2. The philosopher assumes the voice of the master. Philosophers are not, nor can they be, modest participants in team work, laborious instructors of a closed history, democrats given over to public debates. Their word is authoritarian, as seductive as it is violent, committing others to follow suit, disturbing and converting them. Philosophers are present, as such, in what they state; even if this presence is also that of an exemplary submission, they do not subtract themselves form the duty of reason.

Antiphilosophers, for their part, have an absolutely singular way of placing themselves vis-a-vis these two points. They claim to be contemporaries not only of the truths that proceed in their time but they also make their own life the theater of their ideas, and their body the place of the absolute. This is true from Pascal, “joy, joy, joy, tears of joy,” to Nietzsche, “I am…something decisive and doom-laden standing between two millennia.” From Rousseau, “I have resolved on an enterprise which has no precedent, and which, once complete, will have no imitator,” to Lacan, “I hereby found…by myself, as alone as I have always been…” From Kierkegaard, “I have nothing but my life, and I am happy to put it at risk whenever a difficulty arises.”