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In the final analysis, from the moment that the experimen­ tation is not addressed to an established fact but to a being produced by history and capable of history, it is addressed to something that is certainly not a subject in the human sense of the term, but is not a pure object either. No "methodology" can de­ cide, in the name of the "constraints of scientificity," to deny, through the way in which it defines its interrogation, the fact that, to varying degrees, the sense of its interrogation may also present problems for that which is interrogated.

As with Freud, one could speak here of a wound imposed on hu­ man narcissism. Reason had to relinquish the power of judging a priori and submit to empirical observation. Of course, with Newton ellipses ceased being just one geomet­ ric figure among others; they were given their theoretical meaning as the expres- sion of the gravitational force between the sun and the planets. The wound opened by Kepler only deepened, causing a scandal among rationalists such as Huyghens, Leibniz, Euler, and d'Alembert: what is this force of attraction acting instantaneously at a distance?

It was underscored by eighteenth-century thinkers such as Diderot and Lichtenberg. If there is an "event" here, it does not relate to a general history of knowledges, but to the concrete history of the sciences and the notion of scientific discipline as in­ vented by the academic institutions of the nineteenth century. I have spoken of the risk tied to the double separation, concep­ tual and technical, that makes experimentation possible. But the nineteenth century invented and put into place a third separation, to which present-day science owes its characteristics: the social separation between those who "know how to recognize the facts" and those who are incompetent and only have opinions.