Безымянные сообщества

In conclusion let me briefly and, therefore, somewhat irresponsibly sketch out other instances of a thinking of anonymity, at least of a thinking that contains this potential. In a book which by the standards of our time is old, but not outdated — I am referring to the Différend published in 1983 and to a subsequent study L’enthousiasme (1986) — Jean- François Lyotard examines Kant’s «critique» of history. He is specifically interested in the strange status of what Kant calls Begebenheit and what is translated as «sign of history». Kant’s task, it should be explained, is to answer the question (against the Faculty of Law, and there is indeed an ongoing conflict) whether it can be affirmed that the human race is constantly progressing toward the better. The requested demonstration is complicated by the fact that neither progress, nor the human race, being objects of Ideas, can be presented directly, which is only aggravated by the phrase itself having an explicit bearing on the future. Moving away from any intuitive given (Gegebene), Kant comes up with his most intriguing concept of Begebenheit, an event or «act of delivering itself which would also be an act of deliverance, a deal [une donne]» (the Crakow manuscript calls it Ereignis). This event would merely indicate and not prove that humanity is capable of being both cause and author of its progress. Moreover, the Begebenheit must point to a cause such that the occurrence of its effects remains undetermined with respect to time. Being on the side of freedom, it may therefore intervene at any time in the succession of events.

I will hasten at this point just to show where and how exactly Kant comes up with his answer to the problem. He does find an index, a Begebenheit of his time, which for him, predictably enough, is the French Revolution. However, he makes a necessary and exciting detour. For the Begebenheit, strictly speaking, is neither momentous deed nor occurrence, but «the mode of thinking (Denksungsart) of the spectators which betrays itself publicly in [the] game of great upheavals…». This «mode of thinking» is simultaneously universal (albeit not lacking in partiality) and moral (at least in its predisposition), in a word, progress itself. As for the French Revolution, whose outcome remains unknown, it «nonetheless finds in the hearts of all spectators <…> a wishful participation that borders closely on enthusiasm, the very expression of which is fraught with danger»; this sympathy, however, springs from nothing other than the moral predisposition of the human race.

Lyotard, a profound scholar of Kant and the sublime, immediately stops to analyze this enthusiasm which is expressed by so many «disinterested» national spectators. For him it is a «modality of the feeling of the sublime», in fact extreme and paradoxical: an abstract presentation that presents what is beyond the presentable («presentation of the Infinite»). Bordering on dementia, itself an Affekt (an extremely painful joy), enthusiasm is condemnable as pathological from the point of view of ethics, yet aesthetically it is sublime, because, says Kant, «it is a tension of forces produced by Ideas, which give an impulse to the mind that operates far more powerfully and lastingly than the impulse arising from sensible representations».