Enlightenment which is at stake when they add: “If that is no longer, all is lost.” Normative regimes in general would sink away with the primacy of the reflective subject. For want of social integration through consensus, everything is sinking away, they cry out in Frankfurt. Everything, that is to say, every form of a koinon which would generate obligations. Indeed, everything has sunk away, answered the genealogist of conscience in Paris not long ago: “The search for a form of morals which would be acceptable to everyone, in the sense that everyone should submit to it, appears catastrophic to me.”3 On both sides of the line of demarcation that appeared in the nineteenth century—a line which was to separate for some time a constructive and a deconstructive thinking—they are in agreement. The fate of hegemonies tout court is what is at stake in the hegemony of self-consciousness.
An attentive reading becomes necessary, for a thinking of the tragic differend might prove to be more faithful to the critical and emancipatory turn which established modernity than the theses of dialectical reconciliation and pragmatic consensus.
If indeed it did turn out that with the eclipse of referential self-consciousness, we experience the kenosis, the emptying out of any ultimate authority—if, pars pro toto, the “end of the subject” means the “end of hegemonies”—then it is not, properly speaking, a destitution that has been going on for a century and a half. To destitute an authority is always to oppose a No to a prior Yes, it is always a counter-thesis, an anti-authoritarian reaction. The counter and anti gestures necessarily operate right in the middle of that which they commit themselves to denying. No one is more solidly fi xated on the fi gure of the father, the male, or of principles, than he who claims to have freed himself from it. Thus one need only remember how the regimes of the one and nature gave way to the disparate which dislocated them, beginning with their respective establishments, to understand that their destitutions were always a phoenixʼs tale. From the ashes of the Greek hegemony, the Latin hegemony emerges, and from the ashes of the latter, modern self-consciousness emerges. There is a thetic relapse without which no new regime could be put into place (yet which does not take up the destituted positions in any synthesis).
On the other hand, if the contemporary age genuinely shows the exhaustion of normative positions, there can no longer be such a relapse in the thinking that gives in to it. No more can the investment be withdrawn from some ultimate authority and transferred to some safer place. What comes to pass for us is not the destitution of one fantasm after another, but a diremption that deprives us henceforth of any fantasmic recourse. By “diremption,” I only mean secondarily the will not to want to posit, which is only another posture of the will. “Diremption” means first of all an expiration has happened, the annihilation of normative acts that cleanses the tragic condition. If there is a task and a possibility of thinking today, it can only be that of letting normative consciousness collapse—not by putting a stop to philosophy so as to pass on, either to the science (the Anglo-Saxon temptation), or to literature (the French temptation), but by learning not to have wholehearted faith in semantic maximization itself (which is the temptation in any Western language).
How is one to live, under the sign of Proteus? How does one let the positions, which for our peace of mind focus on some particular focal sense of being, collapse?