Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Elizabeth Rottenberg is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at DePaul University. She is the editor and translator of Negotiations: Interventions and Interviews, 1971-2001 by Jacques Derrida (Stanford, 2001) and the translator of Friendship by Maurice Blanchot (Stanford University Press, 1997).

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INHERITING THE FUTURE

Stanford University Press

Contents

Note on Sources and Key to Abbreviations and Translations.....................................................................xiiiPrefatory Note................................................................................................................xixIntroduction: Of Human Bondage................................................................................................1 1 The Legacy of the Future: Kant and the Ethical Question...................................................................21 2 Freud: When Morality Makes Us Sick: Disavowal, Ego Splitting, and the Tragedy of Obsessional Neurosis.....................51 3 Flaubert: Testament to Disaster...........................................................................................88Postscript: Last Words 1......................................................................................................24Notes.........................................................................................................................135Works Cited...................................................................................................................165Index.........................................................................................................................171

Chapter One

Kant and the Ethical Question Ne pas avoir choisi sa libert-voil la suprme absurdit et le suprme tragique de l'existence, voil l'irrationnel. -(Emmanuel Levinas, Totalit et Infini)

Invitation

There is a much noted strangeness about Kant's invocation of Copernicus in support of his own revolutionary turn in the Preface to the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason. The reference to Copernicus is strange, so it is argued, because of what appears to be Kant's anthropocentric (or geocentric) fallacy. As Freud makes clear in another revolutionary context, the name and work of Copernicus signify for us the end of an illusion; they mark, in Freud's language, the final and decisive break with the narcissistic presumption of the earth's central and stationary position in the universe. Troubling and strangely incomprehensible, therefore, becomes Kant's appeal to a radical decentering of the universe when his own analogy is made in view of a no less radical, transcendental recentering of human knowledge in its a priori conditions of possibility. Missing from Kant's revolutionary perspective, it would seem, is the cosmological turn of Copernicus. Transcendental idealism would not be a Copernican change in point of view, in other words, because its orientation remains abidingly human.

But perhaps the trouble lies in our not being troubled enough. Perhaps, on the contrary, it is we who should be more cautious, more tentative in our judgment, more distrusting of our senses when an essential feature of Copernicus's "change in point of view [Umnderung der Denkart]" (B xxii) is its capacity to venture forth against the senses-"auf eine widersinnische ... Art" (B xxii). Can we be so certain, in other words-given our natural tendency to laziness and inertia (indeed to narcissism)-that we, like those thinkers who "entangle themselves to the point of absurdity in Tychonic cycles and epicycles" (SF 149; 83), have not remained fixed in our "way of explaining appearances" and in our original "Standpunkt" (SF 149; 83)? Could it not be that like these thinkers-"otherwise not unwise" (SF 149; 83)-we too have obstinately refused to assume the implications of a radical change of perspective, that we too have missed the revolution?

What if Kant's most revolutionary turn were not to be located in his Critique of Pure Reason? What if, furthermore, this revolutionary turn were the one in which we were not only implicated but newly implicated? What if, in other words, we played a necessary role in the emergence of what is distinctly Kantian about this revolution? What if we were not simply the passive recipients but also the acting heirs-a passivity that would not be incompatible with freedom and autonomy-of a legacy that was itself radically ethical in nature? Such, I will suggest, is the properly Kantian (Copernican) revolution: a turn that is no longer an attempt, even a revolutionary one, to make possible (or conceivable) that which was formerly impossible (or inconceivable) but rather a shift in the notion of possibility itself. This shift introduces, I will argue, a condition of possibility that is distinct and inseparable from an epistemological condition of possibility, on the one hand, and from a practical condition of possibility on the other. For what we will see emerge is a passage (which has nothing to do with the aesthetic), the irreversible passage from speculative "sources of cognition [Erkenntnisquellen]" (B xxvi) to non-speculative or practical "sources of cognition"-a passage or transition that belongs thus to neither realm exclusively. As such, it is a passage that is neither theoretical nor practical (it is not practical reason itself because practical reason exists independently of any critical or epistemological examination of it: indeed it is found in the most ordinary human reason according to Kant); rather it is equally poised between both. Furthermore, it is to such a possibility of passage, I will claim, that we are called on to respond. We are "summoned [aufgefordert]" (B xxi), in other words, against the very nature of our representations, "auf eine widersinnische, aber doch wahre Art" (B xxii), against the very modality of possibility; we are being called per impossibile to a possibility beyond theoretical and practical possibility, which, it will turn out, is nothing less than the possibility of the future. Like the "invisible, world-binding force" (B xxii, modified) of the Newtonian attraction that "would have remained forever undiscovered" (B xxii) had it not been for Copernicus's daring hypothesis-Kant's revolution opens a space for future revolutions. But it does something more as well: and it is "this something more [dieses Mehrere]" (B xxvi) that makes the space left "empty [leer]" (B xxi) by speculative reason not a blank but already a bequest and thus already the possibility of the step beyond.

Thus, besides the perhaps inescapable risk of oedipal overzealousness in accusing Kant of an anthropocentric "fallacy"-a rather minor risk if one is to judge by the unrestrained tones of his accusers-there lies, I will suggest, the risk of skirting an ethical revolution (a revolution that takes place without violence, without hostility) whose emergence on the scene may bespeak an anthropotropism far more revolutionary and decentering than what has yet been understood under the name "Kant."

Laying the Groundwork

THE THREAT OF HETERONOMY

In the Second Section of the Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, written in 1785, one finds an argument structured very closely along the lines of the turn that Kant will later associate with the name Copernicus. In the same way that it is impossible in the epistemological realm to explain the possibility of a priori knowledge if one assumes that knowledge must conform to objects, "so too, in the practical context, one cannot explain the possibility of a categorical...