ABSTRACT
To bear the self-evidence of Hegel, today, would mean this: one must, in every sense, go through the “slumber of reason,” the slumber that engenders monsters and then puts them to sleep; this slumber must be effectively traversed so that awakening will not be a ruse of dream. That is to say, again, a ruse of reason. The slumber of reason is not, perhaps, reason put to sleep, but slumber in the form of reason, the vigilance of the Hegelian logos. Reason keeps watch over a deep slumber in which it has an interest. Now, if “evidence received in the slumber of reason loses or will lose the characteristics of wakefulness” (ibid.), then it is necessary, in order to open our eyes (and did Bataille ever want to do otherwise, correctly certain that he was thereby risking death: “the condition in which I would see would be to die”), to have spent the night with reason, to have kept watch and to have slept with her: and to have done so throughout the night, until morning, until the other dawn which resembles, even to the point of being taken for it-like daybreak for nightfall-the hour when the philosophical animal can also finally open its eyes. That morning and none other. For at the far reaches of this night something was contrived, blindly, I mean in a discourse, by means of which philosophy, in completing itself, could both include within itself and anticipate all the figures of its beyond, all the forms and resources of its exterior; and could do so in order to keep these forms and resources close to itself by simply taking
hold of their enunciation. Except, perhaps, for a certain laughter. And yet.
