The dialectics of «effets d’insu»

Abstract

Isn’t renouncing all possibility of an absolute foundation also renouncing all possibility of a sovereign conscience or a shadowless subject, even on a transcendental level? Then how can we imagine that any discourse can stand, at least for a while? I propose to understand that discourses are submitted to «effets d’insu» (that is effects due to what we don’t have any notion of), an assumption that applies to all kind of discourse as such – be it philosophical, scientific (including logic and mathematics), etc., and even psychoanalytical. It is impossible to eliminate, dispute, refute, etc., what we don’t even have a notion of, therefore nothing is more resistant… until the time when «that» comes to the mind, at least in a context in which it has become possible to bring it to light. Then we can understand that the «effets d’insu» retain the effectiveness of a renunciation to the absolute foundation, because they notify a limit (what we cannot have a notion of remains in the discourse as a kind of blank), just as they confer a form of prop (a necessarily provisional foundation, always dismissible, but what could we better expect in the absence of absolute foundation?). The possibility of «effets d’insu» goes along with a perspective in which a discursive construction is limited by the conditions of its own possibility ; it paves the way to a theory of overriding in which what is taken in consideration is less individual theories than filiations of theories, in which each fundamental overriding implies a reinterpretation of the fundamental principles.