A Man of Little Faith by Deguy Michel Elson Christopher Nancy Jean-Luc

Author:Deguy, Michel,Elson, Christopher,Nancy, Jean-Luc [Deguy, Michel,Elson, Christopher,Nancy, Jean-Luc]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781438453606
Publisher: SUNY Press
Published: 2014-07-15T05:00:00+00:00

OF CONTRARIETY

In the tone of a testamentary axiomatics, the first part of The Need for Roots deploys the principles of Simone Weil’s political thought—the theory and the articulation of theory with practice: a compendium of ontology, psychology, morality and sociology. It is a flaying alive of her thought that strips bare the logical nervures of her “theory,” or the organ of the vision of things. Apodicticity uttered with the tone of assertorical evidence.

I would like to underline a few of its distinctive traits:

It is a matter of laying out, exhaustively, the “needs of the soul”: in order to get oriented in this “very secret arcana” (we think of Kant’s words about schematism). Heuristics does not take as a “common thread” some logical table of judgment. Its logicity rests instead on and within analogy.3 It will go with the soul as it goes with the body. The unicity of being is double: its dual singularity.

Two predicates characterize essentially the being of need and allow for the determination, through analogical induction, of the hidden face, or “soul,” of our being: 1) saturable limitation, and 2) contrariety: any need can be satisfied (unlike desire); and needs always come in “pairs of opposites” (the architectonics of non-deconstructible dyads).4

The general teleological perspective is that of order (which one comes first, at the top of the list?): in the end, it is a matter of disposing the conditions of realizability of a human order (social and political) inspired by the consideration of the natural order, the beauty of which we admire, the splendor of necessity, expressive as they are of an eternal Providence about which some Greek artists and thinkers (more so than the Bible) were able to speak, “while waiting for God.”

The problematic is a Leibnizian one, that of the best of possible worlds: the optimum character of a social order is measured against the (effective, real) compatabilization of (com)possibles, that is to say, of intelligibles, called “needs,” coessentials, and what is more, they contradict one another: the structure of the soul is contrariety.

The supernatural is quasi-natural. The coefficient of “as if” is not applied to the supernatural. At the bottom of Weilian belief, let us not forget, there is mystical experience, the certitude of “God.” I will come back to this later to finish up.

Reason is not at all “dialectical”: there is no order of time where the contradictions of Reason are revealed and set straight. The fixed order is that of non-dialectalizable opposites; neither are they mediatizable through a “golden mean.” The impossibility of a concrete layout of their nonsynthetic composition is on the “political” program. Eternity is not accommodated. The self-contradicting of the needs of the soul, which make up the concrete, human “reality,” is more abyssal than simple contradiction. What is beautiful and poignant in this thought, in these classical propylaea of The Need for Roots, where the columns of Needs are aligned, is the unbending rectitude of this condemned Antigone staring down Death, the sun in her face, before walking backwards into the tomb.

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