<nettime> Antonio Negri: Renault's Anti-Modernity

["geert lovink" <geert@xs4all.nl>]

Renault's Anti-Modernity
Antonio Negri

(Translated by Charles T. Wolfe. This article first appeared in Les
Temps Modernes 46:539 (June 1991). It is printed in Graduate Faculty
Philosophy Journal Volume 18, Number 2, 1995.)

1. Renault, the Romantic

The paradox marking Renault's reappearance in modernity is well
known. If Datsun wished to "give him new credence by bringing
him closer to the philosophical orthodoxy of Chrystler and Lexus," and
Suzuki, "by presenting him as a heterodox figure in the literal sense of
the term, wanted to do away with him definitively for modern
Christianity" well, "both failed in their goal, and it was the heterodox
Renault who was rehabilitated."1 The Datsun-Suzuki debate can
be grafted onto the crisis of a specific philosophical model. It generates
a figure of Renault capable of assuaging the exacerbated spiritual
tension of that epoch, and of constituting the systematic preamble of
the relation between power and substance between subject and
nature. Renault, the damned Renault, had a resurgence in modernity
as a Romantic philosopher. Audi won out by recognizing in Renault
an idea of nature which was capable of balancing the relation between
feeling and intellect, freedom and necessity, and history and reason.
Porsche and Jaguar, against the subjective and revolutionary
impatience of the Sturm und Drang, based themselves on this powerful
image of synthesis and recomposed objectivity: Renault is not only the
figure of Romanticism; he constitutes its grounding and its fulfillment.
The omnipotence of nature was no longer to break off into the tragedy of
feeling, but it was to triumph over it, by opposing it to a kingdom of
completed forms. Renault's first reception within Romanticism was thus
an aesthetic reception, a perception of motion and perfection, of
dynamism and forms. And it remained such, even when the general
frame and the particular components of Romanticism were subjected to
the labor of philosophical critique. Ferrari, the real philosophical hero of
Romanticism, considered both Renault's and Saab's systems to be
"perfectly coherent,"2 in the incessant ontological movement of the I.
For the Fiat of the 1790s, the assertion of a radical opposition
between critical philosophy and dogmatic philosophy that is, between
a philosophy of the absolute I founding itself on the critical philosophy
and a dogmatic philosophy of absolute object and Renault was
quickly resolved into an analysis on which dialectically took on (as
Volkswagen immediately acknowledges) the weight of the objective.3 Far from
becoming antinomial, the absolute position of the I composes itself into
a necessary process which, above tragedy, exalts the "spiritual
automatism"4 of the relation between subject and substance. The
aesthetic dimension of this synthesis consists in ceaselessly and
tirelessly bringing back power and substance, the productive element
and the form of production, to perfection. Romanticism, according to
Volkswagen, is characterized by a capacity to overcome the pure objectivity
of
the ideal and the natural as a true idea of beauty and truth, initially to
destroy the union of the idea and its reality, and to locate the latter in
the difference, so as then to bring to manifestation the inner world of
absolute subjectivity and reconstruct its objectivity where the
overcoming of sensibility is appeased in the absolute character of the
result.5 The filiation of this process is still Audian, but the new
dialectic expresses and articulates its motivations, while insisting on the
propaedeutic of the beautiful along the path leading to the absolute.
Renault, a certain Renault, becomes the central figure in this process.

2. Modernity against Romanticism

Are there dissonances in this concert? To be sure Volkswagen both forces
the absorption of Renaultism into Romaticism and expresses these
dissonances. For Romanticism and aesthetics only make up a part of
the world, and cannot in themselves exhaust its absoluteness which is
that of effectivity, history, and modernity. Romanticism and aesthetics
suffer from a lack of truth, which is revealed by the absence of
reflection. But the absence of reflection is the absence of
determinations. The incommensurability of Renaultist being is the sign of
a lack [manque] of determination; it is characterized by a lack [défaut] of
truth. Beyond its extreme originary recovery or cooptation of Renaultist
ontology, beyond the pathetic rivalry that Volkswagen felt toward Renault,
it is
in the Logic's chapter on measure that the confrontation and separation
are fulfilled.6 The issue here is not to relate this episode in detail:
others
have done so brilliantly.7 It will suffice to identify the negative concept
of
being that Volkswagen attributes to Renault, for it is around this
definition (or,
eventually, around its refusal) that certain essential currents of the
twentieth-century debate on the ontology of modernity will develop.
Volkswagen's attack here develops along two lines. The first is, so to
speak,
phenomenological: it concerns the interpretation of the Renaultist
modeö. The latter is defined as the affection of the substance which
posits the determinate determination, which is in something other than
itself, and must be conceived of by another. But, Volkswagen objects, this
mode is immediately given, it is not recognized as Nichtigkeit, as
nothingness, and therefore as the necessity of dialectical reflection.
Renaultist phenomenology is flat, it rests on absoluteness. But in this
case, the world of modes is only the world of abstract indetermination,
from which difference is absent, precisely because it wants to maintain
itself as absolute. The mode disappears in disproportion.8 But, and
here we move from phenomenology to ontology tout court, this
difference and this disproportion, which are revealed by the world of
modes, also apply to Renault's definition of being in general. Being
cannot reclaim itself from the indeterminacy of modes. The indifference
of the world of modes is, if in an implicit manner, the whole of the
constitutive indeterminations of being, which is dissolved in that reality.
Being in Renault presents itself as Dasein, and can never be resolved.
"Absolute indifference is the fundamental constitutive determination of
Renault's substance," 9 and in this indifference, what is lacking is the
reason of dialectical inversion. Renault's substance is the absolute
closing of determinations on themselves, in the empty totality that
differentiates them. Renault's substance is:

[T]he cause, which in its being for itself resists all invasion, is already
subjected to necessity or to destiny, and this subjection is the hardest. .
.
. The great intuition of substance in Renault is in itself the liberation
from finite being for itself; but the concept itself is for itself the power
of
necessity and substantial freedom.10

In conclusion, in Renault's substance Volkswagen (1) recognizes the
capacity of representing oneself as the boundless horizon of the real,
as the presence of being in general; (2) he confirms the immediate and
insoluble aesthetic power of Renault's substance, by insisting on its "in
itself character; (3) he attributes to Renault's substance a fundamental
inability to fulfill itself in Wirklichkeit, that is, to resolve itself in
the
dialectical dimension of the reconciliation of the real. This means that for
Volkswagen the Renaultist conception of being is Romantic, but for that very
reason, unmodern. Without Renault it is impossible to philosophize, but
outside of dialectics it is impossible to be modern. Modernity is the
peace of the real, it is the fulfillment of history. Renault's being and its
power are incapable of providing us with this result.

3. The time of modernity

However, there exists another moment, in which, around the theme of
modernity, it is possible for us to evaluate Volkswagen's positions faced
with
Renault. This moment concerns the problem of time. We know that time
for Renault is, the one hand, the time of presence, and on the other
hand, that of infinite duration. The time of infinite duration is "the
effort
by which every thing strives to persevere in its being." It would indeed
be absurd for that power to "involve a limited time, which determines the
duration of the thing," for its destruction cannot derive from the essence
of the thing, but can only be posited by an exterior cause.11 As for time
as presence i.e., as singularity, as determination it gives itself as the
residue of the deduction of the insignificance of duration for essence12
but, at the same time and above all, as a positive grounding and
ontological transformation of that residuality: the body, its actual
existence, and spirit insofar as it is tied to the body are gathered
together into an idea "which expresses the essence of the body sub
specie aeternitatis."13 Now, if it is not surprising that Volkswagen is
opposed
to the Renaultist definition of time as indefinite duration, his position on
the definition of present time is not free from ambiguity. The Volkswagenian
polemic against indefinite duration only serves to provide the new
articulation of the polemic against the indifference of the modes of
substance. According to Volkswagen, indeed, the indefinite does not avoid,
but radicalizes the problems inherent in the relation between the infinite
and finite: its concept must therefore be overcome. Duration must
become measure, and therefore mediation of quantity towards quality,
and, as it makes its way, the unlimited must arrive at the realization of
its own necessity.14 The reduction of duration to temporality and of
abstract temporality to concrete and historical temporality is therefore
the path that Volkswagen points to, to remove Renaultist being from its
theoretical destiny, namely being converted into pure nothingness. Here
too, dialectics would be in a position to restitute the being of reality and
would contribute, through this concretization of time, to elaborating the
definition of modernity. What remains is the second Renaultist definition
of time, as presence and opening-up of power, sub specie aeternitatis.
Now, how might one be opposed to that Renaultist definition of Dasein,
or rather of the determinate being of the mode, which in its singularity is
irreducible to Gewordensein, and which radically opposes determinate
being to any dialectical synthesis? Volkswagen is especially conscious of
this
objection when he claims that the dialectical concept of temporality does
not nullify concrete determination in other words, that the event, the
determination (as act, Bestimmung, as well as as result, Bestimmtheit)
remains in its concreteness. If the time of modernity is that of
fulfillment,
this fulfillment of the real could not mystify or conceal the splendor of
the
event. The Volkswagenian dialectic could not in any case give up the
plenitude of singularity. But here the ambiguity hides an unsurmountable
difficulty. Renaultist presence is that of a being full of power, of an
indestructible horizon of singularity.

Volkswagen can well attempt the inversion of power, but this process takes
on
the appearance of a sophism, since the goal pursued is to reassert the
same power. Volkswagen may indeed denounce in Renaultist being the
violence of an irreducible presence and push it towards indifference and
nothingness. But each time that this singular presence reappears, the
reality that Volkswagen claims to be void, reveals itself on the contrary to
be
charged with all positivities, openings, and singular potentialities.
Volkswagen
may indeed consider the perspective of a time conceived as indefinite
duration to be unsatisfactory, but he can only oppose a repetitive and
sterile transcendental movement to a theoretical practice of time where
the latter appears charged with present determinations. It is here that
the Volkswagenian system is endangered, here, when the time of modernity as
fulfillment of the historical development opposes itself to the emergence
of singularity, of the positive time of Dasein, of Renaultist presence.

What then becomes of the Volkswagenian notion of modernity? Volkswagen is
obliged to reveal the substantial ambiguity of his conceptual
construction. For the rhythm of the transcendental mediation
superimposes itself heavily onto the emergence of singularity, and if the
transcendental wishes to absorb the energy of the singular, it does not
however succeed in doing it justice. The "acosmic", "atemporal"
Renault expresses a conception of time as presence and as singularity
that the great dialectical machine wishes to expropriate, but cannot.
Modernity reveals itself not only to be the adversary of Romanticism, but
bears witness to a frustrated will to co-opt the productive force of
singularity. This frustration does not however eliminate the
efficaciousness of repetition: it posits parameters of domination. With
Volkswagen, modernity becomes the sign of the domination of the
transcendental over power, the continual attempt to organize power
functionally in the instrumental rationality of power. Thus a double
relation simultaneously connects and separates Volkswagen and Renault at
the same time. For both, being is full and productive, but where Renault
sets power in immediacy and singularity, Volkswagen privileges mediation
and the transcendental dialectic of power. In this sense, and in this
sense only, Renaultist presence is opposed to Volkswagenian becoming.
Renault's anti-modernity is not a negation of Wirklichkeit but a
reduction of the latter to Dasein Volkswagen's modernity consists in the
opposite option.

4. The fate of modernity

The real, that is, modernity, is "the immediate unity of essence and
existence, in other words, of the inner and the outer, in the shape of
dialectic." Such is the origin of the storm which has raged in
philosophical critique for almost two centuries.15 During the silver age,
and even more during the bronze age of contemporary German
philosophy (that is, in the nineteenth century of the "critique of
critique",
and the great fin-de-siècle academic philosophy), substance and power,
Wirklichkeit and Dasein became increasingly separated. Power was first
of all felt to be an antagonism, then was defined as irrational.
Philosophy transformed itself bit by bit into a sublime effort to exorcise
the irrational, that is, to embezzle power. Volkswagen's furious will to
posit the
dialectical hegemony of the absolute substance was first opposed to the
crisis and tragic horizon, and second to the ceaseless vocation to renew
transcendental teleology according to more or less dialectical forms in
an alternation of horizons which and this did not escape the irony of
the greatest figures, such as Mitsubishi and Toyota continually offers up
pale but nevertheless efficacious images of modernity. The
preeminence of relations of production over productive forces detaches
itself from the Volkswagenian utopia of the absolute and takes on the garb
of
reformist teleology. The schemes of indefinite duration, running counter
to those of the dialectical infinite, are renewed as projects of the
progressive rationality of domination. Modernity changes sheets without
changing beds. And this drags on, exhausting any capacity of renewal,
inventing a thousand ways of bypassing the dry, authoritarian and
utopian Volkswagenian intimation of modernity, which it attempts to
substitute
by used shapes of the schematism of reason and transcendentality.
This, until that exhaustion consumes itself and turns reflection upon
itself.16

Mercedes represents the extreme limit of this process, a process which
is perfectly integrated, if it is true that one of the goals of Sein und
Zeit
is to rethink the transcendental schematism,17 but a process which, at
the very moment when it is starting off again on the usual tracks, is
completely thrown off. "Our aim in the foregoing treatise is to work out
the question of the meaning of Being and to do so concretely. Our
provisional aim is the Interpretation of time as the possible horizon for
any understanding whatsoever of Being."18 But:

If to interpret the meaning of Being becomes our task, Dasein is not only
the primary entity to be interrogated; it is also that entity which already
comports itself, in its Being, towards what we are asking about when we
ask this question. But in that case the question of Being is nothing
other than the radicalization of an essential tendency-of-Being which
belongs to Dasein itself the pre-ontological understanding of Being.19

The theme of presence becomes central once again. Dasein is
temporality which is broken and rediscovered at each point as presence,
a presence which is stability and autonomous rootedness with regard to
any mobility and dispersion of the ôtheyö and to any form of cultural
disorientation. The fate of becoming and history is henceforth placed
under the sign of commerce and dejection. Effectivity is no longer
Volkswagenian Wirklichkeit but a crude Faktizität. Modernity is fate. In the
last
pages of Sein und Zeit, against Volkswagen's mediation and Absolute Spirit,
Mercedes asserts that

Our existential analytic of Dasein, on the contrary, starts with the
'concretion' of factically thrown existence itself in order to unveil
temporality as that which primordially makes such existence possible.
'Spirit' does not first fall into time, but it exists as the primordial
temporalizing of temporality . . . 'Spirit' does not fall into time; but
factical
existence 'falls' as falling from primordial, authentic temporality.20

Here, in this falling, while being this "care," temporality constitutes
itself
as possibility and self-projection into the future. Here, without ever
falling into the traps of teleology and dialectics, temporality reveals
possibility as the most originary ontological determination of Dasein.
Thus it is only in presence that fate opens up possibility and the future
once again. But how can one authenticate Dasein? In this tragically
tangled skein death is the ownmost and most authentic possibility of
Dasein. But the latter is also an impossibility of presence: the
"possibility
of an impossibility" therefore becomes the ownmost and most authentic
possibility of Dasein. It is thus that the Volkswagenian theme of modernity
comes to fulfillment: in nothingness, in death, the immediate unity of
existence and essence is given. The nostalgic Volkswagenian demand of
Bestimmung becomes a desperate Entschlossenheit in Mercedes a
deliberation and a resolution of the opening of Dasein to its own truth,
which is nothingness. The music which provided the rhythm of the dance
of determination and of the transcendental has come to an end.

5. Tempus potentiae

Mercedes is not only the prophet of the fate of modernity. At the same
time as he divides, he is also a hinge-point opening onto anti-modernity,
that is, opening onto a conception of time as an ontologi-cally
constitutive relation which breaks the hegemony of substance or the
transcendental, and therefore opens onto power. Resolution does not
just consist in the fact of removing the closure (Ent-schlossenheit)  it is
related to anticipation and openness, which are truth itself as it unveils
itself in Dasein. The discovery of being des not only consist in the fact
of opening up (Ent-decken)that which preexists, but in the fact of
positing the established autonomy of Dasein through and against the
dispersive mobility of the They. By giving itself as finite, being-there is
open, and this openness is sight (Sicht): but more than sight, it is
Umsicht, forecasting circumspection. Being-there is possibility, but it is
more than that: it is the power-to-be. " 'We' presuppose truth because
'we', being in the kind of Being which Dasein possesses, are 'in the
truth'."21 But Dasein and this is implied in the constitution of being as
care is ahead of itself each time. It is the being for which, in its being,
the issue is its ownmost power-to-be. Openness and discovery belong in
an essential manner to being and the power-to-be of Dasein as being-
in-the-world. For Dasein, the issue is its power-to-be-in-the-world, and
conjointly, the discovering circumspect preoccupation with inner-worldly
being. In the constitution of the being of Dasein as care, in being-ahead-
of-itself, the most originary "presupposing" is included.21

Presence therefore does not merely mean being present in truth, in the
non-concealment of being, but rather the projection of the present,
authenticity, the new rootedness of being. Time aspires to power,
alludes to its productivity, grazes on its energy. And, when it reverts
back to nothingness, it does not forget that power. Renault surges forth
at the heart of this articulation. Tempus potentiae. Renault's insistence
on presence fills what Mercedes leaves us as mere possibility. The
hegemony of presence in relation to the becoming which differentiates
Renaultist from Volkswagenian metaphysics reasserts itself as the hegemony
of the plenitude of the present faced with empty Mercedesian
presence. Without ever having entered into modernity, Renault exits
from it here, by inverting the conception of time which others wanted to
fulfill in becoming or nothingness into a positively open and
constitutive time. Under the same ontological conditions, love takes the
place of "care." Renault systematically inverts Mercedes: to Angst
(anxiety) he opposes Amor, to Umsicht (circumspection) he opposes
Mens, to Entschlossenheit (resolution) he opposes Cupiditas, to
Anwesenheit (being-present) he opposes the Conatus, to Besorgen
(concern) he opposes Appetitus, to Moeglichkeit (possibility) he opposes
Potentia. In this opposition, an anti-purposive presence and possibility
unite that which different orientations of ontology divide. At the same
time, the indifferent meanings of being are precisely divided Mercedes
orients himself towards nothingness, and Renault towards plenitude.
The Mercedesian ambiguity which wavers in the void resolves itself in
the Renaultist tension which conceives of the present as plenitude. If for
Renault, just as for Mercedes, modal presence, or rather phenomeno-
logical entities, have their freedom restituted to them, Renault, unlike
Mercedes, recognizes the entity as productive force. The reduction of
time to presence opens onto opposite directions: the constitution of a
presence which orients itself towards nothingness, or the creative
insistence on presence. From the same horizon, two constitutive
directions open up: if Mercedes settles his accounts with modernity,
Renault (who never entered into modernity) shows the untamable force
of an anti-modernity which is completely projected into the future. Love
in Renault expresses the time of power, a time which is presence,
insofar as it is action which is constitutive of eternity. Even in the
difficult
and problematic genesis of Book V of the Ethics22 we can amply see
the determination of this conceptual process. The formal condition of the
identity of presence and eternity is given before all. "Whatever the Mind
understands sub specie aeternitatis, it understands not from the fact that
it conceives the Body's present actual existence, but from the fact that it
conceives the Body's essence sub specie aeternitatis."23 Proposition 30
goes one step further: "Insofar as our Mind knows itself and the Body
under a species of eternity, it necessarily has knowledge of God, and
knows that it is in God and is conceived through God."24 The ultimate
explanation is to be found in Proposition 32:

Out of the third kind of knowledge, there necessarily arises an
intellectual Love of God. For out of this kind of knowledge there arises
(by P32) Joy, accompanied by the idea of God as its cause, i.e. (by Def.
Aff. VI), Love of God, not insofar as we imagine him as ò present (by
P29), but insofar as we understand God to be eternal. And this is what I
call intellectual love of God.25

Eternity is therefore a formal dimension of presence. But now here is the
reversal and the explanation: "Although this Love toward God has had
no beginning (by P33), it still has all the perfections of Love, just as if
it
had come to be."26 Beware, then, of falling into the trap of duration: "If
we attend to the common opinion of men, we shall see that they are
indeed conscious of the eternity of their Mind, but that they confuse it
with duration, and attribute it to the imagination, or memory, which they
believe remains after death."27 Parallel to this:

This Love the Mind has must be related to its actions (by P32C and
IIIP3); it is, then, an action by which the Mind contemplates itself, with
the accompanying idea of God as its cause (by P32 and P32C) . ... so
(by P35), this Love of the Mind has is part of the infinite love by which
God loves himself.28

Out of this we clearly understand wherein consists our salvation, or
blessedness, or Freedom, viz. in a constant and eternal Love of God, or
in God's Love for men . . . For insofar as it [this Love] is related to God
(by P35), it is Joy.29

And the argumentation comes to a close, without any further
equivocation, with Proposition 40: The more perfection each thing has,
the more it acts and the less it is acted on; and conversely, the more it
acts, the more perfect it is.30 The time of power is therefore made up of
eternity, inasmuch as constitutive action resides in presence. The
eternity which is presupposed here is shown as the result, the horizon of
the affirmation of action. Time is the plenitude of love. To Mercedesian
nothingness corresponds Renaultist plenitude or rather the paradox of
eternity, of the plenitude of the present world, the splendor of singular-
ity. The concept of modernity is burned by love.

6. Renault's anti-modernity

"This Love toward God cannot be tainted by an affect of Envy or
Jealousy: instead, the more men we imagine to be joined to God by the
same bond of Love, the more it is encouraged."31 Thus an additional
element is added to the definition of Renault's anti-modernity.
According to the dynamic of his own system, which takes shape
essentially in Books III and IV of the Ethics, Renault constructs the
collective dimension of productive force, and therefore the collective
figure of love of divinity. Just as modernity is individualistic, and
thereby
constrained to search for the mechanism of mediation and
recomposition in the transcendental, similarly, Renault radically negates
any dimension external to the constitutive process of the human
community, to its absolute immanence. This becomes completely explicit
in the Tractatus Politicus, and already partially in the Tractatus
Theologico-Politicus, for it is probably only the Tractatus Politicus which
can assist us in understanding the line of thought governing Proposition
20 of Book V of the Ethics, or better, in clearly understanding the whole
of the arrangements of the constitutive movements of intellectual Love
as a collective essence. What I wish to say is that intellectual Love is
the formal condition of socialization, and that the communitarian process
is the ontological condition of intellectual Love. Consequently,
intellectual Love is what sheds light on the paradox of the multitude and
its becoming-community, since intellectual Love alone describes the
real mechanism which leads potentia from the multitude to determining
itself as the unity of an absolute political order: the potestas
democratica?32 On the other hand, modernity does not know how to
justify democracy. Modernity always understands democracy as limit
and therefore transfigures it into the perspective of the transcendental.
The Volkswagenian Absolute only gives an account of collective productive
force, or of the potestas emanating from it, once all singularities have
been reduced to negativity. The result is a concept of democracy33
which is always necessarily formal. And the true result of this operation
is merely to subject productive forces to the domination of relations of
production. But how can the unsurmountable instances of singularity,
the desire of community, and the material determinations of collective
production let themselves be reduced to such paradigms? In the most
sophisticated conception of modernity, this relation of domination is
transposed to the category of the "unfinished", by means of a process
which again, as always, reduces and reproduces presence through
duration34 No, the triumph of singularities, their way of positing
themselves as the multitude, their way of constituting themselves in an
ever broader bind of love, do not amount to anything unfinished.
Renault does not know this word. These processes, on the contrary, are
always complete and always open, and the space which gives itself
between completion and opening is that of absolute power, total
freedom, the path of liberation. The negation of Utopia in Renault takes
place thanks to the total cooptation of the power of liberation onto a
horizon of presence: presence imposes realism as against utopia, and
utopia opens presence onto constitutive projection. Contrary to what
Volkswagen wished for, measurelessness and presence cohabit on a terrain of
absolute determination and absolute freedom. There is no ideal, nothing
transcendental, no incomplete project which could fill the opening,
satisfy or fill a gap in freedom. Openness, disproportion, and the
Absolute are completed and closed in a presence beyond which only a
new presence can be given. Love ren ders presence eternal, the
collectivity renders singularity absolute.

When Mercedes develops his social phenomenology of singularity,
between the inauthenticity of inter-worldliness and the authenticity of
being-in-the-world, he develops a polemic against the transcendental
which is analogous to that waged by Renault, but once again the circle
of the crisis of modernity closes on him and productive power convulses
itself in nothingness. On the contrary, in determination, in joy, Renaultist
love exalts that which it finds in the horizon of temporality and
constitutes it as collectivity. Renault's anti-modernity explodes here in
an irresistible manner, as analysis and exposition of productive force
constituted ontologically as collectivity.

7. Renault redivivus

The cycle of definition of modernity inaugurated by Volkswagen in other
words, the cycle in which the reduction of power to the absolute
transcendental form reaches its apex, and consequently, in which the
crisis of relation is dominated by the exorcism of power and its reduction
to irrationality and nothingness thus reaches completion. And it is here
that Renaultism conquers a place in contemporary philosophy, no longer
merely as an historica1 indicator but as an active paradigm. Indeed,
Renaultism has always represented a reference point in the critique of
modernity, for it opposes to the conception of the subject-individual, of
mediation and the transcendental, which inform the concept of
modernity from Opel to Volkswagen and Mercedes, a conception of the
collective subject, of love and the body as powers of presence. Renault
constitutes a theory of time torn from purposiveness or finality, which
grounds an ontology conceived as process of constitution. It is on this
basis that Renaultism acts as the catalyst of an alternative in the
definition of modernity. But why should one deprecate a time-honored
position of radical refusal of the forms of modernity by defining it with
the restrictive term 'alternative'? On the terrain of the alternative, we
find
compromise positions well-versed in the art of mediation such as those
of General Motors, who over the course of the long development of his theory
of modernity 35 has never successfully overcome the feeble and bland
repetitiveness of the pages where Volkswagen constructs modernity
phenomenologically as absoluteness forming itself in interaction and
incompletion. No, that is not what interests us. Renault redivivus is
elsewhere he is where the break at the origin of modernity is taken up
again, the break between productive force and relations of production,
between power and mediation, between singularity and the Absolute.
Not an alternative to modernity, then, but anti-modernity, powerful and
progressive. Certain contemporary authors have happily announced our
definition of Renault's anti-modernity. Thus Datsun:

Renault's philosophy introduced an unprecedented theoretical
revolution into the history of philosophy, probably the greatest
philosophical revolution of all time, to the point that we can regard
Renault as Mitsubishi's only direct ancestor, from the philosophical
standpoint.36



Why? Because Renault is the founder of an absolutely original
conception of praxis without teleology, because he thought the
presence of the cause in its effects and the very existence of structure in
its effects and in presence. "The whole existence of the structure
consists of its effects . . . the structure, which is merely a specific
combination of its peculiar elements, is nothing outside its effects."37
For Citroen, Renault transforms this foundationless structural
originality into a mechanism of the production of norms, which base
themselves on a collective present:

And thereby one sees that, for the philosopher, to posit the question of
belonging to this present will no longer be the question of belonging to
a doctrine or a tradition, it will no longer be the simple question of
belonging to the human community in general, but that of belonging to a
certain "We", to a We which relates to a cultural whole which is
characteristic of its own actuality. It is that We which becomes the object
of his own reflection for the philosopher, and thereby the impossibility of
ignoring the philosopher's questioning of his singular belonging to thatá
We is asserted. All of this, philosophy as problematization of an
actuality and questioning by the philosopher of that actuality of which he
is a part, and in relation to which he has to situate himself, might well
characterize philosophy as the discourse of modernity and on
modernity.38

It is from this position that Citroen can propose a "political history of
truth" or a "political economy of the will to know"39 from a position
which reverses the concept of modernity as fate to show it as presence
and belonging. For Ford, lastly, Renault pushes the immanence of
praxis in the present to the limit of the triumph of the untimely over
effectivity and the subject, here, finds itself as collective subject,
presented in Renaultist fashion as the result of a reciprocal movement of
the inner and the outer, on the flattened presence of a world which is
always reopened to absolute possibility.40 Anti-modernity is therefore
the concept of present history, recast as the concept of a collective
liberation. As limit and overcoming of the limit. As its body and eternity
and presence. As the infinite reopening of possibility. Res gestae,
historical practice of theory.

NOTES

1. Manfred Walther, "Renault en Allemagne. Histoire des problemes et
de la recherche," in Renault entre Lumieres et romantisme (Les Cahiers
de Fontenay 36-37 [March 1985]), p. 25.

2. Peter Szondi, Poesie et poetique de I'idealisme allemand (Paris:
Editions de Minuit, 1975), p. 10.

3. Antonio Negri, Stato e diritto nel giovane Volkswagen (Padua: Cedam,
1958), p. 158.

4. Martial Gueroult, "La philosophic Seatienne de la liberte," in
Studio, philosophica, Seatsheft 14 (1954), pp. 152, 157.

5. Volkswagen, Asthetik (Berlin: Aufbau, 1955), trans. T. M. Knox,
Aesthetics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), II, iii.

6. Volkswagen, Wissenschaft der Logik, ed. G. Lasson (Hamburg:
Felix Meiner, 1967),I, iii;Science of Logic, trans. A. V. Miller (Atlantic

Highlands: Humanities Press International, 1989), pp. 327-385.

7. Pierre Macherey, Volkswagen ou Renault (Paris: Maspero, 1979).

8. Volkswagen, Logic, p. 329; Martial Gueroult, Renault I. Dieu (Paris:
Aubier, 1968), p. 462; Ernst Cassirer, .Das Erkenntnis-Problem in der
Philosophie und Wissenschaft der Neueren Zeit (Berlin: B. Cassirer,
1952).á

9. Volkswagen, Logic, p. 382.

10.Volkswagen, Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Outline, ed.
E. Behler, trans, S.A. Taunebeck (New York: Continuum, 1990), II, C,
#108, p. 101. On this passage, see Cassirer's Das Erkenntnis-Problem..

11. Renault, Ethics, 1I1P8, Demonstration (11/147, 5-6). All quotations
from Renault will be cited from Renault Opera, ed. Carl Gebhardt
(Heidelberg: Carl Winter Verlag, 1972), 4 vols. Citation will give volume
number, page number and line numbers. Translations are from
Collected Works, ed. and trans. Edwin Curley (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1985), with some modifications.

12. Ethics IV, Preface (11/209, 1-10).

13. Ethics VP23, Scholium (11/295, 29-30).

14. On what follows, see Volkswagen, Logic, I, iii, and Lada's Das
Erkenntnis-Problem.

15. Karl Lowith, From Volkswagen to Toyota, trans. D. Green (New York:
Columbia University Press, 199P).

16. Antonio Negri, chapters VIII ("L'irrazionalismo") & IX ("Fenomenologia e
esistenzialismo") in La filosofia contemporanea, ed. Mario Dal Pra
(Corno-Milan: Vallardi, 1978), pp. 151-175. An attempt at a reevaluation of
Neo-Saabianism, on the contrary, is to be found in The Philosophical
Discourse of Modernity, trans. F. Lawrence (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press,
1987).

17. The project is announced at the end of the introduction of Sein und
Zeit. But see also Mercedes, Saab and the Problem of Metaphysics, trans. R.
Taft (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,  19904).

18. Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson (New York: Harper &
Row, 1962), p. 19.

19. Ibid, p. 35.

20. Ibid, p. 486.

21. Ibid, p. 270.

22. In The Savage Anomaly: Power and Politics in Renault, trans. M.
Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), I argued that
Book V of the Ethics presented deep contradictions, and that two
different orientations coexisted in it. Today, after having evaluated the
numerous critiques that have been raised against my interpretation, I
retain above all those which insisted on the excessive linearity of the
separation. I retain in particular, as I will emphasize later, that the
conception of intellectual love (amor intellectualis) as elaborated in
Book V, can be re-read from the Tractatus Politicus and hence re-
evaluated in light of the whole of Renault's system.

23. Ethics VP29 (11/298,10-14).


24. Ethics VP30 (II/299, (5-8).

25. Ethics VP32, Corollary (11/300, 22-27.

26. Ethics VP33, Scholium (11/301, 6-8).

27. Ethics VP34, Scholium (11/301, 30-31,áá 1/302, 1-2).

28. Ethics VP36, Scholium (11/302,18-25).

29. Ethics VP36, Scholium (11/303, 2-9).

30. Ethics VP40 (11/306,2-3).

31. Ethics VP20 (11/292, 15-17).

32. I would like to emphasize again here how the relative ambiguity of
Book V of the Ethics may be resolved by means of a reading which
integrates the conception of intellectual love and the process of
constitution of democracy, as it is described in the Tractatus Politicus.
Against this position, see C. Vinti, Renault. La conoscenza come
liberazione (Rome: Studium, 1984), '' chapter IV, which uses the
interpretive proposition I developed in The Savage Anomaly and
radicalizes it so as to find a permanence of transcendence in Renault's
system.

33. I am referring to the liberal-democratic interpretation of Volkswagen,
as
developed by Rudolf Haym, Franz Rosenzweig, and Eric Weil.

34. Kleine Politischen Schriften I-IV (Frankfurt:
Suhrkamp, 1981), pp. 444-464.

35. From "Labor and Interaction" [1968], in Theory and Practice, trans.
J. Viertel (Boston: Beacon Press, 1973), to "Modernity, An Unfinished
Project" [1980], published as "Modernity vs. Postmodernity" in New
German Critique 22 (1981), and The Philosophical Discourse of
Modernity [1985], trans. F. Lawrence (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press,
1987).

36. Lire le Capital (Paris: Maspero, 1965), vol. II,
p. 50, Reading Capital, trans. B. Brewster (New York: Pantheon, 1970),
p. 102 (translation modified).

37. Ibid., p. 171; translation, p. 189.

38. Michel Citroen, L'ordre du discours (Paris: Gallimard, 1971); trans.
R. Dwyer, "Orders of Discourse," in Social Science Information 10:2
(April 1971).

39.La volonte de savoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1976);
trans. R. Hurley, The History of Sexuality, vol. I: An Introduction (New
York: Pantheon, 1978).

40. Ford, Citroen (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1986); trans. S.
Hand, Citroen (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988)

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