What follows is the synopsis and chapter one of Carlos’s new book project, which is provisionally titled: Ulysses’s Mast: Prolegomena to a Post-nihilist Philosophy. The book argues that contemporary philosophy has lashed itself to Ulysses’s mast to sail past what Adorno called the coincidence of identity and positivity, being and plenitude. Ulysses’s mast thus symbolises in it the preference of contemporary philosophy for indetermination over being. Paradoxically, though, those who proclaim the primacy of the negative in the domain of pure reason tend to neglect the formal value of the negative in the realm of practical reason. As a result, the book argues too, contemporary philosophy seems prompt to fall under a spell which is not so much that of Odysseus’s Sirens as that of Aeschylus’s Furies redressed in modern costume, be it revolutionary or populist. How else, then, may pure reason and practical reason intersect today and contribute to design a new critical philosophy in a time in which most theoretical efforts are put instead in establishing new types of metaphysics (speculative realist, new materialist, and the like)? It is, above all, this question that the book – which combines contemporary philosophical inquiry with readings in the history of ancient and modern philosophy, Greek mythology, comparative anthropology, and the history of ideas – aims at responding.
Shortly we will be announcing, too, the publication of our forthcoming co-authored book, Dionysus and Apollo after Nihilism: Rethinking the Earth/World Divide, on which we have worked very intensely over the past two years and which should be out in the winter of 2023.
Ulysses’s Mast: Prolegomena to a Post-Nihilist Philosophy
C.A.S.
SYNOPSIS
Cicero’s comments on the Odyssey in De finibus led Dante to portray the former as a quest for knowledge, which was also, Cicero claimed, what the Sirens offered whoever sailed nearby their island. Nevertheless, following the Biblical-Eve prototype Dante transforms Homer’s Sirens into seductive women. None of this finds support in the original Greek text, though. For, to begin with, the Homeric Odysseus strives to forge his psyche, and while questioning the appearance of things, and procuring himself knowledge about it, is indispensable to such purpose, achieving knowledge per se is not Odysseus’s goal. Furthermore, what the Sirens do is less to communicate than to sing: they chant what Heraclitus calls the “immortal fame of mortals”; and if this proves problematic it is simply because their songs dazzle the hero who still strives to forge his psyche by offering him the taste of peace beforehand, for Odysseus has neither fallen in Troy, nor has he returned home victorious – not yet. That is, the Sirens do not communicate data relative to the Trojan war: they have knowledge of the deeds of those who fought in it, whose aristeia they sing; their mesmerising voices thus echo that of the Muse(s), yet they are not Muses, but chthonic creatures instead (daughters of Phorcys, a primordial sea god which Hesiod depicts as the offspring of Gaia and Pontus, according to Sophocles); no one has captured perhaps their dangerous ambivalence (which evokes the everyday experience of the Greek sailors, who knew that rocky shores produce a melodious wind but are highly dangerous on account of the shipwrecks they cause) better than Moreau in The Poet and the Siren. Lastly, the Sirens are bird-like creatures rather than femmes fatales, as Waterhouse visually recalls in Ulysses and the Sirens, where he replicates the iconography of a 5th-century-BCE Attic stamnos.
Admittedly, after Dante the next paramount moment in the reception of the Odyssey within Western culture is Joyce’s Ulysses, whose influence upon the consolidation of modernism – which Baudelaire, in turn, was the first to equate with the experience of “the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent” – can hardly be overstated. However, Joyce’s Ulysses and Homer’s Odysseus run perpendicular to one another: while the Odysseus’s original landscape is that of an untraced sea explored by someone capable of orientating himself by re-conducing to their being the appearances he comes across in his wandering through it, the characters in Joyce’s Ulysses are ultimately unable to orientate themselves in the overdetermined space of a modern city. Besides, it can be argued that Joyce’s Ulysses sails past (any) Ithaca, for Molly Bloom’s “yes” to her husband in the concluding lines of the novel is but a flashback that brings no conclusion, therefore, to the novel’s rhizomatic “wander lines.” It can be also affirmed, moreover, that with it Joyce’s modernism prefigures our late-modern shipwrecked condition, as not do we only seem to have sailed past any Ithaca: we seem not to be in position to sail anymore – not even to tell where our own shipwreck occurred in the first place. For it has been claimed that if, today, only the trace of our shipwreck can be evoked, it is to make the surface on which such trace might be located vanish at the beating of a siren’s tail – thus, e.g., Meillassoux. Hence, if Lacan once suggested that one of the remarkable effects of Joyce’s writing was the “undoing” of the “Borromean knot” that keeps together the “Real,” the “Imaginary,” and the “Symbolic,” it looks as though we have now sailed past its oblivion – or to inhabit, if the verb makes any sense, “the forgetting of the forgetting” (das Vergessen des Vergessens), to paraphrase Heidegger. Thus, too, Badiou’s vindication of modernity as “the acceptance of exile without return” and Brassier’s subsequent contention that philosophers “would do well to desist from issuing any further injunctions about the need to re-establish the meaningfulness of existence, the purposefulness of life,” which both put Dante upside down and turn Joyce’s playful sarcasm about how the figural (understood, contra Lyotard, as the coincidence of identity and positivity) eludes us into the far-more resentful view that all figures are made of scum.
In a way, then, it is true, as Ruiz Domènec underlines echoing Adorno, that the cultural history of the West is comprised between two Ulysseses: Homer’s and Joyce’s. I would slightly nuance this contention, however, and assert – as I do in this book – that it is comprised between Homer’s Odyssey, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the philosophical aftermath of Joyce’s Ulysses. For, after Nietzsche and Heidegger, and especially after Adorno, Sartre, and Lévinas, whose respective thoughts have variously shaped Deconstruction, Post-Structuralism, and through these, more recently, Speculative Realism and New Materialism, contemporary philosophy seems to have lashed itself to Ulysses’s mast to sail past what it portrays as the island of myth, i.e., beyond the coincidence of being and plenitude. In other words, Ulysses’s mast has ended up symbolising the preference of contemporary philosophy for indetermination over being, and therefore the primacy of the negative. Interestingly, though, this amounts to confuse the Sirens’ island with Calypso’s and philosophy – which begins with Anaximander’s saying, where the negative is the condition of possibility and the limit of being’s positivity, but does not replace it – with a delusion. The book’s first part (“On Pure Reason”), in which I analyse these and other related issues, concludes with this remark.
Paradoxically, though, those who proclaim the primacy of the negative in the realm of pure reason tend to neglect the formal value of the negative in the realm of practical reason. Accordingly, contemporary philosophy – I argue as well in this book – seems prompt to fall under a spell which is not so much that of Odysseus’s Sirens as that of Aeschylus’s Furies redressed in modern costume, be it revolutionary or populist.
To understand this it is important to reassess Montaigne’s cross-examination of the political virtues of the ancient Greeks (he mentions specifically Lycurgus and Plato) and the Tupinamba (who took part as French allies in the Royal Entry Festival of Henri II in Rouen in 1550 and, invited by Charles IX, visited Rouen again in 1562) in light of Montaigne’s own notes on the puzzlement shown by those whom, drawing on Seneca, he describes as “men fresh from the gods,” vis-à-vis French social inequality; notes which Rousseau would later use to write his Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men. Now, could rereading Montaigne’s text through the lens of Pierre Clastres’s political anthropology, whose theoretical premises go back to Lévi-Strauss’s ethnography and, through it, to Rousseau and Montaigne, help to clarify one of the terms of Montaigne’s aforementioned comparison? That is to say, might Clastres’s theory on the normative mechanisms that extramodern societies tend to implement to prevent the concentration of power, shed light upon the disapproving manner in which the Tupinamba perceived 16th-century French social division? I formulate this question at the outset of the book’s second part (“On Practical reason”).
Cleisthenes, Herodotus, and Plato – I further contend – provide the Greek counterpart to Clastres’s theory. Cleisthenes, with his view that a common nomos cannot be dependent on anyone’s authority, and his subsequent take on isonomia. Herodotus, with his parallel notion of isokratia and, a contrario sensu, his reports on Cyrus’s disparaging comments about the Greeks poleis and on the strict correlation of salutatory kisses and social status among the Persians. Plato, lastly, with his attempt at asking what political justice is, of which the Republic represents a complex literary cum conceptual experiment that, as it is customary in Plato, supplies no straightforward doctrinal response to the question it poses, but contributes to delimit its subject matter in terms that rule out any partisan definition of the concept of justice; Rosen, Martínez Marzoa, and Badiou have drawn diverse implications from it, which are worth considering and discussing. In all three cases, anyway, the formal value of the negative is stressed in the practical sphere.
Their differences notwithstanding – I go on to argue in conversation with Brooks’s, Duque’s, Geiger’s, and Ripstein’s recent interpretations of the political philosophies of German idealism – Kant and Hegel make a similar emphasis by making of the State neither an ideal nor a reality, but the idea (Hegel) of the formal condition under which the sphere of right may grant conviviality based on equal freedom (Kant), which mirrors, in turn, the very notion of practical reason – i.e., that of a purely rational self-determination – and lays the foundations of modern republicanism. Yet, this means that, to a certain extent at least, extramodern law, Greek isonomia, and modern practical reason stand in direct proportionality to one another; and therefore, to play with Deleuze and Guattari’s conceptual triad in Anti-Oedipus, that “savages” – in both the etymological and the Lévi-Straussian senses of the term “savage,” which denote the inhabitant of the “forest” (silva) and that which is “not domesticated for the purpose of yielding a return,” respectively – and “civilised men” are but the two sides of a single coin; in contradistinction, that is, to the “barbarians.”
I am aware that positing their reciprocal presupposition challenges a key axiom in today’s postcolonial theory, which – to keep with Deleuze and Guattari’s own conceptual personae – usually places “savages” and “civilised men,” and with good reason, on the opposite sides of the historical divide. Yet the meta-conceptual register opened up by comparative anthropology since the publication of Levi-Strauss’s La Pensée Sauvage cannot be overlooked either – I am thinking here, inter alia, on the works of Viveiros de Castro, Wagner, and Schrempp. In fact, at the expense of it anthropology would become impracticable qua science. Furthermore, only meta-conceptuality (å and x might be seen as being relatively equivalent to each other in their quality as variations of a non-preexistent A model) can assist cross-cultural comparison in compliance with the requirements of today’s ontological turn, which has restored the value of infinitesimal approximation, à la Leibniz, on behalf of epistemological openness and thus proven, as Lévi-Strauss once put it, that “identity is only a particular instance of difference in which difference tends toward zero.”
Yet, if “savages” and “civilised men” can be viewed as the faces of a Janus-like figure – of which it is difficult to tell, as Danowski and Viveiros de Castro observe, which one looks to the future and which one looks to the past – together they oppose the “barbarians,” as I have anticipated, when it comes down to discussing the essence and the limits of practical reason. Who are the “barbarians,” then? All those who argue for, and often impose by force, some sort of non-isonomic power. Roughly, for history is lavish in nuances: ancient tyrants, oriental despots, medieval princes, modern dictators, and the like. Given, though, that the present book focusses on contemporary matters, I am inclined to include in such category – in addition to any newly self-appointed oriental despots in both the East and the West – traditional Marxists with their dreams about political and cultural hegemonies, Post-Marxist left-wing populists willing to transform the political into the theatre play of a newly designed subject made of cumulative discontent identities, and far-right populists who take their folkloric political subject for granted instead. In short, all those aiming at substituting their own concept of peoplehood for the modern concept of republican citizenship, or at dangerously mixing the two. Thus my former contention regarding Aeschylus’s Erinyes; for the “spectral” subjects (to employ Marx’s own metaphor) of the modern “barbarians” express, if variously, a fundamentally irrational wrath.
A number of contemporary philosophers seem likewise ready to embrace, if not the wrath, at least the nostalgia for a bygone people, be it in the form of an ever-withdrawing community (Nancy) or under the auspices of a new social contract carried on by a new multitude capable of replacing the revolutionary subject of the past (Negri and Hardt). Yet there are other options as well, from the aesthetic rejection of politics prevalent among Speculative Realists to the machinic politics in lack of subject characteristic of New Materialism. I analyse them in the second part of this book. Examining how do those distinct options relate to the primacy of the negative in the domain of pure reason, as discussed in its first part, is, in turn, the purpose of its third and final part (“On Judgment”), where, relying on Guattari’s rereading of Greek mythology in Schzoanalytic Cartographies, I moreover explore if an altogether different and conceptually sound option of bridging the realm of pure reason and that of practical reason can be imagined today. Hence the Kantian echoes in the book’s structure. Besides, the book’s overall motivation is also Kantian, as I intend to sketch in it the prolegomena for a new critical philosophy – along the aforementioned line of reasoning, which goes from the shores of pure reason to those of practical reason and then loops back onto their joint being – in lieu of establishing the ground, as it has become somewhat customary today, for yet a new metaphysics.
The book thus combines contemporary philosophical inquiry with readings in the history of ancient and modern philosophy, Greek mythology, comparative anthropology, and, more broadly, the history of ideas. A double “Introduction” (formed by two independent chapters: 1, 2) introduces the contents of the book’s two major parts (“On Pure Reason,” “On Practical Reason”), which comprise seven chapters each (3–9, 10–16). As for the third part (“On Judgment”), its four chapters (17–20) serve as the book’s conclusion, although the recapitulation of the book’s argument is found in the last chapter alone. As for the coda, it puts all of it into the perspective of the two events that have inspired me to write this book – one literary, the other one biographical, to wit: Derrida’s attacks against Lévi-Strauss’s thought in Writing and Difference and Of Grammatology, which date back to 1966 and paved the wave for what is known as Post-Structuralism in the Anglo-American – Lévi-Strauss responded with a very brief piece published in 1967 in Cahiers pour l’Analyse – and the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, which found me in St. Petersburg, where I had moved to in October 2021 and I was about to start teaching at the European University – and whose underlying logic was made patent avant la lettre, I have repeated to myself many times since, by the Russian vandalisation of Kant’s statue in Kaliningrad (former Königsberg) in 2018. I am by no means comparing here Derrida’s philosophical strikes against Lévi-Strauss’s thought to the vandalisation of Kant’s statue in Kaliningrad; they are just the two events that pushed me to fancy writing this book, as well as – as I hope to show – the unrelated symptoms of two nonetheless related theoretical problems: today’s overrating of the role and the value of negativity in the domain of pure reason, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, their underestimation in the domain of practical reason.
John William Waterhouse, Ulysses and the Sirens