Thesaurus griceianum -- in twenty volumes, vol. ii.

ASPECT Aspect, between Parole, Langues, and Langage v. TIME, and ESTI, JETZTZEIT, LANGUAGE, MOMENT, PRESENT, SPEECH ACT, TO BE. The term “aspect” designates a semantic category of languages, like number, mood, or voice. Traditionally, it is described as referring to the “mode of development” of the process to which the verb refers; more broadly, it concerns the form that this process can take, whether or not the latter is part of some development. This notion is in itself a philosophical object. It appears as such in the history of philosophy, particularly in Greek philosophy, at a time when the concepts that were to serve as the foundation for the linguistic tradition were being worked out. Although the term “aspect,” which was introduced later on by analysts of language, is not part of the philosophical vocabulary, a number of other words that are more or less closely associated with it (ranging from τέλος to “performative”) were at first philosophical terms. The whole history of thought about aspect, which has been marked by translation issues, as we will see, shows that the words in question are untranslatable. However, if “aspect” is connected with the untranslatable, it is in a different way. On the material level, the category corresponds to a network of formal differences that is rather heterogeneous but in which we can nonetheless isolate a kind of “hard core” constituted by forms involved in conjugation (at least in languages in which verbs are conjugated, as in Indo-European languages). Between two marks of conjugation taken from two different languages, there will never be a strict equivalence, precisely insofar as each of them is situated in a different system of conjugation that necessarily determines the value it can have. Moreover, these values run through the whole language: (Philosophie de l’art [1864–69]). The expression became part of the French critical and philosophical vocabulary far more than of the English vocabulary, where the notion of plastic art is generally rare (except, at the beginning of the twentieth century, in the context of the discovery of modern French art and African art). In the Germanic domain, on the other hand, the idea, if not the word, began to establish itself at the end of the eighteenth century: not around “plastic,” but rather around Bild. The plastic arts are the bildenden Künste, about which Thomas Munro observes that “its abstract connotation is broad and vague, coming from a noun [Bild] meaning ‘image’ and a verb [bilden] meaning ‘to form.’ Hence it suggests the forming of visual representations” (Arts and Their Interrelations [1949], 401); the term, given its application to architecture (a nonrepresentational art) and to painting (a non-three-dimensional art), to the exclusion of mobile arts, is supposed to cover the “arts of static visual form” (ibid.). In the Critique of Judgment (1790), Kant distinguishes the bildenden Künste, “those by which expression is found for ideas in sensible intuition” (§51), which include the plastic (die Plastik, sculpture and architecture) and painting, from redenden Künste, the verbal arts, which include eloquence and poetry, and from the Kunst des schönen Spiels der Empfindung, that is, the art of the beautiful play of sensations, music and the art of colors (Farbenkunst). The occurrence of Plastik in this classification signals that the original Greek term is being specialized, considerably enriching the German aesthetic vocabulary. “The Greek genius is the plastic artist [plastischer Künstler] who makes stone into a work of art [zum Kunstwerk bildet],” writes Hegel in his Lectures on the Philosophy of History (1837). The richness of the German vocabulary introduces numerous paths for aesthetic thought to follow (Herder, Schelling, Hegel, Nietzsche, Fiedler) that are more or less closed to other languages. The example of Herder is particularly interesting: in Plastik, Einige Wahrnehmungen über Form und Gestalt aus Pygmalions bildendem Traum, a text published in 1778, his thought is organized around three poles: the generic notion of bildenden Künste and the specific notions of Skulptur (versus Malerei) and Plastik (versus Piktur). In addition to a new paragone of the arts, what is at work here is a promotion of the plastic and of its (tactile) values as a criterion of beauty (“What is beauty?—Ask the blind man!” we read in the epigraph to Plastik). For asserting the superiority of the hand over the eye, by the yardstick of the blind man (Rousseau, Diderot, et al.), the vocabulary formed around Bild is welcome: “A blind sculptor [Bildner], even who was born blind, would be a wretched painter, but in sculpture [bilden] he is not at any disadvantage and would probably even surpass a sighted peer,” or again: “Sculpture [Bildnerei] is truth, whereas painting is a dream” (Herder, Sculpture, trans. Gaiger, 64, 45). Plastik thus goes beyond the classificatory meaning of Skulptur: as posterity was to show (notably Fiedler, Riegl, Einstein), it is the more general modern notion of plasticity (a criterion for assessing painting itself ) that is beginning to be explored here. Refs.: Cassin, B. L’effet sophistique. Paris: Gallimard / La Pléiade, 1995. Chateau, Dominique. Arts plastiques: Archéologie d’une notion. Nîmes, Fr.: Jacqueline Chambon, “Rayon-art,” 1999. Fiedler, Konrad. Schriften über den Kunst. Posthumous edition. Munich: R. Piper, 1913–14. Hegel, G.W.F. The Philosophy of History. Translated by John Sibree. New York: Dover, 2004. Herder, Johann Gottfried. Plastik, Einige Wahrnehmungen über Form und Gestalt aus Pygmalions bildendem Traum. First published in 1778. In Werke in fünf Bänden, edited by W. Dobbek. Weier, Ger.: Volksverlag, 1957. Translation by J. Gaiger: Sculpture: Some Observations on Shape and Form from Pygmalion’s Creative Dream. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. Lamennais, Félicité Robert de. Esquisse d’une philosophie. Paris: Pagnerre, 1840. Larthomas, Jean-Paul. De Shaftesbury à Kant. Atelier national de reproduction des thèses. Paris: Didier érudition, 1985. Munro, Thomas. The Arts and Their Interrelations. New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1949. Riegl, Alois. Stilfragen, Grundlegungen zu einer Geschichte der Ornamentik. Munich: Mäander Kunstverlag, 1977. First published in 1893. Translation by E. Kain: Problems of Style: Foundations for a History of Ornament. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992. . Spätrömische Kunstindustrie. Darmstadt, Ger.: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1973. First published in 1901. Translation by R. Winkes: Late Roman Art Industry. Rome: Giorgio Bretschneider, 1985. Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper. Second Characters, or the Language of Forms. Edited by Benjamin Rand. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1914. Taine, Hippolyte. Philosophie de l’art. First published in 1864–69. In Corpus des œuvres de philosophie en langue française, edited by Michel Serres. Paris: Fayard, 1985. it is not a question of an isolated form but of a whole system that structures the construction of the reference of verbs in that language. As such, they constitute one of the dimensions in which the so-called genius of a language is determined. However, aspectual events are also outside language. They are aspects insofar as they represent values that can be measured first of all in sentences and discourses, that is, where what Saussure called parole is involved, depending as much on the individual thought that the “speaker” elaborates as on the language that conditions this elaboration. On the other hand, they are aspects insofar as they concern a question that involves language generally: the question of the reference of verbs, which is not peculiar to any single language. Caught both between langue and parole and between langues and langage, aspect thus touches in the most acute way on the question of the untranslatable. Everything about aspect is complicated, heterogeneous, and tumultuous: the types of values concerned, the types of forms involved, and the types of concepts elaborated to account for them. This has in part to do with the very notion of aspect, which is to a large extent problematic, and in part with the history of its conceptualization, which is itself singularly tumultuous. Little Parade of Values. When we speak of aspect, it may initially be a question of the different phases to which reference can be made within a given process: thus we distinguish a phase before this process, when it is merely imminent, its advent proper, its development, its completion, and also the situation that results from it. Languages generally have specific expressions to refer to each of these phases (in French, there are various verbal expressions such as commencer à, finir de, etc.). But similar values can be obtained without the mediation of a specific lexical expression. Here are a few examples in French. Il sortait quand le téléphone a sonné (He was going to go out). À ce moment-là, il neigea (It began to snow). Quand elle est entrée, il dormait (He was sleeping). Voilà! Il a réparé la voiture (He finished repairing the car; he did all the work, so it should run). Désolé, il est sorti (Sorry, he has gone out). In addition, alongside these “partial” registrations, in which the process is presented at some phase of its development, there is also the possibility of so-called overall registration, in which the process is presented as having happened, without that happening involving a development: that is how, for instance, the following two utterances in French are opposed to each other, the first presenting the overall process, while the latter describes it as it is happening: — Il répara sa voiture (He repaired his car). Il réparait sa voiture (He was repairing his car). And there is also the matter of the more or less iterative character of the process designated: here we distinguish among isolated processes, intrinsically repetitive processes, reiterated processes, and habitual, recurrent processes. Finally, alongside the question of phases, differences in “point of view” relative to the way in which the process is envisaged also come into play: certain utterances can stage a kind of reference point from which the process is described, and that may be distinct from the moment of utterance. This point of view can be simultaneous with the unfolding of the process, but it can also be external to it, whether prospective or retrospective. The fact that the point of view can be distinct from the point of registration is demonstrated by the following contrast, in which the same process, registered comprehensively in both cases, is envisaged either retrospectively (from the moment of utterance) or from a point of view presented as simultaneous with its completion: Il est entré (He has entered). Il entra (He entered). This variety of phenomena can be explained in part by the empirical diversity of the values that can in fact be marked in languages by procedures that are said to be of an aspectual order. It can also be explained by the complex way in which the concept of aspect itself developed in the history of thought and the history of linguistics. Exchanges among Languages. The concept of aspect developed in an exchange between languages in which it was constantly imported and then re-imported from one language into another, from Greek to Latin, from Romance languages to Germanic languages, from Slavic languages to classical languages, and just as much in the opposite direction, from classical languages to Slavic languages. What is revelatory of this mutual exchange is the history of the word “aspect” itself, which appeared quite late, since it was invented only in the nineteenth century. The word was created in the encounter between East and West, though we do not know whether it was a matter of describing a specific trait of Slavic languages (which were characterized more by aspect than classical languages, or at least more than Romance languages), or of neutralizing what might have been their specificity (by imposing on them a concept of aspect based on classical languages). . For general linguistics, the result is a term used against type: when one thinks about it, the word “aspect” is one of the vaguest for designating what one wants to designate (the mode of development cited by tradition). Naturally, this made the term available for all kinds of reinterpretations: without meaning, it functions as a simple label, ready to cover anything that one might balk at treating under other categories. This explains why the category of aspect was also able to function as a kind of catchall for the category from which it issued, at least in the Western tradition, namely, the neighboring category of tense. Tense and Aspect The boundaries between tense and aspect have been debated ever since grammarians began to reflect on aspect. Species, the appearance of words, the appearance of actions, and point of view: The invention of the word “aspect” to designate aspect. “Aspect” designating a non-chronological verbal category is generally considered a translation of Russian вид by C.-P. Reiff (Grammaire russe), who introduced the work of N. I. Greč (1787–1867) into France. This attribution obscures earlier attestations of the term outside the Slavic domain: M. de Neuville (1818, cited by Auroux, “Le temps verbal dans la grammaire générale”) distinguishes, in addition to the person, number, and tense of a verb, “the aspect, degree, and acceptance”; here, “aspect” designates the duration of the “modification” expressed by the verb, collected in a point or developed to its full extent. The attribution to Reiff also obscures the fact that the translation in question is highly problematic, insofar as the word vid itself can be interpreted as “species, division” (in a classification) or as “aspect” (external: what can be seen; cf. the verb “видеть,”“see”) — and insofar as this word already had a grammatical use in traditions before Greč, traditions that used essentially the first meaning (the second is attested chiefly in certain seventeenth-century Czech grammarians). Finally, this attribution obscures the fact that Reiff himself hesitated between these two values in his translation, initially opting for branche, which is related to a division. He probably substituted “aspect” for it in the 1828 edition. But the last editions written during his lifetime adopt the term branche, and it was the editions reworked by L. Léger (1843–1923) that definitively established the term “aspect,” particularly the 1877 edition, which was long considered authoritative, and which served as a basic textbook at the École des langues orientales in Paris. To be convinced that this translation proceeds from a deviation, if not a betrayal, we need only read Greč’s own text, which is given here in a “re-translation” made by J. Fontaine, in which the author has chosen not to translate vid: in grammatical tenses, that is, in the forms of the language through which times are expressed [in nature], can be expressed a few accessory circumstances through which the meaning and scope of the action are defined more precisely. Forms serving to express these circumstances of the action are called vidy [виды]. The very way in which the notion of vid is used in Russian grammatical discourse (and no longer in the discourse of French Slavic studies) goes in the same direction: “perfective verb” is “ґлаґол совершенноґо вида,” literally, “verb vid completed,” just as “masculine substantive” is suščestvitel’noe mužskogo roda [существительное мужскоґо рода], literally, “substantive of the masculine gender.” A contrario, “substantive in the plural” is suščestvitel’noe VO množestvennom čisle [существительное ВО множественном числе], literally, “substantive with/in plural number.” In the exercises in textbooks written in Russian we hardly find the equivalent of the French “mettre ce verbe au perfectif” (put this verb in the perfective), and Russian students taking courses in Russian language in France generally do not understand this instruction. In fact, for speakers of Russian, the glagoly (ne)soveršennogo vida [ґлаґолы (не)совершенноґо вида] are nothing more than “verbs of an (in)complete kind,” a subset of verbs constituting distinct words and not forms of one and the same word (and if they refused to “conjugate in the present” a “verb of the complete kind,” that is because schoolbook grammar associates these forms with the expression of a direction, the “future”). In other words, this translation has only maintained a persistent misunderstanding between the two grammatical traditions. We see the paradox: the word “aspect,” which is supposed to register the specificity of Russian grammar relative to the organization of verbal forms, and which is supposed to draw a lesson from Russian to challenge categories that issued from the classical tradition, is in fact a betrayal of the way in which Russian grammars conceive Russian grammar. However, another difficulty slips into this operation of translation/betrayal that makes it entirely paradoxical. When the word “aspect” comes to be used to name the division Greč talks about, and also, in a parallel manner (already in Neuville, and to a large extent in the aspectual literature that followed), all the semantic differences, in whatever language, relating to what Greč describes as “the meaning and scope of the action,” to what Neuville defines as concerning “the duration of the modification,” to what came to be called “the mode of development,” and to what has been constantly analyzed since the first descriptions in terms of achievement, perfection, and telos [τέλος], it introduces ipso facto a new dimension into the apprehension of the differences in question: the dimension of “seeing,” strongly presented in vid (formally connected with the verb videt’, “see”), and also in aspect (derived from aspicere, “look at”). Thenceforth, aspect was understood as being a matter of point of view: the notion has been contaminated by the words that name it. That contamination was doubtless fertile for the general understanding of aspectual events in Russian and other languages, making it possible, for example, to introduce a distinction between the form of a process and the way in which the latter is perceived, or between the way in which it is manifested and the way one chooses to see it: a given aspect and a constructed aspect, which may or may not coincide. We can understand, for example, how the opposition between lexical aspect (which is given) and grammatical aspect (which can be used for enunciatively reconstructing the process) was able to develop within such a problematics. However, it is likely that the conceptual imbroglio was much less fertile for the conception that French Slavic studies developed regarding the way aspectual events play out in Russian. The opposition between several categories of verbs governed by regular properties, discovered by Slavic students of Slavic languages, was made into a matter of marking (since the plural is a matter of marking), whereas it is a matter of categories of verbs. This marking was made the exclusive expression of everything relating to the aspectual event, as if in Russian aspect had a simple, univocal expression, whereas in other languages it is mingled with tense and is constructed over a whole sentence, a whole text. This reduced aspect in Russian to a categorization of verbs, and thus to the opposition that the same non-Slavic students of Slavic called, apparently under the influence of the Neogrammarians, by a Latin name: perfective/imperfective. This may explain the recent introduction of a new term to designate in Russian all the events relating to the category of aspect. By a precise reversal, this term is a kind of borrowing from the word that translated vid: aspektual’nost’ [аспектуальнοсть] (aspectuality), introduced by A. Bondarko (“Contribution to the problematic of semantic-functional categories”) and covering phenomena manifesting themselves in various ways in utterances and texts. Refs.: Archaimbault, Sylvie. Préhistoire de l’aspect verbal. Paris: CNRS, 1999. Auroux, Sylvain. “Le temps verbal dans la grammaire générale.” In Hommages à Jean-Toussaint Desanti, 55–84. Mauvezin, Fr.: TER, 1991. Bondarko, Aleksandr Vladimirovič. “K problematike funkcinonal’nosemantičeskix kategorij (glagol’nyj vid aspektual’nost v rsskom jazyke) [Contribution to the problematic of semantic-functional categories (verbal aspect and aspectuality)].” Voprosy jazykoznanija 2 (1967). . Functional Grammar: A Field Approach. Translated by I. S. Chulaki. Amsterdam: J. Benjamins, 1991. Fontaine, Jacqueline. Grammaire du texte et aspect du verbe en russe contemporain. IES, 1983. Greč, Nicolaj Ivanovic. Praticeskaja russkaja grammatika. St. Petersburg, 1827. L’Hermitte, René. “Les premiers grammairiens techques et la notion d’aspect verbal.” Revue des études slaves 40, no. 3 (1988): 543–47. Richardson, Kylie. Case and Aspect in Slavic. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. Reiff, Charles. Grammaire russe. Edited by E. Guilmoto. 2nd ed., 1851; 6th ed. [without an indication of a date, after 1878]. Unbegaun, Boris Ottokar. Russian Grammar. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960. 2 The emergence of temporal and aspectual categories in the Greek grammatical tradition: How the Greek grammarian understood aspect without knowing how, or wanting, to isolate it from tense Adopting a classification and a vocabulary that he owes to Plato, Aristotle (Poetics, 20.1457a10–18; De interpretatione, 2–3,16a 19f., 16b 6f.) opposes the “verb” rhêma [ῥῆμα] to the “noun” ὄνομα by a distinctive trait, the ability to “signify time as well” (ῥῆμα ἐστι τὸ πϱοσημαῖνον χϱόνον) (De int., 2–3.16b6). As an example, he opposes βαδίζει, “he walks,” which “also signifies present time (τὸν παϱόντα χϱόνον),” to bebadiken [βεϐάδιϰεν], “he walked,” which also signifies “the past” (τὸν παϱεληλυθότα) (Poetics, 1457a17). Of these initial definitions, grammarians adopted only the idea that the inflectional paradigms of the Greek verb are “times,” χϱόνοι, which they named using nominalized adjectives in the masculine (the implied term chronos is masculine), several of which designated, in common usage, divisions of time: for instance, enestôs [ἐνεστώς], “present,” and mellôn [μέλλων], “future.” If no paradigm is called “past,” that is because for referring to the past Greek had several paradigms, each of which was to receive its own label, but none of which could claim for itself alone the name of “past.” Here we touch upon a crucial point: what difference could there have been between the different “times” of the past? It seems that the Stoics raised this problem, and more generally recognized that the different “times” of the verb had complex meanings, in which chronology with respect to the present was not the only factor. A scholia on Dionysius Thrax’s Tekhnê tells us that for the four “times” that the grammarians (and following them, we ourselves) called respectively present (ἐνεστώς), imperfect (παϱατατιϰός), perfect (παϱαϰείμενος; literally, “adjacent”), and pluperfect (ὑπεϱσυντελιϰός), the Stoics used the following “double” designations: present extensive (ἐνεστὼς παϱατατιϰός), past extensive (παϱῳχημένος παϱατατιϰός), present perfective (ἐνεστὼς συντελιϰός), and past perfective (parôichêmenos suntelikos [παϱῳχημένος συντελιϰός]). Whatever one thinks of the Stoic theory of time that is in the background of these designations (and the question remains very controversial), it is hard not to admit that the second term of each double designation resembles an aspectual designation. In other words, whereas Aristotle saw badizei and bebadiken as illustrating an opposition between the present and the past, the Stoics saw in it an opposition between presents, between extension and achievement—something like “he is now walking” vs. “he has now finished his walk.” Among the Alexandrian grammarians, as we have seen, “times” were given simple designations which, in two cases out of four, can result from a simplification of the Stoic designations: present extensive→present, past extensive→extensive; whereas in the other two cases, a different term is used: adjacent (the Stoic present perfective) and pluperfect (the Stoic past perfective). Thus any suggestion that the four “times” (of the indicative) concerned might involve a complex temporalaspectual idea disappeared from the terminology. Does that mean that the grammarians had lost all sensitivity to aspectuality? Not really, but it does seem that they resisted giving it an autonomous status that was dissociated from temporality. This resistance is manifested in a particularly clear way in two passages in Apollonius (Syntax, 3, §100 and 102). Examining the difference introduced in utterances in the optative of wish (§100) and the imperative (§102) by the variation of the verbal theme—the “present” theme vs. the “aorist” theme — Apollonius notes that the present theme implies the idea of extension (παϱάτασις), and the aorist theme the idea of achievement (sunteleia [συντέλεια]), for example, graphe [γϱάφε] (present), “continues to write,” vs. grapson [γϱάψον], “finishes writing”; but, commenting on the wish formula he attributes to Agamemnon (eitheporthêsaimi (aor.) tên Ilion [εἴθεποϱθήσαιμι (aor.) τὴν ῎Іλιον]) ([I wish] I could complete the siege of Troy), he glosses it by saying that the wish here is literally aimed at “the past and the finished in time (to parôichêmenon kai sunteles tou chronou [τὸ παϱῳχημένον ϰαὶ συντελὲς τοῦ χϱόνου]),” as if the aspectual notion of the perfective could not, in his view, be isolated from the temporal notion of the past. This example shows how the Greek grammarian both “understands” perfectly the expression of aspectuality in his language, and nonetheless presents a “deficient description” of it because he is unable to isolate aspectuality and temporality conceptually. We can also understand why the grammarians abandoned the double designations that reflected the Stoic point of view in which the expression of tense and the expression of aspect were combined, in favor of a more poorly motivated simple designation, the four “times” of the indicative mentioned above. As for the values that they associated with these “times” in their descriptions of them, even the explanations of the scholiast who cites Stoic terminology lead us to think that they could all be formulated in temporal terms, the four “times” envisaged being simply arranged on a chronological scale going from the oldest (the pluperfect, distant past) to the most present (the present, the time of action still full of the future), via the (continued) the present progressive and the simple present, in particular, with the performative values that the latter can have. The question of the moment—instant, interval, but also point of advent (see MOMENT)—is also shaped by the forms of language, by the different presents on the one hand, and by the aorists on the other—when they ignore duration (“il pleuvra” [it is going to rain]), when they accept duration (“il plut pendant trois jours” [it rained for three days]), and when they say what occurred (“il neigea” [it snowed]). We can understand, then, why the categories of aspect and tense have been connected throughout the history of linguistics. This may result from a confusion on the part of the describers, who are incapable of truly conceptualizing an autonomous aspectual category. But this confusion is also inevitable because tense is haunted by questions of aspect. Grammatical Aspect and Lexical Aspect. Although it is inseparable from the temporal question, aspect is distinct from tense in its strongly lexical dimension: in particular, there is the question of how the process is instantiated and the form it can be given. This depends first of all on the type of verbal lexeme involved, and the semantic modalities of the configuration of its reference, whence the necessity of considering alongside so-called grammatical aspect an aspect that is properly lexical. In the inventory of aspectual facts we have tried to draw up, we did not distinguish a priori between lexical aspect and grammatical aspect. The boundary between them is not absolutely clear, whether from one language to another or within a single language, when similar aspectual configurations might sometimes be attached to oppositions between lexical units constructed with the help of conjugation or through the arrangement of different lexical units within an utterance. Nonetheless, distinctions like those that oppose finalized processes and nonfinalized processes, or those that concern the more or less limited, or more or less intrinsically iterative, character of the process seem at first to correspond to types of processes that are defined lexically. These different dichotomies can refer to types of verbs, distinguishing on the lexical level through the more or less finalized, more or less factual or punctual character of the processes to which they refer. Thus there is a lexical dimension to the aspectual problematics. Depending on the theory, three, four, or two major categories of process can be enumerated on the lexical level. The classification is based on distinctions that are for the most part borrowed from Aristotle, and in particular from a text that was always to serve as a reference point for theories of However, these boundaries are quite porous, some facts being attributed indiscriminately to one category or the other, and the notions themselves sometimes being defined in equivalent ways. Thus in characterizing aspect, grammarians often speak of a temporality internal to the process. As for temporal categories, it is as if they were haunted by the aspectual question. It is generally acknowledged that the linguistic category of tense is organized into three periods around an origin, the present, and that this origin determines the past, the present, and the future tenses. Such a conception of linguistic tense is debatable. First of all, there are linguistic forms whose interpretation appears to be unaware of both the problematics of origin and the structure of the periods thus asymmetrically constituted (the past is established, while the future is virtual). This is the case, for example, with generic utterances. It is also one of the things involved in the category the Stoics isolated and described as the aorist: a form whose value is supposed to be to refer to a moment taken in an indeterminate relation (a-oristos [ἀ-όϱιστος]) to the moment of utterance. In other words, the aorist offers the possibility of not distinguishing periods of time. In addition, it has been shown that the temporal structuring involved in utterances using the aorist was of a quite different order from that described by the past/ present/future scheme: there is no longer an origin separating two periods of time nor the double orientation that that division supposes between retrospection toward a completed past and anticipation of a virtual future. Here the ordering of facts is strictly linear, corresponding to what is described as the sequence of events—unless it is in addition recursive, as in certain cases where the aorist can take on a gnomic value. It turns out in addition that each of the three time periods can give rise to different conceptualizations (see PRESENT) that depend on aspectual oppositions: between a past that has disappeared and a past that has been preserved, between the future and what is to come, between a present that is not limited temporally and a present concomitant with the act of speaking (or thinking, or perceiving), in which it is a matter of what takes place in the simultaneity of that act. Such distinctions occur in languages: consider, on the one hand, the melancholy that can be attached to the French imperfect, and on the other hand the values of achievement that the French passé composé can have; or all the marks associated with the expression of the future (e.g., the simple future of the type “je partirai” [I shall leave] and the periphrastic future called “proximate” of the type “je vais partir” [I am going to leave]); or the distinction made in English between adjacent (the recent past, bordering on the present), and the imperfect (action mainly past, but still including a small portion of future). These four classes continued to be regularly reconstructed and re-evaluated. They seem fated to always follow in the footsteps of another, better established lexical categorization bordering on semantics and syntax: the opposition between transitive and intransitive verbs, with perhaps also middle verbs coming in to complicate matters, and behind them the whole question of diathesis. There is a relation between finalization and transitivity, between the object and the finality relative to that object. There is a relation between the state and the middle verbs, diathesis appearing to be one of the privileged procedures that will cause a verb to move from one category to the other. The fate of this categorization seems thus to intersect with syntax in various ways, to be constantly struggling with the relation between the lexical and the syntactical. Once again, the dissociation in question, that between the lexical and the grammatical, has turned out to be impossible. On the one hand, the so-called lexical aspect cannot be conceived as a fixed given. There are verbs that are predetermined in some way for a reference of this or that type (réparer is cited for finalized processes, bricoler for nonfinalized processes, savoir for properties, and perdre for events), but in general these oppositions are constructed in the sentence, in a given inflectional form, in a given syntactical environment. lexical aspect: the passage on the two sorts of activity in the Metaphysics (Y.6). On this basis, an opposition between telic and atelic processes was constructed by the Neogrammarians of the nineteenth century to elaborate the distinction between perfective and imperfective processes, probably in relation to the Slavic opposition then being theorized. The specificity of the Slavic system is that the aspectual system is organized precisely on the basis of a lexical opposition, insofar as it mobilizes classes of verbs, and among these verbs, relationships of derivation. At the same time, independently of Slavic and any derivational relationship, a typology of processes was worked out that constantly oscillated between ontology and semantics (classes of processes, classes of verbs), and whose touchstone was Vendler’s classification, in which the initial dichotomy of the telic and the atelic is simultaneously reanalyzed, completed (there are also verbs that do not refer to a process; there are also properties), and made more complex (there are two distinct types of finalized processes). Vendler proposes four classes, which he calls “states,” “activities,” “accomplishments,” and “achievements.” 3 Aristotle and telos v. ESTI, FORCE, PRAXIS, PRINCIPLE In the Metaphysics (Y.6.1048b18–35), Aristotle discusses the definition of an action (praxis [πϱᾶξις]). He distinguishes two kinds of activities: kinêseis [ϰινήσεις] and energeiai [ἐνέϱγειαι]: [Only] that movement in which the end is present is an action. E.g., at the same time we are seeing and have seen (horai hama [ὁϱᾷ ἅμα ]), are understanding and have understood (phronei [φϱονεῖ ]), are thinking and have thought (noei kai nenoêken [νοεῖ ϰαὶ νενόηϰεν]) (when it is not true that at the same time we are learning and have learnt [ou manthanei kai memathêken [οὐ μανθάνει ϰαὶ μεμάθηϰεν]], or are being cured and have been cured [oud’ hugiazetai kai hugiastai [οὐδ᾿ ὑγιάζεται ϰαὶ ὑγίασται]). At the same time we are living well and have lived well (eu zêi kai eu ezêken hama [εὖ ζῇ ϰαὶ εὖ ἔζηϰεν ἅμα]), and are happy and have been happy (eudaimonei kai eudaimonêken [εὐδαιμονεῖ ϰαὶ εὐδαιμόνηϰεν]). Of these processes, then, we must call the one set movements (kinêseis [ϰινήσεις]), and the other actualities (energeiai [ἐνέϱγειαι]). We see that the distinctive properties of these two categories of verbs are provided by relations of inference and semantic compatibility between the form of the present and the form of the perfect. In the case of energeiai, there is a relation of inference between the present and the perfect, in the sense that when someone says “I see” we can infer “I have seen.” There is also a relation of semantic compatibility since one can very well say “I have seen” and continue to see. Thus the two forms—the present and the perfect— are verifiable at the same time (hama [ἅμα], simultaneously). On the other hand, in the case of kinêseis, the present and the perfect are not verifiable at the same time. In fact, when someone says “I am building a house,” we cannot infer “I have built a house,” at least in the sense in which the house is finished. In addition, once the house is finished, one is no longer constructing it, which means that there is a semantic incompatibility between the present and the perfect. The term telos [τέλος], which means both “complete action,” that is, “end,” and “limit” (in competition with peras [πέϱας]), plays a crucial role in this opposition. In the category of energeiai, we have actions proper, that is, activities that are complete (teleiai [τέλειαι]) because they have an immanent finality (enuparchei to telos [ἐνυπάϱχει τὸ τέλος]). In the category of kinêseis, we have imperfect activities (ateleis [ἀτελείς]) that do not carry their own end within themselves but are transitive and aim at realizing something. Thus activities having an external goal that is at the same time a limit (peras) do not carry their own goal (telos) within themselves; they are directed toward a goal but this goal is not attained during the activity, but is realized at the end of the activity. And history repeated itself, in the same terms, regarding Slavic languages, with on the one hand the words “perfective” and “imperfective,” modeled on the Latin opposition and imported to describe an opposition in which lexicon and grammar are truly interwoven (since it is a question of categories of verbs, which determine the whole organization of conjugation), and on the other hand the Russian words that are used to characterize the same categories of verbs, and that “signify” the accomplished and the unaccomplished. In the terminological imbroglio, we can once again see the effects of a confusion connected with the inability to acknowledge the autonomy of lexical aspect, or, in the particular case of Slavic languages, the difficulty of isolating the aspectual dimension in the general system of the language. Nevertheless, the same questions, that of the telos and that of accomplishment, are at the foundation of the two aspectual dimensions. They are even so prominent that, alongside the heterogeneous inventory from which we began, we also find, and almost simultaneously in the aspectual tradition, a leveling of all differences in favor of two categories that are supposed to be the categories par excellence of grammatical aspect: the perfective on the one hand, and the imperfective on the other. However, there is also the continuing competition of the “perfect,” another translation of the same “word,” perfectum, designating a category that is not exactly the same as that of the perfective, and which is, for its part, always a grammatical category, never a lexical category: one speaks of “perfect” to designate compound tenses in Germanic languages, for example, of the type “I have received “ (as opposed to “I received”), which corresponds to the idea that the telos is not only achieved, but transcended in the constitution of a fixed state, given as the result of the completion of the process. Two, or three, grammatical categories that are the same and not the same as the two, three, or four lexical categories. It is in the name of these categories, and literally behind their name, that the aspectual descriptions succeeded in being applicable to all languages, conflating all the “imperfects” of all languages (and also the English progressive and the Russian imperfective), all the “aorists” in all languages, and aligning perfects, perfectives, the English perfect, the German Perfekt, the Latin perfectum and the Greek “perfect.” The facts are different, but the words, and the recurrence of a problematics that seems invariable, are too strong. Although it is a matter of conjugations, the lexicon and the relation to ontological questions are too influential. VI. The Aspectual Calculation Lexical aspect and grammatical aspect reduplicate each other. And, in the same movement, the linguistic differences between aspectual categories reduplicate the ontological differences between categories of processes, the former claiming to draw their legitimacy from the latter. And, still in the same movement, metalinguistic differences reduplicate, and then forget, linguistic differences when the term “imperfect” is used in a universal way, to designate a general category of languages, and, at the same time, as a simple morphological label designating forms in a given language. Such confusions between the world and languages, between words and sentences, between langues and metalanguage, Thus manger du poulet (eat chicken) is not finalized, manger de la viande (eat meat) can refer to a property (opposing nonvegetarians to vegetarians), manger sa viande (eat one’s meat) will be finalized, and il mangea sa viande (he ate his meat) is probably factual. On the other hand, the dichotomies in question shape not only syntax but also, to an equal extent and in a way at least as closely connected, the value of marks considered grammatical that appear in the conjugation of verbs: thus finalization is one of the values that can be associated with aorists or perfects, and nonfinalization is in a certain way involved in the characterization of imperfects. Distinctions are no doubt required: imperfects are in general wholly compatible with finalized processes (“Il réparait sa voiture quand on lui a téléphoné” [He was repairing his car when he received a phone call]); then they simply mark the fact that the finality in question was not achieved (at least that is one of the values they can have). If we speak of non-finalization for imperfects, then we must understand it not as an absence of finality, but as the nonrealization of this finality. V. The Imbroglio of Terminologies The fact that the question of the imperfectivity of the imperfect can be raised is in itself astonishing. The word imparfait (imperfect) “translates” (or rather comes from) the Latin word imperfectum, from which “imperfective” also derives (and which it also translates). Moreover, at the same time that the word imperfectum was invented, we see a hesitation that is precisely the one that causes a problem here, between imperfectum and infectum (a nonachieved finality, an absence of finality). The important point is that the whole history of aspectual terminology is constituted by such exchanges. The invention of the words perfectum and imperfectum itself proceeds from an enterprise of translation, in which it is a question of taking as a model, or rephrasing, the Greek grammarians’ opposition between suntelikos [συντελιϰός] and non-suntelikos. However, the difference between the two terminologies is noticeable. A supine past participle, -fectum, has replaced telikos, and hence telos, thereby reintroducing, if not tense (was tense really involved in that past participle?), at least the achievement of an act, and consequently merges with the question of the “accomplished.” In this operation, the Stoics’ opposition between suntelikos (which would thus designate the choice of perfects or imperfects) and paratatikos [παϱατατιϰός] (the extensive, in which the question of the telos is not involved) was made symmetrical, introducing into aspectual terminology a binariness from which we have never recovered. And this symmetricalization, which sought to describe the organization of a conjugation, was then modeled on the distinction introduced by Aristotle (between teleios [τέλειος] and atelês [ἀτελής]), which was not grammatical but lexical. This resulted in a new confusion that is not without foundation because it was already implicit in the montage constructed by the Greek philosophers, with on the one hand the telos used by Aristotle to differentiate types of process, and on the other the same telos used by the Stoics to structure conjugation. ASPECT 55 exist in German, is said to be primarily a matter of discursive construction (with the imparfait forming the background of a narration, and the past tenses forming the foreground of what develops and occurs). More recently, this area has been dominated by theories that situate aspect in a “theory of discursive representations” (cf. Kamp’s discourse representation theory), and try to reduce it to a matter of discursive organization: thus the models currently most discussed make the imparfait an anaphoric mark that repeats an element of the context instead of constructing an independent referent. Once again the relations are inextricably confused: the types of discourse clearly have particular aspectual properties (we have already seen this in connection with aoristic utterances that structure both aspect and tense differently), and yet all or almost all aspectual forms can appear anywhere, in all or almost all types of discursive contexts. Thus we have “foregrounded” imparfaits, which have been recorded and are sometimes called “narrative” imparfaits— for example, in an utterance like “Trois jours après, il mourait” (Three days later, he was dying), where it is a question of narrating a prominent event, and where the distinction between imparfait and passé simple becomes more difficult to evaluate. We also find passé composés in narratives, where they compete with the passé simple: that is why many analysts of the language consider the passé simple an archaic form that is being abandoned in favor of the passé composé. The difficulty is clear: it is hard to attach a given formal procedure to a given enunciative structuration, not only because enunciative structures are supposed to be compatible with several aspectual values, but first of all because the formal procedures themselves are all, more or less broadly, polysemous, their value depending precisely on the context and thus on the enunciative structure in which they are situated. Here again, this is commonplace: polysemy is everywhere in languages. But in this case it affects aspect: it consists precisely in running through aspectual oppositions, the very ones that are also supposed to be associated with some aspectual marker. The case of narrative uses of the imparfait seems to indicate that the imparfait can have different aspectual values, of which some are more or less apparently perfective. The narrative passé composés (for instance, “Il s’est levé et il est sorti” [He got up and went out]) describe the process in its advent and thus do not have the same aspectual properties as those that appear in utterances describing the state resulting from the process (e.g., “Désolé, en ce moment il est sorti” [Sorry, he left just now]). Not to mention the presents, which are highly polysemous in many languages and which, depending on the language, therefore occupy a more or less extensive aspectual terrain. We are obliged to note that aspect is at least partially independent of formal procedures, that it also plays a role elsewhere, in particular, in the enunciative configuration. The Theories. Several models of aspect are in circulation in the linguistic literature. We can divide them roughly into four groups corresponding to four conceptions of aspect. The first group privileges tense. The peculiar feature of verbs is said to be their temporal dimension. Their reference would therefore be fundamentally a matter of situating in between metalanguage and langage, are ultimately quite commonplace. But here the situation is too tangled not to see in it a symptom of what is preying on the aspectual question in this case. If all aspects are related to each other, that is because aspect cannot be reduced to distinctions between categories (categories of words, categories of formal procedures, ontological categories). Aspect is constructed in a complex interaction between lexicon and grammar. There are not as many aspectual categories as aspectual operations. And these operations play a role several times, in the lexicon, in syntax, in conjugation—and may even play several roles within conjugation, producing, for example, perfects alongside perfectives, and then also aorists, and finally simple preterites (the return of tense), in which the conversion to the perfective has operated in a different way each time. Thus these are operations that belong to a calculation. In the transition from the lexicon to conjugations, another displacement is involved. The lexicon is composed of singularities that can sometimes collect, more or less broadly, in categories. Conjugations involve system and regularities: they form paradigms, obey rules, and are constructed on the basis of the differences between them. It is in inflectional systems, and perhaps only in them, if we exclude phonology, that the Saussurean notion of value can find its whole scope and become a veritable formal, calculable object. We have rules, procedures for generating. To move from lexicon to conjugations is thus to move from a logic of categories to a logic of calculation. That is probably the discovery that was involved in the slight shift that took place when Latin grammarians adopted the discoveries made by Greek grammar: choices (of a category, of a theme) are replaced by combinations (of values, of affixes) in accord with regular relationships of generation (paradigmatics) and coexistence (syntagmatics); thus a calculation is beginning to emerge. For this to happen, themes probably had to have lost their operativity in Latin, and affixation, which makes the aspectual value “calculable,” had to have begun to occupy the terrain more clearly. If aspect proceeds from a calculation, then we can understand why it can play a role again and give rise to all distinctions. We can see that with the same oppositions, the same invariant parameters, each language can put into play values that are always singular. Languages do not reproduce, with more or less success, two, or three, or four great, invariant categories; they combine in diverse ways two, three, or four great invariant parameters. Aspect and Enunciative Structuration. To the preceding, a final effect of connection will now be added, in which aspect is plunged into a new dimension, that of the types of discourse that configure the utterance. There is a relation between aspect and type of discourse. The connection is more recent. It was made by Benveniste, who discovered the discours/histoire dichotomy while reflecting on aspectual oppositions (the description of the passé simple and the passé composé in French). Weinrich makes it central to the aspectual question: the distinction between the imparfait and the passé simple or passé composé, a distinction that does not process is instantiated). These intervals can be of variable dimensions, reduced to a point, limited, or unlimited; they can partially overlap or be included in each other. Above all, they are capable of being structured by an opposition borrowed from the topology relating to the nature of their boundaries: these are either “open” or “closed,” the latter time and occupying time, aspect having as its object the internal temporality of processes (the time that they endure), whereas (linguistic) tense has as its object their “external” temporality, that is, the period in which they are situated. The consequence is that all aspectual facts are related to the construction of intervals (the interval during which the 4 Tenses as a system of family relationships in Latin linguistic texts Very few texts on interpretations of tense in the Latin domain remain extant. These texts are very probably all of Greek origin, but we cannot gauge with precision the inevitable role of adaptation and reorganization resulting from the specificities of the Latin language and the critical freedom of the Latin describers. The major characteristic of these texts is that tenses are analyzed in relation to each other, in accord with an overall model of the family relations type: relations among tenses are presented in terms of family relations, engenderment, and marriage. Consider first Varro. In De lingua latina (ca. 45 BCE) he was the first to exploit the two axes, aspectual and temporal, which appear in the Greek texts. His presentation of the verbal system is based on an aspectual binary opposition, infectum/perfectum (cf. 10.48), built on the semantic opposition between the unachieved (infectum) and the achieved (perfectum). Moreover, this presentation is based on the properly temporal tripartite classification praeteritum/praesens/futurum (in that order, that is, along an axis oriented from the past toward the future), in which each term is a participle of the tense it is supposed to represent (praeteritum: past participle of praeterire, “pass before, flow away”; praesens: present participle of praeesse, “to be at the head of,” whence “to be there personally, to attend”; futurum: future participle of esse, “to be”). Varro suggests (but does not say explicitly) that the same tripartite temporal classification can be found in the infectum and the perfectum, which would give us a series with six terms: the infectum would have a present, a preterite, and a future, corresponding in our nomenclature to the present, imperfect, and future; and the perfectum would have once again a present (see XII.B for the problems raised by such an analysis from the interpretive point of view), a preterite, and a future, corresponding to our perfect, pluperfect, and future anterior. The forms that appear along these two axes entertain relationships of engenderment. The point of origin is the present: lego (I read) engenders both the two other temporal forms of the infectum and the form of the perfectum, legi (I have read), which necessarily governs in turn the two other forms of the perfectum. This relationship of engenderment substitutes one order for another. In a first phase, the temporal axis is presented as a realistic progression (from the past to the future), and the aspectual opposition is constructed according to bipolar opposition in which the unachieved seems to be the marked pole in relation to the achieved. On the other hand, engenderment makes the present the source of the past and the future, and it makes the unachieved the source of the achieved, the unmarked pole. This substitution in the form of an inversion is clearly of morphological origin: in the Latin verbal system the form called “present” is unmarked morphologically, which makes the others appear to proceed from it by the simple adjunction of temporal morphemes, just as the form of the infectum is generally (and in any case in living formations at the historical period) unmarked with respect to the form of the perfectum (on the way this perfectum is formed, see XII.B). The form that we would call the present, which is the least marked morphologically, is thus presented as engendering all the others, in accord with a principle (explicit in Varro) of the development of linguistic forms by branching out from a root form. At the end of antiquity, Priscian (sixth century), in book 8 of his Institutiones grammaticae, preserves the principle of this engenderment: his whole presentation of verb tenses is based on the model of cognatio (family relationship), but with notable differences. Like the whole Latin academic tradition preceding him, Priscian retains (Grammatici latini, 2.414.9–418.21) only one temporal series, with five tenses: three fundamental tenses, the present, past, and future, and a division of the past into three tenses, imperfectum, perfectum, and plusquam perfectum (imperfect, perfect, and pluperfect). This does not mean that Priscian is unaware of or rejects the opposition between the unachieved and the achieved, but under the influence of Greek classifications, he uses it to connect tenses with one another, not to account for the fundamental morphological opposition of the Latin verb. The mode of engenderment Priscian describes thus proceeds in accord with principle of continuity: the present includes partly the past and partly the future; the past contained by the present corresponds, if it remains unachieved, to the imperfect, but becomes a perfect if it is achieved, and a pluperfect if this achievement is distant. This effect of continuity allows Priscian to preserve the image of engenderment on the basis of the present, and to indicate a realist legitimation: as soon as the present includes a past element and a future element, it contains, as it were, the embryo of the past and the future. In addition to this family relationship that we could call paradigmatic, Latin texts attest to the existence of a syntagmatic type of family relationship, the cunjunctio temporum, or “marriage of times.” This is a study of the organization of tenses with respect to one another when there are two verbal forms in an utterance. It was in the work of Diomedes, a fourth-century grammarian/compiler (who was undoubtedly drawing on an earlier author), that this study appeared in the most developed form (Grammatici latini, 1.388.11– 395.10). This text, and the parallel passages we find in Charisius, another grammarian/ compiler of the same period, cannot be creations ex nihilo. But it remains that the grammatical tradition abandoned this kind of effort. In fact, properly grammatical analysis was recentered on the isolated minimal utterance that constitutes for grammarians the privileged analytical framework. Then the only original studies on temporal relationships, which Diomedes echoes, were these isolated and largely fragmentary “fossil” texts. Consequently, we see what the four models arrive at: emptying the aspectual problematics of what nonetheless constitutes it, namely, the process, in its accomplishment. A paradoxical effect, when we have said everything except what we were supposed to say. On the empirical level, this leads to theories of aspect abandoning, in just as paradoxical a way, a question that is nonetheless situated at the heart of the problem of aspect, namely, the opposition between process and property. None of the four models truly succeeds in rendering the distinction. Processes and properties can both cover more or less limited intervals, even if there are probably more temporally limited properties than unlimited processes. Properties are by definition qualitatively homogeneous, but processes may be. Properties may even begin, situating themselves in a gradual sequence. Although a point of view is necessary to posit a property, the use of that point of view may involve any kind of process, including procedures, particularly when the latter are the object of a description. The grammatical tradition encounters this question as soon as, seeking to characterize the category of verbs, it repeats that verbs designate actions, and then has to add that they also sometimes designate states and properties. This shows that the difficulty is central: what these aspectual models and traditional conceptions of the verb lack is a theory of what the referent of a verb can be. Thus they lack precisely what Aristotle set about to elaborate, a theory of what he called “movement,” of what in this movement exceeds both time and being: we lack a physics, in which what happens is distinguished from what is true. Thus to deal with the question of aspect we need something that linguists are not, a priori, competent to provide, and which is not their subject: philosophy. Aspect is an subject that is irremediably philosophical. What happens has to be distinguished from what is true. Because languages distinguish the two, and because this distinction is one of the central dimensions of aspect, we must recognize that processes have a qualitative dimension that makes it possible to distinguish them qualitatively from one another, probably a temporal extension, but also a qualitative extension: verbs refer to something that takes place, or does not take place, that is in time, but is not only time. This thing also has qualitative properties. But that is because it does not have only qualitative properties, but is also accomplishment, because the question of aspect exists and develops. IX. The Infinite Reversals of the Question of Aspect This connection between the quantitative and qualitative dimensions in processes’ mode of instantiation enables us to consider various things. It also allows us to account for the reversals to which the determination of an aspectual value can lead, reversals with which descriptions constantly collide. Maria Tzevelekou describes one of these reversals () that is crucial and seems to have determined the whole history of conceptions of lexical aspect. According to her, around the notion of telos, between Aristotle’s founding distinctions and their reinterpretation in the light of aspectual facts, a veritable misunderstanding emerged that led to a literal inversion of Aristotle’s theses. having the topological particularity of including a first or a last internal point, which then represents either the point of arrival or the point of finality. This provides a possible representation of the notion of perfectivity. The second group privileges the oppositions discussed in relation to the lexicon. The matter is based on a rereading of the Aristotelian opposition between energeia and kinesis in terms of qualitative homogeneity or heterogeneity: there are homogenous processes in which the qualitative properties of what is instantiated are stable throughout the instantiation of the process (dormir [sleep] or voir [see] are supposed to be qualitatively stable, and, in the area of inflectional values, a generic present or an aorist is supposed each to be in its own way given as stabilized); there are processes based on a qualitative heterogeneity, precisely because they are finalized, and they thus imply a qualitative change, whether this concerns simply the result sought or is continually manifested during the whole time of the instantiation of the process (réparer [repairing] or construire [constructing] indicate a qualitative evolution aiming at a new state that is differentiated precisely on the qualitative level; a secant imparfait is supposed to indicate an ongoing qualitative development; a parfait is supposed to indicate a qualitative rupture resulting from the instantiation of the process). The third group has already been mentioned: here aspect is fundamentally a matter of the type of discourse and the enunciative configuration. Finally, the fourth group organizes the category around the question of the reference point from which the process is regarded. This involves the double problematic of the registration and the point of view that is emphasized. A matter of intervals, of quality, of discursive arrangement, or of relations between points of reference: it is enough to make one think that one has no idea what aspect is. To be sure, the models are not mutually exclusive. Often enough several of these ingredients are used in the descriptions. Ultimately, we might even say that the tendency is generally to use all of these resources, aspect then being simultaneously a matter of intervals, of quality, of discourse, and of points of reference. That restores some content to it, though the content is rather heterogeneous, but one would thereby have obtained this thesis regarding aspect: aspect is something that mixes diverse ingredients. There remains a problem that still makes these theories of aspect unsatisfactory, even if one considers combining them. In the combination of an interval, qualitatively differentiated zones, a discursive arrangement, and diverse reference points, we cover all sorts of characteristics of verbal reference, but on the other hand, we have said nothing about the entities that have these characteristics, nothing about what thus comes to occupy the interval in question, to receive these qualities, to be ordered in these ways, nothing about this event that a point of view has registered. We have an interval of time, but in this interval something is supposed to take place that is precisely not merely time passing. There is a process that is instantiated, and it is its instantiation that has this or that quality that can be registered or diversely situated in this or that sequence. perfection as a predetermined, stable ontological category: perfection is constructed through diverse articulations of the qualitative and the quantitative, these articulations being not just any articulations, always calculable and explainable, but always and incessantly renegotiable. The question of the telos and perfection is not the only one that gives rise to such reversals. Everything in the dissociation between quantity and quality is perpetually unstable and renegotiable. The fluctuating values of the perfect, the way they reduplicate without reduplicating the perfective, and the shift to which they seem to lead in the evolution of a language (from a value of accomplishment to a value of preterition), are probably another manifestation of these reversals. Everything about aspect leads to confusions. Only a step-by-step calculation of each aspectual value can restitute what will be the foundation of the distinctions involved. X. Aspect, Location, and Determination The distinction between quantity and quality is central to the aspectual question because every instantiation of processes is caught up in the dialectic to which this distinction leads. But that does not mean that aspect can be reduced to the calculation of this distinction. An instantiation is constructed: it also has to be diversely located and determined. Thus there must be two other types of questions, two other calculative elements, in the constitution of aspectual values. First of all, there are the various relations that points of quantitative and/or qualitative instantiation can entertain with the original reference point of the utterance. The category of the aorist testifies to relations of rupture. And the effects of translation often produced by imperfects testify to a complex relation between differentiation and identification that can certainly not be reduced to a matter of anteriority. Second, there is the question that aspectual models hardly touch upon, that of the different forms of iteration or genericity that can be associated with an utterance (with the reference to a verb in an utterance). This implies a model of instantiation, whether quantitative or qualitative, which takes into account the fact that instantiation can be singular, plural, or generic. The same problem arises with regard to Key to this reversal is the notion of telos, which is translated into French by the word fin, which is itself ambiguous (meaning both “purpose” and “end”), but which is not sufficiently ambiguous to render what is involved in telos. The Greek telos can be attained at the beginning of the instantiation of a process: that is the case for energeiai, which are perfect as soon as they are instantiated. Telos designates the alternation between quantitative and qualitative instantiation. Thus it implies that the two dimensions can be dissociated, while at the same time designating the point where they coincide. To use the word telos thus involves referring to both this dissociation and this coincidence. Depending on the process, but also on the points of view adopted, sometimes dissociation, sometimes coincidence will be emphasized. And a process that is a-telic because not finalized will also be telic from another point of view because it has attained immediately its point of perfection (or “achievement,” to use Vendler’s term). These reversals explain the constant misunderstandings surrounding the question of aspect. They also explain the subtle aspectual differentiations that may develop in languages when the telic oscillation, operating at different levels, configures each of these levels differently. They also explain the extensive polysemy of most of the aspectual marks, which can be both telic in some of their uses and a-telic in others. When we consider the way in which the oppositions between perfection and imperfection are constituted through languages, we have to acknowledge that they are infinitely variable. A single process can be considered perfective in one language and imperfective in another. The French verbs prendre (take) and donner (give) are thus described as fundamentally perfective insofar as they both refer to finalized processes; but one of the corresponding simplexes in Russian, dat’ [дать] (give), belongs to the category of the perfective, while the other, brat’ [брать] (take), is considered imperfective, probably because a gift is a gift from the moment it is instantiated, whereas taking implies some delay between the activity it develops and the expected result. Such facts, which multiply when we examine aspectual oppositions in detail, even within a single language, prevent us from considering 5 The reasons for a reversal: Aristotle’s heirs unwittingly betray him In the contemporary literature we find the opposition “telic/non-telic.” It is obvious that these terms are constructed on the analogy with Aristotle’s terms teleios [τέλειος] and ἀτελής. However, their content is reversed. The telic corresponds to Aristotle’s a-telic (a-teles, a = privative morpheme), whereas the non-telic corresponds to the teleios. Thus the term “non-telic” designates predicates that do not include a limit of accomplishment, whereas for Aristotle atêles characterizes the predicates that are fully realized only at the end of the interval of time during which these processes are instantiated: it therefore includes a limit of accomplishment that corresponds to the point of perfection, which is, as it were, delayed. This inversion of the content of the terms used can be explained. It reflects a shift in interest: it seems that the authors who carried out this borrowing and this deviation, which determines our contemporary use of the terms “telic” and “non-telic,” were more interested in the way in which the interval corresponding to the process is constituted than in the degree of perfection of the (perfect or imperfect) actualization of a process during its instantiation. As a result, their central question is no longer the mode of realization (actualization) of process, but rather the existence (or non-existence) of a natural end that delimits the temporal interval. all the inflections of the system. In fact, the situation is still more complex: there are a few constraints that are crucial for distinguishing the two classes. It remains that we find also imperatives, infinitives, and past tenses of the two classes. We do not find the same autonomy in French, German, or English, where, even when it is possible to dissociate two types of formal procedures, they are not clearly autonomous. Thus in French, between the base of the present, that of the passé simple, and that of the “past participle” there are differences of a thematic order: series like voit/vit/vu and even chante/chanta/chanté are probably analyzed more on the model of the theme than on that of affixation, to the extent that the vowel that varies cannot be considered as being external to the base (the oi in voir, and also the e in chante, are part of the lexical base of the verb). But the inflections that can be associated with each of these bases are for the most part strictly specific to them. In French there is no imperative constructed on a base of the passé simple or the “past participle”; and only the “past participle” gives rise to the procedure of auxiliarization that leads to all the system’s forms that are called composées. Even from the point of view of the economy of the systems of conjugation, such a contrast is extremely important. It has been proposed to see in this a difference in the treatment of the relation between tense and aspect: Greek and Russian are supposed to dissociate aspectual marking and temporal marking, whereas other languages have marks associating aspectual value with temporal value. If we grant that the opposition between tense and aspect must be reconsidered, such an interpretation can no longer be maintained as such. Nonetheless, the aspectual operations involved in the two types of procedures are not of the same order. It is the question of the articulation between the quantitative and the qualitative instantiations of the process that plagues, in different forms, both the perfective/imperfective opposition in Russian and the series present/preterite-aorist/perfect in non-Slavic languages. On the other hand, affixes and auxiliaries mark operations related to the determination and location of occurrences of constructed processes—determinations and locations whose effects (in terms of iterativity, on the one hand, and variations in point of view, on the other) correspond to the values that traditional analysts identify as either temporal or modal. Thus we have an (aspectual) calculation related to the quantitative and qualitative dimensions of the occurrence of a constructed process, and on the other hand, a calculation (simultaneously aspectual, temporal, and modal) related to the determination and location of this occu rrence. The particularity of Russian and Greek thus seems to be that they dissociate these two types of calculation. That amounts to giving a real autonomy to the strictly aspectual question of the connection between quantity and quality, whereas in other languages the two calculations interfere. There is another, equally or more important typological difference that intersects with this one, and which this time involves a contrast between Russian and Greek. It concerns the mechanisms at work in the choice of the base subjected to inflexion and auxiliarization. In Slavic languages, this is a derivational mechanism: to move from one aspectual class to another, another verbal the reference of nouns (or rather of nouns taken in a nominal group that is itself part of a sentence, which is in turn part of some discursive configuration). That is, the question of iteration shows that aspect is also a matter of determination, the determination in question operating not on nouns, but on verbs. Aspect is a problem of instantiation. Instantiation turns out to operate in two registers, that of quantities and that of qualities. It proceeds like any instantiation of operations of determination. Through its qualitative dimension it makes use of differentiated points of view that can compete with the speaker’s point of view or simply displace it. And because the operations of determination, quantitative and qualitative, are involved several times (verb, conjugation, syntactical construction, context, discourse), the aspectual calculation produces values that may vary infinitely from one language to another or from one utterance to another. XI. The Question of a Typology of Aspect If it is true that aspectual calculation runs through all forms of the expression of time, we have to give up the idea that there are languages that are more “aspectual” than others, that is, more attached to the expression of aspect than others that are supposed to be more attached to the expression of time. There may be less “temporal” languages in the sense that relations between time described and moment of utterance are less determined. That is often said to be true of ancient Greek. It is not clear that this is pertinent. The ancient Greek aorist has a particularly broad range of values, with major variations regarding the moment of utterance. But that is also true of the French present, and even of the French imperfect, where we find not only hypothetical values (not anchored in time), but also present values (“Qu’est-ce qu’elle voulait, la petite dame?” [What did the little lady want?]), and even references to the future (“C’est dommage, il y avait dimanche prochain un joli marathon à courir” [That’s too bad, there was a nice marathon to be run next Sunday]). As for the French passé simple, it covers a narrower field of values, but it would be difficult to maintain that it refers systematically to the past: the rupture it implies with respect to the sphere of the utterance causes it to be often included in narratives of a fictional kind, for which it makes no real sense to speak of a past (La belle au bois dormant [Sleeping Beauty] tells us about something that has nothing to do with the past other than its mythical dimension). What is taken as a temporal affair is simply the fact that these narratives refer to events that are given as both completed (in a register that is that of fiction) and discontinuous with the present. There is another way of conceiving a typological difference between Greek and French. The system of Greek (ancient and modern) and system of Russian both combine two formal procedures that are largely independent. In Greek, each form of conjugation is characterized in part by the choice of a particular theme, and in part by the choice of an affix. All affixes can, a priori, be combined with any of the three available themes: then we have both imperatives and past tenses or participles in each of the three series. In Russian, there is no theme, but two classes of verbal lexemes. The lexemes of these two classes are compatible with almost First, the case of a word constructed aspectually that can only be specific to a language and its aspectual procedures: it is here that the genius of the language is involved, and what that language alone is able to say. A. First example. Aspects of “knowledge” in contemporary Russian: A perfective knowledge and an imperfective knowledge In the expression “theory of knowledge,” “knowledge” is translated with the help of the de-verbal poznanie, corresponding to the verb poznat’ [познать], “to be familiar with,” constituted on the base of znat’ [знать], “to know, be familiar with” and the prefix po-[no], conferring a perfective status on the verb. The simplex znanie [знание], from the imperfective znat’, would be interpreted here as “to know”—supposing that such a theory is conceived. Nonetheless, there is no bi-univocal relationship between the oppositions poznanie/znanie on the one hand and connaissance/savoir on the other (cf. also Ger. Kennen/ Wissen, which is something else again). Here we seem to find an opposition between an “imperfective” knowledge and a “perfective” knowledge. The originality of this situation is manifest in the articles of the Dictionnaire encyclopédique de philosophie (Moscow, 1983), where poznanie is described as an activity (dejatel’nost’ [деятельность]) associated with a movement from the state (sostojanie [состояние]) of ignorance (ne-znanie [не-знание]) to that of knowledge. Thus one speaks of protsess poznanija [процесс познания], “procedure of knowledge,” or again of čuvstvennoe poznanie [чувственное познание], “sense knowledge” (knowledge gained through the senses), but of sostojanie znanija [состояние знания], “state of knowledge.” Speaking of an aspectual opposition in characterizing nouns, even if they are derivatives—as here—of verbs and opposable in an analogous way to the latter, poses problems. In any case, tradition balks at doing so: it tacitly reserves the perfective/imperfective opposition for forms that have the faculty of governing an object complement. In fact, aspect seems to produce very little among Russian de-verbals (unlike Czech or Slovak, for instance). However, at least in the present case, there is no doubt that the pair znanie/poznanie reflects certain characteristics of the verbal opposition znat’/ poznat’. 1. The values of poznat’ (perfective), or when knowledge becomes an experience Two main values of poznat’ emerge (as lexicographic practice confirms) associated with differentiated restrictions on usage: a. poznat’ istinu [познать истину], “know the truth”: acquire certain, true knowledge This usage has three characteristics: — Poznat’ is indissociable from an (intellectual, physical) investment, from an implication of the subject who accedes to knowledge by himself. Uses in which the complement is located in a teleonomy (the object of knowledge is “to be known”) belong to this class. lexeme is constructed using various affixes, and the lexeme so constructed then has a new semantic value, independently of the fact that it is associated with an invariant aspectual value. The system of themes is based on entirely different principles: it is not a question of constructing another verbal lexeme, but simply of varying the aspectual value of a given lexeme. The morphemes of derivation are singular units of the language; the themes have no singularity and are part of a mechanism of regular variation. The mechanism itself is regular but not generalized. It is in French, where, apart from a few rare defective verbs, all verbs have a present, a passé simple, and a past participle. It is not in Greek, where the absence of a morphology of the perfect is a nonmarginal phenomenon: thus there can be verbs whose lexical particularities are opposed to the construction of such a theme. Themes in French, on the other hand, because they are not restricted, are independent of the semantic content of the lexeme: the regularity of the system has taken priority over the singularity of the lexicon. These differences will necessarily have effects on the mode of calculation with which aspect proceeds in each of these three types of language. In Russian, this calculation appears as a construction associated with regular semantic effects, whereas in Greek it is part of a selection conditioned by semantic singularities, and in French the selection has become as regular as for any kind of inflection. Whereas the Russian aspect is constructed, and the Greek aspect is chosen, we might say that, under the influence of a rule that is blind because unlimited, the French aspect is obtained: it proceeds from a sort of regular deformation operating within the lexeme’s semantic field. That is, aspect is not conceived, and not perceived, in the same way in the three languages. In particular, one of the consequences of the Greek system’s defectiveness is that in Greek aspectual categories can be invented (the missing perfect is invented, a new category is invented), and then be shaped by the genius of a thought. In Russian, aspect has to do solely with the semantic genius of the language, the values that that language invents, and that it reinvents anew for each lexeme: for thought, the Russian aspect is a kind of generator of concepts (see Rémi Camus’s text below on the noun poznanie [познание], which is said to invent a perfective knowledge). In French, the genius has taken on the regularity of a calculatory mechanics, in which nothing is invented, but in which regular effects are produced beyond the lexemes: the French aspect is thus a generator of new points of view on concepts, new insofar as language alone has brought them about. Three different geniuses of aspect: thus we understand better why it has been so hard to export the notion of aspect from one language to another. XII. When Aspect Serves to Conceive Aspect There is an aspectual genius in languages, but there is also the genius peculiar to each form, which can make it untranslatable because it is irremediably singular. There are in fact different ways in which a linguistic event can be untranslatable. This holds in particular for aspectual events. To conclude, we consider three examples, each chosen for its exemplarity, each involving a different form of untranslatability. a kind of “takeover”: knowledge, a nontemporal notion par excellence, is transmuted into an event endowed with a spatio-temporal extension. Knowing becomes an experience. This has in return an effect on the interpretation of the complement of poznat’, of whose meaning it retains—in the context of the establishment of a relation to the subject— only what can be envisaged as an interaction in space and time, the woman becoming a sexual partner, the poverty of the world and truth becoming singular experiences. Thus we see that with poznat’ knowledge is necessarily partial since it is limited to what can be experienced by the subject: the object of knowledge always exceeds what the subject “knows” about it. That is why we find complements after znat’ that are impossible after poznat’: č’ju-to familiju [чью-то фамилию], “someone’s family name,” nomer rejsa na Moskvu [номер рейса на Москву], “the number of the flight to Moscow,” pričinu [причину], “the cause [of],” svoju ošibku [свою ошибку], “his error,” parol’ [пароль], “the password.” These terms refer to objects of knowledge that are incompatible with partial knowledge. 2. The noun poznanie midway between knowledge and knowledge connected with a singular experience The noun poznanie is interpreted in different ways depending on whether it is used in the singular or the plural. In the singular, it is generally given a dynamic, processive value, close to what we have seen at work in poznat’: knowledge is often figured as something mobile, or as a mechanism (endowed with a motor), or as a process, even as a path, for example, in the formula Ternist put’ poznanija [Тернист путь познания], “the path to knowledge is full of thorns.” This processive value denotes the instability of the relation established between the subject and knowledge: the subject does not attain the stable state that constitutes the possession of knowledge. This instability is connected in turn with the actual circumstances of the acquisition of knowledge by the subject(s), with the chance factors encountered, with the difficulties that have to be overcome, with the strategies adopted, and so on. The teorija poznanija [теория познания], “theory of knowledge,” inquires into the actual conditions under which knowledge is acquired. Poznanie also designates knowledge as a human faculty (even if we seldom speak of a “faculty of knowledge”): a faculty manifests itself only if circumstances allow it to do so. Moreover, alongside the negative term neznanie, “ignorance,” there is no more a *nezpoznanie than there is a “nonknowledge” or a “nonbirthday”: failing to achieve the process of knowledge amounts to remaining in a state of ignorance. In the plural, on the other hand, we find a resultative interpretation. But then poznanija [познания] indicates knowledge acquired through what is once again presented as an individual experience, whence the idea of fragmentary or even superficial knowledge, illustrated by this sentence from Turgeniev: “On byl vsegda vysokogo mnenija o poznanijax Dar’ji Mixajlovny v rossijskom jazyke [он был всегда высокого мнения о познаниях Дарьи Михайловны в российском языке]” (he always had the highest opinion of Daria Mikhaïlovna’s knowledge of Russian [superficial, amateur knowledge]). — The measure of actual knowledge is not provided by the object as a concept, but is circumscribed by the investment (in time and space) of the subject; whence the possibility of an adjustment, a more or less exact agreement, between, on the one hand, the direct object as an object of knowledge and, on the other hand, the subject’s investment: “Vy načitalis’ grošovyx brošjur evropejskogo kommunizma i dumaete, čto vy poznali istinu! [Вьɪ начитались грошовьɪх брошюр европейского коммунизма и думаете, что вьɪ познали истину!]” (You stuffed yourself on ten-penny European communist pamphlets and you imagine that you know the truth!). — Attestable complements are terms given as inaccessible to a subject’s knowledge: nevedomoe i zapretnoe [неведомое и запретное], “what is unknown and forbidden,” tajny bessmertija [тайньɪ бессмертия], “the secrets of immortality,” smysl žizni [смьɪсл жизни], “the meaning of life,” real’nost’ [реальность], “reality,” dobro i zlo [добро и зло], “Good and Evil,” sebja [себя], “oneself,” whence poznaj samogo sebja [познай самого себя], “know thyself,” and so on. b. poznat’ plen [познать плен], “know captivity”: to feel and experience captivity Compared with (a), this use is distinguished less by the “concrete” character of the relation it establishes between the subject and the object of knowledge (the subject having been in captivity) than by the absence of teleonomy: the relation is strictly contingent. Thus we find in the position of a complement feelings and internal states (nenavist’ [ненависть], “hatred,” blaženstvo [блаженство], “beatitude,” gore [горе], “sorrow,” bol’ [боль], “pain,” veru Xristovu [веруХристову], “faith in Christ,” etc.); states and processes that affect the subject of knowledge against his will and that will thus tend to be interpreted as harmful (smert’ [смерть]), “death,” nevolju [неволю], “absence of freedom,” etc.); and properties predicated of a term (or a process), generally to a greater degree than one might have expected a priori, and whose astonishing intensity is then emphasized (bednost’ žizni [бедность жизни], “the poverty of life,” čelovečeskoe moguščestvo [человеческое могущество], “the greatness of man,” prelesti osedloj žizni [прелести оседлой жизни], “the charms of sedentary life,” etc.). In these two classes of uses, it is a matter of an immediate, experienced knowledge, and thus of a knowledge that is fundamentally intransmissible because it is inseparable from the singular conditions of its acquisition by a subject. The simple verb znat’ is certainly not incompatible with the experiential value (glossed as “feel” by the Dictionnaire de l’Académie) of (b): On s detskix let znal gore [он с детских лет знал горе] (he has [had] felt unhappy since he was a small child). Similarly, a complement of the type ženščina [женщина], “woman,” is possible in the plural, or with a negative: ni odnoj ženščiny [ни одной женщины], “not any woman at all.” But the particularity of poznat’ is that it can refer to a precise event, a particular experience. Thus po- performs 62 ASPECT of one of its fundamental elements, of the Latin term praeteritum perfectum. The explicit indication that we are dealing with a past tense has thus disappeared, and this is not, as we will see, a matter of indifference. The term “perfect” remains, which has the drawback not only of being a not very legible calque of the word perfectum, but also of leading to confusion with other terms that belong to the same terminological field but cover very diverse linguistic realities: the Greek perfect, the perfective in Slavic languages, the English perfect—which are all prisms that have prevented a precise perception of the values peculiar to the Latin perfect. 1. The specificity of the enunciative location Contrary to the two other Latin preterites, and contrary to the French passé simple, the Latin perfect is also frequently encountered in the kinds of text where reference is organized around the subject and the moment of utterance; these texts belong to what Benveniste calls “discourse,” as contrasted with more neutral texts not connected (embrayées) with the situation of utterance, which he puts in the category of “history,” where “events seem to narrate themselves.” The Latin perfect itself does not determine the construction of the enunciative reference point that structures the representation of the process. In this respect, it differs from the French passé composé, which, by virtue of its etymology, systematically takes the nunc of utterance as its basis; with the Latin perfect, this basis is contextual. It also differs from the French passé composé insofar as unlike the latter, it is not aoristic; an aoristic configuration necessarily implies a break between the process described and the enunciative source, which is far from being the general case for the perfect, even though it can also adapt to this situation in the context of historical narration. On the contrary, in a “discourse”-type context, its factual value is combined with a strong assertive modality that is incompatible with the aoristic break. 2. The specificity of the aspectual registration of the process In a general way, the Latin perfect provides an overall view of the process: translating the inscription of this process in time (its realization or, what amounts to the same thing, its achievement), it also accompanies its achievement until the end, thus leaving the field open for taking into account the situation subsequent to the process in question. This situation can moreover be simply singularized by the fact that the process is no longer instantiated: there is a considerable compatibility between the perfect and negative value. Here is one example among others, taken from the famous chapter on time in Augustine’s Confessions: “Quam longotempore illud non vidi!” (what a long time since I saw that!; Confessions, 11.28). There was a last process (“seeing”) beyond which the contrary (“not seeing”) takes over, and what the circumstantial exclamative measures is this non-p that has succeeded p. Another, commonplace type is what is usually called the “resultative”: the adjacent situation corresponds to the state resulting from the process described. Variations in the degree to which the perfect is lexically fixed can then appear, ranging from entirely set expressions—memini, “I remember” (the verb is defective and has no present form: literally, the form means “I have put into memory”)—to free creations, which are rather rare, for example: “Exarsit animus meus nosse istuc inplicatissimum aenigma” (My soul is on fire to Inversely, in “Biblioteka soderžala obširnyj svod èzoteričeskix znanij [библиотека содержала обширный свод эзотерических знаний]” (The library held a rich collection of knowledge [znanij]), it is impossible to substitute poznanija for znanija because the knowledge in question is envisaged independently of the conditions of acquiring it (the library having as its function precisely to make knowledge available to everyone). Knowing life, living knowledge: The Byzantine heritage. We have seen that the opposition between imperfective knowledge (znanie) and perfective knowledge (poznanie) involves in a crucial way a relationship between knowledge and empirical experience, perfective knowledge (poznanie) being a lived or experienced knowledge. We can inquire into the existing relation between the linguistic pertinence of this lived knowledge and the very special nature of theories of knowledge—of the act of knowing?—in Russia. It seems that we might be able to oppose the Latin tradition, which accords priority to the domain of abstraction and work on concepts, to the “Byzantine” tradition, which emphasizes hypostases: what is in each person is at once a compound of essence (ousia [оὐσία]) and energy (energeia [ἐνέϱγεια]), an experience and a movement of life. We have to acknowledge a clear pre-eminence of the Byzantine spiritual heritage in Russian tradition, even if that pre-eminence also has historical and cultural causes. B. Second example: The Latin perfect and Saint Augustine’s attempt to express time and creation The second example is the Latin perfectum, which illustrates a quite different kind of “genius of the language” since it is described as raising no translation problem, and as finding in each of its uses and each of its values possible equivalents, if not in every language, at least in French. Its genius resides only in the sum of these uses and values, in the field covered, which is peculiar to the Latin perfectum alone, and which might allow, better than any form in another language, the conception of an achievement outside time. Here, the genius of the language is not of the order of what can be said, but of the objects that a language proposes for thought, and thus of what can be conceived in that language. The Latin perfect is not untranslatable in French; its translation is rarely found unsatisfactory. On the other hand, to translate the various occurrences of the Latin perfect, we have to resort to the whole arsenal of French past tenses— passé simple, passé composé, passé antérieur, plus-que-parfait, imparfait—and sometimes even the present. In other words, this “tense” is likely to assume very diverse values depending on the contexts in which it is used. This richness of use corresponds to its morphological richness, and in fact the paradigm of the Latin perfect is based on the syncretism of inherited forms that constituted different, independent paradigms in Indo-European (e.g., the reduplicative perfects vs. sigmatic aorists that we find, respectively, in forms of the Latin perfect such as tegigi, “I touched,” and scripsi, “I wrote,” and also in alternating vocalizations of the root, the suffix -u, etc.). In this context, the traditional name of the Latin perfect is very ambiguous: it is a translation, both set and amputated fecisti et ante omnia tempora es” (Thy To-day is Eternity; therefore didst Thou beget The Coeternal, to whom Thou saidst, This day have I begotten Thee. Thou hast made all things; and before all times Thou art) (ibid., 16). This passage perfectly illustrates the strong assertive value that the perfect can have: for Augustine, it is a matter of attesting the eternity of God, of making it a credo; for God, it is a matter of promulgating the creation of coeternal Being, that is, the advent of the Son. The creative word—though it is a simple word, it suffices to create—is in the perfect. It also shows how one and the same form is able to render the founding act of creation as being both past and yet detached from all temporality, true forever, independently of any experience or any passage of time, and thus escaping human deictic locations that would make it a past that has gone and that has not always been. C. Third example: The function of the perfect in the definitions of energeia and kinêsis The third example is Greek, drawn from Aristotle, and illustrates a third kind of untranslatable: a perfect that is supposed to be untranslatable precisely because it does not belong to Greek, since Aristotle is supposed to have invented it. As we have seen on Aristotle and the telos, Aristotle bases his definitions of the key concepts energeia and kinêsis on an analysis of the compatibilities between forms of the present and forms of the perfect: only energeiai have as their characteristic that the indicative present “goes hand in hand” with the indicative perfect. To support his analysis, Aristotle uses a certain number of perfects, in particular, for each of the energeiai that he has in mind: heôrake [ἑώϱαϰε], pephronêke [πεφϱόνηϰε], nenoêke [νενόηϰε], ezêken [ἔζηϰεν], eudaimonêken [εὐδαιμόνηϰεν], which are respectively the perfects of the forms horai [ὁϱᾷ] (see), phronei (conceive), noei (think), zêi (live well), eudaimonei (enjoy happiness). What is the function of the perfects here with regard to the forms of the present that precede them in the text? How should these perfects be translated? To explain, and at the same time translate, Aristotle’s argument, Gilbert Ryle writes: “Aristotle points out, quite correctly that I can say ‘I have seen it’ as soon as I can say ‘I see it.’ ” The expression “I can say,” which is of course not present in the Greek text, makes it seem that one could in fact use either of these tenses in the Greek language of Aristotle’s time, as Aristotle himself does in the text in question. The truth is quite different: Aristotle’s use of the perfect in the analysis of what he describes as energeiai has nothing to do with contemporary usage of the perfect of these verbs. First of all, the perfects Aristotle uses in the Metaphysics to illustrate energeiai are all, with the exception of heôrake, extremely rare in Greek; it is even likely that he coined eudaimonêke and ezêke for the occasion (the normal perfect with zeî [ζῇ] being bebiôke [βεϐίωϰε]). Heôrake, the only perfect that is regularly found in the texts, never expresses simply the completion of the action of seeing, as it does in Aristotle: its particularity is instead that it continually refers to both the present and the past. For example, in oude touton heôraka [оὐδὲ τоῦτоν ἑώϱαϰα], taken from Plato’s Ion, 533b4, which is translated in English by “I never saw one,” and know this most intricate enigma) (Confessions, 28), via expressions that are being lexicalized—“mihi visum est” (it seemed to me [morally and/or pragmatically] right, hence I decide, or it seemed to me [intellectually] right, hence, I conclude). A third realization of this point of view is the one that makes it possible to express what is over and done with, both achieved and “gone,” hence past: in the text below, this value is not only used but staged by the description of what is “gone” in this case: “Et ipsa una hora fugitivis particulis agitur: quidquid eius avolavit, praeteritum est, quidquid restat, futurum” (Yea, that one hour passeth away in flying particles. Whatsoever of it hath flown away, is past; whatsoever remaineth, is to come; Confessions, 15.20). The final case is the one in which a different process simply comes to occupy the subsequent situation: this is the case of narrative sequences, where the perfective is usually translated by a passé simple, at least if the enunciative fixation is not too marked. We can consequently understand why the Latin perfect would be a particularly flexible and well-adapted tool for expressing the complexity of our perception of time past. Evoking both the image of the achieved and that of what has disappeared, of what is still present or of what has been definitively lost, it stays very close to the lexical meaning of the verbs that in Augustine try to describe the flight of time and memory traces: Quamquam praeterita cum vera narrantur, ex memoria proferuntur non res ipsae, quae praeterierunt, sed verba concepta ex imaginibus earum, quae in animo velut vestigia per sensus praetereundo fixerunt. (Although when past facts are related, they are drawn out of the memory, not the things themselves that are past, but words which, conceived by the images of the things, they, in passing, have through the senses left as traces in the mind.) (Confessions, 23) With praeterire, which recurs three times in this one sentence and also designates simultaneously, as it does in French, the past, what is no longer and what has been, and then with fixere (literally, fix, attach), both the paradox of time and the very diversity of the values of the perfect are described. In addition, we have seen that the perfect showed the situation of the process in time in such a way that one attains and then passes beyond the final boundary of this process, in order, possibly, to be established in the resulting state. Thus it combines the ability to accompany action in a narrative context with the ability to stabilize an achievement: an ideal form for trying to resolve, linguistically at least, the apparent selfcontradiction of the divine act of creation as Augustine sees it, and which is moreover the source of his inquiry into time: “Si enim ullus motus in Deo novus extitit et voluntas nova quomodo jam vera aeternitas, ubi oritur voluntas quae non erat?” (For did any new motion arise in God, and a new will to make a creature how then would that be a true eternity, where there ariseth a will, which was not?) (ibid., 12). We find this resolution realized in the following passage in the text: “Hodiernus tuus aeternitas: ideo coaeternum genuisti, cui dixisti ‘Ego hodie genui te.’ Omnia tempora tu 64 ATTUALITÀ means very precisely “one that I have not been able to see on any occasion (past or present).” This shows that we must not introduce the notion of “saying” into the interpretation of our text (nor, moreover, that of “one can”): it is not what one can say that interests Aristotle here. Why does Aristotle nonetheless use the perfect heôrake to elucidate the ontological status of horai? Because the value of the perfect of the other class of verbs, the kinetic verbs, gave him a very convenient tool for this purpose. The perfect of these verbs faithfully reflects common usage: thus ôikodomêke [ᾠϰоδόμηϰε] (to have built) expresses the state at which the action of oikodomei [оἰϰоδоμεῖ] (to build) has (gradually) arrived. Just as Aristotle could use this value to show that “one builds” does not simultaneously (ouch hama [оὐχ ἅμα]) express achievement, he could also use it to show that “one sees” does in fact simultaneously express (hama [ἅμα]) achievement. In other words: the perfect is employed to show that the complete nature of horai is opposed to the incomplete nature of oikodomei. Using modern terms, we might say that what Aristotle is doing here is showing that there is a “relation of implication” between horai and heôrake, and a relation of “nonimplication” between oikodomei and oikodomêke. His approach is thus very similar to that of recent commentators who have proposed basing the opposition between telic and non-telic processes on tests of implication between propositions (see, e.g., Dowty’s “entailment tests”). As for translation, if the analysis presented above is valid, it would be better to translate horai hama by “he sees” implying “he has seen” than by “at the same time one sees and one has seen.” Beyond what distinguishes them, these three examples have in common that the question raised by the aspectual form singled out is precisely an aspectual question: in poznanie the question of what can be a property (knowledge) is raised when it is connected with a concrete experience that instantiates it; the perfectum Saint Augustine employs is used to challenge the temporal anchorage of an achievement; Aristotle’s perfect seeks to express the perfection of an energeia. That is, what is untranslatable in aspect is the way in which it conceives itself. We should never translate an aspectual form: what it thinks is literally in its form, in what this form literally constructs. Thus we must always translate an aspectual form: translate it literally, in the detours of its form, in order to hear what this form says. Although there can be room for some between-two-languages in the case of nouns, here there is no in-between: one cannot pair a Greek perfect with a French passé composé, there is only Greek and French, the languages one by one—or, outside languages, the invariant question of aspect. Refs.: Apollonius Dyscolus. The Syntax of Apollonius Dyscolus. Translated by F. W. Householder. Amsterdam: J. Benjamins, 1981. Aristotle: De interpretatione. Edited by L. Minio Paluello, translated by J. L. Ackrill. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963. . Poetics. In The Complete Works of Aristotle, edited by J. Barnes, rev. ed., 2 vols. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984. Vol. 2, 2316–3240. Dionysius Thrax. La grammaire de Denys le Thrace. 2nd ed. Edited and translated by J. Lallot. Paris: CNRS, 1998. Ackrill, John Lloyd. “Aristotle’s Distinction between energeia and kinesis.” In New Essays in Plato and Aristotle, edited by R. Bambrough, 121–42. New York: Humanities Press, 1965. Aristotle. Poetics. In The Basic Works of Aristotle, edited by R. McKeon and translated by W. D. Ross. New York: Random House, 1941. Waterlow, Sarah. Nature, Change, and Agency in Aristotle’s Physics. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982. Keil, Heinrich, ed. Grammatici latini. 7 vols. Leipzig: Teubner, 1857–80; repr. Hildesheim, Ger.: Olms, 1981. Priscianus. Vols. 1 and 2 in Grammatici latini. 7 vols. Edited by Heinrich Keil. Leipzig: Teubner, 1857–80; repr. Hildesheim, Ger.: Olms, 1981. Varro, Marcus Terentius. De lingua latina. Edited by G. Goetz and F. Schoell. Leipzig: Teubner, 1910. Benveniste, Émile. “Le language et l’expérience humaine.” In Problèmes de linguistique générale, vol. 1, 67–78. Paris: Gallimard / Le Pléiade, 1966. . “Les relations de temps dans le verbe français.” Reprinted in Problèmes de linguistique générale, vol. 1, 237–50. Paris: Gallimard / Le Pléiade, 1966. First published in 1959. . Problems in General Linguistics. Translated by M. E. Meek. Coral Gables, FL: University of Miami Press, 1971. Binnick, Robert. Time and the Verb: A Guide to Tense and Aspect. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. Bouscaren, Janine, Alain Deschamps, and Catherine Mazodier. “Elements pour une typologie des process.” Cahiers de recherche en grammaire anglaise 6 (1993): 7–34. Bybee, Joan L., Revere Perlins, and Wlliam Pagliuca. The Evolution of Grammar: Tense, Aspect, and Modality in the Languages of the World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. Comrie, Bernard. Aspect: An Introduction to the Study of Verbal Aspect and Related Problems. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976. Confais, Jean-Paul. Temps, Mode, Aspect. Toulouse: Presses Universitaires du Mirail, 1995. Culioli, Antoine. “Valeurs aspectuelles et opérations énonciatives: l’aoristique.” In La notion d’aspect, edited by J. David and R. Martin, 181–93. Paris: Klincksieck, 1980. Declerck, Renaat. “Aspect and the Bounded/Unbounded (Telic/Atelic) Distinction.” Linguistics 17 (1979): 761–94. Dowty, David R. “The Effects of Aspectual Class on the Temporal Structure of Discourse: Semantics or Pragmatics?” Linguistics and Philosophy 9 (1986): 37–61. Fuchs, Catherine. Les typologies de process. Paris: Klincksieck, 1991. Guillaume, Gustave. Temps et verbe; théorie des aspects, des modes et des temps. Paris: H. Champion, 1929; repr. 1984. Hoffman, Philippe. “Paratasis.” Revue des etudes Grecques 96 (1983): 1–26. Hopper, Paul J., ed. Tense-Aspect: Between Semantics and Pragmatics. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1982. Kamp, Hans. “Événements, représentations discursives et référence temporelle.” Language 64 (1981): 39–64. Reichenbach, Hans. Elements of Symbolic Logic. New York: Macmillan, 1947. Ryle, Gilbert. Dilemmas. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964. Thieroff, Rolf, and Joachim Ballweg, eds. Tense Systems in European Languages. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1994. Vendler, Zeno. Linguistics in Philosophy. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1967. Verkuyl, Hendrik Jacob. “Aspectual Classes and Aspectual Composition.” Linguistics and Philosophy 12, no. 1 (1989): 39–94. Vetters, Carl. Temps, aspect et narration. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996. Weinrich, Harald. Tempus: Besprochene und erzählte Welt. Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1964; repr. 1977. ACTUS. Actuositas. It. ATTUALITÀ, ATTUOSITÀ, actuality réalité, effectivité, actualité, réalité effective,Tat, Handlung, Wirklichkeit, Aktuosität ἐνέϱγεια, ἔϱγον v. ACT, and AGENCY, AUFHEBEN, ESSENCE, ESTI, FORCE, ITALIAN, PRAXIS, REALITY, RES, STATO, TATSACHE, TO BE, TO TI ÊN EINAI A set of speculations centered on the notion of the act provided a name for a major philosophical school of the twentieth century: Giovanni Gentile’s “actualism.” This Italian neo-idealism marks a division that reappears within the body of Hegelianism, following from the first revision of the original doctrines proposed by the Young Hegelians in Germany. It is linked to the decision taken by Bertrando speculative content. Distinct from the Gedanke, Denken is in general the act of thinking, the vis cogitans, so to speak. This vis engenders all the determinations, all the states, all the logical elements: it is the soul of the logical process. We can rightly describe all its products as thoughts, in the sense in which they are engendered by it, that is, by thinking as such. [Henceforth,] the true entity of these products will be Denken, not only because they are its products, but also because they themselves produce nothing without the Denken that is immanent in them. (Frammento inedito, 442, 445–47) But Spaventa adds to this a new solution responding to the interpretive limits of the Le prime Categorie della logica di Hegel: [I]n a first phase, thought conceived as the being itself of being does not yet appear clearly, because it appears practically as a purely subjective function: given that pure vision is impossible, etc., I would ask the following question: how can we think the existent? I then retreat into thought, into the elements of thought, which do not constitute concrete thought (the latter being above all and in the first instance a thought of the existent). And I add: thinking = distinguishing (and uniting); being is what can be distinguished [il distinguible], what is purely distinguishable [il puro distinguibile]. Non-being is the pure act of distinguishing: the existent (Dasein, what has become) is the Distinct, the pure distinct. And becoming? Becoming is the distinguishable (being) qua dis-tinction (non-being, simply, which is in this respect both identical and non-identical with being). (Frammento inedito) 2. Return to Trendelenburg and the Young Hegelians’ first reform a. Spaventa’s criticism of the first categories of Hegel’s Wissenschaft der Logik (Science of Logic) draws upon the objections of the Berlin Aristotelian Adolf Trendelenburg (1802–72): What is difficult is not acknowledging the identity of Being and Nothingness, when both of them are the Indeterminate, but rather perceiving and defining their difference, a difference without which Becoming itself is impossible. Most of the old Hegelians have very poorly grasped the difficulty of this position. Trendelenburg was truly the first to draw the attention of both friends and enemies of Hegel to this point, and particularly that of his enemies. Trendelenburg was quite right. (B. Spaventa, Prime Categorie, 400). In chapter 3 of his Logische Untersuchungen (1840), and under the rubric of Die dialektische Methode, Trendelenburg attacked the Hegelian dialectic in its inaugural triad, Being–Non-Being–Becoming (Sein-Nichtsein-Werden). His first question concerns the possibility of a pure thought independent of any image or intuition. That is impossible, and movement constitutes in fact the Vorausgetztes and the Spaventa to translate the German Wirklichkeit, on the model of Aktuosität, as atttualità. The history of ideas that developed was immediately mirrored in a genuine political history: the philosophical apparatus originally worked out by Neapolitan Hegelianism had national reunification as its goal (the Hegelian logico-philosophical program was reconceived as the speculative and political structure of the Risorgimento) before it was transformed again into a speculative apparatus serving the philosophical and political elaboration of a fascist state, for which Gentile himself created the term Stato totalitario. I. Italian Neo-idealism as a Reform of the Hegelian Dialectic and as Translation: The Mediation of Bertrando Spaventa (1817–83) In a letter dated 5 December 1864, and addressed to the Berlin Hegelian journal Der Gedanke, Theodor Straeter, who had just come back from Naples, noted that “if modern philosophy can still really hope to have a future, it will come neither in Germany nor in France, nor in England, but in Italy, and in particular on its marvelous west coast (at Naples) where, at a certain period, the Greek philosophers formulated their immortal thoughts.” In the work of Spaventa, the founder of the Neapolitan neo-Hegelian school, we find an idealism that has been both modernized and renewed. A. The reform of the primary categories of Hegelian logic 1. The pair pensare/pensato (Denken/ Gedanken): Being as an act of thought In his Le prime Categorie della logica di Hegel (1864), where we find no less than fifty-four occurrences of the term atto, Spaventa interprets the inaugural categories of Hegel’s logic: Being, Non-Being, Becoming. For Spaventa, Being is nothing other than a thought that is unaware of itself. Within the act of thinking (pensare) is established, through an abstractive process, the object itself of thought, the thinkable (il pensabile). I can, in thought [pensiero], abstract from myself as thought, as simple act, as a function of thinking, and simply focus on what is thought [il pensato]. Then what is thought is nothing less than Being, the Thinkable, the first Thinkable. (Le prime Categorie della logica di Hegel, 379) In the Frammento inedito (Unpublished fragment [1880–81], published by G. Gentile in his own Riforma della dialettica hegeliana [1913]), after having pointed to the four cardinal points of his great “reform,” Spaventa radicalized his initial reflections: “Being is essentially the act of thought.” Being cannot move by itself, for it cannot move outside identity, whence the necessity of a “logical thought”: The reflection that discovers the deepest determinations in being and non-being is logical thought (das logische Denken) through which these determinations are engendered not in a contingent but in a necessary manner. The Gedanke is thought, we may even say— with or without pleonasm—the content of thought (Gedankeninhalt), or, as the translator puts it, the of “form”; that is the axis of the passage from the Phenomenology of Spirit to the Logic, and the key to understanding the intrinsically negative character of Being, and, consequently, its distinction from Non-Being, from the Nothingness that is its explanation, and thus a “more” than Being which then is distinguished from it. If the Being/Nothingness distinction were only a matter of content, there would be no reason to begin with Being rather than with Nothingness— and inversely. But that is not the case, for as Werner goes on to say, Nothingness is more profound than Being, it is the very depth of Being as regards form. Form means knowledge, because knowledge means shape (gestalten). Being begins, and Nothingness follows; it is the impulse for the process (Fortgang) in the beginning (Anfang); now, Nothingness is not process as such, in this form of Nothingness, but process as such means becoming, for only becoming is the beginning. Actual beginning means proceeding, means beginning and process as a single, identical process (Gang), as a return to oneself—which means, as a passing (Übergehen). Nothingness is the immediate precedent of Being. This knowledge is the ulterior determination. That is why we have two forms, that of the original form and that of form; form means distinction. Being and Nothingness are equally distinct, as regards form; for each identity, each content is only qua distinction, qua form, for they are at once development and manifestation. (Logik, Als Kommentar, 45–46) Thus we can demonstrate the difference between Being and Nothingness by taking into account the fact that Nothingness is “interiorization-memory” (Erinnerung) (see MEMORY) of Being, its negation, and as “negating,” that is, “thinking,” already a Becoming: When I say Nothingness, I know more about it than when I say Being—for the latter is something more, it is what reveals itself, tearing away its own veil; for it is naked Being, the spirit of Being, Being in Being. In Nothingness, Being itself breaks the silence in itself. Nothingness is the reflection (Besinnung) [which Spaventa translates by accorgimento, that is, “penetration,” “intelligence-consciousness-perspicacity”) of Being, the opening up in it of its meaning; its look in itself, the point where its originary character emerges. In Nothingness the sacrosanct duplicity of meaning of the emptiness of Being is unveiled. That it is nothing other than Being itself, Being through itself, full solely of itself—which says its emptiness, which says Nothingness. Nothingness is thus the knowledge of Being with regard to its plenitude, to its accomplishment on the basis of itself, with regard to its free action, to its self-creation;—and in the actuality (in der Energie) [= in energeia [ἐνέϱγεια] of this knowledge that moves in itself, Being no longer says Being, but Becoming]. (Ibid., 41) actual vehicle of dialectical thought. “Das reine Sein, sich selbst gleich, ist Ruhe; das Nichts—das sich selbst gleich— ist ebenfalls Ruhe” (Pure Being, self-identical, is rest; Nothingness, self-identical, is also rest). Their sought-for unity could never produce anything more than a “static union.” How then can movement be introduced into these stagnant waters? Aus dem reinen Sein, einer zugestandenen Abstraktion, und aus dem Nichts, ebenfalls einer zugestandenen Abstraktion, kann nicht urplötzlich das Werden entstehen, diese concrete, Leben und Tod beherrschende, Anschauung. (From pure Being, from an admitted abstraction, and from Nothingness, also an admitted abstraction, Becoming, this concrete, life-and-death-dominating intuition, cannot suddenly emerge.) (Trendelenburg, Logische Untersuchungen, chap. 3) In reality, the much-vaunted “immanent connection” (immanenter Zusammenhang) of the system lets us glimpse different fissures, as well as a general discontinuity. The dialectical process, which was supposed to demonstrate the agreement of concept and thing, “stellt im Gegenteil die Entstehung der Sache auf dem Kopf” (on the contrary stands the origin of the matter on its head) (Logische Untersuchungen, 37f., 108f.). Then Trendelenburg goes through, in the categories of negation and identity, the logical means that the dialectic uses to produce, from empty Being, the absolute Idea, through the series of intermediate figures. Thus it is pointless to conceal the intuition that is already there, just as it is absurd to keep silent about the difference between “logical contradiction” and a “real opposition” that can never be attained by a purely logical route. [T]he responses presented by the bravest commentators of Hegel with a view to forestalling this kind of objection have absolutely not convinced me—perhaps that is an error on my part, but I cannot do otherwise than set forth very clearly my thought on this point. I shall nonetheless make a very limited exception for [Karl] Werner and Kuno Fischer. (B. Spaventa, Prime Categorie, 369) b. Here Spaventa refers to the enterprise of the Young Hegelians, first of all Karl Werner and Kuno Fischer, in response to Trendelenburg’s criticisms. Karl Werner, the first “reformer,” replied to the objections in his Logik. Als Kommentar und Ergänzung zu Hegels W. der L. (1841). Concentrating his attention, like almost all his successors, on the first triad of categories in Hegel’s Wissenschaft der Logik as an example of the inability of Hegel’s philosophy to produce movement, he grants Trendelenburg that Hegel demonstrated only the identity of Being and Nothingness, asserting that their difference was only an “opinion” (einen nur gemeinten [Unterschied]). Werner does not accept the Hegelian thesis regarding the “ineffability” of the distinction between Being and Nothingness. The central point is that one should not in any way attack the question in terms of “content,” but instead keep to the level [Thought is] necessary Thought, or Thought in which nothing is represented other than what is Thought itself: its necessary function. (System der Logik, 205–6) B. Wirklichkeit—Aktuosität versus attualità: Translation’s decision In section 3 of the Wissenschaft der Logik (1812 ed.), entitled “Die Wirklichkeit,“ Hegel introduces, in the third paragraph of “Relation of Substantiality,” the notion of Aktuosität: Diese Bewegung der Accidentalität ist die Aktuosität der Substanz als ruhiges Hervorgehen ihrer selbst. Sie ist nicht thätig gegen Etwas, sondern nur gegen sich als einfaches widerstandloses Element. (This movement of accidentality is the actuosity [Aktuosität] of substance as a tranquil coming forth of itself. It is not active against something but only against itself as a simple unresisting element.) (“Die objektive Logik,” Part I of Wissenschaft der Logik; trans. A. V. Miller, Hegel’s Science of Logic) Further on, in the context of the “Relation of Causality,” Hegel continues: Die Substanz geht in ihrem Bestimmen nicht von der Accidentalität aus, als ob diese voraus ein Anderes wäre, und nun erst als Bestimmtheit gesetzt würde, sondern beides ist Eine Aktuosität. So ist die die absolute Aktuosität Ursache. (Substance proceeds in its determination not from accidentality, as if the latter were formerly something different, and were only now posited as something determined, but rather both are an Aktuosität. Thus absolute Aktuosität is cause.) Finally, in the Zusatz at paragraph 34 of his Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, Hegel explains the following: Der Geist ist Tätigkeit, in dem Sinne, in welchem schon die Scholastiker von Gott sagten, er sei absolute Aktuosität. (Spirit is activity, in the sense in which the Scholastics already said of God that he is absolute Aktuosität.) In short, Hegelian Aktuosität (the state of what is “in actuality,” that is, that which has force and density) is nothing other than the manifestation of substance’s own Wirklichkeit, or what constitutes, in the strong sense, the essential “actuality” of a thing—its reality as necessary reality of the self in relation to itself, that is, free. It is a question, in this context, of explaining, against a certain reifying understanding of Kantian thought, that nothing preexists the movement of manifestation conceived as die sich selbst gleich absolute Wirklichkeit (absolute self-identical reality) (Wissenschaft der Logik, 269). While the term Aktuosität appears once in Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s work, it nonetheless is not one of his own categories. It is in response to Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, and in the context of the accusation of “nihilism”” (where the term Through this identification of Nothingness with thought, movement, contradiction and necessity are reintroduced into the interior of the Hegelian dialectic. Distinction thus rediscovers its “effability” in what Hegel calls the “speculative system of the proposition.” Kuno Fischer, the most imposing of the German “reformers,” also lays emphasis on the first categories by observing that already the first one, Being, qua result of an abstraction carried out by thought, assumes “thought in act,” that is, the “act of thinking” (Denkakt): That is why logic begins for itself with the willed act of thought (mit dem Willensakt des Denkens), and for others, who want to construct (and teach) it, with the postulate of the accomplishment of this Act. The postulate says: “think.” (System der Logik und Metaphysik oder Wissenschaftslehre) But Being, qua abstract and at rest, denies thought, that is, it denies itself, contradicts itself, and so does Nothingness, which is not pure absence of Being but its negation, that is, its contradiction. Thus they pass into one another, giving rise to Becoming, where the contradiction is dissolved. Thinking and Being are identical. Thinking and being are non-identical. The identity is explained in the concept of being, the non-identity in the concept of non-being. (Logik und Metaphysik oder Wissenschaftslehre, 194–98) That is the contradiction internal to Being—to the concept of Being, which permits Fischer to explain Becoming without leaving pure thought. Here everything depends on the act of “abstraction.” In the act of abstraction [Akt der Abstraktion], thought withdraws from all external content and every given into its pure activity, thus creating, on the basis of this material, the universal system of pure concepts that produce themselves as necessary actions of thought in the dialectical order. Pure thought contains the preceding stages of the natural and spiritual world as moments that are prominent in itself, and it is thus, by its very nature, full of the essence of things. It is therefore incomprehensible that someone [Trendelenburg!] should reproach Hegel for thinking that acts of pure thought [die Akte des reinen Denkens] (the categories) are creations ex nihilo. (Ibid., §28f.) While Werner was concerned about introducing movement into the inaugural triad by identifying the second category (Nothingness) with thought, Fischer makes the latter retrocede into the first (Being). The 1865 edition radicalizes still further this gnoseological and subjectivist dimension of Hegelian logic by definitively shifting attention from the initial Being/Nothingness relationship to the “unprecedable” (indevançable) Being/Thought relationship: “actualization,” that is, of the movement without origin or end that precedes (logically) all facticity, and which, freeing it from its representative fixity, brings out its potentialities by connecting it with itself as its other. The present author’s hypothesis is thus that seeking to strengthen a radicalization of the “active“ and “actualizing” part of the category of Wirklichkeit, on the basis of a dynamic return of the resources of the neoFichteans, Young Hegelians, and the nascent Philosophie der Tat (through the connected notions of Tat, Handlung, Tathandlung, wirken, Tätigkeit, Akt. See TATSACHE), the concept of Aktuosität, itself radicalized, certainly offered the model for the whole construction leading to the replacement of the master category of Wirklichkeit by that of Attualità. Its radicalization has in particular to do with its privileged attribution to the Absolute as such, namely God (cf. the previously cited Hegelian Zusatz). Let us note in passing that the English translation of Hegel’s Wissenschaft der Logik, as well as the associated critical literature (McTaggart, Mure, Harris), proposing a parallel solution, were also to establish the term “actuality” as a translation of Wirklichkeit. In France, while Eugène Fleischmann hesitates between réalité agissante and actualité (La Science universelle ou la Logique de Hegel [glossary]), André Droz opts for Wirklichkeit-Actualité on the basis of a historical and categorial argument (the Hegelian relation to the tradition of Aristotelian onto-theology, around [l’ἐνέϱγεια], [l’ἔϱγον], and to Spinozism) (La Logique de Hegel et les Problèmes traditionels de l’ontologie, 123, 125–75). Thus the act of translating set the translated text in movement; it is the translating, that is, the copy, that stimulates and activates the translated, that is, the “original,“ by thus providing it a “more-than-life,“ a “sur-vival,“ a fort-leben that is always to come as Life of the Spirit raising/removing itself above Nature (cf. C. Alunni, “La langue en partage,“ 63). This was, moreover, to become the categorial and speculative paradigm for the whole political/logical system of” the “(Italic) circulation of European ideas.” The Actualism of Giovanni Gentile.Actualism is a doctrine from which Martin Heidegger found it necessary to distinguish himself imperatively and explicitly in 1941: “Actualism is the reverse side of Historicism as a philosophy of the pure Act.” A. The act of auto-synthesis Following Spaventa, Gentile takes into account the same necessity of reforming Hegelianism in a radically “immanentist“ sense by founding a concept of Spirit (Geist) conceived through and through as an “auto-concept,“ as well as a synthesis that is through and through an “auto-synthesis.” To speak of dialectic is to speak of autonomy; that is why the dialectical conception of the real no longer accepts the positing of a Logos (of the “Idea”) alienated outside itself—or Nature—but wants a Logos that, on the basis of itself, makes itself an object inside itself: it is spirit as act that ex se oritur (originates in itself). That is what Spaventa approached by positing, in the margins of Hegel’s text, “Thinking” at the generating center of Being, this Thinking that he described as a “great prevaricator.” Gentile mentions that in Spaventa’s Aktuosität is created for the first time by Jacobi himself!) that this single occurrence is located: Was er [Jacobi] von der Freiheit sagt: Wer sie läugne, komme auf eine unbestimmte Aktuosität und Agilität an sich. (What he [Jacobi] says about freedom: anyone who denied it would arrive at an indeterminate Aktuosität and agility in itself.) (J. G. Fichte, Nachgelassene Werke, 3:390) It is, moreover, probable that Hegel himself took this term from Jacobi, and more particularly from the following passage in the Beilagen zu den Briefen über die Lehre des Spinoza: Aus dem Satze: das Werden könne eben so wenig geworden oder enstanden sein, als das Sein oder die Substanz, zog Spinoza die richtige Folge, daß eine ewige unendliche Actuosität der Materie eigen, und ein unmittelbarer Modus der Substanz sein müsse. (From the proposition: Becoming can no more have become or emerged than Being or substance can, Spinoza drew the right conclusion, that matter must have an eternal, infinite Actuosität, and that there must be an immediate mode of substance.) (F. Jacobi, Werke, 4:2, 137–40) In reality, through Jacobi, it is the whole speculative apparatus of German idealism that was thus condemned: the question of substance, of the Absolute’s self-presentation, and their fatal inscription in Spinozism. Although Spinoza does not use the concept of actuositas, the obvious allusion to Jacobi is accompanied by a certain allusion to Spinoza affirming that divine power (potentia) is none other than his essentia actuosa (God’s essence in action) (Spinoza, Ethics 2, prop. 3, schol.). The critics seem never to have inquired into the origin of an act and a translation decision rife with an unprecedented conceptual and doctrinal force, nor into the source of the speculative and “transductive” passage from Wirklichkeit to Attualità. It is as if philosophers were satisfied with a kind of obviousness of the system delivered in its general economy, in the aftermath of its “monumentalization”: Italian neo-idealism, and the “actualism” of Gentile. Although the inscription of this lexical-doctrinal history can be read in the text itself, in Spaventa’s pure and simple substitution of the neo-Hegelian attualità for every occurrence of the Hegelian Wirklichkeit (reality), it seems possible to reinscribe this choice in the Hegelian original as such. Let us note that it is the “intermediary link” of Spaventa’s writings that dominated the whole future of this twist, which is simultaneously translational, practical, and speculative, of interiorizationmemory (Erinnerung) within the “little Hegelian” system peculiar to Italy. It is in fact in the intermediary work of 1867, and in the central chapter of Spaventa’s Doctrine of Essence, that the decision to translate the Hegelian Wirklichkeit by attualità was made. The choice of this topic is not accidental: as the “background” of Being, Essence is this internal alterity that defines it as Being. It is a structuring alterity, the very dynamism of its engenderment, the process of its of Hegelianism as “transcendental dialectic,” and, consequently as absolute immanentism. (La riforma della dialettica hegeliana, 37) It is on this Spaventian basis (and drawing more on the system inaugurated by Kuno Fischer than on Werner’s first reform) that Gentile affirms his great principle that was to “reform” the whole of transcendental logic: the true category, the true idea, is act, act in act, this actus purus in which the “transcendental ego” consists as a eternal positing of self in the other, of self as an other, the dialectical union of opposites, of subject-object. It thus imposes a sort of transcendental concept of the dialectic—which he describes in Spaventa as “dialectic as Wissenschaftslehre” (La riforma, 30)—by positing, at the very heart of becoming, the Being-subject of “thinking thought” (pensiero pensante), “that pure act of thought (del pensare), which is eternal.” This thought or “universal ego” is beyond time. “Nothing, finally, transcends thought [which is] absolute immanence,” and the totality of experience restitutes its process, a veritable productive synthesis of self, or autoctisi. A single task remains: to resolve the object in itself, in the “becoming-act” of thinking, by moving from an analytical categoriality (at the hypostatized level of the res) to auto-synthetic categoriality (level of autoctisi), of the transcendental dialectic of Being as an auto-concept. magisterial work of 1861, La filosofia italiana nelle sue relazioni con la filosofia europea, the author noted the necessity of “mentalizing (mentalizzare) [Hegel’s] logic.” But it was in his Frammento inedito (449) that Spaventa came closest to a “preactualist” textuality: Generally, subjective thought is reflection: Nachdenken (rethinking); it presupposes Denken (thinking), and in this sense is posterior to it. Hence logic, whatever it is, is posterior to the logos: Hegel’s Nachdenken is posterior to Denken, whose secret he intended to reveal. For some Hegelians (Gabler, “La droite hégélienne”), thinking (Denken) is and remains absolutely and eternally thought and thinking in itself, that is, absolute subject: we could also say Vordenken, Vorsubjekt (proto-thought, proto-subject); thought or the human subject, reflection, are Nachdenken; the absolute subject thinks: as for us, we think again. Thus for Gentile it is clear that Spaventa succeeded in glimpsing the principle of idealism as we now understand it, by sapping the opposition between logic (Denken) and reflection (Nachdenken), by wholly resolving the dialectical process, on the basis of Being itself, in the pure act of thinking: whence the genuine liquidation of the transcendent, and the actuation (l’inveramento) [which translates as Verwirklichung—trans.] 1 “Auto-”: “Auto-subject,” “auto-concept,” “auto-synthesis,” autoctisiv. I/ME/MYSELF, SELBST For Gentile, Hegel, whom he regarded as having forgotten the very nature of a dialectical logic, did not achieve a full awareness of the fact that the generating center of the circular movement of the Absolute (thesis-antithesissynthesis) can only be thought itself as a subject that is an “auto-subject” (autosogetto), a synthesis that is an act of “auto-synthesis” (autosintesi). “Auto-concept” (autoconcetto) and “auto-synthesis” thus provide the titles for chapters 6 and 8 of the Sistema di logica come teoria del conoscere (1:74f. and 153f.). Here the prefix “auto-” is used to express the German Selbst, the reflected/reflecting Ego in itself in its objectivization, the “auto-subject”: “Concept” is the thought (pensamento) of the truth objectively considered as independent of the act that thinks it (dell’atto del pensarla). Auto-concept (autoconcetto) is the thought (pensa-mento) of the truth that is constituted in the very act of thinking (pensiero) that thinks. A thinking intrinsic to the truth which thus thinks itself. (Ibid., 2:153) The Self is the Self on one condition: qua ex se oritur, qua identical with and different from itself. Its being is neither simple identity nor simple difference, nor simple unity of identity and difference; but this unity qua creative of itself: autoctisi: a synthesis that posits its terms in their synthetic relationship. (Ibid., 2:81) Autoctisi: Here, Gentile transposes the Greek [αὐτοϰτίσις] to designate thought’s self-foundation, self-creation: There is neither any pure thesis nor any pure antithesis: non-being and non-non-being: but the synthesis, that unique act that we ourselves are, Thinking (il Pensiero). Being (thesis) in its abstraction (astrattezza) is nothingness; nothingness of thinking (pensiero) (which is true being). But this thinking, which is eternal, is never preceded by its own nothingness. It is rather this nothingness that is posited by it; and it is, qua nothingness of thinking (nulla del pensiero), thinking of nothingness (pensiero del nulla) that is integral thinking. The thesis does not make the synthesis possible; on the contrary, it is the synthesis that makes the thesis possible by creating it with its antithesis, that is, by creating itself. That is why the pure act is autoctisi. (La riforma della dialettica hegeliana, 195) The generic correlative of this autonomic character is the concept of “self-consciousness” (Ger. Selbstbewusstsein): the object of the Ego is the Ego itself. Every cognitive process is an act of self-consciousness. Self-consciousness is neither an abstract identity, nor immobility, but precisely a concrete act. If it were something identical, inert, it would need something else to move. But that would destroy its freedom. Its movement is not something posterior to its being: it coincides with being. Self-consciousness is movement or process as such. (La riforma della dialettica hegeliana, 194) too, as the sovereign “Spirit” of which history is the product. In his Philosophy of Action (1842–43), Hess defines the “ego” as “the performance of an act” (see G. Bensussan, Moses Hess. La philosophie, le socialisme (1836–1845), 174). The “I think” is thus designated as the action that includes three moments, which taken together constitute the ego; and the latter is not a being but the performance of an act.” Thus here we have the sequence of the concepts Akt, Tat, and Tätigkeit, which question the Hegelian opposition between the sphere of interiority (Tätigkeit, Tun) and the sphere of real exteriority (Tat). “Action” represents the integrated unity of thinking (Denken) and doing (Handeln). Let us add, still apropos of Hess, this other point of contact that is the goal of an essential alterity of the future, of an irreversible novelty that constitutes the background of this prospective view in actu as a “praxological” reduplication of the contradiction speculative action/ philosophy. Here the Fichtean operator of the Tat-Handlung is still one of those most present. We must also add to the circle of the exchanger the signatures of A. von Cieszkowski, Bruno Bauer, and Arnold Ruge. Let us note the latter’s programmatic imperative: In place of the system of abstract and theoretically absolute development, the system of concrete development now offers itself, a system that conceives spirit everywhere in its history, and posits the requirement of its future at the end of every history. Hegel’s speculative contemplation has to be awakened by Fichte’s active force. (A. Ruge, Hallische Jahrbücher, 1209f.) Disagreeing with subsistent reality, the representatives of the Hegelian Left thus refer their present to the future, a fundamental leitmotif adopted by Gentile. 2. The return of German translation in Italy These attempts to reform the Hegelian dialectic are presented as an effort to translate the results of German philosophy into a language adhering to the actual requirements of the civil and speculative life of the Italian nation. At the same time, this practice of translation was accompanied by its actualist theory. Whereas Antonio Rosmini (1797–1855) called Hegel a “speculative smuggler,” Spaventa developed, through his theory of the “circulation of European ideas,” a general and speculative theory of “translation”/“tradition” by relating different philosophical traditions as contraband, import-export, and then as traditionalization (unless it should be called nationalization). He considered the constellation of German idealism a simple resumption (a pursuit, underground and elsewhere) of a national and philosophical textuality in exile, constituted “originarily” by the purest renascent and modern Italian philosophical tradition. It is precisely this textuality, first translated into German by Hegel, that Spaventa sought to “repatriate” into an “original” Italic space. Here the (German) “original” is already a translation of the translating language (Italian). Through the work of these series of conceptual and doctrinal exchangers we see the constitution of a genuinely European philosophical fabric marked by a triangulation of which the mediator, up to that point absent from FrancoGerman Begriffsgeschichte, is none other than what we would B. Praxis in translation 1. Complex exchangers Gentile always considered Spaventa to be an idealist who considered and valued experience, and whose philosophy consequently had no pure theoretical moment. The gain in the objectivity of knowledge, the very one that can constantly dissolve the ever-recurring opposition between the titular subject of this knowledge and the object that is supposed to make this same knowledge “objective,” is, for Spaventa, a “practical process.” But all that is impossible in the order of pure theory, without practical activity. This concept, lucidly set forth by Spaventa, is, in my opinion, the key to the new, post-Kantian gnoseology; and it is a great merit in our philosopher to have revealed it in Hegel’s Phenomenology, and to have brought it to light. It was moreover one of the most profound ideas of one of Hegel’s German epigones who was very famous but certainly unknown to Spaventa in this regard: Karl Marx. Man can prove truth in praxis, that is, in reality and power, the positivity of his own thought. (G. Gentile, “Bertrando Spaventa,” 111–12) Gentile thus emphasizes the point where Spaventa’s concept, which he shared, of a concrete knowledge conceived as action, intersects with Marxist praxis. Gentile’s “act” will always have to be grasped as practical activity, praxis, that is, as transformative, creative, and revolutionary (fascist) activity (see PRAXIS). This is the site of the greatest density of the translative exchangers implemented by actualism, the site of their speculative crystallization and their historical-political precipitate. What are its fundamental equations? “Actualism” defined as the “philosophy of the pure act” raises, as soon as it is posited, a question concerning the historical-political translation and “traditionalization” of philosophy in general; we must also add the question of what is described, north of the Alps, as cultural or historical hegemony. From the first sequence—the body of texts collected in Gentile’s La riforma della dialettica hegeliana (particularly “The Act of Thinking as Pure Act,” 1911)—to those that were to inaugurate performatively the new era (a new Zeitalter in politics, Heidegger said, confronted with a work entitled Aktualismus, Schellings Abhandlung über das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit) in the form: “Everything is in the state, and nothing human or spiritual exists, and less still, has any value, outside the state. In this sense fascism is totalitarian.” Gentile appeals to the state-pedagogue and his foundational role. (Here we may speak of a certain consequence of Hegel’s Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, which is doubly pegged to a “philosophy of action” [Philosophie der Tat] and a “role of the scientist.” It is noteworthy that both dimensions are largely indebted to a Hegel who has himself been rewritten by the early Fichte.) The translational exchanger connected with the Philosophie der Tat refers first of all to Moses Hess and his European Triarchy (1841), conceived (against Hegel) as a “holy action of the Spirit” and divided into subjektive GEISTEStat, absolutes GEISTESphilosophie, and absolute GEISTEStat, where the true theoretical commutator of the sequence appears, here AUFHEBEN 71 . “Teoria generale dello spirito atto puro.” In Opere filosofiche. Milan: Garzanti, 1991. Essay first published in 1916. Translation by W. W. Carr: The Theory of Mind as Pure Act. London: Macmillan, 1922. . “Il torto et il diritto delle traduzioni.” In Frammenti di estetica e letteratura. Florence: Lanciano, 1920. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Wissenschaft der Logik. Edited by Anton Koch and Friedrike Schick. Berlin: Akademieverlag, 2002. First published in 1812. Translation by A. V. Miller: Hegel’s Science of Logic. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books / Humanities Press, 1991. Labarrière, Pierre-Jean. “De l’actualité en philosophie. Analyse d’un concept.” Les Cahiers de Philosophie 13, special issue on “L’actualité” (1991): 85–98. Mangiagalli, Maurizio. Logica e metafisica nel pensiero di F. A. Trendelenburg. Milan: CUSL, 1983. Parasporo, Leone. “Sulla storia della ‘Logica’ di Hegel. Saggio di confronto tra le due redazioni della ‘Dottrina dell’Essere.”’ Annali dell’istituto italiano per gli studi storici 8 (1983–84): 175–218. Ruge, Arnold. Hallische Jahrbücher. Halle, 1840. Spaventa, Bertrando. “Dottrina del Trendelenburg sul movimento.” In La cultura italiana tr ’800 e ’900: Studi e ricerchi, edited by Eugenio Garin, 76–79. 2nd ed. Bari: Laterza, 1976. Essay first published in 1863. . La filosofia italiana nelle sue relazionicon la filosofia europea (1861–1863). In vol. 2 of Opere, edited by G. Gentile, 407–719. Florence: Sansoni, 1972. First published in 1908. . Frammento inedito. In vol. 3 of Opere, edited by G. Gentile. Florence: Sansoni, 1972. First published in 1880–81. . Logica e metafisica. In vol. 3 of Opere, edited by G. Gentile. Florence: Sansoni, 1972. First published in 1867. . Le prime Categorie della logica di Hegel. In vol. 1 of Opere, edited by G. Gentile. Florence: Sansoni, 1972. First published in 1864. Tessitore, Fulvio, ed. Incidenza di Hegel. Naples: Morano, 1970. Vitiello, Vicenzo. Bertrando Spaventa e il problema del comminciamento. Naples: Guida Editore, 1970. Werner, Karl. Die Italienische des neunzehnten Jarhunderts. Vienna: G. P. Faesy, 1884. . Logik. Als Kommentar und Ergänzung zu Hegels W. der L. 1841. Reprint, Hildesheim, Ger.: Gerstenburg, 1977. describe as the third party excluded from the FrancoGerman Annals: Italy. This system, which is extremely innovative for every contemporary theory of the act of translation, is accompanied by an absolutely pioneering text by Gentile: “Il torto e il diritto delle traduzioni” (“Wrongs and Rights of Translation”) in Frammenti di estetica e letteratura. In 1920, four years before Walter Benjamin published his famous essay “Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers” (“The Task of the Translator”), the founder of actualism had already given a performative dimension to both to what Roman Jakobson was to call “intralinguistic translation” and to Benjamin’s notions of an Ur-Sprache (originary language) or Überleben/ Fortleben (survival, afterlife), while at the same time defending (against Benedetto Croce) the idea of a genuine “poetics” of translation. The necessary condition for such a conception no doubt has to do with the whole complex, self-reflexive history of this translating/traducing of the concept of Wirklichkeit into the performative attualità. It is through the actualization of this deviation that these views of translation and the theory of translation were able to see the light. Refs.: Alunni, Charles. “Giovanni Gentile-Martin Heidegger. Note sur un point de (non) traduction.” Collège International de Philosophie 6 (1988): 7–12. . “Giovanni Gentile ou l’interminable traduction d’une politique de la pensée.” In Les extrême-droites en France et en Europe, edited by Michel Surya, 181–94. Paris: Séguier, 1988. . “La langue en partage.” Revue de Métaphysique et de morale 1 (1989): 59–69. Bensussan, Gérard. Moses Hess. La philosophie, le socialisme (1836–1845). Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1985. Ciezkowski, August von. Prolegomena zur Historiosophie. Hamburg: F. Meiner, 1981. Cubeddu, Italo. Bertrando Spaventa, “Pubblicazioni dell’istituto di filosofia dell’Università di Roma.” Florence: Sansoni Editore, 1964. Di Giovanni, Piero, ed. Il neoidalismo italiano. Laterza: Bari, 1988. Droz, André. La Logique de Hegel et les Problèmes traditionels de l’ontologie. Paris: Vrin, 1987. Fichte, Johann Gottlieb. Nachgelassene Werke, vol. 3. Edited by I. H. Fichte. Bonn: Adolphus Marcus, 1835. Fischer, Kuno. Logik und Metaphysik oder Wissenschaftslehre. Introduction by H.-G. Gadamer. Heidelberg: Manutius Verlag, 1998. First published in 1852. . System der Logik und Metaphysik oder Wissenschaftslehre. Frankfurt: Minerva Verlag, 1983. First published in 1865. Fleischmann, Eugène. La Science universelle ou la Logique de Hegel. Paris: Plon, 1968. . “Die Wirklichkeit in Hegels’ Logik.” Zeitschrift für Philosophische Forschung 18 (1964): 3–29. Franchini, Raffaello, ed. Bertrando Spaventa, Dalla scienza della logica alla logica della scienza. Salerne: Tullio Pironti Editore, 1986. Garin, Eugenio. History of Italian Philosophy. 2 vols. New York: Rodopi, 2007. Gentile, Giovanni. “Bertrando Spaventa.” In Opere, edited by G. Gentile. Florence: Sansoni, 1972. Essay first published in 1899. . Frammenti di estetica e letteratura. Florence: Lanciano, 1920. . The Philosophy of Art. Translated by G. Gullace. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1972. . La riforma della dialettica hegeliana. 4th ed. Florence: Sansoni Editore, 1975. First published in 1913. . Sistema Logica come teoria del conoscere. 5th ed. 2 vols. Florence: Sansoni Editore, 1987. First published in 1917–23.