Finite States: Toward a Kantian Theory of the Event

Robert S. Lehman

diacritics, Volume 39, Number 1, Spring 2009, pp. 61-74 (Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: 10.1353/dia.2009.0006

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FINITE STATES
ROBERT S. LEHMAN

TOWARD A KANTIAN THEORY OF THE EVENT

In a short review of Guy Lardreaus La Vracit, Alain Badiou interrupts his discussion of the imperative of negation to pronounce on the reappearance of Kantianism on the French intellectual scene. A return to Kant, he cautions his readers, is always a sign of closed and morbid times [qtd. in Hallward 256]. Here, Badious target is a certain reception of Kants practical philosophy in post-1968 France, and the role that this philosophy has played in the so-called ethical turn; Kants wider critical program is, for now, spared. Nonetheless, as a gloss on Badious agon with Kant, the choice of barbs closed and morbid timesis apt. By always asking, quid juris? or Havent you crossed the line? [Badiou, Logiques 565], Kant closes philosophy with his legalism, with his establishment of invariant categories that decide in advance the form of every possible experience. This closure is morbidin the strict senseinsofar as it is secured through recourse to human finitude, to a subject limned by space and time, or born to die. Kantianism, in sum, is synonymous with the reign of the finite subject and the ban on metaphysical speculation. As a philosophy of limits, it is antithetical to truly revolutionary thought. Or, at least this is what I take Badiou to be saying. In what follows, I will suggest that Badiou is, to a point, correct: Kantianism is characterized by closure and morbidity. At least here, Badiou cannot be accused of misreading Kant; or, if he is mistaken, he is probably mistaken for some of the same reasons as Hegel or Schelling. To Badious diagnosis, however, I would like to offer a small, though important, corrective. And this is just to say that Kantianism, while it may be closed and it may be morbid, is notand cannot beboth closed and morbid at the same time. Indeed, it is precisely in the gap separating closure from morbiditya gap Badiou ignoresthat we might find resources for a specifically Kantian theory of the event. Though the following reading will focus on Kants last published text, The Conflict of the Faculties (1798), and on the discussions of revolution, evolution, and death that appear therein, I hope that it will also prove useful for thinking about certain aspects of Kants critical project as a whole.1

Portions of this essay were presented at the conference Form and Genesis, organized by the Theory Reading Group at Cornell University (April 2224, 2010). For their insightful criticisms of earlier versions of this essay, I am indebted to Peter Gilgen and Audrey Wasser. 1 In recent years, The Conflict of the Faculties, and particularly the second essay, which deals with the French Revolution, has received a great deal of attention from critics. See, for example, the studies completed by Foucault, Fenves [1991], Gilgen, Lyotard, and Zupani. Moreover, Lyotard and Zupani address the presence in The Conflict of a nascent theory of the event, my own focus in what follows. Both Lyotard and Zupani, however, center their analyses on the role that the affect of enthusiasm plays in Kants theory. For Lyotard, the appearance of this affect speaks to an affinity between Kants political and aesthetic theories; for Zupani, it allows one to read in Kants writings an anticipation of certain elements of Lacanian psychoanalysis. Neither author traces the development of Kants thinking of the event across the different essays that make up The Conflict.

diacritics Volume 39.1 (2009) 6174 2011 by the Johns Hopkins University Press

1 Forgetting the Revolution In the second of the three essays that make up The Conflict of the Faculties, An Old Question Raised Again: Is the Human Race Constantly Progressing? or, The Conflict of the Philosophy Faculty with the Faculty of Law, Kant places the French Revolution under the sign of ambivalence. His aim in this essay is to locate some experience in the human race which, as an event, points to the disposition and the capacity of the human race to be the cause of its own advance to the better, and (since this should be the act of a being endowed with freedom) to be the author of this advance [CF 7:84; 304]. In other words, Kant is looking for a phenomenal manifestation of mankinds moralso noumenalsubstrate, insofar as the latter must be at the origin of real progress. And he turns to the French Revolution, or he almost turns to it. As Kant explains, The revolution of a gifted people which we have seen unfolding in our day may succeed or miscarry; it may be filled with misery and atrocities to the point that a right thinking human being, were he boldly to hope to execute it successfully the second time, would never resolve to make the experiment at such costthis revolution, I say, nonetheless finds in the hearts of all spectators (who are not engaged in this game themselves) a wishful participation that borders closely on enthusiasm [eine Teilnehmung dem Wunsche nach, die nahe an Enthusiasm grenzt] the very expression of which is fraught with danger; this sympathy, therefore, can have no other cause than a moral predisposition in the human race. [7:85; 302]2 If Kant begins with the revolution of a gifted people, he does so only to withdraw from it, arguing that the violence of its means and the ultimate question of its success are irrelevant, that we must look instead to its spectators. When he turns to these spectators, however, his withdrawal recommences. These spectators, who are not themselves engaged, exhibit a participation that is only wishful and a sympathy that is not quite enthusiasm. Their detached complicity, their disinterested fidelity to the Revolutions promise, are the legible signs of mans moral predisposition, what Kant names the sign of history [Geschichtszeichen] [7:84; 301]. To read the sign of history is to glimpse progress, but it is also to keep a safe distance from the signs material antecedent: the revolutionary event that stands at the origin of this long chain that reaches from combatant to spectator to philosopher. The real events, it seems, take place in our heads. As is well known, Kant was personally committed to the aims (if not the methods) of the Revolution, and when news of the new French Republic reached Knigsberg, he is alleged to have proclaimed, Now I can say, like Simeon, Lord, let Thy servant depart in peace; for I have seen the day of salvation [qtd. in Beiser 36]. Insofar as the Revolution was guided by the idea of a civil constitution, its aims were just [MM 6:372; 505]. And yet, despite his sympathies, neither Kant-the-citizen, who by a basic trait of his nature habitually adapted himself to the existing order of life and was content with it [Cassirer 20], nor Kant-the-philosopher, the great thinker of boundaries, was particularly well posiAs is standard practice, double page numbers refer to the German Akademie edition, followed by the English translation. In all cases, I have relied on the translations included in the recent Cambridge editions of Kants works, using the following abbreviations: Conflict of the Faculties [CF]; Critique of Pure Reason [CPR]; Critique of the Power of Judgment [CJ]; Lectures on Metaphysics [LM]; Metaphysics of Morals [MM]; On the Common Saying: That May Be True in Theory but It Is of No Use in Practice [TP]; An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment? [WE].
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tioned to embrace an event whose raison dtre was transgression. Thus, in an attempt to trace the red thread reaching from Kant to Marx and tying German metaphysics to French politics, Stathis Kouvelakis reads the sign of history as a figure for the gap between consciousness and event, characteristic of Kantian philosophy [10], and so as an intimation of the very long crisis that Hegel, Heine, and finally Marx would inherit [23]. The intellectual heirs of the Revolution, a procession that culminates with Marx himself, all come from the post-Kantian generation, while Kant remains, like the spectators he describes, sympathetic but all too safe. I would, however, like to resist the conclusion that Kant simply prescribes a separation of idea from realitywhich in this case would also be the separation of Kant from Robespierre, of the political from politics, or of Germany from France3and to ask instead how, through his response to the French Revolution, Kant manages the problem of revolution in general, how he reconnects the before and after of revolution to produce something like History in the emphatic, nineteenth-century sense. Before this question can be answered, it will be necessary to treat in greater detail the specific problem that revolution poses for Kantian philosophy. In his 1793 essay on theory and practice, Kant presents the illegality of revolution in no uncertain terms: any resistance to the supreme legislative power, any incitement to have the subjects dissatisfaction become active, any insurrection that breaks out in rebellion, is the highest and most punishable crime within a commonwealth, because it destroys its foundation. And this prohibition is unconditional . . . [TP 8:299, 298]. In a very obvious way, any attempt to secure a right to revolt invites logical contradiction and political disaster, since each resistance would take place in conformity with a maxim that, made universal, would annihilate any civil constitution and eradicate the condition in which alone people can be in possession of rights generally [8:299, 298]. A right to revolution, as a right to overturn the legal order, would be a right to destroy the order that grants rights. This moral-legal prohibition of revolutionary violence does not, though, get at the specific difficulties that the French Revolution presents for Kants political thought. In fact, in his scattered references to the Revolution, Kant rarely raises the question of a right to revolt. This failure to query, after the fact, the legitimacy of the Revolution is evidence of something other than Kants failure to align personal predilections with moral truths. Kant passes over the illegality of the French Revolution because to dwell on it would only exacerbate the damage that this eventand every historically occurring revolutioninflicts on the ideal form of the state, on the form of every state. In short, there is a transcendental threat posed by revolution that appears, not through the hypothetical universalization of a right to revolt, but in revolutionary violence itself. The threat of revolution is a threat to the very legitimacy of the state form. And most of all when revolution presents itself not as the twilight of the state, but, in the words of Hegel, as the states glorious dawn [215]. Revolution reveals a certain illegitimacy at every states origin, and as Kant writes in his Metaphysics of Morals, no legislation can remove the disgrace of an illegitimate birth [6:366; 476]. The illegitimacy of the revolutionary origin is a product of the fact that, though revolution may give rise to a legal state, the means by which it does so are necessarily illegal, prior to or outside of the legality that they found. The problem of birth is, then, first, the problem of the violence that goes into the founding of any
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The relationship between French revolutionary politics and German philosophy is the object of careful analysis in Kouvelakiss Philosophy and Revolution, as well as a background assumption in most studies of Kantian and post-Kantian philosophy. Perhaps the most memorable description of the link between the French Revolution and Kantian philosophy belongs to Friedrich Schlegel: That I consider . . . the French Revolution a marvelous allegory about the system of transcendental idealism is, to be sure, only one of my most extremely subjective opinions [300].

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state; and second, the need to efface this original violence and to insist on the timeless legitimacy of the states dictates. Without the first moment, the state would be impossible; without the second, the state would always appear illegitimate. Kant prohibits revolt not just because this force would be exercised illegitimately, but because any force used for political ends cites the force that founded the state in the first place, and thereby calls attention to the latters ultimate contingency. In his Critique of Violence, a work whose title communicates its debt to Kant, Walter Benjamin describes a similar threat posed by the great criminal who, through his acts of violence, claims the ability to posit law and thus reveals something rotten in the law [242], which is nothing but the fact that law is born of violence. As the grandest act of extra-legal violence, then, revolution lays bare the groundlessness of the states claims to legitimacy. As early as the publication of Solomon Maimons Versuch ber die Transzendentalphilosophie (1790), post-Kantian philosophy registered its frustration with Kants failure to provide a genetic account of the ostensibly universal structures of thought. This lacuna in Kants system was at least in part the motivation for the speculative projects of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. This metaphysical problem resurfaces in Kants reflections on the state. Indeed, if Kant fails to address the question of genesis within his critical system proper, he effectively bans its asking within his political thought. Remaining within the framework of this thought, we might say that every birth is illegitimate and is, consequently, best left unremarked.4 Kant says as much when he writes that the command Obey the authority that has power over you, does not inquire how it came to have this power [MM 6:372; 505]. It does not inquire, then, into authoritys genesis.5 Revolution, however, in its role as a state-founding violence, dramatizes this question, and never more so than when it partakes in the crime of regicideas it does, for example, on January 21, 1793. So, Kant writes of the execution of King Louis XVI: Like a chasm [Abgrund] that irretrievably swallows everything, the execution of a monarch seems to be a crime from which the people cannot be absolved, for it is as if the state commits suicide [6:322;

No one saw this problem more clearly than the German jurist and philosopher Carl Schmitt. In his Political Theology, Schmitt criticizes Kant and his followers for failing to theorize the state of exception, a situation in which the illusion of a transhistorical legal foundation is exposed and the power of real life breaks through the crust of a mechanism that has become torpid by repetition [15]. For Kant, Schmitt writes, emergency law [is] no law at all because he refuses to acknowledge the violence that lies at the origin of every state. In forgetting this violence, Kant forgets the political itself [14]. 5 Versions of this prohibition on inquiries into the origin of the state appear in a number of Kants political writings. In a footnote included in An Old Question Raised Again, Kant writes, Platos Atlantica, Mores Utopia, Harringtons Oceana and Allaiss Severambia have been successively brought on the scene, but have never so much as been tried (Cromwells abortive monster of a despotic republic excepted). The same goes for political creations as for the creation of the world; no human was present there, nor could he have been present at such an event, since he must have been his own creator otherwise [CF 7:92; 307]. Kants goal in this remark is to warn against the danger of utopianism. The form of this warning is strange, however. Kant impugns utopianism for its tendency to encourage reflection on the birth of the state, and responds with a questionable analogy between the origin of the state and the origin of the world. This analogy is presumably intended to suggest the absurdity of trying to imagine the creation of a new state. Though the analogy may hold if we assume that the human, as zon politikon, only becomes actual once she or he is located in a state, Kants claim still seems odd when we remember that the wider context of the essay in which this claim appears is a discussion of the French Revolution, a political birth at which many humans were indeed present. See also Kants observation that it is futile to inquire into the historical documentation of the mechanism of government . . . and his description of revolution as palingenesis [MM 6:33940; 480].
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Borderline, 2009 pencil and banknotes on paper 22 x 30 1/4 inches Courtesy the artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York

464]. Even as it claims to ground the lawful organization of a new state, the revolutionary drama opens a chasm that leaves the distinction between illegitimate birth and unnatural death undecidable. The difficulty in which Kant finds himself with respect to revolution is in part due to the importance in his late writings of an organicist model of the state, a model that he develops in dialogue with the ideas of the German biological theorist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach. As Kant glosses Blumenbach, the organism is that in which everything is an end and reciprocally a means as well. Nothing in it is in vain, purposeless, or to be ascribed to a blind mechanism of nature [CJ 5:376; 24748]. The key distinction is between two sorts of causality: one internal, or organic; the other external, or mechanical. Unlike the machine, which finds its motive and formative powers outside of itself, the organism is autonomous, in the sense that it is responsible for the law of its own being. And for this reason, as Pheng Cheah has recently argued, the organism, in contradistinction to the machine, becomes the preferred model for the rational state at the close of the eighteenth century.6 Thus, when in the context of his famous discussion of beauty as a symbol for the morally good Kant takes as his example of symbolic presentation two figures for the state, he distinguishes them as follows: the state, he writes, is represented as an animate body if it is ruled in accordance with laws internal to the people, but by a mere machine (like a handmill) if it is ruled by a single absolute will [as in] a despotic state . . . [5:352; 226]. Again, the operative distinction is between internal and external causality. However smoothly it seems to function, the despotic statelike a handmillmoves only through an external force. The latter is the efficient cause of the formers dead matter. Conversely, only the self-organized state is truly alive. The conservatism implicit in organicist metaphors, usually attributed to the fact that organisms evolve rather than transform,7 becomes linked in Kants writings to a conservation of causality, with the organism jealously guarding its motive and formative powers from every outside. The stakes of this conservation are high. The organisms status as the cause and author of its own ends is also the expulsion from the organism of blind chance and its avatars: the mechanical, the empirical, birth and death, but also, at least in the political life of mankind, revolution. Whether it creates the state or cancels it, and even when it seems to arise organically from the will of the people, revolution can only be figured as the irruption of blind chance within the states ideally autotelic trajectory. 2 Remembering the Sign of History It is to this irruption of blind chance in the form of the revolutionary event that the state must close itself. The sign of history is the figure for this closure. As I noted above, Kant
Cheah treats the organicist model of the state at length in Spectral Nationality. See especially the first two chapters, which deal specifically with the rise of the organicist state and its role in Kants late writings [17115]. Timothy Lenoir, on whose work Cheah draws, has developed the most in-depth explanations of the relationship between Kants late treatments of the organism and the biological theories of Blumenbach. 7 Beyond its association with conservatism, political organicism has in recent years been linked to forms of fascism. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, in the context of an analysis of National Aestheticism (for which the state is conceived simultaneously as living totality and as artwork), writes that, in its essence, the political is organic. We must allow the term to resonate doubly here and to hear the ergon that lies beneath the organon. This is where the truth of what is called totalitarianism is concealed [68]. For an attempt to theorize a more progressive notion of organicism, see Cheah.
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characterizes the sign of history as the sympathetic response of uninvolved spectators to the French Revolution. These spectators see in the Revolution not just the empirical fact of misery and atrocities but the progress of mankind toward its goal of a civil constitution [CF 7:85; 302]. The sign of history is itself an intimation of progress insofar as it communicates (to Kant, and, through Kant, to his readers) this spectatorial experience. As such, Kant concludes, it will not be forgotten; it will, in fact, be recollected whenever someone considering the ills of the state . . . begins to despair of the health of humanity and its progress toward the better [7:9394; 308]. But what does it mean to remember the sign of history? The sign of history, Kant notes, is not just a future-oriented intimation of progress, but signum rememorativum, demonstrativum, prognostikon [CF 7:84; 301], the sign of a recalling, a demonstrating, and a foretelling. Only as the successful articulation of past, present, and future can it assure us that the human race has always been in progress toward the better and will continue to be so henceforth [7:89; 304]. And this articulation of moments is what is at stake in Kants description of the sign as a fragment of human history (ein Stck von der Menschengeschichte) that is drawn not from past but from future time [7:79; 297]. The sign manifests in the present a future perspective on what will have been mankinds past. To remember the sign of history is, therefore, to remember a history that has been re-membered, that has seen its past, present, and future moments drawn together in a coherent, continuous narrative of human progress. At issue in Kants remarks on the sign of history is the synthesis of a specifically historical experience; nonetheless, the form that this synthesis takes cleaves to a very familiar Kantian logic. Though anything like an exhaustive treatment of the relationship between the sign of history and Kants wider epistemological concerns is beyond the scope of this essay, it is worth noting that the synthetic operations associated with the sign of history bear striking similarities to the functions of the imagination that Kant describes in his pre-critical Lectures on Metaphysics. A present appearance has representations of the past and of the time to come, Kant notes, but in my representations there is a series of the following representations, where the representations of the past relate to the present, just as the representations of the present relate to the future. Just as I can go from the present into the past, I can also go from the present into the future. Just as the present state follows on the past, so the future follows on the present. This happens according to the laws of the reproductive imagination. [LM 28:236; 5455] The present image of an object includes with it a recollection of the objects immediate past as well as an anticipation of the objects immediate future. For this reason, the image of an object is never of a pure, present experience; it is, rather, always the product of a temporal synthesis. Kant thus divides the reproductive imagination into its functions as Abbildung, Nachbildung, and Vorbildung; that is, of the illustration of the present, the imitation of the past, and the anticipation of the future [28:235; 53]. Representational consciousness is the product of this threefold temporal synthesis, a point that Kant repeats and extends in the Critique of Pure Reasons Transcendental Deduction. In the latter text, another threefold temporal synthesis is enlisted to secure a priori not just the unity of the object of experience but also the transcendental unity of apperception, the supreme principle in the whole of human cognition and the foundation of the transcendental logic [B135; 248].8 The sign of history testifies to the accomplishment of an operation very much like the syntheses described above, making legible the fact that the broken moments of his8

In his violent reading of the Critique of Pure Reason, Martin Heidegger famously argues that the origin of Kants three transcendental synthesesthe apprehension of representations, as modi-

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tory have been apperceptively united in a threefold synthesis of recalling, demonstrating, and foretelling. The movement from present to future to past and back to present figured by the sign of history sews shut the woundthe Abgrundopened by the Revolution, and replaces it with the unscarred surface of mankinds progress, with a history that will indeed be interrupted from time to time but will never be broken off [TP 8:309; 306]. And by now it should be clear that, if Kants model for the sign of history reaches back to the pre-critical period, the legacy of the sign of history can be recognized in all those post-Kantian attempts to imbricate episodes in the history of the world with episodes in the history of the mind, a project epitomized by Hegels historical idealism. Insofar as the sign of history appears, it shields us from the mechanical, the material, the contingent; from illegitimate births and unnatural deaths; in short, from all of those morbid figures that revolution cannot help but evoke. And this is what I mean by closure: the sign of history manifests a speculative closure in the face of a certain morbidity. The latter, morbidity, is nothing but the subjects or the states exposure to what exceeds it. 3 The Death of the Subject, 1 While An Old Question Raised Again ends with the anticipation of progress, the Conflict as a whole does not. Kant follows one of his most hopeful essays with one of his most morbid: The Power of the Mind to Master Its Morbid Feelings by Sheer Resolution, or, The Conflict of the Philosophy Faculty with the Faculty of Medicine, an essay far less given to promises of bright futures. Perhaps owing in part to this drastic shift in tone, critics have had a hard time recognizing any meaningful relation between the second and third essays. Ernst Cassirer, for example, in his otherwise complete engagement with Kants Life and Thought, limits himself to the observation that the third essay, which treats of the contest of the philosophical faculty with the medical faculty, is only superficially hooked on [40708]. Contemporary readers have held fast to Cassirers verdict; thus, in his recent Kant: A Biography, Manfred Kuehn describes the composition of the Conflict as Kants last attempt to tie up the bundle of his occasional writings before age and illness made this project impossible [393]. Still, something can be gained by taking Kant at his word and assuming that together the essays amount to a systematic unity [CF 7:11, 243]. The third essayand this will be my claim in what followsdoes have something to add, or perhaps subtract, from Kants discussion of the sign of history. If the second conflict assures its readers of imminent progress by looking to the spectators of the French Revolution, the third imperils this very spectator-subject. Kant presents the third essay in The Conflict of the Faculties as a reply to C. W. Hufelands Macrobiotics: Or the Art of Prolonging Human Life (1796), writing that he is determined to respond to Hufelands text, not with lessons drawn from medical science, but with the sort of advice that philosophy alone can provide [CF 7:98; 313]. Regardless, Kant spends much of the essay dispensing medical advice in the form of exemplary anecdotes: Once, after I had put out the light and gone to bed, I suddenly felt an intense thirst and went, in the dark, to another room to get a drink of water. While I was
fications of the mind in intuition; the reproduction of them in the imagination; and their recognition in the concept [CPR A97; 228]is to be found in Kants pre-critical discussions of image formation. One need not accept Heideggers more controversial claims, however, to recognize the continuity of Kants theorizations of temporal synthesis from the pre-critical to the critical works.

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groping about for my water pitcher, I hit upon the idea of drinking air through my nose, so to speak, by taking several deep breaths and expanding my chest. Within a few seconds, this quenched my thirst completely. [7:112, 324]9 The fact that, in developing this regimen to be adopted, Kant draws on his own experiences, noting that only afterwards can I ask others if they have not noticed the same thing in themselves [7:98; 31314], suggests that what we find here is less a work of philosophy than a work of biography; and like all biography, the inevitability of its subjects death haunts it from beginning to end. While Kant maintains that he has mastered his morbid feelings by diverting my attention from these feelings, as if they had nothing to do with me [7:104; 31314], his constant references to his own demiseWhy do I prolong a feeble life to an extraordinary age by self-denial? [7:114; 326]tells another story. The third conflict presents an unflinchingly morbid narrative of its authors fear in the face of his own mortality. At the end of the essay, Kant slips into a digression on a mental defect from which he now suffers, which takes the form of an inability to maintain unity of consciousness [CF 7:113; 325]. The nature of this defect is such that, in developing an argument, the victim is incapable of maintaining the continuity of the wholethe starting point and the destination drift apart. This entropic process, writes Kant, involves a failure of presence of mind (in connecting ideas)that is, an involuntary distraction [Zerstreuung] [7:113; 325]. Kant here describes the onset of something like dementia, which he attributes to a kind of gout that has penetrated his brain [7:114; 325], and characterizes as a degenerative illness whose ability to interrupt the firm coherence of ideas in their temporal sequence poses a particular threat to the worker in the field of philosophy insofar as this worker must return constantly to thoughts of the entire system. It is not surprising, Kant notes, if metaphysicians are incapacitated sooner than scholars in other fields [7:11314; 325]. To lose ones presence of mind, then, is to fail to link past moments, both to one another and to the present. It is, above all, a failure to re-member. And to Kant, no failure could be more debilitating. At the limit of this illness is the loss of the logical unity of every thought [CPR A398; 440]; that is, of the I think itself.10 So, Kant concludes, the art of prolonging human life comes to this: that in the end one is tolerated among the living only because of the animal functions one performsnot a particularly amusing situation [CF 7:114; 326]. Reading the signs of advancing age and illness, Kant recognizes his own future, one entirely distinct from the sunnier prospects promised to the human race as a whole. Describing the philosophers malaise, Kuehn notes that there is something tragic about the way in which one of the greatest minds who ever lived was reduced to complete helplessness; and yet, he goes on, there is nothing extraordinary about Kants long, drawn-out decline. Many others have had to suffer through it and there are no new lessons
Strangely, this is not the only place in the history of philosophy where the refusal to drink water is invoked as a privileged example. See also the exchange between Socrates and Glaucon in Book IV of Platos Republic: And might a man be thirsty, and yet unwilling to drink? / Yes, he said, it constantly happens [110]. Kant follows his discussion of drinking air by noting that Thinking . . . is a scholars food [CF 7:109; 322]. 10 Peter Fenves, in his Late Kant: Towards Another Law of the Earth, makes a fascinating connection between Kants distraction and a remark that Kant makes in the first Critique: In the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant conjures up an image of radical distraction: only because I comprehend their manifold in a consciousness do I call them altogether my representations; for otherwise I would have as multicolored diverse a self as I have representations of which I am conscious [B134]. Late in his life, as a function of the peculiar incapacity from which he suffered, Kant begins to appear to himself as the multicolored, diverse self he once imagined [153]. Fenvess analysis is, as always, meticulously researched and carefully developed.
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to be learned from Kants dying [414]. But if Kuehn is correct, why should Kant have included the third essay in The Conflict of the Faculties? Though The Power of the Mind to Master Its Morbid Feelings by Sheer Resolution may promise to instruct its readers in the art of resisting hypochondria, the essays real concern seems to lie elsewhere. In posing and re-posing the question of the unity of consciousness, the third essay cannot help but look back to the essay that precedes it. In the second essay, as I noted, the sympathetic detachment of the French Revolutions spectators demonstrates that the work of unifying the before and after of revolution has been accomplished. Reversing Benjamins memorable discussion of the angel of history, we could say that where we see a single catastrophe, these spectators see a progressive chain of events. They will have seen this progress for us, but only insofar as we remember the sign of history. The vocation of the spectatorial consciousness is, however, precisely what is threatened by the illness Kant describes: In every discourse, I first prepare (the reader or the audience) for what I intend to say by indicating, in prospect, my destination and, in retrospect, the starting point of my argument (without these two points of reference a discourse has no consistency). And the result of this pathological condition is that when the time comes for me to connect the two, I must suddenly ask my audience (or myself, silently): now where was I? where did I start from? [CF 7:113; 325]. The movement Kant traces in this passagefrom present to future to past and back to presentis precisely the movement carried out by the spectators of the French Revolution in their threefold historical synthesis. But in the third essay, this operation never achieves unity, and Kant is reduced to asking others to help him to establish his temporal location. During the period of his professorship at the University of Marburg (19231928), Martin Heidegger was fond of asserting that Kant, among all philosophers, had thought the deepest about the problem of human finitude. Thus, Heidegger glosses Kants project as follows: how must the finite being that we call human being be according to its essence so that in general it can be open to a being that it itself is not and that therefore must be able to show itself from itself? [30]. Translated from Heideggers unique idiom, the question here attributed to Kant concerns the status of the human subject as essentially passive, as possessed of an intuitus derivativus, and thus as constitutively open to the outside. In short, Heidegger is simply recognizing that, for Kant, the subject does not generate its own sensible experiences but must, rather, receive them from a being that it itself is not. If Kant dedicates himself, at least in part, to theorizing this open subject, The Power of the Mind to Master Its Morbid Feelings describes a variety of openness that the philosopher cannot control. The ultimate effect of Kants distraction is that, what The Conflict of the Faculties promises in the second essay, it takes away in the third. Consciousness, the guarantor of historical synthesis in the second essay, is threatened by an illness that reminds us: however much this consciousness is idealized, however much it is abstracted from the revolutionary fray, it is still rooted in a fallible material body, a body essentially open and, thus, vulnerable. We can be forgiven for wondering how such a consciousness, unable to secure its own consistency, could be entrusted to unify an epoch divided by revolution, or even to remember a sign of this unity. Like the revolution that threatens the state with a figurative death, the spasmic condition of the brain that Kant describes finds its end in the death of the individualKant informs us that, given his age, his illness will end only with life itself [CF 7:112; 325]. So, when Kant reads a fragment of his own future history, he encounters only his own fragmentation. And even as the Abgrund opened by his illness promises to swallow the I think, in the wider context of the Conflict, it recalls a more literal splitting of bodies. In causing Kant to lose his head, it recalls the very decapitation of kings that the sign of 70 diacritics / spring 2009

history supposedly helped us to forget. Like Louis XVI, and like Kants own consciousness, the sign of history does not survive its encounter with the outside. The literal and figurative dismemberments that shadow Kants discussion appear neither as productive moments of negativity nor as means to authentic knowledge but as interruptions that frustrate the desire for unity. Is it any wonder, then, that so many critics would prefer to see the third essay forgotten? It would make sense to stop here, with this morbid tale of Kants inability to close himself to the outside. As the last word in Kants last published text, The Power of the Mind to Master Its Morbid Feelings by Sheer Resolution presents an ironic coda to the work of the great theorist of the intuitus derivativus, of the subjects openness to being affected. Regardless, it is worth continuing Kants morbid tale for a few more lines, so as to address one more case of exposure to the outside, one that affects Kant not as a collection of animal functions, but as a philosopher. 4 The Death of the Subject, 2 In the preface to The Conflict of the Faculties, immediately preceding The Conflict of the Philosophy Faculty with the Faculty of Theology, Kant reproduces a letter that he received four years earlier from Johann Christoph Wllner, the minister of ecclesiastical affairs under the now deceased King Frederick William II. Here, in the name of the King, Wllner writes: Our most high person has long observed with great displeasure how you misuse your philosophy to distort and disparage many of the cardinal and basic teachings of the Holy Scriptures and of Christianity; how you have done this particularly in your book Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, as well as in other shorter treatises. We expect better things of you, as you yourself must realize how irresponsibly you have acted against your duty as a teacher of youth and against our paternal purpose, which you know very well. We demand that you give at once a most conscientious account of yourself, and expect that in the future, to avoid our highest disfavor, you will be guilty of no such fault, but rather, in keeping with your duty, apply your authority and your talents to the progressive realization of our paternal purpose. Failing this, you must expect unpleasant measures for your continued obstinacy. [CF 7:6; 240] To anyone versed in the history of philosophy, the specific accusationswhich include corruption of the youthmust seem particularly ominous. The considerable freedom that Kant had enjoyed under Frederick William IIs uncle, Frederick the Great (17121786) had rapidly deteriorated following the enlightened Kings demise. Wllners letter to Kant followed on the heels of the 1788 Edict of Censorship, which was to provide the tool for suppressing all writings that were not strictly orthodox [Kuehn 339]. Despite his opposition to just the sort of paternalism that Wllner prescribes,11 Kant was already an old man when he received this letter and was in no position to risk forced retirement without pension or even banishment [Kuehn 379]. Kant had no choice but to obey, and in
11 In On the Common Saying, for example, Kant writes that a government established on the principle of benevolence toward the people like that of a father toward his childrenthat is, a paternalistic government . . .is the greatest despotism thinkable [8:29091; 291]. The same sentiment is already apparent in his discussions of the importance of the public sphere in An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?

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the preface to the Conflict, he includes his response to Wllners injunction, in which he promises, as Your Majestys most loyal subject to refrain altogether from discoursing publicly, in lectures or writings, on religion, whether natural or revealed [CF 7:10; 242]. Kant reproduces this exchange as the preface to a text dealing with matters of religion, explaining to his readers that he was bound by his promise not forever, but only during His Majestys lifetime; his promise was contingent on his status as his Majestys most loyal subject. With the death of Frederick William II in 1797, however, and the happy event of the ascension to the throne of Frederick William III, Kant is again free to publish on matters of religion. The Kings death, something Kant could not have hoped to see given his own advanced years, cancels his promise, enabling Kant to publish The Conflict of the Faculties, with its reflections on religion and revolution, without suffering unpleasant measures. The odd preface to the Conflict foreshadows the dispersal that Kant describes in the third essay, that is, the dispersal of Kants continuous self. Kants promise to the King serves synecdochally for the wider fact of order, of the authority of the king and of the moral law itself, but it also suggests obedience to another kind of order. Like the sign Kant reads in the second conflict, a promise is a fragment of future history. It assumes and enforces an orderliness of time as well as an orderliness of the subject. A promise always foretells a future in which, as promised, it will be kept. Moreover, as Nietzsche writes in book two of On the Genealogy of Morals, to be capable of promising, man must be able to stand security for his own future, that is, he must be calculable, regular [58]. To keep a promise is to remain the man one was when promising. It is this calculable, regular manand, as his biographers never tire of noting, Kant was famously calculable, regularthat the death of the King disperses. The preface again depicts a world in which the constancy of the subject can be challenged by forces outside of it. In the third essay, this outside was identified as a kind of gout that has to some extent penetrated the brain [CF 7:114; 325], an illness that would end with the death of the afflicted; while in the preface, this outside is the historical contingency of a Kings death, an event that kills Kant qua his Majestys most loyal subject. So, death bookends the Conflict, a text wholly unable to master its own morbidity. While regicide reappears from behind the sign of history, and Kant informs us that his own death-in-life will only end with life itself [7:112; 325], it seems that The Conflict of the Faculties is itself the product of a double demise: the figurative death of his Majestys most loyal subject and the literal death of yet another king. But if these morbid figures are present at the beginning of the Conflict as well as at the end, their effects differ greatly. Whereas in the third essay, exposure to a kind of death in life enfeebles the philosopher, in the preface, the happy event of death appears as the very life of philosophy, reopening as it does the public sphere closed by the edict of censorship a decade earlier. I suggested at the beginning of this essay that the resources for a Kantian theory of the event might be found in the gap between closure and morbidity. I would like to conclude with two very schematic remarks: the first, maybe predictably, is that the Kantian theory of the event, as a theory of exposure to the unprecedented occurrence, is nothing but the doctrine of constitutive finitude, of intuitus derivativus. The Kantian theory of the event is, then, Kantianism itself, insofar as the latter initiates the theme of finitude in its modern philosophical guise. But beyond this, as I have tried to show, moments exist in Kants writings when the non-empirical structures that secure this finitudeexemplarily, the subjectare themselves exposed to historical, material, contingent occurrences that exceed them, and that can, consequently, transform or extinguish them. In his last writings, for reasons that seem themselves to be entirely contingent, Kants reflections on these occurrences intensify. It is in this context that we might rethink Kants revolution, not just as a problem of birth and death, but as the possibility of a content that exceeds every phrase. 72 diacritics / spring 2009

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