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1  1 Opening remarks at the debate promoted by the Collège International de Philosophie to celebrate the launch of Présence et champ transcendantal: Conscience et négativité dans la philosophie de Bergson (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 2002). This brief presentation on the origin and structure of my thesis was translated and published in the Mais! supplement of Folha de São Paulo on March 29, 2002.

2  2 This is the same Raggio—an Argentinian logician of international prestige, who identified himself as a citizen of the world—who said that he saw greater philosophical interest in Herder than in the whole analytic tradition.

3  3 In a working note from January of 1959, Merleau-Ponty wrote: “Our state of non-philosophy—Never has the crisis been so radical.” In March 1960, describing this “malaise of culture” still further, he added: “There is a danger that a philosophy of speech would justify the indefinite proliferation of writings […]—the habit of speaking without knowing what one is saying, the confusion of style and of thought etc. Yet: (1) it has always been that way in fact—the works that escape this profusion are academic works (2) there is a remedy, which is not to return to the American analytic–academic method—which would be to retreat from the problem—but to proceed over and beyond by facing the things again.” See Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968), pp. 165, 239. Perhaps Merleau-Ponty did not suspect, in his diagnosis of the state of non-philosophy, how much worse the crisis would become in the following decades, culminating in the misery of today’s absolute hegemony of university philosophy.

4  4 [Translators’ note: decentered, without a ruling principle.] Regarding this term, see Bento Prado Jr., “Os limites da Aufklärung” [“The Limits of Aufklärung”], Estudos Cebrap 15, January–March 1976, p. 173.

5  5 Blaise Pascal, Pensées, ed. and trans. Roger Ariew (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2004), p. 208.

6  6 From Michael Armstrong Roche’s comment on the etching in the exhibition catalogue: Alfonso E. Perez and Eleanor A. Sayre, eds., Goya and the Spirit of Enlightenment (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1989), p. 351.

7  7 José Gallardo Blanco, Diccionário crítico–burlesco (Madrid: Repullés, 1812), p. 88.

8  8 Gallardo Blanco, Diccionário crítico–burlesco, p. 88.

9  9 [TN: In English in the original.]

10 10 A philosophy of ambiguity, as in Merleau-Ponty? Certainly, if we recall, with Heidegger, that eidos, before the great objectification performed by Plato, which made it synonymous with an eternally determined essence, meant no more than “visible aspect” or the variable shape in which things present themselves to us.

11 11 I am not thinking here of the aesthetics of reception currently being produced in Germany, but of older texts such as Malraux’s and Merleau-Ponty’s.

12 12 I am thinking of Kant’s ambiguous attitude toward Swedenborg as analysed by Monique David-Ménard, La folie dans la raison pure: Kant lecteur de Swedenborg (Paris: Vrin, 1990).

13 13 [TN: The reference here is to a collection, under this title, of Heidegger’s short texts; it was translated into English as Off the Beaten Track.]

14 14 See Ludwig Wittgenstein, Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1978), §78.

15 15 See the analysis of the ekphrastic style in Barbara Cassin (in Portuguese translation), Ensaios sofísticos [Sophistical Essays] (São Paulo: Siciliano, 1990), pp. 244–8.

16 16 Let us be clear: the opposition between entering philosophy and leaving it is not simple. Even in the Tractatus, the dissolution of philosophy’s “false” problems did not entail merely dismissing them or replacing with some form of positive knowledge. On the contrary, it aspired to be the introduction of a new lifestyle, characterized by a good relationship with the ineffable through a silent, perspicuous, and synoptic view of the world, of language and its limits. Later on, Wittgenstein not only renounced the idea that philosophy may be “overcome” in a single stroke, but suggested that, if I eliminate an itch, this does not mean that it never existed. Furthermore, as per Antonia Soulez’ sharp suggestion, the “remedy” that cures us of philosophy is of the same nature as the disease it eliminates. Similia similibus curantur—“likes are cured by likes.” Maybe the ideas of entering philosophy and leaving it are internally connected in the form of a chiasma.

17 17 After writing this preface, I had access, courtesy of Roberto Schwarz’s kindness, to Fred Licht’s beautiful Goya: The Origins of the Modern Temper in Art (New York: Harper & Row, 1983), which provides solid support to what I had timidly defended. If we accept Licht’s analyses, I was not actually distancing myself from the author’s intentions when I changed the title of Goya’s painting from They Do Not Know the Way to We Do Not Know the Way, the painter’s ties to the spirit of the Enlightenment notwithstanding. By doing so, instead of retrospectively metamorphosing the work’s original meaning, as if in an imaginary museum, we can in fact discover the more remote roots of our contemporaneity. Thus, contrasting Goya with the learned satirists of the eighteenth century, Licht says: “Goya may pillory the waywardness of men and women, but he never assumes as the self-righteous Hogarth does that this waywardness is alien to him. Even in his broadest, most farcical satirizations, one always feels distinctly that Goya has direct personal experience of the error that is being satirized and that it is not just something he has observed from a detached vantage point” (p. 93). There is no step back here: to break with the theological, cosmological, ethical, and political optimism of the Baroque or the Enlightenment, or with David’s neoclassicism, means, on the contrary, making room for the disconnection of the estranged and alienated world that was made somewhat opaque in modern art. Without even commenting on They Do Not Know the Way, Fred Licht nonetheless points out that the same strange ambiguity of space (the suppression of the horizon and of perspective) that I have tried to point out in the etching under discussion can be found throughout Goya’s work. Commenting on the Caprichos, for example, Licht writes: “The ambiguity of setting and of lighting is what lends to the Caprichos an air of irrationality, of a world gone awry, of figures that have lost their bearings” (p. 96). This ambiguity in the determination of space, with the combined use of black, white, and gray (which eliminates the luminous perspective transparency of the world), is examined countless times in the book (cf. pp. 94–103, 142, 145–6, 180, 182, 187, 210–12, 214–15, 232, 279–81).

18 18 A metaphysical question, but one that also concerns the present state of culture, as it appears to be used in the title of a book by Roberto Schwarz, Que Horas São? [What Time Is It?] (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1987). It is a question that concerns the pendular movements of today’s philosophy between the opposite extremes of skepticism and naturalism, of phenomenology and logical–grammatical analysis; and, finally, it is a question that leads me to interrogate (in a work to be carried out at a later date) the way in which each of these tendencies reconsiders and reinterprets critical philosophy’s transcendental argument.

19 19 Luís de Camões, “Tenho-me persuadido” [“I Have Accepted as Evident”], in The Collected Lyric Poems of Luís de Camões, trans. Landeg White (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), p. 245.