A New Philosophy of Modernity and Sovereignty
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A New Philosophy of Modernity and Sovereignty

Towards Radical Historicisation

Przemyslaw Tacik

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eBook - ePub

A New Philosophy of Modernity and Sovereignty

Towards Radical Historicisation

Przemyslaw Tacik

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About This Book

Tackling important philosophical questions on modernity – what it is, where it begins and when it ends – Przemyslaw Tacik challenges the idea that modernity marks a particular epoch, and historicises its conception to offer a radical critique of it. His deconstruction-informed critique collects and assesses reflections on modernity from major philosophers including Hegel, Heidegger, Lacan, Arendt, Agamben, and ĆœiĆŸek. This analysis progresses a new understanding of modernity intrinsically connected to the growth of sovereignty as an organising principle of contemporary life. He argues that it is the idea of 'modernity', as a taken-for-granted era, which is positioned as the essential condition for making linear history possible, when it should instead be history, in and of itself, which dictates the existence of a particular period. Using Hegel's notion of 'spirit' to trace the importance of sovereignty to the conception of the modern epoch within German idealism, Tacik traces Hegel's influence on Heidegger through reference to the 'star' in his late philosophy which represents the hope of overcoming the metaphysical poverty of modernity. This line of thought reveals the necessity of a paradigm shift in our understanding of modernity that speaks to contemporary continental philosophy, theories of modernity, political theory, and critical re-assessments of Marxism.

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Information

Year
2021
ISBN
9781350201286
Edition
1

1

The Mirror Star

1.0 Modernity, like no other era, has a paradoxical status. On the one hand, there seems to be some working consensuses on when modernity began: the most serious candidate would be eighteenth century, with the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution,1 the French Revolution, the birth of modern subjectivity (Jean-Jacques Rousseau), individualism and human rights, secularization, nation-state and Immanuel Kant’s “Copernican Revolution.”2 On the other hand, such an easy list of historical breakthroughs does not seem to exhaust the specificity of modernity. Perhaps even it only whets our appetite. Modernity appears as an enigma, a yawning gap in the continuity of history, something which transcends all particular events we would like to link it with. Debates on the beginning and nature of modernity never end.
It seems, therefore, that there might be a structural mechanism which is responsible for modernity’s irremovable elusiveness. It can be found already in the beginnings of modern philosophy—in the miraculous epoch opened by Rousseau and Sade and closed by Hegel—namely, at the time in which its possibilities and blockades were being determined.

Kant: Stars, the law, and the remainder

1.1 History of modernity is sprinkled with philosophical dicta—well known, but even more misunderstood—whose almost ahistorical tranquillity contrasts sharply with stark brutality of events that they presage. One of these dicta was authored by Immanuel Kant just a year before the outbreak of the French Revolution. His Critique of Practical Reason, published in 1788, concludes with this famous passage, so mercilessly exploited by commentators:
Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the oftener and the more steadily we reflect on them: the starry heavens above and the moral law within. I have not to search for them and conjecture them as though they were veiled in darkness or were in the transcendent region beyond my horizon; I see them before me and connect them directly with the consciousness of my existence. The former begins from the place I occupy in the external world of sense, and enlarges my connection therein to an unbounded extent with worlds upon worlds and systems of systems [emphasis added], and moreover into limitless times of their periodic motion, its beginning and continuance. The second begins from my invisible self, my personality, and exhibits me in a world which has true infinity, but which is traceable only by the understanding, and with which I discern that I am not in a merely contingent but in a universal and necessary connection, as I am also thereby with all those visible worlds.3
Against all pseudo-philosophical daydreaming about the beauty and sublimity of the Kantian world, this piece grasps the new, modern terror and crystallizes it into the furthest and the most material of all metaphors, a metaphor of astronomical relation.
1.2 In this fragment, Kant portrays the universe as split into two seemingly irreconcilable sides. The first one (let us call it the outside) is constituted by “the starry heavens,” “der bestirnte Himmel.” These heavens are, in fact, “worlds upon worlds,” that is, boundless spaces of emptiness which always empty into an even greater void. The moment we think about it, we are lost, dwarfed by the incessant motion of spheres, whose terrifying magnitude once made Pascal tremble and Blanqui believe in sidereal eternity.4 But this picture is even more horrifying than the famous Pascalian “silence Ă©ternel de ces espaces infinis,”5 “the eternal silence of infinite spaces.” Pascal’s infinite spaces seemed to neighbor each other, being of the same level. Here, however, one infinite void is just a unit of a higher one. Infinities are built one upon another. As a result, the progression of empty, abstract, and lifeless spaces reaches a new dimension.
If physical metaphors are justified in this context, we could speak of a three-dimensional horror of mutually embedded voids. Pascal might have feared the infinity which opened up above his skull, but it was a mere infinity of his world, the world which still constituted a whole. Contrariwise, Kantian thought seems to open the third dimension, in which just one infinity is not enough. In Kant, there are innumerable infinities and even if we managed to cross the one we live in, we would only shift the level and perceive the infinite chain of infinities in which we are trapped. Thus, the heavenly emptiness we dread cannot be neatly opposed to our solid, earthly life. The infinity of infinities already took it all from within: we are always within it. Our world is no longer a tiny, but steady, island in the ocean of nothingness. On the contrary, it belongs to a complex system of mutually embedded infinities and, as such, offers no shelter.
Kant openly admits that we are always-already enmeshed in this terrifying chain of infinities: the outside “begins from the place I occupy in the external world of sense, and enlarges my connection therein to an unbounded extent with worlds upon worlds and systems of systems.” In other words, where I stand, the universe begins. Or rather, to put it more explicitly, I stand where the universe had already begun, ages ago, and thus deprived me of any solid ground. Thus, the outside has hollowed me out, I belong to it, I am out.
When did that happen? Has it always been like that and I have been just mistaken, lured by an illusion of unknown origin? Or was there perhaps a precise moment in which my solid ground has been undermined? Where does the Kantian “awe” stem from, if not from the discovery that I belong fully to the outside? Or maybe this awe is nothing but a tribute that the outside pays to itself, with me watching the scene with a paralyzed gaze? But if so, who am I? And what is my gaze, the only point which pierces the otherwise continuous tissue of the outside? All these questions resound with the echo of spectral figures of thought, desperately conceived to grasp perhaps nothing more than the experience of fundamental modern destitution: from Descartes’ malin gĂ©nie, through Marx’s mole of history, up to Heidegger’s Geworfenheit.
1.3 Yet, the outside is just one part of this universe: the other part is law. In Kantian thought, law acts as the inexplicable cut in the causal chain which imposes upon the natural stream of causes and effects a new beginning, an act based only on loyalty to duty. Law perforates the outside and renders it inoperative. Freedom, based on the sovereign act, in which law self-imposes itself, carves us out of the common causality. The outside cannot operate on me if I exert my freedom through the act of self-legislation.
In the first part of the above cited paragraph, the outside appeared to take our ground, or even worse: to have taken our ground in advance. But then Kant’s argumentation prepares a sudden miracle: law saves us. Contrary to all anthropocentric imagery, which stifles Kant’s notions like cotton wool of self-assuring pathos, this passage does not restore the dignity of human beings denigrated by the immensity of the universe. Law makes an incision in the continuity of the outside, just in the place in which we seem to find ourselves. Through this incision, law opens the abyss of human self-constituting—the abyss, in which we expect to find the grounds for validity of law, for spontaneity of action, for development of human history, but, in truth, in which we grope our way through the dark incomprehensibility of happening, through macabre ages of terror, utter subjugation, and cruel irrationality that constitute our real history. What Kant seizes as the phenomenon of law is, in fact, a much broader and ambiguous area of modern sovereignty.
If we wanted to run away from the overwhelming pressure of the outside, we would find ourselves in a different, yet symmetrical emptiness. The abyss of the universe was constituted by the infinite chain of infinities. However, the second one, the abyss of law, is structured analogically. Every act of self-legislation opens up an infinity of potential applications of thus constituted law; law cannot be exhausted in a singular act of applying it. Application of law always repeats itself, because its iteration is inscribed into its construction. Therefore, the dimension of law also constitutes an infinity (of acts of legislation) of infinities (of applications of each laws). Both abysses, in and above us, are thus infinities of infinities.
1.4 Both Kantian abysses seem mutually exclusive: once we focus upon one of them, it takes the whole ground except for a tiny remainder of the second one. The outside excludes law and vice versa. Consequently, both of them cannot be conceived of in the same dimension. The outside, if taken autonomously, absorbs all that exists—including us—except for the small domain of law, which rescues us from the voracious totality. Analogously, law—taken in itself—throws us into a dark space of self-constitution, in which the actual continuity of the outside loses all its power but does not disappear: it collapses into an inert residue of materiality. With the outside thus rendered inoperative, we would be totally overwhelmed by law if it were not for the tiny grain of matter which stays put. As a consequence, the outside and law never meet in their full forms. Whenever one triumphs, the other one must always collapse into a remainder, thereby giving way for the dimension of totality and simultaneously constituting its last obstacle.
Thus, Kant was one of the first to discover the incessant, terrifying throb which punctuates the history and thought of modernity, the “epoch” whose inner rhythm oscillates between the non-Whole and its tiny remainder.
1.5 The tension between the outside and law paved the way for future struggles of German Idealism. But if we look at his discovery with a clear eye—and some clarity might be reached when history holds its breath for a moment—we will see that it shifts the basic lines of previous, premodern ontology. Kant’s thought—despite his docile habitus—marks the irretrievable switch of paradigms from which a new, modern “ontology” arises.6
What are its traits? First, the universe becomes excessive. Nothing has its predetermined, tranquil place. All is in relation, in a restless grid of relations, constantly switching perspectives and attempting to gain the whole ground against the resistance of the remainder. In this sense, the universe becomes determined, at its base, by a political grid of forces. The political seems the utter, though essentially senseless ground for all sense. Just like space gives anchor to objects and allows to describe them in the most “neutral” way, so does the political become the ultimate common ground for things. As such, it is the basic fluctuating constellation of bare relations on the level in which all explanations lose their push.
Second, we are being thrown into a play of powerful forces which know us inside out. Nothing can separate us from them; it might be only one force turned against the other that gives a temporary shelter. It seems as if, deep inside, we have always already belonged to them—even if this primordial dependence is nothing more than a result of an act of destitution, whose construction makes us indebted to some vague, past era and thus creates the modern sense of historicity. If there is any “us”, it is a contingent intersection of the outside and law, nothing more than a place, which is repeatedly swept away by the tide of new forces gaining the upper hand. In “us,” being made up from two adjacent lacks—the lack in the outside created by law and the lack in law pierced by the resistance of materiality—the two infinities of infinities switch places.
Third, the world becomes utterly estranged from us, with infinity of infinities taking the place of celestial spheres and natu...

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