Preface

Summary

The family theatre organises this theory of judgment whose schema is already fixed for the whole future of Hegelian logic. It is dominated by the Johannine values of life (zoe) and light (phos), that is, truth. (G, 89a/Gl, 76a)

This is very much a family book, a book where family values come and take over the theory traced within it. But the family values are not easy to establish and overspill the containing of them by, say, a politics of the right such as is rampant in this part of Europe (and elsewhere) at the time of writing. For a start, what seemed to be a stable and even perpetual conjunction of life and light, of zoe and of phos in its clarity, what was clear about that unity came to be added to in a way that is still ongoing, in the form of the remains that Derrida refers to: in the figure of Esther. Her appearance, though delayed, should have been accounted for from the start. That is why ‘The book of Esther’ precedes the sections, ‘Clarifying autobiography’ and ‘The book of Zoë’. The extended family, however, far from attaining a new stability thereby, only prompted all the more strongly the force of what Derrida calls the ‘mark’ to threaten it at its edges, sometimes even from within. With Esther arrived this disruptive mark.

For now this book attempts to frame this energy in a kind of still life. This theoretical perspect hopes to trap in its vision and bring home to itself the homely, habitual things of a still life that figures their domestication.