21

tents but emerges in opposition to non-Being.** And it is in this way that

Being presents itself to mankind, in the form of becoming. Thomistic
philosophy explains becoming as the principle of cause and effect:
Aquinas proves that omne quod movetur ab alio movetur. But, adds Bontadini,
Aquinas proves the means (ab alio) but does not prove that becoming
effectively takes place (movetur) on the basis of that same thing: that be-
coming is not originary. Becoming, which takes place in sensuous experi-
ence, is consequently in contradiction with the logic of logos. But it is pre-
cisely this situation of conflict between experience and logos—according
to Bontadini—that engenders the transcending of experience, and therefore
legitimates metaphysical reason understood as the absolute discourse of
Being.
Within the context of a radical secularization of the neo-Thomistic
conceptual framework, Severino opposed Bontadini with a fundamental
objection: that he had not resolved the contradiction intrinsic to the on-
tological status of becoming, for that contradiction does not consist in
the more or less originary being of becoming but in the hypothesis of an
alteration between Being and not Being implicit in the very idea of be-
coming. Becoming is the annulling of that which is the identification of
Being with non-Being and, therefore, negates the principle of noncon-
tradiction. The conviction that beings can be and can be annihilated in
time is the very essence of metaphysical thought: by virtue of this convic-
tion the West has determined its history as “nihilistic destiny.” More
specifically still, nihilism, in hypothesizing becoming as the possibility of
beings to enter and leave Being, in reality defines the Being of beings by
virtue of the—equivalent—hypothesis that they do not exist. In other
words, nihilism consists in the conviction—unconscious but essential for
the history of the West—that being is nothing, that the ontological status
of each single being corresponds to a fundamental “alienation” from
Being. At the foundations of the West. therefore, lies the concept of time
as temnein, based on the separation of being from Being. More radically
than for Heidegger, for whom the nihilism of metaphysics, from Plato on-
ward, was determined by the confusion between Being and being, for
Severino it is the hypothesis itself of the non-Being of things, or their
death, which comes to constitute itself as his unconscious motive.

For metaphysics, things “are.” Their “Being” is their not-Being-a-

Nothing. Insofar as they are, they are said to be “beings” (enti) or “Be-
ings” (esseri). But being, as such, is that which can not-be: both in the
sense that it could not-have-been or could not-be, and in the sense
that it begins and ends (was not and is no longer). Metaphysics is
the assenting to the not-Being of being.*“

Greek thought represented the crossroads separating the nihilistic

destiny of the West from the still-unexplored path that Severino defines
as the “destiny of necessity,” the unconsciousness of nihilism, or, put
otherwise, the unconscious of the West's conscious. “According to
27 RECODING METAPHYSICS

Necessity” (kata to Khreòn) is in fact the formula with which the most an-
cient Western text begins: the fragment by Anaximander, handed down
to history by Simplicius in his commentary on Aristotle’s Physics. Neces-
sity rears up on the crossroads: the thought that has led it and kept it
there is disseminated in the Greek language. Evident in the Greek word
khreon is a series of instrumental determinations, such as the dimension
of “using” (khraomai) and the idea of the “hand” (kheir), so that in the most
archaic definition necessity designates “that of which one has need and
which the hand can take and give.” For Anaximander, Necessity did not
represent a “material” instance at all, referable to a decision, a gesture, a
wish, but was instead the ineluctable appearing and concealing of a
being, whether concrete or mental, human or divine: “Necessity is the
very grip of the hand which holds and gives owing to its inescapable
strength.” It is no longer the hand, the instrumental and technical in-
stance of nihilistic dominion of the world, which follows and pursues
things, but the things themselves which obey the order given to them by
the hand, “according to Necessity.”
The “timbre” of that destiny (of Necessity) which has always flowed
and will always flow outside of metaphysics is for Severino indefinable in
the methodological and programmatic terms in which the way of thinking
of the West is expressed. Necessity is not a project that one can pursue,
betray, or correct. Insofar as it is a fundamental ontological nexus which
binds Being to beings, Necessity is an “originary structure” of everything
immanent to the things of the world. To abandon nihilism in order to re-
ceive Necessity therefore implies the retrieval of an authentic meaning of
being, in which this meaning signifies “mirroring the meaning of being in
language and existing according to the mirroring.” No instrument that is not
the ecstatic listening to the Necessity of Being in its appearing and its
concealing of itself can grasp the most authentic meaning of things:
metaphysics cannot be undone from within, as the mise-en-abyme of de-
construction suggests, nor is the disenchanted conversation with texts of
the metaphysical tradition inevitable, as hermeneutics and above all her-
meneutic ontology maintain. The only guide is in the awareness that at
the basis of the West there lies a nihilistic mystification of the meaning
of being: the conviction that being is nothing. Furthermore, the mystifica-
tion—which is also nihilistic—of the meaning of Necessity follows from
the mystification of the meaning of being. The determination of that
which is necessary is established by virtue of that which is not necessary.
Necessity is such by virtue of non-Necessity, that is, of freedom. Accord-
ing to Severino the destiny of the West descends from this equation be-
tween Necessity and freedom, which is nothing other than the coinci-
dence of Necessity with the nihilistic abyss of death.
Freedom represents the essential alienation of every being from its
Being and keeps the “earth'—that is, the totality of mankind and things,
human and divine—separated from Necessity. Freedom is that which
isolates the earth from Totality and makes man think that it is the only
Recoding Metaphysics 23

“safe region." Freedom, from the viewpoint of the destiny of Necessity,

represents the ineradicable solitude of man and of things on the Earth.
The Necessity to which Anaximander alludes, on the other hand, is
a “destiny” that does not represent the negation of freedom tout court but
a territory different from that in which freedom and Necessity are iden-
tified. It is essential to “come out” from the metaphysical perspective in
order to approach the “glimmer” of Necessity, the luminosity of the in-
evitable link that unites every being to its Being. Necessity does not rep-
resent a semantic field but the relation between any semantic fields
whatsoever, and it is originary because it is absolutely free from its own
negation. It is the principle of noncontradiction: “Necessity is such be-
cause the negation of Necessity is by necessity self-negation.”*?
Necessity thus defined inscribes itself within a totally metahistorical
horizon and lies in pure contemporaneousness. Similarly, it admits of no
gradation whatever by an epistemological unit of measure: its validity
and operationalism are total. Thus the choice between joining or separat-
ing oneself from totality represents the watershed between the nihilistic
perspective of the West and the unexplored path of Necessity. It is to the
originary decision to distinguish beings from Being, the part from the
whole, that the current specialistic fragmentation of knowledge should be
referred. The postmetaphysical development of contemporary hermeneu-
tics, as well as the antimetaphysical propositions advanced by neopos-
itivism and by analytical philosophy, are the unavoidable consequences
of the “decline of totality.”
The immediate implication of this discourse on totality is a position
of radical critique of modernity. It is precisely the thought of modernity
that, in deifying the values of progress and innovation, has brought to
completion that essence most proper to nihilism, which consists in the
adhesion to the becoming of time understood as temnein, as the par-
ticularistic separating of beings from Being. To the extent that it antici-
pates every novelty of becoming, totality is a concept that is supremely
antagonistic to the principle of modernity. Just as totality constitutes an
unbreachable bastion against instrumental reason, so the decline of to-
tality—according to Severino—leads to the absolute predomination of
technology.
Greek thought is witness to the origins of this decline. “Being is and
cannot Be”: the definition of Being given by Parmenides glimpses the
domination of totality. The completeness of Being consists in its extreme
semantic simplicity, insofar as it can act neither as the subject nor as the
predicate of specific beings. The question of empirical becoming put in
this way, however, remains unresolved. Plato was the first and last West-
ern philosopher to dare to go beyond Parmenides, challenging the threat
of nihilism. His efforts were directed toward liberating Being from the so-
lipsism into which Parmenides had relegated it, elevating it as the predi-
cate of all determination. But Being (the idea), in separating into infinite
determinations, fatally loses its original simplicity and is characterized as
24 RECODING METAPHYSICS

that semantic complex which is the Being-itself and not Being-other.

When in the Sophist Plato reopens the investigation—without closing it—
into the meaning of Being, he finds himself in the impasse that Severino
defines as “the failed patricide.” This failure by Plato to overcome Par-
menides marked the definitive turn of the West toward nihilism—a turn-
ing point of which Aristotle with his doctrine of power and action became
the first legislator.
The suggestion of “returning to Parmenides” is therefore not to be
taken literally but rather in the sense of “beginning again from Par-
menides,” on an alternative path to the one taken by the West. Phil-
osophy, as the search for the truth, is destined to remain outside of
truth since “the long path along which it would claim to arrive at truth
can only proceed from non-truth.” The original structure of Necessity, the
most authentic truth of Being, is never the starting or ending point of a
search but represents instead the indispensable nexus between the
transitivity of the appearing of beings on the eternal scene of Being and
Being-itself.
In decreeing the illusory character of every project that aims to ad-
dress, to govern, or to overthrow the necessary order of things, Severino
ends up affirming the radical incompatibility between truth and indi-
vidual self-determination. As dis-traction of the part from totality, sub-
jectivity is in fact by definition always far from the truth, even when it
pursues philo-sophia: “It is Necessity itself which establishes, as non-
truth and as the being mortal, that being which says 'I’.”*° In this perspec-
tive, which one could perhaps call “deterministic,” what space is therefore
left to thought? What does thinking mean for Severino?
If for the West the action of thought has always been conceived in a
dynamic sense as a gesture, an action, the purest and most crystalline of
all possible gestures and actions, outside of nihilism it loses any kind of
intentional characteristic and takes on-the form of the “appearing of the
all.” Thought is the astonished wonder that arises when faced with the
necessary appearing of the all, that appearing which has always already
illuminated the all. Consequently, just as Necessity “is not a gesture but
the place in which every gesture occurs,” neither is thought a gesture but
the place in which the Earth—that is, the sum total of mankind and
things, human and divine—occurs. The authentic meaning of thought is
a “stable circle” that delimits the eternal vault of appearing: thoughts,
feelings, desires, and emotions are external stars of Being which enter
and leave the vault of appearing.
According to Severino, that technological modus of our civilization,
inaugurated at the dawn of modernity by the premises of experimental
science, depends upon precisely the value of the hypothetical (or of free-
dom) that Western metaphysics grants to everything on Earth. Only “out-
side” both West and East, therefore, will it be possible to practice the au-
thentic philo-sophia that means existing and thinking “according to
necessity’—that is, according to “the appearing of the inviolable agree-
Recoding Metaphysics 25

ment between each thing and its being." Only by going back to the cross-
roads in Greek thought before Plato will man be permitted to abandon
the self-destructive path of nihilism and practice philo-sophia. 5”

At the end of this journey through contemporary Italian philosophy

the extent to which its two major currents are inseparably tied to the vi-
cissitudes of their national pasts appears clear. Hermeneutics developed
as an intertextual discourse on the products of historicist tradition,
which, starting with Vico, and by way of postromantic spiritualism, arrives
at Croce and existentialism. The proposal of a radical critique of Western
metaphysics, though less faithful to its own tradition, nonetheless never
interrupts its dialogue with the legacy of Aristotle and the neo-Scholastic
reflection, which at least from the second half of the nineteenth century
has remained alive within a sector of Italian philosophy. Rooted in the
evident contrast between these respective theoretical positions, the dis-
cussion between the two sides is today the most lively element of the
Italian philosophical debate. Whereas hermeneutics attributes to itself a
maieutic function, aimed at describing the totalizing and self-referential
presuppositions on which metaphysics is founded (from which, however,
a definitive detachment cannot be hypothesized), the “radical” line fol-
lowed by Severino, on the other hand, does not admit the possibility of
undoing the nihilism of metaphysics from within, and even less so by
means of the ever more disenchanted dialogue that hermeneutics carries
on with it. In this way history comes to take on a diametrically opposed
role for each of the two approaches. Hermeneutics, posing itself as the
composite horizon of all historical “writings,” identifies in history the in-
tertextual referent of every discursive process. On the other hand, the
perspective that acknowledges the new principles of legitimacy of reason
within the metahistoric sphere of Necessity fatally atrophies every dialec-
tical function of history in which, by being self-reflective conviction that
becoming appears, the nihilistic foundation of the West resides.
From the clash of these two theoretical standpoints there emerges
a further fundamental disagreement concerning the attitude of philosophy
toward the question of technology. If it is true for both sides that the
problem of instrumental reason is to be inscribed within the broader
horizon of nihilism, the ways and nature of the relationship that each
side thinks philosophy must entertain with that horizon are absolutely
antipodal. If for hermeneutics, in compliance with Heidegger's discussion,
it is necessary to interact with the strategies of technological evolution
by maintaining an ethical control over them, for those who, on the other
hand, place themselves within the point of view of Necessity (foreign to
the metaphysical tradition), technology remains the instrument of domi-
nation and self-destruction precisely of that nihilistic destiny in which
the West finds itself trapped. This difference of positions implies a series
of consequences: not only on the purely theoretical plane but also on
that plane of exchanges and interrelations which both sides offer the
26 RECODING METAPHYSICS

interdisciplinary field of the humanities. The dissolution of the original

dialectical density of history, which is congenital to the originary horizon
of Necessity, annuls the dimension of“textuality.” The destiny of Necessity,
which designates the ineluctable and eternal bond which unites every
being to its Being, predetermines the appearing of every reality, human
and divine. The space reserved for interpretation therefore contracts to
the diachronic perspective, insofar as it consists in the fundamental op-
position between Western nihilism and the originary structure of Neces-
sity. Thus philosophy closes in upon itself, conceding very little space
to a confrontation of a synchronic type or to transdisciplinary contam-
ination.
The hermeneutic line, on the other hand, in looking at history as the
intertextual horizon of every discursivity, continues within the synchronic
perspective to widen and intensify its incursions into the contiguous field
of the humanities. Nihilism also—and above all—appears to be a poly-
vocal referent to “historicize,” since it is not absolute concepts but the
“modes” and “itineraries” of thought which constitute themselves as the
meaning of experience. Thanks to the continual relaunching of the in-
terpretive challenge, philosophy not only chooses “humanistic” contami-
nation as its operative territory but also takes upon itself those very pro-
cesses of secularization of artistic practices. Memory, understood in its
broadest meaning as intertextual and metapsychological key, designates
the new place of meditation. Through memory, ethics and aesthetics be-
come mingled within a single founding dimension of thinking: phi-
losophy becomes the “art” of arguing and interpreting by means of that
“historic” instrumentation which is thought.
UMBERTO ECO
Intentio Lectoris:
The State of the Art

During the past decades we have witnessed a change of paradigm in

theories of textual interpretation. In a structuralistic framework to take
into account the role of the addressee looked like a disturbing intrusion
since the current dogma was that a textual structure should be analyzed
in itself and for the sake of itself, in an attempt to isolate its formal struc-
tures.
During the 1970s, on the other hand, literary theorists, as well as lin-
guists and semioticians, had focused on the pragmatic aspect of reading.
The dialectics between Author and Reader, Sender and Addressee, Nar-
rator and Narratee have generated a crowd, indeed impressive, of se-
miotic or extrafictional narrators, subjects of the uttered utterance (énon-
ciation énoncée), focalizers, voices, metanarrators, as well as an equally
impressive crowd of virtual, ideal, implied or implicit, model, projected,
presumed, informed readers, metareaders, archireaders, and so on.
In consequence, different critical theories, such as the aesthetics of
reception, hermeneutics, the semiotic theories of interpretative coopera-
tion, reader-response criticism, up to the scarcely homogeneous archi-
pelago of deconstruction, have appointed as the main object of their
research not so much the empirical results of given personal or collective
acts of reading (studied by a sociology of reception) but the very function
of construction—or deconstruction—of a text performed by its interpret-
er—insofar as such a function is implemented, encouraged, prescribed,
or permitted by the linear textual manifestation, or by the very nature of
semiosis.
It seems to me that the general assumption underlying each of these
theories is that the functioning of a text (including nonverbal ones) can
be explained by taking into account not only its generative process but
also (or, for the most radical theories, exclusively) the role performed by
the addressee and (at most) the way in which the text foresees and di-
rects this kind of interpretative cooperation.
It must also be stressed that such an addressee-oriented approach
concerns not only literary and artistic texts, but also every sort of semi-
osic phenomenon, comprehending everyday linguistic utterances, visual
28 RECODING METAPHYSICS

signals, and so on. In other words, addressee-oriented theories assume

that the meaning of every message depends on the interpretative choices
of its receptor: even the meaning of the most univocal message uttered
in the course of the most normal communicative intercourse depends on
the response of the addressee, and this response is in some way context
sensitive. Naturally, such an allegedly open-ended nature of messages is
more evident in those texts that have been conceived in order to magnify
this semiosic possibility, that is, in so-called artistic texts. I insist on this
point because during the previous decades artistic texts were taken as
the only phenomenon able to display, provocatively, the still-unacknowl-
edged open-ended nature of texts. In the past decades, however, such a
nature has been theoretically rooted into the very nature of any kind of
text. In other words, before the change of the paradigm, artistic texts were
seen as the only cases in which a semiosic system, be it verbal or not,
magnified the role of the addressee—the basic and normal function of
such a system being instead that of allowing an ideal condition of univo-
cality independent of the idiosyncrasies of the receptor. But recently
semiotic theories have insisted that—even though in everyday life we are
obliged to exchange many univocal messages, working (with difficulty) to
reduce ambiguity—the dialectic between sender, addressee, and context
is at the very core of semiosis.
This paper will focus particularly on the change of paradigm in liter-
ary theories. The reasons will be clear in the course of the next para-
graphs: facing the new paradigm I shall take, courageously, a “moderate”
standpoint, arguing against some degenerations of so-called reader-re-
sponse criticism. I shall claim that a theory of interpretation—even when
it assumes that texts are open to multiple readings—must also assume
that it is possible to reach an agreement, if not about the meanings that
a text encourages, at least about those that a text discourages. Since liter-
ary texts are today viewed as the most typical phenomenon of unlimited
semiosis, it will be worthwhile to debate the problem of textuality there
where the very notion of text seems to dissolve into a whirl of individual
readings.

1. Archaeology
Undoubtedly the universe of literary studies has been haunted, in
the past years, by the ghost of the reader. To prove this assumption it will
be interesting to ascertain how and to what extent such a ghost has been
conjured up by different theorists, coming from different theoretical tra-
ditions.
The first who explicitly spoke of an “implied author’ (“carrying the
reader with him") was certainly Wayne Booth (1961). After him we can
isolate two independent lines of research that, until a certain moment,
ignored each other, namely, the semiotico-structural one and the her-
meneutic one.
Intentio Lectoris: The State of the Art 29

The first line stems from Communications 8, where Roland Barthes

spoke of a material author that cannot be identified with the narrator.
Tzvetan Todorov evoked the coupled “image of the narrator—image of the
author” and recovered Anglo-Saxon theories of point of view (from Henry
James, Percy Lubbock, E. M. Forster, up to Pouillon {1946]), and Gerard
Genette started to elaborate the categories (definitely dealt with in 1972)
of voice and focalization. This line also includes some observations of
Julia Kristeva (1970) on “textual productivity,” certain lucid pages of Jurij
Lotman (1977), the still-empirical concept of archilecteur by Michael Rif-
faterre (1971), the discussions on the conservative standpoint of E. D.
Hirsch (1967), and the debate brought to the most elaborated notions of
implied reader in Maria Corti (1976) and Seymour Chatman (1978). It is
interesting to remark that the last two authors drew their definition directly
from Booth, ignoring the similar definition proposed by Wolfgang Iser in
1972. The same happened to me, and I elaborated my notion of Model
Reader along the mainstream of the semiotic-structuralistic line, matching
these results with some suggestions borrowed from various discussions
on the modal logic of narrativity (mainly Tehn van Djik, Janos Petofi, and
Schmidt) as well as from some hints furnished by Weinrich—not to speak
of the idea of an “ideal reader” designated by James Joyce for Finnegans Wake.
It is also interesting to remark that Corti (1976) traces the discussion
on the nonempirical author back to Michel Foucault (1977), who, in a
poststructuralist atmosphere, posits the problem of an author as a “way
of being within the discourse,” a field of conceptual coherence, a stylistic
unity, which as such could not but elicit the corresponding idea of a reader
as a way of recognizing such a being-within-the-discourse.
The second lineage is represented by Iser (1974), who starts from
Booth's proposal but elaborates his suggestion on the basis of a different
tradition (Roman Ingarden, Hans Georg Gadamer, and naturally Hans
Robert Jauss—who in his turn was developing some of the suggestions
of the Russian formalists and the Prague school). Iser was also largely
influenced (as it is demonstrated by the bibliographical references of Der
implizierte Leser) by the Anglo-Saxon theorists of narrativity (well known by
Todorov and Genette) and by Joycean criticism. One finds in Iser's first
book few references to the structuralist lineage (the only important
source is Jan Mukarovsky). It is only in The Act of Reading (1978) that he
brilliantly (and better informed than his structuralistic colleagues) tries
to reconnect the two lineages, with references to Roman Jakobson, Lot-
man, Hirsch, and Riffaterre, as well as to some of my remarks of the early
1960s.
Such an insistence on the moment of reading, coming from different
directions, seems to reveal a felicitous plot of the zeitgeist. And speaking
of the zeitgeist, it is curious to notice that at the beginning of the 1980s
Charles Fillmore, coming from the autonomous and different tradition
of generative semantics (critically reviewed), wrote an essay entitled
30 RECODING METAPHYSICS

“Ideal Readers and Real Readers” without any conscious reference to the
above-mentioned debates.
Certainly all these author/reader couples do not have the same theo-
retical status (for a brilliant map of their mutual differences and identities
see Pugliatti {1985]). However, the most important problem, it seems to
me, is to ascertain whether such a reader-oriented atmosphere really rep-
resented a new trend in aesthetic and semiotic studies or not.
Sifting through the advocates of this trend, I am happy to find myself
and my fellow travelers proceeding in a very respectable historical main-
stream.
The entire history of aesthetics can be traced back to a history of
theories of interpretation and of the effect that a work of art provokes
in its addressee. I consider response-oriented Aristotle’s Poetics, the
pseudo-Longinian aesthetics of the Sublime, the medieval theories of
beauty as the final result of a “visio,” the new reading of Aristotle per-
formed by the Renaissance theorists of drama, many eighteenth-century
theories of art and beauty, and most of Kantian aesthetics, not to speak
of many contemporary critical and philosophical approaches, namely:
(a) Russian formalists, with their notion of “device” as the way in which
the work of art elicits a particular type of perception; (6) Ingarden’s atten-
tion to the reading process, his notion of the literary work as a skeleton
or “schematized structure” to be completed by the reader, and his idea,
clearly due to Husserl's influence, of the dialectics between the work as
an invariant and the plurality of profiles through which it can be con-
cretized by the interpreter; (c) the aesthetics of Mukarovsky; (d)
Gadamer's hermeneutics; and (e) the early German sociology of literature
(see Holub 1984, 2).
As for contemporary semiotic theories, they took the pragmatic mo-
ment into account from the beginning. Even without speaking of the cen-
tral role played by interpretation and “unlimited semiosis” in C. S. Peirce's
thought, it would be enough to remark that Charles Morris, in Foundations
ofa Theory of Signs (1938), reminded us that a reference to the role of the
interpreter was always present in Greek and Latin rhetoric, in the com-
munication theory of the Sophists, and in Aristotle, not to mention Au-
gustine, for whom signs were characterized by their producing an idea in
the mind of their receivers.
During the 1960s, many Italian semiotic approaches were influenced
by sociological studies on the reception of mass media. In 1965 at a con-
vention held in Perugia on the relationship between television and its au-
dience, myself, Paolo Fabbri, and others insisted that it was not enough
to study what a message says according to the code of its senders but
also what it says according to the codes of its addressees. The idea of
“aberrant decoding” proposed at that time was further elaborated in my
La struttura assente (1968). Thus in the 1960s the problem of reception was
posited (or reposited) by semiotics as a reaction against (1) the struc-
turalistic idea that a textual object was something independent of its in-
Intentio Lectoris: The State of the Art 31

terpretations, and (2) the stiffness of many formal semantics flourishing

in the Anglo-Saxon world, when the very meaning of a term or of a sen-
tence was studied as independent of its context. Only later were diction-
ary-like semantics challenged by encyclopedia-like models that tried to
introduce into the core of the semantic representation pragmatic ele-
ments also; and only recently have the cognitive sciences and the field of
artificial intelligence decided that an encyclopedic model seems to be the
most convenient way to represent meaning and to process texts (on this
debate see Eco 1976, 1983).
In order to reach such an awareness it has been necessary for lin-
guistics to move toward pragmatic phenomena, and in this sense the role
of speech-act theory should not be underestimated. In the literary domain
Wolfgang Iser (1978) was probably the first to acknowledge the con-
vergence between the new linguistic perspectives and the literary theory
of reception, devoting as he did an entire chapter of Der Akt des Lesens to
the problems raised by J. L. Austin and John Searle (five years before the
first organic attempt to elaborate a theory of literary discourse based
upon speech-act theory; see Pratt 1977).
Thus what Jauss in 1969 was already announcing as a profound
change in the paradigm of literary scholarship was in fact a change tak-
ing place in the semiotic paradigm in general—even though, as | said,
this change was not a brand-new discovery but rather the complex con-
coction of different venerable approaches that had at various times
characterized the history of aesthetics and a great part of the history of
semiotics. Nevertheless it is not true that nihil sub sole novi. Old (theoret-
ical) objects can reflect a different light under the sun's rays, according
to the season.
I remember how outrageous it sounded to many when, in Opera aperta
(1962), I stated that artistic and literary works, by forseeing a system of
psychological, cultural, and historical expectations on the part of their
addressees, try to produce what Joyce called an “ideal reader.”
Obviously, at that time, speaking of works of art, | was interested in
the fact that such an ideal reader was obliged to suffer an ideal insomnia
in order to question the book ad infinitum. If there is a consistent differ-
ence between Opera aperta (1962) and The Role of the Reader (1979), it is that
in the latter book I try to find the roots of artistic “openness” in the very
nature of any communicative process as well as in the very nature of any
system of signification (as already advocated by my A Theory of Semiotics
[1976]).
In any case, in 1962 my problem was how and to what extent a text
should foresee the reactions of its addressee. In Opera aperta—at least
at the time of the first Italian edition, written between 1957 and 1962
was still moving in a presemiotic area, inspired as I was by informa-
tion theory, the semantics of I. A. Richards, the epistemology of Jean
Piaget, Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of perception, transac-
tional psychology, and the aesthetic theory of interpretation of Luigi
32 RECODING METAPHYSICS

Pareyson. In that book, and with a jargon of which I now feel ashamed,
I wrote that
now we must shift our attention from the message, as a source of
possible information, to the communicative relationship between
message and addressee, where the interpretative decision of the recep-
tor contributes in establishing the value of the possible information.
If one wants to analyze the possibilities of a communicative
structure one must take into account the receptor pole. To consider
this psychological pole means to acknowledge the formal possibil-
ity—as such indispensable in order to explain both the structure
and the effect of the message—by which a message signifies only
insofar as it is interpreted from the point of view of a given situa-
tion—a psychological as well as a historical, social, and an-
thropological one.”
All these assumptions sounded pretty polemical in the 1960s be-
cause the structuralist orthodoxy was still operating under the standards
of the “aesthetic-formalist” third paradigm designated by Jauss (1969). In
1967, speaking of my book Opera aperta, just translated into French, Claude
Lévi-Strauss said in the course of an interview that he was reluctant to
accept my perspective because a work of art
is an object endowed with precise properties that must be analyti-
cally isolated, and this work can be entirely defined on the grounds
of such properties. When Jakobson and myself tried to make a struc-
tural analysis of a Baudelaire sonnet, we did not approach it as an
“open work” in which we could find everything that has been filled in
by the following epochs; we approached it as an object which, once
created, had the stiffness—so to speak—of a crystal; we confined our-
selves to bringing into evidence these properties.

I have already discussed this opinion in the introductory chapter of

my The Role of the Reader, making it clear that, by stressing the role of the
interpretative choice in making up the sense of a text, |was not assuming
that in an “open work” one can find that “everything” has been filled in by
its different empirical readers, irrespective or in spite of the properties of
the textual objects. | was, on the contrary, assuming that an artistic text
contained, among its major analyzable properties, certain structural de-
vices that encourage and elicit interpretative choices. However, | am
quoting that old discussion in order to show how daring it was, during
the 1960s, to introduce the interpretative moment, or if one wants, the
act of reading, into the description and evaluation of the text to be read.
In Opera aperta, even though stressing the role of the interpreter ready
to risk an ideal insomnia in order to pursue infinite interpretations, I was
insisting that one ought always to question a text as an object, and not
on the mere grounds of one’s personal drives. Depending as | was on the
aesthetics of interpretation of Luigi Pareyson, I was still speaking of a
dialectics between fidelity and freedom. | am stressing this point because
if during the “structural sixties” my addressee-oriented position (neither
Intentio Lectoris: The State of the Art 33

so provocative nor so unbearably original) appeared so “radical,” today it

would sound pretty conservative, at least from the point of view of the
most radical reader-response theories.

2. A Web of Critical Options

The opposition between a generative approach (according to which the
theory isolates the rules for the production of a textual object that can
be understood independently of its effects) and an interpretative ap-
proach is not homogeneous with the triangular contrast, widely dis-
cussed in the course of a secular critical debate between interpretation
as research into the intentio auctoris, interpretation as the research into the
intentio operis, and interpretation as the imposition of the intentio lectoris.
The classical debate aimed at finding in a text either (a) what its au-
thor intended to say, or (6) what the text said independently of the inten-
tions of its author. Only after accepting the second horn of the dilemma
was the question whether to find in a text (1) what it says by virtue of its
textual coherence and of an original underlying signification system, or
(2) what the addressees find in it by virtue of their own systems of signifi-
cation or their wishes and drives.
Such a debate is of paramount importance but its terms only par-
tially overlap the opposition generation/interpretation. One can describe
a text as generated according to certain rules without assuming that its
author intentionally and consciously followed them. One can adopt a
hermeneutic viewpoint leaving unprejudiced whether the interpretation
must find what the author meant or what Being says through language—
in the second case, leaving unprejudiced whether the voice of Being is
influenced by the drives of the addressee or not. If one crosses the oppo-
sition generation/interpretation with the trichotomy of intentions one can
get six potential different theories and critical methods.
Facing the possibility displayed by a text of eliciting infinite or in-
definite interpretations, the Middle Ages and Renaissance reacted by em-
bracing two different hermeneutic options. Medieval interpreters looked
for a plurality of senses without refusing a sort of identity principle (a text
cannot support contradictory interpretations), whereas the symbolists of
the Renaissance, following the idea of the coincidentia oppositorum, defined
the ideal text as the one that allows the most contradictory readings (see
Eco 1985).
Moreover, the adoption of the Renaissance model generates a sec-
ondary contradiction, since a hermetico-symbolical reading can search
in a text for either (1) the infinity of senses planned by the author, or (2)
the infinity of senses that the author ignored. Naturally, option (2) gener-
ates a further choice, namely, whether these unforeseen senses are dis-
covered because of the intentio operis or in spite of it, forced into the text by
an arbitrary decision of the reader.
Even if one says, as Paul Valery did, that “il n'y a pas de vrai sens
d'un texte,” one has not yet decided on which of the three intentions the
34 RECODING METAPHYSICS

infinity of interpretations depends. Medieval and Renaissance Kabbalists

maintained that the Torah was open to infinite interpretations because it
could be rewritten in infinite ways by combining its letters, but such an
infinity of readings (as well as of writings)—certainly dependent on the
initiative of the reader—was nonetheless planned by the divine Author.
To privilege the initiative of the reader does not necessarily mean to
guarantee the infinity of readings. If one privileges the initiative of the
reader one must also consider the possibility of an active reader who de-
cides to read a text univocally: it is a privilege of fundamentalists to read
the Bible according to a single literal sense.
We can conceive of an aesthetics claiming that poetic texts can be
infinitely interpreted because their author wanted them to be read this
way; or an aesthetics that claims that texts must be read univocally in
spite of the intentions of their authors, who are subject to the laws of
language and once have written something are bound to read what they
wrote in the only authorized and possible sense. One can read as infin-
itely interpretable a text conceived as absolutely univocal (see, for in-
stance, the reading performed by Derrida upon a text of Searle in “Signa-
ture, evenement, contexte”), as well as one can perform psychedelic trips
upon a text that cannot be but univocal according to the intentio operis (for
instance, when one muses oneirically upon a railway timetable). Alterna-
tively, one can read as univocal a text that its author wanted infinitely
interpretable (this would be the case of fundamentalists if by chance the
Kabbalists were right), or read univocally a text that from the point of
view of linguistic rules should be considered rather ambiguous (for in-
stance, reading Oedipus rex as a plain mystery story where what counts is
only to find out the guilty one).
It is in the light of this embarrassingly vast typology that we should
reconsider many contemporary critical currents that can superficially be
ranked, all together, under the heading of response-oriented theories. For
instance, classical sociology of literature records what readers do with a
text and can remain basically uninterested in deciding on which intention
what they do depends, since it simply describes social usages, socialized
interpretations, and the actual public effect of texts, not the formal de-
vices or the hermeneutic mechanisms that have produced them. The aes-
thetics of reception, on the other hand, maintains that a literary work is
enriched by the various interpretations it undergoes along the centuries
and, while considering the dialectics between textual devices and the
readers’ horizon of expectations, does not deny that every interpretation
can and must be compared with the textual object and with the intentio
operis. Likewise, semiotic theories of interpretative cooperation, like my
theory of a Model Reader, look at the textual strategy as a system of in-
structions aimed at producing a possible reader whose profile is de-
signed by and within the text and who can be extrapolated from it and
described independently of and even before any empirical reading.
In a totally different way the most radical practices of deconstruction
Intentio Lectoris: The State of the Art 25

privilege the initiative of the reader and reduce the text to an ambiguous
bunch of still-unshaped possibilities, thus transforming texts into mere
stimuli for the interpretative drift.

3. An Apology of the Literal Sense

Every discourse on the freedom of interpretation must start from a de-
fense of literal sense. In 1985 Ronald Reagan, during a microphone test
before a public speech, said p (namely, “In a few minutes I'll push the red
button and I'll start bombing the Soviet Union,” or something similar). P
was—as Linear Textual Manifestation—an English sentence that accord-
ing to common codes means exactly what it intuitively means. If you pre-
fer, once provided an intelligent machine with rules for paraphrasing, p
could be translated as “the person uttering the pronoun ‘I’ will in the next
approximately 200 seconds send American missiles toward the Soviet ter-
ritory.” If texts have intentions, p had the intention to say so.
The newsmen who heard p wondered whether its utterer too had the
intention to say so. Asked about that, Reagan said that he was joking. He
said so—as far as the intentio operis was concerned—but according to the
intentio auctoris he only pretended to say so. According to common sense,
those who believed that the sentence meaning coincided with the in-
tended authorial meaning were wrong.
In criticizing Reagan's joke, some newsmen, however, tried to make
an innuendo (intentio lectoris) and inferred that Reagan's real intention was
to suggest nonchalantly that he was such a tough guy that, if he wanted,
he could have done what he only pretended to do (also because he had
the performative power of doing things with words).
This story is scarcely suitable for my purposes because it is a report
about a fact, that is, about a “real” communicative interchange during
which senders and addressees had the chance of checking the discrepan-
cies between sentence meaning and authorial meaning. Let us suppose,
then, that this is not a story about a fact but a pure story (told in the form
“once a man said so and so, and people believed so and so, and then that
man added so and so...”). In this case we have lost any guarantee about
authorial intention, this author having simply become one of the charac-
ters of the narration. How to interpret this story? It can be the story of a
man making a joke, the story of a man who jokes but shouldn't, the story
of a man who pretends to joke but as a matter of fact is uttering a
menace, the story of a tragic world where even innocent jokes can be
taken seriously, the story of how the same jocular sentence can change
in meaning according to the status and the role of its utterer.... Would
we say that this story has a single sense, or that it has all the listed ones,
or that only some of them can be considered the “correct” ones?
Two years ago Derrida wrote me a letter informing me that he and
others were establishing in Paris a Collége International de Philosophie
and asking me for a letter of support. | bet that Derrida was assuming
that:
36 RECODING METAPHYSICS

—I had to assume that he was telling the truth;

—I had to read his program as a univocal discourse as far as both
the actual situation and his projects were concerned;
—my signature requested at the end of my letter would have been
taken more seriously than Searle’s at the end of “Signature, evenement,
contexte.”
Naturally, according to my Erwartungshorizon Derrida’s letter could
have assumed for me many other additional meanings, even the most
contradictory ones, and could have elicited many additional inferences
about its “intended meaning”, nevertheless, any additional inference
ought to be based upon its first layer of allegedly literal meaning. I think
that Derrida could not but agree with me: in Of Grammatology he reminds
his readers that “without [all the instruments of traditional criticism] .. .
critical production will risk developing in any direction at all and au-
thorize itself to say almost anything. But this indispensable guardrail has
always only protected, it has never opened a reading” (Derrida 1976, 158). |
feel sympathetic with the project of opening readings but I also feel the
fundamental duty of protecting them in order to open them, since I con-
sider it risky to open in order to protect. Thus, coming back to Reagan's
story, my conclusion is that, in order to extrapolate from it any possible
sense one is first of all obliged to recognize that it had a literal sense,
namely, that on a given day a man said p and that p, according to the
English code, means what it intuitively means.

4. Two Levels of Interpretation

Before going ahead with the problem of interpretation we must first
settle a terminological question. We must distinguish between semantic
and critical interpretation (or, if one prefers, between semiosic and semiotic in-
terpretation). Semantic interpretation is the result of the process by
which an addressee, facing a textual linear manifestation, fills it up with
a given meaning. Every response-oriented approach deals first of all with
this type of interpretation, which is a natural semiosic phenomenon. Crit-
ical interpretation, on the other hand, is a metalinguistic activity—a
semiotic approach—which aims at describing and explaining the formal
reasons for which a given text produces a given response (and in this
sense it can also assume the form of an aesthetic analysis).
In this sense every text is susceptible to both semantic and critical in-
terpretation, but only few texts consciously foresee both kinds of re-
sponse. Ordinary sentences (like “give me that bottle” or “the cat is on
the mat” uttered by a laymen) expect only a semantic response. But
aesthetic texts or sentences like “the cat is on the mat” uttered by a lin-
guist as an example of possible semantic ambiguity also foresee a critical
interpreter. Likewise when I say that every text designs its own Model
Reader, | am in fact implying that many texts aim at producing two Model
Readers, a first-level or a naive one, supposed to understand semantically
what the text says, and a second-level or critical one, supposed to ap-
Intentio Lectoris: The State of the Art 37

preciate the way in which the text says so. A sentence like “they are flying
planes” foresees a naive reader who keeps wondering which meaning to
choose—and who supposedly looks at the textual environment or at the
circumstance of utterance in order to support the best choice—and a crit-
ical reader able to explain univocally and formally the syntactic reasons
that make the sentence ambiguous. Similarly, a mystery tale displays an
astute narrative strategy in order to produce a naive Model Reader eager
to fall into the traps of the narrator (to feel fear or to suspect the innocent
one), but usually wants also to produce a critical Model Reader able to
enjoy, at a second reading, the brilliant narrative strategy by which the
first-level naive reader has been designed.’
In the light of the above distinctions let me now discuss a distinction
between two interpretative theories of our time proposed by Richard
Rorty in his essay “Idealism and Textualism” (in Consequences of Pragmatism
[1982]). Rorty says that in the present century “there are people who write
as if there were nothing but texts” and makes a distinction between the
two kinds of textualism. The first is instantiated by those who disregard
the intention of the author and look in the text for a principle of internal
coherence and/or for a sufficient cause for certain very precise effects it
has on a presumed ideal reader. The second is instantiated by those crit-
ics who consider every reading a misreading (the “misreaders’). For them,
says Rorty, “the critic asks neither the author nor the text about their in-
tentions but simply beats the text into a shape which will serve his own
purpose. He makes the text refer to whatever is relevant to that purpose.”
In this sense their model “is not the curious collector of clever gadgets
taking them apart to see what makes them work and carefully ignoring
any extrinsic end they may have, but the psychoanalyst blithely interpret-
ing a dream or a joke as a symptom of homicidal mania.”
Rorty thinks that both positions are a form of pragmatism (prag-
matism being for him the refusal to think of truth as correspondence to
reality —and reality being, I assume, both the external referent of the text
and the intention of its author) and suggests that the first type of theorist
is a weak pragmatist because “he thinks that there really is a secret and
that once it's discovered we shall have gotten the text right,” so that for
him “criticism is discovery rather than creation.” The strong pragmatist,
on the other hand, does not make any difference between finding and
making.
I can accept such a characterization, but with two emendations.
First of all, in what sense does a weak pragmatist, when trying to find
the secret of a text, aim at getting this text right? One has to decide if by
“getting the text right" one means a right semantic or a right critical in-
terpretation. Those readers who, according to the Jamesian metaphor pro-
posed by Iser (1978, chap. 1), look into a text in order to find in it "the
figure in the carpet,” a single unrevealed secret meaning, are—I think—
looking for a sort of “concealed” semantic interpretation. But the critic
looking for the “secret code” probably looks critically for the describable
38 RECODING METAPHYSICS

strategy that produces infinite ways to get a text semantically right. To

analyze and describe the textual “devices” of Ulysses means to show how
Joyce acted in order to create many alternative figures in his carpet, with-
out deciding how many they can be and which of them are the best ones.
Obviously, since—as I shall tell later—even a critical reading is always
conjectural, there can be many ways of finding out that secret code, but
to look for it does not mean that one wants to reduce a text to a univocal
semantic reading. Thus I do not think that the first type of textualist des-
ignated by Rorty is necessarily a “weak” pragmatist.
Second, | suspect that many “strong” pragmatists are not pragma-
tists at all, at least in Rorty's sense, because the “misreader” employs a
text in order to know something that stands outside the text—and that
is in some way more “real” than the text itself, namely, the unconscious
mechanism of la chaine signifiante. In any case, even though a pragmatist,
certainly the misreader is not a “textualist.” Probably misreaders think, as
Rorty assumes, that there is nothing but texts; however, they are in-
terested in every possible text except the one they are reading. As a mat-
ter of fact “strong” pragmatists are concerned only with the infinite
semantic readings of the text they are beating, but I suspect that they are
scarcely interested in the way it works.

5. Interpretation and Use

I can accept the distinction proposed by Rorty, but I see it as a con-
venient opposition between interpreting (critically) and merely using a text.
To critically interpret a text means to read it in order to discover, along
with my reactions to it, something about its nature. To use a text is to
start from a stimulus in order to get something else, even accepting the
risk of misinterpreting it from the semantic point of view. If I pull out the
pages of my Bible to wrap my pipe tobacco in, I am using this Bible, but
it would be daring to call me a textualist—even though | am, if not a
strong pragmatist, certainly a very pragmatic person. If | get sexual enjoy-
ment from a pornographic book, | am not using it, because in order to
elaborate my sexual fantasies I had to semantically interpret its sen-
tences. On the other hand, if—let us suppose—1 look into the Elements of
Euclid to infer that their author was a scopophiliac, obsessed with abstract
images, then I am using it, because I renounce interpreting its definitions
and theorems semantically.
The quasipsychoanalytic reading that Derrida gives of Poe's Purloined
Letter in Le facteur de la vérité represents a good critical interpretation of that
story. Derrida insists that he is not analyzing the unconscious of the au-
thor but rather the unconscious of the text. He is interpreting because he
respects the intentio operis. When he draws an interpretation from the fact
that the letter is found in a paper holder hanging from a nail under the
center of a fireplace, he first takes “literally” the possible world desig-
nated by the narration as well as the sense of the words used by Poe to
stage this world. Then he tries to isolate a second “symbolic” meaning
Intentio Lectoris: The State of the Art 39

that this text is conveying, probably beyond the intentions of the author.
Right or wrong, Derrida supports his second-level semantic interpretation
with textual evidence. In doing so he also performs a critical interpreta-
tion, because he shows how the text can produce that second-level se-
mantic meaning.
For the opposite approach, let us consider Marie Bonaparte's meth-
od of analyzing Poe's work. Part of her reading represents a good example
of interpretation. For instance, she reads “Morella,” “Ligeia,” and “Eleon-
ora” and shows that all three texts have the same underlying “fabula”: a
man in love with an exceptional woman who dies of consumption swears
eternal grief; but he does not keep his promise and loves another woman;
finally the dead one reappears and wraps the new one in the mantle of
her funereal power. In a nontechnical way Marie Bonaparte identifies in
these three texts the same actantial structures, speaks of the structure of
an obsession, but reads that obsession as a textual one and in so doing
reveals the intentio operis. Unfortunately such a beautiful textual analysis is
interwoven with biographical remarks that connect textual evidences with
aspects (known from extratextual sources) of Poe's private life. When she
says that Poe was dominated by the impression he felt as a child when
he saw his mother, dead of consumption, lying on the catafalque, when
she says that in his adult life and in his work he was morbidly attracted
to women with funereal features, when she reads his stories populated
by living corpses in order to explain his personal necrophilia—then she
is using and not interpreting texts.

6. Interpretation and Conjecture

It is clear that I am trying to keep a dialectical link between intentio operis
and intentio lectoris. The problem is that, if one perhaps knows what is
meant by “intention of the reader,” it seems more difficult to define
abstractly what is meant by “intention of the text.”
The intention of the text is not displayed by the Textual Linear Man-
ifestation. Or, if it is so displayed, it is in the sense of the purloined letter.
One has to decide to “see” it. Thus it is possible to speak of the intention
of the text only as the result of a conjecture on the part of the reader. The
initiative of the reader basically consists in making a conjecture about
the intention of the text.
A text is a device conceived in order to produce its Model Reader. |
repeat that this Reader is not the one who makes the only right conjecture.
A text can foresee a Model Reader entitled to try infinite conjectures. The
empirical reader is only an actor who makes conjectures about the kind
of Model Reader postulated by the text. Since the intention of the text is
basically to produce a Model Reader able to make conjectures about it,
the initiative of the Model Reader consists in figuring out a Model Author
who is not the empirical one and who, in the end, coincides with the in-
tention of the text.
Thus, more than a parameter to use in order to validate the
40 RECODING METAPHYSICS

interpretation, the text is an object that the interpretation builds up in

the course of the circular effort of validating itself on the basis of what it
makes up as its result. |am not ashamed to admit that |am so defining the
still valid hermeneutic circle.
The logic of interpreting is the Peircian logic of abduction (see Eco and
Sebeok 1983). To make a conjecture means to figure out a Law that can
explain a Result. The “secret code” of a text is such a Law. One could say
that in the natural sciences the conjecture has to test only the Law since
the Result is under the eyes of everybody, whereas in textual interpreta-
tion only the discovery of a “good” Law makes the Result acceptable. But
I do not think that the difference is so clear-cut. Even in the natural sci-
ences no fact can be taken as a significant Result without someone hav-
ing first and vaguely decided that this fact among innumerable others can
be selected as a curious Result to be explained. To isolate a fact as a curi-
ous Result means to have already obscurely thought of a Law of which
that fact could be the Result. When I start reading a text | never know
from the beginning if |am approaching it from the point of view of a suit-
able intention. My initiative starts becoming exciting when I discover that
my intention could meet the intention of the text.
How to prove a conjecture about the intentio operis? The only way is to
check it against the text as a coherent whole. This idea, too, is an old one
and comes from Augustine (De doctrina christiana): any interpretation given
of a certain portion of a text can be accepted if it is confirmed and must
be rejected if it is challenged by another portion of the same text. In this
sense internal textual coherence controls the otherwise uncontrollable
drives of the reader.
Once Borges suggested that it would be exciting to read the Imita-
tion of Christ as if it was written by Celine. The game is amusing and could
be intellectually fruitful. With certain texts it could suggest new and in-
teresting interpretations. It cannot, however, work with Thomas a Kempis.
I tried: I discovered sentences that could have been written by Celine
(“Grace loves low things and is not disgusted by thorny ones, and likes
filthy clothes . . . .”) But this kind of reading offers a suitable “grid” for
very few sentences of the Imitatio. All the rest, most of the book, is resis-
tant to this reading. If, on the contrary, I read the book according to the
Christian medieval encyclopedia, it appears textually coherent in each of
its parts.
Besides, no responsible deconstructionist has ever challenged such
a position. Hillis Miller (in “On Edge”) said that “the readings of decon-
structive criticism are not the willful imposition by a subjectivity of a
theory on the texts, but are coerced by the texts themselves” (p. 611).
Elsewhere (in Thomas Hardy: Distance and Desire) he writes that “it is not true
that . . . all readings are equally valid... . Some readings are certainly
wrong... . To reveal one aspect of a work of an author often means ignor-
ing or shading other aspects. . .. Some approaches reach more deeply
into the structure of the text than others.”
Intentio Lectoris: The State of the Art 4|

7. The falsifiability of misinterpretations (Fàlschungmòglichheit)

We can thus accept a sort of Popper-like principle according to which
if there are no rules that help to ascertain which interpretations are the
“best ones,” there is at least a rule for ascertaining which ones are “bad.”
As | said above, this rule says that the internal coherence of a text must
be taken as parameter for its interpretations. But in order to do so one
needs, at least for a short time, a metalanguage that permits the compari-
son between a given text and its semantic or critical interpretations.
Since any new interpretation enriches the text and the text consists in its
objective Linear Manifestation plus the interpretations it received in the
course of history, this metalanguage should also allow the comparison
between a new interpretation and the old ones.
I understand that from the point of view of a radical deconstruction
theory such an assumption can sound unpleasantly neopositivistic, and
that Derrida’s notion of deconstruction and drift challenges the very pos-
sibility of a metalanguage. But a metalanguage does not have to be differ-
ent from (and more powerful than) ordinary language. The idea of in-
terpretation requires that a “piece” of ordinary language be used as the
interpretant (in the Peircian sense) of another “piece” of ordinary language.
When one says that man means “human male adult” one is interpreting
ordinary language through ordinary language, and the second “sign’—
said Peirce—is the interpretant of the first one, as the first can become
the interpretant of the second.
The metalanguage of interpretation is not different from its object
language. It is a portion of the same language and in this sense interpre-
tation is a function that every language performs when it speaks of itself.
It is not a matter of asking if this can be done. We are doing it, everyday.
The provocative self-evidence of my last argument suggests that we
can prove it only by showing that any of its alternatives is self-contradic-
tory.
Let us suppose that there is a theory that literally (not metaphorically)
asserts that every interpretation is a misinterpretation.
Let us suppose that there are two texts a and B and that one of them
(we know which one) has been proposed to a reader in order to elicit
the textually recorded misinterpretation È..
Take a literate subject X, previously informed that any interpretation
must be a misinterpretaton, and give him/her the three texts, a, B, and &.
Ask X if & misinterprets a or fp.
Supposing that X says that X is a misinterpretation of a, would we
say that X is right? Supposing on the contrary that X says that & is a
misinterpretation of B, would we say that X is wrong?
In both cases, to approve or disaprove X's answer means to believe
not only that a text controls and selects its own interpretations but also
that it controls and selects its own misinterpretations. The one approving
or disproving X's answers would then act as one who does not really
believe that every interpretation is a misinterpretation, since he/she would
42 RECODING METAPHYSICS

use the original text as a parameter for discriminating between texts that
misinterpret it and texts that misinterpret something else. This move
would presuppose a previous interpretation of a which should be con-
sidered the only correct one, as well as a metalanguage that describes
A and shows on which grounds £ is or is not a misinterpretation of it.
It would be embarrassing to maintain that a text elicits only misin-
terpretations except when it is correctly interpreted by the warrant of the
misinterpretations of other readers. But this is exactly what happens with
a radical theory of misinterpretation.
There is another way to escape the contradition. One should assume
that every answer of X is the good one. > can be indifferently the misin-
terpretation of a, of B, and of any other possible text. But at this point
why define X (which is undoubtedly a text in its own right) as the misin-
terpretation of something else? If it is the misinterpretation of everything,
it is, then, the misinterpretation of nothing. It exists for its own sake and
does not need to be compared with any other text.
The solution is elegant but a little inconvenient. It destroys definitely
the very category of textual interpretation. There are texts, but of these
nobody can speak. Or, if one speaks, nobody can say what one says. Texts,
at most, are used as stimuli to produce other texts, but once a new text
is produced, it cannot be referred to its stimulus.

8. Conclusions
To defend, as I have done, the rights of interpretation against the
mere use of a text does not mean that texts must never be used. We are
using texts everyday and we need to do so, for many respectable reasons.
It is only important to distinguish use from interpretation.
A critical reader could also say why certain texts have been used in
a certain way, finding in their structure the reasons of their use or misuse.
In this sense a sociological analysis of the free uses of texts can support
a further interpretation of them.
In any case use and interpretation are abstract theoretical possi-
bilities. Every empirical reading is always an unpredictable mixture of
both. It can happen that a play started as use ends by producing a fruitful
new interpretation—or vice versa. Sometimes to use texts means to free
them from previous interpretations, to discover new aspects of them, to
realize that they have previously been illicitly interpreted, to find out a
new and more explicative intentio operis, to realize that too many uncon-
trolled intentions of readers (perhaps disguised as a faithful quest for the
intention of the author) have polluted and obscured them.
There is also a pretextual reading, performed not in order to interpret
the text but to show how much language can produce unlimited semiosis.
Such a pretextual reading has a philosophical function, and many of the
examples of deconstruction provided by Derrida belong to this kind of
activity. It has happened that a legimate philosophical practice has been
Intentio Lectoris: The State of the Art 43

taken as a model for literary criticism and for a new trend in textual inter-
pretation.
Our theoretical duty was to acknowledge that this happened and to
show why it should not have happened.
a,
Bateat
pi, :
act5 Qi e sn fo </>

= = ee (eis do

aut Sag ave

GIANNI VATTIMO
Metaphysics, Violence, Secularization

Contemporary philosophy has become ever more aware that the

reasons for the distrust of metaphysics and the program of “going be-
yond" it, variously formulated in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,
are ethical rather than “theoretical.” This is probably, and perhaps para-
doxically (since we are dealing with the author of a book like Beyond Good
and Evil), the most characteristic effect of the Nietzsche renaissance in
European thought of the past twenty years. In Nietzsche’s philosophy
there is, on the one hand, a sort of summa of the “unmaskings” of meta-
physics that philosophy has proposed in the past century or so, from the
Marxian critique of ideology to the Freudian discovery of the uncon-
scious, by way of positivism and the birth of the “human sciences.” But
there is also, as more characteristic of and specific to his thought, a rad-
ical “unmasking of unmasking” according to which even the idea of a truth
that reveals a masking, of the attempt and claim to reach a solid “ground”
beyond ideologies and every form of false consciousness, is, precisely,
still a “human, all too human” devotion, still a mask. If, as Nietzsche
maintains, we must distrust metaphysics—that is to say, for him as for
us, the belief in a stable structure of Being that governs becoming and
gives meaning to knowledge and norms to conduct—it is finally not “on
strict grounds of knowledge” (as Nietzsche writes in an aphorism entitled
“An Affectation in Parting,” no. 82 of The Wanderer and His Shadow).' If that
were so, we would remain always still prisoner of another metaphysics,
of a theory that opposes a “true truth” to the errors to be unmasked,
thereby perpetuating the game from which we wish to escape in getting
out of metaphysics. Of course, even saying that we “want to” (or must, or can-
not not, etc.) escape the game and the mechanism of metaphysics implies
that one speaks in the name of a subject, a “we” that seems already com-
pletely internal to that metaphysical logic from which one wishes to escape.
Nietzsche is well aware of this. Perhaps that is why he insists so much, in his
late writings, on the opposition between “overman” and “slaves,” or, as
Pierre Klossowski notes, represents his own doctrine in the form of a “plot,”
for both are ways to exclude oneself explicitly from the horizon of “universal”
affirmations characteristic of traditional metaphysical philosophy.* Even
46 RECODING METAPHYSICS

and above all the most comprehensive and scandalous proposition of his
texts, the statement “God is dead,” is not a metaphysical thesis argued and
demonstrated to the ideal “we” of human reason. It is the tale of an experi-
ence, an appeal to others that they might discover it in themselves,
constituting, on this basis, a “we” to whom and in whose name Nietzsche
might speak.
Does this “we” that constitutes itself a posteriori—beginning with the
community of a recognized experience, from the reception of an appeal—
truly escape from the unmasking of metaphysics and its universal struc-
tures? Or does the difficulty of unmasking metaphysics and the very no-
tion of a truth not spoken always in the name of a “we” show, at least to
some extent, that in the final analysis one cannot really get out of meta-
physics? And again, can we dissolve this problem by admitting that the
metaphysical “we” is really just a rule of the literary genre that we choose
to adopt when we decide (but to what extent in a purely arbitrary way?)
to do philosophy? One must probably give affirmative answers to all
three of these questions, and thus follow a sort of widespread consensus,
implicit or explicit, in contemporary thought. We accept the idea that the
“we” of philosophical discourse is not ideally given in the realm of a uni-
versal and eternal reason but is constituted historically as the generaliza-
bility of experience (and hence also dependent upon the constitution of
a society in which communication tends toward universality and there is
something like “public opinion”). Second, this recognition does not sud-
denly place us in a horizon different from that of metaphysics, since in
fact metaphysics has worked exactly in this way, even if with a different
awareness, in constituting the “we” it believed it found given as human
essence. Third, it is quite true that we therefore continue to belong to
metaphysics, but what binds us to it is “only” the continuity—if not
casual and arbitrary, certainly historically contingent—of a “literary
genre” and of the culture to whose constitution it contributes.
To dwell upon the difficulties that arise when, wishing to call meta-
physics into question, one continues to use its language—by adopting,
for example, the “fiction” of a universal subject like the “we” of traditional
philosophical statements—is not a way to guarantee the validity, logi-
cal correctness, and truth of conclusions at which one wants to arrive,
taking care that the initial steps, on which all the rest will depend, are
“grounded.” Indeed, it is metaphysics that takes care to “ground” rigor-
ously evey step. Aware that the circle is not necessarily a vicious one but
on the contrary guarantees the only possible access to our topic,’ we take
on this problem as well, almost by accumulation, among the dimensions,
stratifications, and ambiguities that burden the discourse of metaphysics
and its “going beyond” in contemporary philosophy, in the philosophy
that has learned from Nietzsche.
Having “listened to” Nietzsche, then, we do not want to, we cannot,
we must not (any longer) limit ourselves to unmasking that inherited
metaphysics in the name of a truer ground. Nietzsche has taught us to
Metaphysics, Violence, Secularization 47

distrust the very idea of a true ground. Even words like “suspicion” and
“distrust” that recur so often in his texts are terms that indicate attitudes
more practical than theoretical. This teaching, and the underlying experi-
ence that Nietzsche was the first to live and formulate in radical fashion,
are no longer only Nietzsche’s. What he theorized—that metaphysics is
only a form of the will to power—has widely penetrated twentieth-century
thought with sometimes differing but always closely related meanings.
The critique of metaphysics that most endured in his thought (and that
thus determines our point of departure) is the critique that would un-
mask metaphysics as a manifestation of violence. The refusal of meta-
physics inspired by reasons “of knowledge,” like that exemplified in Ru-
dolf Carnap's famous text against Heidegger in 1932, no longer has any
force.* Not only has this text and the attitude it expresses been forgotten,
but it no longer enjoys any visible reception even in neo-empiricist
thought. In fact, the paradoxical fortune that the term metaphysics enjoys
precisely in authors and contexts of an “analytic’” tendency—for exam-
ple, in Karl Popper—may be considered its “liquidation.” If there is a
“friendly” attitude toward metaphysics today, it can be found not only in
proponents of a neoclassical thought, but also in philosophers of neo-
empiricist background as well. A not-so-paradoxical fact, if one remem-
bers the close link that Heidegger on good grounds points out between
the inheritance of metaphysics and modern “scientism.”
In any case, it is not in the name of theoretical motivations that one
speaks today of going beyond metaphysics, as though its fault were that
of furnishing a distorted and false knowledge of a reality that could be
understood adequately by other forms of knowledge, above all by science.
Those who distrust metaphysics and think of going beyond it move
instead within the horizon defined by Nietzsche when he writes that
metaphysics is “an attempt to take by force the most fertile fields.”° And
Heidegger, the most radical theorist of the necessity of going beyond
metaphysics, also does not have theoretical motivations. Being and Time
takes its point of departure instead from the impossibility of thinking the
existence of man within the categories of traditional metaphysics, above
all in the light of the notion of Being as disclosed presence. This impos-
sibility does not, however, constitute a problem in the sense that a more
“adequate” notion of Being, capable of being applied correctly to the
Being of man as well, would be necessary. Being and Time, in fact, already
contains Heidegger's critique of the notion of truth as adequation of
proposition to thing. We cannot presume, then, that traditional meta-
physics (still called ontology) deserves the “destruction” that Heidegger
proposes for it (see par. 6) because it does not satisfy a criterion of truth
as correspondence. All we can do is read as implicit in Being and Time what
will become ever clearer in the later Heidegger: we are called to go
beyond metaphysics “because” it discloses itself today in Ge-Stell, in the
world of total technico-scientific organization in which being-there not
only does not allow itself to “be thought” (as it appeared in Being and Time)
48 RECODING METAPHYSICS

on account of the domination of simple presence, but also cannot "be

there” in a radical sense. Heidegger's references to the atomic bomb and
the desertification of the world in talks and addresses of the 1950s and
later are not merely “occasional,” dictated by the good intention of join-
ing his voice to those worried about the future of the human race in the
epoch of great technology of destruction. They contain the “essence” of
his thought insofar as all the effort of that thought, beginning with Being
and Time, to “recollect” Being by going beyond metaphysics is motivated
by the experience of violence. That this is not so evident in his texts is
partly a result of self-misunderstandings of the sort that lie at the origin
of his support for Nazism. More important for us, it is also because
Heidegger, like Nietzsche (and for the same reasons, linked to the un-
masking of unmasking), does not oppose another ethical metaphysics of
nonviolence to metaphysical violence. He is therefore not in a position
to propose clear-cut denunciations but must follow the path of Verwind-
ung, of acceptance-distortion, that leads out of metaphysics only by way
of its secularizing continuation.
The necessity of following this path seems to emerge from the same
difficulties, genuine aporias, that the most powerful denunciations of the
violent essence of metaphysics—those of Theodor Adorno and Emman-
uel Lévinas—also run up against.
In the last chapter of Negative Dialectics, “Meditations on Metaphysics,”
Adorno not only does not see metaphysics and modernization as alterna-
tives, seeing them instead as closely connected (metaphysics is rational-
ization which, in modern society, becomes the actualized technico-scien-
tific organization of society), but also, at least to some extent, seems to
consider the extreme explosion of violence an unveiling and decisive step
along the way of a possible “going beyond” of the metaphysics that in-
spires that violence and is disclosed in it.’ Using a language different
from Adorno's, | would say that it is perhaps only after Auschwitz that
Being can give itself in its authentic minimal and micrological essence
(though without, obviously, attributing any necessary providentiality to
Auschwitz).
The crematory ovens at Auschwitz, Adorno says, are not only a con-
sequence of a certain rationalistic vision of the world, but also and above
all an anticipatory image of what the administered world is and does in
the normal course of events that affirms and renders universal “the indif-
ference of each individual life” (ND, 362). The atrocity of Auschwitz makes
it impossible still to affirm “that the immutable is truth, and that the mo-
bile, transitory is appearance,” and not only insofar as “our metaphysical
faculty is paralyzed because actual events have shattered the basis on
which speculative metaphysical thought could be reconciled with experi-
ence" (ND, 361, 362). Metaphysics turns out to be discredited also and
above all because the indifference to each individual life, to the rights of
the contingent and transitory, is what has always constituted its essential
content. In some way, Auschwitz merely emphasizes all this by disclosing
Metaphysics, Violence, Secularization 49

intolerable violence. (The negativity of Adorno's dialectics, which, as we

will see later, places the telos of reconciliation in an unreachable future,
dissolves for him as well the possibility of a true philosophy of history. It
is therefore difficult to say whether “after Auschwitz’ we can expect some
turning point in the history of violence and metaphysics that would be
different and specific in respect to other moments in history, or whether
Auschwitz is, for Adorno, only the most “extreme” manifestation—be-
cause more visible to us and more atrocious than other wars, massacres,
or natural catastrophes—that we can experience or remember of a violent
“structure” of existence in which, because reconciliation can only be
utopia, there are no caesuras, stages, or significant changes. One can
probably not decide such a question on the basis of Adorno's texts. It
seems to me that Adorno's discourse would have to attribute to “after
Auschwitz" the significance of a turning point, and not merely a value as
rhetorical exemplum of violence linked to the human condition, in order to
have a meaning that is not purely “edifying” and metaphysico-descrip-
tive.)
In any case, it is because metaphysics, and culture in general, covers
and forgets the rights of the living immediate that it prepares Auschwitz:
“That we no longer know what we used to feel before the dogcatcher's
van, is both the triumph and failure of culture” (ND, 366) and of meta-
physics. The course of history “forces materialism upon metaphysics,
traditionally the direct antithesis of materialism” (ND, 365), in the sense
that it is the transitory, the repressed, the low, that now legitimately
claims the rights of the essential. But it is not simply a question of “over-
turning Platonism”: “Whoever pleads for the maintenance of this radically
culpable and shabby culture becomes its accomplice, while the man who
says no to culture is directly furthering the barbarism” (ND, 367). In some
sense, it is literally very true that materialism presents itself as meta-
physics: even to claim the rights of the transitory, the immediate, the low
is to establish a “doubling,” a form of transcendence of what should be
with respect to what is: “What is a metaphysical experience? If we disdain
projecting it upon allegedly primal religious experiences, we are most
likely to visualize it as Proust did, in the happiness, for instance, that is
promised by village names like Otterbach, Watterbach, Reuenthal, Mon-
brunn” (ND, 373).?
Not only is it metaphysical violence to cover and cancel the rights of
the sensuous and transitory by affirming universal and abstract essences,
it is equally violent and fetishistic to strip the sensuous of its dimension
of alterity, negating that “promesse de bonheur’ that the living insist on
reading into it as illusory consolation and, in the end, as masked vio-
lence. The pure unmasking of the violence of the metaphysical universal
would then be transformed into a nihilistic metaphysics, equally as vio-
lent as what it wishes to negate. Against this repetition of metaphysics,
the sensuous and transitory would reassert its own rights: “And yet the
lighting up of an eye, indeed the feeble tail-wagging of a dog one gave a
50 RECODING METAPHYSICS

tidbit it promptly forgets, would make the ideal of nothingness evaporate

_.." (ND, 380). In fact, the greatness of Kant for Adorno was not that of
having placed reason within its limits by decreeing the impossibility of
knowing the traditional objects of metaphysics: God, freedom, immortal-
ity, the totality of the world. Rather, it lay in having defined a “space” for
those metaphysical ideas, a space that in the end is reduced to the ap-
pearance of the aesthetic but is no less true, even if it is only the prob-
lematic truth of the “promesse de bonheur’ that Adorno takes pains to
define with the (problematic) concept of a negative dialectics. The “true”
ground of things, to be opposed to the violence of metaphysical univer-
sality, is not the total senselessness of nihilism—what Nietzsche would
call reactive nihilism: “As in Kafka’s writings, the disturbed and damaged
course of the world is incommensurable also with the sense of its sheer
senselessness and blindness; we cannot stringently construe it according
to their principle. It resists all attempts of a desperate consciousness to
posit despair as an absolute” (ND, 403-4).
The essence of the current post-Nietzschean, post-Heideggerian cri-
tique of metaphysics is here clearly defined, even if Adorno’s answers are
not entirely satisfactory. Thought revolts against metaphysics in the
name of the historical experience of violence that appears to be linked to
metaphysics—not only the violence of Auschwitz but also that of the so-
ciety of total organization prepared and made possible by metaphysical
essentialism and by all the procedures of repression of the transitory that
constitute “culture.” The offended consciousness reacts to Auschwitz by
unmasking the claims of metaphysics. But no matter how contradictory
this unmasking may appear, it is still a reaffirmation of rights which, as
rights, are not pure, immediate facticity. Precisely that which is most
ephemeral and uncertain in the sensuous world (the “lighting up of a
eye,” the “tail-wagging of a dog”) carries within itself a promise of happi-
ness that will not be silenced by an “unmasking” critique. The very rea-
sons that inspire the critique of metaphysics also motivate a paradoxical
recuperation of metaphysics—for Adorno, negative dialectics—located in
“the no man's land between the border posts of being and nothingness”
(ND, 381), the land that hosts the promise of happiness that shines forth
in the dog who wags his tail. We are still within a metaphysical horizon
characterized by the constant reappearance of the “ontological argu-
ment”: “The concept is not real, as the ontological argument would have
it, but there would be no conceiving it if we were not urged to conceive
it by something in the matter’ (ND, 404).
Adorno outlines this “recuperation” of metaphysics as negative dia-
lectics through his insistence upon the Kantian category of appearance
(both in Negative Dialectics, to which we here refer, and in Aesthetic Theory'°)
and upon that of micrology with its Benjaminian ring. These categories are
rather precariously “grounded” in Adorno’s discourse. It is difficult to see
how the postulates of Kantian practical reason can be brought back to
aesthetic experience without residues, as Adorno seems to intend. And
Metaphysics, Violence, Secularization 51

as for “micrology,” Negative Dialectics gets to the bottom of it only by means

of an acrobatic leap, by evoking a notation familiar to contemporary
music, the “presque rien” (ND, 407), as the most likely way to survive, to
maintain oneself in the no-man's-land between being and nothingness.
There is no real argument demonstrating the “why and wherefore” of the
categories of appearance, the transitory, and micrology. Unless, of course,
one consideres Adorno's dialectical mode of thought to be that argu-
ment. But it is precisely in the notion of negative dialectics that all the
problems caused by these other notions are concentrated rather than dis-
solved. Adorno defines negative dialectics as “the very negation of nega-
tion that will not become a positing” (ND, 406), a knowledge “absolute”
insofar as true in its unresolved problematicity.
The ‘promesse de bonheur’ is essentially appearance, it must remain
an unfulfilled promise. Opposed to the violent cancellation and repres-
sion of the sensuous and transitory performed by metaphysics in its tra-
ditional form is the right of the transitory as an expectation of happiness
that would be a reconciliation of sensuous and intelligible, spirit and
matter, the self and nature—in short, the beauty of Hegelian aesthetics
or the generic essence of the Marxian unalienated man. This reconciled
condition must remain always a promise because its realization would
imply precisely the suppression of that dimension of alterity, nostalgia,
aspiration, and openness that constitutes the right and truth of the tran-
sitory. Yet what makes the notion of negative dialectics problematic and
precarious is not so much the constitutive unrealizability of the promised
“bonheur” (an unrealizability that has taken leave of the still-religious
background of Kantian postulates in order to bring everything back to the
aesthetic domain of appearance), but rather the model of thought that
continues to act as a base for such dialectics. In spite of all the sincere
emphasis given appearance and micrology, Adorno’s “bonheur’ is still al-
ways thought according to the most classical metaphysical mechanisms
of grounding. Going beyond metaphysics and its violence thus becomes
a sort of exorcism, a movement to displace far away on a utopian horizon
the feared and desired moment of access to grounding. Dialectical recon-
ciliation is the exclusion of all transcendence, but this only constitutes
the right of the transitory and sensuous against the “normalizing” claims
of metaphysics. In other passages of the same text, metaphysical tran-
scendence is explicitly brought back to the “separation of body and soul,
as reflex of the division of labor” (ND, 400), and it would be difficult to
find another “justification” in Adorno. And yet he must consider transcen-
dence not only as an expression of alienation, but also as the source of
the right of the sensuous in its necessary referral to something else. . . .
In short, in a dialetical perspective, every tension between being and
“ought to be,” between the factual and the intellible worlds, is an expres-
sion of a split that must be reconciled: the tension is temporary and must
be suppressed. In his concern to suspend indefinitely reconciliation—the
moment in which dialectics becomes positing—Adorno seems to realize
a2 RECODING METAPHYSICS

that what constitutes the violence of metaphysics is not so much the

mechanism of transcendence, the referral to another order of reality that
devalues and lowers that which is immediately given, but rather the
mechanism of grounding, the process that claims to reach that promised
“other” and to establish itself in its disclosed presence, in its energeia.
The difficulties that emerge from the notion of negative dialectics,
then, seem only to express a more serious and more radical problematic
encountered by every attempt to go beyond metaphysics without aban-
doning the conception of Being as disclosed presence that determined
the development of metaphysics and that still dominates in the thought
of Hegel and Marx to which Adorno remains tied.
This uncertainty about the true polemical objective of going beyond
metaphysics (transcendence of the sensuous in the direction of a stable
order or of a realm of essences? or rather the very idea that true Being is
Grund, grounding, peremptory alterity that cannot be gone beyond, fully
disclosed presence?) confers a particular fragility upon Adorno's negative
dialectics. Adorno, of course, could defend negative dialectics in the
name of micrology and the “presque rien” as thought that evades meta-
physics in its very form by refusing, strictly speaking, the logic of ground-
ing. In order to develop such a defense, however, he would have to articu-
late better the implications of his micrology which remain implicit, while
the dominant model remains that of dialectical reconciliation—even if
transferred to a utopian future—that is to say, the idea of true Being as
presence. Although the identification of metaphysics as violence places
Adorno on the horizon opened by Nietzsche and Heidegger, that he re-
mains tied to dialectics and to the idea of Being it implies makes of him
a still pre-Nietzschean and pre-Heideggerian thinker.
One can liquidate metaphysics as violence and rediscover meta-
physics, in a different sense, as vindication of the right of the living to a
transcendental dimension (the "promesse-de bonheur”) without radically
criticizing the mechanism that has always, in its entire history, consti-
tuted the base of metaphysical violence: the mechanism of referral to
Grund, of grounding. This is not only a reductive mechanism, as is often
thought by those who read in too simplistic a way the Heideggerian def-
inition of metaphysics as thought that forgets Being in favor of the entity.
Together with the forgetfulness of the ontological difference, masking and
forgetting of this very forgetfulness are constitutive of metaphysics for
Heidegger. Such forgetting reveals itself precisely as the preservation—in
differing forms, from Aristotelian theology to Kant's critique of reason to
positivistic epistemology—of the relationship of grounding, of the appeal
to the entity or to a supreme entity, first or last, that “grounds” it. As
Heidegger has shown, especially in Der Satz vom Grund,'' grounding con-
ceived in this way belongs to metaphysics as forgetfulness of Being in-
sofar as it grounds only to the extent that it is “returned” to the subject
that believes he finds it outside of himself. The principle of sufficient
reason is “principium reddendae rationis.” This may lead one to think that
Metaphysics, Violence, Secularization 53

nonmetaphysical thought, that is to say, a thought not forgetful of Being,

would be able to open itself truly to alterity, and not to that false alterity
of grounding “returned” to the subject, as though the limit of metaphysics
were not above all that of reducing Being to the entity, but instead that
of being unable to furnish a foundation solid enough (since what the sub-
ject believed to be external to itself is instead posited and established by
the subject itself). To forgetfulness of Being defined as the reduction of
everything to the power of the subject (finally, in the form of the technico-
scientific will to power realized in the world of total organization), one
would oppose a “recollective” thought able truly to meet with the “other,”
Being as irreducible to the subject and to its ability to order. If we were
to think in this way, going beyond metaphysics—as certain pages of
Heidegger seem to suggest, pages that have given rise to a sort of “right-
ist” version of Heideggerism—would end up as a radicalization of the
“thought of the other’ that finds its expression in Emmanuel Lévinas
more than in Heidegger.
There are many reasons to consider Lévinas’s thought a decisive
contribution in the direction of the going beyond of metaphysics of which
so much twentieth-century philosophy speaks. Above all, and in a way
more radical than even Adorno, Lévinas carries out all the implications
of the ethical necessity in whose name metaphysics seems to require a
going beyond. Unlike Adorno, Lévinas develops this theme in the name
of ethics while at the same time attempting radically to renew philo-
sophical language. Adorno, on the other hand, while remaining within a
dialectical perspective, was still completely tied to traditional conceptual
language. Radicalization of the ethical necessity and the attempt to de-
part from the language of the metaphysical tradition are closely inter-
twined in Lévinas, even if, in the final analysis, the most significant result
of his thought as far as going beyond metaphysics is concerned is proba-
bly not to be found so much in the “reduction” of metaphysics to ethics
as in the problematization of the conceptual language of metaphysics in
relation to another tradition to which he refers: the Jewish religious tra-
dition. Lévinas himself only partially thematizes this second aspect of his
thought, which opens the way to the problem of secularization as a deci-
sive step in going beyond metaphysics. He seems to consider it marginal
or “instrumental” (in the sense that it is in some way primarily of meth-
odological interest) with respect to the reaffirmation of ethics as the only
basis for a thought that would no longer be violent.
What Heidegger, Adorno, and much of twentieth-century critical
thought call metaphysics and point to as a mode of thought to be gone
beyond, Lévinas calls ontology. He reserves the term “metaphysics” for
thought that, by opening itself to the beyond, to alterity, evades the logic
of violence that has characterized traditional ontology (or metaphysics).
He thus follows one of its historically consolidated meanings (meta ta
physika = beyond physical things, the given visible world, etc.) Ontology is
in fact the knowledge (logos) of Being as such, a knowledge that European
54 RECODING METAPHYSICS

philosophy from Socrates to Heidegger has always considered the pre-

liminary condition of access to entities. Philosophy—or the prevailing
line in Western philosophy—has always held that the task of theory was
to appropriate to itself the notion of Being (ontology or metaphysics has
always been the science of Being as Being). When Heidegger declares
that ontic knowledge (knowledge of entities, of individual given things)
presupposes a knowledge or ontological fore-understanding, that is, of
Being as such; or when Husserl theorizes that the entity can give itself
only by rising against a background, against the horizon that exceeds it,
“as an individual arises from a concept,”'* they merely repropose the old
ontological program of European philosophy. That program, like ontol-
ogy, “has most often been a... reduction of the other to the same” (TI,
43). Individual entities, for that philosophy, can appear in experience only
as “individuals” against the background of a totality that renders them
comprehensible only to the extent that it brings them back to itself. Total-
ity is Being that the knowing subject must always already know before
gaining access to the entity. The latter, however, insofar as it is brought
back to that already-known, to the totality of the universal concept, is not
grasped at all as that which it is, but is immediately reduced to the Same
for the knowing subject. The other, however, not so much as inanimate
object or nature as the other man, is not merely a specimen reducible to
the general notion, to totality. We must arrive at this conclusion if we pay
attention to the theme that opens one of Lévinas’s major theoretical
works, Totality and Infinity: desire, a radical experience of alterity that, taken
as a point of departure, places Lévinas from the very beginning within an
original theoretical horizon, irreducible to the theoreticism prevalent in
the metaphysical tradition. There is a “metaphysical” component (in the
specifically Lévinasian sense) in desire that renders it irreducible to need,
or even to passion: desire cannot be satisfied like hunger or sexual im-
pulses. “The metaphysical desire tends toward something else entirely, toward
the absolutely other’ (TI, 33). This absolutely other, however, is the other
man in his infinity, not only another “I” toward whom | am responsible in
a sort of equal relationship. In the other I seek not only a “thou” that
“completes” me, or with whom to share a common “nature,” etc. The other
is desired insofar as he himself desires, that is to say, is open onto an
infinity. The other is a face, not only a visage,'* because it looks at me
when I look at it and above all because it speaks to me.

Speech cuts across vision. In knowledge or vision the object seen can
indeed determine an act, but it is an act that in some way appro-
priates the "seen" to itself, integrates it into a world by endowing it
with a signification, and, in the last analysis, constitutes it. In dis-
course the divergence that inevitably opens between the Other as my
theme and the Other as my interlocutor, emancipated from the
theme that seemed a moment to hold him, forthwith contests the
meaning | ascribe to my interlocutor. . . . The idea of infinity, the infi-
 Metaphysics, Violence, Secularization 55

nitely more contained in the less, is concretely produced in the form

of a relation with the face. (TI, 195-96)

Since the relation with the other is, according to Lévinas, the first
true experience of Being—what for Heidegger is instead fore-understand-
ing—in Lévinas a constitutive relationship between Being and lan-
guage—or better, between Being and discourse/dialogue—is established
as well. The other as face “produces” himself as infinity in the discourse
he addresses to me, and this strips it of all violence that it could exert on
the “Same,” on the I who encounters it. “The relation with the other as
face . . . is desire, teaching received, and the pacific opposition of dis-
course” (TI, 197). The relation with the other as face is, according to
Lévinas, an ethical relation, but it “does not limit the freedom of the
same; calling it to responsibility, it founds it and justifies it” (TI, 197) be-
cause it is an asymmetrical relation: “The Other, in his signification prior
to my initiative, resembles God” (TI, 293). Even though one cannot say
simplistically that the infinity of the other consists in his being an image
of God—which would still be an ontological reduction of the other, re-
spected only “as” creature, image, etc—the respect that he exacts is
exacted not only in the name of an equality or reciprocity of rights, but
also in the name of a transcendental dimension in which he is. Lévinas
describes this dimension of the infinity of the other by appealing to the
Cartesian formulation of ontological proof and the idea of infinity at its
base. In the idea of infinity that he illustrates in the third meditation, Des-
cartes “discovers a relation with a total alterity irreducible to interiority,
which nevertheless does not do violence to interiority” (TI, 211); and in
the last paragraph of the same meditation, philosophy comes to conceive
of God as a person: “It is a question no longer of an ‘infinite object’ still
known and thematized, but of a majesty” (TI, 212).
In what is probably the best essay on Lévinas’s thought, Jacques Der-
rida has set forth a series of arguments in order to maintain that, ulti-
mately, if ontology is violence in the sense meant by Lévinas, then Lé-
vinas himself with his philosophy of alterity cannot completely escape
this violence.'* On the one hand, the encounter with the other requires
that he in some way reveal himself to us precisely “as” other, and hence
that he be thematized as an ego (and not, for example, as a thing), but this
involves at least a certain fore-understanding of an ontological sort.'? On
the other hand, if, as Lévinas would have it, the face of the other presents
itself to me as an interlocutor in a discourse, the encounter will always
already be mediated by language, which is also ontological “violence”:
“Predication is the first violence. Since the verb to be and the predicative
act are implied in every other verb, and in every common noun, nonvio-
lent language, in the last analysis, would be a language of pure invoca-
tion, pure adoration, proffering only proper nouns in order to call to the
other from afar.”'®
If Derrida is right, at least on these points, there are reasons to
56 RECODING METAPHYSICS

believe that the effort to go beyond metaphysics (as ontological violence)

fails once again, even in Lévinas. One can probably add yet another argu-
ment to those of Derrida—an argument that merely makes explicit hints
already found in Derrida's text. Without discourse and the relative vio-
lence that it implies, Derrida says, “there would be only pure violence or
pure nonviolence.”!” It is easier to understand the second alternative and
hence conclude not only that in spite of the effort to think Being in terms
of pure alterity, Lévinas must accept a certain measure of “transcendental
violence” outside of which even the other as other could not give himself,
but also that perhaps precisely the other as other is, at bottom, a “figure”
of violence, still a form of peremptory authority of the metaphysical
Grund. At times this is explicit in Lévinas's own text: thus in one of the
concluding pages of Totality and Infinity, the exteriority of Being is “entirely
command and authority” (TI, 291), an infinity that turns to the Same as
its highness and majesty. If, as we have learned from Heidegger, meta-
physics is not only the violence of the reduction of everything under a
universal, but also and inseparably the identification of this universal
with an entity—grounding, arché, first principle, authority—then Lévinas
appears as someone who, in order to escape from metaphysics in its first
sense as ontology, simply rediscovers metaphysics in its second sense as
theology. Even though this is an aporia that Lévinas himself seems un-
able to resolve, it is here that we find the most fecund aspect of his
thought: that which sends us in the direction ofthe meditation on seculari-
zation and its meaning for going beyond metaphysics.
The link between metaphysics as the science of Being as Being and
metaphysics as theology—the science of the entity that as a pure act
realizes in itself Being in its fullness—is one of the most deeply rooted
theses of Western thought. That Lévinas has recourse to the idea of infin-
ity as it “functions” in Descartes shows that, at least in this respect, he
does not refuse his own membership in the metaphysical tradition com-
ing from the Greeks. But to that extent, it is also probable that his notion
of alterity succeeds only with great difficulty in escaping from the implica-
tions of what Heidegger has called the onto-theology that runs through
all of European thought. Even if, with his evocation of Descartes, Lé-
vinas's “Other” seems to define itself within the onto-theological horizon
and to reflect in itself, in the final analysis, even traits of violence (in the
“command and authority” that characterize it), it is also true that in other
pages of his work, and particularly in the preface to Totality and Infinity (the
work in which the evocation of Descartes is most essential and constant),
Lévinas seems to recognize as a “source” of his philosophy of exteriority,
not phenomenological analysis carried out with the conceptual instru-
ments of Western philosophy, but the eschatology of the biblical
prophets. Eschatology does not mean primarily a certain anticipation of
the last things that would present itself as the “completion” of philo-
sophical evidence (TI, 22). It takes shape above all as an idea of judg-
ment pronounced upon each being in every moment, outside the succes-
Metaphysics, Violence, Secularization 57

sion and unraveling of their destiny in history as totality. It is only insofar

as they are “able” to be subjected to a judgment that puts them in rela-
tion to the beyond of history, that is, of totality, that men can have au-
thority as “Others” and present themselves as faces open onto infinity. In
the light of the “extraordinary phenomenon of prophetic eschatology,” (TI,
22), Western philosophy appears dominated by the idea of Being as total-
ity and by the violence that it implies: “We oppose to the objectivism of
war [i.e., the link totality-violence of ontology] a subjectivity born from
the eschatological vision” (TI, 25).
And yet Lévinas thinks he can carry out this undertaking with the in-
struments provided by Husserl’s phenomenology (from which thought
learns that one must first of all “let be” [TI, 29]) without, however, remain-
ing within the “ontological” limits that mark it. He maintains that es-
chatology does not live on “subjective opinions and illusions” and that
instead philosophical evidence itself “refers from itself to a situation that
can no longer be stated in terms of totality” (TI, 24). Lévinas is well aware
of the difficulties implicit in this situation: prophetic eschatology as true
source of the thought of the other; the possibility that “Western” phi-
losophy could manage on its own to dissolve the dominion of the notion
of totality: “It is perhaps time to see in hypocrisy not only a base contin-
gent defect of man, but the underlying rending of a world attached to
both the philosophers and the prophets” (TI, 24). Is it possible that the
other could truly escape from the mechanism of metaphysical violence
insofar as he is thought not so much on the model of the Cartesian idea
of infinity, but rather as the “Lord” who speaks in the Bible?
It seems that Lévinas’s entire opus, even and especially the many
edifying pages that appear in Totality and Infinity, is an effort to show that
the “majesty” of infinity thought according to Biblical eschatology does
not have the traits of violence that are instead proper to metaphysical
Being. But isn’t the Being of Western ontology perhaps violent because
it “reduces” to itself? Is this reduction, though, characterized as violent
only or principally for “theoretical” reasons? This would contradict the
ethical inspiration of Lévinas’s thought. The reduction to the same is
called violence not because it does not allow the other to appear in that
which it truly is, as though the essential thing were to know or make one-
self known in one’s own true nature, and the Good were not instead, as
Lévinas often says, above truth and Being. The violence of ontology
would then consist in the exercise of a power, of a command: exactly what
Lévinas attributes to the alterity of the infinite-Lord.
The problem of the relationship between the logos of Western phi-
losophy and biblical eschatology is intimately entwined with these prob-
lems of content. One can therefore say that the hidden center of Lévinas's
thought is the problem of secularization. Lévinas seems to flee continu-
ally from this problem, at least on the surface. The “explosion,” as he calls
it in Totality and Infinity, of the category of totality occurs both because bib-
lical eschatology calls us and because philosophy itself joins in uncovering
58 RECODING METAPHYSICS

its insufficiency. But doesn't this double inspiration perhaps constitute

the hypocrisy of European thought that we should begin to conceive in
terms that are not exclusively moralistic (cf. TI, 24)? Lévinas does not
make clear whether and to what extent he considers Western philosophy
to be entirely dominated by an orientation like that of Ulysses, who in the
end returns to his native island, ‘une complaisance dans le Méme, une
méconnaissance de |’Autre,”!® or whether biblical eschatology is, as it
seems, truly a source completely other from that of thought dominated
by the violence of the same. As we have seen, he does not openly theorize
such a radical alternative. But at that point he should ask himself whether
it is in general possible that philosophy on its own could manage to blow
up the idea of totality that has always dominated it. One can see two pos-
sible schema here: either the thought of exteriority can be instituted
through the theoretical “correction” of errors in Western thought, and
then biblical eschatology would be only a complementary source of truth;
or Greek philosophy is completely dominated by the idea of totality and
to “correct itself’ needs an “external” intervention like that of the word of
the prophets. The first schema does not seem feasible, especially because
to give the thought of totality the form of an “error” able to “correct itself”
would mean to continue to adopt a “representative” image of theory: we
believed erroneously that things stood in a certain way, but now we dis-
cover, etc. But to represent, and hence also to “correct,” a certain errone-
ous representation with a more adequate one is precisely the procedure
of the reduction of the other to the same. It is difficult to think that this
could be the way to get out of the violent ontology of totality. What re-
mains, then, is the second schema: external intervention. But what
Lévinas verifies and Derrida makes quite clear is that thought cannot suc-
ceed in getting completely out of the Western logos, which appears to
Lévinas to be “the means of every agreement, in which all truth is re-
flected” and to be “Greek civilization arid what it has produced: logos, the
coherent discourse of reason.”'? What could the correct way to stay within
the “laceration” between Greek logos and eschatologism be? That the two
cannot be considered sources of truth completely separated appears in
the very “necessity” in which Lévinas finds himself enveloped of having
recourse to an element of traditional metaphysics like the idea of Carte-
sian infinity in order to "speak" of the exteriority of the other. These two
languages are always already given to us in a mutual interwining, like a
sending off and a destiny—in the double sense that the term Ge-Schick has
in Heidegger.
Such a problematic seems to point to the following conclusion: only
by thematizing more explicitly—and not as a marginal problem of lan-
guage and method—the question of the relation between the two tradi-
tions to which he refers (Greek and biblical) can Lévinas get to the heart
of the problem of ontological violence still implicated in his representa-
tion of the other. It is probably not without importance, here, that Lévinas
Metaphysics, Violence, Secularization 59

refers to the Bible as Old Testament, to Judaism, and not to Christianity.

This accentuates the tendency in him, visible in Christian thinkers as well,
to solve the problem of secularization with a pure and simple “return” to
the origin, to a moment preceding the “dissolution” that secularization
presumably represented. What Heidegger calls the metaphysical forget-
fulness of Being in favor of the entity, and Lévinas describes as the pre-
dominance of ontological violence, would be dissolved by a “recollection”
that would constitute a step backward toward an authentic “representa-
tion” of Being as other, obscured by the contaminating itinerary to which
Western history has submitted it. But wouldn't this return not be first of
all purely and simply a rediscovery of the metaphysical Grund in a still-
barbaric form, still marked by the peremptoriness of a relationship of
command, whereas the metaphysics of “grounding” and finally the prin-
cipium reddendae rationis represent instead a first secularization but also a
civilizing effect, a reduction of violence?
It is certainly undeniable that the foundation of the contemporary
problematic of going beyond metaphysics is ethical and, even more, re-
ligious. It is religious in one of the senses that Lévinas has brought to
light: in seeking to go beyond metaphysics one encounters the “Lord” of
the Bible whose alterity, however, consists in not being reducible to
Grund. Not in the sense, as Lévinas seems to think, that Grund does not
“ground” enough, that it is not other enough to be able to provide the
base, authority, and command that desire would seek (thereby con-
tradicting, however, his very own “infinity”), but rather in the sense that it
puts us in relation to an “origin” that escapes every grounding mech-
anism. For this reason Lévinas calls that alterity “immemorial.’’° If we
must take this immemoriality seriously, however, the Lord of the Bible
cannot be thought of as the “creator,” at least insofar as creation tends
to take the form of an absolute beginning, but instead as perhaps merely
the author of the message, or better, as the transmission of the messge
itself. It is not true, as Lévinas believes, that biblical eschatology speaks
above all of judgment that touches everyone at every moment apart from
any historical “belonging,” or better, that this judgment is exercised
through belonging to the events of which eschatology speaks: creation,
sin, redemption, expectation of the end of the world. Biblical eschatology
is also a philosophy of history in which the secularization that Lévinas
does not thematize is “foreseen” or begun. Moments of history are not all
equal before God—a God for whom this would be true would be precisely
nothing other than the God of philosophers, the first principle of meta-
physical ontology. Derrida is right to chide Lévinas for a tendency to think
alterity as a leap outside history,*' even if Derrida then believes he can
resolve the problem of historicity by making a philosophy of the struc-
tural finitude of man out of the inevitability of ontological violence (in
the senses noted above). This philosophy as such would open the field
of historicity, of choices, of human affairs, in which, however, it
60 RECODING METAPHYSICS

would still hold that all moments exist in an “immediate” relation to, and
are equal with respect to the other, Being, God: hence a very sui generis
historicity also unable to truly think secularization.
If the Lord of the Bible must not be a metaphysical “principle” grasped
only in a more initial and barbaric configuration, the eschatology of the
prophets can be considered neither a source parallel to that of Greek
philosophy nor a truer preceding moment to which one should return by
skipping over the equivocations and distortions introduced by the Greek
logos. The “uses” to which the biblical message has been put, both Old
and New Testaments—the Christianization of the West, “Weberian”
rationalization as interpretation and “application” of the Bible—are all
part of the biblical message, are completely internal to it. The “Lord of the
Bible” is such in the double sense of the genitive, to use once again one
of Heidegger's “grammatical” ploys: he is not only the author to whose
will, personality, intention, or, in short, “presence” one can return through
the text; he is also, inseparably, an effect of the text, the “continuity” that
speaks to us in the interpretations, translations, and transmissions that
constitute the history of Greco-Judaic-Christian civilization. To thematize
this relation between the text and its author: precisely this and only this
is, in the end, going beyond metaphysics.
Like Adorno with his notion of micrology, Lévinas says more than
his theory actually manages to contain insofar as he does not carry out
the thematics of secularization to its end. Thus in the beginning of Autre-
ment qu'étre, he writes: “Si la transcendance a un sens, elle ne peut signifier
que le fait, pour l'événement d'étre—pour l'esse—pour l'essence de passer a
l'autre de l'étre. . . . Passer a l'autre de l'étre, autrement qu’étre. Non
pas étre autrement, mais autrement qu'étre. Ni non plus ne-pas-étre. Passer
n'équivaut pas ici à mourir.”?? To discover that the “Lord of the Bible” is
not other inasmuch as he is authority, principle, grounding, but inasmuch
as he is the author of a message that ‘reaches us essentially marked by
the itinerary of its transmission—and hence also by the fact that it has
been understood as Grund, as sufficient reason, and finally as will to
power in Nietzsche—and that as author he is not only origin but also al-
ways an effect of the text means to open oneself to a notion of Being that
takes leave from metaphysics because it sees it in its constitutive connec-
tion with passage. One does not get back to the arché or to the creator or
to the author. And this is the same as realizing that Being is not but takes
place. The experience of secularization, the encounter (whether hypocrisy
or laceration) between the Bible and Greek logos that constitutes the West,
is not, on the level of the history of ideas, an aspect parallel to the coming
to light of Being as an event. It is the same thing. The true meaning that
the appeal to the biblical tradition has for going beyond metaphysics is
that in such an appeal Being gives itself as an event (message, word
transmitted) to which the history of metaphysics belongs as a constitu-
tive moment. To go beyond metaphysics or, as Heidegger prefers, verwind-
en (to take up again, to distort, to submit to and recover from) meta-
Metaphysics, Violence, Secularization 61

physics, is to travel again thematically the itinerary of its transmission or

“to correspond to Ge-Schick," to its sending off, recognizing it in its nature
as secularizing process.” If Lévinas’s path remains that of the metaphys-
ically oriented return to the other as initial moment, authority, and com-
mand, Heidegger's path consists in following the movement of secularizing
“dissolution” in which Being, even through the contamination of the
“Lord of the Bible” by Western metaphysics, liberates itself from its vio-
lent connotations. From “principle” it becomes word, discourse, interpre-
tation. In the Heideggerian “reconstruction” of the history of metaphysics
as the destiny of Being (which, for now, is accomplished in the Western
sunset toward which metaphysical Being moves), Judaism and Christian-
ity are strangely almost absent. Although he described metaphysics as
onto-theo-logy, one could say that the recollection that he practiced
stopped at the ontological aspect. The reception of Heidegger's teaching
has something essential to learn from Lévinas's thought on this point. A
more authentic understanding of the “event” of Being, outside of the re-
current temptations to get out of metaphysics by taking up theology in
place of ontology, can probably arise only from an explicit elaboration of
the Heideggerian recollection of metaphysics that would include its theo-
logical aspect. In its “theoretical” and, inseparably, its “epochal” aspects
(Ge-Stell), the Verwindung of metaphysics is nothing other than seculariza-
tion.

TRANSLATED BY BARBARA SPACKMAN

 a am
“3 Mo ven
tate)
a re
O TI
GIANNI VATTIMO
Toward an Ontology of Decline

According to a well-known thesis of Heidegger, the name “Occident,”

Abendland, not only designates our civilization’s place in a geographical
sense but names it ontologically as well insofar as Abendland is the land
of the setting sun, of the sunset of Being. One can speak of an ontology
of decline and see its preparation and first elements in Heidegger's texts
only if one interprets Heidegger's thesis on the Occident by transforming
its formulation: not “the Occident is the land of the sunset (of Being),”
but “the Occident is the land of the sunset (and hence, of Being).” More-
over, another decisive Heideggerian formula that serves as the title of one
of the sections of Nietzsche, ‘metaphysics as the history of Being,” can be
read in exactly the same way if accented correctly, that is to say, in the
only way that conforms to the whole of Heidegger's thought: not “meta-
physics is a history of Being,” but “metaphysics is the history of Being.”
Apart from metaphysics, there is no other history of Being. Thus the Occi-
dent is not a land in which Being fades, while elsewhere it shines (shone,
will shine) high in the noonday sky; the Occident is the only land of Being
precisely insofar as it is also, inseparably, the land of the sunset of Being.
In its intentional ambiguity, this reformulation of Heidegger's pro-
nouncement on the Occident means immediately to take its distance
from the most widespread interpretations of the meaning to be given
Heidegger's philosophy. Generally speaking, these interpretations can be
characterized as alternately emphasizing one or the other term, sunset or
Being, to the detriment of the connection between them that seems to
me indissoluble. Those interpretations that persist in reading Heidegger
as a thinker who, in some way however problematic or preparatory, fore-
tells a return of Being or to Being, according to a line of thought that may
be called religious (or more precisely, theo-logical, in the sense of the
Onto-theo-logy of Identitàt und Differenz), put exclusive emphasis on the
term “Being.’* Those interpretations that find in Heidegger's thought an
invitation to take note that metaphysics has come to an end, and with it
any possible history of Being, emphasize instead the term “sunset”: of
Being “nothing remains” at all, and this excludes any mythic expectation
of its possible returning to us. The very liveliness with which these two
64 RECODING METAPHYSICS

readings, with all their internal differentiations, continually oppose and

contend with each other may be taken as a sign that the two elements
that they isolate, and that the proposed formula attempts to express in
their connection, are indeed present and problematically connected in
Heidegger's text. Even on a first and superficial reading, such a formula
may begin, without forcing the matter, by explaining that which always
seems an ambiguity in Heidegger's attitude toward the history of meta-
physics. This ambiguity may be eliminated only by interpreting that his-
tory as a dialectical preparation of its own supercession in the direction
of a recollective thought like that which Heidegger himself seeks to ac-
tualize. But Metaphysik, like the Geschichte des Seins, is precisely not a dialec-
tical unfolding. The attention and respect—or better and definitely, the
pietas—that Heidegger displays in regard to the history of that thought in
which ever more clearly nothing remains of Being is not justified dialecti-
cally by an identification of the real (the event) with the rational. Rather,
this pietas can be better explained by the awareness that metaphysics is
the destiny of Being also and above all in the sense that decline “befits”
Being.
Along with this, however, it has also been said that in Heidegger's
texts one finds the premises and elements for a possible “positive” con-
ception of Being, and not only the description of a condition of absence
that would be defined only in relation—a relation of nostalgia, expecta-
tion, or even of liquidation (as in the repudiation of metaphysics as myth
and ideology)—to the presence of Being understood as characterized by
all the strong attributes that Western tradition has always conferred upon
it. These attributes are strong not merely in a metaphorical sense. The
relation between energeia, the actuality that characterizes Aristotelian
Being, and enargeia, the evidence, luminosity, vividness of that which ap-
pears and imposes itself as true, exceeds that of verbal resonance, as
does the relation between actuality ‘and energy, and energy and true
force. When Nietzsche speaks of metaphysics as an attempt to master the
real by force, he does not describe a marginal characteristic of meta-
physics but indicates its essence as it is delineated right from the very
first pages of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, where knowledge is defined in rela-
tion to the possession of first principles.?
I do not think that interpreters and followers of Heidegger have yet
developed even the first elements of an ontology of decline, except in cer-
tain respects for Gadamer's hermeneutics, and the thesis “Being that can
be understood is language.” There, however, the relation of Being to lan-
guage is always studied predominantly from the point of view of lan-
guage, and not from the point of view of the consequences that it might
have for ontology. In Gadamer, for example, the Heideggerian notion of
metaphysics receives no significant elaboration. The absence of a theo-
retical elaboration of the ontology of decline by members of the Heideg-
gerian school probably depends on their continuing, in spite of every
Warnung to the contrary, to think of Heidegger's meditation on Being in
Toward an Ontology of Decline 65

terms of grounding. Heidegger, instead, made it necessary to "leave be-

hind Being as grounding" if one wants to move on to recollective
thought.’ If I am not mistaken, Heidegger spoke of Fundamentalontologie
only in Sein und Zeit, and though his texts speak often of Begriindung, it is
always in reference to metaphysics, precisely the thought that moves only
against the horizon of the assignation of Grund. In Sein und Zeit a certain
intention of grounding does reveal itself, at least in a broad sense, for it
deals with an interrogation of the meaning of Being, that is, of the horizon
only within which every entity gives itself as something. But from the very
start, with the importance assumed by the reference to the passage from
the Sophist in the epigraph of the work, the inquiry is immediately oriented
toward a historical condition. Not even for a moment does it turn to pure
conditions of possibility, whether of the phenomenon or of knowledge, in
a Kantian sense. If we may play upon words, we are faced with a situation
in which the condition of possibility in the Kantian sense reveals itself to
be indissolubly connected with a condition understood as the state of
things, and this connection is the authentic topic of discourse.
In Sein und Zeit, we neither seek nor find what the transcendental con-
ditions of the possibility of the experience of the entity might be, but we
ascertain in a meditative mode the conditions in which, in fact, our ex-
perience of the entity alone gives itself. Of course, this does not imply a
total abandoning of the transcendental plane, of the interest in identify-
ing conditions of possibility in the Kantian sense. But the inquiry must
note from the very beginning that it can carry on only in an inextricable
connection with the identification of conditions in the factical sense of
the word. It is necessary to draw attention to this point, especially in rela-
tion to recent revivals in hermeneutical circles (such as those by Karl Apel
and Jlirgen Habermas) of orientations for the most part Kantian. One of
the elements that already in Sein und Zeit constitutes a basis for the ontol-
ogy of decline is precisely the specific physiognomy that “grounding”
takes on there. Precisely on account of the radical way in which the ques-
tion of Being is posed in that work—with the immediate passage to the
existential analytic—it is clear that any possible reply to the question
can, in principle, no longer take shape as grounding not only in the sense
of the assignation of Grund, of sufficient reason or principle, but also in
the sense that thought cannot in any way expect to reach a position from
which to have at its disposal the entity that is supposed to be grounded.
Already in Sein und Zeit Being is “left behind as grounding.” In the place of
Being able to function as Grund one glimpses, in the centrality that the
existential analytic and the elucidation of the link with time assume, a
“Being” that is constitutively no longer capable of grounding: a weak and
depotentiated Being. The “meaning” of Being that Sein und Zeit seeks and,
to some extent, attains must be understood above all as a “direction” in
which being-there and the entity find themselves headed: a movement
that leads them not to a stable base but to a further, permanent disloca-
tion in which they find themselves dispossessed and deprived of any
66 RECODING METAPHYSICS

center. The situation that Nietzsche describes (in the note that opens the
old edition of Wille zur Macht) as characteristic of nihilism, in which from
Copernicus on “man rolls away from the center toward the X,” is also the
situation of Heideggerian Dasein. Dasein, like post-Copernican man, is not
the grounding center, not does it inhabit, possess, or coincide with that
center. The search for the meaning of Being, in its radical development in
Sein und Zeit, makes it progressively clear that this meaning is given man
only as dispossession and un-grounding. Hence even against the letter
of Heidegger's texts, one must say that the search begun in Sein und Zeit
does not send us in the direction of going beyond nihilism, but rather of
experiencing nihilism as the only possible path of ontology.
This thesis runs against the letter of Heidegger's texts because
nihilism there means the flattening out of Being onto entities, the forget-
fulness of Being that characterizes Western metaphysics and that, in the
end, reduces Being to “value” (in Nietzsche), to validity posed and recog-
nized for and by the subject. So it happens that, of Being as such, nothing
remains. This is not the place to discuss whether and to what extent
nihilism understood in this way faithfully and completely characterizes
Nietzsche's position. It is clear, however, that Heidegger's use of the no-
tion of nihilism to indicate the culmination of forgetfulness of Being in
the final moment of metaphysics is responsible for the fact that, from his
thought as alternative or as attempt to go beyond and as opposed to
what occurs in the case of nihilism, one expects Being to recuperate its
function and its grounding force. Instead, precisely this grounding force
and function also still belong to the horizon of nihilism: Being as Grund
is only a preceding moment of the linear development that leads to Being
as value. Of course this is well known to readers of Heidegger, but it is a
matter of meditating upon it again and again in order to draw its con-
siderable consequences. The peculiar link between grounding and un-
grounding in Sein und Zeit means that, in the final analysis, the search for
the meaning of Being cannot give rise to the attainment of a “strong” po-
sition, but only to the taking on of nihilism as a movement by which man,
Dasein, rolls away from the center toward the X.
The link grounding/un-grounding runs through all of Sein und Zeit and
emerges especially in such moments as the inclusion of Befindlichkeit, the
emotive situation, among the existentials, that is, among the constitutive
modes of the opening of Dasein which, in Heidegger, “substitute” for the
Kantian transcendental; or in moments like the description of the her-
meneutic circle in the light of which truth appears tied to interpretation
as elaboration of the fore-understanding into which being-there is always
already thrown by the very fact that it exists; and, above all, in the con-
stitutive function that being-unto-death exercises in the face of the his-
toricity of being-there. The function and import of being-unto-death is
precisely one of the points most resistant to interpretation and to theo-
retical recuperation and elaboration in the entire Sein und Zeit. Authorita-
tive interpreters such as Hans Georg Gadamer, for example, put into
Toward an Ontology of Decline 67

doubt its very systematic connection to the whole of Heidegger's thought.

Even structurally, the discourse on being-unto-death is exemplary of the
way in which Sein und Zeit sets off in search of a still metaphysical ground
and arrives at nihilistic results (at least in the sense to which I have al-
luded above).
Heidegger in fact arrives at being-unto-death by posing a problem
that at first seems perfectly “metaphysical” in form and content: has the
existential analytic of the first section put Dasein at our disposal in the
totality of its structures?° But, Heidegger asks himself, what does it mean
for being-there to be a totality? Coherently followed through, this prob-
lem leads him to see that being-there constitutes itself in a totality and
hence “grounds" itself to the extent that it anticipates its own death
(since the assignation of Grund, of which grounding consists, has always
meant the closure of the series of connections, and the constitution of
precisely such a totality against the regression ad infinitum). Freely trans-
lating Heidegger's language, we can say: being-there is truly there, that is,
it distinguishes itself from beings-in-the-world insofar as it constitutes
itself as historical totality that goes along continuously, historically,
among the various possibilities that, by coming into being or disappear-
ing along the way, make up its existence. Even inauthentic Being, as a
simple defective mode of historical existence as continuity, harks back to
being-unto-death: its constitutive category is always death but experi-
enced in the form of man, of the quotidian “one dies.” The constitution of
being-there in a historical continuum has to do radically with death in-
sofar as death, as the permanent possibility of the impossibility of all
other possibilities, and hence as authentic possibility insofar as it is au-
thentically a possibility, lets be all the other possibilities on this side of
itself and maintains them in their specific mobility, prevents them from
rigidifying into exclusive possibilities-realities and allows them instead
to constitute themselves in a texture-text.
All of this means, however, that being-there exists and thus acts as the
place of illumination of the truth of Being (that is, of the coming to Being
of entities) only insofar as it is constituted as the possibility of no longer
being-there. Heidegger insists that one must not read this relation to death
in a purely ontic sense, and therefore not even in a biological sense. Never-
theless, like all moments in which philosophy encounters analogous points
of passage (above all, that between nature and culture), this Heideggerian
distinction is dense with ambiguity. If it is in fact true that being-there is
historical—that is, it has an existence as continuous discursus endowed
with possible meanings—only insofar as it can die and explicitly antici-
pates its own death, it is also true that it is historical in the sense that it has
at its disposal determined and qualified possibilities and has relation-
ships to past and future generations precisely because it is born and dies in
the literal, biological sense of the words. The historicity of being-there
is not only the constitution of existence as texture-text; it is also the
belonging to an epoch, Geworfenheit that intimately characterizes the project
68 RECODING METAPHYSICS

within which being-there and entities hark back one to the other, come
to Being in ways shaped differently each time. This double meaning of
historicity, in its relation to being-unto-death, is one of the points at
which, most explicitly though problematically, the link grounding/un-
grounding comes to light; this link is one of the meanings, and perhaps
the meaning of Sein und Zeit.
Whether and to what extent the elucidation of this link also involves,
as it seems to me, renewed attention not only to the ontological but also
to the ontic, biological meaning of death, is a question that should be
addressed elsewhere. What interests us here is to show that the Being
toward which Heidegger speaks can no longer be thought with the char-
acteristics of metaphysical Being, not even when it is qualified as hidden
or absent. It is therefore false and misleading to think that Heideggerian
ontology is a theory of Being as force and luminosity obscured by some
catastrophic event or even by a limitation internal to Being itself, by its
epochality, and that it wants to act as preparation for a “return” of Being,
still understood as luminosity and grounding force. Only if one thinks in
this way will one be scandalized by the thesis according to which the out-
come of Heidegger's meditation, starting with Sein und Zeit, is the taking on of ni-
hilism, which, in the “un-grounding” sense in which Nietzsche experiences
it in the note cited from Wille zur Macht, is a current present but not dom-
inant in the metaphysical tradition, which instead has always moved
according to the logic of Grund, of substance and value. To recognize com-
pletely the implications of this Heideggerian nihilism (and we are only at
the beginning) means, for example, to close the door upon the interpreta-
tions of his thought in terms, explicit or implicit, of “negative theology,”
both those interpretations that take him as the theoretician of diirftige Zeit
that looks back with regret upon and awaits the “strong” giving itself of
Being (as presence of transcendent Being, for example, or as decisive his-
torical event that would open a new history to a no-longer alienated man)
as well as those that read his announcement of the end of metaphysics
as the freeing of a space for an experience that would be organized inde-
pendently of Being (once again, still characterized as a gravity of a meta-
physical sort). In the interpretation proposed here, the outcome of Hei-
degger's thought is not the assertion that the grounding guaranteed by
metaphysical Being does not give itself (anymore, or yet) and that
thought must consequently look back upon it with regret or prepare its
coming. Nor does it consist in taking note that such grounding is finally
rendered vain and that consequently we can and must go on to construct
a “non-ontological” humanity turned exclusively toward entities and en-
gaged in the techniques of organizing and planning their different do-
mains. The latter position lacks (like the former, in fact) a critique of the
“strong” conception of Being and rediscovers that conception without
recognizing it insofar as it ends up attributing to entities and their do-
mains the same peremptory authoritativeness that the thought of the
past attributed to metaphysical Being.
Toward an Ontology of Decline 69

We must therefore continually rethink—as in a sort of therapeutic

exercise—the link grounding/un-grounding that announces itself in Sein
und Zeit and runs through the entire later development of Heidegger's
works. Not only does it manifest itself in the ambiguity of being-unto-
death, but it also alludes to a “nontranscendental,” and therefore also not
“strong” in the metaphysical sense, relation between “right” and “fact”
that opens the way to a completely new conception of the very notion of
grounding. Sein und Zeit began the search for the meaning of Being as
though it were a matter of identifying a transcendental “condition of pos-
sibility” of our experience. But immediately the condition of possibility is
revealed as also the historical-finite “condition” of Dasein, which is rather
project (hence a sort of transcendental screen) but thrown project, charac-
terized each time by a different fore-understanding rooted equiprimor-
dially in its emotive situation, in Befindlichkeit. The grounding that in such
a way is not “reached” but rather “delineates itself’ (since it is never
something like a fixed point at which one arrives in order to stop there)
may be defined with an oxymoron: hermeneutic grounding. Since it functions
by grounding only (more) in this sense, Being takes on a connotation
wholly foreign to the metaphysical tradition, and it is precisely this that
the formula “ontology of decline” means to express.
The idea of a hermeneutic grounding appears in Nietzsche before
Heidegger, and not by chance if both thinkers are moving within the hori-
zon of nihilism. Read, for example, aphorism 82 of The Wanderer and His
Shadow entitled “An Affectation in Parting”:

He who wishes to sever his connection with a party or a creed thinks

it necessary for him to refute it. This is a most arrogrant notion. The
only thing necessary is that he should clearly see what tentacles
hitherto held him to this party or creed and no longer hold him, what
views impelled him to it and now impel him in some other direc-
tions. We have not joined the party or creed on strict grounds of
knowledge. We should not affect this attitude on parting from it
either.

Is it only a question here of a call to the “human, all-too-human”

roots of all that we consider validity and value? That too, probably. But
one grasps the sense of this aphorism completely only when it is linked
to the announcement that “God is dead,” an announcement that is at
once the “truth” that grounds the thought of un-grounding (there is no
longer a strong metaphysical structure of Being) and the recognition that
this “truth” can, in a particular sense, only be a statement of fact.
To understand this hermeneutic grounding as a pure and simple pro-
fession of historicist faith would mean to move again within the horizon
of the metaphysical meaning of Being which, by its presence elsewhere
or its pure and simple absence, continues to devalue all that is not
“grounded” in a strong sense, making it fall into the realm of appearance,
of the relative, of de-value. The historical-finite thrownness of Dasein
70 RECODING METAPHYSICS

never, however, allows an overturning of the existential analytic onto the

level of the identification of historical-banal characteristics of epochs and
societies, since to radicalize the historicity of the thrown project leads to
calling into question the claims of a historicist grounding, and to repro-
pose the problem of the very possibility of historical epochs and human-
ity on the level of the Geschick of Being. A radicalization of the historicity
of the thrown project and placement of the problem onto the level of the
Geschick of Being is what happens in the turn, in the Kehre of Heideggerian
thought beginning in the 1930s.
But the Kehre does not allow itself to be reduced to a more or less
veiled recuperation of historicism only if one clearly identifies in it the
procedure of hermeneutic grounding which brings as its corollary the
explicit enunciation of an ontology of decline. The meaning of the Kehre
is the coming to light of the fact that thinking means grounding, but that
grounding can have only a hermeneutic sense. After the Kehre, Heidegger
incessantly goes over the paths of the history of metaphysics again and
again, adopting that “arbitrary” instrument par excellence (at least from
the point of view of the exigencies of the grounding rigor of metaphysics):
etymology. What we know about hermeneutic grounding is, finally, all
here. Entities give themselves to being-there within the horizon of a pro-
ject which is not the transcendental constitution of Kantian reason but
historical-finite thrownness that unfolds between birth and death, within
the limits of an epoch, a language, a society.
The “he who throws” of the thrown project, however, is neither “life”
understood biologically, nor society or language or culture; it is, says
Heidegger, Being itself. Being has its paradoxical positivity precisely in
not being any of these supposed horizons of grounding and in putting
them instead in a condition of indefinite oscillation. As thrown project,
Dasein rolls away from the center toward the X; the horizons within which
entities (including Dasein) appear to it are horizons that have roots in the
past and are open toward the future, that is to say, they are historical-fi-
nite horizons. To identify them does not mean to have them at one's dis-
posal, but to be always sent to further links, as in the etymological recon-
struction of the words of which our language is made. This hermeneutic
retracing ad infinitum is the meaning of Being that Sein und Zeit sought. But
this meaning of Being is precisely something totally different from the
notion of Being that metaphysics has handed down to us. Before Heideg-
ger and Nietzsche, the history of thought offers only one other decisive
example of a theorization of hermeneutic grounding: the Kantian deduc-
tion of judgments of taste in the Critique of Judgment. There as well, ground-
ing (in the specific case of the peculiar universality of judgments of the
beautiful) comes down to recalling the subject's belonging to humanity,
a belonging that is problematic and always in the process of becoming,
just as “humanity,” equated with the sensus communis to which judgment
of taste refers, is also problematic and always in the process of becoming.
The most significant document that the mature Heidegger's work
Toward an Ontology of Decline 71

supplies for beginning to think in terms of hermeneutic grounding in a

more articulated way seems to me to be his meditation on the essence
of technology and the notion of Ge-Stell. A thesis like that which Heideg-
ger enunciates in Identitàt und Differenz, according to which “in the framing
[Ge-Stell], we glimpse a first, pressing flash of the appropriating event [Er-
eignis|,' may, without exaggeration, be compared to the Nietzschean an-
nouncement of the death of God, for it is close to it in many senses, both
in content and in the way in which it establishes its own validity.® As in
Nietzsche's “God is dead,” we are here faced with the announcement of a
grounding/un-grounding event: grounding, insofar as it defines and de-
termines (in the sense in which be-stimmt indicates also “to in-tone”) the
condition (the possibility, the fact) of the coming of entities to Being; un-
grounding, because this condition is defined and determined precisely as
lacking all grounding in the metaphorical sense of the term.
Ge-Stell, as is well known, is the term with which Heidegger indicates
modern technology as a whole, its Wesen in the contemporary world as an
element that determines, be-stimmt, the horizon of Dasein. In Italian, the
term Ge-Stell is translated as “im-position,” written with a hyphen, in order
to make visible the original sense of Stellen, to place, as well as the sense
“impose” and the coerciveness that Heidegger attributes to it. What is
lost in the translation is the meaning of the collective prefix, ge-, that in-
dicates the totality of placing (but the coerciveness to which “im-posi-
tion” alludes is perhaps also the most evident and fundamental trace of
the meaning of the “totality” of technological placing).
As the totality of the world of technology, Ge-Stell defines the condi-
tion (the situation) of our specific historical-finite thrownness. It is also
the condition of possibility of the coming to Being of entities in this de-
terminate epoch. This condition of possibility is not open only in a “de-
scendant” sense, like any other condition of possibility. It does not only
make each entity appear as that which it is (als etwas), but is also the flash
of Er-eignis. Er-eignis is another key term in the late Heidegger, which liter-
ally means “event” but is used by Heidegger with an explicit reference to
eigen, one’s own, to which it is linked. Er-eignis is thus the event in which
each entity is “propriated,” and hence appears as what it is insofar as it
is also, inseparably, involved in a movement of “transpropriation.” The
movement of transpropriation concerns man and Being before things. In
Er-eignis, in which entities come to Being, it happens that man is ver-eignet
(appropriated) to Being, and Being is zugeeignet (consigned) to man.”
What does it mean, then, that in Ge-Stell, that is, in the im-position
of the world of technology, this game of appropriation-transpropriation,
of which the event of Being consists, shines forth? The fact is that Ge-Stell
as totality of placing is not characterized only by planning and the ten-
dentious reduction of everything to Grund, to a grounding foundation,
and hence to the exclusion of all historical newness. Like the totality of
placing, it is also essentially Heraus-forderung, pro-vocation; in the world
of technology, nature is continually provoked, called upon to serve ever-
72 RECODING METAPHYSICS

new purposes, and man himself is called over and over again to involve
himself in new activities. If, then, on the one hand technology seems to
exclude history insofar as it is tendentiously planned, on the other hand,
this “immobility” of Ge-Stell has a vertiginous character in which a con-
tinual, reciprocal provocation is in force between man and things, a provo-
cation that may be designated by another Heideggerian term, round
dance, the Reigen to which the final page of the essay ‘The Thing” links the
Gering of the world (with the meaning of “lowest,” but also “ring” and “to
struggle” Ge-ring) as the Geviert, the fourfold.'° Ge-Stell places being-there
in a situation in which “our whole human existence everywhere sees itself
challenged—now playfully and now urgently, now breathlessly and now
ponderously—to devote itself to the planning and calculating of every-
thing."!! All of this urgency of the technological provocation in which our
historical existence is—wesentlich—thrown may also be called shock (there
are possible references to Georg Simmel, as well as to the shock of art in
Walter Benjamin).
In these same pages of Identitàt und Differenz to which I refer, Er-eignis
is defined as “that realm, oscillating within itself, through which man and
Being reach each other in their essence, achieve their active essence
by losing those determinations with which metaphysics has endowed
them.”'? The determinations that man and Being have had in meta-
physics are, for example, those of subject and object or, as Heidegger em-
phasizes a few pages later, those which have determined the twentieth-
century distinction between the science of nature and the science of the
spirit, between “physics” and “history,” that is, the division between a
realm of spiritual freedom and a realm of mechanical necessity.'? In the
round dance of Ge-Stell, precisely these opposed determinations are lost:
things lose their rigidity insofar as they are totally absorbed in the possi-
bility of total planning and are pro-voked to ever-new uses (without any
more reference to a supposed natural “use-value”), and man also be-
comes not only subject but also always a possible object of universal
manipulation.
All of this represents not merely the demonic import of technology.
It is, instead, precisely in its ambiguity, the flash of Er-eignis, of the event
of Being as the opening of a realm of oscillation in which the giving of
itself of “something as something,” the “self-propriating” of entities each
in its own definiteness, happens only at the price of a permanent trans-
propriation. Universal manipulability—of things and being-there—liqui-
dates the characteristics that metaphysics had attributed to Being and to
man, above all the stability (immutability, eternity) of Being to which is
opposed a realm of freedom that is problematic and in the process of
becoming. To think the essence of technology, as Heidegger says, and not
only technology as such thus probably means to experience the provoca-
tion of universal manipulability as a call to the event-character of Being.
In the first of the two essays that make up Identity and Difference, “The
Principle of Identity,” there is a dense network of connections among the
Toward an Ontology of Decline 73

description of Ge-Stell as the place of the urgency of provocation, the de-

scription of Er-eignis as realm of oscillation, and a notion that (as the sec-
ond essay, “The Onto-Theo-Logical Constitution of Metaphysics,” shows)
is central to the last phase of Heidegger's thought: the notion of Sprung,
springing (to which is related also the notion of Schritt-zuriick, the step back).
Thought that “leaves behind Being as grounding” (following the formula-
tion of Zur Sache des Denkens) in the sense of hermeneutic grounding is
one that abandons the metaphysical realm of representation in which re-
ality is disclosed in an order of dialectical mediations and concatenations
and, precisely insofar as it evades this grounding chain, springs away
from Being understood as Grund.'* This springing must lead us, Heideg-
ger says, to where we already are, in the constellation of man and Being
represented in Ge-Stell. The leap does not find, upon arrival, a base upon
which to land but only Ge-Stell as the place in which the eventuality of
Being shines forth and makes itself accessible to us as a realm of oscilla-
tion. Being is not one of the poles of this oscillation, which instead moves
between being-there and entities; it is the realm, or the oscillation itself.
Ge-Stell, which can represent the greatest danger for thought because it
throroughly develops the implications of the metaphysical rigidification
of the subject-object relation in technology as total organization, is also
the place of the flash of Er-eignis because the universal manipulability, the
provocation and shock that characterize it constitute the possibility of ex-
periencing Being outside of metaphysical categories, above all, that of
stability.
Why can the experience of Ge-Stell, thus summarily described, take
the form of an example of “hermeneutic grounding”? Here we rediscover
the two elements that constitute Nietzsche's “God is dead,” because (1)
Ge-Stell is not a concept; it is a constellation of belonging, an event that
be-stimmt any possible experience of the world for us, and functions as
grounding insofar as, like “God is dead,” one receives its announcement,
and (2) belonging to Ge-Stell functions as grounding only inasmuch as it
gives access not to a Grund “absolutum et inconcussum,” but rather to a
realm of oscillation in which every propriation, every giving of something
as something, is suspended from a movement of transpropriation. The
hermeneutic character of grounding that is thus put into effect seems to
be linked above all to the first of these two aspects: inasmuch, that is, as
one takes note that the conditions of possibility of our experience of the
world are historical-finite, a historically situated fore-understanding. But
isolated from the second aspect, this “grounding” would be only an over-
turning of the Kantian transcendental into historicism. The genuinely her-
meneutic character of grounding is assured instead by the second of the
two aspects, which, if you like, is the nth metamorphosis of the her-
meneutic circle of Sein und Zeit.
Access to Er-eignis as realm of oscillation is made possible not by
technology but by listening to its Wesen, which must be understood not
as essence but as “to be in force,” the way of giving itself of technology.
74 RECODING METAPHYSICS

To think not technology but its Wesen requires that step back that Heideg-
ger speaks of in the second essay of Identity and Difference (and that corre-
sponds to the springing of the first essay) and that places us before the
history of metaphysics in its totality. One of the difficulties that we en-
counter when explicating the meaning of technology and of Ge-Stell in
Heidegger (ending of metaphysics but also the flash of Er-eignis) is that
his text does not explicate further in what sense thinking the essence of
technology, and hence experiencing Ge-Stell as the flash of Er-eignis, im-
plies also a placing of oneself before the history of metaphysics in its to-
tality but not from the point of view of a dialectical representation of that
history.!? It is legitimate to try to fill this blank by referring to another
text in which Heidegger also speaks of springing: the pages of Satz vom
Grund where we read that the principle of reason calls us to spring away
from Grund into the Abgrund, the abyss, that is at the bottom of our mortal
condition. We accomplish this springing to the extent that “we entrust
ourselves, recollecting, to the liberating link that places us within the
tradition of thought." Access to the realm of oscillation thereby ac-
quires a further and more explicit hermeneutic character; to respond to
the call of Ge-Stell also involved a springing that puts us in a liberating
relation to Uberlieferung, that game of the transmission of messages and
words that makes up the only element of possible “unity” of the history
of being (which is completely resolved in this transmission of messages).
Nietzsche had polemically described nineteenth-century man as a tourist
who roams in the garden of history as though in a warehouse of theatrical
costumes to be taken or left as one pleased. Heidegger often recalled at-
tention to the a-historicity proper to the world of technology, which, by
reducing everything to Grund, comes to lose any Boden, that is, any soil
capable of giving rise to a true historical newness. But the a-historicity of
the technological world, like every element of Ge-Stell, probably has a
positive valence. Ge-Stell introduces us to Er-eignis as realm of oscillation
above all insofar as it de-stitutes history of its auctoritas, making it not a
dialectical explanation-justification of the present, and even less a rel-
ativistic devaluation of it (which would still be tied to the metaphysical
opposition between the value of the eternal and the dis-value of the
transitory), but rather the place of a limited coerciveness, of a problema-
tic universality like that of the Kantian judgment of taste.
The Heideggerian meditation on Ge-Stell thus takes shape, at least
embryonically, as a first direction along the path of an ontology of de-
cline. We may summarize along these lines: (a) Ge-Stell lets Er-eignis shine
forth as realm of oscillation, thus sending us off to rediscover Being not
in its metaphysical characteristics but in its “weak” constitution, oscillat-
ing ad infinitum. (b) To gain access to Being in this weak sense is the only
grounding that thought can reach. It is a hermeneutic grounding, both in
the sense that it identifies the horizon within which entities come to
Being (Kant's transcendental) as a historical-finite thrown project, and
in the sense that the oscillation discloses itself precisely as suspension
Toward an Ontology of Decline 75

of the coerciveness of the present in relation to tradition, in a retracing

that stops at no supposed origin. (c) Retracing ad infinitum and oscillation
are accessible with a springing that is simultaneously a leap into the Ab-
grund of the mortal constitution of being-there. Or, in other words, the
liberating dialogue with Uberlieferung is the authentic act with which
being-there decided for its own death, the “passage” to authenticity of
which Sein und Zeit speaks. It is insofar as we are mortal that we can enter
into, and exit from, the game of transmissions of messages that genera-
tions pass to us, and that is the only “image” of Being that we have at our
disposal.
There are three elements of Heideggerian legacy in the phrase “on-
tology of decline” that seem to me essential: the identification of a posi-
tive theory of Being characterized as weak with respect to the strong
Being of metaphysics, as retracing ad infinitum with respect to Grund; the
identification of hermeneutic grounding as the kind of thought that cor-
responds to this nonmetaphysical characterization of Being; the peculiar
connection of this nonmetaphysical mode of the Wesen of Being to the
constitutive mortality of being-there.
If one thinks that Sein und Zeit began from the necessity of identifying
a notion of Being that would permit, above all, thinking the existence of
man, historically placed between birth and death, and not just the “ob-
jects” of science in their idealized eternity, one can recognize that pre-
cisely an ontology of decline responds, finally, to the plan that had been
outlined. In the end, it seems that one can sum up Heidegger's thought
as the substitution of the idea of Being as life, maturation, birth, and
death for the idea of Being as eternity, stability, and strength: that which
is permanent is not, but that which becomes, in a preeminent way (in the
way of the Platonic ontos on), is born and dies, is. The taking on ofthis peculiar
nihilism is the true putting into effect of the program indicated by the
title of Being and Time.

TRANSLATED BY BARBARA SPACKMAN

 page putamg; oi :
+
AP as SAVI aetar es
9 A
; di. toghe no N
ati, ha slo oven ayant
Aga ve iat ink eet n° oy
gree vale 4) ghrparng la rr) pis
PA PA ATI RIOT ‘era uMwe
Ù
SI E x i ra ie. »- sé “AG : i ape
I a

i i LISI sana SÙ = ae:

cites e IS | qi if è sive» (4.46 è sd’ bm
Lala § pitt ie. tall di a ‘1 hy LIRE atri ramon
a "0 "Ri na fait

ila DaeAps alpPani Ampi ci

DAZerizi à n ri è de bia ul
via beva)

WMG Jar liga pui da

MTV) Rida ali ois Î no Mis HH dal ¢ di‘ pr
at | oe IMA tw eq lis wal) asa) pi:
Sea
“ah mo DI on aps 4 Ww 8 MA ad fe. '
er eee iv ‘ari b Al ubi è Daly i. da 7

pub poi è te | » li 7 4! Bale dIwil sem pas

©’ mv. am ‘ è & hy ® iT dian

iP mi x Y at suaQ* ‘i ù aes? sing D) sé

ij he i i ric hig 9 iii =La i - Se sa Ay

eee eae ree |

rigor sr, dai bat AA ph
to. 1 Mach Ari) a dar 4

ia] n bo ie TICA a i .a ere ae N

‘yw È a mo ii a, Uae

5 7 = :

a vives tifa m4

et >
VEE
© qui fe
ALDO G. GARGANI
Friction of Thought

The philosophy of culture takes us only so far. The risk that

philosophies of culture and philosophies of history run is precisely that
of generating intellectual forms that can be overturned into their oppo-
sites. This process is carried out in the continuous transmutation in
which aspects and conformations of modern culture wish to arrogate to
themselves figures that postmodern culture claims as proper and specific
to itself. The dogmas of logical empiricism have been dissolved. The rigid
program of verificationism, which prescribed translating signifying prop-
ositions into statements exclusively concerning sense data, has been
confuted, for it based itself on the possibility of an illusory translation
insofar as we lack the logical-epistemological foundation for it, that is,
the manual for such translation. Referentialistic theories of language
have been put into question, since the conditions of truth of the state-
ments cannot determine the individual objects to which those state-
ments refer, with the result that scientific theories are systematically
underdetermined with respect to reference.
It is at this point that the cultures of paradigms, of the versions of the
world, and of conceptual schemes have been developed. And having reached
this point, we encounter difficulties even with these conceptions because
one could say that they do not constitute a valid system of self-com-
prehension of the actual initiatives that men, as subjects, undertake when
they describe, refer, narrate, recommend, love, or hate. Perhaps no one
would set about telling stories about someone or something, perhaps no
one would investigate the particles of physics or social institutions, and
no one, finally, would describe the person without whom he presumes he
cannot live because he is in love or simply jealous—which comes to the
same thing—if all of these acts were considered by their agents as being
simply versions of the world, paradigms of description, or conceptual schemes. It is
counterintuitive to concern oneself with something whose meaning is in
principle proved to be no different than that of adding a further version
of the world to the collection of already existing ones. It seems that a
friction effect is rendered necessary, a return to the ground of friction in
order really to do all of those things that philosophers call versions of
78 RECODING METAPHYSICS

the world, paradigms of vision, or conceptual schemes. Men, who are or-
dinarily the agents, the subjects of all those actions, will feel abandoned
and deserted; they will no longer find, that is, the intellectual mirror in
which to recognize themselves. What is more, men who carry out that va-
riety of things do not simply expect to see their own movements and their
own actions reflected in this mirror. Instead, the mirror is offered to them
precisely by the doctrines of versions of the world, of paradigms and of
conceptual schemes, a mirror that simply reflects what men do, what they
undertake. Does Nelson Goodman, perhaps, not mirror Galileo, Des-
cartes, van Gogh, or Canaletto when he writes that there exists the ver-
sion of the world of Galileo or Descartes, that of van Gogh or Canaletto?
The reality is that what Galileo, Descartes, van Gogh, Canaletto, and all
other men as well—who have the honor of being taken into consideration
by professional thinkers, by official thinkers—wanted to find in the intel-
lectual mirror was not the mere image of their movements, their actions,
of what they did and that consequently takes the name of vision or ver-
sion of the world.
They were looking for something else in that intellectual mirror: the
weight of necessity that had moved them, had made them investigate,
write, and paint. They wanted to find the shadow of the gesture of that
coercion which—reflected by the intellectual mirror—they were then dis-
posed to recognize and call truth. The philosophical conceptions that
limit themselves to characterizing their undertakings and actions as ver-
sions, paradigms, conceptual schemes of the world correspond on the
surface simply to plausible and possible thoughts. And, in effect, the
works by Descartes, Galileo, van Gogh, and Canaletto are in fact defined
as possible versions of the world, and it is precisely because they are rep-
resented in this way that they prove to be only possible versions of the
world. Finally, it is because they are only possible versions of the world
that that intellectual mirror is too smooth a surface which leaves one
unsatisfied. It is smooth, lacking friction, just as the pure possibility of
painting, writing, loving, thrashing, and hating is without friction and
smooth. But it is not even the case that men want to smash the mirror in
order to see the reality behind it and then measure whether what they
have done, painted, hated, or set to music corresponds to it. What they
seek is the origin of the necessity that has made them think, hate, write,
and paint. In the intellectual mirror they go in search of everything that
they have been unable to give themselves and that instead was, or is,
burned up as in a collision, with a need that has made them think.
Paradoxical as it may prove to be, the state of pure possibility suffocated
them, it wearied and rendered them prisoners, and it is only in once again
finding the necessity of the origin of their thoughts and actions that they
could once more find the truth that is, at the same time, the pleasure of
thinking and the deep feeling of freedom.
This truth does not exactly consist in matching a representation with
something, with a given, but is a state that is satisfied in once again find-
Friction of Thought 79

ing the necessity that was at the origin of an answer of ours. I experience
a state of truth not in the adequation of an image or of a representation
to something but in the circumstance in which | discover that what I say
and do corresponds to the need of saying and doing it, to the intransitive
act in the enunciation: in other words, that what we can have written, nar-
rated, loved, hated, and set to music uncovers the destiny of our narra-
tion, hate, love, and also of our music. Truth is this interest in the neces-
sity of what is defined as “true.” “True” is a primitive term that indicates
the acknowledgment of the encounter of a thought with the necessity of
this thought. We use the word true with regard to something that is said
or written, and the word true is not a property of what is said or written
as, for example, red can be the property of a vase. No. The word true is the
gesture of recognition and acceptance of the motivation that made one
say, write, and speak.
In this way truth is the direction of our interest toward what has
made us be all that we are, all that we have said. To encounter truth is
for every one of us the meeting of our own destiny in this tangle of pos-
sibilities, alternatives to the accidents that are our lives, in which not
every possibility, alternative, or accident is the possibility, the alternative,
and the accident of our writing and speaking. | can give myself all the pos-
sibilities and alternatives in the world. I can slide over the smooth surface
of plausible and consistent thoughts for an entire lifetime, but the only
thing | cannot give myself is necessity. It will be the acknowledgment of
a collision from without that will make me come out from the regime of
the indifferent and joint possibilities and that will give me the perception
of truth. Only the flash of truth is that which during our life we have not given
ourselves but which has come upon us and made us think, and which we
recognize as such, which has made us think and recognize (riconoscere)
rather than know (conoscere).
This truth is the echo that comes from within to our thoughts, pro-
voked and kindled in us, we who were strong in possibilities though im-
potent in necessity, constraint, and still lacking a destiny. Either we go
looking for necessity or necessity comes to us: be that as it may, this pro-
cess is produced everywhere. In mathematics, even if we leave aside the
Platonizing assumption of a realm of already constituted mathematical
objects and start out from our own free possibilities of postulating and
establishing axioms fully independently, we nevertheless end up by con-
stituting numbers that in the final analysis are like bodies that become
autonomous, even if generated by an initial act of will: entities, in short,
that do not let themselves be indifferently manipulated and that impose
constraints on us—on us, who invented them. This is not unlike what
happens in writing a novel in which we freely create characters that grad-
ually impose their conditions of necessity to which we, their creators,
have to submit. We began by inventing the characters of the book, but at
a certain point an astronomic rotation takes place in the pages of the text
through which we have to listen to them instead of inventing them.
80 RECODING METAPHYSICS

What do we make, then, of the statement by Wittgenstein, who, in

order to furnish an example of his mathematical constructivism, wrote
that if someone were to ask us what number will recur at a certain point
in the expression of Greek pi (a), that is, of an unlimited non-recurring
decimal number, we could reply in the same way as a writer who said
“I haven't decided yet whether I shall marry off the protagonist of my
novel”? I would exactly overturn the meaning of Wittgenstein's remark
here in the sense that mathematics is not a free construction of our intel-
lect in the same way as a novel is but that the novel faces the same clash
with a background of necessity which the mathematician confronts in
dealing with numbers. And now the most faithful translation of the anal-
ogy would run as follows: I still don't know what will make me think or
what will force me to think and to write that the protagonist of my novel
must marry a woman. But it is not only a question of knowing, because
whatever strategy I brought into play would simply be the strategy of a
pure, indifferent possibility. The surface of this ground of possibility is
too smooth, and it is necessary to return to friction. The friction, the
meeting with necessity, is something that | cannot simply think, and pre-
cisely in the sense that it is not that which gives one to think. And when
we know, narrate, and speak, we are simple subjects of that case by which
that which gives us to think breaks out, and that is precisely the flash of
necessity that awaited us from somewhere.
We live, write, and speak in expectation of that accident manifesting
itself, which may be a minute event that waits to destine us to think and
to make a destiny of ourselves. Only in the meeting with what occurs and
makes what we have to think flash as being necessary do we free our-
selves from that unendurable regime of simply possible thoughts which
is the state of repetition, of tedium, of hysterical rigidity, of the metaliic
voice in which we do not actually think but contemplate the plausibility
of whatever ideation. That regime is one in which everything is in reality
similar to everything else, in which everything resembles everything
else, in which there is no distance and in which, instead, there is suffi-
cient sterility to keep us from separating ourselves from any thing and
from making any decision. Thinking, talking, or narrating without meet-
ing what makes us think corresponds to the reassuring idealization in
which the Ego, the subject, presumes or pretends to think itself, others,
and the world and to confer upon them a store of sense. This is the sub-
ject that with its colored crayons tints the world that surrounds it. This
is the operation that in philosophy has been called the “giving of mean-
ing” or the “attribution of meaning” (the German phenomenologists
called it Sinngenbung).
If one stops here it is not difficult to believe that one has moved
ahead, whereas in reality one has remained at a standstill, affirming that
men elaborate or produce versions or visions of the world, that there is
the version of the world—as Nelson Goodman writes—by Galileo, by Des-
cartes, by van Gogh and Canaletto. Each of them, each of us, would have
Friction of Thought 81

his own crayons. The only question that remains would be, What color
do you want to make the world today? And yet there has been enormous
agitation or, rather, a grand speculative drama has taken place among
those philosophers who strove and went to great lengths with “founda-
tional acts of meaning,” with “giving of meaning,” with those crayons that
at times took on the name of transcendental structures of possible ex-
perience starting out from a purer, more gaseous, and more rarefied Ego
that tinges the world with its lights. The philosophers of this type run
about at dawn in the streets of the city in order to color things red and
yellow and then declare at midday that the world is red and yellow be-
cause of their constitutive acts of meaning. In reality none of them actu-
ally went into the city or the countryside at dawn; they stayed in bed like
everyone else. Nevertheless, someone did go, but who? Not them, but
their delegates, the speculative agents, the “transcendental Ego,” the
“constitutive subjects of possible experience’—the new modern figures,
in other words, of the guardian angel. Certainly, if one can only think, if,
that is, one limits oneself only to the initiative of conceiving plausible
and coherent thoughts, then one can also think of something like a guar-
dian angel, or of a transcendental Ego that colors the world or that pro-
duces a version of the world. Everyone has his or her possible colors, and
any color has the value of another.
The subject or the Ego, traditionally understood as the figure itself
of “modernity,” has been conceived as being a fortress whose consistency
depended on the strata of possibility with which it was covered. If, be-
cause of some accident, the facade of one possibility collapses, there is
immediately another. This Ego expressed itself by way of the possibilities
it possessed, but the radius of possibilities upon which the subject is
centered is practically infinite. With the stock of its possibilities, of its
plausible thoughts, the traditional self-centered Ego or subject can face
every situation. Are there not, perhaps, the versions of the world by Des-
cartes, Galileo, van Gogh, and Canaletto—are there not these versions, I
say, for this reason? This fortress of possibilities within which the tradi-
tional subject is positioned is the factory of plausible thoughts and, more
precisely, of thoughts that can arise only from the Ego. It staves off the
meeting with what, rather than a thought, rather than a mere conceiving,
properly causes to think and which is the recognition of that which makes
one think. If it does not barricade itself within its possible and indifferent
thoughts, the subject ceases to direct its autonomous and independent
significations and codifications toward the world; instead, it is a world as
occurrence that comes upon, and presents itself before, the subject. And
it is exactly at this point that thinking assumes the form of the vicissitude
of a destiny that befalls us. From that point on we live in the perspective
of an overturning in which it is not we who go toward the world, but in-
stead a mere splinter of reality, an event from the open background of
occurrences, which presents itself to us and which demands to be thought.
It does not depend on us, and it was not even we who went in search of
82 RECODING METAPHYSICS

it. We cannot foresee it, and we cannot even produce it artificially; we can
only wait for it and, when it presents itself, observe and listen to it with
maximum attention. The so-called free choices of the subject con-
sequently collapse, because what gives us to think chooses to be thought
by us. The coercion induced by the necessity we have met frees us from
the tedious boredom of the indifferent alternative possibilities with
which our old human subject surrounded itself. Paradoxically, that
scenario of possibilities, of alternative options, with which our old sub-
ject was endowed does not let fly a spark of decision. And that scenario
is the theater of the pure, plausible, possible, and conceivable word upon
whose stage no flames burn a forest, no sentence causes a war or a revo-
lution, and on which a small movement in the counterweights of the moral
scruples of the individual does not subvert the life of a man.
This theater of the subject, self-centered and falling back on possi-
ble, coherent, simply conceivable words, is a great exorcism of reality; it
keeps reality at a distance, wanting nothing to do with it. It doesn't want
the world but a version of the world: it doesn't want the event, the accident,
but the conceptual scheme of rational decidability destined to recognize some-
thing that can be defined as an event or is conceivable as an event. But
when, and independently of our will or our intelligence, something is
given us to think, then we meet the world because the world has pre-
sented itself, and from then on it restricts the range of possible thoughts
until making our mind the figure of a destiny. This is the thought that
truly discovers us, and the paradox of this thought is that it discovers us
by coming from without, from an outside of us, but it is as if it had an
appointment with a trace of us that we have never known or, perhaps,
that we have forgotten, burying it beneath the blanket of possible and
plausible thoughts. Truth, then, is no longer the definition of the congru-
ence of a statement with a fact, a sensation, or of the possible agreement
of one proposition with another one, but turns out to be the certification
of a thought of ours together with the necessity of thinking it.
That I am unable not to think under the aegis of something that has
been given as an event is the beginning of every undertaking of truth, as
of every true feeling. It is this truth that we encounter that deprives us of
or perhaps frees us from all the rest of us which was pure conceivability
or intelligent excogitation; and it drains us, it restricts us to being the
line of a destiny, of a necessity of thinking. And, finally, this is the truth
that gives us to think because our thought comes from without. Hence
this motivated thought frees us from that long holiday of life in which the
pure syntactic regime of forms has held us, which is a ritual way of exis-
tence together like others—like holidays, ceremonies, ornamental prac-
tices. Peasants periodically hold a holiday for the grain harvest, but
philosophers have held a holiday for thought without there being a har-
vest to celebrate. Or rather, the holiday was the displacement of a harvest
that did not make them think but that instead made them pensive. It is
also probably for this reason that it was said that every man, the common
Friction of Thought 83

man, is a philosopher; and all this will even prove to be true if it means
to say that every man within himself plays host to the specter of an exor-
cism, the propensity for movement and psychological substitute forma-
tions.
The discovery of one's own self in the form of a stumbling into a
thought that comes from outside, that is, of a thought that comes forward
in order to be thought, is manifested in what could be defined as auroral
situations of nature in which the attitude itself of thought is ramified. In
this sense sex also is a scenario and a pulsation of sensibility, and of per-
ception, which are not projections of meaning on someone or something
starting out from a subject but which show themselves, take shape and
are given shape in a presentation of the other with whom we are involved.
Sex is not the thought of sex, nor is it even deposited in another, in an
already and previously established form. Sex comes about as the discov-
ery that everyone makes of an important reality of one's own Being by
way of an accidental encounter with someone else. Sex is discovered to
the extent to which it is encountered, in the sense that sexual experience
depends on the body of someone else who, in being lived as otherness,
discovers a relation that lay within us in the expectation toward that
other person. And all sexual experience is the rotation of this cycle, of
this circle of mutual strengthening in which the force of the body of
another discovers the force of our own body, of one’s own body. We dis-
cover our sex for the first time—in reality every time—because the sex of
another comes upon us. And it is a not-negligible part of this process that
the first sexual relation or relations, or those which in any sense are al-
ways the first, prove to be unsatisfying or not as intense as they were con-
ceived to be in the fictions of the simulacra that accompanied us in our
sexual fantasies—although, for that matter, no game is immediately in-
tense, full, completely gratifying. The game is not immediately its own in-
tense experience; it does not immediately have the fragrance of unmis-
takable lived experience. In fact, one must enter into the game, play it,
and expose oneself to offense—which it inevitably inflicts because alive
and coming from without—in order to contract its bond and be initiated
into what will later prove to be its call, its irresistible summons.
The unmistakable sign of these events, which oblige us to think their
presentations, is their casual and particular accidental nature, their being,
as it were, the indexes of themselves. Theoretical thought, on the other
hand, which unravels the threads of thoughts that are simply pos-
sible, fatally always sets up great pictures of elevated generality which
are, as such, always suspect. The thought of the possible practiced by
philosophers carries out a discourse that always takes a world as a total-
ity, as a system of hierarchically ordered relations. But this is a general
cosmos that is all held together, without margins or residues, a scene
from which nothing and no one advances to meet us. It is a word, a
geometrical cosmos in other words, and not reality—which is instead the
geometry of a leaf that presumes to say, that reaches out to us in order
84 RECODING METAPHYSICS

to say, and that in presuming gives us something to think. Thus a piece,

a fragment of reality comes toward us.
If the subject that gave meaning to the world with the simple possi-
bility of its thoughts is an illusion, as is also the practical subject that
maintains itself as the total author of its actions, then it is necessary to
conceive thinking itself in a completely new way. That is, it is necessary
to reconsider this name thought for it may turn out to be the name of
something entirely different. In the meantime one must begin to realize
that thinking is not the name of itself, that it is not its own self-designa-
tion. It is the name destined to melt away in the scenes of signs, of an
entire variety of signs of events that constitute the necessity of an in-
terpretation, but of an interpretation that will not be a version of the
world, a simple possible thought of its reality, but rather the bundle itself,
the texture of these signs, of their events, their interlacing in an unheard
of, unforeseeable commonality. The traditional subject must be demoted
or de-strengthened from its position as director of thoughts to become
the theater of events. If one can speak of a subject, it is only as a place
in which the most disparate events draw together. The unforeseeable
ramifications of these events form a commonality only insofar as they
coexist; afterward, and only afterward, one wants—given that they are to
be found together—to attribute the name of coherence to these events
in order to carry out the exorcism of their domestication. The subject now
reveals itself as the theater that unites in a single scene the drift of
pieces, of figurations and signs which were events. One speaks of them
only because they have happened. But the fact that they have happened
counts and makes them that great necessity to which the flow of the
thoughts of every man is now subject. What one calls the “thought” of
men is a communality in which pieces, segments of the scenarios of life,
temporal parts, have come to be piled together as events in a communal-
ity—which is now the term that has to-substitute for that “logicizing” one
of coherence.
The word coherence corresponded to the illusory idea of a glue that
held every step of thought to another in a necessary concatenation, start-
ing from something that was considered the first term of the chain down
to the last. Now, however, we know that thought is not a determined
sequence between a premise and a conclusion but a scenario looking
onto the open backdrop of life and time in the same way in which we say
that a room looks onto the garden or that a room faces the garden. Facing
this piazza of light which is life and time, we must close our eyes, and
certainly not squint, so as not to be blinded and in order to be able to
assume a tenable and even indispensable demeanor for our very survival,
to be able to relax the features of our face, which would otherwise contort
into a grimace under the blinding light. The authority that we possess in
the origin of our thoughts is so limited that we may consider our mind
as a scene open onto a backdrop of events and times uncontrollable in
advance. It is a scene that we have not created but that creates us, and it
Friction of Thought 85

creates us precisely in the sense that it molds our thought into the form
of a theater of accidents and traces that knot themselves together and in
which the exorcising rule according to which “if there is a thing, then
another thing necessarily follows” no longer holds, but rather where there
is one, there is also the other. And the task that inevitably confronts
humankind is not the analysis and definition of the ingredients that run
together and coexist in that communality, which is thought itself, but the
unheard-of effect of that very communality. The unheard-of character of
this community that is the theater of human thought is the suspicion or
the premonition of a resemblance between ingredients of a scene of
thought which, in the ordinary sense of the term, do not resemble each
other. The mind of every man is an open-air theater, and it is a place of
accidents, casualties that press together in that communality we call
thought. There is no preestablished coherency, and every mind is its own
diversity of conformation of these signs of accidents and casualities, and
it is its own diversity exactly in the same way that every man has his own
face and yet is called “man” like so many other millions of men who have
their own faces. The same thing is true for the thought of each individual,
which is his thought, his own peculiar scene of events and signs held to-
gether in a theater that is his mind and that is called “mind” as one calls
minds those of other millions of men who have their own minds.
The mind is the community of signs of events, accidents, and traces
of scenes of life which do not resemble each other and which, neverthe-
less, in being together take on a physiognomy due to an interior gesture.
Now, the words of our language are the clause of this exceptional re-
semblance. Words are the intransitive decision, the inaugural initiative
that presses together the traits, the most disparate and different signs of
events, of the scenes of life. These signs of accidents, these fragments are
like pebbles held together in a small bag; each pebble has its own form,
its own shape, but they are together; in shaking them together they pass
over each other, they are reciprocally modified. And it is precisely this re-
ciprocal modification that goes to make up that physiognomy that we call
resemblance and that we define as “unheard of’ in that no other pebble
is the portrait of another, nor are all pebbles when considered together
the mosaic or the picture of the world. The resemblance of this commun-
ity of traits and signs is the dynamic relation of their being together, of
their “doing” together, acting the one upon the other. In order to acceler-
ate the work of the reapers, a ritual was practiced in Mecklenburg in which
the name of “corn wolf” (Kornwolf) was given to the wolf that presumably
lay in wait in the last sheaf of corn, which every reaper thus avoided tying,
trying to finish before the others. But “corn wolf’ referred not only to the
crouching animal in the last sheaf, ready to jump at the throat of the
slowest reaper, but also to the last sheaf itself. But there is more: the last
reaper, slacking behind all the others, was also called the “corn wolf.” As
one can easily see, it is a question of signs of different objects and events
which, in coming to form part of a single scene, in coming to coexist
86 RECODING METAPHYSICS

together, have ended up forming a community of signs which reflects no

reality whatever, links up to no external reference, and, in short, is not
true with regard to anyone or anything and which, nevertheless, forms a
resemblance that is the gesture of an interior and reciprocal attraction of
the factors at work. The name “corn wolf” is the clause of this sign com-
munity of things which are different from each other, which do not resem-
ble each other, but which coexist together, the one working upon the
other, proving at the end to be the gesture of an interior resemblance, an
internal relation that is intransitive insofar as it is properly inaugural. And
it is inaugural because it does not need to mirror or conform to some
previously established agreement or identity.
The resemblance of the community of ingredients of a man's life,
constituting the physiognomy of his existence and mind, is not the icon
or reflecting image of some piece of reality: that resemblance consists in
the echo that each fragment of the life of a man reverberates in the direc-
tion of other persons. The life of every man is actually the context of a
disorder—what life is ordered?—but a disorder whose components and
constituent elements have set to echoing each other, thereby forming—
and not reflecting—a tracing of internal relations and summonses. The
word, the name, designates, it establishes its power of designation in that
it exiles itself as fulfillment of this community of factors which coexist
together—where if there is the one there is the other, where the one gives
the other in an echoing thought.
For Marcel Proust, “Balbec” is the name of a community of signs; it
is the context of an interweaving of graphic and phonematic features that
model the curves of a scene effluent with meaning (“una scena influente
di senso”). With its pointed, cutting graphemes and the phonematic traits
of the broad sound of the first syllable, which is forced into a brusque
and closed finale, the name “Balbec” in the Recherche du temps perdu echoes
at the same time the broad wave of the Sea of Brittany with the ample
caress of its seduction, and the spires and steep profiles of a Gothic
cathedral. "Balbec” is the name of a communitary relation of echoing
physiognomies centered upon a passion that, even prior to being the
passion of a cognitive and desiring subject, is the very passion that each
of these traits takes toward the others; it is all the love of the one for the
other, the exchange of their mutual, reciprocal, and sliding caresses. The
word radiates from this context of signs, of acoustic and graphic seeds; it
is their community, their reciprocal passion. This name, “Balbec,” is the
theater of a life, the effluent scenario that actually comes to coexist in a
man, who only then we shall recognize as being equipped with what we
call “consciousness,” “subjectivity.” Visual and acoustic traits, sounds,
scenes, a rain of signs, have engraved an influential scene; sufficiently in-
fluential as to make an eye a gaze and a neurophysical apparatus a con-
sciousness.
There is no thinking nor even a desiring, or wanting, that is a separate
act or process, autonomous with respect to these effluent scenes of signs
Friction of Thought 87

which take place, which coexist together, and whose final formula cannot
be foreseen, or even produced artificially, but which must only be awaited
and listened to. Self-conscious reflecting, subjectivity, is only the termi-
nal point, the extreme point that surfaces from the theater of scenes,
signs, accidents, and events which—as it were—aggregate in us but prior
to us and which are all the passion of our living. Consciousness is the the-
ater in which one ascertains, not that a process has been carried out, but
that a process has been carried out and now reaches us: this is con-
sciousness together with the backdrop of necessity which is the imposi-
tion of its own thought. This relation of internal resonances, of echoing
signs that come to coexist in a community that is the antecedent of
thought and that constitutes the reference of names we use, receives the
definition of coherence when it is transposed onto the register of the
"logicizing” discourse that classifies verbal materials without plumbing
their internal seductions—that is, losing their passion. The strabismus of
the gaze, from which one uses the term coherence in the usual “logicizing”
sense, consists in assuming that community or context or coexistence of
echoing signs, of passional seeds, to be the fiber of a causal concatena-
tion that would sustain the unity of thought, inexorably binding the steps
in which it is carried out. In this strabismic gaze coherence is thought of
as a cord that passes through and ties the steps of a thought.
But in fact there is no cord of this kind to constitute the bond of
thought. For that matter, not even in its ordinary and material meaning
does the cord exist as conceived by the “logicizing” philosophers, for the
strength of the cord consists in the superimposition of one fiber over
another, and if we unwound the fibers we would have no cord. Analo-
gously, if we were to remove the signs, events, the different and hetero-
geneous pieces that from the open backdrop of life have come to crowd
together in the community or coexistence of the mind of a man, as, for
example, the idea of “corn wolf,” there would be nothing left to think—in
fact, there would no longer even be thought itself. Thought, then, is not
a specific, autonomous, and independent essence that interprets, that
forms ideas, versions, or conceptions of the world. And equally little can
one say that thought generates thoughts or that the will forms voluntary
acts. No, thought is the concrete weaving formed from an unpredictable
constellation of events, of diverse scenes, of signs of passions; and if
these same events, scenes, these different signs, details introduced by
chance or by the accidentals of life, by the fragments that each person
lives of this existence, were removed, there would no longer remain any-
thing that we could call “thought.” Thinking is the state of the coexistence
of these traits, of these signs of events, of these figurations of a scene of
life, of the signs of their passions. In this sense, thought taken in itself no
longer exists. And if one insists in taking it on as an independent and
autonomous existence, in accordance with the register of “logicizing”
philosophy, it is only a misleading duplication. Thought cannot distin-
guish itself from passions and emotions established by an effluent scene
88 RECODING METAPHYSICS

of signs, of seducing figurations, of graphic and acoustic seeds which

form a coexistence or a community or a context in the mind of a man and
which are his entire destiny.
Thought is not a specific essence, not the autonomous activity of
a consciousness, but the state of a variety of traces, of accidents that
coexist together; it is the relation of their emotions and passions; it is
the same perturbation of their presenting themselves, of the fact that
they take place. If thought per se, as an independent essence, is an illu-
sion, an idealization like that of its correlated concept of subject as sub-
stratum and director of thoughts and actions, then so too is the notion
of man endowed with value insofar as he is the so-called desirable man:
that is, insofar as he conforms to some ethical norm or principal of con-
sciousness to which he can be referred back. If man is a point of inter-
section and of listening to events, signs, of a figural conformation of
graphemic and phonemic traits, if his thought and will are only the state
or context of these signs which are recalled as passions of an echo that
rings in him, there is then no thought that is independent of these con-
crete traces, of these influential scenes of his life, just as there is no inde-
pendent and autonomous will with respect to the things that are wanted,
to the decisions that are intransitively established.
All of this implies a passage from the consideration of man as a de-
siring and desirable Being, capable of being evaluated according to
preestablished norms and criteria, to the state of the real value of man,
for what he is, and not simply on the basis of his desirability. | mean that
in the rotation of the axis of these considerations the value of man is
acknowledged not in the will within him, or in that of another subject
which directs itself onto him, but instead in what is willed in him, in what
within him is not conformity to a will but a completed realization, perfection
of the exactness achieved. Value consists not in the will or desirability, as
was traditionally maintained and as actions—and not by chance—were
traditionally evaluated, but in the completeness of an intransitive deci-
sion which is comparable to an effluent scene, which can be read and or
seen as a situation of nature, which is self-willed instead of conforming
to the criterion of any desirability and which, in consequence, has been
arrived at as nature, which has imposed itself like a tree, a boulder, or
the profile of a promontory. Value does not consist in the will to value
or in its desirability but in what actually turns out to be willed, which
has actually been registered, which has proved to be an effluent scene
to see and listen to.
In short, it consists in that which has been translated into necessity
and which now stands before us as a nature. Like a nature, it does not
correspond to the concepts and attitudes of “good,” “evil,” “beautiful,” and
“ugly’—in the event we even had these concepts prior to meeting the
trace, the sign that those concepts, by way of their completeness and
exactness, also express necessity, that necessity which gives to think
rather that the necessity which thinks, attributed by philosophic tradition to
Friction of Thought 89

the so-called subject, to the transcendental Ego, to that Ego which carries
out the giving of meaning (Sinngebung). Value is the fulfillment, the self-
fulfillment, like that of trees which remain still and well rooted while they
are lashed at by the wind and other elements. Value is the fulfillment of
a nature, in the same way it is equally the completion of the character of
Singleton—regarding whom, in answer to the objection raised by John
Galsworthy, who did not agree with the value attributed in The Nigger of the
Narcissus to this character of a modest and ordinary sailor, Joseph Conrad
observed that Singleton, on the contrary, was a highly significant and im-
portant figure because he lived in harmony with himself, because he was
simply his own nature. And nature here is no longer that of the cosmos
transfigured by the providential design of a thinking subject, giver of
meaning and bearer of values, but the nature that is its own fulfilled
will—as happens when one goes out into a city’s streets at dawn, where
there is no longer trace of good or evil, of right or wrong, but where every-
thing is simply its own force and strength.
The traditional philosophic subject, bearer of thought and will as in-
dependent and autonomous essences, is, in reality, the radical negation of
every thought and of every will. Precisely because of the circumstance of pro-
fessing to think the world from the distance taken by a thought in believ-
ing itself self-sufficient and self-centered, that subject does not know how
to confront the world; it is not capable of tolerating the necessity with
which it gives itself to think and the effort that this imposes on the hu-
man mind. That subject does not have the courage to listen to the world;
it is incapable of assuming a self-control tenable in the face of the storm-
ing of the perturbing voices that begin to echo, surrounding it from every
side and tugging it along a thousand paths. And given that it does not
possess the courage for all this and is incapable of truth, that subject
gave and gives itself over to constructing versions of the world, concep-
tual schemes of ordering and classification as substitutive psychological forma-
tions of the act which demanded the meeting with necessity, the listening
to the perturbing signs which we do not seek but which present them-
selves “in person” so as to come into collision with us. That subject is the
figuration and idealization of the impotence of he who does not know
how to place himself as a completed and determined will, as perfect as a
nature, and that also in this case produces a substitutive formation by
way of the theoretical recommendation of desirable values, of norms and
metrics of trustworthy and guaranteed action.
In both cases this subject of traditional philosophy, this common
man who is the child of our civilization, is he who, in having the courage
neither to know, act, tolerate, nor to suffer, carries out a psychological oper-
ation of displacement, giving other men lessons concerning the ideal and
founded conditions of knowledge and norms regarding the desirable val-
ues of practical conduct. Given that it is not the completed nature of any
of these things, this subject barricades itself within itself; it raves about
theoretical machinations and speculative regulations with regard to a
90 RECODING METAPHYSICS

world it is afraid of nearing. The reign of Kant ends, the ideal community
of communication in which every interpreter, as self-centered subject in
the full transparency of itself to itself and in the revealed presence of
Being, is the contemporary of every other equally self-centered and self-
conscious subject in the presence of full and actual Being: these and
other similar theories (Schleiermacher, Dilthey, Apel) are the displace-
ments and the substitutive formations by which a long philosophical
tradition has plotted the narcissistic isolation of the Ego. They are the
deviating idealization of a thought that chooses the hysterical strategy of
self-reference in order to avoid being invested by the passions in objects,
that still chooses to lay down the law according to a register of austerity
rather than listen to objects, signs, the circumstantial events opened up
by the world's horizon, by the scenes that come to form that unmistak-
able interweaving of necessity and pleasure which is what actually gives
men to think.
It is necessary to come out into the open air of the scenes of the
world and of the most incredible interlacings of that varied impasto of
events in order to trace once again the matrix of history according to
which we, above all, occur. Even the most linear human biographies are
the result of the most disparate ingredients, of factors that among them-
selves are extraneous and divergent and whose only connection is not
that of the analytical rule of coherence but that of what one can only de-
fine as a destiny. There is no linearity in any human biography but only
the incursion of events, signs, figurations, and most disparate repertories
of life, which are condensed in the trace of divisions, distances, and con-
flicts.
It is because of this disparate and diffused origin of the destiny of
each and every man that the word conflict occurs in the transcription of
every life and that the elaboration of the life of each individual is a nature
that looks onto a backdrop of fear. The-community or the context of the
pieces of scenes and signs of reality which form the mind and destiny of
each man breaks away from the difference every time; it is intrinsically
marked by the role of residues that have remained outside, by everything
of which there remains not the presence but the trace. It is perhaps for
this reason that the biography, the mind of every man is involved in a
destiny that is light and darkness; apprehension, appropriation, and loss;
revelation and concealment. It is upon this background that things both
are and are not, that there is transparency and opacity, and that every
flash of truth and of meaning accepted proves to be surrounded by some-
thing vaster. And from the fullness of the meaning of a circumstance
which is certified as being promising, full, and imminent, we are neverthe-
less driven toward its edge where it borders on something inscrutable
which strangely, even if by definition it does not belong to us, seems pre-
cisely to contain the mystery of ourselves or, at least, the interrogation
regarding ourselves and the circumstance we live although we are not
completely ourselves. This very possibility concerning a situation or a
Friction of Thought 91

moment—even a fleeting second—of our life that contents us, that

makes us happy, nevertheless (in fact, perhaps precisely for this reason)
tends toward that shadowy zone, in the direction of the unknown border
or margin. And the tension then rises—on the basis of the present happi-
ness—to cover also that unexplored region which is like the unconcluded
and indefinite heavens of our destiny. We are also terribly interested—
and we must say it—in that zone of the heavens and that horizon which
encircles us from afar. We are made up of extraneousness, and ex-
traneousnesses above all interest us. We could not decline the sugges-
tion of again and anew wanting to make ourselves by way of that diversity
and those clashes which are also already the amalgam of our past.

TRANSLATED BY HOWARD RODGER MACLEAN

MARIO PERNIOLA
Venusian Charme

I. Seduction, Love, “Charme”

It would seem at first glance an impossible undertaking to break the
link between erotism and evil without restoring the illusory, transfigura-
tive positivity of love. The myth of Don Juan has established and main-
tained such a link between the sexual drive and the negative, between
the dynamics of pleasure and sin, for at least three centuries. Though re-
cent attempts to reconsider erotic life through the concepts of seduction!
and love* move in opposite directions, they do converge on one point:
both discourage the search for a path that would be independent of
either the libertine or the romantic tradition. Both react energetically to
the banalization and loss of meaning of sexuality in contemporary society
by rethinking, in original and subtle ways, the two fundamental concepts
through which the West has given meaning to its erotic life. But precisely
for this reason, and notwithstanding the modifications they bring to the
notions of love and seduction, they remain within a tradition that con-
temporary society would seem to have discarded. One may take the sub-
jective aspect away from seduction and submit it to the rules of the game,
but it remains always challenge and negation. One can make love more
anarchic and disordered by multiplying its manifestations to infinity, but
it will always tend toward transcendence. Of course, it is characteristic of
our times to be beyond good and evil, to have little tolerance for truly
immoral or truly moral behavior, and to overturn either into its opposite,
and, finally, to sink both into a state of indistinction in which everything
is reversible into everything else, everything is confounded with every-
thing.
In the erotic civilization of the past two centuries, seduction and love
are complementary dimensions that describe, respectively, the most
common masculine and feminine behavior. For every Don Juan who se-
duces, there is a Lady Anne (or more) who loves him. Of course, one can
significantly modify this paradigm by inverting the roles. One may say
that seduction, as a strategy of appearances, is first and foremost
feminine. The feminine would not be that which is opposed to the mas-
culine, but rather that which seduces the masculine. By the same token,
94 RECODING METAPHYSICS

one can identify the solution to the current crisis of masculine sexuality
in an amorous disorder in which masculine erotism can, by abandoning
the code of virility, open itself to an emotional intensity previously un-
known to it. Both orientations tend toward going beyond the distinction
between masculine and feminine toward transexuality. But both, precisely
because they remain prisoner of the notions of seduction and of love, can
at best overturn traditional attributes without succeeding in going be-
yond the erotic civilization that created the myth of Don Juan and is the
apologist for the redeeming power of feminine love. The heart of the mat-
ter is not sexual but philosophical: the waning of masculinity and femi-
ninity depends upon the dissolution of the concepts of seduction and
love, and on the search for an erotics independent of both libertine nega-
tion and romantic transcendence..
This new erotics must therefore stand upon notions independent of
a prejudicial critique or metaphysics. Better than the word “fascination,”
too connected to the enthralling magic of the gaze and its malevolent
powers, the word “charme presents itself as open to various uses and
suited to indicate divine emotions as well as sexual attraction.* Such
polyvalence acquires better definition when placed in relation to the im-
personal notion of “venus” as it was understood in archaic Roman reli-
gion, before it came to name the goddess and was confused with the Greek
Aphrodite. The interest that the archaic idea of “venus” excites today is
not due to a generic contemporaneity of that which seems least contem-
poraneous, but to specific reasons connected to historical research and
contemporary experience. In fact, historical research can show such a no-
tion was not dissolved by the Hellenization of Roman religion, but re-
mained alive and active in more or less subterranean forms in the West.
At the close of the erotic civilization dominated by the figure of Don Juan
and romantic love, the idea of a “venusian charme” free of mythological
baggage reemerges. It is articulated by means of an analysis of the four
fundamental words Robert Schilling has inferred from the linguistic study
of the term “venus”: veneratio, venia, venerium, and venenum.*

Il. “Venus” as Veneration

If seduction is challenge, transgression, and negation, venusian charme
implies an opposite attitude of acceptance of the given and affirma-
tion of the present. This does not mean resigned and forced acceptance,
obtorto collo, as seems implicit in the verb colere. Nor does it indicate good-
natured consent, as in placare, but rather full assent, a disposition of the
will to say yes, to venerate, to give oneself without reservation. Raymond
Radiguet, one of the most important twentieth-century interpreters of
venusian charme, has captured the essence of veneratio: “It means to de-
value things and misrecognize them, to want them to be different from
what they are, even when one wants them to be more beautiful”?
Veneratio is a silent movement because it suspends and silences the
subjective desires, individual passions, and disordered affections that
Venusian Charme 95

would impose themselves noisily against the divine, worldly, and human
givens that require their realization without seeing or understanding real-
ity, and that rush toward utopia and destruction, oscillating between ar-
rogance and desolation, exaltation and depression. The Roman goddess
Angerona, goddess of will and occasion, seems to personify the silent
premise of all veneration: her simulacrum held a finger to her lips, order-
ing silence.®
Veneratio means to say yes above all to the gods and hence to aban-
don totally all Prometheism, all hubris in the face of the divine. Man must
please the gods; they must be enchanted, enthralled, fascinated by who-
ever turns to them. The captatio benevolentiae is the starting point of this
erotics. But the gods must be silent if they are to be venerated.
It seems that the Romans introduced veneration at precisely the
same moment that they took speech from the gods, deprived them of
myth and tne narration of their feats. Georges Dumézil has shown that
the gods of the Roman religion are the same as those of the Indo-Euro-
pean pantheon, but demythified, silent. Unlike Etruscan religion, Roman
religion has no revelation: the Sibylline Books are a mere collection of
rites to expiate the prodigal. The injunction favete linguis that invited par-
ticipants to facilitate the ceremony's course with silence was therefore
addressed to the gods themselves.
Veneratio means to say yes to the world and hence to abandon resent-
ful attitudes, preconceived criticism, or systematic refusal of the present.
It is impossible to be charmant if one is not at peace with the world, with
the spirit of one’s time, with one’s surroundings. To venerate Venus in
the world means to be willing to recognize the variety of her manifesta-
tions and to will them according to the occasion. Chastity and orgy, mar-
riage and prostitution, monogamy and polygamy, homosexuality and het-
erosexuality: these are not incompatible realities among which one must
choose once and for all, but situations one may appreciate in the proper
moment. Yet the condition of their appreciation remains their silence,
their discretion, their demythification. To be charmant means not only to
be ready for the opposite with the same indifference, but also to maintain
a detachment that allows one to respect the cadence and rhythm even in
the most decisive action. Venus presented herself to the veneration of the
Romans in two apparently incompatible forms: as Venus Verticordia and
as Venus Erucina. The cult of the former was aimed at turning the minds
of young girls and women to chastity. The cult of the latter, of Sicilian
origin but promoted to the rank of Roman divinity and honored with the
erection of a temple on the Campidoglio, was instead closely linked to
the practice of prostitution. The attribution of such opposing qualities to
the same goddess does not arise from a nihilistic attitude that wishes
not to compromise itself and hence favors one quality at one moment
and another at the next, but rather from a profound intuition that man-
ifests itself in the quality of the cult. Diodorus Siculus recounts that when
the Roman magistrates traveled to Sicily, they always honored the
96 RECODING METAPHYSICS

sanctuary of Eryx with sacrifices and homages and “in order to please the
goddess, they forgot the gravity of their mission in order to make merry
in the company of women.” These magistrates were thus charmants in the
eyes of the goddess before they appeared to those of her priestesses pre-
cisely because they took a detached interest in pleasure, a nonparticipa-
tory participation. The poet Giambattista Marino astutely captured this
venusian indifference in regard to chastity and lust when he shows in his
Adone “Venus applauds obscene works no less than their opposite.”
Finally, veneratio means to say yes to oneself. Not, of course, to one's
own desires, dreams, and ideals: all these things are too imbued with ne-
gation and absence, too abstract and inconsistent to be truly retained as
elements or aspects of oneself. Seduction may be rightly defined as a
magic of absence,” but “venus” is, quite to the contrary, inseparable from
presence, from one’s own situation, from that which is given to us. To
venerate means to be at peace with oneself, to know how to will back-
ward, to want that which has happened, to transform (as Nietzsche's
Zarathustra says) every “so it was” into a “thus I willed it to be.” Venera-
tion is amor fati, a will to want that which has been and is, yet not in order
to remain locked within the circle of an eternal return of the same, but on
the contrary in order to want the present without being conditioned by
its contents. It is thus the opposite of quietism that abandons itself com-
pletely to fate. It is the human participation in veneration that transforms
any event into destiny, because the entire past was already “destinal.”
And yet the repetition and devotion implicit in veneratio are not a true
faithfulness. By silencing the gods, the world, and oneself, veneration is
the premise of a mimeticism that distorts all the more the more formally
identical it is to its model. Radiguet remarks, “Nothing resembles things
themselves less than those things which are close to them.”!° This is
especially evident in the consequences of the ritual of evocatio, used by
the Romans to invite the enemy's gods to leave their cities of origin and
come to Rome. The formula used to “evoke” foreign gods was “veneror
veniamque peto.” It is evident that the veneration of foreign gods re-
quired the initiation of a Roman rite dedicated to them, a rite that was
more dislocation and distortion, déplacement and détournement, than respect-
ful procedure. At the base of Roman religious syncretism and of its ex-
traordinary ability to assimilate the most diverse cults, one finds an
attitude of veneration and acceptance that is not mere affability, but
rather a most original erotic strategy, subtle philosophical and political
thought. It would be a grave error to consider veneration a weakness or
meekness; it is rather the arm of a pium bellum, of a good war conducted
without resentment. The association of Venus and Mars that the Romans
probably borrowed from the Greek couple Aphrodite-Ares therefore re-
veals a meaning that is deeper and more exquisitely Roman. The connec-
tion between veneration and war figures also in devotio, the rite in which
a commander in particularly dire straits recited a formula, a carmen that
dedicated him to the Manes and to the earth, in order to obtain victory.
Venusian Charme 97

His offering himself to the beyond reveals a relation between venusian

charme and death that is radically different from that which links Don Juan
to the statue of the “commendatore” in seduction, or that which links
Tristan to suffering and catastrophe in love. Whereas Don Juan is forced
to accept the statue's fatal invitation,'! and Tristan's love is by definition
opposed to mundane reality," the Roman commander spontaneously
consecrates himself to death in order to win. For him, being among the
Manes is once again a way to say yes to the present.

Ill. “Venus” as Venia

If hubris, the arrogance implicit in seduction, invites hate and punish-
ment; if amorous suffering is compensated by moral redemption and
spiritual salvation; the veneratio of venusian charme solicits venia: the be-
nevolence and grace of the gods, the world, and man. Venia is not properly
speaking forgiveness, because no sin or even indulgence has been com-
mitted. Nor is it an allowance of space and time for repentance, since no
deviation or error has occurred; in the venusian dimension, man is inno-
cent. Of course his innocence is not ingenuous, spontaneous, and nat-
ural; it is an innocence located beyond good and evil because veneratio
initiates a new beginning. Titus Livy tells that after the devotio of the con-
sul Decius Mus, the Romans “took up the battle as though the sign had
been given for the very first time.”!5
A conspicuous part of the charme that the venusian perspective has
exercised upon poets in particular derives from its character as repetition
that presents itself as different, other, not identical to the preceding one,
to the model or original. Here we find a explanation of the link between
Venus and spring that is less banal than the usual generic reference to
“enchantment and the flowering of nature.”!* The return of spring is en-
chanting because it initiates a transition, a passage from the same to the
same. The refrain of the poem Pervigilium Veneris brings to the fore the can-
cellation of experience, the indifference in the face of past erotic experi-
ence: “Cras amet qui numquam amavit, quique amavit cras amet” (“Let
those who have never loved love tomorrow, let those love tomorrow who
have loved").
Venia is the consenting response of the divinity who has been an ob-
ject of veneration. In the mutual relation of veneratio-venia that is estab-
lished between man and divinity, Venus combines in herself the two
poles of the relation: she says yes to those who, inspired by her, have
already said yes. She is thus the propitiator par excellence: she suggests
obsequium and is obsequens, is propitious and compliant to whoever already
moves within a horizon of propitiation and condescension. Roman de-
ities are endowed with venia, and Venus is by definition obsequens because
assent and affirmation are implicit in the very notion of numen, of divine
power. Numen comes from nuo, to nod. Of course this does not mean that
the gods may not be irate or hostile at times, but there is always an ex-
piatory or propitiatory rite that reestablishes the pax deorum. It is this faith
98 RECODING METAPHYSICS

in the fundamentally favorable nature of the divine and of the present

that allows the Romans to deify (to the horror of Augustine and Hegel)
even the most harmful forces like fever and the goddess Lua, symbol of
disorder and destruction, as well as the most secondary and laughable
forces like those named in the Indigitamenta, because all these participate
in some way in presence. Upon this faith is founded the possibility of as-
similating the most diverse religions to that tolerant syncretism of the
strangest cults that characterizes the development of Roman religion.
They only thing that is truly unassimilable to the Roman pantheon is
moral radicalism, precisely because it negates the present in the name of
an “ought to be,” of Sollen, of utopia.
The concept of aid is implicit in venia. It is curious that the verb nuo
(I assent) is confused with an archaic nuo that means “I suckle, | nurse”
(whence nutrix). The idea of benevolence and of venia thus seems linked
to that of aid given in early infancy, in a state of extreme need. No matter
how much this may tempt us to consider Venus as one of the many man-
ifestations of the Mediterranean archetype of the Great Mother, such an
identification would overlook the essential point. Readers of the Aeneid
will certainly remember the episode in book 12 when Venus Genetrix runs
to the aid of her son, Aeneas, who has been wounded in the battle against
Turnus. Venusian literature is equally rich in examples that intend the aid
of Venus in an erotic sense, from the Camoens of the Lusiadi (for whom
Venus conjures up from the sea a lovely island inhabited by quite com-
pliant nymphs who give themselves in the most voluptuous ways) to
Radiguet, for whom Venus ironically “lets us glimpse her secrets, her
fruits” unconsciously in sleep.'? But the notion of aid implicit in venia is
much broader than that of maternity or sexual surrender: it must be un-
derstood in all its material and spiritual latitude. Venus is obsequens not
only like a mother who nurses or matrons who, fined for their adultery,
financed the erection of Venus's first’ temple in Rome in 295 Bc. The
characteristic of her venia is of the philosophical order: it implies above
all a willingness more general and vast.
If veneratio is to say yes to the gods, the world, and oneself, first si-
lently and then according to ritual carmina, venia is to receive a yes from
the gods, the world, and oneself, at first through a mute nod, a sign of
approval, an intimate consent, and then through a word that is almost
“independent of him who speaks it” which means “not insofar as it sig-
nifies, but insofar as it exists.” This is the meaning that Emile Benveniste
attributes to the root *bha—whence for (to speak) and its derivations fas,
fama, and fabula.'° Of course the idea of fas understood as a divine word
in a mute pantheon presents some difficulty, but the important thing is
to point out the affirmative character implicit in the word fas and its ritual,
demythified aspect.'’ Thus the term fama seems to have originally had an
affirmative intention. Finally fabula, the fabulation of oneself, may create
a persona (in the Roman sense of mask) but not a subject: the doubt about
Venusian Charme 99

its reliability from the very start prevents the individual from failing pietas
and becoming arrogant.
Just as veneratio, the giving of praise, turns into a mimeticism that
dissolves the meaning of that which it praises, so venia, the receiving of
praise, finally annuls the content of that which is praised. The facility with
which one is accepted as a sexual partner in contemporary life is part of
the venusian charme, but this does not justify any particular complacency
nor does it authorize any intimacy. These encounters, consummated
without pathos and without anyone attributing any particular importance
to them, have a profound enchantment: they are appreciable ceremonies
precisely because they are empty. They are under the sign of Venus: the
venia exercised in them annuls all vanity.

IV. “Venus” as Venerium

The luckiest throw in the game of dice, obtained when the four
die each showed a different number, was called venerium by the Romans.
This illustrates the relation between Venus and success. While seduction
seems connected to an unhappy destiny,'® and love reciprocated has
been wittily defined by Beckett as a short circuit,'!? venusian charme is in-
separable from success and a happy ending. Thus to remain locked within
the metaphor furnished by the game of dice is misleading: Venus has
nothing to do with chance. Her protégé would be like a player who
“executing 100 throws, 100 times gets the venerium,’*° but for the Romans
such pretension would be an expression of the arrogance that is precisely
the opposite of the venusian spirit.
Presumptuousness—Livy calls it iactantia?' —was the sin of the in-
habitants of Praeneste who believed they could always win because they
were protected by Fortuna Primigenia, who is foreign to the spirit of the
Roman religion.?? Fortune, mere chance, does not at all occupy an emi-
nent position in the Roman religious cosmos, and the idea of an essential
and absolute originality is opposed to the experience of a city that was
born and developed through assimilating and distorting mechanisms.
It is not by chance, then, that sources exhibit traces of a polemical
attitude on the part of the Romans with respect to the Praenestine cult
of Fortuna, an attitude apparent in the prohibition on consulting its ora-
cle. The Roman suspicion of the concept of fortune has a philosophical
basis: it depends upon the contrast between a voluble and uncertain for-
tuna and the venusian felicitas, “solid and sincere.”?* That Servius Tullius,
son of a slave and patron of slaves, fortunately conceived and made king,
had according to tradition dedicated a temple to Fortune tallies perfectly
with this assertion. As Angelo Brelich observes, Fortuna in Rome is the
goddess of slaves and those who live by their wits (“sine arte aliqua”), of
those whose only remaining hope is for a stroke of luck. The goddess
Spes is in fact associated with Fortuna in the Praenestine sanctuary.
The success of Venus's protégé is not due to aleatory factors, for he
100 RECODING METAPHYSICS

is not under the sign of hope, which awaits events that may or may not
happen. Nor must he be tainted by arrogance, and hence does not de-
pend upon the presumption that certain favorable events necessarily
occur. Felicitas consists in considering whatever happens to be favorable.
Sulla, to whom the cult of Venus Felix is attributed, seems to have culti-
vated this idea implicit in the notion of venusian charme. He seemed to
attribute greater value to his own image as felix than to real political
power and in any case attributed the latter to former. According to Plu-
tarch, he maintained this opinion of himself to the very end, in spite of
suffering from a horrible intestinal ulcer that destroyed his flesh, trans-
forming it into lice and dirtying him with an unarrestable flow of rotten
matter. Despite this infirmity, which forced him to immerse himself in
water several times a day with no results whatsoever, he never ceased to
consider himself felix. Two days before his death he ended his memoirs,
asserting that “after he had led a life of honour, he should conclude it in
fullness of prosperity.’”4
By associating the concept of felicitas with that of victoria and inau-
gurating cults and temples dedicated to this new goddess, Pompey also
put himself under the protection of a Venus Victrix. Such a choice did not
prove a felicitous one, since it conflicted with Caesar, who placed Venus
in person among his ancestors! Appianus recounts that the night before
the battle of Pharsalus, Pompey dreamed of decorating the temple of
Venus amid the applause of the people. Awakened suddenly, he realized
that the dream was not in his favor and, profoundly unsettled, went to-
ward defeat substituting the battle cry “Venus Victrix” with “Hercules In-
victus.”° The episode demonstrates that venusian charme is not reducible
to a hope for a military victory: it transcends the good or bad outcome of
a single conflict. It is not success in itself that makes one charmant, but
charme that predisposes one for success. The very concept of success loses
its objective characteristics in the venusian perspective and becomes an
attribute of enchantment: the Romans knew quite well that there were
victories that were worse than a defeat, and defeats more providential
than a victory. Caesar's decision to erect a temple not to Venus Victrix,
who had helped him at the Battle of Pharsalus, but rather to Venus
Genetrix is illuminating: he considered victory merely a consequence of
venusian protection.?°

V. “Venus” as Venom
The word venenum, like the corresponding Greek term pharmakon, pre-
sents a double meaning, for it can be used both positively and negatively;
it thus originally seems to have indicated the power of venusian charme in
its multiple manifestations.
This affinity with the Greek term does not, however, illuminate its
conceptual dimension, which is essentially Latin and is determined in
opposition to the horizon opened by the noun pharmakos, related to phar-
makon. In Greece, the scapegoat sacrificed (put to death or expelled) in
Venusian Charme 101

order to purify the city of the ills that afflicted it was called a pharmakos.
To this end, a certain number of degraded and useless individuals were
regularly maintained in Athens at the state’s expense.?” René Girard sees
in this custom a manifestation of sacrifice whose essence consists in the
exercise of a ritualized violence that purifies and guards the community
from the spread of unrestrained and total violence. This theory is founded
on the presupposition that only the ritual repetition of violence, by pro-
voking a cathartic and beneficent effect, can distance and preserve a soci-
ety from barbarism. Human or animal sacrifice (implying bloodshed) is
the only pharmakon-remedy to the pharmakon-venom of generalized vio-
lence: “non-violence appears to be a gift of violence”.?* As Derrida has
shown, this perspective remains operant within Greek philosophy, in par-
ticular within Platonic philosophy.?°
Though there are a few sporadic cases of human sacrifice and ritual
expulsion from the city to be found in the religious history of Rome, the
word venenum turns our inquiry in a different direction. “Veteres vinum
venenum vocabant,” says Isidorus of Seville. This evidence, together with
the study of the Roman feast of Vinalia, points out not only the sacred
character of wine understood as the venusian drink par excellence,” but
also the meaning of the substitution of wine for blood in sacrifices. The
sacralization of wine in Venus’s religion plays a role completely different
from the one it plays in Dionysus's religion: in the most ancient Diony-
sian tradition, there is no reference to wine and the relation between the
two is only established retroactively.*! The Dionysian intoxication comes
from the homicidal fury of the sparagmos, the tearing to peices of the vic-
tim, consumption of his blood and flesh.*” The bloody sacrifice of Dio-
nysism is the pharmakon that restores peace and social order. In the reli-
gion of Venus, however, the vinum-venenum, significantly considered the
“blood of the earth,” immediately takes the place of human blood and
implies a refusal of violence even in its therapeutic and prophylactic uses.
That the pax deorum is reestablished by means of the libation of the con-
tents of the grape-harvest jars, rather than by means of bloody sacrifices,
is a fact of enormous anthropological importance. Venusian charme thus
locates itself at the antipodes of orgiastic intoxication. While the attrac-
tion exercised by Dionysus derives from the ritualized and controlled im-
itation of an originary and founding violence, the attraction exercised by
Venus is, on the contrary, connected to a sort of displacement, déplacement,
transfer: by offering wine rather than blood, Venus establishes an astute
mimeticism that exalts the grace of détournements. Venenum also means
dye, tint, color, and by extension makeup, maquillage. In this way the cult
of Venus interprets a profoundly rooted orientation in the Roman spirit,
traditionally attributed to the second king of Rome, Numa Pompilius: in
response to Jove's request for human sacrifices, Numa did not refuse but
displaced the meanings of words by offering him heads of onions rather
than human heads, hair and pilchards rather than men.”? It is significant
that Jove appreciated Numa's translation, in contrast to the Greek Zeus,
102 RECODING METAPHYSICS

who (as Hesiod recounts) did not forgive Prometheus for having given
him bones covered with fat rather than flesh as a sacrifice. Also in this
perspective is the tale of a certain Papirius, who, in an era when it was
customary to promise entire temples to the gods as a vow, promised Jove
a “pocillum mulsi,” a glass of honeyed wine, and obtained complete ful-
fillment of his requests.**
Venusian charme is certainly linked to appearance, but not necessarily
to “beautiful” appearance. The existence of a cult devoted to Venus Calva,
whatever its origin, is yet further evidence of a religious disposition ori-
ented toward an innocent déplacement that excites, not the wrath of the
gods, but their smile. Demythification is also dedramatization: exaggera-
tions and fanaticism are alien to Roman religion, which rejects the
absolutist claims implicit in the delirious experiences of Dionysism.?°
Dionysus's religion knows ecstatic joy but has none of that humor—be-
nevolent and astute, prosaic and witty—that is an essential part of venu-
sian charme. The poets have been the interpreters of this aspect, from the
incomparable Giorgio Baffo (whom Apollinaire considered the greatest
erotic poet of all time) to Radiguet. Baffo's Venus, who “sprawled out on
the grass in a delightful garden with her lover” teases her companion with
these words: “Come on, then, my lovely, give me the precious juice of
your blessed prick, for I prize the juice of your little dick more than mus-
catel” and concludes: "May those who don't fuck go to hell and become
so many marmots. But let the first to have screwed be praised, honored,
and crowned,” belongs to the same erotic intuition that gives rise to the
Bald Venus and vinum-venenum.*° The demythification that exchanges
wine for blood in sacrifices and onion heads for human heads is nonethe-
less not mere banalization or triviality: disenchantment does not elimi-
nate enchantment, and exteriorization maintains a purity of its own. Ve-
nusian charme does not arise from a dialectic of concealment and unveiling:
it presupposes an already uncovered and available reality. Enchantment
does not depend upon what is hidden or revealed, but on the transforma-
tion undergone by the “crudest” and “most obscene’ reality. If there is still
a secret to be revealed, then we are still in the realm of seduction; charme
begins when there are no longer any secrets. Hence there were Dionysian
mysteries, whereas Venus never had them: “In her role as scarecrow,”
writes Radiguet, “Venus lacks authority’!*” All this leads one to believe
that the notion of purity that underlies venusian charme (and perhaps all
of Roman religion) is completely different from that implicit in Greek re-
ligion. In Greece katharma meant pharmakos, scapegoat, as well as purifying
sacrifice. For Girard, this refers to a conception of purification as purga-
tion, as the evacuation from the city of all that was held to be harmful by
means of the exercise of a violence analogous to the violence from which
one wished to liberate the society. Pharmakon implies an identity between
the evil and its remedy.*® In Rome, however, the substitution of vinus-ven-
enum for blood seems to imply a concept of purity as a simulating opera-
tion, displacement and transfer free from passions and traumatic exclu-
Venusian Charme 103

sions. Venenum could also be merely water tinted with red or myrtle wine,
like that used by matrons for cleansing themselves in the Veneralia feast
of the Ist of April, dedicated to Venus Verticordia! Whoever conforms to
rituals and scrupulously carries out ceremonies is castus. The Roman
ritual without myth dispenses with fixed contents having a precise iden-
tity. Purification seems to become precisely the contrary of purification
in Greece: it is not the identification and expulsion of something held to
be impure, but the ritual emptying out of all aspects of life. On the Ist of
April Roman matrons celebrating the rite of Venus were as castae as the
prostitutes who worshipped Fortuna Virilis.
We cannot conclude without mentioning the meaning of venenum
that has prevailed in the history of the word: venenum as deadly drink. But
here, too, it is difficult to avoid the impression that the Romans aimed at
a displacement of death itself. Plutarch attributed to Numa Pompilius the
institution of an ancient cult dedicated to Venus Libitina, goddess of fu-
neral rites. He observes that the Romans presumably shrewdly assigned
the regulation of the birth and death of men to a single goddess.’ Such
a cult appears to be inspired not by a tragic conception of existence, like
that of the Greeks, but rather by an aspiration to make the cultural aspect
of death coincide with that of birth. Nothing remains foreign to the venu-
sian enchantment of rites and ceremonies.
The very etymological origin of charme, which comes from carmen, re-
fers to this perspective. Carmen has the general meaning of a cadenced
formula, endowed with formal characteristics artificially regulated and
maintained independently of their original meaning. Both religious for-
mulas and the text of the law were called carmen. In the ritualism of the
carmen, Roman religion perhaps finds its own unity;*° in the charme of the
quotidian, the contemporary crisis perhaps finds its own solution.

TRANSLATED BY BARBARA SPACKMAN

ua
LTT ooh pe pe eg
tons
vai e
PL) ae, ote amino
- = nni ri
iii da e ogni à
eli =. 6 OH lee presta it
yah CHO. ELA Sete
=—— ma 6 @ it ii LL.ao
ui om |
pori
arcata te use:
int Aa re
= SEO RO i basi
vara SO Wide
Da Si i al oy Ia -
ey Caipeng: - ee “nare a i
sarah @ baro As sa’ rir: Pn
baa Gath Pert > ree ye

urna ~~ me
Lusi sun di
MARIO PERNIOLA
Decorum and Ceremony

I. The Resplendent
What is the relation between beauty and effectiveness, form and ac-
tion, aesthetics and politics in classical antiquity? The link seems implicit
in two concepts: the Greco-Roman prepon, decorum, and the typically Ro-
man caerimonia.
The history of the first concept is quite complex and tortuous. The
word and originary meaning of to prepon come to ancient Greece from the
vision of an efficacious beauty that appears distinctly before our eyes,
that distinguishes itself by its perspicuity, that excels, shows itself,
shines, imposes itself on the gaze and glows in its singular reality. The
Homeric hero, for example, is endowed with this quality: his virtue is vis-
ible, it falls beneath the gaze of all, stands out conspicuously, distin-
guishes itself without concealment or dissimulation. He affirms himself
independently of and prior to any distinction between appearance and
substance, seeming and being.! It is noteworthy that among the Greek
words that indicate the beautiful, only to prepon is etymologically con-
nected to an Indo-European root whose fundamental meaning refers to
appearance and vision:* not to kalon, in which the idea of beauty seems
to be etymologically connected to health, to the correct proportions of
the limbs; not to agathon, whose originary sense seems to be linked to
force and power, and hence to courage and nobility; nor, finally, the noun
ho kosmos, which means order. Not even to agalma, which indicates the or-
nament and then the statue of the gods as opposed to hé eikon, the statue
of men, seems closely connected to vision.’
The first meaning of the verb prepein is instead “to be resplendent.”
In it the experience of the beautiful is wedded to the festive visuality that
characterizes ancient Greek religion, which has been defined as the clair-
voyant knowledge of festive man in which seeing is no less important
than being seen, in which the knowledge of the divine takes on the form
of an epiphany, of a radiant manifestation of reality.* It is not by chance
that Heidegger saw in appearance as splendor and brilliance, in the un-
concealing permanent self-imposition of the phenomenon, of that which
106 RECODING METAPHYSICS

appears and shows itself in itself, the most originary and essential experi-
ence of Being in the West.’
The verb prepein refers to the inseparable unity between being and
appearance, between that which is and that which shines forth, between
beauty and effect. The poets use this verb in verses that firmly join to-
gether beauty, decision, and success. For Pindar, for example, “gold and
righteousness are proved [prepei] for one who testeth on the touchstone.”°
At the center of Tydeus’s shield, as described by Aeschylus, “the moon,
queen of stars, the eye of night, shines |prepei| radiant” (Seven against Thebes,
390). Finally, the only time that Plato uses the verb prepein with the mean-
ing “to be resplendent” is at the beginning of the Republic, where it refers
to the beautiful procession with which the people of Piraeus celebrate
the festival.

Il. The Appropriate

The originary unity of being and seeming, of effectiveness and
beauty, is nonetheless shattered by historical experience, which shows
that what is resplendent and what effectively succeeds do not always
coincide. Prepein, to be resplendent, in its originary autonomy is no longer
sufficient to guarantee victory and historical success. Beauty that would
maintain its relation to reality must “adjust to,” “befit” that which is other
with respect to it. This is precisely the second meaning of prepein which
takes hold and is maintained in Greek and upon which is grafted the
problematic of to prepon, understood as that particular type of beauty that
adapts itself, that is appropriate. Thus, by virtue of its relation to the
other that constitutes it, it is in opposition to the absolute and universal
conception of the beautiful that is implicit in the canon.
The lyric poets once again elude the tragic experience of this split by
saving the autonomous splendor of the beautiful for poetry: Sappho
writes, “It is not right that a cry be heard in the house of those who serve
the Muse: mourning does not befit [prepoi] us.” But from the moment
when, as Thucydides says, ‘good counsel clearly expressed is open to sus-
picion no less than harmful counsel” (Thucydides, 3.43), the divorce be-
tween that which is resplendent and that which succeeds is wholly con-
summated. The resplendent finds itself in the midst of a battle in which
it has no advantage, and in which, in fact, it is likely to give in. Only by
adapting itself to circumstances better than its adversary, only by know-
ing better than the enemy what is and what is not prepon, what is appro-
priate and what is not, “what must be done in the right moment” and
what must not be done, can it continue to be resplendent. The notion of
prepon is thus wed to the more ancient notion of kairos, occasion (timeli-
ness). Though this link was already implicit in Pythagoras, especially
when he maintained the appropriateness of delivering childish speeches
to children, womanly speeches to women, archonic speeches to archons,
ephebic speeches to ephebes,® it is only in Gorgias that the connection
between what is appropriate and occasion is freed of the originary mysti-
Decorum and Ceremony 107

cal meaning of kairos as referring to the harmony of the cosmos. In Gor-

gias, the fundamental advantage accruing to the Pythagorean sage from
his knowledge of the essence of being, whence his polutropia logou, his abil-
ity to express the same thing in many ways, is dissolved. The beautiful,
taken in the Greek sense which implies the true and good as well, is thus
forced to use the arms of its enemy: “Hence not only must he who would
advocate the most dangerous politics enter into the good graces of the
people, but he who counsels the better way must also secure trust by
means of trickery” (Thucydides, 3.43).
For Gorgias, the problem of to prepon is essentially the problem of
language and its powers of seduction (apate):° “The word, like the procla-
mation sent forth at Olympus, invites whomever it wants, crowns whoever
is capable.”!° But why must the respledent have more apaté, more seduc-
tive force, and hence succeed better? Gorgias’s answer is a drastic one:
there is no prepon, no resplendent that is not appropriate, that does not
conform to the occasion and have seductive force sufficient to assert it-
self and win. The resplendent thus seems to be completely crushed be-
neath the heel of the effective, to the point of complete identification of
the two: all that is real is also beautiful because it conforms to the occa-
sion and precisely by virtue of that conformity was able to become real.
No matter how tragic Gorgias's position may appear because of the im-
possibility of accepting the identity of the beautiful and the real,'' this
identity is always mediated for him by apate, by the seduction of the word.
The resplendent is effective and the effective is resplendent only where
there are people who are sensitive to the charm of the word, only where,
as in Greece, there exists an experience like the great tragic tradition in
which “he who succeeds in a deception better conforms to reality than he
who fails, and he who is deceived is wiser than he who is not deceived.”'”
But is it still possible to identify the resplendent with the appro-
priate, the beautiful with the effective in a country where people are not
used to listening to speeches attentively, or easily forget what they have
heard, or, like the inhabitants of Thessalia, are too crude, too lacking in
good sense (amathesteroi) to be deceived by the word, by this powerful
sovereign who with “a tiny and completely invisible body accomplishes
profoundly divine works’?!? In Xenophon's Socrates the use of the adjec-
tive prepodés slides toward a definition much closer to the useful and ap-
propriate than to the beautiful: “The most appropriate place for temples
and altars is an open and completely isolated place" (Xen. Mem. 3.8).
Xenophon's Socrates completely identifies the beauty of a building with
its utility, with its being khrésimos, or even better harmostos (from harmozein,
which means to adapt). Xenophon's Socrates thus inaugurates a func-
tionalist conception of beauty that is completely foreign to the original
identity of beauty and effectiveness implicit in to prepon. Harmostos corre-
sponds to the Latin aptus, and it is precisely as appropriateness to the
goal that decorum is understood by an entire tradition of thought that is
developed above all in the medieval period.
108 RECODING METAPHYSICS

Even more radical is the negation of prepon worked by Plato. Plato

inaugurates a complete separation of substance and appearance, of
seeming and being. Against Hippias, who advocated the identity of the
beautiful and the appropriate of kalon and prepon, the Platonic Socrates
clearly separates the kalon from contingent effectiveness and proposes to
search for “a beauty . . . that will never appear ugly to anyone any-
where,” that is, ‘beauty itself, that which gives the property of being
beautiful to everything to which it is added—to stone and wood, and
man, and god, and every action and every branch of learning.”'* In the
name of the eidos of beauty, Plato addresses a radical critique to the Soph-
ists, whom he accuses of making objects seem more beautiful than they
are in reality and hence of deceiving their listeners, and concludes, “It
cannot be the appropriate, for on your own view this causes things to ap-
pear more beautiful than they are, and does not leave them to appear
such as they are in reality.”'” The conception of beauty itself opposed to
prepon is, in fact, only an aspect of the broader and more general reduction
of Being to entity that inaugurates Western metaphysics, in which there
is no place for a beauty that is also effective, for a historical resplendent
that wins because it is resplendent. According to Plato, "The same cause
never could make things both appear and be either beautiful or anything
else."!° Beauty is always beautiful whether it wins or not.
The metaphysical negation of the appropriate is reiterated by Plato
in the Ion, where he speaks of poetry. To Ion, who boasts of knowing what
is appropriate for man to say, for woman, servant, and freeman, for those
who order and those who obey, the Platonic Socrates opposes the neces-
sity of distinguishing the word that comes from true knowledge and the
poetic word, which, by divine lot yet knowing nothing, can say so many
beautiful things and do no wrong (lon 542a).
A defense of the notion of prepon, or the appropriate, is found instead
in Isocrates in a form that nevertheless distances it from the oratorical
activity in the assembly or courts, and that gives it a new sense in relation
to kairos, to occasion. A disciple of Gorgias, Isocrates repeats the idea that
“speeches cannot be beautiful unless they are in accord with the cir-
cumstances, adequate to the subject and full of novelty” (Soph. 13). In fact,
he chided Socrates and the Socratics as much as the masters of impro-
visation like Alcidamas for overlooking the mobility, variety, and diversity
of the human situation by superimposing fundamental schematic forms:
for the Socratics, ideas; for the orators, rhetorical techniques. Isocrates
compares these schema to the letters of the alphabet. In this way, he at-
tempts to separate the problematic of prepon from the risks that arose
both from Gorgias's too-empirical formulation and from Plato's implaca-
ble criticisms. This is accomplished by means of two fundamental innova-
tions: the connection of prepon to the problematic of paideia, education:
and the adoption of a Pan-Hellenic point of view. Thus are born the
humanistic interpretation of prepon and the constitution of the orator as
subject. While for Georgias the orator persuades and wins the more he
Decorum and Ceremony 109

makes himself nothing and no one in order to adapt himself to varying

occasions, for Isocrates the orator, having become not only master of
oratory but also master of life, derives persuasion instead from being
trustworthy, from the acquisition of a moral status that elevates him
above politicians and judiciary writers.!” It is not coincidental that Isoc-
rates defines himself as philosopher and considers Socrates and the Soc-
ratics to be sophists. Pan-Hellenism, the unity of all Greeks against the
barbarians regardless of local struggles between individual cities, confers
a political content upon this solemnization and self-promotion of the
orator and allows him to become the defender of an appropriate that is
above quotidian effectuality but still bears a much closer relation to it
than does the Platonic “beauty in itself.”
With Aristotle the readjustment of the claims of rhetoric to a search
for means that may be persuasive for every argument, and the determina-
tion of its object of study as the probable or that which appears probable,
breaks prepon's link both with the beautiful, to which Aristotle attributes
an autonomous dimension, and with the effective, since for Aristotle
“things that are true and things that are just have a natural tendency to
prevail over their opposites.”'® Nevertheless, given that the many are not
capable of learning the principles of science through teaching and, be-
cause of their moral baseness, are persuaded by things external to pure
and simple demonstration, one must take the factor of the appropriate
into consideration in elocution.
The appropriate manifests itself as propriety, as adequation of elocu-
tion to the emotions, characters, and arguments with which it deals
(Rhetoric 3.7.1408a10). Above all, the adequate representation of charac-
ters (ethe) is important to the ends of the concept of prepon. In fact, it inau-
gurates a third way different both from that of the absolute indetermina-
tion of the kairos of Gorgias and Isocrates, and from the schematic
abstractness of the rhetoricians; it is aimed at determining as many “ap-
propriates” as there are categories of people identified concretely and
historically on the basis of their éthé, their customs. Aristotle writes:

Furthermore, this way of proving your story by displaying these signs

of its genuineness expresses your personal character. Each class of
men, each type of disposition, will have its own appropriate way of
letting the truth appear. Under “class” | include differences of age, as
boy, man, or old man; of sex, as man or woman; of nationality, as
Spartan or Thessalian. By “dispositions” | here mean only those dis-
positions which determine the character of a man’s life, for it is not
every disposition that does this. If, then, a speaker uses the very
words which are in keeping with a particular disposition, he will re-
produce the corresponding character. (Rhetoric 3.7.1408a25—30)

In this Aristotelian interpretation, the notion of prepon loses its originary

meaning as effective resplendent because it is recuperated in the context
of a problematic of representation. It is not by chance that it is given
110 RECODING METAPHYSICS

another important application implicit in the Poetics, where Aristotle speaks

of the character and qualities of characters of tragedy (Poetics 1454a16).
The notion of prepon also loses the aesthetico-political tension that charac-
terized the positions of Gorgias and Isocrates. For Aristotle, the appro-
priate is accessory: “One may succeed in stating the required principles,
but one’s science will no longer be dialectic or rhetoric, but the science
to which the principles thus discovered belong” (Rhetoric 1.1358a25). The
Aristotelian appropriate can thus constitute the point of departure for
that aesthetics of the characteristic that, through Theophrastus and Horace,
will develop in opposition to the classicist aesthetics of the canon right
down to romanticism.
The final attempt by Greek thought to think the beautiful and the ef-
fective together is that of Panaetius of Rhodes. In this thinker, however,
the word prepon is eclipsed by kathékon, derived from the Stoic tradition
and referring to appropriate action as opposed to katorthdma, virtuous ac-
tion in the absolute. While this last comes only from logos and hence is
the exclusive patrimony of the wise man in the Early Stoa, kathékon, under-
stood by Zeno in its etymological sense as that which befalls, happens
to, descends on someone, can be accomplished even by fools. Panaetius
brings a fundamental correction to this tradition by emphasizing the im-
portance of kathékon, of the appropriate in a circumstance, in comparison
to katorthoma, absolute duty. In addition, he interprets Zeno's precept of
living according to nature in a very specific and personal sense and con-
siders kathekon precisely as action that is appropriate, that conforms to
one’s personal nature. The notion of the appropriate that in Zeno is
something that supervenes and happens, is thus internalized, allowing
Panaetius to attribute to it that beauty that the most rigorous Stoics as-
signed exclusively to virtue.
The relationship between beauty and effectiveness that constitutes
the conceptual node of the notion of ‘prepon seems nonetheless to be
weighted in the direction of a social reality that owes its raison d’étre to
factors that have nothing to do with either virtue or beauty. Thus the
beautiful appearance of the individual personality, the harmonious and
elegant style of life,'? appear to be something added to an effectiveness
that has become such independently, rather than being the cause of ef-
fectiveness or an inseparable part of it. This is in keeping with Panaetius’s
assertion that happiness requires not only virtue (as Zeno and Chrysip-
pus hold) but also health, wealth (Khorégia), and strength (Diogenes Laer-
tius, 7.128).

III. Decorum
Cicero is the great interpreter and expositor of Greek theories of pre-
pon in the Latin world, and in particular of the oratorical version given
it by Isocrates and the moral interpretation given it by Panaetius. With-
out entering into the vexed question of Cicero’s originality in relation
to Greek models, it is important to dwell upon the Latin word Cicero
Decorum and Ceremony Ill

chooses to translate the Greek and upon the consequences of this choice.
After some hesitation, that word is decorum in both Orator and De officiis.?°
Etymologically, decorum has nothing to do with prepon. While prepon origi-
nally refers to the unity of vision and effectiveness, the Latin decorum im-
plies instead a connection between behavior and effectiveness. Decorum,
in fact, comes from the impersonal verb decet, related to the Vedic "dàsti”
whose meaning is “to pay hommage to” and whose source is traceable to
the Indo-European root * dek°- (to take, to accept, to salute, to honor).
Though essentially different from the Greek, decorum too thus refers to a
religious experience based not upon the festive visuality of the divine but
rather on the acceptance as one's own of the will of the gods, of listening
in order to grasp the signs of fatum, on repetition and veneration. In fact,
in Latin the idea of beauty is associated with religious rites much more
than with vision: pulcher has a specifically religious value in the language
of auguries and designates any favorable omen gathered from the obser-
vation of birds or the examination of entrails. It is also applied to favora-
ble divine powers, to beings favored by the gods, and to the effect of di-
vine will and evokes in all cases a prosperity attributed to the gods.?! The
case of venustus is analogous. Hence there is in Latin as in Greek an origi-
nary inseparability of the beautiful and the effective. But whereas the
Greek connection between that which appears and that which is effective
cannot be maintained and, by clashing with historical experience, pro-
duces a metaphysical solution that completely separates appearance
from reality, the Roman solution is radically different. The identification
between beauty and ritual behavior renders even firmer the Roman link
between the appropriate and the effective.
This is apparent above all in the way Cicero develops the notion
of decorum in Orator. The problem of what is appropriate and what is
not (quid deceat et quid dedeceat) is completely divorced from any external
evaluation and considered in itself. The important thing is to convince,
to entertain, to move: it is up to the discernment of the orator to know
how to judge what is expedient in each case and how each case should
be conducted. Success is in no way separable from that which is fitting
(decet): “For the same style and the same thoughts must not be used
in portraying every condition in life, or every rank, position or age, and
in fact a similar distinction must be made in respect of place, time and
audience. The universal rule, in oratory as in life, is to consider propriety”
(Orator 21).2* Decorum is determined by three elements: by the “re de
qua agitur,” by those who speak, and by those who listen. The orator
must therefore be master of all three types of oratory: Attic, which is
plain, without ornament and characterized by a negligentia diligens; the
middle style, rich in figures and mutations yet serene and tranquil; and
the grave and adorned style, opulent and magnificent. Whoever begins
with too much ardor before an unprepared audience will undoubtedly
offend decorum; such behavior will have results contrary to those desired
“Furere apud sanos et quasi inter sobrios bacchari vinulentus videtur”
112 RECODING METAPHYSICS

(‘He seems to be a raving madman among the sane, like a drunken

reveller in the midst of sober men”) (Orator 23). Cicero states that he
admires above all those who know what is fitting to the case: the essential
quality is to know how to adapt words to people and times, for one must
not speak always, nor in the presence of, nor for everyone in the same
manner.
A fundamental portion of De officiis is devoted to the concept of de-
corum and merits a specific and detailed study. In such a study, it would
be important to identify at least four elements for reflection. In the first
place, Cicero's difficulty in distinguishing between decorum and the hon-
estum is evident: such a distinction “facilius intellegi quam explanari
potest” (De officiis 1.27.93). Indeed, we can trace back to Cicero the formula-
tion of the notion of “je ne sais quoi,” of the “nescio quid” that is so im-
portant in the modern development of aesthetics. Second, it is important
to point out the semantic and conceptual slippage worked by Cicero in
his translation of the Greek kathékon as officium, which comes from opus and
is in turn closely connected to religious rites. Third, this shows that the
Romans' attitude toward historical reality is identical to their attitude to-
ward the divine. The fundamental intuition that gives rise to decorum, quod
decet, never enters into contradiction with historical experience, as hap-
pens instead in the case of Greek prepon. In the fourth place, it is perhaps
possible to identify an influence of the Ciceronian notion of decorum in
the history of Western culture, an influence that precisely because it is
subterranean is perhaps more determinant and effective than the
Platonic-Aristotelian metaphysical tradition that is held to be the royal
road of Western thought.

IV. Ceremony
The link between form and effectiveness, appearance and ritual im-
plicit in the Latin concept of decorum is even closer in the typically Roman
notion of caerimonia. In order to understand this notion, we must first free
ourselves of the spiritualistic prejudice that considers ceremony as ste-
reotyped, superfluous, residual, idolatrous, maniacal, desperate behavior,
seeing it as formalism and sclerosis, lacking in depth and substance. This
prejudice is activated every time caerimonia is thought of as mere carimonia
(from careo=to lack, to deprive oneself), according to an erroneous
etymology already formulated in antiquity.
On the basis of several passages from classical authors, Karl-Heinz
Roloff, the author of the most extensive study of the Latin word and con-
cept caerimonia, shows that in addition to meaning action and ritual be-
havior, the term also designates the very being of the divine, the object
of religion, or what we can roughly translate as “holiness” (Heiligkeit).°?
That ceremony means much more than sanctity seems proved by a pas-
sage from Suetonius that juxtaposes the sanctitas of kings to the caerimonia
of the gods, thereby pointing to the difference between their modes of
being. Hence the word does not refer to a lack but, on the contrary, to the
Decorum and Ceremony 113

fullness of the sacred. This explains why the word is always used in the
singular with this meaning, so much so that late grammarians took it as
a plurale tantum.
When Cicero speaks of a caerimonia legationis, and Tacitus speaks of
caerimonia loci, they are thinking above all of the being of the thing itself.
Finally, Caesar, in De bello gallico (7.2), when recounting the conspiracy plot-
ted by the Carnutes together with other peoples of Gaul, says that they
refused to exchange hostages in order that their plans not be revealed,
but requested that, having united their respective military insignia in a
single fasces, they all pledge by word and oath not to split off from the
others once the war had begun. Caesar defines this act as a gravissima
caerimonia because the military insignia united together acquire a sac-
rosanct, objective power, independent of the beliefs of man and such as
to effectively take the place of the exchange of hostages.
If, then, one must speak of the ceremoniality of the sacred, it cannot be
understood as festivity (Feierlichkeit), the festive and festal contemplation
that Karoly Kerényi attributed to Greek religion, considered in its connec-
tion with vision, manifestation, the splendid appearance of the phenome-
non.*4 There is no reference at all in Caesar's text to an epiphany of the
divine. The Carnutes' attention is completely concentrated upon the ac-
tion that they are about to undertake and the necessity of founding such
a historical action, full of risks and unknown factors, upon obedience to
the gravissima caerimonia of the insignia joined together. Such a ceremony
is not a festivity in honor of an alliance but the objective, extremely seri-
ous, and binding guarantee of an alliance.
Even less can “ceremoniality” be understood as “spectacularity.” Ludi
scaenici are foreign to archaic Roman religion, to which the word used by
Caesar refers.?? A great indeterminacy with regard to the gods is charac-
teristic of Roman religion; often one does not even know if they are male
or female, and their identities are reduced to their names. Dumézil has
rightly compared the Roman pantheon to a world of almost immobile
shadows, to a twilight crowd in which it is difficult to distinguish clear
forms.?° Even though Caesar was speaking of the Gauls, it is clear that he
attributed to them a typically Roman way of thinking.
In its most profound meaning, caerimonia deorum does not refer to the
cult that belongs to the gods, of which the gods are master, nor to the
cult dedicated to them, but rather to the externality of the mode of being
of the sacred. Here a meditation on the Romans encounters the theory of
the sacred as “completely other,” as difference, as a radical refusal of any an-
thropomorphic conception of the divine. Such a convergence of a theory
of the sacred that has roots in the most radical monotheism with the Ro-
man paganism that Hegel considered one of the most deplorable forms
of superstition is indeed surprising. And yet the objective convergence,
despite the distance that separates Roman ceremoniality from Yahweh,
of Jewish iconoclasm and the noniconism of early Roman religion, which,
according to tradition, knew no sacred images for the first 170 years of its
114 RECODING METAPHYSICS

history, is perplexing. It is, in any case, essential to understand that cere-

monial externality is precisely the contrary of a panoramic and decorative
mode of being.
The subjective meaning of ceremony, understood as ritual operation
and behavior, is equally as important as the objective meaning attributed
to “things themselves.” The former sense of the term, which is the most
widespread and common, is nevertheless strictly connected to the latter.
In the ceremony recounted by Caesar, for example, there would have been
no objective holiness if the act of uniting together the military insignia,
an act directed toward a determined goal, had not been carried out: "The
action itself is, in this respect, holiness; without it there would be nothing
sacred, but on the other hand only there where the signa are together is
there the sacred.”?” Thus not only is externality the fundamental charac-
teristic of the divine being, it is also and by the same token the essential
character of the religious rite, which has no need at all to ground its va-
lidity upon a belief, a myth, or internal experience. Here the distance be-
tween Roman religion and the theology of difference of Judaic origins
appears clearly: in the former the exteriority of the rite corresponds to
the exteriority of the sacred, while in the latter the exteriority of God cor-
responds to the interiority of the cult.*® This does not mean, as Hegel
says, that Roman ceremony breaks the individuality of all spirits, suffo-
cates all vitality, and is linked to a total emotional and spiritual insen-
sitivity. The relationship between exterior and interior is overturned: it is
not interiority that grounds and justifies the cult, but rather ceremony,
the extremely precise and scrupulous repetition of ritual acts that opens
the way to a nonsentimental, nonintimistic sensitivity that is not thereby
less articulated and complex. In Caesar's story, ceremony creates a firmer
solidarity among the conspirators than would have been guaranteed by
exchanging hostages. Such a solidarity is not exclusively religious, but at
the same time political and juridical.
One cannot completely grasp the Roman meaning of caerimonia if one
overlooks the politico-juridical dimension, which, however, is not to be
understood as lex, as an act that is voluntarily binding, but rather as ius,
as a rigorously technical rite, a procedure in which both the magistrate
and the parties involved play already rigorously determined roles. The oblig-
atoriness of the ceremony depends not upon the subjective consensus
of the participants but upon the magistrate’s ability to unite the particu-
lar case to the general and abstract form of the rite. lus is an ars that “in
sola prudentium interpretatione consistit.”
Ceremonial behavior is thus determined in relation to two external
and objective terms: the particular situation and the ritual form. Prudentia
is the capacity to harmonize them. On the one hand, obedience to the
occasion, to the particular, to opportunity, does not dissolve into mere
opportunism because it is accomplished with reference to a frame, a gen-
eral scheme inherited from the past. On the other hand, obedience to
ritual is not mere sclerosis because it aims toward the solution of a ques-
Decorum and Ceremony 115

tion, a concrete problem. This harmony between form and occasion is a

recurrent theme in Jhering's major study of Roman law, which he defined
as “the system of disciplined egoism.”?° The practical instincts of the Ro-
mans, Jhering claimed, had made rules and institutions so elastic that
even when scrupulously observed, they always adapted themselves to the
needs of the moment.
The concept of externality as referring to the Roman world does not
mean transcendence of a law that imposes itself unconditionally upon
human interiority. Ceremony is not the execution of an eternal and
immutable “ought-to-be,” nor is it the actualization of a metaphysical
mystery; the terms upon which it grounds itself are all objective but im-
manent to history. The Roman sacred has no pantheistic or mystical
character: as Roloff has observed, it exists above all in each individual
case, in each individual event, fully conforming to the “casuistic” attitude
of the Roman way of thinking.5°
Ceremony is the opposite of decoration, spectacle, mise-en-scène: it re-
veals itself as the condition of effectivity, operativity, history. This is par-
ticularly clear in the Roman conception of time, which is as different from
the eternal return of primitive societies with their cycles of ritual death
and rebirth as it is from the linear history of Judaism with its messianic
tension toward final redemption. In Rome, the ceremoniality of time is em-
bodied in the calendar, a formal structure of days, months, and holidays
that always returns without hindering the historical activity of men but
rather furnishing an indispensable point of reference for the chronologi-
cal identification of every action both in deed and in memory.
The cyclical time of primitive societies, in which what counts is the
re-actualization of the original mythical archetype, and the linear time of
Judaism, which considers the deeds of Israel to be the deeds of God him-
self, are both mythological times, times in which there is an inseparable link
between the chronological dimension and its content. It is precisely this
connection that grounds the holiness of these experiences of time. The
Roman calendar, instead, grounds a demythified but not therefore desa-
cralized or insignificant time. It furnishes a frame, a network of reference
points, a texture whose elements are sacred but which does not say a
priori what they must contain, nor transform their contents into a sacred
history a posteriori. The ceremonial structure of the Roman calendar pre-
sents itself as a condition of history: first it leaves undertermined the
concrete nature of the event; then, when the event has occurred, it does
not annul its specificity by inserting it into a process whose ultimate
meaning is final redemption but goes about maintaining it by making it
a “precedent.”
The ceremoniality of time is, finally, a transfer from the same to the
same. There is nothing to teach or to learn but procedures, ceremonies,
rotating movements in which the occasion, the most empirical particular-
ity, the specific situation, must be played out. It is useless to try to escape
from “Mamurius’s game”: one must continue to play despite the blows.
116 RECODING METAPHYSICS

The blacksmith Mamurius’s teaching opposes that of the other Indo-

European “lords of fire”: not wut, religious furor, wrath that terrorizes
enemies, but rather calm, indifference, mimeticism, in a word, ceremony.

TRANSLATED BY BARBARA SPACKMAN

PIER ALDO ROVATTI
Maintaining the Distance

I would like to thematize two of the possible meanings of scarto. One

of the definitions of scarto indicates an abrupt dislocation or swerve, a
clear-cut passage, like a change of scene. There is a spatial element in it,
both in the strict and in the figurative sense: it is a passage from one
place to another. We could say that in the uniform or the apparently uni-
form movement of experience something occurs to modify the order, and
we need this disordering event in the same way that we need to change
place when we have stayed somewhere at length and monotonously so.
But a second meaning of scarto is distance: the spatial reference remains
but the accent changes. Distance: we can think of the gauge of a railway
track. A “distance,” a gauge, which can be reduced but not filled. An inter-
val, therefore, like a zone of separation, an inability to meet: a place inter-
posed between us and ourselves. Also a void, or simply a not which can
become laceration, cleaving, a hole, or an abyss. We might ask ourselves,
do we also need the lack that this second sense of the term brings to
light?
In order to verify the first statement and attempt to answer the above
question we must broaden our perspective. If we look at the main compo-
nents of today’s philosophic thought we can say that our philosophy has
always oscillated between affirmation and negation, between affirmative
thought and negative thought. In affirmative thought everything—the
whole of reality—is a plane of consistence which is homogeneous and,
at first glance, without flaws, though also a flowing plane upon which
events slide. Affirmative thought, moreover, adds the idea of power to
consistence and flowing: reality is something that develops, that contains
a dynamism, a creative activity within itself. The real, then, is something
complex that dilates in forging ahead. But not according to the most ob-
vious and simplest image of a roll that unrolls, but one of ramification,
bifurcation, differentiation. Power is the power of ramification; the im-
petus forward produces differences. The passing of things is only appar-
ently a tranquil flowing. The image or metaphor of the river is apt: the
river that seems to flow evenly downstream does not simply follow its
inclination but is troubled incessantly by disturbances and fluctuations.
118 RECODING METAPHYSICS

The course of the river is broken by turns, by unexpected bends; its waters
rear and stop in midstream in order to avoid obstacles. We call these dis-
turbances obstacles of the course and by now we have learned to recog-
nize them; we know, that is, that they are not marginal elements: they
coincide with the course itself. It is illusory to think of a flowing without
fluctuation. On the contrary, it is precisely this complex of fluctuations
that we improperly call flowing. The bends of the river are its going ahead.
If coming downstream recalls physical entropy, then going upstream—
which paradoxically is the bends, the turns of the river—is the negative
entropy that is life. What is the negative within this perspective? The
negative is here indicated by the image of inclining; it remains as an
almost imperceptible backdrop, a tendency—certainly—which, however,
countertendencies mask and impede, almost hiding it. There are no falls.
There is only flowing. The pure negative would here be flowing in its pure
state, simply an appearance. It would be the tendency toward order, but
the river does not follow a direct route. Its tortuous course is also experi-
ence, which is almost always the longest path, made up of curves and
bends.
If we turn now to negative thought, the image which we can refer to
is that of a narrow catwalk, of a fine wire that a tightrope walker—that is
to say, ourselves—must cross. A narrow passageway between the banks,
although in this case the passage from one bank to another is not the
essential thing. What counts, instead, is what takes place between the
banks: the difficult equilibrium, the risk of this crossing, which is man’s
experience. If the plane of consistence presents itself as a plenum, the
plenum now becomes a lateral element, secondary and fragile; a minimal
point of support that can be reduced to the wire on which we seek
equilibrium. The void, on the other hand, is endless, pervasive. The abyss
is no longer only beneath us but is everywhere. Man's experience is the
risk of sinking, of being engulfed, of vertigo. It can produce blockage,
paralysis, the feeling of nonpower—that is, of impotence. It can produce
the contemplation of the abyss, or else a provisional morality and logic.
It can produce the expectation of the worst or of the next-to-worst; the
speculation of risk or the reckoning of risks. Within this perspective, man
is fundamentally lack: he misses himself, he misses reality as if he has
missed a target. He can only, and provisionally, deceive himself. Deep
down man knows that this equilibrium is extremely precarious: a small
movement, a scarto, is sufficient to lose it.
Perhaps, however, neither of these positions is tenable as such, nei-
ther is “the position.” We cannot convince ourselves that there are no dis-
continuities as the idea of the plane of consistence and flowing would
lead us to believe, making us think that everything is a question of weft—
thicker, wider, direct, oblique. But neither can we think that experience is
really only the knowledge of the void, that it is obsessively dominated by
this lack, that it is only a way of facing it. Contemporary thought probably
Maintaining the Distance 119

oscillates between these two beliefs, and we are continually tossed from
one to the other.
But let us return to the two images of scarto. The dislocation, the
change of scene, is a sudden happening; something suddenly takes place
like wakening from sleep, like a new fact that changes and gives a differ-
ent tone to our experience. We might ask ourselves: can we plan some-
thing that suddenly happens? In other words, can we find a position from
which to observe without interfering, without straightening out the
curves? Is there a way of looking at the river as fluctuation? Or is our
“looking at” always destined to transform the fluctuation into a flowing?
If we do not wish to reply with a downright no, it is then the course of
consciousness that we must set about correcting, “dreaming” a con-
sciousness that does not imprint itself upon experience in order to render
it linear, a reason that in its ancient rigor has recognized rigidity and,
therefore, in its ancient strength, or in that which it presumed to be its
strength, an inefficacy. A reason that in some way starts to circle around
its object, that constructs a less drastic knowledge, and looks for a mobil-
ity of its own and, at the same time, a syntony with its object. The dislo-
cations, the swervings are precisely that object.
A rationality that must now force itself to acknowledge a rhythm that
is not a logic; that will probably have to make itself smaller given that the
scarto at which one looks and with which one must enter into syntony—is
minimal. It is not, in fact, a “great” change. A reason that will not have to
render itself completely manifest because the scarto as such, in its sudden
happening, eliminates this possibility. A reason that will have to cease
telling itself: “I am,” because the Being of the scarto is fleeting and eva-
sive—it is not there, neither is it before us, it is not an entity. It is not
“this” or “that”, it has no precise border or limit. Hence consciousness
will have to learn to live without this precision. And it will also have to
get out of the habit of being before the object, in the foreground, of being
unique and equal. In short, it will have to recognize itself in these scarti
and, in order to do so, must substitute the “once” with the “repeatedly,”
definition with narration.
Is this possible? In other words—and formulating the question is
very important—can an identity always be different, continually change
place? We can hypothesize that for this to happen there has to be a
doubling, a split; consciousness must double itself. It will have to render
its claim image, imaginary. It must limit its automatic polarizing toward
the one, establish itself in a play of forces, and yet at the same time stay
to one side—not, however, on the side it has already learned to acknowl-
edge as its own. The "one" does not disappear, the element of “once” still
remains: the place changes within a possible topological description of
consciousness. The paradox is precisely that the place where we retain
our own proprium is not to be found.
What, after all, is this consciousness? How does it appear? It is not
120 RECODING METAPHYSICS

utopian, lucid, and transparent but neither is it a pessimistically opaque

consciousness. It is not just identical to itself, or even merely an escape
into difference. It is here that an extremely arduous task begins: a more
complicated subject can be constructed, not only in order to account for
experience made of movements, of dislocations of scarti, but in order to
have experience of one’s being reasonable, to be able to give a “status”
to reasonableness in this situation.
At this point, however, let us look at the second form of scarto: scarto
as the distancing from itself. It is inevitably a form of loss, a missing of
the target. Negative thought tells us there is a lack. Weak reason, correct-
ing, interpreting, and deciphering, might say there is a distance to main-
tain. Negative thought warns us that the scarto is not only a change of di-
rection but also always a sinking. Can we believe that the ground does
not give way and that everything happens in a place, in the place, that
there are merely transfers to do, trajectories to change, or also (only)
leaps to be made, spaces to reduce, and that it is always and only a mat-
ter of covering a route, a path?
Even if we move very slowly we believe we are advancing, moving
forward. At the same time, however, we have evidence of something that
holds us back, of a time, no longer a place or a space, that never manages
to pass—of a leap that is never sufficient, no matter how small it is. A
scarto that is never enough, no matter how literal it may be. And in any
case, something else has already taken place on another level, downward
perhaps, or backward. The void has crept in, has ballasted the thrust and
has trammeled it.
But at this point the question could radically overturn the sense of
the description. Is it not precisely this void that has permitted the thrust,
that made it possible for the thrust to proceed? A vertical scarto, let us
say, has cut the horizontal one: consciousness has also given way, every
move is also accompanied by a fall into the abyss.

In this philosophical context, we might compare the positions of

Paul Ricoeur and Jacques Lacan on metaphor. The Rule of Metaphor by
Ricoeur is a battle against the translation of the metaphor into some-
thing insignificant, into a simple ornament, although above all against
the metaphysical element that Derrida sees as being reproduced neces-
sarily in metaphor itself. Ricoeur maintains that metaphor is important
both in order to comprehend the novelty, the incessant invention, to
which language can give rise, as well as to be able to understand the re-
lationship between this novelty and its truth value, between language
and reality. There is no authentic element that can be substituted and
reinstated, nor a proprium that may be seen as the unfigurable element
that remains at the bottom of metaphor: there is, however, a possible and
infinite play in which the similar and the dissimilar can be combined to
give rise to novelties of meaning.
Ricoeur recalls that old Majorcan tales and fables always began with
Maintaining the Distance 121

an expression which when translated rings as follows: “This—which I am

about to tell you—was and was not.” Ricoeur therefore introduces the
“not,” but he introduces it as an operator of the game of impertinence
and dissimilitude on the plane of linguistic creation. An opening is
claimed against the closure of a sole philosophical scheme which sees
metaphor as merely the reemerging of the aporia of Platonic and Neo-
platonic metaphysics: an opening out toward all the figures that, in point
of fact, play upon this relationship of the similar and the dissimilar.
Ricoeur says, however, that there also exists a return. Finally, metaphor
in its signification as an essential instrument of knowing, as the impor-
tant instrument of knowledge (and metaphor is, in fact, a displacement,
a transfer), allows the possibility of being able to bring closer that which
is distant: the distant concedes, resisting. “It resists": hence the not. The
dissimilar allows itself to be approached, though in a tension, within a
horizon that Ricoeur, in fact, calls tensional. This closeness is a coming
closer once again; it is a return. But of what? The explanation furnished
by Ricoeur is not convincing. It would be a phenomenological return of
the precategorical world, of that level of reality, in other words, which
comes before every code. But if this is the case, what, then, has happened
with regard to the not?
We realize that we do not manage to resolve this “not” on the plane
of the dissemination of sense or, to stay with the language of theories of
metaphor, of interaction. Thus to Ricoeur we can oppose Lacan's the-
ories, to the extent that the latter, however, is not specifically a scholar
of metaphor. For Lacan, metaphor and metonymy act in a homologous
way: the metonymic displacement and the metaphoric sinking are two
faces of the same procedure, without return. The metonymic chain of sig-
nifiers, “this and then this,” functions precisely because at each link of
the chain something—which we can call an irretrievable meaning—has
fallen. Lacan and psychoanalysis, then, indicate an interpretation of the
fallen meaning.
I wonder whether it really matters to recognize the psychoanalytical
“nature” of this aspect of the theory: in my opinion it is important, above
all, to note that the “not,” in a position like Lacan's, implicates precisely
that movement of sinking, conjugated, chained with that of the superficial
“horizontal” slippage. In Ricoeur the “not,” in a coupled relationship with
the “yes” of identity, identical and at the same time different, on this
“horizontal” plane produces meaning, metaphor as invention of new
meaning—that of the live metaphor, in short. For Lacan it is precisely the
loss, the sinking, that permits the production of meaning, of a meaning
that is then registered on the chain of metonymic displacements.

These observations on Ricoeur and Lacan perhaps allow us to sketch

the outlines of the problem. Both speak of scarto, écart. For Ricoeur, infinite
variations are possible within what he calls a “stereoscopic” vision, a vi-
sion that remains unexplored, however. For Lacan, however, lack is
122 RECODING METAPHYSICS

productive precisely because it is the symptom of unattainability, the

negative permits “meaning.” On the one hand, the impertinence of poetry,
the nonpertinence of the poetic metaphor; on the other, the impossibility
of pertinence.
But perhaps we cannot but see a nothingness acting in this “not”: an
art of seeing (such as the Aristotelian one recalled by Ricoeur) in which
the subject, whatever it might be, involves a Lacanian being seen on the
part of the object, and this being seen, an element of alterity in the vision
itself, is the secret that makes the vision function.
Somewhere, then, a distance is to be maintained, not reduced. A
“nothingness” is to be accounted for if we do not want this “nothingness”
to reappear later and shake up everything. Coming nearer demands—
rather, produces—distance, and this production required us to remove
something; it demands a deduction, a tainting, a dislocating. The disloca-
tions of experience also mean maintaining the distance.

TRANSLATED BY HOWARD RODGER MACLEAN

PIER ALDO ROVATTI
The Black Light

The Cartesian Gesture

The “black light” is a metaphor one encounters in some of Jacques
Derrida’s most important essays, in particular in his essay on Foucault's
interpretation of the Cartesian cogito and in the essay dedicated to
Lévinas.' In both it appears at the point of maximum theoretical tension
and seems to mark a limit to philosophical reflection. Derrida's rereading
of the cogito follows a movement, in both tone and theoretical approach,
that is the opposite of calm acceptance of certainty. If natural light—the
natural lumen of Descartes—accompanies and lights the path of knowl-
edge, then the subject's interrogation of itself, precisely because it is a
question whose answer is neither preestablished nor capable of being
preestablished, from the very beginning must take leave of this guide and
venture into a place that Derrida calls “an unheard-of excess.” Here the
philosopher, in search of a thread that might support the meaning of his
own identity, can either deviate or lose himself. To deviate—in this in-
terpretation—may mean turning one’s back on the task; returning “pre-
cipitately' to the naturally luminous zone, betraying the question and
pretending not to have “seen.” But what was seen? Something that blinds
sight and at the same time seems to be the enigmatic source of sight.
Descartes carried out this precipitous return; without it, he would not
have been able to join the cogito to science, nor would he have played that
central role for modern thought that, without exception, the history of
philosophy ascribes to him.
To lose oneself may instead mean giving in to the seduction of the
shadow beyond the light: to let oneself be sucked into the negative world
of night, of abyssal darkness, of the void. Or else to believe positively that
another face of day exists: a retro-world by now disenchanted in another
scene. The cogito also inaugurates this modern descent: Nietzsche can
teach us to see it as the attempt to end the illusory and nihilistic domina-
tion of every higher world and of every askésis. But Descartes does not lose
himself; he “repatriates.” Contemporary philosophic and literary thought
will later take on the task of a “lucid” exploration of the night, forging
ahead (for example with Freud) into the territory of the unconscious. And
124 RECODING METAPHYSICS

so this losing of oneself might simply mean duplicating the light as its
opposite, maintaining the distinction between light and shadow by ren-
dering them specular.
In this knowledge of the “negative,” Derrida suspects an astute re-
venge of natural light capable of expanding and pushing its limits ever
farther ahead, even if that threshold, once identified and not lost, neces-
sarily poses a suspicion at the basis of every exclusive belief in knowing
as light.
The metaphor of the “black light,” then, is not so simple: the move-
ment it would like to indicate differentiates itself equally from a step
backward with the aim of conserving an acquisition of knowledge, and
from a leap forward, to all appearances transgressive although in reality
very often still guided by an “Enlightenment” faith in reason, held to be
capable of enriching and modulating its luminous ray. As Derrida says,
we have to try “not to extinguish that other light, a black and hardly natural
light” to which Descartes paid his debt.* But how can we settle our debt
with Descartes?
We can do it by acknowledging that, though he drew away from it
immediately, Descartes touched upon the “hostile origin" of philosophy.
The philosophical act cannot but be Cartesian in both its senses: in the
authentic philosophical gesture, the subject can only move backward
until identifying itself with the “black light,” and the philosopher can
only repeat—albeit differently—the Cartesian arrest and “return home.”
For the philosopher, identity cannot but be the loss of identity and, at
the same time, the retrieval of identity. But does “identity” here mean
the same thing in both cases? And does not the identity that unites
them perhaps have a third meaning? What “rigor,” what precision and
communicability can be claimed by a consideration whose terms are
so uncertain and oscillating, and which rotates around an obscure
metaphor? L
None, to be sure, if we continue to look for an objective definition of
identity which places it at a distance, fixed, or in any case, endowed with
a mobility contained within a stable frame, available to our cognitive
sight in a way that we consider proper for an object of knowledge. The
human sciences have elaborated many such definitions: why, then, turn
our interest toward the uncertain hypothesis of philosophy? Simply be-
cause the question concerning identity is the question that is reproposed
precisely in the attempt to weaken or eliminate the distance that sepa-
rates us from an “object.” Identity, as “representation,” appears to us as
the disguising of identity itself. Philosophy helps us to discover not only
that between identity and representation there is an essential décalage but,
and above all, that the interrogation concerning identity involves the
meaning of all questions, even scientific ones: in fact, it implicates the
very idea of meaning and, immediately, also that of knowledge.
Derrida's metaphor can perhaps serve as an outline. Knotted to-
gether in it we find many issues that can take us back to the primal scene
The Black Light 125

of our philosophic project, that is, to the “heliotropic” genesis of philos-

ophizing. But these same problems are produced in all their theoretical
urgency in the present, post-Cartesian scene, already furrowed by numer-
ous deviations and strayings: the ambiguous theme of this scene is con-
stituted by the subject in the grips of the loss itself as center. The effect
of truth that philosophy can propose for itself in this condition is under-
mined by the hermeneutic circle in which the very notion of truth in
philosophy appears essentially to be entangled: nevertheless, this can be
taken as a useful description of the theme. A description, not a definition;
and utility in the sense of an approximation capable of producing a rec-
ognition and thus a horizon of communication. An age-old question, it
appears to us to be so new as to take us almost completely by surprise—
and to demand a theoretical invention regarding its every aspect.
Derrida sets into motion a triangulation between subject, knowl-
edge, and light and warns us that the result cannot be contained within
a concept. He points to language, moreover, as the place in which we can
experience that coexistence of excess and the “return home” (the rimpat-
rio). Metaphor is a figure of language. Nevertheless, Derrida also warns us
that the problem—as indeed Nietzsche has previously intuited—is an
even more difficult one, that of the persistence of the metaphor in the
age of its extinction: in other words, of something that we should perhaps
no longer call metaphor. First of all, we should note the inadequacy of a
structural description: not even the topological attempt (and here we can
think of Lacan, who inherited the same problem from Freud and Heideg-
ger), in trying to introduce a dynamic into structural fixity, seems to man-
age to come close. Models of this type succeed in accounting for the com-
plexity of levels and the multiple play of effects. However, the movement
that Derrida believes he reads—however stifled—in the Cartesian gesture
does not seem reducible to a language of levels invaginated like the sides
of a Mobius strip. The different modes of identity that coexist and oppose
each other in the Cartesian gesture—to the point of making the notion
of identity itself seem completely insubstantial—trace a movement of
transformation that any model appears to betray totally. These various
and contradictory identities would, in fact, cease to be so: the reason this
does not happen is that they maintain themselves (or preserve them-
selves) as declensions of the “I am it’—that is, in that subjective displace-
ment which is the very secret of the Cartesian gesture and which even
Derrida takes for granted without realizing it. The condition of this ges-
ture is to live it and to carry it out in person: all of the problems of de-
scription, of “violence” (as Derrida says in these essays), arise in an “un-
heard-of” way starting from the “unheard-of” character of a conversion
which, on the contrary, seems so obvious as to be overlooked.
The “black light” is the linguistic mode with which Derrida chooses
to indicate a subjective experience. The metaphorical enigma attempts
to express the correlative enigma from a point of view that places itself
on the side of the subject and that tries to assert its “disposition” as a
126 RECODING METAPHYSICS

decisive gesture: the philosophical act which, as such, has to be exposed

to the greatest of risks (silence), and only to the extent to which it has to
appear will the movement of identity and sense be given to be under-
stood (a “view,” which will not exactly be such).

A Precious Stone
Derrida himself exhibits certain difficulties regarding this question.
If in the essay dealing with Foucault and Descartes the “black light” is to
be safeguarded against the cancellations of a thought of simple transpar-
ency, in the text on Lévinas the theme of “excess,” in relation to the meta-
phors of light, seems to be referred back to the normality of the
metaphysical procedure. It has often been noted that "the heart of light
is black”? Derrida is referring to the invincible connection between meta-
physics and metaphor, captured in its inaugural moment: the Platonic
metaphor of the sun. Here the light is already doubled: the metaphorical
sun (of knowledge) is both the sensible sun and the ultrasensible, invisi-
ble sun.
The sun that we see with our senses rises and sets, shows itself and
disappears, is now present and now absent; and it also allows itself to be
perceived by men as a source of light and life—but only its effects, its
luminous rays, are given to our sight, and not the source from which sight
is blinded and which literally is not visible. Absence and invisibility set
into motion the metaphoric displacement, the duplication of the suns,
the infinite reference of the metaphysical, the invisible behind the visible,
absence behind presence, metaphysics behind physics. The sun and
metaphor unite in a chain whose links are the innumerable metaphysical
variations and whose bond is “reference” itself, the beyond, the move-
ment of transcendence, true reality which is concealed beyond phenom-
enal reality, the truth to which appearance refers. The Platonic sun is the
true and the good: but its heart is black because it is not visible by the
eye, which nonetheless entirely receives its “virtue” that is precisely the
ability to see.
Metaphor, which with Plato assumes its philosophical status, cer-
tainly has a more ancient history in the horizon of thought and religious
mysticism. An example that has recently attracted attention is the “black
stone” belonging to the ancient Arabian gnosis. Studying the paradigm
of the temple at the origins of Islamic culture, H. Corbin explains that the
black stone corresponds to one of the corner columns of the Kaaba in
Mecca.* These corner stones embody a complex symbology and funda-
mentally correspond to four types of light, each of which represents a
prophet (Abraham, Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed). The Iragi corner of
the stone, the corner of the black light, is that of Mohammed, and within
it, according to the Islamic mysticism of the Sabaeans of Harran, is con-
cealed the very secret of the temple itself. Symbolized in it is the relation-
ship between the terrestrial and the higher, intellective world. The symbol
can be dissolved by way of a mythical account that takes us back to the
The Black Light 127

first man. The black stone—as the Imam recounts to one of his disci-
ples’—was originally the first of the angels: it is he who presents himself
before God to vouch for the pact between God and Adam. However, with
Adam's betrayal and his expulsion from Paradise, God gave the angel the
appearance of a white pearl, which he threw down onto the Earth. Adam
found the glowing pearl: the angel then announced himself to Adam and
reminded him of the pact with God. At this point, however, God trans-
formed the gleaming pearl into a heavy stone: Adam had to hoist it onto
his shoulders and, bearing its weight, carry out the long journey from
India to Arabia. The story teaches that in the terrestrial world the pearl
can assume only dark and burdensome characteristics: it will be black but
will have the power of arousing the memory of the angel and of God in
the mind of man. Beneath the dark veil of worldliness man will be able
to discover the luminous trace of divine intelligence. But let us remark
that the stone is not worthless or vile but precious. It sparkles with red
flashes, it emanates light; it is one of the lights—indeed the most impor-
tant light—that supports the universe. And yet its heart is black. In this
opacity man can “recollect,” remember another light, unheard of, which
is not human (natural) and which consequently will never be “visible.”
Derrida's theme of the two suns, inferior and superior, seems to flow
in the archaeology and the history of our thought: the black light, assumed
within this paradigm in which metaphor and metaphysics continually take
turns, corresponds to the absence, the fading, the eclipse of natural
light—to its necessary referring to another light behind the light. As in
the mythical story just mentioned, the black light is an intermediate ele-
ment between world and ideality, the moment in which truth, in order to
be revealed, has to deny itself sight, has to hide itself. It is an internal
and essential moment for the metaphysics of light, which—according to
Derrida—is nothing other than metaphysics itself. In this “dialectic” the
mad audacity of the philosophic gesture disappears, that risky excess that
knows how to tolerate the vigil of the powers of madness around the
cogito.
When some years later (see Writing and Difference) Derrida tried to
draw up a genetic-ideal study of the movement of the philosophical
metaphor, the black heart of the light proved to be swallowed up in a
“white” mythology, the place of the other metaphysical scene that the
“flower” of philosophy—the heliotrope or sunflower—continuously recalls
as its own life (whence it receives nourishment) but also its own death
(where it is enchained): a play of mirrors, the one placed in front of the
other, a “mise en abime.” As Derrida writes, “Metaphysics has erased
within itself the fabulous scene that has produced it, the scene that
nevertheless remains active and stirring, inscribed in white ink, an invisible
design covered over in the palimpsest.”° A metaphor continues to be lack-
ing: and it ought to be that impossible one by which meaning finally
reaches its own abode and becomes “proper meaning,” truth, presence of
itself to itself, identity. The turning of metaphors, their circular specularity,
128 RECODING METAPHYSICS

is this tropism toward the proper, which if it had a result would confirm
the very end of the metaphoricity.
What, then, are the histories of philosophy? An obligatory game of
infinite and apparently free deferrals: the always renewed promise that
coincidence with the proper is only temporarily abrogated. That one
day—not yet today—the stone will appear for what it is, a pearl of light.
This history is a proceeding according to a false movement of progress:
toward reappropriation, presence, self-presence, identity. The Cartesian
gesture is the culmination and the modern beginning of this journey: the
traveler—that is, ourselves—will believe that he is choosing the route
and will not realize that he himself is the effect of the journey. The black
light is effaced in the pallid writing with which every metaphor seems
destined to write itself, in a circularity without end, without difference, if
not that small and illusory deviation with which it slips from figure to fig-
ure, never effacing the fabulous scene in the same way and once and for
all. But Derrida does not linger, not here at least: the epitaph for
metaphor that he composes is so grief-stricken that it urges him on to an
almost detached observation. Only the enigmatic “finale” of “White
Mythology” introduces a spacing into a discourse that nevertheless takes
on the tone (not apocalyptic)’ of a demonstration. The heliotrope, the
sunflower, is an unrealizable homonym: whether one deals with Plato,
Hegel, Nietzsche, or Bataille, this flower always brings with it both its
double and its end, a dried flower forgotten in a book. No language can
escape this repetition or eliminate from itself “the structure of an anthol-
ogy.... Unless the anthology is also a lithograph. Heliotrope also names
a stone: a precious stone, greenish and streaked with red veins, a kind of
oriental jasper.”®
How can the doubt that metaphor is also a precious stone insinuate
itself within a register of exhaustion in which “meaning” returns every
time to belabor the same point, like a death knell? What does “precious”
mean if this stone is the weight from which language cannot free itself?
How can a “meaning” be “precious” if, according to Derrida, we have in
every way to try to get around it, keeping damage to the minimum?

Intonations
Faced with the recognition that metaphor is evasive we can position
ourselves in two different ways, we can adopt two tonalities of discussion.
We can think that this “escape” is a circle whose limits are already marked
out and then show the circle as a cage from which philosophy would con-
tinually like to free itself without realizing that this continually repro-
duces and legitimizes it. Or we can think that in this deferral something
escapes us and hence position ourselves in order to try to catch the
strange light, the effect as of a precious stone, which surrounds the ges-
ture of fading and flight from oneself.
In the first case the tone would initially be one of observation: a
hypothesis must be unfolded. We would study philosophers—Descartes
The Black Light 129

or Husserl, for example—with the discreet distance of the analyst who

scrutinizes them while they are tackling with metaphor and would like to
free themselves of it. Derrida's reference to a passage of the Entretien avec
Burman is significant. Now the Cartesian gesture—about which “White
Mythology” opens a parenthesis—seems entirely inscribed within rays of
the natural lumen, “aether of thought”; at the end of the Third Meditation
the scene is lit by the “immense light” of God, which Derrida seems to
understand (very differently from Lévinas) as an amplification of natural
light’ Derrida emphasizes that Descartes carries out the discourse of
natural philosophy, certainly not that of theology, and in the conversation
with Burman we read the following: “The narrative of creation {in Genesis]
is perhaps metaphorical; thus, it must be left to the theologians... . Why
is it said, in effect, that darkness preceded light? .. . And as for the
cataracts of the abyss, this is a metaphor, but this metaphor escapes
us.”'° Derrida catches Descartes in the double movement typical of
metaphysics: the referral to metaphor (which is the very figure of referral)
as the hidden source of light, of meaning and truth, coincident with the
need to escape from metaphor, filling the gap that the theologian leaves
open in order to grasp what escapes us. A descending movement (a
return) inscribed within an ascending movement (the process-progress of
natural reason). Descartes encounters metaphor as a disturbance of
natural light. And Derrida is eager to point out both that metaphor is not
a disturbance but the other side of metaphysics and that Descartes, like
every philosopher of reason, considers the metaphoric as a weak and con-
fused moment, something that is not yet a knowledge. The result is that
metaphor is distanced as a movement internal to metaphysics and that
the black heart of the light—here its hidden source—proves to be com-
pletely reabsorbed in the play between presence and absence—that is, in
the very circle of metaphysics.
In paragraph 36 of his Lessons in Time, Husserl confronts the problem
of subjectivity as temporal flux: but in the very moment in which we say
the word flux, he observes, we are already in the presence of something
that is temporally objective. Language has already made us lean toward
a constituted fact whereas we wanted to grasp a constituent phenome-
non. The “absolute subjectivity” only lets itself be indicated “with an
image,” with the metaphoric image of flux: “In the lived experience of the
present we have the point, original source, and a continuity of moments
of resonance. We lack names for all of this.” In Speech and Phenomena, Der-
rida does not let Husserl’s conclusion escape him: “Names fail us.”!! It is
an admission that would reveal how phenomenology can only remain
caught within the “metaphysics of presence,” notwithstanding that lived
experience encounters alterity within itself and that filling identity with
meaning is deferred in a process that is infinite. Instead, the historical
passage from Platonic eidos to Neo-Kantian and phenomenological eidos
only contributes to showing the obligatory play between light and shadow,
between metaphor and metaphysics. It is the difference which produces
130 RECODING METAPHYSICS

the subject, Derrida affirms in a Heideggerian tone: difference may be

discovered within the horizon of subjectivity, but if we remain within
this horizon difference can present itself only as lack or absence, correla-
tive to presence; in this way presence (self-affection, lived experience, the
acting identity) will reveal itself in all its metaphysical movement. “Hus-
serl continually warns us against these metaphors.”!? And he cannot do
otherwise because “names fail us”: he has to admit that the essential (the
proper) of subjectivity is unnameable, only substitutable with images
(figures) that do not fill but instead underline the lack.
Derrida considers Husserl the philosopher who strenuously looks for
“purity,” who continuously warns us against metaphorical impurities and,
nevertheless, does not find names and has to content himself—precisely
in the most decisive areas of his thought—with imprecise images. Here
as well we perceive a distance between the observer (Derrida) and the
object of observation (the metaphor): the tone of the demonstration
closes the task, marking the outlines of an already evaluated repetition.
But then, what did Derrida mean when, with regard to the cogito, he com-
pared the Husserlian gesture to the Cartesian one, speaking of the im-
petus and madness of reduction?
Within the same interpretive horizon ("the Husserlian theme of the
living present is the profound guarantee of meaning in its certainty’),
another tonality rang out—the same one that echoes in the metaphor of
the black light. Just as Derrida was able to show the mad audacity of the
Cartesian gesture which drives it on into a territory “so little natural,” so
one could show the metaphoric node to which the Husserlian gesture
gives access. Precisely the philosopher who warns against metaphors ex-
poses himself to the checkmate of his project by exploding the living
present in an impossibility of naming. But is it really a checkmate? Or is
it not instead an opening, a line of passage of a gesture (the “epoché”)
with which its “impetus” and its “madness” repropose the enigma of
meaning which the black light—to which Descartes was able to draw
near—entrusts to us as a question?
In his essay on Lévinas Derrida quotes Borges: “Perhaps universal
history is but the history of several metaphors.” And he comments: “Light
is only one example of these ‘several’ fundamental ‘metaphors,’ but what
an example! Who will ever dominate it, who will ever pronounce its
meaning without first being pronounced by it? What language will ever
escape it?” Not Lévinas, to whom the polemic is addressed, who speaks
of the “face” as apparition of the other and is therefore himself taken by
the metaphorics of seeing.'* Language is metaphorical and the metaphor
is always, in a certain way, luminous. But now Derrida’s tone is that of
proximity: it is not a question of closing the discussion but of opening it,
starting out precisely from Borges’s sentence. “Light perhaps has no op-
posite: if it does, it is certainly not night. If all languages combat within
it, modifying only the same metaphor and choosing the best light, Borges,
The Black Light 131

several pages later, is correct again: ‘Perhaps universal history is but the
history of the diverse intonations of several metaphors.’ Light has no op-
posite: the black light is not the opposite of light (an opposite that be-
longs to it like absence to presence). It is a question of modifying the
metaphor, working on its intonations, which mark the history of thought.
But what can “best” light mean? Stronger? Even more luminous? No, to
be sure: the movement points instead to a contrary direction, one even
more complicated to figure.
| have attempted to bring out not the contradictions, or the succes-
sive modifications of perspective (the texts referred to in fact belong to a
single phase of thought), but the oscillations of tone that I seem to dis-
cover in Derrida's writings: they indicate the difficulty of maintaining a
position. The difficulty is of like nature to the problem: the revenge of
natural light, the “repatriation” of philosophy, no longer precipitous but
now more subtle and addressed toward an abode already proportionate
to the difficulty yet always necessary. This difficulty plays at Derrida’s own
expense every time the risk of the exercise rests in the application of the
formula: oscillation concerning the value to give to the metaphorical—
now a flower destined to wither between the pages of a book, now again
the reflection of a precious stone that transforms sight. Perhaps, however,
we can attempt to interpret this pendulum: the different positions, al-
though comprehensibly unstable, permit an identification. Passing from
one to another the subject is transformed. It is not cancelled but changes
attitude. To think that difference produces the subject means taking up a
position without thematizing it as one’s own and hence not risking the
experience—also linguistic—of this attitude. This is one tonality: to iden-
tify oneself with the Cartesian gesture to the point of its hyperbole, risk-
ing nonmeaning and the impertinent ambiguity of a metaphor that
reveals my own impotence to say: this is another tonality of the same
theoretical gesture. Between one tone and the other a proximity plays. Is
the passage from the most distant to the nearest only a question of de-
gree or gradation of sight, or does a displacement of levels take place in
it, a transformation of the gaze? Between the two intonations there flows
a transformation of presence to oneself, a movement of identity. It ap-
pears like a loss, an eclipse, a fading, an undermining, an erosion. But
what are we talking about? While we try—with words that fail us—to de-
cipher an unheard-of place beyond ourselves, we are, in reality, trying to
describe a movement that is our very own gesture.

The Black of the Earth?

In the metaphor of the black light, the high and the low, the sky and
the earth do not oppose and annul each other. The light, the high, the
sky, the “aether of thought” are not overturned into their opposites. Light
has no opposite, and it is certainly not shadow: this means that thought
cannot dialectically negate itself as thought and that thought of the shadow,
132 RECODING METAPHYSICS

of the night, of “madness,” is always masked light, an astute reason. Let

us recall Blanchot’s insistence on the term “neutral”: neither the one
nor the other, neither light nor shadow.'* But it is still a beyond. Some-
thing else: does the “madness of the day” introduce another scene? One
cannot escape the “day,” Derrida suggests. In order not to annul them-
selves the sky and the earth have to fuse: the scene maintains a glow, a
paradoxical luminosity that is “nourished” prescisely when it ought to fade
away.
To the “black sun” of mysticism Gaston Bachelard,'” in his reveries
of the earth, opposes the noirceur of matter which permits whiteness to
shine forth: from the nigrum nigrius nigro of the alchemists throughout the
entire imagery of literature down to D. H. Lawrence, who says of the sun
that “it is only its coating of dust which shines. . . . The sun is dark: its
rays are dark.”!° Derrida himself refers to these pages by Bachelard on
the imagination of a black, material heart of light (the black interior of
the swan, and Cocteau who writes, “The ink that I use is the blue blood
of a swan”; or the black milk of the nocturnal goat about which Rilke
speaks).'’ The black sun of the mystics (for example, in the “visions” of
Saint Theresa of Avila) was a blinding due to too much light: the eye that
received it had to close in order not to be dazzled. An excess of light cor-
responded to the black spot of vision.'8 Bachelard moves us, instead, into
the depths of the earth, within our own material covering, which we imag-
ine as being dark and mysterious and which, nevertheless, is the heart,
the abode of things and therefore of ourselves, the place of “rest.” From
the sky to the earth: an imagination more perspicacious than thought
drives us down, in our place, where images take on the power of reversi-
bility: an oneiric world of matter whose qualities are hidden.
Derrida, however, follows Bachelard’s suggestion only in part. He re-
fuses the game of inversion, which still appears sustained by a dialectical
movement: shadow as the inverse of light. Instead, the two experiences
present themselves together: it is a question of limit. The problem is to
identify the maximum limit to which the absence of light can be forced.
The madness of the day is not the epiphany of a dazzling moment but
remains a blinding. Earthly experience—yet no cavern of the unconscious
offers itself for exploration, no inversion in the depths occurs.
This blinding is not the world of an outside or an other. The Carte-
sian gesture is not arrested in the face of something that is greater, that
cannot be controlled. In fact, it is not a gesture of conquest but of ero-
sion: it is an attempt to undermine oneself by weakening natural light.
The blinding is the ultimate experience of an exercise in which the sub-
ject proceeds against the grain. We might say that the subject negates
itself as self. That is, it negates itself as ability to see itself fully and,
therefore, to control itself. But at the same time and following this same
path, it searches for itself. The black light is a metaphor of the subject: it
suggests its movement of erosion which, in order really to be such, can-
not but tend toward a hyperbolic and blinding limit.
The Black Light 133

Phenomenology and Metaphor

Within this perspective it is interesting to return to Derrida's critique
of the phenomenology of Husserl and Lévinas. The metaphor of the black
light can be interpreted phenomenologically as a metaphor of the sub-
ject. Derrida's oscillations take us back to the “madness” of the epoché,
whose tendency toward hyperbole—to blinding—cannot be blocked be-
cause from the very beginning it reveals itself as an essential character-
istic of this movement. We have ended up in the phenomenon of subjec-
tivity: to say that difference produces the subject is a way of translating
conceptually—with detachment, in other words—the risk of a gesture
that does not aim at an “object” but that interrogates itself as the impos-
sibility of objectifying itself. The discovery of absence in presence, of the
other in the same, and of difference in identity has two moments: in the
first the play of reference is maintained within the illusory state of an ex-
change between light and shadow, governed by the light of presence; and
in the second it is the very light of presence that is undermined.
Stopping at the first moment, phenomenology would be a modern
form of metaphysical closure. But can the epoché stop? The phenom-
enological tone of the two moments consists in the movement, in the
gesture itself, in the vicissitude of the cogito. There is no other scene: when
we evoke it we make use of a disguise, and usually we effect a step back-
ward. This is why Derrida—and not paradoxically—defends Husserl and
criticizes Lévinas's “metaphysics of alterity.” Intonations of the same
metaphor: declension of identity. The audacity of the reduction—the
Cartesian gesture, which Husserl relaunches—cannot limit itself to the
first moment: the rational project of a reappropriation of meaning con-
trasts with the radical subjective exercise. The phenomenological gesture
is opposed to the “enlightened” task of Husserl.
In this way Derrida helps us to see a decisive laceration in Husserl's
phenomenology: a dramatic fracture between exercise and project. But it
is from here that the most important philosophic effects of this thought
are derived: the double and contrasting direction of phenomenology is
not an obstacle to be removed but the heart of this philosophic gesture.
Husserl’s refusal to consider the theoretical importance of metaphorical
language—and precisely while the development of phenomenological re-
search is accompanied in his own writings by an intensification of the use
of metaphors—reveals his lack of awareness with regard to this necessary
and productive laceration of thought; here Derrida’s criticism is right on
target. The erosion of identity is a metaphoric modulation, a displace-
ment toward a metaphor whose tone is better able to refer—but at this
level referral is description, rigor, and clarity belonging to metaphoric
capability itself—to the coming and going of subjectivity, its movement
of excess and repatriation. The black light points out this excess to us,
and at the same time, given that it remains “a” light, also indicates the
necessary repatriation. It is necessary in order that the self remain such
and not illusorily dissolve itself, in order that there be word and language
134 RECODING METAPHYSICS

and, therefore, philosophy. But the movement, like metaphor, is not

separable into a before and after: the mobile boundary of excess and re-
patriation, a single experience, is the secret of the gesture itself.
For Lévinas the question is that of a condition whose metaphorics
can instead be borrowed from the relationship between sleeping and
waking: he talks of “insomnia” and of “awakening,” attributing the same
tonality to both figures.'? Derrida’s critique (which does not cancel Lé-
vinas's influence, however, still present in Derrida's most recent writ-
ings)?° is addressed to a thought that would like to free itself from the
“light” (the beyond of being, in Lévinas's sense) and in this way commits
itself to a boomerang effect, to a withdrawal on this side of the same,
modern metaphysical results. To free oneself from the light would mean
allowing oneself to be inundated by an external and superior sun, that
alterity which Lévinas does not hesitate to call God. It would also mean
not comprehending the stakes for which the metaphorical plays, precisely
when philosophical language—as Derrida points out*'!—is being trans-
formed, in an important way, into a metaphorical language.
This critique is well-taken and undoubtedly poses a problem to
Lévinas’s thought. It is, however, also a critique that simplifies the rich-
ness of his thought and does not interrogate its philosophically most
dense implications. The perspective here suggested should allow us to
glimpse this lack. Lévinas's philosophical gesture can, in fact, be com-
prehensively interpreted as a radicalization of the phenomenological
movement in the direction of a key notion—that of passivity. Husserl,
too, moved in this direction when he hypothesized a passive hinterland
of perceptive experience: especially in the later Husserl, the theme of
passive synthesis, already determinant in the Lessons on Time, becomes the
very place of subjective identity, anterior to all judgments and all cat-
egories of the self. So much so that the transcendental and passivity are
knotted together, in an apparent contradiction, in the central ideal de-
veloped in the Crisis of European Sciences—the “Lebenswelt.” Lévinas takes
up this theme again and explodes all of its philosophical consequences,
which Husserl had only cautiously touched upon.”? First, he excludes the
limiting definition of receptivity: passivity is not the contrary of activity—
it implicates the entire subjective attitude. But the most significant mod-
ification consists in characterizing the movement of erosion and the
search for identity by way of passivity. From this point of view Lévinas's
thought is, once again, an attempt to describe the Cartesian gesture, let-
ting the accent fall, however, on the most important aspect: the move-
ment itself. The exercise characterizes itself as a step back, a withdrawal.
Passivity is the movement of the weakening of identity toward an ethical
identity which we certainly cannot consider diminished. The tone of the
exercise and the disposition that we manage to maintain toward both
things and ourselves are ethical. The truly passive element of passivity,
the recognition of the dependence and weakness of the self, is the graft-
ing of a process—which Lévinas calls “retro-descent’—that characterizes
The Black Light 135

the overall tone of subjectivity: thus the ability to maintain oneself inside
this movement is ethical.
From the very moment in which Lévinas defines the subject as "a
passivity more passive than any passivity,” the description can only leap
from metaphor to metaphor. The term passivity already reveals its meta-
phoric nature. Insomnia and awakening are two of the various figures
adopted by Lévinas: they should be taken together because insomnia
gives us the idea of an experience of passivity without vigilance, whereas
awakening suggests a passage from a nonvigilance to a mode of pres-
ence. The recourse to metaphor and to the sliding from one metaphor
to another imposes itself upon Lévinas so as to maintain passivity, vigi-
lance, and presence in an experience which none of the three terms, taken
alone, could indicate and in which all three, united, lose their proper and
usual sense.
If Lévinas opens up the path toward a thematization of the most im-
portant aspect, that is, the mode or the tone of the subjective movement
of the erosion of identity, and if this precious indication—even without
thematizing it—also shows us the unavoidability of the problem of meta-
phor, then Derrida's metaphor of the black light also maintains a supple-
ment, a further problematicity: the repatriation or the impossibility of
getting away from the light. In this particular light, his critique of Lévinas
remains valid. The risk of the gesture, in fact, is a double one: one may
lose oneself in an illusory “beyond,” in a vain madness without day or in
an externality that immobilizes us: or one may underestimate the neces-
sity of repatriation, the necessary compromise with natural light. The sec-
ond and apparently lesser risk puts into question the very vigilance of the
philosopher. Not wary enough to be able to maintain himself within the
precariousness and sliding of the movement, the philosopher will find
that he has constructed “pieces” of theory with the tone of observational
detachment and in the light of an identity that is not undermined.

TRANSLATED BY HOWARD RODGER MACLEAN

 MIL n : vi

mid i :
i |
7

n ln pa , es Dai

i : a, A i7
er ory ete eye | Ra
i ait Py Ania id >, - sé da i si

Ù An OS a î _ Pa al di = ms Da p ’ ST e * i a
| ve! pa 27 @t ala n DIC) sh mei y = sa hed ò da E

i] py li 4 ceti i. ra e la >

a daro è =i lu Sate 4 Cel 5 7

¥ 7" Pied Pasta ta a ae talea: Pa » nà = nl

Ri Appare cal dà È

Te, n [n i a :
. pu oe yok oR Wie A

; ogy cll ih 2
tali ap em Ws ate fl
dba
aiebing
ee = a
Abati >

e re SALI
Ho *e

oS geo Pa

Mo i @

A i I
ac
mini
da
tela eda va
= eaa ps
eo a sieve CA as Pa 7 — in y
© SI eo

ve oh ener PIE i tT
oe ee aon) win roata mntha a tee LT
> ego UP” yale wi e
Par
es iF
iinais oar S fdt anca O]

Srl .2' chime

dp watt Chats as d be 7
fac
tips hte oh Ls Sl | i Li Aa

So hl enti Kos (ate

ry spon:
gio shale
oni a nati la na, mas vaised fi
“ge ey . — |
N ‘hg =e ‘fj
Py ae La = pra i vali ie i

tarprada, DI
ii
| nhie yerte

i pe
' a
Even the atopical is admissible if it appears introduced with reason—Aristotle

FRANCO RELLA
The Atopy of the Modern

Atopy
“Being rooted in the absence of place.” Only in this way, says Simone
Weil, is it possible “to grasp, like all the saints, what is length, breadth,
height and depth."' The absence of place is therefore what paradoxically
allows us to “grasp” space in all of its extensions, to capture its specific
“reality.” It is necessary, then, to remove from the “place” that which ren-
ders it such: what makes it situs and protects us within itself, inside the
secure perimeter of its confines.
The “de-situated’—and therefore atopic—space is not boundless,
however. It contains the limit in itself which no longer passes to its ex-
terior, like a line of defense, but to its interior. In this sense “atopic” is
the truth theorized by Florenskij as the space that comprises everything
that can erase it.?
Socrates is not like all the other sages, precisely because he is
atopos.’ As L. Robin writes: “In many passages Plato has insisted on what
is strange and misleading about the personality of his master: it is his
famous atopy (Symposium 221d), his character that keeps one from know-
ing how to situate such a being within the human categories of common
experience; this is why Alcibiades can only compare him to fabulous be-
ings like the sileni and the satyrs.” Or better still, to the statuettes of the
sileni: containers in which there is a precious content (215a—b, 216e, 221
and ff.), a secret, something extraordinary, “a marvelous thing which im-
poses itself but which is not explained.” This is the Socratic atopy that
generates the embarrassment of Alcibiades and “aporia of his spirit.” In
Socrates—Robin continues—there is “therefore a mystery, as there is a
mystery in love. Love, too, is atopos like Socrates because both, in their
nature, contain ‘a synthesis of opposites.' ”
The word “synthesis” used by Robin is improper. In fact, it is not a
question of synthesis or of coincidence of opposites but of complexio opposi-
torum. The nature of love is such that its space is traversed by a limit that
at once unites and divides the lovers. Erotic union is, in fact, as Schlegel
was to say, the union of the un-unifiable, the real place of difference,
138 RECODING METAPHYSICS

insofar as “it is not hate, as the wise say, but love which divides human
creatures and shapes the world."
Love is complexio: contact and mixing of the diverse; interweaving and
intrigue. Schlegel proposed some terms to express this mixture: Witz,
irony, and arabesque.

Arabesque
The modern city has no confines but is traversed internally by a plu-
rality of limits. The modern city is an atopic space which, precisely be-
cause of its bewildering character, has always been perceived as a labyrin-
thine space. The Italian poet Leopardi, however, celebrated cities precisely
because a thousand limits break up the habitual view, the gaze of reason
which orders everything into hierarchies and categories. One is thus
forced to proceed beyond these limits with the imagination—with the noetic
force of the image.”
In this sense the labyrinth, no longer an infernal figure, a place of
horror to be dominated with the ruse of Ariadne’s thread and the violence
of Theseus's sword, comes to be a cognitive figure. Benjamin speaks of
losing oneself in the big city as “an art yet to be learned.” Dirrenmatt, in
his exploration of the possibles, proposes an image of the labyrinth as a
place of happiness which—with its spirals—protects from the law, from
the violent nomos. But in order to grasp the change of the epochal sense
of a millennial metaphor, it would perhaps be better to find another
name for the labyrinth. Schlegel proposed the term arabesque.°
Massignon speaks of Islamic architecture, in which decoration does
not try “to imitate the creator’ in the illusion of stable and eternal forms
“but evokes him by way of his absence, in a fragile, incomplete, and pre-
carious guise.” Thus are born “the intertwined polygons, variable radius
circle arcs, the arabesque, which is essentially a kind of indefinite negation
of closed geometrical forms.” Schlegel had gone even further, hypothesiz-
ing that the arabesque was an original form of human fantasy: the man-
ifestation of the chaos from which forms originate in what we can only
define as creatio ex nihilo. This chaos is arabesque. The highest order in
which “the teeming of the ancient gods” is perceivable. Here is the su-
preme order, supreme beauty, in that chaos “which awaits only the con-
tact of love in order to disclose itself in a harmonic world.”
The demonic touch of Eros is decisive even in the figure of the
arabesque. The duplicity that unites in a single constellation that which
is, that which has been, but also that which was and which will be possi-
ble—in short, even the interrupted bifurcations of history, the attempts
that have not had a result but that survive as possibilities.
Benjamin spoke of the messianic or prophetic force of the historian,
capable of reanimating what had been defeated. But Schlegel, by way of
his new concepts, had already thought of the historian as a prophet
turned backward.® Going beyond the metaphor of the labyrinth, therefore,
is also this atopic thought of time and history which impels us toward a
The Atopy of the Modern 139

profound revision of our mental and cognitive orders. In fact, if we think

that the real is only one of an infinite number of possibilities, and there-
fore “a particular case of the possible,” then, as Diirrenmatt says, it “is
also conceivable in a different way. It follows that in order for us to be
able to penetrate the possible we have to transform the concept of the
real’’—and this by starting from its elements of greatest resistance, para-
doxical at the same time, and precisely from the “thing.”

The Thing
“The synthesis—in itself impossible—of absolute opposites within
a manifestation is the essential sign of the arabesque.”!° According to the
young Schelling, these absolute opposites are the “conditioned” and the
“unconditioned” in that the general state of the conditioning of the world
renders unsituatable the unconditioned—from which, according to Schel-
ling, philosophy begins. Once the unconditioned has been situated, this
problem resolved, “everything is resolved."!!
To condition (bedingen) is, for the young Schelling, the operation by
which something becomes or is made a thing (Ding). “That which has
been made thing” is therefore conditioned |bedingt]. An unconditioned
thing [ein unbedingtes Ding] is an unthinkable paradox, that is, a non-thing:
it is, in Fichtian terms, Ego.'* Novalis gives a more advanced answer to
this problem. The thing is a paradox; in other words, it is a figure in which
that dissent brought to light by Schelling remains productive. In fact, “we
look for the unconditioned and we always find only things,” which have
the ability, however, to modify their borders through the demonic touch
of Eros, insofar as “every thing worthy of being loved is an object (a
thing)—that which is infinitely worthy of love is an infinite thing
[Sache]."!3 The unconditioned is no longer the absolutely other, external
to the thing, and not even, as Schlegel was to propose—a tendentiously
infinite combinatory process: it is in the thing itself, understood by
Novalis as Sache and as Ding an sich, as thing in its own right, and as thing
in itself.
The thing is therefore the place of a paradoxical synthesis in which
both Polemos and Eros act. It is a product but there is “pleasure in pro-
ducing. Every operation is therefore a polemical operation. Pleasure of
synthesis.” Love for the thing, precisely because it is a polemical love, is,
then, “de-construction and new creation of the world.”"4
The mature Schelling was to resolve this antinomy in his Philosophy of
Revelation by affirming that “things are only particular possibilities indi-
viduated in the infinite, that is, in universal strength.”!? But the most rad-
ical reflection remains that of Novalis. To act upon the thing, Novalis
affirms, prophetically announcing van Gogh's painting, means “represent-
ing what cannot be represented, seeing the invisible, feeling what cannot
be felt.”
Van Gogh has a singular relationship to things: he de-objectifies
them. By penetrating with his gaze within the limits of the object, he
140 RECODING METAPHYSICS

breaks its state of “being conditioned,” he changes the status of the ob-
ject. The conditioned impeded us from seeing the unconditioned in the
thing which now, instead, shows itself: the light of the invisible inside the
visible. The thing, then, yields to our gaze everything that had been ac-
cumulated and secretly guarded within it. The potatoes of The Potato Eaters
(1885) emanate not only the earthy color of fatigue and hunger but also
a light which is much more alive than that dispersed by the blind lamp
hanging from the ceiling.
Is Cezanne’s relationship to things equally tense and revealing?
Think of the persistence with which he painted Mont Sainte-Victoire doz-
ens of times, almost as if the mountain itself might, at a certain point,
become light and disappear like a cloud—or of the elbows or the apples
which sink down onto the surface of the table in his still lifes, suspended
in a possible, infinite slipping only by their extraordinary weight. This is
truly a strange world, a world in which an apple can weigh more than a
mountain. It is a world in which a revolution in the relationship between
subjects and things is about to take place. The change takes two paths.
Things are not immobile but are themselves metamorphosis. It may be
metamorphosis in putrefaction and hence a dissolution into nothing, as
in Fisch am Strand, which Oskar Kokoschka painted in 1930; or it may be
Forms in Combat, painted by Franz Marc in 1914 in order to free things to
a new life.
In the contemporary scene I think, on the one hand, of the petrifica-
tion of things that seem to be torn from the museum of the avant-garde
in order to be frozen in another museum; and on the other hand, of the
changing landscapes, the mobile horizons of certain paintings by young
artists:'’ states from which things emerge, that offer us new profiles, a
different experience of the world.

Contemporaneity
“May the reign of the poet be the world located in the focal center of
his age,” Novalis wrote on the threshold of modernity, which, precisely
with Schlegel and Novalis, began to present itself as a category of
thought and of the spirit.'®
No one was more faithful than Balzac to this “center,” which he
called contemporaneité. In the energies and forms of his age—ranging from
technology to science and fashion—Balzac saw a spiritual density that
made that “inflammatory existence” the place of a true gnostic experience.
The traveler of “contemporaneity” moves with means that “have modified
the laws of space and time,” in a space that is made up of houses and
things but that also presents itself as “an ocean,” as “a splendid charge
of intelligence.” In this world “no harmony of sounds is absent. Here one
can hear the hubbub of the world like the poetic peace of solitude.” In Le
chef-d'oeuvre inconnu, Gambara, and Séraphita, Balzac theorized that in order
to grasp the harmonies in this apparently uniform world of sounds it is
necessary to develop a thought and a poetics of dissonance. This world, in
The Atopy of the Modern 141

fact, has to be atopically de-situated with respect to the laws of habitual rep-
resentation in order to see real harmonies in it, the correspondence be-
tween things that always speaks the language of difference and dissimi-
larity.
The texture of correspondences is in reality foreign and familiar,
atopical and bewildering, says Baudelaire, who inherited the theme of
“contemporaneity” from Balzac and developed it into a true theory of mo-
dernity.!° Surprise, risk, adventure, and peripeteia “vaporize” the habitual
Ego and lead the subject before the great paradox of an identity that is
always constituted by the other, in a relationship in which the greatest
proximity is also the discovery of the greatest otherness. And if Solov'év
and Lévinas were to acknowledge this paradox of proximity-otherness in
love,?° Baudelaire had already given it a dramatic and “gay” representa-
tion in the poem entitled “A celle qui est trop gaie.” The poet draws close
to the lover-sister. But the habitual relationship of love is not sufficient.
In the “flanc étonné” he wants to open a “blessure large et creuse” in
order to infuse “a travers ces lévres nouvelles, plus éclatantes et plus
belles” the venom that makes them more than lovers.
The Ego recognizes the extreme foreignness even of what is loved.
One can only have the extreme experience of the continual mutation of
the other and of things while the Ego also mutates with the other and
recognizes itself only in the bewilderment of the transformation. This is
perhaps the fundamental experience of modernity articulated in Bau-
delaire’s text.
Some years ago Lyotard tried to describe modernity by starting out
from a condition that he defined as postmodern.*! Modernity, according
to Lyotard, is characterized by the domination of “narratives” which can
be summarized in the great progressive narrative that is identified with
the dominant philosophy of history. Without considering that the very
notion of narrative is de-situating and atopical with respect to philosophi-
cal discursivity, Lyotard ended up proposing as characteristic of moder-
nity all those elements that show “in the modern the unpresentable in
the representation itself’:?* in other words, precisely the antithesis of the
progressive narrative, which constitutes one of the poles of the paradox of
modernity.
The proposal was ambiguous but suggestive. It was received as a
liberating voice by theoreticians of the pictorial and architectural avant-
garde, understood as a pure and simple territory, historically defined, to
be freely crossed. It was also welcomed by the heirs of the philosophy of
“decline” and the “end”: both prisoners of that historicism which Lyotard
had declared typical of the modern—as did Habermas, who claimed the
actuality and vitality of the “modern project,” identifying it with the un-
exhausted project of the Enlightenment.
Lyotard has recently corrected his position by declaring that the
postmodern “decidedly forms part of modernity” and that “a work cannot
become modern if in the first place it is not postmodern.” Postmodernism
142 RECODING METAPHYSICS

understood in this way is not, as Gianni Vattimo has said, “modernism at

its end,” but modernism in its nascent state—and this state is constant.
With a theoretical torsion with respect to his previous position, Lyotard,
then, affirms that “postmodern must be understood in accordance with the
paradox of the future (post) perfect (mode)."”?
The thesis is once again suggestive. | myself am convinced that there
is a tradition (and therefore a past, an anteriority) of the modern which
has to be (now, in the future) effected. Schlegel and Novalis, for example,
face the same themes as Hegelian philosophy, but they propose a differ-
ent ‘visibility’ of the world that has not yet been explored. Their thought,
defeated by the Hegelian dialectic, cannot be read within its conceptual
framework, however. It is like an emergence that has moved karstically
along modernity and that today is reproposed in the definition of a differ-
ent horizon of meaning that involves a complex change of the figures and
concepts to which we have consigned the handling of our cognitive and
operative situation.
The bewilderment of the Ego, the metaphor of the labyrinth, the dis-
placement of the light-darkness dialectic in the Kafkian proposal of shad-
ow as place of a different visibility of the world,°4 together with the dis-
placement of the relationship between the real and the possible, are all
certainly included in the modern, but they also—in the moment in which
they become our thought today—work a profound change of epoch.
Today we live in a paradoxical situation in which, together with the
greatest unfolding of cognitive possibilities which man has ever experi-
enced in his history, there is also the possibility—never before so close—
of a total annihilation of humanity and the world. We live in a period in
which what in the past was unthinkable, owing either to distance or to its
dimensions, is today rendered visible on a mass level. After centuries of
interrogating the value of the image in relation to its referent, we are now
confronted by images that have no-object-referent whatever. Traversing
the modern really leads us to go beyond its limits, even if these limits are
not external but rather an internal frontier. More than ever, to think the
modern is to think the limit: it is liminal thought. From this point of view, Bal-
zac, who sets about investigating the limit between the male and the
female, is prophetic with respect to our present-day thought (he is after
our modernity: according to Lyotard, he is totally postmodern). Liminal
thought, precisely because it is poised on the point at which the visible
and invisible touch each other, where place and nonplace are tangents,
is atopic thought. Atopy is perhaps the fundamental word of contempo-
rary modernity.

Secret
As Kierkegaard wrote; “Yes, | think | would even abandon myself to
the devil if he were able to show me every abomination, every sin in its
most horrible guise: this attraction, this taste for the secret of sin.’”? The
emphasis here is not on sin, as one might think at first, but literally on
The Atopy of the Modern 143

secret, which in Kierkegaard's thought becomes a philosophical and re-

ligious category.
The secret is something to discover, but also to safeguard. It pro-
duces the pleasure proper to the search, the typical pleasure of the hiding
place, as well as proximity to the figure of “horror,” amazement, and be-
wilderment. It is once again Plato who in the Symposium proposed this
aspect: Socrates hides a precious secret, something extraordinary and
marvelous, within his grotesque container. And as Robin writes, it is from
this that arises “the inextricable embarrassment, the aporia” of Alcibiades,
because in Socrates there is a mystery that is revealed but also hidden in
the folds of his figure, as in those of his discourse.
The perception of this “secret” and the impossibility of completely
solving it have led some to hypothesize the “existence of unwritten doc-
trines: the dialogues which our culture has handed down for centuries as
a venerable legacy perhaps do not deal with Plato’s true concerns, which
were instead transmitted by oral tradition."*° Socrates is consequently a
container that contains a stupefying and at the same time disturbing
treasure. Perhaps Socrates contains something that does not belong to
him. Perhaps Socrates is a character or a pseudonym of Plato, a character
who has such a great force as to cancel its author.?”
The first Platonic dialogues faithfully follow the life and thought of
Socrates, but with the narration of his death in the Phaedo Plato decisively
arrives at the formulation of his own thought, beyond Socrates. And yet,
like Conan Doyle with Sherlock Holmes, Plato does not succeed in defini-
tively “losing” his character and speaking directly. He disseminates
traces to make us understand his secret, to the point of weakening Soc-
rates’ presence in the late dialogues and completely freeing himself from
Socrates in his last work, The Laws, “making himself the champion of laws
that prescribe the death penalty for whoever criticizes or subverts the au-
thority of the country's laws, both as regards the gods and as regards civil
order. And so the greatest disciple of Socrates . .. ends up by embracing
the point of view of Anytus and Meletus, who had asked that Socrates be
condemned to death precisely because of his independent attitude vis-à-
vis the then-existing religious and civil order.”** The secret of Socrates is
perhaps the emergence of subjective and unavowable instances in Plato,
who had nonetheless proposed to “wither” those parts of the soul in-
clined toward emotion or the expression of the subjective pathéma.
Kierkegaard, who meditated at length on the relationship between
Plato and Socrates in the Concept of Irony,*? wrote in his Diaries regarding
the unavowable of subjectivity: “In my papers, after my death, one will
not find (and this is the consolation) even one explanation of what has
filled my life. In the recesses of my soul one will not find that text which
explains everything, and which makes events which the world often takes
for bagatelles of enormous importance for me and which, even for me,
become futile as soon as | remove that secret note which is the key.””°
But the irruption of the secret in the philosophical discourse displaces
144 RECODING METAPHYSICS

its rules, de-situating it completely. Born from the secret, Kierkegaardian

pseudonyms do not limit themselves to safeguarding the secret but give
it a narrative development that emerges from the philosophical context
in the strict sense: “At the same time as the book develops an idea, its
correspondent personality comes to be delineated,"?! insofar as thought,
in having entered the secret dimension of the narrative, can no longer
do without the properly subjective dimension. The development of the
idea also becomes the construction of a character who lives it and pro-
poses its experience.
Kierkegaard, speaking of A Thousand and One Nights, reminds us that
the narrative is always secretly invested with a vital dimension, “the in-
genious intrigue into which the various stories are interwoven between
themselves like voluptuously twining plants on the ground, the one with
the other. But over the whole there looms the leaden sky of an oppressive
anguish: it is Scheherazade who saves her life by telling stories.”
Philosophy can no longer pretend that these “names'—the pseud-
onyms of Kierkegaard, of Nietzsche, and of Kafka—do not exist. And
Ricoeur has begun to study the development of the aporias of philosophy
within the narrative intrigue, to the point of theorizing a limit in which the
subject expresses itself beyond discourse, perhaps also beyond narrative: in
a sort of “meditating lyricism” which opens to a new dimension of
thought. In fact, the mystery of time, which pushes one to this limit and
is unresolvable philosophically, “is not equivalent to an interdiction
which weighs on language; rather, it gives rise to the need to think more
and to say differently.”*? It is in this way that discourse, narrative, and
tragedy multiply the energies of thought, moving the subject along the
path of the unthought. Thus, in a certain sense, the secret is the soul of the
de-situating force of atopy.

Project
As Schlegel wrote, “The essence of the form of this modern is in-
trigue.’*4 What relationship does intrigue have with the linearity of the
project, which is one of the strongest thoughts of the modern?
To project means to construct the place of difference so that what is
only possible becomes real. In this sense all of the young Schlegel's
speculations concerning the figures of the combination of plurality, and
especially with regard to the arabesque, are the definition of this project and
therefore atopical—capable, in other words, of transforming the laws
of “only reasoning reason.” In fragment 22 of the Athendéum, Schlegel con-
fronts directly the problem of the project. "The project is the subjective
germ of an object that is becoming,” which is characterized, owing to its
total subjectivity and its necessary physical and moral objectivity, in rela-
tion to time. Projects, in fact, are “fragments of the future.” With respect
to these fragments “the ability to immediately idealize objects is essen-
tial and at the same time to realize them, integrate them and partially carry
them out in themselves. And, since that which has a relation to the con-
The Atopy of the Modern 145

nection or separation of the ideal with the real is transcendental, we

could say that the sense of fragments and projects is the transcendental
part of the historical spirit.” The historical spirit, then, organizes the frag-
ments of the past and of the future as the decisive place of the tension
between subject and object in relation to time. It realizes a form which is
a fragmentary totality, a space of presences and omissions: a place of
shadow and mixture.
The criterion of “realizability” advanced by Schlegel tears the project
away from the utopian dimension, from pure analysis and pure ex-
perimentation, which, as Novalis wrote, “leads into boundless spaces and
simply into the infinite,” as in “a labyrinth” or in “a delirious Witz.”
“Realizability” is in relation to what Novalis defined as finis—limit and
aim—which removes “notorious speculation, discredited and false mysti-
cism,” indicating, instead, “the need for limitation—determination, enclo-
sure—|that] refers to a determinate aim and changes speculation into a
necessary and properly poetic instrument”?

Amazement
The mature Schelling, in his Philosophy of Revelation, wrote extraordi-
nary pages concerning the amazement of reason, of stupefied reason,
which, faced by reality without limits, without names, without adjectives
exists from itself and mutates. Heidegger's pages on boredom in Wegmar-
ken and Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik, as well as Freud's essay on das Unheim-
liche, are born of this stupefied perception of an absolute transcendence
of the real with respect to language which, as Valéry said, suddenly “stops
the heart."3° It is the glance we cast, as Novalis wrote in a fragment enti-
tled “Chance and Necessity,” into the “depths of the spirit,” when not only
reason but also “the power of imagination [lie] exhausted and immobile.”?”
And yet, as Plato and Aristotle said, philosophy originates in amaze-
ment. Like the secret, amazement sweeps away “those phantasms that in
the sanctuary have” habitually “occupied the place where the statues of
the gods ought to be set,” as Novalis wrote.
Once again we must return to the de-situating force of atopy.
Novalis’s move is to use physics for the internal world and the soul for
the external world. Normally, he says, “we have stopped at the intellect,
the imagination and reason which are the miserable compartments of the
universe in us,” without a word “regarding their wonderful connections,
passages, and representations. No one has thought of going to look for
other energies that are new and without name.... Who knows what won-
derful unions, what miraculous generations still await us within the inter-
nal.”
A wonderful landscape, disquieting and familiar, like the one that
Baudelaire hypothesized in the correspondence of things. This landscape
was explored by Freud, who, with the concept of Unheimlichkeit, reintroduced
the notion of atopy upon the stage of twentieth-century thought. It was
explored by Jung, who saw the demands of animus and soul move them-
146 RECODING METAPHYSICS

selves in the subject, and behind them the Shadow, the magnificent chaos
that awaits the touch of love in order to unfold itself in a world of sym-
bols. It was explored by the great modern writers, from Balzac to Kafka,
and closer to our own days by Peter Handke, who, in the Die Lehre der
Sainte-Victoire,*? speaks of the invention of the landscape, when a flight of a bird
or the frond of a branch transforms the dreadful anxiety of estrangement
in another place, in which we can once again find the very sense of our
journey: nostos, return home. In fact, as Novalis wrote, “philosophy, strictly
speaking, is nostalgia, the desire to find oneself everywhere at home.” But if our
home is everywhere this means that we are rooted in the absence of
place—in atopy, in other words. We have returned to the principal point
of the experience of the modern: the journey that transforms the
“everywhere of the labyrinth into one's own home.’”° It is the metropolitan
horizon that takes us through the horror of its intérieurs and its dispersion
to the place of an unknown beauty that surpasses every canon. Its full-
ness, as Schlegel said, moves from the celestial dimension to the depths
of the infernal abyss.*' It was described with fear and a shudder of horror
by Zola in his great novel L’oeuvre, pursued with desperate fury by all the
avant-gardes, and today resurfaces in the new landscapes of our moder-
nity, of our own contemporaneity.
The subject looks at these landscapes and is in these same land-
scapes. In fact, one is never only the witness of a thing that happens as
we watch it happen.

TRANSLATED BY HOWARD RODGER MACLEAN

FRANCO RELLA
Fabula

I.
As Valéry said, a great act of strength brought an end to the con-
troversy between Aristotelians and Neoplatonists at the beginning of the
seventeenth century and marked a turning point in the history of thought.
This was Descartes's gesture, his affirmation of a pure object of thought
which brings exclusive cognitive responsibility upon itself. The Aristote-
lian cognitive paradigm was crumbled, the Neoplatonic world was de-
prived of its soul: the great body of the Timaeus became a surface criss-
crossed by measurements, defined in quantities and sizes. But this same
process of de-animation (or, to put it better, of “de-animalization”) must
also be directed within the subject in order to free it from the illness of
the body, which, with its illusory force, convinces that being is what ap-
pears, how and as it appears: the hardness, softness, its coloredness, etc.
Error is always born of the body and extends into intellectual procedures,
weakening them, because of the persistent memory of the sensations it
gave us during our infancy. To arrive at the ego of knowledge, the ego of
the cogito which is decided by a pure intellective act, it is necessary to
drain “the far too yielding brain of infants of the frenetic and the lethar-
gic.” In short, it is necessary “to detach the mind from the senses.”
But this is precisely Plato's objective in the Phaedo and the Republic:
against the “enchantments,” the “disorientation,” and the “deceptions”
produced by the senses, as Plato wrote in the Republic, “measurement,
numbering, and weighing have shown themselves as being very ingeni-
ous aids,” operations that “are the concern of the rational element of
the soul,” which is undoubtedly “the best of the soul,” whereas the other,
that which trusts to sensation, “will be of less worth." It is “ill” and must
be “healed” (602d).
Descartes's certainty is Plato's mathema: victory over the vertiginous
impermanence of the real which ends up by being translated into a the-
ology.
The Scientific Revolution and mechanism paradoxically annihilate
Renaissance Platonism by repeating the gesture of Plato. Giordano
Bruno's universe “without a shirt” (as Kepler wrote), the infinite plurality
148 RECODING METAPHYSICS

of worlds and astral influences, and the innumerable proliferations of

forces in the worldly body, are once again known in a form by a subject
which is—yet again— “without organs,” insofar as “true sight” is not that
of the body but that of reason.
Descartes's anti-Platonic gesture therefore once again realizes Pla-
to's cognitive strategy. The anti-Cartesian polemic of a Platonist like Vico
opens up breaches within this same strategy. Vico, in contesting Des-
cartes, reopens the ancient controversy regarding knowledge. The notion
of a vera narratio makes progress by way of these openings: poetic fiction
as access to truth.

2
Vico rallies common sense and the verisimilar against the scire per
causas of Descartes. But the breaking away that he achieves with respect
to previous philosophy is opened up precisely in the consideration of
poetry, of the narrative fabula, in relationship to truth.
As K. O. Apel wrote, it was a humanistic topos to attribute poets with
a preferential path with regard to truth. Even the nonhumanistic German
tradition—from Meister Eckhart, by way of Jacob Boehme, to Benedict Franz
Xavier von Baader and John Georg Hamann—'drew from the Bible, that is,
from the word of God, the vocation of a creative poetic language.” But Vico
broke away from both these traditions, beginning with the Orazioni and the
Scienza nuova prima: “Falsum poeticum esse quoddam verum metaphysicum,
seu, ut loquuntur, cum quo vera physica comparata, falsa esse videantur.”
Or, as he affirms in the Scienza nuova prima: “So distant is it from the real
that poetry comes from innermost wisdom! That the false poetics are the
same as those which in general are the real ones of philosophers, with
the difference that the former are abstract while the latter are dressed in
images: because one senses the extent to which he is cunning, he intends
it, or to the extent that he is unknowledgeable does not, whosoever writes
that the lesson of poets is unbecoming to philosophers; when the truth
of poets is a truth in its best idea and the truth of historians is often
due to caprice, due to necessity, by mere fortune.”
The truth of poets, then, is the truth of philosophers with respect to
which it not only is not derived (from the knowledge retained by phi-
losophers) but also enjoys a priority of a historic order (the lesson of
poets is not unbecoming to philosophers) and also of a metaphysical
order, as it were.
With these opening remarks Vico had already marked out a clear-cut
caesura with regard to the humanistic tradition (cf. above, 2.13) insofar
as it is the falsehood of poets, namely, the “fictional” structure of poetic nar-
ration, which is the truth of philosophers. As Vico affirmed in the De
studiorum ratione, the poet achieves truth per mendacia, by way of a fiction.
The difference between poetry and philosophy, on this level of reflection
by Vico, is posed in that the first “is dressed in images” and the second
is abstract. Consequently, “the studies of metaphysics and of poetry are
Fabula 149

naturally opposed, the one to the other, ...the thoughts of the former are all
abstract, the concepts of the latter then are more beautiful when they are made
more bodily: in other words, the former studies that the learned know the
truth being free from every passion .. . whereas the latter attempts to
induce vulgar men to strive toward truth with machinery of greatly dis-
turbed effects” (Scienza nuova prima).
Behind these affirmations by Vico we can glimpse—as he explicitly
recalls—the reemergence of Aristotle and implicitly also of Gorgias. Vico,
however, moves beyond both of them. With the Scienza nuova of 1744 he
arrives at a definition of a true "logic of poetry”: the modalities by which
poetry poses itself as vera narratio, achieving real universality by means of
the particulars it embraces on its narrative path.

=
Giambattista Vico's “new science” is a “critical art” which had been
lacking in the “search for the real truth about the authors of nations.” The
first object of this “science” is “philology,” which philosophy “had been
almost horrified to discuss” because of the “obscurity of causes and the
almost infinite variety of effects.” Vico's study, however, sets out to discover
“the design of an ideal eternal history,” and in this perspective both poem
and myth allow one to understand “fables as true and severe histories of
the ways of the ancient peoples of Greece.” Narrated in these fables, in
fact, is a truth that could not have been told in another language. And
this is even more true insofar as we must admit that poetry consists in
nothing other than “in giving sense and passion to insensate things.”!
Poetry is certainly imitation (216), but unlike the mad mirror that
Plato hypothesized in the Republic, it does not reflect everything in an un-
differentiated manner because “poetic characters, which are genera or
fantastic universals," constitute the foundation of a certain knowledge of the
apparent in that “all the particular species are reduced to the genera
which resembled them" (209).
James Hillman has observed that Vico's “fantastic universals” antici-
pate Jung's theory of archetypes. But perhaps Vico's intuition goes be-
yond even Jung’s theory in proposing a poetic and symbolic knowledge
that exists apart from the dimension of individual experience. The experi-
ence of the subject, by way of the “fantastic universals,” can be proposed
as a general knowledge of the concrete.
This notion, in fact, is part of the more general polemic that Vico
conducted against Cartesian positions: the principles of science are not
to be sought in metaphysical assertions but in the very modifications of
the human mind. In fact, “in the night of thick darkness enveloping the
earliest antiquity, so remote from ourselves, there shines the eternal and
never failing light of a truth beyond all question: that the world of civil so-
ciety has certainly been made by men, and that its principles are therefore to be
found within the modifications of our human mind . . . which, immersed and
buried in the body, naturally inclines to take notice of bodily things’ (331)
150 RECODING METAPHYSICS

The language that speaks of this link between mind and body, and
of this “taking notice of bodily things,” is poetic language, not organized
in a “rational and abstract metaphysics, .. . but felt and imagined” by men
“with robust senses and extremely vigorous imaginations.” Thus the cor-
poreal is united to the divine, the visible to the invisible, for “they
imagined the causes of the things they felt and wondered at to be gods”
(375).
The poets, in knowing, “created” things; whence their “name,” poets—
“the same sound in Greek as ‘creator.’ Hence they took things to their
being, they brought things into being “in accordance with a robust bodily
imagination and, because robust and corporeal, they did it with a marvelous sub-
limity, so much so that it excessively perturbed even those who created
these things by imagining them. It is through imagination, in fact, that
the poet makes things be, and this ‘creation’ must in the same way trou-
ble both listener and creator insofar as knowing is an experience which can-
not, in this felt and imagined metaphysic” be separated from the body.
The agitation that is at the basis of this experience derives from the sub-
lime: from the divine that shines in the corporeal.
Vico, however, does not propose a poetry that would be a sort of
“substitutive philosophy,” or even, as will occur in the romantic era, a
poetry that is the highest degree of knowledge as ideal intuition. Follow-
ing the path of philosophy, we could certainly define the “impossible
credible” of the poetic myth a “ruse,” an error. And philosophy can affirm
this from its own point of view. But it cannot invalidate poetic myth in its
peculiarity in that it is a “fantastic speech” which has its own laws and
which, as such, is absolutely true. Philosophy, then, will never be able to
liquidate poetry as nonknowledge or as minor knowledge that poses itself
in the auroral stages of thought when, as Hegel was to say, it has still not
yet attained all of its strength. “All that has been so far said here upsets
all the theories of the origin of poetry from Plato and Aristotle down to
Patrizzi, Scaligeri, and Castelvetro. For it has been shown that it was defi-
ciency of human reasoning power that gave rise to poetry so sublime that
the philosophies which came afterward, the arts of poetry and of criti-
cism, have produced none equal or better, and have even prevented its
production” (384).
The faculty of reason that produced poetry was so “defective” that
the knowledge it gives us has never been achieved by any philosophy, nor
by any successive poetry that could make use of the notions derived from
philosophy and that could pose, then, as a sort of “truth” beneath “the
veil of beautiful verses.”

4.
Having postulated a “felt and imagined metaphysic,” Vico moves on
to define its logic, which he names “poetic logic.”
Etymology is a “history of things signified” by names and by words
(22) The “poetic logic” section begins, in fact, precisely with one of these
Fabula 151

stories, a truly fantastic etymology of the sort proposed by Plato in the

Cratylus, or in our modern age by Heidegger and Lacan. A story, a signifi-
cant sequence, like an adventurous peripeteia, condensed within a name,
but which from this name passes by way of other names, moving in differ-
ent languages with an unscrupulousness that perhaps we shall find only
later in Lacan.
Vico ‘begins by saying that “logic comes from logos whose first and
proper meaning was fabula, fable, carried over into Italian as ‘favella,’
speech. In Greek the fable was also called muthos, myth, whence comes
the Latin mutus, mute—for speech was born in mute times as mental
language . .. whence logos means both word and idea.” The course is a
dizzying one: logos above all means fable, the Greek muthos, which has
been transformed into Latin mutus, and therefore, given this mutism
within itself, logos contains the double meaning of “favola” (tale) and
“mental idea.” Mythos and logos are, in any case, contiguous—a mixture
of mental image, concept, and fable—and from this link we can derive
the successive significations of “fact,” “thing,” and finally of "vera nar-
ratio," true narration (401).
Mythology is therefore a "speaking in fables,” a narrating that is
founded, “as has been demonstrated above,” on “fantastic genera.” It is
diversiloquium in that the fables “signify the different species or the differ-
ent individuals comprised under these genera.” But precisely for this
reason the diversiloquium, the speaking differences, becomes a veriloquium,
the discourse of truth, in that “this fable was defined as vera narratio” (403).
Poetry, then, is narration, and narration, with its movement and
peripeteia uniting diverse things according to the genera and fantastic
universals, founds its cognitive reason within itself. As Vico himself ob-
served, this discourse is a revolution with respect to preceding poetics
insofar as it moves through antinomies and mixtures, through a theoret-
ical hybridization which is proposed as a tensional proceeding. The con-
cept itself of vera narratio is an example of the tensional status of Vico’s
thought. Translated into traditional terms, vera narratio in fact means “true
fiction.”

DI,
Tropes are corollaries of this “poetic logic.” “The most luminous and
therefore the most necessary and most frequent and dense is metaphor.
It is most praised when it gives sense and passion to insensate things in
accordance with the metaphysic discussed above” (404). Once again,
metaphor is a synonym of poetry in that it has the same task and the
same reason (cf. 186). This identification is possible insofar as metaphor,
according to Vico's definition, which is perhaps the “most dense” and
most acute that has ever been given of metaphor, is “a small tale” (404).
It is therefore a short story, a little myth, a brief narration, synthesis or
composition of facts which in itself unites the heterogeneous. In short, it
is a fragment of the more general process of the vera narratio.
BDZ RECODING METAPHYSICS

With metaphor, the body enters the heart of every discourse, of every
logos, given that “most of the expressions relating to inanimate things
are formed by transfers from the human body and its parts and from the
human senses and passions” (405).
It is impossible to speak of anything without the body and “human
senses” insinuating their disturbing presence into the discursive network.
Thus discourse is the image of the universe within which we move; it con-
structs an uneven topography of lights and shadows, reliefs and lacunae,
abstraction and immersion in the body. The supposed absolute purity of
scientific metalanguages is merely a white metaphor, an immense figure
that once again narrates the conflict of knowledge, the history of the sub-
ject and of subjects involved in this conflict.

6.
“This fantastic metaphysics shows that homo non intelligendo fit omnia.”
And this is how Vico, encompassing both, defines them. “When man
understands he extends his mind and takes in the things, but when he
does not understand he makes the things out of himself and becomes
them by transforming himself into them” (405). This is not Cusanus’s
doctrine of the learned ignorance, which also might have influenced Vico.
Intelligere and non intelligere coexist in two different strategies of approach
to the world. But precisely this coexistence brings with it a new term. By
“not understanding," man is transformed into the thing: a continuous
exchange therefore comes about, a continual metamorphosis between
subject and things, between the Ego and the world. Mutation thus be-
comes one of the capital terms of the new fantastic metaphysic. The
object of the knowing of narration.

di
Poetic “falsehood” is truth in narration. Lie, on the other hand, is
proper to abstract reflection that “takes on the mask of truth” in some of
its linguistic-argumentative procedures. “The first fables,” relating the
events of the world as they appeared to men, “could not feign anything
false, they must therefore have been, as they have been defined above,
true narration” (408).

8.
“Monsters and poetic transformations” derive from the cognitive ac-
tivity that composes “the subjects” in order to make up their complex
forms, or that destroys “a subject in order to separate its primary form
from the contrary form which has been imposed upon it” (410). Thus “the
distinguishing of ideas produced metamorphoses” (411).
What for Plato was evil itself—the “metamorphosis of the immu-
table” of which poets stubbornly insisted upon speaking—becomes es-
sential in Vico’s cognitive strategy. But what appears as a process of
metamorphosis is the composition and decomposition of the subject ac-
Fabula 153

cording to its “nervous system,” a process Plato describes in his Phaedrus

when he defines dialectics. When this Platonic metaphor is read as a “small
fable,” the process may be seen as one of real movement, of metamor-
phosis. Plato, too, describes a movement in which one image becomes
another: a process of transformation and transfiguration.

9.
The conceit of nations and scholars has negated poetic wisdom. Vico
polemicizes against the recourse to transrational philosophies, such as
those of occultism and hermeticism, because with this “irksome philo-
sophic wisdom” philosophers, pretending to wish to attribute great
value to poetry, in reality negate it in its cognitive specificity insofar as
they refuse to acknowledge its peculiar logic. And this logic may be un-
derstood only within the double movement of understanding and not un-
derstanding, within a complex framework in which sense and intellect—
by different paths—find a language capable of giving form to the world:
in order to bring to their Being those things that otherwise would lie in
a confused and lifeless heap (779, 125-28).

10.
The “real Homer” must be reevaluated within this framework and
against the Platonic condemnation of the Republic. His “inaccessible lies”
and his extraordinary cognitive fictions (838) have proposed themselves
as a model of wisdom which is still unsurpassed.
‘Oméros—Vico tells us with yet another of his striking etymologies,
true “narrative fictions” that try to deliver a truth otherwise unattainable
by way of “pure” thought—derives from mou, “together,” and from eirein,
“to connect.” Our Homer was therefore “binder or compiler of fables”
(852).

I:
Vico's strategic moves might have but did not, in fact, resolve the
“conflict of knowledge.” The battle was to be resumed in the “modern”
period and with uncertain results.

TRANSLATED BY HOWARD RODGER MACLEAN

 -

ay
ta CI

(gelato)an
Ubs pete

hey i: vail
Meritaka
MASSIMO CACCIARI
The Problem of Representation

Only the Angel, free from demonic destiny, poses the problem of rep-
resentation. Demonic destiny “ist der Schuldzusammenhang des Leben-
digen” (Benjamin, “Schicksal und Charakter”), the guilty context of every-
thing that lives. Guilt, for the demon, is the constitution of the living: it
refers back to an original guilt that condemned at the first incarnation
and set into motion the rota generationis. Life itself is condemnation. The
daimon nails it to the laws of destiny, which have nothing to do with those
of justice? The dimension of the daimon therefore absorbs that of
character: character “abdicates itself in favor of guilty life” (ibid.). As it
does in Plato as well: having chosen one's own life the soul is constrained
by the daimon. Ethos becomes a demon for man, which he can escape
only by way of a new death and a new birth.
Benjamin wants to break the chain that connects the concept of
character to that of destiny. Knowledge has always worked to weave an
extremely fine web in which the two concepts become indistinguishable
wefts—and hence every character can be judged by it in the light of an
unchanging Law, according to Jurisprudential Right. Character, in this
way, makes itself daimon subject to destiny. Within this context a problem
of representation does not seem to exist, given that character is the
daimon, and the daimon is the power of that destiny. In the fabric that
links these terms neither questions nor voids appear. But for Benjamin,
tragedy has already lacerated it. In tragedy, pagan man tries to summon
together his strength “heimlich,” secretly; his victory against the daimons
begins. “Greek tragedy honored human freedom because it made the hero
fight against the superior force of destiny,” as Schelling had already writ-
ten in the last letter of Philosophische Briefe. Blame and punishment are jos-
tled together and confused by the tragic poet: to every Nomos another is
opposed; to every Logos there is a counter-melody. The discourses of
tragedy appear to be dissoi—doubles—and to the greatest extent dissoi
are those of god, servant-guardian of Ananke. However much this knowl-
edge takes away the word from man, reduces him to silence, and, appar-
ently, annihilates him, it is here that "the head of genius was for the first
time raised from the fog of guilt,” and he felt himself essentially free from
156 RECODING METAPHYSICS

the demonic destiny. Certainly, the hero has necessarily to succumb, and
yet, given that he succumbs not without struggling, he shows in his de-
feat, by way of that very loss of his freedom, that in the defeat there oc-
curs “precisely this freedom”: he succumbs “with an open affirmation
(Erklarung) of free will” (Schelling, Philosophie der Kunst). The adventure of
his autonomous logos also begins here. In comedy, character “luminously
unfolds” without allowing anything to exist next to it; comedy affirms the
freedom and autonomy of character from the daimon. The comic persona,
far from being “the puppet of the determinists,” opposes “the splendor of
his unique feature” to the finely woven fabric of Destiny, to the primacy
of guilt it opposes “the vision of the natural innocence of man.” The comic
persona plays its own demonic character by defining its own irreducible
individuality with lucid consequentiality.
But such autonomy presupposes that of logos, of the form of expres-
sion proper to the comic persona. Its freedom, that is, as Benjamin notes,
without however developing the problem, is affirmed by way of its affinity
with logic (‘auf dem Wege ihrer Affinitat mit der Logik’). The tragic word
knows nothing of this affinity; precisely in its agitating together and con-
fusing guilt and punishment, it could not follow the criteria of logic. It
does not represent but re-strikes a sound whose origin is hidden, an adélon,
an inscrutable.* With respect to this adélon the tragic word cannot pro-
claim any form of autonomy. Instead, autonomy is the logic of comic
character, no longer a simple “knot in the net” (Benjamin) but an indi-
viduum that unfurls itself on the basis of the uniqueness of its fundamen-
tal trait or temperament. The discourse of this individual becomes sub-
stance unto itself, complementary to nothing, corresponding only to its
internal order; the “comic” aims at the annihilation of every reality that
lies outside the unfolding of character: from the point of view of the con-
cept of destiny and of daimon, a vertex of hybris, of arrogance.
Hence the problem of representation explodes, already originating
with the tragic form. What relationship does an autonomous logic have
(no longer repercussion, resonance, a link) to the thing? In what way can
a logos that is metaphysically detached from every presupposition repre-
sent a thing that is different and heterogeneous from itself? How can the
logoi stand for the thing itself if no common origin is expressible, or
rather, if the logos, in breaking the net of demonic destiny, has absolutely
and autonomously defined itself? In tragedy, a logos that already radi-
cally doubts every stable, transcendent foundation still torments itself in
order to arrive at the idea of it and sinks, it goes right to the bottom, in
this desperate search. Comedy criticizes the judiciousness of this search:
character is not a demon, but every demonic dimension is here totally
subsumed within the individuality of character. The appearance, the man-
ifestation and expression of character counts for everything. But this ex-
pression cannot be other than onomazein, the onoma, of pure names “which
mortals laid down believing them to be true” (Parmenides, frag. 8.39
Diels-Kranz). The name reflects the doxai, the opinions of mortals, the
The Problem of Representation bey

deceiving order, the apparent disposition of the world. The name is the
arbitrary instrument of men “eidotes ouden,” who know nothing, “dik-
ranoi,” two-headed, for helplessness guides the wandering thought in
their breasts (Parmenides, frag. 6 D.-K.). If the logos beats the path for
which “to be and to be-not are the same, yet not the same,” if it renounces
the absoluteness of the aletheia, if it erects itself in auto-nomy with respect
to the unbeatable force of Necessity, then it is necessarily resolved in the
onomazein. But it is impossible to make any certain and stable Being cor-
respond to the onoma; it is nothing other than the representation of the
oscillating of the entity in the doxa of mortals. Properly speaking, it repre-
sents only the deceiving order of this same doxa, in its perennial changing
of place and color.
How is the absolutely opposed to the atremés heart of the Aletheia
representable? How is it possible to know what never stays? And how,
together, is it possible that in the name, arbitrarily posed and perennially
changing, one gives one representation of anything? The name belongs to
the realm of opinion from which, on principle, the truly real thing es-
capes. Names “are in no case stable. Nothing prevents the things that are
now called round from being called straight and the straight round”
(Plato, Seventh Letter 343a-b). Name, definition, and image form knowl-
edge, but an obscure and instable knowledge of the oscillating entity
which has nothing to do with the “fifth entity,” with the higher degree of
the knowledge of the truly real thing. And if one were to affirm that the
onomazein may comprise the “fifth entity,” certainly he would be afflicted
with the madness of mortals, not struck by the mania that comes from the
gods.
But not only does the abyss of the truly real thing escape the name,
not only is nothing known of its no-thingness by that knowing which is the
ephemeral order of opinion constructed by way of names, definitions, and
images—but the very on that is sought in the onoma (thus Plato explains
the term in the Cratylus: “on ou masma estin,” 421a-b) can never be effec-
tively drawn from the onoma. The search that the name carries out is in
principle interminable. If, in fact, the image were perfect imitation, if the
name stood perfectly for the thing, then there would no longer be either
image or name but duplication of the on itself. “Do you not perceive that
images are very far from having qualities which are the exact counterpart
of the realities which they represent? ... But then how ridiculous would
be the effect of names on things, if they were exactly the same with them!
For they would be the doubles of them, and no one would be able to de-
termine which were the names and which were the realities” (Plato, Crat-
ylus 432d). He who knows the names does not therefore know the things,
neither in the sense of knowing the “it self’ (439d), the truth of the thing
(438e), nor in the sense of a perfect adherence to the appearance of the
entity, of a full touching, point by point, of the on, of acomplete re-present-
ing of it. How can names signify the truth of the thing if they appear in-
trinsically ambiguous, if they do not agree between themselves, if the
158 RECODING METAPHYSICS

legislators who have posed them could most certainly not have been able
to avail themselves of other names from which to learn (and so they
would not have been able to apprehend the “it self” of the on by way of
the name)? Is it judicious to “put oneself and the education of one's mind
in the power of names” (440c) if the knowledge that comes from them
always changes and will therefore always be non-knowledge?
The rupture of the demonic character destines this interrogation:
Socratic comedy. Comedy is the infinite varying of this single question: if
the representation by means of the name does not give the thing but the
doxa around the thing, how will it be possible to arrive at a knowledge of
things by way of these same things, at an apprehension of the truth of
the thing in itself, of the truth that can always be intuited from a knower
who also always is? The freeing of character from the daimon coincides
with that of the name from the being-signified, that is, from being the
imitation-image of the thing it signifies. The name unfolds “in the splen-
dor of its unique trait” (Benjamin), in the solitude of its “temperament.”
“Free,” character roams by means of names and their etymons, combining
and varying, a game of intelligence and of invention which challenges the
original resonation of the word: does this sense not persuade you, does
this explanation seem crude to you?—then see if this other one satisfies
you (399e). Can we really seriously interrogate ourselves regarding the rea-
son of names? “Ask it of others; there is no objection to your hearing the
facetious one, for the gods too love a joke” (406c). A joke that Dionysus is
the giver of wine, that Aphrodite means born of the foam, Pallas the
shaker. The onomazein does not “touch” the truth; to learn the thing itself
is not possible by way of names. Yet it is that “joke” of the name or of the
care for it (which already cast its shadow in tragic drama) that under-
mines the daimon from his dominion over character. And thus the joke
of the Cratylus appears to be tremendously serious. It is the question that
Socrates continuously repeats to himself “as if in a dream”: how will it be
representable and apprehensible that same “it self’ which we consider
not when we observe a beautiful face in its passing and never-ever-being,
but the beautiful always as it is? How will the idea be representable if, as
it turns out, it cannot be apprehended by way of the kaleidoscopic game
of onomazein?
This problem constitutes that “Angel with the blazing sword of the
concept” which Scholem sees rising up at the entrance of “paradise” of
the written: the erkenntniskritische Vorrede of the Ursprung des deutschen Trauer-
spiels.” The angel watches over not only this piece of writing but also Ben-
jamin's entire opus: an opus then, marked by confrontation with the
Platonic problem of representation, disturbing the demonic character
forced into the chains of Necessity. It is to the “Frage der Darstellung”
that, at each turning point in time, at every krisis, “mit jeder Wendung,”
philosophic literature must return. If the reflection of “normal time”
forgets this consideration, does not make room for the consideration
(Riicksicht) of representation, the philosophy of the time of krisis or, better,
The Problem of Representation 159

of time as krisis, it takes on as its own essential task, as its own, that look-
ing-once-again, the return to meditating the question of representation.
The time of crisis coincides with the time of the return—of the anam-
nesis—of philosophy as question of representation.
The representation we are dealing with here is the representation of
the idea. Benjamin explicitly affirms this: “If representation wants to af-
firm itself as an authentic method of the philosophical treatise then it
must be the representation of ideas.” But the idea, insofar as it is “prop-
erty” of consciousness, is not the pro-duct of the intellect's spontaneity;
names are the properties and pro-ducts of consciousness. The idea must
be considered as “ein Vorgegebenes,” a something already-given to con-
sciousness. The struggle for representation is renewed at every krisis:
when, in other words, either the dimension of the idea as a Vorgegebenes
threatens to remain prey of a negative theology (there is no possible repre-
sentation of the idea), or—but the two aspects can be closely intertwined
—one presumes to be able to represent it by way of names-definitions-
images. When this risk is very great, the struggle for representation as
representation of ideas is renewed, “eternal constellations” not deter-
mined by intentions.
The being of the idea is a-intentional, distinct from the connections
of knowing, “exempt from mediation.” The idea is not the eidos or form of
the observation; it is not form of vision. Benjamin explicitly polemicizes
against the neo-Kantian interpretation of Plato. The idea is not the eidos
that in-forms the representation. The problem consists in the representa-
tive giving of itself of the idea, not of the forms in which a “civilization of
vision” represents it. “Truth is the death of intention”; any theory that
wishes to reduce it to the ambit of the intentional relation is destined
not to get to the bottom “of the peculiar giving of itself of truth, a giving
of itself which evades any kind of intention.” The forms of the analytical-
conceptual connections consider themselves representations of the truth,
in the same way that names claim to possess the very thing itself. In real-
ity, this conception only shows ignorance of the problem of representa-
tion. If representation here equals an image that is identical to the thing,
we return to the aporia of the “double” of the Cratylus. We would then say
that the forms of the connection are truth itself. But the forms of the con-
nection are made up of names and verbs, they form the world of the ex-
perience of the entity in its oscillation; thus they are to be rigorously dis-
tinguished from the forms of the giving of itself of truth. If it were we who
pro-duced them, the truth would be pro-duct of our intention; but our
intention can only develop itself—once again—by way of names and
verbs. Thus the problem of representation must only be understood as
the problem of the self-presentation of truth itself.
A philosophy that corresponds to this problem does not find itself
in the condition of mere “research,” to which a “current conception"
makes it equal or even subordinates it.° The researcher moves within the
ambit of simple “extinction of empirics” or the “negative polemic.” His art
160 RECODING METAPHYSICS

of confuting only shows the imperfect nature of the “four entities,” the
unattainability of the “fifth” by way of knowing that originates from the
name. He is an ironist. His art “extinguishes” empirics as it shows the
constitutive instability of its names, its never-being; but in not facing the
problem of representation, it limits itself to a negative polemic. Instead,
the philosopher questions himself regarding the positive representation of
the idea. Of course, on the one hand philosophy values research because
it is also vitally interested in the “extinction of empirics,” but it distin-
guishes itself from research because in the fever of the negative which
seizes definitions and images as soon as they are submitted to meticu-
lous skepsis, in the trouble and effort aimed at removing the dimension
of opinion and naming, it remains attentive to the splendor, the gleaming
of the real in its a-intentional essence. One should note that for Benjamin
this means the exact opposite of an ec-static intuition of truth; here it is
not a question of “ascent” to a higher vision by way of some initiatory
itinerary.’ The truth simply gives itself, haplés, not mediated by our faculty
of representing but suddenly intuited (for Plato intuition is the faculty
nearest to the “fifth entity”). This giving of itself is that of the thing—but
of the thing itself, of the self-ness of the thing, in principle irreducible to
the network of connections represented by naming-defining. The truth
immediately gives itself as the thing in itself and cannot be further inter-
rogated regarding its foundation or its reason. The “fifth entity’ intuits the
truly real, which can only give itself and gives itself precisely by withdraw-
ing from whatever definition. Naming grasps not the truly real, but func-
tions, relationships, and beings which only in their relation prove to be
conceivable. Thus each name gathers in itself more or fewer of the other
names (itisonly understood in the context of other names: Seventh Letter
343a); it is intrinsically mediation with the other from itself. The thing
itself, instead, passes through the mesh of definition; it shines in every def-
inition as that which always withdraws from it. It gives itself in the def-
inition as its own indefinable. Yet what, in the definition, together with-
draws from it is not at all an absolutely transcendent dimension but,
rather, the thing itself, precisely the thing, the this-here individuum of the
thing.
The thing must be said to the Angel. Precisely the thing itself, “invisi-
ble” to functional definition, must be brought to the invisible Angel, to
the Invisible that is the non-place of the Angel. But how can it be said? Is
there a form of saying that is extricable from the onomazein? Is there a word
by which that truth which has the pure and simple consistency haplòs of
the thing can be given? The Vorrede of Benjamin turns upon this question.
The name that for Benjamin “determines the giving of themselves of
ideas” cannot be understood as a form of the onomazein; it must appear,
as it were, after the Platonic critique. The name, for Benjamin, excludes
any “explicit profane meaning”; it determines the giving of themselves of
ideas only insofar as a symbolic dimension belongs to it—that is, only in-
sofar as the idea arrives at self-transparency in the name. The thing itself
The Problem of Representation 161

and the name thus form a symbol. One must listen to the name resonate
in its own right, as “it self,” at one with the thing; not the name insofar as
it serves the definition of the thing within the network of its relations but
the name as sound of the thing itself, one with the giving of itself of the
thing. Just as naming is functional with regard to the representation of
the relationships between beings in their flowing, so also the name may
appear as the symbol of the thing itself, a-intentional self-transparency
of the thing itself.
It is the name-symbol that speaks to the Angel, through us, the most
ephemeral ones. The name, in which the thing “saves” itself within itself,
communicates to the Angel, to the dimension unreachable by the onoma-
zein. One communicates with the Ange! by way of the intransitiveness of
the name; if, that is, an intransitive dimension of the name gives itself
whereby the name resounds as the thing itself, without reason or aim,
then the idea is representable. For Benjamin, philosophy is essentially
the uninterrupted struggle for the restoration of the “primacy” of the sym-
bolic in order to make room for the name as symbol, for only in the name-
symbol does the idea give itself. The Frage der Darstellung becomes the
problem of the name that is abstractable from the onomazein, of the in-
transitiveness of the name, hence symbol of the thing itself, thus determi-
nation of the giving itself of the idea. The task of the philosopher is car-
ried out under the sign of Eros: Eros for the very representation of the
name-symbol, Eros in order to say to the Angel the thing itself by way of
the “intact nobility” of the intransitive word. To say the thing is (would be)
to already tell the Angel, since to say the thing is (would be) to say that
realissimum which cannot be said by way of the onomazein (in which subject
and object remain separated), but only by means of a name that is the
symbol of the thing—self-transparency of the thing itself as such—
“saved,” that is, as idea. The name-symbol of the thing that is “safe, at the
end,” of the thing “as a thing that is” (Rilke, Seventh Elegy, 69-71), this idea
of the thing must be found again, “erected,” in the gaze of the Angel.
There one must listen to the sound of the still-living word: House, Bridge,
Fountain, Door, Window, Tree, Tower, Column. One must say them in this
way, as if none of “these” things, captured in the net of discourse, has ever
been intimately understood to be—say them each as an individual idea.
Better: leave them to become transparent in the symbolic dimension of
the word which, even though in the “streets of the city of torment [Leid-
Stadt]"” (Rilke, Tenth Elegy, 16), still resists intact with itself.
The name-symbol does not possess the thing but represents its giv-
ing of itself. Those words, pronounced by Rilke, have the consistency of
things; they are not the thing but are like the thing itself. The Angel ori-
ents man not to the conquest of that which cannot be detected but to the
recognition of his becoming self-transparent in Eros of which this like is
only the manifestation. But neither is the Angel, as we know, the her-
meneut of the highest Point but rather the patient exegete of its infinite
names. The pathos that moves man toward the name-symbol is therefore
162 RECODING METAPHYSICS

shared by the Angel. The figure of the Angel more resembles that of a
companion caught in our own event than that of the hermetic-gnostic
Psychopomp. The Angel follows man; it wants to be named by man's desire
for the name. Benjamin's New Angel is the extreme figure of that tradition
in which the Angel ends up by being inextricably involved in all the di-
mensions of our saying, of our various and possible saying, and con-
sequently always appears more kindred to their catastrophes, addressed, en-
twined to them. Angel, all the same. Even if he always flashes new in an
instant, he is the form of the giving of itself, in the time of the Leid-Stadt,
of the idea in the name. And the representation, given that it means
Platonic “salvation” of phenomena, also watches over the eschatological-
Messianic motif, precisely the sound of the Angel. Entwined in our allegor-
ical game, in our Trauerspiel, to the point of sharing the same fallenness,
the Angel, nevertheless, does not lose the thread of the problem of
representation. And only then does the allegorical game become authentic
Mourning (Trauer): when the problem of representation is taken back to
its heart, when—in the Angel—it looks for the symbolic dimension of
the name—and here, in this search, in this trying-to-say, and not to more
anchorages, it is shipwrecked.
But of what idea is the Angel the exegete? The idea that is repre-
sented in the name of the Angel must express the inherent eschatological
value of each representation. He is, in fact, the exegete precisely in this
sense: that he causes phenomena to emerge from their appearance, out of
the slavery of the letter, diverting them from their immediate presence in
order to represent them, re-present them according to their truth, thus
finally rendering them justice. Whereas the hermeneutic exercise renders
right to propositions, it orders their connections according to right, it
judges them, the exegesis of the Angel renders justice-praise to the sym-
bolic dimension of the name. But this Angel is the New Angel, turned to
the ephemeral: how can its figure really manage to make the thing “re-
turn,” as a point, to the eternal constellation of ideas? Of what idea can
the Angel, as the New Angel, be the exegete?
In the so-called esoteric fragment of Ibiza, the Agesilaus Santander, his
song (which is singing the Eternal) represents by dividing. His exegesis be-
gins by putting to the test, accusing, creating misery, penia, for the absence
of the loved one. But it is as if this principle of separation were projected
onto the background of that song and then, from within itself, matured
an incoercible force of expectation, an invincible patience.” Accusing and
separating he e-ducates the expectation and patience for the name. The
wings of the Angel are the wings of this patience, of this prosokhé or atten-
tion not addressed to an absolutely separate-transcendent dimension or
to an unfathomable mythos (better still, to that adélon more originary than
any mythein), but addressed to the symbolic dimension of the name,
which always gives itself, to the symbolic “primacy” of the word, of this
word: House and Fountain, Door and Window and Bridge. Separation is
not given—in the Angel—if not at one with this profane attention, at one
The Problem of Representation 163

with the to a-wait that draws us to the future through the same move-
ment of the er-innern (of the re-mem-bering) the past, in that the Angel
has sung (in the instant, and for this reason has addressed himself to us, to
the ephemeral) the Eternal.
Thus in the ephemeral the thing can be “saved” in the name. This
“weak Messianic force” (Benjamin, Thesis of the History of Philosophy) con-
ceded to us represents itself in the Angel: not pure difference, not differ-
ence as separation, but attentive and patient exegesis of difference. The
New Angel can e-ducate to this, for he is not simply ephemeral but is the
perfect Ephemeral, the Ephemeral that has in the instant known how to
sing-praise the Eternal. He protects this weak force for us, that in the
ephemeral this may come about. But what form will this fire of exegesis
be able to take on (and that no exegesis will ever put out) in our own age,
in this time of interminable expectation or necessity of interrogating: the
meeting with the name, with the word interrogated according to the pri-
macy of the symbol?
The Angel is the exegete of a dimension of time to which the weak
Messianic force still belongs. The name that we share in our symbolic
conversation with the Angel is that of this dimension of time. The prob-
lem would not exist if between symbol and allegory a simple abyss were
to open, or if “progress” were established between the two dimensions
(or a “fall”, it is the same thing), irreversibly leading from the former to
the latter. The Angel, however, allegorizes the symbolic insofar as symbol-
ically representing the allegorical. Neither mediator nor pontiff, he is the
name of the original symbolic tension that unites the infinite difference.
Angel, but Angel of history—history, but history conceived in the name
of the Angel. In this name, history as continuum, calendar of the always-
the-same, permanent passage-transition from present to present, succes-
sion of nyn, ceases to have value. The time of representation of ideas frees
itself from that of the “once-upon-a-time’” of the “brothel of historicism,”
of the Universalgeschichte adding event to event. Erkennen to Erkennen. Not
that the Angel (as has already been seen) ec-statically escapes from the
continuum or “transcends” it—but he comprehends those events as “a
single catastrophe”; he would like "to awaken the dead and recompose
the broken’; he maintains secret understandings with past generations.
To break the chain of demonic character is at one with the crisis of time
as inexorable succession. And only at this point does the reason for the
struggle between the Angel and the demon become clear, between his
weak Messianic force and the “principal argument” of unbeatable Neces-
sity (that if the possible is, it cannot but be real; that the possible is only
strength of reality). In the name of the Angel the idea that it is possible “to
detonate” this “argument” is rendered self-transparent, to dash away from
the homogeneous and empty time of the continuum, create days—Fest-
tage—capable of arresting the flowing and re-create it at the same time.
To entropy, to irreversible consumption, his name opposes the ek-tropic
instant. An “eternal” image of the past does not appear conceivable in
164 RECODING METAPHYSICS

this time, an image of the past as perfectly-been. The past itself is still
in-securus, it may light up with hope, it can ask for justice. Never, in this
time, is the past vanquished; the present is never a mere field of victors
from whom, as Simone Weil said, justice is always forced to flee.
A new time is what the Angel incessantly looks for the just representa-
tion: present-instant, interruption, arrest of the continuum, Jetzt-zeit. Every
Jetzt can represent it. The term must therefore be connected to the pas-
sage in Baroque drama where it is contrasted to the mystical-symbolic Nu.
And yet, the Jetzt-zeit does not mark the simple “fall” into the allegorical
but is, in the allegorical, memory of the symbol. It is on the strength of
this memory that the infinite variations of the Spiel are transformed into
a Trauer-spiel, in a game that is illuminated precisely in the mourning for
the absence of the symbol. In the Jetzt of the Jetzt-zeit the time of every
“now” is idea of this memory. However weakly, as “hesitant immobility”
as “slight flickering, imperceptible,” the Jetzt-zeit within its name guards the
only “model of Messianic time” conceded to the force given to us as
dowry. This force is represented exactly in the “saving” the Jetzt-zeit from
its immediate profane meaning, enlightening it, neither transcending nor
sublimating it: profane illumination. In the dimension of time as Jetzt-zeit
which “exceeds” the mere duration, as moment or instant, the only rep-
resentation of the idea is given to us, of the eternal of the idea.
It is that dimension which Franz Rosenzweig comments on with re-
gard to the end of Psalm 115 (113B), the dimension of that “But victori-
ous” which the living (‘But we, the living”), from the depths of their fallen-
ness, can raise in the choral praise of the Living, in the instant of the
praise, breaking the “scene” dominated up until that point by the idolatry
of peoples.!° The greatest idolatry is the cult of the having-been, of the
irredeemable that-was. Against idolatry is raised the cry-song of the living
to the Living Being. Only at this point—in the moment of this song—can
they truly call themselves living; before they were a succession of mo-
ments destined to death, born in order to die. The living recognize and
affirm themselves living only in the instant, periculosum par excellence, in
which they praise the God who is not (the peoples ask “where is” God, but
if God belonged to some place he would be only the genius or the
demon), in which they trust to the Invisible a-waiting, e-ducated by the
Angel, the names. The time of this But, a fragment broken off from the
equivalent continuum of the nyn, is cut-out, truly chronos from krinein,
truly tempus from temnein. Seeming to absolutely contrast this dimension
of time held in the cut-out (the instant between stone and current about
which Rilke says the purest possible) is that of the Aion-Aevum-Ewig, of
the “uncut-out-able” Hodie, of the perennial light Dies. But this contrapo-
sition is abstract, it makes the eternal an ab-solutum from time, it loses
the concrete and living polarity of the two dimensions (just as the ab-
stract separation between allegorical and symbolic loses the very idea of
the Trauerspiel). The great scholasticism (Jewish, Arab, and Christian) did
not limit itself to contrasting the Nunc stans of the divine with the nunc
The Problem of Representation 165

fluens of the creature, but added a third: the tertium datur is the Nunc instan-
tis,'' the dimension of a sudden meantime, so sudden, and yet so actual as
almost not to be felt as moment of time. A dimension of perfect fallenness:
the most sudden moment (fallen like the New Angel) has for its name the
moment that arrests, that cuts-out the continuum. The real name of the
most ephemeral, the name of its idea, is Nunc instantis. The “small door” of
which Benjamin speaks is the image of this name. Like every door, it has
on two sides which unites precisely while separating, Hodie and nunc fluens,
indissoluble polarity, inseparable difference.
The Messianic chance, for Benjamin, coincides with the possibility
of representing this difference. In Christian theology it tends to be re-
solved in the triumphant kairos of the Event, incalculable and unforesee-
able, and yet full, definitive, state. For Benjamin it is not given “to go back
to” the exile and the separation that have broken into the same sphere
of the divine (the Angels narrate it). But in the Jetzt-zeit that arrests, that
cuts-out is-a-turning-point—one may recall the splinters, sparks, and traces
that in the space of the creature profanely a-wait the redemption—it is
possible “die Geschichte gegen den Strich zu biirsten,” to pass history
“against the grain,” overturn its form of empty duration (be it linear or
cyclical). It is possible to discern how the radical incompletion of the
world does not necessarily produce, demonically, mere desperation due
to the breakage but permits, within the thing, to surprise the unexpected
meantime of a Yes that is stronger than any fall and any consumption, of
a But that snaps the infinite repetition of the catastrophe. Tiqqun, weak and
continuously foundering,'” frees not only from the brothels of historicism
but also from the subtler fascination of the investigators of the future,
and guards, beyond any mythology, the idea of prophecy: not vision of
the future but salvation of every moment in its being able to name itself as
that moment, that meantime in which the symbolic primacy of the word
can represent itself, and precisely at the very peak of the allegorical, amid
its ruins. Projected onto every event is the shadow of this eschatological
“reserve,” strong enough to free us from every “been” and chrono-latry.

TRANSLATED BY HOWARD RODGER MACLEAN

EMANUELE SEVERINO
Time and Alienation

“Happy the man who can say ‘when,’ ‘before,’ and ‘after’!” So writes
Robert Musil in The Man without Qualities. In De interpretatione Aristotle con-
veys his own conception of bliss: “When what is, is, it necessarily is; and
when what is not, is not, it necessarily is not. But it is not of necessity
that everything that is, is; nor that everything that is not, is not. That
everything that is necessarily is, when it is, is not the same thing as being
purely and simply of necessity. The same must be said as regards what is
not” (19a23-27).!
“What-is” is to on, being (ente): the participle on indicates not simply
“is” (estin), but, precisely, what-is, the synthesis of a certain determination
(e.g., house, star, man) and its Being (essere). Accordingly, Aristotle’s text
states first of all that when (hotan) what-is—say, a house—is, then indeed
the house necessarily is; but not that it necessarily is haplos, tout court; i.e.,
the house does not exist of necessity. In fact, just as we say, “When a
house is,” so we also say, ‘When a house is not.” A house “is not” when
it has not yet been built, and when it has been destroyed. The phrase
“when a house is not” means either “before it was” or “after it has been.”
Thus all the occasions of Musil’s “bliss” are present.
But this bliss now dominates the earth. Greek thought established
once and for all the meaning of “when,” of “before,” and of “after,” relating
them to Being and to not-Being (to estin and to mé estin). The whole of West-
ern civilization grows within this rigorously consistent “bliss” (even when
we think Greek ontology no longer concerns us). And yet it is the very
symptom of alienation. In spite of everything, Western civilization still re-
mains within the meaning that the Greeks gave to time. Indeed, time it-
self coincides with this meaning. But the aim of these pages is to recall,
once again, that time is the very essence of alienation. And the essence
of alienation is essential alienation, infinitely more radical and infinitely
deeper than any religious, economic, psychological, or existential alien-
ation.
When a house is not, Aristotle says, it is me on, non-being. Western
man is concerned with establishing that when what-is-not is not, it neces-
sarily is not. But he leaves in the deepest and most unexplored darkness
168 RECODING METAPHYSICS

the meaning of the expression “when a house is not” (or “when a man,
trees, stars, the earth, love, peace, war are not”). That which, when it is
not, is not, is—for example—a house. When a house has been destroyed
and has become something past, it is not. Normally one adds the word
“longer” and says it “is no longer”: but, indeed, that which is no longer is
not (and that which is not yet is not). Thus it is of a house and of men, of
stars, of the earth, of love, of peace, of war, that Western man says that they are
past and therefore are not. But a house (and the other things said to
“pass”) is not a Nothing. A house is a place that shelters mortals from the
harshness of the seasons; it is the openness of a determinate meaning:
“house” does not signify “nothing” (the meaning in which a house con-
sists does not signify “nothing”), and for this very reason a house is not
a Nothing. In fact, Western man's very language draws a distinction between
these two phrases: “when a house is not” and “when a Nothing (or Noth-
ing) is not.” Such language does not believe that it can replace the
phrase “when a house is not” with the phrase “when a Nothing is not,”
precisely because it does not take to be a Nothing that which it affirms
is not. Which means that Western thought affirms of a not-Nothing that
when it is not, it is not: for this is affirmed of a house, of a man, of the
earth, of what is past, of what is future. “When a house is not” therefore
means “when a not-Nothing is not,” which is to say, “when a being is not.”
In stating that it is not of necessity that all that is—to on hapan—is, Aristot-
le is indeed stating that some being can not-be: and it is of this being that,
when it is not, one must say “when a being is not.” To be a being means
in fact to be a not-Nothing. Accordingly, in the Aristotelian affirmation
“when what is not [to mé on], is not, it necessarily is not,” the term mé on
does not indicate Nothing and thus the affirmation does not mean “when
Nothing is not it necessarily is not.” In this affirmation the term to mé on
does not indicate Nothing—on the contrary, it indicates not-Nothing or
being (in its happening to not-be), and hence the phrase “when what is
not is not” signifies “when a not-Nothing, that is, a being (e.g., a house)
that happens to not-be is not.” Or “when being that is not is not.”
When a house, once destroyed, becomes something past (or when it
is still something future), it is not. For Western man, what “passes” does
not pass completely: something remains of what is past. Memories,
traces, regrets, hates, consequences, effects—these remain. But not all of
what is past remains. If all should remain, then nothing would be past.
What remains, we say, “is”; what does not remain “is no longer.” When a
house is no longer, something of it does not remain. Ruins and memories
remain, but something does not remain, something “is no longer.” For
Greek thought and for all of Western civilization, saying that something
“does not remain” and “is no longer” means saying that it has become a
Nothing. It is true that from Aristotle to Marx the destruction of a house
is not its total annihilation (precisely because something remains even
after its destruction)—yet it is also true that, for Western thought, with
the destruction of a house at least something of the house must become a
Time and Alienation 169

Nothing. At least the unity and form that the materials of the house pos-
sessed, when the house was, become a Nothing; as does the irreplace-
able atmosphere created by this unity and form. When a house is not,
something of the house (at least the specific unity of the materials of
which it was made) has become a Nothing. And it is precisely of this some-
thing become a Nothing that we are thinking when we say “when the
house is not.” So for a house to be destroyed and become something past
and be no longer, at least something of the house must become a Noth-
ing: if nothing of the house became a Nothing, Western man would not
even say that the house has been destroyed, that it is past, that it is no
longer. And this something that belongs to the house, once again, is not
a Nothing but is being—it is the specific unity of the atmosphere and
materials of the house that was destroyed. It is this being that, when a
house becomes something past, becomes a Nothing. In saying “when a
house is not,” by the word “house” language does not refer to that which
remains of the house (ruins, memories) but rather to that very something,
to that being which becomes nothing and which is less a something that
belongs to the house, that is part of the house, than it is the house itself as
a specific and irreplaceable way and atmosphere of dwelling.
“When a house is not” means therefore: “when a being is nothing.”
The phrase “when the sky is blue” contains the affirmation “the sky is
blue.” And thus the phrase “when being is nothing” contains the affirma-
tion “being is nothing.” If one asks a Western man if being (a house, a
man, a star, a tree, love, peace, war) is nothing, his reply will most cer-
tainly be no, being is not a Nothing. Yet for more than two thousand years
he has continued to say of being “when being is not,” and he goes on
thinking that being is nothing. And he continues to experience being as
if it were a Nothing. If someone were to say “when the sun is the moon”
or “when the circle is a square,” “when stones are birds” or “when even is
odd,” anyone in the West would immediately respond that a “when,” a
time in which the sun is the moon and the circle is a square, stones are
birds and even is odd is not possible. But this feeling for the absurd does
not prevent him from thinking “when being is nothing”; it does not pre-
vent him from thinking that being is nothing. That bliss which Musil
praised (but the whole Western world is of one mind in praising it) pos-
tulates the persuasion that being is nothing. “Before” means “before being
is," and one can say “before being is” when being is not (yet), or when it
is nothing; and “after” means “after being is,” and one may say “after
being is” when being is no longer, or when, once again, it is a Nothing.
The persuasion that time is postulates the persuasion that being is nothing.
Time may exist, in fact, only if a “when being is not'—a “when being is
nothing "—exists; therefore time may exist only is being is nothing. The
nothingness of being is nihilism, and nihilism is essential alienation. West-
ern civilization grows within the persuasion that being is in time and thus
is nothing.
All this seems, to the eyes of Western man, to be based upon
170 RECODING METAPHYSICS

pseudointellectual subtleties. He objects: ‘When being, by becoming

something past, has become a Nothing, it is a Nothing. When it is noth-
ing, it is nothing. Hence it is not true that, in positing a time when being
is not, one thinks that being is nothing.” When being is nothing, it is noth-
ing, he says. But essential alienation consists precisely in the persua-
sion that there exists a “when” it—namely, being!—is nothing. Western
man establishes an identity between the Nothing and the "when" (that is,
the time in which) being is a Nothing. But this apparent identity between
Nothing and Nothing conceals the identity between being and Nothing,
namely, that identity which constitutes itself when one accepts time, the
“when being is nothing.”
It is believed that tempus and the templum alike are a temnein—a separat-
ing of the sacred from the profane. But tempus is a separation abysmally
more radical than the separation of the sacred from the profane. Tempus
separates beings from their Being, it separates the “what” from its “is”:
only on the ground of this original separation may one conceive a “when”
being (the “what”) is united to Being, and a “when” being is separated from
Being (i.e., a “when being is” and a “when being is not”). Original separa-
tion of being from Being, as the essence of time, shows that being, as
such, is a Nothing: in order to not-be a Nothing it must be united to that
Being from which it was originally separated. In testifying to this funda-
mental meaning of tempus (the Greek khronos still echoes the word krinein,
i.e., to separate) Greek thought brings to light the hidden, implicit ground
upon which the separation of the sacred and the profane rests in archaic
preontological (i.e., pre-Western) civilizations; whereas in Christianity the
fundamental meaning of tempus—the Greek meaning of time—becomes
the explicit ground of the separation of the sacred from the profane. It is
because being—a stone, a tree, a star, a man’s life, the earth—is origi-
nally separated from Being and is experienced in this separation, it is be-
cause being is experienced in time that it finds itself abandoned to noth-
ingness and goes in search of a source, an axis mundi, a god, something
sacred, or a kerygma that guarantees its union with Being. It is because
man lives in time—which is to say, in essential alienation—that he builds
templa and evokes the sacred, be it the cosmic sacred or the historical sa-
cred of the Christian kerygma. But it is also because man lives in time that
he entrusts his salvation to modern science and the technology to which
it gave rise, when he realizes that the sacred cannot save him from noth-
ingness. The sacred and technology are the two fundamental ways in
which the inhabitant of time, that is, of essential alienation, seeks his
own salvation, or seeks to save that being which is his world and his life,
anchoring it to Being. But such salvation is impossible—for it does not
transcend alienation but rather attempts to survive within it. Since in-
habiting time means separating being from Being, to will this separation
is to will the impossible (because that being is not—namely, that being is
nothing—is the epitome of impossibility, and salvation is impossible
precisely because it is the will to survive within impossibility); and yet it
Time and Alienation 171

is this “will to the impossible” that, as scientific-technological will, now

dominates the earth.
Paul Ricoeur, for one, has attempted a “mediation” between the cos-
mic sacred and the Christian kerygma, as opposed to the program of de-
mythologization and desacralization of the Christian message and sep-
aration of religion and faith. The basis of this program is the recognition
that science has destroyed the universe of myth. But, for Ricoeur, if sci-
ence has eliminated the sacred from the modern world, the ideology of
science and technology has now itself become a problem. And he finds
allies for his thesis in Heidegger, Marcuse, Habermas, and Ellul. Referring
to Habermas—for whom “the interest of empirical knowledge and the
exploitation of nature is limited to that of practically and theoretically
controlling the world of man,” so that “modernity takes the form of the
boundless extension of a single interest at the expense of all others, and
above all at the expense of an interest in communication and libera-
tion'—Ricoeur affirms that “modernity—namely, scientific-technological
ideology—is neither a fact nor a destiny: it has become an open ques-
tion.”
But if time is the essential alienation in which the existence of mor-
tals grows, then scientific-technological domination of being and the
consequent destruction of every mythical universe and of every kerygma
not only are a fact but also are the destiny demanded by the essence of
time. For the inhabitants of time, “modernity” is objectively a closed ques-
tion, even if some among them cling to the illusion of being able to
open it.
For the Time-dwellers, time is “original evidence.” It is “evident” that
the beings of the world are that of which it must be said “when it is” and
“when it is not,” or “when it is not a Nothing” and “when it is a Nothing.”
Being is that which issues from and returns to nothingness. When being
had not yet issued from nothingness, it was a Nothing; when it returns
there, it is a Nothing once again. But only because being is in time—only
because being is thought and experienced as a Nothing—can the project
of guiding its oscillation between Being and nothingness arise. Only on
the basis of time is the domination of being possible. And, in the openness
of time, the birth of the project of dominating and exploiting being is not
only possible but inevitable. Inhabiting time is the very essence of this
project. Time is in fact that separation (temnein) of being from Being which
takes possession of being as that which can be assigned to Being (from
which it was originally separated) and to Nothing, confronting it in its avail-
ability to the decision that so assigns it. With this separation being be-
comes an absolute availability to the forces that tear it away from and
thrust it back into nothingness. The will that being be time—the will that
wills that the meaning of being be time—is the original form of the will to
power. The original will to power, which takes possession of being separat-
ing it from Being and making it available to domination, is precisely the will
to guide and control being’s oscillation between Being and nothingness.
172 RECODING METAPHYSICS

The will that drives its domination of being to the point of identifying it
with Nothing—driving it to the remotest distance from itself—is the
original project destined to be realized as the scientific-technological
domination of being that destroys the domination of being attempted
through sacralization of being, religious invocation, and Christian faith.
In fact, the will to power first dominates being by conjoining it with the
sacred and the archetype, namely, with the source of Being.
Mircea Eliade, who is a point of reference for Ricoeur, recognizes that
if archaic languages lack such terms as “Being,” “non-Being,” and “Becom-
ing,” the thing (the fact) of “Being,” “non-Being,” and “Becoming” is nev-
ertheless present. And the “thing” is that beings (both human and nonhu-
man) become sacred only insofar as they participate in the Being of an
archetypal world that transcends them. Removed from this participation,
beings become “the profane world” that, as Eliade says at the beginning
of The Myth of the Eternal Return, “is the unreal par excellence, the non-
created, the non-existent: the Nothing.’”? The will to power dominates
being by immersing it in the sacred, that is, in Being. But Eliade main-
tains that for archaic man the immersion of being in the sacred is cyclical
and that this cyclical return of being to the sacred “betrays an ontology
uncontaminated by time and Becoming.” Nevertheless, the return to the
sacred—the will to be as the archetypes are—is, for Eliade, the way in
which archaic man “opposes,” “endures,” and “defends himself’ against
history. It is, in short, his way of dominating “history.” But “history” is
time. Precisely because Eliade’s archaic man accepts time—and so lives
in essential alienation—he attempts to defend himself against time and
to master it through identification with the archetype. It is because he is
an inhabitant of time that he attempts to master time both by fashioning
an ontology not dominated by time and Becoming, and by restoring
being to the original world of the sacred. The same thing occurs in Chris-
tianity and in all the formulations of Greco-Christian theology. The oppo-
sition affirmed by Eliade between archaic man's antihistoricism and
Christian man's historicism remains within the acceptance of time. It is
because mortals have separated, implicitly or explicitly, being from Being
that man has need of God (or of revolutionary praxis, or of technology)}—
that is, of a ground of being. Jesus wants to save man and give him eternal
life because Jesus too is an inhabitant of time and sees around him only
beings abandoned to nothingness and so in need of salvation. The search
for salvation (which is one and the same with the project of dominating
being) is an expression of the essential alienation of man. When men
such as Rudolf Bultmann or Dietrich Bonhoeffer demythologize the Chris-
tian message and separate faith from religion, they too inevitably remain
within this alienation. Their endeavor is based on the consciousness that
the sacred is powerless to dominate being, and that salvation (domina-
tion of being) must be pursued in some other way.
For success, power, and domination and exploitation of being is the
destiny of whoever dwells in time. To dwell in time is to dominate and
Time and Alienation 173

domination demands the destruction of every form of domination that

proves to be powerless. Science and modern technology have shown the
impotence of the domination of being through union with the sacred and
with God. The power of technology has shown the impotence of the sa-
cred and of God, just as it has shown the impotence of every ideology
that, like Marxism, purports to dominate the earth. For the Time-dwellers,
“modernity’—scientific-technological power—is the destiny of the West.
The openness of time is the original power, and the logic of power re-
quires that every power fall before a power more powerful. That the
interest constituted by theoretically and practically controlling man's en-
vironment should expand at the expense of all less powerful interests,
such as those of communication and liberation (this is Jiirgen Haber-
mas's critique, taken up by Ricoeur), this de facto encroachment of the
will to mastery is itself the irrefutable reason why the interest constituted
by scientific-technological will to mastery is destined to destroy all other
interests. To inhabit time is to inhabit the logic of power, and this logic
decrees that the force which is in fact more powerful is destined to domi-
nate all other forces and alternative interests. Spirit, human dignity,
values, brotherhood, love, liberation, morals, politics, the sacred, God,
Christ—all the forms of Western civilization matured within the accep-
tance of time—have progressively proved to be powerless when con-
fronted by the power of technology. They have proved to be impotent
forms of the will to power. Their destruction therefore is not only a fact
to be recorded but also the destiny that can no longer be avoided since
mortals dwell in time.
The triumph of technology is the triumph of nihilism. Much of con-
temporary culture recognizes this fact. But Western culture has not recog-
nized the essential meaning of nihilism. Ricoeur affirms that “both the sci-
entistic illusion and the retreat of the sacred . . . derive from the same
forgetfulness of our roots. In two different but converging ways, the desert
grows. What we are on the point of discovering, in spite of scientific-
technological ideology, which is also military-industrial ideology, is that
man is absolutely not possible with the sacred... man must not die.“
But why must man be possible? Why must man not die? It is clear that
Ricoeur is speaking of man in terms of value; but why must this value not
die? Since time is the meaning of being, the essence of being is its ability
to be destroyed and constructed, created and annihilated. Since being is
availability to Being and nothingness, being (and thus also man) is des-
tined to be manipulated, violated, and exploited by gods, masters, and
technologies (as B. F. Skinner's Beyond Freedom and Dignity attests). Tech-
nological power and the destruction of the sacred and of the kerygma do
not imply forgetfulness of our roots, because our roots are our dwelling
in time, and science and technology are the most rigorously consistent
realization of this dwelling. To be sure, the desert grows. But the desert
is time, and the destiny of this growth is scientific-technological domina-
tion of the earth. All the Time-dwellers who—with Heidegger, Adorno,
174 RECODING METAPHYSICS

Marcuse, Habermas, Fromm, Ellul, Ricoeur, and many others—seek to

oppose the desert’s growth and to defend man and his dignity, all those
who belong to the culture that condemns technological civilization, in-
evitably fail because they are not true to their authentic roots (that is, to
essential alienation), because they are not consistent with the essential
persuasion that envelops them. Their aspirations and projects of a more
human world are the wreckage that the desert’s relentless growth leaves
behind. Philosophy, Christianity, Marxism, art, are the colossal wrecks of
this ever-growing desert.
Just as one cannot combat a disease by restoring the physiological
conditions that originally caused it, so one cannot oppose the desert's
growth by returning to traditional or archaic forms of human civilization.
Essential alienation appears only insofar as does truth, with respect to
which alienation is and shows itself as such. Parmenides, the most mis-
understood thinker in the history of man, took the first step in testifying
to truth when he said, “You shall not sever Being from its connection with
Being,” ou gar apotmézei to eon tou eontos exesthai (frag. 4). But Parmenides'
testimony remains a presentiment. The gaze that sees the desert growing
and that sees its authentic meaning does not belong to the desert.” In
this gaze being, all being, every being, from the most humble to the most
solemn and exalted, is originally united to Being. In this gaze all things
share the nature of the sun, whose existence continues to shine even
when nightfall hides it from our eyes. The Time-dwellers created both the
gods and the jealousy of the gods: the gods are jealous because they kept
for themselves that unity with Being which is the property of every thing.
In this gaze every being is eternal (aion, i.e., aei on, or united immediately
to estin), and the variation of the world’s spectacle, the appearing of vari-
ation, is the rising and setting, the showing and the hiding of the eternal,
in every way like the sun.
But this opens up another aspect of the question, developed else-
where: the discourse of the hermeneutics of the appearing of Being.°
Here | can merely indicate its general course by saying that the persua-
sion that time is evident—the persuasion that time appears, that the sep-
aration of being from Being appears—belongs itself to that essential alien-
ation which is what time is. The Time-dwellers believe that time, the
“when things are not,” is visible, manifest. But for them it is unquestionable
that when a being—say, a house—is not, not only has it become a Noth-
ing, but it also ceases to appear: when a house has been destroyed and is
no longer, it no longers appears either, to the extent that it no longer is.
But this means that on the basis of Appearing we cannot know anything about
that which, “having become a Nothing,” no longer appears. In “being de-
stroyed” and “becoming a Nothing,” the house leaves Appearing; and Ap-
pearing, as such, shows and says nothing about what befalls a being that
has left its horizon. Therefore having been a Nothing (when the house is
not yet) and becoming a Nothing anew (when the house is no longer)
cannot appear; the nothingness of being—namely, time—is not some-
Time and Alienation 175

thing that appears, it is not itself a “phenomenological” content. The per-

suasion that time appears is therefore the result of a hermeneutics of Ap-
pearing that, on the ground of the will that being be nothing, wills that
the nothingness of being be something visible, manifest, and evident.
Outside of essential alienation, that which appears is being—the im-
mutable, the eternal. The eternal enters and leaves Appearing, just as the
sun—which shines eternal—enters and leaves the vault of the sky. When
being leaves the vault of what appears, Appearing keeps silent about the
fate of the being that is hidden (and “when” assumes an unheard-of
meaning). But the Erinyes of truth (Dikés epikouroi) of whom Heraclitus
speaks (frag. 94) reach what is hidden and remind it of its destiny: the
Necessity, the Anagké that it remain united to its Being.

TRANSLATED BY GIACOMO DONIS

 Sera Tasca ra
a DI y=“ aor
do) Tw d e
EMANUELE SEVERINO
The Earth and the Essence of Man

1. The Body and Being as Tekhné

“How, with the death of a man, is the soul not dispersed and this
not the end of its Being?” (‘Hopds mé hom’ apothnéskontos tou an-
thropou diaskedannuetai hé psykhé kai autéi tou einai touto telos héi,”
Phaedo 77b). This is essentially a metaphysical problem. Not because it con-
siders the relationship between the “here” and the “beyond,” but because
it admits the possibility of the “end of Being” (telos tou einai), that is, its
annihilation. It is a specific way of asking whether a certain being con-
tinues to exist even when a certain other being exists no longer. Thus the
fundamental presupposition is that beings can not-exist, and so also can
exist no longer, that is, can “end.”
For metaphysics, things “are.” Their “Being” is their not-being-a-
Nothing. Insofar as they are, they are said to be “beings” (enti) or “Beings”
(esseri). But being, as such, is that which can not-be: both in the sense that
it could not-have-been or could not-be, and in the sense that it begins
and ends (was not and is no longer). Metaphysics is the assenting to the
not-Being of being. In affirming that being is not—in assenting to its
nonexistence—metaphysics affirms that the not-Nothing is nothing. Pre-
cisely because the fundamental notion of metaphysics is that being, as
such, is nothing, metaphysics must seek reasons to support its thesis that
certain privileged (“divine”) beings are exempt from birth and death, and
so cannot be said to not-be. These “reasons” alone enable it to recognize
the essential not-nothingness of certain beings; without them, being as
such appears to it as a Nothing.
Today we no longer believe in the metaphysical reasons for the im-
mortality of the soul. And yet, with the latest developments of science,
the project of practically constructing precisely that which metaphysics
was unable to demonstrate grows ever more determinate and consistent.
But this project too—like the entire history of the West—grows within
the fundamental notion of metaphysics. For the construction of being can
be undertaken only if being is thought as what can begin and end; or, in
general, as what can not-be.
Western culture is incapable of setting any limit to technology's
178 RECODING METAPHYSICS

aggression against being. The project of constructing man's body is now in-
separably accompanied by the project of constructing mental facts. Thus
human happiness is no longer seen and pursued as a transcendent condi-
tion, determined by man's moral conduct during his life in the world (or by
the combination of such conduct and divine grace), nor as an immanent
result of historical dialectic. Happiness is seen today as the product of a
technology whose success derives from its being rooted in physico-
mathematical knowledge. Western culture can set no limit to this aggres-
sion against being, because the essence of such culture is metaphysical ni-
hilism, whose most radical and consistent realization is technology itself.
From the very dawn of metaphysical thought, Being has been tekhné.
In the Sophist (247d-e) Plato defines Being as dunamis (power): that which
is (to on) is that which has the power of making or of being made: dunamin
eit’ eis to poiein eit’ eis to pathein. “Making” (poiein) signifies bringing into Being
(eis ousian) that which previously was not (hoper an mé proteron on); "being
made” (poieisthai) signifies being brought into Being (Sophist 219b). But
power is the very essence of tekhné, because if tekhné can be divided into
productive tekhné and acquisitive tekhné (poietike tekhne, ktetike tekhne), the
acquisition of beings—such as money making, property holding, hunting,
fighting, knowledge—is nothing but an ordering of that which has already
been produced in the various forms of poiétiké tekhne (219c). The distinction
between divine tekhnè and human tekhné (theia tekhné, anthropine tekhne,
265b-e) is therefore the supreme difference between beings. Theia tekhné
produces all the beings of nature; anthropiné tekhné produces all the beings
which are brought from not-Being to Being in human arts. Being is tekhné
because it is essentially enveloped by the horizon of making and of being
made; that is, because it belongs essentially to the process of bringing
and of being brought from not-Being to Being (aitia tois mé proteron ousin
huteron qiqnesthai). If something is not tekhnikon—if it does not produce or
is not produced, or is not part of the process of producing—being pro-
duced—then it is not: it is a Nothing. Theia tekhné has today been sup-
planted by anthropiné tekhné, but the meaning of Being has remained iden-
tical to the one established by Plato once and for all in Western history.
God and modern technology are the two fundamental expressions of
metaphysical nihilism.

2. The Eternity of the Body and the Spectacle of Alienation

Authentic untimeliness' is the overcoming of the essence of the
West. But, above all, it testifies to the truth of Being, which says that
Being is and that it is not possible that it not-be (hè men hopòs estin te kai
hos ouk esti mé einai, Parmenides, frag. 2, v. 3). “Being” means everything
that is not a Nothing. But only the Nothing is nothing. “Nothing” cannot
also be predicated of a “something,” which is presumed to be meaningful
as a not-Nothing (and any meaning whatsoever is meaningful as a not-
Nothing), and is, at the same time, relegated to the limbo of nonexis-
tence—for it is posited as “something” (namely, a not-Nothing) that,
The Earth and the Essence of Man 179

when it is not, is nothing. Thus thought that testifies to the truth of Being
cannot accept the claim that with the death of the body the soul con-
tinues to exist—not because it claims that, when the body no longer
exists, the soul cannot exist either, but rather because both body and
soul are eternal. Like every being. The soul cannot exist without the body,
just as it cannot exist without any being, for the destiny of all being is to
exist. (‘Aeternus’ is a syncope of “aeviternus,” and “aevum’ is aidn, “always
being,” the impossibility of not being. But this impossibility must be re-
ferred to the totality of Being, not to a privileged being—and therefore
the Greek aiòn is the very expression of metaphysical nihilism.)
The body's disintegration is not its annihilation but rather is the way
in which it stably leaves the horizon of the appearing of Being. History is
the process of the appearing and disappearing of the eternal. Dialectic is
not the essence of Being insofar as it is, but of Being insofar as it appears.
Being cannot be altered by the onslaught of technology. Unscathed, it un-
covers the spectacle of the alienation of the meaning of Being—the spec-
tacle of our time. Man today believes he can attain unlimited control of
the creation and annihilation of Being. This persuasion is the basis of
every work he performs, which means that every work brings into Appear-
ing the spectacle of alienation. If we were convinced that by opening
and closing our eyes we caused the birth and the annihilation of visible
things, we could certainly develop a way of living based on this convic-
tion; but the reality that would appear and the life we would live would
be different from the reality that would appear and the life we would live
if we were free from this form of alienation. Like this movement of the
eyes, Western technology too is an art of disclosing Being. But this art
brings into Appearing a different content from what would appear if the
West were free from the alienation in which metaphysical nihilism con-
sists. The technological construction of man does not invent man but is
the disclosing of eternal man. Technology, however, in its failure to see that
its—and all—acting is essentially a revealing, discloses a different hu-
manity from that which would appear in the light of the truth of Being. It
discloses the humanity of alienation.

3. The Coherence of Technology

Everything is eternal. And so, also the appearing of Being is eternal.
But while in Appearing there are things that appear and disappear, Ap-
pearing itself, as the total horizon, cannot appear and disappear. If it ap-
pears and disappears, then it is only the appearing of a part of what
appears, while Appearing, as the transcendental event, is the locus in
which everything (and so also the appearing of certain things) begins and
ceases to appear. But in the truth of Being it cannot even be supposed that
everything has ceased to appear (or might never have appeared): if that
should occur, Appearing (i.e., a not-Nothing) would become a Nothing.
Being is destined to appear. In this destination lies the essence of man.
The original meaning of ‘soul’—of ‘mind’, ‘thought’, ‘consciousness’,
180 RECODING METAPHYSICS

etc—is its positing itself as the appearing of Being. And ‘I’ signifies Ap-
pearing insofar as it has itself as its content; that is, it expresses in con-
densed form the identity of form and content.
Not only is man eternal, like every being, but he is also the locus in
which the eternal eternally manifests itself. The metaphysical alienation
of the West is inevitably accompanied by an inability to comprehend the
meaning of man. Appearing is understood either as an empirical determi-
nation (a being among the beings that appear) or as the transcendental
horizon. In the first case, man too is a being that issues from and returns
to nothingness. His consciousness is conditioned by birth and death;
during his life it is continually being kindled and extinguished, as sleep
and the phenomena of “loss of consciousness” traverse it. Thus technol-
ogy can undertake the construction of a consciousness free from these
conditioning factors. For idealism, on the other hand, consciousness is
the transcendental horizon, containing time within itself; and therefore it
is eternal. But in this case, eternity expresses the ontological privilege of
thought with respect to beings that are thought, just as Plato's Idea is
privileged with respect to sensible beings. Thus, like every metaphysi-
cal demonstration of the existence of an immutable being, idealism’s
grounding of the eternity of thought is destined to fail. And technological
projecting of man can therefore legitimately undertake the construction
not only of particular mental facts, or of consciousness understood as
one of the particular facts of experience, but also of thought's transcen-
dental horizon itself and its incorruptibility.
Any philosophical-metaphysical protest raised by Western culture
against these alleged excesses of technology overlooks the fact that tech-
nology takes the fundamental thought upon which both the protest and
all Western history rest to its logical conclusion. In undertaking to trans-
form man into superman and God, technology nonetheless operates
within the horizon that, opened up for the first time by metaphysics, en-
closes the entire development of our culture. Technology takes to its log-
ical conclusion the meaning of the metaphysical horizon by which it too
is enveloped—the horizon constituted by the thought that being can be
a Nothing. This thought has been the basis of every metaphysical affirma-
tion of immutable being. It is therefore perfectly consistent that meta-
physics qua technology should undertake the practical construction of the
immutables and the immortals that metaphysics qua contemplation has
been unable to ground. Except that, in so doing, metaphysics no longer
brings to perdition mere modes of reasoning but the entire civilization of
men on earth. Metaphysics qua technology has in fact transformed every-
thing that appears—the customs of peoples, houses, plants, the stars—
into a spectacle of perdition.

4. The Never-setting and Philosophy

Within the horizon of all that appears, the great stream of determina-
tions that appear and disappear is held in by never-setting banks: they
The Earth and the Essence of Man 181

accompany those beings whose Appearing is necessarily implied by the

appearing of any being. These beings are the never-setting “background”
of any disclosure of Being, the eternal spectacle in which all time—and
so also the history of the alienation of the West—unfolds.
The appearing of a being is necessarily implied by the appearing of
another being, when the first being is a necessary determination of the
second. Originally, the necessary determination of Being (and so also of
Being that appears) is the truth of Being. Truth is the incontrovertible
position (positing) of its content. It says of the content what it is Neces-
sity to say—and is the original openness of the sense of ‘necessity’. Truth
is the incontrovertible appearing of the totality of Being, insofar as that
totality is dominated by the necessity that opposes Being to not-Being.
Since truth is the structure of the necessary determinations of what can
be affirmed with truth, no Being can appear without the appearing of the
truth of Being. A being—this book, for example—is not its other (is not
other than what it is): being the negation of its other is a necessary deter-
mination of this being. But this can occur only if the possibility of calling
into question the position of such being and of its predicate has been
superseded, and only if the incontrovertible meaning of necessity is man-
ifest. A necessary connection is such only insofar as it is inscribed in the
original structure of the truth of Being, which accordingly—as the struc-
ture of the necessary determination of Being—is the never-setting back-
ground that accompanies and envelops any manifestation of a Being.
Philosophy does not guard a truth that man happened upon at a cer-
tain moment in his history: man is the eternal appearing of the truth of
Being. And philosophy is the emerging of this essential hearing—which
is the very essence of man—once every other hearing has been relin-
quished. Philosophy does not present us with new things, previously un-
known, but is the conspicuousness that what has always stood before us
assumes when attention is no longer focused on what supervenes and
vanishes. Not only are we eternal, but—since the eternity of Appearing
belongs to the truth of Being—we eternally know we are eternal. Only
within this immutable appearing of the truth of Being can the history of
man—and so also the history of the West, as the history of the abandon-
ment of that truth—unfold. Distraction from truth is possible only insofar
as truth continues to appear. For men, “oblivion of the sacred spectacle”
(lethe hon tot’ eidon hierdn, Phaedrus 250a) is a concealment of truth, in the
sense in which it can be said that the sky conceals itself from a country-
man watching birds in flight or falling stars: the sky of truth appears eter-
nally, but the things that cross it call attention to themselves and become
all-important. Then, language has words only for what is important and
life runs its course, as if truth had set and only things remained.

5. The Occurrence of the Earth

The beings crossing the never-setting sky of the truth of Being are
the occurrence. The background does not occur but is the still place that
182 RECODING METAPHYSICS

receives the occurrence. Being eternally appears in its truth, and in this
Appearing, the flowering of Being occurs. In the clear silence of truth the
occurrence is the prodigious. However long awaited, it is in fact the
unexpected. Since it receives the occurrence, Appearing is not the infinite
appearing of Being, the epiphany in which the completed totality is dis-
closed and in which, therefore, no further revelation can occur. As finite
Appearing, eternal truth is contradiction. Although it lets all things appear
in the whole, the whole in which it envelops them is not the completed
totality of Being but only the formal meaning of this totality. Thus what
is not the whole is made to appear as “whole.” This contradiction could
be superseded only if finite Appearing should become infinite. The eternal
appearing of the background is the manifesting of a contradiction, which
could be resolved only in an occurrence. But truth also knows that the
whole cannot become an occurrence.” Thus, in its essence, truth awaits
the occurrence granted it: the measure of its liberation from contradiction.
In this measure lies the salvation of truth (i.e, the truth of salvation).
However long awaited and however much truth knows of it, the occurrence
is the unexpected. If truth knew everything of it, the occurring of the
occurrence could add nothing to such knowing, within which the ocurrence
would therefore have always already occurred.
The prodigious occurrence is the earth. Joy and pain, war and peace,
feelings, stars, thoughts and actions all belong to the earth. The earth is
Being’s offering. Being has always inhabited Appearing, but the earth is
the guest’s long-awaited gift. Truth accepted the offering. In the begin-
ning, truth willed the earth, and this will encloses and sustains any mortal
willing.
In the life of man, philosophy is an unusual event. Man normally
lives in untruth, looking after the problems of the earth—the problems,
that is, of everyday life and those raised by religions and ideologies, by
science and art, and by philosophies themselves. But the life of man is,
in its essence, the eternal appearing of Being; and Being can only appear
in its truth, since the truth of Being is the background whose Appearing
is necessarily implied by the appearing of any thing. However deep the
untruth in which he lives may be, man is still the eternal manifestation
of the truth of Being. Living in untruth cannot, therefore, be thought to
be an oblivion that leads to the disappearing of the truth of Being. For
untruth is possible only within that truth: not insofar as it is “a part” of
truth, but insofar as it belongs to the occurrence that comes to light in
the eternal appearing of the truth of Being.
Solicitude for the earth, in which untruth consists, is grounded first
of all on the truth of Being's acceptance of the earth. We can will some-
thing—a house, food, love—only insofar as we first will the horizon
within which the individual things that we will can appear. The occurrence
of the earth is the originally willed horizon, in which any thing that we
will is willed. But this original will would not be possible if the eternal
appearing of truth had not accepted from Being the offering of the earth.
The Earth and the Essence of Man 183

This receiving of the earth, performed by the truth of Being, is the same
original that acts in the solicitude felt by untruth for the earth. But in
untruth, the receiving of the earth unites with the conviction that the
earth is the whole with which, assuredly, we deal. In this conviction, Being
that occurs is isolated from the truth of Being. Untruth is possible only
insofar as the occurrence brings with it, in the eternal appearing of the
truth of Being, both the receiving of the earth and the isolating conviction.
For receiving the offering belongs to the offering: it is the way in which
the occurrence occurs. But also the isolating conviction belongs to the
offering. For, if the background is indeed the truth of Being, error (the
isolating conviction) can (and must) belong as negated to the background;
so that, as posited—as that of which one is convinced—it cannot but occur
with the occurrence of the offering.
As willed by truth, the earth stands out against the background.
Truth, in its receiving of the earth, wills that the earth continue to appear.
Receiving a guest means willing that he remain. In willing the continua-
tion of its occurring, truth does not treat the occurrence as the unex-
pected. The occurrence, as such, is the unexpected, but willing the occur-
rence means no longer treating the unexpected as unexpected; it means
giving the unexpected what it does not have. This giving—namely, the
will that the occurrence continue to occur—is the conspicuousness of the
earth. To the earth, as projected into the future (into the place where it
continues to occur), is given what it does not have.
But however much the earth may stand out against the background,
the receiving of the earth cannot conceal the background—cannot, that
is, conceal the truth of Being. The earth is received in the light of truth:
in the eternal appearing of the truth of Being, Being flowers, this flower-
ing is the earth, and the receiving of the earth is the way in which the
flowering is spread out in Appearing. But for that kind of distraction from
truth to arise, in which untruth consists as the normal condition of the
life of man, something else is required besides the receiving of the earth.
Untruth is solicitude for the earth, united with the conviction that the
earth is the dimension with which, assuredly, we deal, and beyond which
there is total darkness. Since the appearing of the truth of Being is eternal
and never-setting, that other which (for untruth to arise) is required be-
sides the receiving of the earth cannot be the setting—that is, the disap-
pearing—of truth, but must be the very conviction that the earth is what
surely appears. In other words, the other is the appearing (i.e., the occur-
ring) of this conviction within the never-setting appearing of truth. For
Hegel, like Plato before him, truth (namely, that which from the viewpoint
of metaphysical alienation is the truth of Being) appears only in philo-
sophic consciousness. In other forms of consciousness (the forms of un-
truth), either truth is wholly absent, or it appears in a process, determin-
ing the dialectic transition to higher forms of consciousness. The myth of
the cave corresponds to the phenomenology of spirit: truth, as a unitary
totality, appears only at the end of a process. But the truth of Being
184 RECODING METAPHYSICS

neither rises nor sets, and in its eternal Appearing lies the essence of
man.
Thus man, insofar as he lives in untruth, is the appearing of a conten-
tion: between truth, which eternally appears, and error, which accom-
panies the occurrence of the earth and sees in the earth the sure ground.
In the appearing of the truth of Being, Being flowers and error belongs to
its flowering: it is one of the beings that begin to appear. But it appears
as at once denied and affirmed, rejected and accepted. Appearing, which
as appearing of truth is negation of error, at the same time lets error
stand free in Appearing as not negated, and therefore as accepted. In so
doing, it becomes the scene of a contention: the appearing of a contradic-
tion. Truth, which as such is already contradiction (because it posits as
“whole” that which is not the whole: because it is the finite appearing of
the infinite), here finds itself involved in a broader contradiction in which
truth and error contend for Appearing.
But error's freedom in Appearing—its eluding the dominance of
truth—remains an enigma. Is the appearing of the truth of Being itself
responsible for this freedom, or is the rebellion against truth part of Ap-
pearing’s destiny? Can error be “freely willed” by Appearing, or is the tol-
eration of error—and so the existence of untruth—established by the
necessity of Being?

[In response to the editor's request to shorten this chapter, the author
selected the sections to be included (1-5, 10-14). The four central sections
were dedicated to the discussion of more specific issues and can be
omitted without essentially interrupting the discourse.|

10. Threefold Alienation

Let us review the fundamental traits in which the essence of man is
revealed.
Being is eternal, and it eternally appears in this actual Appearing—
which is not “mine” but which I myself am. Man has always been and will
always be the revelation of Being, a satellite that forever accompanies the
constellation of Being. Since the actual Appearing cannot not-exist (for it
is itself a Being), Being is destined to appear—and therefore to appear in
its truth, because the appearing of the truth of Being is that without
which no Being can appear: it is the never-setting background of anything
that appears. Being eternally appears linked to its “is” by dominant neces-
sity; accordingly, the veritable and concrete meaning of necessity's domi-
nance—of the structure of the truth of Being—eternally appears. As the
eternal revelation of the truth of Being, man lives, in this sense, “the life
of the gods” (thedn bios, Phaedrus). But the “plain of truth” (to alétheias pedion)
stands gathered and still before him, and in this still spectacle man
dwells forever. Contemplation is not a periodos outside of which man has
a home to which he can return (oikad' élthen): his home is the truth that
eternally stands before him.
The Earth and the Essence of Man 185

Yet his original dwelling place is an infinite unrest. Any being that
appears, appears included in the totality of Being, but this totality only ap-
pears formally: the concrete fullness of Being remains concealed. The
eternal appearing of the truth of Being is the finite appearing of the infi-
nite, where what is not the whole (because it is only the formal meaning
of the whole—it is only this meaning, ‘whole’, without being the concrete
to which this meaning is referred) is made to appear as the whole. In the
eternal appearing of the truth of Being, the totality and every determina-
tion of Being appear as contradiction. The appearing of the truth of Being
is the original being in contradiction. Being has always shown itself in
Appearing, presenting itself in its truth. But Being with all its determina-
tions does not enter Appearing. The occurrence of the earth testifies to
the finitude of the primitive appearing of Being (everything that occurs is
what has not yet appeared). In this primitive Appearing, therefore, the
seal guaranteeing that all has definitively appeared cannot manifest it-
self. This means that the truth of Being, which eternally appears, includes
finitude, namely, the essential contradiction of its own Appearing. This
contradiction is the constitutive alienation of the essence of man. Super-
session of this contradiction is the absurd: finite Appearing that becomes
what it cannot become, namely, the infinite appearing of Being (see “The
Path of Day,” 17).
If this first alienation forms the essence of man, the occurrence of
the earth beings with it a second and a third form of alienation. The sec-
ond form is the occurring of the earth’s isolation. Its conflict with the
truth of the earth opens the horizon of man’s living in untruth. This con-
flict gives rise to a second sense of being in contradiction, namely, the
contradiction between the constitutive contradiction (in which the ap-
pearing of the truth of Being consists) and the earth's isolation. This sec-
ond contradiction is man’s life in untruth, his fallen existence. The third
form of alienation is metaphysical alienation—namely, the history of the
West. Here, the most gigantic effort is made to testify to the truth of
Being. But the basis of this testimony remains the earth’s isolation, which
is just what in the authentic—and still unattempted—testimony should
have been left behind as past. Greek metaphysics addressed itself to the
truth of Being but did so without relinquishing the conviction that the
earth is the region with which, assuredly, we deal. If the earth is the sure
region, then the becoming of beings and the very occurrence of the earth
have to be thought first of all as the process in which being has been, and
returns to being, nothing. Metaphysics inquires into the conditions of the
thinkability of Becoming so understood, which is to say, into the think-
ability of the unthinkable. The history of the West has thus become a
celebration of the solitude of the earth, and the West's gods are the gods
of this solitude.
There is a fundamental difference, however, between the first indi-
cated form of alienation and the other two. This is due less to our not
knowing whether the other two forms also belong to the essence of man
186 RECODING METAPHYSICS

than it is to contradiction’s meaning something different in them than it

does in the first form. The first form is a contradiction not on account of
what appears, but on account of what does not appear in it; not on ac-
count of what is said, but on account of what is not said. What is in fact
said there—what appears—is only a part of Being, not the whole. Accord-
ingly, the supersession (which moreover cannot occur) of such alienation
would be the appearing of the whole: it would mean saying concretely
that very thing which in alienation is said abstractly—and which for this
reason appears as contradiction. In contrast, in the other two forms con-
tradiction takes shape on account of what is said. In the second, the iso-
lation of the earth is the negation of the truth of the earth, and this nega-
tion is held fast together with that truth. Here, there is not a not-saying
but rather a saying no to truth. Just as in the metaphysical alienation of
the West there is not a not-saying but a saying and a doing in the light
of the thought that posits Being as identical to Nothing. One does not
rid oneself of these other two forms of alienation by positing concretely
that which, in them, is posited abstractly, but rather by negating it. In
passing beyond the first form, it is the position of the content qua abstract
that must become something past; in passing beyond the other two, what
must become something past is the position of the content as such.
But metaphysical alienation has now become the dominant trait of
the earth's isolation. The works of isolation have been overwhelmed by
the works of metaphysics. Western civilization has become the supreme
concreteness of the way in which the truth of Being is contested, and the
occurrence of the earth made an object of contention between isolation
and truth.

11. The Earth's Isolation and the Mortal

The isolation of the earth—which dominates the decisive moment
of Western thought: the Platonic “parricide’—led metaphysics to think
Being (determinations) as identical to Nothing; and it is upon metaphys-
ical nihilism that Western civilization has been built. The civilization
which today leads the peoples of the earth is grounded on the very event
that brought about their fall into untruth. The earth's peoples have always
been the dwelling places where the truth of Being gathers. But when the
isolation of the earth came into these dwelling places, they became the
houses of untruth. Which peoples have fallen into untruth?
Untruth is traceable first of all in the way in which the actual Appear-
ing lets Being appear. I live in untruth. Which means: in the actual ap-
pearing of Being, the isolation of the earth continually counters the truth
of Being. Only at times does the earth's solitude begin to set and let me
begin to remain what I eternally am. The solitude soon returns, in full
force and with all its consequences, so that all my decisions and works
become decisions and works of untruth.
But the earth is always before me laden with the fruits of metaphys-
ical alienation which were called out into the light by the people of the
The Earth and the Essence of Man 187

West. The works which appear on the earth can in fact be interpreted as
Being's response to the calls of the earth's peoples. Today, however, the
works of the people of the West—the products of technological civiliza-
tion—have overwhelmed all other works. Yet in any work—including
those of the West—there is a trace of the truth of Being. In the works of
untruth, there is also a trace of the earth’s isolation. But we still have to
learn how to uncover these traces. We know that any work can preserve
the opposed traces of truth and of isolation, but what are these traces?
What are the traces of truth? And what are the traces of the earth's iso-
lation?
Metaphysical nihilism, within which Western history unfolds, is the
trace of the solitude in which Western man has enveloped the earth. We
can realize that the people to whom we belong have fallen into solitude
because we know that metaphysics is the dominant spirit of the West.
For metaphysics, being, as such, is nothing. This is the sign that
metaphysical thought grows on the solitude of the earth. Isolated from
its truth, the earth in fact is a Nothing. Isolation, which posits the earth
as the surest region of being, is in its truth the nihilation of the earth.
Indeed, affirming that the earth is the sure thing means, in truth, affirming
that the earth is nothing. Metaphysics is the truth of isolation: it is the
testimony to the nothingness of the earth. It betrays the truth of Being
precisely because it looks at that truth through the solitude of the earth.
Accordingly, it posits the totality of Being, just as the earth itself is pos-
ited in isolation. The isolation of earthly things thus becomes the tran-
scendental determination according to which metaphysics posits the to-
tality of beings. As isolated from their truth, all beings are a Nothing; and
it is precisely because from the very beginning metaphysics thought being as
a Nothing that it can explicitly affirm that being, as such, can become a
Nothing. (For being as such is not incorruptible and ungenerable, but
being insofar as it is a privileged being— insofar as it is one of the gods
of the West.)
Isolated from its truth the earth is a Nothing, because if the earth
can appear only insofar as its truth appears, then the appearing of the
earth (or of any being whatsoever) without the appearing of that being's
truth is what cannot be and therefore is a Nothing. Untruth is the fallen
existence of mankind. It strikes root in the conviction that the earth is the
sure region of being: the earth is the sure thing, because the earth is what
appears. For the things of the earth to appear, nothing else is required
but their Appearing itself. What a house, a man, a tree, joy or suffering is,
is told by the thing itself in its unfolding and interweaving with the other
earthly things that appear—for also in untruth beings are affirmed be-
cause they appear. Why do we affirm that the sky is blue, that we heard a
voice, that the lamp is on the table (and so forth with the countless affir-
mations that make up the world in which Being appears in untruth), if
not because the blue of the sky, the voice, and the lamp on the table ap-
pear, or we believe that they appear.’ Even if only the content of Appearing
188 RECODING METAPHYSICS

and not Appearing as such is testified to, also in untruth the content is
affirmed because it appears.
But untruth does not limit itself to affirming the earth. It also posits
the earth as the thing that surely is and so sees in it the totality of the
content that appears. In this way the earth is isolated from its truth (i.e.,
from the background that eternally appears and without which nothing
can appear). Thus thinking that the earth is the sure region of being
means thinking, in truth, that the earth is a Nothing, because—when re-
ferred to the earth—being the sure region means being a Nothing. For
the earth is only a part (the part that occurred) of what truly is the sure
region, and the part, when posited as the total content of Appearing, is a
Nothing. (Furthermore: the part, thought without that on account of
which it is—i.e., without its truth—is a Nothing.) In untruth, what is
thought and therefore willed is the earth's nothingness: the things of the
earth are treated as a Nothing in the very act in which they are posited
as the sure region of being. Thus in any work of untruth a trace of the
nihilation of things can be uncovered: every work bears the sign of the
conviction that it is a Nothing. And so when language, as a work of un-
truth, intends to name the things of an earth left in solitude, its every
word names the Nothing. But, that the earth should be in uncontested
solitude is only an intention: the truth of the earth is the contrasting
background that eternally appears, coming to light in every work and in
every word of untruth.
Alienation, which makes man become a mortal, is the root of meta-
physics. When he posits the earth as the sure region of being, man be-
comes a mortal—he becomes, that is, one of the things of the earth,
whose nothingness is thought and willed. Metaphysics is the testimony
to the nothingness of the earth. Isolated from the truth of Being, the earth
stands before man as a Nothing. Metaphysics testifies to what stands be-
fore us and affirms that being, as such, is a Nothing. But metaphysics tes-
tifies to solitude not because it knows that isolation is the fall into un-
truth, but rather because it knows how to express the result of the fall. It
does not express the fall as a fall (for this comes about in the truth of the
untruth of Being), but rather as that which, as a result of the fall, lies be-
fore us (and before us lies the earth’s nothingness). Thus metaphysics is
not simply a false thinking—it is the consciousness that man must have
of the meaning of Being and of himself, since he has become a mortal.
The affirmation of the nothingness of being is not the only sign that
metaphysics grows on the solitude of the earth. Metaphysics is the
explicit affirmation that the earth is the content of immediate knowing—
and this is an explicit affirmation of the earth's solitude. The earth is in
fact ta phusika, for phusis is the region of Becoming and reality-that-be-
comes is the totality of what immediately appears. Precisely because it
“draws from Becoming to Being” (holkon apo tou gignomenou epi to on, Plato,
The Republic, 521d), metaphysics posits the region of Becoming as what,
certainly, must be transcended, but which, for this very reason, is the in-
The Earth and the Essence of Man 189

dubitable dimension from which knowing must proceed (and with which
man, in his present life, originally deals). This is the fundamental property of
every type of metaphysics, whether phusis be understood as a being out-
side the mind or as the content of the cogito or of phenomenological de-
scription; whether metaphysics, in transcending the region of Becoming,
comes to affirm an immutable being (a being which transcends Becom-
ing) or comes to identify reality-that-becomes with the totality of Being,
positing the original content of experience in the form of thought. The
Indo-European root of kosmos is kens; “to announce with authority” (Latin
censeo). For metaphysical thought kosmos is phusis understood as the region
of Becoming; which means that the earth is the sure place, the region
that announces itself with authority (and silences the voices of myth). The
“world” is the earth as the sure place and so as solitude. In the untruth
of premetaphysical man, the nothingness of the earth is the invisible
thought that (countered by truth) guides his every step. This thought
leaves its traces in man’s works, but metaphysics alone has testified to it
and made it visible. Metaphysics is thus the uncovered trace of the fall
of man; and the history of the West is that dizziness from the fall which
is the West's awareness of its own dominant thought.
The West, in receiving the earth, enveloped it in solitude and fell into
untruth. Metaphysical dominance is the trace of the fall. This trace is lack-
ing in the works of nonmetaphysical peoples, where all testimony to the
truth of Being is silent. Their works too (like all works) preserve traces of
truth—which stands eternally gathered before all peoples—but they do
not testify to it. We do not know how other peoples received the earth.
We may suppose that they, too, whose works testify only to earthly things,
saw and experienced the earth as the sure ground—as the only thing that
can be testified to—and therefore that they, too, fell into the untruth of
Being. It may be supposed that the fall is part of the essence of all
peoples. But these suppositions still cannot be evaluated. Do only mortal
peoples inhabit the earth?

12. The Earth's Isolation and the “Parricide”

Western civilization is the only testimony in man’s history to the
truth of Being. But the West addressed itself to the truth of Being while
grounding itself on the solitude of the earth, and truth's only testimony
became its most abysmal betrayal. Isolation, which nihilates the earth,
determines the relation that metaphysics establishes between the things
of the earth and their Being. Throughout the course of its history, meta-
physics has attempted to think the Being (the existence) of what is origi-
nally seen as a Nothing. Seeing the nothingness of things in fact means
positing them as isolated from their Being and recognizing the essential
accidentality of their relation with Being (i.e., of their existing). It is there-
fore inevitable that, while explicitly opposing being to Nothing,
metaphysics also comes to explicitly affirm that being is nothing (when
it is not and insofar as it can not-be).
190 RECODING METAPHYSICS

The earth's solitude envelops also he who first named the truth of
Being. All antiquity attests that Parmenides affirmed pure Being, while
denying the existence of the determinations of the manifold. Acting at the
root of this negation is the absolute separation—the isolation—of deter-
minations from Being.* Isolated from Being—thought, that is, in their
separation from Being and so from the truth of Being—determinations
must necessarily be understood as a Nothing. Parmenides posits them
as a Nothing, not because he does not yet know the Platonic distinction
between heteron and enantion, but precisely because he isolated them from
Being; and thus, in isolation, the heteron must be posited as the enantion
tou ontos. But the determinations of the manifold are in the first place the
determinations-that-become of the earth, and their separation from pure
Being—that is, from that of the truth of Being to which Parmenides did
testify—expresses the way in which Parmenides keeps the earth isolated
from the truth of Being. Thus the way in which the manifold things of
the earth are thought (the way of solitude) determines the way in which
the manifold in general is thought. Hence it is precisely because Parmenides
too is convinced that the earth is the sure ground that, when he measures
the earth against the trait of the truth of Being to which he had testified—
and this trait is the pure eon whose dazzle tries to ravish the witness
from the earth—he is compelled to posit the untruth (ouk eni pistis aléthés,
frag. 1, v. 30), the illusoriness, the unsureness, and, ultimately, the nothing-
ness of the earth.
And the very link with which Plato unites Being to its determinations
is forged in the solitude of the earth. In its truth, Being is not pure Being,
but rather the union of pure Being and a determination. Plato is the wit-
ness to this union, but he unites to Being what also for him is originally
understood as absolutely isolated from it. Plato, too, isolates the earth
(and then the totality of determinations) from Being, and therefore also
Plato must take the earth and, in general, determinations, to be a Noth-
ing. It is precisely this Nothing—that is, this non-Nothing which, isolated
from Being, must be posited as a Nothing—it is precisely this non-
Nothing, now understood as nothing, that he unites to Being (i.e., to its
being a non-Nothing). For Parmenides Being is the pure “is”; a determina-
tion (such as “house”), isolated from its “is,” must be posited as a Noth-
ing. Plato, in contrast, knows that Being is a determination-that-is (e.g., a
house-that-is), since “is” means “is not a Nothing,” and a determination,
for example, “house,” is not a Nothing (is not a meaning-nothing). But in
forging this link between a determination and its “is,” Plato—like Par-
menides before him—from the outset isolates the determination from
its Being and so, from the outset, has to understand it as a Nothing. Thus
he unites to Being (i.e., to not-being-a-Nothing) what is destined to be
thought as a Nothing. Insofar as a determination is already thought as a
Nothing, metaphysics deems legitimate the accidentality of its union
with Being. Once this has been admitted, it cannot but be affirmed that
a determination “is when it is, and when it is not, it is not,” and that there-
The Earth and the Essence of Man 191

fore its coming-to-be is a process in which it (the non-Nothing!) has

been, and returns to being, a Nothing. Even the Idea (ousia ontòs ousa—and
each of the gods of the West), qua determination, is a Nothing. In fact, in
order to posit it as Being—as that Being whose fate is never to be a Noth-
ing and which therefore is ontés on—Plato and all Western thought must
resort to reasons that are different from the true—and unthought—reason,
which is the truth of the earth. If the earth comes out of solitude and de-
terminations are no longer isolated from their Being and from the truth
of their Being, then it is determinations as such—any determination of
Being—that must be posited as ontds on, that is, as that which can never
have been, nor ever return to being, nothing. God—in contrast—is the
result of the will to posit as Being (ontds on) what is originally thought as
a Nothing.
The dominant thought of metaphysics is the identity of Being and
Nothing—yet metaphysics explicitly undertakes to safeguard and pre-
serve their opposition. The Hegelian dialectic is one of the paramount
forms of metaphysical thought; but the identity of Being and Nothing,
which constitutes the first triad of Hegelian logic, is by no means a formu-
lation of the dominant thought of metaphysics. Hegel in fact stresses that
the identity of Being and Nothing is not the identity of determinate Being
(Daseyn) and Nothing (as if it were “the same whether I am or am not,
whether this house is or is not, whether these hundred talers are, or are
not, part of my fortune”’), since that which is identical to nothing is pure
Being, Parmenides’ pure “is,” isolated from determinations. Therefore, ac-
cording to Hegel, common sense has no call to be astonished at the iden-
tity of Being and Nothing (it would, rather, have good reason to be as-
tonished at their difference, as in fact Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburg was);
and therefore it is not a matter of indifference, according to Hegel, whether
something determinate is or is not.° Like Plato and Aristotle, Hegel de-
fends the noncontradictoriness of being: he too undertakes to safeguard
the opposition of not-Nothing and Nothing. But for this very reason,
Hegel, too, identifies Being and Nothing: not in the sense of the first
triad of the Logic, but rather in the same sense in which Plato and Aristotle
do so. In the very act in which it affirms the opposition of being and
Nothing, metaphysical thought allows being to be a Nothing. Hegel op-
poses being (Daseyn) to Nothing, but he distinguishes finite beings, whose
destiny is to be born and perish—to have been, and return to being,
nothing—from privileged being, which is itself the eternal becoming of
the finite (so that the nothingness of finite being is the condition of the
eternity of privileged being). Here too, the determinate, as such, issues
from and returns to nothingness, because the basis of Hegelian
metaphysics, too, is the isolation of the earth—and, therewith, of deter-
mination as such—from the truth of Being.
The fundamental metaphysical doctrine, designed to clarify the
meaning of the isolation of determinations, is the Hegelian doctrine of
abstract understanding. And yet, this epic struggle against the isolation
192 RECODING METAPHYSICS

of determinations is guided by a thought that is completely enveloped by

the solitude of the earth. Hegel's Logic intends to be the overcoming of
the abstractness of pure Being (the “is”), which, as isolated from determi-
nations, is (in its turn) a Nothing. Indeed, dialectical development is the
determinate mode according to which the synthesis between pure Being
and the totality of determinations is instituted. But the ultimate meaning
of this Hegelian synthesis is still the Platonic one. From the outset a bot-
tomless abyss (the abyss which isolates the earth from the truth of Being)
yawns between pure Being and determinations, so that the union of the
two sides is the synthesis of what from the outset was destined to remain
divided. In dialectical development, pure Being determines itself (i.e., it
unites with determinations). But the determination—as empirical, and not
privileged, determination—maintains in its synthesis with Being the
character that from the outset belongs to it as separated from Being—
namely, the character of being a Nothing. It is united to Being but con-
tinues to be a Nothing. Thus it is inevitable that Hegel should treat the
determination as a Nothing and affirm its synthesis with Being to be ac-
cidental, and that therefore it is destined to be born and to perish (i.e.,
to have been, and return to being, nothing)—only that privileged being,
which is the very accidentality of the synthesis, remaining eternal. (In
Hegel, the synthesis between pure Being and categorical determinations is
indeed intended to count as necessary and not as accidental. But this
necessary synthesis—the organism of categories, the Idea—is once again
the privileged structure that, as in Plato, makes the becoming of empirical
determinations—i.e., the institution of the accidental synthesis between
the categorical and the empirical—possible.)
Aristotle had already reproached Parmenides with isolating Being
from determinations (Physics 186a22), stressing that Being is other than
determinations as distinct (toi emai heteron), and not as separate from them
(ou gar ei khoriston). Distinctness does not imply the nothingness of deter-
minations (‘outhen hétton polla ta leuka [= polla ta onta| kai oukh hen"), pre-
cisely because what is other than Being is distinct from it in meaning but
is not something isolated from it (“allo gar estai to einai leukdi | = onti) kai to
dedegmendi, kai ouk estai para to leukon |= on| outhen khoriston"). And yet, the
isolation of determinations with which Aristotle reproaches Parmenides
underlies Aristotelian—and Platonic, and Hegelian—metaphysics. Pre-
cisely because determinations isolated from Being (and from the truth of
Being) are a Nothing, metaphysical thought can admit that, coming to
be, they have been nothing (and return to being nothing): “For what is
generated is what is-not” (gignetai gar to mè on, Metaph. 1067b31). Indeed,
for metaphysics the greatest difficulty lies in thinking that a thing is not
a Nothing.

13. The Salvation of Truth

Pure contradiction is the original dwelling place of man. The eter-
nal manifestation of the truth of Being is the primordial structure of
The Earth and the Essence of Man 193

contradiction. Any other contradiction is grounded on this structure.

Coming-out of primordial contradiction is an occurrence, since such con-
tradiction is the attitude that has always been assumed by the never-set-
ting background, which is the place where every occurrence can be re-
ceived. The “life of the gods,” which the peoples of the earth lead in their
original dwelling places, therefore has always awaited its salvation. Salva-
tion lies in the occurrence. The true meaning of salvation—that is, the
truth of salvation—is in fact the salvation of truth. Since man is the eter-
nal guardian bf the truth of Being, the true meaning of the salvation of
man is the salvation of truth. And for truth salvation means passing
beyond the contradiction that has always penetrated it.
The occurrence is a coming-out of the motionless unrest of the
never-setting. One does not come out of, that is, one does not escape,
the never-setting; instead, one comes out of the primordial contradiction
in which the never-setting finds itself, owing to its not being the com-
pleted manifestation of every trait of Being. Although the never-setting
does let every being appear in the “whole,” it cannot bring out into the
light all that concrete richness of things which the meaning of “whole,”
by appearing, demands be brought out (and thus what is not the whole
is made to mean “whole”). Since the never-setting background is that
without whose appearing nothing could appear, contradiction does not
belong to the background in the sense that, without contradiction, noth-
ing could appear. For contradiction is the attitude assumed by the
background insofar as it does not contain the concrete whole of Being.
Contradiction is not that without which nothing could appear, but rather
the background is invested with contradiction owing to the not-appearing
in it of the whole. Salvation is the completion of the revelation of Being
which is granted to the eternal appearing of the truth of Being.
The occurrence is unique. If in addition to the earth something else
occurred—heaven, the beyond—then both would constitute the content
of the occurrence. Therefore the occurrence occurs in the occurrence of
the earth; and salvation lies in the occurrence. But the occurrence is also
the greatest of perils—the possibility of abysmal perdition. Being offers
the earth to the guardians of the truth of Being. And the offering was ac-
cepted. The receiving of the offering belongs to the offering: it is the way
in which the occurrence occurred. Receiving the offering means willing
the continuation of the occurrence to the completion of its occurring. Its
total completion gives the measure of the disclosure of Being which is
granted to the essence of man, thus giving the measure of the liberation
from contradiction: the measure of salvation. But is the earth the mea-
sure granted, or is this measure given by a different completion of the
occurrence?
The guardians of truth received the offering while leaving it in sol-
itude. We have no means of shedding light upon man's fall into the sol-
itude of the earth. But insofar as the earth’s solitude is a fact, it has no
need of light. Since the truth of Being eternally appears, man's life in
194 RECODING METAPHYSICS

untruth is possible only as a conflict, in Appearing, between the truth of

Being and the isolation of the earth. The distraction from truth is man-
ifest not only in our everyday existence (which seems concerned with any-
thing but the truth of Being) but also in Western civilization itself—the
civilization that today rules the earth. Yet it could not appear if isolation
had not occurred. But why did the earth's peoples, when they received
the offering, envelop it in solitude? Any answer to this question is still
only a posible interpretation.
The alienation opposed to that in which the peoples of the earth
have fallen is the rejection of the earth, that is, the will that the occurrence
should not continue. No trace has been uncovered of this form of aliena-
tion. Suicide (which in our culture has become a form of metaphysical
nihilism) is one of the events that occur within the receiving of the earth.
Rejection of the earth is a form of alienation, because only the occurrence
can bring salvation. If the isolation of the earth is a negation of the truth
of Being, so is the rejection of the earth: for the rejection of the earth is
the rejection of salvation. Salvation may be rejected, because in the oc-
currence which brings it one fears abysmal alienation. One may enclose
the earth in solitude, because it is believed that the only salvation possi-
ble lies in the way in which the occurrence of the earth stands before us.
If salvation disappoints, one attempts the supreme feat of forgetting the
ground of the disappointment—namely, the truth of Being. And the only
way in which man can do so is by isolating the earth. But how can the
value of this interpretation be established?
In fact, truth—as testified to in philosophy—does not even know
whether the history of salvation is a necessary development to the never-
setting background of Appearing (i.e., an epiphany of Being, which, like
the appearing of the background, is ineluctable), or whether it is a history
of freedom. The offering of the earth, the receiving of the offering, the fall
into solitude, the metaphysical alienation of the West, and all the ways
of the occurrence: are these the steps of freedom or of inevitable neces-
sity? And the truth of Being, which eternally appears—what does it know
of the measure of its own salvation? For even if, in philosophy, the truth
of Being does remain here before us with the setting of the isolation of
the earth, we do not know whether, in testifying to it, we are testifying to
the whole that eternally appears.

14. Repetition of the Acceptance of the Offering

And yet philosophy, as the guardian of the truth of Being, is the rep-
etition of the supreme moment of the history of salvation. The slow reflux
which in philosophy carries the earth’s solitude to its setting places the
truth of Being anew before the offering of the earth and allows it to repeat
the receiving of the offering. In the primordial receiving, the earth's
peoples brought the earth to encroachment. Their fall into untruth made
the earth itself a work of untruth. The West has become the leader of un-
truth, its bearer and dominant witness; and so the earth has become a
The Earth and the Essence of Man 195

work of the West. Yet the only testimony to the truth of Being is in the
history of the West. The possibility of repeating the receiving of the offer-
ing was granted to Greek thought. And in fact the Greeks came close to
the repetition. Greek thought looked out on the testimony to the truth of
Being, but without stopping there it continued its course, leading the
West along the path of Night, into the remotest distance. Will the West's
wandering star approach that testimony anew, making it possible to re-
peat the receiving of the earth?
In philosophy, the truth of Being again encounters the offering of the
earth. Untruth's rampant dominance is crossed by a reflux which slowly
carries it toward its setting and allows the truth of Being to reemerge.
The earth places itself anew, uncontended, before the eyes of truth,
whose guardian is philosophy. In fact, the truth of Being is testified to in
philosophy, because the conviction which isolated the earth and con-
tends for it against truth has set. But the earth remains before us laden
with the fruits of its long solitude. Truth calls it back from exile, but the
voice of truth now finds it in various guises, for the earth is laden with all
the time and all the works of alienation. And yet in philosophy the possi-
bility that the history of the salvation of peoples should begin anew is
safeguarded. We are faced with the supreme test, on which the comple-
tion of the occurrence and the conclusion of the history of salvation de-
pends. Thought that testifies to the truth of Being may again be swal-
lowed up by the solitude of the earth, and the peoples of the earth may
definitively move away from the truth of Being. But in the possibility that
opens all hope lies.
Untruth is such, not because it wills the earth and the earth's con-
tinuation, but because it isolates what is willed. This willing, as such, is
the same original will with which the eternal appearing of the truth of
Being wills the earth and its continuation. The earth's peoples accepted
the offering. This is affirmed, precisely because the earth and its continu-
ation in fact appear as willed. The repetition of the receiving of the offer-
ing is therefore not a new occurring of what has occurred ever since Being
offered the earth to man. Ever since the offering occurred, the earth has
appeared in the truth of Being, which since then has also been the truth
of the earth. Untruth is not a conflict between the pure truth of Being (to
which the earth is not yet linked) and the isolation of the earth, but rather
between the truth of Being, which is also the truth of the earth, and the
isolation of the earth. Thus it is a conflict between the truth of the earth,
which wills the continuation of the earth in truth, and the isolation of the
willed earth, in which willing becomes the will that the earth should con-
tinue in solitude. The repetition of the receiving of the offering is, there-
fore, the setting of the conviction that isolates the earth; so that, with
this setting, not only do we remain what we have always been, but we
also remain what we have begun to be ever since the offering of the earth
occurred—we also remain the receiving of the offering.
Philosophy is not the return of the silence of man's original dwelling
196 RECODING METAPHYSICS

place, because philosophy preserves the occurrence of the earth in the

truth of Being; but with the setting of the isolating conviction, the earth
is called by the pure voice of truth. Yet the earth—unsetting work of the
West's untruth—is indifferent to the voice of truth. The voice of solitude
sets, but the works it called forth do not, and ever more vertiginous is the
West's race towards the constellations of Night. The earth, as a work of
the West's alienation, appears in the truth of Being; so that philosophy—
insofar as it is our remaining what we have always been and what we have
begun to be since the offering of the earth occurred—is the contradiction
in which solitude and nihilism are superseded (i.e., in which they set)
only in the abstract element of thought, while their works are left as not-
superseded. This contradiction is the way in which man is faced with the
supreme test, to which the completion of the history of salvation is
linked. Since the true meaning of salvation is the salvation of truth—that
is, the completion of that revelation of Being which is granted to the eter-
nal appearing of the truth of Being—any other meanings of salvation can
be accepted only if they can be conjoined with this original meaning.
Even if we allow that the kerygma can save in this original sense, theol-
ogy, especially today, realizes that the conditions of hearing the kerygma
are lacking. But also theology is dominated by metaphysical nihilism: its
accusation that this hearing is impossible in our time is grounded on that
same dominant thought—that is, the nothingness of being—which itself
prevents true hearing. The only hearing in the history of the West has
been metaphysical hearing, in which everything is made to pass through
the solitude of the earth and where, therefore, no Advent and no kerygma
can bring salvation.
Philosophy, insofar as it witnesses the setting of the isolating convic-
tion, makes true hearing possible. But if salvation is to occur, the road to
salvation must pass through the setting of the works of solitude and so
through the setting of the West, the dominant witness to solitude. Await-
ing this setting, philosophy looks out on the supreme possibility of the
peoples of the earth. Only if, in philosophy, the isolating conviction does
not counter the truth of the earth, can the earth be brought to setting as
a work of untruth. For the earth to become a work of truth, it is first neces-
sary that the truth of the earth should not appear countered by the isolat-
ing conviction. It is for this reason that philosophy brings us back to the
fork in the road which once opened up before the original dwelling place
of man: to the right, the untrodden path of Day, where the earth becomes
a work of the truth of Being; and to the left, the path of Night, which leads
the earth into solitude. Is philosophy the dawn of Day? Or is it the swan
song before the truth of the earth is definitively caught up in its con-
flict with the isolating conviction and the West resumes its precipitous
course, never looking back?
Nor can the individual save himself independently of the history of
the West, that is, of the way in which the earth's peoples bring to comple-
tion the occurring of the earth. As long as philosophy is the contradiction
The Earth and the Essence of Man 197

in which the isolating conviction sets but the works of solitude do not,
no eupraxia can bring salvation: it falls on sick ground and becomes sick
itself. Any single individual's resolve to save himself independently of the
configuration that historical objectivity assumes, will be merely pathetic.
But insofar as the individual is the guardian of the truth of Being, he is
the good shepherd who calls his peoples back to the parting of the ways
and shows them the path of Day.
Taking this path—bringing the earth as a work of the West to its set-
ting—means superseding the contradiction of philosophy and so bring-
ing philosophy toward its completion. Philosophy is contradiction insofar
as it is only our remaining what we eternally are and what we have begun
to be since the earth was offered to us. But on the path of Day philosophy
is the earth, which becomes the uncontested work of truth. And so it is
the completion of the occurrence: Being's assent to the will that the oc-
currence continue and be accomplished in the truth of Being.

TRANSLATED BY GIACOMO DONIS

 > . a
” 7 7

=v = d (I VA
© dra agio rari pò
Ta AGI i
agi i ko og e fo yaad
dadi OEE lieti baer -

> vend), ¢ Pew

=) see si (a) -

sa § ihaf CO! Wee

Contributors

GIOVANNA BORRADORI teaches aesthetics at the Faculty of Architecture,

Milan Polytechnic. Her publications include Il Pensiero Post-Filosofico (1988)
and articles in such journals as Rivista di Estetica, Alfabeta, The Journal of
Aesthetics and Art Criticism, and Social Text. She is currently translating Jacques
Derrida's Memoires pour Paul de Man into Italian.

MASSIMO CACCIARI first proposed a conjugation between the dialectical

tradition of Marxism and the nihilistic horizon in which the ontological
discourse of Nietzsche and Heidegger operate. His publications include
L'angelo necessario (1985).

UMBERTO Eco is a semiotician and best-selling fiction writer. Among his

books published in English are The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the
Semiotics of Texts (1979) and Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (1984).

ALDO G. GARGANI, a distinguished Wittgenstein scholar, edited and trans-

lated Wittgenstein's Memoires into Italian. His recent writings have ap-
peared in journals and anthologies such as Filosofia ‘86.

MARIO PERNIOLA is a leading figure in the Italian contemporary debate

who first raised the issue of “the statute of the referent,” which led to
the discussion of “dissimulation” and “simulacra.” His books include Trans-
iti: come si va dallo stesso all stesso (1985).

FRANCO RELLA is a scholar of German and Austrian avant-garde art of the

turn of the century. He has focused his work on the connection between
the aesthetics of modernism and the culture of the Vienna Succession,
including Musil, Rilke, Wittgenstein, and Kafka. His publications include
La battaglia della verità (1986) and Metamorfosi. Immagini del pensiero (1984).

PIER ALDO ROVATTI, a crucial figure within Italian post-Marxist debate, has
more recently devoted his interests to the relationship between the “weak”
hermeneutical perspective and French post-structuralist theories, with
particular attention to Derrida, Lévinas, and Lacan. He is the co-editor,
with Gianni Vattimo, of Il Pensiero Debole (1983).

EMANUELE SEVERINO has animated recent Italian philosophical discussion

with his attempt at accomplishing a radicalization/overcoming of Heideg-
ger's critique of Western metaphysics. His publications include La struttura
necessaria (1979) and Essenza del Nichilismo (1982).
200 RECODING METAPHYSICS

GIANNI VATTIMO has recently become a leading figure in the contemporary

philosophical debate due to his theory of “weak thought.” His publications
include Il soggetto e la maschera (1981), La fine della modernità 1985, and the
anthology Il pensiero debole (1983), co-edited with Pier Aldo Rovatti.
NOTES

Introduction: Recoding Metaphysics

1) Many anthologies dedicated to continental philosophy do not even

mention the Italian contribution. Particularly significant cases are those
devoting all their attention to topics that represent the central nodes of
Italian debate since World War II, such as phenomenology, existentialism,
and hermeneutics. See, e.g., Continental Philosophy in America, ed. Hugh Sil-
verman, John Sallis, and Thomas Seebohm (Pittsburgh: Duquesne Univ.
Press, 1983), focused on Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty and the
impact of their thought on contemporary research. Also Hermeneutics and
Deconstruction, ed. Hugh Silverman and Don Ihde (Albany: State of New
York Press, 1985); and Hermeneutics and Praxis, ed. Robert Hollinger (Notre
Dame, Ind.: Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 1985), both concerned with the
role of hermeneutics in contemporary philosophy and criticism. An im-
portant problem concerning the lack of knowledge about the Italian scene
has to do with its very “philosophical” specificity, especially in compari-
son with the latest French positions of structuralism and poststruc-
turalism. In fact, many French authors (from Barthes to Foucault, Deleuze,
and Derrida) have been contextualized in America within the broad field
of “literary studies." For this reason, exhaustive presentations of the
structuralist/poststructuralist debate do not take any Italian contribution
into consideration. See, e.g., Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist
Criticism, ed. Hosué V. Harari (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1979).

2) For the history of Italian philosophy, see Eugenio Garin, Storia della
filosofia italiana, 3 vols. (Turin: Einaudi, 1966).

3) In order to contextualize the contemporary debate within the broader

perspective of the history of Italian philosophy since World War II, see
the volumes of collected essays La filosofia italiana dal dopoguerra ad oggi
(Bari: Laterza, 1985), and La cultura filosofica italiana dal 1945 al 1980 (Na-
ples: Guida, 1982).

4) For a survey of this hermeneutical position of Italian contemporary

philosophy see Giovanna Borradori, “Weak Thought and Postmodernism:
The Italian Departure from Deconstruction,” Social Text 18 (Winter 1987/
88): 39-49. A very good critical reading of this tendency, within its proper
historical perspective, is given in the essay by Valerio Verra, “Esisten-
zialismo, fenomenologia, ermeneutica, nichilismo,” in La filosofia italiana dal
dopoguerra ad oggi. A manifesto of contemporary Italian hermeneutics is the
anthology Il pensiero debole, ed. Gianni Vattimo and Pier Aldo Rovatti (Mi-
lan: Feltrinelli, 1983; Baltimore: John Hopkins Univ. Press, forthcoming).
Other volumes of collected essays that are emblematic of this debate are
La crisi della ragione, ed. Aldo G. Gargani (Turin: Einaudi, 1979); and Filosofia
‘86, ed. Gianni Vattimo (Bari: Laterza, 1987).
202 RECODING METAPHYSICS

5) A useful contextualization of this “radical” side of the Italian debate

within its proper historical perspective is given by Adriano Bausola in his
essay “Neoscolastica e spiritualismo,” in La filosofia italiana dal dopoguerra ad
oggi. Only in some respects did Massimo Cacciari contribute to develop-
ing this theoretical position, particularly with his book Krisis: Saggio sulla
crisi del pensiero negativo da Nietzsche a Wittgenstein (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1976).
Other basic references to this side of the Italian debate are the following
works by Emanuele Severino: La struttura originaria (1958; Milan: Adelphi,
1981), Il destino della necessità (Milan: Adelphi, 1980), and Essenza del Nichi-
lismo (Milan: Adelphi, 1982).

6) Literary journals have attempted to present the hermeneutical side of

the Italian contemporary debate by dedicating entire issues to this topic.
See Differentia 1 (Autumn 1986), and Substance (Fall 1987). In French see Les
philosophes italiens par eux-mémes, Critique, nos. 452-53 (Jan—-Feb. 1985).

7) This difficulty is due to two factors: In the first place, a basic lack of
knowledge about the Italian scene itself, which makes it impossible to
get a historical perspective in which to contextualize contemporary philo-
sophical events. In the second place, the failure of Italian culture to exor-
cise the experience of Fascism, which, in order to pursue its nationalist
politics, put a strong emphasis in every field on the “national” element.
This is why, still today, many authors hesitate acknowledging the national
roots of their discourses, in which, very often, their originality lies. An
emblematic case of this “anti-Fascist censorship” is the discussion (which
will be more deeply explored later on) of the role Vico and Croce played,
and still play, in the development of Italian philosophy. An accurate his-
torical account of the influences of historicism throughout twentieth-cen-
tury Italian thought is the essay by Eugenio Garin, “Agonia e morte
dell’idealismo italiano,” in La filosofia italiana dal dopoguerra ad oggi.

8) In his exhaustive essay “Il carattere della filosofia italiana contem-

poranea,” in La cultura filosofica italiana dal 1945 al 1980, Carlo Augusto Viano
points out the important role played by the “eclectic strategy” in the con-
stitution of Italian cultural unity during the Risorgimento. “Since its ori-
gins, that is, after Napoleonic resettlement of Europe, Italian philo-
sophical culture, very sensitive to its own peculiarity, had to face the
perspective of borrowing from foreign cultures and of reconsidering its
own tradition, more or less remote in time. On the one hand, the image
or mirage of an Italian tradition which through Vico reached back to the
Renaissance held sway. On the other hand, one glimpsed the presence of
European culture which could not easily be taken back to that tradition”
(29)

9) Vattimo and Rovatti, “Premise” to Il pensiero debole, 10.

Notes 203

10) Giambattista Vico, The New Science of Giambattista Vico, trans. Thomas G.
Bergin and Max H. Fisch (New York: Cornell Univ. Press, 1970).

11) Vattimo, “Dialettica, differenza, pensiero debole,” in Il pensiero debole,

LT

12) It is crucial to remember that by “economics” Croce meant a dis-

cipline-container in which flow into each other all of the disciplines
oriented toward practical success or technological efficiency, all experi-
mental sciences, or more generally, all sciences proceeding by generaliza-
tion.

13) That these “internationalist openings” refused Croce's legacy and

even fought against it is in itself contradictory. As a matter of fact, their
strategy was to operate on different philosophical systems trying to adapt
them to the Italian situation, forgetting about their original context and
manipulating them freely as if they were abstract historical objects, a typ-
ical historicist attitude. Even though throughout twentieth-century phi-
losophy, there had been cases of commingling between different systems
(such as between Marxism and psychoanalysis in Germany and France
between the two world wars, and between Marxism and existentialism in
France after the Second World War), what distinguished the Italian situa-
tion of the 1950s was the degree to which these comminglings took place.
Marxism was wed not only to existentialism, but also to pragmatism,
neopositivism, and phenomenology. Moreover, such an intersection of
different philosophical systems started out from an abstract criticism of
each individual formulation: to this extent, neopositivism was considered
a global theory of rationality and not, as originally, a criticism of scientific
language. In the same way, the metaphysical élan and connection to
specific aspects of American society of American pragmatism was ig-
nored, so that it appeared as a “behavioristic” pedagogical theory. As
Viano points out (‘Il carattere della filosofia italiana contemporanea," 21—
23), the “eclectic strategy” of Italian postwar philosophy would never have
existed without the historicist background.

14) Enzo Paci, La filosofia contemporanea (Milan: Garzanti, 1957), 65.

15) See Enzo Paci, Ingens sylva: Saggio su Vico (Milan: Mondadori, 1949);
and Paci, Esistenzialismo e storicismo (Milan: Mondadori, 1950).

16) Enzo Paci, Il nulla e il problema dell'uomo (Turin: Taylor, 1950); and Paci,
Dall'esistenzialismo al relazionismo (Florence: D'Anna, 1957).

17) Enzo Paci, Funzione delle scienze e significato dell'uomo (Milan: Mondadori,
1963), trans. as The Function of Sciences and the Meaning of Man by Paul Piccone
204 RECODING METAPHYSICS

and James Hansen (Evanston, Ill: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1972); and
Paci, Idee per un'enciclopedia fenomenologica (Milan: Bompiani, 1973).

18) See Vattimo, “Dialettica, differenza, pensiero doble”; Aldo G. Gargani,

“L'attrito del pensiero”; and Pier Aldo Rovatti, “Tenere la distanza,” the
latter two translated into English in this volume as “Friction of Thought”
and “Maintaining the Distance,” respectively.

19) See Vattimo and Rovatti, “Premise” to Il pensiero debole, 9.

20) Luigi Pareyson, “Federico Guglielmo Giuseppe Schelling” and “"Gio-

vanni Amedeo Fichte,” in Grande Antologica Filosofica (Milan: Mondadori,
1954).
21) Luigi Pareyson, La filosofia dell'esistenza e C. Jaspers (Naples: Loffredo,
1950); Pareyson, Esistenza e persona (Genoa: Il Melangolo, 1985); and
Pareyson, Estetica: Teoria della Formatizità (Florence: Sansoni, 1974).

22) See Armando Rigobello, L'impegno ontologico: Prospettive attuali in Francia

e riflessi nella filosofia italiana (Rome: Armando, 1977).

23) Luigi Pareyson, “Rettifiche sull’esistenzialismo,” in Studi di filosofia in

onore di G. Bontadini (Milan, 1975), 246-47.

24) Gianni Vattimo, “Verso un'ontologia del declino,” in Al di là del soggetto

(Milan: Feltrinelli, 1981), 51; translated in this volume as “Toward an On-
tology of Decline,” 63.

25) Vattimo, Al di la del soggetto, 13.

26) Ibid.
27) See Gianni Vattimo, Il soggetto e la maschera: Nietzsche e il problema della
liberazione (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1974). An interesting overall glance at the
Italian debate on Nietzsche can be found in the appendix to Friedrich
Nietzsche, Il libro del filosofo, ed. M. Beer and M. Ciampa (Rome: Armando,
1978).

28) See Cacciari, Krisis; also, Massimo Cacciari, Pensiero negativo e razio-
nalizazione (Venice: Marsilio, 1977).

29) See La crisi della ragione, ed. Gargani, 30.

30) Umberto Eco, “An Ars oblivionalis? Forget It!” trans. Marilyn Migiel,
PMLA 103, no. 3 (May 1988): 255.

31) Ibid., 259.

Notes 205

32) Umberto Eco, “Intentio lectoris: The State of the Art,” 39-40, in this
volume.

33) Gustavo Bontadini, Dal problematicismo alla metafisica (Milan: Marzorati,

1952).

34) Emanuele Severino, “La terra e l'essenza dell'uomo,” in Essenza del

Nichilismo, 216; translated in this volume as “The Earth and the Essence
of Man,” 177

35) Severino, “Premise” to La struttura originaria, 16.

36) Ibid., 89.

37) See Emanuele Severino, “Che cosa significa pensare” and “Le neces-
sità dell'Occidente e la Necessità”, pars. 10-11 of the “Premise” to La
Struttura originaria, 90-98.

Intentio Lectoris: The State of the Art

Booth, Wayne. The Rhetoric of Fiction. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,

1961.

Chatman, Seymour B. Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and

Film. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1978.

Corti, Maria. Principi della comunicazione letteraria: Introduzione alla semiotica della
letteratura. Milan: Bompiani, 1976.

Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty

Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1976.

Eco, Umberto. The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts.
Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1979.

. Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language. Bloomington: Indiana Univ.

Press, 1984.

. Theory of Semiotics. Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1976.

Eco, Umberto, and Thomas Sebeok. The Sign of Three. Bloomington: In-
diana Univ. Press, 1983.

Foucault, Michel. “What is the Author?” in Language Counter-Memory Prac-

tice, edited and translated by Donald F. Bouchard, 113-38. Ithaca, NY.
Cornell Univ. Press, 1977.
206 RECODING METAPHYSICS

Genette, Gerard. Figures III. Paris: Seuil, 1972.

Hirsch, E. D. Validity and Interpretation. New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press,
1967.

Holub, Robert C. Reception Theory: A Critical Introduction. New York: Methuen,

1984.

Iser, Wolfgang. The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction

from Bunyan to Beckett. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1974.

. The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response. Baltimore: Johns

Hopkins Univ. Press, 1978.

Jauss, Hans Robert, ed. Nachahmung und Illusion. Kolloquium Giessen, June
1963. Munich: W. Fink, 1969.

Kristeva, Julia. Le texte du roman: Approche sémiologique d'une structure discursive.

The Hague: Mouton, 1970.

Lotman, Juri. The Structure of the Artistic Text. Translated by Ronald Vroon.
Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1977.

Miller, J. Hillis. Thomas Hardy: Distance and Desire. Cambridge, Mass.: Har-
vard Univ. Press, 1970.

. “On Edge: The Crossways of Contemporary Criticism.” Bulletin of

the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 32, no. 4 (1979): 13-32.

Pratt, Marie Louise. Toward a Speech Act Theory of Literary Discourse.

Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1977.

Riffaterre, Michele. Essai de stylistique structurale. Introduced by Daniel

Delas. Paris: Flammarion, 1971.

Rorty, Richard. Consequences of Pragmatism: Essays, 1972-1980. Minneapolis:

Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1982.

1. I realize now that my idea of system of expectations, though built up

on the grounds of other theoretical influences, was not so dissimilar from
Jauss's notion of Erwartungshorizont.

2. In Opera aperta | was considering under the heading “work of art” not
only literary texts but also paintings, cinema, television. | am grateful to
Wolfgang Iser (1978) for observing not only that some of my remarks on
nonverbal arts were also relevant for literature (chap. 5), but also (chap.
Notes 207

3) that my further discussion on iconic signs (Eco 1968) supported the

idea that even literary signs designate "the conditions of conception and
perception which enable the observer to construct the object intended by
the sign” and therefore “constitute an organization of signifiers which do
not serve to designate a signified object, but instead designate the instruc-
tions for the production of the signified.”

3. One could say that, while the semantic reader is planned or instructed
by the verbal strategy, the critical one is such on the grounds of a mere
interpretative decision—nothing in the text appearing as an explicit ap-
peal to a second-level reading. But it must be noticed that many artistic
devices, for instance, stylistic violation of the norm or defamiliarization,
seem to work exactly as self-focusing appeals: the text is made in such a
way as to attract the attention of a critical reader. Moreover, there are
texts that explicitly require a second-level reading. Take for instance
Agatha Christie's The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, which is narrated by a charac-
ter who, at the end, will be discovered by Poirot as the murderer. After his
confession, the narrator informs the readers that, if they had paid due at-
tention, they could have understood in which precise moment he com-
mitted his crime because in some reticent way he did say it. See also my
analysis of Allais’s "Un drame bien parisien” (Eco 1979), where it is shown
how much the text, while step-by-step deceiving naive readers, at the
same time provides them with a lot of clues that could have prevented
them from falling into the textual trap. Obviously, these clues can be de-
tected only in the course of a second reading.

Metaphysics, Violence, Secularization

This discussion of the problem of going beyond metaphysics is related to

several of my recent essays: “La secolarizzazione della filosofia," Il Mulino,
no. 300 (1985); “Ermeneutica e secolarizzazione: A proposito di L.
Pareyson,” Aut Aut, no. 213 (1986); “Ritorno alla (questione della) meta-
fisica,” Theoria (1986).

|. Friedrich Nietzsche, Human All-Too-Human, Part II, trans. Paul V. Cohn,

ed. Oscar Levy (1909-11; rpt. New York: Russell & Russell, 1964), 239.

2. Pierre Klossowski, Nietzsche et le cercle vicieux (Paris: Mercure de France,

1969).

3. See Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (New York: Harper & Row, 1962),
par. 32.

4. Rudolf Carnap, “The Elimination of Metaphysics through Logical

208 RECODING METAPHYSICS

Analysis," in Logical Positivism, ed. A. J. Ayer (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1960),
60-81.

5. I use this term in the largely descriptive sense that it has, e.g., for K.
O. Apel, who divides contemporary philosophy into two major currents:
analytic and existential. See Apel’s Transformation der Philosophie (Frankfurt:
Suhrkamp Verlag, 1973).

6. Nietzsche, Human All-Too-Human.

7. Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York:

Continuum, 1973). Further references to this work, abbreviated ND, will
be included in the text.

8. Translator's note: I have modified slightly the syntax of the English

translation of this phrase from Adorno.

9. Translator's note: | have modified the English translation, which in-

explicably translates the town names as “Applebachsville, Wind Gap, or
Lords Valley.”

10. See Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. C. Lenhardt, ed. Gretel
Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann (1970; rpt. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul,
1984).
11. Martin Heidegger, Der Satz vom Grund (Pfullingen: Neske, 1957).

12. Emmanuel Lévinas, Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pitts-
burgh: Duquesne Univ. Press, 1969), 45. Further references to this work,
abbreviated TI, will be included in the text.

13. Translator’s note: Vattimo here uses faccia and volto to differentiate be-
tween the two meanings, and in the rest of the essay he uses the term
volto, to refer to face. Although the English “visage” might be a more accu-
rate translation of the Italian volto, and “face” a more accurate translation
of faccia, | have followed the English translations of Lévinas, in which the
French visage is rendered as “face.”

14. The essay is significantly titled “Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay

on the Thought of Emmanuel Lévinas.” In Jacques Derrida, Writing and Dif-
ference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1978).

LPS bicde 125i,

16. Ibid., 147.

17. Ibid.
Notes 209

18. See Emmanuel Lévinas, Humanisme de l'autre homme (Montpellier: Fata

Morgana, 1971), 40.

19. Emmanuel Lévinas, Difficile liberté (1963; rpt. Paris: Albin Michel, 1976),
230.

20. On this point see the comments by S. Petrosino and J. Rolland in La

vérité nomade: Introduction à E. Lévinas (Paris: La Découverte, 1984), 73. This
essay and Derrida's have been particularly present to me. Among the re-
cent writings on Derrida in Italian, see also M. Ferraris's dense essay
“L’ esclusione della filosofia: Ebraismo e pragmatismo,” Aut Aut no. 123
(1986), for important observations on the theme of secularization.

21. See the already cited pages from the preface of Totality and Infinity.

22. Emmanuel Lévinas, Autrement qu'étre ou au-delà de l'essence (The Hague:

Martinus Nijhoff, 1974), 3.

23. On the notion of Verwindung in Heidegger, see the last chapter of

Gianni Vattimo, La fine della modernità (Milan: Garzanti, 1985). Also avail-
able in French translation as La fin de la modernité (Paris: Seuil, 1987).

Toward an Ontology of Decline

1. Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche (Pfullingen: Neske, 1961).

2. Martin Heidegger, Identitat und Differenz (Pfulligen: Neske, 1957); Identity

and Difference, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper & Row, 1969).

3. Friedrich Nietzsche, Human All-Too-Human, Part 2, in Opere, ed. Giorgio

Colli and Mazzino Montinari, Vol. 4 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1964).

4. Hans Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York: Seabury Press,
1975).
5. Martin Heidegger, Zur Sache des Denkens (Tiibingen: Niemayer, 1969), 5—
6.

6. See Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (New York: Harper & Row, 1962),
par. 46.

7. Friedrich Nietzsche, Human All-Too-Human, Part 2, trans. Paul V. Cohn

(New York: Russell & Russell, 1964), 239.

8. Heidegger, Identity and Difference, 38 (translation modified).

9. Ibid., 35-38.
210 RECODING METAPHYSICS

10. Martin Heidegger, “The Thing,” Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert
Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 180-82.

11. Heidegger, Identity and Difference, 35.

12. Ibid., 37 (translation modified).

13. See ibid., 40.

14. See ibid., 32-33.

15. See Heidegger, “The Onto-Theological Constitution of Metaphysics,”

Identity and Difference.

16. Martin Heidegger, Der Satz vom Grund (Pfullingen: Neske, 1957), 186-
87.

Venusian Charme

1. Jean Baudrillard, De la séduction (Paris: Galilée, 1979).

2. Pascal Bruckner and Alain Finkielkraut, Le nouveau désordre amoureux

(Paris: Seuil, 1977).

3. A. Vergote, "Charmes divins et déguisements diaboliques,” in La séduc-

tion, ed. M. Olender and J. Sojcher (Paris: Aubier, 1980).

4. R. Schilling, La religion romaine de Vénus depuis les origines jusqu'au temps de

Auguste (Paris: De Boccard, 1954). See also the articles devoted to Venus
collected in Schilling, Rites, cultes, dieux de Rome (Paris: Kliencksieck, 1979);
as well as G. Dumézil, Idées romaines (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), which adds
the term venustas to those listed by Schilling.

5. R. Radiguet, Les joues en feu, in Oeuvres complètes (1952; Paris: Slatkine Re-
prints, 1981); translated as Cheeks on Fire by Alan Stone (London: Calder,
1976).
6. G. Dumézil, Déesses latines et mythes védiques (Paris: Gallimard, 1956).

7. Diodorus Siculus, Biblioteca historica, trans. C. H. Oldfather, Loeb Classi-

cal Library (London: Heinemann, 1833-1967), 4.83.5.

8. Giambattista Marino, L'adone (Bari: Laterza, 1975-77), canto 20, line 92.

9. M. Olender, Une magie de l'absence, in La séduction.

Notes 211

10. R. Radiguet, Le diable en corps (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983); English trans-

lation, The Devil in the Flesh, by A. M. Sheridan Smith (Boston: M. Boyars,
1982).

11. See Mario Perniola, La società dei simulacri (Bologna: Cappelli, 1980),
180-83. An interpretation of the relationship between Don Juan and the
statue close to my own is that of J. N. Vuarnet, “Le séducteur malgré lui,”
in La séduction, 72. The importance of the connection between Don Juan
and death, which most interpreters overlook, is emphasized by J. Rousset,
Le mythe de Don Juan (Paris: A. Colin, 1978).

12. D. De Rougement, Love in the Western World, trans. Montgomery Belgion

(Philadelphia: Saifer, 1953).

13. Livy, Ab urbe condita 8.9.13. See also H. Fugier, Recherches sur l'expression
du sacré dans la langue latine (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1963); and Fugier,
Temps et sacre dans le vocabulaire religieux des Romains in “Archivio di filosofia,”
Mito e fede 1966.

14. G. Wissowa, Religion und Kultus der Romer (Munich: Beck, 1912), 289.

15. R. Radiguet, “Statue or Scarecrow” (“Statue ou épouvantail”), Cheeks

on Fire, 70-71. English translation modified.

16. E. Benveniste, Le vocabulaire des institutions indo-européenes (Paris: Minuit,

1970).
17. P. Cipriani, Fas e nefas (Rome: Instituto di Glottologia dell’Università
di Roma, 1978), 19.

18. This is a recurrent theme of Baudrillard’s De la séduction. E.g., “Seduc-

tion is a destiny: in order for it to be fulfilled, all freedom must be there,
but also wholly extended, like a somnambulist, toward its loss” (p. 147 of
the French edition).

19. There is an echo of this definition in Bruchner and Finkielkraut's Le

nouveau désordre: “Erotic short circuits emerge and upset acquired classifi-
cations from the inside.”

20. Cicero, De divinatione 1.23.

21. Livy, 6.28.

22. See Angelo Brelich, Tre variazioni sul tema delle origini (Rome, 1955).

23. Valerius Maximus, 7.1.

212 RECODING METAPHYSICS

24. Plutarch, Sulla, in Plutarch's Lives, the Dryden Plutarch revised by

Clough (New York: Dutton, 1910), 2.175.

25. Appianus, De bellis civilibis 2.69.

26. Schilling, La religion romaine de Vénus, 315.

27. Edith Harrison, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion (Cambridge,

1903), 95.

28. René Girard, La violence et le sacré (Paris: Grasset, 1972), 358; translated
as Violence and the Sacred by Patrick Gregory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
Univ. Press, 1977).

29. Jacques Derrida, “Plato's Pharmacy,” in Dissemination, trans. Barbara

Johnson (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1981).

30. Schilling, La religion romaine de vénus, 133ff.

31. H. Jeanmaire, Dionysos (Paris: Payot, 1951), 23.

32. Girard, La violence et le sacré, 188-89.

33. Ovid, Fasti 3.345; and Plutarch, Numa Pompilius, in Plutarch's Lives.

34. Livy, 10.42.7.

35. See p. 2, chap. 3, of A. Bruhl, Liber pater: Origine et expansion du culte
dionysiaque a Rome et dans le monde romain (Paris: De Broccard, 1953).

36. G. Baffo, “Venere e Adone,” in Poesie (Milan: Mondadori, 1974).

37. Radiguet, “Statue or Scarecrow,” 71 (translation modified).

38. Girard, La violence et le sacré, 408.

39. Plutarch, Numa Pompilius.

40. Such a conclusion is clearly at odds with the basic thesis of Schil-
ling’s book. For him, venus implies a total devotion to the deity that stands
in Opposition to fides, that is, the joint contract between human and
supernatural. Romulus's religious attitude is thus an expression of venus,
while Numa Pompilius would illustrate fides. Venus is emotional and mag-
ical-mystical, and has a dimension of interiority and supplication, where-
as fides is rational and juridical and has a dimension of exteriority and
Notes 23

formalism. But doesn't the particular quality of Roman religion reside

precisely in the Verwindung of these oppositions?

Decorum and Ceremony

1. E.g. in Iliad 12.104. See the most extensive study available: M. Pohlenz,
To prepon: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des greichischen Geistes (1933), in Kleine
Schriften (Hildesheim: Olms, 1965), 100-139.

2. The Indo-European root “prep-" means precisely “to fall under the
glance, appearance, form.” See J. Pokorny, Indogermanisches Worterbuch (Bern
and Munich, 1959), 1:845.

3. P. Chantraine, Dictionnaire étimologique de la langue grecque (Paris: Klienck-

sieck, 1968).

4. K. Kerényi, Die antike Religion (Munich and Vienna: Lagen-Miiller, 1969).

5. Martin Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Ralph Manheim

(New York: Doubleday, 1961).

6. Pindar, The Pythian Odes, trans. Lewis Richard Farnell (London: Macmil-
lan & Co., 1930), 10.67.

7. No. 150 in Edgar Lobel and Denys Page, Poetarum lesbiorum fragmenta
(London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1963).

8. A. Rostagni, “Un nuovo capitolo nella storia della retorica e della sofis-
tica," Studi italiani di filologia classica, 2, nos. 1-2 (1922): 148-201.

9. O. Cataudella, “Sopra alcuni concetti della poetica antica, I, Apate,”

Rivista di filosofia classica 59 (1931): 328-87.

10. Gorgias, in M. Untersteiner, ed., Sofisti: Testimonianze e frammenti (Flor-

ence: La Nuova Italian, 1967), 2:87.

11. In M. Untersteiner, I sofisti (Milan: Lampugnani Nigri, 1967), 1:251.

12. In Untersteiner, Sofisti, 2:143.

13. In ibid, 2:99.

14. The Greater Hippias, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. Edith Hamilton
and Huntington Cairns, trans. Benjamin Jowett (1961; rpt. Princeton:
Princeton Univ. Press, 1973), 291d, 292c-d.
214 RECODING METAPHYSICS

15. Ibid., 294b.

16. Ibid., 294e.

17. Werner Jaeger, Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture, trans. Gilbert Highet
(1947; rpt. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1963).

18. Aristotle, Rhetoric 1355a, 21. The English translations are those of W.
Rhys Roberts (New York: Random House, 1954).

19. M. Pohlenz, Antikes Fiihrertum: Cicero De officiis und das Lebensideal des
Panaitios (Leipzig and Berlin: Teubner, 1934), 55ff.

20. Pohlenz, To prepon, 107 n. 2. In a passage of De oratore, Cicero translates

prepon as aptus.

21. P. Monteil, Beau et laid en latin: Etude de vocabulaire (Paris, 1964), 72ff.

22. The translation used is that of H. M. Hubbell in the Loeb Classical

Library (London: Heinemann, 1971).

23. K. H. Roloff, “Caerimonia,” Glotta: Zeitschrift fiir griechische und lateinische

Sprache 32 (1953): 101-38.
24. Kerényi, Die antike Religion.

25. G. Piccaluga, Elementi spettacolari nei rituali festivi romani (Rome: Editori
dell’Ateneo, 1965), 64.

26. G. Dumézil, La religion romaine archaique (Paris: Payot, 1974), 50.

27. Roloff, “Caerimonia,” 111.

28. See Emmanuel Lévinas, Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis
(Pittsburgh: Duquesne Univ. Press, 1969).

29. R. von Jhering, Der Zweck im Recht (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Hartel, 1904—5.).

30. Roloff, “Caerimonia,” 121.

The Black Light

The pages that follow are part of a larger work published as La posta
in gioco: Husserl, Heidegger, il soggetto (Gazanti, Milan, 1987). In particular, the
first part of this work analyzes the contemporary “vicissitudes” of the
Cartesian cogito with reference to Husserl, Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida,
and Lévinas.
Notes BIS

I. J. Derrida, “Cogito and the History of Madness” and “Violence and

Metaphysics,” in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: Univ. of
Chicago Press, 1978).

2. Derrida, “Cogito,” 61.

3. Ibid.

4. Cf. H. Corbin, The Image of the Temple (1980). Corbin has also recently
been referred to by F. Rella in Metamorfosi (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1984), 95ff.

5. Corbin, The Image of the Temple, 114. Corbin refers to the conversation of
the sixth Imam, Ja'far al-Sadiq, with one of his disciples. His source is the
volume by H. Bietenhard, Die himmlische Welt im Urchristentum und Spatjuden-
tum (Tubingen, 1951), 231—-54.

6. J. Derrida, “White Mythology,” in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass

(Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1982), 213. Also, Derrida, “Le retrait de
la métaphore,” Poésie 6 (1979): 103-26.

7. In the sense analyzed by Derrida in “D'un ton apocalyptique adopté

naguère en philosophie,” in Les fins de l'homme (Paris: Galilée, 1981), the
proceedings of a conference held at Cerisy-la-Salle in 1980. This article
has been translated into English by John P. Leavey, Jr., as “Of an Apoc-
alyptic Tone Recently Adopted in Philosophy," Semeia 23 (1982): 63-97.

8. Derrida, “White Mythology,” 271.

9. One of the fundamental motifs of Lévinas’s thought of alterity is pre-

cisely the interpretation of the idea of God and the infinite of Descartes:
this motif circulates in all of Lévinas's work up until the recent De dieu qui
vient a l'idée (Paris: Vrin, 1982).

10. R. Descartes, Entretien avec Burman, in Oeuvres et lettres, ed. A. Bridoux,

2d ed., Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (Paris, 1963), 1387-88. The passage is
cited by Derrida in “White Mythology,” 268.

11. E. Husserl, Zur Phanomenologie des inneren Zeitbewisstseins (1928), ed. R.

Boehm (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1966).

12. J. Derrida, Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl's Theory of
Signs, trans. David B. Allison (Evanston, Ill: Northwestern Univ. Press,
1973), 84, n.9.
13. J. Derrida, Writing and Difference, 92. Blanchot objects: “The face—al-
though I have to admit that the name constitutes a difficulty—is the pres-
ence which | cannot dominate with the gaze, which always transcends the
216 RECODING METAPHYSICS

representation that I can make of it and every form, every image, vision
and idea in which I can affirm it, arrest it, or simply let it be present," M.
Blanchot, “Conaissance de l'inconnue,” in L'entretien infini (Paris: Gal-
limard, 1969), 77.

14. See M. Blanchot, “L’oubli: La déraison,” in L'entretien infini.

15. Of particular interest, as philosophic elaboration within this horizon,

one should see M. Cacciari's recent considerations on the religious “icon”
with reference to the writings of P. Florenskij and the painting by V. S.
Malevié: see Icone della legge (Icons of Law) (Milan: Adelphi, 1985), 173ff.
For example: “The mind concentrates the luminous principle, it takes back
to its point where it reaches such an intensity as to no longer be able to
‘free itself’ from itself and, consequently, to no longer be able to produce
the world of maya. That only is Light: the black hole. A formidable implosion
sucks in all the sensible by way of the window of the icon amassing it in
the invisible point where every direction, every sense and dimension
simultaneously remain as possibles. The black hole is the term that is des-
tined for that vortex of the invisible that the window of the icon produces”
(208).

16. G. Bachelard, La terre et les réveries du repos (Paris: Corti, 1948), 27—28.
Compare, however, all of the previous chapter dedicated to the "reveries
de l'intimité materielle.” Derrida refers to this book by Bachelard in Writ-
ing and Difference.

17. G. Bachelard, La terre et les réveries du repos, 20, 24.

18. Regarding the metaphor of the “black spot,” see the essay by Derrida
on Bataille in Writing and Difference.

19. See E. Lévinas, De dieu qui vient a l'idée, 51n.

20. See, e.g., the reference to the “come” as “voice” which is not reduced
in any linguistic register, in the last part of “Living on/Border Lines,” in
Deconstruction and Criticism, by H. Bloom et al. (New York: Seaburg Press,
1979), 75-176.
21. J. Derrida, Writing and Difference.

22. Cf. in Lévinas, as terminal point of his critical excavation within

phenomenology, the essay entitled “De la conscience à la veille,” in De
dieu qui vient a l'idée, 34-61.

The Atopy of the Modern

1. Simone Weil, Notebooks (Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1976), 230.
Notes 217

2. P. Florenskij, La colonna e il fondamento della verita, trans. P. Modesto

(Milan: Rusconi, 1974), 194.

3. See V. Jankélévitch, L'ironie (Paris: Flammarion, 1964), 113ff., for a list

of the numerous passages in which this term appears in relation to Soc-
rates. The fundamental elaboration of this concept or figure of thought
occurs in the Symposium. Quotes from L. Robin refer to the “Notice” that
precedes his edition of Le Banquet (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1981). Robin
translates “atopos” as “déroutant,’ misleadingly.

4. Friedrich Schlegel, Lucinde, in Kritische Ausgabe seiner Werke, ed. E. Behler

et al. (Paderborn: Sch6ningh, 1958), 6:61.

5. Giacomo Leopardi, Zibaldone, ed. Francesco Flora (Milan: Mondadori,

1976). On the noetic force of the image, see H. Corbin, Corpo spirituale e
terra celeste, trans. G. Bemporad (Milan: Adelphi, 1986).

6. Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. R. Tiedemann and H. Schwep-

penhauser (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1972-85). Friedrich Durrenmatt, Drama-
turgy of the Labyrinth. On the theme of the mutation of the fundamental
metaphors, see H. Blùmenburg, Paradigmen zu einer metaphorologie (Bonn:
Bouvier, 1960).

7. L. Massignon, “Finisterre,” in Nell'Islam: Giardini e moschee, 2 (1986).

Schlegel, Kritische Ausgabe seiner Werke, 2:318—19, 2:313; vol. 18, sect. 4, frag.
471; vol. 18, sec. 2, frag. 592. The arabesque pose presents itself as an
original form because it contains all possible forms. The very form of pos-
sibility is therefore, insofar as it is not yet realized, null. But this null is
not nothing: it is rather an “infinite fullness.”

8. Friedrich Schlegel, “Athanaeum,” in Kritische Ausgabe seiner Werke, 1:80.

9. Friedrich Dùrrenmatt, The Judge and His Hangman, trans. Cyrus Brooks
(London: J. Cape, 1967).

10. K. K. Polheim, Die Arabeske, Ansichten und Ideen aus Friedrich Schlegels Poetik
(Paderborn: Schòningh, 1966), 113.

11. F. W. J. Schelling, letter to Hegel, 4 Feb. 1795, in G. W. F. Hegel, Briefe

von und an Hegel, ed. Johannes Hoffmeister, 4 vols. (Hamburg: Felix Meiner,
1969-81).
12. F.W.J. Schelling, Vom Ich als Prinzip der Philosophie oder iiber das Unbedingte
im menschlichen Wissen (1795), in Schelling, Ausgewahlte Schriften, ed. M. Frank
(Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1985), 1:56.

13. Novalis, Werke, Tagebiicher und Briefe, ed. H. J. Maahl and R. Samuel
218 RECODING METAPHYSICS

(Munich: Hanser, 1978). The fragments cited in the text are from vol. 2, p.
227, frag. 1; p. 226, frag. 304.

14. Ibid., 2:666, frag. 600. This fragment, entitled “Theory of Pleasure,"
could constitute the title of an erotics of knowledge, which is perhaps
Novalis’ secret project, the point of convergence in his immense fragmen-
tary work, which can be compared only to Leopardi’s Zibaldone. Frags. 124—
25, vol. 2, p. 343, are also cited in the text.

15. Schelling, Ausgewahlte Schriften, 5:666.

16. Ibid., 2:840.

17. | have in mind the painting of M. N. Rotelli, Aperto, Venice Biennale,

1986.

18. Novalis, Werke, vol. 2, Nachlese, pp. 20ff. Schlegel attempted at various
times to define the category of the modern, but it was by then a charac-
teristic of his age which affected Hegel as well.

19. It is not by chance that Baudelaire stands at the center of Benjamin's

Passagen-Werk, another great attempt to grasp and represent this new
category of thought. Baudelaire is not only one of the greatest—or the
greatest—poets of the nineteenth century; his pages of art and literary
criticism are also memorable, as are some of the theoretical affirmations
scattered in the Journaux intimes.

20. V. Solov'év, Il significato dell'amore e altri scritti, ed. A. Dell’Asta (Milan: La

Casa di Matriona, 1983); Emmanuel Lévinas, Le temps et l'autre (Paris: PUF,
1983).
21. Jean Frangois Lyotard, La condition postmoderne (Paris: Minuit, 1979);
Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Mas-
sumi (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1984).

22. Jean Francois Lyotard, Le postmoderne expliqué aux enfants (Paris: Galilée,
1986), 25.

23. Ibid., 29-33. Habermas's positions are set forth in his 1980 Adorno
Prize speech.

24. See Franco Rella, La battaglia della verità (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1986), chap.
4.
25. Soren Kierkegaard, Papirer, ed. P. A. Heiberg (Copenhagen: Kuhr and
Torsting, 1909-48), vol. 2, A 603.
Notes 219

26. Giorgio Agamben, “La cosa stessa," in Disegno, ed. G. Dalmasso

(Milan: Jaca Book, 1984), 3. The reference is to the theories of Gaiser and
Kramer; see Hans Kramer, Platone e i fondamenti della metafisica, ed. G. Reale
(Milan: Vita e Pensiero, 1982).

27. Or at least this may be the fear of the author. I don't think it is rare
for a narrator, faced with certain aspects of his character, to operate what
Schlegel called a “parabasis,” that is, a sort of interruption of the narrative
autonomy of the character itself in order to signal that that figure is not
the container of his ideas or that, vice versa, it expresses things that do
not belong to its author.

28. Solev'év, Significato dell'amore, 322.

29. Soren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Irony with Constant Reference to Socrates,
trans. Lee Cape! (London: Collins, 1966).

30. Kierkegaard, Papirer, vol. 4, A 68.

31. Ibid. vol. 5, A 68.

32. Ibid., vol. 2, A 113.

33. Paul Ricoeur, Temps et récit (Paris: Seuil, 1983-85), 391-92.

34. Schlegel, Kritische Ausgabe, vol. 18, sec. 4, frag. 1471.

35. Novalis, Werke, 2:684, frag. 906.

36. See Luigi Pareyson, Lo stupore della ragione in Schelling, in Romanticismo,

esistenzialismo, ontologia della libertà (Milan: Mursia, 1979); Pareyson, “Fil-
osofia e esperienza religiosa,” Annuario filosofico Mursia (1985); Martin
Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe, Pt. 1, Veroffentliche Schriften, vol. 9, and Pt. 2, Vor-
lesungen 1923-1944, vols. 29-30 (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1976-83); Sig-
mund Freud, “The Uncanny,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psycholog-
ical Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey, vol. 17 (London:
Hogarth, 1953-74); Paul Valéry, Oeuvres, vol. 2 (Paris: Gallimard, 1977), 166.
On Valéry, see Franco Rella, Metamorfosi: Immagini del pensiero (Milan: Fel-
trinelli, 1984).

37. Novalis, Werke, 2:619, frag. 633. “Chance and necessity (the external
through me)... . One is necessarily frightened when one casts a glance
into the depths of the spirit. The sense of depth and the will have no
limits. It is thus like the heavens. Exhausted, the power of imagination
stands immobile.”
220 RECODING METAPHYSICS

38. Ibid., 2:771, frag. 138.

39. Peter Handke, Die Lehre der Sainte-Victoire (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1980).

40. Novalis, Werke, 2:675, frag. 857.

41. See Schlegel's texts in Polheim, Die Arabeske, 29-31.

The Problem of Representation

1. Walter Benjamin, “Schicksal und Charakter,” in Gesammelte Shriften, vol.

2, pt. 1 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1980), 175.

2. The theme (already of Schelling and Hélderlin) of the end of demonic

necessity, of the Ubermacht of destiny, also appears central in the Star of
Redemption by Franz Rosenzweig. The figure of the “servant of God,” simple
subject of the judgment that destiny pronounces, is contrasted, for man
and the world, with the “light of revelation.” Gratia sua, the direction of the
will is not demonically fixed once and for all, “but in every moment dies
and in every moment it renews itself’ (F. Rosenzweig, Der Stern der Er-
losung, 2d ed. [Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1930], pt. 2, book 3, pp. 160-63;
trans. as The Star of Redemption by William Hallo [New York: Holt, Rinehart,
and Winston, 1971]). It would be of considerable interest in this respect,
moreover, also to develop an analysis of the relationship—until now only
touched upon—between Benjamin and Aby Warburg. “The struggle with
the monster” (“der Kampf mit dem Monstrum’), the passing, extremely
“periculosum” and never once and for all overcome, from the “monstrous
complex to the ordering symbol” (“vom monstrosen Komplex aum
ordnenden Symbol") (quoted in H. Gombrich, Aby Warburg [London: The
Warburg Institute, 1970], 251-52, the ability to safeguard—save the past
dominating its immediately demonic appearance—all the “polarities” of
the genius of Warburg have profoundly to do with the Benjaminian con-
cept of character. “Homo victor’ one could say, with Warburg (see ibid.,
322), he who “remains master of his forces: man enough to break the con-
tinuum of history” (Walter Benjamin, “Thesis on the Philosophy of His-
tory,” in Angelus Novus, in Schristen |Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1955]).

3. F. W. J. Schelling, Philosophie der Kunst, in Sammtliche Werke (Stuttgart,

1856-61), vol. 1, pt. 5, p. 697.

4. G. Colli, La nascita della filosofia (Milan: Adelphi, 1975), 67.

5. The following Benjaminian citations are taken from Ursprung des

deutschen Trauerspiels, in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 1, pp. 203-ff., trans. as
The Origin of German Tragic Drama by John Osborne (London: New Left
Books, 1977).
Notes 221

6. On the distance between philosophy and “research” see the very in-
teresting pages by M. Sgalambro in La morte del sole (Milan: Adelphi, 1982).

7. The absence of properly gnostic suggestions on Benjamin has been

clearly indicated both by F. Desideri in Il tempo e le forme (Rome: Armando,
1980), and by G. Schiavoni in Walter Benjamin: Sopravvivere alla cultura
(Palermo: Sellerio, 1980). In this respect the difference with the thought
of Ernst Bloch is also evident.

8. It is probably on this problem (that of the symbolic-iconic sign) that

Benjamin's constant interest is centered with regard to romantic aes-
thetics and criticism. Concerning this problem see T. Todorov in Theories
of the Symbol, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press,
1982). It is against the background of these romantic theories that it
would prove to be necessary to face the relationship between Benjamin's
concept of Eros and that of Klages (finally rescued from bad literary
“spells,” as managed by G. Moretti in Anima e immagine: Sul “poetico” in Lud-
wig Klages [Palermo: Sellerio, 1985]), which is expressed in the discussion
of the soul with the image, an image which the soul does not derive from
itself but from which it is struck, which it undergoes, as the image of dis-
tance, unable to be possessed.

9. This is one of the most profound affinities between Benjamin and

Kafka: for Kafka, in fact, impatience constitutes the sin. Regarding this
theme I refer to the second chapter of the first part of my book Icone della
Legge (Milan: Adelphi, 1984), the chapter dedicated to the Kafkian “inte-
gration.”

10. Rosenzweig, Der Stern der Erlosung, 210.

11. Cf. E. Przywara, “Zeit, Raum, Ewigkeit,” in Tempo e eternità (Padua:

CEDAM, 1959); and E. Grassi, “Apocalisse e storia,” in Apocalisse e insecuritas
(Milan and Rome, 1954).

12. For the general picturing of these motifs within the ambit of the
Jewish mystical tradition and its radical discussion in Benjamin (and, in
other respects, also in Kafka) the following are fundamental: G. Scholem,
Kabbalah (New York: Quadrangle, 1974); and Scholem, Zum Verstandis der
messianischen Idee im Judentum, in Judaica, vol. 1 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag,
1977).

Time and Alienation

1. Aristotle, De Interpretatione, trans. J. L. Ackrill (Oxford: Clarendon Press,

1974).
222 RECODING METAPHYSICS

2. See the Acts of the Conference on “The Sacred,” Centro Internazionale

di Studi Umanistici, Rome, 1974, 72-73.

3. Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return, trans. Willard R. Trask
(Princeton, N. J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1954).

4. Acts of the Conference on “The Sacred,” 73.

5. E. Severino, Essenza del nichilismo (Milan: Adelphi, 1982).

6. Ibid., 88-131.

The Earth and the Essence of Man

1. Translator's note: As opposed to that of Nietzsche.

2. E. Severino, “The Path of Day,” in Essenza del Nichilismo, 145-95, 17, 21.

3. But also in the case of what is believed to appear, something is af-

firmed because it appears. One affirms, e.g., that also the unseen parts of
a lamp exist. They certainly do not appear as the visible parts do (the
specific error of naturalistic realism consists in the identification of these
two ways of appearing): yet, in some way—and in any event according to
a modality different from that of the visible parts—the nonvisible parts
also appear precisely insofar as one speaks about them and is aware of
them. It will be said that they appear as “ideal” determinations. So be it:
but at the same time it is clear that, in this case as well, their existence
is affirmed on the basis of the appearing of such a modality of existence.

4. See Severino, “Postscript” to “Returning to Parmenides,” in Essenza del

Nichilismo, 71.

5. G. W. F. Hegel, Science of Logic, trans. A. V. Miller (London: George Allen

& Unwin, 1969), 85.

6. See, e.g, ibid., 86.

INDEX

Abbagnano, N., 11 63-75, 180, 193-94; and Appearance,

Abendland, 16, 63 22, 106, 174-75, 179-80, 190-92: and
Absence, 137 non-Being/Nothing, 20-25, 167-75,
Adorno, T., 48-53, 60, 173 177-80; and Truth, 67, 190-92, 181,
Aeschylus, 106 183-84, 191-97
Aesthetics, 26, 30 Benjamin, W., 50, 72, 138, 155-65
Agamben, G., 3 Benveniste, E., 98
Agathon, 105 Bergson, H., 7, 10
Aletheia, 157. See also Truth Blanchot, M., 132
Alterity, 56-59, 133 Boehme, J., 148
Amor fati, 96 Bonaparte, M., 39
Anagké, 175. See also Necessity Bonhoeffer, D., 172
Ananke, 155 Bontadini, G., 20-21
Anaximander, 22-23 Booth, W., 28
Antirationalism, 14 Borges, J. L., 40, 130-31
Apel, K. O., 3, 65, 90, 148 Brelich, A., 99
Aporia, 4, 143 Bruno, G., 147
Appearance, |7,50—51, 102; and Being, Bultmann, R., 172
22, 106, 174-75, 179-81
Appolinaire, 102 Cacciari, M., 4
Aquinas, T., 20-21 Caesar, 113-14
Arabesque, 138-39 Canaletto, 78, 80-81
Arche, 56, 60 Carchia, G., 3
Aristotle, 4, 20, 22, 24-25, 30, 52, 64, Care, 18
109-10, 122, 137, 145, 147, 150, 168, Carnap, R., 47
191-92: De doctrina christiana, 40; Carra, 5
De interpretatione, 167; Metaphysics, 64, Castelvetro, 150
192; Physics, 22, 192; Poetics, 30; Ceremony, 105-116
Rhetoric, 109-10 Cezanne, 140
Atopy, 137, 142 Charme, 93-104
Aufklarung, 8 Chatman, S., 29
Augustine, 7, 8, 14, 19, 30, 98 Chrysippus, 110
AUStIn es ly Si Cicero, 110-13
Author, 26-43 Cogitowl23 30" 133 M47 e189
Concealment, 105
Bachelard, G., 132 Conceptual schemes, 77-82
Baffo, G., 102 Conrad, J., 89
Balzac, 140, 146 Consciousness, 7, 11, 86-88, | 19-20,
Barthes, R., 29 179, 183
Bataille, G., 128 Constructivism, 80
Baudelaire, C., 32, 141 Corbin, H., 126
Baudrillard, J., 13 Corti, M., 29
Beauty, 8, 105-7 Crocen Bane O— 3102, 02>
Beckett, S., 99
Becoming, 4, 21, 172 Dal Lago, A., 3
Being, 3-4, 16, 33, 45, 48, 52-55, 59-61, Dalmasso, G., 3
224 RECODING METAPHYSICS

Death, 16, 22 Eschatology, 56-61

De Chirico, 5 Ethics, 26, 53
Decline, 18 Evil, 11, 93, 152-53
Deconstruction, 5, 19, 22, 27, 34, Excess, 123, 125-26
41-42 Existentialism, 19-20, 25
Decorum, 18, 105-116
Deleuze, G., 3, 13, 17 Fabbri, P., 30
Derrida, J., 3, 5, 14-17, 34-36, 38-39, Fabula, 39, 147-53
41-43, 101, 120, 123-35; and Lévinas, Face, 130
55-60; Le facteur de la vérité, 38-39; Fascism, 9, 20
Of Grammatology, 36; “Signature Event Fichte, J. G., 139
Context,” 34-36; Speech and Phenom- Fillmore, C., 29
ena, 129; Writing and Difference, 127 Finitude, 7, 10, 14
Descartes, R., 5-7, 20, 55-58, 78-81, Florenskij, 137
123-35, 147-49 Forster, E. M., 29
Desire, 55, 86 Fortune, 99
Destiny (Geschick), 3, 17, 22-23, 61, 70, Foucault, M., 13, 29, 123, 126
155-56, 171, 179 Freedom, 22-23, 156
Destruction, 47, 168 Freud) 545 AlI23 2545
Dewey, J., 10 Friction (Attrito), 13
Dialectic, 142 Fromm, E., 174
Différance, 5
Difference, 113; ontological, 3, 14-15 Gadamer, H.G., 3, 7, 14-15, 29-30, 64, 66
Dilthey, W., 9-11, 90 Galileo, 78, 80-81
Diogenes Laertius, 110 Galsworthy, J., 89
Dionysus, 101, 158 Galuppi, P., 8
Dissemination, 15 Gargani, A., 3, 14, 20
Distance, 13, 18, 117-22, 124 Genette, G., 29
Diiky lava. 29 Gentile, G., 9
Doxa, 156-7 Ge-Stell, 47, 61, 71-74
Doyle, C., 143 Gilson, E., 20
Dualism, 18-20 Gioberti, V., 8
Dumézil, G., 95 Girard, R., 101
Diirftiger Zeit, 68 God, 55-60, 114-15, 127-29, 134, 164,
Durrenmatt, F., 138-39 172-73
Duty, 110 Goethe, J. W. V., 6
Goodman, N., 78, 80
Earuhe2o=24 alii on Gorgias, 106-109
Eco, U., 18-20; La struttura assente, 30; Gramsci, A., 1, 11, 14
Opera aperta, 31-32; The Role of the Ground (Grund), 46-47, 52, 56, 59-60,
Reader, 31—32; A Theory of Semiotics, 3 | 62/072
Ego, 80-82, 89-90, 139, 141-2, 147
Eidos, 129, 159 Habermas, J., 65, 141, 171, 174
Eliade, M., 172 Hamann, J. G., 148
Ellul, 171, 174 Hand, 22
Empiricism, 5 Handke, P., 146
Energeia, 52, 64 Hegel, G. W. F., 9-11, 51-52, 98, 113,
Epoché, 130, 133 128, 142, 183, 191-92; unhappy
Eros, 93-94, 138-39, 161. See also Love consciousness, ||
Error, 3, 147, 183-84 Heidegger, M., 3-4, 7,12, 14, 16, 20-21,
 Index 205:

47-48, 52-61, 63-75, 125, 130, 144, Kojéve, A., 10

151, 171, 173; Befindlichkeit, 66, 69; Kokoschka, O., 140
Being and Time, 4, 47-48, 65, 70, 73, 75; Krisis, 1589
Dasein, 66-69, 71; Er-eignis, 71-74; Kristeva, J., 29
Geviert, 72; Geworfenheit, 67;
Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik, 145; Labriola, A., 11
Indentitàt und Differenz, 63, 71-74; Lacan, J., 120-22, 125, 151
Kehre, 70; Nietzsche, 63; "The Thing," Lacks 12 1=22
72; Wegmarken, 145; Zur Sache des Language, 2, 13, 15, 33, 64, 107, 125,
Denkens, 73 129-30, 134, 169; and Being, 55;
Heraclitus, 175 and metalanguage, 41; of meta-
Herbart, J., 10 physics, 3, 46
Hermeneutic Circle, 19, 66 Lawrence, D. H., 132
Hermeneutics, 14-20, 25-27, 30, 64-65; Leopardi, 138
and historicism, 4-6; and meta- Lévinas, E., 3, 14-15, 48, 53-61, 123, 126,
physics, 3-4 129-30; Otherwise than Being, 60;
Hippias, 108 Totality and Infinity, 54-58
Hirsch, E. D., 29 Lévi-Strauss, C., 32
Historicism, 5, 9, 10, 14, 20, 25 Light, 123, 129
History, 6-7, 25,59, 163, 172; of Being, 63 Limit, 119, 142
Hubris, 95-97 Logic, 87, 150-51, 156, 191-92
Humanism, 8 Logos, 53, 57, 60, 110, 151, 155-56
Husserl, E., 12, 30, 57, 129-30, 133-34 Lotman, J., 29
Love, 93-94, 137-41
Idealism, German, 6, 9 Lubbock, P., 29
Identity, 33, 72, 102, 124, 127-28, 170, Lukàcs, G., 15
190 Lyotard, J. F., 3, 141
Imitation, 149
Infinite, 8, 54-55 Marc, F., 140
Ingarden, R., 29 Marcel, G., 14
Intentionality, 12-13, 19 Marcuse, H., 171, 174
Interpretation, Theory of, 27—43 Margin, 18
Iser, W., 29, 30, 37; The Act of Reading, 29, Marino, G., 96
31; The Implied Reader, 29 Maritain, J., 20
Isocrates, 108-110 Marx, K., 51, 168; Capital, 11
Marxism, 1, 9-17, 45, 173-74; and
James, H., 29, 37 Ideology, 15
FAUST hie Ree 88.182 Mazzini, G., 8
Joyce, J., 29, 31; Finnegans Wake, 29; Meaning, 13, 15, 89, 130, 173; of Being,
Ulysses, 38 DORAN ODS
Jung, C., 145 Memory, 15, 18-19, 26
Merleau-Ponty, M., 12, 31
Kafka, F., 50, 142, 144 Metaphor, 117-122, 124-35, 151-53
Kant, I., 6,9, 12, 30, 50-52, 65, 66, 74,90, Metaphysics, 3, 45-62, 63, 121, 126-29,
129, 159; Critique of Judgment, 70 [SS lil op eco Ot eresencemle9;
Kepler, J., 147 overcoming of, 3, 13, 23, 46-48, 53;
Kerényi, K., 113 recoding, 1-26
Kierkegaard, S., 14, 142-44 Metonymy, 121
Klossowski, P., 45 Miller, J. H., 40
Knowledge, 6, 54, 65, 79, 153 Mind, 85
226 RECODING METAPHYSICS

Mnemotechnics, 18 Phenomenology, 11-15, 57, 133-34,

Model Reader, 19, 27-45 [75163
Modernity, 5, 23, 137-46, 153, 171 Phenomenon, 20, 65
Morris, C., 30 Philosophy, 1, 14, 26, 77, 124, 134, 145,
Mukarovsky, J., 29, 30 146, 161, 174, 181-82; Italian, 1-26;
Musil, R., 167 and Truth, 24; Speculative, 14
Myth, 6, 151 Phusis, 188-89
Piaget, J., 31
Nazism, 20, 48 Pietas, 8
Necessity, 22-26, 158, 175 Pindar, 106
Neo-Kantianism, 10 Plato, 3, 4, 14, 23, 20-25, 75, 101, 108,
Neo-Mannerism, 5 121, 126, 128-29, 145, 148, 150, 155,
Neo-Platonism, 8, 23, 121, 147 159, 183, 186, 190, 192; Cratylus, 151,
Neopositivism, 10, 12, 20 157-59; lon, 108; Laws, 143; Phaedo,
Neo-Scholasticism, 20, 25 143, 146, 177; Phaedrus, 153, 181, 184;
Nietzsche, F., 3, 20, 45-47, 52, 60, 66, Republic, 106, 143, 146-50, 153, 188;
70, 74, 123, 125, 128, 144; Beyond Good Sophist, 24, 178; Symposium, 137, 153;
and Evil, 45; Gay Science, 17; Death Timaeus, 147
of God, 46, 69, 73; Human, All Too Plotinus, 7
Human, 17; The Wanderer and His Poe, E. A., 38-39
Shadow, 45, 69; Will to Power, 47, 66, Poetry, 7; and truth, 7, 148-53
68; Zarathustra, 76 Poiein, 178
Nihilism, 22-26, 66, 169-75, 178, 187 Popper, K., 41, 47
Nohl, H., 11 Porphyry, 7
Nothing, 20-25, 122, 168-75, 177-79, Positivism, 9, 45
186-92 Pouillon, 29
Noumenon, 20 Pragmatism, 10, 37-38
Novalis, 139-40, 142, 145-46 Presence, 3, 129-30
Prepein, 105-112
Ockham, 18 Proust, M., 49
Ontological Difference, 14 Prudentia, 114
Ontology, 14-15, 53-57, 63-76, 172; Pugliatti, 30
fundamental, 65
Ontotheology, 63 Radiguet, R., 102
Other, 54-55, 113, 183 Reader, 19, 27-43
Reason, 16-17, 137, 173
Pacieky, Wal 5.2.0 Rella, F., 8, 20
Paideia, 108 Representation, 124, 155-65
Panaetius, 110 Richards, |. A., 31
Paradigms, 77 Ricoeur, P., 3, 14, 120-22, 171, 173-74
Pareyson, L., 8, 11-15, 20, 31-33 Riffaterre, M., 29
Parmenides, 4, 20, 23, 24, 156-57, 174, Rigobello, A., 3
178, 190, 192 Rilke, R. M,, 132, 161
Passivity, 134-35 Robin, L., 137
Patrizzi, 150 Roloff, K. H., 112
Peirce, C. S., 18, 30, 40-41 Romanticism, 14
Perniola, M., 3, 17, 20 Rorty, R., 37-38
Personalism, 14 Rosenzweig, F., 164
Petofi, J., 29 Rosmini, A., 8
Pharmakon, 100-103. See also Venom Rousseau, J., 6
Index 221

Rovatti, P. A., 3, 20 Thucydides, 106

Time, 4, 18, 21, 115, L67—75, 170-72
Sacred, 113-14, 173 Todorov, T., 29
Same, 55 Totality, 22, 54-57, 183, 185
Savinio, 5 Transavanguardia, 5
Scaligeri, 150 Transcendence, 52, 93
Schelling, F. V., 14, 139, 145, 155 Transcendental, 65-66, 69
Schilling, R., 94 Transcendental Ego, 81-82, 89-90
Schlegel, F. V., 137—38, 140, 142, 144-46 Trendelenburg, F. A., 191
Schleiermacher, 90 Trat/24937 4558070790127)
Schmidt, 29 159-60, 175; poetic, 7, 148-53; of
Scholasticism, 20, 164 Being, 181, 183-84, 191-97
Science, 7
Scientism, 47 Unconscious, 19-26, 123
Scienza nuova, 6, 7
Searle, J., 31, 34, 36 Valery, P., 33, 147
Secularization, 45-61 Value, 66
Semantics, 29, 31, 36 Van Gogh, V., 78, 80, 81, 139
Semiotics, 18-19, 27, 36, 42 Vattimo, G., 3, 8, 16, 18, 20, 142
Severino, E., 4, 20-24 Veneratio, 94-97
Sexuality, 83, 93 Venerium, 99-100
Stein oy Js} Is) Venia, 97-99
Simmel, G., 10, 72 Venom, 100-103. See also Pharmakon
Simplicius, 22 Vergil, 98
Simulacra, 13, 17 Vico, G., 5-8, 16, 19, 25, 148-53
Sine Cars Violence, 45-62, 125
Skinner, B. F., 173 Voltaire, 17
Solov'év, 141 Von Baader, B. F. X., 148
Sophists, 30
Space, 137 Wahl, J., 10
Speech-Act Theory, 31 Weakness (Debolezza), 13
Spiritualism, 8, 20, 25 Weber, M., 10
Structuralism, 18-19, 30 Weil, S., 137
Subjectivity, 7, 10, 12, 81-91, 125-26, Weinrich, 29
129-35, 146 Whitehead, A. N., 12
Sublime, 30 Will, 156
Synthesis, 137, 139, 192 Wittgenstein, 80
World, versions of, 77, 82
Technology, 3, 17, 25, 72-73, 173,
177-78, 180 Xenophon, 107
Tekhné, 178
Thing, 139, 156, 160 Zeno, 110
Thought, 26, 81, 84, 117; Weak, 6, 16 Zola, E., 146
Thresholds, 18
 [e Ma Tne OF 2), iii ei) St
een ae ili ea
dre i eest ~ ri 4 i
sa Vas Be SiatrrmeT «pase Mi
& (4) App ay SS = x
i E A Ze ot moi dr? iii £04089
4 25 =e fai 3 Aue mn » - “i
(Mio O64 pate Ni i; > Ps
sk a 38 a 2 » : Se
noe € e |
“e = 11H 89 264 $4 =i | , ha ieee
ig he tua dio
= SO, : è è. Cad
i | Mae fifa i x
: n 4 ° ait mae
a AA 48 | a? 2 Pay P >» RI DR
i , 6 atei : = iV 01) e nt
si - 0 POD Qt
OA sn Cini
ne” 5 61 ua al >» a

re Is aie SR]
—
basa i Liu
% | P i © DI al ==>

ged q imoe eo" 5 è( e

3 0 sr
hy ht a ib = I aa
A vi tove' iptas of - nie “tut Cais
| % = fi op 0% AG or
Gr ~.
Lian ul He:3 pi n
moi V pata =i Peo è;
29 Ai 1 2
x ah Oe ao nae
0045). ,

Ù te
Li

w”

è Ii
 i, n
Ar
i
 IN i 7 —
TC A i cd i |
IZ
oe Di x
AI
ay
ALvai
dee =) ee
Si ae VIA pur
II
\ n ie 5:
> là
 naand
Heer"auc
s assothers
eedevelopingalter-
critiques to

‘thaneve beforescm
a

ori teac : aesthe

- Giovanna Borradori
Massimo Cacciari
Umberto Eco
Aldo G. Gargani
Mario Perniola
Franco Rella
. Pier Aldo Rovatti
rank Severino
ianni Vattimo