Philosophy at the Theater | The paper

A singular situation, the review for a review: the introduction to a mise en abyme, which is nothing more than a staging. Like any production, even that of the abyss ends up saturating what it opens up. Hence the comic effect, which never fails if the abyss is not enough. Thus in the advertising billboards of Quaker oats, where one sees – as Aldous Huxley recalls in the “novel of ideas” par excellence, “Point against point” – “a Quaker holding a box of oats on which the image of another Quaker holding another box of oats, on which, etc.”

We believe we are witnessing the affirmation of the Other, but it is only a question of the preservation of the identical. Analogous is the game of dialectics, of that “regulated and methodically cultivated spirit of contradiction, inherent in every man” – according to Goethe’s guest Hegel, recorded by Eckermann – which however, as one insists on it, always takes more like a school question; more, to a “neurosis”. The diagnosis might sound a bit dramatic; but – protested Michel Foucault, who had been its author – “text without context is nothing but the ruin of the soul”, so that, before judging it specious, he will have to understand the reasons.

First of all – he warned years later in an interview with a Japanese newspaper – it was necessary to understand the climate in which those words had been pronounced: “it was 1970”, an era in which at the antipodes of the traditional, somewhat frustrated attempts to formalize thought according to the forms of eristics, an écriture alien to dialectical thought and instead ensnared by “repetition”, as an expression of an “original innocence, located in the closest point of language and yet always remote” was making its way.

Kafka, Blanchot, Bataille, Artaud were the first to bear witness to this. However, no one had yet led philosophical reflection to deal with this scenario. To do this, it would have been necessary to ignore the distinction between reality and illusion on which speculation was based since Plato, so as to make the latter a “theatre” in which the indistinguishability between the true and the false always dominates.

“Theatrum Philosophicum” is the title of the critical clipping that Foucault dedicated to Gilles Deleuze, wanting to pay homage to the one who was the first to make possible the mise-en-scène of a thought that plays at dispelling “the philosophy of representation, of the original, of resemblance, of imitation, of fidelity”.

Contrary to what happened with Nietzsche, used and deformed to the point of making him screech, Foucault’s exegesis of Deleuze proceeds by reconstructing some possible models of reading of his major works, “Difference and repetition” and “Logic of sense”. What he finds there is “an always nomadic, always anarchic difference, with a sign that is always in excess, always displaced”. Analytical insistence leads him to distill it into excerpta which must express a meaning that can only be said starting from the “difference” itself, which is not a simple “gap” (which would still be connected to the regulatory function of the concept and of the categories) , but it is a dodging of identity through the accentuation of the “underground duality between what receives the action of the Idea and what escapes this action”.

It is from this “inverted methexis”, for which there is no longer any distinction between the model and the copy, but only between this and the simulacrum, that those dispersive developments that distinguish the Foucaultian page in its proceeding in large volutes of sentences, with the grace of the graphomaniac and the exuberance of the mannerist, following the rhythm of a dictation that expands in all directions, without ever arriving anywhere. After all, only by adapting to Deleuze’s thought by not giving in to the temptation of a convenient clarity, and therefore accepting to highlight everything that is disturbing in it, does it seem possible for Foucault to make a work of interpretation, or rather of identifying those conceptual creations, of those lines which pass between them, and which are similar to the “convolutions of a movement which occupies the space in the manner of a whirlwind, with the possibility of surfacing at any point”.

In doing so – observes Filippo Domenicali in the afterword to the Italian edition (Mimesis, pp. 114, euro 9) which for the first time returns Foucault’s writing in its entirety, and in a fine and sensitive translation – it comes to build and deconstruct itself a textual fabric in which a series of annotations are displayed, almost by juxtaposition, without ever assuming an antecedent “meaning” – almost as if the meaning can never be anything other than a “reading effect”. Or perhaps better, as if illogicality were a comfort, as if laughter were permitted to thought and chance a proof of eternity.