“If Right cannot prevail, then Might will take over!” How often have we heard this cry of despair? How sensible it is to cry for Reason in this way when faced with the horrors we witness every day. And yet, this cry too has a history, a history that I want to probe because it might allow us to distinguish anew science from politics and maybe to explain why the Body Politic has been invented in such a way as to be rendered impossible, impotent, illegitimate, a born bastard.
...the Greeks made one invention too many! They invented at once democracy and mathematical demonstration, or to use the terms that Barbara Cassin comments upon so beautifully, epideixis and apodeixis. We are still struggling, in our “mad cow times”, with this same quandary, how to have a science and a democracy together