The Shattering of the Crystal Spheres: ‘rolling from the centre toward X’

Abstract

Kant claims that his achievement in philosophy is the analogue of that of Copernicus’ in cosmology. Colloquially this carries the sense of a major paradigmatic shift in perception: since Kant is claiming for his achievement the status of a rupture with the past, a clean break. The problem with this claim, however, is revealed as soon as one begins to examine the cosmological, metaphysical and concomitant political charge of Copernicus’ work. It then becomes apparent that Kant’s claim is not really as apocalyptic, as cataclysmic, or as revolutionary, for the terms, conventions, limits and possibilities of thought as he would wish us to think. It is ultimately in Bataille’s sense, comical. ‘No one can say without being comical that he is getting ready to overturn things: He must overturn, and that’s all’ (Bataille 1991 20/10). Put otherwise, in the line of thought being followed here, Kant’s thought is characterised as being a ‘renovated theology’ (Deleuze1983, 93). In consequence, far from constituting the invention of a thought that would escape State-form and ‘blast open the continuum of history’ (Benjamin 1973, 264),^x Kantianism is taken to be a clandestine means of reinstating transcendence.² The link between the State-form and transcendence is the compliment to the intimacy that can be explored in an abstract diagram of immanent critique and philosophico-political heresy; this intimacy is not accidental but constitutive; the State-form in its different manifestations through history is sustained by transcendence.³

Since Copernicus man has been rolling from the centre toward X.

Nietzsche 1968, §1.5

Since Copernicus, man seems to have got himself on an inclined plane — now he is slipping faster and faster away from the centre into what? into nothingness? into a ‘penetrating sense of his nothingness?

Nietzsche 1969 III §25

Therein we have the reason why every man, whether he be on earth, in the sun,or on another planet, always has the impression that all other things are in movement whilst he himself is in a sort of immovable centre; he will certainly always choose poles which will vary according as his place of existence is the sun, the earth, the moon, Mars etc. In consequence, there will always be a machina mundi whose centre so to speak, is everywhere, whose circumference is nowhere, for God is its circumference and centre and he is everywhere and nowhere.

Cusa, De Docta Ignorantia Bk. II, Ch. 12