Abstract
In this chapter, I continue the discussion of dislocation as a second level of visionary critique by introducing the notion of adjunction as global dislocation, providing as an example the inverse relation between analytic and synthetic methods as described in the B Preface to Kant’s First Critique. Once the strategy of dislocation has been globalized, the first level of visionary critique can be “lifted up” through the second level to a third level, which I call variously relocation, distribution or redistribution, depending on context. I introduce this third level by showing how Kant’s transcendental deduction can be understood as just such a lifting. I conclude the chapter with a relocation of my own, in which I subject Blumenberg’s own account of philosophical modernity to a redistribution as a further exemplification of the three-tiered strategy of visionary critique (or paraphysics, as I also call it).
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Notes
- 1.
See the description of Kant’s transition from the critical project as complete in the First Critique to the recognition of the need for a Second Critique given above. The second edition of the First Critique appears in 1787 and the Second Critique first appears in 1788.
- 2.
I am inevitably reminded of Erik Satie’s most outrageous project, the Vexations.
- 3.
This preliminary section of the chapter on the transcendental deduction reflects a cultivation of the fruits of the metaphysical deduction in a vocabulary appropriate to their application to the project of the transcendental deduction . It is here that the transcendental (synthetic ) route depends on the antecedently traversed metaphysical (analytic ) one.
- 4.
Disappointingly, at least at first blush, in the Second Critique Kant admits that “in place of [a] deduction of the supreme principle of pure practical reason,” he is able to deduce only a conditional result: that if I have insight into the possibility of an efficient cause, then I have insight into both the possibility and necessity of the moral law “as the supreme practical law of rational beings, to whom one attributes freedom of the causality of their will” (Kant 2002, 119). The argument from possibility to necessity resembles Leibniz’s conditional reformulation of the Cartesian ontological argument and will eventually drive in the direction of the ether deduction and the doctrine of self-positioning in the Opus Postumum. Ultimately, this deferral in the Kantian project is not surprising, at least from a perspective like the one I have advocated, in which a continual “relayering” is underway.
- 5.
I thank Thomas Cerbu for insisting that Blumenberg’s account of modernity needs to confront Milton , and Nathan Vacher for initiating this confrontation in a Masters Thesis under Cerbu’s supervision.
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Bassler, O.B. (2018). Adjunction and Relocation. In: Kant, Shelley and the Visionary Critique of Metaphysics. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77291-2_5
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