ABSTRACT
The problem of beginning within philosophy opens out in at least two different directions. The first posits the possibility of a new beginning. A point of departure which by its very nature fails to be included in what preceded it because the preceding is deemed to have failed in the task that it set for itself. This is, in outline, the direction taken by Descartes. It is one that eschews any self-conception of the eff ective presence of the historical in that its own adventure is that which introduces the possibility of history (even though as will be seen it is history as the end of history). The second involves the argument that far from there being a project to begin again-a projected new beginning within philosophy-there is the need to recognise that philosophy has already begun. History can be inscribed in terms of the emergence of the position of recognition: a recognition incorporating its own coming-to-emerge. It is this recognition that seems to counter, countering by both regrouping and redescribing, the posited new beginning. Not only does such a move check what is at stake in the first opening, it repositions the projected singular identity of such positions in terms of an impossible aspiration that would entail either simple particularity or the idiosyncratic. Here in the second approach, and in contradistinction to any simple particularity, there will be a different conception of the singular. It is one in which the singular is singular in so far, and only in so far, as it is a part of but apart from the whole. (The problem of what will henceforth be called the logic of the apart/a part will be examined in greater detail in relation to its work-a work situated beyond the range of intentional logic —in Hegel’s actual formulation of diremption and division within the Difference Essay.20 It should be noted that this formulation occurs in response to what Hegel identifies as the ‘need’ for philosophy. This specificity will in the end be of considerable significance.) The singular thus construed comprises an integral component of the process of diremption. This as the above suggests is in broad outline the Hegelian direction. Here the task at hand involves tracing the workthe move from the outline-enjoined by these two different philosophical directions. In both instances there is more at stake than an implicit response to the question of philosophy’s identity. In moving from the response there emerges another point of departure-a differing orientation-namely the question; the question itself and thus the inherently problematic status of the ‘itself’.
