before and after finitude
The entire argument of After Finitude is built on a subtle, but all the more commonplace misinterpretation of Kant. Kant’s “Copernican Revolution” did not institute ”correlationism.” Rather, it showed the way out of the ”correlationism” that tacitly determined every traditional metaphysics, and that, in fact, rendered vain the pursuit of metaphysical (ontological) truth. The structure of knowledge, to be sure, is correlationist, and it is by explicitly recognizing this that Kant hopes to institute the foundational revolution that had previously eluded philosophy. Yet the a priori truth of “correlationism,” and it is this that matters to philosophy, is not given through a structure of “correlation,” but as an immediate, intuitive experience that resists conceptual articulation. The finitude of the human subject is absolute: it is the presentation of the immediate experience of the a priori — which is not just what necessarily comes “before” empirical experience, but rather the “opening” in which things show up.
To deny the “correlationist” structure of cognition is not to affirm an “absolute” knowledge, but to back away from the very grounds in which the true problem of knowledge becomes at once possible and opens up onto the question of ontology and truth. With rationalism, the thought of correlation, contained in the very principle of identity, becomes the ineradicable and unseen horizon of thought. A=A means A corresponds to itself. Pure analytic judgements merely extrapolate from the correlation implicit in the logical form of thinking. (Thus, for Kant, the revolution in logic happened immediately. This means only: the correlational moment, the discovery of which precipitates positive science, came immediately. But the revolution of philosophy is only spoken of by analogy with the revolutions of logic, mathematics, and science : philosophy does not discover correlationism, but the truth of correlationism. To deny correlationism in knowledge is only to close the way to this truth.)
The truly philosophical problematic of langauge emerges in the wake of Kant . Yet it is not a radicalization of his “correlationism,” but rather an attempt to escape the aporia that opens up between the intuitive presentation of the a priori, and its discursive representation — an aporia that threatens to reinscribe correlationism within the thought of an absolute finitude.
Language is the differential presentation of difference: it is not that everything must correspond to language, but rather that language is the immediate medium in which difference (pure synthesis) appears. The essence of Romanticism: language is made present to us through the mediation of the work. The a priori of language is a primordial difference that is not discursively articulatable, nor purely intuitive, but is given to us only through the difference that seizes the repetition that would constitute the same as the same. The “primordial difference” transcends the difference between intuitions and concepts: presentations and representations.
Yet the a prioricity of language is also not exhausted in this difference. Language is also the field of experiences, and of history. (Kant and Vico — Derrida and Benjamin)
