It is the time after all stories, the time when one takes a direct interest in the sensible stuff in which these stories cleaved their shortcuts between projected and accomplished ends. It is not the time in which we craft beautiful phrases or shots to make up for the emptiness of all waiting. It is the time in which we take an interest in the wait itself.

Jacques Rancière

The Time After

[Staying] with the trouble requires learning to be truly present, not as a vanishing pivot between awful or edenic pasts and apocalyptic or salvific futures, but as mortal critters entwined in myriad unfinished configurations of places, times, matters, meaning.

Donna Haraway Staying with the Trouble

橫眉冷對千夫指，俯首甘為孺子牛。

魯迅《自嘲》

I would like to begin this essay with an anecdote: one day in the midst of our rhetoric seminar, our professor Nasser said something seemingly profound that made me ponder again and again. For whatever reason, our discussion drops into silence from time to time.

Nasser wanted to mediate the situation, yet he always stuck in a position between speaking and listening, and often ended up making some weird sound. He told us this is because when he wants to speak, he feels he is being condescending (because he is an experienced professor, so perhaps his joining will disturb the power dynamic and turns the class into a lecture), but when he realizes this and decides not to speak, he feels even more condescending (because he has taken for granted that we all agree he is more knowledgeable and because of which it is better for him to quit acting like the annoying Socrates, that is to say, to intentionally remain silent).

There is something subtle going on here: Nasser thought twice. The first thought turns his action into inaction, and the second thought turns his inaction into action. If anything, it reminds me of Nietzsche’s piece on history from his Untimely Meditations . In this essay, Nietzsche examines the role that historical knowledge plays in the lives of individuals and society. As the central thread of discussion, the opposition between two elements, life and history, has again and again been deployed by later scholars for various purposes. In this essay, I wish to discuss how such a simple opposition has developed into an increasingly complex ground for contemporary speculative and philosophical theorizations. We shall begin with a brief reexamination of these two concepts.

The original Nietzschean lesson is in fact quite simple: history, designating historical knowledge proper, should be served “only to the extent that history serves life.” ( UM , 59) Nietzsche’s perfect example was that of a modern man who is magically transported back to the ancient Greeks and who, as Nietzsche claimed, would consider the Greeks very ‘uncultured.’ ( UM , 79) This is because the definition of culture consists of historical knowledge that is not of one's own, and the Greeks, since there are few great civilizations preceding them while being accessible, are freed of constrained of this knowledge which transforms modern men into "walking encyclopedia" and thus devoid of their own culture, that is, lifeless.

The message hidden under could be interpreted as a call for action, actions that are forbidden due to an excessive knowledge present-at-hand. Its later variations and interpretations, however, have been deviating and redoubled, as our understanding of knowledge and action have been given manifolded significations. I shall discuss this forever dialectic between theory and action in the contexts of: disciplinary knowledge production, cognition, and politics.

In The Burden of History , Hayden White situated history as a discipline always oscillating between art and science, as it sometimes functions like a positivist science in which knowledge production is limited in accordance with the verifiable historical sources, while other times it improvises as the art which exercises its creativity to narrate the truth contents given limited evidence. White, following Foucault, understands the idea of historiography to be essentially a constructivist enterprise. That is to say, history should not, methodologically, be conducted as if its objective is to unveil some a priori given of the past, but to “choose our past in the same way that we choose our future.” (White, 39) While Foucault focuses on an interpretation of Nietzsche as a critical historian who was formulating methodologies for proper historical research, Hayden White crafted his argument, interestingly, based on the advancement of other disciplines such as sciences and the art, and the disillusionment of historians’ outdated conceptions of history as a quest for the Truth. Historians, believed by White, need to understand the sciences and the art has evolved from that of the nineteenth-century realist way of narration and the positivist way of doing scientific research, to new paradigms exemplified in, for example, existentialist novelists (Camus), post-impressionist painter (Cézanne), and constructivist physical and social scientists (Einstein and Weber). (White 43) This methodological liberation from the old forms corresponds to a realization of the fact that historical research is in need of a revolution of the same kind that resituates history between nowadays revised conceptions of art and sciences. In White’s own words: …[ The ] burden of the historian in our time is to reestablish the dignity of historical studies on a basis that will make them consonant with the aims and purposes of the intellectual community at large, that is, transform historical studies in such a way as to allow the historian to participate positively in the liberation of the present from the burden of history .” (White 41) Foucault had explained this objective more meticulously. In Nietzsche, Genealogy, History , he reworked over the three kinds of history borrowed from Nietzsche’s Untimely Meditations (the piece discussed above). Before discussing it, let us understand that Foucault identified historiography not as a project of uncovering origin or reality properly understood, since “the origin lies in a place of inevitable loss;” ( NGH , 79) on the other hand, it, as effective history, aims to be “an unstable assemblage of faults, fissures, and heterogeneous layers that threaten the fragile inheritor from within…” ( NGH , 82) What this means is that our understanding of history that strives to be objective and disinterested will always miss the so-called true discourse which corresponds to true facts in history, just like Nietzsche claimed “it requires a great deal of strength…to forget the extent to which to live and to be unjust is one and the same thing.” ( UM , 76) I claim Foucault’s idea here can be put in very simple terms, and I agree with the argument raised by scholars from various fields that Foucault is appropriating Nietzsche for his own formulative purposes, which, just as his very argument developed here, is precisely how history should serve life (we also can find the same argument for Benjamin in Steinberg). (Steinberg, 22) Let us go back to the three kinds of history of Nietzsche that Foucault had reexamined: the monumental, the antiquarian, and the critical. Foucault corresponded them with the Platonic modalities of history, namely, the parodic, the dissociative, and the sacrificial. ( NGH 93) Nietzsche explained the monumental history as the complete madness about some highest points in historical development and by which the present is unanimously devoted to the repetition of such moments. ( UM , 68) Foucault nevertheless pointed out that such a view towards history has a “parodic double,” in which appears the possibility of alternative identities. ( NGH , 94) This is a positive side of the monumental history, in the sense that the identities are faked and swapped to reveal, in modal terms if you will, the semantics of accessible possible worlds. Genealogy in this sense aims precisely not to reaffirm the already constructed narratives of our past but to actualize hidden possible facts within which the truth may lie. The Deleuzian connection here is also fairly obvious: the enactment of the present for the monumental past can be seen as an exemplification of “repetition is not generality,” in which repetition is not the return of the same but it is something always in the process of self-differentiation. ( DR , 1) This connection will be returned back in due course.

The second kind of history Nietzsche discussed was the antiquarian history.

According to Foucault, Nietzsche had had a different perspective on antiquarian: first in

Untimely Meditation , in which he revealed the negative aspect of antiquarian history as an

excess, an obstacle that prohibits our lives since it "knows only how to preserve life, not how to engender it.” ( UM , 75) However, later Nietzsche adopted a more positive view, exemplified, for example, in Human, All too Human , where he rendered the intention of antiquarian history to be revealing the heterogeneous systems which inhibit the formation of identities. ( NGH , 95) We might call this the “dissociative double” of the antiquarian history. Just like the parodic double of the monumental history reveals alternative possibilities of identities, or, in François Rabelais’ words from Gargantua and Pantagruel (which might be the place where Foucault had borrowed), alternative face under a mask in a converted carnival, this dissociative double reveals the multiplicities of faces under a single mask, that is to say, literally, to disassociate from the rigid conception of the bijection of causes and effects behind a single observable historical event.

The third kind of history Nietzsche discussed was the critical history, which, at first, was simply a reexamination of the past by the criteria of the present, that is to say, properly, to critique . Nietzsche had warned us against the excessive use of this type of history which will lead to indulgence into some sort of presentism or historical nihilism in which everything is to be revolutionized; in other words, this is the danger of the deployment of life for truth, and Nietzsche wants the exact opposite. Foucault, again, argued that the later Nietzsche changed his mind and claimed that it is precisely in the deployment of the will to truth (which is always biased) that we will be closer to truth, and this is what Foucault called the destruction of the subject, or, what I would call the “sacrificial double” of the critical history. ( NGH, 96) Bringing the three aspects together, we find Foucault’s deployment of them in fact forms the three methodological foundations for his logic of all historical investigations.

The discoveries of unreality (how something could be otherwise), of plurality (how something could be manifoldly constituted), of criticality (how the truth could be approached as intersubjectivity) exactly correspond to three levels or dimensions of historical analysis which are: 1. archeological a type of procedure which, unconcerned with legitimizing and consequently, excluding the fundamental point of view of the law, runs through the cycle of positivity by proceeding from the fact of acceptance to the system of acceptability analyzed through the knowledge-power interplay. ( WIC , 61) 2. genealogical something that attempts to restore the conditions for the appearance of a singularity born out of multiple determining elements of which it is not the product, but rather the effect. ( WIC , 64) 3. strategic . at a given level, the logic of interactions operates between individuals who are able to respect its singular effects, both its specificity and its rules, while managing along with other elements interactions operating at another level, such that, in a way, none of these interactions appear to be primary or absolutely totalizing. Each interaction can be resituated in a context that exceeds it and conversely, however local it may be, each has an effect or possible effect on the interaction to which it belongs and by which it is enveloped. ( WIC , 65) These three dimensions of analysis proposed will later be developed by Foucault more specifically and also adopt different names, such as, in What is Enlightenment , homogeneity, systematicity, and generality, as well as serving the foundation and modified into the introduction to his famous Archeology of Knowledge , which we shall not delve into. ( WIE , 48) After this “genealogical” detour of Foucauldian genealogy, let us remember the theme of this essay should be that of the relationship between history and life. We might conclude from above that the Foucauldian historiography is an appropriation of that of Nietzsche, while in Genealogy of Morality , Nietzsche claimed genealogy is to be entirely subordinated to the question of value. What might be concluded at this point is that when Nietzsche’s emphasis is definitely on life, and history is one that which only serves life, Foucault turns the dialectic around, claiming that this life, in turn, serves history, and these two are not simply mutually exclusive, as to do history is not always to diminish life.

The opposition of life and history can be framed also in Hegel's master-slave dialectic.

But to stick with Nietzsche, let us return to a Deleuzian formulation that brought everything above into the same context.

The Hegelian spirit is a dialectical negation, claimed Deleuze, which has to constantly negate and be negated in order to progress. The bondsman and his lord are an exemplification of the unification of self-consciousness. ( PS , 115) Hegel characterizes the lord, as a self-contained consciousness, that requires the bondsman to sustain his interdependence. The slave then transforms from a primal state of being-in-itself to a state of self-consciousness, or, being-for-itself, by realizing the product he made for his lord is a reflection of his own being (alienation). ( PS , 115) The only advancement here is an epistemological one instead of ontological. It is a shift of perspective, or a gain and progression in self-knowledge, in which the lord and the bondsman dissolved; that is to say, they became one. And it should not be forgotten that it’s the desire which serves as the primal drive, or libido, that motivates this totalizing movement of self-knowledge. ( PS , 109) Deleuze sees the Hegelian notion of desire as essentially negative, in that it is only through a (dialectical) negation of the other (bondsman) that the self (lord) can progress in self-knowledge. And this negativity is Deleuze’s main target. In Nietzsche and Philosophy , Deleuze deployed Nietzsche’s discussion of slave morality to characterize this Hegelian move. In Genealogy of Morality , Nietzsche distinguished slave morality from master morality.

While the latter is an affirmation of life in itself, an aristocratic strength unmediated, the former is out of parasitic envy and resentiment . ( GM , 20) The slave morality’s system of evaluation is fundamentally secondary and derivative; it is dependent upon the presence of the conception of the master but not in itself. It is not about what it is but is about what it is not . With this opposition of moralities at hand. Deleuze claims that the Hegelian model of self-knowledge of the spirit which has an internally binary structure to be later unified, is a slave morality, a self-denial of life: Who is the dialectician, who dialectics the relationship? It is the slave, the slave's perspective, the way of thinking belonging to the slave's perspective. The famous dialectical aspect of the master-slave relationship depends on the fact that power is conceived not as will to power but as representation of power, representation of superiority, recognition by "the one" of the superiority of "the other". What the wills in Hegel want is to have their power recognised, to represent their power. ( NP , 10) Deleuze understood life to be only that of pure affirmation, that is, action taken unconstrained or unmediated by others. If we frame it back in the language between life and history, it is not hard to see that real action (life) should always contain an end in itself, since any consideration of it as means would imply a chain of telos (with its length) longer than one, that is to say, the action is not self-contained, or, it is mediated, or, it is (self-)historicized. It seems at this point we have to equate a true life, a life that is not conquered by history, with some notions of unconscious which does not implement preloaded plans or ideal representations (think of master-slave dialectic which will reach self-consciousness), and the Übermensch is simply one which comes back to be an animal after it had been a human.

An anthropo-essentialist might say the definition of being human is our capability of language. We represent the world in a field of transcendence, as if the signifying-structure is outside space and time. Any theorization is exactly the use of language, or, one might even claim, language itself is the theory par excellence . Let us derive an alternative consideration of consciousness than the Deleuzian-Nietzschean affirmation: recall the insight from Lacan that the ego capable of signification, that is, language, is directly a product of the mirror stage, and the goal of any psychoanalysis is simply a “disenchantment” of the Imaginary by the Symbolic. Lacan, who has been immersed in Kojeve’s teaching, borrowed much from his Hegelian-Heideggerian formulation. The amor fati of Nietzsche exemplified in Heidegger as his so-called resoluteness . In Heiddegerese, it is the “reticent self-projection upon one’s ownmost Being-guilty, in which one is ready for anxiety.” ( BT , 343) That is to say, to be brief, the acceptance of one’s destiny as Dasein, a thinking being who cannot escape but concerns its own existence. The famous “thrownness” of Dasein designates a status of “always already.” In usual Heidegger’s reading, we understand it as Dasein’s necessity of choosing one possibility over other and thereof will inevitably be “missing out.” The resoluteness here is the realization that whether to choose one choice or the other, we cannot but understand that the other choice will always be hidden from us, so hesitation will lead to nothing but simply inaction (history over life!). I offer another interpretation, or rather, the same interpretation unfolded in a special context: If the constitutive condition of us being human is that of the use of language, thinking, and being conscious, this thrownness is also that which needs to be affirmed. Just like in Lacan, desire itself, even merely as an eternal search for the structurally absent objet petit a , is not to be purely negated and the objective of psychoanalysis, again, is not to advise going back to the Real and meet an early death, but to realize the unattainable nature of Desire itself, while affirming this conclusion (the real existentialist).

It is in this sense we can understand why “the essence of technology is nothing technological,” why Enframing/concealment is also a revealing/unconcealment, and why “where danger is, grows/The saving power also.” ( QCT , 34) We can tell that not too much has changed in these fifteen years after Heidegger delivered The Age of the World Picture lecture, in which the authenticity lies in a “withdrawn from representation.” ( AWP , 136) To affirm language is not to affirm present-at-hand, which serves as representations, since language has also an aspect of readiness-to-hand (language game if you are a Wittgensteinian).

Let us not be lost in these endless jargons, and come back to the theme. Already in Foucault, we see the opposition between life and history is not simple. In Nietzsche, excessive use of history hinders life, but in Foucault, life and history actually serve each other. Are they talking about the same history? Let us unravel this with our just explicated Heidegger ready-to-hand. To repeat, the history that hinders life, for Nietzsche and for Deleuze, is precisely the in-resoluteness before any action. In Foucault, doing history is already an activity that is history but at the same time a life. The gist lies in whether we construe history, that is, a form of language, as present-at-hand or readiness-to-hand. But the question doesn't seem to disappear immediately: how are we to understand consciousness which constitutes human beings? Doesn't consciousness been equated with a form of present-at-hand since thinking necessitates hesitation before action? I believe here consciousness also needs to be divided into different senses. In one case it denotes the constitutive condition of us being human, but in the other case, it means being-self- conscious in the middle of an action. It seems we will commit a category mistake if we use them two unanimously.

Already in Deleuze, we see the praise of unconscious as the master morality which is pure affirmation. There seems to be a mania of how unconscious action can play a huge role in shaping social reality. In Deleuze, we would call them lines of flight which disturb the molar lines that ordain and consolidate societies. In Adorno, we see the praise of unconscious art making as an expression of truth content, or, mimesis, of the socio- political contexts of the time, while the conscious activity of art will be caught in standardized and commodified culture industry, defined by norms and unable to contain truth to be later interpreted in a radically hermeneutical way. In Rancière, we see the concept of the political points to precisely those (spontaneous) activities that disturb the status quo of a state, the police which prohibits the free distribution of the sensible, that is, the occasioning of dissensus. In Badiou, we see a call for the fidelity to the Event, an active engagement of the subject with this transformative disruption of the normal order of beings. In Butler, we see how speech-act can be merged into a post-structural framework in which the exact reference of signifiers is always deferred, reiterated dragging and unexpected actions (which escapes self-consciousness) are always performative which reshape our referential system to make social environment more inclusive. In Zizek, we see his reworking over the idea of ‘between two deaths,’ in which the subject persistently acts in a way that is not acknowledged by the Symbolic order (Wittgenstein: there is no private language), and eventually brings new order of things into this intersubjective existence.

For the long list above, I wish to adopt a division of good and bad which is moderately clear already. In our discussion of historiography as well, we see the result of the deployment of life in opposition to history is that life somehow, acting in disruptive, de- subjectivized way, gives a positive new order of things that should be praised. Here in political and social theories, we can see the prototype of opposition between life and history emerging. On the one hand, an element represents norm, order, consolidation, and generally how things are and rules ought to be followed (les us call this ‘history’). On the other hand, an opposite element represents disruption, creation, discontinuity, reterritorialization, etc. (let us call this ‘life’). This opposition is already beyond the simple structuralist opposition since the fact that actions can affect the system is evident (we have feedback loop, in cybernetical terms). However, it seems to me this opposition is still over- simplified.

If we frame them in the language of Kant, we know theory and action belong to different realms of existence. We as human, according to Kant, always exists in both the noumenal and the phenomenal worlds. Human experiences things in the phenomenal world, in which experiences are processed by our mental faculties such as transcendental aesthetics (space and time) and transcendental logic (twelve categories and derived concepts) which gives the form of cognition. Our actions, nevertheless, acts directly in the noumenal world which is populated by things-in-themselves. It is precisely this division into different worlds that define human as human, for if our actions are, too, in the phenomenal world, then they will be subjected to rules such as causality which externally determines in the course of time, and if our cognition are in the noumenal world which touches the things-in-themselves without mediations, then we become God, that is to say, we obtain directly the transcendental truth outside space and time and the categories, which includes the normativity/prescriptivity of our action, so we are again determined, not in the sense of causal determinism, but some weird variations of theological determinism.

According to Kant, we derived our principles of actions, the Categorical Imperative, via pure practical reason. These laws of morality are regulative in the sense that they define the limit of what we ought or ought not to do given the circumstances. The above lists of figures and their theories are such types of laws. As in my formulation, the theories mentioned can be coined in the form of a relatively simple opposition between life and history, in which life is praised and history is debased. In the Elements of Philosophy of Rights , Hegel identified the notion of freedom to be central yet radically different from the Kantian one. If Kant’s moral laws are regulative, we can say Hegel’s laws are constitutive , in that they are embodied in the inherent structure of state and our civil society. While Kant’s Imperative are outside space and time, and specified into different forms given the contexts, in Hegel, the laws themselves are context-sensitive (Hegel doesn’t even accept the notion of a noumenal world). Thus, quest for ethical knowledge is grounded in the empirical and the contingent, which elevates dialectically in the immanent construction and destruction of the configuration of our world.

Going back to the contemporary thinkers mentioned (let us call them disruptive thinkers), we see clearly a constructive methodology has been given in each of their case, yet they are quasi-transcendental which can be subjected to the same critique implicit in Hegel towards Kant. Life and history now can be put into terms of a dialectic, in which we know life is the one which disrupts and is unconscious of – unmediated by – the surrounding. History, on the other hand, symbolizes that positive order which structures and consolidates and prevent life from being life. Disruptive thinkers all presume this positive structure (history) which life intends to disturb, therefore, even Deleuze, falls into his own use of Nietzsche’s slave morality, while the Hegelian master-slave dialectic which realizes itself in self-consciousness, in some sense, is in fact the real master.

The Kantian posits that “All acts which concern the rights of other people and whose maxim does not coincide, with their publicly announced aim, are wrong…All guiding principles which need publicity (if they are not to miss their goal) are in accord with justice and with politics...” ( CPR , 39) This is the position is what the disruptive thinkers have adopted. They imagine an ideal unity of thinking and action so that all discrepancy will be relinquished, and the failure of this unity is constitutive to public power structure (the police, the order of Being, the culture industry, the molar lines, etc.). This wishful thinking, however, missed the target in the sense that a constructive order is one that which always already fails such unity; in other words, it is not just constitutive to the status quo but to all external structures whatsoever.

This is the Kantian regulative freedom, freedom which constrained by certain universal imperatives with acceptance of the ideal being always yet to come, a fake amor fati without memento mori , while the Hegelian constitutive freedom is one that always revolutionize the current structure with the current ideal, right on our horizon of meaning.

It does not mean immanent revolution in the sense of always returning the same revolution with the same imperative (“disturb the system!”), but act with a posteriori knowledge that is inducted from the phenomenal world (Maoist dialectical epistemology from On Practice ).

History never simply opposes to life in the sense of paralysis, it opposes to life only when the dialectic between them is not realized. History and life are two faces on the same coin, and the unity is given by the permanent idealization of action and materialization of theory directed by dialectical/historical materialism. The un-self-conscious practices, either as poetical dwelling or blind libido-driven social movements, can not in themselves solve the problem, but only serve as a mental revolution which ignores the objectivity (intersubjectivity) of social reality (in this sense Adorno is somewhat subjected to the same critique he offered to Heidegger).

The Deleuzian-Nietzschean pure affirmation of the master is always a self-affirmation.

What is affirmed is the self-differentiation in time which is an internal difference, while the external difference, difference with others, is considered to be generality, that is, slave morality (mediation). When Deleuze claimed Kant’s transcendental philosophy is not transcendental enough (for the transcendental structure is fixed but not given by something higher and higher which eventually leads to the empirical, thus Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism), we might also claim that Deleuze here is not Deleuzian enough. If we fulfill Nietzsche’s perspectivism to its fullest, are not those who self-denies, from the master’s perspective, slaves? So, the master self-affirms while denies others, and slaves self-deny but affirms the master. We know the master never denies, but here the master seems to be hysteric/paranoid in purely affirming the action taken, too unconscious to the extent of dwelling in the world as if s/he is the only existence, while the slave, too self-conscious to the extent that every action taken is a result of over-consideration or intentional negation of the master. A real master, on the other hand, always affirms, no matter the differentiation is internal or external, qualitative or quantitative, of self or of other. An Übermensch of Nietzsche is not simply beyond good and bad, but beyond good and evil .

All the striving of resistance that posits beforehand an order of being simply exhibit its paranoia or adolescent rebelliousness against the name of their father.

Perhaps the final point this essay wishes to make is one that is somewhat compatible with, but mainly different from, the one David Bates commented on the Schmittian Katechon in a cybernetic age (just to make more connections with the readings in class).

The punchline of that essay was that the Katechon symbolizes something between order and chaos, between disruption of a system and an automatization which diminishes degrees of freedom, a "spirit of the political" that always conserves alternative forms of governance (deferral of disorder). (Bates, 125) In our language, it is something between pure affirmation of life and historicization, namely, a deferral of historicization which also does not entirely negate others. I suggest it is (compatible with) an affirmation of all, of everything. Just like how the Christian God loves his every child, a true savior does not negate what he deems to be fallible. This is not any form of naïve relativism, saying everyone should be equal, just like perspectivism is no relativism. Not only organizing civil uprising showcasing discontent constitute the political (opposing Event to Being), but also, confined or even consolidates the current order, strategically/intentionally being subjectivized and only then reterritorializes the terrain (turning Truth into Being). This is fundamentally where Hegel is different from Kant, and where the revolutionary leaders like Mao and Lenin different from the philosophers (also where Sellars is different from McDowell). Levinas interpreted philosophia not as a love of wisdom, but a wisdom of love. A formulation of clear and total idea (such as the cult for non-conscious actions in which telos are not predetermined but continuously in the making) is not always obtainable before its enactment. More often, truth can be examined only by practicing it. When slogans and keywords were called (involving assemblages, collaboration, decentralization, etc.), what is described is an attack to the ideal in which everything is ordered and placed in perfect harmony with others (a quasi-logical-positivist ideal). So a new ideal has born in which every first-order ideal is canceled (we need a telos that disclaim all telos, conscious actions are the product of capitalism which makes human into homo economicus , and so on).

However, this higher-order ideal is still an ideal plan. Just like the ideology of permanent revolutions is still an ideology, any theory, no matter how many layers of contextualization have been added, it is still void without been put into practice. In the story at the beginning of this essay, we could well analyze the situation to be that our professor was been too self- conscious so that he thought he would be too condescending by speaking to mediate the silence, which was never the case, and too much self-conscious will make hesitation and weird sounds (history over life!). However, my point here is exactly the opposite: This hesitation is beyond necessary. To realize the self is been too self-conscious is different from not been conscious at all in the first place, in which case more serious violence might as well happen for that the actions taken were not in control of the conscious self. Thus, the subject is not too self-conscious that he needs to think twice before action, but it is always necessary to think twice in any given situation. What the critics of self-consciousness did not realize is that their realization itself already constitutes some form of consciousness.

History over life is concerning indeed, but we can concern about it only under the condition that our life is not over history.