Federico Rodríguez

This text explores the problem of transcendental stupidity in Sigmund Freud, Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Derrida’s works, seeking to combine it with (1) the paradoxical figure of Oedipus (the original complex) in psychoanalytical and philosophical tradition and (2) the symptomatic situation of some important animals (wolf and dog, symbols of wild and domestic life [i.e.: Freud’s Wolfs, Freud’s Chow-Chows]) in analyses and therapies. The case of the Man of the Wolves (der Wolfmann), the case of Mr. Sergei K. Pankejeff described in Aus der Geschichte einer infantilen Neurose, a fundamental dream in contemporary culture history, would be the point of departure.

These pages take a fresh look at some of the irreducible complexities of the philosophical problem of violence (its theological-political delimitation and eventual use), on the occasion of Peter Fenves and Julia Ng’s recent English critical edition of Walter Benjamin’s classic essay Toward the Critique of Violence (1921), published on the centenary of the original German text. Starting from this eminently philological context, we would like to show how, in this essay, the true and antagonistic intimacy between so-called “nonviolence” (a politics of pure means) and the “doctrine of non-action” (a Taoist reversal of Kantian morality) is determined through a logical critique of pacifism (as dogmatic, contradictory, metaphysical, “a more remote theorem”). Benjamin’s critique is also crystallized through an exceptional and profound reading of the divine commandment of the Torah: “Thou shalt not kill” (Ex 20, 13).

What does it mean to prefer life over death? Is this also a matter of taste? And when, at what moment of the dispersal of life, will this preference have begun? Has it really started? From, on the one hand, the background of a “sublime nothing” as a possible “dogmatic concept,” in the Kantian manner, to name the entropic course of nature; and, on the other, considering “suicidal thinking” as an atavistic will that would escort this eschatological vision, we attempt to answer these questions through a set of mirrors (i.e., “germinal and deforming” reflexive understanding) established from the text commentary of three voices of young philosophers. Thus, in the first and second epigraphs, the ontological thanatology of Philipp Mainländer and Jules Vuillemin is presented through a commentary on several passages drawn from the Philosophy of Redemption (1876) and the Essay on the Significance of Death (1948), showing how both reveal, at this precise point, a sharp difference between humans and the rest of animals, and an noticeable idealist vocation. The third and last epigraph responds to the questions raised by both (indirectly in the first case, directly in the second) by focusing, after some detours through other texts, on some unpublished notes of a talk on suicide by Jacques Derrida (1959-60).