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The Palgrave Handbook
of German Idealism and
Poststructuralism
Edited by
Tilottama Rajan
Daniel Whistler
Palgrave Handbooks in German Idealism
Series Editor
Matthew C. Altman, Philosophy & Religious Studies
Central Washington University
Ellensburg, WA, USA
Palgrave Handbooks in German Idealism is a series of comprehensive and
authoritative edited volumes on the major German Idealist philosophers and their
critics. Underpinning the series is the successful Palgrave Handbook of German
Idealism (2014), edited by Matthew C. Altman, which provides an overview of the
period, its greatest philosophers, and its historical and philosophical importance.
Individual volumes focus on specific philosophers and major themes, offering a
more detailed treatment of the many facets of their work in metaphysics,
epistemology, logic, ethics, aesthetics, political philosophy, and several other areas.
Each volume is edited by one or more internationally recognized experts in the
subject, and contributors include both established figures and younger scholars
with innovative readings. The series offers a wide-ranging and authoritative insight
into German Idealism, appropriate for both students and specialists.
Tilottama Rajan • Daniel Whistler
Editors

The Palgrave Handbook

of German Idealism and
Poststructuralism
Editors
Tilottama Rajan Daniel Whistler
Centre for Theory and Criticism Department of Philosophy
University of Western Ontario Royal Holloway, University of London
London, ON, Canada London, UK

ISSN 2634-6230     ISSN 2634-6249 (electronic)

Palgrave Handbooks in German Idealism
ISBN 978-3-031-27344-5    ISBN 978-3-031-27345-2 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27345-2

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature
Switzerland AG 2023
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether
the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of
illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and
transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar
or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication
does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant
protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book
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The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
Series Editor Preface

Matthew C. Altman, Philosophy and Religious Studies, Central Washington

University, Ellensburg, WA, USA
The era of German Idealism stands alongside ancient Greece and the French
Enlightenment as one of the most fruitful and influential periods in the history of
philosophy. Beginning with the publication of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason in
1781 and ending about ten years after Hegel’s death in 1831, the period of “classical
German philosophy” transformed whole fields of philosophical endeavor. The intel-
lectual energy of this movement is still very much alive in contemporary philoso-
phy; the philosophers of that period continue to inform our thinking and spark
debates of interpretation.
After a period of neglect as a result of the early analytic philosophers’ rejection
of idealism, interest in the field has grown exponentially in recent years. Indeed, the
study of German Idealism has perhaps never been more active in the English-­
speaking world than it is today. Many books appear every year that offer historical/
interpretive approaches to understanding the work of the German Idealists, and
many others adopt and develop their insights and apply them to contemporary issues
in epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, politics, and aesthetics, among other fields. In
addition, a number of international journals are devoted to idealism as a whole and
to specific idealist philosophers, and journals in both the history of philosophy and
contemporary philosophies have regular contributions to the German Idealists. In
numerous countries, there are regular conferences and study groups run by philo-
sophical associations that focus on this period and its key figures, especially Kant,
Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, and Schopenhauer.
As part of this growing discussion, the volumes in the Palgrave Handbooks in
German Idealism series are designed to provide overviews of the major figures and
movements in German Idealism, with a breadth and depth of coverage that distin-
guishes them from other anthologies. Chapters have been specially commissioned
for this series, and they are written by established and emerging scholars from
throughout the world. Contributors not only provide overviews of their subject mat-
ter but also explore the cutting edge of the field by advancing original theses. Some

v
vi Series Editor Preface

authors develop or revise positions that they have taken in their other publications,
and some take novel approaches that challenge existing paradigms. The Palgrave
Handbooks in German Idealism thus give students a natural starting point from
which to begin their study of German Idealism, and they serve as a resource for
advanced scholars to engage in meaningful discussions about the movement’s phil-
osophical and historical importance.
In short, the Palgrave Handbooks in German Idealism have comprehensiveness,
accessibility, depth, and philosophical rigor as their overriding goals. These are
challenging aims, to be sure, especially when held simultaneously, but that is the
task that the excellent scholars who are editing and contributing to these volumes
have set for themselves.
Contents

Part I Reading the German Idealists After ’68    1

Reading Kant����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������    3
Sean Gaston
Reading Fichte��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   25
F. Scott Scribner
Reading Maimon����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   37
Daniela Voss

Reading Novalis and the Schlegels ����������������������������������������������������������������   59
Kirill Chepurin
Reading Hölderlin��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   83
Gabriel Trop

Reading Hegel I: Textuality and the Phenomenology ���������������������������������� 107
Kristina Mendicino

Reading Hegel II: Politics and History���������������������������������������������������������� 125
Gregor Moder
Reading Schelling�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 143
Tyler Tritten
Reading Schopenhauer������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ 165
Joel Faflak

Part II Themes and Concepts  185

Systems of Knowledge ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ 187
Tilottama Rajan
Psychoanalysis�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 215
Gord Barentsen

vii
viii Contents

Art���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 239
Anna Ezekiel
Nature and Extinction ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ 259
Thomas Moynihan
Language���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 291
Oriane Petteni and Daniel Whistler
Difference���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 323
Arkady Plotnitsky
Nothing�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 343
Andrew W. Hass
Apocalypse�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 361
Agata Bielik-Robson
The University�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 383
Lenka Vráblíková
Enlightenment and Revolution ���������������������������������������������������������������������� 399
Kyla Bruff
Sovereignty and Community�������������������������������������������������������������������������� 429
Ian James

Part III Contemporary Stakes  447


Felix Culpa, Dialectic and Becoming-Imperceptible������������������������������������ 449
Claire Colebrook
Monism and Mistakes�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 465
Adrian Johnston

Editors’ Conclusions: The Past, Present, and Future of the
Theory–German Idealism Relation���������������������������������������������������������������� 489
Tilottama Rajan and Daniel Whistler

Index������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ 509
Notes on Contributors

Gord Barentsen researches on romantic philosophy/literature and psychoanalysis

(Freud, Jung, Lacan), philosophies of nature and the subject, and theories of the
unconscious. He has published Romantic Metasubjectivity Through Schelling and
Jung: Rethinking the Romantic Subject (2020), and his projects include new transla-
tions of Jung’s metapsychology papers.
Agata Bielik-Robson is Professor of Jewish Studies at the University of
Nottingham and at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy
of Sciences in Warsaw. Her publications include, most recently, Another Finitude:
Messianic Vitalism and Philosophy (2019).
Kyla Bruff is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Carleton University in Ottawa,
Canada. Her research focuses on nineteenth- and twentieth-century German and
French social and political philosophy.
Kirill Chepurin is a visiting scholar in theology at the Humboldt University of
Berlin. He has published on German Idealism, German and British Romanticism,
nineteenth-century Russian thought, utopia, and political theology. He is the co-­
editor (with Alex Dubilet) of Nothing Absolute: German Idealism and the Question
of Political Theology (2021).
Claire Colebrook is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English, Philosophy and
Women’s and Gender Studies at Penn State University. She has written books and
articles on contemporary European philosophy, literary history, gender studies,
queer theory, visual culture and feminist philosophy. Her most recent book is What
Would You Do and Who Would You Kill to Save the World?
Anna Ezekiel is a feminist historian of philosophy working on post-Kantian
German philosophy. She has translated work by Romantic writer Karoline von
Günderrode and other women philosophers in Poetic Fragments (2016),
Philosophical Fragments (Oxford University Press, forthcoming), and Women
Philosophers in the Long Nineteenth Century: The German Tradition (2021).

ix
x Notes on Contributors

Joel Faflak is a professor in the Department of English at the University of Western

Ontario; a visiting professor at the University of Toronto; and author, editor, or co-
editor of 15 books, most recently Romanticism and Consciousness Revisited (2022),
with Richard C. Sha, with whom he also co-edits Palgrave Studies in Affect Theory
and Literary Criticism.
Sean Gaston is a research fellow at the University of Melbourne. He has published
widely on the work of Jacques Derrida. His books include Derrida and Disinterest
(2005), The Impossible Mourning of Jacques Derrida (2006), The Concept of World
from Kant to Derrida (2013) and Jacques Derrida and the Challenge of
History (2019).
Andrew W. Hass is Reader in Religion at the University of Stirling. His interests
and publications operate at the intersection of religion, philosophy, theology, litera-
ture, and art, with particular interest in the idea of negation and German Idealism.
His current projects focus on music, spirit, and silence.
Ian James is Fellow of Downing College and Professor of Modern French
Literature and Thought in the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages and
Linguistics at the University of Cambridge.
Adrian Johnston is Professor and Chair of Philosophy at the University of New
Mexico and a member of the Emory Psychoanalytic Institute. He is the author of,
among many works, Žižek’s Ontology (2008), Badiou, Žižek, and Political
Transformations (2009), and Prolegomena to Any Future Materialism (2013), as
well as co-author, with Catherine Malabou, of Self and Emotional Life (2013).
Kristina Mendicino is Associate Professor of German Studies at Brown University.
She is the author of two monographs, Prophecies of Language: The Confusion of
Tongues in German Romanticism (2017) and Announcements: On Novelty (2020),
as well as numerous essays and collections addressing German Romanticism,
German Idealism, and phenomenology.
Gregor Moder is a senior research associate at the Department of Philosophy of
the Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana. His recent works include Hegel and
Spinoza: Substance and Negativity (2017) and an edited volume on The Object of
Comedy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020). As of 2019, he is the principal investigator on
a research project on the Theatricality of Power.
Thomas Moynihan is a historian of ideas and author of X-Risk: How Humanity
Discovered Its Own Extinction (2020). He is a research fellow at the Forethought
Foundation and Visiting Research Associate in History at St Benet’s College,
University of Oxford.
Oriane Petteni is a postdoctoral researcher in the ETHICS department at the
Université Catholique de Lille, and holds a PhD in Philosophy from the Université
de Liège and has published widely on J. W. Goethe, G. W. F. Hegel and
F. W. J. Schelling.
Notes on Contributors xi

Arkady Plotnitsky is a distinguished professor of English at Purdue University.

He has published 9 books, several edited or co-edited collections, and 200 articles
on continental philosophy, Romantic literature, and the relationships between litera-
ture, philosophy, and science. His most recent book is Reality Without Realism:
Matter, Thought, and Technology in Quantum Physics (2021).
Tilottama Rajan is a distinguished university professor at the Department of
English and the Centre for Theory of Criticism, the University of Western Ontario,
Canada. As well as three monographs on Romantic literature, she has published
Deconstruction and the Remainders of Phenomenology (2002), and (co)edited sev-
eral books including After Post-structuralism (2002), Idealism Without Absolutes
(2004), and recently, Roberto Esposito: New Directions in Biophilosophy (2021).
F. Scott Scribner is Professor of Philosophy and Chair of Global Studies at the
University of Hartford. He has published widely in post-Kantian German Idealism
and twentieth-century continental philosophy, and his book is an apt expression of
his concern with the intersection of these two periods: Matter of Spirit: J. G. Fichte
and the Material Imagination (2010).
Tyler Tritten has published multiple books and articles on Schelling’s later
thought. Other projects typically lie within the field of speculative philosophy,
including his last book: The Contingency of Necessity: Reason and God as Matters
of Fact (2017). His current project concerns the possibility of a speculative
empiricism.
Gabriel Trop is Associate Professor of German in the Department of Germanic
and Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of North Carolina at
Chapel Hill.
Daniela Voss is an associate lecturer in the Department of Philosophy at the
University of Hildesheim, Germany. She is the author of Conditions of Thought:
Deleuze and Transcendental Ideas (2013) and co-editor with Craig Lundy of At the
Edges of Thought: Deleuze and Post-Kantian Philosophy (2015).
Lenka Vráblíková is a lecturer in the Department of Visual Cultures, Goldsmiths,
University of London, and, in 2016, co-founded “Nätverket Feministiska Läsningar/
Feminist Readings Network.” Her work lies at the intersection of visual culture
studies, transnational feminisms, critical university studies, feminist deconstruction
and political ecology.
Daniel Whistler is Professor of Philosophy at Royal Holloway, University of
London, and the author of a series of books on F. W. J. Schelling, François
Hemsterhuis and Victor Cousin.
Editors’ Introduction

That much contemporary theory has unfolded in the shadow of G. W. F. Hegel

comes as no surprise to anyone. Since Judith Butler’s 1987 Subjects of Desire (if not
before),1 a whole publication industry has emerged within the Anglophone world
charged with charting the ways in which late twentieth-century European philoso-
phers and theorists have reacted to Hegel, have read him against the grain or have
interrogated his legacy. This includes translations of (for example) Jean-Luc Nancy’s
1973 The Speculative Remark, Jacques Derrida’s 1974 Glas, and Catherine
Malabou’s 1995 The Future of Hegel2; original English-language texts by Fredric
Jameson and Slavoj Žižek3; and collections such as Stuart Barnett’s Hegel after
Derrida and Žižek’s, Crockett’s, and Davis’s Hegel and the Infinite.4 Indeed, the
importance of Hegel to the work of theory precedes the linguistic turn of the 1960s,
in the work of the Frankfurt School and the broader constellation in which they sit;
Georg Lukacs, Herbert Marcuse, and Theodor Adorno all wrote studies on Hegel.5
While we do not take up “critical theory” here,6 Adorno’s major works, Negative
Dialectics and Aesthetic Theory—both implicitly engaged with Hegel—are in fact
contemporaneous with 1960s’ “Theory,” and there are many synergies between
them and Derrida’s epoch-making 1967 Of Grammatology.7 As part of the Hegel-­
reception we must also mention pre-poststructuralist thinkers such as Georges
Bataille, the subject of Rodolphe Gasché’s 1978 Phenomenology and
Phantasmatology, which makes the post-war French thinker an occasion for explo-
sively deconstructive readings of the work of Hegel and Schelling toward their own
auto-immunity.8
Equally, while not as pervasive, the interest in Immanuel Kant shown by Derrida
himself, Žižek, Michel Foucault, Jean-François Lyotard, Nancy, and Gilles Deleuze,
among others, is familiar to English-language readers, as evidenced by the rela-
tively early date at which a translation of, for example, Lyotard’s Lessons on the
Analytic of the Sublime appeared (1994).9 An occasional broadening of this Kant-­
Hegel axis also goes back some decades, for instance to Tilottama Rajan’s and
David Clark’s collection, Intersections: Nineteenth-Century Philosophy and
Contemporary Theory (1995),10 which includes essays on J. G. Fichte,
F. W. J. Schelling, and Arthur Schopenhauer as well as Hegel and Friedrich

xiii
xiv Editors’ Introduction

Nietzsche. Collectively these works have constituted the intersection of German

Idealism and contemporary theory from the 1960s onward as a field in its own right,
one that is ripe for expansion beyond the simple tracing of influences, and is no
longer limited to the figures or texts privileged in philosophy departments. Moreover,
what is also becoming visible in English is that there are further, occasionally sub-
terranean, ways in which theory has appropriated (and continues to develop from)
other German philosophers dating from the turn of the nineteenth century, such as
Schelling and Salomon Maimon (or G. W. Leibniz, if we were to go further back11).
It is within this growing diversification of encounters between German Idealisms
and poststructuralisms—both terms we want to complicate—that the present vol-
ume is positioned. An exhaustive survey of connections between these two large
areas is impossible. But this volume, the most broad-ranging of its kind, offers a
number of exemplary “probes” into the Idealism-poststructuralism relationship.
Several essays take up specific past-present pairs (such as Kant and Derrida, Fichte
and François Laruelle, Schelling and Žižek), while others focus more purely on
German Idealists refracted through a contemporary lens, not so as to apply the latter
to the former within a model of influence or derivation, but so as to recognize
Idealism as a co-originator of the very theory that helps to bring out its contempo-
raneity. Finally, other essays also make Idealist and contemporary thinkers equal
partners in a dialogue around key topics such as difference, focusing not so much on
the historical record as on initiating a live program of theorizing within the
Humanities today—an ongoing conversation whose participants still include Hegel,
Schelling, and their peers, in addition to Derrida, the late Foucault, and others.
In order to do justice to the complexity of these interactions and their future
potentials, we push both labels—“German Idealism” and “poststructuralism”—to
their maximum extension. In the context of this volume, both Idealism and post-
structuralism are not “rigid designators,” the phrase Saul Kripke uses for names as
“pure signifiers” that “designate” and “constitute the identity of a given object
beyond the variable cluster” of its actual properties or historical shifts. As Žižek
argues, in critiquing Kripke, rigid designators simplify an ideological field made of
“non-bound, non-tied elements … whose very identity is ‘open,’ overdetermined by
their articulation in a chain with other elements.”12 Interestingly, in his First Outline
of a System of the Philosophy of Nature, a text whose theory of matter can double as
a theory of concept-formation in Deleuze and Guattari’s sense of the concept as
non-simple and multiplex,13 Schelling similarly describes organic “products” as
containing a “multiplicity of unified tendencies” or “actants” that are “bound” or
“determin[ed]” in “figures” to achieve a heuristically necessary “rigidity” that
remains under pressure from other actants repressed within the “figure.”14 Likewise
an intellectual field—feminism and “ecologism” are Žižek’s examples—remains
indeterminate until the intervention of a “nodal point” or “point de capiton” that
“quilts’” the elements in the field, “stops their sliding,” and seemingly “fixes their
meaning.”15 From this perspective Idealism and poststructuralism too are stabilizing
nodal points that we prefer to use as fluid designators calling for further reflection,
rather than determining their materials under a rule or “universal,” as Kant might say.
Editors’ Introduction xv

With regard to the multiplicity of actants in the signifier “German Idealism,”

there has long been a paradigm shift in scholarship away from the traditional Kant-­
Fichte-­Hegel axis in philosophy (or the Kant-Hegel-Nietzsche sequence in “the-
ory”) to a richer sense of Idealism as enmeshed in an intellectual and often
interpersonal milieu that includes “Classicists” like J. W. Goethe and Friedrich
Schiller and “Romantics” like Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis16; philosophers of
nature like C. F. Kielmeyer who influenced Hegel and Schelling, and Lorenz Oken
who was in turn influenced by Schelling; less canonical figures like Maimon; and
female philosophers working in this tradition like Karoline von Günderrode and
Bettina Brentano-von Arnim. To insert Idealism back into this wider milieu—to
evoke Georges Canguilhem’s theorizing of “milieu” in organic and synergistic,
rather than mechanist and determinist terms17—is to recognize the ways in which,
especially in this period, philosophy and “the margins of philosophy” were recipro-
cally constitutive. Indeed, this interdisciplinarity is a key aspect of the retrospec-
tively named “theory” that emerged in the 1960s18 and is what makes “Idealism”
and “poststructuralism” such appropriate interlocutors for one another.
For example, Kielmeyer, though previously approached purely for his involve-
ment in the genesis of the life sciences by earlier historians of thought, is now being
reinserted into a milieu in which, on the one hand, his 1793 speech “On the Relations
Between Organic Forces in the Series of Different Organisations” was translated into
a different and more philosophical register to provide a speculative basis for the self-­
organization of matter that catalyzes post-Kantian hopes for a self-assembling of
matter into spirit; and in which, on the other hand, this speech was itself influenced
by J. G. Herder’s Ideas for a Philosophy of the History of Mankind (1786–1791).19
The point is, in part, that such “translations” between fields are what make the
Idealism-Romanticism conjuncture, with its encyclopedic range of interests (indexed
by Hegel’s Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences) a first version of theory.
Indeed translation, as Antoine Berman argues in a book Derrida takes up in an
essay on Schelling, “Theology of Translation,”20 is at the very heart of Romanticism.
For Berman, “restricted translation” (of actual texts), which was a key part of
German Romanticism, is nested within a broader general economy of translation
that entails a philosophical and “ethical” choice. Against “the ethnocentric struc-
ture” and “narcissism by which every society wants to be a pure and unadulterated
Whole,” this broader translation seeks to “open up in writing a certain relation with
the other, to fertilise what is one’s Own through the mediation of what is Foreign.”
Perhaps Novalis’s claim of “universal versability,” or the “translatability of every-
thing into everything” that underwrites his Romantic Encyclopedia, is in some
respects uncritical21; nevertheless, the entanglements between Idealism and
Romanticism are the condition of possibility for reading Idealism against the grain
in the more experimental interzone of “theory,” and Novalis’s Fichte Studies
(1795–1796) and his Notes for a Romantic Encyclopedia, or the Universal Brouillon
(1798) are in dialogue with, or traverse the same terrain as, work by Idealist philoso-
phers, as do Friedrich Schlegel’s fragments and lectures on Transcendental
Philosophy.22
xvi Editors’ Introduction

Our use of the epithet “poststructuralism” is also intended to encompass a broad

range of theorizing after structuralism. It comprises not just that thinking which the
Anglophone world saw as radicalizing French structuralism in the 1960s (“post-
structuralism” narrowly understood), but all the various forms of contemporary
theory in the “continental” style that have emerged out of that primal scene, some-
times including non-French, “post-poststructuralist” thinkers such as Mladen Dolar
and Giorgio Agamben. The origins of poststructuralism are widely associated with
two events. One is the 1968 student uprisings in France which contributed to a gen-
eral contemporary feeling for the need to call classical philosophy in question,23 a
need mirrored in the desire of early nineteenth-century German philosophy—
whether “Idealist” or “Romantic”—to think beyond Kant and Fichte and to provide,
in Benjamin’s words “A Coming Program for Philosophy.”24 Secondly, and sensing
this practico-intellectual revolution from the other side of the Atlantic, there is also
the 1966 conference at Johns Hopkins University on “The Languages of Criticism
and the Sciences of Man.” Yet although this conference is widely seen as inaugurat-
ing “poststructuralism,” the word is never used in the volume that came out of it,
The Structuralist Controversy (1971), which includes essays by a number of think-
ers of whom only Derrida, Jacques Lacan, and Roland Barthes would now in any
way be named poststructuralist.25 The label emerged later, and is something of a
theoretical monster, condensing various mutations, amalgamations, and omissions
that French philosophies underwent in their translation to the Anglophone world,
whether through commentary, adaptation, or the actual history of what was trans-
lated and in what order. One of the few early studies of this material to appear in
France itself was a 1979 book by Vincent Descombes. Significantly Descombes
uses the descriptor “Modern French Philosophy” to encompass the “humanist con-
troversy” inaugurated by structuralism itself, as well as the work of Derrida,
Deleuze, Foucault, and Lyotard; he also goes back to Alexandre Kojève’s lectures
on Hegel before moving on to “the intellectual scene in 1960,” in which he includes
Pierre Klossowski, whom we think of as belonging to an earlier generation but
whose Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle actually appeared in 1969.26
In other words, like Idealism, poststructuralism is a porous label which is
retained in this volume partly for convenience. Derrida himself understood the
term as a “purely American notion” and a “transformation … of this thing come
from France” for American purposes, as he puts it in “Deconstructions: The
Im-Possible.” Derrida preferred “deconstruction,” not to be understood in its lim-
ited literary-critical sense of Yale Deconstruction, which also reflected an
American instrumentalizing of deconstruction as applied theory,27 but rather as an
operation bearing on “systems,” and on the traditional architecture of the funda-
mental concepts of ontology or of Western metaphysics. As such, deconstruction,
which Derrida specifically thinks in relation to Kant’s notion of architectonic in
the first Critique, is a “question about the foundation … the closure of the struc-
ture,” about “a whole architecture of philosophy,” the unsettling of which opens
up new “possibilities of arrangement or assembling.”28 As one of our editors,
Tilottama Rajan, has argued in desynonymizing the two terms, “poststructural-
ism” does have a descriptive value to the extent that the prefix “post” signifies a
Editors’ Introduction xvii

certain contemporaneity and break with tradition that French commentators who
merge it into structuralism do not highlight. However, “deconstruction” in its
broadest sense is an approach that can be traced back, well before the Johns
Hopkins conference to the earlier but overlapping generation of Bataille,
Klossowski, and Maurice Blanchot.29 This approach is not necessarily limited to
a focus on language and structure, though it may involve an interest in writing
(écriture) and often in “literature,” thought as an ontological rather than disciplin-
ary term30—an interest that does not necessarily derive from Saussure. Moreover,
“deconstruction” is not always committed to the abjection of a consciousness-
based vocabulary (however much this may be problematized)31—a vocabulary
obviously central to German Idealism. Indeed, Descombes describes the work of
both Derrida and Deleuze as a “radicalisation of phenomenology.”32
It would be more accurate, then, to speak of an anti-foundationalist thinking of
which poststructuralism is a particular, historically specific permutation. The pres-
ent volume does not take up deconstruction or modern French philosophy as they
existed prior to the 1960s, and so “poststructuralism” as a term of convenience also
indexes a date-range. Nevertheless, a broader use of this term as a floating signifier
for anti-foundationalist thinking generally is what provides the volume’s rationale
for extending its contents beyond those theorists working through the aporia of clas-
sical structuralism, to include philosophers who do not obviously take as their start-
ing point a concern with the consequences of the linguistic turn, such as Laruelle or
Quentin Meillassoux.
The basis of the present volume is, therefore, the realization that so many of the
thinkers who fall under this large umbrella owe significant and often multiple debts
to the German Idealist tradition, which was already engaged in the process of ques-
tioning its own foundations. Indeed, what unites the “poststructuralisms” of this
volume is more than anything else a tradition, running from Derrida and Deleuze to
Žižek and Malabou, of treating German philosophers as privileged dialogue part-
ners. As noted, previous thinkers such as Adorno or (however differently) Bataille
had already situated their projects in the aftermath of Idealism. But the generation
of thinkers for whom 1968 provides a nodal point, and who have proven such a
crucial reference point for “theory,” were even more determined to thematize their
points of convergence with and divergence from the German Idealist movement (or
more broadly German philosophical traditions). Outside of his partnership with
Guattari, Deleuze was also a counter-historian of philosophy, who wrote books on
Leibniz, Kant, and Nietzsche33; Derrida’s work, as he himself has stressed, was
doubly formed by his role as an agrégé-répétiteur who trained students for their
exams at the École Normale Supérieure, and by the uniquely French emphasis on
the explication de texte method introduced by Gustave Lanson.34 This conjunction,
and the resistances it produced, led to the early Derrida’s deconstructive method of
reading minute sections from philosophical texts against the grain, as he does with
Hegel in “The Pit and the Pyramid.”35 This signature method is also one we find in
Paul de Man, for whom the canon, including Kant and Hegel (as well as Rousseau
and Nietzsche), remains similarly important. Derrida’s student Malabou has also
xviii Editors’ Introduction

written a trio of books arguing for the plasticity and epigenetic potential of Hegel,
Heidegger, and Kant.36 It is not an exaggeration to say that poststructuralism and
deconstruction can often be understood only in relation to a philosophical tradition
of which German Idealism forms the center.
With this context in mind, we have divided the volume into three parts. Part I
focuses on individual German Idealist philosophers, including the more obvious
(Kant, Hegel), the recently recovered for theoretical purposes (Schelling), the more
marginal (Maimon), the ex-centric (Novalis, Hölderlin), and the under-theorized
(Fichte, Schopenhauer). The essays in this section do not all read from past to pres-
ent in terms of a model of influence or uptake that privileges the contemporary;
some reverse this trajectory. Part II turns from this framework of figures to a topical
approach that also speaks to the multi- and interdisciplinary engagements that char-
acterize both German Idealism and poststructuralisms. Chapters are dedicated to
central theoretical topics, such as difference, nothing, art, revolution, and language,
as well as to key areas of connection, like nature, psychoanalysis, and politics. Such
a structure obviously entails that individual thinkers at both ends of the historical
spectrum are not circumscribed to particular chapters, but recur in different constel-
lations on different topics throughout the volume. Finally, Part III takes stock even
more explicitly of the contemporary issues at stake in this conjunction of fields, with
the aim of furnishing a sense of new directions and future trends. That is, the con-
tributors to this final section think through—but also beyond—the Idealism-­
poststructuralism conjunction, to look for a variety of new, surprising affinities
between the past, present, and future.
Part I therefore begins at the origins of German Idealism with Kant. There are
several lines of connection between Kant and French theory, but Sean Gaston
focuses on Derrida in particular, providing a comprehensive survey of Derrida’s
changing relation to Kant over the course of his career, from the early work on
Heidegger’s Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, through “the Kantian turn” of
the early 1980s (also present in Lyotard) to Derrida’s last seminars. As Gaston sug-
gests, given the ongoing publication of these seminars, Kant’s role in Derrida’s
version of the deconstructive project is still emerging. But suffice it to say that Kant
stands behind multiple topics taken up by Derrida—from the self-authorization of
reason to the university, hospitality, cosmopolitanism, mondialisation (a word
Derrida prefers to globalization), and the death penalty. The diversity of these
engagements speaks not only to Kant’s importance for Derrida, but also to the way
the later Derrida in particular has expanded the Kantian canon itself, leveling the
marginalization of Kant’s minor work in relation to his Critiques, and opening up
the relation between theoretical and practical philosophy generally, on both the
Idealist and poststructuralist sides.
The following chapters in Part I proceed chronologically: “Reading Fichte” by
F. Scott Scribner is devoted to theoretical readings of Fichte—in particular,
Laruelle’s extensive use of Fichte in his Principles of Non-philosophy to radicalize
the inaugural philosophical decision Fichte invokes into a decision for or against
philosophy itself.37 In “Reading Maimon”, Daniela Voss considers another contem-
porary return of a German Idealist, connecting Deleuze with Maimon, who
Editors’ Introduction xix

reformulates Kant’s first Critique by way of a Leibnizian interpretation of the dif-

ferential calculus. Though Deleuze sees Maimon (and Leibniz) as finally stopping
short of a contemporary understanding of difference that breaks with a philosophy
of identity, it is clear that differentials, as infinitely small elements or infinitesimals,
open a path toward the “unthinkable” within thought and toward Deleuze’s own
transcendental empiricism. The Maimon-Deleuze connection is particularly inter-
esting because it directs us to an aspect of the Idealist constellation of disciplines
whose synergies with poststructuralism are often overlooked, namely mathematics.
As the case of Maimon brings out, mapping the difference between hard and soft
sciences onto “continental” theory risks ignoring the ways in which the so-called
hard sciences and mathematics have developed since the Enlightenment and the role
they play in poststructuralism considered as a source of new logics and
epistemologies.38
Infinitesimals also play a role in early Romanticism, though differently. In
“Reading Novalis and the Schlegels”, Kirill Chepurin probes the impossible desire
of Novalis and the Schlegels to write universal histories (conceived as general econ-
omies rather than the restricted economies of the Enlightenment genre), yet to
encompass increasingly minute particulars. His approach broadly accords with a
reception-history of the Frühromantik that includes Blanchot, Lacoue-­Labarthe and
Nancy, and Berman.39 But he expands on the “infinite versability” earlier described,
so as to think through Romantic “cosmism” as the Eurocentric narratives of global
humanity and modernity that develop from it, and also the deep time of planetary
processes not encompassed in the word “globalization.”40 Chepurin thus brings out
how Romantic thought resonates with issues such as (de)colonization and ecologi-
cal crisis that have emerged in the wake of poststructuralism, but he also sees the
incommensurable joining of unities and divisions in the literary absolute’s “poietic,”
constructive system as a fertile ground for speculating on these issues in ways that
need not be confined to a negative philosophy: a critique, pure and simple, of
Romanticism’s “meta-positions.” Gabriel Trop likewise approaches Romanticism
as an originary site for theorizing in “Reading Hölderlin”. In a bold move, he turns
not to Hölderlin’s critical writing41 but to his “speculative poetics”—especially his
engagement with Pindar in the Pindar Fragments—as a form of concept-creation
(in Deleuze and Guattari’s term) that produces a “hyperbolic” rather than sequential
logic for navigating phenomena. Hölderlin’s poetry has interested philosophers and
theorists from Heidegger to de Man to Alain Badiou. But Trop hyperbolizes (as it
were) the translations and transferences between poetry and philosophy by putting
Hölderlin in direct and continuous dialogue with his Tübingen classmates Hegel
and Schelling. Allowing poetry to generate new geometries and rhythms of percep-
tion that can equally open new ways of reading philosophy, he thus fundamentally
recasts the relationship not just between literature and philosophy but also between
Romanticism and Idealism.
The sheer extent of Hegel’s importance for poststructuralisms and the range of
his work itself are recognized by two complementary chapters that discuss and
exemplify the later twentieth-century reception of his work, one oriented inward to
Hegel’s writing, and the other outward to his politics. In “Reading Hegel I: Textuality
xx Editors’ Introduction

and the Phenomenology” Kristina Mendicino, in the spirit of the early Derrida, pro-
vides a deconstructive reading of the “Foreword” to the Phenomenology that is
exemplary for reading Hegel generally and considers how Hegel’s thought is always
caught up and delayed/deferred by its reading, even at the level of his writing itself
as a reading. She thus follows through on Trop’s intuition of the relevance of tropes
like enjambment and caesura to unearthing a counter-logic in Hegel’s writing that
turns the forward movement toward a paraphrase of concepts back on itself. In the
next chapter Gregor Moder then works through the turn away, in the French recep-
tion, from the more sympathetic philosophical readings of Hegel by Kojève and
Jean Hyppolite to a more historical and Marxist emphasis, focusing on Louis
Althusser’s Marxist-poststructuralist critique of Hegelian history as totally coincid-
ing with itself through the exclusion of anachronism and contingency. Drawing on
the Ljubljana School of Hegelians (including Dolar and Žižek), Moder instead
argues for a constitutive kernel of contingency and anachronism at the heart of
Hegelian history—a political equivalent to the rhetorical processes Mendicino
describes in Hegel’s writing. The result, Moder suggests, is that the “end of history,”
the totalization that serves as the Žižekian point de capiton which sutures events
together across these differences, is itself utterly contingent.
Recently, there has been a resurgence of interest in the third member of the post-­
Kantian triad, F. W. J. Schelling, which is not reflected in post-1960s’ theory but
could not have happened without it. Schelling’s corpus has difference at its core, as
he kept beginning “again from the beginning” as Hegel puts it; Schelling kept ques-
tioning the foundations of his own thought, since “what went before did not satisfy
him.”42 Other aspects of this diverse corpus are explored in the essays by Gord
Barentsen, Thomas Moynihan, and Rajan, but in the penultimate chapter of Part I,
Tyler Tritten focuses on one of the few sustained contemporary engagements with
Schelling43: what he sees as the missed encounter between Žižek’s psychoanalytic-­
materialist account of Schelling and the latter’s middle work of the Weltalter period
(1809–1821). Tritten argues that in over-mediating Schelling through Lacan, Žižek
forecloses any possibility of thinking “before the political.” While the Real, in the
Ljubljana School’s unique reading of Lacan, is not barred from the Symbolic but
rather erupts within it,44 Žižek’s explosion (rather than critique) of ideology thus
remains, in Schellingian terms, a negative rather than a positive philosophy.
In the last chapter in Part I, Joel Faflak also takes up a thinker whose work can be
put in dialogue with psychoanalysis and, indeed, is part of its invention. Freud rec-
ognized his debt to Schopenhauer’s theory of the will as a blind force generating
and exposing representation as reason’s fantasy of its self-sufficiency. But contem-
porary theory has largely ignored Schopenhauer, even though he could be said to
practice the deconstruction of Idealism and live the agon of being unable entirely to
bring this about.45 Accordingly, Faflak provides a reading of The World as Will and
Representation that is darkly “Romantic,” insofar as he treats it as both theory and
text, as a philosophy of that of which it is itself the symptom. In moving forward, he
asks what this thinker, who missed his moment in 1818 to be recovered in the 1850s
and forgotten again, can say to our time. He concludes that “the in- and non-human
dimension of existence” disclosed by the will speaks powerfully to the writing of
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doggerel had been scrawled, difficult to read in their crabbed
seventeenth-century handwriting. A sconce for a candle, nailed into
the wall, was the only solid monument left of these distant memories.
The eye was more immediately challenged by the evidences of a
recent visitor’s presence. One expected a rude pallet of straw; a
simpler resting-place had been contrived with three cushions
obviously looted from the club lounge. There was a candle-end stuck
in an empty claret-bottle, and two candles in reserve. There were
numerous cigarette-ends thrown carelessly on and around the dust-
heap at the corner; all these were of a common and undistinctive
brand. There was a rather crumpled copy of Friday’s Daily Mail,
probably derived from the same source as the cushions. There was
a tin of boot-polish and a brush, as if the stranger had been careful
about his appearance even in these singular surroundings. These
relics Reeves quickly reviewed with absorbed interest, and then
turned to Gordon in despair.
“All these traces,” he said, “and not one that you could call a clue.
If the man has escaped us, he has escaped us without leaving a
solitary hint of his identity.”
“That hardly surprises me,” said Gordon. “Of course the man has
been in a sense your guest, but you could hardly expect him to sit
down and write you a Collins.”
“One might have expected one crow of triumph.”
“Perhaps that was one in the billiard-room.”
“In the billiard-room?”
“Yes, somebody had left you a miss in balk.”
“Do you really think . . .”
“Oh, I don’t know. Let’s go on exploring.”
All this time, except for their own whispers, there had been no
noise in the secret passage. Through the little window sounds came
from a distance, rarefied as sounds are when they come through a
small opening. A motor-cycle hooted several times: somebody
shouted “Fore!” on the links: far below (as it seemed) somebody was
filling a bucket. They crept out again into the passage, the torch
switched on again: for some twenty paces they were on the level,
then they began to descend, and almost immediately the ceiling
grew higher above them—they were in a wall-space instead of a
floor-space once more. Just as they reached the foot of the steps, an
unforeseen development threw all their plans into confusion—the
passage branched in two directions, one branch going straight on,
the other turning off sharply to the right.
“What do we do here?” whispered Reeves, flashing the torch up
either corridor in turn. “Whichever way we go, it seems to me, we
may be taken from the rear.”
“I know; we must chance it. We can’t separate, because we’ve
only got one torch. We’ll try the branch that goes straight on, but be
ready to turn round at a moment’s notice.”
This passage, after a short distance, seemed to terminate in a
blank wall. But there was a crack in the wall and Gordon, bending
down, saw through the crack the billiard-room as they had left it a
quarter of an hour ago, the balls still in position, the door still shut
behind which Carmichael and Marryatt were on guard.
“Switch the light higher up,” he whispered.
Surely Reeves’ torch was giving more light than usual? It seemed
to have suddenly doubled its brightness. And then, just as he
realized that another torch had been turned on from behind them, a
strange voice came out of the darkness:
“Now then, you there, I’ve got you covered. You this side, drop that
torch. . . . That’s right: now, you in front, put that revolver down. . . .
Now turn and go back the way you came.”
It was humiliating, but there was nothing to be done. They had
been taken in the rear by somebody coming up the other arm of the
passage; they could see nothing of him, looking straight into the light
of his torch. He stood at the junction of the two branches to let them
pass, still invisible: as they went back on their tracks, Gordon had a
wild idea of doubling into the priests’ room, but he saw it would be
hopeless. He would be unarmed, caught in a trap, with a man who
was probably already a murderer covering him with a revolver. They
went on, an ignominious procession, right up to the opening in
Reeves’ room, which they had left ajar behind them.
“Step right out,” said the voice, “and don’t stir till I tell you.”
Obediently they crept out into Reeves’ room, expecting the
stranger to shut the door behind them and fasten it in some way still
unknown to them. It was a surprise to both of them when the secret
entrance was once more blocked with the shadow of a human form,
and they were followed into the daylight by a quite unmistakable
policeman.
 Chapter XIV.
A Chase, ending with a Surprise
“Now then,” said the policeman, falling back on a formula in face of
an unexpected situation. “What’s all this about?”
There can be no doubt that, on most occasions, the sense of
humour is a handicap in life. It implies introspection, and he who
introspects is commonly lost. But laughter is, in great part, the child
of innocence, and it is doubtful if anything could have exculpated the
two amateur detectives from the charge of being criminals so
speedily as the complete break-down of Gordon’s gravity when the
question was asked.
“What are you doing in these rooms?” asked the policeman, less
suspicious but by no means more friendly.
“Well, you see,” said Reeves, “they’re my rooms.”
“I ought to warn you,” the policeman pointed out, “that this may
involve you in a serious charge. We have reason to think that a
murderer has been hiding in that passage there. Say nothing if you
don’t want it to be used as evidence.” And he took out the inevitable
note-book which is the policeman’s substitute for a thunderbolt.
“I’m sorry, officer,” said Gordon, “but you must see that we’ve been
going round one another in circles. You’re looking for a murderer—
let me make a rash guess, and put it to you that it’s Brotherhood’s
murderer you’re looking for? Well, we’re doing exactly the same. It
seems that, by a mere chance, he’s been taking refuge in a passage
which communicates with this room which is rented by Mr. Reeves
here. And instead of finding the murderer, we’ve found one another.”
“Very irregular, gentlemen. You know as well as I do that if you’ve
any information in your possession which might lead to the
conviction of the criminal, it’s your duty to communicate it to the
police. Of course, I’m very sorry if I gave you gentlemen a fright, but
you’ve got to look at it this way, Whose business is it to see justice
done, yours or mine? You see, if it hadn’t been for you gentlemen
giving the alarm, not meaning to, I’m not saying you meant to, but if
you gentlemen hadn’t given the alarm, I might have got this chap
bottled up properly in the passage there; and now how am I to know
where he is? That’s the way you’ve got to look at it.”
“But the coroner’s jury brought in a verdict of suicide,” objected
Reeves.
“Ah, that may be; but you see it’s this way, the Force isn’t tied
down by what the coroner’s jury says, and if the Force has its
suspicions, then it acts accordingly; and if anybody else has their
suspicions, then it’s their duty to communicate them to the police,
d’you see? And then the police can act accordingly.”
“Well, I’m very sorry if we’ve interfered with your plans at all,” said
Gordon, seeing that the Olympian rage was taking its normal course,
and simmering down into a flood of explanatory platitude. “We were
meaning to take a little something after all that hunting about in the
wainscoting; it’s dusty work. I suppose it’s no good asking you to join
us, Inspector?”
“Sergeant, sir, is what I am. Of course, it’s against the regulations,
strictly speaking, when on duty; but if you was to offer me something
just to show there’s no offence taken, why then I won’t say No to a
glass.” And, as the pledge of amity began to flow, Jove ratified his
compact by the infallible formula, “Here’s to your very good health,
gentlemen.”
Reeves felt that the moment had arrived for cooperating with
Scotland Yard. The fact that Scotland Yard, with no golf balls and no
photographs to guide it, no Carmichael and no chewing-gum to aid it,
had after all got on the track of the right criminal, began to impress
him.
“Well, Sergeant,” he said, “there’s not much sense in either of us
playing a lone hand, is there? What I’m asking myself is, why
shouldn’t you and we hunt in couples?”
“Very sorry, sir; of course, any information you may see fit to give
the police will be acted on accordingly; but you see it’s against our
regulations to take civilians about with us when we’re on duty, that’s
how it is. Not but what, as it’s all between friends, I don’t mind taking
you gentlemen downstairs and showing you the other door of that
there passage as you didn’t see and I came in by.”
The fact that Carmichael was still at his useless post occurred to
the two friends at this point, and made them consent to the indignity
of a personally conducted tour. “In a cellar the other door is, but it’s a
cellar you have to get to from the outside,” the sergeant explained,
leading the way downstairs. They were not destined to complete, on
that occasion, their experiences of the passage. They had only just
got out of the front door when the whirlwind figure of a second
policeman almost cannoned into them, and their attention was
directed to a motor-cycle, with side-car, just disappearing through the
lodge gates.
“It’s ’im,” panted the new-comer. “Gone off on the blinking bus!”
The mystery man had disappeared, and disappeared, with
singular effrontery, on the very vehicle on which the representatives
of the law had come to track him down.
“Come on, Sergeant,” shouted Reeves, rising to the occasion. “I’ve
got my car only just round here, and she’ll do a better pace than
anything else you could pick up!” And, while the agitated sergeant
explained to Gordon the message he wanted telephoned to the
station at Binver, Reeves did a record time in starting and bringing
round to the front his new Tarquin “Superbus.” It was scarcely three
minutes since the disappearance of the adventurous stranger when
the two policemen, one at Reeves’ side and one luxuriously
cushioned in the tonneau, bounded off down the drive in pursuit.
“What does that car of yours do, Sergeant? Forty? I can knock fifty
out of this easily, as long as we don’t get held up anywhere. I say,
what happens if some of your friends want to run me in for furious
driving?”
“You’d get off with a caution, sir, and it wouldn’t be in the papers.
You’re all right, don’t you worry, as long as you don’t run into
anything.” Indeed, at the pace Reeves was making, it seemed highly
desirable that they should not. The motor-cycle was still out of sight,
and it seemed likely enough that they were on a forlorn quest. About
half a mile from the Club the road split into two, either branch joining
the main London road, but one going southwards and one going
northwards to meet it. Would the fugitive make for the crowded
suburbs, or for the open country to the north? The question was
fortunately decided for them when they saw a more than usually self-
diffusive herd of sheep blocking up the northern arm. Nobody in a
hurry would have tried to penetrate that bleating barrage when he
saw a Clear road to his right. Whatever his plans had been, it must
have been the London direction he had taken. In a moment they had
dived under the railway close to Paston Oatvile station, and swept
round into the open current of the London main road.
Saturday was not yet far advanced enough to have released its
stream of pleasure-traffic, so late in the year especially. Their right of
way was disputed only by occasional lorries and market-carts. Two
motor-cycles they overhauled, with a spasm of hope each time,
which died down upon a nearer view. The road was for the most part
a gentle switchback, rising and falling over the long folds of the
countryside, and at the top of each incline their eyes swept the
stretch in front of them for a sight of the fugitive. The surface in front
of the engine seemed to spring into a cascade and jumped out on
you suddenly; the sere hedges became streaks of gold.
They had gone ten miles without sighting their quarry, and the
sergeant began to grow anxious. “The expresses stop at Weighford,”
he said, “and that’s only a mile or two on.” He turned to his colleague
behind. “D’you remember what time the express from the north stops
at Weighford? Quarter to twelve? That’s bad. You see, sir, if he gets
to Weighford before we catch sight of him, he may drive through it or
he may turn aside to the station; and if he makes for the station he’ll
most likely catch the express for London.”
“So can we, if we don’t get held up at Weighford. A quarter to
twelve, did you say? I think we ought to do it. But if we don’t sight
him first, it’s a bad look-out. What’s that on ahead?”
“That’s not the one, sir. Ah, there’s the goods sidings; express isn’t
signalled yet.”
Weighford is a straggling, unpleasant town, which seems to cast a
blight on the road as it passes through, and they were mercilessly
bumped. More than once, too, they had to slow down; and finally, to
crown their disappointment, they saw the gates of a level-crossing
shut against them. Then, just as Reeves was slowing down, the
gates began to swing open, and the sergeant suddenly crowed with
delight. “That’s him, sir! Got held up at the level crossing, and now
he’s only half a minute’s start of us.”
The remainder of the race was a thing only to be remembered in
nightmares—the children that only just got out of the way in time, the
dog that didn’t; the lorry that wanted to turn in the middle of the
road. . . . But they had their man marked now, and could see that he
was making for the railway; could hear, too, the whistle of the
express and the grinding of the brakes as it slowed down into the
station. At the further platform a quiet, rural train with the label
Binver was sitting on its haunches and panting after the exhaustion
of its last five-mile crawl. The station-master was fortunately found,
and the progress of the express held up in the interests of a police
search. The fugitive had left the side-car standing at the entrance
and lost himself among the passengers before his pursuers could
alight.
The search, laboriously and muddle-headedly carried on with the
aid of the station officials, lasted some five minutes without any
result. Fussy passengers might have been paid by the criminal to
delay operations, so ready were they with helpful advice. At last an
inspector pointed to a door on the non-platform side of an empty
first-class carriage, which was unfastened.
“Got through on to the six-foot way, that’s what he’s done, and
slinking round on the other platform maybe.”
“Wrong!” shouted Reeves in a flash of inspiration; “he got through
into the Binver train just as it went off, and hadn’t time to shut the
door properly. Sergeant, it’s us for the road again!” The sergeant
hesitated, then allowed himself to be fascinated by the theory. The
station staff was left with orders to go on searching; the side-car was
entrusted to the Weighford police, and, within a quarter of an hour of
their arrival, Reeves and the two Binver policemen were tearing back
along the main road as fast as they had come down it.
Local trains waste most of their time waiting at stations and
chatting to the signalman. When they are on the move, they are not
really easy to catch even with a fast motor, especially when they
have nearly ten minutes’ start. There was no stop, so far as this train
was concerned, between Weighford and Paston Oatvile. Paston
Oatvile had, of course, been warned to hold up the train on arrival,
but the staff there was neither numerous nor intelligent, and it
seemed very probable that the elusive passenger would be on his
travels again, if they could not be on the platform to intercept him.
This time Reeves excelled himself and so did the Tarquin. There was
no doubt about the objective; no mental undercurrent of hesitancy to
breed infirmity of purpose. The driver himself became part of the
machine, a mere lever in the relentless engine of human justice.
Almost all the way the line was visible from the road; and as reach
after reach of it was disclosed, three pairs of eyes searched for the
puff of smoke that would mark the Binver train.
They saw it at last when they were a full mile off. A moment more,
and they were at the station gates almost before the wheels of the
train had stopped. Three harassed officials were explaining to
irritated passengers that they must keep their seats, please. And so
began the cruel, inevitable search for the traveller without a ticket.
They found him at last, sitting apparently unconcerned in a first-class
carriage; the police did not bring him out, but climbed in after him.
Reeves went up to endure the effusive gratitude of the sergeant, and
caught sight, as he did so, of the prisoner’s face.
It was Davenant.
 Chapter XV.
Gordon takes the Opportunity to
Philosophize
“It seems,” said Carmichael, blinking through his spectacles, “that I
have been mistaken. My old tutor always used to say to me—that
was Benger: I suppose he’d be before your time, Gordon? Of course
he was—Benger always used to say to me, ‘Mr. Carmichael, always
follow your nose. You’ve got a straight nose, Mr. Carmichael, but a
crooked brain.’ Very witty old chap he was, Benger, always saying
things like that.”
“It was a dashed funny mistake, too,” mused Reeves. “Do you
realize that, quite possibly, Davenant may have stood behind that
hole in the wall and heard us coming solemnly to the conclusion that
he didn’t exist? That he never had existed, except as a sort of
spiritual projection of old Brotherhood, and now, consequently, he
had ceased to exist?”
“And what is still more singular,” said Carmichael, “is that so far
from helping the cause of justice, we seem to have actually hindered
it. For I take it there can be little doubt that it was our tapping and
measuring upstairs which put Davenant on his guard and made him
bolt.”
“Tapping? Measuring?” protested Gordon. “Don’t you believe it; it
was Reeves singing. I always said the man would beat it if we let
Reeves go on like that. I’d have done the same myself.”
“I’m not at all sure,” said Reeves, “that he may not have found the
chewing-gum on his trousers, and formed his own conclusions that
way. However, there isn’t very much harm done. The police have got
their man, with no great inconvenience to anybody except that poor
old collie at Weighford. Rather a fine dog it was, and the owner
wasn’t a bit nice about it when I saw him.”
“I suppose,” Carmichael asked, “that the police can actually prove
Davenant was the murderer?”
“Not a bit of it,” said Reeves confidently, “unless they’ve got more
up their sleeve than I think they have.”
“But surely,” urged Gordon, “if he went to all the trouble of hiding
himself like a rat in the wainscoting——”
“That’s all very well, but they haven’t even proved Davenant was
the man in the passage. You see, Davenant was travelling on that
train, but it’s the train he always does come up by every Saturday.
He might say that he hadn’t had time to get his ticket; that he had
come all the way from London; that the real murderer must have
slipped out on to the six-foot way and lost himself on the opposite
platform. I don’t know that he will say that; of course, he is reserving
his defence. But even if they can bring people to prove—people who
saw him boarding the train at Weighford—that he was the man we
were pursuing, it still doesn’t follow that he was the murderer. It’s
extraordinary, the shifts men have resorted to before now when they
thought they were going to be accused of murder, although they
were as innocent as you or me. Put it this way—suppose Davenant
had actually come up by that train on Tuesday, for reasons best
known to himself. He gets to Paston Whitchurch, and then hears of
what we found at the third tee. He cannot give any plausible
explanation of his coming back here on Tuesday at all. He has some
grudge against Brotherhood which we know nothing about. Now, if
he can conceal the fact that he came back here at all that day, he
escapes suspicion. He knows, somehow, about this secret passage;
knows that, as a member of the club, he can wander about here
pretty safely without attracting attention. He decides to lie low in the
priests’ hiding-place till Saturday, and then turn up bright and smiling,
knowing nothing about the murder. I say, innocent men have done
stranger things before now.”
“It sounds pretty thin to me,” said Gordon.
“Once more I tell you, it is a fatal habit to proceed from observation
to inference, and give inference the name of fact. You say Davenant
is the murderer; I say, we don’t know that; we only know that
Davenant was a man who for some reason expected to be accused
of the murder, and consequently behaved in a very peculiar way.”
“I still don’t quite see,” said Carmichael, “what exactly happened
while I was waiting outside the billiard-room door.”
“Nothing happened while you were waiting outside the billiard-
room door; it had all happened already. Quite early on, while we
were worrying about up here, Davenant saw that the place was
unhealthy for him. He wandered out into the billiard-room, arranging
the balls, I think, as a kind of message for us, and then strolled off
somewhere—into the servants’ quarters, I suppose. It’s obvious that
he must have had a confederate in the house. Then the police came
—I imagine they must have watched somebody bringing him things
from outside.”
“Sullivan,” said Gordon. “That was what he was doing, obviously,
the day I was over in Davenant’s cottage, he was taking him collars
and things.”
“Anyhow, the police came and climbed in at the cellar, making a
great song and dance about it as the police always do. Davenant
saw that things were getting pretty serious, so he made for the
nearest motor-bike he could find—I don’t know whether he knew it
belonged to the police or not. Having once started to run away, of
course he couldn’t very well stop at Weighford and tell us it was all a
silly mistake: having started to bolt, he had to go on bolting. And he
did it damned cleverly: if he’d had time to shut the door of the
carriage in the express, or had a season ticket to justify his presence
in the Binver train, how could he have been caught? That was the
train he always came back by on Saturdays.”
“I don’t think he would have escaped,” said Carmichael. “Truth will
out—there’s a lot in the old saying. By the way, I wonder if either of
you know the origin of the phrase magna est veritas et prævalebit, or
rather prævalet, to give the exact form?”
“We’ll buy it,” said Gordon.
“Actually it comes from the third book of Esdras. That’s a thing
ninety-nine people out of a hundred don’t know. But what was I
saying? Oh, yes, it’s extraordinary how criminals don’t escape. If you
come to think of it, we were close on the track of our man the whole
time.”
 “There,” said Gordon, “I can’t agree with you. Up to a certain point
we were on the right track. Then you came and confused all the
tracks with your ‘Davenant-is-Brotherhood’ slogan. After that we
were at a loss—or rather, it was worse than that, we were definitely
off the true scent, although the man himself was within a few yards
of us. It was only because he came out of his hiding-place and
disturbed Reeves’ papers—a sheer accident, from our point of view
—that we were able to start again. Now, your ideal detective is never
dependent upon an accident.”
“Well, don’t rub it in,” suggested Reeves. “After all, we are both of
us as much to blame, because we swallowed Carmichael’s theory
like lambs.”
“Well, as a matter of fact, I never did agree with Carmichael.”
“Never did agree with him? Well, you kept jolly dark about it. What
weren’t you satisfied with about his explanation?”
“Oh, it seemed to me to disregard human probabilities. And, as I
told you the other day, I trust human probabilities more than I trust
circumstantial evidence. I didn’t believe, for example, that the same
man could be a Catholic from Saturday to Monday and an atheist for
the rest of the week.”
“But Carmichael explained that. Surely it’s reasonable that a
Roman Catholic should want to sweep away what he regards as
inadequate theologies?”
“No, it’s just what he wouldn’t do. I used to know a good many
Catholics at one time, and I know a certain amount about their point
of view. And they couldn’t act in the way Carmichael described,
because it would be doing evil in order that good might come of it.
And Catholic theology, you see, doesn’t allow that.”
“I only gave that as a possible explanation,” objected Carmichael.
“There are plenty of other possible explanations.”
“I know. But what’s the good of any number of possible
explanations when no single explanation is probable? I never can
understand the kind of madness that imagines it has solved a
difficulty when it has found a whole number of possible explanations
that aren’t probable. What difference does the number of them
make? As a matter of fact, in this case there’s only one—that
Brotherhood really was an atheist, but posed as a Catholic when he
was Davenant merely to put people off the scent. But can’t you see
how monstrous that is? Instead of taking the trouble to go over to
Paston bridge every Sunday, he might have gained a far bigger local
reputation for piety by sitting under Marryatt once in three weeks.”
“Well, what other human probabilities are there?”
“Next to changing one’s religion every Saturday to Monday, the
most impossible thing in the world would be to change one’s game of
golf every Saturday to Monday. Theoretically it sounds all right; in
practice I don’t believe in it. I can’t think how you did either,
Carmichael, because golf is a thing of which you have some
experience.”
“Well, why didn’t you communicate these doubts to us before?”
“You were talking too hard. But I can produce my diary to show
you what I did think about your suggestion.” And Gordon
disappeared, to return after a few minutes with a formidable volume
over which he spent an unvarying twenty minutes every evening.
“Here you are. ‘Thursday—Carmichael has had an inspiration—he
thinks Davenant and Brotherhood were the same person, a sort of
Jekyll-and-Hyde pair. He overlooks, it seems to me, the obvious
phenomena of religion and golf. But of course it is very typical’ ”—he
broke off. “I don’t expect that part would interest you.”
“Go on,” said Reeves. “I shouldn’t have thought Carmichael was
typical of anything. What’s it all about?”
“Well, the truth is that in this diary I don’t merely record what’s
happened; I’ve got into the way of philosophizing over it a bit. As you
know, Reeves, I’ve got a bad habit of writing for the papers, and I
find writing down my impressions every day often helps me to find
subjects.”
“It would be a privilege to hear what you made of all this,” said
Carmichael dryly.
“ ‘But of course it is very typical,’ ” Gordon read on, “ ‘of all these
modern philosophies. They are always for explaining something in
terms of something else, just as Carmichael wants to explain
Davenant in terms of Brotherhood. In plain English it means mixing
up two things that are entirely different. The moderns, for example,
will have it that punishment is only another name for correction. And
once you have said that, the whole idea of punishment drops out of
sight altogether. Or they will tell you that a concept is the same as a
mental picture, or that Truth is the same as beauty, or as intellectual
convenience, or that matter is a form of motion. The root of error is
always one of those false identifications, saying that A is B when it
isn’t.
“ ‘The cause of them is a rage for the simplification of experience,
the result is a paralysis of thought. There is a sense of neatness and
efficiency about identifying Davenant with Brotherhood; it explains
such a lot—you always can explain a lot by overlooking the facts.
But the result is that poor Reeves, who up till now at least had
Davenant to hunt for, now regards Davenant as an imaginary being,
and is reduced to hunting for an imaginary murderer. Just so it looks
very neat and efficient to say that punishment is the same thing as
correction; it explains a puzzling idea, simplifies your thought. But
what you have done is to banish the whole idea of punishment from
your mind, and turn a real thing into a mental figment.
“ ‘But this theory of Carmichael’s makes an even prettier parable of
the great and unpardonable error which tries to make one thing out
of matter and Spirit—tells you that Spirit is a mode of matter, or the
other way round. Just as Carmichael will have it that Davenant is a
mode of Brotherhood. Like the materialist or the idealist he is
stultifying experience for the sake of a formula. Couldn’t one write
this up, somehow? Brotherhood, representing Matter, leaves off
where Davenant, representing Spirit, begins. Carmichael,
representing the modern mind, finds this an excellent reason for
supposing that they are really, somehow, the same thing. The
materialist sees Brotherhood everywhere, the Idealist sees Davenant
everywhere, and consequently neither of them can solve the
detective mystery of existence. It looks as if one could work up a sort
of Oriental mythology out of it, as good as most Oriental mythologies
anyway. And the joke of it is that Davenant’s really round the corner
the whole time.’ I say, that was a pretty good shot anyhow. Why,
Carmichael, I even seem to have anticipated your discovery of the
secret passage.”
“H’m,” said Carmichael; “there are some interesting half-truths in
all that.”
 Chapter XVI.
Reeves promises to do his Best
The conversation recorded in the last chapter took place (I forgot
to say) on Saturday afternoon. It was while he was at tea downstairs
that a message was brought in to Reeves telling him that a lady
wished to see him on urgent business. She would not give her name,
but she was waiting for him in what was called “the small lounge”—a
dreary little room, which had something of the air of a hospital
waiting-room; she would be glad if he could come as soon as
possible. Disregarding Gordon’s suggestion that he should take
Carmichael with him as a chaperon, he made his way to the small
lounge with some feeling of self-importance, and found himself most
unexpectedly confronted with Miss Rendall-Smith.
“I’m afraid you think badly of me, Mr. Reeves,” she said, “and you’ll
probably think worse of me before I’ve finished.” (Reeves gurgled
dissent.) “The other day I turned you out of the house and told you to
your face you were a liar. And that’s a bad introduction for me when I
have to come to you, as I come now, asking for your help.”
Reeves was horribly embarrassed. You can offer whisky to a
policeman to show there is no ill-feeling, but it is more difficult to offer
it to a lady. “I’m sure I should be very glad to be of any use,” he said.
“I seem somehow to have made a bad impression on you the other
day, though I still haven’t the least idea how. Wouldn’t it really be
better if we put all our cards on the table and treated one another
frankly?”
“That’s just what I want to do. And, as a sort of guarantee of good
faith, I’m going to tell you exactly what it was that made me
suspicious of you the other day. You brought me a photograph of
myself and told me you had found it on the body of the man who was
killed. Now, I was quite prepared to believe you; he had got, and I
knew he had got, a photograph of me. But the photograph you
showed me was not the one I gave him. It was a portrait taken on the
same occasion, at the same sitting; but it was in a slightly different
pose. So I thought, you see, that you were setting a trap for me. Your
manner was so dreadfully Come-now-young-woman-I-know-all-
about-you, that I really thought you were a policeman, and were
trying to bluff me in some way . . . No, I haven’t finished yet. There
was one person living round here who had a copy of the other
photograph, the same kind as you showed me. And that was Mr.
Davenant, whom they arrested this morning as the murderer.”
“I see. Yes, of course you must have thought I was trying it on. The
fact is, I don’t yet know exactly how that photograph got into my
possession, but I can give a guess now, which I couldn’t have then.”
And he described in outline the discovery of the secret passage and
the sliding panel. “You see, if it was Davenant who was behind that
panelling all the time, it was quite possible for him to take away the
portrait we found on Brotherhood, and to put the portrait you gave
him there instead. I can’t think why he should have wanted to do it;
but there were four of us who all thought at the time that the
photograph looked different when we took it down from the cornice.
And that’s quite natural, if it really was a different one.”
“Well, all that gets us into the reason why I called. Mr. Reeves, are
you working in any sort of co-operation with the police?”
“No. I helped the police by taking them to Weighford and back in
my motor, but I’m not working for them, I’m working on my own. To
tell the truth, I haven’t very much confidence in the intelligence of the
police, or in their methods.” He omitted, somehow, to mention that
the co-operation of civilians was contrary to police regulations.
“In that case I can speak freely. But I want you to understand,
please, that I tell you all this in complete confidence so far as the
police are concerned. Now, will that be all right? I mean, I suppose
you will be called as a witness.”
“I suppose that they can only call me as a witness of how I found
the body on Tuesday, and how I took the police to Weighford to-day.
There is no reason why they should expect me to have any theories
about who the murderer was. I think it will be all right.”
 “Well, I’ll risk it, anyhow. You see, I know that the police, once
they’ve caught a man, will always want to convict that man, merely
so as to save themselves trouble, and save their own faces.”
“That’s my experience of them, certainly.” Reeves had no
experience in the matter whatsoever, but there was no harm in
agreeing.
“Well, I’d better tell you about myself first of all, and how I come to
be mixed up in the business. My name isn’t, legally, Miss Rendall-
Smith, although it was my maiden name. My legal name is Mrs.
Brotherhood.”
“You mean that you are——”
“His widow. It must be a wonderful thing to be a detective, Mr.
Reeves.”
Reeves was thrilled with the compliment, which a more
introspective person might have suspected of irony. He suddenly
remembered that a detective ought to have a note-book, and write
down facts in it. He had no note-book, so he said, “Excuse me,” and
fetched a sheet of the club note-paper. On this he wrote down in
pencil “Miss R.-S. = Mrs. B.” It looked rather silly, somehow, when he
had written it.
“I was brought up in these parts, Mr. Reeves. My father used to be
Rector of Binver. When that photograph was taken—those
photographs were taken, my father was still alive, and I was still
unmarried. The only person who’d ever asked me to marry him was
Mr. Davenant—I expect you know that he belongs to these parts
too.”
“I didn’t actually know it.” The phrase suggested that Reeves might
have inferred it, but had not any direct information on the point. “I
suppose he didn’t live at the Hatcheries then?”
“No, his people had a house near here, which has been pulled
down since. His mother, of course, was an Oatvile.”
“To be sure.” Reeves sucked his pencil, and wrote down “Mr.
Davenant senior m. Miss Oatvile.” Then a light burst upon him
—“Good heavens!” he said, “then that’s why he knew about the
secret passage?”
“He would, of course. He’s told me that he used often to play here
when he was a boy. Then there was a coolness between his people
and the Oatviles, I think because his people became Catholics. No
quarrel, you know, only they didn’t see so much of each other after
that. Anyhow, Mr. Davenant was badly in love with me and wanted
me to marry him. I wouldn’t—partly because I wasn’t quite sure
whether I liked him, partly because my father was very Low Church,
and he’d have been certain to make trouble over it. Then the
Davenants left the place, and I did too after my father died; and we
didn’t see any more of one another.”
“When was that?”
“Three or four years before the war—1910 I suppose it must have
been. I started out to work for a living, because my father hadn’t left
us very well off. And then, quite soon, I met this man Brotherhood.
He proposed and I accepted him—you mustn’t ask me why, Mr.
Reeves. That’s a thing even detectives can’t find out about, why
women fall in love with men. I’ll only mention that at that time he
wasn’t a bit rich. After I married we lived in a rather horrid house in
Kensington. I never knew anything about his Stock Exchange
business much, though I always had an idea that it wasn’t very safe,
if it was even honest. He began to make money quite soon; and
then, you see, he made the whole of it over to me. He was afraid, of
course, that he might go bankrupt, and he wanted to have a good
reserve which his creditors couldn’t touch. I was always rather a fool
about business, or I suppose I should have minded the arrangement.
As it was, I just thought it very nice of him, and we made
arrangements to take a house in the country. I wanted Binver,
because it was one of the few places where I’d any friends.
“Then, quite suddenly, I found out about him. I don’t mean about
his business; I mean about his private life. There are lots of atheists
who are very nice people; my husband wasn’t one of them. I
somehow feel that he chucked over morals first and religion
afterwards, if you know what I mean, not the other way about.”
Reeves wrote down “Brotherhood not only – God but – morals”;
then he scratched it out again. Miss Rendall-Smith went on:
“I didn’t want a divorce: you see, I’d been rather strictly brought up
about those things. And of course he didn’t want one, because of the
money. Just when I wanted help and advice, I met Mr. Davenant
again; and he was furious when I told him about it all. He set to work
to try and find out something about my husband’s business, and he
did discover something (I don’t know what it was) which would have
ruined him if it had come out. Then he went to my husband and put a
pistol to his head, so to speak—blackmailed him really, I suppose.
He made my husband take a solemn oath to let me go my own way
and never, without my express consent, publish the fact that he’d
married me. Then I came down here and took the house in Binver
and thought it was going to be all right.
“Quite soon afterwards my husband rented a bungalow, as you
know, and came to live at Paston Whitchurch. I think he wanted to
keep a watch over me; I think he also wanted to give me the
impression that he was behaving better. But, as he always went
away for the week-ends, I didn’t feel much interested about that.
Once or twice he asked me to come back to him, but of course I
wouldn’t. When Mr. Davenant came back from the war, he took a
house at Paston Whitchurch too, but he could only come there from
Saturday to Monday because of his work up in London. I think he
just wanted to be near me, and to be able to help me if I was in
trouble. And that was the state of things up to last Tuesday. Only my
husband had foreseen his bankruptcy, and was making desperate
efforts to get me to come back to him. The horrible thing was that I
had no hold over him—the secret which would have ruined him once
had no terrors for him then—so I’d nothing but his bare word to
depend on. And I’m afraid that wasn’t much to go upon.
“I knew nothing about what happened on Tuesday till I saw it in the
papers. I still don’t know how or why the police got the idea that it
was Mr. Davenant who murdered my husband. Of course, if they
came to know all that I’ve been telling you now, they’d think it was a
certainty. But I’ve told you about it, because I thought it was best to
let you know everything, and then perhaps you could help.”
“Of course I should be awfully glad to do anything I could to—well,
to establish the innocence of an innocent man. Was that your idea,
Miss Rendall-Smith?”
“Mr. Reeves, do you believe at all in a woman’s intuitions?
Probably you don’t, because you go in for clues and all that sort of
thing. But I assure you I’m as certain that Mr. Davenant never laid a
hand on my husband as I’m certain that you’re sitting in that chair. I