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Description
This famous phrase from the Phenomenology of Spirit, which was interpreted in the twentieth century as an expression of Hegel's logocentrism, could well know a new destiny. Particularly because of scientific discoveries concerning the importance of stem cells, the phrase allows one to examine the question of regeneration in regard to scarring. Such reworking leads to a new questioning of the trace.
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To recover: this verb alone can tie together all the questions that Derrida asked me the day of my thesis defence on 15 December 1994, and that now appear in his beautiful text A Time for Farewells (Le temps des adieux). I would like to pay homage to these questions and to the decisive dialogue that we had that day. The discussion revolved around the signification and range of several gestures or movements that are contained within the English verb to recover: to heal, to return, to relocate a lost object or return to a normal state. It involved the characterization of a modality of philosophical invention that consists not in creating a language or a conceptuality from nothing, but in relocating, in causing to return that which is already there but which one does not see. The discussion interrogated the paradoxical possibility of a philosophical event that situates itself between to recover and to discover. Something like a rediscovering. Recovering, rediscovering: is there, between these two verbs, a possible future for philosophy?
My thesis centred on Hegel and the role that the concept of plasticity plays in Hegelian thought. You are attempting to invent Hegel in causing him to return, Derrida told me, in making a word return that, to some extent, was asleep in language, awaiting its status as a concept: "plasticity." But is it possible to invent Hegel in causing him to return, in rediscovering him, in healing him with a word, plasticity, that designates, precisely, according to one of its principal meanings, the capacity to cure, to recoup health? Can such a return, such a plastic surgery, such a "lifting," as Derrida said, be compatible with new thought?
We spoke thus of the mode of thought that consists in awakening that which is already found there, lying low and hidden in language like a sleeping animal:
To invent, and most particularly understanding invention as an event, means here to rediscover what was there without being there, both in language and in philosophy; it is a question of finding, yes, but of finding for the first time what was always there and what had always been there, to find again. [...] Such words, which seemed lost, hidden away in language, almost asleep in language, but asleep with one eye open, here they appear leaping into the center of the stage, organizing and playing a lively and vigilant role. These words are almost like animals. (Derrida, Time xvi-xvii)
The focus of this discussion did not and does not only apply to the motifs of invention and recovery in general. The conceptual animals that are in question here come from not just any forest and are ready to pounce onto not just any scene. They claim to exceed two limits, and it is certainly this claim that Derrida questions. The first limit, that which Heidegger, in The Principle of Reason (Der Satz vom Grund), compares to the ring of fire through which the tiger must jump, is the limit of metaphysics. If a philosopher is susceptible to returning (to recovering and to being rediscovered), it is necessary that he be able to do so after the end of metaphysics; it is necessary that he be able to pass through the ring. The second limit is the limit of deconstruction. If Hegel is susceptible to returning, in the name of, or in accordance with, his plasticity, he must be able to cross the circle of fire of his deconstruction. To invent in causing to return is to cross this double limit, to jump beyond this duality.
Invention as rediscovery consists not only in reawakening authors and categories that were thought achieved, accomplished, used, but again to revive them after their deconstruction. The question asked by Derrida is therefore that of knowing what chance a philosopher like Hegel or a word like plasticity have to return, after their deconstruction, after metaphysics, and beyond the deconstruction of metaphysics. "Which is the scene of this goodbye to which, without even having said farewell, we are now returning?" Derrida asks (Time x). Can plasticity provide such a scene? Can it allow philosophy to recover from metaphysics and to muffle the sound of its toll (glas)?
To recover, how does this movement, active and passive at the same time,... |
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