Notes-1

notes

Preface

  1. ‘The Philosophical Order’ (L’ordre philosophique’) is the name of the series

co-edited by Badiou in which this book was first published in France by Editions du Seuil (translator).

Chapter 1: Ancestrality

  1. Among the principal texts discussing this distinction we should mention

René Descartes (1985a), Meditations on First Philosophy in J. Cottingham, R. Stoothoff, D. Murdoch (eds), The Philosophical Writings of Descartes. Vol. II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), Sixth Meditation; and Descartes (1985b), The Principles of Philosophy Article 1 and Article 4 [Oeuvres complètes, vol. IX, p. 57–62 (Paris: ed. Adam et Tannery, Vrin, 1996)], in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes. Vol. I, J. Cottingham, R. Stoothoff, D. Murdoch (eds) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), Second Part; John Locke (1979), An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (Oxford: Clarendon Press), Book 2, ch. 8. It goes without saying that Descartes and Locke do not understand this distinction in the same way, but we will focus here on a sense that seems to be common to both.

  1. For reasons that we cannot examine here, Locke will add ‘solidity’ to this

list. We should add that, from a strictly Lockean point of view, secondary qualities, like primary qualities, are intrinsic to perceptible bodies, since they correspond to the latter’s capacity to engender in the mind sensible qualities which those bodies do not possess in themselves. But we are here following a common usage according to which secondary qualities are identified with sensible qualities, and thus dependent upon the relation between perception and the thing perceived.

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  1. On this point, see Alain Renaut’s analysis of Kant’s letter to Marcus

Hertz dated 21 February 1772 in Renault (1997), Kant aujourd’hui (Paris: Aubier), ch. 1, pp. 53–77. For Berkeley’s critique of the distinction between primary and secondary qualities see Berkeley (1998), A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Understanding, J. Dancy (ed.) (Oxford: Oxford University Press), Part One, Sections 8–10.

  1. Cf. Hegel (1977), The Phenomenology of Spirit, tr. A.V. Miller (Oxford:

Oxford University Press), Introduction, §85, p.54 (translation modified – translator).

  1. Huneman, P. and Kulich, E. (1997), Introduction à la phénoménologie (Paris:

Armand Colin), p. 22.

  1. Francis Wolff (1997), Dire le monde (Paris: PUF), p. 11. 7. Wolff (1997), pp. 11–12.

  2. Martin Heidegger (1969), Identity and Difference, tr. J. Stambaugh (New

York: Harper and Row).

  1. Heidegger (1969), 38. Heidegger insists that the ‘co-’ (‘zusammen’) in the

term ‘co-propriation’ should be understood on the basis of belonging, rather than belonging being understood on the basis of the ‘co-’. But this is simply a matter of avoiding the metaphysical understanding of the unity of thought and being as nexus or connexio, and the submission of everything to the order of the system. Thus it is not a question of abandoning the ‘co-’, but of rethinking its originary nature beyond the schemas of representation. On this point, see Heidegger (1969), pp. 29–33.

  1. Martin Heidegger (1998a), ‘On the Question of Being’, in Pathmarks, W.

McNeill (ed.) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 308.

  1. Dominique Lecourt recapitulates the basic elements of this history of

absolute dating in the polemical context of the revival of creationism in 1980s America. Cf. Lecourt (1992), L’Amerique entre la Bible et Darwin [America Between Darwin and the Bible] (Paris: PUF), ch. IV, p. 100 and passim. On this point see also the French edition of Scientific American: Pour la science, Le temps des datations, January–March 2004. For a more technical introduction, see Roth, E. and Pouty, B. (1985), Méthodes de datation par les phénomènes nucléaires naturels. Applications [Dating Methods Using Natural Nuclear Phenomena: Applications] (Paris: Masson), particularly ch. 1.A (E. Roth: ‘Principes, généralités’) [‘Principles and Generalities’], and ch. IX (G. Lalou and G. Valados: ‘Thermoluminescence’).

  1. Although it is essentially distinct from the objection from the un-witnessed,

the argument from ancestrality is nevertheless closer to the objection which points out that the singular birth and death of consciousnesses implies a time which cannot itself be of the order of consciousness. But

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correlationism could defend itself against the latter by pointing out that one’s individual birth and death occurs within a time which is woven from intersubjectivity – the time of the community of consciousnesses, which means that to be born and to die is to be born and to die for other consciousnesses, and hence to be deployed in a becoming which is once more reducible to its givenness for a community of egos. It is our conviction that this rejoinder is a desperate sophism, which reduces emergence and perishing to whatever the other perceives of it. But it is in order to avoid this loophole that we have restricted our argument to the ancestral, which rules out any recourse to community, but more importantly has the advantage of demonstrating that it is science which grants us access to a time which cannot be captured by any correlation.

  1. We shall see in Chapter 5 of this book that Husserl and Heidegger registered this difference – although the unperceived never presented them with any serious difficulty, since it is synonymous with lacunary manifestation, they obviously considered the thought of a world devoid of all life to be a redoubtable challenge.