over and over again, each does so from a different perspective, which explains and justifies their joint publication.
If I am not the victim of a retrospective illusion, I could in fact claim to be resuming, in each and every one of them, an old obsession that had already surfaced in my first work in 1964: the question regarding the place of the subject, or rather the problem of ipseity and its forms of expression. When I recently presented that work—my thesis on Bergson—on the occasion of its recent French translation, this is how I described my subsequent itinerary:
To conclude, I should proceed a little further into the paradox of the distant that suddenly reveals itself to be close; and I should do this by describing the curve drawn by an itinerary that, starting from the reconstitution of the Bergsonian origin of subjectivity in the transcendental field of images, seems to return to him in two different stages.
I took a first step during my stay in France between 1969 and 1974 at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, after being dismissed from the University of São Paulo, when I wrote a book (of which only a few chapters were published) on Rousseau and his essentially rhetorical concept of language—that is, on his conception of intersubjectivity or, in Jean Hyppolite’s excellent formulation, on Rousseau’s decision to instate language in the place that the metaphysical tradition reserves for God.1
I would go on to describe the second step, which culminates in this book, as the one that led me, back in Brazil, to dedicate “several essays to the analytical philosophy of mind, with the intention of showing how this tradition distances itself from Wittgenstein’s thought and betrays its deepest spirit by ignoring how the problem of subjectivity and transcendence remains regardless of its conception of philosophy as grammatical analysis.” That is how Ludwig Wittgenstein came to take center stage in this book: never as the object of a properly philological approach or as a pretext to penetrate, unarmed, the field of the philosophy of logic, both of which are tasks beyond my reach. My goal was rather to make an intuitive incursion, if I may use an expression frequently employed in a pejorative sense. Do not expect, dear reader, a technical or scholastic treatment of Wittgenstein’s texts, especially because I agree with my old friend Andrés Raggio2 (himself a notable logician of the highest creativity and technical skill), who liked to say that, in philosophy, technical skill is inversely proportional to the philosophical interest of a text.
Why Wittgenstein, then? Certainly not because he is in fashion (and, thank God, he no longer seems to be in fashion, as indicated by the growing proliferation of different naturalisms and of the so-called empire of cognitive science). Perhaps even for the opposite reason: because he is, as he declares himself to be, an essentially untimely philosopher by virtue of his radical opposition to the dominant spirit of contemporary techno-scientific civilization—or rather to das Kapital (see the chapter “Wittgenstein: Culture and Value” in this volume). In other words, if my texts are correct, the dominant interpretation of Wittgenstein in academic philosophy3 (today, philosophy tout court) does not do justice to his work. For me, the point was to show that the language therapist is still, first and foremost, a philosopher—like Plato, Plotinus, Descartes, or Kant—never the mouthpiece of common sense or of any form of positivism. A conservative manoeuvre? Another disguised apology for philosophia perennis? I do not think so; but only the reader can have the last word. Deep down, I believe that, in Wittgenstein (but also in Bergson and Deleuze … may my analytic colleagues forgive me), we can find a conception of philosophy that is essentially anarchontic,4 is not opposed to conceptual analysis, and manifests itself throughout the history of philosophy in various works, especially those of Rousseau and Pascal. I am thinking of an old philosophical war against all forms of foundationalism, a war that refuses the easy way out taken by skepticism and relativism and that is perhaps more current than the current vogue of postmodern weak thought. Pascal spoke against the “absolutism” of philosophy: “[t]o make light of philosophy is to philosophize truly.”5 And Rousseau, after demolishing the ambitions of dogmatic metaphysics, adds, I need a philosophy for myself. Of course, I may seem to be anachronistically shuffling the lines of the history of philosophy. But perhaps it is necessary to do so and to reject historicism and philosophia perennis at the same time, to imagine a time for thought that is syncopated and discontinuous. Walter Benjamin? I do not know. Let us say that the ultimate intention here is to introduce a minimum of negativity into the academic debate by revealing what is fragile in the moral–ideological assuredness that lies at its deepest foundation.
But this is all very vague and refers more to a distant and still imprecise target of these writings than to the steps actually taken. It could not be very different at the level of the telos (end or goal): we have before us little more than a philosophical wager. Let us confess, from the start, that we do not know the way, as we could say by placing in the first person the title of a beautiful etching by Goya: No saben el camino [They Do Not Know the Way] (see Figure 1).
Figure 1. Francisco Goya y Lucientes, No saben el camino, etching nr. 70 from the series Fatales consequencias de la guerra de España con Bonaparte i otros caprichos enfaticos [Fatal Consequences of Spain’s Bloody War with Bonaparte and Other Emphatic Caprices] in the collection Desastres de la guerra [Disasters of War], 1810–20.
This is how Michael Armstrong Roche describes this etching:
A grim procession—two friars, one tonsured, the other cowled, both glowing in their white habits; three nobles, one wearing a tied wig and long waistcoast, all wearing outdated breeches and hats; two priests in cassocks and sombreros de teja (wide, soft-brimmed hats; and other lay people, all with their eyes closed—staggers through uneven, barren terrain. Rocky outcroppings make it impossible for the members of the procession to keep to a straight path. Roped together like a string of mules, in single file, some with heads bowed, they seem unaware of each other and of the person leading them into the gorge. He has raised his head in supplication or perhaps bewilderment. Light from the right side of the print penetrates the darkness, forming an abstract pattern, and plays off the polished surfaces of the rocks lining the abyss, and off the leader.6
After this description, Roche goes on to explain how the etching gives new meaning, in the spirit of the philosophy of the Enlightenment, to the biblical parable of the blind man who guides and leads another blind man to the abyss (Matthew 15:14 and Luke 6:13) and to the proverb that comes from it. He insists on the novelty introduced by Goya, in contrast with previous representations of this scene (by Bosch and Brueghel, among others), both through the multiplication of characters and through the identification of blindness as unknowingness, ignorance, or superstition. In the words of Goya’s friend, the satirist José Gallardo Blanco, in a discourse against the anticonstitutionalism of the church, liberal ideas eliminate “the obstacles that prevent them from freely walking down the path of virtue toward happiness.”7 Or, even more clearly, “the paths of virtue, if we are to follow them with a sure step, must be illuminated by the light of wisdom; understanding guides the will; one cannot travel far on the road to perfection blindfolded and with bound feet.”8
Roche even points out the etching’s reference to the reign of Ferdinand VII and to the blindness of his followers, who were committed to political and religious repression. It is not darkness, it is ignorance.9
However, by turning the etching’s title from the third person to the first, we can see it differently, integrating it into the earlier tradition of Bosch and Brueghel. It is clear that, in so doing, we ignore the author’s deepest intentions or create a myth. But we do not necessarily produce an arbitrary deformation. In fact, something like a grain of freedom inhabits the heart of perception. A perception is never the passive record of a form in itself:
