Where is Medieval Philosophy going?
Inaugural Lecture delivered on Thursday 13 February 2014
Dédicace
To Jean Jolivet
Texte intégral
The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it.1
“Once we have tasted modern philosophy, it is rather difficult to become accustomed to that of the Scholastics. Everything about it is rude and barbarian. The most abstract and futile questions, those that should never have been conceived of, are piled up one upon the other. And far from remedying the underlying problems, the expression adds a new source of unpleasantness, by its dullness and obscurity… The pains of a traveller crossing arid and uneducated countryside is no greater than that of a rational mind compelled by duty to devote itself to the Scholastics, to read […] the twenty-one folio volumes of Albert the Great […] or the seventeen volumes attributed to Saint Thomas Aquinas.”2
1Mr Administrator,
Ladies and Gentlemen,
Dear Colleagues,
Dear Friends,
2This is what is in store for you. Or rather, this is what, from today, would be our common destiny, we who have “tasted modern philosophy” at least once: I who am “compelled” by the duty of my office to “devote myself to the Scholastics”; you whose desire to know may lead you once again into this venerable institution. Indeed, this is what would unite us, had the diagnosis of André-François Boureau-Deslandes (a naval officer and member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences), published in his Histoire critique de la philosophie in 1737, been founded. Obscurity, dullness, boredom: a formidable trio that, alas, we have to acknowledge, does sum up the opinion about medieval philosophy that prevailed for a long time and until fairly recently.
3It will be said that the views expressed by the author of L’Art de ne point s’ennuyer and of Réflexions sur les grands hommes qui sont morts en plaisantant are not conclusive.3 Probably. But it is by no means exceptional. In 1735, in his Traité de l’opinion, the Marquis Le Gendre de Saint-Aubin painted an identical picture of a philosophical age that was irremediably spoilt by the misuse of logic.4 To be sure, his writing was not as dull as that of Deslandes: it showed the two “sects” that divided peripateticism, the Nominalists and the Realists, “fighting” one another, “to the point of extravagance”, waging “real battles”, “arousing fury through the vainest disputes”, to the extent that, to put an end to the “disorder in France”, Louis XI decreed that the Nominalists’ books were “to be bound in chains that no one was authorized to open”. Le Gendre commented: “What a triumph for a victorious party! […] this chaining up in libraries was an admirable invention to savour a victory. The Scotists, free, browsed, showered with honour, sat beside their enemies shamefully bound in chains.” One book scornfully eyed the other; one was honoured, the other fettered. People knew how to write in 1700; they were not for all that better historians. Le Gendre’s account of the 1474 Parisian crisis and of the Edict of Senlis which, on 1 March temporarily put an end to this situation, is approximate5, with little detail on the “enchained books”6, and incomplete. It overlooks the dénouement, namely the abrogation of the measure seven years later and, above all, it leaves contemporaries’ derision out of the account. On 25 February 1475, Robert Gaguin (1433/34-1501), Minister General of the Trinitarian Order, wrote to Guillaume Fichet (1433-April 1476):
King Louis has just decreed that the books [of the Nominalists] should remain under lock and chain in the libraries, so that they may no longer be looked at […]. Would you not say that these poor books are enraged or possessed by demons, so that they had to be bound up to prevent them from pouncing on passers-by?7
4To bind [lier] rather than to read [lire]: an interesting anagram. As I said, after the Humanists’ amusement came the abrogation: this was France. The Provost of Paris, Jean d’Estouteville, wrote to “Monsieur le Recteur, et MM. de notre mère l’Université de Paris” that the king had ordered him to “have all the Nominalists’ books unchained and unlocked” and to make it “known” in the collèges that everyone could henceforth study “whosoever they wished” to study.
5One of the first modern historians of the Université de Paris, Eugène Dubarle, commented in 1829 that:
This new measure of the King was welcomed with cheers, and it had unsurprising results; the Nominalists, no longer being persecuted, were soon forgotten.8
6We could add: and with them all the Scholastics – as people’s commitment to a new social, cultural and political world, irrespective of what we call it: Humanism, Renaissance, Reform – was characterized by the abandonment of former ways of thinking and the jettisoning of false medieval knowledge, to the benefit of real science, or that of vain theology, to the benefit of real faith. The problem is that not everyone agrees on the end of the Middle Ages, and that it is not because they would supposedly have ended that we are no longer in them. “We are even more scholastic than we think”, wrote Abbé de Condillac in the mid-18th-century Cours d’études written for Ferdinand de Bourbon, Philippe V’s grandson9, before noting that by scholastic, he meant the “confusing mix of philosophy and theology”, that was canonized at the same time as “Saint Thomas” by John XXII on 18 July 1323.
7History has moved on since the 18th century. Our Middle Ages are no longer those of Condillac and even less so those of Deslandes and Le Gendre. They are less obscure, less confused, less gloomy, less dull. But what exactly are the Middle Ages? Our Middle Ages? Not a “new Middle Ages”, nor the hastily glorified, quickly forgotten object of a vacuous trend that might be called “new Medievalism”. The Middle Ages that I call “ours” is the period about which I learned from my teachers at the 5th Section of the École pratique des hautes études: Paul Vignaux, who taught the History of Medieval Theology, and Jean Jolivet, who taught Religion and Philosophy in Medieval Christianity and Islam. It was also that of Paul Vignaux’s predecessor at the Religious Sciences section, Étienne Gilson, Senior Researcher in the History of Doctrines and Dogmas, before being elected to the Chair of the History of Philosophy of the Middle Ages at the Collège de France. On 5 April 1932 Gilson delivered his Inaugural Lecture entitled Le Moyen âge et le naturalisme antique, in which he paid homage to two scholars, claiming that “the spirit of his ‘own’ teaching would never cease to bear their mark” – even though neither of them was a medievalist: the philosopher, sociologist and ethnologist Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, and Henri Bergson.10
8The Middle Ages that a student in the late sixties could discover in the books of Étienne Gilson, who had left the Collège de France in 1950, or in Paul Vignaux’s seminars held at the Sorbonne until 1976, were actually very different. Gilson, who was engaged since the late twenties in the debate on “Christian philosophy” generated by Émile Bréhier’s famous claim that “we can no more talk of Christian philosophy than of Christian mathematics or Christian physics”11, considered that “the progress towards metaphysical truth described several times by Thomas Aquinas found its place in the economy of divine salvation”. Vignaux, who had worked extensively on the relationship between Christian philosophy and the theology of history12, had moved away from the Gilsonian world since the thirties. He suggested that his students move beyond the theology of the history of philosophy expressed in the Gilsonian notion of “Christian philosophy” by reflecting on the “the historical being of Man”, “implying a philosophy of religion focused on Christianity itself”. Christian philosophy or the philosophy of religion: the gap was maximal between the two Middle Ages, but it was this difference that was instructive, especially in relation to philosophy “in the making” at the time. The period was indeed generous: Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze, Lyotard, but also Vuillemin, Granger and others offered budding historians of philosophy material to question their practice. History per se was not forgotten either; with the Dubys or the Le Goffs, the Middle Ages opened up to them, irrespective of the approach, with the perspective of the “rebel diversity” that Vignaux assigned as the primary object to “the historian who had received training in philosophy”.13
9Rebel diversity: the alliance of the two terms was pleasing to the ear. But was it the whole story? Gilson had had a successor at the Collège de France, who was not a medievalist: Martial Gueroult. In Histoire et technologie des sytèmes philosophiques, his Inaugural Lecture delivered on 4 December 1951, Gueroult, the author of L’évolution et la structure de la doctrine de la science chez Fichte (1930), rejected the then usual historiographic categories such as “realism”, “idealism” or “criticism”, and characterized all philosophy in terms of “structures”. By this he meant that there was both a singular monument and an individual system of evidence of truths – not general structures but “individualized” ones, “insoluble from the content that was adherent to them”.14
10Structure: here was a concept that seemed to open a new pathway, making it possible to wrench medieval studies from the historiographic patterns inherited conflictingly from the 18th and the 19th centuries. Since the Summa theologica was erected, in a Panofskian vein, as a cathedral of knowledge, did scholastic formalism and its technicity not lend themselves better than anything else to the realization of the dual purpose of philosophy – “to build a monument, and to demonstrate a truth” –, a dual purpose that Gueroult described in relation to the “submission to immanent laws inherent in the forms in which philosophizing thought locks itself while simultaneously instituting them”, “laws and forms that impose themselves on the subject in spite of himself”?15 At the end of the sixties, the time seemed to have come for a young medievalist to revisit the Middle Ages with the conceptual tools of his generation, and to confront both the diversity, whether rebel or not, and the structure, whether general or individualized.
11That is what I undertook in 1975, the year I joined the CNRS, at the Centre d’études des religions du Livre, which was founded by Paul Vignaux, the medievalist, Georges Vajda, the Hebrew scholar, and Henri Corbin, the scholar of Islam. I continued on the same path at the École pratique des hautes études and at the University of Geneva, my second philosophical homeland, until the Faculty of the Collège de France bestowed the honour on me, in 2012, of electing me to this Chair of the History of Medieval Philosophy. Except for an adjective in the place of a noun, it has the same title as that of Étienne Gilson’s Chair.
12This likeness is crushing – including stylistically. At a time when idiolects and syntactic habits were destroying French prose, Gilson had effectively, and singlehandedly in those days, maintained the demand for well-structured sentences, clear thoughts and color rhythmicus, instilling Chateaubriand in Duns Scotus where so many others had been content to put Trissotin in Vadius. Yet, as crushing as it may be, the rapprochement is nevertheless obliging, as is the trust and generous support of Claudine Tiercelin, Chair of Metaphysics and Philosophy of Knowledge, to whom medieval studies have a twofold debt, first in view of her innovative work on Duns Scotus himself or on Duns Scotus and Peirce16, and second for the role that she subsequently played in recreating this Chair. It is a great privilege for me to be able to contribute, at her side, to the defence of a certain idea of rigorous philosophy and metaphysics. I am also grateful to Pierre Corvol, Michel Zink, Antoine Compagnon, Jean-Noël Robert and Paul Veyne. Their advice or friendship has on several occasions helped me through some difficult times.
13Ladies and Gentlemen, we come to the Middle Ages with questions, only to discover more questions. After more than forty years of teaching and research, I must admit that I have given up most of my predecessors’ questions: Christian philosophy, theology of history, philosophy of religion. On the other hand, another one has imposed itself on me with growing acuteness: how to do history in medieval philosophy? The difficulty stems a) from the nature of the object: medieval thinking, that is said to be torn between reason and faith – what Durkheim called the “tragedy of scholastics”, and b) from the status of the discipline itself: the history of philosophy, which is challenged by philosophers and historians alike.
14To that I will simply answer today that one cannot do history of medieval philosophy without doing medieval philosophy. The Chair that has just been recreated is not a cenotaph. The object exists and only asks to live. When it comes to philosophy, whether or not Deslandes and Le Gendre like it, the Middle Ages are not the longest parentheses in the history of human thought. They are nevertheless long, even longer than we think17; and it is also true that, although central, they are relatively remote from everything else. Yet their limits are variable, or rather, dependent on one’s view of history as much as of philosophy.
15When did medieval philosophy begin? When did it end? One might say: is it not self-evident that it began and ended with the Middle Ages? That is incorrect. Or rather, it depends on one’s answer to other questions. For a long time, the historian’s Middle Ages started, might I say, long before the fall of Rome in 476, with the abdication of Romulus Augustulus, the last Roman Emperor in the West, and ended in 1453 with the capture of Constantinople by Mehmed II and the fall of the Eastern Roman Empire. This ending of the Middle Ages, a political and religious event internal to both the Roman world (Romanitas) and to Christianity (Christianitas), also marked culturally the beginning of a period of revival, the “Renaissance”, driven by the exile of Byzantine humanists in Italy – according to the scenario that Michelet elaborated, between mourning and falling in love, in his lectures at the Collège de France in 1840-1841.18 Condillac, who did not yet use the capitalized word Renaissance, but rather naissance (birth), renaissance and révolution, that need only to be heard together without capitals to reach Michelet, saw the Greeks’ intrusion in a very different light. Their influx boosted dead languages to the detriment of living ones, ruining the hopes that Dante, Petrarca and Boccaccio had already sparked well before that: “The Greeks”, he wrote in his lecture on logic, “those Greeks to whom we attribute the revival of literature, spread through Italy like a cloud, and blocked off the light that had started to appear”.19
16As we can see, there is no purely historical periodization: political history is closely entangled with cultural history, and the latter with literary history, which can weave two narratives with contradictory meanings on the same weft. The same is of course true of the history of philosophy. In the second edition of La Philosophie au Moyen Âge, Gilson laid the first milestone for the “Christian religion’s first contact with philosophy, in the 2nd century of our era, as soon as there were converts of Greek culture”.20 The ensuing narrative took the three paths available a priori – remember the term – to Christians when they had only just met philosophia: “condemnation”, “absorption in the new religion”, “use for apologetic purposes”. This scenario warrants long comments but time demands that I go directly to my own.
17Medieval philosophy can lead only to an event for philosophy: here, the closing of the Neo-Platonic School of Athens in 529 by the Christian Emperor Justinian, which led to the exile in Persia of the last pagan philosophers, from Damascius and Simplicius to Isidore de Gaza. In the same year, the Alexandria School, the other Neo-Platonic school still operating, started to take a turn towards Christianity, with John Philopon. This turn was rapidly completed by his successors. Closure, exile, conversion: that was the first episode. What was the last? Ernest Renan argues that everything changed when, “on 4 April 1497, Nicolas Leonicus Thomoeus took up the Padova Chair to teach Aristotle in Greek”.21 The creation of a Chair of Philosophy emancipated from the tutelage of the Scholastics’ Arabized Latin, of their “emaciated categories” and their “untamed jargon”: this is what might mark the end of the Middle Ages in philosophy. The thesis is precise – only the time of the lecture is missing. It is excessive, but it draws attention to an essential point: the entry of Greek and, at the same time, that of Greece, which was then oriental, into the European fold. Another possible episode might be the creation of Chairs of Greek and Hebrew – without forgetting Mathematics – at the Collège de France in 1530. A third, with variable dating, would be the growing use of vernacular languages in scientific communication and academic contexts. And finally a last one, which brings them all together, was the giving up jointly of Latin, of Aristotle and of religious law. Giordano Bruno had attempted it in 1584 in Spaccio della bestia trionfante – The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast22 –, but the Campo de’ Fiori stake was the response he received on 17 February 1600.
18Let us go back to the beginning. For whom was the closure of the Athens School an event? For us, and not for the Eastern Christians, nor for the Latins. Not for the Eastern Christians, who for a long time had baptized philosophy, making “philosophy according to Christ”, the real philosophy, be it Christian life as such or its perfect form, monastic life.23 Not for the Latins, who for a long time could say with Augustin: “Verus philosophus est amator Dei”.
19All borders are porous. Every event hides a process. As philosophy was, for the Byzantines, and hence for the Jews and the Muslims, the “foreign science” – foreign to the “us” of the religious community –, doing the history of medieval philosophy means doing that of a series of philosophical acculturations. And “acculturation” implies “appropriation”, active assimilation, in short: translatio, which means both transferral and translation. “Acculturation” also implies competition, rejection and refusal.
20The “spatial turn” effected in history24 is as important for medievalists as are the “linguistic turn” and the “cognitive turn” for philosophers.25 The historical geography of knowledge has to supplant the traditional divisions of the history of philosophy. Historians’ current development, as Lieux de savoir [Places of Knowledge], in what concerns us here, and inter alia the study of the production and circulation of knowledge, of “practices of sociability” and of the material conditions of intellectual work, can no longer be overlooked. This is what I am referring to in my books when I use the Carolingian term translatio studiorum. Doing the history of medieval philosophy means, above all, doing the history of the philosophical texts of Antiquity, of their forms and their genres, their survival, circulation, transmission, reproduction and reading. It means studying the translations and the translators, the constitution of corpuses, the formation of canons, the institutions, communities, social groups and individuals who, in one way or another, contributed to that endeavour. It also means studying the relations that these actors maintained, along with their function in society or in the Churches, and their ideology. Between the closing of the Athens School and Leonico Tomeo’s accession to the Chair, there is more than one “Middle Ages”. There are several continuations from Late Antiquity, several changes of language – from Greek to Latin, Greek to Syriac, Syriac to Arabic, Arabic to Hebrew, Arabic to Latin, Hebrew to Latin, and also Latin to Greek and Latin to Hebrew –, several phases of rupture, rearrangement and reshaping, several renaissances, reversals or interruptions, in all sorts of environments and geographic, cultural, religious and institutional spaces, in the East, the West, the land of Islam, the countries of Christianity, of which the historian of philosophy must simultaneously preserve the particular characteristics and identify the family resemblances. A 6th-century student of Olympiodorus or of Stephanus of Athens is not a 12th-century Parisian ecclesiastical scholar, but apart from the diversity of the places, environments and idioms, both had a highly significant point in common, they read the same philosophical texts: Aristotle’s Categories and Porphyry’s Isagoge. They were actually philosophically closer than are those who today argue “the futility of reading a philosophical article more than ten years old”.
21The task of the historian of medieval philosophy may seem disproportionate. One thing is sure, he or she cannot perform it fully by simply contrasting “historical reconstruction” and “rational reconstruction” or “textualism” and “contextualism”.26 Considered in relation to Quentin Skinner’s 1969 distinction27, the history of medieval philosophy, as I see it, occupies an original place. It concerns texts, but this is not a textualism in Skinner’s sense – a “theory of the text alone” (the whole text, nothing but the text) –, since it is not concerned with the text without its context. Nor is it a pure unqualified contextualism, for which the study of the “contextual conditions of the production of statements” would suffice for reconstructing the original meaning. On this point I agree with Skinner, as I do in the analysis of the various “myths” to which he claims the historian of the “text alone” is exposed: 1. the myth of doctrines, which retrospectively imposes on an author theoretical conditions defined by a set of mandatory themes, determined by the historian: “a pack of tricks we play on the dead”; 2. anachronism by anticipation or the mythology of prolepsis, which confuses the signification that a work could have had for its author with the impact it subsequently did have; 3. the “myth of coherence”, which compels the interpreter to neutralize the antinomies, contradictions or divergences that affect a work – a practice that brings to mind for me the symphonic or concordist exegesis method that Late Antiquity philosophers applied to the reading of Aristotle and Plato, that the Scholastics applied to Aristotle alone, and then that the Late Scholastics and the Neo-Scholastics applied to Thomas Aquinas; 4. finally, the myth of influence, to which, in 199928, I sought to oppose the notions of “tracing” and “traceability”.
22In the same year, in L’Art des généralités, a book on the theories of abstraction, I used the term “philosophical archaeology”29 for the first time. This is how I now define all of my work, formerly presented under the related terms “history of corpuses” and “history of networks”.30 The word archaeology implied a reference to Foucault that calls for an explanation. It was Kant who introduced the term in his answer to a prize question set by the Academy of Berlin: “What real progress has metaphysics made in Germany since the time of Leibniz and Wolf?” He ventured the following oxymoron: “a history a priori”31, that Foucault undoubtedly remembered when, in the preface to Les Mots et les Choses, he typed his own “historical a priori”32, with an effect, he later admitted, that was “rather startling”.33 It was in any case Foucault who, debating with George Steiner34, revived the Kantian idea of a “philosophizing history of philosophy” understood as philosophische Archäologie, in other words, in its interpretation, as “the history of what makes a certain form of thinking necessary”. This is the meaning that I adopt in my own work.
23Just how far can we follow both Gueroult and Foucault conceptually and narratively? The question caught and still holds my attention. That is why, while continuing to seek structures in history in Paris, I started looking elsewhere as well: towards the other rugby-playing country, England – Oxford in this case, where from 1935 to 1941 a philosopher who was also an archaeologist, in the true sense of the word, had taught. I am referring to Robin George Collingwood. Keeping for later the confrontation of his theory of “absolute presuppositions” with Gueroult’s “laws” and “forms”, on the one hand, and with Foucault’s episteme, on the other – of which, admittedly, I feared (although no longer do) the outcome –, I borrowed from the English philosopher that which I needed in order to practise what I saw as a pragmatic version of structuralism in history. This version was characterized first by the elimination of general longstanding problems, to the benefit of particular and temporary complexes of questions and answers, and second by the adoption of the constructive reenactment method, summarized in the statement “All history is a re-enactment”35 or, as W. H. Dray put it, “All history is a re-enactment of past thought as expressed in past action”36. Re-enactment is the English and archaeological version of what Heidegger phenomenologically called “objectification in a living understanding” (“in lebendigem Verstehen”). I will revert to this. The constructive re-enactment has an original structural dimension that a structuralist will say is too weak, and a non-structuralist too strong: that of the complex of questions and answers. It allows us not to bow, with Lévi-Strauss, to the “powerful inanity of the event”37, as one would in a queue to offer one’s condolences, hurrying to the exit: the structure. Of the event of thought, as an event, one cannot say – as, in our young years, certain readings of Du miel aux cendres suggested – that there is nothing to say other than that it happened.38 It can, in fact, be re-enacted, and thereby provide further food for thought. Interestingly, it does not return alone. According to Collingwood, as any thought belongs to a complex of questions and answers, the task of the archaeologist philosopher, as an archaeologist, cannot be limited to exhuming a thesis in order to study, evaluate and discuss it atomistically. He or she has to “re-enact” his or her original questionnaire holistically, and literally rethink this thought in and with the whole to which it belongs.39 Philosophical archaeology claims to own not only the terms and questions of a philosopher but also, beyond that, their organization, their “structure” – the word is Collingwood’s.40 What is actually a complex of question-answers, a CQA? It is neither more nor less than an MCQ, a multiple-choice questionnaire. The difference is that instead of answering yes or no by ticking a box, like believers who cannot sign their name, we answer with two series of arguments: textual (per auctoritatem) and rational (per rationem). It is therefore effectively the questions-answers themselves that have to be re-enacted, all together, as complicated or complex as that may be, so that, where relevant, it may then be the basis of a standpoint, a refutation, an ad hoc or even overall critique.
24One will say: that is unfeasible! Yet that is exactly what a medievalist does most of the time, and even three times, for each thought that he or she brings up: a first time by editing the text containing all the questions-answers – the medieval archive is largely unpublished; a second time by translating it – the number of people who read Latin is declining; and a third time, by analyzing it conceptually – which is the aim of the game, irrespective of the argument of those who, in my opinion too rigidly, contrast the culture of commentary and the culture of argumentation, “continental” philosophy (or history) and “analytical” philosophy (or history)”41. The three activities: editing, translating and analyzing are mentally indissoluble, and all three are required. Editing means first copying. Transcribing a manuscript is like reading an invisible music score in the concatenation of signs and abbreviations written on the parchment. It means entering, also, into the duration of a work. There are invariants in history: even if the laptop has replaced the calamus, we still do not transcribe a 25 × 16 centimetre folio faster today than we did yesterday. The journey between the eye and the hand is the first act of re-enactment: we cannot edit a sentence without rethinking a thought – including when we make a mistake.
25Medieval scholars were Collingwood’s oldest disciples. One need only glance at a philosophical or theological text of the Late Middle Ages to see that it is mostly composed of a set of questions and answers, articulated on the basis of precise argumentative structures corresponding to well-defined pedagogical practices which, in turn, produce close but varied literary genres: challenged questions, for example, or quodlibetical questions – the academic form of the tournament, the question put to the master who ventures there, by anyone (a quolibet) on anything (de quolibet). The list would be long. We see emerging the disputational, agonistic format, “the dynamics of conflict and alliance” between concrete actors and abstract actants, who liken the movement of the concept to a social movement.
26The past thirty years have witnessed a vertiginous growth of archives, amplified by the new means of reproduction, storage and circulation of data. Is this formidable accumulation of texts, authors, themes and events still conceptually exploitable? It seems unlikely. When the googlization of data reaches a certain point, the “rebel diversity” no longer provides food for thought; it saturates our sight.
27The question is not new. An advocate of emplotment or “mise en intrigue” which, as Ricoeur put it, “introduced a first epistemic discrepancy between the event as it occurred and the event as it is related, recorded, [and] communicated”42, will say that the objective field of events in which the narrator draws an itinerary is in any case “divisible to infinity”. The danger for the historian of medieval philosophy is therefore not of a different nature today than it was one or rather two centuries ago; it is, and remains, as Paul Veyne wrote, that of “being drawn into the chasm of the infinitesimal”, if he or she “stops seeing events in their plots”43. Others question diversity itself, following Arthur Oncken Lovejoy (1873-1962) in The Great Chain of Being, which, in 1933, laid the foundations of “the history of ideas”44. In “this very fine book” – as Pierre Bourdieu described it in his lecture on the State45 –, the American philosopher, going back over what he called “unit-ideas”, that is, the elementary units in the constitution of philosophical systems (“the elements, the primary and persistent or recurrent dynamic units, of the history of thought”), explains that the “increments of absolute novelty [are] a good deal rarer than is sometimes supposed”. He argues that the historian’s task is therefore first to identify the “persistent dynamic factors”, the “ideas that produce effects in the history of thought” – hypotheses, implicit or incompletely explicit assumptions, more or less unconscious mental habitus, “dialectical motives” that are at work in the thinking of an individual or generation, and finally principles above all – that have to be tracked down “through all [...] of the provinces of history in which [they] figure[d] in any important degree, whether those provinces are called philosophy, science, literature, art, religion, or politics”.46 The history of philosophy is a matter of principles – that is the premise that philosophical archeology borrows from the overly disparaged history of ideas.47
28Whether we are looking at the emplotment or the quest for elementary ideas, or both, the accumulation of data is not, in any case, a difficulty as such. The archive is not a lifeless depository; it is a fossil energy. That is where one has to seek “that which makes” possible or even – to follow Foucault – “necessary a certain form of thinking”. The history-narration that, in my opinion, the energy of the medieval archive necessarily creates, is a history of the “third kind” in which, beyond the actors, individuals, groups, classes and “clashing forces”, the principles, distinctions, schemes or conceptual and argumentative structures intervene of their own accord, as actants. Invariants have a history. Structures change. Events themselves have a duration.
29The form of thinking that I study is the modern articulation of the notions of subject, agent, self, and person. The main theme of my teaching at the Collège de France will therefore be this “archaeology of the subject”, the foundations of which were laid by the publication of Naissance du sujet in 2007, La Quête de l’identité in 2008 and, this very morning, La Double Révolution.48 How and why did the “subject”, a passive substance or substrate, a thing that in Aristotle’s ontology is conducive to accidents, become the human subject of action, called “I”? That is the guiding question, opened by the Nietzschean critique of the “logical superstition” and “grammarian routine” that makes us attribute our actions, as predicates, to a subject supposed to be its own master (as Lacan put it, though slightly differently).49 This is also the point where philosophical archaeology crosses the path of what Heidegger elaborated under the title of “critical destruction” (kritische Destruktion) and “deconstruction” (Abbau) – a deconstruction of which the history will have to be done one day in order to deconstruct it in turn – like modern Lumière brothers.50 Actually, the thing is by no means new. It was in the Fribourg 1920 summer semester lecture, The Phenomenology of Intuition and of Expression, that Heidegger put forward the first true elaboration of the notion of “deconstruction” which has now conquered the world, after having conquered the North-American French Studies departments and then the ministries in Paris.51
30Starting from a diagnosis of “the contemporary philosophical situation” to elaborate phenomenologically a “theory of the formation of philosophical concepts” (eine Theorie der philosophischen Begriffsbildung), Heidegger provided a precise description of Abbau as a “liberation”, which induces a certain conception of the history of the conditions of possibility of the Geistesgeschichte or “intellectual history”. The historical philosophers – as one says historical events – have the status of “facts” only in a “living philosophical apprehension” (in lebendiger philosophischer Erfassung). The same apprehension, which responds to a desire to go “far out”, “ins Freie”, to free oneself of the so-called “epigonal” history that adds up “systems” and “points of view”, is accomplished by Abbau. Deconstruction is intended to “free ourselves of an inauthentic tradition imposed on us”52, to bring the “obstructive concepts” back to their origins, to “unblock” the path leading “to things themselves”.53 It is a philosophical act set in the practical horizon of a certain form of philosophy: phenomenology.
31In the thirties and forties, once the break with phenomenology was consummated, the destruction of traditional ontology made way to the “history of being” (Geschichte des Seins). The keyword was no longer the return to the origins, but change, mutation, permutation, transformation: Wandeln and Verwandlung. The 1934 summer semester lecture – Logik als die Frage nach dem Wesen der Sprache/Logic as the Question Concerning the Essence of Language, initially announced under the title Der Staat und die Wissenschaft/The State and Science (may those who have ears, hear!) – raised the following questions:
What does it mean that Man is a subject? What does “subject” mean? How does it happen that we overstate the being of Man in this way? (Was heißt, der Mensch sei Subjekt? Was bedeutet “Subjekt”? Wie kommt es zu dieser Ansetzung des menschlichen Seins?)
32These questions are those of the archaeology of the subject. Heidegger’s answer relates to permutation (Verwandlung), to the complete reversal of the meaning of the words subiectum and obiectum on the threshold of modernity, to the complete turn around (Umkehrung) they were given by a meaning exactly opposed to that which they had had in the Middle Ages: the scholastics called subiectum the extra-mental thing, that we today call the “object”, and obiectum the mental representation, that we now call “subjective”. Hence, another question:
How and along which way did it come to this turning around of the fundamental concepts of philosophy, and what does it mean? (Wie und auf welchem Wege kam es zu dieser Umkehrung der Fundamentalbegriffe der Philosophie, und was bedeutet sie54?)
33This is once again what the archaeology of the subject investigates. What answer does it yield? This year’s series of lectures, entitled Inventio subiecti. The Invention of the Modern Subject, will give a first approximation, while starting to examine the archaeological critique of the thesis proposed in 1941 by Heidegger in Metaphysics as History of Being, according to which it was with Descartes that, for the first time, subiectum and ego, subjectity and egoity (Ichheit) acquired an identical meaning.55
34Stat Roma pristina nomine, nomina nuda tenemus: the former Rome is no more than a name; we retain only empty names, wrote Bernard de Cluny in around 1140, in On Contempt for the World (De contemptu mundi). I do not believe a word of it. Roma, Rome or, from Eco, Rosa, the rose, remains as a name, to be sure, but this name is not empty: there are thoughts between the words and the roses.
35The history of the thinking subject lies in the outline of a medieval quadrilateral where four questions are formed, call for one another or are linked to one another. Two of them directly concern thought: 1. Who thinks? In other words: Who is it that thinks in me? My Self, as Locke would say, or “id” or “it”; auf Deutsch: “es”, as Lichtenberg would say, then Schelling, rephrasing the Cartesian cogito in the impersonal form of a “Es denkt in mir”: it thinks in me, as one says “Es regnet bei mir”: it is raining at my place. 2. What is the subject of the thinking? In other words: what is this, the thing, the res, das Ding, l’aliquid, that is thinking in me?56 These two questions, that we can consider equivalent or not, are bound to the other two questions of the quadrilateral, which are as old as philosophy: Who am I? And what is Man? In their interweaving, the four can serve as a questionnaire on “the” question of the subject of thought, and define its “historical a priori”.57 This structure, or rather this “theoretical schema” was not put in place on its own, nor from the outset. The question of the subject of thinking changed meaning several times, as did the notions denoted by the term subject. The same applies to the other three questions. Throughout the Late Middle Ages, this questionnaire grew longer. It evolved in relation to the evolution of the models of ψυχή (the soul). Why? Because: 1. new questions appeared during the course of the two main controversies in the 13th and 14th centuries: the “Averroist controversies” on the unity of the intellect, and the “Thomist controversies” on the unity or plurality of substantial forms58; 2. psychology underwent profound changes notably, in the 14th century, the substitution of the Aristotelian notion of “sensible perception” with the notion of “intellection” or of “intuitive knowledge of the singular”; 3. the science of the soul, centred by the De anima on the intellect, the exercise of thinking and knowing saw the growth of the part allocated to the analysis of “emotions” (attributed by Aristotle to the body-intellect “compound”: le κοινόν59).
36Hence, a new problem arose: is there a single subject of thinking, perception and emotions? An alternative version of this problem would be: Who says “I” in “I think”, “I perceive”, “I feel”?60 Is it the same subject that says “I” in “I think”, “I see” and “I have pain”? Is it always the same I? Who or what is it about every time? The soul? The body? The compound? The person as the subject of the union of body and soul? This new problem draws a bridge between the Late Middle Ages and the Classical Age, between the Averroist controversies and a new set of discussions: the “Cartesian” controversies. It is the problem of the unity of Man. With him, the questionnaire keeps getting longer.
37By asking whether Man, body and soul, is a being (one) by accident (ens per accidens) or a being (one) by itself (ens per se), the 14th-century masters formulated the question that was to be at the centre of controversies launched against Descartes by Aristotelian Calvinists in Utrecht in 1641.61 The Averroist-Descartes axis is capital for the history of the subject-agent. Following this axis means building several “plots”. The Heideggerian highway of the history of being is not the only road that archaeology should take. There are other itineraries. The archaeology of the subject cannot simply be an account of the (pre)history of the Cartesian-Kantian subject in the scholastic tradition or even in the “ancient and medieval” tradition. If there are other itineraries, it means there are other destinations – Reid rather than Descartes, Brentano rather than Kant –, and therefore also other traditions, that we will discover as we go along.
38Where is medieval philosophy going? It is going to where philosophy is. It is there where philosophy is going. It became medieval once the Middle Ages were over; it was only philosophy when the Middle Ages were still saeculum modernorum, the “century”, that is, the “age” “of the Moderns”, for those living in it. Today it is going there where he or she who wants to relate, that is, to put its history in relation, must go: to Cordoba or to Vienna, but also to Paris or Edinburgh, the two new Athens, one French, under the Valois, the other British, during the Scottish Enlightenment.62 The inquiry on “the spatial dynamics of modern philosophy”, undertaken in the framework of the Sociology of Philosophies63, can be taken up mutatis mutandis by the medievalist. The archaeology of the subject will in any case lead us, in space and in time, from the Council of Chalcedon (451) to 18th-century Scottish philosophy, then to 19th-century Austrian philosophy and finally, I hope, to the deconstruction of the deconstruction – a Tahafut-at-Tahafut, a Destructio destructionis of the third millennium, an Averroist project for post-post-modernism. The journey will be long. Journeys shape old age: the traveller is, in spite of everything, a little pressed for time.
39His eagerness to start is therefore equalled, Mr Administrator, Ladies and Gentlemen, Dear Colleagues, Dear Friends, only by the desire to serve with dignity the institution that, sixty-four years after the departure of Étienne Gilson, has made the unexpected choice – but an exciting choice for the recipient – of recreating a Chair of the History of Medieval Philosophy at the Collège de France.
Notes de bas de page
1 O. Wilde, “The Critic as Artist”, Intentions, London, James A. Osgood, 1891, p. 117.
2 A.-F. Boureau-Deslandes, Histoire critique de la philosophie où l’on traite de fon origine, de fes progrès & des diverfes révolutions qui lui font arrivées jufqu’à notre tems, vol. III, Amsterdam, François Changuion, 1756, pp. 269-270.
3 In Le Nouveau Dictionnaire historique ou histoire abrégée de tous les hommes qui se sont fait un nom par des talents, des vertus, des forfaits, des erreurs etc. ; depuis le commencement du monde jusqu’à nos jours, vol. III, Caen, G. Le Roi, 6th ed. 1786, pp. 158-159, Louis Mayeul Chaudon (1737-1817) draws a nuanced portrait of the man and the work.
4 G.-C. Le Gendre de Saint-Aubin, Traité de l’opinion ou Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire de l’esprit humain, vol. I, Paris, Briasson-Vienne, Briffaut, 1735, pp. 141-142.
5 Cf. Z. Kaluza, “Les étapes d’une controverse. Les nominalistes et les réalistes parisiens de 1339 à 1482”, in A. Le Boulluec (ed.), La Controverse religieuse et ses formes, Paris, Éd. du Cerf, 1995, pp. 297-317.
6 V. Le Clerc, Discours sur l’état des Lettres, in V. Le Clerc and E. Renan, Histoire littéraire de la France au xive siècle, vol. I, Paris, Michel Lévy, 2nd ed. 1865, pp. 358-359, points out that the enchaining was both a general precaution against theft (“with strong locks and anathema”) and, “sometimes” only, “punishment inflicted on suspect works”. On the libri incatenati, see M.-H. Jullien de Pommerol, “Livres d’étudiants, bibliothèques de collèges et d’universités”, in A. Vernet (ed.), Histoire des bibliothèques françaises, vol. I : Les Bibliothèques médiévales du vie siècle à 1530, Paris, Promodis, 1989, pp. 93-111.
7 I am citing the translation of Amable-Guillaume-Prosper Brugière de Barante (1782-1866), in: Histoire des ducs de Bourgogne de la maison de Valois, vol. XII, Paris, 1824-1826, pp. 167-168. Jean-Baptiste-Louis Crévier (1693-1765), Histoire de l’Université, vol. IV, Paris, 1761, pp. 364, is closer to the original Latin, found in a book edited by L. Thuasne, in Roberti Gaguini Epistole et orationes, vol. I, Paris, Émile Bouillon, 1903, pp. 248-249. [Our translation from the French.]
8 E. Dubarle, Histoire de l’Université, depuis son origine jusqu’à nos jours, vol. I, Paris, J. L. J. Brière, 1829, p. 311. In: Discours sur l’état des Lettres, the first volume of the Histoire littéraire de la France au xive siècle, co-authored with Ernest Renan (op. cit., p. 359), Victor Le Clerc deridingly commented: “The only universities that received this authorization to read [the Nominalists’ books] with jubilation were in Germany; but perhaps they then read them less than when they were banned and locked away.”
9 Cf. Condillac, Histoire moderne, vol. VIII, Chapter vii, De la scholastique, et par occasion, de la manière d’enseigner les arts et les sciences, Œuvres complètes, vol. XII, Paris, Lecointe & Durey & Tourneux, 1822, pp. 279-303.
10 É. Gilson, “Le Moyen Âge et le naturalisme antique”, Archives d’histoire doctrinale et littéraire du Moyen Âge, no. 7, 1932, pp. 5-6.
11 É. Bréhier, “Y a-t-il une philosophie chrétienne ?”, Revue de métaphysique et de morale, vol. 38, no 2, 1931, p. 162 [pp. 133-162]. On the controversy, see G. B. Sadler, The 1930s French Christian Philosophy Debates: Relevance, Present Condition, Brief History and Main Positions, Catholic University of America Press, 2011.
12 For a precise view of the Vignaux-Gilson debate, its genesis, its nature and its implications, see P. Vignaux, “Philosophie chrétienne et théologie de l’histoire”, in De saint Anselme à Luther, Paris, Vrin, coll. “Études de philosophie médiévale”, 1976, pp. 55-68.
13 Cf. P. Vignaux, Philosophie au Moyen Âge, Paris, Vrin, 3rd ed. 2004, pp. 94-95: “The historian who has received philosophical training must be wary of unifying or systematizing too much; he/she must allow rebel diversity to be visible.”
14 M. Gueroult, Leçon inaugurale au Collège de France. Chaire d’histoire et technologie des systèmes philosophiques, Paris, Collège de France, 1952, p. 24 and 33. Cf. C. Giolito, Histoires de la philosophie avec Martial Gueroult, Paris, L’Harmattan, 1999, p. 136.
15 M. Gueroult, Leçon inaugurale au Collège de France, op. cit., p. 23.
16 Cf. “L’influence scotiste dans le projet peircien d’une métaphysique comme science”, Revue des sciences philosophiques et théologiques, vol. 83, no 1, 1999, pp. 117-134.
17 Cf. J. Le Goff, Un long Moyen Âge, Paris, Tallandier, 2004.
18 Cf. J. Michelet, Cours au Collège de France, ed. by P. Viallaneix with the collaboration of O. A. Haac and I. Tieder, Paris, Gallimard, 1995, 2 vols. On the circumstances, meaning and impact of the invention of the “Renaissance”, see Lucien Febvre, Michelet et la Renaissance, Paris, Flammarion, 1992, which goes over the lectures delivered in 1942-1943 at the Collège de France. Cf., inter alia, C. Gaspard, “Les cours de Michelet au Collège de France (1838-1851)”, in: Le Cours magistral xve-xxe siècle. Histoire de l’éducation, no. 120, 2008, pp. 99-112.
19 Condillac, Cours d’études, VI, xx, 1, in: Œuvres philosophiques, vol. II, Paris, PUF, coll. “Corpus général des philosophes français”, 1948, p. 173. Cf., in the same vein, Histoire moderne, vol. IX, De l’Italie, Chapter ix, De l’état des arts et des sciences en Italie, depuis le xe siècle jusqu’à la fin du xve siècle, Œuvres complètes, vol. XII, op. cit., pp. 431-432.
20 É. Gilson, La Philosophie au Moyen Âge. Des origines patristiques à la fin du xive siècle, Paris, Payot, 1999 (1st ed. 1944), p. 9, with, on the same problems of periodization, according to the philosopher or the historian (this time on the 13th to 14th century continuity/break), Lucien Febvre’s review, “Histoire des idées, histoire des sociétés. Une question de climat”, Annales. Économies, sociétés, civilisations, no. 2, 1946 (1st year), pp. 158-161.
21 E. Renan, Averroès et l’averroïsme, Paris, Michel Lévy, 2e ed. 1865, p. 385. In 1497 the Venetian Senate created a Chair for Tomeo, to enable him to teach Aristotle from a Greek text. Cf. D. De Bellis, “La vita e l’ambiente di Niccolò Leonico Tomeo”, Quaderni per la storia dell’Università di Padova, no 13, 1980, pp. 37-75. Remember that at the time Padova was, according to Renan, the “Latin Quarter of Venice”.
22 Cf. G. Bruno, Spaccio della bestia trionfante, ed. by G. Aquilecchia, Intro. by N. Ordine (Giordano Bruno, Œuvres complètes, V/1-2), Paris, Belles Lettres, 1999.
23 Cf. A.-M. Malingrey, “Philosophia.” Étude d’un groupe de mots dans la littérature grecque, des présocratiques au ive siècle après J.-C., Paris, Klincksieck, 1961; with commentary by A. Guillaumont, Revue de l’histoire des religions, vol. 164, no. 2, 1963, pp. 244-246.
24 Cf. A. Torre, “Un ‘tournant spatial’ en histoire ? Paysages, regards, ressources”, Annales. Histoire, sciences sociales, no. 5, 2008 (63rd year), pp. 1127-1144.
25 The “linguistic turn” was also of prime importance for the medievalists: inaugurated by J. Jolivet’s seminal book Arts du langage et théologie chez Abélard, Paris, Vrin, 1969, it is still one of the major research themes in medieval philosophy. Cf. I. Rosier-Catach, La Parole efficace. Signe, rituel, sacré, Paris, Seuil, coll. “Des travaux”, 2004.
26 On these notions, cf. R. Rorty, “Quatre manières d’écrire l’histoire de la philosophie”, in G. Vattimo (ed.), Que peut faire la philosophie de son histoire?, Paris, Seuil, 1989, pp. 58-94.
27 Q. Skinner, “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas”, History and Theory, vol. 8, no. 1, 1969, pp. 3-53.
28 A. de Libera, « Le relativisme historique. Théorie des “complexes questions-réponses” et “traçabilité” », Les Études philosophiques, no 4, 1999, pp. 479-494.
29 I had nevertheless, from 1996, used the term archaeological to define the method and aim of my research on universals. Cf. La Querelle des universaux. De Platon à la fin du Moyen Âge, Paris, Seuil, 1996, p. 26-27 [2nd ed. coll. “Points”, 2014, pp. 29-30]: “Our conception of history will not accommodate […] the ‘retrograde movement of the truth’. Of importance to me is the archaeological order: I wish to explain how medieval thinking encountered the network of concepts, theoretical objects and problems from which it drew, as one of its possible figures, the problem of universals; how what historiography calls ‘Nominalism’ and ‘Realism’ came to be; on what recurrent conceptual schemas medieval philosophers based their understanding of Aristotelian thinking and forged their representation of Platonicism.”
30 Cf. A. de Libera, “Archéologie et reconstruction. Sur la méthode en histoire de la philosophie médiévale”, in collectif, Un siècle de philosophie, 1900-2000, Paris, Gallimard/Centre Pompidou, coll. “Folio Essais”, 2000, pp. 552-587.
31 Cf. I. Kant, Über die von der Königl. Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin für das Jahr 1791 ausgesetzte Preisfrage : Welches sind die wirklichen Fortschritte, die die Metaphysik seit Leibnitzens und Wolfs Zeiten in Deutschland gemacht hat ?, in: Gesammelte Schriften, Berlin, Walter de Gruyter, vol. XX, 1942, p. 341; English translation: What real progress has metaphysics made in Germany since the time of Leibniz and Wolff?, Abaris Books, 1983.
32 On this notion, see J.-F. Courtine, “Foucault lecteur de Husserl. L’a priori historique et le quasi-transcendantal”, Giornale di Metafisica, no. 29, 2007, pp. 211-232.
33 See M. Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, London and New York, Tavistock Publications Limited, 1969, p. 143.
34 Foucault responded to “The Mandarin of the Hour Michel Foucault”, The New York Times Book Review, no. 8, 28 February 1971, pp. 23-31. See, in this respect, “Foucault répond”, Dits et écrits, t. II, 1976-1988, no. 100, Paris, Gallimard, coll. “Quarto”, 2001, p. 219 sq.
35 Cf. P. Ricœur, La Mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli, Paris, Seuil, coll. “L’Ordre philosophique”, 2000, pp. 366 and 495-496 (on Collingwood and the re-enactment of the past in the present).
36 Cf. W. H. Dray, History as Re-Enactment: R. G. Collingwood’s Idea of History, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1999, p. 150. Dray’s wording combines Collingwood’s two main ideas of: re-enactment and the recurrent thesis that “All history is the history of thought.” On the genesis of these theses, cf. R. G. Collingwood, An Autobiography, London/Oxford/New York, Oxford University Press, 1970.
37 C. Lévi-Strauss, From Honey to Ashes (Introduction to a Science of Mythology: 2), New York, Harper & Row, 1973, p. 475: “To be valid, any investigation which is entirely aimed at elucidating structures must begin by submitting to the powerful inanity of events”.
38 C. Backès-Clément, “L’événement : porté disparu”, Communications, no. 18, 1972, p. 154 [pp. 145-155].
39 On re-enactment, see R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History, ed. and intro. by J. Van der Dussen, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1993, pp. 282-302. On Collingwood’s philosophy of history, historical relativism and re-enactment, cf. C. Kobayashi and M. Marion, “La philosophie de l’histoire de Collingwood : rationalité, objectivité et anti-réalisme”, in C. Nadeau (ed.), La Philosophie de l’histoire au xxe siècle. Hommages offerts à Maurice Lagueux, Québec, Presses de l’Université Laval, 2007, pp. 119-164.
40 The term structure appears from the canonical description of the CQA and the distinction between “propositional logic” and “question and answer logic” in An Autobiography, op. cit., p. 37.
41 For a balanced point of view, see P. Engel, “Retour aval”, Les Études philosophiques, no. 4, 1999, pp. 453-463; C. Panaccio, “Philosophie analytique et histoire de la philosophie”, in P. Engel (ed.), Précis de philosophie analytique, Paris, PUF, 2000, pp. 325-344; K. Mulligan, “Sur l’histoire de l’approche analytique de l’histoire de la philosophie : de Bolzano et Brentano à Bennett et Barnes”, in J.-M. Vienne (ed.), Philosophie analytique et histoire de la philosophie, Paris, Vrin, 1997, pp. 61-103 and, more recently, T. Sorell and G. A. J. Rogers (eds), Analytic Philosophy and History of Philosophy, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2005.
42 P. Ricœur, “Le retour de l’événement”, Mélanges de l’École française de Rome. Italie et Méditerranée, vol. 104, no. 1, 1992, p. 29 [pp. 29-35].
43 Cf. P. Veyne, Comment on écrit l’histoire. Essai d’épistémologie, Paris, Seuil, coll. « L’Univers historique », 1996, p. 53.
44 A. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being. A Study of the History of an Idea. The William James Lectures delivered at Harvard University, 1933, Cambridge (Mass.)/London, Harvard University Press, 2001 [22nd edition]; 1st ed. 1936, 2nd ed. 1964. In 1940, Lovejoy founded the Journal of the History of Ideas.
45 P. Bourdieu, Sur l’État. Cours au Collège de France (1989-1992), Paris, Seuil, 2012, p. 472-473.
46 A. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being, op. cit., p. 15, with the critique of Q. Skinner, “Meaning and understanding in the history of ideas”, op. cit., p. 9.
47 For a defence of Lovejoy, cf. C. Knight, “Unit-ideas unleashed: a reinterpretation and defence of Lovejovian methodology in the history of ideas”, Journal of the Philosophy of History, no. 6, 2012, pp. 1-23.
48 A. de Libera, Archéologie du sujet, vol. I, Naissance du sujet, Paris, Vrin, 2007; t. II, La Quête de l’identité, Paris, Vrin, 2008; vol. III/1, La Double Révolution, Paris, Vrin, 2014.
49 Translator’s note: The author makes a wordplay between Lacan’s le sujet supposé savoir, and le sujet supposé s’avoir, a wordplay on savoir [knowledge], which it is impossible to render in English.
50 The first film of the two brothers Louis and Auguste Lumière presented to the public, L’Arroseur arrosé (1895), lasted for 49 seconds. A deconstruction of the deconstruction would need more time than that.
51 “Destruktion” appeared from the first Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie, a lecture delivered by M. Heidegger at Fribourg in the 1919/20 Winter semester, ed. Hans-Helmuth Gander, Frankfurt, Vittorio Klostermann, 1993, Gesamtausgabe (GA) 58, p. 139 (for “Abbauen”, cf. p. 147).
52 Cf. M. Heidegger, Phänomenologie der Anschauung und des Ausdrucks. Theorie der philosophischen Begriffsbildung, edited by Claudius Strube, Frankfurt, Vittorio Klostermann, 1993, GA 59, p. 5.
53 According to the expressions used in the 1923/24 Winter semester Marburg lectures, Einführung in die phänomenologische Forschung, § 20, ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Hermann, Frankfurt, Vittorio Klostermann, 1994 (2nd ed. 2006), GA 17, p. 118; Introduction to Phenomenological Research, English translation by Daniel Dahlstrom, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 2005.
54 Cf. Logik als die Frage nach dem Wesen der Sprache, edited by G. Seubold, Frankfurt, Vittorio Klostermann, 1998, GA 38, p. 145; English translation by Wanda Torres Gregory and Yvonne Unna, Logic As the Question Concerning the Essence of Language, Albany, State University of New York Press, 2009, p.121.
55 Cf. Die Metaphysik als Geschichte des Seins, in: Nietzsche, vol. II, edited by B. Schillbach, Frankfurt, Vittorio Klostermann, 1997, GA 6.2, p. 434; Metaphysics as History of Being, in Nietzsche, vol. II, English translation by David Farell Krell, HarperCollins, 1991. For a more detailed formulation of this thesis, encompassing both Kant and Leibniz, see the second Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie, ed. F.-W. von Hermann, Frankfurt, Vittorio Klostermann, 1975, GA 24, p. 178; English translation by Albert Hofstadter, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1982.
56 In other words: “This ‘I’, or this ‘He’ or this ‘It’ (the thing) that thinks”, this “transcendental subject of thoughts = x” that, according to Kant, “we know only by the thoughts that are its predicates”.
57 This schema is introduced in A. de Libera, Naissance du sujet, op. cit., pp. 188-208. It is taken up again in id., La Quête de l’identité, op. cit., p. 22, 31, 199, 253 and 367.
58 See ibid., pp. 205-228. On the interventions of the Magisterium against the unity of substantial form in the 1270s and 1280s, see L. Bianchi, Censure et liberté intellectuelle à l’université de Paris (xiiie-xive siècles), Paris, Belles Lettres, 1999, pp. 21-52.
59 On this theme, cf. H. Lagerlund and M. Yrjönsuuri (ed.), Emotions and Choice from Boethius to Descartes, Dordrecht/Boston/Londres, Kluwer (series “Studies in the History of Philosophy of Mind”, vol. 1), 2002; S. Knuuttila (ed.), Emotions in Ancient and Medieval Philosophy, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 2004.
60 Cf. J.-B. Brenet, “Moi qui pense, moi qui souffre. L’identité du composé humain dans l’anti-averroïsme de Pierre d’Auriole et Grégoire de Rimini”, in O. Boulnois (ed.), Généalogies du sujet, de saint Anselme à Malebranche, Paris, Vrin, coll. “Bibliothèque d’histoire de la philosophie”, 2007, pp. 151-169. On Latin Averroism, cf. J.-B. Brenet, Les Possibilités de jonction. Averroès – Thomas Wylton, Berlin/Boston, De Gruyter, coll. “Scientia Graeco-Arabica”, 2013.
61 On the Utrecht controversy, cf. A. de Libera, La Double Révolution, op. cit., pp. 87-133.
62 On Edinburgh, “Athènes britannique” and “Ville-monde”, see S. Van Damme, À toutes voiles vers la vérité. Une autre histoire de la philosophie au temps des Lumières, Paris, Seuil, coll. “L’Univers historique”, 2014, pp. 163-169 and 173-195.
63 Cf. R. Collins, The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change, Cambridge (Mass.), Harvard University Press, 1998.
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