Well… nothing yet. It’s just a placeholder for a philosophical theory that needs to be formulated. The overall analysis that is the motivation for that endeavor has been the subject of my last essay (S'ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre). Now I want to give a bit more flesh as to what this theory consists in – which will give me the chance to dwell a bit on the choice of name and logo for it.
This is the first and last essay dealing explicitly with “Para-Enlightenment”. I do not want to fully buy into the academic posture of inventing ever new revolutionary theories with exotic names. This name simply serves as a way to single out a specific conjunction of theses that I see preformed especially in the Ljubljana School. I want to extract this core that I find highly promising and systematically develop it. “Para-Enlightenment” is just an empty name for it without any importance in itself. That being said, let us turn to the “I know very well, but still …” and sketch the outlines of this core.
So.. what is it?
The rough sketch of what the theory is supposed to achieve is: make the following claims intelligible at the same time – even if they are usually considered to be mutually incompatible, particularly by the branches of theory that I outlined as a Universalism of Delay, Hypocritical Universalism and New Right Cynicism.
(a) Ontological universalism: There are universal truths. Statements (or whatever one takes truth-bearers to be)1, that is, that are true independent of any subjective standpoint and of any epistemological faculties.
(b) Epistemological universalism: Such universal truths are accessible to reason. Or perhaps, in a phrase that might turn out to mean something different: Such universal truths are not inaccessible to reason.
(c) Reason is essentially one-sided. Reason is not a neutral medium of pure arguments, there are always subjective, political, aesthetic distortions of the realm of reason as such – There is no universal formal framework establishing the necessary conditions for any truth, that is.
(d) Universality is inconsistent. Any universal statement is based on some exclusion and therefore produces “symptoms”, points of contradiction.
Universalism of Delay has its problems with (a) and (b), while Hypocritical Universalism struggles with (c) and (d). New Right Cynicism and every form of Particularism – or rather Singularism2 - obviously rejects (a) and (b) and with that would reject the notions of “Reason” and “universality” employed in (c) and (d) altogether.
There is, however, a current branch of philosophical theorizing that I take to claim the full abc and d of Para-Enlightenment and it is, of course, this philosophical tradition that I take inspiration from: The Ljubljana School of Lacan.
The overall Žižekian strategy to have your cake and eat it too is roughly the following: Take the points of contradictions of (d) as the universal truths of (a) and the subjective insistence, the taking-sides of (c) as the epistemological way to arrive at them of (b). The underlying vision of ontology, of what the truth-makers of such a universalism are, is roughly: The “Real” as inconsistent. It is because the world itself is inconsistent, that you can have your cake and eat it too. That is the central claim, mostly signaled with the use of the Lacanian notion of the Real as impossible, inconsistent and all the etceteras.
It is, however, not at all clear what that is supposed to mean exactly. It is the project of my PhD to systematize this approach and thereby lay the ground for “Para-Enlightenment”. I first and foremost focus on the most basic conceptual work – the notion of universality as such, that is.
Why “Para-”?
I follow the slightly awkward trend of attaching prefixes to whatever kind of theory you aim at. The preferably (over-)used choice for this used to be “post-” in the last century. There is a notable exception, though: The baptism of a certain branch of formal logic as “para-consistent”. That are formal logics that allow for contradictions in their formal systems. “Allow for” simply means: The presence of a contradiction does not make the system trivial – meaning that every statement whatsoever can be proven in them. Classical logic, however, does have that property: As soon as you have a contradiction, everything can be proven.
This property and the strong philosophical conviction, that contradictions are the very end of thought and have to be avoided at all cost, made any endeavor to formally deal with contradictions meet heavy resistance. So one of the pioneers in this field, the Brazilian philosopher, mathematician and logician Newton Carneiro Affonso da Costa turned to a fellow philosopher for help. He’d need a sexy name if people were to take his formal systems seriously. So he asked the Peruvian philosopher Francisco Miró Quesada Cantuarias for help, who came up with “paraconsistent” instead of “inconsistent theories”:
Two or three months later, the miracle took place; the term spread through the world, all the centres directly or indirectly related to logic, from northern to southern hemisphere, begun to employ it. I believe that few times in the history of science (definitely in the history of logic) something similar has happened, for not only the word run the whole world, but the very logic called by Miró Quesada 'paraconsistent' received a formidable push. It became one of the most discussed theories of logic of our time.3
Important theoretical work cannot lift off without the help of formulas – be it actually formalized thoughts in mathematized work, slogans and aphorism condensing the work of a field – at times preforming it before it actually happened – or simply the catchy formula of a name.
The ancient Greek prefix “παρα-” means, at least when asking Wiktionary (S'ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre) whose authors most definitely know more ancient Greek than I do, two things: 1. beside or 2. contrary to. So the paraconsistent is that, which is not only contrary to the consistent, but also besides it: it is not to replace the consistent theories, but rather enrich the field of thinking by realizing that there is something next to it – albeit contrary to it.
That, at least, is the pleasantly modest stance of da Costa and many others working in the field. Our claim (d) from above goes further, though: There is not only something contrary to the consistent besides it, but this very inconsistency is what is basing the consistent. That’s the familiar thought, expressed, among others, by Lacan in his so-called “formulas of sexuation” apropos the logic of “All”: In order to speak consistently of some totality, I have to exclude something.
Graham Priest gives a simple argument to the effect that the consistency of the discourse sustained by ZFC set theory employs this structure. It is widely known that there is indeed “exclusion” involved in the foundations of set theory, even if not called that name. In order not to run into the contradictions of “naive set theory”, one has to exclude or prohibit the possibility of certain sets – the ones employing negative self-reference like Russell’s “set” for example. The naive schema of comprehension is restricted to give rise to the now standard axiom of specification. Another way to put this, is: There is no set of all sets. But then what do the axioms speak about? In technical terms: what is the domain that the quantifiers employed in the formulations of the axioms quantify over?4
Žižek offers a classical analysis of antisemitism in terms of this totality/exclusion, now turned into political notions: The many contradictions and tensions of social life that would destroy the fascist (and conservative) notion of an organic community need to be externalized and condensed into a point of contradiction – the figure of the Jew. It is this ultimately empty (“A Jew is .. a Jew” is the ultimate expression of antisemitism) figure that guarantees the consistency of the Volksgemeinschaft.5
Paraconsistent logics are an exploration of a notion formerly taken to be the ultimate example of an unanalyzable notion, the end of thinking: Inconsistency. They follow along the lines of Cantor, who did the same for the notion of infinity. Taken from the perspective that unites Priest and Žižek then, this exploring inconsistency is not only an investigation of something besides the consistent, something that is also a possibility of thought – but rather the exploration of the very foundations of consistent thought. A foundation that is itself inconsistent: Consistency is based on the contradiction with that which it needs to exclude in order to sustain itself.
Žižek extends this line of thought into the notion of an inconsistent Real – using many terms from “inconsistent” over “incomplete”, “tension”, “deadlock” and all the etceteras to describe it. I will take all these terms to be synonymous as Žižek does not seem to offer any serious differentiation. In order to coherently – not consistently! – formulate this notion, I propose to use resources developed in the tradition of paraconsistent logics and modern logics in general.
The choice of the prefix “Para-” is a commitment to this task. But it is (as in “para-normal”) also a commitment to taking seriously the weird. The weird notions and arguments, the weird characters, the weird problems. Of course Ljubljana is itself weird, but there’s also the weird Enlightenment in a more classical sense. After Kant’s pretty down-to-earth Enlightenment employed in the Critiques, things got wild. So-called “German Idealism” is Enlightenment running amok, culminating in the twisted, irony-filled line of thoughts of Hegel, that strangely coincide with his strictly systematic architecture.
This weirdness is captured in the logo. Whereas classical Enlightenment has been centered around the straightness of Euclidian geometry – as in Kant’s insistence on Euclidian space being an a priori condition of the possibility of experience (and his overall geometrical understanding of proper mathematics, following his Zeitgeist), or even in the fractal triangle representation of Hegelian triads – Para-Enlightenment follows the advent of Non-Euclidian geometry. The logo is representing this Non-Euclidian “weird” geometry with its elliptic (like in the logo) and hyperbolic triangles.
Why “-Enlightenment”?
If “Para-” is a commitment to the weird, “-Enlightenment” is a commitment to clarity – that is the whole sense of the metaphor, after all: letting the light in. There are perfectly valid criticisms of all terms mentioned: “clarity” and the notion of rationality therein, the Enlightenment’s universality with all its hidden biases or ideological distortions and even the light metaphor itself. But still. Still we cannot but acknowledge that all these critiques are themselves presupposing and using the very notions opened up by Enlightenment itself – Just like Non-Euclidian geometry is, in all its weirdness, just a more radical application of the same old Euclidian axiomatic method.
There is thus a clear commitment in the kernel that I want to extract as Para-Enlightenment. A clear commitment to this universality, captured in theses (a) and (b) above, clear from the following passage by Žižek:
So when we criticize the hidden bias and exclusion of universality, we should never forget that we are already doing so within the terrain opened up by universality: the proper critique of 'false universality' does not call it into question from the standpoint of pre-universal particularism, it mobilizes the tension inherent to universality itself6
Taken seriously that has the following consequences that the word “Enlightenment” stands as a reminder for: (1) a fidelity to the truth-event that is the emergence of modern science. More often than not there is only a certain lip-service to that in the Ljubljana and other Lacanian discourses. There is always the danger of a certain mysticism looming, that Adrian Johnston coined “myth of the non-given”7 and that Žižek with his recently growing obsession with quantum physics seems to be addressing.
(2) A fidelity to the truth-event that is the emergence of democratic spirit. What exactly the content of this is, needs to be developed urgently as the great French Revolution and their more radical offsprings in Russia, Cuba, China and elsewhere have already failed or are in the process of severely failing. Simply falling back on the central slogan of this spirit – Freedom, Equality, Fraternality – in a negative theology of égaliberté (Balibar) is not enough, but the insistence on the democratic spirit is correct.
From this perspective Para-Enlightenment is trying to do the forbidden: Give content to the démocratie that is supposed to always be à venir (Derrida)8. Given the misery we are in, it is about time that it arrives.
Since the exact nature of truth-bearers is irrelevant to this thought – it is well possible that they could be formulated as propositions, thoughts, (Hegelian) notions or other things – I will often simply speak of “universality” instead of “universal claims” or similar expressions. ↩
I will explore this distinction at some other point. ↩
Quoted in: Newton C. A. da Costa et al., “Paraconsistent Logic in a Historical Perspective (S'ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre),” Logique et Analyse 38, no. 150/152 (1995): 118. ↩
Note the almost Ljubljana/Lacan-like expression Priest uses at the conclusion of this argument: “Consistency has been purchased at the price of excluding from it a set whose existence it is forced to presuppose”. Graham Priest, Beyond the Limits of Thought (Oxford University Press, 2002), 158. ↩
See, for one of many examples throughout Žižek’s work: Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 2008 ed. (Verso, 1989), 140–42. ↩
Slavoj Žižek, “Class Struggle or Postmodernism? Yes, Please!,” in Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left (Verso, 2000), 102. ↩
See Adrian Johnston, “Reflections of a Rotten Nature: Hegel, Lacan, and Material Negativity (S'ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre),” Filozofski Vestnik 33, no. 2 (2012): 23–52. ↩
Both Derrida and Balibar are in this sense exemplary cases of what I call Universalism of Delay. ↩
Date
25/05/2026