La Vitesse du Voyage (The Contradictions)

As a rule, the history of ideas grants the discourse it analyses a credit of coherence. If it happens upon an irregularity in the use of words, several incompatible propositions, a play of meanings that do not fit together, and concepts that cannot be brought together into one system, it sets itself the task of finding, at a more or less deep level, a principle of cohesion that organises the discourse and restores a hidden unity to it. This law of coherence is a heuristic rule, an obligation of procedure, almost a moral constraint of research: not to multiply contradictions needlessly; not to dwell on small differences; not to attach too much weight to changes, regrets, returns to the past and polemics; not to presuppose that people’s discourse is continually undermined from within by the contradiction of their desires, by the influences to which they were subject, or by the conditions in which they live, but to concede that, when they speak and when they hold dialogues with one another, the point is probably rather to overcome these contradictions and to find the starting point from which they can be brought under control. But this same coherence is also the experience of research: it defines the ultimate units that conclude the analysis; it lays bare the internal organisation of a text, the developmental form of an individual work, or the meeting place of different discourses.

One must presumably assume it in order to reconstruct it, and only when one has pursued it for long enough will one be sure of having found it. It appears as an optimum: the greatest possible number of contradictions resolved by the simplest means.