has roused philosophers from dogmatic slumber ever since they began to speak their vernacular languages: What is going on with us today? Descartes and Kant understood philosophy as arriving at new and epoch-making ways of thinking nature. “Philosophy,” the greatest systematician will say, “is its era, seized by thought.”5 If the turns philosophy has taken in recent times—the historicist, linguistic, and interpretive turns—have indeed im plant ed it on yet another new terrain, then the starry-eyed gaze pretending to look at the world anew sheds light on the auto-da-fe of critical reason. Out of systematic freshness, or even analytical freshness in the Anglo-American6 sense, we forget to examine the ground under our feet. Topology, as we shall see, problematizes that ground which is the air in which we live.
Topology does this as an analysis of sites. It seeks to inscribe the “reality” that we, we moderns, fantasize in its relationship to the Greek and Latin “realities.” As I intend to practice it, topology makes use of both historical and systematic tools—a distinction that is of decidedly limited import.
Before turning to the historical, to the systematic, and to their conjunction in the topological, we need to say a word about the sense in which fantasms are what is in question. This sense is inscribed between Nietzscheʼs minimizing in junction and the following maximizing injunction of Aristotle: “Man lives as mortal. As far as possible, he should live as immortal”7 One would hardly know how to better formulate the traits of ordinary experience such as the analytic of ul ti mates seeks to extract them. First there is the immortalizing thetic attraction, then the with draw al that singularizes us. If it wants to be wary of subjectivist entanglements, this analytic will have to go to work on historically given sites. It will have to be linked with a topology of broken hegemonies, a topology that analyzes the legislating constellations to which the ultimates have given rise.
Hoson “as far as possible”—how far exactly?
On Hegemonic Fantasms
“Say ground. No ground but say ground.”
—S. Beckett8
The history I will attempt to retrace is the one in which the Aristotelian hoson was maximized: the history of norms. I understand this term in its strongest sense, the sense in which it names the authoritative representation that serves, during a given linguistic era, to constitute the phenomenality of phenomena and thereby to legitimize all theoretical and practical rules. In the normative sense, a fantasm cannot be exhausted in regulatory representations. It designates the sovereign principle to which the professional philosopher refers all laws of knowledge and acting, but which in turn cannot be referred to any thing else,9 the principle that serves as the ultimate reason for all generic principles, the trans-regional canon for all regional canons. This principle makes, absolutely though fantasmically, e pluribus unum—from many, one— not as does a major premise from which other propositions would follow, but rather as a burgeoning production center. Fantasms rule by authorizing not the deduction of a finite corpus of conclusions, but the indefinite association of representations that require that one follow them. Well, such representations are called laws. Hence if laws are measured against the fantasmic authority, then this fantasmic authority will be normative in the sense that one refers to it as to the law of laws.