INTRODUCTION
Kratè

§1
A brief encounter at Ichijo-ji

"I only have one thing to teach you, and it is this: you are too strong. Do you understand me, Musashi? The way of the sword is the way of man. Being strong doesn't last forever. You are too strong. Truly, you are too strong." Miyamoto Musashi turned pale. Each of the words the monk threw in his face struck him like the blows without count that he had rained down upon others - but he did not understand why they should affect him so. All his life, he had trained to master the art of the sword so that he could defeat and triumph over any who dared face him in combat. He succeeded and became the greatest swordsman in Japan. Yet the taunts of the monk rekindled the doubt that he had smothered one day long ago. He had thought that the way of the katana required him to master every gesture, every breath; he had become the very sword he used to cut down his adversaries. Even as it meted out death, the sword brought life to the one who seized upon its energies and its curves, its plenitude and its void, its beginning and its end - or so Musashi had thought. But with a few words, the monk had reduced this self-certainty to nothing; the unyielding strength the young ronin had learned to cultivate was transformed into a wince - worse: it assumed the face of the very impasse that the discipline of the sword should allow one to avoid. Musashi trained to become Japan's most powerful samurai - but in achieving this, he had lost all access to the way of life to which he aspired. In becoming too strong, he had lost life as such. All this time, he had failed to grasp the most elementary lesson: that life is not a question of strength - indeed: that it is the contrary of all strength. In life, one never wins; in life, triumph is a vanity - as is the greatness one hopes to derive from it.

§2
The Musashi posture

When Yoshikawa Eiji wrote his epic romance of Musashi's life1 and decided to include the encounter with the monk Nikkan, it was as a sort of moral fable. To the furious arrogance of the ronin, he wanted to oppose the ironic wisdom of a Buddhist monk, to suggest that wisdom, if it exists at all, must pass through an examination from the outside, an exterior to our obsessions. But it was a fable whose scope went far beyond a simple lesson in balance and modesty: it implied a general relation with the world. Underscoring the vanity of strength, suggesting that life is in the first instance a defeat, sneering at the possibility of greatness - collectively, these indicate a posture, a physical and mental position. One might say there is a "Musashi posture" proper to all individuals standing up and facing the world as if they expect it to justify itself to them - even if it ends up crushing them just like anyone else. This posture was not exclusive to Japan at the start of the twentieth century, to its aggressive desire for death, or to the spirituality it sought in its syncretism of Shinto, Buddhism, and philosophical thought. It was a posture that could be found wherever issues of truth, beauty, or action were interpreted in the manner of a physics equation, in which it is only the forces that are present that count. Between the Japan of the Showa era (when Yoshiwara wrote) and that of the Edo period (when Musashi lived), a temporal arc embracing all of modernity could be traced. To this temporal arc, one might add a geographical one, starting from Japan and encompassing the entire globe: an arc which would define a zone of the arrogance of strength and the forgetfulness of life. This double arc, it must be said, was, and still is, the one within which we think.

§3
A surplus of strength

The age in which we live - however we understand this "we" - bears witness to the triumph of the Musashi posture. Wherever an equanimity, intelligence, or reconciliation with a world larger than us prevails, the same obsession with strength is in evidence. This obsession, however, does not direct itself upon the means through which humanity might crush or destroy; it is not an obsession with the violence or pollution that has marked almost the entirety of its history. Rather, it is the obsession with the possibility of detaching oneself - an obsession with creating a space situated somehow above the mediocrity of our fellow human beings, their morbid impulses, and their senseless actions. The strength of one who wins every time is a strength whose prime characteristic is that it encounters no real resistance: it is a literally inexorable strength - a surplus of strength. We have, in fact, become superstrong. There can be nothing placed before our eyes or submitted to our curiosity that is not subject to an examination in which we alone are judge, jury, and executioner, and with no possibility of appeal. Nothing can resist us: the greatest work of art, the most heroic action, the noblest enterprise, the most impeccable figure - their superlativeness pertains only so long as we grant that it be so. Each of us, everywhere in the world, whatever our wealth or poverty, our culture or our ignorance, our effective power or lack of the same - we are stronger than all. Superstrength is the contemporary condition of human being - a condition of thought, a way of looking and reflecting, a system of evaluation. Above all, it is a space: a sort of mental gymnasium where, like Musashi, we move our warrior body with the same pitilessness as the ronin felt for his adversaries.

§4
Critique and modernity

One might well ask if there was something new in the human obsession with strength - even dating it back to the dawn of modern times. It is a notable fact, however, that the era in which Musashi fought duel upon duel was also the era in which, on the other side of the globe, a philosophical project was launched which took strength as its explicit object. This was the project of critique, a project of great prestige and certainly among the greatest theoretical successes of modernity. There is even something of a synonym there: modernity could only ever be a critical modernity. From its birth at the end of the sixteenth century, the critical project spread first in literate circles, then in popular ones, until it constituted the fundamental basis of everything that matters to contemporary society: education, the press, politics, the arts, and so on. From theater to design, from political theory to rhetoric, from literature to the social sciences, the critical project constitutes the default system for all thought processes enjoying any degree of respectability. Historians, for their part, have shown the importance of the role it played in their original conception, their development, and their evolution - how it was decisive in opening up an exit ramp from the age of religious, political, and scientific dogma.2 Absent the possibility of critical thought, we would forever be delivered over, bound and tied, to the power of authorities who, in the name of God, the Law, or the True, claim the capacity to distinguish the thinkable from the unthinkable, the possible from the impossible, the sayable from the unsayable. If modernity can be defined as the journey we have undertaken in our move away from dogmatics, then critique must be accorded its due praise. This merit, however, scarcely conceals a difficulty, a problem, a whispering unsettlement - one that ever more insistently arises from the overthrow of dogmatism and the restitution, to each person, of the authority to think. Authority - in other words, strength.

§5
Reason: being right

Critique is the materiel of superstrength. The absolute omnipresence of critique compels this assessment in all domains of the thinkable - therefore also of the sayable, and therefore also of the possible. It is thanks to critique that our gaze, our palate, our hearing, our sense of touch, indeed the whole panoply of our senses, encounter the phenomena within their scope as inferiors - as migrants, as it were, subject to our validation. Faced with a world of things and sensations, it is we who have the power to decide what is worthy and what is not, what is acceptable and what is not, what is beautiful or what is not - even if we qualify our judgment as pertaining "for me." In actuality, it is never merely "for me" that we judge. If we judge, it is for the very fact of judging - it is because our regime of thought is now entirely structured by the logic of judgment.3 If critique is the materiel of superstrength, this is because we no longer possess any other; its omnipresence, within the space of the thinkable, has crushed all possibility of assuming any posture other than that of Musashi. In rejecting the authority of dogmas, the moderns have wholly submitted themselves to an anti-dogma, as one would speak of an antipope: the anti-dogma of reason - the ordering of thought in accordance with the possibility of being right. By defending a new conception of reason, critique has resulted above all in defending the capacity of reason to triumph over everything that is not reason - or, to be more precise, to triumph over everything that fails to conform to the functional specifications that support...