Radical Nature

The persistence of the frontier (and therefore nature, violence and evil) leads to the question of the relation in Kant between politics and morality. Kant’s famous distinction between political moralist and moral politician is shown to deconstruct in the very effort Kant makes to secure it. This has important implications for how we think about revolution and the relation of the philosopher to the state.

The End of Nature

This chapter examines the frontier from the point of view of nature. Politics emerges from nature (whether naturally or not) by drawing a frontier. Kant talks a good deal about nature and the emergence from a state of nature in his political writings: in this ambiguously following Aristotle. It is argued that “frontier” in all its senses comes to name a residue of nature that always subsists in the becoming-political of the human.

Finis

The situation we have found in Kant might seem to be just what is understood and sublated by Hegel’s account of these same issues. But Hegel’s resolution of the problem of the frontier is shown to contain an unwarranted dogmatic element that prevents convincing sublation of the violent natural dispersion we have shown to be a consequence of thinking through the problem of the frontier.

The Abyss of Judgment

Judgment would be the faculty of the frontier. A detailed reading of the introduction to the Critique of Judgment and of the Critique of Teleological Judgment shows Kant developing a radically subjective thought of natural purposiveness that must take precedence over the scientific or objective investigation of nature. This thought necessarily leads, however, beyond nature to theological questions. Kant’s effort to think these through and thus to throw a bridge over the abyss (a radical figure of what we have been calling “frontier”) between the legislations of theoretical and practical reason is shown to founder on the structure of teleology itself, which, as was already suggested in the strictly political writings, necessarily involves a moment of hesitation or interruption that essentially cuts teleology from its telos, and that just is the structure of the frontier as we have been following it from the beginning.

The Guiding Thread (on Philosophical Reading)

A reflection on the status of reading in philosophy, in dialogue with Kant (reading Plato) and Heidegger (reading Kant). Philosophy calls for reading insofar as it is not mathematics, and cannot be understood essentially in terms of history. The motif of the guiding thread is a very seductive figure for reading philosophical texts, but that figure itself leads to an inevitable dispersion that is practised here and that cannot be grasped by philosophy as such.

Rest in Peace

“Perpetual peace” proposes a number of confusing arguments about the disappearance of frontiers in cosmopolitanism and their necessary maintenance in internationalism. Given pervasive images of death in the text, it transpires that the chance of perpetual peace depends on its not being perpetual (which would be death), and thus always involving a hesitation or interruption that involves an element of radical evil. This also affects our understanding of the relation between critique and doctrine in Kant’s thinking more generally.

The Return of Nature

Even supposing that Kant can solve the fundamental questions of political philosophy in the foundation of “the” State, nature-as-violence returns at the level of the relation between states. Solving this (external) problem turns out to be a pre-requisite for solving the “internal” problems of state organization: nature supposedly uses the spherical nature of the globe to force a solution and it seems at first as though cosmopolitanism and perpetual peace provide the answer to that external problem. It turns out that analogically speaking, this is difficult to accept given the antinomies of pure reason—and politically difficult, given that the best image of perpetual peace always might be a graveyard.