Logic of Imagination

John Sallis

Description

Logic beyond the limits of reason

The Shakespearean image of a tempest and its aftermath forms the beginning as well as a major guiding thread of Logic of Imagination. Moving beyond the horizons of his earlier work, Force of Imagination, John Sallis sets out to unsettle the traditional conception of logic, to mark its limits, and, beyond these limits, to launch another, exorbitant logic—a logic of imagination. Drawing on a vast range of sources, including Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, and Freud, as well as developments in modern logic and modern mathematics, Sallis shows how a logic of imagination can disclose the most elemental dimensions of nature and of human existence and how, through dialogue with contemporary astrophysics, it can reopen the project of a philosophical cosmology.

Precursions
1. The Logic of Contradiction
2. Formal Logic and Beyond
3. Exorbitant Logics
4. The Look of Things
5. Schematism
6. Proper Elementals
7. Elemental Cosmology
Notes
Index

Sujets

• Philosophie
• Épistémologie
• Philosophie de l'esprit
• Movements
• PHILOSOPHY
• Philosophie et théologie
• Phenomenology
• Continental

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 20 juillet 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253013644
• Langue: English

Extrait

LOGIC OF IMAGINATION
STUDIES IN CONTINENTAL THOUGHT
John Sallis, editor
CONSULTING EDITORS

Robert Bernasconi
J. N. Mohanty
Rudolph Bernet
Mary Rawlinson
John D. Caputo
Tom Rockmore
David Carr
Calvin O. Schrag
Edward S. Casey
Reiner Sch rmann
Hubert Dreyfus
Charles E. Scott
Don Ihde
Thomas Sheehan
David Farrell Krell
Robert Sokolowski
Lenore Langsdorf
Bruce W. Wilshire
Alphonso Lingis
David Wood
William L. McBride
LOGIC OF IMAGINATION
THE EXPANSE OF THE ELEMENTAL
JOHN SALLIS
INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS Bloomington and Indianapolis
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press 601 North Morton Street Bloomington, Indiana 47404-3797 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
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2012 by John Sallis
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Sallis, John
Logic of imagination : the expanse of the elemental / John Sallis.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-253-00589-2 (alk. paper)
ISBN 978-0-253-00590-8 (ebook)
1. Imagination (Philosophy) I. Title.
BH301.I53S26
2012
128 .3-dc23
2012005746
1 2 3 4 5 17 16 15 14 13 12
TO JERRY AGAIN, AND ALWAYS
CONTENTS
List of Plates
Acknowledgments
PRECURSIONS
I. The Tempest
II. Tracings
III. Legacies
IV. Spiralings
1. THE LOGIC OF CONTRADICTION
A. Ones
B. A Principle Most Firm, Steadfast, Sure
C. Another Logic
D. Logic as Metaphysics of Contradiction
E. Contradiction at the Limit
2. FORMAL LOGIC AND BEYOND
A. Divergences
B. Pure Logic
C. Transcendental Logic
D. Dismantlings
3. EXORBITANT LOGICS
A. Infraction
B. The Field of Things
C. Kettle Logic
4. THE LOOK OF THINGS
A. Showings
B. Doubling Looks
C. The Look of Sense
5. SCHEMATISM
A. The Elementals and Their Texture
B. Preeminent Spacings
C. Schemata of Imagination
D. Before the Elemental
6. PROPER ELEMENTALS
A. The Space of Propriety
B. Seclusion
C. Natal Mortality
7. ELEMENTAL COSMOLOGY
A. The Expanse Beyond
B. Unabsolved Space
C. Stretch of Imagination
Index
PLATES
1. Frans Hals, Portrait of Jaspar Schade (c. 1645)
2. Raphael, Madonna del Granduca (1504)
3. Raphael, Madonna della Seggiola (1514)
4. Paul Klee, Kettledrummer (1940)
5. Vincent van Gogh, Along the Seine (1887)
6. Vincent van Gogh, The Wheatfield (1888)
7. Vincent van Gogh, Seascape near Les Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer (1888)
8. Caspar David Friedrich, The Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (c. 1818)
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am grateful to the State University of New York Press for permission to include the text of my paper The Logic and Illogic of the Dream-Work, which originally appeared in Rereading Freud: Psychoanalysis through Philosophy, edited by Jon Mills (2004). Thanks also to the following museums and agents for permission to include images of artworks: National Gallery in Prague (Plate 1), Palazzo Pitti (Plates 2 and 3), Zentrum Paul Klee (Plate 4), Van Gogh Museum (Plates 5 and 7), Kunsthandel P. de Boer (Plate 6), Art Resource (Hamburger Kunsthalle) (Plate 8). I also want to thank Michael Benson for generously granting permission for his image of the Andromeda Galaxy to be used on the cover of this book; the image appeared in his book Far Out: A Space-Time Chronicle (New York: Abrams, 2009) and is based on a photograph made at the Palomar Observatory by Davide De Martin, to whom I also owe thanks.
I would like to express once again my gratitude to the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung for continued support of my research.
For their generous and able assistance during production of this book I am grateful to Nancy Fedrow and Marina Denischik. Most of all, I am profoundly grateful to my editor and friend Dee Mortensen, whose continual support and extraordinary expertise have been invaluable.
Boston
January 2012
LOGIC OF IMAGINATION
PRECURSIONS
The first word belongs to the poet, the last word too, perhaps, if indeed there be a last word. For it is the poet s word that has the utmost capacity to turn imagination disclosively upon itself, letting its trajectories be discerned and gesturing toward all the things that open to its evocation. Yet the most remarkable things that can be called forth by force of imagination are not in truth things at all but rather the elements, elemental nature in a sense akin to that which oriented early Greek thought. This sense is akin to that which comes into play, even still, when one speaks of being exposed to the elements. It is akin also to the sense that animates the title as well as much of the diction and action of Shakespeare s last play.
I. THE TEMPEST
It all begins with the storm. Or rather, with the storm and its semantic double, with the storm itself as it is presented, represented on stage, and with the word that refers to the scene, either the very word storm or the Latinate synonym that entitles the play. The title alone suffices to pose this twofold, as the word prompts one to picture what the word names, calling up the image. The title and the twofold it broaches are repeated and extended in the initial stage directions, which prescribe that The Tempest begin with a stage representation of a tempest: A tempestuous noise of thunder and lightning heard . 1
So it does begin, in just this manner, showing on stage what is said in the title of the play. The first scene pictures Master, Boatswain, and the mariners aboard the ship, hastening to contend with the threat of the storm and cursed by the passengers, who belong to the party of Alonso, King of Naples. Little do they know that they are under the magical power of Prospero, former Duke of Milan, who twelve years earlier was overthrown by his treacherous brother Antonio, who at that time was aided by Alonso and now is among those aboard the storm-tossed ship. Little do they know that the island on which they are about to crash is the very spot where Prospero, with his young daughter Miranda, finally landed after being put out to sea and where in the intervening years they have lived with the company only of two very strange, not quite human creatures, Ariel and Caliban. As the scene aboard the ship draws to a close, the king s old councillor Gonzalo exclaims that they are split-that is, ship-wrecked-and his final lament that he would fain die a dry death leaves the unmistakable impression that all have perished in the stormy sea.
The title of the play extends its pertinence beyond the first scene, indeed extends it throughout. Though the storm subsides after the first scene, its threat remains. Later in the play the earthy monster Caliban and the tag-named jester Trinculo crawl under a gabardine in order to shelter themselves from the storm, which, because they hear thunder, they take to be coming again. When, much later, the airy spirit Ariel appears as a harpy to render the principal characters in the king s party mad, distracted, deprived of themselves, his appearance is accompanied by thunder and lightning and-as the stage directions also prescribe-he vanishes in thunder. Yet beyond these and other particular invocations, the play as a whole is determined by the tempest with which it begins: the entire sequence of scenes from Prospero s revelations to Miranda, to the two love scenes with Ferdinand, Alonso s son, to the scenes of the magical banquet and of the masque, to the final scene in which all are gathered before Prospero s cell-this sequence is the consequence of the storm with which the play begins.
That The Tempest begins by presenting the scene of a tempest is indicative of the decisive twofold. A similar indication is provided by the stage directions-at the beginning, though elsewhere too-that prescribe what is to be seen or heard. This twofold of the said and the sensed is decisive, not only in The Tempest, not only in drama as such, but also, from its beginning, in philosophy. In a fragment handed down by Sextus Empiricus, Heraclitus declares, on the one hand, that all things come about according to the ( ) and, on the other hand, that each thing is to be discerned, as regards how it is, according to ( ). 2 The fragment thus yokes together listening ( ) to the and discerning things according to . In its most immediate-though not its most originary-sense, the fragment thus juxtaposes the relation to speech and the stance of vision; that is, it sets forth the twofold of the said and the sensed. It is this very twofold that will prove to delimit the gigantic interval within which the story of the history of metaphysics is inscribed. What is remarkable is that in The Tempest there are also to be found many of the elements-including the elements themselves-that interrupt this story and that prompt another, different discourse.
The beginning does not consist merely of tempest in general, of the idea, concept, or signification attached to the word. Rather, it is determined also by the singularizing effected through the definite article: that with which it all begins is the tempest, a particular, or rather, singular, tempest, indeed one so utterly unique that it is to be found nowhere except in this play. It is a tempest that, contrary to appearances, despite the fear and desperation it evokes in those aboard the ship, has been stripped entirely-absolutely-of its destructive force. Most wondrously, the tempest