Kant on the Frontier

Philosophy, Politics, and the Ends of the Earth

Geoffrey Bennington

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780823275984
• eBook ISBN: 9780823275991
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory
• Index: Literature

Frontier: the border between two countries; the limits of civilization; the bounds of established knowledge; a new field of activity. At a time when all borders, boundaries, margins, and limits are being—often violently—challenged, erased, or reinforced, we must rethink the concept of frontier itself. But is there even such a concept? Through an original and imaginative reading of Kant, Geoffrey Bennington casts doubt upon the conceptual coherence of borders.

The frontier is the very element of Kant's thought yet the permanent frustration of his conceptuality. Bennington brings out the frontier's complex, abyssal, fractal structure that leaves a residue of violence in every frontier and complicates Kant's most rational arguments in the direction of cosmopolitanism and perpetual peace.

Neither a critique of Kant nor a return to Kant, this book proposes a new reflection on philosophical reading, for which thinking the frontier is both essential and a recurrent, fruitful, interruption.

1. The End of Nature

If the biblical theologian meddles with his reason in any of these tenets, then, even granting that reason strives most sincerely and earnestly for that same objective, he leaps (like Romulus’s brother) over the wall [so überspringt er . . . die Mauer] of ecclesiastical faith, the only thing that assures his salvation, and strays into the free and open fields of private judgment and philosophy. And there, having run away from the Church’s government, he is exposed to all the dangers of anarchy.

—Immanuel Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties

Natural science must not jump over its boundaries [muß sie ihre Grenze nicht überspringen] in order to bring within itself as an indigenous principle that to whose concept no experience at all can ever be adequate and upon which we are authorized to venture only after the completion of natural science.

—Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment

Displacing slightly the classical form of the question, let’s ask no longer “What is a frontier?” but “What is the nature of a frontier?” In a famous passage, Marx says that exchange must have begun in an external way at the frontier of natural communities.1

What is the relation between exchange, nature, and frontier (these are also the three key terms in Aristotle’s derivation of economics and chrematistics)?2 We would need to ask what a “natural community” might be and whether “natural” communities have so-called natural frontiers. We shall see that, as has become a truism, there are no natural frontiers, that what are called natural frontiers (shores, rivers, mountains) are named thus only by analogy with nonnatural frontiers, once they have been crossed.3 Only after the fact, after nature, does a “natural” frontier become a true frontier, nonnatural, instituted, therefore traversable. And yet, we shall see that in a deeper and more persistent sense, all frontiers can be called natural, in the sense that they are frontiers of nature, lines where nature stops, the point of transition or transgression at which nature turns into one or other of its others (culture, law, technē, politics, etc.). In this sense all frontiers are (on) the frontier of nature. Where there is a frontier, there is (at least one) nature.

So let’s displace our question again. How does a frontier happen to nature? Or, perhaps, how does a frontier return to nature? What is the event of a frontier? Here is a description of a frontier happening (or rather, but this is [in] its nature, precisely, its nature as returning to nature), not quite happening:

Remus, the story goes, was the first to receive a sign—six vultures; and no sooner was this made known to the people than double the number of birds appeared to Romulus. The followers of each promptly saluted their master as king, one side basing its claim upon priority, the other upon number. Angry words ensued, followed all too soon by blows, and in the course of the affray Remus was killed. There is another story, a commoner one, according to which Remus, by way of jeering at his brother, jumped over the half-built walls of the new settlement, whereupon Romulus killed him in a fit of rage, adding the threat, “So perish whoever else shall overleap my battlements.”4

For now, let’s take from this famous passage the idea that the frontier is drawn in the context of a prior violence or discord, or rather that tracing it involves its originary transgression—that the frontier, drawn against natural violence, arrives always too late not to be itself violent. Drawing a frontier always represents an act of violence in a context of violence (but the very concept of context presupposes that of frontier and so cannot explain it) and invites further violence: jealousy, mockery, revenge, threat, warfare.5

Here is another, more recent, description of a frontier happening (or rather, as always, not quite happening):

Wherever two regions are about to form a boundary [. . .], the third region [. . .] establishes a chain of outposts. In order that these outposts do not form bilateral borders with their neighbours, they in turn are surrounded by chains of islands in a structure which is repeated down to infinitely small dimensions [. . .]

What may seem almost impossible as a boundary between three “countries” can be extended without any mathematical difficulty to situations with 4, 5, 6 [. . .] competing domains. The boundary is made up entirely of points where 4, 5, 6 [. . .] countries meet.6

This passage comes from a popularizing book about fractals. Without addressing the specifically mathematical aspects of fractals,7 let’s note in this description the incautious mix of the language of nature and the language of politics: There is talk of “islands” but also of “countries,” of “competing domains” that have “neighbors.” Note also the whiff of a purposiveness (we shall see that there is no frontier and no nature without the question of teleology arising) in the phrase “in order that these outposts do not form.” Where does the competition come from, and what is the force that would prevent bilateralism in the name of a more complex plurality? No doubt we could describe the frontier between the natural and the political in fractal terms, but let’s beware of the more or less hidden metaphysics in such descriptions and of our desire to appeal to a “scientific” description as the final arbiter of all our problems.8 Nonetheless, fractal geometry will often return to give us precious analogies for thinking the structure of the frontier, up to the point when the structure of the frontier will oblige us to examine the structure of analogy itself.

It is, then, impossible not to talk about nature if we want to talk about frontiers. We proposed two apparently contradictory hypotheses about this: On the one hand, that there are no natural frontiers, and on the other, that all frontiers are natural or else of nature in the sense that every frontier would mark the spot where nature begins or ends. If we manage to hold these two hypotheses together (which we cannot do by simply leaving nature behind), we may be able to understand why nature turns out to be (especially in political philosophy, perhaps) such a critical concept (critical because always precritical, always awaiting decision and division, the krinein of the nomos). As we shall see, nature is what we find at, on, or in the frontier. The frontier comes down to nature, still belongs to it, because nature is what comes back at the frontier, returns to the frontier. The nature of the frontier is nature, and the nature of nature is to return at (on or in) the frontier.

So it is certainly not by chance that Kant talks a great deal about nature in the two texts we shall first be reading (and that will provide us with what those same texts would call a “guiding thread” for reading Kant more generally).9 For these two texts, as we shall see, are devoted to thinking the frontier or—this will be the whole problem—thinking frontiers in the plural. It would not be easy to extract from them a simple doctrine as to so-called natural frontiers. On the one hand, Kant recognizes that there are at the very least divisions or separations that seem to be quite natural—“The community of man is divided by uninhabitable parts of the earth’s surface such as oceans and deserts” (KPW, 106)—but immediately points out the means of crossing such boundaries or frontier-zones: “but even then, the ship or the camel (the ship of the desert) make it possible for them to approach their fellows over these ownerless tracts, and to utilize as a means of social intercourse that right to the earth’s surface which the human race shares in common” (KPW, 106).

This is part of a more general doctrine of natural providence, or at least of a quasi-natural providence, a doctrine carefully subdivided into three aspects and given the supplementary gravitas of Latin terminology.

This use of Latin is not at all insignificant in Kant and, in fact, engages with a whole politics of language in its relation to philosophy:

In the great wealth of our languages, the thinking mind often finds itself at a loss for an expression that exactly suits its concept, and lacking this it is able to make itself rightly intelligible neither to others nor even to itself. Coining new words is a presumption to legislate in language that rarely succeeds, and before we have recourse to this dubious means it is advisable to look around in a dead and learned language to see if an expression occurs in it that is suitable to this concept; and even if the ancient use of this expression has become somewhat unsteady owing to the inattentiveness of its authors, it is better to fix on the meaning that is proper to it (even if it is doubtful whether it always had exactly this sense) than to ruin our enterprise by making ourselves unintelligible.10

Kant returns to this issue, annoyed, in the preface to the second Critique:

I have no fear, with respect to this treatise, of the reproach that I want to introduce a new language, because the kind of cognition itself approaches popularity. This reproach with respect to the first Critique could also not have occurred to anyone who had thought it through and not merely turned over the pages. To invent new words where the language already has no lack of expressions for given concepts is a childish effort to distinguish oneself from the crowd, if not by new and true thoughts yet by new patches on an old garment.11

Kant’s irritation continues for a while. In a note called by the last sentence of this same paragraph, he claims to fear more than obscurity the misunderstanding of popular or ordinary expressions. He takes the example of his use of “permitted” and “forbidden” and as if by chance the problem of linguistic invention returns to illustrate how this “somewhat unusual” usage (which might have looked like a new construction) is not, however, “altogether foreign” to ordinary usage: “It is forbidden to an orator, as such, to forge new words or constructions; this is to some extent permitted to a poet” (CPrR, 9). And this can be further related to a note to §17 of the third Critique: “Models of taste with regard to the arts of discourse must be composed in a dead and learned language: the former, in order not to have to suffer the alterations that unavoidably affect living languages, which make noble expressions flat, common ones outmoded, and newly created ones of only brief currency; the latter, so that it should have a grammar that is not subject to any willful change of fashion but has its own unalterable rules.”12 These passages do not appear to be taken into account in Jean-Luc Nancy’s brilliant account of Kant,13 where there is, however, the following important reminder: “The language of Kant himself abounds in archaisms, in multiple borrowings, sometimes from dialectal usages, sometimes from the old language of t...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Preface to the English Edition
• Pre-liminary
• Prolegomena
• 1. The End of Nature
• 2. The Return of Nature
• 3. Rest in Peace
• Interlude: The Guiding Thread (on Philosophical Reading)
• 4. Radical Nature
• 5. The Abyss of Judgment
• Finis
• Appendix: On Transcendental Fiction (Grenze and Schranke)
• Index