The response of Ulysses

✍ Scribed by Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe

• Book ID: 104639227
• Publisher: Springer Netherlands
• Year: 1988
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 579 KB
• Volume: 7
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0167-7411
• DOI: 10.1007/bf00141645

✦ Synopsis

The temptation is great to render this question as the response of Ulysses to Polyphemus --the one aptly named, in terms at least of current "philosophical" idle talk concerning the subject: "No One" ("Personne"). The response, according to an old schoolboy stereotype that however has not altogether lost its resonance, swiftly if playfully conjures the persona or the hupokrites. One can imagine the "stage". The unique and powerful but henceforth blinded eye of metaphysics (this eye which Nietzsche evoked in the Birth of Tragedy, explaining that it had destroyed, in its function as "the eye of Socrates", precisely the stage), incapable of "theorizing", at the moment of its escape, the former subject which it thought to have fixed, in full light, like being itself. In lieu of and for want of this stage: a theater of shadows, pretenses and ghostlike presences, the play of language games: mimesis unchained, which is to say that no stage (no theater) will henceforth contain it.

But the staging is too simplistic: replayed a hundred times within the tradition of an "as if" (als ob), a tradition soon to mark its bicentenary, it has been a hundred times more or less skillfully reset in all the forms of "post." This suffices, or should suffice (after all, in the language that today dominates, following the example of what was once Latin, the anagram of post is quite simply stop). To act as if the subject no longer existed, or as if the question is no longer being raised, is possibly as vain as supposing --as if nothing were going on --a "renewed" problematic of the subject (of law, ethics, communication etc.