Empire (15 page)

to the concept of modernity, but it was effectively dominated and

held in check. The cultural and religious revolutions were forced

toward rigid and sometimes ferocious structures of containment.

In the seventeenth century, Europe became feudal again. The

counterreformist Catholic Church was the first and most effective

example ofthis reaction, because that church itselfearlier had been

rocked by an earthquake ofreform and revolutionary desire. The

Protestant churches and political orders were not far behind in

producing the order ofthe counterrevolution. Throughout Europe

the fires ofsuperstition were lit. And yet the movements ofrenewal

continued their work ofliberation at the base. Whereever spaces

were closed, movements turned to nomadism and exodus, carrying

with them the desire and hope ofan irrepressible experience.13

The internal conflict ofEuropean modernity was also reflected

simultaneously on a global scale as an external conflict. The develop-

ment ofRenaissance thought coincided both with the European

discovery ofthe Americas and with the beginnings ofEuropean

dominance over the rest ofthe world. Europe had discovered its

outside. ‘‘Ifthe period ofthe Renaissance marks a qualitative break

in the history ofhumanity,’’ writes Samir Amin, ‘‘it is precisely

because, from that time on, Europeans become conscious of the

idea that the conquest ofthe world by their civilization is henceforth

a possible objective . . . From this moment on, and not before,

Eurocentrism crystallizes.’’14 On the one hand, Renaissance human-

ism initiated a revolutionary notion ofhuman equality, ofsingularity

and community, cooperation and multitude, that resonated with

forces and desires extending horizontally across the globe, redoubled

by the discovery ofother populations and territories. On the other

hand, however, the same counterrevolutionary power that sought

to control the constituent and subversive forces within Europe also

began to realize the possibility and necessity ofsubordinating other

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77

populations to European domination. Eurocentrism was born as a

reaction to the potentiality ofa newfound human equality; it was

the counterrevolution on a global scale. Here too the second mode

ofmodernity gained the upper hand, but again not in a definitive

way. European modernity is from its beginnings a war on two

fronts. European mastery is always in crisis—and this is the very

same crisis that defines European modernity.

In the seventeenth century the concept ofmodernity as crisis

was definitively consolidated. The century began with the burning

ofGiordano Bruno at the stake, and it went on to see monstrous

civil wars break out in France and England, and above all it witnessed

the horrible spectacle ofthirty years ofGerman civil war. At the

same time, the European conquest ofthe Americas and the slaughter

and enslavement ofits native populations proceeded with ever-

increasing intensity. In the second halfofthe century, monarchic

absolutism seemed definitively to block the course offreedom in

the countries ofcontinental Europe. Absolutism sought to fix the

concept ofmodernity and strip it ofthe crisis that defines it through

the deployment ofa new armory oftranscendentals. At the same

time, outside ofEurope conquest slowly gave way to colonialism,

and the precarious search for gold, riches, and plunder was progres-

sively displaced by trade exclusives, stable forms of production, and

the African slave trade. The seventeenth century, however—and

this is what makes it so ambiguous—was a fragile, baroque century.

From the abysses ofthe social world always arose the memory of

what it tried to bury.

We can find testimony to this fact with one single but enor-

mous reference: Spinoza’s philosophy of immanence, which domi-

nated the latter halfofthe century ofEuropean thought. It is a

philosophy that renewed the splendors ofrevolutionary humanism,

putting humanity and nature in the position ofGod, transforming

the world into a territory ofpractice, and affirming the democracy

ofthe multitude as the absolute form ofpolitics. Spinoza considered

the idea ofdeath—that death that states and powers carried like a

weapon against the desire and hope ofliberation—merely a hostage

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used to blackmail the freedom of thought, and thus banned it from

his philosophy: ‘ A free man thinks about nothing less than of death,

and his knowledge is a meditation on life, not on death.’’15 That love

that the humanists considered the supreme form of the expression of

intelligence was posed by Spinoza as the only possible foundation

ofthe liberation ofsingularities and as the ethical cement ofcollec-

tive life. ‘‘There is nothing in nature which is contrary to this

intellectual Love, or which can take it away.’’16 In this crescendo

ofthought, Spinoza testified to the uninterrupted continuity ofthe

revolutionary program ofhumanism in the course ofthe seven-

teenth century.

The Transcendental Apparatus

The counterrevolutionary project to resolve the crisis ofmodernity

unfolded in the centuries of the Enlightenment.17 The primary task

ofthis Enlightenment was to dominate the idea ofimmanence

without reproducing the absolute dualism ofmedieval culture by

constructing a transcendental apparatus capable ofdisciplining a

multitude of formally free subjects. The ontological dualism of the

culture ofthe ancien re´gime had to be replaced by a functional

dualism, and the crisis ofmodernity had to be resolved by means

ofadequate mechanisms ofmediation. It was paramount to avoid the

multitude’s being understood, à la Spinoza, in a direct, immediate

relation with divinity and nature, as the ethical producer oflife and

the world. On the contrary, in every case mediation had to be

imposed on the complexity ofhuman relations. Philosophers dis-

puted where this mediation was situated and what metaphysical

level it occupied, but it was fundamental that in some way it be

defined as an ineluctable condition ofall human action, art, and

association. Hence the triad
vis-cupiditas-amor
(strength-desire-love) which constituted the productive matrix ofthe revolutionary

thought ofhumanism was opposed by a triad ofspecific mediations.

Nature and experience are unrecognizable except through
the filter

of phenomena;
human knowledge cannot be achieved except through

the reflection of the intellect;
and the ethical world is incommunicable T W O E U R O P E S , T W O M O D E R N I T I E S

79

except through the
schematism of reason.
What is at play is a form ofmediation, or really a reflexive folding back and a sort ofweak

transcendence, which relativizes experience and abolishes every

instance ofthe immediate and absolute in human life and history.

Why, however, is this relativity necessary? Why cannot knowledge

and will be allowed to claim themselves to be absolute? Because

every movement ofself-constitution ofthe multitude must yield

to a preconstituted order, and because claiming that humans could

immediately establish their freedom in being would be a subversive

delirium. This is the essential core ofthe ideological passage in which

the hegemonic concept ofEuropean modernity was constructed.

The first strategic masterpiece in this construction was accom-

plished by Rene´ Descartes. Although Descartes pretended to pursue

a new humanistic project ofknowledge, he really reestablished

transcendent order. When he posed reason as the exclusive terrain

of mediation between God and the world, he effectively reaffirmed

dualism as the defining feature of experience and thought. We

should be careful here. Mediation in Descartes is never well defined,

or really, ifwe stay close to the text, we find that mediation resides

mysteriously only in the will ofGod. Descartes’s cunning stratagem

consists primarily in this: When he addresses the centrality ofthought

in the transcendental function of mediation, he defines a sort of

residual ofdivine transcendence. Descartes claims that the logics of

mediation reside in thought and that God is very far from the scene,

but a new man such as Blaise Pascal is perfectly right to object that

this is just an example ofDescartes’s trickery.18 In fact, Descartes’s

God is very close: God is the guarantee that transcendental rule is

inscribed in consciousness and thought as necessary, universal, and

thus preconstituted:

Please do not hesitate to assert and proclaim everywhere that

it is God who has laid down these laws in nature just as a

king lays down laws in his kingdom. There is no single one

that we cannot understand ifour mind turns to consider it.

They are all inborn in our minds just as a king would imprint

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his laws on the hearts ofall his subjects ifhe had enough

power to do so. The greatness ofGod, on the other hand, is

something which we cannot comprehend even though we

know it. But the very fact that we judge it incomprehensible

makes us esteem it the more greatly; just as a king has more

majesty when he is less familiarly known by his subjects, pro-

vided ofcourse that they do not get the idea that they have

no king—they must know him enough to be in no doubt

about that.19

The realm ofpotentiality, which had been opened by the humanist

principle ofsubjectivity, is limited a priori by the imposition of

transcendent rule and order. Descartes surreptitiously reproposes

theology on the terrain that humanism had cleared, and its apparatus

is resolutely transcendental.

With Descartes we are at the beginning ofthe history ofthe

Enlightenment, or rather bourgeois ideology.20 The transcendental

apparatus he proposes is the distinctive trademark ofEuropean

Enlightenment thought. In both the empiricist and the idealist

currents, transcendentalism was the exclusive horizon ofideology,

and in the successive centuries nearly all the major currents of

philosophy would be drawn into this project. The symbiosis be-

tween intellectual labor and institutional, political, and scientific

rhetorics became absolute on this terrain, and every conceptual

formation came to be marked by it: the formalization of politics,

the instrumentalization ofscience and technique f

or profit, the

pacification ofsocial antagonisms. Certainly, in each ofthese fields

we find historically specific developments, but everything was al-

ways tied up with the line ofa grand narrative that European

modernity told about itself, a tale told in a transcendental dialect.21

In many respects the work ofImmanuel Kant stands at the

center ofthis development. Kant’s thought is enormously rich and

leads in numerous directions, but we are interested here primarily

in the line that crowns the transcendental principle as the apex of

European modernity. Kant manages to pose the subject at the center

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81

ofthe metaphysical horizon but at the same time control it by

means ofthe three operations we cited earlier: the emptying of

experience in phenomena, the reduction ofknowledge to intellec-

tual mediation, and the neutralization ofethical action in the sche-

matism ofreason. The mediation that Descartes invoked in his

reaffirmation of dualism is hypostatized by Kant, not in the divinity

but nonetheless in a pseudo-ontological critique—in an ordering

function ofconsciousness and an indistinct appetite ofthe will.

Humanity is the center ofthe universe, but this is not the humanity

that through art and action made itself
homohomo.
It is a humanity lost in experience, deluded in the pursuit ofthe ethical ideal. Kant

throws us back into the crisis ofmodernity with full awareness

when he poses the discovery ofthe subject itselfas crisis, but this

crisis is made into an apology ofthe transcendental as the unique

and exclusive horizon ofknowledge and action. The world becomes

an architecture ofideal forms, the only reality conceded to us.

Romanticism was never expressed so strongly as it is in Kant.

This is the leitmotifofKantian philosophy: the necessity ofthe

transcendental, the impossibility ofevery form ofimmediacy, the

exorcism ofevery vital figure in the apprehension and action of

being. From this perspective one should perhaps consider Arthur

Schopenhauer the most lucid reader ofKantianism and its Romantic

gesture. The fact that it is difficult if not impossible to reunite the

appearance ofthe thing with the thing itselfis precisely the curse

ofthis world ofpain and need. And this is therefore not a world

constructed in a way so that noble and high forces, forces that tend

to truth and light, can prosper.22 In other words, Schopenhauer

recognizes Kantianism as the definitive liquidation ofthe human-