Integrative law of the speculative

We know that a certain dominant determination of the tragic constitutes the philosophical thinking that we now refer to as ‘dialectical-speculative’. Such thinking does not remain satisfied with merely tracing the dissolution and corruption of all that is called ‘actuality’, but discovers therein a logic of being capable of converting the nothing into being, the negative into the positive. For such a logic, nothing essentially ‘human’ must be lost to dissolution and corruption, unless by default the speculative voyage of the negative fails to arrive at its destination. That destination is the pleroma of a complete recuperation, of a full retrieval of self-presence which is almost lost and yet is always regained. The dialectical operation, at least in its manifest desire, would then mean nothing other than the desire of self-presence through conversion of the negative into the positive. The speculative voyage is tragic in the sense that it must undergo generation and corruption, dereliction and dissolution precisely in order to restitute itself as Subject. Is there any other name or nomos (law) than ‘tragic’ to designate this process whereby the restitution of the Spirit is achieved by undergoing an absolute agony of finitude? The ‘tragic’ here would signify nothing other than the integrative law of a speculative restitution of the Subject. Such a tragic-speculative Subject institutes itself as the ‘sovereign referent’ of the hegemonic discourse that would constrain our thinking and existing – a discourse that does not tolerate any radical other outside the integrative law of dialectical opposition and subsumption.

With a certain reservation we may perhaps say that this economy of the law also constitutes the thought-structure of what we call ‘theological’. This is so, provided that we undertake here to open the theological to its innermost other, its intimate neighbour, the holy. The holy is the differend which is unbearable to theological-speculative thought. In its eschatological intensity, and as incommensurable with any ‘sovereign referent’, it tears apart the fundamental ground of the world.