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Afterword: From Divergence to the Common
To philosophise is to diverge
To diverge is not only to leave, to separate, to open up a withdrawal, to abandon the ways and themes of common conversation and even to become dissident. It is equally, in opening an elsewhere, to risk going where no path is marked out, where the ground has become uncertain, where the even and settled light, the light known by everyone, no longer penetrates as it did before. Can we hope to perceive something else from this withdrawal and through this retreat, according to a childhood dream that still persists, or at least to perceive in a different way? ‘And I’ve sometimes seen what man thought he saw … ’ (Rimbaud) – it is certain, in any case, that here we will face a solitude it would be impossible to avoid. Not a casual and more or less anecdotal solitude, but a solitude that is inevitable and constitutive as a principle, which arises from what began one day through dissociation, by and in thought, and that will no longer be effaceable. Perhaps through this divergence we have even started to become inaudible, and we shall need to make a lot of effort afterwards to get back to ordinary language, to reconnect with the habitus and conventions and hope to make ourselves heard once again so that, by lavishing so many pledges of good will, it will be believed that we have cast away at least a little of its strangeness.
Is this the heart – the factum and even the fatum – of any path of thought, or is it really only the case for philosophy? What seems certain is that philosophy made this its first act, to establish it as its point of entry, and that it draws its will from this resolution. This is its threshold. Parmenides, the father of philosophy – or in any case the first to have been made a ‘father’ so that ‘parricide’ could then be committed by diverging from him – posited it expressly as a condition of departure and point of access. The path sought and into which one ventured, that of ‘law and justice’, was accused of being ‘apart from people’, ‘off the beaten track’, ap’ anthrôpon ektos patou. The formula is even insistent in its intensification. It says both that one has to separate oneself from others and that one must emerge from the common rut, from the path that has already been cleared, from the patos. It is only by leaving this unreliable field of ‘opinions’, doxai, that we will be able to raise ourselves to the ‘unshakeable heart of truth’. Or perhaps it will be necessary to go back still further into this genealogy of divergence from which the philosopher would come? Perhaps the first philosopher is actually Ulysses, the Ulysses of the Odyssey who, in his drifting, wandered from one unknown place to another, running from divergence to divergence, before ‘returning’. He diverged from the very milieu of his companions while staying close to them: enjoining them to stop up their ears while attaching himself naked to the ship’s mast to expose himself alone, wanting (or being able) only to be alone when the dangerous revelation came.
To diverge from the language and culture in which one was born, at one moment, in that place and surroundings, and in that context where one started to open one’s eyes, to discover and learn and to form and constitute oneself into a ‘subject’, and to do so through a deliberate – or I’d say strategic – choice, as I did when going from Europe to China, is therefore, all in all, only to reiterate the very gesture of philosophy, its first act, but to do so afresh, by exacerbating its conditions so that in consequence there is nothing really anecdotal or ‘exotic’ about it. It is to retrace the steps of Ulysses, but by systematically making use of the possibilities and ambition of this divergence. It is, de facto, to emerge from the history of European philosophy, to extract oneself all at once from its debates and notions and to break with its filiation. But to what extent aren’t we always beginning to philosophise in Europe by going back into the history of the question, carried along by something that isn’t just etymology? Right from the start, it means breaking not only with its great philosophemes like ‘being’, ‘God’, ‘Truth’, ‘Freedom’ and so on, but also, more radically, with the language in which they have been articulated, extracted as one suddenly finds oneself from the Indo-European and its family atmosphere – from its family site. To diverge from European philosophy by way of the Chinese elsewhere – this elsewhere of language as also, for such a long time, of History, the two extremities of the great continent, China and Europe, having spent so long before meeting, at least as far as thought is concerned – is therefore to diverge from what has already been thought and sedimented in Europe (from which the bed of thought is formed, and which is therefore no longer being thought about; from what within it is so well assimilated, integrated and accredited that it makes us forget those choices that have been hidden away and the concealed biases, no matter what suspicions of philosophy have followed and have come to constitute ‘evidence’), therefore that one no longer thinks about: that one no longer thinks of thinking about.
But if I say that such a choice of divergence (by way of China) only exemplifies the inveterate gesture of philosophy, it is really because this work is already valid, in itself, in all respects, as on any scale. It is what is at work within the very history of philosophy and that renews it: each philosopher becomes a real philosopher to the extent that he separates himself from those coming before him or, to make the point more precisely, opens up a divergence in relation to them. This is even what is already valued with respect to oneself: to philosophise is nothing but mercilessly to distance oneself from what has been one’s own thinking, detaching oneself from what one has already thought to progress into what one’s thinking will become. This work of separation has nothing in common with any itching of originality but is established well beforehand, as an act of departure from what will subsequently be fixed as a critical operation, devoted to refutation, by which every philosophy is designated, or by which it frees itself and institutes itself. Whether each philosopher, according to the well-known phrase, will ‘say no’ to the one who came before or, as has been said time and again since (see Foucault or Deleuze), that to philosophise is ‘to think otherwise’, this is merely the consequence of it.
If to philosophise therefore means primarily and repeatedly to inscribe a break, to introduce a distance, to provoke an effect of dissociation and to engage a dissidence, it is because such a break, by being widened (and the more it widens), opens up fresh access to what is unthought. But if I insist on this primary gesture, it is also because I am wondering whether it may today be under threat – or perhaps it is already out of date? Today, it is constantly announced that, thanks to the convenience of the Internet deploying its all-embracing network and connecting everyone in ‘real time’, and thus also because of the indefinite multiplication of data, intelligence has now become collective, in such a way that we will think ‘together’ and no longer as each one of us in our own way. Today when, even when it comes to research in the ‘human sciences’ (very inappropriately when it comes to philosophy), it is endlessly repeated that any work can only be conducted, and validated, within a team, and that the figure of the solitary seeker is to be condemned, I wonder if a thought that diverges will even be tolerated? Yet, at the same time, to protest against ‘unique thought’ has become an all-pervasive theme, itself repeated to the point of tedium ... But will we be able to take heed of this if we are no longer able to leave it, to begin a withdrawal, to abandon established questions (those that appear to be obvious), to dissociate ourselves; or, to put it in a positive way, if we do not know how to open up, to explore a way into, the place where the terrain is no longer recognised, whose path is no longer taken (and is the path even still there?), and where the common light no longer penetrates, if we do not know how one evening to leave, to leave alone (disengaged and disconnected), facing the solitude and moving away to who knows where? This is what to ‘diverge’ really means.
The well-known unknown
But what should that from which philosopy each time diverges as it finds a new departure generally be called? What must it tear itself away from because thought sinks in it from the outset? It could be called, following Hegel and Nietzsche, who treated it in unison, although each in their own way, the ‘well-known’. We need to take apart this illusion: what is close at hand and familiar, Nietzsche said, gives the irresistible impression of being what is most easily accessible, although this well-known is only the reflection of those of our beliefs and mental habits that have become fixed. ‘What they call the known’ is the ‘habitual’, yet this habitual is what is precisely most difficult to know, in other words to consider as a problem: as an unknown, far away and external thing, and it is what needs to be discovered instead of being taken for granted. Or, as Hegel said, the well-known is precisely ‘unknown because it is well-known’, weil es bekannt ist, nicht erkannt (see the Preface to the Phenomenology). Actually, it is not even ‘recognised’, er-kannt, due to the fact that it thereby causes us from the start to tip into the security of what we think we know, without even beginning to think it: to think that there is something there to be thought. Similarly, seeing in it only a support to enable us to go further, we hasten to stride over it.
It is said, with a wisdom that is on the whole commonplace, that we should not simply be surprised by what no longer surprises us, which is also referred to as the familiar. But that thought, all thought, at the same time as it becomes implanted (by the very fact that it has become implanted), is deactivated. It gets bogged down in (or rather due to) the very thing that has instituted it: as soon as it has become our representation of things, Hegel said that the mind believes it has finished with it. Worse still, it believes, with no further distrust, that it can be used as a tool. This means that the mind henceforth treats what has ‘immediately’ come to be imposed on thought as common categories and that it suspects neither its genesis nor what it contains that is unthought. In passing, Hegel opened up from such categories a list of terms that had become static, those around which European thought then did no more than turn – but, as is said, ‘turn in a circle’ and, therefore, to do so rather in vain. These are the couplings of ‘subject’ and ‘object’, ‘God’ and ‘nature’, or ‘understanding’ when faced with ‘sensibility’, and so on. The discourse of philosophy is then able to come and go between these terms as often as it likes and without any longer knowing how to move them. They have become pillars between which the ‘movement’ of thought circulates, but it no longer shakes them and does no more than evolve at the level of their ‘surface’, Oberfläche, each person believing that he is then able on every occasion to verify them directly from their representation and apart from their relevance because he doesn’t have any distance from which to question them.
Yet how can we hope to have control over this well-known unknown, which has become immoveable, since it is from this that we think? If European thought is fundamentally marked at the intersection of these terms – ‘terms’ also meaning a place to stop – what obliqueness, or rather what cunning, is to be found in order to start ‘prising’ ourselves away from them? To go to China, to find an elsewhere of thought, is a strategy the mind needs in order no longer to submit. For what we find there is a thought as elaborate as ‘ours’ (in Europe), but without there being any suspicion of influence or contamination between them: it is an elsewhere that doesn’t belong to the system of alphabetical composition, and one whose writing responds to the other possibility, which is ideographic rather than phonetic. It is an elsewhere which has not spoken about ‘being’ and has therefore not conceived of the ‘question’ of Being and has not had to posit (or prove) the existence of ‘God’, and which, without having disregarded the divine, has not had to ‘deal with God’, which has not made ‘truth’ the pledge and the criterion of thought, which has not developed a thinking about the subject whose first attribute would be freedom, and so on. This is the strategic choice that I made in finally trying to diverge myself from this well-known unknown. But what relation exists between all of these pillars we see of ‘Being’, ‘God’, ‘Truth’, ‘Freedom’, and what edifice do they support? Without our being aware of it, won’t all of our thoughts be consigned to the same boat?
Divergence versus difference
Yet it will first of all be necessary, in order to approach the question, to set out a fundamental distinction, without which the undertaking would be futile – an undertaking which one suspects would immediately be exposed to both turmoil and criticisms from all of those who refuse to move even slightly from what is ‘well known’ in thinking. Indeed, it is the notion of difference that is ordinarily invoked between these two ways of thinking – that is the Chinese and the European. Will this be enough? Or won’t it straightaway betray the oblique strategy that I’ve made a start in putting forward, due to the perspective it requires and notwithstanding the banality of its use? If I’ve spoken of ‘diverging’, it is because divergence isn’t difference. What is the ‘difference’ between divergence and difference? Further on, I will put the ‘divergence’ between them to work. In order to make a start let’s therefore say that, if divergence and difference both have separation in common, difference marks a distinction, while divergence opens a distance. Hence, difference is classificatory (in operating through resemblance and difference) at the same time as being identificatory. According to Aristotle, it is by going ‘from difference to difference’, and doing so as far as the final difference, that the essence (definition) of the thing is reached. In contrast, divergence is a figure. It isn’t identificatory but exploratory, or I’ll call it heuristic: the question is thus no longer what the thing ‘is’ in its singularity, due to its difference(s), but ‘how far’ the divergence takes it as it overflows the norm. Not being classificatory, the divergent is therefore a figure that produces not an arrangement, as difference does (difference is really the tool of typologies), but what I’d conversely say is a disarrangement (as the French say: to ‘create a divergence’, when speaking about language or behaviour). In this sense, divergence is opposed to what is expected, to what is ordinary and conventional – or let’s now say to what is ‘well known’.
From this, it will be deduced that, while difference serves description, proceeding through analysis (already the diairesis tôn eidôn διαίρεσις τῶν εἴδων of the Ancients), divergence initiates prospection. Divergence envisages – it ‘sounds out’ – the extent to which other paths can be opened up, and while a difference determines itself (which marks its limit), a divergence explores. Yet from this difference of operations, we can distinguish the advantage that can respectively be derived from them. The operation of difference, as it arises from a neighbouring genre in which it distinguishes one species among others, serves to establish a characteristic from this specificity, while that of divergence, through the evident distance, holds in tension what it has separated. But what does it mean to ‘hold in tension’? In the case of difference, once it has been recognised, each of the terms that have been distinguished are enough, since they are and remain flatly in their place, wedded to their specificity, while in the case of divergence each of the separated terms remains open to the other through the distance – the gulf – that appears: instead of each of the separated terms remaining in their en-soi, finding their essence in it, as in difference, it is by measuring themselves against the other, by remaining, so to speak, (sus)pended from it, that the divergence is appreciated. It is through the other, in accordance with it, that this ‘through’ is grasped by a divergence that remains active.
This enables us to understand why the fate of difference is linked to thinking about identity. In fact, it arises from it in a double sense: when it began, it assumed a common genus, identified as such, whose specification it marks, and in its aim or its destination, upon its arrival, it leads to the isolation of an identity, fixing its essence as a thing – in other words, giving it its definition. That such a difference would henceforth be presented as initial, as linguistic minimalism has already done for some time now, and even that it no longer has to be coupled with resemblance (the linguistics of this, as we know, having nothing more to do), the fact remains that the determination of such a difference is still sustained, and both founded and justified, by a concern with identification. The fact that one element would no longer have existence except in the name of a difference, or that it would no longer be isolated from the property other than by the establishment of differences – and no longer the inverse, as the classical schema (of metaphysics) would have liked – doesn’t preclude the fact that, in this structure or system, the relation of difference, henceforth placed ab initio, still has the function of characterising or specifying – it knows no other end than knowledge. Confronted with this, divergence allows us to emerge from this perspective based on identity. It reveals what I would describe in an overflowing of identity as ‘fertility’, which allows us to abandon the point of view of knowledge so as to be understood as a resource of thought.
The fertility that is uncovered by divergence is in fact twofold. First of all, the fact that the inclines of the divergence continue to be turned towards one another, being maintained in a reciprocal apprehension instead of each of them having withdrawn into their own specificity, means that they work between themselves as they find out about one another through each other. Since they do not find an essence in themselves, they contemplate each other only through their relation. In other words, if the divergence is working, or if it operates, it is in the distance it brings into focus and which resists any future closure: the divergence opens a between as it places what has been separated in tension. The divergence isn’t analytical, as difference is, but, by widening (the more it widens), the divergence is an intensive. If difference also establishes a relation, then each of its terms goes on its way alone and it isn’t aware of the fertility of this between which is what generates intensity. Divergence, on the other hand, releases possibilities about which one wonders, amazed and intrigued, how far they might go. They overflow from what was previously envisaged and even from what could be imagined. Pushing the boundary markings aside, ...
