Who is we?

"...WE must step into its pace and be the Notion which develops and fills out what is contained in the result. It is through awareness of this completely developed object, which presents itself to consciousness as something that immediately is, that consciousness first becomes explicitly a consciousness that comprehends its object" (pg. 180)

I think, Tom, this is what you were talking about with regard to "us" nudging consciousness along. I think this "we" is the same "us" referred to on the page before: "For us, this object has developed through the movement of consciousness in such a way that consciousness is involved in that development [this involvement I think refers precisely to this 'nudging], and the reflection is the same on both sides, or, there is only one reflection."
In this, the Quantum Leap reading of the Phenomenology, the future of consciousness (us) is always ensuring its own possibility by revisiting its own past development. In short, it is always actively going back and making what is necessary for it itself to exist.
It always seems to step in on one side of a reflection - and this reflection is usually the necessary "doubling" that initiates a dynamic alternation of difference and identity (as you said at the end of your last post). I will try to find more and better examples of this in the future. I know it sounds very speculative.
And, in fact, I am mostly inclined to read this way because of Heidegger: "Yet is the absolute really actual in the Phenomenology of Spirit? If so, then the absolute must be actual before the beginning of the work...Does the problem not become simply the executing and reexecuting of the [Quantum!] leap?" (pg. 149, Lectures on Phenomenology)

Talk 6/15/06

So I wanted to quickly speculate on a couple of mysterious points related to the rehabilitation of the wheel within the framework of autoimmunity that Derrida sets up in the first chapter of Rogues. And I wanted to do it basically through a linking up of some very powerful concepts that Derrida brings up almost as a sort of shorthand, these are the notions of the metaperformative and of supersoverngty and then sort of drops without mentioning them again. I wanted to center these links and frame them as an attempt to achieve the mystery marriage of St. Catherine (perhaps ridiculously) to the baby Jesus. And then Maude’s going to do a quick thing on the thinking of Islamic fundamentalism as rogueish. So basically starting with the story of St. Catherine: she converted sort of the entire roman imperial court to Christianity under Maximillian and Maximillian pronounced that she should broken on the wheel (an image which is immediately important for derrida, although he does not mention st. Catherine, “The scene of torture was something else; I would compare it to being tortured on the wheel, since it too takes the form of a machine in the form of a circle, indeed a hermeneutic circle. Tied to the machine, bound hand and foot, I would turn, I would be exposed to a series of blows. Quartered.) The emperor is not able to carry out the sentence, for every time Catherine touches the wheel it shatters and disintegrates before her fingers. SO they use a sword instead and for some reason that works. St. Cathy more or less by a sort of act of divine violence against the wheel basically destructures the right of the powerful sovergn to be right, and thus places herself in so high an ontotheological position as to allow her to marry God. Derrida says there is always a wheel in torture. St. Catherine’s obliteration of the wheel rareifies the terrifying autoimmunity of the encircling violence and an insistent repetition, a relentlessness, the turn and return of the circle, leaving only the pure martyrdom of death, apotheosis, and marriage to the messiah. By breaking the wheel that would break her, she frees it from its relentless sovreinty, and appropriately, ever after, is cited as one of the fourteen most helpful saints in heaven, as the patroness of wheelwrights and anyone else whose trade depends on the wheel.
The question of return, of repetition, is immediately the play of autoimmunity involved in the notion of democracy. When considering democracy, when enacting it and most of all when defending it, one is always on the wheel, and involved in the torsion and alternation of an essential self-betrayal, and a becoming other. Democracy, derrida says, is always becoming not-democracy in order to defend itself – always turning on itsel f and attacking itself in the name of its own defence. While at the same time democracy’s essence is always to protect itself from its own self-negation – by negating itself. So Derrida gives the example of the 9/11 terrorists and how American democracy produced them and destroyed itself by immunizing itself against the democratic threat that it produces against itself. In this way, democracy’s essence is counter-essential: to always be what and where it is not, to declare its sovergn non-essential law and territory and then to find itself removed from itself. Again, another torture image from Italy, which their quite good at, of Titian’s Flaying of Marsyas, wherein Marsyas, for exceeding himself and his station by beating Apollo in a music competition, is literally skinned alive crying “why remove me from me?” Quid me mihi detrahis?
The question obviously becomes, for derrida, if democratic autoimmunity and the return of the wheel are inextrincibly linked by the self-same fiction of autoaffection, are both the wheel and democracy doomed to the tyrannical and even torturous return of ipseity, of relentless repetition? But even if we recognize in this wheel not the return of the same or of the qualitatively equal, noting that derrida states that even the notion of the equal is never equal to itself, has never happened the same way twice, and can never return, but an auto-immunity which is not quite truly auto, how does such a wheel become free and how can it then free democracy from the auto-immunity while at once preserving its essential betrayals, or to return to the central paradox, how does that which was always already aporetic become truly, ethically, justly or freely aporetic except by the betrayal of the very criteria we hope to establish by asking this question? So it is a question of how to find a freedom for the wheel which does not just free itself by betraying itself, but one which frees its circular motion from its winding axis and lets it wander? And I just want to hint that part of the answer to this would lie in what derrida calls the metaperformative, which he distinguishes from the constative, the non-performative, and the performative, First, a critique of the “pure” performative as the constitutive logic of the democratic wheel of autoimmunity, as the freeing power that jealously demands its own sovernty and proper spaces: (152) Now here a little earlier is the thought of something neither performative nor non-performative (91) and finally the location between and away from these of the metaperformative “This indecidiblity is , like freedom itself, granted by democracy and it consitutues I believe the only radical possibility of deciding and making come about performativley, or rather letting come about (metaperformativley). This metaperformative seems nothing less than the thought of a free wheel, democracy not bound on the axis of autoimmunity, a new re-public which frees up the very discretionary boundries of the public, which lets free rather than performativley freeing. “yes for democracy opens public space, the publicity of public space, by granting the right to a change of tone, to irony as well as to fiction, the simulacrum, the secret, literature, and so on. And thus to a certain non-public public within the public, to a res publica, a republic where the difference between the public and non-public remains an indicidable limit. “This metaperformative freeing which is in fact a letting be free describes nothing less than the task of republic or res-publica as spatializing lovingly and ethically. So as a notion of spatiality that constitutes world, the very spatiality of the wheel is changed in its freeing from the ipseity of the performative, by freeing the wheel from its axis and letting it travel freely through spaces which are both public

Talk - 13/05/05

So the research I want to introduce today is centered around “peritrope,” of which you can see a very breif definition on the first-page of the handout, which I will just quickley read out:

Peritrope was known for many centuries primarily as a tool for refuting ancient skepticism (in Sextus Empiricus, Avicenna, and Thomas Aquinas, for example). If I make the assertion, “There is no truth,” then you can respond using peritrope by posing the rhetorical question “Well, then, isn’t that true?” It is often known as the accusation of ‘self-refutation.’ The word itself is Greek for "turning around".
First formally identified by Sextus Empiricus in a discussion of Socrates’ refutation of Protagoras, Peritrope has a long and surprisingly contiguous history in philosophy. Since peritrope is, put simply, the accusation that a philosopher has retained what he has disavowed in and by the disavowal itself, peritrope has an immediate bearing on all questions concerning the possibility of any totalized overcoming or transcendence in general. Despite this, peritrope has only received limited academic attention in recent years (mostly in the work of Barbara H. Smith, Carl Page, and Myles Burnyeat).
“a mess of an article on an idiocyncratic non-topic”

Idiosyncratic non-topic, although meant to mortally wound my article, actually goes a long a way toward developing a description of something which, though it remains itself, is at work in so many essentially different ways throughout the history of philosophy, that it can hardly be said to be a topic at all.
So you can see that immediatly the issue of the clarity or lucidity of the concept of peritrope is already at issue. But, at very least, it seems at first, peritrope must be a concept. But from the start in Sextus Empiricus, peritrope was never part of the kind of philosophy that dealt with concepts. So is it a rhetorical device, is it an idiosyncratic non-topic? This raises the question of whether the vocabulary of philosophical ‘concpets’ Ãis appropriate to a subject such as peritrope with such an enormous variety of historical incarnations and appearances. But, to complicate matters, there are moments in the history of philosophy where peritrope is treated as a kind of plain old analytic concept, as in the work of Myles Burnyeat, but there are other moments when it is literally a bodily experience,w where it is the only thing that can exorcise the malignant deceiver God from the dream of rationality, as in the Cartesian Cogito.
But just the same, as I said, it is there with unmistakeable lucidity in the earliest sceptical writings, not as a dead concept but as a living trope or a mode of being, and, most importantly for this phase of my reasearch, as the point of departure of a therapeutic method for eliminating anxiety that accompanied melancholia. (for Deleuze/ Derrida) My reasearch seeks to trace the appeareances and behaviors of peritrope from a cathartic departure point for scepticism, through its rol Êe as a defence of christian faith, to its appearance as the gauranteur of modern subjecthood in the Cartesian Cogito. Today I just want to talk a bit more about the semi-originary therapeutic role it played in ancient scepticism, to talk about some of the issues I’ve been working on recently.
For Sextus Empiricus, a Greek Alexandrian physician and the only sceptic who left a comprehensive account of his system, pyrrohnian scepticism only really gets off the ground when it turns from an interrogation of our admitidly dim sence-perceptions to a self-interrogation wherein doubt and scepticism themselves are overturned in an act of peritrope. From Outlines of Pyrrhonism, “Even in professing sceptical sayings regarding the doubtful, such as “Each thing is no more this than that” or “I determine nothing,” the sceptic still does not dogmatize. For, whereas the dogmatist lives as if his dogmas were absolutley real, the sceptic does not deliver his sayings in any absolute sence; for he knows that the saying “All is false” speaks of itself just as it s peaks of everything else, as does the saying “Nothing is true,” so the “No more” saying is itself “No more” this than that.”
The ou mallon formula is the central trope of skepticism at the time of Sextus Empiricus. Its translation and precise meaning are already at this stage at issue. Ou Mallon is the sceptical slang by which one brushes away not only all dogmatism, but the scepticism as well which calls dogmatism into question. At this point, not only sence perception and objective reality are called into doubt, but the fainomonon of skepticism itself as it flourishes in thought. The skeptic herself is immediatly and deliberatley displaced, and becomes an “object” of skepticism. No longer a beleiver in skepticism, she becomes a skeptic, in practice and in person. At this moment of thought where epistemology seems to decisivley fail, the goal of the philosophical logos itself switches from the uncovering of dogmatic truths through critical doubt (associated with the peripatetics) to an unending ther apeutic practice wherein doubt and thinking are not seen as tools for the extraction of essences (diabebaioumenos). In peritrope, when skepticism casts itself aside, i.e. when it becomes skepticism, when the doubter’s doubt is doubted by the doubter, what emerges from this reflexivity is not as we might expect the self-certainty of the Cartesian Cogito, but a hollowed out subject who no longer posesses the capacity for the kind of dogmatic critical doubt which does not also doubt itself.
Now, the larger project of skepticism is to deliver us from anxiety of human existence, through this suspencion of judgement (epoche) to a non-state of the soul known to the greeks as ataraxia, which has been translated over the centuries as quietude or freedom from worry. But the process described above is likened by Timon among other sceptics to the purgative cures associated with the treatment of melancholia. Fear and anxiety in Hypocrates and Galen are treated primarily as symptoms of melancholia, and cannot be directly treated apart from it. Scepticism, then, in its peritropic moment, tries its purgative method directly against the symptom, which at once reframes it as an ailment or cosmic imbalance. THis description of the process is from Diogenes Laertius:
Also the expression, "Every reason has a corresponding reason," &c., does in the same manner indicate the suspension of the judgment; for if, while the facts are different, the expressions are equipollent, it follows that a man must be quite ignorant of the real truth.

Besides this, to this assertion there is a contrary assertion opposed, which, after having destroyed all others, turns itself against itself, and destroys itself, resembling, as it were, those cathartic medicines which, after they have cleansed the stomach, then discharge themselves and are got rid of.
Diogenes Laertius

But this description of scepticism is directly challenged by the peripatetic philosopher Aristocles:

'It is altogether a silly thi ng, when they say, that just as cathartic drugs purge out themselves together with the excrements, in like manner the argument which maintains that all things are uncertain together with everything else destroys itself also. For supposing it to refute itself, they who use it must talk nonsense. It were better therefore for them to hold their peace, and not open their mouth at all,

'But in truth there is no similarity between the cathartic drug and their argument. For the drug is secreted and does not remain ˇ in the body: the argument, however, must be there in men's souls, as being always the same and gaining their belief, for it can be only this that makes them incapable of assent.
Aristocles quoted in Eusebius

The very nature of the healthy soul is here at issue with regard to anxiety, doubt, and knowledge. Does scepticism leave its dangerous residue in its unwitting victims when it administers itself as a purgaitve? Or does it really and truly evacuate itself, leaving the soul in state of natural health, free from the anxiety caused by insipid dogmas? Or, in other words, is the healthy soul capeable of dogmas and absolute assertions about the world and about itself? This, of course, is not a question for which skepticism can provide an answer. Or, if it does, it cannot know its answer absolutley, remaining undecided even in regard to whether it has answered. As the Democritean Metrodorus of
Chios (fourth century B.C.) said, anticipating the most important anti-dictums of both skepticism and socratic philosophy:
“We know nothing, not
even whether we know or do not know, or what it
is to know or not to know, or in general whether
anything exists or not.”