FIRST SESSION

Theory and practice, then.

(It) must be done [Faut le faire].

When I say faut le faire, what am I doing?

Of course, or so it would seem, I am heaving a sigh of discouragement, discouragement tinged with ironic protest at the curriculum that requires us to deal, in one year and in the form of a seminar, with such a question, if that is what it is. As I do each year — but rest assured I won't take it beyond this year — I'll start by critically analyzing the situation that is imposed on us by inviting you not to be satisfied with critiquing it, in theory, but to try to transform this situation effectively, practically. No further in that direction.

But if you analyze the sigh that I let slip in a little more rigorously, if you analyze it beyond the sense of disappointed fatigue on my part that it may convey, beyond my admission of impotence and my refusal to deal with such a subject in these forms, if you consider the ready-made expression faut le faire, I say if you consider it, whereas you precisely cannot consider it, you can only understand it in a given situation, that is to say determined as an event, in a context. And according to the context, a context of a particular type, for there are types of context, and contextual variability is not absolutely empirical and atypical, it includes possibilities for regulation on the basis of type, if then you understand it in a context of a particular type there are at least two senses to the locution faut le faire in our language. It either means:

First emphasis; it will keep us here for quite some time.

1. It is not enough to talk about it, or to promise, or consider, look at, hear, or receive it passively, to talk about it, or think of it, it must be done, in other words there "must be practice." Theory is not enough, there must be practice. But you can already see the difficulty of doing — a difficulty connoted by the expression faut le faire, which always means "it's not easy" because it isn't enough to consider, look, hear, wait for, receive passively, be content to talk about it or think of it or intend it — it still must be done and that's more difficult, that's what is difficult. But this difficulty, though, is not only what is directly uttered by what I say when I say faut le faire, it is already within the difficulty of understanding (thinking, understanding, determining, considering) what I mean when I say faut le faire. You have seen — or heard — that even before knowing what doing [faire] means one knew that its sense, its meaning-to-say would be determined only in the context of an opposition: doing as opposed here to thinking, representing, there to looking, considering, or again to speaking, saying, and even in opposition to several sorts of saying, of language, language uttering what is or language uttering what will be, and what will be in the form of theoretical expectation or else in the form of a commitment or promise. "I am going to do it": it isn't enough to say I am going to do it, it must be done; but I am going to do it can itself be an expectation or a commitment; in saying I am going to do it, this seminar, I may be announcing that doing it is within what I can foresee, that it is merely to come, but I may also be announcing that I commit to doing it, by means of a promise and a contract. And even, added complication, saying that I intend to do it does not signify that I promise to do it; it's not the same thing, the same sense, the same intention, such that the utterance "I am going" to do it can signify a theoretical expectation, either an intention without commitment or promise, or else a promise. And one could still refine things much more, as we will no doubt do later. For the moment I am content to register that the "doing" of "must be done" includes, in addition to the difficulty that it states ("must be done"), the difficulty of understanding what it does in saying "must be done," doing being determined solely within an opposition; and to be opposite to thinking is not to be opposite to representing, or to looking, or speaking or saying, or expecting or promising, or being passive. Each time, in each instance of the opposition, doing signifies something else, and sometimes something else entirely. Not only does it signify something else according to whether it is opposed to thinking, or knowing, speaking, expecting, promising, etc., but it can on occasion signify one of those opposites opposed to another one. It is not enough to think it, it must be said, where saying comes down to doing, it is not enough to intend to promise, it must be promised where promising consists in doing, acting, producing, transforming, therefore, wherever there was only mute thinking or interior discourse or discourse that was theoretical, constative, , etc. That is in order to announce, in a somewhat jumbled way, the immense difficulty that lies before us, as a theoretical problem and/or practical task. For if one must know what is meant by thinking, representing, speaking, saying, intending, theorizing, speculating, promising, etc., in order to know what doing means, then we won't be able to avoid dealing with an enormous history that cannot be only a history of meaning or a semantico-philosophical one.

When I said that "must be done" determines its doing only by reference to an opposite, in the oppositional situation that places it in respect of X Y Z (thinking, saying, wanting to, intending, claiming, expecting, promising), I myself seemed to imply, given our context, itself determined by the program "theory-practice," not only that the word "theory" can, in decisive contexts, cover this or that point along the chain "think, say, want to, intend, speculate, promise," but more precipitately still I seemed to presume that doing<=>practice. Yet nothing is less simple and less evident. The semantic value of what is practical [du pratique] or of practice, indeed of praxis, supposing — this is purely hypothetical for the moment — it to be unifiable, such a semantic value cannot be accounted for simply by what one calls doing, even supposing that value of doing to be itself unifiable. Just as what is theoretical about theory can play along a scale [clavier] that goes from theorein as gazing, or (not the same thing) contemplating (privileging, as is all too easy today to state, or make of an affair of state [d'en faire état, ou affaire d'état], the metaphor of the gaze), well then, just as the theoretical can play along a scale going from the powerful optical or eidetic metaphor all the way to thinking, cognizance, knowledge, , discourse, language, science as opposed to action, intention as opposed to action, etc., so practice can play along a semantic scale going from the very rich semantic hub of the Greek praxis, already very enigmatic (as we'll see), all the way to values such as act, action, gesture (gaze?), transformation, operation, effectuation, execution, labor, production, technique (techne no doubt playing a very important role in this semantic history), etc. If one takes into account the fact that these two — what I have just more or less blithely called "these two" — scales combine their oppositions,...