on 11-Oct-2016 (Tue)

with the phenomenology of a mind here: “One can discern still more reasons for the importance attached by Proust to this circular form of a novel whose end returns to its beginning. In the final pages one sees the hero and the narrator unite too, after a long march during which each sought after the other, sometimes very close to each other, sometimes very far apart; they coincide at the moment of resolution, which is the instant when the hero becomes the narrator, that is, the author of his own history. The narrator is the hero revealed to himself, is the person that the hero, throughout his history, desires to be but never can be; he now takes the place of this hero and will be able to set

Proust’s aesthetics and critical method are, ultimately, not outside his work but are the very heart of his creation: “Proust will make this aesthetic into the real subject of his work” (p. 135). As in Hegel, the philosophical, critical, reflective conscious- ness is not only contained in the scrutiny given to the operations and works of history. What is first in question is the history of this con- sciousness itself. It would not be deceptive to say that this aesthetic, as a concept of the work in general, exactly overlaps Rousset’s.

Proust’s aesthetic is defined at the beginning of the essay on Claudel. And the affinities are evident, above and beyond all the differences. These affinities are assembled in the theme of “structural monotony”: “ ‘And thinking once more about the mon- otony of Vinteuil’s works, I explained to Albertine that great writers have created only a single work, or rather have refracted the same beauty that they bring to the world through diverse elements’” (p. 171). Claudel: “ ‘Le soulier de satin is Tête d’or in another form. It summarizes both Tête d’or and Partage de midi. It is even the conclusion of Partage de midi . . . ’ ” “ ‘A poet does hardly anything but develop a preestablished plan’” (p. 172

This aesthetic which neutralizes duration and force as the difference between the acorn and the oak, is not autonomously Proust’s or Claudel’s. It translates a metaphysics. Proust also calls “time in its pure state” the “atemporal” or the “eternal.” The truth of time is not tem- poral. Analogously (analogously only), time as irreversible succession, is, according to Claudel, only the phenomenon, the epidermis, the surface image of the essential truth of the universe as it is conceived

We will not, of course, examine in and of themselves this metaphys- ics or theology of temporality. That the aesthetics they govern can be legitimately and fruitfully applied to the reading of Proust or Claudel is evident, for these are their aesthetics, daughter (or mother) of their metaphysics. It is also readily demonstrable that what is in question is the metaphysics implicit in all structuralism, or in every structuralist proposition.

In particular, a structuralist reading, by its own activity, always presupposes and appeals to the theological simultaneity of the book, and considers itself deprived of the essential when this simul- taneity is not accessible. Rousset: “In any event, reading, which is developed in duration, will have to make the work simultaneously present in all its parts in order to be global....Similar to a ‘painting in movement,’ the book is revealed only in successive fragments.

The task of the demanding reader consists in overturning this natural tendency of the book, so that it may present itself in its entirety to the mind’s scrutiny. The only complete reading is the one which transforms the book into a simultaneous network of reciprocal relationships: it is then that surprises emerge” (p. xiii). (What surprises? How can simul- taneity hold surprises in store? Rather, it neutralizes the surprises of nonsimultaneity. Surprises emerge from the dialogue between the simultaneous and the nonsimultaneous. Which suffices to say that structural simultaneity itself serves to reassure.)

Jean-Pierre Richard: “The difficulty of every structural account resides in that it must describe sequentially, successively, that which in fact exists all at once, simultaneously” (L’univers imaginaire de Mallarmé, p. 28). Thus, Rousset invokes the difficulty of gaining access to the simultaneity which is truth within reading, and Richard the difficulty of accounting for it

Does one have the right to constitute this metaphysics or aesthetics so well adapted to Proust and Claudel as the general method of struc- turalism? 55 This, however, is precisely what Rousset does, in the extent to which, as we have at least tried to demonstrate, he decides that everything not intelligible in the light of a “preestablished” teleological framework, and not visible in its simultaneity, is reducible to the inconsequentiality of accident or dross. Even in the essays devoted to Proust and Claudel, the essays guided by the most comprehensive structure, Rousset must decide to consider as “genetic accidents” “eac

Baudelaire is perhaps only in the Balcon, and all of Flaubert is in Madame Bovary” (p. xix), the true Proust is not simultaneously everywhere. Rousset must also conclude that the characters of l’Otage are severed not by “circumstance,” but, “to express it better,” by the “demands of the Claudelian framework” (p. 179); he must deploy marvels of subtlety to demonstrate that in Le soulier de satin Claudel does not “repudiate himself” and does not “renounce” his “constant framework” (p. 183). What is most serious is that this “ultrastructuralist” method, as we have called it, seems to contradict, in certain respects, the most pre- cious and original intention of structuralism.

To be a structuralist is first to concentrate on the organization of meaning, on the autonomy and idiosyncratic balance, the completion of each moment, each form; and it is to refuse to relegate everything that is not comprehensible as an ideal type to the status of aberrational accident. The pathological itself is not the simple absence of structure. It is organized. It cannot be understood as the deficiency, defect, or decomposition of a beautiful, ideal totality. It is not the simple undoing of telos.

n order to respect this strange movement within language, in order not to reduce it in turn, we would have to attempt a return to the metaphor of darkness and light (of self-revelation and self- concealment), the founding metaphor of Western philosophy as meta- physics. The founding metaphor not only because it is a photological one—and in this respect the entire history of our philosophy is a pho- tology, the name given to a history of, or treatise on, light—but because it is a metaphor. Metaphor in general, the passage from one existent to

In historiam, it is the fall of thought into philosophy which gets history under way. Which suffices to say that the metaphor of the “fall” deserves its quotation marks. In this heliocentric meta- physics, force, ceding its place to eidos (i.e., the form which is visible for the metaphorical eye), has already been separated from itself in acous- tics. 60 How can force or weakness be understood in terms of light and dark?

Diaphanousness is the supreme value; as is univocity. Hence the difficulties in thinking the genesis and pure temporality of the transcendental ego, of accounting for the successful or unsuccessful incarnation of telos, and the mysteri- ous failures called crises. And when, in certain places, Husserl ceases to consider the phenomena of crisis and the failure of telos as “accidents of genesis,” or as the inessential (Unwesen)

Criticism, if it is called upon to enter into explication and exchange with literary writing, some day will not have to wait for this resistance first to be organized into a “philosophy” which would govern some methodology of aesthetics whose principles criticism would receive. For philosophy, during its history, has been determined as the reflec- tion of poetic inauguration.

Excavation within the other toward the other in which the same seeks its vein and the true gold of its phenomenon

The Instant of Decision is Madness (Kierkegaard

This book, admirable in so many respects, powerful in its breadth and style, is even more intimidating for me in that, having formerly had the good fortune to study under Michel Foucault, I retain the consciousness of an admiring and grateful disciple. Now, the disciple’s consciousness, when he starts, I would not say to dispute, but to engage in dialogue with the master or, better, to articulate the interminable and silent dialogue which made him into a disciple—this disciple’s consciousness is an unhappy consciousness. Starting to enter into dialogue in the world, that is, starting to answer back, he always feels “caught in the act,” like the “infant” who, by definition and as his

name indicates, cannot speak and above all must not answer back. And when, as is the case here, the dialogue is in danger of being taken— incorrectly—as a challenge, the disciple knows that he alone finds him- self already challenged by the master’s voice within him that precedes his own. He feels himself indefinitely challenged, or rejected or accused; as a disciple, he is challenged by the master who speaks within him and before him, to reproach him for making this challenge and to reject it in advance, having elaborated it before him; and having inter- iorized the master, he is also challenged by the disciple that he himself is. This interminable unhappiness of the disciple perhaps stems from the fact that he does not yet know—or is still concealing from himself— that the master, like real life, may always be absent. The disciple must break the glass, or better the mirror, the reflection, his infinite speculation on the master. And start to speak.

My point of departure might appear slight and artificial. In this 673- page book, Michel Foucault devotes three pages

will it not be possible to interro- gate certain philosophical and methodological presuppositions of this history of madness? Certain ones only, for Foucault’s enterprise is too rich, branches out in too many directions to be preceded by a method

“The language of psychiatry, which is a monologue of reason on madness, could be established only on the basis of such a silence. I have not tried to write the history of that language but, rather, the archaeology of that silence.” 5 And throughout the book runs the theme linking madness to silence, to “words without language” or “without the voice of a sub- ject,” “obstinate murmur of a language that speaks by itself, without

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When you start something, the first and most crucial decision you make is whom to start it with. Choosing a co-founder is like getting married, and founder conflict is just as ugly as divorce. Optimism abounds at the start of every relationship. It’s unromantic to think soberly about what could go wrong, so people don’t. But if the founders develop irreconcilable differences, the company becomes the victim. In 1999, Luke Nosek was one of my co-founders at PayPal, and I still work with him today at Founders Fund. But a year before PayPal, I invested in a company Luke started with someone else. It was his first startup; it was one of my first investments. Neither of us realized it then, but the venture was doomed to fail from the beginning because Luke and his co-founder were a terrible match. Luke is a brilliant and eccentric thinker; his co-founder was an MBA type who didn’t want to miss out on the ’90s gold rush. They met at a networking event, talked for a while, and decided to start a company together. That’s no better than marrying the first person you meet at the slot machines in Vegas: you might hit the jackpot, but it probably won’t work. Their company blew up and I lost my money. Now when I consider investing in a startup, I study the founding teams. Technical abilities and complementary skill sets matter, but how well the founders know each other and how well they work together matter just as much. Founders should share a prehistory before they start a company together —otherwise they’re just rolling dice.

One could perhaps say that the resolution of this difficulty is practiced rather than formulated. By necessity. I mean that the silence of madness is not said, cannot be said in the logos of this book, but is indirectly, metaphorically, made present by its pathos—taking this word in its best sense. A new and radical praise of folly whose intentions cannot be admitted because the praise [éloge] of silence always takes place within logos, 7 the language of objectification. “To speak well of madness” would be to annex it once more, especially when, as is the case here, “speaking well of” is also the wisdom and happiness of eloquent speech