on the possibility of critique

1. accept its power to unify a multitude of disparate phenomena through a small set of axioms
2. reveal the love of law and hatred of phenomena behind this
3. restrict the theory to the animal world and liberate human beings for a different ordering principle, established at some obvious turning point in history, at the advent of ‘culture’ as nature’s opposite and improvement, culture, with its own definition of a ‘phenomenon’ and its own sense of ‘development’; this shift can of course be explained evolutionarily, but what comes after the leap out of natural evolution cannot; even if the “species” survives, it is no longer defined zoologically
4. refuse the emphasis on survival, as a necessary but not sufficient condition; instead, recall the beauty of death, the absurd possibility of resurrection, the retrospective interpretation of these anomalies as sharing a look, a ‘species,’ returning the incomparable being to its finitude—the ends of singular half beings and one-and-a-half beings, none of which actually conforms to the idealized grouping principle
5. cut open the dialectic of individual and species, in which each reflects the other; allow the intercourse between gene and individual to be seen as not simply mimetic
6. imagine it as a retrospective self-justification of capital, arising around the same time as capitalism’s codification in the 19th century, refining itself along with it as its perfect ideology: competition for scarce resources, adaptation to the market, law of general equivalence of all beings, motivation reduced to winning, law of constant change as growth, death erased except as a means to gain
7. identify an irreparable split between universalizing theory and singularizing life (on the example, perhaps—among other possibilities—of language); placing philosophy and natural science on one side, and literature and philology on the other
8. illuminate, again, the destructive need: theory must needs be independent of evolution to capture it, yet insofar as it is conceived of as independent of its laws, as stating its laws and thus as following its own, un-evolutionary law, theory can never account for its ability to capture evolution
9. review again the concept of history; even if now it seems to have absorbed nature, it has not changed natural science’s view of its own theories: they still belong to a motionless, ahistorical model, planted in the old Aristotelian lifeworld and Newtonian physics; synthesize—in a clash—intellectual history with natural history, production with reception, Darwin with Kant (a theory of everything that cannot explain this line is no theory: “toda la vida es sueño y los sueños, sueños son.”)