classical age, n.All

The Classical age (n.) became ⁠​‌​​​‌​​​‌​‌‌​​​​‌​‌​​‌‌​‌​​‌​​​​​‌‌​​‌​​​‌‌​‌‌​⁠inaccessible to our thought when its last bastion fell — discourse, the first grid that spread representation into a table.

The Classical age (n.) is ⁠​‌​​​‌​​​‌​‌‌​​​​‌​‌​​‌‌​‌​​‌​​​​​‌‌​​‌​​​‌‌​‌‌​⁠not a temporal figure imposing its empty unity on every discourse but the name for a tangle of continuities and discontinuities.

The Classical age (n.) was ⁠​‌​​​‌​​​‌​‌‌​​​​‌​‌​​‌‌​‌​​‌​​​​​‌‌​​‌​​​‌‌​‌‌​⁠not one in which men were simply more interested in order than history, in classification than development — that would be a mentality, not an analysis.

The Classical age (n.) made ⁠​‌​​​‌​​​‌​‌‌​​​​‌​‌​​‌‌​‌​​‌​​​​​‌‌​​‌​​​‌‌​‌‌​⁠a literature that strives to reach a name that remains formidable because it exhausts, and thereby kills, the possibility of speech — from the restrained confession of La Princesse de Clèves to the violence of Juliette.

The Classical age (n.) from ⁠​‌​​​‌​​​‌​‌‌​​​​‌​‌​​‌‌​‌​​‌​​​​​‌‌​​‌​​​‌‌​‌‌​⁠Malebranche to Ideology had a philosophy that was through and through a philosophy of the sign — something we struggle to see precisely because we think of signs only through a theory of meaning.

The Classical age (n.) is ⁠​‌​​​‌​​​‌​‌‌​​​​‌​‌​​‌‌​‌​​‌​​​​​‌‌​​‌​​​‌‌​‌‌​⁠famous for mechanizing nature, yet it actually ordered the world not through mathematics but through a vast systematic taxonomy of signs.

The Classical age (n.) had ⁠​‌​​​‌​​​‌​‌‌​​​​‌​‌​​‌‌​‌​​‌​​​​​‌‌​​‌​​​‌‌​‌‌​⁠one essential problem in thought: how to find a nomenclature that would also be a taxonomy — a system of signs transparent to the continuity of being.