Half-life of luminaries: knowledge and its crises

The article examines the conditions of so called crises of knowledge in the situation set up by Immanuel Kant’s revolution. The latter is treated as a gesture of radical detachment from the ontology where knowledge could exist as a part of the world, the most privileged and powerful part. Kant’s thesis of the impossibility of coordinating our knowledge with things covers up the memory of knowledge as an instance or “luminary” already present in the world, which united in itself three figures of identification: self-knowledge with knowledge of the world, knowledge with a reason or foundation, and knowledge with power. The splitting of these identities set the directions of “crises of knowledge,” both historically known and possible in the future. Self-knowledge and the givenness of intellect for itself ceased to converge with cognition of the world. Cognition of the world, including a scientific one, ceased to coincide with the efficacy of the world or the logic of agency and foundation. Finally, knowledge as such ceased to be the most real part of this world. Today, knowledge is realized in forms that do not allow the intellect to become a thing, and it is the interdiction that draws the boundaries of the actual region of knowledge, which cannot claim ontological completeness or even localizability. Knowledge has slipped into a zone of homonymy where the multiplication of knowledge no longer promises a solution to the fundamental problems of its justification posed by modern philosophy.